Photographs, Photographers and Photography

August 29, 2010

The new Kindle

Filed under: Hardware — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:40 am

A mixed bag and mostly disappointing.

When Amazon announced the latest version of their Kindle monochrome book reader I took the bait. At $139 ($189 with 3G) the cost is low enough to make acquisition an impulse purchase and, indeed, I expect the device to be free in a couple of years with your first purchase of x books from Amazon.

iPhone 3G, Kindle, iPad indoors in indirect natural light.

First, let’s be clear. The Kindle competes with the iPad in only one regard and that is as a single purpose book and periodical/newspaper reader. Its use to photographers is extremely limited as it cannot display color, has a small screen and is mostly useful if you upload your PDF instruction books to it. The bulk of the device is so low and the weight even lower, that it makes sense to take the Kindle with you in preference to the various instruction books for your picture computer, aka the modern digital camera.

Amazon ships the Kindle pre-registered in your name, a nice touch, and adding your wifi network at home is a matter of moments. There’s a nice pre-loaded instruction book (why does Apple make you download that for the iPad?), the recharger is minuscule and a nice long USB/recharger cord is provided to charge the device. Mine came 50% charged and power consumption is so low (the Kindle’s display is always ‘on’ – switching it off merely switches off wifi and the related power drain) – that you can expect days of continuous use on one charge. When ‘off’ the screen displays a portrait of one of any number of famous authors. A nice touch.

So while the Kindle does not compete with the iPad, there’s no denying that it’s hard not to make comparisons and, in a word, the Kindle is plain awful when thus judged.

The feel is ‘throw-away-plastic’ rather than ‘Leica-fixit-when-it-breaks’. The ergonomics are simply foul. Lots of tiny buttons, awful placement of the ‘back’ button right below the five way controller, no touch screen (I kept touching mine, after so many happy hours with the iPad) and, worst of all, the page forward and back buttons – which are duplicated along the long sides – could not be placed worse. Every time I pick the Kindle up I do so by spanning it with my hand to grasp the long sides, thus avoiding actuating any of the keyboard buttons. This immediately causes pages to flip and I lose my place. Horrible – did anyone actually try using this ergonomic horror? Further, every time you change pages you get a disconcerting ‘flash to black’ like with an old fashioned mirrored SLR or DSLR.

The Kindle’s screen technology when used indoors is equally poor. The background is a light gray, the contrast is accordingly low, the screen is small and unless you have direct light shining on the screen it’s an eyestrain to read. Look at the picture above. Awful.

Many make much of the Kindle’s low 8 ounce weight compared to the iPad’s 24 ounces and, frankly, that’s nonsense. The iPad weighs no more than the average book, you do not hold it elevated but rather supported on a lap or in bed (just as you do with a book) and holding the Kindle aloft is simply a pain in the you-know-what, but you find you have to do that to get close enough to the small screen. The iPad’s weight is not an issue. Don’t be told otherwise. Or, if you prefer, return to your 48 oz. netbook or 80 oz. MacBook. That’s weight.

So why would anyone buy a Kindle? You only need look at the next two snaps and you will likely buy one. These show the iPad and Kindle in direct sun.

Kindle in direct sun. The grey background does a lot to reduce eye strain in bright light.

iPad in direct sun. Useless.

Here you can see the two best and worst features of the devices – the Kindle screen just gets better as the light intensity rises and the iPad not only sucks in the sun, it’s made impossible to use by the Chief Fetishist’s insistence on glossy screens only for all Apple’s devices. So at $139 if you live in a place with sun and like reading outside (meaning CA, Florida, southern Spain, France or Italy, I suppose) buy one. The $189 version is a waste of money, though that’s what I got. You simply load up your books at home using wifi. 3G, I thought, would be nice for on the road download of newspapers, but as Amazon and the publishers idiotically insist on charging you yet again even if you already have an iPad or desktop subscription, and because the Kindle version of the WSJ or NYT is severely edited, 3G makes no sense unless you get an urge to buy books from the Kindle Store when in an area without wifi. Worse, while you can access a mere couple of dozen famous blogs, Amazon wants to charge you for that too! Why on earth would I pay for something I can get free on multiple other devices? Mr. Bezos, what have you been smoking?

There is one reason, however, to get the 3G model. For the occasional beach or outdoor reader, 3G allows you to use Whispersync to pick up a book where you left off on your iPad or iPhone or other Kindle device. And as the 3G service has no recurring monthly cost (unlike with the iPad) you can just about convince yourself that it makes sense, if you try hard. Of course, the 3G service is from AT&T so better first decide if your place of contemplated use can get AT&T reception. If not, the Kindle falls back on the even slower EDGE system, which is better than nothing and has good US coverage.

The book shown on the screen, by the way, is Barbara Tuchman’s splendid ‘The Guns of August’ detailing the ‘outbreak’ (meaning unilateral unprovoked German aggression and the usual German atrocities) of WW1, each device at the same page owing to Amazon’s excellent ‘Whispersync’ technology which keeps all books you are reading using the Kindle or a Kindle app in sync. That’s the only other feature to like about the Kindle.

Bottom line? It’s no bargain. $139 if you like to read in the garden on sunny days or at the beach.

August 19, 2010

An awesome viewfinder

Filed under: G1/G2 — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:28 pm

The G1 finder shines.

Just how good the electronic viewfinder in the mirrorless Panasonic G1 really is was brought home forcefully to me when I spent a couple of days snapping away on the central California coast earlier this week. I had with me both the Canon 5D and the G1 and was reminded time and again why I prefer the EVF in the G1 to the traditional mirror/prism construction of the 5D.

The EVF in the G1 is not perfect, true. In bright light it will wash out highlights immediately, but no matter how bright the light you will have no difficulty reading the display data – aperture, shutter speed, etc. But things get even better in poor light. In the image below, the light was exceedingly poor – look at the exposure data. Yet the EVF adapted the image to show it in daylight brightness – much as you see it here – and composition was a breeze. In this sort of lighting you can actually read the Canon 5D’s display data, which is nice, but the G1’s is every bit as clear plus you get to see what you are photographing which, for photographers, is a nice feature ….

Inside Mission Carmel, CA. G1, 9-18mm Olympus MFT lens at 18mm, 1/8, f/5.6, ISO 1600.

I was lucky to get away with it at 1/8th second hand held and even at ISO 1600 there is no shortage of detail.

The Mission Carmel was founded June 3, 1770 and includes a working K-8 school. It is about as spectacular an example of California Mission architecture as you will find and quite beautifully maintained. Recommended, regardless of your religious views, or lack thereof.

August 16, 2010

Virtual reality revisited

Filed under: Panoramas — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Better tools and some thoughts on Flash.

I have decided to do some new work in Virtual Reality panoramas, having written extensively in these pages about the technique some four years ago. Snow Leopard refuses to let either PTMac – the software used to stitch the constituent images – or CubicConverter – which converts the stitched panorama into Virtual Reality format – work, so my first port of call was to ace panoramic pro UK photographer Rod Edwards. Rod has got this technique down and one of the most stunning examples of VR I have seen is his panorama of the famous Racetrack in California’s Death Valley which can be seen by clicking here.

Following Rod’s advice I settled on PTGui for stitching and Pano2VR for VR generation. Processing VR panoramas is a two step process – first stitch the constituent images into a seamless flat whole, then convert that image into a circular panorama which the viewer can pan at will in all directions, not to mention the ability to zoom in and out.

In the process I learned a couple of things. First, the software is now friendlier than before, though the Panotools engine used by PTGui seems identical to that used by the obsolete PTMac. Second, Pano2VR is an excellent tool making it easy to add sound, navigation controls and copyright data. But, most importantly, I learned how superior Adobe’s Flash is to Apple’s Quicktime. Yes, Pano2VR can generate VR files in either format. The Flash versions are half the size and offer far more control. Panning in Flash panoramas is also much smoother than the jerky alternative in Quicktime. Yes, the very same Flash which greedy piggy Steve Jobs has banned from the iPad. It’s ironical that Quicktime VR is no longer supported by Apple’s own latest version of their media player, QuickTime X, as they appear to be abadoning the VR format. But you don’t expect Apple to tell you that now, do you?

So to play a jerky Quicktime VR pano you have to download the older Quicktime 7 if it’s not on your system. Let’s hope the anti-trust powers stomp on Jobs’s arrogance and force him to open the iPad to Flash. If not, the competition will see to it in any case, and I’ll be first in line for a tablet which plays Flash and has a built in SDXC card reader. What a jerk! Here’s a guy who has a monster ego and a huge vendetta against Adobe for some reason. A little power is a dangerous thing ….

As a quick proof of concept, I snapped six pictures of a loft interior using the Canon 5D and Canon fisheye lens mounted vertically on the King Pano panoramic head. The excellent King Pano remains available and I recommend it. You do not need a fisheye to use it but a fisheye lens is the way to go if you want to do 360 degree Virtual Reality panoramas. Even with regular lenses, the King Pano is immensely useful as it provides the correct nodal point offset for the camera, meaning your efforts to stitch images properly will be speedily rewarded. Determination of the right setting for rotation of your rig about your lens’s nodal point is not that hard, and well explained in many places on the web, including on this site.

As proof of concept, click on the picture below. I have added some Vivaldi to jolly things along and the whole thing takes a minute or so to download. I did not bother using HDR, though that technique is highly recommended in VR work owing to the huge dynamic range frequently encountered – look at the burned out windows as an example. HDR fixes that. Nor did I fill the zenith and nadir holes, concentrating on the core stitching functionality instead. So next week it’s off to Point Lobos to do the real thing. In the image below I used TIFF files for maximum definition and you are looking at the Flash version.

Click to load and play the panorama. Use the mouse to navigate in all directions.
Will NOT play on an iPad.

To view a selection of my earlier panoramas, please click here. These use Quicktime7.

Disclosure: No connection to, or investment in, any of the companies mentioned in this article.

August 15, 2010

Adobe Photoshop Express

Filed under: Software, iPad — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

A useful iPad app.

I’m not sure what they are putting in the water coolers at Adobe Labs HQ in San Francisco, but they should definitely stick with the program.

