Mike and Christie got married last year.  I was invited, but wasn’t able to go.  I don’t remember why.

Last night, I was talking with a friend who did get to attend.  It turns out the photographer who shot their wedding did a terrible job, to the point where none of the pictures are usable.  A total disaster.  Now M&C are desperately calling all the guests, hoping they have some pictures they can have.

I hate to see anyone get screwed by a bad photographer, not just friends.  It gives all of us a bad reputation.

Last October 6, I was having problems downloading a utility for my new Z3100 printer from Hewlett Packard’s website. I sent a support request to HP. I found my own workaround a few hours later and never thought about it again.

Until today, when I got an answer back from HP. That’s right, almost five months later!

One of the trendy things to do at a wedding reception is to release butterflies. The bride envisions an explosion of butterflies soaring from the box. It’s certainly a beautiful vision, if not firmly rooted in reality.

First of all, butterflies are not free, not by a long shot. Typical prices for 100 butterflies is $250 – $600 depending on species and time of year.

Second, butterflies don’t fly. Not much, anyway. Every time I’ve seen a butterfly release at a wedding, what actually happens is the butterflies continue to sit quite contentedly in and on the box. The few that do fly or get shooed off go just a few feet and perch on some guest’s head.

Finally, butterflies are not made of butter. They don’t make butter. They’re not an ingredient in making butter. Why are they called butterflies?

I’ve been working on and upgrading computers since my original Atari 400 back in the early ’80s. And I’ve never seen a machine where upgrading the memory and hard drives was so simple as my new Mac.

It took me 38 seconds from start to finish to upgrade from 2 to 6 gigs of RAM. Remove the side of the computer (4 seconds), pull out the memory riser cards (6 seconds), move one existing memory module from the lower card to the upper card (5 seconds), insert the two new memory modules on the lower card (8 seconds), reinsert the memory cards (10 seconds) , and reattach the side (5 seconds). This was immediately after shutdown, no need to move the computer or detach/reattach any cables like video, network, USB, etc.

Adding a new 750 gig hard drive was even easier and faster at 35 seconds. Remove the side of the computer (4 seconds), pop out the drive carrier (2 seconds), attach the drive to the carrier (20 seconds), reinsert the carrier (4 seconds), and reattach the side (5 seconds). No fumbling with screws, data cables, or power wires, it’s all built into the case. Again, all done without any moving or detaching/reattaching any cables.

With a PC, these tasks are way more difficult. Usually the memory banks are buried somewhere on the motherboard and very difficult to reach, I really appreciate the fact that the memory carriers just pop out of the Mac. And installing a hard drive means running additional power and data cables, plus you have to get the drive in there and then screw it into place. You certainly can’t do these jobs with the PC in place, so I’d say that what I accomplished in under two minutes on the Mac would take me 15-30 minutes on my PCs.

I was out shooting the lunar eclipse last night when a jet cut right across the moon! I missed catching it as it crossed, but this is just after, showing the contrail which disappeared a few seconds later. This is about 5 minutes before mid-eclipse.  Unfortunately, a very thin cloud slipped into the shot, so I lost a lot of detail on the moon.

One funny incident happened on the cruise. There were a load of photographers working for the cruise line on the ship. There were taking portraits, table shots, embarkation photos, etc. Not very good photos, I might add.

I was walking around the ship on the last day with my D3, shooting various parts of the ship. I was cutting through the second level of the atrium, near the photo display/sales area, when I heard someone saying “excuse me” and tapped me on the shoulder. It was one of the photographers who wanted to see my camera. Within a few minutes, I had a gaggle of them around me, checking out the D3 and sharing stories of how they hated the crappy Olympus cameras they had to work with. We also chatted about various tools like Lightroom and Photoshop.

I felt like the guy in high school with the super-cool car.

