For many years I’ve dreamed of having location data attached to my images so that I could see where I took my favorite pictures at my favorite places. Unfortunately none of my cameras have had GPS either built-in or as an attachment. My iPhone has the ability to do it but sadly it wasn’t until recently that I figured out how. I decided to take advantage of my recent renaissance and assigned myself the task of learning how to do it while visiting a super secret location over the Christmas break.

And so on a visit to Ridgefield (oh what a giveaway!) I fired up MotionX-GPS on the phone and had it keep a running tally of my travels around the refuge, then emailed the data file to my laptop. It took me a couple more weeks before I sat down to learn how to import that data into Aperture, and it’s a bit fussier than I hoped, so I also learned how to do it with a little command line utility called exiftool. Photo Mechanic can also do it, and did it quickly, but the locations weren’t right so I have a little more learning there.

I do wish my camera could do this natively, not just because of the extra steps required to add the data later, but because it requires that I remember to start and stop the GPS tracking. And anything that requires that I remember to do something, well …

This screenshot shows an example of how the GPS data looks when imported directly into Aperture, in this case it was my visit to Ridgefield on January 15th. The purple trace shows where I drove around the auto tour, the pins where I stopped and took pictures. Currently selected is a spot beside Rest Lake where I photographed a coyote hunting voles as the snow fell gently down.

On the map you can see the Columbia River running to the left of the refuge, and a little offshoot that comes by it on the right, plus the numerous sloughs that run through the refuge. Lewis & Clark visited Ridgefield but apparently Clark wasn’t quite as impressed with this blessed little place as I am, for he wrote,

“Opposit to our camp on a Small Sandy Island the brant & geese make Such a noise that it will be impossible for me to sleap.”

His prediction proved true, as the following morning he added,

“rained all the after part of the last night…I slept but verry little last night for the noise Kept up dureing the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white & Grey Brant Ducks & c. on a Small Sand Island they were emensely noumerous, and their noise horid…”

I’ve not seen brant at Ridgefield but the rain and swans and geese and ducks, those I know quite well, although in much smaller numbers it seems than William Clark once saw (and heard).

The next motivational carrot is my computer setup. Which is a bit strange because my 15″ MacBook Pro combined with my 27″ Thunderbolt display is hands down my favorite setup of all time. But the carrot isn’t upgrading the computer itself.

It’s the iPad.

I don’t have an iPad but after playing around with my wife’s iPad 2, for as much guff as he took for saying it, I side with Jobs in calling it magical. If the rumored iPad 3 launches with the rumored retina display, rumor has it I will buy one. This would motivate me to update my web site and probably the blog as I suspect they are hard to navigate with fingers. It’s a bit embarrassing but I write them largely for myself and am by far their most voracious reader, so I would adapt their design to whatever I’m reading them on. And if I’m doing a major update, I might as well add in some much needed features (for example you can search the blog but not the main site, understandable when I launched it in the 90′s but rather shameful in this day and age).

An iPad would also be useful on the MAX, where lately it has been harder and harder to get a seat where I can use a laptop, but my MAX riding is likely to falloff steeply this year. My real motivation is to try it out for home use, as I think I’d frequently use it when I’m not at my desk, freeing up the laptop to spend most of its time hooked up to the big display for photo editing but still able to tag along with me when I need it.

There’s another motivational aspect to all of this, which is that with my current office setup I can’t work on that big beautiful display and watch TV at the same time. Plus the big desks, built when dinosaurs and giant CRT’s roamed the earth, limit what furniture I can put in my little office. Currently I have a recliner that I love, but while the cats can sleep atop me, there’s no room for Ellie to get in on the snuggling. I’m hoping a smaller desk and love seat would remedy the situation, but I’m not sure I can make it work.

Regardless of what I do or don’t do, the Great Snuggler has staked his claim to his semi-permanent position on my lap.

I cried when he died.

I was at work in the middle of the afternoon when I realized I had been staring absent-mindedly into my monitor for quite some time. I was worn out, stretched too thin, and suddenly I just had to get out of the office. I went home.

As I walked in the door Ellie ran up to greet me as she always does, and she brightened my mood as she always does. Grinning from ear to ear, tail wagging, dancing in joy. We played until she tired. I went into my room and opened my laptop and learned that Steve Jobs passed away.

