On This Week in Tech talking about Google X Loon Balloons, Sony NEX-7, etc
I joined from Christchurch a few days ago to talk with Leo and the gang about what happened behind the scenes at the Google launch of Project Loon in New Zealand. Here’s the full article on StuckInCustoms.com about the Google Internet Balloon launch.
Daily Photo – Wild Tokyo Streets
Here’s the wild Tokyo streets not far from Roppongi. It turns out this tiny little spot is safe to stand in. I think. Well, it probably wasn’t, but those little lines gave me some sense of safety. Either way, I took all the shots and got out of here quickly!
You can see Don Quixote there on the left. It’s a very popular store in Tokyo and they have everything! They have t-shirts, shaving cream, kid toys, and adult toys. Those last two categories are quite different.
This is a 30 min preview of the 4+ hour post-processing landscape tutorial from New Zealand. We recently had people came from all over the world to spend four days taking photos. We recorded the whole thing… watch this to see what happened! 🙂 You can get all 4+ hours at http://store.stuckincustoms.com/tutorials
Daily Photo – Waterways in the Hills
Here’s another photo from the beautiful course at The Hills here in New Zealand. They decided to make these beautiful waterways that weave in and out of the course. They are great for photography too because they always flow very slowly, so there is a nice clean reflection. Whenever I (rarely) get a clean reflection off water, I always feel like a lucky guy!
Today Adobe announced Photoshop CC that is only available to cloud subscribers.
Adobe should not release such lame updates to Photoshop and Lightroom to convince people that the cloud-subscription software is exciting. They should make dramatic improvements – things that photograpehrs can’t live without. Can we live without “Smart Sharpen” and “Intelligent Upsampling” with Photoshop. Err, probably. The Lightroom improvements are equally underwhelming. You know that the updates are lame when one of the top bullet points is “Include video in your slideshows!” How did THAT become one of the top-most-requested features?
Here's a list of some of the features with Photoshop CC. I am not thrilled. Also, that seems like kind of a lame photo they are using to show off their product, isn't it? Maybe Photoshop has gotten to the point where it is just kind of like a pencil or a paintbrush -- they can't be improved upon. Maybe Adobe really has run out of ideas (except for ideas around new business models where you get to pay them every month).
It also worries me that Adobe is running out of ideas for their photography-related products. Their “big features” are, at best, incremental improvements. They are certainly not exciting enough to drive millions to subscribe to their cloud subscriptions. Their biggest idea, sadly, seems to be cloud-based subscriptions.
Business-model confusion with Adobe
Adobe’s PR and marketing team has a whole list of reasons about why Cloud-based subscription is so awesome for Photoshop. They have a few good points in there, such as it is easy to do incremental updates. But mostly, the reasons are lame and not exciting to amateurs and hobbyists who can’t afford to shell out a ton of money every month.
Here is the confusion: If Cloud-based subscriptions really are so awesome for Photoshop, why do they have a completely different business model for Lightroom? They tell me, well, Lightroom is more for hobbyists and casual people, and Photoshop is more for professionals. I think that sounds kind of ridiculous, don’t you?
What is especially confusing for me is, “How do I explain this to people?” I get a bunch of people that come to this website or to the HDR Tutorial (new and improved, and free as always, btw!) to get advice on what kind of software to get. We get a lot of new photographers who don’t really own any software. Now I have to give confusing advice: “Well, you really need Photoshop and Lightroom. Photoshop you have to pay every month for, but Lightroom you can just buy once.” People are like, “Whhhhaaat?” Why have two business models for such complementary pieces of software? It’s completely confusing to new people, and moderately confusing to veterans.
Anyway, these are the kind of confusing decisions that come out of committees. I hope they clarify things soon, and I also hope they have a business model that is less punitive to beginners, students, and hobbyists that can’t afford the high price of cloud-based subscriptions. It’s not like Netflix or World of Warcraft with their monthly fees. You pretty much have one kind of customer there. With photography, you have the full span of professionals and studios to ameteurs and hobbyists. In my judgment, it’s too punitive to have One-Pricing-Model to rule them all.
Daily Photo – Sunset in New Zealand before the Blizzard
We are expecting a major blizzard coming into Queenstown tonight! We just got back from the grocery store to stock up. I’ve got all my cameras fully charged and ready to go… I’ll try to hit as many places as I can with the fresh snow… chains are ready and all is good to go! Super-excited.
And, speaking of the article above, I can’t think of any of my images that could have been improved if I am using the new features in Adobe’s cloud. Sure, I subscribed to their cloud (Adobe did not gift me one, nor will they probably ever because I am so critical of them), and I am using the latest of everything… but none of these new features have really found their way into my photos yet. Comon Adobe… I know you can do better.
