At one point, I read this great piece about monitor Gamma, and how, even back in the day, video cards on Macs and Windows boxes measured out to the exact same Gamma spec.  This lead me down a long road, ending at Bill Atkinson's studio in California...

Gamma, how 1.8 became the Mac "standard" and the History of Color Management- an Excerpt from Color Pipeline:

How do I use gamma in color management?

I set the “gamma” selection at 2.2 when I calibrate my monitors. That’s it. My video card and my monitor have a gamma of 2.2, regardless of the so-called Apple and Windows “standards.”

That brings me to a story to loop us back around to “Life After Color Management.” It’s my Bill Atkinson story.

OK kids, today’s the day.  Apple releases Snow Leopard, and it’s looking really hot. 

Primarily the thing that’s looking like a big plus for anyone, like photographers, who are taxing their system resources by crushing huge amounts of, or just huge, files, is the increase in efficiency and size on the disk.  Here are some numbers:

-72 sec startup on a MacBook Air, (vs. 100 Leopard).
-Applications open faster- Safari: 3sec., for example, and half that if you open the app again. 
-The OS is half the size (around 5-7GB) of Leopard, the install is purported to be only 15 minutes.

As far as features and, well, Apple calls them “Refinements”,

the complete list is here, from Apple

.

Some of the ones that photographers may love are…

The basics of sensor design, from a 2003 vintage Kodak Powerpoint piece. 

Putting together some stuff for my studio lighting class last night, I decided on a tribute to my grandfather- and I grabbed the camera that is always sitting on my desk, the Kodak Retina IIa that he gave me, at age 10, for my first "real" camera.  Sitting on the desk, side-by-side with my Canon G9, I was struck by the similarities of the two.  Not only in size- but in what these two cameras were trying to acheive at their respective times.  The Kodak boasted a Schneider lens with a Copal shutter with speeds up to 1/500th sec.  The Canon has opened more than a few eyes with a "pocket camera" size, and a remarkable file and set of features. 

We called the Olympus E-P1 / Canon T1i / Nikon D5000 Head-2-Head a "Mini Head-2-Head" simply because we had fairly limited access to the E-P1 and there were a few things that we couldn't work on- one being the RAW files.  The Olympus software, Master 2, is all but unusable, and the results we got we didn't even feel we could publish.  At that point Adobe Camera RAW was the 5.4 version, and didn't support the camera, so all the testing we did was on in-camera JPEG processing- generally not so good.