Blogarithms

After 88 years, DuArt Film Labs in New York City recently announced they are abandoning motion-picture film processing for an all-digital business. It’s not only the end of an era for DuArt and for film, but also for those who have been part of the DuArt team over many decades. As a DuArt alumnus, I owe a great deal to Irwin Young, Paul Kaufman and Bob Smith who ran DuArt when I worked there in the 1970s, so I’ll take this opportunity to tell a bit of my own story in the DuArt context.

After working in motion picture sound in the San Francisco Bay area, I moved to New York in 1971 to attend the NYU Graduate Institute of Film and Television. My goal was to get beyond being just a “sound guy” and learn the other aspects of filmmaking: cinematography, editing, writing, etc. After grad school, producing and directing two quite forgettable documentaries and spending a year covering events like the U.S. Senate Watergate Hearings for NBC/Visnews (now Reuters), I went back into the motion-picture sound business with a full-time gig at DuArt. The company has always supported young, up-and-coming filmmakers on low budgets, offering discounts and terrific technical advice. Both of my own films were processed and mixed at DuArt, and I was very comfortable there. Not only did I get to spend hours at the mixing console, I also was exposed to every aspect of motion-picture post production. I was able to dabble in such esoteric fields as color correction, negative cutting and film chemistry. It was a tremendous learning experience.

When you’re an in-house sound guy, you take whatever jobs come in the door. And one day I found myself recording the English-language ADR (dialog-replacement “looping”) for a series of films by Lina Wertmüller including Swept Away and Seven Beauties. Well, it wasn’t just one day. It was weeks of 8-hour/day sessions in that darkened room with actors in the booth going over and over the same lines while on-screen were some of the most depressing images of World War II concentration camps, a favorite setting for Wertmüller’s films. It wasn’t a creative process. It was dreadful.

A year before – we’re talking maybe 1974 – I had taken a course in the PL/1 programming language at the New School on a whim. This was just before the MITS Altair 8800 came on the scene, and I had a sense the world was about to split into two groups: those who understood computers and those who didn’t. I wanted to be in the former group.

So in the middle of recording take 12 of some scene from Seven Beauties, we took a break. I bumped into Irwin Young, chairman of the board of DuArt in the hallway, and we struck up a brief conversation. He had started a project to computerize certain aspects of motion-picture color correction and duplication, and I asked him if there was any way to get involved. (I didn’t add, “and to get out of this studio where I’m going crazy!”) Irwin asked if I knew anything about computers, and I replied, “Well, I took this course…” To my great surprise, he decided to put me in charge of the project. Irwin was always like that. He gave young people (techies and filmmakers alike) opportunities for tremendous growth, and he supported them along the way. An amazing guy who makes DuArt the very unique place it is.

I was made Director of Computer Services at DuArt. Although I was the only in-house employee of the department, I was actually working under the tutelage of Fred Schlyter, an eccentric electronics engineer who until then had single-handedly designed the hardware and written the software for DuArt’s cutting-edge projects. Fred was a truly brilliant engineer, and his attitudes about the efficiency of software and hardware design shaped my own work for the rest of my career.

Over the next few years, Fred and I did some rather amazing things. We created a network of about six Data General Nova and perhaps a dozen PDP-8 clone minicomputers. This was before the days of Ethernet, and Fred designed a remarkable scheme based on twisted-pair optically isolated wiring. It proved to be fast, inexpensive and 100% reliable in a very noisy industrial environment. Fred designed the custom controllers for the Novas and PDP-8s, while I wrote the operating system, drivers and application software. (Fred wouldn’t dream of using the manufacturers’ operating systems!)

Fred invented frame count cueing, which was the basis for all of our work and which revolutionized – I’m not exaggerating! – motion-picture post production. In 1979, Fred was given a Technical Achievement Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (ie, the Oscar folks) for this work.

While Fred was crunching out state-of-the art hardware, I was doing my best to keep up with the software. Initially, everything was written in assembler language. Fred’s hardware was “sparse” to say the least. We didn’t even have hardware keyboard debouncing. Fred figured (correctly) that we could do that in software and thereby save a component or two. Likewise, we didn’t use chips to control seven-segment plasma displays. He gave me a seven-bit output device for each digit, and I turned each segment on and off in software. Not difficult, but certainly very low-level.

