On Santa Cruz beach.
G1, kit lens
September 29, 2009
September 28, 2009
Beach hut
On Santa Cruz beach.
G1, kit lens, HDR using 3 images and Photomatix
It seems the almighty dollar even rules at the beach – or thinks it does. Then again, this hut is many years old ….
September 27, 2009
The HackPro – Part I
With thanks to FU Steve.
Having earlier explained how he hacked an MSI Wind netbook for portable computing (”The netbook Apple will not make”), the pseudonymous FU Steve touched base with me last week to mention that his iMac 24″ – a late-2006 white model, like mine – was beginning to show screen artifacts which indicate imminent failure of the graphics card. I mentioned that Apple wanted $900 to repair mine, a ridiculous sum, and that put FU over the top. He decided to build a Hackintosh. More specifically a machine to equal the performance of the ridiculously overpriced MacPro, naming his ‘build’ the HackPro.
Here are extracts of the interview I held with him.
TP: I understand you are getting all the parts for your HackPro. Could you share the details with my readers?
FU: Glad to. By the way the machine will run Snow Leopard and because all the components can be shipped overnight and come with a three year warranty, if something goes wrong I can simply replace a faulty part in 24 hours, rather than losing my machine to Apple for weeks. The single costliest component is the CPU at $220.
My component list excludes a monitor but includes a keyboard, mouse and hard drive, but if you have these already, the cost obviously drops. I’m including the long form descriptions below so that there is absolutely no question about the parts used.
- EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ Video Card – 512MB GDDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV
- Antec Sonata III 500 Quiet Super Mini Tower ATX Case (Black)
- Antec TriCool 120 3-speed fan for HDD cooling
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Quad-Core Processor, 2.83 GHz, 12M L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA775
- Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
- Sony AD-7240S-0B Optiarc DVDRW Drive – DVD+R 24X, DVD-R 24X, DVD+RW 8X, DVD-RW 6X, DVD-RAM 12X, SATA
- Sony Multi-Card Reader/Writer MRW620-U1
- 8gB (4 x 2gB) Patriot Extreme Performance Viper Series 4 GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit nVidia EPP Certified – PVS28G6400ELK
- IOGear USB 2.0 Bluetooth Micro Adapter GBU421
- 1.0TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200RPM 32MB Cache SATA II HD
- Apple keyboard and mouse – both wireless
- Arctic Silver thermal paste
All told that lot ran me $930 without a monitor. The only tools you need are a Philips screwdriver and a modicum of grey matter. Between the Antec case and the motherboard you have all the connecting cables you need. You could do without the Sony Card Reader if you already have a card reader, but installing it in the box cuts clutter and the cost is only $18. Likewise, you don’t need 8gB of RAM (though Snow Leopard can use all of it) as the speed increase in Lightroom is some 8-12% compared to using 4gB, but RAM is now getting so inexpensive, especially if you watch out for rebate deals, that it’s not a lot more if you use 8gB. There is faster (and costlier) DDR3 memory available, but you trade speed for stability. Not good. It never does to be at the bleeding edge of technology if you are paying for hardware with your own money.
If you prefer to use a wired keyboard and mouse you can delete the IOGear Bluetooth adapter ($18), but may need to add USB A-to-A extension cables if your monitor does not have any USB sockets, as the Antec case will likely make its home below your work desk. That can be a bit of a stretch. Either way, you will need to borrow an USB wired keyboard and mouse for the setup. Your system will be unable to recognize bluetooth wireless devices until …. you have accessed the system, and you cannot access the system without a keyboard! It’s a Catch22.
If you feel spendy, you can upgrade the CPU to a 3.0gHz (Q9650) Intel Core2 Quad for $50 more, but that seems a lot to pay for so modest a speed increase – 23% more for a 6% speed bump doesn’t solve, in my book.
TP: Do you have preferred vendors?
FU: (Laughing). Yes. Anyone who is cheap and charges me no sales tax! I used Amazon and Tigerdirect.com. Both are easy to deal with in the event a faulty component needs to be replaced. Those residing outside CA may prefer Newegg.com which charges sales tax to CA residents.
