That was the reply I received from a friend when I asked if he’d managed to find me an iPad while on his recent trip to the U.S.

I had been wanting an iPad for a while and another friend had tried to find me one while there without success. Well he had success initially but not in the model I wanted so emailed me to see if I wanted another model. I said yes but when he went back they were all sold out……..

So, I now have a basic 16GB WiFi only model of iPad. Apart from wanting to develop iPad apps, my desire for an iPad was for it to replace my laptop that I used primarily for browsing the web, checking email and steaming movies for watching in bed. I wanted to do all those things but in a smaller form factor that was easier to carry. In the two days I’ve had it, it’s looking like it might succeed but I’ll need more time to decide. In the meantime here are my first impressions.

What I like

It’s fast. The UI is very responsive, especially when pinch zooming in something like the browser. There are teeeny delays when the virtual keyboard appears but nothing of any real consequence.

The screen is lovely. It’s bright, crisp and of a good enough resolution for most tasks. The glass is a little too reflective for work in direct sun but hey, I’m a computer programmer. Sun is the devil anyway.

UI enhancements are great. The iPad uses the same OS as the iPhone but because of the added real estate there are enhancements to the regular user interface. The biggest improvement is support for split views. That is, you can have more than one thing displayed on screen at once. For instance with Mail on the iPhone you would see a list of your emails and after tapping one the display would transition to another screen to see the content of the email. With the iPad you see the list of emails on the left and a view of the currently selected email on the right. Essentially the whole things saves time and improves usability.

Orientation lock. You can flick a switch to lock in the current orientation. This is great for using the iPad in bed or on a flat surface where the iPhone can sometimes switch orientations unexpectedly.

Battery. The battery life seems pretty impressive. While I haven’t done any hardcore stress tests on battery, during my usage over the last couple of days I have seen it dropping roughly 8-10% an hour.

What I don’t like

The home screen. While it works fine on the iPhone due to it’s smaller size, on the iPad the home screen looks sparse and the icons way too spaced apart. It looks like something taken from a phone and shoehorned into a bigger device; which it is. With all the real estate it has they should have added some other UI elements.

Too slippery. While it looks slick, the anodized metal finish is way too slippery for holding it in the air one-handed. I find myself wanting to hold my iPad in one hand and use the other to control it but it feels like it could fall at any moment without finger gymnastics. Maybe a case, when mine arrives, will solve that.

Region locking. The iPad is not available in New Zealand and so the iPad cannot connect to the NZ app store. The only thing I can get for it is free apps from the US store via my Mac. While Apple aren’t the only company to do this sort of thing, I think in this day and age, region locking is arcane and unacceptable.

No iPhone tethering. The WiFi only iPad will not even allow you to tether to your iPhone to get 3G connectivity. This is likely to protect whatever carrier provides the data plan to the 3G iPad and to force WiFi only owners to actually buy the 3G iPad. I am having to resort to jail breaking my iPhone and using a program called MyFi which turns my iPhone into a wireless access point.

So there is a quick like/dislike based on my two day experience. I am liking it more the more I use it and hopefully with the release of OS4 it will get even better.

Computers, iPad, Mac

I thought I better do a little post about a subject that all photographers should be very aware of but one I found quite a nightmare to find a nice solution to. The problem is what to tag your photos with. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Maybe it is for you but for me I would always tag a photo how I thought, and then later want to find it again and realise I hadn’t quite done it right and couldn’t find the photo. Other times I would labour over it so much I’d give up or just put one keyword like “House” and be done with it.

I did however stumble upon a post on the world wide web about a year ago that solved all my problems (I can’t find it any more, so thanks to whoever was the original author). It’s a simple solution but hasn’t failed me yet. Let’s start with an example.

On the surface I might keyword this with Bath, Cody, Deidre (The name of my wife). Now this might work for the obvious, but if I was later trying to find pictures of my son in the sink I may miss it. Also, if I was looking back for photos that we had in this house I’d miss it too. What about black and white photos? Or photos with mirrors? Or night photos?

So to cover my bases I use the tip. It suggests you just simply remember these six words – WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW? Now they might not all apply to every photograph but they should cover all your bases should you need them. Let’s look at the picture and see what I’d end up with.

WHO

Who is in the pictures; the actual people’s names or titles. Well it has my son Cody and wife Deidre, so Cody, Deidre are the starting two. I may if I’m feeling anal, add Wife, Woman and Son, Boy.

