Last week I was in San Francisco. I took my XPan with me, and expected to be able to buy some decent film in situ - surely film is still alive in the heartland of f64 et al ?

Well it appears not. The only place I could find which even admitted to stocking film, Discount Camera (which seems like an ok place) only had some old Sensia. I wanted my favourite Velvia 100F. They suggested I visit Adolph Gasser’s (that’s A-Dolf, of course). Beautiful website by the way, so retro, so 1995.

So I did.  I found my way to the film section, and encountered an overweight, grumpy soap dodger who seemed to resent having to deal with a customer.

I asked if they have Velvia 100F, and was treated to a condescending lecture which informed me that Merkins didn’t like Velvia 100F, and it had been replaced with Velvia 100S (which I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist in the US of A or anywhere else). I was also informed that 100F has been out for “over 15 years” and was no longer available.

Having had quite enough of this blatantly untrue and / or pig-ignorant bullshit, I decided to cut my losses, buy some Provia 100F, and get out in the fresh air.

Well, imagine my surprise when I saw this ad, this evening, on the American photo.net website…

So, in the hope that this might get Googled by somebody somewhere, Do Not Visit Adolph Gassers in San Francisco. And forget any idea you might have that all Americans are service oriented….

This really is the final straw for my relationship as a customer with Germany’s worst software house, LaserSoft. 

I few days ago, I submitted a topic to the user forum, asking for shared experiences on scanning Portra 160NC with Silverfast. I did not criticise any aspect of Silverfast, or Lasersoft, in fact as far as I remember I was complimentary. I was just a novice negative user looking for advice with the famous NegaFix miracle solution.

So, today, I was a bit surprised to receive this:

Hello drm,

You are receiving this notification because your topic “Scanning Portra
160NC” at “LaserSoft Imaging” was disapproved by a moderator or
administrator.

The following reason was given for the disapproval:

Dear Customer,

our(sic) SilverFast forum is not intended for individual techsupport as this
would make the forum hard to read for users that seek certain help or
information. Also our Support staff can not hadle (sic) “everyday” support over
the forum efficently (sic), therefore please use our support assistent (sic) to get
individual support. If there is no answer in the support assistent (sic) that
solves your problem you will automatically be redirected to our Support
request form where you can create a support ticket.

—
Yours Truely (sic),
The Site Admin

One can only applaud them from keeping upsetting information like my post from their nervous users.

My answer, also verbatim, after I edited out some possibly inappropriate references to the teutonic character (especially when reflecting on the excellent support I have received from NIK software’s team in Germany):

This is really so bloody stupid. I take the time to participate in your forum, asking a general question to the community about scanning a particular film stock which I’m not familiar with. This is not “tech support” - even if I did also ask tech support - it is actually a topic I have no experience in and am seeking other’s advice. In general this is what a user forum is for (Adobe, Apple, PhaseOne, Microsoft, etc etc)

Your site COULD be the destination for everybody still interested in scanning. It could become a huge resource for the community which in turn benefit you by increasing attention on your products (this is called “marketing”- I suggest you research it)

Fine, I will no longer waste my time on your forum, or your software. Actually, thanks to other resources in the web, I have discovered the wonderful ColorNeg & ColorPos plugins from C F Systems, which demonstrate what a piece of crap “NegaFix"is in particular, and in fact how bad the rest of your terrible, expensive software actually is.

The emperor has no clothes. SilverFast is complete sh*t. There is no magic bullet (VueScan hasn’t got one either). Scan in raw mode and sort it out in Photoshop, or invest in ColorNeg.

I have to say I’m not very comfortable with the way Apple ties RAW support to OS X versions.  I’m one of a group of users (relatively small, but not insignificant) who could not use 10.5.6 because it breaks DDC monitor hardware calibration on PowerPC systems (G5s are still pretty good at running Aperture). This affects monitors from NEC, LaCie, Eizo and Quatto and probably others - i.e. all the high end brands used by pro photographers.  Early reports are that 10.5.7 has NOT fixed this, and it is extremely unlikely that it will ever be fixed now.  Note, it does seem that this far from being 100% Apple’s fault, but nevertheless it WAS working up to 10.5.5, and it does work on Intel hardware, so it can’t be rocket science to get it right. It just isn’t a priority in pointy-haired product manager land.

