One of the most frequent photography-related questions I get is, “Which camera should I buy?” Given the sheer volume of digital camera models being introduced every year, and the mega-hype associated with every trivial feature, it’s not surprising people have a hard time choosing a camera model. When I get asked this question, I usually run down a quick checklist of questions (budget? SLR or P&S? etc.) with the person, and then make one or two recommendations based on my experience.

Apparently, the bloggers at Make The Photo get asked the same question a lot too, because they’ve put together a flowchart with the same type of questions I normally ask, along with their own recommendations for each category of photographer. Their flowchart is available at http://www.makethephoto.com/how-to-choose-a-digital-camera/.

I love this flow chart for several reasons:

1. It uses roughly the same questions as I use, in the same order, so it matches how I decide which camera to recommend.
2. It recommends the same cameras as I would in most situations.
3. The flow chart is regularly updated as new cameras are introduced. The last update was a few days ago, when they added the newly-announced Canon T2i.

In other words, if you use this flow chart, you’ll get the same recommendations as if you’d asked me directly, assuming I was able to keep up with every new camera announcement. From now on, when someone asks me for a camera recommendation, I’ll first point them to the flow chart, and, if they have any questions, I can answer them. Yay for the Internet!

I get asked every so often what my photo processing workflow is like, so I decided to post it here:

1. I always shoot RAW. (Why? Disk space is cheap; ruining a great shot because of white balance issues is annoying.)
2. When I arrive home with a new batch of photos, I copy them all to two places: my NAS (to back up my unedited photos) and my photo editing workstation (into a to-be-edited folder).
3. My wife Caroline reviews the photos on the photo editing workstation using Canon’s Digital Photo Pro (DPP), marking the ones she does and doesn’t like.
4. I review Caroline’s selections and occasionally make a few changes to the selections. In addition to some differences in taste, I will occasionally toss out photos because I don’t think they are salvageable. I also add in  photos similar to some of the already-selected photos because I plan on cropping or editing them differently. I will also sometimes switch out a photo for a very similar looking one for technical reasons — slightly better focus or exposure, or less noise. Having said all that, about 95% of the photos I post are the ones Caroline selected.
5. I delete the rejected photos from my photo editing workstation. (Note that I still have all the unmodified photos on my NAS.)
6. I edit the selected photos in DPP, and then export them as top-quality JPEGs.
7. If needed, I edit the photos some more in Photoshop. (This is pretty rare.)
8. Caroline reviews the edited photos and provides feedback. If needed I work with her to retouch the photos she has concerns about. Usually a few more photos get deleted at this point.
9. I upload the photos to SmugMug.
10. I move the edited RAW and JPG files to an edited folder on my NAS. The NAS now has every photo I took straight off my camera, an edited RAW file for photos I’ve posted, and all the JPGs that I’ve posted.
11. The NAS is backed up regularly to two separate external drives, one of which is stored off-site.

(And before anyone says, “You should try Lightroom!”, I’ve tried Lightroom, and prefer DPP’s RAW processing.)

Almost invariably at the end of a software project, someone will insist on fixing an annoying but non-critical bug. Perhaps the browser will freeze if you hit refresh 200 times in a row, or maybe button text overlaps when you get more than 20 incoming calls during an outgoing call. The cry will go out, “We should fix this bug! It’s a simple change! It couldn’t possibly break anything!” Sometimes this will come from marketing; other times the engineer for that component will want to make the change.

Looking at the proposed fix, the change will appear to be fool-proof. Perhaps a variable didn’t get initialized properly, or a resource had a typo, or someone forgot a break in a switch statement. You may say to yourself, “There’s no way something this simple could possibly break anything, so let’s do it!”

Before you agree to a claimed “zero-risk” change, read this true story from Raymond Chen at Microsoft. It demonstrates how every change has risk, sometimes in unusual and unexpected ways. During the middle of a project, there’s time to find and react to any unexpected side-effects from a change; at the end of a project, the side-effects may be serious enough that dealing with them will delay the software’s release. Do you want to be the one explaining to the CEO that the product can’t ship on time because a “zero-risk” cosmetic fix introduced a serious problem into the planned final build?

So avoid the temptation, and at the end of a project only fix bugs that actually prevent the product from shipping.

