Category Archives:  Commentary

Ben & Jerry’s Guitar Story

Ben & Jerry at Filoli Gardens

Ben & Jerry at Filoli Gardens

I recently had the opportunity to attend a live performance by Benett Zussman and Jerry Snyder. They are both performing artists, instructors, and an absolute pleasure to watch and listen to them play.

Since their performance was taking place at Filoli Gardens, it would seem a shame to not bring my camera along to take some photographs:

Ben and Jerry At Filoli Garden

  • Jerry playing a particularly nice piece.
  • Ben and Jerry cranking out some beautiful music.
  • Ben and Jerry taking a moment to pose for a photograph.
  • Jerry Snyder playing his guitar at Filoli Garden.
  • Ben Zussman playing his guitar @ Filoli Garden

The Guitar Story

Ben & Jerry have a regular performance entitled, “The Guitar Story”, in which they will be performing a series of pieces from different time periods in history leading up to the current day.

They have two performances coming up in June 2013. So if you enjoy the guitar played well, their performance would be worth attending.

The Guitar Story : http://sbgs.org/ai1ec_event/the-guitar-story/

Going Static!

While I love the ease with witch WordPress makes managing content and interfacing with third party sites, I really really hate some aspects of the performance hits. I also hate risking getting hit with something if a plugin/module/core has a new exploit out.

So, spent the past weekend dinking around to make the site hostable in a static format. And so far, it works great!

Here’s to going static!

The Canon Pro9000 Mark II Printer: Why No banner Mode!?

Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II (image from DandyGadget.com)

Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II (image from DandyGadget.com)

A while back, when Canon was doing their DSLR+Printer rebate offer, a whole slew of Canon Pro9000 Mark II printers flooded the market(eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, etc.). I went the Craigslist route and purchased one from a cheerful fellow who had bought his with his new Canon Rebel T3i. I’ve been enjoying using the printer on and off since. Well, let’s face it, it’s a big printer and is meant for making big prints. I’ve made a few 13″x19″ prints on Canon’s Platinum Glossy papers and love them. I’ve also made some prints on Canson’s Platine Fiber Rag, which I adore.

Night Panorama of San Francisco, shot from Twin Peaks

Night Panorama of San Francisco, shot from Twin Peaks

I recently shot the above night time panorama of San Francisco from Twin Peaks. I love this shot and wanted to make use of the 13″x38″ metal frame I had picked up a while back, with a panorama in mind. This one fit the dimensions almost to a tee.

As any Canon Pro9000 Mark II owner knows… you can’t print longer than 26.6″. Yes, 26.6″ on a 13″ wide printer.

Why, Canon? Why!?

Now, of course, I didn’t have any 38″ long paper on hand. But I did make use of two sheets of the 13″x19″ Canson Platine Fiber Rag, and after some cropping in Lightroom, I got the image printed out as two 13″x19″ and attached them together to form a 13″x38″ panorama.

Panorama printed as 2 13x19 prints in a 13x38 frame, hung on wall.

Panorama printed as 2 13×19 prints in a 13×38 frame, hung on wall.

Personally, I like how it turned out, with the exception of the seam in the middle. Close inspection will reveal that there is a minor misalignment at the point of the seam, something hard to avoid if printing borderless.

What I would have liked to have been able to do was print a 13″x38″ single sheet. They sell the paper and I would have liked to have printed it. Canon’s new Pro1 printer supports printing to 44″. There is NO reason why Canon can’t release an updated driver to handle printing 44″ on the Canon Pro 9000 Mark II. From what most people have gathered, the limitation is a SOFTWARE limitation in the binary driver.

Needless to say, I’m a bit irked by it. Even programs like Qimage can’t work around it because the printer doesn’t support roll/banner mode, ie. printing a second sheet without performing an eject/page load operation.

However, in order to get banner printing capability in a 13″ wide printer, I would have to look at investing in one of their ipf line of printers, which are quite a bit more than I want to invest in a printer, $1200+. The Canon Pro9000 Mark II cost me $140.

The other option is to go with Epson printers, which can all do 44″ paper, or with the new drivers, can all go to 129″.

The thing is, I like my Canon Pro 9000 Mark II’s output. The prints are just gorgeous. Not only that, it uses the same ink cartridges as my Canon Pixma ip4500. So there is no need to buy two different ink sets, just one kind and I’m good for both printers.

