Category: Learning

I went a’ protesting

Spent a few hours in the pouring rain last week protesting with about 120 other folks down at City Hall.

One guy came up and was reading our signs. He said he was an immigrant to the US for 10 years and in his entire time of being here he’s never seen something so “insane”. He couldn’t believe what is happening in the White House and thanked us for showing up.

Another gentleman was a military veteran who spent the entire two hours walking with his partner from corner to corner with a large visible sign. He was very stoic, yet friendly, individual.

A lot of horn honk and thumbs up including one from a school bus and a firetruck, which was very amazing. I’m pretty sure the firetruck wasn’t supposed to be doing that. 🙂

It felt good to get out of the house and be around other people. To do something other than doom scroll and read sarcasm and defeat on social media.

A++ would protest again.

Background Updates on Apple Operation Systems Can Be a Little Confusing

Does iPadOS support uncompressed RAW files from the Fujifilm X100VI? Documentation says yes, experience said no!

With the latest release of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3.1 I finally have support for uncompressed RAW files from my Fujifilm X100VI on my iPad. A camera that is now a year old. Grumble grumble. This is great news, but I had quite a strange experience getting it to work.

For the past year I’ve had to use a “real” computer to transmogrify my camera’s RAW files – in their native .RAF file format – into DNG files in order to work with the images. I used the handy Adobe Digital Negative Converter to accomplish this. It’s free and quick to do, but not something I could do natively on my iPad.

This meant I couldn’t use my iPad, or if necessary my iPhone, to edit these RAW files in Apple Photos. I prefer to travel flight and not take my laptop with me so an iPad is a perfect companion when traveling away from home.

When I heard that iPadOS now has support for my camera, I went and took some test photos and tried to import them into photos on my iPad. Unfortunately, when I went to import these images into the Photos app, I was greeted with a boring grey rectangle instead of the actual images!

I restarted my device, checked to make sure I was using the latest version (18.3.1), and even downloaded sample RAW/RAF files from DPReview to test. I also double checked that I was shooting in uncompressed RAW and not compressed RAW, which remain unsupported on Apple devices.

I thought, either the documentation is wrong, I did something wrong – possible, but highly unlikely – or there’s a snafu somewhere in the support of these files.

I posted a message on Apple’s support forums asking if anyone else had an idea or could test this situation to confirm.1

A few hours later I figured out what is happening. I think. Apple stuff often “just works”, but when it doesn’t – or when it doesn’t clearly indicate it’s doing something – your experience can get wonky. Good news is that my iPad does support the X100VI RAW files! The confusing part is that this appears to be an undocumented feature of the (latest?) OSes that was a little slow to catch up.

While I was trying to import these RAW files, for the first time I’ll note, into Photos on my iPad I saw an icon appear near the wi-fi and battery status in the top bar. An icon I had never seen before. It was blue and had a gear icon surrounded by two arrows. It appears that my iPad was trying to sync something, but it was unclear as to what. I searched the web to see if I could find an explanation for this icon and lo and behold, I found a post in the very same Apple Community forums.

A few hours later I went back to my iPad, opened Photos, and guess what? The images were loading and could be viewed and edited.

I think what I have stumbled upon is a new feature in iPadOS. Instead of having RAW support for every possible camera included in the OS (or downloaded as part of an update) Apple has decided to instead download support for the camera’s RAW files on an as-needed basis. This makes sense from a storage perspective. It also explained the gear/sync icon that was new to me (and others, judging by the link above). This is a little confusing from a user perspective – if things aren’t instant or described well to the user you have guess what is happening. Patience is a virtue I suppose. 🙂

So, all is well on my end. A funny – not ha ha, but weird – experience and lesson learned about how Apple software works (or doesn’t?) :p

Addendum:

I think this also applies to older versions of MacOS, like Sonoma. I have an older iMac that is being kept alive thanks to the great open-source OpenCore Legacy Patcher project. It’s a 2017 5K iMac running Sonoma. 2 I can now open these RAF files in Photos on Sonoma and they work, even if Apple’s page on Sonoma support says it does not. 🙃

Addendum 2:

A few days later. To test my download-RAW-support-as-needed theory I downloaded some sample RAW images from a Canon EOS R5 II, a camera I’ve never used before. As soon as I started the download the mystery blue sync icon appeared. Photos opened the image without issue.

Charger

Cars were my father’s one true obsession. He could take a single look at any car and regale you with information about it. What engine it came with from the factory, what options were available, who famously drove one, what races it participated in, quirks of its engineering or design. My dad loved cars. Car magazines? If one was published, he was a subscriber. When YouTube came along he would share numbers car-related videos with us over dinner – kindly, but forcefully in his excitement. 

Every year, for as long as I can remember, we would go to the big car show in downtown St. Louis. Where all the manufacturers – and later only a few – would show off their latest concepts and models. Easter car show in Forest Park. Every year. Sundays as a kid at the local dealer looking over what they had in stock. No nosey salesmen to bother you! Every Friday, from Spring to Fall we’d be at the local classic car show. He’d stop and look at every car. No hyperbole. 

I humored him as I didn’t get to spend enough time with him as a young man and enjoyed his company. As I got older and into car culture myself I found my own favorites and additions to the “If I win the lottery” wishlist. I also started bringing along my camera. Much to his chagrin I was more interested in taking close up photos of the details of the car. The ornaments, the badges, the chrome, the gauges. He always wanted me to take a wide shot of the whole car. 

He passed on the first of this year and when car season came around I wasn’t sure I’d want to go again. Finally, in July with the long holiday weekend I decided to go once more. One last walk around the parking lot. Smelling of exhaust and too-rich mixtures of gasoline. Of oil. Oldies – or popular music to my dad’s generation – on full volume. Cars of every color and shape.

I took this picture of a late 60s early 70s Dodge Charger. Lit by the fading sun. A well-cared-for specimen that my dad would have told me all about. 

Fujifilm X100VI f4.0, 1/1000, 125 ISO (Auto) Light crop and edits to RAW file for exposure and color.3