TP: But the MacPro uses the Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ CPU (i7 socket) with 8 cores whereas you are using the older 4 core ‘Yorkfield’ (LGA775 socket)?
FU: Yes. The key advantage of the 8 core in the MacPro is faster video processing. My primary use is with Lightroom and Photoshop – I am a still photographer – so the added cost of the 8 core makes no sense as these applications do not take advantage of it.
TP: Don’t you have to be an engineer to build this thing?
FU: (Laughing). You have to be kidding me! A 12 year old could put this together – it’s easier than Lego. All the connectors are keyed so you cannot get it wrong. You install the motherboard in the case which already has a power supply installed by the manufacturer, plug the memory and graphics card into the motherboard, connect the power supply, graphics card, HDD and dvd burner cables to the motherboard and plug in the fans. There are no fewer than four fans, by the way – GPU, CPU, power supply and case. And the case one is no less than 4.5″ in diameter – quite a change from the toy ones in the iMac. You can add a fifth to cool the HDD for all of $15 if you use several hard drives – the case will accommodate four HDDs. And the whole thing is dead quiet. And did I mention the removable, washable air filter?
TP: Ok, so the assembly is easy. How about the software part?
FU: Just Google for the fix. It’s super easy and the installation allows fully automated system updates. I bought my Snow Leopard update disk from Apple for $29 and that’s what I used.
TP: Legality?
FU: Look, Apple has stolen from me for years. Every single piece of Apple hardware I have owned has broken after two or three years and proved impossible or uneconomical to fix. How on earth can Apple’s false advertising (”It Just works”) be any more legal than what I am doing? That should read “It Just Breaks”. And now my iPhone consistently drops calls – in San Francisco of all places – because Apple’s and AT&T’s greed has resulted in so many sales that AT&T’s systems are simply overloaded.
Apple maintains that its OS can only be run on Apple branded hardware but that has yet to be tested in the courts. Further, the fact that Apple has not gone after the hacker community suggests they have concerns that they might not legally prevail. And I paid them for their software, many times over, if you look at all the hardware failures I have suffered over the years.
No, given that the little guy like me has no possible redress against Apple’s consumer fraud, it’s more than a little ‘holier than thou’ to argue the legality case here.
TP: So what’s the performance like?
FU: No idea as I haven’t assembled everything yet. But I can give you some meaningful predictions. Geekbench on my iMac (2.16gHz, ATI7300, 3gB RAM) reports a reading of 2850 and I expect that the HackPro will come in at 6000 or so, so roughly twice as fast on CPU intensive tasks like converting RAW files. On video I would expect a similar performance increase as the nVidia 9800 GTX+ card I’m using is a rebadged GT150. The current HackPro uses the GT120 which is a rebadged, and more modest, 9500GT. More Apple and nVidia spin. So the HackPro will be better as regards graphics capability. The card has dual DVI outputs, by the way, meaning it can drive two regular 24″ or smaller monitors or one 30″ dual-DVI display at full 2560 x 1600 definition.
I could overclock the CPU and GPU and get even more performance, but I’m conservative by nature and prefer to trade speed for reliability.
TP: And the case?
FU: Can you say elegant? No boy racer looks or neon lights here:
Antec Sonata III case
Antec has been making high quality cases for years and this one is as good as they get. HDDs slide in on rails and there are several externally accessible bays behind the top door for things like DVD burners, card readers, etc.
TP: Thanks, FU. When can we expect results?
FU: Give me a couple of weeks or so. One final thought. For Windows users, this machine will run Windows with no hacking, and will run it faster than all but the costliest gaming machines.
The results can be seen in Part II here.
September 26, 2009
Panasonic Lumix 20mm Micro Four-Thirds lens
State of the art.
A couple of years ago I wrote that the real digital revolution in photography gear would be fomented not by traditional manufacturers but rather by the new breed of companies specializing in electronics and modern design, unshackled by historical investments and conventions.
