I spent part of today driving on Interstate 5 up into Northern California. Most of the day was a blue sky day. Not a cloud in sight. I stopped off in Weed to get some dinner and when I got back outside and hit the road again, the sky had just erupted into this crazy sunset cloudscape.

iPhone 3GS • ©2009 James Duncan Davidson

This photo was a quick iPhone shot from the rest area just north of Weed. It’s a pretty impressive sight, no? To think, if I had spent any more time eating dinner, I would have missed the show. The iPhone photo here doesn't quite do the scene justice, however. The auto white balance algorithm (which always works against sunsets) slurped quite a bit of the intensity out of the yellows and pushed in too much blue. I’ve tweaked things back and forth a bit in Lightroom, but since it’s a JPG image, the basic color balance decisions are baked in and there’s not a whole lot of leeway.

Never fear. I didn’t just rely on the iPhone for this one. After I shot the photograph above, I pulled out the D700 and managed to get a few frames off before the sky opened up and dumped rain on me. And, of course, I shot in 14-bit RAW so that I could fine tune the white balance and capture a lot more of the range out of the scene. Here’s the result:

Nikon D700 • ©2009 James Duncan Davidson

That’s more like it. That’s the scene I remember looking at just a few hours ago. And yes, it was that intense. The iPhone did a pretty good job (especially for a tiny chip cell phone cam), but at some point, you gotta pull out the big guns. I only wish I had found a better place to stop than a rest area. Sometimes you gotta take what nature gives you.

Tomorrow, I’m probably cutting over the mountains and out to the coast. It was hot inland today and I could use a bit of time time sitting above breaking waves.

John Adams at Velocity 2009 • ©James Duncan Davidson

One of the guys I’m always happy to run into at conferences is John Adams (@netik) who—for the last year or so—has been helping keep Twitter going. He took the job last year at Velocity and this year spoke a bit about what it takes to keep the fail whale at bay. He's also a fellow photographer which means that we always geek out a bit about photography whenever we bump into each other.

You can see more photos in the Flickr set for the Velocity Conference.

©James Duncan Davidson

Yesterday, after lunch in Sausilito, I hung out for a bit near the Golden Gate. It’s always a fantastic place to view the ocean and get buffeted about by the wind. Yesterday was no different. The fog wasn’t thick, but the wind was certainly making its presence known on the battery area above Baker Beach.

If you want to check out this particular view, the green arrow below is where I took this particular photograph from. Ya gotta love GPS embedded data in iPhone photographs, and in this case it’s spooky accurate.

The path I was on doesn’t show up in the map right now, but the location is accurate to within just a couple of feet of where I was standing, as you’d expect from a fully accurate GPS.

Earlier today, I got a chance to have a photographers lunch with Derrick Story and Pinar Ozger. We talked about all sorts of things: the economy, jobs, and other creative endeavors. But you probably don’t want to hear about that. No. You probably already know that Derrick has had his mitts on a review sample of the Olympus E-P1 Digital PEN and you want to hear about the camera already. Since I did indeed get to play with the camera for a bit, I can certainly oblige.

First things first. In hand, the E-P1 is most definitely not a compact camera. It’s not shaped or sized like one. On the other hand, it is most definitely not a SLR of any kind. It’s size and shape is somewhere in between the two. It’ll go into a jacket pocket, as long as you don’t have a huge lens on it. It’ll go into a purse or small bag. It won’t go into your jeans pocket.

Let me try to describe this a different way. Holding the E-P1 is a lot like holding a rangefinder. Pinar noted that it felt very similar in size to her Leica Ms, though it was a bit lighter. To me, it feels nice and solid in hand. Solid like it was made out of a single chunk of metal. Solid like how the new Apple MacBook Pros feel compared to other laptops. In short, it feels good.

In operation, everything works pretty much as one would expect. I didn’t have any issues poking about its control set. In less time that it takes to write this, I put the camera into Av program mode, set my aperture to a reasonable setting, sorted out exposure compensation, and snapped off a few shots. The schnick-schnick of the shutter (yes, there’s a real mechanical shutter in there) is super subdued and would be hardly noticeable if you didn’t hear the focus confirmation beep going off before the shutter tripped. Shut off that beep and you’ll be good to go almost everywhere that requires a bit of discretion with sound levels.

