Equipment - tools of the trade: June 2005 Archives

I'm just about to leave St. Paul for New Haven. My office is all packed up -- about fifty boxes of books waiting for UPS. The movers arrive on Friday to take everything away. My little cottage is going on the market next Tuesday. It's the end of a nice period for me in the mid-West.

Since I'm driving to Connecticut from Minnesota and because I'll be doing a lot of traveling this summer as I wrap up my fieldwork, I thought I would get a 3G cell-phone that would allow me to connect to the internet while on the road. After a lot of research, I decided on the Motorola v330 from T-Mobile, which has a $19.99 unlimited internet plan (unlike the other vendors who are metered or much more expensive). The v330 has built-in bluetooth and can operate as a wireless modem for the 3G/GPRS service.

The phone arrived today. The hard bit was setting it up for dial-up-networking (DUN) on MacOS X. It took some figuring out. Here are my notes:

A thread on the large format photography list is titled, Kodak Discontinuing B&W Paper?:

"Well, I can't quite believe this one, but it's from the venerable and usually well informed Richard Knoppow on the F32 list:

'My contact at Kodak has informed me that Kodak has discontinued all B&W paper. The official announcement will be made later today. Kodak will continue to manufacture B&W film and chemicals.' I'd like to hope it's yet another misunderstandign of one of Kodak's announcements about some kind of downsizing"

We are reaching the point where the evolution of sensor design is plateauing and we are seeing only minimal differences between different platforms. And I think this is a good thing because it forces us to return to the original question of how we choose cameras. This article was stimulated by people finding that Leica R9/DMR was taking photographs that were only slightly better in quality than the much less expensive Canon EOS 20D. The Nikon D2X photographs also rival those taken with the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II even though the sensor size is much different.