Yearly Archives: 2006

QTVR on the big screen

QTVR

100″ of forest glory!

I wrote the other day about displaying QTVR pictures on the TV screen.

Today, using the same connecting cables with my iBook I plugged the computer into the ‘Video 1’ input on the AV unit in our home theater and what do you think I got?

Surround sound quality from the MP3 soundtrack – which you can listen to here – was excellent, even if only in two channel stereo. Visual quality was marginal, probably accounted for by the fact that I used a fairly modest quality setting on the Canon 5D when snapping the images. Further, I constrained the quality of the Quicktime movie to keep file size small for speedy loading from my web site. On the other hand, we are talking a 100″ diagonal screen here – now that’s an enlargement!

The screen is 16:9 format (1.78:1) which suits most movies. The QTVR is 2.55:1 which is standard widescreen, and the difference in aspect ratios accounts for the black bars at the top and base of the screen area. I could save the QTVR image in CubicConverter to match this format if desired, thus filling the screen.

For my upcoming one man show at a local winery in April 2007, I hope to get in a couple of big screen TVs as an advertising promotion with a local TV vendor and will thus have QTVRs running throughout the show in addition to the display of framed, static photographs.

Costly excess

Photography

Canon introduces the 50mm f/1.2 L.

A while back Canon used to sell a 50mm f/1.0 L lens for its DSLRs, quietly discontinuing it rather than face the barrage of derision it generated. Seems that the bottom of an old Coke bottle had superior resolving power and you could buy half of Atlanta’s annual production for less.

Now, just in time for Photokina, Canon announces the slightly slower 50mm f/1.2 L variant.

I confess that it has always left me wondering why anyone makes an f/1.2 standard lens. The quality has historically been poorer than the f/1.4 across the board, the weight and bulk double and the cost far greater. All of this for half a stop in speed?

Step back a moment and think about this. In its DSLR range Canon has the best sensors on the market. Sony may be catching up (they make the sensors for the Nikon DSLRs) but try your full frame Canon DSLR at 1600 ISO and you will know what I am talking about. Now given that you can make more than acceptable originals for 10x enlargements at 1600 ISO, how on earth can half a stop be justified? Shoot in RAW and you can pick up another stop or two at the processing stage with very little quality loss.

So unless you really need to have bragging rights, keep your money and buy a couple of f/1.4 variants. The f/1.2 will retail at $1,600 (!), whereas the f/1.4, a lens with a great reputation, sells for $315. You can drop one of the f/1.4s on the concrete sidewalk and still walk away unhurt…. Now I know that $1,600 is chump change by Leica’s standards whose superb 50mm f/1.0 Noctilux sells for no less than $3,900, but then only collectors and tort lawyers (prrobably the same thing) buy those anyway.

I would far prefer to see Canon adding internal IS to their top of the line bodies (like Sony/Minolta) or at least incorporate IS in the 400mm f/5.6 L lens, which sorely needs it.

A Blast from the Past

Photographers

Extraordinary recreations by a Russian photographer.

Run, don’t walk, to see the work of Dmitry Popov, a Russian photographer who has meticulously recreated scenes from the first 60 years of the American Century for a car magazine. Each features period automobiles together with actors in period clothing recreating the time and feel of a place (mostly) in America, none better than this one at the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The man reading the San Francsco Examiner, leaning on his magnificent Buick, is doing so on September 3, 1939 – the war that America won for an ungrateful Europe would not start here until some 27 month later, when Japanese tourists visited Hawaii.

Popov writes:

“Every photo shoot is preceded by thorough research of the era. When and under what conditions a particular vehicle model was produced sets the theme. The majority of my photographs are the result of a classically arranged photo shoot. The actors, costumes, hair, makeup, setting, and props are all fashioned to the standards of the era. Although each of the photographic series on each site is presented only partially, the collection taken in its entirety tells a story. The term “Photo-Clipping” would best describe my collection. The series of pictures tells a “moving” story using still images. Most of photographs on this site were taken between 2002 and 2004 for a Russian automotive magazine Autopilot produced by the Kommersant Publishing and Golf Style Next magazine, Moscow, Russia.”

