We had a  ball. Gary Fields, Budde King, Ron Paxton and Al coir gave many people a helping hand with their digital cameras. The one area that seemed to present the most confusion was White Balance. Many of the cameras had been inadvertently to incandescent lighting. This resulted in poor daylight pictures. Others used daylight settings with incandescent lighting. Again, unsatisfactory color. Some cameras do a pretty good job when set on auto white balance. However to be safe, it is wise to use the settings for sunshine, incandescent lighting, shade and so on. We used  filters for these corrections when using film. Now we can make the appropriate selection in the camera. Less stuff to carry around in our pockets.

Our thanks to Gary for setting up the session and to Budde King and Ron Paxton for their individual attention. Al Coir also helped many familiarize many people with their cameras.  It does help to read the manual that  comes with the camera, even if we don’t understand it all, and then be grateful for the help from other folk. Just goes to prove that our Senior SIG meetings are helpful and also fun.

See you at the next meeting. Jim Roose

During our March and April meetings, Al Coir provided in-depth looks at I Works, both Pages and Keynote 2. Al obviously has spent a lot of time with these two programs and his presentations were helpful and instructive. If you have a newsletter that you would like to pep up or make a change of face, you should take a look at Pages. It contains some very nice templates.

Our June meeting should be very exciting. Gary Fields and friends are going to provide instruction in digital photography and hands on help with your problems and camera. This session should be a real swinger.

We are pleased that the problems that Buddy King’s father recently suffered have been stabilized. Good to hear.

We keep reading that some day digital photography would be as good as film. For most of us that is already true. To days four and five megapixel cameras provide excellent enlargements of eight by ten inches and larger, which is sufficient for most of our needs. Most of the cameras are light, compact and easy to carry in purse or jacket pocket. There is another side to these light compact cameras. That is the tendency to shoot quickly withourt taking time to steady the camera. Take time to hold the camera properly and steadily and squeeze the shutter button, don’ jab or jerk. Being an octogenarian , we find that a tripod or monopod is a big help. While a tripod is the most stable , and there are a number of good light weight ones, we like our monopod. It can serve us as a cane or walking stick, and in a crowded area is much more convenient than a tripod.

Recently we visited the butterfly house at the botanical garden. It was crowded both with people and butterflys. Our monopod helped us steady our camera I n the crowd and our micro lens gave us good sharp images. As we age we need a steadier helping hand. Do like the pros. Use your tripod.

MacOS 10.4 will soon be available. Be interesting to see how it works. To find out how the rest of the folks react to the newer system attend the Senior SIG meetings. There will be many personal reactions. Don’t forget the coming meeting with Gary Fields and Friends. They should have most of the answers toyou digital photo questions.

Happy Macing. Jim Roose

AMUG Sr. SIG news for March – April 2005

We are now well into the year 2005 and we would like to review a few facts about the Senior SIG, First of all, Al Coir and Bob Charnetsky have led this group well and it is on a sound footing. Our meeting place is assured, has theater seating and parking in the area is quite good. The new projector (we still owe Al some on that purchase) is great and we have internet access. We are offered useable answers to our questions and the presentations are both informative and entertaining. At the AMUG SR SIG site you will find interesting news and useful information. Why not take advantage of these wonderful opportunities? Many of us also enjoy the after the meeting lunch fellowship.

When we do to use our photos, we often find that cropping will improve then, though if we try enlarge the cropped image a bit we lose some resolution. If you are using Adobe PhotoShop there is a trick you might try. You may have heard Gary Fields and others mention 110. This is increasing the size of the file by 110%, then doing so again and again. Why it works? Don’t ask, it just does. We have used it by enlarging by 110% a file as many as five times to get the size we wanted. So far we have not been disappointed. If you have Nikon Capture 4, you can increase the by percentages. The maximum appears to be 200%. We understand, that, this does not work with the D1X cameras, though that could be wrong.

We are exploring remote control of our camera, hoping that eventually we will be able to do this wirelessly. For now, we connect our D70 to our computer with a USB cord. With an extender cord, we have placed the camera over twelve feet from the computer. When using this connection, we can use the shutter release on the camera and the photo data is recorded directly on the hard disk rather than on the compact flash card in the camera. The image is on our monitor and we can evaluate it in the larger view before trying again. We also can control the camera from our computer, seeing the enlarged image on the monitor and being able to see what adjustments we would like to make immediately is handy. Beats waiting for the film to come back. Great for our table top work, and we are sure for studio photographers. Our next step is to try wireless for bird photography. Maybe an iBook for portability and we would have it made. We can dream can’t we?

We have taken a quick look at Apple’s Pages and Keynote 2. At first glance Pages reminds us of Microsoft Word. We hope it is not as quirky as we find Word. So far, we like what we have seen of Keynote 2.

See you at the next Senior SIG meeting. Meantime, have fun and enjoy your Mac.

