A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
1 June 2023
We've just archived Volume 12, Number 5 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 20 Features, 17 commented News stories, 26 Editor's Notes (which included 172 items of interest), no real reviews (although we had a test drive) and one site note for a total of 64 stories.
A year ago in May, we published 57 stories including 16 Features and 15 News stories. We had five stories with gear specifications then but last month we published eight.
We also published 29 stories with 115 images and just one obit.
READERSHIP has plateaued over the last three months, which look almost identical. The one noticeable difference was a 120 percent uptick in visits.
It seems as if everyone was clamoring for news (or inspiration) in May.
For some inexplicable reason, our news story a bout the Sony ZV-1 II was the most popular story by a long shot, garnering over 147 percent more views than the Horn that followed it (and was followed by five more Horns before our Photo Mechanic anniversary story. And then two more Horns.
It seems as if everyone was clamoring for news (or inspiration) in May. Which the Horns provide in spades.
BACK AT THE BUNKER, this was an eventful month with repercussions to come.
We did jump at the sudden appearance of a 16-inch M2 MacBook Pro on the Apple refurb list. We usually chronicle our upgrade experiences and a few of last month's feature stories took an early stab at it.
But only yesterday did we finally finish updating all our critical applications to run on the M2 under Ventura. We'll shortly fill you in on the details.
But already, we're enjoying the unbridled performance of the new chip architecture from the multiple CPU and GPU cores to the shared memory. There are no delays in screen draws any more (on this Metal machine) and operations that took a minute (like DNG conversions when ingesting images from a card) are now quicker than the blink of an eye.
We did a lot prep work earlier this year to prepare for a USB-C world woth EZQuest peripherals and that has let us bring our USB-A world to the M2 environment while moving the clutter away from the MacBook to a hub for the most part.
But the most important benefit has been being able to run M2 software like PureRaw 3.0 and Photoshop beta's Generative Fill. Our review plans have been hampered this year by running Monterey on the unsupported, non-Metal hardware of our 12 and 13 year old MacBook Pros.
But those days are over.