Filled with ideas and resources to help you find your “spark” of inspiration
146 beautifully designed pages filled with colorful photographs
Presented in Nicole’s approachable and conversational style of writing
Real-life inspirational examples
Dozens of ideas to help get those creative brain-cells active
Want to see more from Nicole and the book?
Watch the show that went live last night here on the blog. She joined us to talk about it!
Daily Photo – The Golden Seaspray
It’s fun to take photos of waves exploding on rocks. You never know what you’re gonna get, so it’s a good idea just to take a ton of photos. I must have taken 50 or 60 to get this one. It’s a lot of guesswork involved!
In cases like this, maybe I could have done even better with the Sony NEX-7 instead of the D800. The thing is that I could have hit that 10 FPS, and it would have come in very handy! One of the main problems with the NEX-7 would NOT have reared its ugly head here — the buffering. You can get enough shots when the wave hits and then just wait for the buffering to catch up while waiting on the next wave!
I was able to use Stuck On Earth to find a lot of great places in Big Sur! By the way, don’t forget that you can now get it for iPad AND Android. We are glad that so many people are enjoying it! Anyway, don’t forget that one cool feature that lets you download all the photos in a given area and add them to a new trip. This came in handy here… I just kind of vacuumed up all the good spots into a “Big Sur Trip” with a single click!
Daily Photo – The Mighty Trees at Glen Oaks Big Sur
Here’s another photo from that amazing place I stayed in Big Sur. It’s called the Glen Oaks, so be sure to take a look at this place when planning a trip to the area!
It’s fun to take photos of these huge trees. The difficult thing is getting a sense of scale. So it’s good to use things in the photo like humans or houses to give everything a sense of perspective. This trick also works with caves or anything that is impressively huge in real life.
In case you missed the video while I was up on CN Tower in Toronto to take this photo below, just click that link and you can watch on YouTube.
Mirrorless Cameras and Post-Processing on This Week in Photo
Here is a fun interview I did with Frederick Van Johnson from TWIP recently. Enjoy! 🙂
Daily Photo – The View from CN Tower in Toronto
While walking around the top of the tower, I was taking photos with both cameras – the Sony NEX-7 and the Google Glass. Of course, I ended up getting better photos with the Sony, and here is one of them below.
I get a strange email from Google. Just sign the paperwork they say. We can’t tell you anything. I sign, assuming it’s gotta be cool with an approach like that.
Fast Forward One Week
Next thing I knew, I was up in a helicopter over Tekapo, New Zealand, sitting by Steven Levy from Wired magazine tracking balloons as they headed for the stratosphere. I was just a few hours north of my home in Queenstown, so I was excited to check out this secret Google X project right in my own backyard!
So, here’s the whole story. I’ll start with a video I shot with Google Glass that shows some of the behind-the-scenes. Can’t see it in your country? Here’s the Vimeo version.
(Note, there is the Longer Video coming soon that has a lot of the tech talk and geeky stuff if you want to know more.)
Here is beautiful Tekapo, NZ. The water is that wondrous color from all the fresh glacial melt.
So, what’s the reason for all this? Well, there are billions of people on Earth without Internet. Billions! What’s a crazy (loon-y) idea to get them Internet? Step in Project Loon from Google X and Rich DeVaul. What’s the net result of it all? You can see the little white dot-balloon in the photo bellow on the left floating over New Zealand.
The Internet floats over New Zealand. Another Google Loon Balloon makes its way towards the stratosphere, spreading Internet like ambrosia dripping from Mount Olympus. We soared up vertically over the mountains, spiraling up to track the balloons. I had great trouble spotting the balloon from the chopper! But there, you can see a little white dot there on the left in the sky. It's not like one of those giant hot-air balloons. It's more like a tiny weather balloon.
New Zealand was a perfect test bed because even though we have only 4 million people, 1 million of us don’t even have Internet. Or, if we have it, it’s crazy-expensive. We even visited one farmer (Charles) who said that he had to pay $1400 for ONE month of satellite-Internet. Crazy!
So, imagine a network, a mesh of balloons that spin around the earth, effortlessly handing off Internet from one balloon to the next, just like the way you hand off phone service from one tower to the next as you drive. You can see more about the tech on Google’s Project Loon site.
Inside the secret Google warehouse... somewhere in New Zealand. By the way, this place is very cold and full of things that you should not touch.
Anyhoo, I was invited along to take photos. Google was nice enough to even officially license a few photos (thanks!). No, they didn’t pay me to write a nice article. I’m just kind of a Google fan. Stephen Levy and Wired liked some of the more special photos too, so you can see even more in Stephen’s article (Wired magazine). Man, he’s a cool guy. You really get to know a dude when you’re ripping through the New Zealand mountains with these crazy Kiwi pilots!
