'last week, I went to  a getMETAsmart event put on by The Stock Artists Alliance at Seattle Pacific Univ.  If your photography of any value - any kind of value... you need to know this stuff.  The presentation was excellent.  I'm changing some things I'm doing and will be adding more...

ad hoc quid pro quo so little time so much to know...  

and on my ferry ride home aboard the WA State Ferry Kitsap, I recorded this as well as many others.  That boat has a strange vibration to it different than the others I noticed it when the camera was at my eye and me rising up slightly on my toes to dampen most of the inherent vibration transferred through the deck... actually exchanging vibration for muscle motion...   (and depending on how much coffee and time on the feet... no alcohol involved but it might have helped steady or not)   and it also seems to move through the water differently... it's flow, I mean... (or it may have been someone that steers differently)... </tangent>

©2009 Ed Book

Camera     Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
lens     24mm
exposure     1/4 sec @ f/4 ISO 3200

key things here are the very slow for hand held camera at age 61 62 on a moving ferry and it's compensation of using an image stabilized lens and very wide (for full frame sensor) lens.... I also rose up on the balls of my feet and leaned against a bulkhead (nautical name for 'wall"). 

Because I was using such a wide angle lens my position wasn't nearly as far as it appears in the image.  I was close enough that I was looking up at the buildings.  You can see the slight tilting of the tall buildings due to perspective distortion from pointing the camera upward.

Peace

Tags: -print available-, metadata, motion, nautical, night, puget sound, wa

I own IView Media Pro 3 (IVMP3), and Microsoft bought the program, and then changed a few things and renamed it Expression Media (part of the new Microsoft Expression suite of programs). The program, if you're not familiar with it, is used for DAM (digital asset management otherwise known as organizing and controlling digital files, most importantly for me, digital image files.)

I wasn't up to speed on IVMP3 yet when the change happened and I did put in a lot of effort to understand the program and system but haven't been able to use it productively yet. Because Microsoft doesn't want to lose its IVMP3 customers because the new program is double in price, they gave IVMP3 owners a free update to Expression Media. I downloaded it to try out.

It was a problem from the start... well, before the start because the serial number they sent me didn't work. I eventually got it to install and now am finding so many problems that I resorted to reading the discussions about it. Hah! those in the know say not to use the program yet because there are so many problems that it's worse than useless. Parts won't import from the program it replaced and scripts and plugins, which are important, don't work and and and and and...

These problems are all deal breakers...

Consider this. This new program only allows the 8.3 convention of filenaming. (8.3 means a file name with eight digits and a three digit suffix. My files all contain my name, date, camera designation, and file number as a minimum (example: edbook070625-_Q6V1234.psd where "edbook"=my name, "070625"=date," _Q6V"=the name my camera was born with, "1234"=the file number given by the camera for this file, ".psd"=the designator of the file format (in this case Photoshop). If I attempted to import all my digital files into Expression Media, they would be shortened to eight digits...

Microsoft says that they have put out a "hotfix" but the program has no update command and I can't find it on their website. They said that they would put out a service pack (a Microsoft term for an update to fix program errors) but it won't be available till the third quarter of this year at the soonest.

I'm glad that I use Macs and don't have to deal with these types of things in all my programs and operating system. And, I'm hoping that Adobe catches on that we users need a reliable program for DAM and will expand Lightroom or Bridge to fill the major gap.



Peace

Tags: digital asset management, metadata, rant, software