The quality of pictures

A corollary of Mycroft Holmes' theorem: the quality of pictures taken with a lens is proportional to your degree of confidence in the lens itself.
In other words, if you don't like a lens, you will not like the pictures it takes.

I instinctively liked the Tamron 18-270, but after a very deep comparison with the Sigma 18-250, I ended buying the Sigma, which is excellent (truth is, probably they are very similar), but every time I use it, I have a vague feeling that "it's not what I really wished", and I tend to underestimate the pictures it takes.

I'd say the same reasoning applies to the Sony 70-300G vs the Tamron 70-300: if you pay ~3x the price for ~1.2x the quality, it may be that you are buying some extra "confidence" in the lens.
It's easier to trust a lens that is more expensive.

Lightroom 4 catalog sync

The good news about software is that sometimes a new release fixes an unreported bug.
Lightroom 4 is able to import in Windows a catalog created on a Mac.
LR3 used to stop with an unknown error, which is usually an elegant way for the program to say: there is a bug somewhere and I stopped just in time before crashing...

iPad color profile

I'm surprised: it's a very simple thing, but apparently nobody thought about it before.


http://www.planetquark.com/2012/03/16/preview-your-ipad-colors-on-your-display/

(you can download the .icc profile from the page and, for example, soft-proof your photos with LR4)

"The best" does not not mean "better"

I was recently considering to buy an A77.

A backpack that you can carry on your back

Recently I bought another excellent item from Sony: the LCS-BP2 backpack.
Sony has a very good arsenal of camera bags, and this is a welcome addition.
I use a big backpack to store my gear at home, but it quickly became so heavy that you don't want to carry it on your back... This one instead is reasonably small.

From the pictures, you can see it holds a fully loaded camera, two long lenses and it has a top compartment for flash, batteries, etc. But actually it has one more section which is not visible (between the camera and the top), so you can carry three lenses; simply it's not that easy to open.

Frozen glass

The case of copyright infringement for reproducing the same retouch effects on a slightly different photo (see the whole story here) seems a bit "open to abuse": in that particular case it may be correct, as the intent was likely to reproduce the original photo as closely as possible, but such a sentence may be dangerous if blindly applied.
Many Lightroom presets (and Photoshop actions) are freely available: does this imply that everyone who applied the same preset to a photo can be taken to court?
Furthermore, many presets are really similar (I have - say - 30 B&W presets, but I could probably delete half of them because either the differences are minimal, or they get the same final effect in different ways, but they are generally undistinguishable). But as a rule, one preset corresponds to a "mood", and two photos may want to convey the same mood.

In Lightroom there are only a few different ways to convert a photo to B&W. If I publish say 5 different presets called "Convert to B&W", I could sue everyone...

Lightroom 3.x and CameraRaw cache

Not many people noticed, but Adobe back ported a feature from the upcoming Lightroom 4 into the 3.x series. The CameraRaw cache folder was full of large files (about 10MB each), but the new engine creates much smaller, compressed, files (about 500K each).
So the key point is: clear your cache (from Lightroom preferences) and reserve a smaller space.

If CameraRaw finds an old, large file it will leave it there, but new files are always created small