Yearly Archives: 2007

Formula One – Bravo Honda!

Photography

Can you think of a better use for photography?

Now it’s no great secret that I graduated from the same college as Colin Chapman of Lotus Cars fame – University College, London. Indeed, while I shared the education of Mechanical Engineering with that inspired genius, I never practised as an engineer. Not only was I far from Chapman’s class, it was just too hard a way of making a living, and too fraught with risk. In my case, I suspect, that risk would have gestated in the guise of serious injury to users of my designs. No, the engineering world became a safer place for my absence from it.

However, none of this in any way dilutes my interest in one of the only two sports I care about (the other is cricket), which is Formula One auto racing. The near senseless pursuit at vast expense of solutions to problems no one ever imagined has a certain perverse appeal, I must admit. Sort of like an expensive woman. You know you should know better. But you get involved anyway. When it comes to photography and Formula One racing, it has largely been a desert strewn with forgettable detritus. How many snaps of cars at speed and babes in tight tops do you really want? OK, I can do with fewer of the ones of cars at speed.

With the honorable exception of photographers like Jesse Alexander, little great photographic work has been done in this sport, despite the fortunes expended on motor drives and extreme telephotos. However, watching the 2007 season opener in Melbourne, in the fair land known as Australia, I was captivated by the new Honda car, which is devoid of stickers and sports a magnificently applied picture of the earth. The picture is from Honda’s web site, God bless them.

It gets better. Honda has offered to pixelate the names of the first two million donors on the car, so that you can honestly say you support the racing effort. And the money goes to saving the world. That’s a twofer. Rest easy, the boob who was one heartbeat away from the presidency a while back isn’t going to be stealing it, as he is not involved. Anyway, he’s too busy with cinema ticket sales.

I have always greatly enjoyed the huge pictures of produce on those delivery trucks and now Honda has gone one better.

250 ASA

Photography

Huh?

Who remembers Kodak Super XX film?

I loved it as a kid – it was the predecessor to TriX, though I used it long after it was discontinued. That would be in the 1970s. The main reason I used it was that Kodak still made it in bulk 35mm rolls for cinema use, so you could pick up fifty or a hundred feet (the latter good for over 700 snaps) for a song. It’s speed was 250 ASA, the grain sharp and tight, like TriX and the speed could be easily pushed to 500 ASA with a bit of extra time in the developer.

And 250 ASA (or 25 DIN to the Europeans amongst us, the Britain of my youth, of course, not being a part of Europe any more than it is now) was a speed that was just right. Not so fast that you had to stop down excessively, but fast enought to permit short, blur free shutter speeds. Your lens, as often as not, was set at f/4 or f/5.6 where pretty much every lens is at its best, and affords just the right degree of background blur to liven things up a bit.

DIN? Deutsche Industrie Normen or something. Only the Germans could concoct a system so perfectly ridiculous that you had to be a Doctor or Professor (which every German is, of course) to understand it. You see, it was a logarithmic system such that an increase of 3 represented a doubling in speed. So 24 was twice as fast as 21, which happened to be 100 ASA. As for 25 DIN being 250 ASA, well, let me tell you that much time with a scientific calculator was needed to figure that one out, my memory of logarithms not being what it once was. Go figure. Still, it kept enough consumers confused for long enough that camera stores (remember those?) thrived. A confused consumer is a repeat customer, often as not.

So, in a strange flashback to days of yore, I find myself setting the ISO (what?) on my Canon 5D to 250, often as not. Right there between Regular (100) and Fast (400). Then of course there is Very Fast (800), Super Fast (1600) and Bloody Fast (3200). Come to think of it, why don’t manufacturers simply mark the speed dials S, R, XX, F, VF, SF and BF? Now those I can understand.

Why Lightroom is a good thing

Lightroom

Competition Apple’s Aperture sorely needs

Imagine if taxpayers got to choose the lowest cost provider for things like the judiciary, law enforcement, taxation, national defense, freeway repair, and on and on. There’s no earthly reason why all these aspects of running a nation could not be privatized. Remember those Cajuns who gave George III’s mighty army of redcoats such a whipping at the Battle of New Orleans. Yes, a private, for profit army, which took on and defeated the most powerful country on earth. Presumably GW chose them not for their political correctness or sensitivity to other cultures, but because they could place a musket bullet square between the eyes of a Briish soldier at 200 yards. But as you drive to work on potholed roads, avoiding tax collectors masquerading as Highway Patrol cops (here in California their cars are emblazoned with inanities like “To Protect and to Serve”), wondering what war we will lose next, and troubled by the insane cost to you of all those inept government lawyers on your payroll, it begins to dawn that competition is a good thing. Always. It’s one of the immutable laws of a profession with few right answers – economics.