I was hoping to have the Dragon*Con Friday photos up by now, but for two reasons they’re not done yet:

1. Friday was by far the biggest day for photos, so it’s taking longer than I expected
2. I spent a large part of the weekend migrating to a new computer that I assembled myself.

My previous system was a 4-year-old WinXP dual-core AMD system that was really showing its age. The new system is much spiffier:

• Intel Core i7-860 quad-core hyperthreaded processor
• 8GB RAM
• 160GB SSD for the OS
• 1TB high-speed SATA drive for data
• Blu-ray optical drive
• Radeon 5870 graphics card
• 750W power supply
• Intel DP55SB motherboard
• Antec Mini P180 case
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Not surprisingly, the new system is very fast. Operations that took a second or two on the old system are now instananeous. Launching Photoshop CS4 used to be slow enough to grab a coffee; now it takes 3 seconds. This massive speed increase is making a big difference in my ability to edit photos (and Caroline’s ability to select photos) efficiently, so I’m hoping I will be able to get photos out quicker in the future. (When you’re going through 1000 photos, even one or two seconds per photo saved adds up quickly.)

Recently I decided to purchase a new camera, the Canon 5D Mark II. It has received excellent reviews from just about everyone who’s used it, and seemed like the appropriate upgrade from my Canon 40D. I quickly discovered that even though the camera has been out for over six months, it’s still very hard to find. Most major online sites list it on back-order, and Amazon.com doesn’t even sell it except through third-parties.

When there are shortages of consumer electronics product such as the 5DII or the Nintendo Wii for long periods of time, conspiracy theories are inevitable. Perhaps the manufacterer is deliberately keeping supplies low to maintain an image of popularity or exclusivity? Or perhaps there are quality control issues? While these are all possiblities, they’re not very likely. At Handspring and Palm, I saw first-hand how difficult it is to have the right amount of product available at all times, and some of the reasons why there can be long-lasting shortages of a consumer electronics product.

Before getting into specifics, it’s first important to note one thing: having too few of a product is much preferred over having too much. Of course, having exactly the right amount is ideal, but in the real world forecasts are always going to be slightly off, so it’s better to estimate low. Why? Because inventory is bad, especially in consumer electronics. Having a warehouse full of product that the company has already paid for but hasn’t sold is a drain on operating cash. It also puts pressure on the company to lower prices, reducing profits. Low inventory means stable pricing, solid margins, and strong cash flow. Shortages mean a company is making money, but could be making more. A glut can reduce prices to the point the company isn’t making any money.

So what would prevent a company from building enough of a product to meet demand? The obvious answer is of course  shortages of one or more parts. If your product has an LCD screen, and there’s a worldwide shortage of LCD controllers, you probably won’t be able to get enough LCD controllers to build the number of units your customers want. Worse, if you’re a small or medium company, the LCD controller manufacturers are likely going to favor their best (AKA biggest) customers, with any leftovers going to smaller companies. If you’re a big company, while the LCD controller manufacturers may be filling a larger percentage of your requests, because your orders are so big, a small percentage shortfall is still large in absolute numbers.

Some parts also have very long lead times, with six to nine month lead times not unheard of. Since Christmas stock is built in fall, by February or March you need to decide how much your customers will want in December. If you guess wrong, you’re either going to have a shortage or a glut. Manufacturing decisions that look dumb today may have been made 6 months ago, and may have seemed like a good idea at the time. Keep in mind that shortage is preferred over glut.

Even if with enough parts on hand, a manufacturer may be limited by their product assembly line capacity. It’s easy to say, “why don’t they just bring up another assembly line?”, but it’s not that simple. Bringing up an assembly line is a long-term investment that is very time consuming and expensive. If an assembly line is brought up and then idled a short time later, the company will lose a lot of money. Therefore, a company will need to be 100% sure demand will stay high enough to require the additional line. Again, shortage is preferred over glut.

Finally, an international company like Palm needs to decide where to send product after its been built. If every geographical region’s requests can’t be met due to a shortage, HQ needs to decide who gets priority. This decision can be made a variety of ways, including deciding which regions are most strategic, which regions are most profitable, or which retailers are screaming the loudest. In the case of the 5dII, the US dollar is pretty weak right now, leading me to speculate that Canon is allocating fewer units to the US because they are less profitable than units sold in Asia.

So while it’s possible a company is deliberately building too few devices, it’s much more likely that someone, somewhere in the supply chain, made a wrong decision based on available data a few months ago.

