Webb Commentary

Expression Media used to be called iViewMedial Pro until Microsoft bought it. Iview was a good, solid photo cataloging program. I was never ecstatic about the tech support, but then I was never very unhappy with the program and when upgrades came they were good ones and significant.

When Microsoft bought the program I cried. I’ve spent the last few years becoming MS free…free of all MS products. My take on MS is that it is not overly interested in improving its software. Its chief interest is selling software. If it meant taking software like Word (that basically did all that it needed to do fifteen years or more ago and needed no changes except for some cosmetic ones and those needed for new OS systems, and perhaps add some new file formats for compatibility purposes) and rearranging the menu items and touting “new” features, that’s what it did. That sort of “upgrade” made my head spin and caused me many hours of distress trying to figure out the “new” way to perform “old” functions.

I got tired of the stress and cash outlays to Bill the robber baron. I fled to Mac. For awhile I had both MAC and MS operating systems running and I worked hard at finding replacement software for my MS programs and other programs that operated only on MS Windows. The most difficult one to replace was QuickBooks which I used for invoicing and tracking sales and customers. The company had quit making Quickbooks for the Mac. I was overjoyed when I at last found a solution and I could dump Windows from my Mac.

And then MS bought my workhorse, iViewMedia Pro. Gahhrrrrr!!!

Microsoft immediately increased the price, changed the name, and put their logo on it. They did offer the “upgrade” to most users for free. Months later, the second upgrade came. I don’t remember that there were any improvements. If there were, they were fairly minor. But now there was a new bug. The imput windows in the batch renaming menu were now black! which made it almost impossible to see anything in those windows.

The third and current “upgrade” fixed that problem but introduced a new, a truly disastrous problem. Now the “Comments” fields cannot be opened in the “Organization” tab which basically destroys the function the Organization tab is intended to provide.

Another new “feature” can be found in the View menu item, however. Now users can access “Virtual Earth” directly. Now that is a feature every photographer has been waiting for in their photo cataloging program.

I declined this upgrade. I am hoping that MS will tire of this program and sell it to a small, energetic company that will treat it well. This program is far better than iPhoto. Neither Apeture nor Lightroom tend to the problems of cataloging as straight forwardly as it does.

Are there other alternatives I am missing? PLEASE tell me there is.

Tags: archive, digital archives, library, photography // Add Comment »

I am one of the very lucky people. Back in the days when I earned a regular salary, I worked for Len Press, a man whom I have always admired and respected. That admiration has grown over the years. He and his wife Lil came here from Boston in the 1950s, planning to stay a year, and never left. That was very fortunate for Kentucky. It was only because of Len that Kentucky has an extensive, statewide, public television network (KET) that is unmatched in the nation. It celebrated its 40th year in September (2008).

Lil’s achievements have been more wide ranging. She helped establish a large mental health network of facilities and treatment in Kentucky. She organized a Governor’s Scholars program. For a time, she was the assistant director of the Appalachain Regional Commission in Washington, DC; and, more recently, she established The Womens Network for Democratic Principles.

Both Len and Lil are tireless and enthusiastic people who see the worst and imagine the best.

Recently, Len finished a history of KET. I did the cover design and book layout. I am proud of the design and happy to see this work published. It is a bit of Kentucky history that needed the details recorded. And Len did it so very well. He is a great writer.

But most of all, I am proud to say that Len and Lil are my friends.

Tags: art, graphic design // Add Comment »

What a major pain in the butt air travel miles have become. The idea of getting points for miles traveled was once a treat and a real PR gambit for airlines. It now leaves many holders feeling cheated and disappointed, and that can’t be good PR.

Airlines keep making it more and more difficult to exchange points for tickets and have found endless ways to change the rules and provide offers that are designed to steal points from your account at 10 cents on the dollar. Now airlines like Delta have quit fooling around at these cheesey ways to relieve you of points and simply began “expiring” them.

As yet, as far as I know, no one has fired a class action suit at them for this underhanded behavior. But I’m still hoping. From their point of view they can taketh away what they giveth. From my point of view, it was a contract. They gave me something of value and it is mine. Taking my property is simply theft.

Tags: Skymiles, air miles // Add Comment »

I bought a new computer recently, a FAST Mac, dual core, with Intel processors along with Apple’s latest OS, Leopard. It shines and it makes programs I’ve used for years walk and talk.

