…and if he wins, you’ll be able to check them out for yourself. It seems a Florida man took some upskirt photos, got arrested for voyeurism, and now his attorney insists that he didn’t break any laws, because there’s no expectation of privacy in a public place.

It’s true that US law generally agrees that you can photograph anything that’s visible from a public place, but there are already a number of exceptions, and I suspect that shoving your camera into a private place is one of them. This argument might fly if she had deliberately exposed herself or worn a skirt so skimpy that a reasonable person would conclude that her underwear was supposed to be showing, but in all other cases, the perv’s gonna lose.

[And, yes, I’ve met a few of these guys. One of them worked in a camera shop and eagerly showed off a digicam that had the lens connected by a 5-foot cable. His exact words were: “perfect for my sneakies!”. (if I recall correctly, it was this model)]

I like Parallels, even if it can be a real memory hog, but even the latest version doesn’t have very good USB support. Unfortunately, there’s a Windows application I want to use that requires good USB support. Even more unfortunately, it will never, ever run under Vista.

Why not? Because Minolta sold off their entire camera business to Sony, who has no interest in updating the remote-control software for the Dimage A2.

I don’t currently own any computers that run Windows XP, and I don’t particularly want to. But if I ever find the free time to start playing with studio lighting again, I’ll want to remote-control the A2, and with XP gradually disappearing from the market, now’s the time to figure out how.

With the latest Parallels 3.0 build, plugging the camera in while it’s in remote-control mode locks up the virtual machine.VMware Fusion not only handles the camera correctly, it seems to use about half as much memory.

[Note that there is an abandoned open-source project to decipher the Minolta protocol and write a GUI capture tool. I’m not really interested in hacking on it.]

Sony’s first Minolta-compatible SLR was the A100, which was a rebadged and slightly improved Minolta 5D. They’ve now shown off prototypes equivalent to the old 7-series and 9-series bodies, which is good news for people like me with a significant investment in Minolta glass.

My new MacBook is not the ideal machine for running Apple’s Aperture application, but it’s supported, and with 2GB of RAM, usable. At least, it would be if Aperture didn’t crash every five minutes on a brand new install of version 1.5, while just poking around with the supplied sample project.

I hope it will be more stable on my Quad-core G5, which is the ideal machine for this sort of application…

(or was, before the new Mac Pro came out; still, one can’t whine too much about the power of Last Year’s Computer, especially when it’s quite the screamer)

I just admire how thoroughly the photographer covered this little World Cup promotional tie-in. Two girls, two bikinis, two DVDs, seventy pictures. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Every once in a while, I suddenly remember that I’m studying Japanese, and that I have the resources to figure out what things really mean, not just what other people claim they mean. Usually, this involves song lyrics or anime dialog, but today I was reminded of the trendy photographic term bokeh, and decided to sort it out.

Googling the term will turn up dozens of sites that carefully explain that bokeh refers to the quality with which a photographic lens renders the out-of-focus area of images, with a mix of technical jargon and artistic handwaving, and tell you that “boke” is the Japanese word for blur.

There are objective, measurable differences in how lenses render blurred areas of the picture. Minolta even made a monster of a portrait lens specifically designed to produce glorious blur (I tried it out side-by-side with a conventional lens here). Once artists get hold of a word, though, there’s no telling what it might mean, and I’ve seen a number of pretentious explanations of the true meaning of bokeh.

So you’ll understand my amusement when I looked it up and discovered that boke actually means “out of touch with reality”. Less politely, “idiot” or “senile fool”.

The actual Japanese photographic term is ピンぼけ (for the kana-impaired, “pinboke”). It’s a compound word; pin from the Dutch brandpunt = “focus”, and boke from the verb 暈ける (“bokeru”) = “to fade”.

[update! a comment on the Wikipedia page led me to an alternate choice: ぼけ味 (“bokeaji”), which is a combination of ピンぼけ and 味 (“aji”), meaning “flavor”. Supporting evidence for that can be found on Japanese camera sites like this and this (second one mildly NSFW).]

