The 7 stages of Nik/Google grief

Nik software's heads must be spinning right now wondering what hit them. One moment they're on an all time high because Google just bought their company and the next the internet is filled with photographers all clearly somewhere in the 7 stages of grief about it. Check out the comments on Nik's announcement post: http://education.niksoftware.com/2012/09/17/google-acquires-nik-software/. Here are a few highlights from their comments and from Twitter:

1. Shock and denial

Comment on Nik's post: This is terrifying. You make the best plug-ins in the business. I am scared.

2. Pain and guilt

Comment on Nik's post: You just ruined my day. Sorry to see this happen to a good product line :-(

3. Anger and bargaining

Comment on Nik's post: It would be helpful to have a statement from you or Google or GooNik or Nikoogle as to what this means for your products.

4. Depression, reflection, loneliness

Comment on Nik's post: I guess this is the beginning of the end, after 12 years of using your plug-ins, probably time to move on.

5. The upward turn

Comment on Nik's post: I was planning on upgrading my complete collection, but I’m glad I haven’t done so yet. Time to look for a replacement.

6. Reconstruction and working through

Comment on Nik's post: Oh well. Snapseed was great while it lasted. Time to find an alternative app I guess.

7. Acceptance and hope

On Twitter @chrismarquardt: I see it as an opportunity to do more education around how to get great b/w conversions without the help of NIK

Ok so that's all very entertaining but seriously, should we be worried? Well I'd say yes - worried. But not necessarily in despair, yet. So far we've not seen a response from Google or Nik describing what will happen to Nik's existing product line. All we have to go on is Google's previous track record. Sadly that  hasn't been so good. The recent google acquisition, Sparrow, immediately ceased development. And before that Picnik, the web based photo editing software - was also closed down. Certainly the future looks very bleak for Nik's IOS products.

No doubt we'll see improved photo editing tools in Google's own products like Android and Google+ but what about Nik's existing product line? At the very least it seems likely that talent within Nik will be at least partially distracted into Google products. It seems like Google likes to acquire companies for the talent rather than the products. If that's the case here I believe it'll be the end of the very best plug-in products on the market - products I use very regularly. But perhaps part of the deal with Google is that the Nik plugins will go on. Or perhaps I'm just in stage 1 myself.

Those of you looking for good alternatives should look at Topaz Labs and OnOne Software. This is a huge opportunity for those guys and if they're smart they'll think about offering discounts or cross-grade deals.

[The attached picture, by the way, is one of my old black and whites which I just recently re-processed from the original RAW using Silver Efex Pro and got a very pleasing result in a fraction of the time it originally took me with Photoshop]

Pre-visualisation can be a straight jacket

Pre-visualisation can be a straight jacketIt's good to go to a shoot with an idea of what you want to achieve. Pre-visualising a shot is a valuable skill and can lead to some amazing work, especially for a technically skilled photographer. But it can also be a straight jacket. You leave the shoot with pictures that you hope will give you the raw (pun intended) materials to make the pictures you pre-visualised. So when you click through those pictures you're looking for signs that they've got the characteristics you wanted. You reject shots that don't support the idea in your head. If you're very diligent you'll process the winners at this point, publish them and archive away the shoot.

But sometimes, if you can make the time to go back to those pictures 1 month, maybe 2 months later you'll find gems in there that you didn't see before. You'll look at the pictures with different eyes. You won't have that pre-vis straightjacket on any more and hopefully you'll be able to look at the pictures with a clear head - seeing what's good and bad in each on its own merits. Once you can do that you're free to take those RAWs in directions you didn't intend and a whole new kind of art can appear. Some art is made, some is discovered. Most is a little of each.

Above is an example from my recent work. I've been getting as much practice in as I can with portraiture and studio lighting. I attended (rather than taught - for a change) a lighting academy run by Will Cheung, editor of Advanced Photographer magazine, and run by the company that organises my own workshops, Welshot Imaging. We shot 4 different models during those two days - you can see my "keepers" from this workshop in the Gallery - and this shot above was one where we were set up for a dramatic type of light. On the day I saw it as black and white without realising quite what I had in mind. I processed the images from the workshop during the following week and published all the winners. This shot never made the publishing cut because it just didn't look right and I didn't know why.

