There are nearly 40 photos available taken underwater or topside in various places such as Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. There will be more variety to come as I gather feedback and then carefully select new images, process, soft-proof and print them (repeat and rinse until satisfied)

Printing sizes are for now available in 8 x 12″ (20 x 30cm), 12 x 16″ (30 x 40cm) and 16 x 20″ (40 x 50cm) and start at 35€ or $50. To celebrate the launch and benefit the (few) readers of this blog, until August 23 there will be 20% discount with coupon code SBBLLCH (enter at checkout time).

As mentioned on the online store, prints are 100% guaranteed, and if for whatever reason you do not like the print, you can ask for a refund or reprint whichever you prefer.

Again, I cannot thank enough all the people that have encouraged me to do this, should they be friends, family or people I bumped into while traveling and I hope the end result is to their liking. (and big thanks to the one who pre-ordered).

On a more general note, keep in mind that hiking/tracking of gorillas takes place at altitudes of 2500 to 3000 m. Paths are muddy/slippery, the forest is thick and will sometimes involve you bending low to go under some branches, moreover some sections can be very steep. Trekking in those conditions can last from 2 to 6 hours or more on the entire day. While this is far from needing athletic fitness, you need moderate/average physical fitness. If you’re doing several consecutive days, be prepared for it. For the little story, we have heard about someone booking all 8 permits for 7 consecutive days in high season (yes, that’s $28,000 of permits non-refundable) so that his daughter and himself could be alone but they gave up after 3 days because it was too tiring.

Clothing

• Poncho. Must have. It is ample and cover you well, allows you to also carry a backpack and cover your camera if it is raining and you’re not shooting. You will be leaving backpacks a few hundred meters before joining the gorillas, so do not count on carrying loads of stuff in your bag.
• Trekking shoes (waterproof) with pocket gaiters. When it is raining the path is very muddy and you can easily have your foot in 15cm of soft mud. You will be dirty, no way around it. On desperate measures you can rent neoprene boots at the park.
• A good trekking pant, typically the one in polyester or cotton/polyamide/elasthane, something that dries well and is not too warm. Forget the beige/whitish stuff but pick something darker like dark beige/greenish. No jeans as they will be soaked wet and get heavier.
• “Technical” T-shirt, 100% polyester. Easy to wash, easy to dry. Comfortable to wear and does not soak water/sweat. You may want to bring a long sleeve t-shirt if you’re not wearing your sweater on top so that you don’t get scratched or stung by plants around.
• Light polyesther sweater. Same as above.

Photography

A gorilla is black. The forest is very green. The weather is usually cloudy/misty, so this is dark conditions (and I mean very dark sometimes) and your camera will be challenged for the correct exposure. If it rains on top of it, you’re on for a rough ride. If gorillas are very active and moving a lot, you get the whole package of non ideal conditions.

You will get close to the gorillas. Around 7m in theory. In practice, gorillas do not know about this and youngsters can get pretty curious and come towards you. Before you know it and they will be 2m or less from you. You’ll be asked to retreat quickly and the guide may divert attention of the gorilla.

