Followups and Updates

A few notes this silent gray morning:

• TOP's big Fall Print Sale will start on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Black Friday. That's November 26th this year. Please do plan on stopping by to view the images—they're outstanding and I think you'll like them. This sale is very important (very) for the health and viability of this little website, and I hope you'll consider supporting it. Spread the word!

• If you've sent me an email and not received a response, I apologize. I'm hopelessly behind on email. I could spend eight hours a day answering email, no exaggeration. I do read them all, unless I miss one by mistake.

• There are going to be a lot of new comments posted soon (I'm 120 behind in the moderating this morning [UPDATE 6:22 p.m.: all caught up]). Check back at least to the Photoshop post to see some good new ones. Complicating this is that the moderation interface is still partly broken after TypePad's big maintenance more than a week ago, and still giving me trouble. It's slowing down my workflow, not critically, but significantly.

• I think some of you commenters resolved the "no card slot in new Mac Minis" issue for me. It's probably just that too few buyers used the feature, so it became a liability, not enticing to shoppers, thus no longer worth providing. But a longtime guiding principle of this blog, and of the magazine I edited before it, is that I/we want photographers to have what they need to do their work. Whatever that is. That's who, and what, I advocate for. Most photographers do still use SD cards, so the lack of a card slot on computers is inelegant and an inconvenience. And about Apple "hating" us: companies aren't actually people, U.S. law notwithstanding, and don't have feelings. In the post it was an (indulgent?) example of what Ruskin called "the pathetic fallacy," but it amused Yr. Hmbl. Scribe and that's always half the battle.

• I should have mentioned that I made a conscious decision not to use Apple Aperture (past the trial period) because of having been "twice burned" as they say. I'd been around long enough to watch Apple serially neglect and abandon software. Yes, I do understand why they stopped supporting ClarisWorks/AppleWorks. Yes, I'm still sullen about it. I wasn't going to put in the time mastering Aperture only to have it be neglected and abandoned. Turned out I was right, which is too bad. Companies, though not people, do have patterns, like people do.

• Of course Panasonic could make the little 20mm focus properly, O Ye of Little Faith, and no, it would not make the lens too big or heavy. Bigger and heavier than it is now, yes, but who needs it to be as small as it is now? The wee bairn feels like it's made of paper and weighs three ounces! Eighty-seven grams to be precise. They could go nuts and make it weigh 50% more and it would still be small and light and handy.

• The mindless Internet is currently on a "Micro 4/3 is dead" kick. Ignore that. Micro 4/3 is not dead. Let's wait and see how FFM (full frame mirrorless) actually fares before assuming the whole world is going that way, shall we? History is littered with Next Greatest Things that never took off and never caught on even though they were going to. 

• I'm still trying to switch to green tea from coffee, erasing the habit of 45 years, and a TOP reader, photographer Glenn Brown from Ontario, Canada, kindly sent me some samples from his wife's and daughter's tea company. Their tea is well labeled and the beautifully designed packaging includes a clear back on the bags so you can see what they tea looks like. Very nice. Check out Clearview Tea Company of Creemore, "a small hamlet north of Toronto." The Organic Lucky Dragon Hyson is mild and tasty. Thanks to Glenn, Rebecca, and Maggie.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Tom Bell: "I was going to offer to send over some real tea from old Blighty to some importers at the docks in Boston...lovely Darjeeling or Broken Orange Pekoe. Then I just thought maybe not a good idea...too taxing.  😎  " 

HR: "There are now eight full-frame mounts: four mirrorless (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Panasonic/Leica) and four DSLR (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax). Did I leave anyone out? There is one Micro 4/3 mount. I suspect all eight of the FF mounts will not be around for many years."

Comments

[robert e]

Hi Mike,

Give roasted rice green tea a try. This long-time coffee lover finds it both more satisfying and more soothing than straight green tea. Called "genmaicha" in Japan, it's fairly easy to find in cosmopolitan groceries, east asian markets, Amazon, etc. and it's relatively inexpensive (it was at first a way for poor people to stretch their tea).

[jseliger]

"The mindless Internet is currently on a "Micro 4/3 is dead" kick. Ignore that. Micro 4/3 is not dead"

I don't think it's dead either, but the $2,000 M 4/3 camera is, if not dead, then at least a really hard sell (and getting harder). "Price" is supposed to be one of M 4/3's strong points, and in the last generation or two it often has not been.

[Michael Perini]

Just when you’re taking up Tea the news is full of “Dark Roast coffee reduces risk of Dementia and Alzheimer’s “ stories
Personally, I’m holding out for the study that shows the benefits of Ice Cream

[James]

Mike, if Typepad is giving you trouble, it is time to start thinking of upgrading to more modern software (almost certainly WordPress). And while you're at it, you're going to have to upgrade to a modern theme, which adapts to phones and so on.

Have you seen your blog loaded on a smartphone? I have tried a few times and I have learned to not even try.

