Equipment Equipment as of March, 2006 A few things have changed in the last two and a half years, and I am now an apartment dweller, no longer living with Eve. I'm very happy with the new arrangement, but that story is told elsewhere. I sold the Powermac G4, but I still have the G4 Powerbook and the G5; except the G5 now has 3.5GB ram, with two 250GB hard drives inside, and is running Mac OS 10.4.6. I didn't mention it before, but the SATA pci card is a SeriTek/1SE2 with two external ports bought at MacWorld 2005, and it has been joined by a SeriTek/1VE4 with four external ports that I bought this year. Those connect to a SeriTek/1EN2 Two-Bay enclosure, and a SeriTek/2EN4 Four-Bay enclosure, respectively. There are two 160GB drives in the two-bay, and two 250GB and one 160GB drive in the four-bay. If my math is correct, that's 1.48 terrabites of storage with one empty bay, still. That's pretty amazing if you look at the storage I had in 1995, and all of it has worked flawlessly so far. I've upgraded to Adobe Photoshop CS2, and soon I'll be upgrading to Final Cut Studio. I'm still using Adobe GoLive CS, but the software I'm most excited about these days is Cinema 4D version 9.1. I'm dying to upgrade Cinema to 9.6, but so far have managed to restrain myself--my finances have limits, especially after my MacWorld 2006 spending spree. To get up to date on cameras, I have to go back to MacWorld 2005, where I bought a Canon Optura 30. I haven't put any of it's output online yet, but some day... This year I bought my first serious digital camera, a Canon Rebel XT with a serious lens: a Canon CA241054IS 24-105mm f/4L IS USM AF, both from B&H photo, and I got my $75 rebate check from Canon just last week. I'm still using the Bogen 3021 tripod with a 3047 head. I had fantasies of never having to deal with noise again, but that is a little unrealistic. Still, I've taken some shots I'm very happy with, and if you keep checking the New Photo Index, someday I will actually post some of them online. I would have posted some already, but I've gotten involved with my podcast, Bare Brains, to the point of obsession, although hopefully that will wind down in a couple of weeks. I think I may run out of things to talk about; at least temporarily. For the podcast I'm using another MacWorld special from B&H, a Snowball USB microphone, that I'm very pleased with. In the following entries you can see the progression of equipment I've used since I started this site in 1995.
			Equipment as of Summer, 2004:
		My current still camera is a Nikon Coolpix 4300. For video I bought a factory refurbished Canon Elura in 2000 that I'm still using. Eve and I share a Velbon Maxi 343E tripod and a Umax Powerlook III scanner with transparency adapter. I have three Apple computers: a G4 dual 500MHz with 1GB ram, two 40GB hard drives set up as RAID 0, and two 160 GB SATA drives running off a pci card. Hooked up to that is a Wacom Entuos 2 6X8 tablet, making this my main Photoshop CS machine. Then there's a G5 Dual 2GHz with 1.5 GB ram, 160GB and 250GB hard drives, with a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. I use a Griffin iMic for sound in and out. Finally, I have a 15" G4 Powerbook, 1.5GHz with 768MB ram and 80GB hard drive. All three have Superdrives. My main software are Adobe Photoshop CS and GoLive CS, and Final Cut Pro 4.5
		Equipment in 1995: I use a Canon T-90 (35mm), with several lenses: 20-35mm zoom, 50mm, 80-200mm zoom, and a 300mm (some bought used); and a Zone VI 4x5 field camera, (which has yet to see the "field") with one lens, a Schneider 210mm. A Bogen 3021 tripod with a 3047 head works with both cameras. My kitchen is more darkroom than kitchen, with a Zone VI 5x7 enlarger (Cold Light Head with Variable Contrast Control, Motorized Focus Control, and Compensating Enlarging Timer, all from Zone VI, and two Schneider lenses: 80mm and 150mm. Since I live in apartments and wall-mounting is frowned on, the enlarger is mounted on a cabinet made of one-inch plywood that is so overbuilt it will print without shaking in all but major earthquakes. I process black and white film and prints in a Jobo CPA 2 rotary processor, and wash the prints in a Nova archival washer. I don't know much about the science of photography or processing--I get by, and I try to make the end products archival. I print almost exclusively on Kodak Polymax Fine Art paper.
	My dining room is more framing studio than dining room: small table with two chairs; two 32x40 five-drawer flat files stacked up with a plywood work surface on top where the Rotatrim Mastercut II lives; a modular kitchen cabinet base unit topped with another work surface where the Logan model 350 matt-cutter lives; and a Seal Products Commercial 210 dry-mount press on a roll-around kitchen cart that came with the apartment. The computer is a Power Macintosh 7500/100 with 80 megs of ram, a built in 4x CD-rom player, and two internal hard drives: the original 1-gig Quantum Fireball, and a 4.3-gig Quantum Atlas. The modem is a Global Village TelePort Platinum. On the scsi chain are a Smart and Friendly 1002Pro CD recorder, a SyQuest EZ 135 and a La Cie Silverscanner II. Software: Adobe Page Mill 2.0 and Photoshop 3.0.5, Claris Works 4.0, Live Picture 2.0, and Netscape 2.0.
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