• Get the sun shade of your lens on it. Even if there is no sun, it actually protects from the rain getting on your lens, and it is humid everywhere anyway, so it is a good idea to have it set
• Get a camera that is very good at high ISOs and be prepared to push to ISO 3200. If you can do more than that with minimal noise, good for you
• For close up, underexpose by -2/3EV to -1EV. A gorilla is a dark subject so your metering system will likely think it needs to overexpose it (this is opposite to shooting something white like the snow where the metering might be fooled and tend to underexpose). I suspect sometimes you may need to push to -2EV, but setting it to -2/3EV is a safe bet for close up.
• Get a zoom lens with stabilization. A 70-200 f/2.8 lens is good (you can even add a 1.4x TC), so is a 70-300 f/3.5-5.6. Again, gorillas will be close.
• Do not take a 400mm fixed or you will regret it. Foliage can be dense, you have very little leeway to move around to position yourself and if you’re in a group of 8 people, good spots will also be limited.
• Use Aperture Priority (AE). If you shoot at f/2.8 at 200mm or close, use spot focus to know what you want to be sharp (typically the eyes)… personally I found shooting f/4 to f/7.1 with dynamic focus (or sometimes spot) being more adequate in relative close up so that the whole face is sharp, but that might be just me.
• Use spot metering for face close up. I did all my shots using matrix metering (evaluative on Canon) and it seems it did a reasonably good job on the D700, but I regret not having done a comparison.
• In case of doubts, you can try to bring another body with a lens such as a 24-70 to get wider shots or for the in and out of the trek. I personally found it too cumbersome and it never left the bag which was stored a few hundred meters away. It is easier to have a pocket camera.
• Do not think you’ll be able to swap lens on location. This is hardly the place to do so
• Forget the monopod yet the tripod… in most places this is really less than ideal, you’re in the middle of branches, bush, uneven terrain, things are constantly changing, youngsters gorillas may come toward you and you need to keep your distance, so it’s not like it is a fashion photo-shoot.
• Know how to setup your ISO sensitivity settings and be prepared to change it. The 2nd day, youngsters were moving all over the place, so I changed it to up to ISO 3200 with minimal shutter speed of 1/400. The 3rd day I was still using this setting but as gorillas were more static, I could have easily set minimal shutter speed to 1/250 or even 1/125 and thus would have had shots with lower noise.
• Stop shooting and enjoy the moment, gorillas have very human facial expressions and youngsters playing are pretty funny.
• If you do not have a DSLR with video, it can be handy to have a pocket camera recording in HD and use from time to time to get some short clips.
• Listen to the guide and do what he says. If you look like you know what you’re doing with the camera and he feels you’re a sensible individual he will think about you and get you in the best positions first, even cutting some obstructing foliage.

I hope the above will be useful information as a basis if you intend to go photograph mountain gorillas. It is a fantastic experience and is well worth it. Enjoy !

For me, it was about 20 years since I went to see gorillas in Rwanda. At that time I was around 15 and living in nearby Burundi and we came there a couple of years after Dian Fossey’s murder. Since I did not have any visual evidence but only a (fading) memory of a very close encounter I was keen to go back and organize a trip there to try to bring some shots that I will keep for the years to come.

Organizing a trip to see mountain gorillas first mean to secure permits to do so. Gorilla Permits are scarce and definitely not cheap nowadays. In Rwanda, it is possible to visit up to 7 groups of gorillas, and only a maximum of 8 people can join, which makes up to 56 permits a day available. A permit cost USD500 and allows to stay with the gorillas for only an hour. This is obviously to limit the interaction and not disturb them too much.

For this trip I wanted to secure 3 consecutive days of permits so that we could enjoy maximum photo opportunities and visit different groups. Season plays a big role in the availability of permits, most of the permits in june/july/august/september are booked up to a year in advance and while it is possible to get a spot left here and there, this is not really possible to get 3 days in a row for several people. In my case I took advantage of going during the end of the rainy season and I had a lot of choice in term of dates while I did the booking in April. The other advantage of the rainy season is that gorillas are not high up in the mountains but come lower, so treks tend to be shorter. In our case we barely had to trek an hour in the forest to see the Sabyinyo, Group 13 and Kwitonda groups. The exception seems to be the Susa group which tends to be very far away and can easily require 4-5 hours of trek at 2500-3000m in dense forest. Incidentally Susa is also the largest group, boasting up to 33 individuals.

