As I finally take my blog live, I wanted to address the lack of comments. I decided to follow the John Gruber/Matt Gemmell model and forego comments. I'm not so much worried about negative or adversarial commentators as I am with just keeping my site simple. There's no extra widgets or social feeds, and I didn't feel like I needed to have comments either. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to hear from you though. I plan on linking most of my articles from Twitter as well, and I would love to have you comment on my posts there!
Universal Battery Charger
As part of my preperations for WWDC I decided to get an external battery charger for my iPhone. I never actually ran out of power last year, but I got very close almost every day and I had to make an effort to keep it charged. I think it will be nice to have a charger available for emergencies. I looked on monoprice for their 30-pin compatible chargers and I found a few of them. But there are a lot of problems with these. For one thing, they're marked up on price compared to the USB options. For another, if you use a case you'll have to take it off to use them. I didn't want to deal with either of those issues, so I decided to combine parts to make my own.
Here's what I got:
That is a 2800 mAh battery, a USB 2.0 A Male to mini 5 pin Female adapter, and a USB 2.0 A Female to A Female coupler. What that let's you do is plug any Apple 30-pin cable into the battery to charge your devices.
I tested it out on my iPhone and it worked very well. It charged my phone from 50% to 100% in 1.5 hours and used about 3/4 of the battery's charge. I'll definitely be keeping this guy charged up and in my backpack all week long at dub dub.
Screenshot of shopping cart below:
Thoughts on Lenses
Recently I've been thinking about upgrading my photography kit and trying to decide which lens to buy. Canon is currently running a great special on their professional-level bodies and L-series lenses so there are some great deals right now. It's always important to consider your use-case when purchasing camera equipment. My work covers a broad range of categories but primarilly I shoot sports, nature, and landscape. I'd been debating between upgrading either my 17-40 F/4L or 70-200 F/4L to their 2.8 cousins, or buying a lens in a completely different focal length range.
I use Aperture for all of my photo management, which means that I not only have access to all of my photos but a complete database of all of my photo metadata. I decided to run some analysis on that data to see which lenses that I have used produce the best photos. These results don't necesarily say anything about the quality of these lenses, meerely my own preferences for which lens to use in a given situation and my own satisfaction with the results. Note that I only own two of these lenses, the rest I've merely borrowed.
Out of all of the 5 star images in my library (1300 out of 162655) here is the breakdown per lens:
300mm F/2.8L IS: 305
400mm F/2.8L IS: 151
17-40mm F/4L: 280
70-200 F/2.8L IS: 98
70-200 F4L: 84
The rest are the 600 F/4L IS, the 16-35 F/2.8L, 24-70 F/2.8L, the 28-135 F/3.5-5.6 IS, and point-shoots.
Sadly only three of these are from my iPhone :(
That tells me that the 17-40mm F/4L is by far the best value I've ever gotten out of a lens (600 dollars for hundreds of good shots) and that 300mm is my most used-per-good-shot focal length.
These ratios are about the same if I lower to 1 star images and above (sample size of 25000 photos). The only exception is that there are far fewer 400mm images here (roughly 1800) meaning that the 400mm produces far more exceptional results per-image-shot (which is to be expected since it costs about $8000). I would love to own a 400mm F/2.8L if I could afford one. I think it's the best lens I've ever used.
Overall I think this shows that the 17-40mm F/4L is an incredible lens for the money that has served me well, and that I need to invest in a lens in the 300mm focal length range for my own use. It also shows that my usage of the 70-200 focal length range, even though it's an exceptional range (and both are exceptional lenses) is limited and that my results in that range don't tend to be as good as those in the wider range (landscape, etc.) and at the farther end of the range (closer to action). I'll continue to rely on my 70-200 F/4L for mid range shots, and probably invest in a 300mm F/4L IS for future long range needs.