Oh, and the real “Japanese word for blur”? 不鮮明 (“fusenmei”). A related word that might come in handy occasionally is ぶれ (“bure”), meaning “camera shake”.

[Update 7/23/05: okay, the rule of thumb seems to be, “if you can’t handhold a 50mm f/1.4 at ISO 100-400 and get the shot, spot-meter off a gray card and check the histogram before trusting the exposure meter”. This suggests some peculiarities in the low-light metering algorithm, which is supported by the fact that flash exposures are always dead-on, even in extremely dim light.]

[Update 7/22/05: after fiddling around with assorted settings, resetting the camera, and testing various lenses with a gray card, the camera’s behavior has changed. Now all the lenses are consistently underexposing by 2/3 of a stop. This is progress of a sort, since I can freely swap lenses and get excellent exposures… as long as I set +2/3 exposure compensation. I think my next step is going to be reapplying the firmware update. Sigh.]

The only flaw I’ve noticed in my 7D was what looked at first like a random failure in the white-balancing system. Sometimes, as I shot pictures around the house, the colors just came out wrong, and no adjustment seemed to fix it in-camera.

Tonight, I started seeing it consistently. I took a series of test shots (starting with the sake bottle, moving on to the stack of Pocky boxes…) at various white balance settings, loaded them into Photoshop, and tried to figure out what was going on. Somewhere in there, I hit the Auto Levels function, and suddenly realized that the damn thing was simply underexposing by 2/3 to 1 full stop.

Minolta has always been ahead of the curve at ambient-light exposure metering, which is probably why I didn’t think of that first. It just seemed more reasonable to blame a digital-specific feature than one that they’ve been refining for so many years.

With that figured out, I started writing up a bug report, going back over every step to provide a precise repeat-by. Firmware revision, lens, camera settings, test conditions, etc. I dug out my Maxxum 9 and Maxxum 7 and mounted the same lens, added a gray card to the scene, and even pulled out my Flash Meter V to record the guaranteed-correct exposure. All Minolta gear, all known to produce correct exposures.

Turns out it’s the lens. More precisely, my two variable-aperture zoom lenses exhibited the problem (24-105/3.5-4.5 D, 100-400/4.5-6.7 APO). The fixed focal-length lenses (50/1.4, 85/1.4, 200/2.8) and fixed-aperture “pro” zoom lenses (28-70/2.8, 80-200/2.8) worked just fine with the 7D, on the exact same scene. Manually selecting the correct exposure with the variable-aperture zooms worked as well.

These are the sort of details that make a customer service request useful to tech support. I know I’m always happier when I get them.

This is a great little product with one serious, annoying flaw. It prints extremely nice 4x6 borderless prints, with excellent color, but even if you send it a picture that’s been formatted to be exactly 4x6, something in the driver or the printer itself is increasing the image size slightly and cropping about 1/8th of an inch on all sides.

This is actually the same behavior people have been getting from traditional one-hour-photo prints for decades, but when you have complete control over the cropping on your computer, it’s a damn nuisance. It’s even more annoying when you’re printing out documents with narrow margins or pictures downloaded from the web.

A quick Google suggests that their tech support folks are clueless about this issue, and don’t actually understand the complaints they’re getting about it. [Update: those complaints must be old. I got a clear, correct response within a few hours. Sadly, it’s a “working as intended” feature, and they don’t mention workarounds]

My guess [confirmed by tech support] is that they’re fudging the image to cope with misaligned paper, so that a supposedly borderless print doesn’t end up having a border on one side. I’m going to create a numbered 1/16th-inch grid in a PDF file and see precisely what ends up on the paper.

Update: Printing this PDF (created by this Perl script) at various magnifications reveals that 95% is just about perfect, but small alignment errors may produce a tiny white border around the edge of photos. The print driver has some adjustments for paper positioning, which should allow you to get perfect, uncropped, full-bleed prints at 95%. Mac OS X applications that use the standard print dialogs should all work with this, including iPhoto.