WHAT

This category means both the physical objects and actions in the photograph. Here the obvious would be Bath, but look deeper. If I keep telling myself “What is here?” and “What is happening?” I might then add Sink, Mirror, Reflection, Holding, Yawn, Clasped, Washing, Naked, Water, Baby, Toes

WHERE

Where was the photo taken. Expand this from the immediate vicinity to wider areas in case later you need to find all photos in that area. In this case it could be Inside, Sink, Bathroom, Home, Street Name and even City if you wish. Sink here doubles up but that’s fine, only use it once. At least you haven’t missed it which is the main thing.

WHEN

This is for time related key-wording. In this example I would use 3 Months and Night. Of course the obvious ones would be for special occasion photos like Easter, or Mum’s Birthday.

WHY

This one relates to the event itself and why you’re taking the photo. Here it’s obvious – Bath Time, but other photographs might be Graduation, Birthday, Family Portrait. These ones often sound like “What’s” but I use “What” to be the actual things IN the photograph. Of course, feel free to do what you want.

HOW

Probably often left out a lot but this one can help describe something about how you took the photo. Maybe something like Aerial, Helicopter, Underwater, Tilt/Shift or in this case if I really had to (I probably wouldn’t) I would say Black and White, Handheld

So in the end if I could keyword this photograph with:

Cody, Deidre, 
Bath, Sink, Mirror, Reflection, Holding, Yawn, Clasped, Washing, Naked, Water, Baby, Toes,
Inside, Sink, Bathroom, Home, Street Name,
3 Months, Night,
Bath Time,
Black and White, Handheld.

Remember it’s up to you what you consider important for your photos, but I find it an invaluable guide for my keywording.

May you never lose another photo again!

Photography

I originally got into computer programming because of video games. The moment I had my Vic 20 (OK, my SpectraVideo, I swapped my Vic 20 after a week because it sucked) I was programming, wanting to know how all these cool games did their thing. I dabbled away here and there making different sorts of games for myself and in the early to mid 90’s I got to actually work on a couple of commercial projects. One, known as “The Game That Shall Not Be Named” was a complete pile of rubbish that I, along with my friend Chuck, were employed at the 11th hour to try and help salvage. We failed (Believe me, the game actually got released in a better state than what it was in before we started). But my proudest game development moment came with a PC port of an Amiga game called Seek and Destroy. I worked for 18 months on the game, driving the project because the artist had worked on the Amiga version and could hardly be bothered working on this one. It got released on Epic Megagame’s budget label ‘Safari Software’ at a time just before Epic really started to make it big and sold, if my memory serves, a whopping 13,000 copies! Needless to say, I am NOT retired.

Anyway I just happened to Google it today to see if there was anything around on the game, and was very surprised to see that someone had actually made a video of the game being played. Unfortunately the person playing does not seem to have worked out that the helicopter can strafe, but nonetheless it brought back the warm and fuzzies. At the time it was a pretty revolutionary game in the way it drew the screen to fake up full screen rotation.

Enjoy!

Seek and Destroy Factoids

- The game almost got banned in Germany. We were pushing  the limits with the game’s final screen showing a UN soldier (In blue helmet) with a gun to the head of a captured enemy. We had to move the arm so it was facing up, change the blood from red to green and remove the colouring of the helmet.

- I had to finish the game while I was on my OE. After selling Seek, I got some money and took my wife on a trip to Europe. While we were enjoying ourselves, we found out Germany needed changes so I went and stayed with one of Epic’s employees in Potton in the UK. They got me an Amiga and the source code and I spent about 3 weeks trying to fix all the things the Germans hated. I imagine we probably sold 2 copies there.

- There are secret codes that unlock a large anti-war rant when you finish the game. The whole game was just over the top and meant to be extremely tongue in cheek. A lot of people didn’t quite see it that way.

- The company I worked for (Vision Software) made a massive amount of money off “The Game That Shall Not Be Named” then promptly urinated it up against a wall (Literally, by buying a pub) and went bankrupt. The first I knew was when I received a letter from the bank saying that my wages had bounced.

- The game was originally just a helicopter game. But, in what I still to this day, feel was not one of Epic’s greatest moves, they wanted me to shoehorn a tank mechanic in the game. Please, if you play it, do not blame me for the tank…..

- While the game was waiting to be published, I, along with another developer was working on a SUPER fast full screen rotation algorithm in x86 assembler. We got it working real well but could not squeeze another cycle out to get it to a consistent 60fps on our 486 DX40, only on a DX 2 66 could handle the job. We decided that that was way too high spec for minimum requirements, so abandoned the tech for Seek. Nowadays the chip in my credit card could do it.