I've shot a few more model sessions since then and on a whim I was looking back through previous shoots and suddenly it struck me what was wrong here. This was clearly a film noir shot and I'd missed out some of the glow and lighting emphasis needed to make that work. A little tweak in Nik Color Efex Pro and Lightroom and voila - a shot I couldn't see before is now something I'm pretty proud of.

Turn your phone into a camera remote - if you can afford it

I've noticed a flurry of similar products appearing lately that turn an iPhone into a shutter release for your SLR. Here are links to a couple of them. The first, ioShutter, is being promoted by the excellent Photojojo which I encourage you to subscribe to. The second is a recent Kickstarter project by the name of Trigger Happy Camera Remote. But let's back up a moment. The equivalent Canon product is the TC-80N3 which allows you to not only remote trigger your camera but also program a number of shots to be taken on a timer and set the duration of bulb exposures - it's sometimes called an intervalometer. Useful stuff but the typical price here in the UK is £120 or $135 in the states. Honestly that's *way* over priced for what it is.

So the prospect of turning a camera phone into an intervalometer is intriguing, first because the "brains" of the gadget can be provided by the phone which should make construction much simpler and cheaper but also because the phone should make the interface easier, prettier and allow it to do more. I first saw the Kickstarter project and I was impressed by what a good idea it is but when I saw the price they were asking my first thought was that the creators were smoking crack. They want $70 for the Trigger Happy Camera Remote when it launches (or $50 if you get in on the Kickstarter funding). ioShutter is even worse - they want $70 just for the cable and another $10 for the app.

But hold on a minute - wasn't this idea meant to replace the complex bit of this gadget, making it simpler and cheaper? See the thing is, I've already bought an intervalometer and I didn't pay £120 for it. I didn't even pay £50 for it. I paid about £20 for it on Amazon. Just try searching for "TC-80N3" on Amazon and you'll see a load of extremely affordable alternatives to the Canon version. There are Nikon equivalents. Mine was made by a Chinese company called Yongnuo and yes it's a cheap knock-off but it's pretty solidly made. It works reliably and it's a *fraction* of the price. I've been delighted with it. Here's one for just $15 on the US Amazon store - it's identical to mine, clearly a rebadged Yongnuo.

The ioShutter and Trigger Happy Camera Remote guys think Canon and Nikon are their competition but they're wrong. Their real competition are these cheap knock offs. So tell me, how much do you want to pay? $70 or $15? I don't care how much prettier the iPhone version is, that's a no-brainer.

But that's not all!

Triggertrap Mobile cable+dongleThere is another option - Triggertrap Mobile costs $10 for the app and then $20 for the cable+dongle, so $30 for the lot. Still more than the Yongnuo but when you see what you get it's *really* worth it. The Triggertrap app does all the intervalometer stuff plus you can trigger your camera for time-lapse, distance-lapse, motion detection, sound, magnetism, vibration and even facial recognition. For $30. Sign me up - I already placed my order.

I love Kickstarter and entrepreneurs. I usually want to support them and I've backed quite a number of Kickstarter projects but I am getting mightily sick of the price gouging that goes on with photography gear. I've not used any of these products yet but on what I've seen so far the Triggertrap leads the pack by a country mile. Hurrah for sensible pricing.

Why Apple computers suck for business

Liverpool Apple StoreI've been using macs in my business for some years now but the shortcomings of Apple's offering were never clear to me until last week when my iMac hard disk died. It's my main business machine and while my data was safely on external drives I still needed a powerful computer to actually do my job (mainly video production). I've had 2 iMacs and both have had internal hard disks die within 2 years of purchase. On the first iMac I fixed it myself - I'm originally a pc guy so I thought 'how hard can it be?'. Silly me. I got it done but for my next iMac, my current one, I bought AppleCare thinking it would be easier to get Apple to take care of any problems. I was very wrong. 

