Amazing.
Take a look at David Bergman’s 1,474 megapixel snap of the inauguration.
And you thought your big DSLR had a lot of pixels?
You can zoom in for detail.
January 24, 2009
January 20, 2009
The cult of Leica
Amusing writing.
There’s an amusing piece by Anthony Lane on the cult of Leica in the September 2007 issue of The New Yorker, a magazine renowned for using three words where one would do.
Click the picture to read.
January 19, 2009
Something’s afoot at Panasonic
The new Leica M?
Call me dated. Say I am out of touch. Ridicule my love of the mechanical age.
I have no problem with any of those accusations as all are true.
So when I wrote a while back, not a little intrigued, of the Panasonic G1, it was for no other reason than that this photographer’s schnozzer sensed a possibility in the making.
Revolution? Why, yes. A modern Leica M for the digital set because, whether you like it or not, we are all members. Meaning small, fast, quiet and with large aperture lenses for low light work.
And we all know who designs the lenses for the best Panny designs, don’t we? Can you say Leica?
These thoughts were brought to the fore when DP Review published its analysis of the Panasonic G1. To cut to the chase, it’s not ready for prime time any more than the L1 (which at least looked like a Leica M) was. But you have to respect where Panny is going with this.
Meaning they are inching closer to the Leica ideal – small, quiet, fast, unobtrusive.
Now all they need to do is throw the design book out of the window and …. take a hard look at the form factor of the Leica M – but 33% smaller this time. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a viewfinder that works in something less than California sunshine.
January 18, 2009
The Impassioned Eye
A Cartier-Bresson documentary.
To wile away a couple of hours being shown his pictures by the great man himself is one of the better things to do with your time.
The documentary is called Henri Cartier-Bresson – The Impassioned Eye and is an orgy of HCB’s pictures, with many interesting tidbits on what was happening at the moment he pressed the button. I am struck again by how special his early (1930s) surrealist vision really was. It’s something which faded over time making his newer pictures mundane by comparison.
If there’s an error it’s the credit for his greatest picture – the man jumping over the puddle. It’s not a 1950s effort – it dates from 1932 and was taken during a time when his vision would forever make Henri Cartier-Bresson the most renowned photographer this world will ever know. And when you listen to the stories behind the pictures of Chanel or Bonnard or the Curies, all will be forgiven.
Highly recommended.
January 17, 2009
Steichen and fashion
A true modernist.
Reader and contributor Peter Solmssen dropped me a note about a fine slide show profiling the fashion photography of the great American photographer Edward Steichen. Click the picture to view.
Martha Graham by Edward Steichen, 1931
These pictures are from the Conde Nast library and are just as striking today as they must have been 80 years ago.
January 14, 2009
Cheer up!
It will get better, despite the government.
It seems more than appropriate to share a depression era photograph of Norma Shearer, by the great Cecil Beaton, at a time when America is leading the world into a massive depression, one likely to compete with the Big One for the worst ever.
The coming depression is a good thing, contrary to what our ‘business as usual’ leaders tell us. America is over-levered, over-retailed, over-car’d, over-banked, over-housed, over-medicated, over-lawyered and over-fed. We need a large percentage of the related businesses to fail, bringing down inflation and encouraging savings and capital formation. Because, sure as hell, if you don’t provide for yourself you know the government will not. And I can assure you that no conceivable form of government stimulus will fix what ails us until a broad swath of bankruptcies cleans the Augean stables known as American Retail and Residential Housing. Face it – most people are designed to rent, not own. And no one needs a new iPod.
So enjoy the picture, look forward to going to the movies for $1.50 (it’s called Netflix and you don’t have to drive your foul SUV to see one), forget the vacations (you have had too many as it is) and save your money. You are going to need it.
January 13, 2009
SDHC cards in the Canon 5D
Some surprising results.
SDHC cards are, let’s face it, the happening thing. With capacities up to 32gB and multiples of that in the offing in a postage stamp-sized medium, CF cards are not going anywhere. Add the fact that one vendor even offers an SDHC card with wireless transmission capability (though it does not support RAW files at the time of writing) and there’s reason to think that the greater bulk and inferior contact mechanism of the CF card (which depends on mating fragile pins with the card as opposed to the SDHC’s far more robust broad wipers) are headed for the technology waste bin. Finally, the burgoening netbook and flash memory markets are not about to use CF cards whereas every netbook and more devices have built-in SD card slots.
So, just for fun, I procured an inexpensive CF-SDHC card adapter ($25) and a bottom-of-the-line Kingston 8gB SDHC card ($18) and tried it in the 5D.