Computers, Programming, Video Games

OK, the next little review I’m going to do in my rundown of my new machine is the machine itself seeing as the opener was just about Apple’s new Magic Mouse (which you can read here). I’ll finish off with a little article later about the keyboard, which while not a new design, is the first time I’ve used one of Apple’s flat type keyboards so I have a bit to say about it.

Hmm, where to start? I had an aging iMac (2006 Model) that sported a Core 2 Duo running at I think about 2.06GHz. The machine served me well but when Apple announced their Quad Core’s the temptation was a little too much especially because I do quite a bit more photography and video encoding than I used to. As mentioned in another post I had initially ordered from JBHiFi only to be told over a week later that they wouldn’t be arriving until mid Jan. I cancelled the order and bought from the Apple store; the machine arrived DEcember 29th. Buying from the Apple store was fortuitous for me, but not my bank balance because while ordering online I made the decision to get the i7 Quad core as opposed to the i5. Some benchmarks showed up to around 30% increase in performance compared to the i5 model, and for a measly couple of hundred bucks it seemed like a silly thing not to do it.

So, some basic specs:

• Quad Core i7 Intel Processor with 8MB L3 cache, Hyperthreading and Turbo mode (realtime overclocking).
• 4GB DDR3 RAM @ 1066MHz with 2 slots spare.
• 1TB Hard drive.
• 27″ LED backlit screen.
• Various USB, Firewire 800 and other ports.

As with my other review, I’ll break it down into a few parts (along with a rating): Setup, Screen, Performance, Peripherals and Connectors.

Setup (D)

Setup on this thing was abysmal. This is the first Apple machine that I have had problems with during the initial setup, and this time they were twofold; one much more serious than the other. First the not-quite-as-serious-but-damned-annoying.

The machine has NO, that’s NONE, NOT ONE, Firewire 400 port. When migrating from one Mac to another, using a Firewire cable between your new machine and old one is a pretty standard way of connecting them together. You just plug them in, boot one of them in Target disk mode and away you go without a care in the world. Unfortunately because the new Quad Core has no FW 400 port and I was upgrading from a machine that only had FW400, I didn’t have a cable or adapter do link up my machines. I would have needed to have purchased the correct cable beforehand. You could argue I should have looked at the specs more closely but I would say it’s pretty reasonably to expect FW400 to still in machines these days. Maybe I’m just too much of an old fogey.

The second issue was much more serious. After not being able to use Firewire to migrate, I made a Time Machine backup of my disk. I then plugged it into my new machine, selected it as the source for the migration and went away. I came back sometime later, saw it had finished successfully and rebooted my machine. As a little paranoia check I then looked in my documents folder to find that only a few of my files had been migrated. Confused I re-ran the migration assistant and watched it. What I saw was a surprise.

At some point in the migration the drive with my Time Machine backup on just disappeared from the system. The light on my external drive dimmed down to indicate it wasn’t in use and the migration assistant just sat there. After a while it popped up a dialog saying it had finished successfully! I then ran Disk Utility and the external drive wasn’t even appearing. It wasn’t as though it had just been dismounted, it was gone completely. I had to turn the power off and on on the enclosure to get it to be recognised again. I repeated the test to make sure and it did it 2 more times at seemingly random places. I will also say at this point that the enclosure had worked flawlessly for me on my old mac.

At this time it was very late at night (Early morning in fact) and I wanted to get this working so it could migrate while I slept, so I turned off all powersaving options that looked dodgy, moved the drive to another USB port on the machine and tried again with a partial migration. This worked so I migrated the rest of my content and the machine was finally up and running. I have yet to go back and diagnose the problem accurately, but a quick search on the Apple forums revealed that this problem is happening to a few others. Most of which run Snow Leopard but some that don’t, and some with machines a couple of years old.

Apart from these two issues, all the hardware detection worked well and everything was up and running in the end.

Screen (A)

The screen on an iMac is no laughing matter seeing as it’s integrated into the computer. I was pretty happy with my old one, but this one blows it away. It’s large, very bright and of course sexy. I have not noticed any dead or hot pixels either which is nice. With a screen that big I almost expected some.

The screen is true 16:9 which is nice compared to older iMacs which have 16:10 screens. It’s LED backlight and probably the only thing I can fault it on is that it’s not perfectly evenly lit. The corners are brighter than the rest of the display but it’s not something you tend to notice, and I bet you’d find your LCD TV has the same issue (Mine does).

