Browsing my favourite site of all photography, DPReview, I came across their posting about craigslist ad and respond published on PetaPixel. It is a topic of wedding photographers: how much they charge and how some people think that those prices are outrages.

My first reaction was: why DPReview, professional site, would post “news” not worthy nor professional enough to discuss. Opinions about “over-priced” products could be everywhere: Walmart vs Gucci, Hyundai vs Bentley, Dom Perignon vs Henkell Trocken.

I shot wedding before and I do realize how much work it is, but I am not defending nor supporting photographer Nikki Wagner, I actually think it is unprofessional to try to defend your prices – if you are professional, and you value your work, that’s the only reasoning behind your prices, not how much it cost you to run your business.

Here are two examples:

Scenario (a) – with today’s technology and power of photo editing software you can take photos with Canon T2i – perfect little camera. Cost: $869,99 CDN, and you get two lenses. For additional $126,99 CDN you can get good enough 50mm portrait lens. This camera shoots in RAW, so using great software DxO Optics Pro, you can ‘fix’ distortion and even color process images like it came from 5D Mark II, all for $99. As for photo manipulation, there are tons of software out there, which perform same functions as Photoshop, if you know what you are doing: free Gimp, or PixelMator. At the end of the day, as my mentor Terry Cioni once said: “the most important thing in photography is not camera nor lenses but two inches behind viewfinder”. For other points outlined in the article: hosting – I pay only $8,95 for DreamHost and it has unlimited space and bandwidth; don’t buy car – rent it at the time you need it, it’s like $30 per day etc.

Scenario (b) – when photographer is charging 5K for a wedding, it is not just equipment and supplies that are included in that price – it is years of experience, hours of photo manipulation and experimenting and strive for perfection as an artist. As a perfectionist in my own photography, I do understand that it’s not pure hardware/software cost – it is much more than that.

So with all that said, my final thought is that both craigslist ad poster and photographer who wrote the article both have valid points. But both DPReview and Nikki Wagner lost their argument, failed to make a point and came out as un-professional. Real artist do not have to ‘explain’ to others why his/hers art cost that much – the price is set and people have freedom to choose to either pay it or not. And as a professional photographer news site, dpreview, please stick to what you do the best – review equipment, post photography news, and provide interesting professional grade articles. Leave ‘childish’ arguments to somebody else. People have choice to either wear Walmart $29 jeans or pay $400 for D&G, drive $13,000 Hyundai or $400,000 Bentley – and it does not make them as suckers to spend that much money nor cowards to charge that much.

Happy shooting!

Tags: Photography

I came across this really cool JavaScript plugin, developed by Artem Geller and three other developers, which allows site visitors to share selection of the text. It’s called MASHA – short for Mark and Share

Try it yourself on this website and on my Portfolio and Articles blogs: select portion of the text, and you will see icon for highlighter appears. By clicking on that highlighter, selected portion of the text would be highlighted blue and additional characters will be added to the page’s URL. By sharing that URL, you will be able to share your highlighted text.

It is very slick, considering that recipient does not have to have any plugins installed on their computer, it works across browsers and even on iPhone/iPad!

UPDATE: since Masha removes spaces from my sidebar and I don’t have time to try to fix it, I’ve disable it. Please visit developers’ site to see the functionality. Sorry about that.

Tags: Gadgets, Programming, Web

After 3 hours of sleep, around 6am on Saturday, I came back to the office to fiddle around with server one more time. No matter what I did, ODR still thought that ODM is on the network, and I’ve decided to move to the Plan B.

Plan B was to export our current OD structure via Archiving, install new OS X server on MacMini and restore from there. Little I knew how corrupted LDAP was on the original server, after all ‘hard reboots’ throughout it’s lifetime.

By around 10am, I clearly understood that Plan C is my only solution – which was exporting users from original OD and re-importing them into brand new installation of OS X. The only positive from this approach was that our users would have to change their passwords upon initial login anyway, to comply with recent implementation of IT Sec Policy, so loosing user’s passwords was not a big deal.

By around 11:30, I had all my users imported and passwords reset, but one more hiccup was waiting for me… Read »

Tags: Apple, DNS, IT Solutions, Open Directory, Server Setup

And here comes magical day – Friday, May 20th. All planning is done, hopefully, and we are ready for servers’ upgrade, update and reconfiguration.