After a while we had built up quite a collection of code, and I was looking for a higher-level programming language for the Data General Novas. Not finding one to my liking, I decided to create my own process-control Algol and a complimentary real-time operating system. Together they ran all aspects of DuArt’s color correction, negative handling and film printing processes including the numerical-control programming of the Oxberry optical printer.

DuArt rolled out a vast array of similar projects such as the computerized transfer of Eastman Color Negative (ECN) directly to video using a Rank-Cintel flying-spot scanner. Prior to that, one had to first make a print or interpositive. Being able to get video directly from the original negative or internegative yielded a much higher-quality image.

Ultimately, I fell in love with the art and science of compiler writing. I found the challenges of compilers more exciting than the applications themselves, so I left DuArt to start my own compiler-writing company, Rational Data Systems (RDS). And when I did, who offered to rent me cheap office space and stay on as my first customer? Of course it was Irwin Young and DuArt Film Labs.

When RDS moved out of the West 55^th Street DuArt building around 1979, I lost touch with Irwin, but Fred and I worked on another project until 1984, when RDS relocated to California.

My memory of these times, 30+ years ago, remain clear as a bell. I still have source code listings of that first compiler and operating system, and I look at them every time I pretend I’ve done something cool since then. I owe a great deal to Irwin Young and the culture of opportunity he created at DuArt Film Labs. I don’t bemoan the passing of film at DuArt, as I know they’ve been advancing video and digital and supporting innovators ever since I left in the late 1970s.

Trey Ratcliff has been an inspiration to me and many others in the world of HDR photography. I often find his work to be way over the top, but I’d love to be able to do what he does and adapt it in my own style. Trey has released two eBooks (PDFs) about HDR and now has a series of either three ($197) or four ($397) DVDs entitled HDR Workshop. I really want to watch all 6 hours and 28 minutes of the premium set, but there’s just no way I’m going to spend more than $60/hour, even with his offer to join the online “clubhouse”. At $199 for the full set I might bite, but not at nearly $400.

So as I predict will happen frequently with these overpriced DVDs, I’m looking for partners. If I can find four others who will each chip in $75, I’ll buy the Premium Package and share them. Here’s how it will work:

• Four people commit and send me $75 each via PayPal.
• I’ll send the first DVD to the first partner who commits.
• When partner #1 is done with DVD #1, s/he sends it to partner #2.
• When partner #2 tells me s/he has received DVD #1, I’ll send DVD #2 to partner #1, etc.
• Each partner is expected to watch and send out each DVD within a week of receiving it.
• With tax and shipping, I’ll be paying nearly 2x what everyone else pays, so I get to keep the DVDs at the end.

You’ll get to view $400 worth (?) of DVDs for only $75. My theory is that by sending it out only one DVD at a time we can minimize hoarding along the way. No one gets a new DVD until the next partner along the way gets the previous DVD. The only disadvantage is that each partner will have to mail four separate DVDs to the next person, but that only adds a few dollars and a little effort. The first partner should get disc #1 quickly. (I’ll put myself at the end of the list.) Partner #4 won’t get DVD #1 until late September.

Want to join the partnership? Email me at doug@rds.com. Once we have four partners (plus me), I’ll place the order. (U.S. only, please.)

When I re-started my interest in photography a little less than two years ago, my friend Scott Loftesness was already experimenting with HDR (high dynamic range) imaging. Scott was in turn following the groundbreaking work of Trey Ratcliff and I jumped onto Trey’s bandwagon as well. But like anyone else who has ventured into the world of HDR, I’ve struggled to perfect a workflow that yields pictures with the benefits of HDR (able to render a wide range of luminosity) without the over-the-top color artifacts we’ve all seen from Photomatix and other HDR processors. My quest for a more realistic look recently took a new course when I integrated a new phase: color correction using the Lab color space in Photoshop based on what I learned from the on-line tutorials by Dan Margulis.

Getting deep into Lab color isn’t for the faint of heart. I have a decent background in this technology, and I’m still struggling with the concepts. (I studied cinematography at the NYU Graduate Institute of Film and TV with Beda Batka, then learned the fundamentals of color correction and wrote software for motion picture film processing at DuArt Film Labs in NYC in the early ’70s.) In an nutshell, the primary advantage of working in the Lab color space (instead of RGB or CMYK) is that luminosity (the ‘L’ channel) is entirely separate from color (the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels). Furthermore, modifying the ‘a’ and ‘b’ curves combined with Photoshop’s ‘blend if’ feature of adjustment layers allows you to control the saturation of very specific portions of the color palette.