Well, cheap-er. In my last post, I forgot to mention that Amazon’s regular price was slightly lower than B&H and they have a rebate going now and I get 3% back on Amazon purchases because I have an Amazon VISA. Altogether, I saved about $250 buying it from Amazon vs B&H and almost $450 off buying it directly from Apple. Amazon even beat Apple’s educational pricing.

I love Amazon.com and B&H Photo, two terrific retailers with great prices and fantastic customer service.

Got my new Mac Pro last week. I returned the bad one to B&H and got a new one from Amazon instead of a replacement from B&H. When I got the first Mac Pro, Amazon was out of stock. Since they’re now in stock, I hoped that this machine would be from a different “batch” that wouldn’t have the hardware problems so common with the new 8-core Mac Pro systems.

I fired up the new system and it immediately found that a new version of OS X had been released a few days before, so I had it download and install the update. So I don’t know if the hardware was different or the new OS X version fixed the problem. Regardless, I’ve had none of the crashing and weirdness of the other machine. Using Lightroom, Capture NX, and other high-intensity tools is so much nicer now.

I’m very, very pleased with the new machine. Once I do some more testing, I’m seriously thinking of replacing several other machines in the office with Macs.

Getting access from the ship was a real pain (and expensive) so I didn’t get around to posting shots during the cruise. So here are some shots. (I had to be somewhat conservative in shooting. I decided at the last second to take a different camera body and in the hysteria of the change I left out my memory cards. The local Best Buy in New Orleans had cards, but the prices were awfully high, so I only got one 4-gig card)

Arriving at the ship: You can’t imagine how big these things are until you’re standing by one.

 

Down the Mississippi: The ship flipped around and headed downriver. I was surprised how long it took to reach the ocean, around 12 hours.

 

Waiting on sunrise: The decks are really empty at six in the morning

 

First day sunrise: A beautiful, clear morning. I really enjoyed just standing up on the deck and taking in the experience. The view was pretty nice, too

 

Sleepyhead: Not everyone was up before sunrise

 

Third day: Backing into the pier at Progreso. You can see the reaaaaalllllly long causeway that leads from the dock into town. I was feeling so lousy we never left the ship. The kids had a really great time in the ship’s “Camp Carnival” program.

 

Cozumel: Apparently the pier at Cozumel was damaged during one of last year’s hurricanes, so we had to anchor about a mile offshore and take shuttle boats to shore. So we didn’t even get onshore until about 10:30, only enough time to walk to Carlos & Charlie’s for lunch and head off to our swim with the dolphins.

 

Heading home: The trip home was a bit rough, a couple of storms and lots of rolling around.

One thing that was kinda neat was the “towel animals” the cabin staff would make every day. The kids got a real kick out of them

 

Just a shot to give you an idea of how small the cabins are. Of course, you don’t spend a lot of time there, but just getting ourselves and three kids dressed in such a small area was a bit of a comedy

 

Some shots of the ship, it was really windy and cold that last day, so the pool area was a bit deserted.

 

Our last sunset at sea

 

And sunrise in New Orleans

Well, we’re on the ship.  Left the house at 4:30 this morning to fly to New Orleans, so we’re pretty tired at this point.  Emily fell asleep in the middle of dinner.

The ship left the dock at about 5:00.  I thought we’d be in the Gulf in an hour or two, but I was dead wrong on that one.  Apparently, we’ll be in the Mississippi River until around 4 in the morning.

Having a great time so far, the food is excellent. And plentiful.  Samantha couldn’t make up her mind between the fillet mignon and the broiled salmon.  The waiter had an excellent solution: he just brought her one of each.  I had the fillet (wonderful) and something called a melted chocolate cake for dessert, which was essentially a bowl of melted chocolate.  I was a happy boy.

 I wanted to post some pictures, but I messed up and forgot to install Nikon Capture NX on my laptop.  The older version of Capture I have can’t handle the raw files of the new D3.  So I’ll set the camera to shoot both raw and jpg files, I’ll try to post some shots tomorrow.