First of all I booked a genius bar appointment at my nearest store which is not all that near to be honest, in the Trafford centre in Manchester. I drove up there (40 mins drive) and they confirmed what I already knew - SMART was reporting that the disk was failing. They told me they didn't have the part in stock and that it would take 5-7 days to get the work done. Not good - I have customers waiting on me to deliver. So we called around and found that the Liverpool One store had the part in stock. Ok I say, let's go. It's another long drive and Liverpool traffic is a bitch but finally I get there and I'm politely dealt with - even being taken up to the inconveniently located genius bar in the staff lift because I'm carrying an extremely heavy and sharp edged 27" iMac. No surprises - they can't fix it there and then. 3-5 days I'm told.  Disappointing when you consider they have the part, the tools and my computer all in the same place. It crosses my mind that if they'd give me some desk space I could just do it myself. But no, I am well behaved and I go home. Another long drive in heavy traffic - nearly 2 hours. I hate to think how much I've spent in petrol up to his point. Nearly as much as the cost of a new hard drive. Considerably more if you factor in the cost to the environment and a whole day of my time. 

I leave the Apple guys alone for the whole of the next day, Tuesday, only occasionally looking at my empty desk and fretting about the lost work time. But on Wednesday the lack of productivity and a weird sense of responsibility towards my customers forces me to call Liverpool to ask where they're up to with my machine. You have.. 5.. calls ahead of you in the queue. The girl who eventually answers is polite but resolute in her unwillingness to give me any idea when the work will be complete. Her best estimate is the same 3-5 days I was originally told. Here's the thing, though. When I was told that, I was hoping Apple liked to under promise and over deliver. I needed my computer and I needed it NOW. I literally had nothing I could do without it except hassle the Apple store folks. So that's what I did. After being cut off and calling again (you have.. 4.. calls ahead of you in the queue) I speak to the same lady and she tells me that she's spoken to the staff the back and my computer will be fixed today. Great! I tell her I'm driving up and I'll wait in the store until it's done. Yes I know that's going to put pressure on the store staff. That's the idea.

So I make the long drive to Liverpool again.. More petrol, another lost day of productivity, more high blood pressure. And I deal with the guys in the store. The chap running the genius bar is annoyed with me but keeps his cool and after some cajoling he nudges the guys in the back.  They promise they're now working on it. I drink coffee in Starbucks - getting out of his hair for 30 mins is my little reward to him for his compliance. Eventually I go back to the store and almost another hour later my computer is brought out. I force a smile, thank the staff for putting up with me and head home. It's another long drive and I arrive only just in time to pick up the kids from nursery. Another day is lost and all of that night and half of the next day will be taken up reinstalling but at least my destiny is back in my own hands. I resolve never to give away that control again. 

So here's the problem. Apple are rightly proud of their customer service. The staff interpersonal skills are superb. That makes dealing with Apple a very smooth ride but where the rubber meets the road is getting the damn computer fixed. Apple performs very poorly indeed on this point. What matters to me as a business when my computer has failed, especially when I've paid extra for AppleCare (my colleague jokingly suggested that perhaps I'd inadvertently purchased AppleDontCare) is that my computer is fixed fast so I can get back to work. 

I lost most of Sunday, all of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and half of Thursday to this failure and it was only that quick because I bothered and cajoled the Apple staff. If I'd not done so I would have waited even longer. I also paid a crap ton of money in petrol and invested a lot of my own time driving around. Compare this experience with how I would have handled this failure in a PC. All I would have done there is driven to PC World, overpaid for a new SATA drive and then replaced it myself. Total lost time - 1 day tops. Even with AppleCare paying for the drive and the manpower this was much more expensive than simply swapping a drive in a PC. 

Consider that business proposition again - if I had a PC I would have paid less for the computer, less for the drive, less for the petrol and I would have been back to work in 1 day instead of 4. Tell me again how great your premium price Apple solution is?

What I've described here isn't extraordinary - a disk died, they replaced it. Nothing went wrong particularly aside from the disk itself. If anything they went faster than they typically would - because I nagged them. And yet I still consider their performance apalling. Apple don't seem to be aware of what matters to business. Paying extra for AppleCare gets you no special treatment. They don't appear to have anything like the necessary infrastructure for repairing stuff quickly and getting businesses back to work. As a result I'm considering switching away from Final Cut and onto to Premiere so that I can use PCs again. Premiere is way too expensive but the overall risk to my business is considerably less than sticking with Apple. 

PW184 - Fujifilm X-Pro1 at Focus On Imaging 2012

Theo from Fujifilm shows us the new X-Pro1, an interchangeable lens camera that packs the same kind of manual controls as the last year's star camera the X100 and a brand new sensor design.

PW184 - Fujifilm X-Pro1 at Focus On Imaging 2012