When a mobile phone camera used in between sips of a latte does not indicate a sufficient dedication to the craft of photography, one may wish to emulate Aaron Gustafson. He has published a series of photos taken with a head-mounted 4×5″ film camera while skydiving. Check out the guy’s Web site (the HTML design is so advanced it doesn’t work with Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer) or this Youtube video.
[For young readers: 4×5″ sheet film was the standard negative size for high quality photography from just after World War II until the advent of the digital age. It was typically used in a view camera, equipped with a bellows and a dark cloth. Each sheet of film was developed individually in a tank. More: see the film chapter of my online photography textbook.]
Interesting. I’ve done over a thousand freefall photography jumps(mid 90’s handycam and Nikon 2002) never seen anyone intentionally take freefall pictures without anyone in them. Not filming people in freefall goes against ‘mutual appreciation’ which is a core component of skydiving.
Heaviest cameras I’ve heard of being jumped helmet mounted are 70lb movie cameras- done very carefully and not without a bit of extra risk.
Since you seem to take such delight in pointing out the (very rare) shortcomings that befall Mac OS X, I can’t resist pointing out that in this case, this web sight works great in Safari on a Mac. Really Philip, take an honest, unbiased look at the Mac — it really is far superior to any Wintel system on the planet.
Thanks, Joe. Perhaps the HTML monkey designed it on a Macintosh and, when it worked in Safari, decided to ship it without testing it on the other 95 percent of the world’s computers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems ). For a publisher, I’m not sure that the ability to make incompatible Web sites is a great argument for designing and developing using a Macintosh.The average advertising-supported site would not be happy with a 95 percent reduction in readership.
As for the rarity of the shortcomings of the Mac OS X, I have found that nearly every time I’ve tried to use a Macintosh for anything other than reading email, it has proven inadequate. On my last visit to my cousin’s house in Oakland, the Macintosh could not deal conveniently with the Flip video camera. On the previous visit, I struggled to assist my cousin with an iMovie project that had gone haywire (we failed and all of the editing work he and his daughter had done had to be scrapped; Adobe Premiere on Windows has never let me down like this). I borrowed a Mac to give a presentation and tried to use the convenient “offline browsing” function of MSIE; it did not exist. Then there are countless times that I’ve tired to use Web sites and could not accomplish my task in any browser running on the Macintosh that I had grabbed. Some references to those old postings…
http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2010/01/03/does-the-flip-video-camera-work-with-apple-macintosh/
http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2007/05/18/offline-browser-of-web-pages-on-a-macintosh/
You ask me to take an “honest, unbaised look” at the Mac. What would that entail other than what I’ve done? Computers are tools. People sit down at a computer and try to get something done. There is nothing inherently interesting about a desktop personal computer. It isn’t running Haskell or teaming up 16 processor cores to support a relational database management system. Thus the best way to evaluate a desktop personal computer is to sit down and try to get something accomplished.
Out of necessity, I’ve try to get something done on a Macintosh every 3-6 months (when visiting a friend or relative). I almost invariably fail at the task and sometimes the failure is interesting enough that I write a blog posting.
Almost everything that I did with a computer for work last year could not have been done on a Macintosh:
1) I had to install and write some code using the Ingres RDBMS and associated development environments; none of this software runs on the Mac
2) I had to sign off some students to take helicopter checkrides using an FAA Web-based system… which runs only in MSIE on Windows
3) I used the Oracle 11g RDBMS… which does not run on the Mac.
4) I used airplane performance calculation software (answers the question “Can you take off from Runway X at Airport Y at Temperature Z, lose an engine, and climb away from the obstacles on the remaining engine?”), approved by the FAA, supplied by the manufacturer, and running only on genuine Microsoft Windows.
For someone who isn’t interested in collecting a paycheck or leaving the ground after purchasing an airplane, I can see that a Macintosh might be considered “far superior” and perhaps that is the source of Apple’s 5 percent market share. But personally I find it to be very frustrating when I’m not able to accomplish tasks, which is why I’m not anxious to turn my once/quarter experience with the Mac into an everyday annoyance.
I guess that was kind of a long-winded response. Let’s hope that subsequent comments are about skydiving or photography, and not celebrating the beauty of Macintosh-to-Macintosh-only communication as exemplified by this photographer and your computer.
I can’t say that I cared about Aaron’s photographic efforts while skydiving, but his field guide to birds of the Pacific Northwest is a real winner.
Macs are beautiful and they UNIX underpinnings. Those two things alone explain why so many Mac owners love them. They also have additional hard-to-find-elewhere niceties such as nicer LCDs and higher quality touchpads.
But if you are a productivity nut those features will not matter to you, but the following Mac shortcomings will:
* Window management is terrible. Their top menu idea is obsolete and broken on multiple monitors.
* Macs can’t manage files. Finder can’t even approach Windows Explorer from 1995
* Keyboard is nearly disabled, menus have no hotkeys, most apps are entirely mouse-driven
* Filesystem permissions are unmanageable. Try having a common folder for all family members on a Mac workstation. Windows machines have decent UIs for managing ACLs for years
I absolutely agree with Phil: an average Mac can’t be used for multitasking, you are forced to deal with one application at a time: be it web surfing or email or whatever. It is much harder to be productive when the number of files your working on or/and
number if windows you have open exceed some fairly low limits – their UI idioms do not support that. Even their dock by default happily eats like 20% of your precious vertical real estate leaving you with a 500px screen.
Go to a nearest Starbucks and see how slowly and inefficiently mac users operate their machines. The only task they seem to have no difficulty with is scrolling text.
Ev: I hope that I didn’t say that “an average Mac can’t be used for multitasking”; obviously it has the same 1960s-style preemptive multi-tasking as most other computers. What I meant to say is that I had periodically tried to use Macintoshes to accomplish a variety of tasks and, almost every time, failed or was hindered. The failures had nothing to do with multitasking; I was only trying to do one thing at a time.
I was referring to Apple’s application and window management UI idioms that make it hard to work with many apps and files simultaneously.
Nice idea, but the shots displayed could have been taken with a G11.
You’d have to see these printed huge to get any appreciation for the amount of work that went into this.
(I went Mac 2 yrs ago and now wish I’d done 12 yrs ago.)
I think the Mac vs. Windows debate really comes down to “which is better for what I need to use it for?”, rather than an all-inclusive “which is better?”
At my day job, I build avionics software. I use a variety of tools that do not exist for the Mac, and probably never will. Even if I were to opine that the Mac has a nicer interface or higher-quality hardware, it really doesn’t matter if I can’t get the work done.
On the other hand, at home I use my computers for things like music production, photo editing, and Unix-ish software development (often SSH’d into a GNU/Linux machine). For these tasks, the Mac is more than adequate, and indeed, I much prefer using the Mac for these things.
Pick the right tool for the job, and don’t blame the tool if you’ve picked the wrong one.
Oh, and, I also have a Flip video camera. In my opinion, it’s the Flip video camera that’s poorly designed, not the iMac, and the fact that the camera happens to work well with any computer at all is just a small-scale miracle. 🙂