Trevin Chow

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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.

I frequently forget to change the date and time on my camera’s when I travel so the timestamps in all the photos I take are incorrect. Even worse is when I bring multiple cameras and only 1 of them, since this causes photos taken on the same date and time have EXIF data that is in conflict with each other depending on which camera I used.

Most photo editing applications don’t make it easy to edit the timestamp in the EXIF data of your photos. I have no idea why, but for some reason they felt fit to prevent us from doing it. (Adobe Lightroom allows you to edit the “capture time” but for most people, buying Lightroom just to edit EXIF info is a little overkill )

There are a lot of apps out there for Windows that will edit EXIF data, but many of them are overkill or way overpriced. Fortunately, a long time ago I stumbled upon a free app to do this called Exifer.

Exifer is a nearly free software (you only should send me a postcard if you’re using Exifer frequently) with which you can manage the metadata (EXIF/IPTC) of pictures taken by digital cameras. Because many image processing software destroys this metadata when saving such files, the idea was to create a backup of the metadata before editing it in any software, and then, after that to restore it back into the processed file. With Exifer you can do this very easily.

The last update to Exifer was in 2002, but it still does exactly what it needs to do (edit EXIF data) and it compatible as far back as Windows 98 and even runs perfectly on Windows 7. Although I don’t use Exifer too often, when I do, it’s a life saver

Schmap is a free online travel guide various popular domestic and international destinations.  They source all their photos freely by canvassing sites like Flickr.  Typically I don’t license my images for free, but I’ve done once already with Schamp because I really like the idea of providing a free travel information.  Besides, it’s just plain cool to have my photo in an online travel guide!

A second photo of mine that I took during my Cirque de Soleil promotional shoot just got included in the Schmap guide for the East-side of Seattle.

This is the photo:

On your PC, you can see it in their guide for Redmond Town Center.  They also have an iPhone formatted version for your viewing pleasure.