Monthly Archives: December 2008

Speed

Photography

We all need it.

Faster lenses. Faster films. Faster sensors. Faster CPUs. Faster prints. Faster publishing. Faster access. Faster retrieval.

In all areas of human effort, speed is seen as a good thing. Time is money. The exception, of course, is government which is not playing with its own money. But we are talking of good things here, so let’s move on.

In most areas of my life I very consciously focus on doing mundane tasks – those which confer no great added value to my world but must be done – as speedily as possible.

In the world of photography that means using digital, not film (plus the results are far superior in any case). Delegating printing of all but the largest photographs to professional labs that do this sort of thing all day. And using snappy processing and data management software like Lightroom to keep all those pictures in easily accessible form. For the most part I see little purpose in spending time at a screen processing images and aim for the best in-camera original to keep back-end efforts at a minimum. Anyone can process and print. These are purely mechanical tasks, despite what those, seeking to protect what little knowledge they have, would tell you. Face it. The ‘great printers’ were, as often as not, lousy photographers. Can you say Ansel Adams?

One of the nicest things about modern computers is that most come with built-in webcams allowing you to make video calls to like-equipped colleagues anywhere in the world. I suppose I should make that “…. Mac-equipped colleagues….” because, for the life of me, I have never succeeded in getting a webcam to work reliably with Windows for any sustainable period and do not know anyone who has. Mine, in various Macs, has yet to fail in four years of solid use. What else is new?

The other day, enjoying one of these calls, I began to grow increasingly irate at the latency and image smearing I was getting on the video side of the call. Now it’s no great secret that America has some of the world’s worst broadband capabilities and, yes, you can blame a government which would rather regulate than free technology. As a result our internet connections are generally 10-25% the speed of those enjoyed by Europeans and Asians. Criminal. This from a country which claims a lead in all things technological.

Living in a rural area – to put this in perspective, most of my neighbors use dial-up – I didn’t hold out much hope of significantly increasing my internet connection speed but decided to call the cable company on a whim and learned that I could double my speed by simply upgrading to a newer modem (which they supplied at no up front cost) and paying an additional $10 monthly. So two hours later I had the new modem on line and could measure the difference. The standard for this is Speedtest.net and here are my before and after readings:


Before


After

Exactly in line with the cable provider’s sales pitch. Amazing. Best money I have spent this year.

Now before you start thinking that 8 mbps/1 mbps download/upload is fast, take a look at the statistics available at Speedtest.net. These are averages for the cities concerned:

Tokyo: 25/15
Sydney: 30/20
London: 35/30
Paris: 21/13

In other words, the best I can get here is still far slower than the worst in these great cities. And these places are run by foreigners, for goodness’ sake!

Nonetheless, the next time I go to upload snaps to any one of my web sites, I am at least consoled that the time wasted will be half of what it was yesterday.

You think it was easy getting broadband here in the boonies? How about a 405 foot ditch and like amounts of broadband coaxial cable and PVC piping? We did this 5 years ago when buying the place and, despite many teething troubles, the whole thing is now very reliable. And newly fast!


Getting broadband in the boonies is no simple thing

Have you checked your connection speed? Do so. My carrier makes contractual promises about speeds and I hold their feet to the fire on those. Too bad no such speed guarantee is offered by the ISPs I use, whose service and speed vary from poor to execrable.

For the record, this site is hosted at BlueHost.com, whose owner is forever blogging on how great his crappy service is. My photo web site (click on the right) is at Readyhosting.com (I like to spread the pain) and all you need know is that they use Windows server technology. The less said the better.

Too bad it’s so difficult to change ISPs. If you are looking for an ISP, avoid these two stinkers who have the bedside manner of the IRS and the efficiency of General Motors. Remember that 99% up time means an ISP is down over 3 days a year. Just say no to such poor statistics and keep shopping until you find 99.999%.

Eric Lafforgue

Photographers

Exceptional photography, exceptionally presented.


Click the picture to enter Eric Lafforgue’s site

There is a remarkable paucity of iPhone applications which focus on content rather than technique. One standout which I have had on my iPhone for a month now, is Eric Lafforgue’s superb application which does one thing only. It showcases his exceptional travel photography. Further, the implementation is so drop dead gorgeous that it’s a wonder to me that more photographers have not released something similar. Go to Lafforgue’s web site and you see the same elegant presentation with near-total focus on content – something many photographers with insanely irritating Flash websites would do well to learn from. Lafforgue uses Flash sparingly and to great aesthetic effect on his web site. The iPhone variant is as simple as can be – pictures are simply flicked with a finger to turn the ‘pages’.


