Taking your manuals with you

One thing that I have amassed as a digital photographer are lots and lots of instruction manuals. Cameras, flashes, wireless units, audio recorders, Pocket Wizards, studio lights, computer software, portable lights and all of them with more features than I could possibly remember. So I am really good about keeping all of the instruction books on a bookshelf in my office... ready to be referenced at a moments notice.

The only problem is that I am rarely shooting in my office when I need to look up some obscure feature offered by one of my cameras or accessories. Typically I am out of town, or at least across town when I need to look something up... and my manuals are... right there on my office shelf and out of reach.

So I started downloading pdf's instruction manuals of all of the cameras and other devices I use frequently and have a folder with my own little "digital library" that is on both of my laptops so that it always travels with me and I have access to all of my manuals whenever I need to look up a feature or setting.

Here are some of the links to the most popular items... if there is something you want that isn't listed, you can probably do a Google search for the name of the device and the words "manual" and "pdf" and if it's online, that should lead you to it. (Example: "Canon 40D pdf manual")

Canon manuals -- click on the camera you need the manual for. Then click on "Drivers & Downloads." Scroll down the list and download the manual for the camera.

Nikon manuals -- in the Nikon Knowledge Database under "Search by Product" select "Digital SLR" and in the sub-menu you can select the camera you want. Then under "Search by Category" select "Manuals and Guides" and then hit the search button and you can download the manuals you want.

Pocket Wizard manuals -- the various Pocket Wizard manuals (for current and previous products) are listed here.

Quantum battery packs and Q-Flashes -- a list of all the manuals for all their lights, batteries and accessories.

Happy shooting and computing!

10.5 and the little bugs

So overall I am still really liking Leopard (since have it installed on all my machines, I guess it is too late to not like it) but there are still a few things that continue to bug me.

The first and most annoying is that my HP 7310 All-In-One printer will no longer do double-sided-printing. It appears this has been a known issue since Leopard's release and HP has worked with Apple and on the Leopard install disk are print only drivers for the majority of their printers... that's right print only drivers... so a lot of the other functionality of the all-in-ones has disappeared. No more scanning or faxing from the computer and no more double sided printing.

And I can't begin to tell you how much fun it is to have to feed each page of my published image copyright continuation forms by hand into the printer after filling them out in Acrobat so that they will print on both sides correctly...

There are numerous discussions about this on most of the Mac forums.
Hopefully we will see a fix from HP soon.

The other thing that has come up recently (I've only experienced it in the last two weeks) is a bug where in using Photoshop CS3, when you try to enter a size in the crop tool, nothing ends up being entered into the boxes where you put the size and resolution of the image. Most of the time, quitting out of Photoshop and opening it back up again does the trick... but still... what a pain.

This also happens using the feather tool and a number of other tools, but most frequently for me with the crop tool. What is odd is that I am having this happen on my MacPro and my MacBook Pro but not on my MacBook. It could be because I do the least Photoshop work on the MacBook.

There has also been some debate over whether this is an Apple bug or an Adobe bug. Hopefully come MacWorld it will be fixed since there has been word that 10.5.2, which is rumored to be scheduled for release at MacWorld, will fix the problem.

A short term workaround for the problem: If you hover your mouse over the text Width, Height, and Resolution text in the menu next to the boxes where you enter the size, and then hold down the mouse button you can use it like a slider (go right or left) to increase the value to what you want in the box. If you also hold down the shift key, it will go by increments of 10 (pixels, inches, etc.), if you hold down the option key, it will move by increments of 0.1 (pixels, inches, etc.)

The other way you can make a crop if the bar isn't behaving is to do a crop with no data in the sizing windows and then use the "Image Size" tool under the "Image" menu bar item in CS3.

The other Leopard oddity I have experienced on all three of my Macs is the occasional really long startup or shut down for no apparent reason. If there were updates that were installed or running maintenance scripts or something beforehand, I wouldn't worry... but it is odd that this happens every so often. Repairing permissions doesn't seem to make a difference and there are no rogue startup applications that could be causing the problem... hopefully this will be put to bed by 10.5.2 as well.

If I had to do it all over again, I would still be running Leopard right now. It is fast and very stable... with the exception of the problems listed above... none of which are important enough to avoid making the jump... but hopefully they are viewed as important by the companies that hold the keys to fixing the problems.