CF-SDHC Jobo card adapter, 8gB Kingston SDHC and 2gB Sandisk CF cards
455 RAW images on one card!
Side loading of the SDHC card in the adapter
While thicker than a CF card, the adapter fits the Canon 5D fine
The comparison, for timings, was a top-of-the-line Sandisk Extreme IV. I expected write times to be much faster with the Extreme IV, and they were. Taking 10 snaps in rapid succession in RAW on the 5D, the red light (indicating write status) on the rear of the camera remained on 16 seconds with the Sandisk compared with 39 seconds for the SDHC+adapter combination after taking the last picture. So if serial shooting in vast quantities is your thing, look elsewhere – the 5D has a 17 image RAW buffer so rapid shooters will find themselves bumping up against this – and slowing snap to snap times – with slower cards.
However, when it came to importing the images into Lightroom 2 (I used a Firewire CF card reader for the Sandisk and a cheap Transcend USB reader for the Kingston), import timings were 28 seconds and 26 seconds respectively. The SDHC card was faster! By contrast placing the SDHC card in the CF adapter and using the Firewire reader took 34 seconds – slower still. So SDHC import using an SDHC USB reader beats CF in Firewire!
Why bother? Because I like to use a netbook (with its SDHC slot) on the road and the built in SDHC card reader is a joy to use – no card adapter to forget. And because fast write times mean little to me, I am quite happy to have 450+ pictures available on one card which also fits a broad gamut of other devices in the home. And, maybe one day, Eye-Fi will produce an SDHC card with wifi built-in which supports RAW files. You won’t be seeing that in the CF format any time soon.
My only niggle is that it would have been nice had the adapter been end- rather than side-loading as the design requires removal of the adapter from the 5D to permit removal of the card. But overall, this is a fine value and I would guess the slower write speed in the camera would be made up for by the use of faster cards, if that matters to you. For me, it’s not an issue.
January 12, 2009
Project Vionnet
When you cannot find it, make it.
Vionnet dress with ruffle skirt, 1934
Take the Greek classicism of the great French dressmaker Madeleine Vionnet (1876-1975) and marry it to the no less classical photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and you have a timeless combination of life and art. So it hardly needs adding that the best gift this Christmas brought along was Betty Kirke’s definitive book Vionnet which my grandparent’s gave me this past December 25th.
Not only an orgy of photography by Hoyningen-Huene, Penn, Steichen, Beaton, Horst and other greats, this very large format book includes detailed patterns for many of the seemingly simple, yet highly skilled, creations of this greatest of clothes designers.
January 11, 2009
James Nachtwey
War photographer.
It is appropriate that this fine documentary is introduced by that other famous lover of danger, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. For decades now James Nachtwey has found it impossible to stay away from conflict. Where most of us are happy reading the Sunday cartoons, Nachtwey is risking his life at the frontlines of whatever conflict ails the world on any given day. As he sadly explains, he is not about to run out of photographic opportunities.
Nachtwey comes over as a compassionate, caring individual who manages to establish close rapport with his subjects, allowing him that special close-up perspective which distinguishes his pictures. Appropriately, the documentary starts with Robert Capa’s famous dictum “If your photos aren’t good enough, you are not close enough”. Nachtwey is always close to the action.
One remarkable aspect of this piece is that Nachtwey uses a video camera – perched on his shoulder, I would guess – while taking his stills, so that you get pretty much the photographer’s view of the action, right down to the LCD panel atop his camera. It’s a little disconcerting how intrusive that seems but once you hear Nachtwey explain how he works with his subjects – and why he seems invisible to them – you understand.
This is a fine documentary but be warned that many of the pictures are very, vary hard to stomach, so if you get queasy at the sight of war pictures you should really avoid this film.
Nachtwey is showing the world what it chooses not to see. Gripping viewing.
January 10, 2009
About mentoring
It never hurts to have a sponsor.
Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe – mentor and parasite?
This documentary is really much more about the rich curator and collector Sam Wagstaff than about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose tediously mediocre output is testimony to the power of marketing over quality. Repeat the lie often enough and people desperately searching for an opinion to fill the void of their own will beat a path to your door.
Mediocre and tedious as Mapplethorpe’s work may be, it does not detract from Wagstaff’s vision. The latter is best known for amassing a vast collection of vintage photographic images dating back to the very start of photography, a collection which he eventually sold to the Getty Museum, a great sponsor of photography. Not that he needed the money as the Wagstaffs were New York monied elite, but the Getty obviously agreed with his discriminating eye.