Never has this proved more true than with the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 ’standard’ lens for the G1/GH1/GF1 micro four-thirds camera range. As the excellent piece at DPReview discloses, this 40mm equivalent lens is simply state of the art, a superb marriage of hardware and corrective software design. I would go as far as to say that it is to digital what the 35mm SummicronM, in its aspherical final version, was to film. I used one of those for years and, suffice it to say, you could buy no fewer than seven of the Pannys for the ridiculous price asked for the Leica optic today, so it’s hard to complain that the Panasonic lens is expensive.
The new Panny lens peaks at f/4, just like the Leica Summicron of old (both in its 35mm and 50mm guises) and, unlike the kit zoom, does not include shake reduction. Perhaps the shake reduction on the Olympus EP1, which is built in to the body of that camera, works, but frankly the EP1 is such a poorly executed camera for street snaps (slow focus, awful shutter lag, no proper viewfinder, mediocre optics, etc. – a joke from such a great manufacturer) that it’s not like I will ever be trying it.
So why am I not rushing out to buy one? Well, I very much intended to when it was first announced but, frankly, I have become so enamored of the kit lens with its exceptionally useful 14-45mm (28-90mm on full frame) zoom range in a very small package that I no longer want to be burdened with the task of swapping lenses when snapping on the street. Or, for that matter, carrying more clutter. While f/1.7 is nice to have, the f/3.5-5.6 maximum on the kit lens is fine for my purposes, as I am not an available light maven. And the kit lens is so good I find that I am using it at or near full aperture nearly all the time, with the built in shake reduction adding 2-3 stops, effectively, in low light, making the effective aperture range more like f/1.4 to f/2.5. The only thing I miss is the shallower depth of field that a true f/1.7 offers, but the compromise more than works for me.
September 25, 2009
September 24, 2009
Lone worker
Burning the late night oil.
G1, 24mm, f/6.3, 1/30, ISO 400
Spotted late evening in Carmel, CA.
The G1’s iISO feature (intelligent ISO) determined the ISO 400 setting, presumably predicated on using a shutter speed no slower than 1/30 to avoid camera shake at the 24mm focal length. I was using aperture priority and chose the f/6.3 setting. iISO seems to settle on shutter speeds no slower than 1/30 at medium focal lengths, unless the light is so poor that an even slower shutter speed is called for. At 24mm (48mm full frame equivalent) the 1/30th is like 1/125th with the two stop gain in shake reduction owing to the OIS feature built into the lens. I have the ISO limit set at 800 as at 1600 the image really starts to break up.
The bottom line is that iISO does an excellent job of mitigating camera shake by adjusting ISO, to the extent allowed or possible.
September 23, 2009
Pigeon point
Angry sea.
Spotted on the way down to Carmel last week.
This is the lighthouse keeper’s hut at Pigeon Point, on the Pacific. Selective masking in Lightroom did the trick.
5D, 24-105mm at 24mm, f/4, 1/4000, ISO 250
September 22, 2009
Lightroom wins
Aperture is dead in the water.
Having started serious volume digital photo processing with Apple’s Aperture and finally made the switch to Lightroom almost two years ago, the following data recently released by Adobe hardly surprise me:
Clearly, I’m not the only one making the move, especially if you take into account the large increase in Mac sales in the past few quarters. Forget the upper table – Aperture does not run on Windows so it’s not a fair comparison. The lower table is.
When did you last hear of a meaningful update to Aperture or see any advertising for the product?
Those still using Aperture should be getting worried and would do well to consult my earlier piece on abandoning that major stress source for Mac performance. Aperture is another orphan application which couldn’t handle the heat in the kitchen. It’s future is …. well, what future? Have you noticed how Aperture does not even support Panasonic G1/GH1/GF1 RAW file import – maybe the most signifiant camera design to hot the market in the past year? That makes me think it’s a dying application, starved of capital as Apple concentrates on making …. cell phones.
It bears repeating – the user interface in Lightroom is not only logical and linear, it actually makes photo processing fun. That’s not something I thought I would ever write. And you don’t lose track of originals or accidentally erase them, either.
September 20, 2009
Spam in the RSS feed
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam eggs and spam.
Putting aside the Monthy Python quote, above, readers using an RSS feed (such as Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Vienna, etc.) will have noticed that yesterday’s postings had summaries inundated with spam. This spam appears to advertise stimulants which readers here have no need of, this blog offering a natural high.