Speaking of focus operation, much has been said about the fact that contrast detection autofocus is typically slower than the phase-detection systems in SLRs. And more has been written about the fact that the E-P1’s focus system isn’t as fast as the zippy system in the Panasonic GH1. Not having had my hands on a GH1, I can’t address that. But what I can say is that autofocus speed is reasonable. It’s not as fast as the autofocus system on my D700 bodies, but it’s a heck of a lot faster than any compact camera I’ve used. Faster is always better, but in the time I played with it, I didn’t have any complaints. I should note, however, that I didn’t try to take pictures of kids or pets zipping around at high speed.

If you need to drop back to plan B, manual focusing works like a charm. When you turn the focusing ring, the viewfinder zooms in letting you judge critical focus. You can move your zoomed view around the photo with the control pad if you’re not in the right place. And, the focus ring (at least on the zoom lens on this review unit) has a nice feel. It’s not so sensitive that you’d have a hard time settling in on just the right focus. With a bit of practice full-on manual focus should be easy as pie, if you’re into that kind of thing.

What about shutter lag? I didn’t notice any. In manual focus mode, I didn’t perceive any time between when I fully pushed the shutter button and when I heard the shutter release. When using autofocus, the shutter releases right after the confirmation beep. Any lag that people run into in day to day operation will probably be from autofocus acquisition. (See earlier disclaimer that I didn’t shoot any running kids or pets during my brief hands-on!)

For our lunch, we had plenty of sunshine and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There was so much Sun that I actually got a sunburn. Ouch. In other words, it was a perfect test to see if the display was usable in full on daylight. The E-P1 passed with flying colors. I didn’t have a problem using the display at all. Furthermore, while 230K pixels might be a low resolution spec these days, I didn’t notice it being a problem either. In the slightly more reasonable lighting level under a roof, I found the display to be quite colorful and easy to use. I think this is one of those cases where more resolution would be nice, but the display as-is is perfectly usable.

After playing around with the camera for a bit and talking with Derrick about his experiences with it, I think I only have two open questions left. The first is how it performs in low light conditions. Derrick posted a set of photos on Flickr showing various ISO settings, and the results look promising. I intend on printing his sample images out at 8X10 and 12X18 sometime soon and see how they look. I’m still curious, however, how the E-P1 will to perform in more challenging lighting conditions. Stage lighting, for example.

The final question is how much latitude there will be in the RAW files when working with them in something like Lightroom or Aperture. Right now, this is simply unknowable as neither Adobe Camera RAW or Aperture has support for this camera’s RAW files. Hopefully, there will be the same amount of malleability for highlight and shadow recovery as well as general exposure adjustments as what we’ve become accustomed to from digital SLRs. Obviously, I’m not expecting D700 levels of plasticity, but I am interested to see how much latitude there will be in practice.

Let’s cut to the chase. Would recommend the E-P1 as a general purpose all-around enthusiast camera based on what I experienced today? The answer is a totally unqualified yes, especially if you’re looking for something smaller than an SLR. Put it this way, cameras like the Canon G10 are no longer of interest at all to me at all. Do I want to replace my Nikon D700 bodies with the E-P1 for my professional work? Ha! No way. Do I want a Digital PEN for all those times where the bulk or noise of my Nikon or Canon gear is too much? Oh yes. Yes indeed.

Many thanks to Derrick Story for the chance to spend a bit of time with this camera!

iPhone 3GS • 1/9500 sec @ f/2.8 ISO 70

These three photos and a movie were shot with my trusty iPhone 3GS as part of my ten a day project that I’ve been on. At least ten photos or movies a day with the iPhone was the deal I made with myself before plunking down the cash on it. So far, except for conference shoot days (I give myself a pass on these days since I’m already shooting so much anyway), I’ve been pretty good about it most days.

I did miss my target yesterday. Something about catching up on sleep after three early mornings and then catching up with email and the like. Today, however, I made sure to get back on the horse and went for a walk along the bay.

iPhone 3GS • 1/6000 sec @ f/2.8 ISO 70

To get things just right exposure-wise in this tricky scenario, I did have to do a bit of experimentation with setting the focus/exposure point. If there’s any one thing I’d love to have on this camera, it’s an exposure compensation control of some sort. Maybe a double finger gesture up and down to bias the exposure program for the next exposure?