For instance, I’ve used Corel’s Painter program through four generations of owners and I have always thought highly of the program. In some respects it was a program before it’s time. The first developers used fractal math to make it work. It couldn’t have otherwise. Computers were still relatively slow and underpowered when the program was first introduced. Even so, it demanded more of computers than computers had. I was always frustrated when I had to weight for a brush stroke to catch up with my hand movement.

The latest generation of computers makes this program sing. It’s almost a new program and nothing has changed but the computer and the operating system.

Speaking of operating systems, Leopard is brand new from the top down. All the dusty corners and cluttered code has been cleaned away. It attends to graphics like no other operating system has.

I bought a new program that exists because of the OS called ScreenFlow that shoots two movies simultaneously. One is of the monitor and everything that happens on it, and the other is of the person sitting at the computer in front of the built-in camera. It also records audio. After the shooting stops, ScreenFlow offers both videos up in an editor that lets you integrate the two and to move around the screen and zoom in an out, as well as other features.

It only works with Leopard. The beauty is that while ScreenFlow is shooting two movies, other programs aren’t noticably affected. I decided to create some tutorials with ScreenFlow. Why not? It’s easy.

Here is my first effort. It demonstrates the underpainting feature of Corel Painter 10.

I also have this video on Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/UnderpaintingFeatureOfCorelsPainter). If you want to see it in an even larger version than the ARCHIVE default view, then click on the play/download QuickTime option in the ARCHIVE menu on the left side of the screen.

Tags: art, video // Add Comment »

I’m not as excited about ImageKind as I once was. I haven’t sold anything there, but that doesn’t surprise me. My site gets lost there. ImageKind is still focused on selling frames and hasn’t done much to make it a special place for the creators of art and photography.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

I spent the month of February in Mexico at the adjoining towns of Itapa and Zihuatanejo. At one corner of the bay at Zihua there was some great surfing, great for me at least. The surf ran almost parallel to the shore and surfers were close os that I didn’t have to have a super telephoto lens. I took a couple hundred images and just for fun morphed a few of them together in a short video.

Here it is,

Tags: photography, travel, video // Add Comment »

My parents grew up in the Depression years and struggled to make ends meet all their lives. Needless to say it was an especially rare occasion for us to eat out and that always meant some fast food place or a home grown mom and pop stop where food was plentiful and cheap.

Mom was a farm girl and she knew how to cook anything she could grow and she was a careful grocery shopper. For instance, we had liver and onions more frequently than hamburger, and hog liver at that because it was cheaper than beef liver which was cheaper than hamburger. I liked what mom cooked and I still get a special pleasure when I run across something that tastes like her cooking.

I was in my thirties before I had food that was wonderfully prepared and presented. It was in Marsailles and I spent three hours eating a simple multi-course meal complete with tastes of several wines. I have never been the same since.

It is always fun to look for interesting places to eat when traveling. Of course small towns are usually unlikely places to find really good food. Not long ago I stumbled onto a delightful eatery in Frankfort, Ky., less than thirty minutes from where I live. Although it is the capitol of Kentucky it is a relatively small town.

The surpizing place I found is called “Rick’s White Light Diner.”

The owner, Rick, just got tired of working too hard running big restaurants or working for other people as a private chef. So he bought a little diner that had been a hamburger joint for as long as anyone can remember. It’s a small place. Three tables and five or six stools at a counter. A place big enough that he can make a living but not too taxing.

He can run it and still have enough time left over to enjoy life outside of the restuarant. Rick opens at eight in the morning and closes at two. He cooks and holds forth on world events and politics for six hours a day. And loves it.

Tags: food, travel // Add Comment »

I have been thinking about ways to increase traffic to my websites and, of course, make more money. My latest ideas involve several approaches, all of which is taking more time to implement than I had hoped. The first idea is a giveaway.

I have been shooting photos of Lincoln sites for sometime now. There are several places in Kentucky and Illinois and one good one in Indiana. I’ve been to Springfield, IL., twice in the last 5 or 6 years and twice to the Boyhood Home in Indiana.

From time to time I do some layout work and graphic design for a local publisher. Back in the summer the publisher wanted to put together a prototype for a nationally distributed, one-of-a-kind Lincoln Magazine for the bicentennial. That project got me started searching the national archives and online digital libraries for free, quality photos related to Lincoln. I have put together a pretty good collection. Together with my own photos I have about 700 or 800. That got me to thinking that lots of small publishers as well as teachers and others will be needing photos.

