On top of all that, the day job, which long ago went into “Death March” mode despite several clear warnings from several people, is sucking al life from me. So I don’t suppose things are going to be fixed for a while.

And you know what else ? I’m not actually terribly good at photography, beyond the basic mechanics - and even then, I’m borderline at best. Check out my Flickr stream, which is one thing I do update, for the sad evidence.

So, if you are actually reading this, and you would like to see some great photography, as well as some extremely nice and well presented slideshow podcasts, I suggest you stop reading this and put your valuable time to better use at Bruce Percy’s The Light and The Land website. Adieu.

Edward Burtynsky wannabe

weeping willow

About 200m above ...

... this one

Things are a bit better on the cataloging front. IPTC and keyword metadata written into DNG files in Lightroom should import into Aperture, although some workarounds are required, in particular where ratings are concerned.

One thing I dislike about Lightroom is way that keywords are edited and managed, and especially how this is all mixed up with search. I especially dislike the way that I have to switch to the Library module to work with keywords.

Well, with Aperture, you don't need to switch to anything, but I have to admit it took me a while to work out how I could make bulk edits to keywords. When importing keywords with certain characters, for example "á", Aperture mangles the keyword. So "Jökulsárlón" became "árlón". To fix this I tried to do it the "Lightroom way", which obviously didn't work. You can't edit keywords in a multiple selection using the metadata panel, at least as far as I can see.

But you can use the Keyword HUD:

This can be quickly used not only to edit, add or remove keywords, but also quickly apply them to images, whatever you're doing to them, be it editing, retouching, arranging for print, for web, anywhere. And for my scattered mind, this is way, way better than Lightroom's rigid approach.

Aperture 2.1 zips along fast enough in image browsing mode, but as soon as I start adding adjustments, things start going downhill fast. The loupe, for example, starts staggering around like an intoxicated tortoise, and strange video artifacts show up, such as half the image blanking out, or the image disappearing altogether when I move a slider.

Most irritating, the histogram in the levels "brick" doesn't display, and frequently the main histogram doesn't either.

Levels adjustment histogram missing in action...

The histogram itself is very sluggish, and cannot be used to evaluate the effects of adjustments in real time. All in all, it is quite worrying, and also a bit baffling. This is the top end Mac laptop. It is used in PR shots for Aperture 2. And yet it performs at a level which, honestly, is barely adequate. Do I really need a Quad Core Mac Pro to run this thing ?

However, last week, we spent a few days at the heavenly haven of Casa Bolsinina, Tuscany, being looked after by Maria Pia and Marcello. Although I can't say I was feeling particularly motivated, I took a few bits and pieces of gear with me (only 4 cameras), and intended to get up at least once at 4am for a Tuscan dawn.

Well, one morning I set the alarm for 4am, which given that I got to sleep at 1am was a bit drastic. And when 4am came around, I dragged myself out of bed, far enough to see that the sky was completely clear. This, in context, is bad news. Ideally there would be a thick ground mist, which can be used to artfully used to conceal the less attractive parts of the Tuscan landscape.

So I went back to bed.

And felt guilty.

Finally, at 5am I decided to give it a go. By this point, the sky was lightening, and I decided to head in the direction of Val d'Orcia, since getting to the Crete Senese ridge would (a) take too long, and (b) was pointless given the lack of mist.

At some point I glanced around and saw I'd struck oil - a new crescent moon was just rising. All I needed to do was to find a suitable framing for it. Fast. A "this is better than nothing" opportunity arose just outside Buonconvento, and here it is ...

Before Photoshop...

...after Photoshop

Footnote

In some cultures, a new moon is an invitation to make a wish for the coming month. Well, I didn't make one, but I had been hoping to see a porcupine (or two). And I did. Unfortunately, it was plastered all over the road - a long, straight stretch of road, where some doubtless petrol-head Italian had been compensating for his frustrating relationship with his underpants by bravely travelling at 180kmh.

I have calmed down a bit since, and at the risk of offending my many Italian friends, really, what the F&*% happens to Italian men's brains when they get behind a steering wheel ? Why do almost all of these courteous, educated, polite and cultured people turn into brainless, arrogant, rude homicidal maniacs ?

Same reason the Germans, British, French, etc do I guess.

It's really difficult to see what the development team have been doing for nigh on 2 years. EM is still totally dependent on QuickTime and the Mac OS X support for RAW formats, so unlike competitors Extensis Portfolio or Adobe Lightroom, it cannot preview Olympus E-3 files. It has gained a hook to Microsoft's Google Earth clone. Yippee. Always wondered where I took my photos. Oh, and I can catalog Office 2008 documents. Wonderful.