First we got a really value added, fairly priced upgrade to Lightroom 3, many of whose enhancements I have written about here – film grain, superior RAW conversions, outstanding flexibility to remove lens aberrations and distortions – and now, at no cost, an iPad app named Adobe Photoshop Express.

The price is right!

It’s an inspired piece of programming which really ‘gets’ the touchscreen interface and one of the best efforts yet to make the iPad into a photo processing platform. Sure the controls are limited – basic exposure, sharpness, effects, frames, monochrome conversions and so on – but all the ’sliders’ for the controls dictate that the user merely slides his finger across the screen to change things. Surely this is the future of photo processing? Further, sign up at Adobe and if you can get comfortable with access rights (theirs not yours) to your pictures, then you can sync your snaps to your desktop or laptop via their servers.

Here’s a simple snap of our son with a neat frame added – this is a screen shot as I do not have an Adobe online storage account:

Winston at Point Lobos. My ‘equipment man’.

Very worth while looking into and it seems some of the earlier bugs have been stomped on as I have had no issues with my version. And what have you got to lose?

August 14, 2010

More on Adobe lens corrections in Lightroom 3

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Very clever indeed.

A friend wrote recently how much he was enjoying using the newly added built-in lens corrections in Lightroom 3 with his ultra-wide Nikon zoom on a pair of Nikon pro bodies, a lens whose profile is included with Lightroom 3.

This got me thinking. How can one-click corrections work when distortion varies so widely over the focal length range of many wide zooms? If the lens is pre-programmed into Lightroom’s database by Adobe you do not get a choice of focal length when applying the profile. It’s strictly a one choice affair, which contrasts with my approach when crafting profiles for the 9-18mm MFT Olympus zoom for my Panasonic G1, where I had to create disparate profiles for each of the four marked focal lengths. The barrel distortion of that lens decreases with increasing focal length, so it’s not possible to make one profile to fit all focal lengths.

Now one of the finer lenses for my full frame Canon 5D is the 24-105mm L zoom. Lightroom 3 includes a built-in profile for this lens unlike with the Olympus 9-18mm where I had to make my own. The Canon has fine resolving power and micro contrast at all focal lengths of its useful zoom range but suffers from the most atrocious barrel distortion at the wide end (the center of peripheral straight lines bows out), changing to mild pincushion distortion (the center bows in) at the long end. How could Adobe’s ‘one click’ approach possibly work with this lens whose distortion characteristics vary widely with focal length?

Note that if you use Canon’s DPP software (I do not) to process your pictures I’m fairly certain that it corrects distortion at all focal lengths. However, the 5D, unlike the G1, has no in-body distortion correction for the manufacturer’s lenses, so processing in LR3 brings in the images in their fully distorted glory just as with the G1/Olympus lens combination. And distortion correction is important to me as I frequently take architectural pictures where I want my straight lines straight.

Well, it was but a few moments work to take five snaps, one at each of the marked focal lengths, with a straight edge close to the top of the frame in each. I processed these through Lightroom 3 and, after making virtual copies of each, applied the one-click lens distortion correction to each of the virtual copies, selecting the single profile for Canon’s 24-105mm L lens in each case. The pictures were snapped at 24, 28, 50, 67 and 105mm.

Here are the results – in each case the corrected version is shown first:

At 24mm. Extreme barrel distortion in the uncorrected image at right.

At 28mm. Mild barrel distortion in the uncorrected image.

At 50mm. Very minor barrel distortion in the uncorrected image.

67mm. Very mild pincushion distortion in the uncorrected image.

105mm. Very mild pincushion distortion in the uncorrected image.

So as the above pictures suggest, the Adobe built-in profile for the Canon 24-105mm lens takes into account the focal length at which the image was made and applies distortion correction appropriately. It may be ‘one-click’ for the user, but it seems there’s much more going on below the surface. In all cases the correction is almost perfect, with only the 67mm and 105mm images slightly overcorrected and showing mild barrel distortion. The correction at the wider focal lengths is especially praiseworthy, as the above pictures show. Very clever and much more sophisticated than the case where you have to make your own lens profiles in those instances where Lightroom 3 does not include these.

August 13, 2010

The Leitz close-up gizmo outfit

Filed under: Hardware — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

A new high in strangeness.

If the 20mm Russar and 400mm Telyt were odd ducks in my lens tool kit over the years, this one takes the biscuit.

It’s the Leica close-up kit marketed in the 1950s which I owned for many years. I say “owned” rather than “used” because it was much more fun to assemble this collection of hardware and play with it than it was to use.

The Leitz close-up kit.

What you see in the neat fitted box is my Leica M2 attached to a Visoflex I mirror housing. The housing is attached to the Leitz Focusing Bellows I fitted with a 135mm f/4.5 Hektor lens head and a compendium lens shade – the latter extendable at will for very effective shielding of the lens. There’s a fine 45 degree right-way-round prism finder lower left. An excellent Leitz ball and socket head is lower center. These are beautifully made and I continue to use a variant on my monopod with the Panasonic G1. Highly recommended if you can track one down on the used market – exceptionally engineered, very secure when tightened owing to the design of the ball and indestructible. Attach a QR plate and you are done.

It’s hard to put into words how beautifully engineered everything in this kit really was. Every component speaks to the very height of the machinists art and confirms that Leitz’s quality and finish had only one way to go once the fifties ended. Downhill.

The lens fitted to the assembled Visoflex I and Bellows I

The idea of a continuous focusing range from infinity to life size was not new at that time – large technical cameras with long extension bellows had been doing that trick for ages – but seldom had it been executed as elegantly as here, especially in the 35mm film format.

The fitted case also accommodated a dual cable release with adjustable pin lengths. The idea was that the longer pin would raise the flapping mirror in the Visoflex I and further pressure on the plunger would then trip the camera’s shutter. It worked well.

Double cable release attached to the Visoflex I.

Everything was designed just so, right down to the bracing blocks in the lid of the case which made absolutley sure that your precious gear would not flail about in transit.

Truly a fitted case.

A second finder in the kit provided a reverse waist level view and, as you can see, the mirror in the Visoflex I was well oversized, for better function with long lenses.

With the waist level viewfinder in place.

In practice the 45 degree finder was far superior, offering an unreversed image at chest height, and included eyesight adjustment. Perfect.

Focusing, however, was far from perfect. The plain ground glass screen in the Visoflex I had no focusing aids and lacked a fresnel lens, so light drop off to the edges was severe. You simply opened the lens up to its modest f/4.5 maximum aperture (nope,no click stops here) and then racked it back and forth either side of what you though was sharp until it looked as good as you could get it. Then, fingers crossed, you pressed the button or rather you depressed the plunger on the twin release, trying not to forget to stop the lens down first. Of course, as the lens was completely manual things went dark really fast, so that handheld photography was pretty much out of the question. Definition at f/4.5 was iffy and depth of field so shallow that only the very lucky tried to use this apparatus hand held.

The compendium lens hood just went to prove that the engineers and designers at Leitz, Wetzlar had spared no expense. Like everything else in the kit it was beautifully made, slipped into the front of the bellows focusing rack on two chromed rods and clipped neatly to the front of the Hektor lens head in the groove provided.

The compendium lens hood for the Visoflex I.

The Hektor lens head was ordinarily sold with a coupled rangefinder focusing mount but for use with this kit the head was detached from the rangefinder mount and inserted into an adapter tube for fitting to the Bellow. Leitz wallowed in an orgy of adapters for seemingly everything in those days and various other lens heads had to use specific types. However only the rare 125mm f/2.5 Hektor and the 135mm Hektor and, later, Elmar and Tele Elmar kens heads would focus to infinity. You could also fit the 200mm and 400mm Telyt heads if you could find a second tripod to support the whole thing. The 135mm Hektor was a decent pre-war four element design and gained anti-reflection coating during the war years, being replaced by the more capable Elmar and, later the even better Tele Elmar which was the last 135mm rangefinder lens Leitz made with a detachable head. The even later 135mm Apo-Telyt-M was strictly for use on a Leica M body, with a fixed head. It was quite superb for its intended purpose, as my copy testified, provided your Leica M’s rangefinder was properly calibrated. Many were not and only the M3 with its nearly life sized finder could really do the lens justice at full aperture and close focus distances when it came to dead on focusing.

The Hektor lens head fitted to its intermediate collar.

It’s some reflection on how times have changed when this sixty year old gear is compared to a modern full frame DSLR. My Canon 5D fitted with the Canon 100mm f/2.8 EF Macro and a ring flash offers focusing from infinity to life size in a standard focus mount – no bellows needed! – is auto focus and auto aperture, delivers quality which will knock your socks off, and is easy to use handheld. There’s even a costlier ‘L’ version available with anti-shake technology. As these things go it’s also relatively compact, if not lightweight. None of that could be said of the Leitz outfit but the craven functionality of the Canon gear lacks everything the Leitz hardware possesses in spades. Sheer physical engineering beauty.

I have taken more great pictures with the Canon gear than I can recall but cannot recall having taken one half decent picture with the Leitz outfit – which is why you see none her.

But it sure was nice to look at. I bought and sold mine, after many years of ownership, for a song.

August 12, 2010

A bargain basement G1

Filed under: G1/G2 — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Snap one up while you can.

The Panasonic G1 is discontinued but remaindered new samples are still out there at a bargain price.

G1 pricing at Amazon.

The replacement G2 is $770, so the equation is simple. If the following new features of the G2 are worth $270 to you, get the G2:

  • A touch screen to focus the camera
  • A movie mode

And, of course, the 14-42mm kit lens on the G2 is now widely reported as being inferior to the 14-45mm version on the G1, and I can most certainly testify to the quality of the latter.

The G10 (lower quality movie mode) at $540 is not really an alternative to the G1. It has an awful EVF (one key reason you buy a G1/2 is for the excellent eye level viewfinder), drops the swiveling rear LCD display (not like I care about that and nor should you – LCDs are not a useful framing tool) and has the same lower quality 14-42mm kit lens.

The G1 at $500 strikes me as a real bargain for real photographers tired of lugging around their heavy APS-C or full frame DSLRs. I have had no reliability issues after nearly 7,000 frames over the past year. If you just want a G1 back-up body, it is not sold in that configuration in the US but I would bet you can unload the spare kit lens for $200 to someone displeased with the latest version. So call it $300 for a spare body. Not bad at all.

And if you want to join the cadre of elite users, like me, you can get the blue bodied version for a modest $40 more!

Further, if you want to get lucky, it seems that an iPhone and a G1 are THE winning combination:

As usual, Windows users are SOL.

August 11, 2010

Running Windows on a Mac

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Ugh!

Looking back I suppose there have been two sound decisions I made in my business life – we won’t go into the dozens of poor ones here!

One was leaving socialist England in 1977 for America which, back then, truly was the land of opportunity and, in contrast to my homeland, actually had a work ethic. The other was quitting my day job almost a decade ago and deciding to make my own living.

Working for yourself is truly a breath of fresh air and has probably added a couple of decades to my life expectancy. No more corporate team spirit, working for the greater good and all that gobbledegook which has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth over the past few decades in America’s ‘feel good’ society. Whenever forced to attend one of those ghastly team building sessions – whose goal would have made Stalin proud with its emphasis on stamping out all individuality – I would quickly plead a headache and head for the nearest beach with my camera.

But the greatest reduction in stress in my life came from no longer having to use Microsoft’s Windows. This fraud passing for an operating system with its need for large support teams of unwashed techies and constant problems was in my life no more. I became a full time Mac OS X user. And while I have nothing but contempt for Apple’s fragile hardware, OS X has been a model of stability and reliability this past decade and is as good as it gets in the latest Snow Leopard iteration …. especially if you run it on a home made PC box! Good, plentiful, cheap, easy replaced and reliable PC parts installed in a Hackintosh come to life when presented with a sound OS.

However, because I manage money to make ends meet, there are one or two financial applications I use on occasion which only come in Windows versions meaning – oh! horror – that I still have to load that piece of garbage on occasion.

While OS 10.5 Leopard was around I used Parallels as an emulator to run Windows – my copy of Windows started life as Windows 98 and I upgraded it to XP years ago. Parallels was buggy but sort of worked, with a clunky interface and a very long install time. It would lock up every other day on my MacBook and Intel iMac. Well, still better than Windows.

When Snow Leopard OX 10.6 came to market I upgraded but, surprise, surprise, Parallels would no longer work, the maker wanting more money to make its product compatible. Now given that any spend related to Windows is regarded as obscenity in the home, I shopped around and found two competitors.

The competition is comprised of VMWare’s Fusion, also wanting payment, and Sun’s VirtualBox. The latter is free and, now that Oracle has bought Sun, has some serious development effort being put into it. There’s money in virtualization. My earlier experience with VirtualBox 2.0 was awful and I had forgotten about it.

But when VirtualBox 3.0 was released in June, 2009 I paid attention. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, did not become one of the world’s wealthiest by suffering fools (Gates at MSFT didn’t suffer them either, but made sure he sold his product to them) and a download of VirtualBox 3.0 showed the product to be much improved. Super stable on the HackPro, fast and easy to set up if, that is, you can get past the instructions which were written by engineers for engineers in contrast to the Apple approach of writing instructions for regular humans.

Mercifully, I am an engineer and most certainly not a regular human, so installation was a breeze. I then installed Windows XP Sp2, duly inserted my Win 98 disk to prove I was legit (though why anyone would actually want to steal Windows must be one of the great mysteries of our time) and immediately upgraded to Win XP Sp3 which, amazingly, went without a hitch.

I’m currently on VirtualBox 3.2.6 and Windows runs in it in its own little space, making sure no bad stuff migrates over to my OS X work space. If it gets clogged up I’ll simply reinstall it and the one or two apps I use. I give it 4gB of the 8gB of RAM in the HackPro when it’s on and allow it to use all four cores of the Intel Core2Quad CPU in the HackPro, and it runs fast if only in 32-bit mode, but how anyone can stand the UI of Windows XP beats the hell out of me. It was awful in Win ‘95 and remains so in XP. No, if anything, it’s worse in XP, trying to interpose a user friendly interface which only makes the bad look awful. VirtualBox + XP Sp3 load in some 40 seconds and XP constantly reminds me that my ‘computer may be at risk’. How about fixing that, Microsoft, without forcing the user to pay for band aids? One of the nicest aspects of VirtualBox is that it allows you to create virtual disk drives in Win XP so that you can seamlessly access files in your OS X space. So, for example, I can install Lightroom 3 on the XP ‘machine’ and access my Lightroom catalog on the OS X side easily. A related benefit is that I can see how this site looks in XP using the truly awful Internet Explorer browser which, needless to say, respects few of the standards adopted by every other browser in the universe.

Windows XP Sp3 running this site on the HackPro. OS X in the background.

All the usual peripherals work with no tuning – wireless internet, USB devices, sound, card readers, optical disk drive and so on. The only thing I have not bothered with is getting wireless printing to work as life is too short. I merely take a screen snap and print from OS X on the few occasions I need hard copy.

Anyway, this is a really long winded way of saying that if you really must run Windows on your Mac, get VirtualBox.

It is free, super stable and if you get a hankering to run Ubuntu, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows XP or Vista, Windows Server, Windows 7, Oracle Enterprise, Debian, Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, SUSE or Mandriva on your Mac, virtualization is a nice safe way of doing that.

And if you are seriously troubled, then consider updating to Windows 7 and making the world’s richest man yet wealthier. After all, there’s a fool born every minute and he has made Microsoft what it is today.

Running Windows in emulation mode under OS X on a PC box hacked to run Snow Leopard may sound like feeding bacon to a pig, but it’s the only safe way of running Windows on anything.

And, if you absolutely must know, this site looks almost acceptable in Internet Explorer 8. Lightroom 3? No problem, if limited to the slower 32-bit mode.

Lightroom 3 running in XP/VirtualBox in 32-bit mode.

August 9, 2010

Latest iMac 27″ bench tests

Filed under: Computing — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Compared to the HackPro.

When FU Steve built the HackPro to replace my fried 24″ iMac the goal was simple – make something reliable and fast for photo processing with superior heat management and using inexpensive off-the-shelf parts.

Technology marches on and Apple has now released its latest iMac which in its best configuration includes the latest Intel i7 CPU and a 27″ display. Is it better than the HackPro?

Summer 2010 27″ iMac.

HackPro (under the desk!) running two Dell 2209WA monitors, fall 2009 vintage.

The proof of the pudding is in test scores using Geekbench (CPU and memory performance) and Cinebench (video and graphics speed).

The specifications compare as follows, both machines using Snow Leopard 10.6.4:

HackPro:

CPU: 2.83gHz Intel Core2Quad, Q9550
GPU: EVGA Nvidia 9800GTX+ with 512mB GDDR3 memory
RAM: 8gB DDR2 800mHz

iMac 27″ i7:

CPU: 2.93gHz Intel QuadCore i7
GPU: ATI Radeon HD5750 with 1gB GDDR5 memory
RAM: 8gB DDR3 1333mHz

Here are the test results using Geekbench and Cinebench, both in 64-bit mode:

Geekbench 2.1.6 64-bit:

HackPro (my tests):

Overall: 6731
Integer: 6430
Floating point: 10142
Memory: 3385
STREAM: 2545

iMac (Apple Insider tests):

Overall: 10052
Integer: 8868
Floating point: 15764
Memory: 5028
STREAM: 4258

Cinebench 11.5 64-bit:

HackPro (my tests):

OpenGL: 23.44 fps
CPU: 3.16 pts

iMac (Bare Feats tests):

OpenGL: Not stated, but I would guess 20-30% faster
CPU: 5.50 pts

What’s the fastest that Cinebench has tested? Here are the results from their database (12C/12T means 12 Cores and 12 Threads):

Cinebench R11 OpenGL test results – HackPro in orange.

Cinebench R11 CPU test results – HackPro in orange.

The bottom line is that the top of the line iMac i7 CPU model smokes the HackPro with faster video, CPU and RAM performance. The price is competitive too. The top of the line iMac i7 with 8gB RAM sells for $2,399. The HackPro with a like screen (the Dell U2711), CPU, GPU and RAM would cost $2,000 to make.

So what’s to choose?

  • The iMac is $400 more
  • The iMac needs zero construction time. It takes an experienced worker 3-4 hours to assemble the HackPro, and klutzes need not apply
  • The iMac uses an LG 2560 x 1440 IPS display with a glossy glass cover; the screen only accommodates 72% of the AdobeRGB gamut. 1 year warranty.
  • The Dell U2711 uses the same LG display with a matte plastic cover; the screen accommodates 96% of the AdobeRGB gamut. 3 year warranty.
  • Reliability of the iMac is unknown.

So the iMac is a good buy if you can get over the unanswered reliability issue and think you can properly profile that garish screen with the very limited adjustments provided. My experience is that Apple makes some of the most unreliable hardware on earth, with heat managment consistently compromised at the altar of appearance. However, if this new iMac proves reliable then it’s getting very hard to justify the 100% premium asked for the separate box MacPro.

There’s no arguing with the value this time around. Further, if you want a second 27″ display, Apple’s newly announced (glossy, of course) Cinema Display will run you $1,000, which is much the same that Dell is charging for its comparable Ultrasharp 2711.

Am I tempted to upgrade? Not remotely. While I can increase the HackPro’s CPU performance by 20% by simply overclocking the CPU there is no incentive to do so, given my needs. The enhanced speed means little to me as my primary use is Lightroom 3 (where everything is super fast on my rig) and I do no video processing; were I doing the latter for a living I would certainly think about it, if I could get comfortable with the glossy screen and its poor handling of the Adobe RGB gamut. The most likely upgrade in my future is to a pair of larger Dell monitors – either the 24″ U2410 ($500 each) or the 27″ U2711 ($1,000). But that’s a discussion for another day. Stated differently, for my use the HackPro’s processing speed is at the point of diminishing returns, meaning I would have to spend a lot more for a relatively modest increase; the graphics display card remains state-of-the art and can drive anything out there but there are now considerably better and larger displays available, albeit at a price. Indeed, for my day job of money management, which uses lots of stock price, bond yield and live news data feeds, the only thing I would like in the HackPro is more screen real estate. It seems there’s never enough display space available in our information overloaded world.

As a matter of interest, as the HackPro is assembled from readily available off-the-shelf PC components, upgrading to the CPU and RAM specifications of the latest top-of-the-line iMac would necessitate a new motherboard, CPU and RAM at at total cost of $700. The GPU in the iMac is close in specs to that in the HackPro so no upgrade is called for. Everything else in the HackPro – case, coolers, drives, card reader, wireless, can be reused. Not something you can say of the iMac. And given that most of the HackPro’s components come with 3-5 year warranties, a fairer price comparison suggests adding AppleCare at $169 to the cost of the iMac which extends the one year warranty to three years.

How cool does the HackPro run with its five fans (two set on medium – case cooler and HDD cooler, three variable speed – CPU, GPU and power supply coolers)?

The spikes are from running the demanding Cinebench video benchmarks.

Sure would be nice to have that data for the new iMac; when running Lightroom the temperatures barely budge on the HackPro.

If you are spending someone else’s money, not your own, here are the latest MacPro prices, all without a monitor:

Prices for dopes.

August 8, 2010

Leitz 400mm f/6.8 Telyt

Filed under: Hardware — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Another funky lens.

Templeton sunset. Leicaflex SL, 400mm Telyt f/6.8 with adapter #14127,
1/125, f/6.8, Kodak Gold 100, handheld with shoulder brace.

Continuing the saga of odd lenses, here’s another one I used for years before it gave way to modern automated technology.

This one is at the opposite end of the range to the 20mm Russar profiled the other day and is none other than the magnificent Leitz 400mm f/6.8 Telyt.

Leitz has a long and storied tradition of making great 400mm lenses, starting with the 400mm f/5 Telyt made for the 1936 Olympics – you know, the games where Jesse Owens so disappointed German hopes for white supremacy. Indeed, you can bet there are many images documenting his four gold medals taken on this very lens. The pre-war model was uncoated and once America had recapitalized them on the sound principle that a fat German was safer than a hungry one, the Germans updated it post-war with a new mount and lens coatings to reduce flare. While the lens was fairly special for its time – f/5 at that length was really fast – it used a conventional rotating helicoid to focus and was a handful to use owing to its great weight. Handling was hardly helped by the fact that the Leica screw mount body user had to first fit a mirror box, the Visoflex, to permit focusing and viewing. This device did Rube Goldberg proud. To make matter worse, Leitz also offered a simple mounting tube and an optical viewfinder, though how on earth you focused or, for that matter, composed accurately with that remains a mystery to me.

So Leitz went back to the drawing board and conceived a handy follow focus mount with a trigger. The user held the grip and, on pressing the trigger, could change focus with a trombone sliding action, with fine focus being accomplished with a turn wheel under the thumb.

The focusing device, the Televit, came in Leica M and R mounts for use on the fine Leicaflex cameras and accepted the lens heads from the 200 f/4 and 280 f/4.8 existing lenses plus two new head units designed specially for the Televit.

These were the 400mm and 560 f/5.6 Telyt lens heads, which could only be used with the Televit, unlike the 200mm and 280mm lenses which came with a traditional, and detachable, helicoid focus mount. The Televit was a big improvement in the focusing department but the whole thing still weighed a ton.

So Leitz tried yet again and, in the 1970s, released their best effort yet, the 400mm and 560mm follow focus Telyts with a modest maximum aperture of f/6.8. These used a simple two element construction and were long focus not telephoto, meaning the 400mm lens really was 400mm (16 inches) long. Like the Televit, the heads for the two optical units were interchangeable and the lens came with a shoulder stock. This was a nice idea but in practice was a pain to assemble, so most dispensed with it. I always preferred a monopod with a QR base with mine and mostly used the lens at f/6.8. Sharpness did not improve on stopping down and you generally wanted to avoid doing that as the aperture control was as rudimentary as on the pre-war f/5 predecessor, meaning click stops with no preset mechanism. Ugh!

I used my 400mm f/6.8 Telyt first on my M2 and M3 with a Visoflex 2 or Visoflex 3 mirror box (much improved versions of the earlier Visoflex 1, but still Goldbergish), then on my Leicaflex SL film body with an adapter where it worked well if slowly – exposure metering was a match-the-needles affair. A nicely balanced outfit. But it really came into its own when the Canon 5D came along and one more adapter ring now allowed use of the lens on a modern high definition full frame body with aperture priority exposure automation.

The 400mm f/6.8 Telyt dismantled for transit.

Assembled.

Built-in filter slot.

The focus release button for the trombone movement.

When I first bought the lens it had been sitting unused for many years and the grease in the trombone slide had dried out. $80 later it was relubricated and working superbly. You really needed no fine focus control as it was so nicely balanced that achieving fine focus just using the sliding motion was easy. This was probably as good as traditional manual focus technology every got with a lens of this length. They can be found for a song on the used market; just prepare to have yours relubricated before use.

As you can see the lens was no slouch:

Egrets off Highway 1, California. Canon 5D, 400mm f/6.8 Telyt with #14127 Leica-M to Leica-R
and Leica-R to Canon EOS adapters, 1/125, f/11, ISO 200, monopod.

The Telyt was sold (as it was in mint condition it went to a collector, needless to add – what a waste) and replaced with the Canon 400mm f/5.6 ‘L’ which is superior in every way – sharper, auto aperture, superb autofocus. Technology had moved on and it’s the reason you will never see a pro using a Leica at a soccer game – they still do not make autofocus long lenses to this day, and without autofocus you cannot compete. That Canon lens has, in turn, been largely superseded by the magical Panasonic 45-200 (90-400mm FFE) which offers 400mm equivalent length at the long end at f/5.6 and – here’s the magical bit – fits in your jacket pocket and weighs under one pound. And did I mention that it includes anti-shake technology?

August 7, 2010

Apple Battery Charger hype

Filed under: Hardware — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

The latest in spin from Cupertino.

Traditional rechargeable batteries have a short shelf life. They self-discharge quickly and cannot handle many charge cycles before dying.

Apple has introduced a charger with six AA rechargeables using enhanced technology rechargeable batteries. At $29.95 it’s not a bad value as things Apple go, though you are limited to recharging only two batteries at a time and have to avoid the gag reflex when reading the usual hype on their web site. Still, given the low self-discharge rate, that’s not a big deal. Charge two, charge two more, etc. They claim that the recharger has very low static current draw but it would seem to me that any sane person would not leave the charger plugged in unless it was actually charging, so hardly a feature.

The Apple device actually uses Sanyo Eneloop batteries which have been around a while. You can read about the technology here.

And, needless to say, you can do much better on the price by buying the Sanyo four battery charger which comes with eight AA and 2 AAA batteries for $29.45 from Amazon. It also comes with C and D size adapters which take your AA batteries but that’s dumb as small AA batteries will not run long in a high drain device like a flashlight (English: ‘Torch’, which is far more accurate) which typically uses C and D cells. So you get more batteries and a four cell charger for less than the Apple device. No surprise there. Plus the recharger will also charge AAA cells; at least one of my remotes uses those.

Additional AA/AAA Eneloop batteries are very inexpensive at Amazon if you need more than the eight/two supplied. Eight AAs sell for $20 with 4 AAAs at $9, meaning you are getting the charger for all of $5 in the kit.

The model of Sanyo recharger is 110 volt only, but there are multi-voltage versions out there is you look. I cannot tell from the hype on Apple’s web site which voltages their charger works with.

What’s the downside? These batteries can deliver no more than 2000 mAh of current, compared with 2700 for fresh, throw away alkalines. So if you have very high current draw devices, they will seem weak. On the other hand typical uses – Bluetooth wireless keyboards, computer mice, TV remotes, clocks, etc. – will pose no problem.

The upside? Less toxic waste and you always have a battery handy when needed. These will work fine with the Apple wireless keyboard (four in the white original, three in the first aluminum one, two in the current aluminum one) and, best of all, with Pentax DSLRs as Pentax seems to be the only manufacturer out there with the common sense to use regular AA batteries in its fine SLR cameras.

Once my supply of disposable AAs is exhausted I’m buying this little kit. And you can bet I’m not falling for the Apple recharger hype, a device marketed by a company which increasingly regards its customers as stupid.

August 6, 2010

The Russar 20mm lens

Filed under: Hardware — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Major league strange.

The Unfinished Church, Bermuda, 1999. Leica M6, 20mm Russar, Kodachrome 64.

Mention of the quirky Leitz Stemar stereo lens yesterday got me to thinking of some of the stranger lenses I have owned. Without a doubt on of the oddest was the 20mm Russar-M f/5.6.

Mine came in black – the Russar 20mm f/5.6 ultra-wide angle lens.

This was a super wide angle Leica thread mount lens without rangefinder coupling. Not that any was needed as at 20mm pretty much everything was sharp all the time. I got mine shipped from the UK for under $200 and it came with the best wide angle viewfinder I have yet seen. Not only was the image clear and relatively undistorted in the finder, the field of view was accurately defined and the whole thing was superbly made using light alloys. None of these atrributes apply to the awful Leica 21mm finder, now in plastic and costing a ridiculous $750 today. Further, the Russian finder had a swivelling foot which allowed you to tilt it down for parallax correction at close distances. A masterpiece.

But the lens was even better. When the Russians took possession of eastern Germany in 1945 one of the priceless properties there was the old Zeiss, Jena factory. I cannot confirm this but am fairly certain that the 20mm Russar was optically identical to the 21mm Zeiss Biogon and like designs, meaning a deeply protruding rear element which rested very close to the camera’s shutter and required a deep rear lens cap for storage. The oddest ‘feature’ of this lens was the aperture ring which was deeply recessed within the front of the lens so you had to stick your finger almost into the lens to change f-stops.

This placement, of course, precluded the use of a filter as with one in place you could not adjust the aperture.

Viewfinder and Russar 20mm on the Kiev copy of the Contax II. The lens also came in a Contax bayonet mount.

The definition was excellent at all apertures and best at f/8. In practice you would simply take a wild guess at the correct focus distance (in meters, not fun for one brought up to estimate in feet!) sight through that wonderful finder and bang away. I kept it permanently mounted, using a screw to bayonet adapter, on my Leica M6 which had such a poor viewfinder (can you say flare? – I shoot into the sun a lot) that it made a natural mule for the Russar. What’s more, it amused me no end to have a Russian lens mounted on what was then Germany’s finest.

The lens was an inexpensive alternative to the Leitz Super Angulon f/3.4 (the earlier f/4 was a real dog) and later Leitz Elmarit and Aspherical Elmarit f/2.8 designs which cost and arm and a couple of legs. The Aspherical variant remains in the catalog at $4,400, so you get the picture. When my Russar-M finally moved on, replaced by that same unbeatable Aspherical Elmarit (it was one of my ‘more money than sense’ moments, I confess) I found myself missing the Russar’s compactness and built-in ‘hood’. The Elmarit was gargantuan by comparison, and the even larger hood an object of ridicule. I never used it. When the Aspherical Elmarit was finally sold I did at least have the pleasure of doubling my money on it, Leica gear prices having gone through the roof.

The equipment pictures above are from the excellent USSRPhoto site which has masses of information on all sorts of Russian camera gear.

Bermuda Sky, 1999. Leica M6, 20mm Russar, Kodachrome 64.

A 20″ x 16″ print of the above over the mantlepiece at home testifies to the quality of the Russar.

August 5, 2010

Panasonic 3D lens

Filed under: G1/G2, Hardware — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

The Stemar is back!

Sold in very limited numbers in the mid-1950s, Leica’s Stemar lens was an elegant way of making stereo pictures with your rangefinder Leica.

The 33mm f/3.5 dual lens Stemar

The Stemar lens (the name derives from STEreo elMAR – meaning a simple four element design like the 50mm Elmar) would take two images, each 18×24mm on a standard 24×36mm film frame and came in a kit with a tailored lens hood, a 33mm clip-on viewfinder, a close up lens/prism, and a binocular viewer to permit 3D examination of the transparency image. There was also an even rarer attachment for your slide projector to project the twin images on a large screen. All are visible in the picture below.

Stemar outfit.

Given that it came in a Leica screw mount, easily adapted to the latest Leica M cameras, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work every bit as well with the latest M7 Leica film camera or even the M9 full frame digital, though I’m not sure how you would create viewable transparencies with the latter; doubtless possible with some ingenuity.

As the picture shows, the lens was something of an ugly duckling, screws showing prominently on the front plate, the ugly protruding finger focus tab, the many gadgets needed to make it work, and definition cannot have been that great. The four element Elmar design works reasonably at 50mm and 65mm (the latter on the Visoflex SLR ‘mirror box’) and well at 90mm but is probably poor at 35mm. Leitz made a 35mm full frame Elmar pre-war and it was soon replaced with the excellent six element Summaron. Compare with the Panasonic lens, below and see what stylish modern design is all about.

As with all low production Leica hardware, the Stemar has now acquired that awful epithet of ‘collectible’, meaning it’s doomed to a china cabinet and commands a $6,000 price tag at auction. I find this every bit as damnable as the $1mm Ferrari treated in like manner rather than thrashed on the backroads, which was the design intent.

Now a Stemar was not something I ever owned. Even a few years ago when it was actually affordable it would have been no use to me, as a childhood eye defect forever rendered me incapable of seeing in three dimensions. My brain – such as it is – cannot fuse the disparate images, with the happy result that I read with my right and drive with my left eye. It makes for interesting moments when trying to pour red wine in a white tablecloth restaurant, as I have no depth perception, and is the reason you will invariably find me delegating the task! I have experienced too many reddening tablecloths to want to repeat the experience, testimony to my having missed the glass completely ….

But I console myself that my infirmity has been all to the good. Like the blind man with an overly developed sense of hearing, this One Eyed Jack simply tries harder with what he has. While motorcycling near the cliff edge can be an unusually unnerving experience, I grit my teeth and try harder, consoling myself as the journey ends that I am a better and stronger person for the experience! Further, I get to save money and weight on binoculars, as a monocular is fine, the second optic being wasted on me.

But 3D is the coming thing. In one of those mail catalogs I simply cannot seem to unsubscribe from, the assorted big screen TVs for sale were dominated by one thing – labels screaming ‘3D’. Motion pictures are a hit in the format (or so my 8 year old assures me – I cannot go with him as I cannot actually see anything but a head-splitting mess on the screen) as Hollywood discovers the latest in moneymaking technology. More power to them. I get to save on the entry price to the 2D theater.

Many of those 3D TVs in the catalog come, of course, from Panasonic, which is a pioneer of the technology. So it’s hardly a surprise that they will shortly release a 3D lens – just like the Stemar but auto-everything – for the G-series of micro Four-Thirds camera bodies.

Panasonic’s modern Stemar.

I don’t know the focal length but would assume 16mm or so, as the Full Frame Equivalent of 33mm used in the Stemar is ideal for 3D images – anything much longer and the subject tends to lose the 3D effect. Or so I am assured by those with binocular vision. I think it’s a tremendously exciting development as the images taken with this optic will simply be ported to your Panny 3D TV set for viewing with those funky glasses, a far superior experience to the Stemar’s hand-held binocular viewer, I would guess. In that case, your ‘collectible priced’ Leica M9 may finally fulfill the potential, with its equally collectible Stemar, which the latter so under-delivered on over fifty years ago. The G-body + Panny 3D lens will run you some $12,000 less, by the way.

Just goes to show, doesn’t it? There really is not that much new under the sun.


Here’s Panasonic’s press release on the subject; check the double asterisked note – you can bet Panny’s designers have a Stemar or two in their labs. The English may be stilted but the awareness of the predecessor design is clear:

And here’s the 1954 audience enjoying the predecessor anaglyph system – one lens red, one green:

August 4, 2010

Topaz DeNoise

Filed under: G1/G2, Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:31 am

Snake oil?

I confess that I have always regarded noise reduction applications for digital images as so much snake oil – a solution which makes the problem worse. Sure, they reduce noise but they also destroy definition in the process. Better noisy and sharp than blurred and smooth, in my book. Further, with most of my digital snaps being on the essentially noise-free sensor in the Canon 5D my incentive for ‘denoising’ images has been non-existent. Until, that is, the Panasonic G1 with a sensor one quarter the area of the one in the Canon became my daily user. Go over 13″ x 19″ when printing (and that is really the only time you will see noise in practical use) and noise makes itself heard, if you get my drift.

So the other day when I was giving my new Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens a good workout on the G1, I indulged in a spot of pixel peeping to see how good the definition was and, in the process, ran into noise when examining the equivalent of a 30″ x 45″ print on the Dell 2209WA monitor. Now one of the claims for Lightroom 3 is that it comes with significantly improved noise reduction capabilities, so I promptly gave these a shot .

Here’s the original RAW image:

At 18mm, f/8. Sunflowers.

And here’s a 30x selection before applying any noise reduction; this is an excellent test image as it has fine detail and shadows:

No noise reduction at 30x. ISO320, RAW.

Here’s that same section after applying the best looking noise reduction in LR3:

After applying LR3 noise reduction.

The LR3 noise reduction setting were as follows – the sharpness settings are my import defaults for the G1 RAW files, and were determined after much experimentation (5D images need less sharpening, by comparison):

LR3 noise reduction settings

Topaz DeNoise costs $80, seems to be popular on the chat boards, and requires Photoshop CS3 or later, where it installs as a plugin. As I’m still on CS2, and unlikely to upgrade, I wanted to run Topaz DeNoise from within LR3. This dictates the download of two applications – the plugin itself (41.2mB download, 113.7mB installed) and a separate app named Fusion Express (free) which is a 509.1 mB monster of a download but installs at 57.9mB if you restrict the installation to Topaz DeNoise; the Fusion Express application supports many Topaz apps, hence the size of the download. Now the installed size of Topaz Denoise must represent some of the sloppiest programming on record. At 113.7mB for a single purpose tool it exceeds the 89.5mB of Lightroom3 by some 27% – and last I checked LR3 does a heck of a lot more than just remove noise. Draw your own conclusions.

For RAW originals Topaz provides no fewer than seven presets for noise reduction and after some experimentation I determined that the lightest of these gave the best result. That said, the result was significantly inferior to what LR3 delivered with its built in tool. No matter how I tried, I could not reduce the artifacts in the circled area to as low a level as LR3 provided and shadow detail in the hairs on the stem of the sunflower was marginally worse at all settings, even after adjusting the ‘Adjust Shadow’ slider.

Topaz DeNoise version at RAW – lightest setting.

The Topaz noise reduction setting were:

Topaz DeNoise settings

What this little experiment goes to prove is that Adobe has done a truly stellar job in coding the noise reduction features built into LR3 and kept it nice and simply with just five sliders (you mostly use the first three shown above) compared to the overkill of seven offered by Topaz. No matter how much I messed with these I could not approach the LR3 result with regard to the elimination of contour artifacts in out-of-focus areas, and these artifacts are both more noticeable and annoying in the Topaz processed image.

Speed? LR3 is instantaneous. Topaz? First you need to invoke the plugin from within Lightroom which causes the RAW image to be converted to a TIFF copy then exported to Topaz DeNoise, some 7 seconds. Topaz Denoise take a further 7 seconds to process the preview image, and seven seconds every time you move a slider which makes experimentation a royal pain, then a whopping 58 seconds to process and save the file in TIFF format (I’m doing this on my four core Mac with 8gB RAM running a 2.83gHz CPU speed with an Nvidia 512 mB 9800GTX+ video card – it doesn’t get better than that!). So that’s a minimum of 72 seconds per image on a very fast computer. Good luck if you have many images to process …. that’s no more than 50 images an hour.

For the geeks amongst you, here is the Geekbench 64-bit score for my hardware:

So while Topaz DeNoise does a half decent job for the $80 asked, and if you shop around you can find discount coupons bringing the price down to $50, if you are a Lightroom2 user you can upgrade to Lightroom3 for $100. For the additional $20/$50 you get superior noise reduction, the processing is instantaneous compared with bog slow for Topaz, LR3’s improved Adobe Camera RAW processing software compared to that in LR2 is included, and LR3 offers an integrated solution which does not require that you exit the Lightroom application to enter a separate de-noising one. I did not do any tests with JPGs as I only use RAW, and you should too.

You can draw your own conclusions where the value lies. Here’s a side-by-side comparison to make things easier:

LR3 on the left. Topaz on the right.

August 3, 2010

Keywords in Lightroom

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:06 am

A useful discipline.

No matter how well you catalog your images in Lightroom, adding keywords always helps. That snap at the beach may belong under ‘Beach and Sea’ in your catalog or, equally well, under ‘Abstracts’. But if you add the name of the beach as a keyword, or the words ‘beach’ if it’s cataloged in abstracts, the chances of finding it at some later date when you have many thousands of images added will increase through the use of keyword search.

To find which of your images are missing keywords, set up a Smart Collection (Library->New Smart Collection) as follows:

Then when you click on the Smart Collection named ‘Without Keywords’ you can see all the images that need keywords added. I frequently forget to add keywords before cataloging my images after import and processing, so this is a useful discipline. And if you are way behind on your keywording, simly do a few images each time before quitting Lightroom. The payback down the road in image retrieval and time saved is immense – it takes less time to enter a keyword than to search for an image without one.

And while you are setting up this Smart Collection, take a look at some of the other filters that Smart Collections support. It’s a powerful tool.

August 2, 2010

Lens profile correction in practice

Filed under: Lightroom, Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:20 am

A dream to use.

Having explained how to create your own lens profiles for use with Lightroom3 yesterday, here’s that experience being put to use.

In this snap I wanted to emphasize the foreground sign to heighten the impact of the lone child on the beach. As you can see the original is rather blah as I was trying to moderate exposure between the poorly lit sign (the sun was shining into the lens – note how flare free the image is, especially as I do not use a lens hood) and the brightly lit beach. A separate attempt using fill-in flash looked too artificial for my taste, like one of those over-lit 1950s outdoor Hollywood musicals.

Original on the top. G1, Olympus 9-19mm MFT lens at 9mm.

A quick tap on the lens correction profile for the lens in LR3, two minutes work with the adjustment brush on the signs using AutoMask and zero feather to faithfully define the edges, a local exposure adjustment of plus one stop on the masked signs, a minus one stop exposure adjustment to the whole image, a touch on the vibrance slider, a little post-crop vignetting (the Olympus lens is totally free from optical vignetting even at 9mm, as you can see from the original, above), some selective darkening of the foreground and a blah original becomes a picture, and exactly what I visualized when pressing the button. The sheer idiocy of the sign testifies to the fact that the least able in any society work for government.

Stop! Turn right! G1, 9-18mm Olympus at 9mm, 1/800, f/8, ISO 320

With images where you expect to use lens distortion correction or perspective correction at the processing stage, it makes sense to compose with a little space around objects close to the edge of the frame, as that space will be lost when corrections are added – as in this example. Things are made a lot easier by the fact that the Panasonic G1 has one of the very few viewfinders which shows 100% of the image – most crop 3-5% making it impossible to exactly preview the saved file.

Lightroom3 is a powerful, efficient photography tool. The enhancements in Lightroom3 have now almost totally obsoleted my use of Photoshop for which feature, alone, I am immensely grateful.

Thank you, Adobe. Now maybe you can convince that jerk Steve Jobs to allow Flash to work on the iPad before I resort to jailbreaking mine.

August 1, 2010

Lightroom 3 Lens Profile Creator

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:04 pm

DIY lens profiles.

Adobe has not left Panasonic MFT camera users out in the cold when it comes to automation of corrections to remove distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting in Lightroom 3. They provide a fine tool to create your own lens profiles, for example when using non-Panasonic lenses on a G-digital body, like my newly acquired Olympus 9-18mm MFT. In my third column reviewing that outstanding optic, I stated:

Well, it turns out that Adobe provides a free application named Lens Profile Creator which allows you to create your own lens profiles for just about any lens on any camera, film or digital, from iPhone to Leica S2 or scanning 4×5 back on a field camera. The download includes not only the charts (you must print one so that you can photograph it) but also instructions for use of both the application and details of how to set up your camera and lighting.

With the G1 it’s only necessary to do this for non-Panasonic MFT lenses like the Olympus 9-18mm ultra-wide zoom. Panasonic lens’ distortions are corrected by the software in the G1/G2/G10/GH1/GF1 range of bodies. Here is what Adobe says of their application:

The PDF instruction guide for Lens Profile Creator can be found here and the instructions for printing the calibration charts are here.

Creation of a lens profile is easy. You take nine pictures of the chart – I used RAW as that is all I use – convert them to DNG format by importing to LR3 then exporting in DNG format, and then you load the nine DNG images into Lens Profile Creator to create the lens profile for a specific focal length. As chromatic and barrel distortion in the Olympus 9-18mm lens vary with focal length, I did this at the four marked focal lengths – 9, 11, 14 and 18mm – a total of 36 pictures. It doesn’t take but a few minutes to take the pictures (alignment, per Adobe, is not critical) and, on my nuclear powered Mac, Adobe Lens Profile Creator took some 2 minutes to generate each of the four profiles from the nine constituent pictures I took for each. For the criminally insane, you could generate multiple profiles for each focal length at varying apertures, (chromatic aberration varies with aperture) but I would rather be taking pictures. Please yourself. I focused (!) on creating profiles at disparate focal lengths as it’s barrel distortion that is the most sensitive variable for my use and it varies significantly with focal length.

Once done you place the profiles in the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0 directory on your Mac where they will be available to all users of that Mac. (There are also instructions for those poor, unfortunate Windows users who place little value on their time and have yet to get a life). Finally, the Adobe application allows you to submit the profile to Adobe’s user forum though for some bizarre reason the submitted profiles are only currently available for download to Photoshop CS5 users, not Lightroom 3 users. Hey! Adobe! Can you say ‘Duh!’?.

Here’s how your Lightroom 3 options will look if you named your profiles correctly:

The drop down focal length selection panel in LR3.

And here’s a ‘before’ (no profile) and ‘after’ (9mm profile) comparison of a profile being applied:

Henry Moore’s bollard. Before and after with the 9mm profile.

Why four profiles? Because the degree of distortion and chromatic aberration differs at different focal lengths. Pixel peeping the above I can confirm that chromatic aberration is also accurately corrected. That’s a pretty nice bit of application programming at Adobe. In practice you note the nearest focal length used to take your photograph when in the Develop module of LR3 and click on the appropriate profile. You are done.

If you would like to download the profiles I created, for your own use, you can do so by clicking below. Feel free to share them with anyone. Unzip the downloaded file then place the four individual profile files (not the enclosing folder) in the directory referred to above. Next time you start LR3 they will be available. Please note that these are solely for the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens used on a Panasonic G-series digital body.

Click to download Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens profile
for the Panasonic G-series body.

So if you really must have automated corrections for that 65mm Super Angulon on your 1964 Linhof 4×5, Adobe Lens Profile Creator is the tool you need.

Indeed, I see no reason why this software tool should not be used to create profiles for your film and flat bed scanners – instead of photographing Adobe’s target, simply scan it and run the scans through the program, so now you can profile your scanner (or, heavens forbid, a darkroom enlarger) in much the same way you can profile your 21st century lens on the latest in digital bodies.

Alternative #1- DxO Optics Pro Elite:

DxO makes the fancifully named DxO Optics Pro Elite for correction of lens aberrations at the equally fancy price of $300. It’s bog slow even on my hyper-speed Mac, must be loaded separately from your regular processing application and at the price asked compares poorly with the free Adobe Lens Profile Creator. I reviewed it here. And there is no version for Snow Leopard. These people need a loud wake-up call.

Alternative #2 – PTLens:

I wrote in glowing terms of PTLens here. It’s a $15 app which can be used as either a stand-alone or as a PS or LR plugin, and has a large and constantly updated lens database. The latest version includes the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for both RAW and JPG on a Panny G body but I cannot recommend it. Simply stated, the RAW profile is awful, way overdoing the correction and turning barrel distortion into severe pincushion distortion instead. Further, as you have to round trip the file from LR that means that a TIFF file (lossless) is first generated, meaning that your 12mB RAW file will be 80gB by the time you save it back into LR. Not a big deal but with its current RAW profile I cannot recommend the product. My profiles, above, are way superior.

By way of illustration, here are the PTLens (left) and my custom profile (right) versions of an original which shows pronounced barrel distortion of the horizon. In the PTLens version a lot of the image is lost and the figure is way too elongated. If you could see the horizon which PTLens chops out you would see severe pincushion distortion, not to mention chopping out much of the ultra-wide effect you just paid good money for:

PTLens vs. my custom profile at 9mm

Here’s another example showing what a poor job PTLens does with this camera/lens combination – PTLens on the left cuts out lots of image information; my profile on the right does it correctly:

Moore’s bollard again – see above for the ‘as shot’ original. PTLens version on the left.

Alternative 3 – use LR3:

If you don’t mind having to manually correct distortions for every picture then manually adjusting for chromatic aberration, LR3’s controls are just fine when used with the Olympus 9-18mm. However, if your ultra-wide lens displays the ‘bow wave’ type of distortion where the barreling changes to pincushioning at different spots on the horizon then the built in LR3 control, which can correct plain spherical distortion only, is of no use and a tailored lens profile is the only option.

Conclusion:

“If you want a job done well, do it yourself” is one of the most asinine homespun philosophies in the Western world. If you want a job done well, delegate it to a professional and maximize your time value by applying your skill set to what you do best. This may just be an honorable exception to that dumb ‘rule’. If you want a good lens profile, do it yourself or if you use the Olympus 9-18 MFT on a G-body, use mine.

July 31, 2010

A great Lightroom 3 book

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Martin Evening scores again.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about Martin Evening’s outstanding Lightroom 2 reference book and the Lightroom 3 version is now available.

Best of all, you can get it in a Kindle eBook version which will play on up to five devices – I have mine on the iPad and on my desktop Mac.

What distinguishes Evening’s writing is not only clarity and practical experience, he is also a very good photographer. Too often these so called software experts turn out to be truly awful photographers which makes you wonder what you could possibly learn from them. It’s still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, last I checked. The beauty of an eBook is that you can look up the index then just touch the page to jump to it; it’s also weightless, not something that can be said of the 600 page paperback predecessor, which I refer to constantly. Further, you can bookmark as many locations as you like as well as change the font sizes to suit your eyesight. The Table of Contents is instantly available if you touch the bookmark logo at the base of the screen.

Bookmarking in the Kindle edition on the iPad.

Finally, the Kindle version meets with my goal of getting rid of every last physical book in my home, freeing the wall space covered with bookshelves for better use – like displaying photographs.

I use mine on the iPad where it works really well, as both my big Dell monitors are full when using Lightroom, making the desktop Mac unavailable unless I want to switch apps. You can also read the book on a Kindle but without color it’s not the same. It is very handy to peruse on the iPad in idle moments – rare is the occasion when I do not learn something new. And thanks to Kindle’s sync technology, the page you left at on the iPad will be the page the book opens at on the Mac, and so on.

There’s a good reason to buy the latest version – the new features of LR3 offer substantial processing enhancements and it really helps to have a working photographer show how to get the last ounce out of these.

I continue to learn daily about Lightroom – yesterday, for example, I did my first split toning effort. I never did understand what those sliders were for until I checked Martin Evening’s book.

Hut. Split toning – my first attempt! G1, 9-18mm Olympus @ 9mm, ISO 320

Update as of July 30, 2010: Amazon just released an updated version of the Kindle app which allows free text search! Want to look for ‘noise’? Just touch the magnifying glass, type the word and there you are. Wonderful!

Some of Evening’s insights are tremendous. Take this one on film of days past:

Any old timer worth his salt knows well that if you agitated your film less when it was in developer that you would increase sharpness, owing to the exact effect he describes. It was a pre-digital age ’sharpening’ process, albeit with near-zero control! The book is full of this sort of thing though rarely as quirky as this.

July 30, 2010

Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens – Part III

Filed under: G1/G2 — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Finally, some pictures.

In Part I, I looked at some of the design aspects of the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for the Panasonic G1 and in Part II set forth some thoughts on how it handles.

This article addresses results. How good is this lens in practice?

So what qualifies me to pontificate on wide lenses?

I have always been a ‘wide’ rather than a ‘telephoto’ guy, liking to get close to the action. That’s my street snapper thing. In that context the widest lens I have used, and still own, is the Canon full frame f/2.8 8 mm fisheye for my 5D which, with de-fishing software, yields an effective Full Frame Equivalent (FFE) of 12mm. That’s insanely wide. That Canon lens is no slouch but the micro contrast is simply not there in big prints and definition is not that great at the corners until you stop it down to f/8.

The next widest lens I have used is the very costly 14mm f/2.8 Canon L for the 5D, a loaner. At thrice the cost of the fisheye it underperforms in every way with heavy chromatic aberration at most apertures and poor edge detail. A real dog. Apparently improved in the Mk II version but at $2,100 you can forget it. And it’s an absolute monster in your bag or on your camera.

The next widest was a sweet and minuscule 20mm f/2.8 Takumar which I used for years on my Pentax ME Super 35mm film camera. Small, fast, no bulbous front element and sharp all over. Everything was right about this optic which explains why it is much sought after on the used market.

My worst experience with ultra-wides was with the Canon 20mm f/2.8. No fewer than two of these soiled the rug and I was glad to see the last of them. Poor corner definition at most apertures, horrible vignetting, there’s really little good to be said about this excuse passing for a lens. Canon should be ashamed.

Then came two really heavy hitters. The unsurpassed 21mm f/2.8 Leica Aspherical Elmarit for my Leica M bodies (really a bit too large to equate well with the compact Leica M’s ethos) and the huge 21mm f/4 Super Angulon for my Leicaflex SL (a nice pairing) and Leica R4 (which it overpowered from a balance perspective). The former cost me $1,000 lightly used, I sold it for $2,000 and it now costs $4,200. The latter, actually a Joseph Schneider design licensed to Leitz, moved on with my Leica SLR gear when digital came along. It was almost as good as the Aspherical but sported a huge front element and was immensely heavy. Over-engineered in the way only Leitz knew how back then.

In use:

To check things out I set out for Half Moon Bay, a rather down-at-heels coastal town a few miles south of San Francisco. That is a good feature. Have you ever taken a good snap in the pristine, manicured sterility of Beverly Hills?

Half Moon Bay has some funky beach streets and an interesting boat marina and commercial fishery on the wharf.

Using the lens, absent the reverse rotation of the zoom ring compared with the two Panny lenses in my G1 kit, is unexceptional. The size, once extended, is similar to that of the 14-45mm kit lens and operation is much the same except, of course, that the 9-18mm Olympus is really wide at 9mm.

Loading the pictures into Lightroom 3, three considerations arise:

1 – Orientation sensor: There is a bug in the Olympus lens firmware (or is it in the G1’s body firmware?) which prevents portrait orientation pictures from being automatically rotated upright in Lightroom 3. All pictures load in landscape orientation so it’s necessary to Command-click all the portrait images and turn them through a right angle using LR3’s controls. A minor irritant and one which will hopefully be corrected in a firmware update.

2 – Barrel distortion: Panny lenses on the G1 have in body distortion correction. Load the images into LR3 and distortions are notable for their absence. Because there is no in camera distortion correction with the Olympus lens on the G1, barrel distortion is noticeable – straight lines at the edges bow outwards in the center. This is easily fixed, where it matters, using the Lens Corrections->Manual->Transform->Distortion slider in the Develop module of LR3. (LR2 does not have this feature). This has to be done in the Manual section, as Automated (”Profile”) corrections in LR3 are currently limited to Canon, Nikon, Sigma, Sony and Tamron lenses. I do not know if Adobe will add Olympus lenses mounted on a Panasonic body. To get things dead straight, the slider has to be at +10 with the Olympus lens at 9mm and +3 at 18mm. The distortion is not severe and need only be corrected in architectural or landscape shots with prominent straight lines. You can also automate distortion correction by clicking here.

3 – Chromatic aberration (color fringing): As with barrel distortion, this has to be corrected manually. It’s mostly noticeable as a red fringe when pixel peeping at 9-10mm focal length and a setting of -15 to -20 on the Lens Corrections->Manual->Transform->Chromatic Aberration->Red/Cyan slider in LR3 does the trick.

It makes no sense to incorporate these settings into an import profile as that assumes that all pictures imported are taken on this lens at a specific, wide, focal length. Simply add the settings on the ‘keepers’ – it takes seconds to do.

None of these are disabling issues as the pictures from the lens are in every way as detailed and sharp as from its Panny stablemates, which means superb. There is a total absence of vignetting at any focal length or aperture and if you see any in the pictures here it’s because I added it in LR3 to heighten the impact of an image. Rather funny that designers go to all that effort to eradicate vignetting and photographers then proceed to add it when processing their pictures.

Examples:

Barrel distortion:

Barrel distortion at 9mm – look at the horizon.

Barrel distortion at 18mm – less pronounced, but still there.

Chromatic aberration:

Not illustrated as it’s only visible to pixel peepers.

How wide is 9mm (=18mm FFE)?

18mm FFE is incredibly wide and if you are new to something this wide be prepared for disappointment with your first few snaps. Take a look at the two pairs of pictures above – one is at 18mm FFE, the other at 36mm. The increased amount of foreground is immense – I have kept the horizon at the top of the frame for comparison purposes. If you think you need this lens to ‘get more in’ forget it. Unless your back is against a wall or unless you have strong foreground interest, your pictures will be awful, your subject a tiny blob in the distance. And if you are afraid of getting in close, stick with your longer lenses and save your money; an ultra-wide is not for you.

Here’s another case in point – I was but a couple of steps away from this surfer dude throwing the ball to his retriever:

At 9mm, f/4.5 – the chocolate lab gets ready to retrieve.

An 18mm FFE lens is a surrealist’s delight. Sure you can take the proverbial interiors of cathedrals with it, and that’s fine, but I prefer to buy picture postcards of those as they are far better done than anything I want to spend time on.

At 9mm. Portholes and gull. Lovely architecture for a building in a fishing village.

How about flare?

The wider a lens gets the higher the likelihood that strong light sources will be in the frame. This is an extreme example – the dynamic range between the interior of the bar and the strong sun outside is some 10 stops.

At 9mm, f/4.6. Lower picture shows the effect of using the Fill Light slider in LR3.

Flare is very well controlled, even in this extreme case. There are only minimal light source haloes to be seen in either interior or exterior pictures at 9mm. I do not, and will not, use a lens hood. Here’s a larger image:

At 9mm, f/4.6. Flare is well controlled.

What’s the depth of field like?

It’s extreme at 9mm no matter what aperture you use. 9mm is 9mm. No matter whether it’s on an MFT body or something larger – depth of field is a function solely of focal length and has nothing to do with the size of the film or sensor used. While in the picture below I stopped down to f/22 to be safe (the rusted beams were inches from the lens) this also shows that, DP Review’s charts notwithstanding, where they show definition falling as the lens is stopped down, f/22 is as sharp in practice as is f/4.

At 9mm, f/22. A few inches to infinity ….

Finally, when your back really is against the wall, this sort of thing becomes easy:

At 10mm, f/9. Colors on a wall. Taken in a narrow alleyway.

For more snaps over the next few days check my photoblog, Snap! While I have emphasized pictures taken at the wide end of the lens (a primary reason to buy it) performance at longer focal lengths is every bit as good.

Be honest – Micro Four-Thirds is lousy for big prints!

OK – here’s a full frame image:

At 18mm, f/8. Sunflowers.

Now here’s a magnified section which, if the whole thing was printed, would make a 30″ x 45″ print:

Magnified section of above – screenshot.

And your point is?

Conclusion: Despite a few quirks – a contra-rotating zoom ring, a faulty image orientation sensor on import to LR3 and the need to manually correct chromatic aberration and barrel distortion if needed when used on a Panasonic rather than an Olympus body, the performance of the Olympus 9-18mm MFT ultra-wide zoom is as good as anything I have used at this focal length range. Color rendition is identical to that of the 14-45mm and 45-200mm Panasonic MFT lenses for the G1 camera range. At $600 it is an outstanding bargain.

42 lbs. The fish and the amount of fat this fisherman needs to lose. At 9mm, f/4.5

As the above shows, one huge advantage of an ultra-wide is that your subjects have no reason to believe they are in the frame!

July 29, 2010

Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens – Part II

Filed under: G1/G2 — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Some thoughts on ergonomics.

In Part I I looked at some of the design aspects of the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for the Panasonic G1. My Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens duly arrived on schedule, Bert the Border Terrier viciously attacked the UPS person (always a fun time) – and I have had a chance to try it on the G1. My first impressions relating to fit, finish and ergonomics follow.

Size and weight:

Collapsed the lens is smaller and lighter than the excellent 14-45mm kit lens. (Note: For Full Frame Equivalent focal lengths simply double what you see here, making the kit lens 28-90mm, etc.) The first thing I did was to attach a good quality B+W F-Pro UV-Haze filter for protection, identical to the one used on my 14-45 and 45-200 Panny lenses. I can confirm that there is no trace of corner vignetting even with the 9-18mm at its widest setting of 9mm.

Shutter interlock:

I rambled on about collapsible lenses in Part I and the bottom line is I do not like them. The Olympus is a collapsible lens. However, the maker has done a fine job of designing the collapsing feature. Attach the collapsed 9-18mm to a switched on G1 (no need to turn it off) and you get the “Please check that the lens is attached correctly” message. Press the shutter release and nothing happens. Now turn the zoom ring, which is very smooth (unlike the stinker on the 14-45mm) counterclockwise (anti-clockwise to our former oppressors in the UK) and you will feel a gentle click and the viewfinder of the G1 comes to life. There’s no need to depress the release catch on the barrel – just turn the zoom ring. For that matter, when extending the barrel you can simply pull it out by hand and give the zoom ring a slight tweak to lock it. The only time you do have to slide the release button forward is when you wish to collapse the lens for storage, which requires that you turn the zoom ring clockwise all the way – clockwise as viewed from the rear of the camera or by simply pushing the barrel in with the catch depressed.

Zooming:

Zooming is the opposite to that adopted by my two other Panny lenses (14-45mm and 45-200mm), meaning wide is clockwise and telephoto is counterclockwise. That will take some getting used to! Of the three lenses, the Olympus has the smoothest zoom action – you can operate the zoom ring easily with one finger, useful for street snapping. No way you do this with the gritty zoom ring of the 14-45mm and the 45-200mm is best held from below when zooming. The latter’s zoom ring is very smooth though it tightens up noticeably at 160-200mm. The Olympus is longest at 9mm and shortest around 15mm, extending a little from 15-18mm. The wonders of modern optics seem to have turned everything on its head.

Lens caps:

I hate lens caps and never use front ones, replacing them with a UV filter for protection. The rear is a matter of lens design. The 45-200mm needs no rear cap as the glass is always well recessed at any focal length. The 14-45mm does need a rear cap for while the glass is well recessed at 45mm you will likely put it away at 14mm and the rear elements are very exposed. The 9-18mm is a mixed bag. If you are prepared to store it extended the rear element is most exposed at 9mm but not especially so. At 18mm it is well recessed. No rear cap needed. However, once collapsed the rear element is every bit as exposed as that of the 14-45mm at 14mm and a rear cap makes sense. My inclination is to carry the 9-18mm non-collapsed for that reason and for the reason that all that collapsing and extending just results in wear. In that configuration a three lens outfit needs just one rear lens cap – for the 14-45mm. when it’s not on the camera. I like that. In no case does any of the three have a rear element which protrudes beyond the lens flange, so standing any of these lenses on a flat surface will not damage the rear glass.

Size in practice:

Why would you keep the 9-18mm extended at all times? Take a look – there’s little difference in size when it’s at 18mm from the 14-45mm and a little more at 9mm.

The Olympus lens at 18mm.

The Olympus lens at 9mm – its largest physical size.

Clearly it’s a practical answer to simply keep the Olympus in your bag set to 18mm and forget all the collapsing/extending nonsense.

Auto focusing:

Like the other two, the lens is near dead silent when autofocusing. Rather oddly it seems to ‘bounce’ beyond the focus point then comes back a bit and while that’s unnerving at first it’s also very fast and after a few frames you forget about it. Subjectively it’s marginally slower to lock on than the 14-45mm but the difference is minimal in practice. The 45-200mm is slower than both and has that disconcerting habit (which it shares with the Canon 100mm EF Macro at close focus distances) of going the wrong way through the focus range now and then before locking on. But I’m prepared to forgive that wonder lens this occasional quirk in exchange for a pocketable 400mm FFE optic. Thanks to the magic of the EVF it doesn’t matter what the lens aperture is or how poorly lit the subject. The EVF will make the subject equally bright under all conditions, even with the lens stopped down to check depth of field. Magic. So the modest f/4-f/5.6 (at the long end) aperture of the Olympus lens is simply not an issue. Sure, there’s no anti-shake technology unlike on the two Panny lenses, but this is a really wide lens – it’s hard to get camera blur at these wide angles. Use this lens on an Olympus MFT body and you benefit from the in-body anti-shake technology, if that’s important to you.

Indexing:

Only two manufacturers have ever got indexing of lenses right, in my opinion. Leica and Pentax. Both adopted a really large hemisphere of plastic (red on Leica lenses, white on Pentax’s) which you could feel even with gloved hands. Knowing from memory where the related dot was on the bayonet flange on the body of the camera, changing lenses by feel was a dream. You did not have to look. No way you are going to do this with the G1. Sure Panny thoughtfully provided indexing plastic blobs on its lenses but they are so small and hidden behind a flange on the rear of the lens as to be useless. Olympus’s approach is even worse and consistent with their earlier designs. They use a recessed red paint-filled index marker and the only way you are going to use that is by looking hard for it when mounting the lens on the body. Shame. A one cent piece of glued-on plastic could fix this so easily. It’s just lousy design thinking. You can clearly see the issue in the above pictures.

Fit and finish:

(i) Focus ring: The only time you need touch the focus ring is when focusing manually. Like with the two Pannys, the focus ring has no stops and is dead smooth. Set the G1 up right and apply a first pressure to the shutter release and you have what is easily the best high precision manual focusing system on the planet. Even with the camera on autofocus, as soon as the focus ring is turned the image in the EVF is greatly magnified and the lens switches to manual focus. And it’s really, really critical manual focus, owing to the magnification. Let go of the shutter release and the picture returns to normal size.

Now you really do not need this with a lens as wide as the 9-18mm which is very tolerant of focusing errors, but with, say, a macro, it’s a killer feature.

The Olympus uses a scalloped alloy zoom ring whereas the Panasonic lenses use rubberized grips. There’s no difference in practice but 35 years with Leicas make me a huge fan of the elegant scalloped design compared to the utilitarian rubber version. Sadly, Leica dropped that design when the accountants took over but Oly is sticking with it. Nice.

(ii) Feel: The lens is exceptionally light but nothing about it feels cheap.Some have accused it of feeling ‘plasticky’ which is meaningless to me. It feels fine. What did you expect? Stainless steel and brass in a 5.5 ounce ultra-compact optic? These people probably expect a Porsche 911 Turbo to deliver 100mpg too.

(iii) Wobble: All lenses with extensible mounts, be they zoom or collapsible, exhibit wobble. Grasp the front of the lens and you can feel it move from side to side as you work it. That was true of my Leica collapsible lenses, is true of the 24-105mm L zoom for the Canon 5D and is true of all three lenses for my G1. So here are my subjective ‘wobble’ evaluations, with each lens set to its longest dimensions:

  • 45-200: – very, very slight. No impact on definition.
  • 14-45: – very slight. No impact on definition.
  • 9-18: – same as for the 14-45. Haven’t tested it in the field yet as regards definition.

(iv) Does the Olympus lens coexist with a Panasonic body?

I have encountered no issues with the use of the Olympus lens on my Panasonic G1 body. Except for the zoom ring turning the other way all camera functions are unchanged. Actually, I did have rather a funny thing happen when first looking through the EVF (I never use the LCD screen, considering it one of man’s worst inventions). Every time I focused by taking a first pressure on the shutter release the image would continue to wobble. Wait a minute, I said to the resident Border Terrier. What gives? I haven’t been close to the hard stuff in weeks and it’s only early afternoon. Even at my age I don’t wobble that early in the day. So I tried the two Panny lenses and there it was again. Everything wobbled after focus was achieved. Well, a quick check disclosed that I had accidentally moved the top left dial on the G1 from AFS (single point focus) to AFC (continuous focus) and what I was seeing was the lens hunting in modest internal light as it oscillated about the optimal focus point. Phew! Switching the dial back to AFS (Panny really needs to make the clicks stronger) all was well again.

None of the lenses discloses any discernible fit issues at the lens flange end.

Firmware:

My G1 is on firmware v1.5 (current version) and the Olympus is 1.0. At this time there are no firmware updates for the Olympus lens – the one out there is for the non-MFT similar spec lens.

So that’s about it for the ergonomics.

In Part III I show some pictures taken with the Olympus lens and comment on the optical performance in real life. If you want test charts, go elsewhere. I use my camera to take pictures, not test charts.

One final thought. Here’s my global travel outfit – total weight 4 lbs. Isn’t technology wonderful?

G1 kit and friend.

The current range of Micro Four-Thirds lenses appears below, with the ones I own circled in red. Using regular Four Thirds or even larger APS-C or full frame DSLR lenses denies the concept of the MFT system and makes no sense to me, generally sacrificing automation and adding bulk. If you need them, use them on the bodies they were designed for.

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