This weekend I took advantage of a special offer from BorrowLenses.com and rented a Nikon D3S body just to see what a $5,200 camera was all about. I also wanted to check out its ISO 12,800 sensor — yes, it’s amazing — and its ability to bracket for a wide dynamic range. I went looking for challenging locations and settled on Muir Woods, only 20 minutes from home.

Muir Woods is a beautiful place, but a tremendous challenge to photographers. The dynamic range of light is phenomenal: from brilliant sunlight to deep, deep shadows in redwood trees that are already quite dark on their own. Only HDR gives you the opportunity to simultaneously capture blue sky and the details of tree trunks in shadows. The above photo is a merge of seven separate exposures, each one f-stop apart. (Nikon D3S in DX mode at ISO 200, Sigma 10-20mm, f/4-5.6 at 10mm f/5.6) If you’re new to HDR, notice that the sky is blue, not an overexposed white, while you can still see detail in the darkest part of the tree trunks. If I didn’t tell you, would you know this was an HDR image? Does it have those weird artifacts you typically associate with HDR? Note that no masks were used. Only global Lab changes were applied. Below are the two extreme originals.

My workflow (as of today) for images like this is as follows:

• Import RAW images into Lightroom 3.
• Apply camera calibration. (I use ColorChecker Passport and create a new profile for each location.)
• Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop.
• Use the ‘Flat’ or ‘Photorealistic Low Contrast’ preset. (It won’t look good yet!)
• Change the mode to Lab Color.
• Apply Dan Margulis’ ‘no brainer’ curve in an adjustment layer.
• Increase contrast in the ‘L’ channel.
• Make final color adjustments to the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels. (The leaves are actually yellow, almost entirely in the positive values of the ‘b’ channel’)
• Save back to Lightroom 3.

I’ve developed (and am still developing) this workflow empirically, and I’m reverse engineering it to try and understand what’s really going on. The idea is to merge the originals into a rather flat (color-wise) image, then work in Lab to recover the colors. Lab is particularly good when starting with these flat, unsaturated images. This seems to avoid a lot of the artifacts that Photomatix and Photoshop HDR Pro create if you use them alone to render your final composite image. So far, so good.

I’ve been learning a lot about photography and Photoshop from Kelby Training’s online videos for the past two months. Most of the videos are quite good. But the video files have now failed to stream for two weekends in a row. I’m paying $24.95/month, and I really only have the weekends available to spend time watching this stuff. Last weekend I was told:

Our location was down due to extreme weather conditions this past weekend that disrupted our servers for the Online Training.

Okay, but what’s their excuse for this (three-day) weekend?

Kelby Training didn’t voluntarily credit their customers for the downtime, which seems remarkable for a time-based service. I had to ask for a partial-month credit, which I did receive. It also seems odd that in the 21st century there isn’t someone available, at least on-call, to solve infrastructure problems like this on weekends. Even ten years ago we all knew how important it was to have someone available 24×7 for such incidents, and that was true even for websites and companies far smaller than Kelby Training. They should also have a Twitter feed, or at least an RSS feed, to which they post information about outages and expected resolution timeframes. Maybe there is such a thing, but I couldn’t find it. Oh, and while we’re at it, how about some social-networking and community features? There’s not even a forum where students can learn from one another or interact with the instructors. Very 20th century if you ask me.

Thanks to tips from @ScottKelby, I got a head start on how to shoot fireworks. Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 at 200mm f/16, ISO 200, bulb exposures from 2-4 seconds, and a very solid tripod. If only the KelbyTraining.com videos weren’t down for the second weekend in a row.

Three years ago The Conversations Network launched the PodCorps.org website, a place to match producers with audio and video stringers around the world. Nearly 1,000 stringers have joined PodCorps.org, but the website has not achieved the kind of critical mass required to make it a success in anyone’s book. We have therefore decided to close the PodCorps.org website as of July 5, 2010.