Oh yes, it does have another problem. It gets dirty quick. Thankfully Apple supplied a screen cleaning cloth in the box- nice.

Performance (A+?, A++?,AAAAA?)

Performance is a hard one for me to quantify with comparative numbers simply because I dont’ have a raft of other machines to run benchmarks against. This has thankfully been done by a number of other people and I’d suggest you go looking at those sites for raw figures. I can however give an indication about how it feels to use the machine and some general speed comparisons.

In short, the i7 Quad Core iMac is blisteringly fast. Due in a small part to the 4GB DDR3 RAM vs my old 2.5GB DDR2 RAM and due in a BIG part to the 4 cores at higher clock speeds, this thing blows my old Core 2 Duo out of the water. Firing up applications is very fast although the decrease in load times is not as much as the raw processing speed increase; after all, hard drives are still the slow, lumbering behemoths they were a couple of years ago. When the applications are running though, things are sublime. In fact this is the first Mac I’ve owned where I feel it’s “Fast enough”. By that I mean when I tell it to do something, it does it before my patience wears out.

Of course the physical theorem that patience is inversely proportional to length of ownership of a fast computer, means that I’ll think this thing is as slow as a ZX81 within a week.

The main pieces of software I tend to run at the moment are Handbrake (For encoding my entire DVD collection), Lightroom for my photography and general use software like Mail, Chromium and iTunes. I also run The Gimp from time to time as well.

Handbrake encoding is now so fast on this machine that I can encode a full feature film faster than I can rip it from disc. Ripping takes about 30-40 minutes to rip a disk and now my movies are encoding in around the same time. My old machine used to take upwards of 2 hours to encode a movie. Basically, my new machine is 4x faster than my old one at encoding movies in H264 at the settings I use (level=40:ref=2:mixed-refs=1:bframes=3:weightb=1:subq=9:direct=auto:b-pyramid=1:me=umh:analyse=all:no-fast-pskip=1:merange=32:no-dct-decimate=1). This now affords me the option of using very high quality settings for my encodings which take my new machine 2 hours, but used to take 8 or so on my old one.

Lightroom not only starts a lot faster, but browsing my photo library in grid mode is now a pleasure; the wide screen allowing me to see 50-60 photos at once. Loading previews are a snap now too of course and general usage has improved a lot. It’s probably not quite as marked as encoding, but then Lightroom is rather disk intensive.

General usage is also where I see a massive improvement. Application start times, responsiveness of the UI and the ability to run more apps at once are all big plusses. I have also finally started using Spaces. I now put one application on it’s own space which keeps my desktop uncluttered and switching between is so fast and smooth that it’s practical to do so. I think the machine has finally caught up to the sluggish UI framework that Apple uses so it’s no longer as much of a burden. All they need to do now is rewrite that abysmal piece of rubbish – Finder – and the machine would be perfect.

All this performance does come a bit of a cost though. Heat. After using my iMac for a while I reached around the back to feel what it was like and was rather shocked at how hot the back of the machine gets. This of course is a good thing because it means the heat is not inside your computer burning it alive, but it was still surprising. There are also fans at the back which, when they aren’t on mean you machine is almost inaudible. When they do kick in (When I’m encoding video) it’s a moderate background noise that’s a little quieter than than my external Vantec RAID enclosure.

Connectors (B-)

The connectors that come on the iMac have been pretty common fare on macs for a while now. You get 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 Firewire 800 port (I smell the death of Firewire looming unfortunately), Audio in and out and a mini Display Port. The one additional connector that intrigued  me was the addition of an SD card slot. This is a very consumer-oriented port and when I first heard about it being added I thought it seemed a little cheap to add it to such a nice machine. Nowadays though, almost every device you use for capturing still and moving images uses SD cards at the consumer level so I am sure lots of people will be happy the SD card slot is there.

The slot sits just below the Superdrive slot on the right side of the machine and there’s been a few complaints around the internet suggesting it’s too close. Some people have accidentally slid their SD card into the SuperDrive slot and I can see how that can happen if you don’t look or check very carefully.

Now I shoot with professional still cameras so I use CF card for those, which would have been nice to have in the machine, but my video camera is a simple SD card recording Panasonic HDC-SD9. I do have a card reader but I found the iMac SD card slot to be much faster and will definitely use it for my video capturing from now on.

