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Harold and Ron looking at Warren's Photos Attendance was small due to conflicts with other activities; but, halfway through the meeting, we had the largest book raffle ever in terms of the number of books and one of the largest in terms of the funds raised for the Northern Vermont Regional Hospital. The Raffle The book raffle went very well with everyone wanting to accommodate the interests of others. We use a one cell table in Pages with a random function =RANDBETWEEN(1, 22) to select the winning numbers. The second number is changed to fit the number of raffle tickets issued. Stephen Farber was the first winner and selected Using Mac OS X Leopard. He also went home with a copy of Photo-pedia.. Ron Lay-Sleeper took home a copy of Mac OS X Leopard On Demand and Photo-pedia. Harold won a copy of Mac OS X Leopard On Demand. Warren won a took home a copy of Photo-pedia. All of these books were published by Que. They were provided by Pearson Eduction/InformIT. You can read about them under Reviews. Cell Phones Harold Turner and Jane Fuller had sent an email request for advice on which cell phones other than iPhones were Macintosh compatible. Gail Murphy replied “that most phones that are palm (if you are speaking of smartphones) are compatible. Using a product like "MissingSync" http://www.markspace.com/ makes using your smartphone (Treo, Blackberry, Centro) a breeze.” Barry Hayes replied with “What do they mean by compatible? I can send images and synch contacts with my motorola razor by bluetooth. Any bluetooth phone should be able to do that.” In the meeting, someone said that MissingSync will translate between many equipment programs. Harold said that he knows a third party app that will support the phone he is interested in. He wanted to know how he could get a program into the cell phone and if it was a bluetooth cell phone would blue tooth work to load the program. It was decided that he would probably have to get a USB cable to connect between his computer and the cell phone. Cell phone companies like Unicel do not like to see you download information on your cell phone because they do not have enough bandwidth. I was reminded that I should make sure my emergency cell phone was charged because it will not work if it isn’t. I started charging it when I got home. A doctor from Princeton recommends that you do not give kids a cell phone because their brains are developing and could be affected by rays from the cell phone. Internet Communications Warren Walker said that there is wireless internet based in Plainfield, but he would have to move 200 feet of granite that is between it and his house. He is hoping he can get DSL. Stephen Farber is working through a satellite hookup. He said that thunderstorms and rain can cause problems. Wet leaves on a tree sometimes come down over the dish and cause problems. We discussed pornography and spam which often seem to go together. Someone told us about a person who signs up for lots of free things, and gets lots of spam. He suspects that most of the free services sell addresses. Someone told about a person who knows about scams who received an offer to rescue puppies in Africa with pictures of the puppies and sent money to cover the shipping cost. Stephen said there was a flaw in the domain name server system that could redirect communications. Most router companies fixed the problem, and Apple apparently fixed the problem on there server software systems. However, some people are criticizing Apple for not patching the problem on our systems which come with Apache and could be setup as a server. There is no risk for most of us who do not set up our computers and internet servers, and we questioned the level of risk even if we did. Other Computer Stuff Intel created dual core processors, like having two CPUs on one chip, to speed up processing. There are two versions, You want the Dual Core 2 which is faster than the Dual Core. Software, the operating system, splits commands between cores to increase the speed. Some universities have attained fantastic speed using massive parallel processing, something like 1,000 core processing, but this requires special programs to split the work up between different processing branches and only works with programs that are specially written for their computer. Apple bought a company to get their specialists who can optimize multicore systems because they need to learn how to get more speed out of eight core systems which now are no where near eight times as fast. Warren said Photoshop CS3 is now going to 64 bit processing which will also require special system software to get optimum results. Apple's next operating system, Snow Leopard, will run faster with fewer problems and will provide a strong base for future development but will not contain many new features. -------------------- In the last quarter Apple's earnings were the highest ever for the quarter and sales of Macintosh computers set new records. Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer's said the company expects a dip in gross margins this quarter because, among other factors, it's planning "a significant product transition." Rumors are running strong that this means new laptops or new iPods or both. ------------------ Warren sent an email with a JPEG attachment to a person with a Windows machine, and they could not open the attachment. He sent it again after checking Edit > Attachments > Always Send Windows Friendly Attachments and they were able to see it. I always leave this checked, but I do not know if it makes any difference to Mac users who get the message. ---------------- Ron Lay-Sleeper has been playing movies on an old G3 Mac but it cannot convert some of them fast enough to play. Stephen said it could also be an older slower hard drive that is causing the problem. Digital Photography Warren bought his Mac G4 Tower in December 1999. It was a powerful machine capable of running Photoshop and processing large images. It was a good choice. He is still using it and will continue to use it for printing and other work. The latest iMacs have more powerful video so Warren bought a new midrange 20” iMac. He will use a Sony Artisan CRT screen with his iMac for the highest quality color. He will continue to use his Spyder Pro to adjust his color. Warren says when he starts up the two machines his iMac is up and running while his G4 Tower is still just thinking about it. Warren brought in pictures of waterfalls, a butterfly, mushrooms and flowers. One was a 24” manual composite of several photos. Asked where he took one of the pictures he gave directions which included finding a snowmobile trail and following it to a trail past No Trespassing signs to a bog. One reason Warren bought his camera was that it is so well sealed to keep dust and moisture out, but dust can get into a SLR when you change the lens. With film that is not a major problem because the dust just gets on that frame of the film. With a digital SLR the dust can get on the sensor. Warren’s camera also has a feature to shake dust off of the sensor, but Warren now has s spot of dust that will not shake off. He has to use Photoshop to correct that spot on all of his pictures. Warren first checks the composition on his images. Then he uses his camera’s histogram to check the exposure. Next he decides if he will need multiple exposures to cover the full range of light on the image. Then he dials in the focus. His camera has a feature where he can capture an image and display the histogram without filling up his memory card. Warren is now taking multiple photos, each captured at a different exposure, for high dynamic range processing for when he has an edit program to process it. In Photoshop CS3, the Merge to HDR command lets you create HDR images from multiple photographs. The HDR image uses 32 bits per channel created by merging 16 bit RAW images to contain far more information than can be displayed on a standard 24-bit monitor. Warren said some programs let you choose between many different algorithms to map this 32 bit data into something that can be displayed or printed while others use fewer algorithms but more mapping objects. Photoshop Help just says, “ Photoshop lets you adjust the preview of the HDR image so it can be viewed on a computer monitor.” As Warren explained it, you take different exposures of the same subject using camera RAW. You expose for the highlights and shadows separately - exposing for everything as midrange. Thus you maintain details in the shadows without the problems of dark dots, and in the highlights without unwanted color casts. HDR optimizes each tonal range and you can choose between wonderful realism or surreal results. (I probably could explain this better if I knew what I was talking about.) I asked Warren how he gets a flower print that has the same color as in the flower. My wife asked me to take a picture of a daylily to show people at the Vermont Flower Farm so she could buy more that match it.
The color that looked to me most like the flower I could see through the window was the image As Shot from my Cannon PowerShot G9 camera as shown herer. Stephen said that I could get a color chart and take a picture including the color on the chart next to the flower.
Warren said he does not worry whether the color of the flower is exact as long as it looks right. (Do you wonder if this isn't also true in gardening catalogs?) Ron has a Sony A-100 camera. It is one of the newer DSLs. which displays a preview of the image on the LCD monitor before you shoot. He is also getting a Mac which will be able to run Photoshop Elements 6 so he will be able to use Photoshop Elements 6 The Missing Manual. Here Warren is showing a picture of a special mushroom. Next month Warren will tell us how he creates his wildflower calendars. I asked him to tell us a little about how he finds and shoots his pictures as well as well as how he creates the calendars. It should be a great meeting. |
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