January 2004 COBA Meeting

Written: January 14, 2004
Last Updated: January 15, 2004

John Spicer demonstrates the Nikon D2H while I give a talk on metadata and annotating your images.

It's hard to believe that this is the start of the third year for Camera Owners of the Bay Area! I had the idea for the user group back in December 2001, when I was talking with David and Richard H. at Keeble and Shuchat in Palo Alto. A month later, we held the inaugural COBA meeting in the Mountain View City Hall, where Jim Rose demonstrated the EOS-1D.

Two years later, COBA's still meeting and the new cameras are still coming out. Right now, rumors are rampant on what Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and others DSLR manufacturers are going to announce/release at PMA in February. I've heard that there are some exciting new products in the pipeline, and I can't wait to see them. With the Summer Olympics in Athens in just a few months, my Canon bet is on an EOS-1D replacement. We already know that Nikon will be releasing the low-cost D70, but rumor has it they have another camera to announce, perhaps the D1X replacement. Another rumor says that Olympus will be upping the resolution on their E-1 camera. Everything will be revealed shortly!

Tonight, John Spicer gave a demonstration of the Nikon D2H. The D2H is a 4 megapixel, 8 frames and second camera that's aimed at the photojournalist market. The D2H is John's first digital camera; previously, he was shooting film with a Nikon F100. He was fairly exhaustive in detailing the new features of the D2H. I'm astounded by the excellent battery life on the camera. Some reports say that the D2H's battery can last for several thousand images! After over 2 years, my 1D's batteries barely last me 125 shots! At MacWorld, I had a chance to test out the 802.11b wireless adapter for the D2H, and it looked sweet.

After John's presentation, I spoke about metadata and image annotation. As I've mentioned before on this web site, I'm in the process of annotating my entire photo collection. From October, 1998 to January, 2004, I've amassed nearly 60,000 images! Beginning in December of last year, I had 0 of those images annotated with metadata such as location, city, state, country, people, keywords, and caption. Today, after countless hours sitting in front of iView on my Mac, I've annotated over 33,000 of those images. Only 27,000 images to go!

Though the process is time-consuming, annotating your images is really useful and ultimately essential. The adage that a picture is worth 1,000 words is only valid if you can find the image! Having metadata attached to the image and in a database allows you to search through your images for particular people, locations, and keywords. Want to find all the images of you at Moscone Center in San Francisco or on the Stanford campus? It's easy if you've annotated your images, hard and time-consuming if you haven't! Get in a habit of annotating your images the minute after downloading them. It doesn't take that much time and the benefits are multiplied each time you do it!

A number of people expressed an interest to see my presentation online so here it is. I hope you find the information useful!


John Spicer and his Nikon D2H	Nikon D2H and the SB-800 flash	John Spicer talks about the D2H
COBA members listen to John	January 2004 COBA Meeting	Modeling flash with the SB-800's
Will and Ed listen on	Ed and Steve check of the magnification feature

Enter The Photo Gallery

Reader Comments

Adam,

You are tireless. Hearty thanks for the many things you do for COBA.

That Nikon was revealing to me as I am not the kind of photographer it was intended for, but still amazing.

I enjoyed your Annotation presentation as I will have to do something along those lines this year. Getting comfortable with the concepts involved was really useful.

DavidOB

--posted by David Blanchard @ Thursday, January 15 2004, 12:24 pm EST

Thanks for posting the meeting notes and your presentation. I was particularly interested in your thoughts and workflow on annotation but couldn't make it south last night. I've been thinking about annotation for my own photos--especially after coming back from my recent trip with over 2,400 images!

--posted by Dave Patchen @ Thursday, January 15 2004, 13:42 pm EST

Although I could not attend the last (4) meeting(s) I did aquire a Nikon D100, and LOVE IT!!! I am still learning so many different possiblities to shoot with it's endless for this newbie to photography.

I hope you all enjoyed the chat about the Nikon D2H. And as far as battery life, I have NEVER run my battery down, even with flash, it's amazing!

I look forward to attending another meeting soon, I am missing out!

Regards,
MaryLea Ostle

--posted by MaryLea Ostle @ Thursday, January 15 2004, 16:12 pm EST

Adam,

Thanks for COBA and your presentations. I've learned a lot from you: photoshop CS, brainstorming session, annotating photographs, and mjuch more. I thank you for your passion and kindness to share all these to us. I'm impressed by your skills.
Keep up the good work.

Thanks a lot Adam!
martin

--posted by Martin Chandrawinata @ Friday, January 16 2004, 2:23 am EST

I think it is a very smart and very liberal move for the organization to become "Camera Owners" from the original "Canon Owners".

I now see the great benefit of Nikon and Canon owners share and exchange knowledge! (...well, this is not to belittle Sigma, Fuji, and other brand owners!!)

Great Job, guys! Hats-off especially to you Adam!

--posted by Alex Aye @ Saturday, January 17 2004, 1:23 am EST

Adam, thank you for the opportunity to share my enthusiasm for the Nikon D2h with the COBA members. I especially like the photo of me with the D2h and SB-800 flashes. You presentation on documenting your photos was very useful. Fortunately, I do no have the large number of photos to document, but I had better get started before it is too late.

--posted by John Spicer @ Monday, January 19 2004, 18:18 pm EST

Thanks for mentioning iView--I'd never heard of it before, and after reading about it here I downloaded the demo. I've put almost 2000 images into it so far, and I generally like it better than Portfolio.

I did have one gripe--when doing batch annotations, sometimes (well, often) not all of the selected images actually receive the annotation. It seems like sometimes it ignores what you tell it when it asks if you want to apply the change to all selected images.

I'm willing to put up with the hassle, though, because iView makes it really easy to find images based on fields.

--posted by Ken Hagler @ Friday, January 23 2004, 0:11 am EST