We’ll be back.

24 April 2016
Going for the Deep ★ blog.iconfactory.com

Craig’s excellent piece on the future of display technology:

There’s only one way for manufacturers to improve displays and gain a competitive advantage. They need to make the displays “deeper”; able to show a wider range of color. It’s also clear from Apple’s work that they see smarter displays, with things like True Tone technology, as a way to distinguish themselves in a crowded market. Apple is in a unique position with regard to color management. They own a technology called ColorSync that first saw the light of day in 1993 with System 7.1 on the Mac. It’s also been integrated at a system-level for all of the OS X releases. It’s a very mature technology that recently made its way to mobile in the iOS 9.3 release. On the other side of the coin, Android has no color management. Companies like Samsung are going to find it impossible to pull off something like True Tone and DCI-P3 without the aid of color management.

The 9.7″ iPad Pro display is truly remarkable. One week in, even the iPhone 6’s display is pale in comparison; less refectlections, better dynamic range, eye-soothing white balance, simply great. I can’t wait for all of these trickle down to the Mac’s display line.

18 April 2016
Tri-X Factor ★ 1843magazine.com

Bryan Appleyard writing for The Economist’s 1843:

The more important innovation, however, was aesthetic. It is hard to describe exactly the look of a Tri-X picture. Words like “grainy” and “contrasty” capture something of the effect, but there is more, something to do with the obsidian blacks produced by the film and with a certain unique drama that made the rock photography of the Sixties and Seventies so powerful and distinctive.

Ilford was the black and white film of choice for many shooters. I, however, have always preferred Tri-X for its subtle, silky rendition of the images. ISO 400 film shot in ISO 800, and pull-processed back to ISO 400 was my secret development recipe then.

David Robert Jones (1947 – 2016)

11 January 2016
R.I.P. David Bowie David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie (/ˈboʊ.i/[1]), was an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, painter and actor. Bowie was a figure in popular music for over four decades, and was known as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His androgynous appearance was an iconic element of his image, principally in the 1970s and 1980s.
Tuesday, 24 November 2015

The Apple Pencil

Gus Mueller, creator of Acorn:

I find that when using the HB Pencil in Procreate, I get something that is very, very close to what I feel when I’m drawing in my sketchbooks. But of course now I’ve got layers and many colors and a perfect eraser to work with. And endless pages. I love it. I’m drawn to it. It’s wonderful. You should absolutely try one if you haven’t already.

Myke Hurley, an avid note taker & self-professed pen geek, penned this:

In my testing, I used the Notes app and two other apps—Notability and GoodNotes. With these I was able to freely write on the screen, at practically any size I wanted, and I got the results I would have normally expected from pen and paper. The Pencil was able to keep up with me, and I was genuinely surprised at just how small it would let me write. Without a shadow of a doubt the Apple Pencil and the iPad Pro is a comparable and comfortable solution for digital note taking. I will definitely be using this going forward.

I have yet to read on how the iPad Pro + Pencil combo would work from a photographer’s point of view, and hardware availability aside, there’s a software side to this that can make, or break the Pencil’s true potential.

As of this writing, Astropad seems like an ideal compromise to bridge the software gap to a photography-centric use case for a photographer like me: masking & local adjustments. I don’t use Photoshop, and I limit my editing to what’s available on Aperture Adobe Lightroom, which mostly are masked adjustments.