So it’s good to have a strong competitor for Apple’s Aperture. That supports another law of economics. All competition drives down price. Case in point – Apple cut Aperture’s price by $200 when Lightroom started to look like a serious threat. Apple’s growing arrogance and prigishness is naturally controlled by the spectre of an alternative. Great!

While I make no secret of my dislike for Adobe Corporation (or Macromedia or whatever it’s called today) and its products, I very much like that they have taken Aperture on, head-to-head.

Why do I dislike Adobe? Load a piece of Adobe software on your computer and you end up feeling treated like a common thief after jumping through all the security and authorization loopholes. The other day I tried loading my copy (‘my’ as in I paid for the wretched thing) of Photoshop CS2 on my iBook and what do I get? Some lawyer schmuck at Adobe telling me that I have exceeded the maximum number of installations permitted for my software. Never mind that one of these had to be erased as it failed to work, thus making me a thief of my own property ….

Further, the world’s worst user interface is to be found in Photoshop, so it’s little wonder I switched to Apple’s Aperture once it came out.

So when Adobe rushed out Lightroom in Beta form a while back, I took a quick look to see if there was any great value added compared to Aperture, and found none. It was amusing, however, to see that the brilliant, original thinkers at Adobe felt duty bound to try to emulate the look and feel of Aperure. Good artists copy, great ones steal.

Since my first look at Lightroom the application has had many enhancements and now seems a credible competitor to Aperture based solely on what I have read. Take that with a pinch of salt as I have not used the final version. Indeed, I will not be trying it as life is simply too short for so complex a change not one year after moving everything to Aperture. I do recall that (a less than fully featured) Lightroom was much faster on my iMac G5 than Aperture. Add the fact that there are still some glaring issues with Aperture that need fixing, and it’s good to have a robust, well funded competitor from Adobe that will run on Apple computers.

Aperture remains very slow to add RAW support for a broader range of cameras (though the just announced OS X 10.4.9 had added the Leaf Aptus backs for porfessional users) and, most critically, is just too slow for a high volume snapper working in RAW on anything but the very best Macs – meaning big dollars. So while I recognize that Apple’s goal is to sell hardware, and one insiduous way of doing this is by making software that runs too slowly on anything but the costliest machines, it’s great to see Adobe putting Apple’s feet to the fire. Let’s hope the next version of Aperture does not need a $7,000 computer to run properly. Ever tried exporting a jpg file from a RAW original in Aperture? How about a 60 second wait per picture?

Come on Apple – wake up or lose the fight. Make Aperture faster. Forget eveything else until you have done this. Not a little bit faster. An order of magnitude faster. Never mind more plug-ins, user controls, this or that doo-dad. The application needs speed. Everything else is secondary. I am more likely to upgrade to a better Mac because I like the user experience with my iMac than because I am frustrated with the slowness of your product.

Another unnecessary solution

Photography

A fool and his money are easily parted

No sooner do I go on about Solutions looking for Problems than along comes this dusie (that’s short for Duesenberg, if you really care) from Logitech, a company which actually makes some fairly decent peripherals for iPods and the like:

Yes, it’s none other than the Logitech Aperture Keyboard, which gets my first annual SLOP (Solution Looking for a Problem) award. As you will see, the pristine clarity of Apple’s keyboard has been obliterated with what can only be droppings from a passing bird, purportedly in the interest of helping you remember which key does what in Aperture.

Now, given that the hot keys I use for Aperture are limited to a handful – Z for Zoom, H for HUD, ~ for the Loupe being the dominant ones – you expect me to buy this excresence because I struggle remembering three keys? Probably ideal for all those US public school graduates who never got to the Reading part of the syllabus (you know them – they are the ones with risk free government jobs and inflation-weighted pensions which we all pay for), preferring instead to listen to their iPods.

Let’s see, what could you do with $99? How about driving 1,000 miles in search of that great picture instead? Put it towards a proper tripod so that you can finally see what your lens can do? Make a few big prints for friends?

Nah. Get that keyboard instead. Guaranteed to make you a better photographer.