In his own words:

What we do know is that we live in a world where a cam­era, far from being the shield for the press that it once was, is now often seen as a tar­get in con­flict sit­u­a­tions. Rather than be safe­guarded, we become the tar­get. That cre­ates a new world of unease and mys­tery for those work­ing in places where just being a pho­tog­ra­pher puts you at risk. It requires an extra sense of self, and smarts, to be able to not only make the pic­tures, but safely get them, and one­self, out.

I have linked to David’s work a num­ber of times here, but I rarely read his words. This one, a 2-part score by John Camp is not to be missed.

I have owned three gen­er­a­tions of MacBook Pro Unibody and all three gen­er­ates a sub­tle but annoy­ing click­ing noise after a long use and increases fre­quency as I click the touch­pad or typ­ing with it on my lap. Luckily I am not the only one with such prob­lem, and if you own a recent 15″ model MacBook Pro there’s a good chance you are expe­ri­enc­ing it too. Here’s a YouTube record­ing of the noise.

Ten One Blog dis­cov­ered the source of the noise (no, it’s not the sud­den motion sen­sor) and found a per­ma­nent fix:

One of the con­nec­tors in this sys­tem touches the bot­tom plate right in the cen­ter where it flexes a lot. When the com­puter heats up, the metal pins in the con­nec­tor scrape nois­ily against the cover and chas­sis. It makes you want to eat your hands.

By remov­ing the con­nec­tor (two easy screws!), you remove one of the ground­ing con­nec­tions between the uni­body enclo­sure and the bot­tom cover.

I chose not to remove the con­nec­tor but to stick an elec­tri­cal tape on the back of the bot­tom case where the con­nec­tor touches, which seems to have fixed the problem.

Jump to the linked post for some pic­tures and more details.

From usabil­ity per­spec­tive, pro­gres­sive is usu­ally good, because the user gets feed­back that some­thing is going on. Also if you’re on a slow con­nec­tion, pro­gres­sive JPEG is prefer­able because you don’t need to wait for the whole image to arrive in order to get an idea if it is what you wanted. If not, you can click away from the page or hit the back but­ton, with­out wait­ing for the (poten­tially large) high qual­ity image.

Bottomline: Progressive JPEG is the ticket to flaw­lessly serve retina-quality pho­tos for the new iPad today.

Today is that day. Have a glo­ri­ous Nyepi, my dear Balinese friends.

Fascinating two-part film on the early days of Shanghai, when they were still encour­aged to have ‘no more than two children.”

Three bil­lion pop­u­la­tion and forty years later, it’s eco­nom­i­cally imprac­ti­cal two have a sec­ond child. (via China Stories)

New UI design & engine, content-aware and includes the new Camera RAW with adap­tive wide angle, field blur & tilt-shift capability.

The down­load size is mas­sive: 984 MB for Mac, and 1.7 GB for Windows. I’m curi­ous as per why the Mac ver­sion is only half the size of the Windows download.

How does iPhoto han­dles files larger than it can sup­port? (Un)surprisingly well.

While we’re in this topic, iPhoto is now in the hands of one mil­lion unique users.

I have been silently wish­ing that this day will come.

While I love Instagram as an app/service, I don’t use the cam­era func­tion much. Hipstamatic is my go-to app when it comes to cap­tur­ing pho­tos; for its speed, sta­bil­ity, but mostly its spon­ta­neous nature.

What I’d do — much later — is to post my pick to insta­gram (user: @w1ll) and (option­ally) fed to either Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. I’m still using the 3GS, so it isn’t the most effec­tive use of my time wait­ing, it’s slow but it beats post­ing the photo indi­vid­u­ally to each network.

The good news is Hipstamatic had metic­u­lously redesigned its shar­ing inter­face and baked Instagram’s API right in, so not only you can post pho­tos directly from it, but you’ll prop­erly get Hipstamatic-specific tag­ging in a nicely designed inter­face in its own Hipstamatic-style.

It’s just great that when two poten­tially com­pet­ing par­ties can shake hands and make the world a bet­ter place for their users.

On an inter­view about the part­ner­ship, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom reveals that there will be more apps to have such sup­port built-in. I’d be thrilled to see such inte­gra­tion with iPhoto, or bet­ter yet, iOS, the same treat­ment as Vimeo had.

© Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Four years since Martin Scorsese left the project, this poignant doc­u­men­tary on the life and the legacy of Bob Marley is see­ing the light of day. If you have seen The Last King of Scotland and the grip­ping 2010 doc­u­men­tary, Senna, you’d prob­a­bly have an idea what kind of cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence he’s show­ing us this time.

Also see: David Burnett’s Soul Rebel

© Tyler Stableford

Steve House shows the world what he can do while pho­tog­ra­pher Tyler Stableford shows the world how the new EOS 1DX & the Speedlite 600EX-RT see dif­fer­ently. BTS video here.

Shadowed by the main attrac­tion of this month, the new Speedlite from Canon isn’t get­ting the atten­tion they deserve:

The Speedlite 600EX-RT rep­re­sents the next gen­er­a­tion in wire­less flash sys­tems. In addi­tion to tra­di­tional opti­cal wire­less trans­mis­sion, the Speedlite 600EX-RT facil­i­tates radio con­trolled, two-way wire­less trans­mis­sion up to 98.4 feet, among up to 5 groups with a total of 15 indi­vid­ual Speedlites. Communicating on 2.4 GHz fre­quen­cies, the Speedlite 600EX-RT does not have the same direc­tional lim­i­ta­tions of tra­di­tional wire­less opti­cal trans­mit­ters. Where other wire­less sig­nals can be inter­rupted by phys­i­cal obsta­cles, radio con­trolled sys­tems excel. 15 trans­mis­sion chan­nels are avail­able, selec­table man­u­ally or auto­mat­i­cally, and radio trans­mis­sion IDs can be set to pre­vent mis­fir­ing in the event of sig­nal inter­fer­ence on the same channel.

Canon’s Speedlite line was in dire need of a revamp. The IR-based wire­less solu­tion doesn’t work well out­door and con­trol­ling them requires a rocket sci­ence degree. This looks like a viable answer to the users’ cry for help.

Syl Arena, the author of Speedliter’s Handbook, wrote a wish list and have it revis­ited after try­ing out the new toy.

It is very likely that Apple has recy­cled the 5 Mp back illu­mi­nated CMOS image sen­sor from the iPhone 4. [sic] That unit was the Omnivision OV5650. The OV5650 is the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion back illu­mi­na­tion (BSI) tech­nol­ogy from OmniVision. This 5 Mp cam­era fea­tures 1.75 µm pix­els, and is designed to deliver DSC qual­ity in a mobile phone application.

Follow the link for close-up pho­tos and die image for the object(s) in ques­tion. (via iFixit)