I thought I was done writing about the troubles of buying a really good LCD display, hopefully before my CRT finally dies. Which, I might add, it stopped doing some of the antics that were causing me to think that failure was impending. But, no...

A few things that have been working lately...

Depth of field brackets on cameras are quite handy to start a discussion about picking the right aperture to get a desired depth of field and suggest the concept of the hyperfocal distance. I wish more lenses had them. I've got an old Vivitar Series One lens that has a quite pleasant set of depth of field brackets that work at any zoom length. Modern zoom lenses don't even try to get this right.

Loosing your inspiration is a form of impotence. The more you obsess over it being gone, the harder it is to get back. And I recognize this, so I just didn't bother scheduling much in terms of shooting and didn't worry about it...

The major thoughts I got from the lazyweb was that I really wanted a display with an IPS panel type. And preferebly the LED backlight. Of which, there's exactly one example of, the Apple LED Cinema Display.

While researching destinations for my recent trip to the middle of California, I came upon an interesting factoid. There is a bottled water plant in the middle of the desert, right next to the dry lake bed that it is helping keep dry.

It's so refreshing to see a site that will tell you what really sucks, instead of what's just above average.

It's better to not cart every last piece of gear you own around. I'm fairly bad about dragging most of my gear with me if I'm driving somewhere, but if you aren't careful, this can really get into your way. Like my friend who was complaining that he dragged a bunch of camera gear around but didn't take a single shot.

This is inexcusable as far as camera design goes.

There's a world of difference between a weather-sealed professional camera or a waterproof camera and a normal camera, but any reasonable camera should be able to be taken to the beach for a few hours without breaking.

So it looks like somebody picked up some of the rights to Rollei cameras, which means that some of the hardware could return.

Cynically, I understand that if you can make the Rollei TLR and continue to sell it, people will buy them and put them on a shelf somewhere. Just like Leicas.

The last monitor I actually purchased was a 15" Sony CRT sometime in the late nineties. Since then, I've obtained progressively larger CRT displays, culminating with a 21" Sony Trinitron, for free. But now my most recent CRT is starting to act up...

I got word that Kodak is discontinuing some sizes of chemicals and even discontinuing selling some of them...

I've been out and about, which is why I didn't post about this earlier. Ricoh is offering a new system that allows the user to swap out a lens-sensor unit.

I'm not sure what to think of the Ricoh GXR. Clearly there's an advantage here. With a big-sensor prime lens and a small-sensor zoom lens, you don't have anything big and bulky... But the engineer in me figured we've got a few cranks of Moore's Observation (you know, the one that says that CPUs get twice as fast every 24 months?) such that the usefulness of the GXR as a long term system purchase isn't likely to be great. But, on the gripping hand, I should also note that my PC still has serial ports, even though it can go many times faster via USB, so maybe it's less of an issue than I think.

I am, however, very much impressed by how quirky Ricoh is allowing themselves to be. In a world of look-alike digital SLRs, it's nice to see some variety.

Galen Rowell is one of the links on the long chain of truly inspirational wildlife photographers. If Ansel Adams was the master of the super-sharp black and white print, Galen was the master of the 35mm Kodachrome and Velvia slide, taken while messing around up in the mountains.

I thought this story was worth sharing, about this while I drove through Bishop, off to photograph some of the same scenery that he'd photographed when he was alive.

I've been following these cameras for a while. Good thing I didn't pre-order the E-P1 now that the E-P2 is on the way out. :)