Currently looking at possible ways to bypass the limitation. If anyone knows of how to get the printer to print past the 26.6″ limit, I’d like to know.

Update:

Alas, if only ImagePrint supported Canon printers… but it seems that Epson is the brand of printers that gets all the love.

Whichever route I go, new gear means syncing some serious cash. Better clear off my personal projects list and do some Spring cleaning before even considering going down that expensive and entangled route. :)

Inspired By Others

A Small Case of Mistaken Identity

Occasionally, I get interesting little tidbits of entertainment from certain facets of real life. Case in point, people with similar names to me. Apparently, my name is fairly common. As such, there are in excess of 600 “Wing Wong”(s) in just the bay area alone. So it was inevitable that I would eventually encounter a collision at some point.

Yesterday, I got an email from a photographer I had contacted a while back. He asked in passing whether or not I was the “Wing Wong” who was recently featured in RangeFinder magazine. I just HAD to check it out. If you’re curious, facebook profile.

Apparently, he’s based out of San Francisco and is a working photographer and designer. Very very cool. No blood relation though.

What To Do When Inspiration Strikes

While it was an interesting case of serendipity, I didn’t think much of it. A couple of Facebook posts, and some inspirational ideas on the commute home. Slept on it. This morning, on the train ride in, I thought to myself, “why not?”.

So, I went and checked out the RangeFinder online site and found that they had a contest going on, which was about to close shortly. I took a couple of minutes to download the original of my “Crystal Forest” shot and uploaded a resized version, after paying my $35 image fee.

For those interested and who’d like to support me with a People’s Choice vote, here is my submission:

Me, My Photography, and SmugMug

Where I’m Coming From

I’ve been a long time PRO level subscriber as well as supporter of SmugMug. They are easy to use, have a great display, allows for unlimited uploads, and generally have a great support team that responds quickly.

I subscribed to the PRO level, now referred to as Business level, when it was $99.95. I did multi-year subscriptions to lock in my rate and for the last several years, I’ve been at that level. For what I was getting, it was a great deal, even though I’ve never been able to figure out, how they managed to make money, given the unlimited storage model they were working with. I had assumed they either made enough through commissions on sales or the bulk of their users were heavily under-utilizing the service.

Just before the recent Labor day weekend, I got an email from SmugMug indicating that effective mid-October, there would be a price bump for all Pro level subscribers of $100. So $99.95 subscribers get bumped up to the $200 mark and those at the $159.99 get bumped to the $25x level, etc. New subscribers get the $300 price tag.

For me, this would be a doubling of overhead for what is effectively an already expensive hobby. With cost of living going up, our household has been making cuts where we can. My hobbies and the subscription services tied to that hobby are no exception. The amortized monthly amount would effectively be going from $8.33 to around $16.66, so not a big monetary bump. But still, a bump.

Then, there is the question of business model. In SmugMug’s reply to the public and to their subscribers, the need for the price bump was to counter increased storage usage by PRO and BUSINESS users. The subscription price will go up, but nothing else will materially change. Those who don’t like the higher price can downgrade to the new PORTFOLIO account, which is $159.95/year. This really isn’t an option for those who still want to make monies off of their sales, as you lose the ability to set prices and make a profit from sales.

SmugMug did address the storage utilization issue and noted that mid-range PRO/BUSINESS users used at least 4X that of the lower tiers, and the heavy PRO/BUSINESS users used 4X of the mid-range PRO/BUSINESS users.

Instead of bringing in a tiered model, which would tie their storage utilization to a revenue stream, they decided on a fixed price bump. This potentially addresses the issue in a couple of ways:

  • Some users will leave, taking their storage footprint with them.
  • Users will pay more for their account, but might not increase their footprint, resulting in more net income.

However, here is the gotcha:

  • If users realize they aren’t getting anything from sales anyways, they might just downgrade to the $40/year account, leaving their large data footprint on the SmugMug servers.
  • The responses from SmugMug and the responses from end users might indicate that people may now make heavier use of the “unlimited” aspect of their SmugMug account.

What is the Cost of 1GB?

From what I can see from public posts and announcements, SmugMug’s storage capacity is handled by a combination of in-house storage systems and 3rd party back-ends like Amazon S3 cloud storage. Can’t speak to their in-house prices, but publicly available pricing via AWS S3 is around $0.15/GB, depending on region and durability. Inbound traffic to the AWS S3 is free, but outbound is billable.

