I’ve gotten this email from more than one person in the past. If any friend asks for cash via email, please make sure you talk to them directly on the phone before you even think about helping them. Usually, it means that their email account has been compromised, so they should also immediately change all of their passwords.

Hello

I’m sorry you’re getting the mail from me at this Point in time,my family and I came down here to Manila(Philippines), for a short vacation unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel we stayed,all cash credit cards and cell were stolen off but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.

I have been to the embassy and the Police here but they’re not helping issues at all and our flight leaves pretty soon from now but we’re having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let us leave until we settle the bills.Please be so kind to reply back so I can tell you what to do and how to get some cash to us.

I’m freaked out at the moment

Here’s a helpful snopes article that talks about this scam. Also, all the telltale signs of scam from non-native English speakers are there: poor grammar, arbitrarily capitalized words, missing spaces, and the use of the word, “kind” or “kindly.”

In older versions of Mac OS X, you could set your PATH variable in terminal by adding to your .profile in your home directory. Recently, a bunch of my scripts started to fail because I use a lot of tools that are located in /opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin, and those paths were no longer in my PATH environment variable.

As of the latest updates to OS X 10.8.3 (Build 12D78), Terminal.app no longer seems to parse .profile when it starts up. What works, now, is to edit “/etc/paths”.

I just tested it, and it works.

Keri Wilk and I have started a new site called Rotorpixel. We are both relatively-new in the RC multi-rotor aircraft hobby, but finally feel like we have amassed enough knowledge to start to share with others, publicly. Both of us will be posting about our journey, and Keri will be designing, fabricating, and selling multi-rotor imaging accessories like gimbals. My writing will be found at my Rotorpixel blog.

Timelapse video of the Northern Lights / Aurora Borealis taken during the evenings of March 18 and 19, 2013. Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 14mm f/2.8L USM II lens. Shutter speeds from 5s to 15s at ISOs between 2500 and 6400. Music courtesy mobygratis.com.

Special thanks to Mike Knott for his company, and to Ronn Murray, Casey Thompson and Marketa Stanczykova Murray for their incredible, local hospitality!

I went on a fantastic whirlwind of a photography trip to Death Valley at the end of January, 2013, with my friend, Dan Kitchens (of Kozyndan). We spent 2.5 days seeing all of the big sites. I’m an ocean and city person, so I was fascinated and took pictures of pretty much everything. Special thanks to everyone who gave me advice before and during the trip: Alice Kao, Andy Biggs, Phil Colla, Eric Hanauer, Curtis Leo, Mark Braden, James Moskito, Dave Hunsinger, Angela Filose, Merlin W. Phillips Jr., Kelly Raymond Bracken, George Vincent, Jane Call, John Moore, and Phil Sokol. Thanks also to Sue Chen for the use of her car and home, and to Dan Kitchens for his company and ability to act as a catalyst for great imagery.

Let’s say you want to share some assets you have on Dropbox with a friend. Easy, right? You just “Share This Folder” to your friend’s email address.

“Share Link” and “Share This Folder” are very different

If your goal is to get the file(s) to your friend—and not collaborate on a project together—”Share This Folder” is probably not be the best way to do it. (read more »)

If Safari won’t save or print PDFs (but views them without any problems), you probably have an Adobe PDF plug-in installed. In Safari, go to Help->Installed Plug-ins and do a search for “PDF.” If you have anything with “PDF” in it other than “WebKit built-in PDF,” that is probably the culprit.

On my computer, the problem was “AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin”. To remove it, I quit Safari, did a Spotlight search (Command-Option space) for that file name, and then dragged it to the trash. When I restarted Safari, I could print and save PDFs again. You can also manually find the plugins by going to the system “Library” folder (the one at the root of your hard disk, not in your user folder) and looking in the “Internet Plug-Ins” folder.

I’m on OS X 10.8.2, running Safari 6.0.2 (8536.26.17).

Last year, I watched Craig Peters, a SVP at Getty Images, nearly get booed off of the stage during his talk at Luminance 2012. He said that Getty was focused on creating the best return for their stock holders, and most photographers I spoke to after the talk were really upset at some of the numbers Peters claimed during the talk, which they believed to be fabrications.