Changes to the light box view to support a second monitor are great, but they seem to have dropped the ball when it comes to single monitor support. There are still vestiges of a once great piece of well supported software in there, but all the evidence is that the customer base has collapsed.

Incredibly, there's still nothing quite as good out there for Mac at least, at least assuming you have file formats supported by OS X. I'm going to try Photo Mechanic again. It does seem to do a lot of things I use iView for, and it does seem to be edging towards full DAM functionality.

On my previous 4 trips to Iceland I used the E-1, and shot over 4000 frames, of which at least 3 are quite nice. The E-1 took everything Icelandic weather could throw at it, and just shrugged. It never missed a beat, and never picked up any sensor dust. However, its 3 point auto focus was far from ideal for wildlife, and the 5 Megapixel sensor was a bit limiting. So, now was time to hand over to the E-3 with 10 Megapixels and a totally new state of the art AF system, not to mention in-body stabilisation.

The weather was again up to the challenge, and the E-3 had to put up with the elements, although not to the extent the E-1 has gone to. However, it looks like it is well up to the standards of its illustrious predecessor. Temperatures were between -10 and +5, usually around -2. And it snowed. A lot.

The viewfinder on the E-3 is fantastic, and nobody should have any trouble with manual focus. In theory, Live View should also be useful, but to be honest, on at least half of my attempts to use it, I gave up, as the screen simply wasn't readable enough. The screen is one area where the EOS 1Ds blows the E-3 out of the water. The Canon's screen is simply gorgeous, and usable even in bright light. The E-3's is adequate, but frankly it should be a lot better. Having said this, I did not use the auto brightness adjust feature, which might make things better, but on the other hand, it screws up colour reproduction. Anyway, I did get a least one shot with Live View that would have been very tricky without it.

I also notice that the screen brightness seems to suddenly jump or fall a few notches, in all modes (playback, menu, info). This may be a fault, or an undocumented feature. Classify under mildly annoying, for now.

I quite frequently made long exposures, using either an infrared blocking filter or a Singh-Ray Vario-ND filter. I noticed that the camera makes a very pronounced noise (the audio kind) when the mirror is up. Again, I'm not sure if this is normal or not. Actually, it may well be because I forgot to turn IS off... Long exposure performance with the E-3 is simply exceptional compared with the E-1. However, I cannot recommend the Singh-Ray filter, as it introduces some very nasty colour shifts and irregular darkening. This is partly due to the design, based on two polarisers, but frankly, it is way over-priced and clumsy to use. It seems worse on the E-3 than the E-1 or E-400, but it isn't brilliant on them either. I'll be sticking to B&W NDs in future.

Given the specifications, and the temperatures, one thing that really surprised me was battery life. And not in a good way. The E-3 munched its way through 3 fully charged BLM-1s, for 750 frames. Two of these batteries were brand new. I did not indulge in anything like excessive chimping, and set review time to 2 secs when I was unsure of exposure, or off otherwise. Not impressive.

Speaking of exposure, that is another area Olympus needs to look at. Spot metering works fine, as it should, but ESP metering is really all over the place. Very inconsistent and very sensitive. Ok, so snow and ice are not easy targets, but getting 2 stops over exposure on snow is pretty impressive... not to mention following up with 1 stop under on a nearly identical scene. This is not news to me - it is equally hopeless on the other 2 cameras.

Auto Focus, on the other hand, is dramatically better. Using the 50-200 (non SWD) I did get some hunting, but nothing like with the E-1, where hunting is the norm, and acquiring focus is a rare event. I usually used a single, central focus point. Panning on moving targets worked far, far better than anything I've used before.

The ergonomics are not as good as the E-1. No contest. The loss of the mode dial is bloody stupid, and the dual-purpose direct buttons are a pain in the posterior. Remembering which button & dial combination to use for shooting mode or AF mode is neither intuitive nor a pleasant user experience. Otherwise the handling is ok, but I do not find the position of the shutter release to be quite right. It is an ok camera to use, but it has lost the fluidness of the E-1.

As for using it with gloves, well it depends on the gloves. With North Face windstopper trekking gloves, it is pretty tricky, although not impossible. With LowePro photographer's gloves - which are fine at -5C - it is absolutely not an issue.

Compared to the EOS 1Ds MkIII, the camera is noticeably smaller, but the weight feels similar. The EOS is lighter than it looks, and the E-3 heavier than it looks. Obviously the EOS delivers much higher resolution, but the difference between the two in terms of lens performance is impressive. The ZD lenses simply do not vignette, and are sharp right into the corners, wide open. On the other hand, the 1Ds delivers a degree of vignetting and corner softness that will have 'em drooling on Flickr :-). However, as mentioned before, the 1Ds has a truly fabulous screen.