One interesting thing I noticed about the metadata is how fast an exposure the iPhone can take. The top photo is reportedly at 1/9500th of a second. The one just above is a 1/6000th. That’s pretty spiffy quick.

iPhone 3GS • 1/1600 sec @ f/2.8 ISO 70

I find myself shooting a lot of these little 30 second clips of things. Life in motion. Simple scenes. So far, however, I remain fairly dissatisfied with uploading them to the web. So far I’ve played with Flickr, MobileMe, and now with YouTube. Still to come, I want to give Vimeo a shot. In any case, here’s a movie I shot and posted up to YouTube. You can compare it to the same movie uploaded to Flickr.

It seems that the codecs used to size things down on both YouTube and Flickr really hate the waves. At least YouTube has a higher quality option that seems to do quite a bit better. Of course, I guess I could just host the bits myself and shoot out QuickTime files.

Reading through my blogroll today, I came across a post Moose Peterson wrote about Some Like it Hot!. This is a new book by Susan Neider that focuses on the thermals in Yellowstone National park. As soon as I saw the cover image, I recognized the subject matter. It struck me that I’ve made a very similar photograph. I quickly dug through my Yellowstone images, and found the same view in my photostream on Flickr.

Here’s the cover for Susan Neider’s book and a crop of my image side by side:

At two different points in time, Susan and I must have stood in almost the exact same place and pointed our cameras in almost the exact same way. Susan’s angle of view is from a bit lower than my own, and the time of day is quite different as you can see from the shadows, but the similarities are striking, indeed. More interesting are the small differences in the colorations in the mineral deposits. I wonder what the time delta is between these two shots.

Pretty funny. Nice photo Susan! I hope the book (available at Amazon) does well.

Last weekend, I shot some photos out at the Oregon coast with the new iPhone 3GS to see how it handled. For being a camera phone, it handles plenty well and produces a fairly good result. Feed it through Lightroom and do just a skosh of of push and pull (add a bit of clarity and vibrance), and it turned out scenes like the following with ease:

Not too shabby. I should note that there’s not too much plasticity (for lack of a better word) in the files. Push or pull on the sliders too much and you can easily break these images. It’s really easy to go from just enough of any kind of adjustment to OMGTHATSWAYTOOFAR. Much easier than on bigger cameras. I’ve also notice a tendency for sky colors to tend towards purple at times. But we’re talking about a camera phone in your pocket for goodness sake. I’m willing to cut it tons of slack as long as it can turn out half way decent results.

Even though looking at images at a 100% doesn’t tell all of the story of what a camera can do, here’s what is in the above image when you zoom down to 1:1:

It’s none too shabby. Of course, these are great conditions and the camera is shooting at 1/1000th at ISO 70. Not too challenging. But still, for an itty bitty tiny lens and sensor, none too shabby at all. My only real complaint is that faintish magenta tinging in the water pulling off the beach.

I tested out movie mode as well. Here’s one of the clips I shot while standing on a different overlook:

The frame rate in this Flickr hosted movie is a bit choppy. The original QuickTime movie looks quite a bit smoother. But, for web-based quick video, it’s not too bad—for a freaking camera phone that slips into a pocket and is with you everywhere! I’m pretty happy with it, I have to say. It definitely satisfies that lust I had for a Flip or similar pocket video recorder.

The last year or so, Zicam has been part of my arsenal of dealing with colds and the like. I got turned onto it at WWDC last year, I think. Not any more, thanks to a FDA Consumer Warning about Zicam. I just saw the warning today, thanks to a Colbert tweet joking about it of all sources. Go figure.

Into the hotel trash went my stash. I like my sense of smell just fine, thank you very much.

In an admission of my true photo dorkatude, I took this with my iPhone 3GS and tossed in a bit of vignette in Lightroom. The deal I made with myself when I got the new iPhone was that I had to take at least ten photos a day with it. Today was a slow day, obviously.

Over the span of the last few months, I’ve had several pieces of my camera kit disappear on me. Not bodies or lenses. No, not that. Instead, it’s been ancillary gear. Two of my favorite Gitzo monopods, a tripod ballhead, and a bunch of my HonlPhoto speedstraps and snoots. At first, I thought I was going out of my mind. I’ve never misplaced gear. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve misplaced my fair share gear, but it’s always come back to me in the form of it having been hiding somewhere in a bag or the corner of a closet.

