Picture by chotda on flickr

Man is it SOAPBOX time again today. Hold tight. Lean back. Get the popcorn out.

This story was handed to me by a friend. Let's call him Thomas. Thomas lives in Germany.

Thomas recently got a recommendation by another friend of mine (let's call him Michael) to check out the work of a Science Fiction author (let's call her Sue). "If you're a fan of Heinlein, Gaiman and Gibson, you've GOT to read her books, she's excellent! A real discovery!"

Being the modern guy he is, Thomas got online to buy one of her books. The original English version, not the German translation. Not as a hardcopy, but as an eBook.

With the iPad on the horizon (first deliveries in Germany will start in about a week) he also wanted to future-proof his investment. Buy it now, start reading on the iPhone, continue reading on the iPad as soon as it arrives. Sounded like a plan.

Apples iBooks app and iBookstore aren't an option here in Germany yet, so he looked into Kindle. Turned out the book in question wasn't available in the German Kindle bookstore. Bummer.

Next stop Stanza. Yes, it's not available as a native iPad app just yet, but with the Kindle app having made it to the iPad, there is a chance that Stanza will be allowed in too. So Thomas installed Stanza on his iPhone, fired up the built-in book search and lo and behold, there was the book in question, available on the BooksOnBoard store right from within Stanza. For $12.72. He hit the "Buy" button, was transferred to the BooksOnBoard web store in Safari, he registered an account with BooksOnboard, diligently filled in all his information, got to the book page, put it in the shopping cart, clicked the check out button in anticipation, and ...

"This title is not allowed for sale within your country. Item failed to add to cart! Please close this window and try again."

OUCH. BIG OUCH.

After some more research Thomas had to learn that it seemed impossible to legally buy the book in question as an English version in Germany in any eBook format.

Thomas was ready to spend $12.72 of his hard earned money for this eBook. He happily wanted to throw money at an online store (e.g. the entire chain: the shop owner, the publisher, the author, and even the government if you take taxes into account). But for some very stupid reason he wasn't allowed to. What's wrong with this picture? Everything!

And this is where Thomas had it. He wanted the book. "If they don't want my money, I'm savvy enough to get a hold of this eBook in another way."

20 minutes later he not only had a copy of this one eBook on his hard drive, but about 500 others too. Five friggin hundred. Why? Because he couldn't find the book on its own on BitTorrent, but instead had to download it as part of a ridiculously large Science Fiction book collection.

Just to make it clear: this download was not a paid download. At this point let me add a quick word about BitTorrent: No, not everything on there is illegal. By far not. BitTorrent is first of all a great technology. The telephone is a great technology too, and I don't even want to start thinking about the amount and kind of illegal activities that the telephone is being used for at this very moment...

Back to the story:

Let's do the math. Thomas was ready to pay $12.72 to BooksOnBoard, and I'm sure they would have loved to take the money and give him the book. Instead he now had 500 not-quite-so-legal eBooks sitting on his hard disk. Assuming the same price, those books summed up to over $6000 in lost sales potential.

Book industry? Government? Authors? Collecting Societies? I don't really care who's fault this is, but are you reading this? Instead of losing a sale of $12.72 you have just lost the potential to make $6000. If Thomas wasn't such an honest soul, that lost potential could have easily multiplied many times. "Look what I just downloaded, let me send you a copy..."

Imagine the amount of people searching for (not necessarily legal) ways to get a hold of digital goods, that they cannot get otherwise for ridiculously stupid reasons.

PS: Honest soul that he is, Thomas of course deleted the 499 eBooks that he had to download to get to this one book. And he hasn't shared the downloaded copy with anyone. Not even with me. He's now trying to find out if there is a way to send Sue a donation, because he loved her book so much that he wants to give her something in return. Which will probably be way more than what she would have earned if he had bought it the "normal" way.

What is your take on this?

Okay, so I record an MP3 for the Daily Photo Tips With Chris podcast using VR+ (my favorite voice recording app on the iPhone) and send it off via email to Posterous. I've done that for a long time and it has never failed me.

Normally what happens is that Posterous picks up the email, extracts the MP3, hosts it, adds it to the according blog and then my dptwc site picks it up from the RSS feed that Posterous automatically generates for me.