Now I realise that the iMac is considered Apple’s “consumer” desktop but in reality the speed of this machine is far from consumer. It’s a machine that I think any professional photographer or videographer could happily use and this is why I wish they had have added a few other ports. First a legacy Firewire 400 port would have been nice, or at least include an adapter. Secondly I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of a CF card slot. CF cards are what the professional stills camera photographers use and the addition of one would have be a lovely cherry on top.

27", Apple, Computers, i7, Mac, Quad Core

OK, now that I’ve had a little time to play with my new Quad Core iMac (i7, everything else standard) I thought I’d do a series of posts on how I’m finding it. This first one won’t be about the machine, it will be about the Magic Mouse that comes standard with the machine. I’m starting with this because it’s the most annoying thing about my new setup.

The Magic Mouse is Apple’s latest bluetooth mouse for their Macs. It’s sleek and stylish like most things Apple but the revolutionary thing about this mouse is that it has a multi-touch sensitive top and therefore no mouse ball/wheel. It’s totally smooth and I must say totally gorgeous.

There are 5 factors regarding the mouse that I want to talk about. Build, Ergonomics, Tracking, Button surface and Battery and I’ll tackle them in that order.

Build (A)

There’s very little I can fault about the build quality of this mouse. Seriously it has to be not only the sexiest mouse I’ve seen but also the most solid feeling. Given the fact that there is no ball or wheel, means that there’s pretty much two pieces to the unit; the bottom and the top. The top is a lovely white surface (Clear cover with white underneath) and is decorated with a light grey Apple logo at the bottom. The underneath looks like anodised metal (It is in fact plastic) and contains the battery cover (This mouse is wireless), power switch, laser and foot pads.

Ergonomics (C-)

“C-!!” I hear you scream? Yup, I have to give this mouse a low score on ergonomics. The main culprit is the low profile nature of the mouse. It is so low I cannot rest my hand on it easily and have my finger tips still on the mouse for swiping. If I raise my hand so that my fingers fit, then I put more strain on my wrist as it heads more towards a 90 degree angle. I then have to move my wrist in an arc in order to move the cursor. And given the fact that the screen is 27″ in size on my iMac, that’s a big arc, especially if you use the default mouse tracking settings as I will talk about next. Even Apples images on their site show someone holding their mouse like it’s a dainty little thing that you tinkle with.

What I need to qualify this score with though, is that you need to take your hand size into account. While I don’t think I have overly large hands I have longish fingers but if you were blessed with hands the size of fieldmice, you should be OK.

After a week of use I am already finding the mouse rather tiresome on my hands, wrists and arms and if I cannot find a way to alleviate the discomfort I will probably go back to my $20 no-name mouse with scroll wheel.

Tracking (B-)

In my opinion, tracking has always been a weak point of Apple mice and this mouse is no exception. The maximum speed that you can move the mouse is borderline unusable on something like my iMac with it’s 27 inch screen. I would find myself having to move the mouse miles across my desk to get from one side to the other and if you use a mouse pad, forget it, you’ll fall off the edge before you get there. You will need to get a utility called MouseZoom which allows you to increase the speed of your mouse tracking. I have mine set to 10, which is the maximum MouseZoom allows, whereas Apple’s maximum is 1.7 on that same scale (i.e. my tracking speed is nearly 6 times faster). Now that I have MouseZoom installed the mouse works pretty well.

Button surface (A+)

The surface of the mouse is a single piece of Apple’s mojo infilled acrylic like substance. In order to scroll just swipe your finger along the surface as you would with a scroll ball. It is also multi-touch aware so you can scroll two fingers horizontally to navigate forward and backwards in Finder, your web browser (It works fine with Chromium) or other application. These features can be altered within the System Preferences to turn them on or off, switch buttons and set sensitivities.

Magic Mouse System Preferences

There is nothing bad I can say about the touch sensitivity of the mouse so far. It works flawlessly, scrolling when I ask it and not scrolling when I don’t. Additionally, because the scrolling allows for momentum you get a more natural feel to your movements when using it.

The scrolling seems like Apple over-compensated for the abysmal product that was the Mighty Mouse. A single surface mouse with a tiny ball that worked beautifully for about a month then never worked again. That mouse ball had to be cleaned so regularly that you spent more time doing that than using your computer and then eventually it just stopped working. I don’t think there are many people I know who still have a working Mighty Mouse, and I know several that have been smashed in frustration once they stopped working.

