Single-Serving Photo

I don’t usually do these short news-breaking stories, but this one actually irked me. Rob Galbraith, notable photographer and outstpoken reviewer of photographic equipment and technique, published a story in his blog, Rob Galbraith: DPI, pitting the late-2008 unibody MacBook Pro 15” display against the displays of two similar laptops, the Dell Inspiron and the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60.

Conclusion? Despite Apple’s long-held position as a maker of laptops uniquely suited to field shooting, Galbraith says, “In ambient light environments which induce screen reflections, the late-2008 MacBook Pro 15 inch’s glossy screen moves deep into the not acceptable category.”

Though it remains in the running for one of the more accurate displays among laptops, it fails to outshine the Inspiron or the ThinkPad in overall color accuracy or viewing angle flexibility, according to Galbraith’s hands-on analysis.

Of course nothing is totally black and white in the field of photography or even technology, so be sure to read his full review and peruse some of the responses on the Slashdot post.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, the Lensbaby is a “selective focus” lens made by (who else?) Lensbaby, Inc. I picked up my Lensbaby 3G (not related to the cell phone technology) what must be at least a year ago now. I could probably find out by looking up my first blog post about it, but I’m too lazy.

Here’s a photo I took in San Francisco’s Chinatown:

~~/Places/California/SanFrancisco/FashionSense.jpg~~

The reason I write again about the Lensbaby is that Lensbaby, Inc. has announced a new line of Lensbaby products and boy oh boy do they look like fun. The new Composer combines easier focusing as well as the ability to make the lens stay put without fiddling with the mechanical rails and buttons that my 3G has.

Here’s a picture of the very recognizable Transamerica building in downtown San Francisco from street level:

~~/Places/California/SanFrancisco/Transamerica.jpg~~

The selective focus is something you probably could do in Photoshop using a zoom blur filter. Nevertheless, these images are essentially untouched out of the camera other than your basic curves and cropping. It’s a lot of fun to manipulate the lens while peering through the viewfinder to see how it distorts the image and brings your attention to a certain element in the composition.

Here’s one from Boston:

~~/SingleServings/2007/June/09Jun07-03.jpg~~

And another, for good measure, also from Boston:

~~/SingleServings/2007/June/09Jun07-04.jpg~~

If you like, go read about the new Lensbaby products on their website. The lenses are not very expensive, relatively speaking, and although they are one-trick ponies, that one trick is a lot more fun than it might seem at first.

I’ve been a devout Photoshop user for over a decade. The first version of Photoshop that I ever laid hands on was 2.0… That’s pre-layers, and also the first version available for Windows! I started using it seriously around version 4.0 and I have kept up with nearly every version since then. I remember distinctly the addition of effects layers, shape layers, and the creation of the verb “to Photoshop” (which Adobe officially frowns upon).

Originally, I used Photoshop to create everything from promotional stickers and web graphics to letterhead and stationery. Eventually I moved to Illustrator for layout/drawing stuff, but Photoshop remains a huge part of my daily life. As the owner and sole employee of Fisheye Multimedia, I am called upon to repair and modify photographs for my clients and to manipulate newspaper layouts for framing. As a photographer myself, I spend hours upon hours in Lightroom and Photoshop, tweaking masks, adjusting curves, cloning and healing, and so on.

I am a very particular Photoshop user with specific needs and expectations established by years of use. Photoshop CS3 is a piece of crap. (more…)