When I posted the last entry, it came up without the MP3 link in the RSS. On closer inspection I found that the entry on the Posterous site was not hosted by Posterous but by some third party and that Posterous didn't include the MP3 link.

My first assumption was that Posterous had changed their process without telling anyone, and I got quite frustrated to find out that the very service that I had built an entire podcast on was now broken for me.

Had I been aware of how wrong I was, I wouldn't have gone out on Buzz and Twitter and on this blog entry to talk about it.

AvirajPosterous was quick to react on Twitter and forward it to their dev team and I thank him for this, because it saved me a lot of embarrassment in the long run.

Turns out it was my own fault all along. The VR+ recording app can send out MP3s vie email, which is why I love it so much. One feature I never used was to send the MP3 as a link, in which case they upload it to their own VR+ servers and then send the link via email. I had accidentally enabled that feature and by doing that I broke the entire process.

All I can offer are my sincere apologies to Posterous, I should have done a much more thorough root cause analysis before I went out and made so much noise about this. I like the service that Posterous offers a lot, it enables me to do so much and I'm happy that they are around.

Note to self: Social media are a great way to generate buzz about things and the companies who get it and react fast are going to be the winners in the long run. Social media are also dangerous when it comes to spreading false information. Always (ALWAYS!) make sure you check and doublecheck the facts before you complain in public or it can backfire.

Workshops, workshops, workshops... 2009 was such an exciting year in so many respects and I am very grateful for being able to do the things I do.

With Brooklyn Cookin', the workshop that I held together with Chef Mark, this year's season is now over, and what a great final workshop that was. Both Mark and I found that we'll have to do a workshop along the same lines again next year. The concept is perfect: the target audience is couples where one half is into cooking and the other half is into photography, and here they have a way to learn and spend time together.

Even though this year is over from a workshop perspective, it actually isn't. At least not for me. I am going to spend most of November preparing everything for a smooth 2010 launch. My goal is to have everything ready by December. And there are a lot of things to be worked on. Luckily most of my workshop locations are already nailed down, some helpers need to be briefed, and then there's the whole registration process. I have looked into offers in the cloud, but there is no workshop/seminar management system that even remotely seems to fit the bill.

All I need is to manage the registration process and payments for about ten workshops. Internationally. With deposits. And limited number of seats. For a decent price. And no, in an economy where everyone needs to think twice before spending anything, I consider taking 10% of the workshop fees *not* decent, because that would eventually increase the workshop price by that same amount.

So in short, I haven't found a good and easy way to automate this yet. Which is why I've taken things to the cloud in a different way for 2009 and why I'm going to go even further in 2010. In short: I'm using online services and forms to handle the sign-ups, I have simplified the confirmation and registration process using Services on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I use PayPal to handle the bulk of the payments, and I use my own time to keep it all together. Not ideal, but workable. The KISS principle applies. Keep it simple, stupid. I don't need a full-fledged database to handle a couple of hundred participants. Every participant ends up in a spreadsheet with a status field depending on where in the registration process they currently are, and if I need to send out a bulk mail to all participants of an individual workshop, a simple copy/paste of the email address column for that workshop will do just fine.

The biggest item are the workshop pages on the web site. This is where everything is supposed to come together in a nice and easy to navigate way. I have spent hours and hours to design something that ties together everything from basic information about the workshop ("why would I want to come to this workshop?"), the agenda ("what are the workshop details?"), timing ("when does the workshop start and end?"), accommodation ("what hotel is near by?"), navigation ("how do I find my way to the workshop?") and pricing.

Obviously I design this once and duplicate it for all the workshops, but the content will be different for each workshop. The overview, the detail description, the example images, the example video, the FAQ. And the language.

So I guess I better get busy and finally start tying all those lose ends together to bring you not only an excellent 2010 workshop season, but also a great experience when it comes to finding the right one for your needs and going through the registration process.

If you want to be notified as soon as the 2010 workshops are ready, please make sure you are on the newsletter (get the newsletter here).

Got a way to help me simplify the registration process? Leave a comment!

A warning upfront: if you came here for a photography article, this one's not for you. This is about the iPhone and a little odyssey that eventually lead me to solving all my iPhone 3.1 issues. Wall, almost all of them...