I have read many blog posts and articles where the authors confuse energy sources with energy transports. Failing to make this distinction makes it impossible to discuss energy policy coherently, so I wanted to write a post about this topic.

An energy source is something occurring in nature from which humans have found a way to harness energy. Waterfalls, sunlight, petroleum, and plants all fall into this category. Frequently, though, energy sources are not in the same physical or temporal location where the energy is needed and cannot be easily transported, so an energy transport is required to move the energy. Examples of energy transports include electricity and hydrogen.

The easiest way to distinguish between an energy source and an energy transport is to compare energy in versus energy out. Petroleum products release more energy when used then it took to refine the petroleum, so it is an energy source. On the other hand, it takes more energy to produce hydrogen then what is released when it is used, so hydrogen is an energy transport. 

It’s not always clear whether something is an energy source or merely a transport. Ethanol has been touted as a “green” energy source, but by some peoples’ calculations it takes more energy to produce corn ethanol than what you get using it, making it an energy transport. You still need an energy source to produce the power required to make the corn ethanol.

It’s important to note that energy transports are not equally efficient. For example, high-voltage electrical lines lose a much smaller percentage of the power being transported compared to low-voltage lines, which is why high-voltage lines are used for long-distance energy transport. The less energy lost by an energy transport, the more efficient it is.

When looking at the energy efficiency of a device, measuring how efficiently it uses the energy in an energy transport is not helpful; instead, you need to look at how much energy is required to make the energy transport to begin with. For example, hydrogen-fuel cars do not actually run on hydrogen energy. The energy in the hydrogen used by the car was generated using an energy source like oil, coal, or solar. Therefore, to determine the true efficiency of a hydrogen car, you need to look at how much energy (oil, coal, solar) was required to produce the hydrogen. Sometimes there are multiple intermediary energy transports — coal generates electricity which is used to create hydrogen to run the car — so the question becomes, how many miles per poud of coal does your hydrogen car get?

When talking about alternative energy, it’s important to be clear whether you’re talking about better energy sources or better energy transports. While it’s important to use efficient and eco-friendly energy transports, if the energy being transported was generated by inefficient or dirty energy sources we’re not that much better off. For example, too many people claim that electric cars are more eco-friendly than gas-burning cars without stopping to consider how we will generate that electricity. Since a lot of our electricity is generated by burning coal, is switching cars from a petroleum-based energy source to a coal-based energy source really a good idea? Likewise, hydrogen is a relatively clean energy transport and may eventually be practical for powering cars, but what energy sources will we use to generate that hydrogen?

One of the reasons people focus on energy transports is that our options for energy sources are limited, and all of them have significant drawbacks:

• Petroleum is considered “dirty”, and there’s a relatively limited supply pumped mainly by countries hostile to us.
• Coal is considered even more “dirty” than petroleum, and there’s a limited supply too.
• Most solar power plants require solar cells with all sorts of toxic chemicals that leach out into the ground. Solar is also very expensive and because of the inefficiency of today’s solar cells is limited to relatively small parts of the world.
• Hydroelectric requires dams that cause ecological damage to fish and streams.
• Natural gas has a very limited supply.
• Nuclear generates toxic waste and requires a lot of overhead to safely run a generation plant.
• Wind is limited to very few areas of the world and causes ecological damage to birds. Some recent studies have suggested it also modifies the surrounding climate by altering wind patterns.
• Geothermal is also limited to very few areas of the world.

However, if we are serious about becoming more eco-friendly, we must start seriously discussing where we should be getting our energy from, instead of only discussing the best ways to get that energy into our cars, homes, and offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that advances in technology often outrun society’s ability to adapt to them. A good example is public records laws. When many public records laws were originally passed, searching through public records was difficult and time consuming. You (or someone you hired) had to go down to the courthouse and manually read through tons of documents. This effectively meant that public documents were really only available to people with a lot of time (or money, to pay for someone else’s time).

When those records were put online and indexed by search engines, the information contained in them became easily accessible to everyone. Want to know what your neighbor paid for this house? Google it. Want to know when your boss got married? Google it. Once people realized how public public records were, the amount of information made available was reduced to protect people’s privacy. In principle, that information had always been available; in practice, it was only made available in a usable format after it was indexed.