I’ve thought about Steve frequently the past fifteen years, for a number of reasons. Almost daily the past five, because of his Stanford speech. I don’t remember when I first read it, but it has haunted and inspired me ever since.

… for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement address

It was this quote that troubled me the most. While I like my job and the people I work with (I’ve been at my company for nearly 15 years, if that’s any indication), I’ve never loved my job the way Jobs clearly loved his. But until I can find a job that will pay me to spend my days hiking and tossing hedgehogs and handing out belly rubs, I guess I never will.

But I took his advice to heart in how I spend my free time, and if you look back through my hiking journals you’ll see these are the years when I started planning at least one big hiking trip per year. When I started getting up before dawn despite my night owl nature and heading to Ridgefield over and over and over again. When I stopped worrying over the cost and bought the big lens that has delighted me so. When I learned to keep an eye on those journals and watch for when the gap to my last outing grew too large, a warning sign I had slipped into a funk, and celebrating my favorite things through photography became a way to work myself out of it.

One of the ways a man I never met changed my life. I’ll miss you Steve.

I had to replace a broken power supply cable for my laptop and while I was at it, picked up Apple’s 27″ Thunderbolt display. I’ve been interested in a big monitor ever since Apple launched their 30″ display years ago, but today was the day I finally realized the dream.

I’ve only just hooked it up, but wow! Wow!

This pic was a quick snap from my iPhone and I managed to get three out of the four pets in the frame. That’s Ellie’s paw sticking into the lower left corner, Emma’s tail sticking out from behind the box on the right, and of course Scout in the back on the window seat.

Ahem. Her window seat.

All three are now zonked out beside me in my office. The only one missing is little Sam, who was asleep in a chair in the basement last I saw him. Mostly asleep anyways, Emma was in a mischievous mood and was up on the table poking him from above.

Poke poke poke!

After the long writeup about workflow in the previous post, one more thought about tools. This is a picture of Templeton with the 15″ Powerbook I referenced in that post, my favorite computer of all time until my current MacBook Pro.

The picture was taken in January 2006 while Templeton was recuperating from surgery to remove the sewing needle he swallowed right before we left on Christmas vacation. He had to be kept from running and jumping, and isolated from Scout, so one of us stayed with him in the guest room while the other stayed with Scout. He had to wear a plastic cone to keep him from pulling out his stitches, but we gave him supervised time with it off so he could relax and clean his fur away from the incision.

I left the room for a brief moment and came back to find him sitting at my laptop, paws on the trackpad as though he was settled in for work. What he had really done was an old Templeton standby, though.

He stole my spot.

Templeton and my 15″ Powerbook. I loved them both. I miss one. Important as they are, tools are just tools.

One of the podcasts I listen to, Enough by Patrick Rhone and Myke Hurley, has been asking their guests what applications they would install if they had to get by with a MacBook Air (and its 64 GB of storage) as their main computer. After listening to the their choices I took a look at my own and a couple of small things surprised me.

The first was that when I looked at my list of installed applications I didn’t have as many third party applications as I expected. This is partly because I’ve used a laptop as my main computer for many years, and up until the latest was always hard pressed for hard disk space, but it’s partly a conscious choice. Since switching to the Mac years ago I’ve used Apple’s applications by default and only look elsewhere when I find them confining.

The second was that I looked at each application in my dock and thought about how often I use these apps today to make sure they still make sense to be there. As a result I ended up taking Photoshop out of the dock, marking the first time since I got into photography it hasn’t owned a prime location in the dock or Windows task bar.

The Workflow

Here’s a rough list of my workflow moving pictures from field-to-web, and the tools I’m currently using at each step:

1. Take notes in the field (Moleskine and uni-ball)
2. Download pictures from memory card to computer (Photo Mechanic)
3. Backup up the hard drive (SuperDuper!)
4. Make a first pass at choosing which pictures will be edited or rejected (Photo Mechanic)
5. Make a final pass at choosing which pictures will be edited or rejected (Aperture)
6. Edit the pictures (Aperture)
7. Hedgehogging (Ellie) and belly rubs (Scout, Emma, Sam)
8. Goof around (Safari, NetNewsWire Lite, iTunes)
9. Resize to create web and thumbnail versions (Photoshop)
10. Upload the web and thumbnail versions (Photo Mechanic and Transmit)
11. Update the website (BBEdit) or blog (MarsEdit)

The Moleskine & the uni-balls

I’ll start with the new pens and paper I purchased for taking notes while taking pictures before moving on to the software. The uni-ball pens use gel ink and write much more smoothly and consistently than my old pens. So far I prefer using the finer Signo RT Gel (0.38mm point) for writing in the Moleskine and the wider Signo 207 Gel (0.5mm point) for general use.

The large red Moleskine notebook is beautifully crafted to the point I was a little concerned I wouldn’t risk exposing it to the same weather conditions as the previous cheap notebook. But it poured rain my second day out with it and even in the car I knew I couldn’t keep it from getting a little wet, so I was happy to see I was as willing to let the new gear suffer the slings and arrows of rainy fortune as the old.

I would like to try some Field Notes notebooks before my next big hiking trip, they are much smaller and thinner and better suited to long day hikes, but not as well suited to my days at Ridgefield.

OS X Lion

I discussed upgrading to Lion a bit in the previous post, but I’ll mention it again as the screenshot shows the new Mission Control feature, where you can see little snapshots of many of the tools I’ll discuss. Plus a few sneak peaks of pictures that will be coming online soon (starting with my current desktop picture of a young heron I watched throughout the winter and spring).

Mac App Store

One of my favorite applications on the Mac is the Mac App Store itself. When I upgraded laptops four months ago, I decided to do a clean install for once. All I had to do was enter my Apple ID and Aperture and all the other apps I bought at the App Store installed like magic. Simple. Beautiful.

Contrast that with installing Photoshop.

After finding the install disc and letting it run, it asked for a serial number, which in and of itself isn’t too bad as its on the disk case, but does get tiresome when you have to do it for app after app. But then because I was doing a clean install and didn’t have Photoshop already on my system, and since my CS5 version is an upgrade version, it also wanted a serial number from an earlier version.

Oh corks!

I had forgotten about this step as I usually don’t do a clean install of the OS. With a brief bit of panic I started searching to see if I still had one of the older DVD’s around. I’ve upgraded Photoshop through many versions over the years and used to keep all of the boxes lined up in my bookcase, but in a rare bit of office cleaning I got rid of most of them. Fortunately I didn’t throw out the previous versions discs and was able to enter its serial number as well. I’m sure a phone call to Adobe would have sorted it out soon enough if I had lost the older serial number, but it illustrates why I now buy all my software through the App Store when possible.

Photo Mechanic

I’ve used Photo Mechanic for the past five years to download my images from a card reader and quickly sort out the rejects from the keepers. I’ve been looking to move away from Photo Mechanic as its target audience is photo journalists and I don’t need any of that functionality, but while Aperture does have the ability to download pictures and compare them, so far I’m still much better and faster at doing this in Photo Mechanic.

I’ve also come to use it as my general purpose image viewer so I nearly always have Photo Mechanic fired up for one use or another.

Aperture

I’ve written before about how I fell backwards into using Aperture, the photo processing program from Apple. I’m still learning the ropes but getting more comfortable with it, using multiple libraries is rather clumsy but otherwise there is a lot to like. I especially like the way it handles RAW images from my Canon 7D and how easily it works when I hook up my laptop to my external display.

There’s a sneak peak of an upcoming picture in the Aperture icon on the screenshot above (it’s up near the top since it is running in full-screen mode), I still have a lot of sorting and editing to do before this picture comes online, but the little tree swallow was one of my favorite (and most anxious) encounters.

My biggest worry with Aperture is Apple’s long-term commitment to it, it’s not central to their business which gives me pause, but for now I love the way it handles my 7D’s files so it is my photo app of choice.

Photoshop CS5

I took Photoshop out of my dock a week or so ago with a heavy dose of nostalgic regret. I started using Photoshop 4.0 back in college and it has occupied a prized spot in my Windows task bar or Mac dock ever since. But since I switched to Aperture for my photo processing, I primarily only use Photoshop for resizing images for the web, and I since I send the files directly from Aperture there isn’t a need for it in my dock anymore.

I do use Photoshop for other things at times, but it is a professional application with a professional price so now that I’m not relying on Camera Raw for my photo processing, I’m not sure if I’ll keep upgrading it or not. It’s a little similar to what will happen when we upgrade the Civic: I’ve driven a stick shift since I bought my first car in college, but on the next car I’d prefer a continuously-variable transmission instead.

Time marches on, needs and desires change, and thus sometimes my tools must too.

BBEdit

Something that hasn’t changed much, to my discredit, is my main site at racphoto.com which still revels in its mid-90′s look. I’ve hand coded it since the beginning and since my knowledge of web design hasn’t evolved much since then, neither has the site. Another thing that hasn’t changed is the program I use for writing the HTML code, BBEdit from Bare Bones Software. I started using it back when I first got my Mac and have used it ever since.

I would like to upgrade the look and functionality of my site at some point but the driver will probably be when I get an iPad, as navigating the site with fingers isn’t so easy. I’ll need to decide then whether to keep writing it myself or go with a pre-made site like Squarespace, or perhaps even WordPress. But for now, HTML and BBEdit it is.

Safari

Safari didn’t exist back when I switched to the Mac but it’s been my primary browser from the day that it did. I keep Google’s Chrome browser on my system since I don’t have Flash installed on my computer, so I use Chrome’s built-in Flash for the rare times I need it (primarily Amazon’s music and video services). I keep Firefox installed too, mostly for testing purposes.

Safari is even better in Lion so it remains my browser of choice.

Transmit

When it’s time to upload images for the blog or website I drag them from Photo Mechanic into one of my all-time favorite programs, Transmit, from Portland-based Panic. Back when I thought I was going to be leaving the Mac, one of the reasons I decided to keep using my MacBook for everything but photo processing was Transmit. On the one hand it makes no sense to not want to abandon a platform because of an FTP program, even one as nice as Transmit, but part of it is that they seem to be a great little company and I’m happy to support them. And part of it is well-designed apps like this just make my computing experience simpler, and more enjoyable.

And that’s enough.

I’ve been using Transmit since 2004, I had been on the Mac for a little while at that point and was using a freeware FTP program that I wasn’t very happy with. Then someone recommended Transmit, I downloaded the trial, and I think I set the record for the fastest time I’ve gone from trying out some software to deciding to buy it. I upgrade every time a new version comes out without even thinking about it, it’s always worth it.

NetNewsWire Lite

I can be a bit scatter-brained so I rely on automatic feeds to tell me when my favorite sites get updated, and I’ve always used NetNewsWire for this task. When the new Lite version popped up on the App Store, it replaced the older but more full-featured version I had been using.

Another one of those programs that makes me happy to be on the Mac, great software from great developers.

DoublePane

You can’t see this from the screenshot, but I recently got DoublePane from the App Store and I love it. It does something I think you can do in Windows 7 by default, which is to use keyboard shortcuts to snap a window to the left or right half of the screen. Just the thing when I’m ready to upload images, I can snap Photo Mechanic to the left half of the display, Transmit to the right, then drag images from one to the other. Then with another keyboard shortcut, Photo Mechanic is back at full size.

A fantastic little time saver and highly recommended if you need to use windows side-by-side.

SuperDuper!

Also not visible in the screenshot above is SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket. I use it daily to create a bootable clone of my laptop’s hard disk onto an external disk, as well as special situations like before I upgraded to Lion. I haven’t tried Time Machine yet, which serves a similar but different purpose, but SuperDuper has given me peace of mind for if and when my laptop hard drive falters.

Another great piece of software from a long-time developer on the Mac. There’s a theme here.

Mail

I’m not a power user of mail apps, I used Outlook Express when I was on the PC and have used Apple’s Mail ever since I switched. It got a major upgrade with the Lion release and I’m still finding my way around it, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

iTunes

Not specifically related to photography but iTunes so completely transformed the way I listen to music (for the better) that I couldn’t help giving it a plug. It tries to do too much these days but when it comes to music, I love it and use it constantly when I’m listening to music or podcasts as I edit my pictures or write my posts.

MarsEdit

MarsEdit also isn’t in the screenshot but that’s because I was evaluating it while writing this post. It’s an offline editor for blog posts, and it made writing this post so much so easier than the web browser version provided by WordPress that I bought it from the Mac App Store before finishing this post.

And with that, I’m finishing this post.

I always knew I was one in a million! Or at least one of a million!

Yes, I was one of the over one million people that downloaded OS X Lion on the first day it was available. I’ve been on the trailing edge of Mac OS updates lately, I never upgraded to 10.5 and I only went to 10.6 when I had to because a software upgrade required it. But I’m as excited by recent advances in technology as I have been in a long time — including the iPad even though I don’t own one — and I love the direction Apple is taking its traditional lineup with Lion and recent computer updates.

I’ve only had my 15″ MacBook Pro for four months, but even at a month in it had become my favorite computer of all time (unless you count the iPhone, which would win by a landslide). The new laptop has all the charm of my previous favorite, the 15″ Powerbook, a computer greater than the sum of its parts. The new laptop is all that with greater parts, especially its quad-core processor and high-res screen.

I haven’t had much time to play around with Lion, or to read John Siracusa’s typically fantastic review of the new OS (it was his review of OS X 10.0 that first got my eyes wandering lustily to the Mac platform after decades in the PC camp, and his review of 10.2 that pushed me over the edge into buying my first Mac).

But so far so good with the new OS … well, there is one major disappointment: the name. Despite how closely the Ear of Cupertino bends to the Mouth of Irvington, Apple went in a different direction. Look I know Sam conjures up all thoughts adorable and snuggly, which might not be appropriate for a powerful new OS, but he’s more dangerous than any lion if you get between him and his food.

Just ask Scout and Emma.

Sometimes things don’t go as planned.

When last we met I was going to build a Windows desktop. I needed a much faster computer for my photography work and didn’t like Apple’s desktops, and their laptops were too slow, so as much as I hated to leave the Mac push had come to shove and it was time to move on. I’d at least keep the MacBook for pretty much everything else as well as my mobile photo processing.

I picked up a fast solid state drive (SSD) for the MacBook in December then settled in to wait for the new Intel chips to arrive in January. They arrived on schedule to fantastic reviews so I put together a shopping list for my new build. The list was mostly complete, just needed to finalize a few parts, when I woke to news that Intel had discovered a flaw in the new chipsets and all motherboards were being pulled off the shelves.

Of course.

The first week I couldn’t decide what to do but then decided to wait until the fixed parts came out in a few months and build my computer then.

In the meantime, since I was going to transfer my Photoshop license to the Windows machine, I started looking for a less expensive photography app I could keep on the MacBook. Apple’s Aperture was now on the App Store for only $80 so I downloaded the 30-day demo to see if it was at least good enough for use as a secondary RAW converter.

I nearly swallowed my tongue when I tried it on the way home on the train, I was getting much better results out of Aperture than the Adobe converter I had been using for years. I went back and adjusted my Adobe settings and got closer to the Aperture results, but couldn’t help but think that Aperture should be my main program and the Adobe converter demoted to secondary status. But then again, no, since Aperture wouldn’t run on the fast new PC I was building.

Then my portable hard drive went south, and while I had everything backed up and didn’t lose any pictures that caused further delays until I could get a new hard drive in.

Then lo and behold, while still weeks away from fixed PC parts being available, out of nowhere a new challenger emerged. Apple did the last thing I expected and put quad-core chips in the 15″ MacBook Pro. At this eleventh hour a couple of visits to the Apple store convinced me I had found my new computer.

I had to order online to get the configuration I wanted, so it was a week of oh so patiently waiting for the Fed Ex man to show up. I restrained myself from hugging him when he showed up early last Friday morning, I did, just barely.

Stay tuned, the new laptop is so many kinds of awesome and a few images at least will be coming online soon. In the meantime enjoy this picture of Scout, taken with my iPhone.

Templeton died a few years ago, long before I had an iPhone, but since I gave the other pets the Instagram treatment, it only seemed fair to upload one of my favorite pictures of him onto the iPhone and give it a go. I was thinking of a funny moment with him the other day and burst out laughing, I felt a bit self-conscious but consoled myself that the other riders on the train had probably seen stranger things.

Updates here have been pretty few and far between the past few months, partly due to long hours at work, but hopefully I’ll be a bit better now that things have calmed down. But the other part of the equation is that the Canon 7D has ruined my life.

Not that I don’t love it, it’s by far the best camera I’ve ever owned and I’ve had a great deal of fun with it the past year. It’s just that the files it creates are so much larger than my older cameras that it broke my workflow. The biggest problem is that my old laptop isn’t up to the task of processing the large images. And while I’ve known that for the past year, I couldn’t bring myself to buy a PC to solve the problem.

Most of that comes down to how much I’ve loved OS X since switching to the Mac years ago, and lately to how much I love the little iPhone. But push has come to shove, I took a large number of pictures over Christmas at Ridgefield and realized I haven’t even finished sorting, much less editing, some of my pictures from my visits last Christmas.

Since I’m not a fan of Apple’s desktops, I’ll be making my return to Windows for my photo processing machine (but keeping the MacBook for everything else). I’ve decided to build the computer this time instead of buying one, my first attempt at that, and hope to be up and running in the next couple of weeks. Can’t wait! Although the dizzying array of motherboards may drive me to take up the drink.

So before too long pictures should start coming online fast and furious. Next up will be one of my favorite images of 2010, taken on the last day of the year, but I’m tired so it will have to wait ’til the morrow. It’s not the sharpest picture, even at web sizes, but if you like eagles …

Another barn swallow picture from two months ago, the male brought in some building material (this time, sans mud).

Adobe just released an updated version of their raw file converter, with some new options for color profiles. I’m playing around with a few new and older images like this one to test out the changes. So far I like what I see.

The bigger news for me was the release of the second major version of Lightroom, which seems to address some of the problems that kept me from purchasing the first version. To test out the eval version, I’d like to sort and edit some images from Yellowstone in 2004 and 2005, which are ripe for a re-editing anyway.

It’s exciting to see how far the software tools have come since my first days of digital photography in December of 2000. It’s also exciting to see how far computers have evolved, the difference between my little MacBook and the desktop I was using back then is astonishing.

Today’s photo is the first to go online from my recent trip to Yellowstone and the Tetons. If you know me, it will seem like a strange choice to lead off with since, squint all you like, you won’t see any animals in the picture.

Snow flurries were flying when I hiked the Beaver Ponds Nature Trail in the northwest section of the park. I hadn’t see any animals on the hike, so when I came across this lovely little red plant dusted with snow, I put on some extension tubes, hooked up the remote cable, and took some pictures until I got cold and needed to get moving again. It’s one picture that summarizes the ups and downs of this trip nicely.

The Ups and Downs of the Animals
Don’t get me wrong, I was fortunate enough to get some nice animals pictures, so stay tuned for elk, pronghorn, several birds, and, if you’re quiet and still, a little pika.

But it was still disappointing not to see more bears or moose or any sheep. And not to see more animals on the trail away from the madding crowds and traffic, when you really feel like you get to know the personality of the animals. I can hike in beautiful mountains and not see wildlife without leaving Oregon. I did get to spend a lot of time with elk during the end of their rut and saw more pronghorn than before, plus a few more nice animal encounters, so the trip had its rewarding moments, just not as many as I had been expecting.

Even my favorite red squirrels rarely chattered at me as I hiked in Yellowstone, though thankfully the boomers in the Tetons were up to the task.

With fewer animals out and about, I made a deliberate attempt to capture some of the sights and shapes and textures of Yellowstone, and this picture is one of those attempts.

The Ups and Downs of the Weather
The weather is always going to be variable this time of year, so I wasn’t too surprised that the sunny and warm weather that had been predicted disappeared by the time I showed up. And I actually like clouds during the day when I’m shooting wildlife. But there was ice this time that shut down roads and limited access to the park on a couple of days, plus a snowstorm that made me leave for home a day earlier than planned. The Tetons were covered in clouds nearly the entire time I was there.

On the plus side, the rain was more a drizzling and occasional rain and not like the downpours I saw last year. And the snow was beautiful when it wasn’t shutting down the roads. The aspens were at their peak fall color and were as beautiful as always. And the last day in the Tetons at least let me see the peaks as I hiked in the canyons until exhaustion and snow turned me back down the mountain.

The Ups and Downs of My Equipment
This was my first dedicated photo trip with my MacBook, and it acquitted itself well in all areas but one. The speed when working with RAW files seemed an order of magnitude faster than my old Powerbook, a very welcome development that let me get to sleep earlier each night. The wireless range was much better, particularly important on this trip as I tracked the weather each night. The larger hard disk also came in handy.

But the color accuracy of the screen doesn’t seem as good as the Powerbook’s was, and at one point when looking at some problem areas in animals with dark fur, I actually thought something was wrong with my cameras. When I got back home, I removed the color calibration I had created with Apple’s software program and things got a lot better in the key problem areas (deep shadows as well as the reds of this plant). This screen doesn’t calibrate well with that program, not sure if a hardware calibrator would be better.

The camera equipment worked about like I expected since little was new to me. The only recent acquisition was a ballhead robust enough to support my telephoto lenses. I ended up going with the Arca Swiss Z1 and it worked nicely in the field, although I’m going to have to reapply the blue Loctite since the 500mm lens made the head twist loose on one occasion.

Given the frequent drizzle, I found myself once again wishing that Canon would add weather-proofing to its consumer cameras. And I’d certainly like the better autofocus of its pro line. What I’ve been waiting for the past 5 years is for a digital equivalent of the old EOS 3 film camera.

Fortunately it got announced right around my birthday this summer.

Unfortunately for me it’s made by Nikon.

The Bad Things
For the most part, the things I don’t like and the things I like are what I expected.

The biggest negative (and one which caught me offguard) is that it takes a long time to recharge the battery if you’re actively using the laptop — especially if it’s something intensive like charging your iPod. I picked up the laptop shortly before a trip across the country, and as I sat there in the airport with the battery charging much more slowly than I was used to, at first I thought there was something wrong.

I don’t know if the issue is the lower power rating on the MacBook’s power supply (compared to the Pro charger), but it’s definitely something to watch for on long trips when you’re recharging in the middle of the airport.

Apart from that, though, the negatives have been what I expected. I definitely miss the nice metal feel of the PowerBook, and I miss the larger screen. The MacBook has the same horizontal resolution as the PowerBook with a little less vertical resolution, but I knew I’d prefer the higher res of the 15″ MacBook Pro.

The integrated graphics can’t play a modern game, but I was surprised to see in a quick trial that it seemed to play one of my old games just fine — and it was running in emulation under Rosetta! Granted it’s not much of a graphics challenge compared to a modern game, but it was much better than I was expecting.

So far, that’s it, not much to complain about.

The Things Almost Too Good To Be True
One of the reasons I went with the MacBook was to try out the glossy screen. I’ve heard photographers go on and on about the matte versus the glossy screens, but so far I think the glossy screen is fantastic. I was afraid reflections would be a problem, but I haven’t found that to be the case. It doesn’t calibrate as well as I’d like with software calibration, there’s some shades of orange or red that come out too intense, but my PowerBook wasn’t perfect in that department either.

What I really love about this screen is that you can use it outdoors, even on a bright sunny day. During the warmer months, I use my laptop outdoors more than I use it indoors, either riding the train to work or sitting out on the back porch. This was a real struggle with the PowerBook, but it’s a breeze with the screen on the MacBook — even with the screen not at full brightness.

If the sun is shining on the screen (unavoidable sometimes on the train), you can still read the screen just fine, which I was certainly not expecting. At one point the entire screen was covered in sunlight, and I could actually turn the backlight all the way off and still use the screen.

I can’t speak to how the modern matte screens of the MacBook Pros would do in a similar situation, but I’ve been amazed at how nice it is to use the little MacBook outdoors.

Another pleasant surprise is the wireless reception. My PowerBook really struggled to get a signal on our porch, you had to sit in just the right spot with the laptop at the right height and angle to even get a slow connection. The MacBook gets a nice strong signal out here, and it’s almost comical riding the train to work and seeing how many hotspots I can see now.

I’ve had problems in hotels before where the Powerbook could barely get a signal — at one hotel only the bathroom got even a weak signal, at another I had to sit in the corner by the bed. Sometimes you have to go into the hall or to the lobby, so the good reception of the MacBook is a welcome change.

Finally, there’s the speed.

Oh my goodness, the speed.

The PowerBook ran OS X just fine, but it really struggled to convert RAW images. I haven’t done exact timings but the MacBook is probably an order of magnitude faster. I haven’t seen this much of a speed jump in a couple of decades, it reminds me of my first PC when I upgraded from an Intel 8086 to a 386 and sat there with my jaw wide open at the difference in speed.

I use Adobe’s Camera Raw converter for most of my images, and the funny thing is it converts images so quickly that it has completely thrown off my timing. With the PowerBook, I’d batch up a few images and then switch to reading email or browsing the web. With the MacBook, it’s done right away so I don’t have an excuse for goofing off on the internet.

More Good Things
Based on the first versions of the MacBooks and MacBook Pros, I was worried about heat. My PowerBook already got hotter than I liked, especially during the summer months (we don’t have air conditioning), since I often use my laptop on my lap. So far, the MacBook seems to run a lot cooler than my PowerBook, at least in terms of the external temperature. We’ve had some really hot days this July so Apple, my thighs and I thank you.

I like the latchless lid, it’s not significant enough to impact the buying decision but it is a nice touch. More important is how easy it is to swap out the hard drive, the 120GB drive is fine for now, but the same 120GB wasn’t going to be enough on the MacBook Pro since I’d want to install a Windows partition and some games — and swapping the hard drive there is complicated enough that I’d pay someone to do it.

Another nice touch is the trackpad, I love the two fingered scrolling and right click — a couple of features that have been standard for a while on Apple’s laptops but which weren’t available on my PowerBook. Scrolling in particular is something I instantly fell in love with (once I realized it worked better with my middle finger and ring finger), and now I’m wondering how I ever got along without it.

I was a little worried about the keyboard on the Macbook but it hasn’t been an issue, I probably don’t like it quite as much as the old PowerBook keyboard but I like it just fine. What I do miss is the backlighting on the PowerBook, that was a nice touch.

Battery life is also a welcome improvement over the PowerBook (although the current 15″ Pros have the same battery life thanks to their LED backlights and Santa Rosa chipset — these will make the MacBook even better when Apple updates the MacBook down the road).

Finally, there’s the price. I don’t think Apple has ever had a laptop that is as good a value as the little MacBook. It might not sound like it from this post, but the PowerBook was by far my favorite computer I’ve ever had in over twenty years of using computers. It was my daily companion for over three years, and I would have kept it another three if it hadn’t been for the lack of speed.

The MacBook has big shoes to fill, but so far the honeymoon period hasn’t worn off like I would have expected. Back when I had my 12″ PowerBook, what I really wanted was a widescreen version, and the MacBook comes pretty close to that.

Now if it only came in an aluminum shell and with a dedicated graphics card …

I’ve been spending money like a drunken sailor the past few days. The biggest purchases were a wide angle zoom for my camera (to replace the one that got smashed) and a laptop to replace my beloved but aging Powerbook.

The worst part has been deciding what to buy as my decisions changed on an almost daily (if not hourly) basis. I finally settled on Canon’s 17-55mm EF-S lens to replace the smashed 24-85mm lens and Apple’s 15″ MacBook Pro to replace my 15″ Powerbook. I went down last weekend to get the MacBook Pro but the store was out and didn’t get their shipment from Apple during the week.

In the meantime I changed my mind and decided to get the regular MacBook instead of the Pro. If you’re reading this post faster than normal, it’s because it’s being written on my zoomy new white laptop instead of the old slower silver one.

And the lens? I changed my mind at the last minute on that one too and ordered Canon’s 24-105 L lens. That should be here on Tuesday (along with a circular polarizer, an 8 GB CF card, a remote release, an extension tube set, a card reader, a 2GB stick of memory for the MacBook, and a partridge in a pear tree).

Blame the drunken sailor.

And in case you’re wondering, the picture has nothing to do with this post, it’s just a picture of Templeton from last year that I finally got around to editing. He’s zonked out beside me at the moment but I’m sure he’d approve.