My storage footprint at SmugMug is around 24GB, according to their metrics. That puts me at around $3.60/month, or $43.20/year. This is suspiciously close to the $40/year annual bottom tier subscription model with SmugMug, which still offers unlimited storage, but no customizable themes, domains, or custom pricing. Ie, they are front-ending your gallery.

Depending on the end-user’s equipment, 24GB is either ALOT of photos or it is only a moderate number of photos. For me, it represents around 2000 photos or around 12MB per image. I’ve got fairly large original JPEG(s) uploaded with the intention of printing them with the best detail possible. However, most will compress their images to under 2MB apiece. In which case, 24GB represents 12,000 images.

A PRO/BUSINESS user downgrading to an entry level account would still be able to upload as many images as they desired, just minus other niceties. If they have a front-end blog/gallery somewhere else, and are just using the SmugMug service to host images, then this can represent a problem for SmugMug. They effectively become a REALLY cheap unlimited image hosting service. Probably not a good spot to be in.

Where I’m Going

I’m not confident that SmugMug isn’t going to need to bump their prices again in the future. The price bump prompted my own re-evaluation of how I use their service, what features I use and what features I don’t use. My pain points and how a change can provide improvements to my own usage of my images.

I currently host my own blog website, this blog website, on my own virtual server. I _could_ host my images here, as that would incur a total of $0 additional cost to do so. This would also be the simplest means of hosting my images. However, the amount of storage space available to me is limited, and there are other considerations for that space usage: logs, temp files, other batch jobs running, etc.

So, looking to Amazon S3 storage hosting, I would incur a charge of around $3.60/month. However, that is only the case if I decide to store my original image files on Amazon S3. Since I’ll most likely no longer be printing the images, I no longer need to keep 12MB/image files and can bring that per image footprint down to around 2-4MB apiece. Or $0.60 – $1.20 / month to host my images. I would still be able to partner with 3rd party printing services like Fotomoto or BayPhoto using their ROES applications to do print orders.

Amazon S3 also has an interesting option, where you can associate a fully qualified hostname like say… gallery.wingtangwong.com to an S3 bucket. Replicating the folder structure of the images, file names, etc. would allow me to provide backwards-compatibility with already published URL links. No additional charge for this configuration.

Features like gallery passwords, gallery displays, and RSS/ATOM news feeds would need to be implemented with some coding either in WordPress or another mini server application. (TBD).

I have until mid-2013 to decide what to do, but in the meantime, I’m building out my plan B with the intention of migrating off of SmugMug. I would like to see SmugMug continue to grow, but they have made their business decision and it is pretty clear. In order to make their business model work, they will be focusing on photographers and subscribers who are actively marketing and promoting print sales through their site.

I’m not part of that demographic, and I don’t take it personally. Landscapes change and situations change. This is a change, and I’m changing my strategy and processes.

This has also prompted me to re-evaluate my photography in general.

Some Thoughts On Kickstarter

Crowdsourcing Money Is Awesome!

All one has to do is look at awesome Kickstarter projects, like TheOatmeal’s Tesla Museum to realize how great the process and community is.

In fact, I just recently received the extremely awesome, Gwendolyn and the Underworld, by Bill Robinson! I’m looking forward to another book that I’ve backed on Kickstarter, along with some retro game remakes.

I’ve also gotten a very well made 360 pano adapter for an iphone, as well as great support software.

However, all is not well.

Crowdsourcing Projects Can Suck!

So, I also backed this document the last shuttle flight project. The reward was to have been a CD/DVD of the footage. It’s been like 2 years and the project organizers have stopped responding to emails and communications. In this case, I’m basically screwed. I’m out my money, and I’m SOL on getting the reward I was promised. And since the dollar amount was fairly low, it isn’t worthwhile to go after them.

Most everyone else got their reward, so in my case, I just got the short end of the stick. Though you can bet had the value been higher, this would have been pursued. Short of a class action, though, it would be very tempting for some crooks to rip people off through these crowdsourcing funding projects.

Summary: Buyer Beware!

Long and short of it, crowd sourced funding is definitely buyer beware. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of funding an underdog or a potential dark horse, that you fail to see that it could just be too good to be true. :( The massive funding campaigns for the game stations and such… I fear might wind up going down that dark road. Only time will tell.