Monthly Archives: June 2011

Leica 25mm f/1.4 Summilux MFT

Hardware

Strange.

The newly introduced 25mm f/1.4 Leica Summilux.

When you wanted a really fast lens for the Panasonic G range of cameras the usual resort was to the 20mm f/1.7. That lens mightily underwhelmed when I used it, showing very slow focus, awful flare control and lots of other issues, which you can read about here. I returned mine.

Now along comes the Leica-branded 25mm f/1.4 MFT lens at a rumored price of $1,000, making it the costliest MFT lens yet. The design and pricing raise several questions.

First, a 25mm f/1.4 has the same depth of field as a 50mm f/2.8. If you have used the latter on a full frame camera you will know that f/2.8 is too slow to really isolate a subject from its background. The 50mm FFE new Leica lens for MFT will be no different. So if you are buying this lens to isolate subjects you will be disappointed. Now a 50mm f/1.4 really does isolate – but that would mean the 25mm would have to be f/0.7. That is not going to happen. (Depth of field is solely a function of focal length and aperture; the size of the frame exposed is irrelevant. A 105mm lens on a 4×5 camera has the same depth of field as the same focal length on an MFT one).

Second, the lens has no OIS shake reduction. OIS adds two stops of safety so 1/30 at f/1.4 without OIS is the same as 1/8 at f/2.8 with OIS. The sole beneficiaries here will be Olympus MFT Pen users where OIS is built into the body, though I suspect any Pen body will be overwhelmed by this big lens. No Panny MFT body includes OIS – it’s in selected lenses.

Third, there’s no indication of how quickly this lens focuses. It will have to be fast and accurate to justify the astronomical price tag.

Fourth, you can buy a 50mm f/1.4 for your Canon for $450 or your Nikon for $400. Sure, you lose the compactness of an MFT kit, but that’s an enormous price difference.

Fifth, by MFT standards, the lens is huge. Who wants that when one key reasons to use MFT is compactness?

Finally, the new 16mp sensors found in the Panny GH2 and in the upcoming G3 add a rumored two stops of grain reduction. So your poky f/3.5 lens just became the equivalent of an f/1.7 by simply setting your ISO 4x faster for the same level of noise as before. And a G3 body at $600 still leaves $400 in change from the Leica-branded optic.

So I confess I’m unsure who this lens is marketed to. It’s too costly, lacks OIS, too bulky and you can do a better job with background blur in a few seconds using Photoshop’s tools. I doubt Panny will sell many.

I would much rather see Panny fixing what ails the 20mm f/1.7 and maybe making a good 45mm (90mm FFE) fast portrait lens. A 20mm f/1.4, say, with OIS, proper flare control and fast focusing at $600 would get my attention.

Snapseed

iPad

Adobe, where are you?

Click for the Snapseed site

This $5 iPad app shows the progress being made in touchscreen photo processing apps. (Warning – I have not used it). Check out their video by clicking the above picture. The app uses the touchscreen technology well and the app is very much more than a toy. It includes area selection and smart masking for application of processing to selected areas. Check out the Selective Adjust video. The automasking is just the sort of magic the iPad is all about. Night and day compared to any other masking scheme I have seen, and entirely intuitive, Well done, Nik Software. Every user of digital sensors knows about their propensity to burn out highlights and this is just the ticket to fix those.

In its usual manner, Apple is squeezing the margins and disappointingly refused to increase the maximum storage when they release iPad2, the largest still limited to a modest 64gB. It’s not a hardware constraint. Tear downs of iPad2 disclose there’s lots of room in there for more flash storage. And given the rotten state of competitors’ offerings, Apple has no incentive to add storage at the present time.

Still, that will eventually come, and it’s important for photographers who want to work with RAW files rather than with compromised JPGs. What use is you super-duper DSLR with its phenomenal data capture if you are going tp throw most of the goodness away by working with compressed JPGs?

More flash storage is on the way. Intel is making huge strides with flash storage technology. The SSD recently installed in my HackPro used 32nM spacing (1nM = One billionth of a meter); it’s already obsolete, the current offering using 25nM, at a lower price. Once they cut that to 12nM, storage per unit area will quadruple and per unit volume it will be eight times as much. So help is on the way. With the typical RAW file coming in at some 15mB, 1000 RAW originals will need 15gB of storage or some 235 times the current maximum. With storage densities doubling annually we are 8 years away from that number. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it reached sooner, driven in large part by a burgeoning mobile computing market.

By that time, Intel’s high speed connectivity technology (which Apple would have the world believe is their invention, naming it Thunderbolt) will be the standard on all devices, mobile or not, so downloading your processed pictures from the iPad to your work computer will take seconds. Right now low USB transmission speeds are a huge bottleneck.

Meanwhile, where is Adobe in all of this? They own the serious/professional photo processing market though two outstanding applications, whether you are a Mac or Windows user. Lightroom and Photoshop. (Aperture’s market share is a rounding error). But Adobe’s poky touchscreen offerings for the iPad are underwhelming. Let’s hope they get on it before their faster, smaller competitors take the market from them. Why do I care? Because I want the functionality of exporting to LR or PS on my desktop and I sure as heck do not want to learn any new, big, complex apps which may replace it. I would rather be taking pictures.

I would rather be taking pictures. The Bubble. G1, kit lens.

A magic moment in a child’s life, spotted in San Francisco’s west Mission District.

Rosamunde Sausage Grill

Dining, Photographs

In SF’s Mission District.