The reason we failed to reach that critical mass is rather straightforward: We are spread too thin among multiple projects and didn’t commit the resources required for PodCorps.org’s success. The Conversations Network has a very small budget and depends entirely on volunteers. And while many people supported the concept by registering on the website, we were not able to recruit a volunteer team to manage and promote PodCorps.org.

I want to personally thank everyone who registered for their participation and support of the PodCorps.org concept. I only wish we had the resources to fulfill our side of the bargain. The Conversations Network’s other projects (SpokenWord.org and our proprietary podcast channels) get all of our attention and are doing quite well, but we need to accept our limitations in order to ensure our successful projects continue without distraction.

MEDIAmobz: An Introduction

For those of you in the video world, I want to use this opportunity to introduce a somehwat different alternative to PodCorps.org. We have a long standing friendship with a for-profit company called MEDIAmobz. They have a network of producers that provide video production services for the business market via partners such as Business Wire and Cisco. As PodCorps.org is closing, we thought you might want to sign up with MEDIAmobz as a way to find video production jobs around the world.

Dave Toole, founder and CEO of MEDIAmobz passed along this note:

“Thanks for considering joining our producer community at MEDIAmobz. We provide you free tools to post your video reels and links to your work to help market your capabilities to the business market. We have provided dozens of clients turn key video solutions for business story telling. We do not charge clients to post jobs and only charge a small fee when they have agreed to hire a production resource. We hope that we are able to help provide an easier way for clients to connect with creative resources to help them tell their story. Please have a look around and let us know what we can do to help you in providing your services.”

Public Media Opportunities

For those of you interested in public radio or TV in the U.S., here are some additional related sites you should check out:

• Public Media Corps (PMC)
• Public Radio Exchange (PRX.org)
• Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)
• Transom.org

Over the past two months we’ve been discussing the future of SpokenWord.org with our advisors, directors and members. We now have a new plan for SpokenWord.org and we need your help.

The web is awash with audio and video. There are great programs out there, but they’re just too hard to separate from the noise. We created SpokenWord.org because we wanted to help people locate the best podcasts, videos and slideshows. We got the basics right — topics and collections — but our homepage in particular isn’t discriminating enough. Literally every five minutes we display the latest programs in each topic, but they’re not filtered. There’s little sense of what’s worth watching or listening to as opposed to just being “new”.

What’s missing is the human touch. For example, I’ve recently become obsessed with photography, and I’ve been looking everywhere for the best podcasts and videos to help me learn more. Along the way I’ve had to work my way through all sorts of junk in order to find the good stuff. If only there were a photography guru who would take the time to find the best podcasts and individual episodes for me. That would be awesome.

So that’s what we’re doing in SpokenWord.org 2.0. We’re building a team of expert curators, each with his or her own specialty. These curators will find the very best audio and video programs and use SpokenWord.org to present them to you. These curators and their collections will be the primary feature of our website.

Is there a topic you’re particularly passionate and knowledgeable about? Would you be willing to share your expertise by maintaining a curated list of feeds and episodes for SpokenWord.org? Would you like to become one of our curators?

There’s no monetary compensation for your effort, but I think you’ll be rewarded by the appreciation you receive and the credibility you’ll gain within your niche. We’re going to work hard to spread the word about SpokenWord.org and our curators, and I think being the SpokenWord.org curator for a particular topic will eventually carry some real weight.

We’re still early in the process of implementing the website features to support this new concept. In fact, the concept itself is still evolving. If you’re interested either in becoming a curator or just participating in the discussion of how our curation system will function, please join the brand-new Google Group dedicated to SpokenWord.org curation.

We’ll soon have a way for you to formally apply to become a curator, but for now, joining the discussion is the best way to get involved.

Before I could sell a bunch of old stuff on eBay, I first needed to buy some new camera gear (strobes, stands, umbrellas, etc.) to post some good photos. You know how this works: The gear I bought cost more than what I’ll get back from selling the old junk, and it will probably take up more space. That’s how geeks do spring cleaning.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve been a slacker when it comes to color calibration. (My monitor still isn’t calibrated, although next week a new X-Rite Eye-One i1 Display 2 will arrive to take care of that.) A few weeks ago I bought another X-Rite product: a ColorChecker Passport and I’ve been using it for simple white balance. It works great. Just use the white-balance eyedropper tool in Photoshop, Lightroom, etc., and you can solve most of your color temperature variations. Everything looked pretty good to me, so I didn’t give it much thought.