Quite why a man with film star looks surrounded by gorgeous fawning women would take the path he did I will leave you to figure out, for I will never understand it, but suffice it to say that his lifestyle choices resulted in a premature death at age 66, almost certainly the result of his protegé’s proclivities which saw them both dead within 2 years of one another.
No matter. Wagstaff made photography collectible and we should all be grateful for that. The documentary is fun to watch and heaps well deserved praise on a visionary photography collector and curator.
January 9, 2009
Sound recording
It’s a lot easier now.
When the hero of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 movie, Diva, sets to making his bootleg recording of the operatic soprano who never records, he is hiding the best portable analog tape recorder ever made, under his coat. Simply stated, the Nagra was the Leica of its time.
Actor Frédéric Andréi starts the Nagra
Seconds later, soprano Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez lights into Ebben ne andro lontana from Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally – you know the tune even if you have never heard of Catalani.
Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez – mediocre voice, non-mediocre looks
The movie is a splendid example of the very best in French film, which means it’s awfully good. Quirky, avant garde, beautifully filmed and a great plot.
I was reminded of the movie when asked for a recommendation for a really good digital voice recorder the other day. Naturally, I mentioned the Edirol R-09 which I am delighted to see Edirol has improved, enhancing the finish and redesigning the fragile battery door. We have been using ours for more than two years – with external microphones to mostly record my wife and son’s piano playing – and remain delighted with the fine sound quality this device offers. Unlike our protagonist’s beautiful Nagra, it can fit in any pocket.
For anyone interested in just how good French movie making can be, Diva is highly recommended. For anyone liking great photography, it’s a must have movie.
Here’s a track of my wife playing Misty Blues, recorded on the Edirol, using nothing but its internal microphones. Editing was done using Audacity with the LAME MP3 plug-in to permit MP3 output generation. This is a wonderful, and free, sound editor which I recommend for easy editing of sound tracks.
January 8, 2009
Storage is power
The next order of magnitude
Here’s how you store 2 terabytes of data today:
Yesterday the SD Association announced that by the end of 2009 2 terabyte capacities will be possible on SDHC cards. That’s 2,000 gigabytes. On a postage stamp…. The current limit is 32gB.
What does 2 terabytes store?
- 400 full length uncompressed movies
- 100,000 books
- 167,000 RAW image files
- 2,000 record-length CDs
Well, you get the idea. The Library of Congress will be in your wallet before long. Though some might argue it already is.
January 5, 2009
Sheer joy!
Enjoy it.
When did you last see something that refused all your efforts not to smile?
Well, this will prove you have not lost it.
Created by Matt Harding and Melissa Wilson and you can see more here.
January 3, 2009
Cloud computing and MobileMe
The coming thing.
Cloud computing – where data files and even applications – reside on a remote, secure server (”the cloud”) is nothing new. Large businesses with broad and fast pipelines to their servers have been doing it for years. It allows application maintenance and upgrade to be centralized, improving efficiency and reducing costs, and helps ensure that data files are properly backed-up and protected against loss and illicit access.
Indeed, this blog resides in the ‘cloud’ and is sometimes even speedily accessible when the service provider’s computers are not stretched past their limits, which seems to be most of the time.
None of this has really helped the retail/home user environment. While we all run web photo web sites with low definition pictures which can be accessed by anyone we elect, this does absolutely nothing for off line storage of large originals (think RAW and PSD files) owing to the low speed of broadband connections in the US. European and Asian readers will laugh when they read this, while enjoying data transfer at rates many times those available in America.
So we plod along backing up daily to non-fire or theft-proof hard drives in our homes, when we remember, hoping those precious originals do not get lost.
This Christmas I bought my wife a Flip movie camera for recording our boy’s adventures. My research took all of three minutes. It was cheap, it looked nice, had few controls and, best of all, that renowned technophobe masquerading as the technology writer at the Wall Street Journal loved it. When I checked their web site I discovered that both Standard Definition and High Definition models were made. It took but one more second to choose the SD one. A 640 x 480 movie (the same size as most of the photos in this journal) is more than adequate as a keepsake or memory, and the prospect of users downloading an HD version for viewing was more than I could stomach. A one minute video is some 7mB in compressed Quicktime SD format. It takes about a minute to download for most users. Just imagine waiting 5 minutes or more for the HD version. Journalists use their employers’ high speed lines for tests – meaningless for home consumers.
OK, so now our movies reside on a server and playback is almost immediate for all but the worst attention spans. But is that the best cloud computing can do for the man in the street on a realistic budget?
