Grant Nakamura’s Photography Blog

Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy celebrated their 35th anniversary with a Gala Event at the William Mitchell School of Law on Saturday night, July 31.

Several of my photographs were in the silent auction. The largest print of Kawishiwi Lake in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness sold quickly, or so I’m told.

Lake Kawishiwi Photograph Finds New Home

This tablet is awesome!!!

I was looking for a way to increase my monitor/editing space while not increasing the size of my traveling “kit.” I usually bring my Wacom Intuos3 9×12 tablet with me on my photo adventures, so when I saw the Cintiq I was curious, but a little leery. I had heard that using it was a little difficult: the pen would get in the way of seeing the underlying image. The reviews on the B&H Photo website were, instead, “glowing.”

I set it up with my MacBook Air (MBA) at home to make sure it worked before leaving for Montana.

It does require a lot of cabling and a DisplayPort to DVI adapter. But once set up it is cool.

Using it with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6 is a breeze and quite helpful. I set the Cintiq as the main display in the System Preferences > Displays dialog and then in Lightroom set the MBA’s display up in Window > Seconday Display > Loupe – Normal.

This setup lets me do all my editing on the Cintiq and then see the changes on the MBA in full screen. The extra information that can be displayed simplifies working in the Library module.

The set up in Adobe Photoshop CS4 is similar, but a little more labor intensive. Once I’ve opened a file in PS, I use Window > Arrange > New window for … to create a new window that is an active copy of the original file.

I have to move the window to the MBA display and press cmd-0 and the ‘F’ key to create a full screen copy of the image. I can now zoom in on the first window on the Cintiq and do my editing while seeing the full screen image on the MBA’s screen.

The transition from the Intuos3 to the Cintiq has been painless. The pens work the same and “mousing” around with the tablet is the same. The only shortcoming (and I knew this from the reviews) is at the edges of the screen/tablet. It can be stubborn to get the Dock to appear when I have it set to Auto Hide. There is the inconvenience of re-calibrating of the tablet since different viewing angles will cause misalignment of the cursor and the pen tip.

All in all, I really like this tablet.

My blogging efforts have been sorely lacking over the last many months…Too many depressing events in my life have caused me to look inwards and not outwards. But several “events” over the past 6 weeks have changed my outlook.

Thanks go out to these people for helping me out of my hole: Tom, Paul, Phil, Wendy, Dan, and Lee from our Snowbird/Alta trip; Stacey, Ruth, Earl, Ben, all the members of the PSIA Alpine Team, and all the participants of the PSIA National Academy, and, finally, Tom, Pat, and Chris.