Most of the day was packing and flying, but that didn’t stop me from taking some pictures.
While I was up in the air, I experimented with some of the raw conversion features built into the D90. I usually shoot in RAW and then process in Aperture or Photoshop, but did some playing with the camera. Note the star cross effect. Funny.
We are well into this whole patterns thing now, picking up lots of new lingo, and becoming better at communicating with other developers. Next on the list: the observer pattern. This is an important pattern to use to help prevent tight coupling and keep code separated into discrete objects. This pattern allows communication between two objects at particular times without each object needing to be too tightly coupled to the other.
The idea behind the observer is like a subscription. Do you have a newspaper or magazine subscription? Have you signed up for cell phone texts from your favorite band when they have new tour dates? The act of you signing up with the newspaper, the magazine, or the band, is you saying you want a subscription, or that you want to become an observer. When the subject (newspaper, magazine, band) has something new to share (on a schedule or not) they run down their subscriber list, and notify the observers by mail, or text.
On the software side, the idea is the same. Your subject needs to provide a way to take subscriptions, hold a list of observers, and when a particular state changes, notify them. There is usually a couple of methods on the subject that takes in an interface that is used for getting on or off the subscription list. On this interface is also the “call back” method. This is the method that the subject will execute when it wants to inform the observers of state changes.
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I have been going on photo walks for some time now from work. I am starting to tire of the places that I can get to within a short walk from work. One of the places that I frequent though, is Mears Park.
This is one place that is great to come to in the Spring/Early Summer. This park attracts lots of people from the surrounding office buildings and people from the near by condos walking their dogs. There is a little fake creek running down the middle, and all around this creek and the outside are flower gardens.
These gardens are kept in beautiful condition by a crew of volunteers. A person or group of people are assigned to each flower bed section. I was talking to one woman there recently that said there was a waiting list. How about that. A waiting list of people wanting to work for free.
So this tends to be a spot that I can come to several times a week even, and just walk around, and take some pictures. It’s amazing how comeing back just a day or two later and I will see new flowers that strike me that didn’t the day before.
So, if you live or work in St.Paul, I would suggest you stop by some day that you look outside and wish you were anywhere but inside. It will just take a few minutes.
I really had no idea who Zack was until Feb 18 2009. That was guest blog Wednesday on Scott Kelby’s site, and Zack posted the first video guest blog. It was truly amazing and inspiring. This is another piece of his work that really must be watched. The picture on the left, of Zack, ¬†is from that post.
Anyway, after that I started going to his blog. Not long after the guest blog post, he started doing critiques of other photographers web sites, and their work. (People volunteer to be critiqued). I have now watched 10 video critique posts by Zack Arias and Meg (his wife). There is so much content in there to talk about, and I have learned a lot. Some of which I knew, some of which reinforced things I was thinking about, and other stuff that that I am thankful to have learned now. There would be too much content to try to cover it indepth in one post, so I thought I would really just summarize in point form what I got out of his videos.
While I was watching these critiques, I took brief notes. This is really a summary of the notes I took. I am not getting into discussion of these points too much here, but there is a ton of material for further discussion. The material¬†is also collected from across the 10 posts, not in a order by post. I would encourage you to start from post one and just start viewing. Some of these things he hits on many many times, and it becomes more obvious when you take notes because you see the patterns you have written down.¬† There tends to be more “Don’ts” in the photo galleries section¬†and more¬†”Do’s“¬† in the sections on¬†his thoughts on what kinds pictures to take.
 
I headed to the St.Anthony Main area with Rich to take some pictures last weekend. (It seems to take longer and longer before I can get pictures into a post!)
We discovered a little park that juts out into the river getting you past the power lines for a better view. This park has lots of Excel Energy signs all over it, and boards describing hydro electric production and their benefits (while curiously ignoring any downfalls)
We walked out into this park and got some reasonable pictures. We would have stayed longer, but some officers from the parks service came and told us that the park closed at dusk. No set time, just dusk. Strangely, they don’t chase many photographers away, and the time they get there to tell people to leave varies with the day. I will have to head back again sometime.
The star pattern in the lights was not from a filter. I was just shooting at f/16 with my Tamron 17-50 f/28 lens. Most lenses will give some sort of star pattern at that aperture. Number of points depends on the number of blades the lens has.
 
Apple released some new hardware on Monday. I always get psyched when that happens. Well, sometimes it is just a speed bump, and a “what ever”, but Monday has some interesting things introduced.
The 13″ MacBook, the one with the aluminium case got promoted to a MacBookPro. They get to charge more for the laptops with a “Pro” at the end. 
You can compare the the different models at Apple here. It did get firewire 800 and a new non removable battery that Apple claims to get up to 7 hours of life. Wow, that would be cool.
Right now I have a 15″ MacBookPro, and it can feel a little big and heavy to carry around. The 13″ is 4.5lbs, and the 15″ is 5.5lbs. I think mine is a little heavier than that. The question though, is does the 13.3″ screen at 1280×800 and only a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor cut it for image editing. Granted, this wouldn’t be designed to be the main image processing machine, but still… how big a trade off is it. We will have to wait and see what people think of the 9400M and running Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture on it.
So I headed over to the Apple store, and I configured a 13″ MacBookPro with the 2.53Ghz processor (faster one), 4gig of ram (default), and 256Gig of solid state hard drive. Total: $2299.¬†Yes, that’s right, a SSD. Living on the edge. You could get the 128Gig version and get the cost under $2000. I think that a SSD for travel would be a great option. No worry about moving parts, and they are generally a touch faster.