After watching the flawless launch on a chilly morning, we ended up taking a chopper to a remote farm. There were a lot of choppers. It was kind of like Apocalypse Google Now.
We exit one of the choppers to go check the Internet on this farm. You can see the pilot running off with all my camera gear on his back.
We landed and jumped off to go try out the Internet. Again, flawless. I can only assume they had a few failed tests beforehand… they must have been working on this for a long time. But man, it was smooth. The family was super excited. They were on Trademe.co.nz, which is the eBay of New Zealand. The husband was looking for a new truck… his wife was not thrilled.
The balloons worked perfectly. Raven Aerostar is the company that is behind the balloons; they are Google’s design partner for Project Loon. They make balloons for NASA and stuff, so they are pretty hardcore.
Rich talks with one of the tester families. You can see the friendly red Google antenna above and the Loon balloon over there on the right (the tiny white spot!)
At lunch, the creator of the project, Rich DeVaul, told us a funny story. I don’t even know if I can repeat it, but I will. It seems innocuous enough. BTW, I’m not a real journalist or anything. I’m just a guy that takes photos and likes stories.
[Queue Radiolab soundeffects] Rich is tearing down a highway in central California. He’s in his own car. There are other Google people in there, and they are peering upwards and out the window like tornado chasers. They have radio antennae, laptops, and all kinds of crazy Google equipment as they try to track a balloon. At some point, they overload his alternator and they come to an unceremonious stop. They are stranded.
Rich has to call his wife to pick them up. She’s been in the dark for years about this project, and he hasn’t told her anything. She drives hours and hours to pick them up. He fills up her car with nerds and equipment and they sit there silently, ignoring the Fringe/X-Files nonsense that is happening in the backseat. His lips form a line as he looks side to side innocently. I’m not sure if that look actually happened, but it probably did.
I heard she’s here at this press conference that’s happening right now in Christchurch. So now she knows everything; She’s probably quite proud of him!
More balloons are lined up and ready for launch as a chopper lands behind.
And, by the way, if you are here in New Zealand in Christchurch, come see me at the Festival of Flight at the Air Force Museum on Sunday! The Project Loon event is from 10am-2pm on Sunday June 16th. There will be a lot about balloon science and stuff like that… bring the family! Here’s a map.
Anyway, hats off to all the engineers and team members. It’s a cool project. It’s all quite early, of course, but if they can keep iterating, it will be a really cool option to get Internet everywhere. I can see remote villages in Africa having one of those red-ballooned antennas. I can see it forcing competitive local Internet services in SE Asia to provide cheaper service and no data caps (the same way Google Fiber is disrupting competitive services). I can see myself putting one of those antenna on my truck so I have Internet no matter where I travel in New Zealand to take photos. Man, I can’t wait!
The Loon Balloon rests off-stage in secret, waiting for the curtain to drop!
We make a multi-G turn in the mountains, turning the chopper almost totally on its side to chase the balloon.
Inside the Google X NZ Warehouse, the overall plan is described in a chalk talk.
One of the tester families somewhere in Central Otago, New Zealand, below their friendly Google antenna. That's their old satellite dish there beside it where they once had to pay $1400 for a month!
Rich describes the launch WHILE the launch is happening right behind him at the Tekapo airport.
A ton of Loon balloons being prepped for launch! Next time you see them, they'll be floating 20km overhead, twice as high as commercial airliners.
Here's the whole gallery of all the images on Google+. Just click above to visit.
The Google Science Fair – Free educational event – The Science of Photography
I know some of you were able to watch the Google Science Fair event a few weeks ago, but be sure to check out that website for some of the other videos. I wish I had all these resources when I was a kid!
Daily Photo – A view of the city from the Hollywood Hills
One night, Tom and I went up to the top of Runyon Canyon to shoot the city. On the walk up, I liked the view of one of the palatial Hollywood Hills homes through the valley. I zoomed in with my 28-300 mm lens to get this shot.
If you’re ever in LA and looking for some new types of city shots, take a hike around Runyon during the sunset. You may find some cool scenes!
This was a fun episode with Leo recently. You might enjoy! 🙂
Daily Photo – Beihei Park Island in Beijing
It was a beautiful and still night when we arrived. This park is quite huge and it can take well over an hour to walk around the whole island, so there wasn’t a lot of time to catch a good location for the setting sun. Luckily, Tom had been to this spot before, so we were able to quickly get in position. Good sunsets are really rare in Beijing because of all the smog, but this evening came out nicely because of a strange pink-purple light that burned through the smog/fog as the sun set.
