From the Adobe(r) Lightroom podcast with Catherine Hall:

Pose by asking the participants to role play. For instance, imagine you are in Paris …

This approach has worked really well for Catherine in her shooting of weddings. Especially as the models are usually not professionals, but rather everyday people. By asking them to role play, they can be enticed into interesting poses to match desired composition, without the stiffness associated with directing specific poses.

George Jardine’s interview technique is simply sublime. This is one podcast series where I do not miss an episode. I went back and listened to the early shows. There is much to learn about photography in these interviews.

From the LightSource podcast with David Tobie from Data Color:

The in-camera highlight clipping is based on the color space that is set.

This is apparently true even if you are shooting RAW.

The implications of this are that you can no longer trust the clipping information. It will clip earlier, as RAW typically captures a wider gamut than say sRGB.

This episode is worth a listen if you are starting to reach the point where colour is important. Especially how colour looks on screen as compared to in print.

From sfnblog:

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) spent almost US$1.6 million last year lobbying the U.S. government on issues ranging from advertising to freedom of information requests, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

I’m not sure which is more broken: the US government’s lobbying process, or the NAA’s need to spend so much protecting their position.

Apple’s iPod Shuffle is now only $65 AUD ($49 USD). I picked up one when they cost a bit more, and found it to be a very useful way of playing music when I didn’t want to have to think about it. Like when snowboarding.

The downside? It so small and convenient, I can’t seem to find mine. Perhaps this is a good reason (excuse) to look at an iPod Touch.

- found via techmeme

On January 21^st, aged 89, Marie Smith died and with her the Eyak language passed into oblivion.

From the Economist:

This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life.

Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that she worked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

… in an age where perhaps half the planet’s languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.

Of late I’ve noticed that deleting mail on my GMail account doesn’t always work. Delete a message, check mail, and there it is back again. Very frustrating.

Google took some time to actually add the ability to delete mail. Their theory was that if you had enough storage, you shouldn’t need to delete mail. And to find anything, you can just search.

In theory, that works just fine. In practice, users like being able to delete some mails. The ones I like to delete, aside from junk, are the notification mails from on-line services. I want to receive them, I don’t want to keep them.

In actual fact, most of the email I receive in my Google account are specifically these mails. I don’t pollute my normal email address with them. Thus, the deleting issue causes me some problems.

It does make sense why Google struggles with deleting mail. Their servers are massively redundant, housed in farms. To my understanding their mail store is built on the same platform as their search tool. This would mean that multiple copies are kept of all your mail.

When you ask to retrieve mail, a parallel query would be issued to the farm. The results would then be collated and returned to you in the GMail user interface. Simple enough.

Except, when you delete a mail, it now needs to be deleted in multiple locations. So if you hit delete, it sends out the delete command to the parallel server farm. Being a delete, it may take a bit longer to process than a query, as the farm is optimized for queries. They are a search company after all.

So while the delete command is being run, my refresh command is run to find any new mail. Unfortunately, it would find some of the mail I had asked to be deleted, but had yet to actually delete.

At least this is my theory on why deleted mail keeps popping back into my Inbox. Even if my theory is right, it doesn’t make it less annoying.