Battery (B+)

Wireless mice are both a boon and a bane. Less cables is oh-so-much better but having to put batteries in the thing all the time is annoying as all hell. So far though I must say I’m happy. As you can see in the screenshot of the System Preferences panel above, my mouse is sitting at 87% battery life. These are the standard batteries that ship with the mouse and I have had the machine a total of 6 days. I only use my machine out of work hours at home for about 20 hours a week, so if you work it all out that’s about 130 hours on a set of 2 AA batteries. I’m fine with that, especially seeing as I will move to rechargables.

As expected, the bluetooth worked flawlessly and when I turned on my iMac for the first time it was detected and started working without a hitch…once I turned the power on on the mouse of course.

Summary

To finish off, the mouse is a solid and sexy performer with poor ergonomics. The touch screen tech is great, however I don’t have to have a fancy touch surface on my mouse when I just want to scroll. Any other mouse on the planet does that well enough with the old scroll wheel. It’s just Apple that can’t make mice with wheels/balls.

Apple, Computers, Mac, Magic Mouse, Review

Well I finally did it. I went and upgraded my old 2006 iMac. Doing photography and encoding a lot of my DVD’s recently I’d been a little annoyed at the speed (Or lack of) of my old iMac. While it boasted a Core 2 Duo running at a little over 2Ghz, it had started to show it’s age with raw throughput when using Adobe Lightroom and Handbrake. Apple had recently revved their lineup so I decided to look into an upgrade and see what it’d cost me. Of course, a small upgrade to the low end iMac would have still left me with tech envy, so I opted for the new Quad Core iMac.

I had ordered through JBHiFi but after some mucking around by them and being told in the end I wouldn’t get it until mid January I cancelled my order and bought instead from the Apple store. This was a good move for Apple because while I was there I noticed that for just a teeny bit more I could get the i7 Quad Core running at 2.8GHz as opposed to the i5 Quad Core @ 2.66GHz which is Apple’s stock top of the line model; the i7 is a custom build which benchmarks showed to be about 20% faster in some cases than the i5. So I hit the button and hunkered down for the guesstimated 6th Jan ship date. However, I must have been a good boy throughout the year because on the 29th of December Santa delivered my new toy!

I eagerly unpacked it and admired the predictably sexy Apple packaging then fired it up, grabbed my Firewire cable to join to my old iMac for migration and – uh oh – “Where do I stick this Firewire plug” – oh “I don’t, it only has a Firewire 800 port now”. This was my first hurdle and while very inconvenient, the Migration Assistant allows network migration. I hit Airport and started the process – “Oh, 13 hours to migrate? No way am I waiting for that!” so I cancelled it. In the end I had to resort to making a Time Machine backup of my old machine first and using that as my migration source.

Then issue two hit me and this was was a bit more worrisome. I let the migration progress, came back when it finished, looked at my files and noticed lots were missing. I then tried migrating again, and watched it. Part way through at some random time (I tried a few more times) my drive would just disappear from the system and so the migration wouldn’t finish. On top of that the Migration Assistant reported success so I thought it’d worked. In the end I turned off every setting to do with Sleeping, Screen Fading and what have you as well as trying a different USB port and managed to get migrated without the drive being lost. I really hope the issue doesn’t come back but I’ll spend some time later looking into it.

Anyway once up and running I have to say the machine is sexy. It looks good, with a 27″ anodised aluminium body and runs like the clappers. I did some test encodings of DVD’s of mine and the machine could encode at about 4x the speed of my old iMac. Very, Very nice. Everything opens fast, Lightroom flies and life is good. Apart from this keyboard which is already hurting my hands.

The mouse on the other hand feels quite nice, albeit small (Most mice are for my hands) and the touch sensitive surface for scrolling and swiping works well. It does suffer from Apple’s usual mouse issue of not tracking fast enough, but I found a little Preference Pane called Mouse Zoom that makes my mouse a lot faster, even if not quite fast enough for me.

Anyway, I can’t wait to get into some real work with this baby.

Apple, Computers, Mac

Recently I was asked to do a photoshoot of a house that was currently being renovated in a very swanky part of Auckland city. The builders were proud of the work they had done on the home and wanted something as a memento. Not only did they want the main rooms shown off, but they wanted some of the finer work photographed also. I had shot some product photography for one of the builders earlier in the year for a deck-jacking system they had invented and they called me back to shoot this home.

Having never shot a house before (And when you see it, it wasn’t a small house) I was a little unsure of I could pull it off and suggested the pull in a pro architecture photographer, but the client didn’t mind and trusted that I could get the job done for them. I also hired a couple of assistants to help me at different parts of the day. Nykie from mistralphotography took up the bulk of the work and a good friend of mine Vincent Yu came in during the last hour of the shoot. I had them essentially go around and shoot little pickup shots of details and other things that I wasn’t going to shoot in the primary photography. They did a great job!