My daughter gave me a book for Christmas titled “Wikinomics.” It has stimulated my thinking about using the Internet as a marketplace. It talks about some of the great online successes and it got me to exploring sites that I had either overlooked or dismissed as not being interesting to me. Basically the thesis of the book is that the old hierarchal business models are no longer the best models and that “open-source” approaches are what’s working best. It makes the case that the media industry is currently making a huge mistake in trying to protect its product by prosecuting copyright violations instead of embracing the “sharing” concept and trying to figure out ways to make money through it.

Here is what I am in the process of trying. I have placed about 300 of my own Lincoln related photos on Flickr and made them available through a Creative Commons license. I have slides that I am getting scanned and I will upload those later and also make them available for free. The old photos I found in various online archives are already in the public domain. I will put this collection in one location and make it easy for people to find and download. I have put my personal photos on Flickr and the found stuff on my website.

Flickr is a high traffic area and should bring visitors to my websites, although how I manage that has to be pretty constrained to comply with Flickr rules.

To make money on the Lincoln site I going to offer a collection of images as illustrations that I have enhanced using programs like Photoshop, Painter, Photomatix and Bibble. One problem is how to deliver the images to buyers. The best way, of course, is to let buyer download an image after they have paid for it. That little trick, at the moment, is beyond my skill/knowledge. I use PayPal’s simplest market basket to take orders. I haven’t discovered a way to reference PayPal back to a download page. Most credit card/market basket providers are expensive and I need a low cost method. If anyone has suggestions I would be happy to hear them.

There is another strand that I’m just beginning to experiment with too, and that is profiting from click-thru advertising with Google and using affiliate ads. I’ve always hated ads cluttering a page and avoided using “free” web sites that dumped ads on my pages. But now my thinking is, what the heck if I get paid for it.

From what I’ve read the trick is to have lots of pages and an interesting and active blog that gravitates traffic to them. Right now the traffic on my sites is pretty low. To stimulate some activity, I’m looking for opportunities like Flickr that will generate some awareness of my work. Again, any ideas you have along those lines would be welcome.

A third approach is to partner with an outfit like www.ImageKind.com. It is a hot, relatively new online company that specializes in printing, framing, mating, and shipping. All those things are important to buyers and a pain for artists and photographers like me who would rather be creating new works than doing those necessary things.

Presentation is also very important to buyers and that is where ImageKind shines. Shoppers can choose from a large selection of frames and mats and preview how the prints will look. They guarantee their work and offer a 30 day return option if the customer is not satisfied. ImageKind handles the transaction and takes care of all the details and sends me my asking price above their cost. I also get 15% of the framing price.

There are some wrinkles that I am not happy about but for the most part this sharing scheme seems great. I will say more about this as I learn more.

Tags: Google, earn, money, selling, websit, website // Add Comment »

Here is another response from Canon.

As Chris said, “Canon does not supply specifications to or test with
other manufacturers products.” There is no way that we could possibly
check compatibility with the thousands of companies that make
accessories or software that can be used with our cameras.

From what I can gather from Adobe’s website; Adobe has decided not to
support the 40D with CS2. You should contact Adobe for further
inquiries regarding this decision. If you look at Adobe’s updates for
CS3 you will see that they create an update for each new camera or group
several cameras in the update.

Your comments about the universal negative format are noted and will be
passed along to the appropriate party.

Thank you for taking the time to write. Please write to us again if you
have any questions.

Canon is completely wrong on this. Why on earth is Canon not “supply(ing) specifications to or test(ing) with other manufacturers products.” Actually, I see little reason for Canon to test with other manufacturers products but it SHOULD supply its specifications to anyone asking for them. Why should it make its specs proprietary? History has shown that open-source code has, in the long run, always improved the code.

Canon also has it backwards as to who should worry about compatibility with software. It thinks it is imperative that software companies such as Adobe keep up with them rather than the other way around. There are only a few major software companies that provide top of the line digital darkroom tools. I can count them on one hand and have fingers left over. And the principle one, Adobe, has created an open source format, DNG.

Some argue that DNG is not perfect because it is lossey, however, it is the best option on the table for now and it will not get better until camera raw formats become open-source too.

Tags: digital archives, dng, raw // Add Comment »

Here is my response to Canon.

My question is if “Canon does not supply specifications to … other manufacturers….” how is it possible for Adobe to “create their own plugins for Canon RAW files”?

I disagree with your attitude that it isn’t Canon’s responsibility to test compatibility with major software apps. If I use the CRW format I want it to be archival. That means other software has to read it as well as Canon’s software. It is time that Canon and other camera manufacturers work together on a common format that will permit access to photo files for ages to come.

That would be in everyone’s best interest and make me believe that you really do “value me as a Canon customer.”

Tags: dng, photography, raw // Add Comment »