This time, it hasn’t been coming back out of the woodwork. I’ve never misplaced so much gear so permanently before. Certainly not monopods and ballheads. At this point, I’ve looked everywhere.

After calling up hotels, double cleaning out my car, and triple going through everything in my storage closet, I’m starting to think that it’s not me. You’d think that if I had suddenly developed a knack for loosing things, I’d lose lenses, memory cards, and hard drives too. And while I do misplace my memory cards or the like now and then, I usually find them within an hour or two or three. Most of the time, it happens after I chill out and let my brain noodle on where I put them last.

Then it hit me that there was a common theme behind everything that was missing. The last time I’m sure that I saw any of these items was when I closed them up one piece of baggage or another and then checked it on an airline.

Now, I have to say that I fly with gear a lot. Cameras and computers always come with me. But things like tripods, monopods, and sundry lighting equipment are just too much to go carry on. Who wants tripods, monopods, and strobist gear anyway? Seriously, I’ve never had this kind of trouble before. Not until now. Then the next thought hit. My flying habits have also shifted around quite a bit of late. I’ve been flying Southwest more and going in and out of SJC and LAS more. Southwest is great for pricing and ticket flexibility and being able to take a straight shot from PDX to LAS or SJC is really nice. Both of these, however, are changes from my previous trouble free routine.

Is that it? Is it airport related, airline related, or some combination? It’s hard to say for sure. You can be sure that I’ll be doing a better job inventory tracking my gear after a flight from now on.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just losing my marbles. That could be it too.

I just saw the news today that Kodak is discontinuing Kodachrome. I’m not surprised. It’s use has been in decline for a long time—even before digital cameras made their mark—thanks to its unique chemistry and processing requirements. The introduction of Fuji’s E-6 process Velvia in 1990 was really the turning point for Kodachrome. Ever since then, the writing has been on the wall.

Still, it’s sad. Kodachrome has a look like nothing else. And, nothing else lasts like it. You can pick up a Kodachrome from the 1950s and it looks just like it did when it was taken.

My longtime friend Mike Clark from The Pragmatic Studio recently went to Hawaii on vacation and, of course, took his camera. During his trip, he captured a great photo of a green lizard. Yesterday, he sent me an email asking for any comments or criticism about his photo and what I might do to it in Lightroom. Instead of trying to communicate vaguely through email and a couple of static photos, I pulled out ScreenFlow (which I’ve been meaning to play with sometime) and kicked out a fast little screencast of me in Lightroom talking my way through processing his image.

Mike really responded to this video in a positive way. With his encouragement and help, I’ve decided to put this up for the world. Here it is, assuming my movie embedding fu is up to the task.

The clip should play either in place your browser or maybe pop open into its own window if you’re in a feed reader. Firefox doesn’t seem to be cooperating as much as I’d like, though it is degrading half-way decently. Hopefully. If, for whatever reason, my embedding fu isn’t up to the task, click through here to go directly to the movie in your browser. As to the results, here’s the image after I was done with it. If JavaScript is enabled (or hasn’t been stripped by whatever you’re reading this in, like Facebook), then you can mouse over to see a before/after comparison that mimics what I see when I compulsively hit the '\' key in Lightroom’s develop module.

Now that you’ve watched the clip and seen the results, I should note that this is just a quick experiment. It’s raw and rough around the edges. It’s certainly not scripted. But, I kind of like it that way. As I go, I try something with a vibrance adjustment, then rethink that adjustment after working on the tone curve a bit. It’s has that feel like the viewer is looking over my shoulder or sitting right next to me as I go through my process.

Also, please note, there will be differences in how this movie displays colors from the original image, depending on your display, the compression, and the phase of the moon. Full color management in QuickTime will rock.

What do you think? Worthwhile? Would you like to see more like this where I take other images and walk through how I’d approach them in Lightroom? No promises as to anything like that happening, but this was really fun to make and I wouldn’t mind getting feedback and sorting out if something useful could come of this sort of thing.

The embargo of information about the new Oympus E-P1 has expired and news about it is being posted around the net. You can read hands-on preview impressions at DPReview and Digital Camera Resource Page. DPReview in particular has posted a set of sample images that seem to indicate that the camera has the goods. Derrick Story has also posted his initial PEN thoughts and is currently in New York to test drive the camera at an Olympus event.

