Yes, I deleted my facebook account. Or at least I'm on the way to. They don't let you delete it right away, they tell you they'll deactivate it for two weeks, just in case you change your mind, we don't want to rush things, do we? And then if within those two weeks you don't log back in, they delete your account. I'm not sure what exactly they delete, if they'll leave pictures up or some other things I wrote, but to be honest, I don't really care. I just want to send a message out that I'm not on facebook anymore.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of great people on facebook, a lot of my friends, a lot of my relatives, and so on. I didn't quit facebook because of them. The facebook platform has a lot of value for a lot of people, just not for me at this point. I quit facebook because I never actually used it. All I did was pipe my Twitter messages into facebook. And sometimes, maybe once or twice a month I actually logged in, just to find out that I had a ton of pokes, things on my wall that I didn't want, and a lot of friend requests from strangers.

The facebook concept of mutual friendship doesn't really work for me in the online world, facebook only lets me friend someone when they friend me back. It doesn't scale. Wait... "friend"?! Wrong on so many levels. Where I come from, a friend is someone I like to spend time with. A person that I'd be comfortable enough with to share personal things. I can't really deal with the concept of "friends" as a currency, and that's exactly what facebook does. He who has the most "friends" wins. I'm sorry, you could be the coolest person in the world, but if I don't really know you, why should I call you a friend?

My circle of real friends is small. Maybe a hand full of people who I would call actual real friends. I can ask them anything, I can tell them anything, I can share with them whatever I want. Friends. True friends.

The concept that other platforms use rings much more with me. On Twitter I follow someone because I'm interested in what that person has to say. They don't have to follow me back, they don't even have to know me. On Google+ the circles work in a similar way, with no real expectation of following someone back. If someone posts too much, I can remove them from my circles. If I post stuff that's too much or not relevant to other people, they are free to ignore what I do.

That just makes so much more sense to me.

And no, I haven't done this because Leo Laporte did it in the past. He deleted his account, but he's back on facebook now. I guess because with what he does, he just can't afford not to be there, but I don't have the feeling he particularly likes it. But I remember the feeling that I had when Leo pulled the plug a while ago. When he announced that he had deleted his account my first thought was "You @#$%!$%, doing what I wish I could do." I had wanted to do that for quite a while. And I didn't have the guts to do it back then. Lots of "friends" and connections, a network holding me back. But the simple fact is that I never really used that network. I had an account there because I had the feeling that I had to.

My life is a bit more clutter free now, I reduced my number of social networks to two: Twitter and Google+

What is the value of a blog if nobody reads it? Well, okay, you are not nobody, but looking at the access stats and at the level of engagement (e.g. the amount of comments and mentions), this soapbox is pretty much barely alive.

This blog (aka soapbox) is my little well-hidden space that I post and that a few hands full of people read. Some have subscribed via email, some via RSS, some just stop by every now and then and read. People come to consume, not to interact.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming anyone, on the face of it, this soapbox is simply a sub page in my web site, not even the front page.

In contrast there's Google+ now. From an engagement point of view, the difference between the soapbox and G+ is the difference between a warm summer breeze and a storm. The first time I stuck my head out into G+, it's been pretty much one of the most refreshing interactive experiences I had in a long while.

Engagement is what it's all about in social media and just in case you miss my posts here (yes, they will still come and yes, they have been more frequent in the past), then you might want to stick your head in over at G+ and say hello.

They are in closed beta at the moment, but I've got a hand full of invites to give away, so shoot me an email if you want one.

» Visit me on Google+

Final Cut Pro X has been out for a few days. And I've given it a test drive on my MacBook Air 11" (1.6GHz, 4GB). It works amazingly well even in that hardware configuration, and not working in a broadcast environment, I like most things about it. A lot.

But here's something I don't like about it. Or maybe I just don't understand it.

FCP X claims to be fully color managed, using Colorsync. However, the viewer inside FCP X seems to show the wrong gamma. Look at the picture above.

• Left top: the source clip in Quicktime X, as shot with a Canon 5DMkII
• Left bottom: the storyline preview thumbnails as automatically rendered by FCP X. They match the original.
• Right bottom: the clip in Quicktime X after exporting it to ProRes422. It matches the original.
• Right top: the preview in the FCP X viewer. Clearly not matched.

Now before you go "but you need a calibrated broadcast monitor for a good preview" - no, I don't. The original files are H.264 progressive 1080p. They are RGB. They will never see a TV set, they will always stay on computers. They will be only viewed on computers, so I should be able to edit and view them in FCP X on a computer while they look the same way they are exported to a computer.

It took me a while to figure out that the viewer in FCP X needs a color profile with a gamma of 1.8 in order to show things the way they are.

I'm a photographer. I have worked in Gamma 2.2 for years. It's the default. And a lot of photographers have started adding video (DSLR video that is) to their portfolios. Ask wedding photographers. They don't want to switch back between different gammas depending on what they work on. They also don't want to have separate computers or monitors fixed to these gammas. That is simply not practical.