Overall we were pretty fortunate on our trip and had really amazing interaction, including seeing a newborn gorilla just 1-day old. On our second trek to go visit the Group 13 with 22 individuals (and plenty of youngsters playing around), we were only the 2 of us to go. Photography wise this was pretty tough due to the dark and wet conditions. In anticipation of this trip I bought a Nikon D700 as I knew my old D80 would not be enough. I was using at first a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 and then switched to a Nikon 70-300 f/3.5-5.6 VR. Most of the pictures were taken at very high ISO, up to 3200. I was also constantly having -2/3EV to make sure to not have the camera being fooled by the dark fur. During the 2nd trek, youngsters gorillas were pretty active, so cranked up minimum shutter speed to 1/400. (which I unfortunately forgot the next day while gorillas were more lethargic and thus shot at higher ISOs than what I could have). The camera did a pretty good job and I was happy I had the D700 for this.

You can view some of the gorillas picture on my Flickr Rwanda set.

For the details, I tried to use a vanilla kernel 2.6.31.12. I based the install from Brandon Turner blog entry (keep in mind a few things need to be adapted depending on your system, ). After many failed attempts due to bad grub2 configuration, I managed to load the kernel…a bit.. it crashes with:

Cannot access memory beyond end of bootstrap direct-map area, Unknown interrupt.

A little bit of googling direct me to a post in the xen-users mailing list:

No, it’ll be a 32-bit-specific issue though. I would recommend just running a 64-bit build of Xen, if the CPU supports 64-bit mode. It’ll be something to do with GRUB2 dumping the dom0 kernel and initrd higher in memory than GRUB1, past the end of where 32-bit Xen is set up to be able to access. Probably not a hard fix, although I have no GRUB2 installation to test with.

Ok, so..off we go, I’m downgrading grub2 and revert back to grub-legacy.

After a bit of fiddling, I manage to boot again only to be greeted by another giant stacktrace following:

BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at c07ab790.

Obviously I can spend weeks on this, debugging and nagging xen-users, but I think I have played enough with patches and alternatives to figure out that best thing to do is to avoid that combination of Ubuntu 9.10 + Xen 3.4.2 on a Pentium M machine. I’ll see what VirtualBox looks like on 9.10 and then decides whether or not to try with an older distrib if it does not do the job.

Hertz Mustang Shelby GT-H for sale!

The retail price for the Shelby GT-H is € 45000.-

More information on Hertz website

While trying to figure out what was new in the Spotify catalog since last time, I realized that as a newcomer there seems to be absolutely no way to see what is available in the catalog without downloading the rich client. I found that fairly surprising as the content is nowhere to be seen on the website, no promotion, no teasing. You need to download the rich client. Period.

By accident I found the Metadata API (If you manage to find it by browsing their website, tell me where because it sure isn’t obvious). So I was just experimenting with Google App Engine.. that was the ideal tiny project to try the Python version. So here we go, there is a very simple interface available at spotify-search.appspot.com.

The Spotify Metadata API is extremely limited, so there is not that many possibilities to implement something advanced, but it was the ideal small project to get an idea of the Python version of Google App Engine. Barely a couple lines of code and it makes use of the memcached, urlfetch, the Django template engine and cElementTree. The CSS is based on the Yahoo! YUI one.

I’ll extend it in the next couple of days as soon as I have more time in my hands.

Note: Google App Engine seems to have some reliability issues as it has been throwing 500 errors all day across the planet including in the admin console, so do not be surprised if you get something like that when you use the service.

I didn’t test yet all features of the API such as image transformation or XMPP, but focused mostly on the datastore. Luck or not the datastore seems to be plagued by latency issues. While you are supposed to deal with some degrees of failure when using cloud services, the current situation seems beyond normal and probably a bit challenging for real applications. Messages in the forums clearly indicate the status is worse than what the official status shows or we’re all unlucky. I’d be really curious to hear about production behaviors not too tainted by marketing pitch.

As of now, there is large amount of failures due to timeout, should it be when reading small or writing even the smallest entities. For writes, the Task Queue can help alleviate failure issues.Your mileage may vary, as the tasks are all URL based you will still need a bit more work than you would likely expect instead of just handling a simple datastore put in your code, but all in all the ‘retry until it’s ok’ implementation of the task queue can really be helpful. This is of course assuming you can live in most cases with delayed writes.