I used three lenses, the 14-54, 50-200 and 7-14. This was also the first time I used the 7-14 seriously, and I was very impressed. It delivers an incredible sense of depth, almost three dimensional, and controls flare extremely well. An expensive lens, but worth it.

So, in conclusion, there is much to like about the E-3. In terms of delivering images, it is a huge advance over the E-1. In terms of ruggedness and all terrain capability, it is equal. But in terms of ergonomics, well, sadly, it doesn't quite hit the same heights of perfection.

The evenings out here are waiting to be rediscovered. They won't wait for ever.

"The current does not have administrator's privileges"

Well, Mr Olympus-San, a) yes he has, and b) why the hell does he need to log on as admin to run a bloody (third-rate) photo management application ?

Winter, in Ticino.

I actually discovered the site through Rebekka's blog, and this is where the strange doings come in (cue creepy Twilight Zone sounds). This evening I wanted to send my complements to the people at Focus, and went back to Rebekka's blog to find the link ... only to find the post has been airbrushed out of existence. It is still in my RSS reader archive though.

I wonder why this is ... seems a very professional operation...although there is something a little strange, not to mention screwed up, with the Vimeo hosting.

I think we should be told.

UPDATE - well I have been told. Rebekka doesn't like the music and is unhappy about the edits, so she's decided to keep quiet about it. I can see what she means about the music, but I just tuned out.

Convergence added to the Ticino Gallery

Swirl added to the Ticino Gallery

Slither added to the Ticino Gallery

Hideaway added to the Ticino Gallery

See all latest updates

Also available on Flickr

So finally, I've selected 20 photos from last September in Sardinia, out of 300, and added them. You can see them in the Sardinia Gallery.

It's getting more and more difficult to keep everything pointing in the same direction. I discovered that Mac OS X 10.5 (some cat or the other) has arbitrarily removed support for Image Capture scripting, so I had to delve back in the black hole of AppleScript - surely the most truly awful programming environment ever conceived - and work out how to use Image Events. Naturally, the logical approach didn't work, so as ever I had to find a workaround.

Since I am now, for better or worse, using Lightroom for sorting and raw processing, I had to find a way of generating web images in the way I need them without first rendering the RAW files. I thought I'd hit upon a neat trick, using the fact that Bridge CS3 knows about colour labels I apply in Lightroom, and thus enabling me to pipe these to my Photoshop action, but, naturally, there was a glitch here too: seems you can only have one folder at a time open in Bridge, and Lightroom organises files (as I told it to) in multiple folders. I may be wrong about this - Bridge is nothing if not obscure - but it does look like Bridge really is absolutely hopeless as anything much behind a pointless file browser replacement.

Then there is the sneaking feeling that Lightroom maybe isn't the optimum way to process RAW images. I don't know. I like the adjustment tools and the highlight recovery in Lightroom, and some of the browsing tools, although the rest, in my opinion, is a clumsy mess, probably the result of trying too quickly to be master of all trades. The problem is that Lightroom does offer, in theory, a very nice integrated solution, unlike anything else other than Aperture.

Amazing really - as soon as I find a bit of time to get back to photography, it is immediately sucked up by keeping up to date with the software.

Still, I quite like some of the Sardinia photos.

Whatever. I thought a bit about the lens issue, and decided that the 12-60 doesn't have compelling arguments for me over the 11-22 & 14-54 I already have.

So I decided to go and get the E-3 body. Whilst I was waiting for an assistant, I started to think a bit.... does it really have much to offer over the E-1 & E-400 I already have ? E-400 gives me 10Mpix. E-1 gives me all weather capability, and prints up to A3 (I doubt I'll ever need bigger). Almost all of my "ok" shots (I haven't progressed to "good" yet) are taken on tripod, so IS is of little use to me. LV would be useful sometimes, I think, although I'm not certain. The 30 min exposure would be a definite plus, if the noise is controlled enough (and no reviewer has even mentioned this yet)....

So, on balance, I wondered would that E-3 improve my photography, or enjoyment of photography ? The answer, clearly, was "unlikely". And so I walked out of shopping therapy.

I was pretty stunned. First, because the sheer quality of the 3 or 4 sites featured monthly is pretty intimidating. Secondly, because the photo part of this site has been in practical hibernation for over a year.

But it's true. And here's the proof:

I've been reading OP since pretty much issue 1. But I never thought I'd get anywhere near being featured in their pages.

So, just for this one post, please forgive me if I'm just a little bit unsufferably pleased with myself.

Wait a minute... it's not the April 1st edition is it ?