I’ve done no more than just read everything I can find in the hours since the embargo was lifted. Given that, I can only cheer and speculate. That said, here are my cheers so far:

• The first cheer is simply for Olympus pushing the envelope and putting out a large sensor, interchangeable-lens compact camera. A super huge cheer for this! This is what the promise of micro 4/3 has offered.
• The second cheer is that the camera doesn’t seem to sacrifice much to meet its price point of $799 with the kit 14-24 lens and $899 with the 17mm pancake. Instead, it seems that most everything that’s been pared away has been to meet its size requirements. It’s not cheap, but it’s actually a bit less than I was expecting.
• Including a histogram mode in live view. I’ve not seen a demo shot or video of this so far, but it’s in the spec list.
• Including an attachable finder with the 17mm pancake lens. That’s just cool in an old-school rangefinder way.
• Thank goodness the E-P1 uses SD cards and not the funkier XD cards that Olympus has hung onto for too long. SD has become the standard. Even hard core super-pro SLRs are going that way.
• The digital leveler is a cool feature to have. Side to side leveling is status quo these days, but pitch is novel and welcome.
• The prospect of being able to use M-mount lenses with Panasonic’s adapter is just too tasty. I can’t wait for somebody to give it a spin and tell the world how it gos.
• The first high-ISO sample images on DPReview look more than acceptable at 3200 and 6400 looks as good as you could expect.

In addition to all the product cheers, airing up with the Blendtec folks in the promotional videos is worth a cheer all its own. Check it out in the video section of the EP-1 page. The video starts out by blending up an Olympus digital SLR and goes on from there.

Along with my cheers and obvious enthusiasm for the camera, however, are a set of open questions:

• The reported feedback about the time to focus isn’t encouraging. Contrast-detection based autofocus simply isn’t as fast yet as the phase-detect systems in SLRs. It remains to be seen how big a deal this will be.
• I’m super curious to see how easy it is to use manual focus with the focus assist where the display zooms in when the focus ring is turned. If this works well, it might be the way to go if autofocus proves to be slow.
• I’m quite interested in what the shutter lag is like, independent of autofocus time. If it’s quick and snappy, like it should be, then I could see myself using manual focus a lot.
• I haven’t yet seen full size ISO 1600 samples. I’m really curious to see these, and in a variety of conditions. If ISO 1600 shots print out nicely at 8X10 or so, however, I’ll be more than happy.
• The display resolution of 230K pixels seems a bit low, especially for a camera that relies totally on live view. It’ll be interesting to see if this hurts things.
• The exposed sensor when the lens is off is a bit freaky. It’s probably OK, but it’ll be strange the first few times to see the sensor staring back when the lens comes off.

Hopefully, some of the people that are hands-on with the camera will get a chance to answer these questions in the days to come. In particular, I’ll be looking forward to Derrick Story’s thoughts on the camera after his hands on shoot in New York.

So far, however, it looks like Olympus might just have a winner on their hands.

©2009 James Duncan Davidson

I’ve long been a fan of Doc Searls. Between The Cluetrain Manifesto and his writings online, I’ve learned a lot either directly from reading his thoughts, or from pondering them with other inputs and coming to my own conclusions. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a genuinely nice guy and has the same birthday as I do.

This image is a crop of a photograph of Doc I made when he spoke at eComm2009 in San Francisco. The thoughtful expression on Doc’s face suits him well. I wish that the orange stage lights hadn’t put in so much fill on the side of his face, but you take what you’re given sometimes.

Previous closeups: Jack Dangermond and Bob Martin

1AM on a Saturday night. I’m home puttering around the house. Working on the book. Sketching up a few logos. Nothing too exciting. And then, without warning, excitement shows up outside my window. People whooping and hollering. I look out and... this is what I see:

Thousands of bikers rolled by over the course of a half hour or so. Most of the bikers were naked. Some were partially naked. All were having fun.

I love this town. Frankly, I don’t think I have the, um, cojones to do something like this, but I’m glad other people do.

Photogeek details: Nikon D700, 1/50th@f/2.8, ISO 6400.

I have found my happy spot when writing. It’s the full screen writing mode quite a few writing applications now provide. I first saw these in WriteRoom and Scrivener, but now it’s a part of Pages as well. The implementation in Pages is really nice. All the formatting lovely of Pages with no distractions when you don’t want them.

