Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:34 on 22 July 2012

1. It’s very complex. There’s lots of settings to master. This sort of comes with the territory when shooting digital, and I expected it.
2. The official documentation is, quite frankly, awful. Olympus only ships a very abridged printed manual with the camera, expecting users to consult a PDF file for any detailed information. Not a reasonable expectation, really, given that I don’t carry my computer with me into the field. And even the unabridged PDF version of manual is incomplete; see below for an example. This does not necessarily “come with the territory” and I didn’t expect at all.

Probably the most egregious example of how lacking the documentation is is Olympus’s description of the Magnify function:

Press the button once to display the zoom frame, again to zoom in. Keep the button pressed to cancel zoom.

“Excellent!”, I thought. I’m planning on using the camera, via an adapter, with my old Pentax telephoto lenses (which, thanks to the crop factor, will be twice as telephoto as they were before). “A way to force the camera into an MF assist mode with a single button press will be quite useful.” So I used the setup menu to assign the Magnify function to a button.

And kept finding that button did nothing. I tried and tried pressing it for various lengths of time, pressing it while turning one or the other of the two dials, pressing it while holding the shutter button halfway, etc. Nothing ever worked. Until I happened across a blog post that prompted me to try it again, this time with the preview screen enabled to display a live view (normally it is off and one uses the EVF to preview the scene).

That did the trick, but it shouldn’t have taken me over a week of experimentation followed by a number of Google searches to figure out something which should have been explicitly described in the manual.

I’m still glad I bought it, mind you (and consequently just spent more money to round out a basic lens outfit for it). It’s just that using it would be a far better experience if only the manual were more complete.

Published at 19:57 on 16 July 2012

I’m still trying to withhold final judgement, but my most recent tests indicate that it really should work quite well for me.

Recently took it camping, and the results were somewhat spotty: sometimes I could nail the focus, sometimes it just seemed to have issues. But that was trying to take pictures in windy weather (read: subjects waving in the wind), and I didn’t have a tripod (read: my own shaky hands were a factor).

Sure, it has image stabilization, as pretty much all digital cameras these days do. But that only goes so far, and nothing works as well as turning IS off and mounting the camera on a tripod. Once I do that, focusing consistency seems to improve to what it is with a traditional film SLR.

As an example, I tried to focus on the anthers of the floret in the center of the picture, and so far as I can tell that is where the focus ended up being.

Sure, it’s a little wonky: the view isn’t exactly live and the lens doesn’t respond at the exact moment you twist the focus ring, and you hear a little motor racking the focus in or out a fraction of a second after you tweak the focus ring a little bit one way or the other.

But, wonky or not, it is possible to manually set the focus with a minimum of fuss or bother. Really, given how fiddly macro photography is in general, by the time I’m done fiddling with the tripod and getting the framing right, the tiny bit of extra time it might take to focus is pretty much dust on the gears.

And it’s not all a loss, either. That picture was taken in the shade at ISO 1600. There’s no way you can get ISO 1600 slide film: it’s just not made. And ISO 1600 print film is way grainier than the image I just got above. I’d have had to fiddle with an off-camera flash or exposure times in the range of a second (and hope a slight breeze wouldn’t ruin the shot) to get the same results on fine-grained slide film.

Published at 19:36 on 16 July 2012

Contemporary EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens) cameras, that is.

Encouraged by looking through two recent electronic viewfinders (which have improved astoundingly in the past few years), I purchased an Olympus OM-D E-M5 yesterday. Just took a batch of macro pictures with it, mostly using manual focus. Unlike a compact digicam, it’s totally usable for macro photography. Which is good, because that’s a big part of why I purchased it.

Mind you, the EVF is still not as good as an optical viewfinder: the view is slightly delayed, and like a movie or TV set it’s a sequence of still pictures in rapid succession, not a true moving view. It’s also a discrete set of pixels with a noticeable grain to it. But the point is it’s close enough to a true live view on a ground-glass screen to be completely useful, even in fairly gloomy light.

In fact, it can make it surprisingly easy to focus in gloomy light, because what you’re looking at in such situations is an amplified view of the available light. It can be a little disconcerting at first to look in the finder and see a bright scene when photographing on the forest floor. On the minus side, there’s a limit to how bright the EVF can be, and it ends up looking surprisingly gloomy in bright sunny situations. It’s still far better than trying to shade the preview screen on a camera body while at the same time attempting to hold the camera still, however.

Focusing the lenses feels a little on the odd side, too. Even though focusing is done in the traditional way by turning a collar on the lens, that collar is just a digital encoder which causes the camera’s CPU to tell the lens to rack itself in or out as it is being turned. But again, it’s good enough to allow precise manual focusing; it’s far better than the futile putsing around with buttons to manually focus a compact digicam.

In short, EVIL cameras do not offer the performance of an SLR, and probably never will. But that’s not completely the point: a 35mm SLR does not offer the performance of an 8×10 view camera (those are the big, old-fashioned-looking cameras that are inevitably used on tripods and which photographers get under a cloth to focus), yet despite that people use SLR’s because they are smaller, lighter, and more convenient than view cameras.

And so it is with EVIL cameras, particularly when compared to the size and weight of modern DSLRs, which tend to be significantly buliker and heavier than old film SLRs. Trading performance for convenience has a long history in photography. I’ve avoided purchasing a DSLR because I did not want to take that extra weight and bulk on the trail with me, and I’m pleased that my new EVIL camera will allow me to ditch even more weight and bulk.

