ACDSee Pro 3 Photo Manager Released

ACDSee Pro 3 Photo Manager.

I see it is now available. I looked through the details of the enhancements ACDSee have made. I cannot see much that Lightroom cannot do – but their claims are very broad.

Perhaps in the editing area they are more powerful than Lightroom but I am not enough of an expert in Lightroom editing to judge.

They have features to upload photos to Smugmug and Zenfolio. But not the services I use: Flickr and PicasaWeb. I don’t see any mention of an add-in or plugin architecture that enables others to be written.

I did not see any reassurances that they have improved the reliability of the software. That seems critical given the mass of problems similar to mine that I saw on their support forum. And I didn’t see any mention that you can do basic things like editing and reorganizing keywords.

I’m sorry to say I cannot see any circumatances where ACDSee can tempt me back. See http://bkkphotographer.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/acdsee-customer-support-i-gave-up/ and http://bkkphotographer.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/how-i-got-to-lightroom/

Thai Railway Museum

There is a small railway museum in Bangkok. It is in the north-west corner of Chatuchak Park. It’s a pleasant walk to get there through the park from Mo Chit Skytrain Station or Chatuchak Park Subway Station.

Unfortunately it was closed when I visited on Tuesday afternoon so I only took a few photos of the exterior.

There used to be a steam locomotive exhibited outside but it’s been gone for some time now. The interior houses a miscellany of engines, coaches and other artifacts.

According to the sign outside it also houses the Thai Railfan Club.

Slow Internet in Thailand

My internet connection has been even slower than usual today. It’s all right in the Thailand mornings but in the evening it’s like molasses.

I’ve reduced my blog postings a lot. I hope things will recover soon.

Sense and Sensitivity: dpreview.com

http://blog.dpreview.com/editorial/2009/09/sense-and-sensitivity.html

This Editorial Blog post at dpreview.com taught me a lot about a basic concept I thought I understood: the ISO sensitivity of my camera’s digital sensor.

The comments are confusing and often contradictory as different people weigh in.

The post leaves questions unanswered – but there will be a Part 2.

This is similar to how I thought I understood how a camera shutter works. See here.

Kate Winslet doesn’t like Photoshop

PhotoshopNews: Photoshop News and Information » Archive » Kate doesn’t like Photoshop – Digital Ethics.

To prove there’s nothing new in all this controversy about altering published pictures with Photoshop, here is an article from April 2005.

I think it is a good summary and draws the distinction between fashion or glamour work and photojournalism.

Sometimes I think the prohibitions on any manipulation of a “journalistic” picture are excessive. But I understand the reason: once you permit some “fixes” it’s impossible to draw a consistent line.

Note that the article only talks about practices in Western countries. I would be very interested to read of how photojournalists, their editors and newspaper owners treat the subject elsewhere. I have a feeling the standards are not as strict elsewhere.

Changed the Header

I finally got around to using the Bangkok skyline silhouette I made a month ago as a header for the blog.

See http://bkkphotographer.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/at-last/

Lifting the Veil of Mere Pixel Perfection – NYTimes

Lifting the Veil of Mere Pixel Perfection – NYTimes.com.

This is one of the silliest ideas I have heard in a long time. I don’t know how you could possibly have a rating system for retouched pictures that ordinary folks – the people the British and French governments want to protect – could understand.

Surely better to educate people. Entertainment, show biz and the associated magazines are about fantasy, not reality.

Focusing on Photoshop is also so short sighted. Humans have been perfecting their appearance and concealing their flaws throughout history.

Of course, none of the people here in Thailand need Photoshopping. It is  full of natural human beauty. And that wasn’t a joke.

Guaranteed - no Photoshopping!

Spam Email – The Same Old Tricks

A few years ago articles about spam or unsolicited email messages were in newspapers all the time. People feared that spam would overwhelm the Internet. Since then things have calmed down and I have not read much about it recently.