In fact, search engines have made it much easier to find all sorts of information about a person. Before Google, when you met someone at a convention, you couldn’t find out much about them afterwards unless they chose to share their personal contact info. Now, you could plug in the info from their badge into Google and (usually) find a wealth of info about them. Fanime has about 10,000 attendees; if only .1% of them are stalkers, that’s ten stalkers walking around Fanime.

However, right now, there is a good way to protect against this — don’t put a real name or any Internet aliases on your badge. For conventions that always print a real name, black it out with a marker. Without a search term, text-based indexes are useless . Stalkers could take a picture and post it on various forums, but that is hit-or-miss, doesn’t scale, and alerts the target that someone is stalking them.

This is a good way to protect yourself for now, but what happens when you can search by photo? Facial recognition has been around for a while, but it has always required tremendous computing power and was somewhat unreliable, In last year or so, Google rolled out facial recognition in a limited fashion for Picasa. This means the technology is getting easier and cheaper to deploy. In the future, what if Google developed an image-based index? In other words, what if you could point Google at a picture and ask for more pictures of the same person?

If that happened, anyone who has pictures of themselves posted online could be found with one photo. If a stalker took one picture of my daughter at the mall, without even knowing her name they could find all my photos of her, and probably eventually find her address and other info.

Of course, eventually, society will adapt. Google text-search encouraged people to make their blogs “friends-only”  and reduced the amount of information in public records. Some people always restricted their blog, but it didn’t become the norm until people realized how much info about themselves could be found through Google. Likewise, once people realized the impact of search by photo, most people would probably restrict photo access to friends/family.  But just as it’s pretty much impossible to suppress all text info about yourself online, it will be impossible to suppress all photos of yourself online, and we will all lose a little more privacy.

When I mention to people I co-own a web & email hosting company, they usually ask how many customers we have. After I tell them, they are often surprised. “Why would someone pay for email?” they ask. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN Mail, and many more offer it for free. Web hosting, too, is free. Want to post photos? Flickr is free. Want to blog? LiveJournal is one of many free options. Facebook and MySpace are free. With all these free options, how do paid hosting companies stay in business?

The answer is simple: Customers are willing to pay for perceived value. If a user accidentally deletes their email from Gmail, will Gmail restore it from backups? If a user is having problems setting up their iPhone to work with Yahoo Mail, can they get tech support from Yahoo?  These are all example of value provided by paid hosting companies; as long as paid hosting companies continue to provide value to the customer that the free sites don’t, they will continue to thrive. Of course, some customers do not assign much or any value to these items; they will stick with the free sites.

A good analogy is in restaurants. Outback charges $15 for a steak; how does Ruth’s Chris stay in business selling $50 steaks? The answer is obvious — Ruth’s Chris’s customers perceive at least $35 of extra value in the better quality of their steaks and better table service.

One of the hot topics in professional wedding photography is “shoot and burn” photographers. In a recent podcast, David Ziser from Digital Pro Talk discussed the challenges shoot and burn photographers pose to traditional wedding photographers. While shoot-and-burn photographers are not free, they typically charge about 80-90% less than a traditional wedding photographer. Of course, they do a lot less than a traditional photographer; unlike a traditional photographer, who would carefully retouch every image in Lightroom or Photoshop, go over proofs, put together a photo album, and order prints, a shoot and burn photographer typically dumps the photos directly from the camera onto a CD or DVD and lets the couple handle everything else. Also, shoot-and-burn photographers can afford to charge much less because they generally are not trying to make a living in photography; as long as they cover the cost of their (relatively minimal) equipment and make a few extra bucks on top of that they are happy. This undercuts professional photographers who often times can barely make a living at their current prices.

In my opinion, a large part of why shoot and burn photographers are doing well is because many traditional photographers do a lousy job of providing perceived value to their customers. Telling potential customers they should pay ten times as much because “I’ll provide you an album and prints” only works if customers value an album and prints. News flash — many don’t. In my experience, the younger generation views photos as something to share online (on sites like Flickr and Facebook); prints are mostly superfluous. Physical albums take up space, and can only be shared in person. Online albums can be viewed by anyone, anytime, from anywhere. You may say that they will regret not making prints in the future; whether that is or is not the case is irrelevant. Until time travel is invented, their future regrets will not affect their buying patterns today.

