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I haven’t been able to publish these ‘weekly snaps’ for the past three weeks, but here I am with number 5; this time I’ll start off with a couple of cliché photos.

Boschi di Carrega, Parma. Nikon D7000, 35mm f/1.8G; f/4 and 1/800s. Shooting something new in the woods is incredibly frustrating, unless you are in some North American National Park, with oblique sun rays lighting up a thousand years old tree. But I wasn’t in Yosemite or Sequoia National Park, it was midday, and yet I wanted to capture something fresh. The result is not entirely satisfying mostly because of the slightly nervous bokeh of the Nikon 35 1.8G. Some parts of the leaves are also out of focus.

Lately I’ve been reading quite a lof of articles about parenting. Most of them are book reviews but I did not read any of these books though¹, which could mean: (A) I’m a bit shallow, (B) stressed out New Yorkers, overproductive Chinese immigrants, rich Californians are not people that I feel entitled to give me directions on how to raise my kid (even though I acknowledge their superior education and intelligence and that their sons and daughters will surely rule the world).

This week’s post has been delayed by some very expected news.

I’ll start off with two variations of a similar photo I published in Weekly snaps #3; the first is a classical black and white, the second a slightly toned black and white.

Then I have three photos which were the first ones shot with the Nikon D7000; they were very poor in terms of exposure accuracy but then I was very surprised at the amount of stuff I could recover in post processing; a truly wonderful sensor inside the D7000.

[Click here for italian version.]

It’s been quite some time now that I have gone back to DSLRs, but the little Panasonic GF1 is still a constant presence in my backpack. In the meantime, Panasonic has churned out countless other iterations on the same micro four/thirds concept; but to me it has somehow watered down the concept and only the latest one (GX1) seems to be the true successor of the GF1.

This week, moody skies.

All shots taken with a Nikon D7000 during last weekend’s walks in and around town with Giulia. I wanted to add “all shots were minimally processed except for that one” but the reality¹ is that I used also some dodge and burn, at least one curve adjustment and several other little tweaks. As somebody once said, no photo is truly OOC (straight out of the camera).

And about that one, well that one was the easiest one as I just applied Laroque’s snap preset for that one.

There are still pearls to be found on the internet, after all.

In these days I have found three photography blogs which are full of interesting and well written articles; stimulating, instructive, much better of the crap that Popular Photography publishes (and I’m not even mentioning the countless websites and blogs of pixel-peepers and technology feticists).

Worth bookmarking them for when you have time to sit down and read something that will help renew your passion for this art:

Rumors of an upcoming iPad Mini are abundant.

As usual, all the tech bloggers are very concerned with things such as pricing, market position, technical feasibility, etc. What a bunch of boring guys.

Now, bear with me for just a few moments, because all I want to do is tell you why I’d like an iPad Mini:

1. to read pdfs; using every now and then my wife’s iPad I realize that it is the best way to read magazines and study/annotate scientific articles. A smaller iPad would be just fine for me because otherwise I would end up just leaving it at home.
2. to collect my photos in a portfolio (which means at least 32 Gb for me).
3. to mess around with snapshots (I won’t say “edit” because I feel that real editing can only be done with a bigger computer); I have had recently so much fun playing with Snapseed and Diptic on my iPhone that I think using them on a larger display would only make things even more fun. What I’m thinking is iPhone shots, not Nikon D7000 shots, instantaneously zapped to the iPad Mini via iCloud.
4. Aperture/Lightroom library editing on the go; there are these apps (Pixelsync and Photosmith) that allow you to do what I think is the most tiresome yet essential activity in photo editing – pruning the bad apples, deciding what’s a keeper. I would like to use one of these apps while I’m watching The Wire on the couch.

So that’s all I want to do on an iPad¹. And if I could do these things on a much cheaper device (€200-250) then I would seriously consider buying one.

This week a few pictures taken during a lazy Sunday in Ziano Piacentino. Good wine there, and a first experience using an old manual focus Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 which I had modified to AI-S to use it on my D7000.

Ok, so this one was obviously not taken with the 85mm but with my Tokina 12-24 f/2.

Emphasis is mine:

Shoot from the hip and sort it out later in Photoshop; this is a slippery slope plunging inevitably towards the depths of despair and devastating loss of self-esteem that comes with shooting on program mode with a high ISO, no tripod and a reversed lens hood. The latter is the photographic equivalent of wearing socks with sandals; clearly a fate worse than death.

David Noton, “The Difference Between the Taking and the Making of a Photograph”.

Last time I wrote something about this blog, how I moved everything to Jekyll and modified the original themes.

Then Ian tweeted about that issue that I had with the fonts, that the blog looked differently when viewed on a PC or a Mac. And he also added that embedding fonts was easy.

So I looked around and in fact it was easy; more importantly, there’s plenty of open source fonts made available by Google. What was not easy was to decide which combination of fonts to use.

If somebody would actually read these posts he’d start thinking something like “what a loser”.

Here I am, a fairly old git, waiting for his first baby, with too many things to do at work (and off-work), losing precious sleep hours to relocate his blog on GitHub.

And what the hell is GitHub, asks the non-geek. Well, GitHub is basically a VCS (Version Control Systems¹) that allows programmers and hackers to exchange and host their coding efforts; but it does more than that, such as the possibility to host also personal blogs for free.

A comment on Italians’ ability to manage confusion:

the Italians broke the laws of physics and created instant order out of utter disorder and chaos. We were waved and whistled by the police, straight through to the start area.

About cyclists (especially roadies) shaving their legs:

In fact, it was based on sound principles of physics and human anatomy, where the hairs help in a small way to allow the evaporation of sweat, which takes energy from the surrounding skin to do so. I was always hit by arguments like about how unhygienic it was and how much better a shaved leg would be. But I had read that shaved skin was more likely to suffer infection, which just left the questions about aerodynamics, aesthetics and conforming to my peer group.

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Inspired by Pindelski’s blog¹ here’s my first collection of snaps, something that I’ll try to honour as a weekly appointment.

There will not be a common theme or anything like that, and I cannot promise to post new snaps every week (most of the times I have a feeling that it will be stuff from my archive).

What you will find in here is photos that I have taken and that I want to hold on to for whatever reason I may have. And the fact of publishing them online is an act that makes them prominent, and gives them the recognition which I feel they deserve in that particular moment when I sit down and write.

A short recap on how to build and install open mtb maps under OS X.

Essentially, a shorter version of the detailed instructions given on mtb-forum.it, written for my own convenience – but I thought somebody could find it useful especially to see the result of using different ‘styles’.

##tools

• gmapbuilder: to convert the OpenMtbMaps into the .gmapi format.
• MapInstall/MapManager to install the .gmapi files into the system, ready to be used by Basecamp and/or copied into a Garmin gps.
• Basecamp (also available on the AppStore): the main application to view and plan routes.

##data ##

I was very happy about my hackintosh, everything going smooth and easy… until it all broke down and I was left with no computer for almost a month.

And what was even stranger was that also Filippo’s hackintosh, built at the same time as mine, went down only a few days after mine. If computers were organic, I would have thought about some sort of mortal sickness.

Ok let me say that there’s a happy ending to this story: the motherboards were not dead but only in a coma. It was necessary to reinstall the bios and use an external graphic card to redirect the display because for some reasons the integrated HD3000 gpus were not working.