Minnesota tip: bag the camera outside

More from Story's great site:

The Digital Story: Ziploc Bags for Cold Weather

Bringing a camera in from the cold weather to a warm house promotes condensation forming on the outside of its body, possibly migrating to the inside of the camera where it can confound electrical components. To prevent this mishap, place your camera in a Ziploc bag before coming inside. Leave the camera in the sealed bag until it reaches room temperature. The condensation will collect on the bag, not your camera, thereby protecting your investment.

Better bounce flash with a business card

Wow. I need to try this:

The Digital Story: "The Holiday Photographer" - Podcast #12

One drawback to bouncing light is that the subject's eyes can go dark because the illumination is from above. A great trick to fix that is to attach a plain white business card to the flash head with a rubber band as shown in this illustration. It "kicks" just enough light toward the eyes to brighten them up while still getting the benefits of bounce flash.

Generally speaking, I increase the ISO to 400 for bouncing because you do lose some light from the added distance and the surface of the ceiling. Otherwise, you should be able to use Program mode and auto flash.

Digital photography: Learning the Histogram

I'm browsing all the old posts in Derrick Story's new site. This one is excellent: The Digital Story: "Learning the Histogram" - Podcast 13.

The tendency when joining a new blog is to only look at the new stuff. If the volume is not huge, I prefer to find the best of the archives.

This article also told me what "gamma" means. Who would have guessed? Gamma refers to the midpoint of a tonal range.

Huh?

What's hard about that?

I wonder if 'monitor gamma' refers to how a particular display deals with middle tonal ranges. Mac vs. Windows gamma is a big and insoluble problem in digital imaging -- I don't think color profiles adjust for differential gamma management (I could be wrong). I set my Mac displays to mid-way between Mac and Windows gamma -- it muddies the UI but my images are more viewable on Windows.

Aperture Workshop Notes - free

A great offer from Derrick Storey, who turns out to have a blog I didn't know about -- you can download a tutorial on Aperture.

The Digital Story: Aperture Workshop Notes PDF

For my recent Inside Aperture Power Tools workshop that I led with Scott Bourne at Macworld SF '06, I compiled class notes to accompany the workbook. I promised the class that I would make those notes available online. I'm also offering them to everyone in The Digital Story community.

These notes are in PDF format (5.8 MB download -- 30 pages). Topics include importing images into Aperture, comparing and rating, editing tools, vaults and backup, exporting images, and printing. In part, I'm releasing these notes because there are many misconceptions about Aperture, such as limits on export configurations (based on the presets Apple provides that are totally editable)...

iPhoto Library Manager cannot merge iPhoto 6 Libraries

I don't know if the hacks I've written about will work with iPhoto 6, but IPLM won't:

iPhoto Library Manager: Manage multiple iPhoto libraries in Mac OS X

iPhoto 6 update (1/14/06): Apple released an update to iLife at Macworld last week, including iPhoto version 6. iPhoto Library Manager 3.1 and earlier are partially compatible with iPhoto 6. You can still use iPhoto Library Manager to create new libraries and switch between them, but the album copying, merging, and importing features are not currently functional. An update for iPhoto Library Manager will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks to provide full compatibility with iPhoto 6.

If IPLM can't be made to support iPhoto 6, then anyone upgrading will lose the limited ability to consolidate iPhoto libraries that we have now.

I do seem to be alone in my concern about this however. My guess is that people who would feel as I do generally use Photoshop/Bridge or Aperture. I think I'm the wrong customer for iPhoto. (Not the first time!).

Safari finally renders nested bullets correctly

Wow. This only took about three years. Safari 1.3.2 now renders nested menu items correctly -- for years they were garbled.

This isn't CSS or AJAX or DHTML. It's basic HTML 1.0.

IE, Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla -- every other browser I've ever tested could handle this. Safari couldn't.

My ancient and chaotic Credit Card Fraud Page showed scrambled headings for years in Safari. I gave up checking after each release came out without a fix, but I suddenly thought to check with the very latest 10.3.9 compatible version of Safari.

I wonder when they fixed this. It took long enough!

Flip4Mac WMV: Play WMP audio in QuickTime

Now that Microsoft has discontinued WMP support on OS X this is the only option: Products - Flip4Mac WMV.

It's free, but there are problems at the moment with recent Mac updates. I'd wait a week or two.

I suspect Microsoft's WMP discontinuation was based on DRM fights and issues.