Part of it is that email filters have improved and most spam is trapped before delivery. My Yahoo and Gmail accounts both have spam boxes that are emptied regularly. A year ago I used to accumulate over 1,000 messages a week in my Yahoo spam box alone. Today I “only” have 313 in Yahoo but another 761 in Gmail.

Sometimes the filters are too aggressive. I remember almost losing a client in my consulting business because he wrote “we will pay you $ XXX” and my email promptly dumped it in the spam box. I said I didn’t get his mail and almost lost the job.

Only last week an important message from my bank was dumped in the spam box even though it was from a known email address. That caused me some stress and annoyance.

Still some notorious spam schemes get through the filters. Currently my Yahoo Inbox contains:

• A variation on the famous Nigerian bank scam where a fake bank officer tries to get your cooperation to retrieve some finds. But this one is about a bank in China.
• A fake email from the American Internal Revenue Service telling me I must go to some web site to update personal information, and
• Something similar purporting to come from PayPal.

I am surprised that Yahoo email did not catch all of them. They are so obvious. But even my suspicious heart skipped a beat when I saw a message with the subject “Notice of Underreported Income”.

Yahoo offers “improved spam filtering” if you pay them for an upgraded account. I wonder if they let a few known spam messages through to their free accounts to make a point.

I created a new email account for “BKKPhotographer” and it has not received any spam. I have not published the address so no spammers have harvested it from web sites or other peoples’ address books. I have had my main Yahoo and Gmail accounts so long that the address must be in many places.

Spam is still an annoyance but it no longer seems to be bringing the Internet to its knees. The old technology is amazingly resilient and adaptable.

Save the Planet

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These photos did not get many views on Flickr, but I think they are really cool.

They are outside Wat Thep Phila School. Many Buddhist Temples have a school nearby. Wat Thep Phila is a Royal Temple near Ramkhamhaeng University by the Khlong San Sabe canal.

They are newly painted and the colours were nice and saturated already so I did no processing in Lightroom.

Wat Thep Phila is also the place where students will go to pray for good luck before their exams. Exams start next week at Ramkhamhaeng so the temple will be crowded with students making merit.

Here is a photo of the temple:

Car Gallery at Siam Paragon

It’s on the third floor of the upscale shopping centre in Bangkok. It seems to be a permanent exhibition of some of the most expensive cars sold in Thailand. When I visited there were:

• Lamborghini Gallardo (above)
• Lotus Exige
• Jaguar XF
• Porsche Cayman and Boxster
• Citroen C6
• Hummer H3
• BMW 3, 5 & 7-Series plus a Z4

There was a sign that Aston Martin was there too but no more.

There are displayed in units that would otherwise be shops and the lighting is very varied. For some like the C6 and the Hummer it’s hard to take a good picture. Or, should I say, a challenge.

There were not many visitors when I looked around on a weekday afternoon. Each mini-showroom had a single staff member who was clearly bored. And the visitors were all photographers like me. A Japanese tourist asked me to take his photo next to the Boxster. But unlike my Victory Monument friend he was a perfectionist and asked me to take the photo again with flash.

The lighting varied and produced some very strange colour casts. My Nikon Coolpix P6000 did not deal with them very well and I had to try to fix it in Lightroom and Photoshop.

The hardest example was the Lotus Exige where the camera reproduced some, but not all of the yellow stripes on the car as bright orange.

The Citroen C8 was so badly lit that I could not get an in-focus picture without using flash – and with the simple in-camera flash there were so many reflections that the picture was unusable.

I took one picture of the fronts of each of the BMWs on display and combined them into one: “The Faces of BMW 2009″. I am interested how BMW make subtle changes to their designs that keep both a family appearance and also something distinctive for each line of vehicles within the brand.

The sticker on the BMW Z4 listed the price as 4,599,000฿. That is US$137,281 or 93,384 Euro according to Oanda.com.
Finally, there was a model of a Porsche Super farm tractor in display. I had no idea they made farm tractors in the 1950s.

I understand they rotate the cars from time to time. So it is worth going back in a few weeks.