On December 6, Google Drive announced that “5,000 new photos of nature, weather, animals, sports, food, education, technology, music and 8 other categories are now available for your use in Docs, Sheets, and Slides.” A couple weeks ago, an iStockphoto forum post started an avalanche of negative articles after an iStockphoto contributor said that he received $12 for the Google Drive platform licensing deal mentioned in the announcement.

Photographers are hoping that Getty, who owns iStockphoto, and Google release full details about what is actually going on, but photographers are already starting to remove pictures from iStockphoto, in protest. Personally, I’m glad that I never licensed my pictures through Getty. Don’t get me wrong—I give away plenty of pictures to NGOs that I support; licensing your pictures for free is something only you can decide you want to do.

My Flickr pictures that Getty editors are interested in licensing

If you don’t want to support Getty and are a Flickr user, you can opt out from the entire process by logging in to Flickr, going to your account’s “Privacy & Permissions” page, and changing the settings for “Make your photos eligible for invitation by Getty Images?” to “No thanks…”.

Select “No thanks” at the “Eligibility for Getty Images invitations” page to opt out

I spend way too much time thinking about data storage and backup. I’ve been a professional photographer for nearly 10 years, and have accumulated over 10 terabytes of pictures, video, and project data. I have finally implemented a storage and backup scheme that I’m happy with. It took a long time to set up, but I have direct access to all of my media now, and have comfort in knowing that it is securely backed up. (read more »)

In September, I went to New York to give a talk at Luminance, a fantastic event organized by Photoshelter to celebrate and explore the intersection of business, technology, culture and photography. The talks were almost all really interesting, and the discussions that happened in the break area between the talks were equally as interesting. I hope Photoshelter puts on another event next year. If you’re interested, please let them know!

Also, Photoshelter is running a Lytro camera giveaway through the end of November. All you have to do is sign up for their newsletter to be in the running to receive an 8GB Graphite Lytro camera.

My ElevationDock is now modified to support an iPhone 5, using Mike Hellers’ 3D model and my own Lightning cable. I was in Carmel this morning to give a talk and stopped by afterwards to see Mike and Jody Elliot of XIT404, who were gracious enough to print me one of the adapters.

The printed part required the use of a dremel to install properly, and because it isn’t at an angle like the Lightning adapter ElevationLabs will be shipping soon, the iPhone 5 sits a bit high and doesn’t rest against the back of the dock.

The machined ElevationLabs part is $15 plus shipping and is probably better, but if you have access to a 3D printer and are OK with the drawbacks, you can do the mod yourself.

Photo: Dan Burkholder

I will be on a panel about the future of photography at the Center of Photography Art in Carmel, California, at 10am on Sunday, November 4, 2012. More information at Exposure: A Weekend of Workshops, or on the flyer. Hope to see you there!

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-10-08. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-10-01. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-09-24. (read more »)

Today, the general manager of a camera store in Thailand rudely interrupted me as I was introducing the Lytro camera to a few of our Photokina photo walk attendees. He literally walked in between me and the group; the very first thing he asked was, “Where is your manager?” I assume he said this because he is an older Asian guy and I look like a young-ish Asian guy. He must be very traditional. I can respect experience and wisdom, but the automatic assumption of hierarchy due to age is barbaric. Also, I’m American, and I am just not into that sort of implicit relationship (Ren, the founder of Lytro, is even younger than I am). After the rude introduction, he proceeded to brag about himself for a few minutes, making a few demands. I won’t go into the details.

I did my duty and referred him to our sales team, but I can’t say that I was overly enthusiastic in my recommendation to follow up.

The night I arrived in Cologne, I woke up at 3am to get on a Skype call to co-host This Week in Photo with Frederick Van Johnson, Nicole Young, and Steve Simon. I really enjoyed getting to chat with them about the photography news of the week!

I listen to TWiP every week during my commute from San Francisco to Lytro HQ in Mountain View. If you are interested in photography, I highly recommend subscribing to the podcast.

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-09-17. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-09-10. (read more »)

On August 28, 2012, I was featured in an OnAir (live) Google Hangout series called Life Through the Lens, which was described to me as “sort of like ‘The View’, but for photography.” I really enjoyed the interview—I got to blather on about some of my favorite pictures for over an hour.