Author: JH

I’m looking for a compact camera that goes well with a suit (as in: small and unobtrusive), survives helicopter attacks, can take three days in a snow cave at high altitude and subzero temperatures, and so forth — all the usual stuff people who use cameras seem to go through these days. The only one I found so far is the Panasonic FT2/TS2. Is it good enough? Yesterday I returned one with a lens that was not perfectly centered. The second sample looks better — the lens is razor sharp all the way to the corners. These two from a forest near Munich from earlier today.

The effort one has to put into choosing these things is ridiculous. Why oh why does it take a camera to make a photograph?

Thank God, the Jesus Tablet is here. If someone could give me back the past 30 minutes, I’d skip the impartial (oh well) cover stories of Time and Newsweek, and head right over to “Fake Steve,” here.

“Needless to say,” as they like to say in photo-blogging, only to then go right on to say whatever is needless to say: I’ll buy one as soon as I’m back in Manhattan.

I’ve been shifting more and more work from Adobe Photoshop to Lightroom during the past two or three years. Still, every single image had to go through Photoshop at some point. But now, the latest beta version 3.0 of Lightroom, out for two weeks or so, has become so good though that I don’t need Photoshop anymore. Not only that. For the things I do in post processing, which is mostly local changes of contrast, Lightroom is intuitive and quick — no more tedious selections or messing with layers, for example. And, obviously, all edits are “non-destructive” and can be copied to similar images, which saves a lot of time.

If you’re on a Mac and dislike Adobe, the latest version of Apple Aperture is not bad at all and, in principle, does the same things as Lightroom; unfortunately, my up-to-date Macbook Pro, equipped with generous amounts of extra RAM, is brought to its knees by Aperture after only a little bit of editing; and, at least for my camera, the raw conversions, on a pixel level, are more refined with Lightroom no matter how much work I put into Aperture.

What am I to do with all that free time now? Take the bar exam? A Ph.D. in philosophy perhaps? Sleep more?