The way it works right now feels wrong to me. With Mac OS X 10.6, Apple officially switched the default gamma of their Macs from 1.8 to 2.2. If FCP X is really as fully color managed as it claims it is, then its viewer should honor a gamma 2.2 color profile the same way the players and the other parts of the system do.

Or am I missing something essential?

Group shot, Berlin LIMITED workshop 2011. Photo: Sean Galbraith

Large format photography has the potential to seriously mess with ones mind. The photographer's mind and that of the audience.

For a photographer it is still the most affordable way to get spectacular resolution. The camera movements allow for compositional freedom beyond anything that is possible in smaller formats. Due to their simpler and much more symmetrical design, the image quality of the lenses is generally superb. And last but not least, the different workflow and the more thorough approach to each individual photograph generally make for more thought-out pictures.

The audience reaction to large format pictures is often a different one than to 35mm photography. Due to the higher resolution, the pictures will typically have more detail, which oddly enough tends to be true even when downsized to web resolutions. The large size of the medium (4x5" and higher) results in a very different look and depth of field. And the typical lack of falling lines tends to give even very busy pictures an amount of structure and a tidy appearance that is hard to achieve with smaller formats.

My typical reaction to the higher resolutions used to be: "meh". My impression was that at the sizes typically used on the web, it wouldn't make any difference if the picture was shot with a DSLR or if it was taken with a large format camera.

After having immersed myself in large format photography for a while now, I had to change my previous "meh" into a "HOWLY COW" though. The amount of perceived detail even at smaller resolutions tends to be spectacular.

I should have known about the detail thing from the video side of things though. A very similar effect happens when you downsize HD video footage (1920 x 1080) to SD resolution (544 × 480). The amount of perceived detail is just a lot higher than with native SD footage.

Here's my audio engineer's look at it: sound recordings are often made at a much higher bit-depth (24 bits) and higher resolution (96 kHz) than the resulting CD will ever have (16 bits / 44.1 kHz). Why? Higher perceived resolution, even at the final down-sampled stage.

My next step is to print one of these pictures at 25x50" to see the ACTUAL detail. Zooming in to tiny portions of an image to see them at a 100% pixel resolution on your screen just isn't the same.

By the way, here's a little detail from the above shot:

Group Shot (detail), Berlin LIMITED workshop 2011. Photo: Sean Galbraith

What's the largest print you've ever made?

Car Train (click to view and comment on flickr)

Man muss analoge Bilder auf die Schatten belichten, die Lichter finden sich dann schon von alleine. Solches hört man immer wieder, und es ist schon ein Stück weit berechtig, speziell wenn man sich im Bereich der "guten" und "normalen" Belichtung befindet.

Two guys with large format cameras in the black forest. Imagine the amount of geeking .. and eye-rolling from non-geeks ;)

Black Forest (click to view and comment on flickr)

So I return from that film dev workshop that we held in Braunschweig, home of Rollei and Voigtländer, and I had completely forgotten about that one incident.

Until just now.

Rewind. Imagine a group of photographers experimenting with different developers, fighting about water of the right temperature, stepping on each others' toes (in a nice way of course) and then imagine me standing in the middle of this, thinking "why don't I develop that roll of Efke 50 in T-Max developer?", then elbowing my way to the basin and mixing the developer.

According to the Massive Dev Chart development should have been 6 minutes at 20 degrees Celsius. Turns out amidst all the chaos I ended up with 26 degrees (don't ask), and I didn't notice until it was already in the development tank. Oh well, no harm done, higher temperature can be somewhat evened out by shorter dev time. Didn't have a formula though, and I'm a sucker for strong contrasts, so I went with what my gut told me: "shorten it, but not too much. Maybe down to 5 minutes", which is what I ended up doing.

After the full cycle of developing and fixing the film, I got a bit of a shock when I opened the tank. The film looked like it wasn't fixed. Brownish in nature and the bits that should be transparent didn't look very transparent. Luckily film is pretty much light proof after only a short time of fixing it, so you can always fix some more if you need to. 10 minutes of fixing later the film still didn't look right. It looked pretty much half fixed. Bummer. I asked my favorite film photography expert Michael of Spürsinn on what to do and he finally resorted to bathing the film in undiluted fixer for a minute, just to see if that would do something.

But it didn't.

We rinsed the film, pulled it out of the spiral and lo and behold, it was transparent, just with a pretty strong tint that looked opaque from certain angles. Super weird.

I forgot about the experiment until a few minutes ago, when I began scanning some of the pictures.

Turns out the Efke 50 / T-Max developer combination produces great contrast that still leaves enough room to work on in the (digital or analog) darkroom.

Here's a negative scan straight from the scanner, uncorrected:

And here it is with just a slight black point adjustment and a tiny raise in exposure level:

I love it when the photos are 80% where I want them straight from the camera and they still give me enough headroom to play with. I'll file this film/dev combination under B as in BINGO!

What's your favorite combination?