So in this case, we’re stuck with a choice: new camera support, or monitor hardware calibration: pick one.

This could be the issue which drives me away from Aperture - crazy, really.  And really, you have to start wondering if the photography market segment really is considered any sort of priority at Apple these days.  All the signs point to the company being mainly concerned about supporting the consumer level (iPhoto, glossy screens) and considering that anything higher level is commercially insignificant.

Maybe I’m just too old for this s**t, but in a week when I’m questioning if I actually get any benefit from Flickr, i.e. does it help ME to reach whatever nebulous objectives I have for my persona-as-photographer, I came across fotonauts:

Fotonauts, apparently, has the “mission” to “enable the creation of the definitive pool of images for everyone to contribute to, discover, use and enjoy, covering all areas of human interest”. Whew. Is that ambitious, or pretentious, or both ? Whatever, it certainly isn’t holding back! (by the way, the “about” page on the site is veritable treasure trove for Bullshit Bingo fans).

The thing is, what is the point, exactly ?  Is there actually a deep demand for this “definitive pool” ? And anyway, who makes it definitive ? A cursory appraisal finds the usual holiday snaps and latest online trends (like some truly atrocious HDR, but that’s a whole rant all to itself).

One of the things which fotonauts is aiming to fix is “collaboration usually takes the form of shallow “pat on the back” style commenting”, which I fully commend. By how are they going to fix this, hmm ? Well, and I quote, by “(enabling) albums made up of the images from more than one photographer, and (allowing) multiple collaborators”. Well, fab. And how is that different to Flickr, just to take one example ?

The fact is this so badly misses the point that I cannot believe that anybody involved with fotonauts has any photographic background in anything other than family snapshots.

Photography, in very large part, is about self-expression. Not group expression. Would a collection of photos of America in the 1950s randomly assembled from the collections of Robert Frank, Cartier Bresson, Ansell Adams and LonelyGirl13 from Hicksville, Alabama be of any artistic interest ? I doubt it.

And NATURALLY, it’s all hooked up to Twitblogfacebo.  As for the business model, well it is invisible at present, but I wouldn’t mind betting that it will have something to do with bargain basement - and exploitative - photo licensing.

In my opinion there is a real demand for some kind of web resource which is genuinely aligned with ambitions of “serious” photographers. At the moment small self-organinsing clusters within Flickr go someway in that direction. But Flickr is too democratic, and has far too much noise. However, fotonauts, at least so far, is just another “me too” photo sharing site wrapped up in fancy words.

Oh, and it’s a Beta too ... as you can tell from this screenshot:

I didn’t touch anything. Honest.

If you’re reading this then you’ll know I’m finally back online. The old, grey photoblogography at snowhenge is no more, but all of its content has, I hope made the move over to this new site. Over the past few years I’ve been living a slightly constrained existence, both due to living in a very small space, and having an extremely time consuming job. Well now I’ve got a lot more space, all of my photography gear is unpacked and dusted down, and my job has become a little less time consuming.

At the time of writing, the actual photography content of this site is very low. A friend of mine convinced almost a year ago that I should try to present concise, edited portfolios online, rather than the huge database driven catalogue (of over 700 photos) that I had built up over the years. I think he’s right, and it is a step in the direction of becoming a better photographer, but it is easier said than done. For a start, I’m not terribly good at editing, and when I do start getting into it, I start to re-evaluate everything, selections, ratings and processing, so I’m not quite there yet. And I haven’t yet designed the web pages to present the portfolio in. So for a while at least, the photography pages will be a work in progress.

I am finding Aperture 2 to be an excellent editing tool, and an underestimated RAW developer and processor. It takes a while to get used to some of the processing tools, especially if you’ve been used to the Adobe way of doing things, but certainly to my eyes the results are at least as good as from any other tool - including the excellent RAW Developer - and the adjustment tools are very powerful. I’m pretty much committed to it now, so I guess the next thing to happen is that Apple will withdraw it…