For read, this is a bit more problematic. Given the latency of the datastore for get and the failure rate, it does not seem doable to solely rely on it, even for the simplest personal CRUD application. Assuming you had just a todo list app, it would be kind of frustrating to save your entry about 10 times before it is saved and can be displayed in the list of entries. So no matter what, using the memcache API as much as possible seems to be a must, not for performance reason but simply because it is more reliable than the datastore. (one could argue this is a performance issue).

Despite these shortcomings, I’m favorably impressed with the Google AppEngine Java SDK, it works really well, the API is well done and is easy to use. Integration in Jetbrains IDEA 9.0 is pretty convenient.

Deployment is a breeze as well though it could do with a bit more polished error feedback, you can have a syntax error in your cron jobs which will go unnoticed in local deployment but upload to production will fail with a totally vague and irrelevant message. Also expect some large behavior differences however with the local datastore as it is much more flexible in term of what you can store. Typically, you can persist tens of thousand entities at once in local in a very fast put operation, but it is limited to 500 entities in production and the delay can be significant and will timeout. The infrastructure is not simulated either, so long running queries are not canceled in local like they tend to be in production. Overall while the local datastore is not exactly fast, the latency in production is at least an order of magnitude worse, so this something to get used to.

Bulk loading (or lack of that is) in the Java API is a bit of annoyance and you need to do it using the Python one.. which means you need to duplicate your models in both languages. It is manageable but not terribly attractive at the moment so I hope they will introduce it sooner rather than later.

That being said, I find myself more and more frustrated at the Java web framework landscape compared to the simplicity of doing it in Python. There sure is a lot of unnecessary complexity for simple things in the Java web environment those days. The thing that I still appreciate most compared to Python is the quality of the tools available for development and that as soon as you need to do something relatively complex, you will likely find a mostly solid existing solution for it.

So next step was to actually access the cdrom..which did not work, it was not mounted automatically and fstab ended up with 2 cdroms (not sure why) with /media/cdrom0 mapped to /dev/scd1 and /media/cdrom1 to /dev/scd0.

In addition, booting the instance, vmware complained about the floppy disk not accessible even though it was the usual default ‘autodetect’, and it seems to cascade into the entire disappearance of cdrom devices…oh well.

I kinda took a shot in the dark and modified fstab to keep only /media/cdrom0 mapped to /dev/scd0, manual mount..miracle I could see something.. then proceeded to reinstall vmware tools and I can now see shared folders… and all seems to be going well…for now.

• Google – because I use it for searching information constantly, as well as GMail, Documents, Maps and News on a daily basis
• Flickr – A nice place to share photos but also to look for inspiration.
• LinkedIn – I’m absolutely terrible at keeping contacts with people, LinkedIn changed this radically for me as it makes the contact information all accessible in one place with an incentive to update it.
• TripIt – In the same area, a regular complaint from family and friends is to know where and when I’m going to some places, with TripIt, it made it substantially easier as it will broadcast the information automatically.
• Amazon – Most of the books I buy are from this place.
• Wetpixel – To keep in touch with what’s happening in underwater photography land
• ScubaStore/DiveInn – I tend to buy most of my underwater gear online if I can. Fast and reliable service.
• InfoQ – The portal I regularly visit to get some tech news update. Agile articles are a bit overwhelming in the last couple of years though.
• Wikipedia – So convenient to read complete information about a topic in a digestible format.
• dpreview – To keep an eye on photography-related news
• TED – Because some things are worth spreading

I would have loved to have this from people from a much diverse background (ie non-technical), but the sinae qua non condition is that this person actually has a blog, so I do have to fallback to technical people on this one:
Emmanuel, Geir, Leo, Sylvain, Torsten

On a personal note, I owe a big thank you to Christophe Bisciglia from Cloudera.