For a traditional wedding photographer to continue to be successful, I think they need to do several things:

• They need to understand how the Internet has changed how people view photos. Prints and physical albums are nice, but most people want to share their photos on Facebook and view online albums. Despite the best efforts of Shutterfly and Snapfish, the Internet is not just an easy way to order prints.
• They need to convey the value they provide in terms of image composition, image quality, retouching, and professionalism. A traditional photographer is not better because of the extra end products they produce, but because they produce better pictures. Remember that some people will never perceive any additional value in high-quality photos; they will always go with shoot and burn photographers (at best). They are not a traditional photographer’s target market.
• Do what customers value; don’t bother doing what customers don’t value. If a customer only values digital files, sell a package that only provides digital files. If your customer perceives the value you provide in terms of image quality, they will be willing to pay more than they would to a shoot and burn photographer.
• Accept that the proliferation of digital SLRs has permanently reduced the perceived value of photography. This is the natural progression of technology. Cell phone companies no longer can charge $2/minute for domestic calls, and domain registrars no longer can charge $100/yr per domain. Just because you could make a living as a pro photographer in the past does not mean this will remain a viable full-time occupation in the future. Complaining about technology, commoditization, or competition does not make it go away and just makes the transition harder.
• When marketing themselves and their services, photographers should remember that positioning is important. Are you McDonald’s, Outback or Ruth’s Chris?

Of course, these tips are not limited to photographers. If you own any business, you should always ask yourself what your company’s value proposition is to your customers, and always make sure you charge customers for perceived value, and only for perceived value.

Last week my home office’s monitor, a three-year-old 19″ non-wide-screen LCD, died. Since I originally bought it, LCD prices have come down a lot, so I was happy for the excuse to replace it with something bigger. Because of the space limitations imposed by my computer hutch, I quickly settled on a 24″ widescreen as the desired size for the replacement, and then spent a lot of time looking at the various brands and options. My old LCD was a ViewSonic; did I want to stick with them? I’ve been reasonably happy with the 22″ Dell monitor at work, so perhaps I should go with Dell? Or perhaps a different brand such as Samsung or Gateway? After wading through many sites and forums full of reviews I settled on the Dell 2408WFP.

I chose the 2408WFP for serveral reasons. On paper, the specs look really great. 2 DVI inputs, HDMI, DisplayPort, height-adjustable stand, and many other goodies. Also, at least one reviewer tested its color reproduction accuracy and found it to be very good, and since I do a lot of photo editing, color accuracy is very important to me. While the 2408WFP was fairly expensive compared to other 24″ widescreens, the additional features it had compared to other monitors and the 25% off coupon I found made it seem worth the price.

Today the new monitor arrived, and I immediately set it up to see what it was like. On the forums some people complained about a red tint, uneven lighting, and other issues; I must have gotten lucky because the one I received doesn’t have any of these issues. It did over-saturate colors by default, but that was easily fixed by switching the display mode to sRGB and installing the color profile on the included CD. I then compared the display to a printed version of the SmugMug Calibration Print, and found that the monitor was pretty much dead-on, color-wise. I was also happy that its stand required less depth than the 19″ ViewSonic stand, allowing me to set the monitor further back on the table.

After using this monitor for a few hours, I’m very happy with it. The monitor is bright and sharp, color reproduction is great, and it’s the perfect size for my work area. The only negative I’ve noticed is that it puts out a lot more heat than my old 19″, probably due to its larger size. The last thing my home office needed is another heat source, but at least I don’t have to worry about being cold this winter.

Just when I thought the major music labels have begun to understand this new invention called the Internet, I read http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10047311-93.html. While it’s nice that they are finally selling music in most consumer’s preferred format (non-DRM’d MP3), I don’t understand why they are insisting on selling it to you on physical media that you have to buy at a store. Do I have to go to a bookstore to buy an ebook? Perhaps the music companies believe they are in the business of selling a physical product? Or maybe they’re trying to resurrect the concept of the album, making you buy nine tracks you don’t want in order to get the one track you do. According to Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/22/sandisk-major-labels-announce-slotmusic-microsd-cards-preloaded/), they even expect people to carry around metal binders full of microSD cards.

Perhaps retail stores are seeing the trend to legal digital downloads of music, and are beginning to feel like Blockbuster when Netflix took off? In that case, it’s the retail stores that are being shortsighted; there’s no reason for consumers to prefer to purchase digital content at physical stores.