Last weekend I visited Ron Mueck’s exhibition at Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art and took a few shots of his amazing sculptures.
The Big Baby, 5m long sculpture of a newborn baby girl.
See the larger image here.
Mask, is Ron’s selfportrait, approximately 3m long sculpture.
See the larger image here.
To illustrate the real size of it here is another shot with some people in the background.
For a few years I’ve been using Flickr to post and share my photos, but as my Pro account was expiring a few weeks ago I have decided not to renew but rather to move on. Yes, my Flickr account is still alive, but since it’s no loner a Pro account only the latest 200 uploaded photos are displayed.
Why did I move on? Well, Flickr hasn’t changed a lot in years and the interface feels so yesterday. One of the major issues I had was the white background with no options to change. Yes, there are some third party ‘gateways’ to display the pictures on black background, but that’s really not it.
I explored number of alternatives and here are some that I have found: Zoomr, PBase, PhotoBucket, PhotoNet, SmugMug, Deviant Art, Zenfolio, 23, PicasaWeb, Fotki, Fotolog, Photo Dekho, Photo Buzz, Humble Voice, WebShots, DropShots… and all of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Some are free, some you pay for, most of them have a basic free account, but if you want real stuff you have to pay. Some of them look great, some are far from great and some just consfused the hell out of me.
In the end I have signed up with SmugMug. I found that SmugMug is the closest to what I really wanted, it has an excellent professional looking interface, number of ways to display your portfolio by using over 50 themes, endless ways of customising your site and has an awesome set of tools for uploading and managing your photos.
The Power and Pro accounts even let you point your own domain name to your SmugMug account, which is pretty cool. All account types offer unlimited storage and traffic for photos with Power and Pro accounts including unlimited HD videos.
Have a look for yourself , you will get a 14 days free trial account and if you decide to sign up
, don’t forget to use the SmugMug discount coupon X6dRIaxh10P1k - that will save you $5.00 of the regular price for any type of the account.
By the way, my SmugMug gallery is here if you’d like to have a peek and let me know what you think.
One of the new functions of iPhoto 09 are Faces. When you select the Faces in the menu bar on the left you will see a cork board with the thumbnails of faces that iPhoto has identified in your library. The default thumbnail photo, or the key photo, is not always the best choice, so you’d like to change it.
There are two ways of doing this. Firstly, you can click on a little “i” icon in the bottom right corner of the photo, then skim through the photos until you find the one you like. Click on it and your new key photo will be set.
The other and easier way of doing this is simply to skim through the images (slide your mouse pointer over the thumbnail) while on the cork board, and once you see the photo you’d like to set as a key, just hit space bar. The new key photo is set. The same applies for the Events view thumbnails.
An extra tip – if you are skimming through the Faces, hold down the Option button, this will show you the entire photo, not only the face.
After returning a new 24 inch iMac two times and getting the replacements I figured out that the problem is not related to the particular machine, but rather to all of them. I read tons of forums and the issue is so widespread that it leaves no doubt it’s a design fault. A design fault that Apple is leading us to believe they are not aware of, despite hundreds and thousands of calls to their customer support asking for help.
The problem is essentially this, the display is brighter on the left than it is on the right. Much brighter. Below is an illustration of how the brightness is distributed across the screen.
There are three areas of interest here:
1 – The display gets darker closer to the left edge of the screen
2 – The display brightness is constant
3 – The display gets darker towards the right side of the screen
Apple tries to compensate for this with ridiculously high level of brightness, which to be honest masks the problem rather well. The screen is simply so bright by default that any normal human being either needs to have sunglasses while using the iMac or turn the screen brightness down. The problem is, you can turn the brightness down only so far. And that is very little. Even the lowest setting is still way way too bright for most of us.
Here is the drill – the lower the brightness, the lower the panel temperature. The lower the temperature, the darker the edges of screen, hence the gradient. I am sure Apple is aware of this and this is exactly the reason why they keep the thing so bright.
I tested a few free utilities that will let you darken the screen further, and the one that best suits my needs is (or are) Shades. Shades actually doesn’t darken the screen by reducing the brightness, but rather applies a transparent overlay of specific colour. The default colour is black but you can change it to any other colour in the preferences window (not that I could imagine someone using a pink overlay).
The slider, that you can have either in the menu bar or on the desktop, doesn’t really change the brightness but the transparency of the overlay, which in turn makes your screen to appear darker.
What I did was to reduce iMac brightness to the minimum, then apply Shades to darken it a bit further. This made my display reasonably dark, but also produced even heavier gradient.
My wife, having heard me talking loudly to myself about the panel temperature and being frustrated with the gradient, came up with a brilliant idea… and not so brilliant solution. She laughed and said “If you need the temperature, why don’t you put the blow heater next to the screen, on the right end”.
This actually made me thinking and, of course ,brought up the answer to the problem. Turn up the iMac’s brightness control all the way up to generate enough temperature, then darken up the display with the Shades overlay.
The display brightness is now flat across the screen. When I wake up the computer in the morning there is a little of gradient along the right edge, about 2 inches, but within a few minutes this is gone.
One thing that may work against this is the screen calibration. I have noticed that some custom calibrations I have made have resulted in an unusual pink-ish tint towards the right edge, but Adobe RGB and sRGB work perfectly fine.
If you’ve got the all new 20 inch silver iMac, you may have noticed how beautiful the colours on that glossy screen are. You may have also noticed that they are more beautiful on the top of your screen than on the bottom.
It’s not only that colours are washed out as you go towards the bottom of the screen, they also change as you change your viewing angle. This makes the new iMac very much useless for any half-serious graphical designer. (see the video on the bottom of this page)
The reason for this is that Apple has used TN displays, which are the low end displays and are very cheap. 24 inch model comes with IPS displays, just like the old 20 and 24 inch white iMacs, and they are perfectly fine.
Take a look at the first picture below. Two Finder windows, none of them selected, positioned right at the top of the screen. The colour of the toolbars is identical. continue reading…