I love my iPhone 3G. I'm doing more and more with it, from emailing, stats checking, podcast recording (Daily Photo Tips is entirely produced on my iPhone), calendaring, checking my bank accounts, .. you name it. It has become so important to me that I have even started to use an iPhone case to protect it. And if you know me, you know that I've NEVER used a case on any of my phones before.

I'm still on the 3G, because my German T-Mobile plan ("1st generation plan") wouldn't allow me to early upgrade the phone without having to also upgrade to the next higher plan ("2nd gen") which for reasons that most Germans on the 1st-gen plan who use the MultiSIM option know is a pretty much no-go. But I digress.

Let's start at the beginning:

The update to 3.1 and what it broke

When I updated the iPhone to 3.1, all hell broke loose. Or rather the opposite. My iPhone came to a screeching halt. All of a sudden it wouldn't react for a minute right after a reboot. Or scrolling in a podcast list would be super jerky. Or flipping the home screen sideways would stop for 5 seconds before it would resume. Or the calendar app would try very hard to open but fail and return to the home screen. I could go on and on and on. I tried a lot of things, lots of detective work, but couldn't really piece it together. When I twittered about it, I received a note from someone who seems to work at Apple letting me know that it's not 3.1 being the problem but that iTunes 9 was buggy. Well, the iTunes 9.0.1 update came along and nothing really changed on my iPhone. Still the same lack of response to so many things.

What I found out early was that it was likely to be a memory issue. Using the iStat app I could see that the amount of free memory was pretty low. Usually in the 1MB range.

The other thing I noticed was that when I hooked up the iPhone to iTunes, the bars that show you how much of its capacity is filled with music, videos and apps, had changed. The usually very small orange-colored "other" portion was much bigger all of a sudden. At this point I still didn't have enough information to piece it together.

The phone call with Apple Care

So with my out-of-warranty phone I finally gave in and called Apple Care. Got a nice lady on the phone who couldn't really help me. I managed to talk her into letting me talk with a 2nd-tier engineer and from him I finally found out one crucial piece of information: the orange bar contains calendars and contacts. I probably could've found this information online, had I know what to search for.

The calendar and its "new and improved" broken behavior

Around the same time I started noticing that all my subscribed calendars were now being synced to the iPhone. This is new behavior in 3.1 and it only happens if you sync them via mobileme. If you sync via iTunes, you can make a choice which calendars to sync.

This is especially interesting as I am subscribed to some high-volume calendars, such as Leo Laporte's TWiT Live production calendar (I'm a guest on his Tech Guy radio show and this calendar is my main way to know if I'm on his recording schedule or not), and Twistory, which is my twitter history as calendar entries. This last one is really high volume depending on how much I tweet, but I've found it really valuable at times and don't want to miss it.

The epiphany (or: what needs to come together to break things)

Here is my root cause analysis, mixed in with a good portion of guesswork:

1. Calendar entries and contacts obviously take up working memory on the iPhone. To be able to sync and fire off alarms at the right time, I assume the iPhone calendar reads all calendar entires into memory on startup.


2. mobileme syncs all calendars to the iPhone, even the subscribed ones. With mobileme there is no way to select which calendars to sync and which to not sync.


3. I have 596 conctacts in my address book. Some with pictures. Most likely another memory eater.


4. I have a bunch of high-volume calendars subscribed in iCal.


5. Disabling mobileme or even just disabling the calendar on the iPhone brings it back to life.

This would explain why only 3G users see the issues (the 3G has less memory than the 3GS) and then only some of them (who is crazy enough to have 596 contacts and god knows how many calendar entries in about 7 different calendars?)

The solution

I spent good portions of the last weekend on finding a solution. And thanks to Monika's just recently re-ignited love to sock knitting (a lovely cherry-cream-colored pattern emerges as I type this post), this has even still been a weekend in sweet harmony ;)

1. Find a way to not sync the high-volume calendars to the iPhone

The best solution was to use Google Calendar™ to help with this:

a) Dump the subscribed calendars from iCal
b) Instead subscribe to them in Google Calendar
c) Now add your Google account to iCal and enable the subscribed calendars in the delegation tab of the account settings

Voila! The subscribed calendars don't sync to the iPhone anymore, but you still have them in iCal.

