Photography Goodies

Gear and gadgets:

• Gordy’s Camera Straps
• Italian leather Leica camera cases
• Photojojo

HDR software for OSX:

• LR/Enfuse – This is a plugin for Lightroom that uses opensource Hugin project. The results tend to be very natural, but you don’t have much control through the plugin UI.
• Photomatix – Pretty much the standard others are compared to. The UI is a bit outdated, but you have a great deal of control over the end result. (pro and light versions)
• HDRtist – Seems like a good middle of the road option. Nice UI, good image results, but missing histogram and some more advanced features. (pro and free versions)
• HDR Pro Photo – Haven’t tried, looks full featured, on sale in the Mac App store.
• HDR Express — Haven’t tried it, looks like it is full featured, on par with Photomatix, but a better UI.
• Others in the Mac App store… none stand out

Right now I’m mostly using LR/Enfuse. While it is fun to play around with strong tone mapping and extreme HDR effects, I’m aiming more for the natural look with just a bit of extended range lately.

Blogs:

• Jeffrey Friedl
• Joe McNally
• Shutterfinger
• 35mm Photo Bureau
• Luminous Landscape

Nikon P7000 Notes

The p7000 is almost the perfect high end compact camera:

• raw support
• excellent zoom range (better than the G12 and LX5)
• nice ergonomics
• decent low-light performance
• great image quality
• easily accessible manual controls

I was aware of these three issues when I bought it:

• slow shot-to-shot speed
• poor low-light focus
• no dedicated ISO dial
• 28mm, f2.8 on the short end is ok, but not as good as the Panasonic LX3 or LX5

The first two were apparently fixed in the 1.1 Firmware release and the last two I can live with.

It felt decent in the store. Slow but not intolerable. When I took it out on the first shoot, it suddenly seemed incredibly slow, taking 5-6 seconds after a shot to finish writing and become available for the next shot.

I did some more research and found other people were running 5-6 pause times:

• Camera speed tests after 1.1 firmware update
• Discussion on update improvements

So I played around with the settings and the main one you want to avoid is the zoom in preview. It basically zooms 1:1 on a small part of the picture to show you how sharp it was/wasn’t. This feature seems to add 2-3 seconds to the write time. Turn it off unless you have a lot of patience.

The setting you want to avoid is in Settings… Monitor Settings… Image Review… “Zoom in on active focus point“. Turning image review off completely shaved off another half second or second. Using a faster SD card also helps a bit. With a class 10 card and regular image preview my write times are somewhere around 2-2.5 seconds, which is acceptable for a compact.

Other random links:

• Flickr thread on interesting after market products for the p7000
• Retro faux-leather cases on eBay for the p7000

Notes on MacRuby and sqlite3

Each time I install the latest version of MacRuby, I spend an hour re-figuring this out, so here it is…

Under certain conditions installing the ‘sqlite3-ruby’ gem on OSX with macgem fails with this error:

Building native extensions.  
This could take a while...
/bin/sh: line 1: 27196 Abort trap
/Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework/Versions/0.11/usr/bin/macruby extconf.rb
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3-ruby:	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework/Versions/0.11/usr/bin/macruby extconf.rb
checking for sqlite3.h... yes
checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... no
sqlite3 is missing.
Try 'port install sqlite3 +universal'or 'yum install sqlite3-devel' and check
your shared library search path (the location where your sqlite3 shared library
is located).*** extconf.rb failed ***Could not create Makefile due to some
reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log
file for more details. You may need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
    --with-opt-dir
    --without-opt-dir
    ... etc ....

/Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework/Versions/0.11/usr/lib/ruby/Gems/1.9.2/
gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.3.2/ext/sqlite3/extconf.rb:20:
in `asplode:': sqlite3 is missing. Try 'port install sqlite3 +universal'or 'yum 
install sqlite3-devel' and check your shared library search path (the location 
where your sqlite3 shared library is located). (SystemExit) from 
/Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework/Versions/0.11/usr/lib/ruby/Gems/1.9.2/
gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.3.2/ext/sqlite3/extconf.rb:29:
in `<main>'\

The problem is that macports installs into /opt/local by default so even after doing ‘port install sqlite3 +universal’, you’ll get this error message. You need to specify the install prefix using this awkward command line:

sudo macgem install --version '= 1.3.2' sqlite3-ruby -- --with-sqlite3-dir=/opt/local

Version 1.3.2 is the one I’ve had luck with on MacRuby up to version 0.11.