Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-03-12. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-03-12. (read more »)

Earlier this month, Adobe announced that there would be three upcoming improvements to the DNG camera raw “standard” that would improve performance. I’ve not historically converted my RAW files to DNG, but performance improvements would certainly be a big factor in a decision to move to that workflow.

I don’t know whether any of the announced improvements have actually made it into Adobe Lightroom 4, but I the upgrade from version 3 to 4 last night ($79), converted some files to DNG, and ran tests. Navigation and editing was as sluggish as ever on my 12-core Mac Pro (with plenty of RAM)—I couldn’t tell if there were improvements when working with DNGs. Then, I did some exports to 1920-pixel JPG files:

Test 1: 28 ARW raw files from Sony NEX-5N
ARW->JPG, 2010 Process: 52 seconds
[ARW/DNG]->JPG, 2010 Process: 40 seconds
DNG export 23% faster

Test 2: 28 CR2 raw files from Canon 7D
CR2->JPG, 2012 Process: 62 seconds
[CR2/DNG]->JPG, 2012 Process: 43 seconds
DNG export 30.6% faster

Here’s the CPU graph for the export process. You can see the clear improvement in CPU utilization in the DNG export.

CR2->JPG export (green), DNG->JPG export (orange)
24 virtual cores in 12-core Mac Pro

It does seem that there are real reasons to convert raw files to Adobe’s DNG raw format. If Adobe continues to improve DNG performance, I’ll likely move my workflow over to DNG conversion upon import.

I love Lightroom—it is my photo organization and processing app of choice—but in general, Adobe Lightroom 4 feels sluggish, and it took as many as 6 seconds to move between Library and Develop modes (inconsistent, presumably due to caching). No interface move should take 6 seconds on this computer. I hope there is a performance update in the near future that deals with the poor performance.¹

It is really exciting to be able to post pictures from the Lytro camera, now. :) I posted 50 pictures of Schrep and Erin’s cats…

… and an assorted gallery from the past 10 months, including pictures of Coco Rocha from our photo shoot back in July of 2011.

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-03-05. (read more »)

This was my first motion dolly timelapse attempt. We learned a lot that night; somehow, multiple failures still resulted in a video! Thanks to Jody Elliott for loaning me her 1Ds Mark III for the shoot and to Jason Bradley for shooting with me and hauling the gear down from the Bay Area.

Lytro light field cameras have reached the real world. :)

Congratulations, Lytro team!

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-02-27. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-02-20. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-02-13. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-02-06. (read more »)

Hello, everyone. I’m back from the remote Eastern Fields of Papua New Guinea. We only had 6 days out there because two strong tropical storms moved into the area, but the diving was good (until we moved back to the coast).

My 4-week cough turned into a 6-week cough, so I only did 3-4 dives in the Eastern Fields. It was extremely frustrating, but I enjoyed being out on the ocean with a great group of people. Here’s the video slideshow I made for the group:

Music selection by kozyndan. End credits by me and Dan.

Tony Wu (my co-trip leader) has posted a fantastic write-up of the trip, and a Wetpixel thread is tracking more pictures and experiences.

As always, you can see the expeditions we run over at Wetpixel: http://wetpixel.com/expeditions

I’m back from Papua New Guinea, and finally downloaded and watched “All for a Bowl of Soup,” an episode of Dan Rather Reports which aired Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 8pm ET on HDNet (strangely, I had to watch iTunes’ SD version of “HD”Net).

“All for a Bowl of Soup” is the most no-nonsense piece I’ve seen about the global shark finning problem. It combines facts with awe-inspiring footage of thousands of shark fins being pulled into a single fisheries facility in a single day.

The show features my friend, Shawn Heinrichs, and a significant amount of his investigative footage showing huge numbers of shark fins in processing facilities, as well as footage of a live, finned shark suffocating to death. It also includes about a minute of my shark footage shot in the wild.

“All for a Bowl of Soup” hatched as a plan between me and Derek Reich, a freelance cameraman who does a lot of work with HDNet. We had been talking about it for awhile, but finally hashed out a proposal when we happened to both be stranded in New York during Hurricane Irene last year.

If you have half an hour to spare, please download and watch “All for a Bowl of Soup” from iTunes. If you are moved by the piece, please donate to Shark Savers—my conservation organization of choice—or to your chosen shark conservation organization, and spread the word!¹

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-01-23. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-01-16. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-01-09. (read more »)

This online journal has been running since September of 1999. I refuse to call it a “blog” because it was around long before blogs were invented the common name for such things.

On December 8, 2001, I set up Greymatter and started using it to post online journal entries. On February 9, 2003, I migrated to Cafelog b2, which apparently made me quite happy. On January 18, 2006, I migrated from b2 to Wordpress, which was quite a bit of work.

Here is a table showing posting and commenting activity:¹

In the last couple of years, Twitter and Facebook (and now, Google+) have caused me to post here less and less frequently. I think I’m going to redesign echeng.com to be more of a hub for my photography work sometime during this coming year. This particular design here at echeng.com has been in place since February of 2003—I can’t believe it has lasted this long!

I went on a fun photowalk with Robert Scoble last Tuesday, where we gave him a chance to play with a pre-production Lytro Light Field Camera. Scoble posted a thoughtful summary of the photowalk and included a video interview of me, which you can see here in this post.

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-01-02. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2011-12-26. (read more »)