2. Move everything to Google Calendar

I could have stopped here, the above solution already does the trick for me to speed up the iPhone, but - alas - I'm on another calendar-related quest, so I continued to do my research: The search for a better calendar that helps me with my workshop planning.

But that's a story for the next blog entry.

Got similar iPhone 3.1 experiences? Share them in the comments!

I just got an unhappy (or even upset) email from a fan. I won't user her real name here, so let's call her "Liz". She was complaining about the amount of promotion vs. content on my show. I assume she meant Tips from the Top Floor.

"It takes 30 to 40 minutes to download and listen to your podcast and read your website. Unfortunately for me, I have found that about 75% of your content is advertising for donations and workshops and less than 25% provides information about photography... therefore, I waste a lot of time to get little content. Also, I hear the same promotions over and over about your workshops when I am sure that I am not going to them. I try to skip through them on my ipod, but usually, I just lose interest and shut it off. Even though I have learned from you, I am coming close to cancelling your podcast."

Getting feedback like this always slightly gets to me. On the one hand it's great to hear from the audience, and this kind of feedback is worth more than any "great job" type of mail (please keep those coming too though, as my ego likes them ;)) because it almost always comes from a person who is passionate about what I do and who has the guts to speak up and voice their opinion.

I hear you, Liz, and believe me, I don't like promoting stuff on my shows. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and one reason I do is that I get more than enough advertising on the old media. If I listen to podcasts I want them to be clutter-free too, unless the clutter is a part of the show that I like.

There is one exception where I truly love talking about things: An example would be the Everest Trek. Things that I am personally involved in, things that are a part of me, things that I'm very very (very!!) proud of.

Then there are sponsors. Apart from the current Squarespace campaign I haven't had a sponsor worth mentioning in almost a year. I'm not sure how you get to 75%, I can only assume that's what it felt like to you as opposed to that's the actual amount of time you've measured. I am über super cautious in who I allow on the show as a sponsor. The only way I believe I can make this work for both sides is to only advertise things that are of interest to my audience. Only then will it be perceived as being more of a value than a burden. Believe me, I have been offered quite a few campaigns in the past year, and I have turned down almost all of them because of this very reason: they just weren't relevant to my audience.

And let's be honest, being self-employed and spending well over 20 hours a week (probably much closer to 30 actually) producing free content in various forms doesn't really pay the bills, so I don't always have choice in that matter.

But let's get back to Liz and her email:

"Regarding your last blog about "geeks," what does that have to do with photography? My career was in Information Technology and I get a lot of content about IT from many sources. Why would I want your opinion about who is a geek? I want to learn about photography from you!!!"

In the header of this blog it used to read "This is the place where I post my thoughts on photography" but I'm not only about photography. I'm a geek, I'm a musician (I'm actually in the middle of producing a CD for a local band), I'm a podcaster, and I've chosen this place to be my personal blog where I talk about anything that interests me, anything that comes to mind and that I think it worth sharing with you: my soapbox. Tips from the Top Floor is the photography place and the photography posts here usually get linked from there.

To better reflect this, I have now changed the copy in the header of this blog to "This is the place where I post my thoughts. Usually on photography."

And this is where I open this discussion up to you, the readership. Do you think this blog should be exclusively about photography? And has my show content really gone down the drain in favor of promoting stuff?

Let me hear your thoughts in the comments!

What are your first thoughts when you hear the words "tilt" and "shift" in one sentence? Let me guess. It must be something along the lines of "making big things look like miniatures" and yes, that's one of the effects that you can achieve using a tilt/shift lens. Actually all you need is the tilt, the shift part is more helpful when it comes to messing with perspective.

I've got my opinion about this effect and it's very similar to my opinion about tonemapped HDR images with all the sliders in Photomatix cranked up all the way to the right: I'm not a big fan of them. I believe these types of effects tend to get old very fast, and whatever effect you use, it will only work great if it helps you realize your artistic vision and tell the story that you want to tell with an image. If your picture can't tell a story, or if it lacks interest in terms of its composition, the majority of viewers will probably still go "oooh" and "aaaaah" but the image will get boring very soon.

Okay, enough with the soapbox. You've got to know the enemy in order to be able to fight it, so here's your first lesson: what tilt is all about.