People shopping on west Mission Street in San Francisco are not wealthy. The area is full of cut price stores and interesting groceries selling exotic foods. Many languages are spoken, Spanish being the most common. The people are warm and extroverted, neighbors frequently meet on the street and if the area has more than its share of drunks, addicts and derelicts, none of that takes away from its character.

When you next find yourself on west Mission Street, be sure to check out The Rosamunde Sausage Grill. The menu offers a choice of sausages on a French roll ….

…. and a varied beer selection. Wine drinkers need not apply. Check out the great names. I can recommend the ‘Russian River Damnation’ lager:

The interior is nothing to write home about, basic beer cellar, but the food and beer are excellent.

Best of all, sit outside and watch the street scene as drama unfolds before your eyes.

Son of Klingon. G1, kit lens @ 18mm, 1/400, f/4.5, ISO 320.

Beware the Cloud

Software

A catastrophe waiting to happen.

Apple duly rolled out its bunch of cloud-centric offerings this past Monday to the usual stomach churning hype. It was one of the worst presentations I have seen from the fruit company, unfocused and confusing. None of this aided by a CEO who is clearly (and tragically) on his last legs. Steve Jobs looked awful, his voice was hoarse and he had difficulty with movement and memory. Far worse than before. Sad. But none of that resulted in moderation of Apple’s ridiculous hype. That trait is truly embedded in the corporate culture at One Infinite Loop.

Amongst the ridiculous claims of ‘new features’ were things like Autosave and Versioning which saves your work as you type. “Brand new”, “Apple only”, etc. Of course, this only works with Apple’s apps – sorry, but I know of no working finance professional who uses Numbers in preference to Excel (which has an Autosave feature in any case) or prefers Pages to Word, awful as the latter may be. It’s called ‘industry default’. These users, myself included, will not be migrating to Apple’s products just because of Autosave. Lightroom has been saving on the fly since Version 1 years ago on Macs and PCs, and allows you to step back through versions. Even the wretched Intuit Corporation has had on-the-fly saving in Quicken for well over a decade. And that’s in a PPC app!

But the hype meter was really cranked up for iCloud, Apple’s desperate attempt to catch up with Google’s Android and related offerings. Before writing more, let me just relate a little personal chronology.

  • iDisk at MobileMe went down and files stored there were inaccessible. Mercifully I had local copies.
  • MobileMe went down and I could not receive or send email.
  • This site went down owing to server problems at BlueHost, the hosting service I use.
  • Snap!, my daily Photoblog, went down – same hosting service, same issue. Twice.
  • There was a power cut and all computers here went down for the 30 minute duration. (I do not have battery back-up).

Time frame? How about all happened during the past seven days? And this is in a big city environment with relatively stable infrastructure, not Tornado Alley, though we do get the occasional earthquake here in California.

Now let me illustrate how AT&T pipes its broadband into the home here. This is typical not unusual in America where doing everything at the lowest cost is the prime dictate. Homes here are separated by easements which act as locations for utility poles – power, telephone, broadband. Here’s the utility pole whence broadband enters the home – even the US Congress could not have made this mess:

Thereafter, the precious length of copper cable conveying broadband goes through a couple of junction boxes, a few more twists and turn, then enters the home through this high tech orifice, also known as a hole in the wall:

And you expect me to trust my data to the cloud? No matter that it will likely be hacked by a fourteen year old from the Ukraine next week, how do I get at it when one of the many variables between the remote file server and my desktop goes down?

Want more hype? Apple will replicate your music catalog at its data center giving you download access on many devices to your catalog wherever you have a broadband connection. Something Amazon has been doing with Kindle for years now. They keep one copy of each book, as does Apple of each tune, and a list of what belongs to whom. It’s hardly magic. You have long been able to access your Kindle catalog from any device. Delete it to make space and you are still the owner should you eventually decide to re-download it later. The biggest advantage of Apple’s approach to music storage is the effective amnesty for thieves. Those who have stolen music on their computers now get an iCloud version for $25 a year – presumably a chunk of that goes to the record companies. But for serious music lovers this approach does little. First, fully 50% of my iTunes music catalog is missing cover art as iTunes cannot recognize the music (no, it’s not Lady Gagger). So this feature adds little and means I will instead have to upload my unrecognized files to iCloud to make them available on multiple devices. Now my files are all in uncompressed form ripped from my original CDs, as my ears cannot stand compressed music, so now I’m looking at the prospect of uploading hundreds of multi-megabyte files to the cloud. Remember how long that took with CrashPlan? I think I’ll pass – it’s faster to move them locally, and much more secure.

But there is one positive to all this iCloud hype. MobileMe will be killed some fifteen months hence, replaced with a free account with up to 5gB storage in iCloud. It will provide email, iCal, Safari bookmarks and so on synchronized across multiple devices, just like MobileMe does. Sometimes. And you will even be able to get a partial refund of what you just paid for MobileMe using this. I have no idea how competent or reliable iCloud will be, but it could not possibly be worse than MobileMe.

I believe the next global financial meltdown will result from over-dependence on cloud storage (unless the villains on Wall Street get there first, again), with some simple human error or hostile act rendering much of the civilized world without internet access. No web purchases, no bank access, no credit card transactions, no national defense, no medical records, you name it. Our enemies no longer need nukes. A pair of cable cutters will do. Alternatively, if it can go wrong it will. There’s no reason for you to lose your photographs in the process. Store them locally and back up, on-site and off-site, often. Who would you rather trust with your data – you or a cloud vendor about whose technology and procedures you know precisely zero?

What happens when you trust the cloud. G1, kit lens.

And now, the cartoon of the year: