On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

After all of my protesting and rationalizing about how I would not buy an iPhone for now, I went ahead and bought one. I’ll use it as my business phone, with the Blackberry supporting with rapid corporate email, calendar and EVDO modem support.

This is my first cell phone camera, so on my run today I brought the iPhone and stopped a few times to grab some shots. I can’t say that I expect to produce work with it, but as a sketch book, as here, it works well enough. No problems with auto white balance or exposure. I understand it’s fixed focus, so it’s interesting how the foreground tree is well detailed but the background woodpile here doesn’t hold up as an object. This may be due to the low pixel count.

My biggest complaint is that phone number recognition needs improvement. The Blackberry translates foreign numbers perfectly, allowing me to dial numbers wherever they appear- email, calendar appointments, web pages. The iPhone recognizes US numbers on web pages or in mail messages. There’s no recognition in the Calendar App. That means that when I have a telecon, I need to write the number down from the appointment and switch to the phone and dial. Or I can get the web view of my calendar from the Outlook Web Access site and click on the number to dial. If it’s US, but not if it’s international.

Of course this is related to the lack of copy and paste capability. With a simple copy function, I’d be able to move the number into the phone app. I loved the Newton’s clipboard- you’d highlight text and drag it over to the side of the screen where it stuck until you dragged it back in to use it.

But it’s a 1.0 product, and I trust these refinements will come soon enough.

Micro Persuasion: Turn Your iPhone into a Mobile Nerve Center

However, the iPhone doesn’t go far enough by itself. You can make it go even further with these free undocumented techniques I have implemented over the past few days. It will turn your iPhone into a mobile nerve center that allows you to keep essential information at your fingertips. These tips can be used by themselves or in conjunction with the GMail Nerve Center techniques I wrote about in February.

I’ve won another week of the war against buying an iPhone. I’ve gained a bit of appreciation for the Blackberry as I’ve looked at how far I can push it’s functionality toward that of iPhone. At this point my mental equipoise is at waiting for my Verizon contracts to expire in Feb/March and keep the Blackberry on Verizon for business mail and EVDO modem use and move calls over to AT&T and the iPhone. The iPhone “ecosystem” seems to be developing rapidly, but I can’t see giving up push email and full on the go highspeed internet access. Perhaps, as John Gruber suggests, my next iPod will serve as my iPhone. The multimedia and wi-fi browsing without the cellular service. A nice complement to the Blackberry.

Sad to be writing about this so much and to even be wasting so much mental energy on it, but there must be many others who like me are committed Blackberry users who want the phone and browsing interface of the iPhone.

This is one of the C-41 process black and white images. When I shoot color, I want the color to be a strong element in the image. With black and white, it has to form and light.

In this suburban landscape shot, right on the road outside my house, I used on camera flash to pick out reflective elements in the scene. I’m learning more about the quarter tone levels control in Aperture. The controls overall are less direct than using curves in Photoshop, but in some ways may be more integrated, working on the RAW file itself.

I wonder whether Aperture will ever add local tonal control at all? Without burning and dodging, it’s hard to call it a digital darkroom, after all. But if I can get roundtripping working better, perhaps I can stick to local changes in Photoshop, avoiding the levels that slow Aperture down so much and spoil the integration of the two programs.

I took a short walk in the neighborhood tonight with the D80, this time with the 50mm f/1.8, thinking the extra stop would be useful as the light faded. As shutter speeds started dropping below what I can hand hold, particularly on a walk when I pause and shoot, I put the on camera flash into action. I dialed the flash compensation down by between 1.5 and 2.5 stops. It was enough to isolate foregrounds in the light and bring the shutter speed up to 1/30th.

Apple 2.0: Countdown to the Touchscreen iPod

Now the question is not if but when Apple (AAPL) will release it’s long-rumored 6th generation video iPod with a tiny version of OS X on the inside and a big touch-sensitive screen on the outside.

It’s sad that the concept of the PDA has lost currency over the last few years. I relied on my Newton and, later, a Palm for many years to not only provide calendars and addresses but also as a mobile information source.

As the cell phone converged with the PDA, the screens shrunk and the availability of text data on the unit receded into the background. My Palm based Kyocera phone was a much worse Palm and my Blackberry is even worse for keeping notes and reference on. Similarly, the iPhone brings phone, contacts, calendar and web to the fore, making data storage secondary.

On the Blackberry, I’ve developed a style of emailing myself reference material that I expect to need while out or traveling. It’s not my “peripheral brain” as the PDA was, but rather a portal into other data stores.

I hope that if there is a touch screen ipod, it has the iPhone’s virtual keyboard and an elegant way to create and store text files and outlines. Like the Newton did so well.

The Online Photographer: What is Your Photographic Legacy?

But that’s exactly where most of my photos sit. Paper carton or hard drive, a box is a box. I’m only too willing to concede that only a few hundred of them would be of interest to anyone other than me. Perhaps only a few dozen would qualify as award-winners—but again, what’s the difference, if they’re all just sitting in a box? And what interest or value would they be to my wife and kids once I’m dead and buried? Is the whole point of this my own personal amusement, or am I serving some greater purpose?

I used to wonder about the purpose of art, my art in particular, until I heard a seminar given by an investigator who was studying speech and language using functional MRI. By looking at what parts of the brain are active during tasks, one hopes to understand more about the processing pathways. One of the intriguing findings was that when listening to speech, one’s own speech production area lights up in addition to the areas that process language. It’s as if the words being heard are being run through your brain as if you yourself were saying them. Of course, it’s an important task to separate the words in your own head from those you hear from outside, a distinction that breaks down in psychotic states.

Fundamentally, talking to some one is an attempt to change the brains of other. Putting your thoughts inside the brains as others. It’s an attempt to change their way of thinking. Some art is verbal or language based like radio or the novel. Others either include a visual component or are exclusively visual. Or aural. All are invitations to see what I see, hear what I hear. And be changed in some way by the experience. Profound art produces profound changes in it’s audience. When viewed as a simple act of communication, art becomes much less mysterious.

But just as we talk to ourselves, either out loud or non-verbally, we can also produce art for ourselves. I get to look at many more images and many more image states than does my web audience. It’s a single person feed back loop of the activity of seeing the world, taking images and viewing/manipulating the result. For me, the art is an activity of learning to see and sharing what I learn with others who are interested. These banal images of the suburban landscape appeal to me because they are for me more simply about the act of seeing and less about what is seen. I tell myself “Open your eyes and look around. You’re here.”

I don’t really like roosters, but I like rooster statues. This was one of the rare occasions when I stopped the family-filled car and spent a few minutes photographing.

This is a straight Aperture postprocessing. The previous post’s image of the steam engine was sent on the full round trip through Photoshop. While I have sufficient speed, there’s a big bottleneck once an image has Photoshop layers and is sent back to Aperture. While Aperture can render and display the layered image, it slows everything way down. And any further manipulation of the image in Aperture is also slow. For example, exporting this image for Flickr took no appreciable time. The steam engine detail tied up the computer for several minutes.

I need to develop a workflow in which the layered PSD files live in a separate archive outside of Aperture. Within Aperture would live the RAW files, the straight manipulations and flattened PSDs. I need to find the best way to do this while keeping the round trip process intact.