Apple rolled out its enhanced Dot Mac service in August of 2008, renamed MobileMe. Simply stated, it was a catastrophe. Many who depended on DotMac for email service suddenly found they were without any for days on end. Further, the claims made for MobileMe, which included synchronization of data across multiple devices in an instant, were flat out poorly tested hype, something we are increasingly used to from Apple. You really thought the iPhone 3G was ‘twice as fast’ as its 2G predecessor? You wanna buy a bridge in Brooklyn cheap?
Nonetheless, the idea stuck in my mind and I gave it the usual gestation period (the old ‘never buy Version One of anything’ rule) before signing up for a free 60 day trial subscription at the end of 2008. My goal was not only to synchronize email, the Address Book and iCal across three Mac OS X computers, I was also sick and tired of jumping around mailboxes on my iPhone to see emails while trying to remember which ones I had already read elsewhere. The iPhone, unlike OS X’s Mail application, does not support a consolidated mailbox and, like many, I have legacy mailboxes from old vendors which I dare not delete just in case something of importance crops up in one. No, I had no interest in uploading my original picture files. Those reside on external back-up drives and, with iTunes, aggregate over 125gB in storage. No way you send that over a cable or DSL modem from home. Further, the costly ($99/year) basic MobileMe subscription only provides 40gB of space, even if you could somehow speed up data transmission.
After a week of banging away at it and resolving usage and topography issues, I’m getting to the point where I have started to almost trust the service. After updating OS X Leopard to 10.5.6 I am getting reliable sync of Address Book and iCal data and mostly getting good email sync. In the case of the latter I am still getting some instances where an email read on one computer is not updated timely on the others but it seems to be getting better – ever since MobileMe decided to send me hundreds of iCal reminders to myself by email from the past three years …. Mercifully, this has only happened once, so far. I also continue to have sporadic downtime in MobileMe’s email availability and this really needs repair before MobileMe becomes trustworthy.
I have now removed the email boxes for my two service providers and am relying on MobileMe. The emails from those are automatically forwarded to MobileMe and I respond from my MobileMe account. I no longer see a gamut of in- and outboxes. Sure, Gmail is fine and offers tons of free space, but it would be hard to concoct a worse user interface. By contrast, the UI in Apple Mail is superb. And finally, I have one email box on my iPhone whose unread message count is correct for the first time since I bought the device on June 30, 2007! It is rather reminiscent of magic when you update a contact or calendar event on one Mac and have that change speedily conferred on all your other devices. Further, if you find Apple Mail’s spam filter as weak and I do and use the best there is – Spam Sieve – you only need run this on one computer as automatic synchronization will zap spam across all your devices.
MobileMe – not for serious photographers – yet.
So MobileMe may be worth looking at for some users, but it’s hardly the cloud computing answer photographers are looking for. Why not use one of the other file server services for photographers? Well, one famously went out of business in 2008, losing many photographers’ images, so what I want here is a service with a high enough profile, lots of capital and high reputational risk, such that failure is simply not an option. I believe Apple is in that “too much to lose” position and now that they are talking of moving more of their applications to web versions (iPhoto? Word and number processing?) I remain more interested than ever in the service.
Finally, a proper email count on the iPhone
One issue I ran into is that my main computer would try syncing endlessly. The fix is to back-up then erase the folder User->Library->Application Support->SyncServices, empty the trash and reboot. Then reselect your sync options in System Preferences->MobileMe->Sync. These are the options:
I do not Sync the Dock owing to limited screen space on one of my devices, plus I keep my dock at the left hand side of the screen which makes icons smaller than if you keep the dock at the base of the screen. I do not Sync Dashboard Widgets for much the same reason. I do find the ability to Sync Safari bookmarks much more useful than I would ever have expected, as my work flow tends to be the same regardless of which OS X device I am using. I expect that sync issues will go away once the various devices are stable after a sync or two.
Apple’s site says that MobileMe also works with Windows but for the life of me I cannot think of a use for that. A buggy but improving service with a buggy and failing operating system? I think not.
January 2, 2009
Smile!
A happy moment.
South Beach, San Francisco. 5D, 24-105mm @ 35mm, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 400
This little Yorkie was patiently waiting while the passerby endlessly futzed with her camera.
January 1, 2009
Cellist
The big city can get awfully lonely.
San Francisco BART, 5D, 24-105mm @ 35mm, 1/180, f/4, ISO 400
The cellist at the Powell Street BART in San Francisco was making beautiful sounds, wasted on Christmas shoppers, each vying for the best bargain. He looked shyly away as I placed money in his cello case.