This is what it looks like:
Mercifully, my RSS feed only contains a brief extract of the posting so the schmuck who did this doesn’t get his click-through link to show up. I reposted the piece under a different name but no joy. The same spam in the summary field showed up.
Some very smart people are on to this and I found the fix on Alwyn’s Blog which I recommend if your blog is similarly afflicted.
Suffice it to say that the problem is fixed and the revised posting of yesterday’s piece now looks like this in the RSS reader:
Unfortunately, there’s no way of deleting individual articles from the RSS history but at least newer pieces – like the one immediately preceding this – are now shown without spam, viz:
I have also added an “input the code” requirement for Comment submission to preclude spam comments from morons who set up trawlers to do this sort of thing. Boy, the world is just full of losers ….
So if you wonder why I have suddenly become a proponent of Islamic Law (You get caught spamming we hack your right hand off), now you know.
CA fixer, ocn vu
Realtor talk
Seldom has a subset of the population charged as much or added as little value as the US realtor (translation: real estate broker or shill). A ‘profession’ which charges 5-6% of the selling price for showing you where the bathroom is. It is some testimony to the power of this corrupt lobby that it has survived in a world of internet databases.
Here’s an example of what is known in California as a ‘fixer with an ocean view’ – likely $1mm:
Spotted on Highway one (yes, with an ocean view!) the other day.
September 19, 2009
Abstraction in Carmel
Recent snaps focus on abstraction.
I don’t know how these things happen, but now and then my photography hits an abstract streak, much as it did during my recent sojourn in Carmel-by-the-Sea, that prettiest of California’s seaside towns. Maybe it’s just a reaction to all that hard striving retail shopping all around.
On guard. Thinking of Saul Leiter.
Self portrait – I’m shielding my eyes from the bright sun ….
Stairs
Carmel pines
Snapping away
The bride
Fake landscape
Painted painting
All snapped on the G1, mostly in Carmel’s alleyways which, the local guide book informs me, has no fewer than 42 such passageways!
September 18, 2009
Old Monterey
Almost gone.
Wander down to Fishermen’s Wharf in Monterey and you will be inundated with plaques, street names and quotes from seemingly the only famous person ever to have lived there, John Steinbeck. However, once you reach the fabled Fishermen’s Wharf of which he wrote so passionately, you are confronted with the very worst of modern taste. T shirt vendors, popcorn sellers and awful mass market restaurants so devoid of originality that you want to run for cover.
Yet, creep down a narrow alleyway or two and you can still get a feel for what Steinbeck was writing about.
Steinbeck’s dove. G1, 33mm, f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO 100
Wharf’s edge. G1, 41mm, f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO 100
Gull. G1, 45mm, f/6.3, 1/1000, ISO 100
The Costliest Tree in the World
A reality check.
I have a passionate aversion to vacations, regarding them as a time when you look into the distance and do nothing useful. So when chance found me on the Monterey peninsula at the start of the week I wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste by sitting idly on the beach.
Instead, I did something I last tried some ten years earlier, plonking down $9.25 at the gate to take the 17 Mile Drive around Pebble Beach, of golf and classic car show fame. It’s seventeen miles of the most beautiful views and coastline on earth, true, but I couldn’t but help thinking about the insane economics of living there. The nuttiness of the whole thing is perhaps best exemplified by what is possibly the most photographed object in the world, the Lone Cypress on 17 Mile Drive, near the Carmel Gate.
Obligatory snap of The Lone Cypress.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250
Now you should know that the 17 Mile Drive is home to some of the priciest real estate on earth, never more so than for the three or four estates which actually have a view of the tree. I would guess that the cost of these is $20mm each, one even going so far as to post a plaque grandly stating ‘Lone Cypress View’ at its gate. Now with opportunity cost at a modest 5% and property taxes and maintenance added, annual cost of this little abode is in the region of $1.5mm after tax, what with all the gardeners and servants required. Or $3mm pre-tax.