Guess what, these lenses actually weren't designed to achieve that miniature effect at all. In fact it all started very early, when large format cameras came along. Using bellows and all, they had everything they needed to move the lens out of the optical axis (shift) or to change its angle in relation to the film plane (tilt).

But why would I want to do that if not for a cool looking miniature effect?

Let's look at tilt first, as it's the visually much more interesting effect. If you look at the focal plane, e.g. the part of an image that is in focus, it typically is parallel to the lens and parallel to the sensor. Now tilt the lens and you're changing a few things. Most notably you tilt the focal plane. Tilting the lens forward effectively tilts the focal plane forward with it (see the Scheimpflug Principle for a more detailled explanation).

A normal parallel lens produces the out-of-focus areas of an image behind and in front of the focal plane. If you tilt the focal plane forward, you also tilt the out-of-focus areas with it. These are now above and below the focal plane. And guess who loves this? Yes, landscape photographers do. It will allow them to tilt the focal plane in a way that coincides with the landscape, and as the out-of-focus parts are above and below the landscape, they virtually disappear. Everything all of sudden is in focus front to back from very close to very far, and without the need to stop down to an aperture of F64 (which in turn creates other issues). Bliss!

Of course you can use this for evil too. Or more precisely in an opposite fashion to achieve a certain effect, the "miniature effect". More about that in a soon-to-come post on this blog.

What's your opinion about the miniature effect? Do you hate it? Do you love it? Do you fake it? Let me know in the comments!

(click image for bigger version, click here to see the final version)

"Aaah, there's certainly some Photoshopping in this picture, right?" - if I got a penny every time I heard that...

Image manipulation. What a dirty little word. For many people this word implies fraud and deceit. It implies that the photographer isn't saying the truth with their photography. That they lie to the viewer by making something out of a picture that wasn't there. In many people's eyes it also means that nowadays you don't have to take good pictures anymore. Photoshop will fix it for you. Right?

They couldn't be more wrong. Or as my friend Robin Preston, a great illustrator and photographer, usually puts it: You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Let me get on my soapbox and then together let's have a quick look at the different techniques that are used every day in order to "manipulate" photography.

1. RAW conversion. Most serious photographers use the RAW format these days. It has more dynamic range, and it allows for much more subtlety during post processing. A RAW file is like a negative. You have to develop or convert it. And this conversion process is the point in the workflow where the photographer can and should make decisions on things like white balance, contrasts, saturation. A first step in the manipulation of images. "But I only shoot JPG, so my pictures are untainted!" Well, not quite. At the point where you look at the JPG on your memory card, your camera has already made a whole big bunch of decisions for you. It has determined the white balance, it has played with the contrasts and color saturation, it has sharpened the image and compared to the RAW file, your camera has thrown away about 90% of the image data in order to compress it to a smaller size.

In short: relying on JPG, or rather on your camera to do the post processing for you is synonymous to handing off the image development decisions to someone else, in this case the computer that's built into your camera. Not unlikely to what usually happened to the films that you handed off to the corner drug store for development.

Did analog photographers do this? Hell yeah! Developing film, enlarging the image, choosing chemicals, temperatures, durations, types of film, types of paper, ... that all had an influence on how the images came out.

2. Straightening. Yes, I'm guilty of straightening at least one out of ten of my images during post processing. It just happens that I don't hold the camera exactly straight sometimes. It has become better since I've started using a grid screen in my camera's viewfinder, but I still don't always get it right. Why do I straighten? Because I don't like that horizontal line of a building right next to the left side of the frame of my image to be one degree off and shout at the viewer "HEY! LOOK! The photographer had a little accident here!". Skewed water surfaces are even more prone to cause some level of discomfort with the viewer. Even half a degree off and the image will start waving a little red flag. And I usually want my viewers to feel comfortable when they look at my photography.

Did analog photographers straighten images? You better believe it! It's one of the easiest things to do actually. Just slightly rotate the photo paper before you expose it.

3. Contrasts. If you've ever shot in the RAW format, you will know that these images have the tendency to look more flat and less contrasty than JPG images. This is on purpose. In the RAW mode, the camera will produce images that are specifically made to be post processed. And this includes the contrasts. Contrast is extremely important. Photography is not an absolute art but has a lot to do with how contrasts relate to each other. So managing the contrasts in your image becomes an integral part of the process.