On the iPhone

I find myself firing up Lafforgue’s application at odd times just to enjoy his work. During the one month it has been on my iPhone it has been updated several times for newer content. Highly recommended on the desktop or on your phone.

Lens of the Year

Lenses

No contest.

It’s not so much ‘Lens of the Year’ as it is ‘Outfit of the Year’ and the choice will surprise none who have been visiting here recently.


Canon 5D, Canon 100mm EF Macro and Bower ring flash

While none of this gear is ‘new’ – the 100mm macro has been around for ages, the 5D is no spring chicken and ring flashes are as old as politicians’ lies – what is so very special about this outfit is how simple the technical side becomes. Back when, in the bad old film days, you used a lens head on a bellows, constantly messed with focus and depth of field, tried to remember the right exposure compensation when the bellows were racked out and then suffered agonies trying to light your subject. Then, when you snapped the picture, you realized that you had forgotten to stop the lens down and were five stops over-exposed.

But Canon obsoleted all of that with a few strokes of genius, doubtless available from other makers also. First, they made the lens fixed length. It does not change in size as you focus. Second, the focus range is continuous from infinity to life size on a full frame sensor body. Third, focus is automatic and blisteringly fast. And, finally, E-TTL makes sure that all those arcane calculations are a thing of the past, computing the optimal blend of natural and flash light on the fly. A nice 100mm length also allows the photographer to step back from the subject, leaving more working room, and throw in the Software of the Year and you have the most perfect macro kit yet.

Thanks to all this magic 100% of your attention can be devoted to the subject and the technology takes care of the back end. This compares well with the automatic gearbox in cars which leaves more brain cycles available for the job of driving rather than shifting gears. Sure, there are people who like to use a clutch. (None of them drive in Formula One, by the way). There are also people who will tell you that film beats digital and good sound ended with the LP era. Have pity on them, while they do their calculations and make incantations to the analog gods of yore. The world will always have its technophobes, most so over-invested in yesterday that they have to defend antiquity.

And it’s not like this wonder lens is wildly expensive, compared to the mess of adapters, bellows, racks etc. in olden days. The lens retails for under $500 and works every bit as well on Canon’s cropped sensor bodies as it does on full frame. The optical and mechanical quality is right up there with Canon’s exalted ‘L’ offerings – I know as I own some. In fact, there’s not a sharper lens in my kit. So add an inexpensive digital Rebel body, splash out another $150 on the ring flash (no need to get Canon’s costly version), and you have the best macro kit out there for under $1,000. What’s that, you say? You want the ability to switch off one side of the ring flash tube for better modeling effects like the Canon one does? Well, dear reader, I have two words for you. Black tape. You stick it over one half of the flash tube in the same way you stick it on your camera to obliterate all those gauche manufacturer’s markings. Now that’s what I call a bargain.


The good old days were …. really bad.

The Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro autofocus lens is the Lens of the Year.

Software of the Year

Software

A run away winner.

Until a fellow photographer pointed me to the inspired application known as Helicon Focus this award would easily have gone to Adobe’s Lightroom. Having switched from the slowness and bugginess of Aperture to the logical, modal work flow of Lightroom, I remain delighted with that application’s great user interface and with the fact that one application provides processing, digital file management, printing, web and book output, and it gets better with each new release. Best of all, except for some sluggishness in the adjustment brush in LR 2, which Adobe is working on, the application flies on just about any computer made in the past 5 years. Ever said that of Apple’s offerings? Best of all is the fact that LR has made visits to Photoshop increasingly rare and, hopefully in some future version, the horror that is Photoshop’s interface can be well and truly forgotten. Meaning that Adobe will add perspective correction to LR, the only significant feature missing for this photographer.

But my new found interest in macro and my ‘discovery’ of Helicon Focus (thanks to a fellow photographer) leave me in no doubt that is is far and away the most innovative and well engineered application I have learned in 2008. It simply opens up the world of close-focus and macro to heretofore impossible pictures. The fact that it’s been around for several years only speaks to the maker’s poor marketing – they should be telling the world about this brilliant piece of programming.

Here’s the sort of subject Helicon Focus excels at – I took several differently focused pictures and combined these into one sharp whole, using Helicon.


5D, 100mm Canon Macro, ring flash, 1/60, f/22, ISO 100, tripod. Composite of four pictures. Click the picture for the Helicon site.

The big print hanging at home is, simply stated, a show stopper. The starfish pops off the surface of what is a pretty low key print. Helicon Focus has taken close-ups out of the laboratory and made them accessible to all, whether your subject is seen through a microscope or a very long lens with limited depth of field, no matter the aperture. With the 100mm Canon Macro the whole process is a dream. Add a ring flash to provide some relief in the shadows and you have a very powerful tool set. Very well done Danylo and the whole team. I have read about like functionality in Photoshop CS4 and it’s so poorly implemented and so complex, I doubt anyone at Helicon is losing sleep, especially when you compare prices.

Helicon Focus is my pick for Software of the Year.

There’s a close runner up for the Software of the Year award and that is Bruji’s suite of database products.


Click the picture for Bruji’s web site

I use DVDpedia for movies and Bookpedia for my photography books – click in the right hand column and you will see the nice, clean web output these cataloging tools generate. These applications work well on the Mac but just sing on the iPhone; update something on the Mac and the iPhone will sync the changes when asked, if it is in wi-fi range of your Mac. It works perfectly every time and you can take your database of movies and books with you wherever you take your iPhone. Simple, superbly supported by an enthusiastic team and far better than the slow, clunky Delicious Library which I used earlier – an application that puts looks before speed. There’s something very warming about emailing for help and getting a quick, enthusiastic response from one of the Bruji developers. An experience you will never have with Adobe, Apple or Microsoft. Well done, Bruji!

Camera of the Year

Cameras

Still waiting.

Modern DSLRs are superbly competent, have great lens choices, come in a variety of sensor formats and enjoy minimal shutter and focus lag. They come from any number of manufacturers and share two bad features – they are bulky and noisy. The Mark II and Mark III variants do nothing to fix this and are very much in the land of diminishing returns, but it’s nice to see that Canon now has two full frame manufacturers to compete with – Nikon and Sony/Minolta. Best of all, by introducing the 5D Mark II, Canon has done a real number on the resale value of the Mark I and I expect you will be able to find lightly used Mark I bodies in 2009 for under $1,000.

Street and advanced casual snappers want something small, fast and quiet in their pocket when not hauling around the DSLR and they want a decent sized sensor, not one of those ridiculous fingernail sized things found in nearly every compact digital. They want instant on, couldn’t care less about the LCD screen, want an optical viewfinder and auto focus. They want a proper buffer so that snap-to-snap times are very short and they want a semi-wide angle non-zoom lens which suffices for most of the work the camera will be expected to do.

In other words, they want a digital Leica without the antiquated feature set, bulk, dated manual focusing and overpriced lenses of the Leica M8.

Well, we are not much closer to getting that in 2008 than we were in 2007.

Sure, the Sigma DP-1 is a compact with a large APS-C sensor capable of big, noise free enlargements. But everything else about it is wrong. The fixed focus length lens extends and retracts (why, for goodness sake?) making start-up times ridiculous and the whole thing sports what must be one of the worst user interfaces ever. The lens is also ridiculously slow for what you get.

The Panasonic G1 has some promise, dropping the SLR mirror, adding a competent electronic viewfinder for through-the-lens viewing, but pointlessly retaining the SLR form.

And that’s about it. The Panasonic LX-1, now in its third iteration, does some things right (so-so shutter lag, quiet, small, Leica optics) but has a lousy, small sensor and the lens extends and retracts. At least they now include an accessory shoe in the LX-3, meaning you no longer have to glue on your viewfinder the way I did.

Here’s what mystifies me. Given the sheer number of DSLR users, each wanting something small, simple and fast for fun use, why can none of the world’s camera makers get it right and put out a minimally featured digital point-and-shot with a fast 35mm f/2 non-retractable fixed focus lens, a big sensor and no shutter lag. How hard is that? They could sell these for $500 all day long.

So the Camera of the Year award goes to …. no one. The big manufacturers continue to refine their DSLRs to ridiculous extremes and continue to miss a vast, unserved sector – the very users of those DSLRs who no longer need to upgrade to 10 frames per second or 600mm f/2.8 lenses with IS.


The ideal digital snapper has to borrow the best features of these.

Take the lens and lack of shutter lag from the Leica, the electronic viewfinder and mirrorless/prismless design of the G1 and add the Sigma’s big sensor and you have a winner. Come to think of it, make two versions – one with a 35mm f/2 and the other with a 75mm f/2 lens. The size should be somewhere between the Leica M (too bulky) and the LX-1 (too small). Forget about Live View, face detection, wifi, interchangeable lenses, IS and all that other nonsense, sell them stripped and bare and photographers will make a line at your door.