Trevin Chow

I’m happy to announce that, starting today, my new photography exhibit is up at Spur Gastropub in Seattle.  The show is titled Dreaming in Black and White and consists of black and white photos of  urban settings to fit décor of Spur.  For those that have seen my previous work on display, you’ll see mostly new work with a few of my all time favorites mixed in.

The photographs are being projected digitally on a huge screen that overlooks their dining area with 3 minute transitions between each photo.  This provides a unique viewing experience than previous shows since in the past, I’ve worked with much smaller canvas sizes.

In addition to being my first show done digitally, it is also the first one I’ve done entirely in black and white.  Being primarily a color photography, it was quite the learning experience.  Photographs that looks fantastic in color can look completely dull when you convert to black and white.   There is truly an art to picking the photographs that have sufficient contrast.

After spending the last 3 weeks culling through photos, the resulting set of photographs is something I’m really proud of and would love you all to check it out.

The show starts today (April 9th) and runs for the next 3 months.  Stop in for a drink or a meal, check my photos out and let me know what you think.  (I highly recommend the cocktail named “Broken Spur #2”, it’s ridonkulously good).

Here is a sample of 2 photos from the show to wet your appetites:

The rest of my portfolio can be seen at http://www.trevinchowphotography.com and my daily photo blog is at http://www.trevinchowphotography.com/blog.

You can also subscribe to get my daily photos sent to you by email.  I don’t share your email addresses with anyone and you can unsubscribe at any time.

After getting a new desktop recently, I opted to install Windows 7 64-bit and haven’t looked back. Adobe Photoshop CS4 runs great in 64-bit, although I have a few plugins that aren’t 64-bit compatible.

So while I can launch Photoshop’s 32-bit instance, the Lightroom always launches the 64-bit version when you use the built-in “Edit with…” functionality. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to get Lightroom to use the 32-bit instance of Photoshop instead. Hallelujah, I finally found a solution!

The solution requires a change to the Windows Registry. There is an unrelated Adobe’s Knowledge Base article that gives the location of the Photoshop registry keys, I was able to figure out how to get this to work finally.

Warning: Backup your registry before attempting this fix.

1. Open the Windows Registry editor by hitting <Windows Key>+R to bring up the Run box, and type in regedit.

2. Find the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Photoshop.exe

3. There are 2 keys present with the following values (assuming you installed Photoshop to the default location):
(Default) C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Photoshop.exe
(Path) C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\

4. We need to just change the path to the 32-bit version of Photoshop instead.  Double click on each one, and change the values to the following:
(Default) C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Photoshop.exe
(Path) C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4

Now when you’re back in Lightroom, you should be able to use the “Edit in Photoshop” functionality and it will launch the 32-bit version of Photoshop.

I’ve started a new photography blog that is separate from this one, that is more optimized for viewing my photos.  This is a more curated than my Flickr stream (which is more of a firehose of my daily photography).  You can expect to see photos taken mainly with my toy cameras and my iPhone.

Here’s a few of the recent photos I’ve posted:

Head on over to check it out, and feel free to subscribe to it by RSS or if you prefer, subscribe by email to get updates in your inbox every time I post something new. 

(I had a few issues at the beginning getting the blog layout right, so I republished photos several times over to accommodate different sizes.  So if you were an early subscriber, I apologize for the glut of updates in your RSS reader!)

If you have firewire and shoot with a Compact Flash (CF) card, do yourself a favor and buy the Hoodman Firewire 400/800  CF card reader today.  This thing is a freakin’ speed demon!  I’m getting between 40-45 MB/s and downloading 175 RAW files from my Nikon D700 in less than a minute. 

To get the fastest speeds, you need to be using fast UDMA CF cards but it also supports non-UDMA cards as well.  Personally I use the SanDisk Extreme IV cards and highly recommend them.  I have never had one of their cards fail, and if their cards can survive explosions, they will put up with anything I throw at them

At first, I was hesitant to replace my Lexar USB card reader which is convenient due to supports both CF and SD.  However, since I shoot mostly with my DSLR, I opted to buy this additional card reader to sit side-by-side with my Lexar reader so I could save time.  I used to have to walk away from my PC while Lightroom imported my photos, but now I can see the files at freakishly amazing speeds.

Construction wise, it’s also built sturdy enough to both in your home office and on the road (assuming you have FW on your laptop) .  From the Amazon comments:

Almost immediately after I bought my reader, I dragged it across sub-Saharan Africa on some of the world’s bumpiest roads in 115° average afternoon temperature, under conditions where almost everything broke-down (cars, generators; hard-drives, computers; lenses etc.). The Hoodman CF Reader worked flawlessly… in fact, it still does, even in my air-conditioned office.

This was the best $80 I’ve spent in a really long time.

Over the past year, I’ve fallen in love with photos out of toy / Lo-Fi cameras so I was absolutely thrilled when I got a Zumi Digital camera 2.0 as gift this past Christams.  I have been shooting like a fiend with it for the past week.  Here are some sample shots:

One of the hidden surprises of this camera was that there is an undocumented black & white mode!  I stumbled across it by accident going through the menus one day, and the great part is that it also works for videos!

Here is a shot I took of downtown Seattle:

Here’s how you turn the B&W mode on:

1. Start with the camera off
2. Press the “On” button and wait for the screen to say “Ready”
3. Press “Menu” button 5 times so you cycle through all the menus and end up back at the screen that says “Ready”.
4. Press “OK” button 3 times – first time to toggle into Video mode, second time to toggle back to camera, then the third time to go back to video mode. 

Tada! You’ll now see video mode in B&W, and if you press the “OK” button one more time, you’ll go back to photo mode which will now also be B&W. 

You automatically go back to color mode when you turn the camera off and back on, which means that you unfortunately can’t stay in B&W mode by default.

Note: I have the Zumi 2.0 camera, so this may not work for the first generation that was originally sold by Photojojo.