Aperture SSD Performance
I plan to write a lot about iOS development on my blog but I wanted to kick things off with some articles about photography. I've been a photographer for more than 12 years and I've been shooting sports professionally for 5 years. Photography is one of my passions and it's even better when it synergizes with my other passion: computers. Below is an article I posted on Macrumors to test my hypothesis that an SSD would improve performance in some areas of Aperture usage.
I finally made the jump to an SSD for my primary volume, so I thought I'd share some of my experience with using it for Aperture so far. A while back, a lot of people told me that they thought SSDs would have no bearing on Aperture performance. The assumption was that most Aperture tasks are CPU bound (preview processing, exporting) so the SSD wouldn't offer much benefit. I decided to put this to the test using my own setup and workflow.
First, my setup. I'm using a 2010 3.2GHz Mac Pro with 13GB of RAM. I am using a referenced master's library configuration. The library package resides on the main volume (MacPro HD) and the masters reside on a 2TB RAID-1 mirrored volume (MacPro RAID).
My basic workflow with Aperture is this. After returning from a shoot I import everything from the CF card (using a FW800 CF reader) into a new project. I mostly shoot sports, which is on a deadline, so I am typically editing immediately without waiting for the import to finish. This means that I am scanning through thumbnails and full size images before they are processed or cached. It's critical that this process doesn't hang or lag at all because I generally don't want to wait for the import to finish (especially on projects involving 2000+ photos).
For the test I used a 1000 photo set from a trip I just took to India. I completed my import and basic editing process first with my library on a 1TB HD, and then again with the library on a 480GB SSD. In both tests I downloaded all the images from the CF card during the import. While the import was in progress I timed several benchmarks using a stopwatch (I admit this is not very scientific). I also continually scanned through thumbnails and full sizes to gauge the overall "feel" of each system. I also took a few other non-import related measurements that I feel are worth including.
So, here's the results.
HDD:
Mac Startup Time: 56s
Aperture Startup Time: 39s
All Photos Load Time: 12s
All Projects Load Time: 22s
Import Thumbnails (and metadata): 1:28
Copy All Images to Masters Directory: 1:50
Total Import Time: 3:20 (sum of two previous steps)
Process Embedded JPEGs: 2:57
Process All Images (previews): 14:25
Load 10 Previews (select an image, wait for it to fully load, right arrow to the next, wait, repeat): 17.4s
Notes: during this process scrolling locked up frequently. It was difficult and frustrating to flip between images. Tapping an image often resulted in a 4-5 second beach ball cursor.
SSD:
Mac Startup Time: 21s
Aperture Startup Time: 10s
All Photos Load Time: 12s
All Projects Load Time: 8s
Import Thumbnails (and metadata): 12s
Copy All Images to Masters Directory: 1:51
Total Import Time: 2:20 (sum of two previous steps)
Process Embedded JPEGs: 1:57
Process All Images (previews): 12:30
Load 10 Previews (select an image, wait for it to fully load, right arrow to the next, wait, repeat): 15.1s
Notes: There were never any hangs of any sort while flipping between images during the import process. Tapping on an image resulted in an instant preview followed 2-3 seconds later by a full quality image.
I think the summary is that there is definitely a performance benefit to having the Aperture Library metadata on an SSD. I think the initial project import time is the best example. From 88s to 12s, a 6x improvement in performance. I have no doubt the hangs in performance with the HDD during this time were a result of the disk head moving back and forth writing metadata, previews, etc. and then having to seek back to find some bit of metadata from the library for a given image before showing it's preview in the viewer. For me, the lack of hangs and freezes during import make the SSD a huge win. I also like the faster startup time for Aperture, as well as more-quickly loading large projects (or multiple projects, like all photos). So yes, while exporting (or as shown in this example, preview generation) don't really benefit from the SSD, I still think it's worthwhile to use one with Aperture.
Original:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1357118
Hello World!
Hello, my name is Conrad. I'm 6'5", 25, and this is my first blog post.