There were a couple of obstacles to this shoot. The biggest was the contrast ratios. Trying to get a good exposure from inside to out was challenging because the house had so many windows. I employed some HDR for exposure blending, flash, and avoided problematic areas as much as I could and things worked out pretty good in the end.

The second was what to shoot! In the lead up to the shoot it was hard to get access to the location because the home owners were now living in it, and were giving permission out of the goodness of their hearts. So, the builder wanted to turn up on the day to show me what he wanted photographed but he got held up at another job so I had to just go ahead anyway. I’m glad I did because I finished not long before a dinner party started to be prepared which would have made shooting the kitchen a little hard

The images were captured, processed and delivered to the client within a week and the response was very satisfying:

“Hi Aaron……those look amazing    AWESOME  photos…thank you very much..”

I also added a number of images with some more stylised treatment to make things a little more dynamic.

So all in all a successful shoot and the builder said that he will get me back for his next job – nice!

Yes, it’s finally happened! Cody Charles Koolen-Bourke came into the world on Saturday 22nd August 2:37pm weighing 3860g (8.5lbs). He had to come buy way of emergency C-Section as he wasn’t being too cooperative in the birthing department and after mum ended up being induced and going through hell with NO cervix dilation, we chose to have him removed.

Mum and Dad have always kept our separate names, Bourke and Koolen respectively but with the new arrival we have joined them into one family name. We are all now Koolen-Bourke’s. Cody’s middle name comes from Dad’s best friend, Charles “The Machine” Warner.

Cody is an absolutely gorgeous little man and Mum and Dad love him to bits (We did way before he was born!). Our Building a Baby page which follows our IVF journey will now come to an end now that he’s built and switched on But our blog will continue to be updated for our friends and family who want to follow his life. Here’s one picture of Cody just under an hour old. Sharing some skin to skin with his Mum. Dad being an avid photographer, had his camera with him during the birth and operation so some pictures will be posted soon and you can see how a C-Section unfolds and how our little man came into the world.

Cody at 1 hour old

See you all soon. Mum and Dad

Wow, it’s been 4 months since my last blog post and that was for a photoshoot so I thought I’d do a bit of a catchup so you can all see what I’ve been up to lately.

Work

With the imminent arrival of our baby boy (REAL IMMINENT NOW, 4 days!), and Dee stopping work, we needed to make sure we had enough cash to pay the bills. So I’ve been out job hunting for a position back in the IT industry. I gave my CV out to a few recruiters but only 1 got me interviews – Adam Roi from Robert Half International. He was put on to me via Chuck, a friend of mine. The first job I went for was at Navman. Made it through the first interview, and the second technical interview and then they were looking to make me an offer and that’s where things went pear shaped. The recruiter had the wrong idea about the salary I was after so Navman’s offer was going to be quite a bit lower than what I was looking for. However we were starting negotiations and then wham, Navman head office did a freeze on the role while they decided if they wanted to turn it into a different, more managerial role.

So that one sat on the sideline and in the meantime another job at a company called Qbik appeared. When I had first talked to the recruiter he had mentioned that there might be a job at Qbik at some point in the future and described the workplace and the owner of the company and it sounded like a place I’d like to work in. Big loft style work place, small team, dynamic and the workplace was attached to a recording studio that the owner of Qbik also owns – neat. Oh, and they have a proper coffee machine! So I ask the recruiter that if he could get me a chat with them I’d like to meet up cause it sounds like the sort of place I’d like to work.

Regarding the actual company, if you’re a computer nerd you may know them. They make Wingate, software that initially started in the 1990’s as a proxy internet connection so that multiple computers could connect to the internet at once through dialup. From what I know, the creator of Wingate was flatting with some people and they wanted to share their internet so he wrote a program to do it….and the rest is history. I remember using Wingate in a flat we had and it was awesome. So I went for the first interview, which was a mix of questions, general chat and a walkthrough of the product – it lasted about 3 1/2 hours! – the longest interview I’d ever been on. From there it seemed they liked me so brought me back for the tech interview. I must have done OK because shortly after an offer was made and I’m now working there – and it’s loads of fun – best job I have had in donkey’s years.

I must say their tech interview was pretty indepth and I was more than once stumped and felt a little embarrassed actually because they were questions I should have known, but being solely a C# boy for the last 1 1/2 years before my 11 month sabbatical, the odd bit of C++ had leaked from my brain.