These days, if you run into me at the cafe, this is what you’ll probably see:

I love this way of working so much that I really wish my favorite code editors—such as BBEdit—featured a full screen mode. Sounds a bit ludicrous and modal, I’ll grant. And, one would have to sort out how to elegantly put a list of files in the margin that wouldn’t clutter things up. But, this full screen thing is pretty cool for some tasks.

This August, I’m going to be doing something a bit different. Obie Fernandez and company are putting together BizConf, a small business conference in Florida. The conference is focused on sales, marketing, contracts, and legal matters—check out Obie’s description for more. To spice things up, the more straightforward biz topics are being mixed up with a few other interesting things, one of them being photography. And that’s where I come in. I’ll be doing a photo bootcamp of sorts. It’ll be equal mixes of business and fun—all focused on photography and the camera.

As to the shot of me they’re using in the rotation on the website... They put out the call for materials and head shots while I was in a really busy period and I think I must've mumbled “check out my photos on Flickr.” Of course they picked out the super emo shot. Too funny. Don’t worry, I don’t take myself anywhere near that seriously!

It’s totally clear why Apple went with subsidized pricing starting with the iPhone 3G. The psychology of spending less up front and getting dinged a bit extra every month is powerful stuff. “Look, it’s only $199!” Now, all of those that bought an iPhone 3G on a subsidized price get to meet the dark side of the deal. It’s up to your carrier to decide when you can get an update to the new iPhone 3GS at the subsidized price.

For example, I bought my iPhone 3G early on. Not the first day, but soon thereafter. AT&T, at least on the contract that I’m on, lets me get full upgrade pricing a year after the initial purchase as long as I agree to a new two year contract. Otherwise, the price is higher. For example, during the order process right now for a new iPhone 3GS, here’s what I see:

$399 for the 16GB model, huh? That’s a $200 premium if I want to be a first day buyer of the new, sexier iPhone. But, if I wait about a month till July 13th, I may qualify for a standard upgrade. I think I can hold on tight until then to save $200.

But, and let me emphasize this strongly, what I see above and what you see may vary a great deal both in the price charged as well as the date at which you may qualify for standard pricing.. Some folks on Twitter (@psyton and @morkdorison to point at a couple) are reporting that they are being told they have to wait 18 months instead of 12 in order to qualify for an upgrade. From what the fine print on the Apple site says (pointed out by @bretto), some folks might have to pay as much as $599 to get a new phone, depending on where they are in their contract.

Of course, we all agreed to the contracts and the terms. So, whining loudly isn’t exactly going to do much good. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that there is only one contract to choose from. Really, if I could have paid more when I bought my phone, paid less for the monthlies, and come out even, I would have been happy to in order to have a cleaner upgrade path. Maybe a lot of other people would have either. But that choice doesn’t really exist. Sure, you can pay for an unobligated phone, but it’s locked to AT&T and the monthly fees are the same. That option is called loosing both ways.

As an aside, and as an illustration of how ridiculous dives into the legal terms and conditions can get, here’s the fine print on the Apple iPhone comparison page:

Sure, most of that fine print is on things like battery life and speed and all. But seriously. Really? I wonder if the Palm Pre folks are about to cook up their own version of a snarky fine print add. Oh wait, they’re exclusive with Sprint. They’ll have tons of their own fine print. Never mind.

If you’re stuck way back in your contract, and in a strange twist of terms and conditions, it may be better for you to terminate a contract and sign up for a new one. @idbjorh looked into this and found his early termination fee was $125. Of course, you have to wonder if they might hold that against you when you sign back up on the same day. I’d guess you’d loose your number.

As I said, this is the dark side of those juicy subsidized prices. Boy howdy. If there was any one thing I was hoping Apple would do when they got into the mobile phone market was that they would make all of this less of a pain in the ass. That certainly didn’t happen.

Update: It’s been an interesting day talking to all sorts of people about this via Twitter, iChat/AIM, and other channels. There’s one thing that I thought was obvious, but which I want to make even more clear.

I don’t have my knickers in a twist the contract terms, per se. I knew what I was signing. I also knew that on my deal, I’d get an upgrade opportunity at twelve months like I have with my AT&T service for a while. What is annoying are the variable terms. It creates so much confusion that even the media, such as the WashingtonPost/TechCrunch article on the topic, can’t get the subtlety of the facts straight. It’s like they did what I did this morning, look up their account and assume that everyone else’s has the same terms. It’s only when you hear from lots of different people how much variability there is.

