Nikon D300

Somehow I justified moving up from the Nikon D70 (see photo of Lucky on left), a camera that four years ago answered Canon's challenging Rebel and broke even newer DSLR ground. Among other novelties of the D70 were steps up to the easy use of "raw" files. These offered densely packed and detailed photos (6.3 megabytes at that time), some said capable of two or three stops "wider" than popular, compressed files like jpeg.

The camera I moved to is the Nikon D300 (12.3 megs per frame), and its an amazing animal. I won't bother to list all the features. You can check those out at Scott Kelby's astounding review from 12/17/2007. Among the startling upgrades are the autofocus system, the three-inch monitor, the placement of plenty of buttons on the outsides of the camera, and on and on. Kelby said the D300 was a no-doubt-about-it professional camera and he was selling his D2Xs and a D200 to prove it.

So here's an alert: I plan to feature shots from my new D300 on this and other sites of mine starting today. My hope is I will prove the investment wasn't wasted. Let me know.

The Truth About Photo-Organizing Tools

Without making a thorough or rigorous survey of all the tools available for sorting and keeping track of new photos as they enter your system let me say this about that. There are weak links in the chain.

A few years ago I pulled most of my photos together into JASC’s Photo Album 5, a really helpful system since sold to COREL. The new owners celebrated the acquisition by developing and marketing an incompatible program called COREL Photo Album 6. Note that the predecessor bought by COREL was JASC Photo Album 5. Does the number 6 follow the number 5?

Well, for openers, not really. Number 5 was a successful package, and the COREL newbie (Number 6) seems to utilize much of the convenience of the former. But sometimes the apple falls quite far from the tree. Photo Albums 5 and 6, though distinguished nominally only by version numbers, admit their differing data base managers are perfectly incompatible.

Looking back, I’ve built a modest collection of four thousand digital or digitized photos across the last ten years by digitizing old film or by taking pictures for the last five years with digital cameras. Three quarters of those photo files can be retrieved in several ways (for example, by date) but the most useful design (and the most time-consuming to develop) is tracked by “keywords” that let me pull up all the “shorebird” photos as opposed to all the “raptors”, and so on. I’m still not able to pull together several photos of the purple finch if I say to the system “really raspberry-headed birds”. But give me time.

At last count I have, like too many of us, not only thousands of photos but about 20 hobbies. A tool like a photo album organizer lets me bring some order to at least two of my hobbies, photography and painting. There is hobby overlap because, for example, I keep track of watercolor and acrylic paintings by means of photographs. (To track paintings for sale and those that are sold I use a different photo organizing system that is linked to the others.) I don’t have any record of the oils I used to do since they grew up before digital photography obscured my view of the world.

About forty dollars bought me the COREL photo album. A solid competitor, though one with fewer features, is Picasa, a freebie from Google. After installation, both photo organizers mine your computer looking for image files by extension. Most of my photos and yours bear the “.jpg” suffix so that makes things easy. As a result, you can superficially organize your photos by date of creation as a computer file or, what is more useful, by the date when each was shot. Any serious camera, and many others that are merely jokes , will stamp the date when you took the photo and let that info be recovered by computer software. More cameras every day recognize the EXIF standard and store a subset of useful, relevant data inside each picture file.

Having offered all this, let me say that I’m disgruntled by the prospect of once again keying in the names and phrases that may organize my last four thousand photos. But living without this information now and in the future frightens me. I just spent half a day looking for a shorebird photo without calling on old Photo Album 5. The same photo (one of 285 I was told) popped up in about ten seconds when I went back to consult the older program and see what it remembered about my older (pre-COREL Photo Album 6) photos. So the advantages of a program like number 5 and 6, regardless of manufacturer is pretty obvious. But where I will find the time to key in all this data I do not know, unless I simply stop shooting new pictures for a month, an unlikely prospect. An old lesson from my youth as a data base manager may recommend not going back to re-load the old data of Number 5 in the newer system. I’ll let things stand where they are and begin to store newer photos in system Number 6.

It’s not the most favored method, living with two contrasting, incompatible systems. But it does let you continue to use the time and energy you put into the older system, and go on to a bright future using the newer. Until some yokel builds yet another incompatible but preferable system. God forbid.

For a side-by-side summary of available software in this area go to the following Web site: Photo Organizing Software Review 2008.

Push & Pull -- Every Day the Same Thing

 

It is the duty of these two fellows to push out and pull up the tide every day. Twice a day, ackshully. The one in the lead is the resident union rep. He gets to shove around the other sanderlings and "least" sandpipers. These guys are so bold they run along beside you about six feet away and won't give up their claim to the shore till you clumsily come too close, which is seldom. I left nothing in the shot for scale though. Sorry.
So how tall are they? They're about four inches high. I'm working on a scale that is more internationally clear than "inch". How about "pulgada". Es decir: Quatro. Quatro pulgadas.

Pelicans Seek Publicity

No, I'm not talking about a ball club. These are real pelicans. Natural animals. Beasties.

