Places of Memory

Coincidences are an amazing thing, not unlike memories, they are pretty must impossible to design or encapsulate. They just happen through some deep hidden connection in your mind. I have been thinking  bit about memory and I happened upon an exhibition of Angela Grauerholz’s Photos at at RIC in Toronto. Her “almost retrospective” focusing on an ongoing theme of hers, she is interested in the French concept of ”Lieux de Memoire” (sites or places of memory). Her take is this is the very opposite of Henri Cartier Bresson’s “decisive moment”, which is more a coming together or a special geometry, of people, of places and light, a serendipity, perhaps a coincidence. Both of these concepts that need a mind to expose them but they are perhaps opposites.

 

One piece I particular liked was her cabinette memoire, which was a large box like construction, Something that you might find in an older Public Library or Museum, wonderful cabinetry. On the top where a number of slide out panels. Each panel looked like a conventional box framed print (without a matte). However each had two sides and another print on the reverse side. The prints showing opposites themes, looking one way may be a door of window looking in. or interior, looking the other was the door of window framing the view outside or an exterior view.

 

A Beautiful Dawn and being Accustomed to My Camera

Even though I was still half asleep and had not put in my contact lenses, I couldn't help but notice the magnificent sunrise. So I quickly grabbed my camera, despite being dark and not being able to see clearly I was able to get the camera in Exposure Priority and dial up what I thought might have been a higher ISO (I got both right) But I could tell the exposure would be way to slow (ie 1/4 second) to be hand held (click on the image on the right to see how blurry the resulting photo turned out). I didn’t even check the screen and cranked the aperture wheel down a few notches (not knowing or being able to see). These sounded better, possible quick enough, and I took a couple of overlapping images to make a panorama..

The image above is just a quick collage created with picasa. I think my beloved Pentax has done a great job even though I wasn’t able to visually check the setting or button I was pressing. Naturally I could see enough where to point the camera in the right direct and could hear the autofocus tracking my lens back and forth.
This story continue (I took a few sets of bracketed), after using my muscle  memory to select my user programmed mode on the main dial (which is preprogramed to create a series of EV values)

I had breakfast and put my lenses in, upload the photos and like the initial pano set. So I have taken it though Autostitch and used Perfect Enhance to hold down the digital noise.

The exercise of using your camera without looking at the dials, and just taking the picture is highly recommended. (Even in the Dark)

The strange case of transparency & memory

After taking up the offer to download perfect effects 8, which is over now by the way, I was puzzled by the fact that when I ran the stand alone browser on my computers (I tried it out on two separate computers) would end up hanging as I clicked on a photo in the browser. Looking around the install notes and the manual I saw a warning for windows users about the graphic card drivers and memory (the minimum is stated as OpenGL 2.0 compatible video card with 256 MB dedicated video RAM, 1280x720 resolution) . BUT my drivers where up to date and I had exactly the required dedicated graphics memory on one computer and considerably more on the other. Some photography related forums have similar posts from several other frustrated OnOne window's user.  The link through lightroom worked fine, so I just had to stop using the standalone version.

I was checking out some diagnostics about system tune up stuff that HP provides on my desktop computer and one item grabbed my interest it related to the screen theme and it reported that the theme I was using, the Aero style, was using its full quota of memory and my system might be faster if I just used the Windows 7 Basic theme. Ok it made a very slight, perhaps imperceptible improvememt, but only if I was looking, to browsing speed and starting up new windows. The most obvious thing Areo does is give you transparent edges on your window as if you are looking through a glass pane. It looks nice but is just cosmetic, so it didn’t bother me having it turned off. You can find where to change the screen themes by clicking on your screen background and selecting personalize, you’ll have to scroll down a bit to find Windows 7 Basic theme. The interesting outcome is the edges of my panes are still translucent?

Graphics memory! I realized this might be the missing issue for running Photo Effects 8 in standalone mode. AND it was!

So if you have a windows PC and are having problems with Perfect Effects “freezing”and “hanging” your system, try changing the screen theme, it worked for me.

Getting Satisfaction ...or Ignored?

I hope Adobe know they really aren't helping me to stay loyal. I have put the creative cloud frustration behind me, by not using it! However I am still interested in upgrading to Lightroom 5, specifically I do like the new radial filter also the healing brush and upright are nice improvements, but the beta versions I have tried out so far (LR5beta, 5.1beta & 5.2beta) all seem to be a bit too sluggish and all have some inconsistent issues (I assumed these were bugs and would get fixed, so I am waiting for the bug free version to purchase). I have downloaded and successfully installed lr5.3 beta anticipating good things. Yet I can still see the sluggishness (at least on my windows 7, 64 bit PC with 4 GB RAM) compared with LR 4.4 on the same machine. However I have now noticed significant performance deterioration on lr5.3 when I leave it open while working on other programs, (eg word & powerpoint) and/or having the computer hibernate. Reopening lr5.3 is then incredibly slow and lots of disc activity. I wonder if this is memory leakage and just classic virtual memory disk thrashing? I have to exit lightroom and restart it to get decent response and occasionally rebooting the computer is required. So I'm not encouraged to upgrade just yet.

So I decided to put my observations on the Adobe user forums, and see if other are seeing the same issues. Well the old forums don't seem to exist and I was guided into community powered support (aka getsatisfaction.com) so I pressed on and tried to post my query. That wasn't so easy and involved not only supplying my adobe log in details but also signing up for a getsatisfaction account as a member of the photoshop family. I seemed to be going around in circles. However the code to authenticate my email address for getsatisfaction didn’t arrive until a day later, so I couldn't do that at the time. Also I was guided to look for similar posts in the forums (and there are actually a lot about sluggish performance) before mine was accepted as something different, new and accepted as a new post. I did get a link to my post via an email BUT if I try to find it in the forum menus I can't, so I'm guessing others won't either. I suspect my observation are just going to be ignored, such is life I guess.

I also made an effort to check that I was part of the "improve adobe products program", which supposedly collects anonymous data on how lightroom is used and it seems adobe does realise I already was registered. This is another of those worrying things with benign sounding names where you provide information but never actually see any results or feedback. A thank you for participating and this is a summary of what we found would be nice.


I am still interested if others have seen this behaviour, but I'm not so confident getsatisfaction photoshop family is anything more than deflecting support rather than supplying it. The emperor’s new clothes in a cloud based crowd sourcing new fabric.