60,000 Songs. In your achingly fashionable corduroy messenger bag.

This caused quite a stir on Twitter, so I thought I'd give the rest of the world a heads-up. I was looking for a buyer for my MacBook Pro but didn't find one, so it was clearly time for at least a hard drive upgrade to make the machine more livable.

My usual source for hard drives is Dabs, since they carry a dazzling array of drives, always have it in stock and they get the finger out and ship on time. I also love their site's interface for drilling down through the various specifications: choose SATA, choose laptop, choose 160-300GB.

300GB? Yes, 300GB. That's not a typo.

I hadn't caught the news that laptop drives had reached this kind of size. I knew Apple had a 250GB CTO option on the latest MacBook Pros, but I didn't know 300GB even existed. The device in question is Fujitsu's MHX2300BT. It's a 2.5" 300GB drive with a 4200rpm spindle and an 8MB buffer. I paid £116 at Dabs for it, which is a pretty nice price.

In between bulging Aperture and iTunes libraries, the chunky iLife '08 install, a Leopard partition and maybe Boot Camp in the future, 300GB is the kind of size one wants in a laptop these days.

Acorn from Flying Meat

Gus Mueller has a new app out! A small, light, fast, cheap, modern and powerful bitmap editor called Acorn. This is something the platform has really needed for some time, in my opinion, and it looks like a great app.

I've already got my license and I'm looking forward to making use of it in the future.

Colour Management and Printing in Aperture

I've hit that funny point in printer/ink pricing where replacing the cartridges in my printer (Canon ip4300) will cost 80% of its original purchase price and far more than its current market value.

I've written in the past about the problems I've had getting this printer to play nicely with Aperture. Somehow, I've never been able to quite get everything together to make a nice print from this printer. It's not particularly the colour rendition - I would be happy if it was merely that one problem. I've had consistent problems with uneven banding across the print. The strange thing is that Lightroom prints very well to this printer.

Anyway, one of the reasons for writing this post was to point out two documents in Apple's support knowledge base that I had not seen before:

• Aperture: Optimizing for your printer
  
• Aperture: Color and gamma settings for print and web
  

The first walks through setting up print presets in Aperture, giving advice on when and whether to adjust things like Black Point Compensation and Gamma. Very welcome information. The second document gives some detail about producing customised display profiles and soft proofing on-screen.

Oh and, while I have your eyeballs: anyone have a recommendation for a printer/paper combination that's working well for printing Canon CR2 RAW files?

Colin Prior at the Apple Store

I'm just home from an afternoon at the Glasgow Apple Store, where Colin Prior was giving a talk on "Photography and the Mac". Really, Prior did the 'photography' part and Peder Engrob, Apple's photo guy for the EU, did the 'on the Mac' part. The Mac part was basically a 12-minute run-through of the main features of Aperture. Surprisingly, I actually learned three tricks that I had not known about before.

For those who don't know Colin Prior, he's a native of Glasgow and one of the pre-eminent landscape photographers in the world. He's very famous in the UK, although I'm not sure he's so well known in the US. I heard him speak once before in support of his latest book, The World's Wild Places. That day, the focus was more on environmental issues than on the photography itself (ironic, given the air miles he puts into his work). Today, though, it was all photo geek, all the time. I made several notes, which I'll try to reinvigorate into something that makes sense for you. In what follows, words in italics are paraphrased. Words in "inverted commas" are direct quotes.

On The Mechanics of Photography

Prior started off by discussing some of the technical aspects. He said that the techniques of photography are essentially trivial to master and are getting easier all the time. Choice point: the difference between f/4 and f/2.8 is £1400 or bumping your ISO up a couple of notches. Save your money.

On Landscape Composition

Colin showed numerous examples of his work and talked the crowd through his thinking in the composition of each. He focused on two aspects: leading the eye through the image and using simplification to represent a 3D scene in a 2D frame. He discussed a point that he teaches students in his photography school: consider what turns you on about a scene and simplify your composition to emphasise that aspect above all others. If it's colour that excites your eye, compose the landscape in bands of colour and eliminate detail. If it's texture, eliminate wasted space.

There was one choice quote, in particular, about photographing trees. He showed a close up of the tops of three trees, each a splendid contrasting colour. He said: "When faced with this, most people get their wide-angle on and that doesn't say anything about anything". I've long preferred to shoot landscapes with a 70-200mm lens, rather than my 10-22. It was interesting how much Prior was talking about lenses 300mm and longer.

On Light

Prior is a Scot, and he knows overcast days. His advice for landscape photographers was: if you don't have the light, you can't get the big landscapes. On overcast days, he says "Look into the landscape. Get beyond the literal and pick out details".

People ask him "why go up a mountain?". His answer: you've all been standing in the valley pointing your telephoto up at the shimmering peaks. When you get up there, you have that fantastic light to work with literally at your feet.

On the Discipline of Landscape Photography

For me, this was the choice quote of the whole afternoon: "You must commit yourself to the landscape. There are too many landscape photographers working out of a car". Tough words to hear for a weekend warrior like myself, but so obviously true.

He showed an image of Rannoch Moor: "People ask how long it took to make this image. It took me five years."

On Photographic Technology

Prior clearly has no romantic notions about photographic technology. He praised Aperture to the heavens, glorified digital photography and declared the new Canon EOS 1Ds Mk. III to be the new gold standard in image quality for "some time to come".

Prior was pretty scathing about medium format. He said that the point of medium format was the modularity of the system, particularly with respect to changing film backs. His belief was that this is no longer of any relevance in the digital age, and described the notion of digital backs for M/F systems as "archaic" and "wrong thinking". His belief was clear that APS-C/35mm-based photography is where the future will lie.

Prior made a few predictions on the technological future of photography: that the SLR mirror box and pentaprism will disappear in short order; that hi-definition video viewfinders are the way forward, allowing much smaller camera designs and that retrofocus lenses will become a thing of the past, leading to greater image quality. I'm not sufficiently embedded in the photographic world to make a judgement call on these, but I bet that Colin Prior talks to Canon's technical people on a regular enough basis to know what's going on in the labs.

I just got schooled by kids

I'm sitting in a Primary 2/3 computing lesson taken by a colleague. These kids are ages 5, 6 and 7. The topic is "How Computers Help" and we're asking the kids how computers help. The answers are amazing:

• "You can download stuff for your Nintendo Wii"
  
• "You can go on the internet and find a house"
  
• "You can go on eBay and buy stuff"
  
• "You can watch a DVD"
  
• "You can print pictures from your camera"
  
• "You can get a movie camera and talk to other people"
  
• "You can download music to your iPod"
  
• "You can put your songs on a CD"
  
• "If you don't know what to wear to school, you can go on the internet and find out"
  
• "You can send your typing to a friend"
  
• "You can go on the internet and see pictures"
  

What they didn't say was as interesting: nothing about typing letters, nothing about spreadsheets or databases. Not that you would know this from educational resources. People who make up these courses are still stuck in the days of ClarisWorks, when it was really an awesome feat to have a spreadsheet and a graphic in the same document.