It gets worse. You see, 17 Mile Drive is socked in with heavy fog for three months in the summer, being on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific, and for three more months in the winter it’s raining and awful. But catch it on a spring day or, as I did, a late autumn one and, truly, it is heaven on earth. That’s if you can get around the tour buses and crowds. So for your $3mm, you get to enjoy the Lone Cypress for 6 months of the year. Which, without a doubt, makes it the Costliest Tree in the World.
Some other views along the Drive:
Bird Rock, replete with seals, sea lions, pelicans and cormorants.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250
Spyglass golf course, with deer.
5D, 400mm, monopod, ISO 250
September 17, 2009
Belt up!
A firm vision.
Depending on your view of the world, this is either nirvana or hell. I tend to the latter, but it still makes for a jolly display. I would imagine the clerks in this store go bonkers every now and then and start thinking homicidal thoughts. You can have too much order ….
Belt store display. G1, 33mm, f/5.6, 1/60, ISO 800
Chez Mondrian
Rectangles.
Who could resist this gorgeous assemblage of rectangles?
Chez Mondrian. G1, 45mm, f/5.6, 1/4000, ISO 100
Seen in Carmel, CA earlier in the week.
Here’s the real thing:
Mondrian by Mondrian. Tableau 2, 1922.
September 16, 2009
On the BART with Walker
The modern Leica at work.
On the Bart. G1, 30mm, f/5.3, 1/20, ISO 800
The Bay Area Rapid Transit (San Francisco subway/tube/metro) was rocking and rolling mightily when this was snapped, suggesting that Panasonic is onto something with its OIS anti-shake technology – check the shutter speed, above. Don’t be expecting this feature in a Leica until the M14 comes out three decades hence, at which time the economy will have recovered and some dumb ass banker will lend you $100k to buy the thing.
By the way, the auto white balance in the G1 is every bit as good as that in the Canon 5D, which is to say it’s awful. I had to mess with the color sliders in Lightroom 2 to get a semblance of accurate skin tone in this snap.
Doubtless Wlaker Evans would have killed for this sort of rechnology, not to mention color, when he snapped this one back in 1938 as part of his subway series:
Evans used a camera concealed in his coat triggered with a remote control. No such subterfuge was called for in my picture.
How to save a $billion
Keep the government well away.
Fellow photographer Leigh Sheldon sent me this amusing article about how a pair of MIT students put a camera in space for … $150. My wife uses a similar model and I can vouch for its all round value for money, though I had no idea it was this good!
Their cost was about $1 billion less than NASA has cost the US taxpayer so far.
Click the picture for more:
September 15, 2009
Experts and pictures
Trust your eyes, not charts.
Frequently one sees performance of digital cameras compared using JPG images. This could not be more useless. Different sharpening algorithms in the cameras being compared render such comparisons meaningless, compounded by the poor dynamic range of the JPG file format. JPG is the fastest way of making a fifty dollar camera out of a thousand dollar one. Add to this technical ‘analysis’ the fact that different lenses at different price points are being used and what you end up is so much noise.
Some try to counter these issues by comparing unprocessed RAW image output. Even worse.
All digital images require anti-aliasing – the process of removing ‘jaggies’ from image details. For example, when the Leica M8 was first ‘tested’ reviewers gushed over the native definition of the RAW images produced by the camera, comparing these favorably with Canon, Pentax and Nikon DSLRs’ output. Chalk and cheese. The Japanese cameras use a strong anti-aliasing filter, placed in front of the sensor. The Leica M8 (and M9) uses none, preferring in-camera software to do the same thing to images rendered with its previous generation Kodak sensor. To get the best out of the Japanese cameras’ RAW images substantial sharpening must be applied in Lightroom (or whatever you use) to get the best from the original file and make a proper comparison.
Reviewers would have it that this makes the Leica image superior as no sharpening is needed, conveniently disregarding the fact that sharpening has been done in camera. They will then compound this misinformation by comparing a fixed focus lens on the Leica (because that’s what they were given to test and are too lazy/ignorant/conflicted to do it right) to a lower quality zoom on the Japanese competitor.