But yesterday I decided to take advantage of the real purpose of the ColorChecker Passport and I created Adobe DNG Profiles for each of my camera/lens combinations. (The rest of this post applies only to those who shoot in RAW format.) I even went so far as to create “dual illuminant” profiles based on two exposures with widely varying color-temperature sources. I didn’t really expect much benefit from all of this. It was just a way to waste an hour instead of working. I used X-Rite’s software to create the profiles and install them into Adobe Camera Raw so they’re available to Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3.

Last night I sat down to see how these profiles might affect some of my old photos. I was blown away by the results. I expected very subtle changes. How far off could my lenses and cameras’ sensors really be? I’ve always adjusted color, exposure, contrast, etc., to give me the results I wanted. I figured this might just make it a little easier. But the results were dramatic. The colors in many shots became much more vivid without introducing unwanted saturation or contrast.

Unlike the use of a neutral gray card for setting white balance, using a DNG profile doesn’t require you to do anything at the time you shoot. Once you’ve created profiles for your gear, you apply them in Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom 3 — all in post-production. You can still use the ColorChecker Passport during your sessions to correct for white balance, but a single profile works across all sessions and lighting conditions.

And this is where I had my breakthrough. The DNG profiles are separate from white balance. I apply the profiles when I import my photos into Lightroom. Then I set the white balance, color temp, etc. The DNG profiles compensate for variations in the equipment, which don’t change due to lighting conditions from one session to the next. It’s the white balance adjustment that corrects for the color temperature of the illumination at the time of exposure. You might think that you can use color temp and tint adjustments to compensate for your sensors and lenses, but I learned you really can’t.

You can create new DNG profiles for extreme lighting conditions at the time of exposure, but you won’t need to do this under most circumstances. Invest an hour or two to create good dual-illuminant profiles once and use them forever. (I used a Nikon SB-900 strobe with and without a TN-A1 (full CTO tungsten orange) filter for my two exposures.) The only cost is a ColorChecker Passport: $99 at places like Amazon.com. It’s already improved my photos more than any other $100 investment.

Today we held our annual meeting of the board of directors of The Conversations Network, during which we elected two new directors: Hugh McGuire and Rashmi Sinha. They join the five current directors, all of whom are continuing in that role for another year: Brian Gruber, Jake Shapiro, Jon Udell, David Weinberger and me. Thanks to all of them for their invaluable advice. Everyone needs help, and I’ve got the best.

It’s sorta like being a TWiT. Today I had the pleasure of being a guest on This Week in Photography. The podcast should be available there in a day or two.

A few weeks ago I offered to share my experiences from our November Kenyan photo safari, and the TWiP team decided to make an entire episode on the topic. In addition to host Frederick Van Johnson, the show included two folks who are not only much better photographers than I am, but who also spend an incredible amount of time in Africa: PixelCorps’ Alex Lindsay and photo-safari leader Andy Biggs. It was humbling and flattering to be on the same show with these guys.

Knowing that the show notes would include a link to my blog, I decided to update my SmugMug gallery page. My work can’t touch Frederick, Alex or Andy, but I’m learning!

I didn’t really forget, but I’ve been very busy and am just now catching up. Nine days ago (June 5) was the seventh birthday of IT Conversations, still the longest running podcast in existence. So Happy Late Birthday to ITC, The Conversations Network, our members, major supporters and TeamITC, the wonderful folks you never hear about that bring you a new program more often than every day of the week.

I’ve been on Maui for nearly two weeks shooting photos and doing some real work in my spare time. I’ve uploaded some of the images of Ka’anapali Beach, Iao Valley and Haleakalah crater to Flickr. But check out these stunning HDR images by Scott Loftesness from his day trip to Yosemite.

This weekend is the Wa’a Kiakahi festival of Hawaiian sailing canoes, and I’ll have another Flicker set of photos from that event posted soon.

I spent most of Saturday with my old friend, Scott Loftesness, walking and shooting the grounds of Maker Faire 2010 in San Mateo. We didn’t settle the Canon/Nikon argument, but we did spend most of our time with our respective 70-200mm lenses. Scott’s on his 5D MKII and mine on my D90.

It’s interesting to compare the results in our Flickr sets: Scott’s and mine. Not so much to compare cameras, but rather interpretations. Neither Scott nor I really knew what the other was shooting, and certainly not the composition of one another’s individual shots. Seeing how someone else visualizes the exact same subjects is a great way to critique your own interpretations. A lot of improving one’s photography (for me, at least) is working to get beyond capturing the obvious quick snapshot and instead learning to experiment with position, angle, light, depth-of-field and exposure. Looking at Scott’s photos helps me see ways in which I’m still stuck in the snapshot paradigm.

IT Conversations will be seven years old in three weeks, and as often happens at this time of year I find myself taking a step back from the day-to-day issues surrounding The Conversations Network to try and see the big picture. Where are we and where are we going?

I’ve published the Annual Report and assimilated the results from our annual survey of members as I do every year, but those only address the mostly tactical issues (How well are we doing what we’re already doing?) as opposed to the more strategic ones (What should we be doing?).

This time around I’m going to go through the process more publicly than usual, partly because blogging about it helps me organize my thoughts, but mostly because I want to get input from as many people as possible.

When I started IT Conversations in 2003 virtually no one else was posting free audio recordings of conferences, events and interviews. It was relatively hard to do, so I had to invent many of the tools, processes and even a suitable content-management system for high-volume audio post-production. Over the years this became known as podcasting and hundreds of thousands of people learned how to do it.

Two years ago with help from our Boards of Advisors and Directors I realized that podcasting and video had become so easy and ubiquitous that the needs of the larger community had shifted from “How do you do it?” to “How do you find it?” The discussions that followed led to the creation of SpokenWord.org, our site for finding and sharing audio and video podcasts.

But while SpokenWord.org now has metadata for over 640,000 audio and video programs from nearly 7,500 RSS feeds, it hasn’t really caught on in the way that IT Conversations did in those early years. Ask most geeks, and they’ve probably heard of IT Conversations. But aside from our 4,000+ registered members, virtually no on has ever heard of SpokenWord.org. Sure, we haven’t done much to promote it, but neither did we do so for IT Conversations. SpokenWord.org just isn’t solving a big enough problem for enough people to make it worth our user’s time and effort to tell someone else about it.

Taking stock, what are our assets and our strengths?

1. We have an excellent team of 35 (active) part-time writers, producers and audio engineers who create IT Conversations, Social Innovation Conversations and CHI Conversations, and good processes for recruiting, training and management.
2. We have excellent processes and technology for audio post-production, task allocation, content management and automated show assembly.
3. We have a good metadata directory for audio/video programs and feeds with personal-collection features (SpokenWord.org).
4. We have an archive of 2,500 of our own programs.
5. We do this all for less than $35,000 per year.

And weaknesses?

1. The growth of podcasting (not just ours) is flat.
2. SpokenWord.org has a very small user base and in it’s current form isn’t solving any big problems.

Don’t get me wrong. The Conversations Network’s channels are the best podcasts on their topics and SpokenWord.org is a terrific resource for those who do use it. But I believe we can (and should) do a lot more with what we have.

The Conversations Network is a 501(c)3 non-profit, which implies a mission to benefit the public. So the question to you (staff, listeners, members and readers) is: What should we do next to continue that mission? I’ve got my own ideas, but I want to hear from you first.

What do you do with all your junk? I don’t mean the stuff that’s really worth something. I’m talking about things you’ve accumulated that aren’t individually what it would cost to sell them on eBay and ship them. Things like old cassette players, power adaptors for you-can’t-remember-what, ear buds from long-dead iPods, etc. Like you, I’ve got a bundle of this junk, and I need to get rid of it — to make room for more junk. But I don’t want to just throw it into the garbage and have it end up in a landfill. I’d rather give it to someone else who will throw it into their garbage and have it end up in a landfill.

Is there a website for this or a way to sell it on eBay? I’m happy to photograph and inventory it, but I need to sell it in large tranches — sorta like junk bonds. Got any ideas?

In the ’60s and ’70s I was a fairly serious although amateur photographer. Then, for nearly three decades, I just stopped. I was going to write “I don’t know why” but the dates correspond to the years during which I started and ran a software company. I guess I was just too busy working. During those years, my trusty Nikon F gathered dust and any pictures I took were with the point-and-shoot cameras (film and then digital) I bought for my wife.

