Roblog

I’m still really enjoying my DSLR camera (Nikon D60), and I use it at the slightest provocation. So I can’t claim to have been too upset when, while at my daughter’s first practice swim meet, two people separately came up to me to ask if I would be the team’s photographer. I suppose I was the parent that had the most serious-looking camera.

Although I wasn’t looking to be out in the heat for all that long, I was eager to test my photography skills at the swim meets. I asked a lot of questions about what they expected of me: what kinds of pictures do you want (action shots, pictures of individuals), what are you going to do with them (ready for printing, or just online viewing), how should I provide them for use, etc. I needn’t have been so concerned. Previous years were just a few snapshots, and in fact last year there were no pictures of the meets at all.

Logistically, I set myself up quickly to manage the pictures. I created a new iPhoto library for Glenshire Gators photos, and I have the Picasa account to which I can upload the photos. I thought about trying to annotate the photos with the people in them, but I don’t know any of the team members currently, and I doubt I will be able to recognize them in their swim goggles and swim caps. So I’ll just upload the pictures without annotation, but after I’ve cropped and otherwise cleaned-up the pictures.

It’s been going quite well. I end up with about 100 pictures at each meet, and I’m getting better about what looks good. I like getting shots of swimmers just entering the water, and timing pictures of front crawl where you can see their faces are very dramatic when it turns out. Closely cropping the picture is best, too, so I often am at maximum zoom (12x).

You can see how I’ve done by checking out the Picasa page:
http://picasaweb.google.com/glenshiregators/
Any picture from 2009 is one I’ve taken.

One of the pictures I took at my daughter’s last swim meet had a really interesting splash effect. Most of the pictures that turn out well have a lot of water splashing and you can recognize who the swimmer is. In this case, it appears that two water drops of about the same size collided in midair to produce a “crown”. Look closely in the upper-left area of this picture and you might see a small water drop that looks like a flower.

http://picasaweb.google.com/glenshiregators/Meet3VsAshtonVillage#5350348430115133794

I’ve seen this effect in pictures where people use strobe lights to try to capture water droplets striking a surface, but I never imagined I’d see this shape at the local pool. Neat!

My printer died last week, but not from a usual cause. When we put in a fresh cartridge of black ink, an error message appeared on the printer’s screen saying that a part internal to the printer has exceeded its service lifetime and that Epson service must be called. I am not one to cave in to any piece of computer hardware’s demands, so I did some searching online.

Apparently, this (Epson Stylus Photo RX700) and many other models of Epson printers have a waste ink pad that collects the ink that is cleaned off of the print heads. After a pre-determined number of cleanings, the printer is programmed to report an error so that the waste ink pad can be replaced.

This makes some sense. After all, it won’t do any good cleaning print heads if the cleaning pad is full of ink. But as it was, the printer literally would not print anything until this error was cleared. I tried some tricks that were referenced on various sites I found, but no combination of key presses I tried cleared the error. The printer still refused to function at all. Replacing the waste ink pad was apparently something Epson did not intend for the typical user to do, since it’s not easy to get at and requires special software to reset the internal counter to indicate that the waste pad has been replaced.

So I used the online Epson help page, which advised me to call a (non toll-free) number for service. My wife did this, and got a foreign service desk that had a really bad delay in the line, making it very difficult to have a successful conversation. After struggling through the call, the official recommendation she got was to buy a new printer.

What?!?! “Buy a new printer”? The printer decided to stop working, not because anything was really broken, but because something might become broken someday (maybe) with continued use? And the official response was to buy a new printer? That is ridiculous and unacceptable. Certainly, it’s not uncommon in the computer industry to design a product with “planned obsolescence”, but this was not only planned, but pre-programmed into the printer to have it commit suicide after a set amount of use. I’m still flabbergasted by the whole thing.

My wife got a “loyalty code” from the foreign service representative that supposedly would give us a good discount on another Epson printer. I didn’t even check to see what the discount was. After all, how many cleanings would any other Epson printer allow me before it decided I needed to buy a new printer again?

So I did actually take their advice and bought a new printer. But not an Epson. I got a Canon PIXMA MP980. It’s a really nice printer with all the features I liked in my Epson, and it came with a $100 rebate at the Fry’s I bought it from. It’s slightly smaller, can still scan slides and film, and matches the style of my computer better. It actually has some new features, too, like duplex printing and the ability to print borderless prints from my Mac.

I’m happy with my printer purchase, but my previous good will and good experience with Epson products has disappeared. Right now, I’m not sure I will ever buy another Epson product again.