Jim Roose

SENIOR SIG New November/December 2004s

At the September Senior SIG meeting the presenter was once again Harry Keto, who showed some more of his efforts with Photo to Movie. He used his own laptop and speakers for his presentation and both the show and sound were very good.

We are writing this about three weeks prior to our October meeting, but are sure that at that meeting everyone got a kick out of Al Coir’s joy in using the SIG’s new projector. We hope that it is everything Al has expected.

As we move into November Christmas is not far away, especially if you hope that either Santa or Mrs Santa will leave a new digital camera or perhaps a new printer under the tree. Don’t leave them up in the air about what you want, but be rather specific and both sides will b happy. But are you certain which camera or printer you want? Thee are a few steps ou might make get it right.

As to cameras, the more pixels the better, right? What are you going to use it for? If for family pictures with an occasional eight by ten, then a four or five MP will be adequate and save you some money. After all, more pixels means more money. Next not all cameras with the same MP rating are equal. To meet the lower market pricing there are occasions when compromises are made in design or production. Get on the internet and check out all the reviews you can find, as well as doing some comparison pricing.

When it come to printers, you can do pretty much the same thing. You can take an additional step. Go to the different stores and look at the printers and the color pages they produce. Also check the quality of the text printing. Generally, you will save money on ink if a printer has six to eight individual ink color cartridges. Replacing only a single color at a time will save you money. Many printers show the best results using the manufacturers paper. Compare quality and prices of paper as well as ink. If space is a problem and eight by tens will probably you largest color prints, then limit to printers that will print on letter or legal size paper. Once you go to the larger width papers, again the price moves up quickly.

If you do your home work, on Christmas morning, instead of a piece of coal in your stocking, both you and Mr. or Mrs Santa will be happy. Enjoy!

Have a very merry Holiday season and a great New Year. Keep backing up. Attend the Senior SIG meetings for fun and new ideas.

Jim Roose

SENIOR SIG. NEWS - AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2004

We are sorry we missed the July Senior SIG meeting. One of the ultimatums when we moved to our apartment was that all of the computer related cables must be out of sight. We were able to meet that demand, but at what cost? We have printer, scanner, speaker, external hard disk, zip disk and floppy disk cables all mostly out of sight. Man, when we need to replace or run a new cable, what a fishing expedition. Will have to explore tis wireless business in detail.

From time to time, we have made a few comments about type. For our news letters, or any letters for that matter, good looking typing or type setting sets the more experienced folk apart. Not all type fonts come with perfect word spacing. When you type a personal letter or news letter, or whatever, take a good look. Does it look pleasing to you. In other words is it attractive visually (optically). There are a few simple steps that can help make your effort more pleasing to the eye.

Kerning. Kerning is adjusting the spacing of letters, either closer or further apart. Some programs will let you adjust the spacing between two letters. Others adjust the spacing between all the letters in a word. We prefer the former. For example: Va versus Vase. This column is being prepared in Word, which we find awkward. Difficult to break old habits.

When you italicize a word, consider the space preceding it. Some italic fonts have a tendency to space tighter than Roman fonts. Eyeball it and see if you need to make any adjustments. Also, the slant of italics can cause enough space before the word to be distracting.

Ligatures are two or three letters combined into a single word. The purpose being to avoid conflict or clashing. Usually between the letters f and i, as well as f and l. Here with the letters fi the dot above the i conflicts with the top of the letter f. The ligature &Mac222; looks much cleaner. If your application permits, turn on the “automatic ligature substitution” feature. For some example ligatures see Illustration 4.

Is bolder better? Sometimes to emphasize a point you may use bold type. Often the first bold in a type family is not adequate. Use the next bolder, or where three weights are offered use the second or middle weight.

What type face to use? Thomas Rubarth uses Adobe’s Minion for the AMUG News. It is a good readable pleasant looking type face and is available in the newer open face format. While our favorite type face is Adobe’s Garamond, it is not that much different from Minion. We use the new open face version.

What do you get with open face type. One heck of a lot. Take a look at figure one to see a fraction of the character markings available. If that is confusing, if you are using InDesgin you a pull down menu (figure two) that lets you narrow in your choice. Making a fraction, you can pick denominators and numerators. For chapter or column headings you can select Titling. Looking for an ornament, you can narrow your choice to just ornaments (illustration 3). Of course, should you just wont real small caps, just click on Small Caps.
We have used various applications to view the keyboard options, but believe that the one that comes with Adobe’s InDesign is the best so far. A couple of the others are having some problems with open face fonts.
That is enough rambling about type. Before we close, we want to take this opportunity to thank Thomas Rubarth for adding illustrations to some of our columns. He took time to go on the internet to look at what we were describing and to down load appropriate illustrations. Thank Your.

Keep backing up, enjoy your Mac and we hope to see you at the next Sr. SIG meeting

Jim Roose