Did analog photographers manage contrasts? You betcha! Ansel Adams' Zone System is all about contrast management. Choice of film, paper, chemicals, temperatures, durations, ... all of that will influence contrasts.

4. Brightness distribution. Brightening parts of an image and darkening others? Bring out your pitchforks!! Or.. wait. Back in the analog darkroom we did the same thing. Burn and dodge. During the exposure of the photo paper that usually took several seconds to minutes, we would allow for more light to fall on those areas that we wanted to darken down (it's a negative process) and we would temporarily block light from those areas of the picture that we wanted to brighten up. Ansel Adams did a lot of that too. In fact most of the time that he spent taking (or making?) a picture was in the darkroom, managing brightness/darkness distribution (let's call that contrasts) making use of his Zone System.

5. Local contrast enhancements. If you apply a large radius unsharp mask filter (USM) to your image, you will effectively increase the local contrast. Smaller structures will appear more contrasty. You have control over this by varying the radius and amount you set for your unsharp mask. Now this MUST be cheating! Right?

Well, not exactly. At least there is nothing specifically digital about it. It's a technique which again derives from the analog world. It has been used to enhance contrasts and perceived image sharpness long before we had computers with Photoshop.

So what's the verdict? Are digital photographers cheaters? Is it wrong to adjust an image digitally? Let me hear your opinion in the comments!

On the weekend, Monika and I shot a wedding. We usually don't do that for clients, but this one was different, as friends of ours got married. But what does it take to shoot a wedding? I actually get that question a lot. Most of the time the question comes in an email and it is phrased more like "What equipment do you recommend for shooting a wedding?"

[insert sound of alarm bell here] Wrong question. Entirely wrong question. If someone cooks a great meal for you, you don't compliment them on their pots and pans, now, do you? You don't need to know what word processing software (or what notepad and pen) your favorite authors use to write their books. You don't ask a painter what brushes they create their art with.

You enjoy the meal, the book, the painting for what it is.

Why is that so different in photography? "Wow, that's a big camera. You must take great pictures with it" is actually an insult. It de-values our creative side.

But don't worry, you're not alone, and if you are new to photography, it's very easy to fall for what the industry tells us. Which basically is this: Buy new gear from us and your pictures will be so much better.

Wrong, industry. Dead wrong! Some of the best pictures I've seen have been taken with (by today's standards) inferior equipment. A picture is maybe (if at all) 10 percent about the technical quality, about the image sharpness, about the lack of chromatic aberrations, about resolution and about the number of megapixels. 90 percent of the image is YOU. It's your eye, your sense of composition, your sense of placing things in the frame so they play with each other in a way that helps you bring out that image you had in your head before you pressed the shutter button. It's about timing too, actually one could argue that it might even be mostly about timing. Even in landscape photography, where the clouds have that tendency to not wait in that beautiful spot until you're finished setting everything up for the picture.

So I'm not blaming you for asking the equipment question. I'm blaming the industry. Heck, even I have fallen for it, buying things that I didn't need and that didn't benefit my photography at all. I'm just glad I haven't spent $150 on a white balance device yet. And probably never will. The good old grey card ($5.95), a sheet of white paper ($0.01), or even the good old Pringles lid (unfortunately they stopped making the opaque ones, but some yoghurt lids will do the trick too) are all it takes. Everything else is Voodoo unless you get paid big $$$ for a job and need to impress your customer, or unless you really need 100% color accuracy in product photography, for print, or in high profile fashion stuff. I don't need that accuracy. Our eyes aren't scientific measurement devices. They are much more easily influenced by the light conditions surrounding us, which is why you should try to edit your images in consistent surrounding light conditions, but I digress.

How did I get here? Oh, I know, we talked about how the industry makes us buy more and more stuff, and how we forget that photography is actually about learning to see, about anticipating how the viewer will look at our picture, what will make them explore our photograph in which way and how we can guide their eye to what we deem important in a picture.

Photography is about telling stories. Stories that have arches, tensions, reliefs, and in the end it's about one of the most basic things: it's about evoking emotion! If I look a picture and it moves me in one way or the other, I couldn't care less about the technical side of things.

When was the last time you've bought something for your photography that didn't help you at all? Let us know in the comments what that was.