But in 2008 we started to prepare for a trip to Kenya, and I got back into it. Santa Claus brought me a Nikon D90, so I had ten months to learn how to use it before the Africa trip. I read all I could about the current crop of lenses and ended up renting a few from BorrowLenses.com, an excellent service. In the six months since returning from Kenya, I’ve been taking a lot of pictures, learning more and more about Lightroom 2 and Photoshop and buying more lenses and other gadgets, new and used. The cost of those lenses now dwarfs what Santa spent for that D90 body, but I really like my current collection:

• Nikkor 18-200m f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR (the upgraded kit lens for the D90)
• Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF (a great portrait and general-purpose lens, which is like a 75mm on a full-frame camera)
• Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 DC HSM (to cover the wide-angle end of the spectrum)
• Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G AF-S ED VR Micro (a terrific 1:1 macro lens, also good for portraits)
• Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G AF-S ED VR II (cost a bundle, but an amazing lens)

No longer do I have any excuses for not having great photos. Now I’ve got to learn to live up to the quality of the glass.

Here’s a post that will be of interest only to that small percentage of Blogarithms readers who are struggling with character-encoding issues in the world of PHP/MySQL. But to those of you who fall into that category, this may be helpful. In the process of preparing for the launch of our first series in French, I’ve been working my way through this issue. Although we haven’t tested everything and I expect there will be bugs, here’s what I’ve learned/decided so far.

• We store everything in the CMS database as utf-8.
• Nearly all CMS strings are stored in the database as simple utf-8 without HTML entity encoding. HTML is not allowed in most CMS fields.
• One can check MySQL’s charset at its phpMyAdmin main page: /main.php
• Our Long Description field (shows.description) is the one CMS field that has special handling:
  • Many HTML elements are allowed in this field.
  • The TinyMCE editor enforces the HTML elements rules, eliminating those that are not allowed.
  • The TinyMCE editor is configured to HTML encode <,> and & on output. The encoding is invisible unless the user activates HTML mode.
  • All characters are still utf-8 encoded as elsewhere.
• All HTTP responses include a Content-Type header specifying utf-8 character encoding. (”AddDefaultCharset utf-8″ in http.conf.)

       Content-Type text/html; charset=utf-8

• In generated RSS feeds all strings are HTML entity encoded (<>& only) during feed generation.
• We also convert various strange characters such as those that may have been copied/pasted from a Microsoft Word document. Current such transformations include
  • slanted single and double quotes
  • various em and long dashes
• All generated RSS feeds use utf-8 character encoding:

       <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?>

• All HTML pages use utf-8 character encoding:

       <head>
          <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
                content="text/html;
                charset=utf-8" />

• Immediately after opening a database connection and before any other query is performed, the following query is run to ensure that MySQL performs no character-set transformations:

       SET character_set_results = 'utf8',
           character_set_client = 'utf8',
           character_set_connection = 'utf8',
           character_set_database = 'utf8',
           character_set_server = 'utf8';

• All form elements are (or at least should be) written as follows. It’s not clear what a browser will do with this, for example if the user pastes into an <input> field text that has been copied from a Microsoft Word document with non-utf-8 encodings.

       <form accept-charset='utf-8'...

• All strings in ID3 frames use iso/iec 8859-1 character encoding and hence are limited to that character set. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1.)

More our 2010 survey of registered members of The Conversations Network:

Here’s how many said they found features “somewhat” or “very” valuable:

• Our 5-star ratings system: 67% (65% last year)
• Personal recommendations: 58% (60%)
• The Conversations Network Newsletter: 55% (615)
• Personal Playlists: 42% (49%)

When we asked what features were missing from the websites, the most-common answers were suggestions to improve the usability and navigation.

When asked about how we currently announce new shows on Twitter, 36% said “Don’t change anything” while 60% said “I really don’t care!”

Continuing the results of The Conversations Network’s 2010 annual survey…

CHI Conversations (our newest channel):

• Didn’t know about it: 58%
• Never listen: 27%
• Listen occasionally, often or regularly: 15%

How did you discover CHI Conversations?

• Another podcast: 29%
• Search engine: 16%
• Link from another web site: 13%

Satisfaction was consistently “good” (as opposed to “poor” or “excellent”) for  content quality, audio quality, sophistication, diversity and overall.

26% visit the CHI Conversations website at least monthly.

18% subscribe to the channel’s RSS feed.