As I have pointed out many times here, the 5D I use – depending on the lens used – mostly needs a sharpening setting of 40-60 in LR. This works fine for the 24-105, 85/1.8, 100 macro and 400/5.6. The 200 f/2.8 ‘L’ is so sharp that it needs a setting of 20 at most. The 20.8 and 50/1.4 I owned (both sold) needed 70 or more at wide apertures. The Panasonic G1 uses so little in-camera RAW processing that it needs even more sharpening – my default import setting for the G1 with the kit lens in LR is 90.
So what’s the right answer to the question : “Is this camera capable of delivering the resolution/speed/handling/whatever that I need?” I’m afraid that, with the host of variables in the digital process, and the broad range of skill sets and needs among users, the only right answer is “Try it and see”.
After all, would you trust a surgeon who never operated before to work on you? Because that’s what these reviewers are – hardly a one of them can take a picture to save his life and what works for you will differ from what works for the guy working for ‘click-through’ advertising dollars using free gear from the manufacturer. He’s not about to bite the hand that feeds him.
So for the reader who asked here the other day “Should I sell my LX-3 and get a G1?” there’s no right answer to that question. How can the needs of, say, a street snapper, compare with those of a macro or sports enthusiast? Depends what you want to use the camera for – there are no Swiss Army Knife solutions.
By all means read the technical reviews to get a sense of the gear but don’t waste your time on comparisons with other makers’ equipment by those unqualified to pontificate. Try it yourself.
Expert camera reviewers. G1, 14mm, f/4, 1/2000, ISO 100
An online camera review reader having just finished yet another mind numbing twenty page special:
Public schooling
Urban art at its worst.
Walk south along that chicest of San Francisco’s streets, Fillmore, and turn west on McAllister and you are suddenly in an area which feels like a concentration camp. Lined with housing estates for the poor, each comes with a healthy ration of locked gates, barbed wire and surveillance cameras.
Then, just when you though things could get no worse as you approach City Hall, something like this confronts you:
Lefty. G1, 35mm, f/5/5, 1/400, ISO 100
An appropriate tribute to one of the greatest government crimes of our times. Public schooling. This mural suggests that this chap finally cracked and set about himself with a heavy object, doing the students justice. Can’t say I blame him. Just imagine turning up to school only to be confronted with this daily ….
September 14, 2009
The Panasonic G1 and GH1 sensors
Sensor design is still in its early days.
Friend of the blog, and fellow Panasonic enthusiast Peter Solmssen has forwarded a fascinating technical piece which addresses changes in digital sensor design and suggests the oligopoly held by Canon and Nikon, who account for 78% of the DSLR market, is likely to weaken.
Most significantly, the article provides evidence that the Panasonic sensor in the GH1 (the G1 with video added) is anything but the same as the one in the G1. I would hate to have to compete with a behemoth like Panasonic which can roll out the first workable Electronic View Finder in the G1 only to completely redesign its sensor for the GH1 released shortly thereafter.
I quote: “Upon receiving the DMC-GH1, we fully expected to see a fabrication process similar to the DMC-G1, but partnered with a new design to add HD video functionality. While still early in our analysis, we have been pleasantly surprised to see Panasonic switch fabs and radically re-design their fabrication process and pixel architecture. ”
By the way, the GH1’s sensor is oversize compared to the one in the G1 so that when the user changes aspect ratios (16:9, 3:2 or 4:3) the total pixels used stay much the same.
The article also addresses innovations by Samsung in the sensors used in the fine Samsung/Pentax DSLR cameras and suggests that Canon is sitting on its laurels for now. In fairness, I have to add that’s no bad thing given how wonderful the FF sensor in my 5D is, but I have never known complacency to be a winning strategy.
Click the chart for more.
For those who thought sensor designs had peaked this piece will reinforce the fact that we are still in the early stages of innovation which, coupled with the new breed of Electronic View Finders, will make the next decade a Golden Era for new and increasingly responsive camera designs. In fact I expect that a decade hence, the pentaprism and flapping mirror will have disappeared from all but the most basic cameras (and the Leica DSLR, of course), confined to Rube Goldberg’s (Heath Robinson’s for UK readers) garbage bin where they belong.
On the BART. The G1’s antiquated sensor will do fine for now!
G1, 31mm, f/5.4, 1/80, ISO 800