Still, $2000 for a laptop is still kind of expensive, but you could go with the regular 250Gig hard drive and the price is on $1499. Sounds much more palatable, but dang…. I want the SSD…
I won’t be rushing out to get one anyway. First of all, my current laptop keeps going and going and going. It is only a little over two years old, but I bought a refurbished model, so I was a bit behind the tech curve when I got. But the dang thing just works. I have installed Leopard, Aperture 2.1, Photoshop CS3, and it runs just fine. After a couple of years on a windows machine, I was¬†already cursing those laptops. This MacBookPro,¬†still works just fine. Sigh… no good compelling reason to upgrade.¬†
The other reason is that I always buy refurbished. I have an iPod, an iMac, and the MacBookPro that I have purchased refurbished. They have all worked out fabulously. I have saved quite a lot by doing that. So, if I was going to get one, I would wait for the next speed bump, and pick one up from the refurbished site. I wonder if any 13″ models with a SSD will show up there…
We have looked at the Factory, the Adapter, and the Singleton patterns. Now we look at the Decorator. The Decorator is similar to the Adapter, but with a subtle difference. With our ReptileAdapter, we wrapped the Reptile class to map the interface methods of Animal to the appropriate methods on Reptile. With the Decorator we also wrap a class, but to add functionality, not to map it or replace the functionality.
The idea behind decorating things in the real world is pretty much how it sounds. We wrap an object with new functionality, while keeping the old functionality. How about a camera in a waterproof housing? When closed up, we have added the functionality of waterproofing, but we still provide a way to press the buttons and turn the dials so that the camera can be operated.
On the software side, the idea is the same. It is usually used when we have one object that we like how it functions, but we want to augment the behavior for a different situation. Done correctly, we can keep inserting one object inside another adding functionality at every step.
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I saw several twitter links come by today that seemed interesting, and thought I would link them up.
Packing Light – from Shutterbug
189 Business Ideas – from New Media Photographer
How to Add a Copyright Notice to Your Photos – from Black Star Rising
Sending Nice HTML Email with PHP – from CSS Tricks
5 Useful WordPress Functions You Didn’t Know Existed – Nathan Rice
Bootcamp II: Introduction- from Strobist
20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Devloper Easier - from net tuts+
The last pattern we looked at was the Adapter pattern. It was a good pattern to start with as it maps well to the physical world and is fairly simple. Now we will look at the Singleton pattern. In some respects it is the simplest of patterns, but there are some things to think about.
The idea behind the Singleton is to ensure that there can be only one (insert Highlander jokes here). If you had a factory that made widgets, you would want a widget to be created many many times. But there is only one factory. If you were modeling the US government, you would only want one president. Only one senate.
On the software side, the idea is the same. It is usually used when we only want one set of configuration variables, one controller, one data base connection pool, that kind of thing.
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“S” as in Super phone, or at least “S” as in speed. If you missed the WWDC live, you can check the recaps from the live feeds that Ars Technica and Engadget posted.
The highlights are the speed, and the new hardware bits. I don’t find my iPhone to be too slow; more network bound than anything, but I am sure for the folks playing games that the extra speed will be welcomed.
I think the compass sounds interresting, and the ability of the phone to allow accessories will allow TomTom (they demoed the app) to do turn by turn directions. The biggest hardware piece I think is the new camera. Not the most exciting, but now a 3MPix camera that can autofocus (currently fixed) and do macro, and video. Already I heard someone complaining about only 3MPix. COME ON PEOPLE! How big a sensor do you think is in this thing. More pixels than that just equals more noise!
Anyway, they are also talking longer battery life, all fitting into the same size hardware. The 3G version has dropped to $99, and the new 3GS will be available on June 19 (with the iPhone OS 3.0 available June 17). It will be $199 adn $299 for 16meg and 32 meg versions.
I am continually amazed at the applications that are created for a device such as this. I use apps on my phone (not even games) more than I use the phone capabilities. Build it, and they will come.
They also demoed voice control, but I wasn’t sure if that was a 3GS feature, or a OS 3.0 feature. Either way, voice control over not just dialing, but things like iTunes is pretty cool.
There were lots of cool OS 3.0 features demoed. The google maps service will be empedable into other apps with full pan and zoom, custom annotations, current location and geocoding. The ability for iPhones to talk to each other sounds really cool, but the push notifications are what looks to be a great feature. Not sure how it will effect battery life, but having notification from other apps would be great, although as I add more and more poeple to my twitter friends, I am not sure I want to be notified everytime someone tweets!
Find my phone appears to be only for Mobile Me users, but it allows you to locate a missing phone on a map. You can send it a code to have your phone (even if set to not ring) to make a noise. If you are convinced that your phone is gone, you can even send it a code that will wipe all your data.
I can’t believe it has taken so long to get MMS messages on the iPhone, but they will finally be here. Not on June 17 with the new OS, but sometime this summer when AT&T gets around to getting their support for it. Really? Yikes. I don’t suppose that this or AT&T blowing off tethering support all together is going to set that well in Jobs corner office. That’s right, AT&T has chosen to not implement tethering on it’s network. Shakes head. Sees new carrier in Apples future.
Well, looks like I will be doing a sync and update around June 17, but despite the new camera features, I won’t be in line on the 19th. I don’t want to be stuck in an AT&T contract and find out I can switch carriers 
Update: Looks like Chase Jarvis is getting one for the camera features, but then again, he takes better pictures with his iPhone than I do with my camera… sigh…
Update: Apples guided tour via video: http://www.apple.com/iphone/guidedtour/
This is the blog of Christopher Ward. He is a Canadian currently living in Minneapolis. Chris is a photographer and computer consultant.
You will find posts about tech frustrations, and details about his passion for photography. See you around.
For info on a photographer for weddings, kids, family and senior portraits, please see Christopher Ward Photography.com
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