The Luminous Landscape is one of the sites I watch on a daily basis. Micheal Reichmann always has great articles on photography as well as great guest essay’s.
Today’s guest is Art Wolfe. Most of the work we see from Art and all other photographers is the final product, the end result of sometimes lots and lots of planning, time, patience and luck. The essay Art provided gives a glimpse into what it takes to get to a great shot and what some of the hundreds of thousands of images professional photographers capture that usually never see the light of day.
Art Wolfe Essay at The Luminous Landscape: Night Fisherman
Digital Photography, Miscellaneous
It’s funny how seemingly random events can suddenly be tied together.
I was having our carpets cleaned a couple of days ago. Not big deal, it had been a year. With two kids, two adults, two cats and a dog, the carpets needed cleaning. I hired Monarch Cleaning. I met them in a BNI group and they do a great job. The cleaner showed up and started working.
I knew one of our cats would not like the cleaner and his machine doing it’s job. So when he came too close to her hide out she ran downstairs. I saw her tear through our family room, and then I lost track of her. After a few minutes I decided I had better find out where she went.
She does like to get up on top of our kitchen cabinets, after jumping on our counter and then our refrigerator. This time she wasn’t on the cabinets. She decided that the space between the refrigerator and the cabinets was a better place to hide.
Being 5′ 10″ I am not able to see the top of the refrigerator without standing on tippy-toes. When I did this I saw the cat hiding from the carpet cleaner. What I also saw was 4 years of dust accumulation.
After the carpet cleaner completed his job, very nicely thank you, the cat came down from her hiding place and I got busy cleaning the refrigerator. Since there was not a lot of room above the refrigerator to get in and clean I had to pull it out. No problem, it’s on wheels. Hmmm…should they be making a crunching sound when I pull it out?
Turns out there was more than just dust accumulation. Apparently kids getting their own water from the door, along with the unavoidable dropped food can cause an accumulation of “stuff” just under the base of the refrigerator, just out of sight.
Thankfully I was already in a cleaning mood so the mop came out too. I guess I should write a thank you note to the carpet cleaners, otherwise I don’t know how long that would have gone unnoticed.
Miscellaneous
Standards, as in general rules to follow, are all around us. From the way we print an address on an envelope, to the qwerty layout of the keyboard I’m typing on, to the layout of the gas and brake pedals in our car. Mess with standards and things get harder to use.
What brought this to my mind is a recent quest to provide my children with entertainment in the back seat of our car on an upcoming trip. Yep, an in-car video system. I checked out screens mounted in the headrests, on the ceiling with drop-down screens and portable systems that attach to the headrests but are removable.
A Seemingly Simple Goal
My goal was to have a system that wasn’t DVD dependent. Burning DVD’s is a slow and painful process on my system, and having to carry around a stack of DVD’s just doesn’t seem necessary with current MP3/Video systems like the iPod.
I found a two-screen portable DVD system that has a good headrest mount and has an A/V input plug, the Philips PET708. Reasonably priced at Target. Then the decision on what MP3/Video player to drive it. The choice are many these days: iPod Touch, iPod Classic, Zune, Creative Zen W and other choice from sources like iRiver.
I almost went with the iPod Classic, not wanting to shell out for the new Touch, but I ended up with a 30 GB Zune.
Oh The Joy
Now the fun part…getting them to talk to each other. The Zune has A/V out capability through a 3mm A/V jack. I looked at the Zune website and saw what look like standard composite video cables (yellow for video, red for audio right, and white for audio left, with a 4 band 3mm jack). I had two already, one from the DVD system, and one from a camcorder. I tried using both of them to get video out from the Zune. No luck.
After a trip to Radio Shack I had another, higher quality, cable to try. I went next door to Target to test it out since the input jacks on my own TV are tucked far behind a large and heavy set. I ended up with only garbled video out with one of the cables.
Once I got back home I had the bright idea of switching the plugs going into the TV to see what would happen. Turns out the Zune was sending video signal out the Audio Right jack of my cable (at least for two of them, the third didn’t get me anything).
How It All Mapped Out
Then I sat down with a voltage meter and mapped out the various connections on the jack to the audio and video plugs. Turns out the two cables that worked were both wired the same (and gave me video out on the audio right jack). The third cable’s ground was in the wrong place, but I’m sure it worked for my camcorder.
So is there a standard layout for these types of cables? I surely don’t know but I assumed there would be, and the 3 systems I was working with (DVD Player, Camcorder and Zune) didn’t follow the same rules.
What should have been a a quick and easy interaction between video devices has turned into a time-wasting excercise in futility.
Worst of all instead of being able to go to a Radio Shack or Target and get a standard cable I had to order the Zune compatible A/V connection cable, and I had to order another A/V connection cable for the DVD system so I can get them to talk to each other. It will still require another trip to Radio Shack to by a coupler for the cables, but at least they can’t screw with that.
I guess Microsoft and Philips got a little more money out of me this time, but this little experience will be hanging around my brain for a while.
Miscellaneous