If anything, I actually think responsibility for the confusion rests with Apple who agreed to go with subsidized pricing to cut upfront costs. The low prices were well received, but it shouldn’t have been too hard to see the confusion that this would create later when you have a yearly upgrade cycle and your customers can only sign two year contracts.

Predictions about the WWDC2009 keynote are so yesterday. Today, the keynote came and went. The interesting things weren’t so much in the top level announcements, but in all the little things. Here’s my list of cheers and a couple of boos for the keynote.

Cheers:

• The 13" MacBook Pro comes into its own, complete with a FireWire port. The new SD Card slot is interesting. I’ve mostly got CompactFlash cards, but for most photographers, this will be very handy indeed.
• Safari Plug-in crash protection rocks. Hopefully that’ll help improve the experience a bit.
• Snow Leopard for $29. That seems about right. It’s about the best that Apple can do considering they have a conservative opinion about Sarbox accounting rules.
• Find My Phone via MobileMe. They just sealed the deal on my next year of MobileMe subscription. It’s something that I was hoping would come since last year’s announce of support for remote wipe via Exchange.
• Internet tethering via Bluetooth or hardware for the iPhone, unless you happen to be on AT&T.
• Tom Tom navigation app. Very cool.
• Giving developers at least a small window to test their windows on the official GM release of iPhone OS 3.0. Apple hasn't done this in recent memory with their desktop OS (at least from 10.3 on), leaving developers wondering if their apps would go wonky or not at the last minute.
• The new camera features, including autofocus and macro are SWEET. These were somewhat expected, but the feature set seems quite impressive for a mobile phone now and I can’t wait to play with it.
• Tap to focus on the iPhone 3GS. The interaction to focus sounds perfect and for whatever reason, I figured if autofocus showed up, it’d be automatic. The fact it isn’t rocks.
• Built in iPhone 3GS compass. It’s been on the rumor sites for a while, but I’m really happy to see that it made it in. It’s the perfect compliment to the GPS unit.
• Pricing on the new iPhone 3GS at $199. Perfect. Now, let’s see what AT&T has to say about upgrades. Usually, they’re pretty good about giving you subsidized price again after a year.

Boos:

• AT&T delayed support for MMS. I personally don't really care about MMS, but apparently some people really do. To have flubbed this one up is embarrassing for them.
• AT&T not supporting tethering. Seriously. WTF. Double, no triple boo points for AT&T.
• When you can update from your previous phone or iPhone and how much it’ll really cost you are entirely dependent on your carrier. This is the downside of the subsidized pricing. There are more thoughts about the downsides of the iPhone pricing in the next post.

All in all, a pretty good keynote from where I sit. From what I heard on the UStream feed, Phil, Bertrand, and Scott did a great job with things. Steve is surely happy. Now starts the waiting game until June 19th. Actually, from AT&T’s website, it looks like I may be waiting till July 13th. Guess that’ll twelve months after I bought the 3G. But, with a new camera and faster speed, what’s not to like? Except maybe all that fine print about the contract stuff.

Photo Credit Unknown

Everyone I know right now is digging for the latest rumors on what Apple might or might not announce on Monday. I have to admit, I’ve been tracking those rumors closely. But, today I was more interested in a leak on the camera front. Photos of the retro-styled Olympus Pen E-P1 turned up on Japanese forum, along with some specs. Who knows of course if they are true or not, but I’m certainly excited and hoping for the best. And, there’s obviously something coming at the climax of the Olympus PEN 50th Anniversary build up.

A pocketable 12 Megapixel Micro Four Thirds camera with a 17mm 2.8 lens (which should work out to a 35mm equivalent) would definitely be a welcome addition. Decent sized sensor. Fast lens. What’s not to like, at least on paper? Tho, I gotta say, I really liked the look of the prototype that Olympus showed off at Photokina last year. This one doesn't look quite as scrumptious so far. We’ll hopefully see soon enough, however.

Uncle Bob (aka Robert C. Martin) of ObjectMentor gave a blisteringly awesome, impassioned, and thoughtful keynote at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas about professionalism in software development. He’s one of the more animated and intense speakers out there. It is a challenge to photograph Bob on stage, however, and to catch his intensity. He moves quickly as he underlines each point with a gesture or expression. It’s the best kind of challenge really, as when it all comes together, the results are great.