Published at 11:35 on 8 July 2012

No new revelations, really: I miss how Portland is more countercultural than Seattle. I don’t miss the lousy air quality or more prolonged summer heat waves.

I also don’t miss the flaky hipster factor: as an example, there’s one vegan food store in Portland that doesn’t open until 10:00 AM because none of its owners (nor, frankly, much of its clientele) are up before noon, so 10 seems almost unimaginably generously early an opening time for them. And since 10:00 AM is (by their standards) an ungodly early hour, the store almost never actually opens at the stated time of 10, anyhow. Which is annoying to anyone whose schedule isn’t based on “rock and roll hours”.

Published at 21:43 on 7 July 2012

I’m in Portland for what was billed as the estate sale of a friend who passed away this spring, which turned into a giveaway of possessions to friends, which then turned once more into a giveaway of only minor possessions. Which turned the trip into something of a wild goose chase, because the object I was most interested in might be valuable.

In the end, it probably shouldn’t have been that big a surprise, because difficulty in managing the need to divest oneself of possessions sort of runs in that family: my friend’s mother was a compulsive hoarder who filled a whole house with stuff, and my friend then obsessed for years about meticulously sorting through all his mother’s junk.

And I can’t get that angry, because the object I wanted is definitely a want and not a need.

Published at 20:05 on 2 July 2012

Apple recently discontinued its old Mobile Me service and replaced it with iCloud. If, like me, you’re not using OSX Lion, there’s no seamless way to change your Mail settings so that they will work on iCloud, even if you did go to the iCloud web page and say you wanted to keep reading mail from an older Mac system.

I did not find the Apple help page to be very helpful in this regard, so for the record, here’s the procedure I figured out to get Apple Mail working with iCloud:

1. Do not delete your old account! It is not necessary.
2. Under the “Mail” menu item, select “Preferences…”
3. Select the “Accounts” tab, then select your Mobile Me account.
4. In the “Description” field, edit the description so that the host name after the @ reads: imap.mail.me.com .
5. In the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) selection tool, select “Edit SMTP Server List…”. Set the SMTP server for your old Mobile Me account to smtp.mail.me.com . Ensure the “Use default ports (25, 465, 587)” radio button is checked. Also ensure the checkbox next to “Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)” is checked.
6. Click “OK” to save your changes and return to the accounts settings.
7. Click on “Advanced”.
8. Ensure the “Use SSL” checkbox is checked.
9. Close the preferences window. Be sure to save your changes when asked.

Published at 22:49 on 30 June 2012

The President of Paraguay was recently impeached, not because he broke any laws or anything, but for so-called “poor performance of his duties”. In this case, that means firing two officials (the chief of the national police and the minister of the interior) in the wake of violence involving the national police. To make matters stranger, the votes in congress were both wildly in favor of the impeachment, meaning that they were backed both by the impeached president’s own party and the opposition.

I’ll confess to not knowing much about the Paraguayan constitution, but if Paraguay is like most countries, both sacked officials supposedly serve under the president and at the president’s approval. That’s probably why a number of neighboring leaders aren’t taking too kindly to the antics. This includes President Piñera of Chile, who is from a right-wing political party, so this can’t be accurately portrayed as simply a case of leftist leaders trying to shield one of their own from being held accountable for malfeasance (of which there really doesn’t seem to be any).

More details here and here.

Published at 15:56 on 17 June 2012

It’s sort of unusual for something like this to make it into the mainstream media, but sometimes unusual things happen. How much more attention is given to violence in the privileged areas of the city is something that’s recently struck me as well.

Published at 10:06 on 15 June 2012

I’m having to learn it for work purposes, and have already studied the language enough to be able to offer the following brief executive summary:

Ruby is a merger of an elegant, Scheme-like language which offers functional programming and metaprogramming with an ugly Perl-like syntax and design philosophy.

Published at 18:54 on 12 June 2012

No, I’m not going to rehash why I’ve chosen to leave Portland and not return; I’ve done that enough already, and most of the reasons for doing so are personal and thus not necessarily applicable to most others.

And no, I’m not going to try and talk anyone out of it. Portland is indeed by many measures a great place to live.

What I am going to do is warn anyone against moving there without a job in the hopes of finding one once there. Unless you have a lot of money squirreled away, and are prepared to weather a significant period (read: a year or more) of unemployment, don’t do this!

Portland has the most depressed economy of any major West Coast city. Expecting a job — any job, but especially a good job — to materialize just because The Great You just moved there is the epitome of self-centered magical thinking. I’m still subscribed to a Portland-area mailing list, and I’ve lost count of how many “Help! I moved here and a job did not materialize for me!” type messages I have seen.

To reiterate: it is not easy to find work in Portland. Even for what are entry-level service positions in most other major metro areas, in Portland employers will expect experience, often significant experience. If you don’t have that, they will throw your résumé out and move on. And odds are they will find someone with the desired experience.

Also, don’t assume because that because you do meet the minimum requirements for a job, even a menial one, you can easily score one. You might end up competing with (and losing to) other applicants who well exceed those requirements.

I am not being negative here; I am merely being realistic. There are many great things about Portland, but the local economy is definitely not one of them. It stinks.

If you’re itching to try living in Portland, find the job first, then move. Or be successfully self-employed. Or save up a lot of money and gird yourself. Or fly out and couch-surf with friends and be prepared to fly back if you don’t find anything.

Just don’t pull up stakes and expect something to materialize because you need it. Or I will just say I told you so.