This is story telling in the classsic mould of Life or Picture Post magazines of the era, when photojournalism was king and television in every home was still a distant idea in RCA’s corporate brain.

You don’t have to like cars to enjoy Popov’s fabulous work, though it doesn’t hurt if you do.

Highly recommended.

QTVR on the TV screen

QTVR

A couple of cables, a smart friend and the iBook do the trick.

My eventual goal for the QTVRs + sound that I am making is to show them on the big screen, meaning the 100″ screen in the home theater on which I project movies.

Well, my iBook, a nice portable source for all of this, is a rather dated G4 model so the first port of call was my trusty nerdy friend, a man of great erudition and wisdom when it comes to things computer. As usual, he did not disappoint.

As advised, I bought an adapter from Apple for some $25 for the video signal – its output end looks like this:

Apple calls it the ‘iBook Video Adapter’ and it connects to the mini-VGA socket on the side of the keyboard. If you want to do this make sure you get the right adapter for your iBook – they vary from model to model.

Those outputs are, respectively, S video and Composite video. As I have a few composite video cables lying around terminated with standard RCA phono plugs, I connected the adapter to the iBook and thence to one of the yellow video inputs on the front of my TV and, hey presto!, the image appeared on the screen, easily controllable with the track pad on the iBook.

For sound, my nerdy friend advised that the only way to do things with this older iBook (meaning it’s completely obsolete, being 3 years old….) was to rout a stereo minijack cable from the low level headphone output using an RCA phono plug-terminated cable to attach the sound feed to the ‘Tape’ input on my receiver. The latter is an ancient Onkyo bought used for very little and produces great sound. Sure enough, the oracle did not let me down, as sounds of birds twittering proceeded to emanate from the speakers. Once inserted the poor quality internal speakers in the iBook were silenced.

It may not look pretty but it works:

I also tried connecting the red and white phono plugs from the iBook to the sound terminals on the TV and there was more than enough signal to drive the TV’s speakers at adequate volume, even if the fidelity was lower than through the speakers attached to the stereo system.

The next step, then, is to try this same setup with the home theater system. This panorama used HDR photography to prevent the bright outdoors from burning out.

A predictable disappointment

Cameras

The Panasonic Lumix L1 is a catastrophe

Much as I predicted a couple of months back the Panasonic Lumix L1 which has just hit the market is nothing short of a catastrophe as photographic tools go. This is Panasonic’s first attempt at a DSLR with removable lenses so you would think it should be good. For $2,000 you get what sounds like a nice Leica lens and decent manual controls. You also get about the worst viewfinder possible and no image buffer, meaning that shooting in RAW demands a five second pause between pictures while the camera saves the image direct to the card.

A remarkably objective review by Michael Reichmann – remarkable as he admits the camera was a loaner so you would think he would make nice – confirms my earlier conjecture that the use of the lousy viewfinder from the Olympus Evolt E-330 would make the L1 a lousy camera, and adds the killer point about the absence of the RAW buffer. Thank you for your candor, Mr. Reichmann.

Sure, Panasonic seems to have cured the worst of its noise problems in the images, but that’s hardly much use when you can barely see what the devil you are photographing in the first place.

I have not used the L1 and am not about to. Suffice it to say that he compares the viewfinder unfavorably to the one in the Canon Rebel 350. That I have used and must say the viewfinder in the Rebel is underwhelming to the point of mediocrity, as the image is so small. At least it’s bright. The 5D is fine, just like a regular SLR if not Leica bright, so you can see where I am coming from. Then again, at $3,000 the 5D had better be good.

Leave this camera to the Leica fetishists who will buy it because it looks like a Leica M rangefinder which, I suppose, is about as bad a reason to buy a camera as I can think of.

Update as of November 11, 2006: I retract what I wrote about Reichmann’s apparent objectivity, above. Please read the following journal entry.