They gang up every day at an hour or two before sunset and make their way to their hideout. The big birds often fish alone or in the company of one or two others. Since they're such big guys, they may know enough to stay out of each other's way. This group is sailing north at the moment, along the outer shore at Huntington Beach State Park, South Carolina. That's in Georgetown County.

Driver, Follow that Cat!

Lee Gomes in the Wall Street journal of 3/12/08 draws your attention to studies about cats and people.

His take-off is the laser. It seems if you aim a ten-dollar laser pointer across the room your cat will attack the dot at once. If you move the dot, or if you start again a while later with your old ploy, the cat will get right back at it, relentlessly proving it didn't learn the dot was not a bird. Or! Or proving that it cannot "choose" to chase the dot. It must chase the dot, because committing the cat to action takes place prior to choice.

Scientists and their ilk have studied where in the cat's thinking the "decision" to follow the beam comes from. The reaction is apparently primitive in the history of the cat's mental evolution, and the alarming news is man is not much different.

That is, we will go back to a stimulus again and again even though we haven't chosen to.

The decision to pay attention to history is in this case missing. That tells me a lot about myself. Occasionally I'll watch TV shows I've seen before, or rent movies I know almost by heart. I've read War and Peace three times. That's not the problem I'm addressing here. What scares me a little is my subscribing to two New York newspapers so I can read about the same international developments. Then I top that off with browsing through a dozen other media resources from NYC to LA, too often picking up the same tidbits via the news reading services -- all on the Internet.

So here's my conclusion: I spend too much of my day learning the same things over and over, and the only thing that will correct this loss of time to redundancy is to step up and take responsibility for thinning the numbers of newsbits I get each day, before I can think about it. However, I want to reduce repetition, not block new news. How can I do this? I'll put my mental media-policeman to work on this at once and keep you posted.

How can you help stomp out pre-conscious, redundant news? Begin at home.

For instance, I just cancelled the Wall Street Journal --where ironically I found Gomes' column -- and will subsist here in South Carolina on only two dailies, one a local and the other the New York Times. That's a start.

But darn it! I cut back on the WSJ just when it was culturally waking up.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

How Lucky Can You Get?

This guy's name is "Lucky" and the folks he lives with consider themselves lucky to have him nearby. I'd say he "answers to the name of Lucky", but that's not always true. Still, at a little short of twelve weeks, he's doing well, though his owners have missed more sleep than they wanted to. Lucky was born on August 25, 2007. He's a Tibetan Terrier, which is a bit of a misnomer since he isn't a terrier at all. The British named him a terrier because he was similar to other terriers they knew, weighing in around 30 pounds. Yesterday at the vet's clinic Lucky stood at 8 pounds, showing a gain of about 2.5 pounds in a space of two weeks or so. He likes to sleep and eat, though he's no couch potato, and can run faster than his owners care to. He is not afraid of toads, but at night he gives them a respectful distance. You'd like him. He'd like you.

A KC Cat and Landlord

On a warm spring afternoon in Kansas City this fellow found a ventilated bed where he could consider the coming sunset. On the ground level he has a partner who's not so bold, but certainly is as confident and friendly. How can cats own so much property and do so little to maintain it? They make up a blessed race.

Live Oak Alley

This live oak has a dozen or more syblings along the "alley" at Brookgreen Gardens. The daffodils had gone by at the time of this visit, and that looks like an azalea in the crook of the live oak's arm. These trees are at least 200 years old and date from the era of rice plantations, farmed by slaves imported from west Africa because they knew how to back up rivers to flood the rice fields and feed and harvest the crop.
After the Civil War the slaves either left or no longer could be driven to do the dangerously hard work. Rice farming here stopped and the plantations folded. In the early 1900's several of the old properties were consolidated and the old riceland turned into hunting camps for the wealthy. The buildings are gone, except for an old kitchen at Brookgreen, but many of the walks, walls and springs survive. Note "Spanish moss" hanging from the limbs of the live oak. Guides will tell you the plant that drapes from the trees is neither Spanish nor moss, but the name sticks.

Azaleas in May at Brookgreen Gardens

Azaleas look good wherever they show up, and a lot of them live at Brookgreen (no relation) Gardens. This was taken in May when dozens of huge bushes or trees were covered with thousands of blossoms. We've visited these gardens for a dozen years at this point in spring and always got here after a heavy rain, so we often saw most of the petals on the ground. But this time the rain waited, the plants burst out and the flowers held. Timing means a lot when Mother Nature is in charge.

Swallowtail Caterpillar on Duty

In July we planted parsely in a strawberry jug on our patio hoping caterpillars and then butterflies would come and visit, and they did. This is a two-inch long swallowtail caterpillar, who had about ten brothers or sisters or whatever and they ate our parsely up, which is what it was there for anyway. We missed seeing the swallowtail butterflies emerge and found when they'd gone only a few sloughed skins. (The butterflies are black with yellow ornaments and look like Stealth fighters only smaller.) We're happy to have them as guests, and when my camera is working again and a swallowtail visits us, I'll snap a photo and put it here for you to enjoy. Until then, this fellow ranks as a pretty handsome caterpillar.