Also, please consider running a Lighthouse audit. It is a tool Google developed for developers to see how their sites work or don't on mobile. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/#devtools

[Moose]

"Most photographers do still use SD cards, so the lack of a card slot on computers is inelegant and an inconvenience."

My new-ish HP portable also lacks an SD slot. I an pleased at that. Yes, I do use SD cards. However most are of the UHS II variety, with extra contacts. They increase write speeds on my primary cameras, significantly improving focus bracketing speed, burst rate and length and provide much faster data transfer.

On the road (as for the last six weeks)I may have hundreds of images to download. UHS II read speed is a great convenience. I would be using a reader anyway.

That is, I would if there were a USB 3.0 connection. Howsomever, like Apple portables I've seen, the HP is very thin, and it's only at the very back that it's thick enough to accommodate something that large.

I'm pleased that they chose to use that limited space for one USB 3.0 socket and two USB-C sockets, rather than one less of those and an SD card slot that I wouldn't use. I could, of course, connect my small UHS II reader via a USB-C socket, but that would require a UHS-C to USB 3.0 dongle.

With Apple, too, it may be a case of competition for physical space on the device that determines what connections are provided.

BTW, the UHS III spec is out, and cards are starting to appear. A UHS II socket would be obsolete before the computer is.

[c.d.embrey]

This video, showing how to replace late 2018 Mac Mini RAM must be fake news, 'cause all the experts have told us this isn't possible 8-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=2UrSLnnMyeg

Way back in the 1960s Big Red told me the best doesn't cost any more—you just make payments for a longer time. Still true today.

[william lewis]

I don’t know where this would fit as a comment but I highly recommend reading the article ‘Afterimage’ in the Nov 12, 2018 New Yorker magazine. I found it truly scary!

Bill Lewis

[Robert Roaldi]

Don't go cold turkey. Have a cup of good coffee in the morning, switch to tea for the rest of the day. And you don't need 12 oz of coffee. You drink coffee for the taste, not to hydrate.

[HR]

Just get the Olympus 17mm f1.8. It has exactly what you want: bigger, heavier, faster AF. Or look at the Sigma 19mm f2.8. It is also bigger, heavier, and faster AF. Most of the time f2.8 is just fine. No shortage of m4/3 lens choices.

[Dan Khong]

I don't know if Micro 4/3 is really dead but baby boomers can remember that in the 60's, we wore bell bottom pants.

When I see old photos that show how people looked wearing them, many of us are still thankful that they are gone and wish never to see them again.

[Richard Parkin]

I don’t know how time consuming tweeting is but if you tweeted whenever you updated comments (maybe only if there were a lot) then people could get an alert via IFTTT as I do now with your tweets for articles. Sadly Wordpress does not allow us to detect new updates to comment posts directly. I have thought you may be able to “refresh” your article when you add comments and then it would be detected as a new article with IFTTT. I don’t know enough to describe the best way to get alerts to readers but maybe someone else does?

[Steve Renwick]

>>I was going to offer to send over some real tea from old Blighty to some importers at the docks in Boston ... Then I just thought maybe not a good idea...too taxing.<<

Harboring such a thought is revolutionary.

[c.d.embrey]

Thanks Bill Lewis for reminding me to read the Afterimage article.

What I find interesting is that convincing synthetic images and videos are made easier by the banality of Ad-Am photography. Having seen photos that look a certain way, we start taking them that way ourselves, and the regularity of these photos makes it easier for networks to synthesize pictures that look “right” to us.

As this technology rolls-down-hill from Hollywood to Ad-Ams it will be fascinating, or maybe appalling, to watch the results.

[Daniel Speyer]

Same yellow as in "Mr. Blandings Builds HIs Dream House"?

[Richard Parkin]

Regarding the TOP on phones comment by @James. I think we’ve seen this complaint before but I have just checked again and TOP is perfect on my iPhone 7+ — just double tap the text and it fills the screen 😉 same as on iPad. These damned adaptive websites can be a nuisance as they decree what you see and also are confusingly unfamiliar if you use both I iDevices and desktops 😡.

[Eolake]

Clearly I’m not as smart (or healthily cynical) as you, for I had no clue that Apple might abandon Aperture. It’s not always I love Apple. (Fortunately I never got further than Photoshop anyway.)

I miss Appleworks/Clarisworks. It was a nifty and simple little program which could do a lot. And for years I hoped it might develop into a good office app. Though I hear Pages and Keynote are powerful.

I am using my iPad Pro 20 times more than I use my Mac these days. It’s wonderful for living room use, I have a floor stand and just swing it in over my lap and put the external keyboard in my lap. The screen and text sizes are easier on my eyes than a desktop monitor.

[alex]

When I see a full-frame camera and 24-70 zoom that only weigh a pound I'll start believing micro 4/3 might be in trouble. As nice as the big stuff is it's too heavy for long-distance hiking and bicycling.

[PbF]

I have to disagree with the Mac Mini 'needing' an SD car slot - I've never taken my SD cards out of the camera; I use the USB cable to offload images from the camera to computer....

consequently, I never have to worry about whether or no there's a card in the camera, either....