DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve owned a Canon SD450, a 5-megapixel pocket camera with a decent reputation, for about a month. There are two things about it I find nearly intolerable:

1. The redeye prevention mechanism is worthless. Or, it’s turned my son into the spawn of Satan.
2. Unlike every other digital camera I’ve ever used, it doesn’t mount to my computer like a disk drive.

The redeye problem is horrific. More often than not, portrait subject have glowing fireballs where their eyes are supposed to be. Sure, I can darken the pupils in Photoshop — I don’t mind using a $600 piece of software to correct a design flaw in my $300 digital camera. I have nothing else better to do with my time, really.

The camera appears to have two different redeye-reduction flash modes, although I believe the redeye reduction is the same in both cases; the difference is limited to whether the flash fires at all. In Portrait mode, the camera’s flash setting defaults to “Auto Redeye Reduction.” The second redeye mode, “Redeye Reduction On,” in which the flash fires regardless of ambient light, is available at the cost of an extra button-press. Both flash modes are equally incapable of eliminating redeye.

(In attempting to determine whether the two red-eye reduction modes are doing the same thing, I looked at the EXIF data for several test images. There is no difference in notation regarding redeye, so in the absence of any visible difference in the flash’s behavior or the sample images themselves, I’ve concluded that there is no difference. The EXIF tags follow:

• The “Redeye Reduction On” mode generates an EXIF tag reading: “Flash fired, compulsory flash mode, red-eye reduction mode”.
• The “Auto Redeye Reduction” generates an EXIF tag reading: “Flash fired, auto mode, red-yed reduction mode”. Yes, there’s a typo in the camera’s firmware. And perhaps in the redeye prevention routine too.)

One workaround would be to shoot images without the flash. Given that the camera’s highest ISO setting is 400, this is not an option indoors. At ISO 400, images are grainy, and unless you like to leave a lot of lights on, blurry too.

The other workaround is to buy Canon’s $100 external slave flash, the HF-DC1. I just bought one, and it does appear to alleviate the redeye problem. But it effectively doubles the size of the camera, and adds two more button presses to the process of taking the first picture. I’ll post a review of the slave flash in the future.

The second thing I hate about this camera is that I can’t access the SD card directly from my computer. I know external USB card readers are cheap ($15), but I can’t imagine Canon shaved too many cents off the manufacturing cost to not include this feature. The USB port is already there. They’re just missing some software.

And guess what? Software is really small. It would have fit inside the case.

So, until I remember to add a card reader to my next Amazon order, I’m stuck using Canon’s feature-limited “CameraWindow” software to offload images from the camera. It gives me only two options: copy all photos, or copy new photos. I can’t copy selected photos. Nor can I delete selected photos.

Also, the CameraWindow software stupidly writes image files to the computer’s hard disk with a mod time of “now,” rather than the time the image was taken. So I can take my new camera and its 1 GB memory card, shoot 500-odd pictures over a week’s vacation, return home to offload the photos, and every image file is dated within the past minute. That’s just incredibly lame.

There’s a workaround, of course; I wrote a PHP script that parses the image files’ EXIF tags, extracts the exposure date/time, and resets each file’s mod time. It’s yet-another clumsy extra step to fix a problem that my 4-year-old Coolpix 995 didn’t have.

After a meeting in St. Helena, I had a purely Napa experience: I bought $16 worth of chocolate that I could nearly close my hand around, and three doors down, a small bottle of balsamic vinegar that at $160/gallon costs 66 times more than gasoline, even in St. Helena.

In other words, the Napa experience is: upscale food items, great presentation, and, natch, exclusive prices. Or excessive. Maybe both of those.

Foodie photos from St. Helena

I guess I don’t have a lot of reason to wear oxblood tassel loafers any more.

Heh, I’m pretty happy about that.

My long-delayed mixdown is complete. Tune in for the next three Thursdays to hear the results. (Is that a cheap ploy to build interest and traffic? Why, yes it is.)

Long-distance mixing takes a lot of time. The engineer, Evan, has a pretty amazing ear, so the basic tracks came together immediately. The fine tuning is what takes the time: he sends MP3s, I take two weeks to listen to them (through two pairs of headphones, two pairs of speakers, on a portable stereo, in the car, at high volume, at low volume, from the next room, etc.), then he takes another week to adjust the mix, and then we do it again. We’ve been working on this since Thanksgiving — I downloaded the first round of mixes in Hawaii, over dialup, before I realized I could sponge off the neighbor’s wifi if I sat by the kitchen window.

Had I been present for mixdown, the turnaround time on the various EQ and level changes we made would have been measured in seconds instead of weeks. Next time, I’ll probably just fly to LA for this.

The four songs I sent Evan covered the spectrum of genres from acoustic ballad to heavy rock. One was recorded about 12 years ago with an early incarnation of the band that would become JAR — an abandoned track rescued from some dusty ADATs in the garage. I didn’t write it, and had no designs for it (other than posting it here). If JAR had become famous this song would have showed up on the box set after I’d gotten old and fat and bought a castle next to Elton John. Alas, now I’m old and fat, and the closest I’ve been to Elton John was the time I sat on a People magazine at the dentist’s office. Anyway, Evan nailed this mix on his first attempt. It blew me away. It’s a better song now than the day we recorded it.

The other three tracks were recorded here (and chronicled here). One was an old JAR song, Bleed. Another was an acoustic tune by JAR’s guitarist. The last was my own song Ode to Soup, which was a bitch to mix for a lot of reasons: there were two lead instrumental voices, the recording engineer was an amateur (this means me), the drum and guitar tracks were assembled digitally from multiple takes, and I was sweating every detail.

I’m happy we’re done, and I’m happy with the results. I am in the midst of writing new songs, in hopes of finishing up my first CD within 12-18 months. (It’s a long time… lots of concurrent plans for the next year.)

MP3s coming your way:

• 2006-02-02: No Regret
• 2006-02-09: Bleed
• 2006-02-16: Ode to Soup

Y’all come back now, y’hear?