So first let’s see what we have, then we’ll see what we want, and then we will see what we get…

Our current setup is:

3 XServes and one VMWare OS X Server all working very hard and therefore one XServe, which acts as Open Directory Master (ODM), AFP, SMB, DNS, DHCP and Netboot server, works very hard every day and hangs ocasionally. During those ‘hangs’ “hard reset” is required, which does the number on the server. Single sign-on process is not working anymore and every time server ‘hangs’, since it’s running DHCP and DNS services, none of the users can access Internet. So back to set-up:

• XServe 1 – Mac OS X 10.5 Server, AFP, DNS, DHCP, SMB, ODM
• XServe 2 – Mac OS X 10.4 Server, AFP, FTP, Mail, Web and FileMaker Server
• XServe 3 – Mac OS X 10.5 Server, AFP, ODR (Open Directory Replica)
• VMWare Server – Mac OS X 10.5 Server,AFP, FileMaker Server

Now in order to free up XServe 1 and ensure it’s stability and no-impact on Internet, I’m bringing MacMini into the picture, running 10.6 OS X Server which will be DNS, DHCP and ODM. XServe 1 would then be AFP, SMB server – file server.

Plus, all servers, except VMWare server, will be running 10.6 Server software to increase performance of existing hardware and utilize latest Mac technologies. Read »

Tags: Apple, DNS, IT Solutions, Open Directory, Server Setup

There comes time, when Apple releases new OS X Server version and existing server is acting up. And that time is perfect for spring cleaning, updates and upgrades.

So this time came. Apple has OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server for quite some time now, with bunch of possible bugs and kinks worked out, with skinnier footprint and increased performance on existing hardware. Our existing server, which hosts DNS, DHCP acts as Open Directory Master and on top of that serves files via AFP and SMB, after multiple “hard resets” is not performing how it once did. It also, for some reasons, lost it’s “single sign-on” capabilities via AFP (while it’s OD Replica works just fine). And, on top of that all, time showed that having DHCP and DNS on the server that every now and then “freezes” and requires “hard reset” is not a practical idea – once server is “hung”, users cannot access network at all. Read »

Tags: Apple, DNS, FileMaker Pro, IT Solutions, Open Directory, Server Setup

I’m really suspicious to all things said and showed on the internet, and this video is not exception. Somebody please pinch me as this video from 1994 talks about electronic newspapers.

We see newspapers going to e-publishing thanks to success of tablet device, iPad from Apple in particular. But this video talks about future more than 15 years. Just to put this into perspective: 7 years before release of Mac OS X, 5 years before release of Mac OS 9, 3 years before release of Mac OS 8, and a year before release of Windows 95. Read »

Tags: Apple, Cell phones, Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, New products, Prototype, Video, YouTube

Well SouthPark guys did it again. In the season 15th Premier episode they make fun of location tracking, iTunes agreements and everything else that could make fun of.

Here is sneak peak

Words won’t explain it, you’ve got to watch it.

Tags: Apple, iPad, SouthPark, Video, YouTube

In case you haven’t heard yet, YouTube is now capable of streaming 3D video in various formats. If you have 3D capable TV or monitor, there are two options available for you. You can use old school anaglyph (colored glasses) and, my pick, no 3D devices option. Well with 3D devices it’s pretty straight forward, but how about rest of us who don’t have those devices on our hands. There is option and it’s called stereogram! (read on and video is below)

Read »

Tags: 3D, Gadgets, Video, YouTube

This is pretty cool. By using front camera, app developers can create apps that ‘simulate’ 3D, i.e. glasses-free. Front facing camera tracks face position, esentially what angle is looking at the iPad, and adjust picture on the screen.

We track the head of the user with the front facing camera in order to create a glasses-free monocular 3D display. Such spatially-aware mobile display enables to improve the possibilities of interaction. It does not use the accelerometers and relies only on the front camera.

Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay

Here is video:

From MacStories

Tags: 3D, Apple, iPad, New products, Prototype, Video

Ok, I’ve been waiting for this one for a while now. Ever since I’ve learned that Verizon would introduce Personal Hotspot I hoped that Rogers would follow this as well and not block it.

Now, it’s official: iOS 4.3 on Rogers has Personal Hotspot that lets you connect up to 3 devices to share your cell phone data.

Read »

Tags: Apple, Cell phones, Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, IT Solutions