The Boy

So yes, I have a job, Dee’s stopped hers and her Doctorate is on hold (For up to a year she can pause it) and everything is falling into place. I will stop here and continue the update in his very own page which resides here.

Photography

My photography has slowed down a little in the last few weeks because of another project which I’ll talk about below, but recently I had two items accepted into a local exhibition and it’s now showing here in Auckland. Both items that were chosen (Of the 3 I submitted) were baby photos, one of Liliana and one of Tyler. Here they are.

I submitted my photos for the print exhibition (There was a digital projection section too) and the images themselves are 14×9.3″ and surrounded by a white matte and black frame making them come out about 24×16 IIRC. Print submissions get to keep their framed prints at the end of the exhibition which is nice and I’m looking forward to hanging my first printed photographs.

iPhone Development

Well I finally decided to stop talking about writing a game again and finally start doing it. Choosing a platform wasn’t that hard either. Developing for the a Wii, DS, XBox or PS3 costs 10’s of thousands, assuming the companies will even bother to grace you with a response. The iPhone on the other hand costs US$99 for a license to publish your titles and OSX comes with everything you need to develop for it. It’s an indy developer’s dream.

But even though everything was there to start, I still needed an idea. Now normally at this point I’d think about it for months and get nowhere, but I decided it’s better to just get in there and start doing something, so I didn’t spend time thinking about it too much or trying to come up with the next ground breaking, revolutionary idea. I went back through the archives of titles over the years to see if anything had a cool mechanic that could be worked with. I also wanted to be sure the game was small and wouldn’t take long to develop. I didn’t want to spend a year developing a title only to have it sell a few copies so I’m trying to hit a sweet spot between a fun game with lastability (and that will dictate what you can ultimately charge for it) and development time. Numerous websites of other indy developers supported this angle. You need to find an idea that can easily be picked up and played for 10 minutes while on the bus or waiting for a coffee. The majority of people don’t care about epic adventures or 32 player shooters. They want to play Peggle or Planet Puzzle League or Sudoku.

So I had my idea, and got started. I’ve currently spent about a total of 80 hours on it (I didn’t track it since day one) and it’s about 80% complete. Which, if this ends up being like most game development means there’s still 80% to go .

Now I can’t release any screenshots yet as the artist has just came onboard and they haven’t really  started but as soon as we’re ready I’ll put some up on a dedicated website for the game and the company I will be launching alongside it.

So, that’s a quick update for now. I’ll try and make the next one a little sooner!

I had a great opportunity the other day to shoot two excellent subjects, Peter and Gesa. They are expecting their first child in around 8 weeks time and wanted me to take some photos of their pregnancy as well as some fun couple shots. We did this shoot entirely inside their home with a mix of environmental and “studio” style shots against a plain black background.

The variety of shots taken on the day was great for them to have a nice selection to chose from, but equally great for me to shoot a number of different styles. Here’s a selection of my favourites from the day.

This is one of a number of shots we did with Peter and Gesa mucking around on the bed. I think this capture’s Gesa’s sneakiness very well! Gesa is great to photograph because she’s not shy about having some fun, and Peter then joins in and they can just play and I can concentrate on capturing the moments.

Belly measuring was one photo they wanted to capture and I decided to shoot this with a wrap around light to focus on the tummy and let everything else drop into shadow. Yes, that 92 is in centimeters and while Gesa is 32 weeks pregnant, she still quite tiny – what luck!

The photograph above ended up being the couple’s favourite of the day. I love her smile and the colours and tones of the couch against the wood. Thankfully the couch didn’t catch fire being up against the fireplace like that!

This was one of the more intimate moments shared during the shoot and as a photographer it’s great to have subjects that are just so comfortable being in front of the camera. You can take time to explore a large number of poses and emotions.

This photography is an anomaly, because it wasn’t part of the regular shoot. Peter was sitting on the couch as I was setting up the lighting for the next set of photographs and I was using him for some tests. I liked the resulting shot with the contrasty lighting and the intense stare so I thought I’d add it to their collection.

This was one of the first shots with Peter without his shirt, and Gesa was making fun of him. You can’t quite tell here, but Peter was trying very hard not to laugh.

To finish off the photos for today I’ll post another fun one we shot just for a laugh. It was a great session and I thoroughly enjoyed myself – congratulations guys, with parents like you, your little girl is going to be awesome!

Photography, Shoots