A neat movie site.
The oddly named ‘If we don’t, remember me’ blog takes iconic moments from famous movies and plays them back in an infinite loop.
This is one of the best – click the picture to go there.
Click the picture.
For my interview with David Hemmings, click here.
Ingenious.
The Lumin app for the iPhone allows the use of the phone’s camera as a magnifier, with or without illumination from the built-in LED. That’s incredibly clever, and I have found it ideal for determining serial numbers on hardware for insurance purposes. Such numbers are increasingly screen printed in very small fonts on equipment and the their falling size and my aging eyesight conspire doubly against me.
You can take a snap of the area imaged and email it to yourself with ease – here’s an example of the serial number on my Panny G3:
Other uses include looking at restaurant menus in poorly lit diners, spotting that wood splinter in your finger, examining your Border Terrier’s nose to try and determine just how it manages to stay frigid, and …. well, you get the idea.
There are many flashlight apps in the iPhone AppStore, but none that can compare to this. Try and buy an illuminated magnifier for $1.99 that fits in your vest pocket and doubles as a flashlight.
Some classics.
In an interesting article in The Atlantic titled The Triumph of Kodakery the author includes several classic early Kodak advertisements.
A search of the web discloses many more. What is striking about these is not only the clarity of the message, but also the artwork. The message remains relevant today, the artwork has rarely been surpassed.
The first four, which are very old, do not use a photograph in the advertisements, but only the churlish observer would object to that. No history of photographic innovation can deny Kodak its rightful place at the head of the long list of inventive geniuses in the last century.
Clutter be gone!
I wrote about the new look I had adopted for this journal on the iPad and iPhone here.
Since making that change I have been increasingly frustrated on returning to the old desktop theme, replete with sidebar, drop-down boxes and clutter. Cramped and tired, it was due for an overhaul.
After a bit of searching I came across the Book Lite theme (link at the bottom of the page), the single column theme you are looking at. This relegates all the links to the bottom of the page and presents a far cleaner page to the reader. After a bit of tailoring to use more of the display’s width, replacement of the inept WordPress Search function with Google Custom Search – the latter accessible through a link at the top of the page, and a few other tweaks, things were looking pretty good, so I put the new look into service.
Links now appear at the bottom of the page.
Here’s how this page looked in the old style:
On those rare occasions where posts include long text paragraphs, I will break text into two columns (a real pain to do) and the new look serves that presentation well. For the technically inclined, the theme used supports widgets, making arrangement and inclusion of links at the base of the page a simple matter. The ability to translate content – however poorly – using Google Translate has been retained, as have all other link functions from the old theme.
Going forward I will be adding more multimedia display tools, including scrolling photo galleries and enhanced video integration.
No new thinking.
If you look at the hand-held SLR, it really has had no radically new thinking since Pentacon had the idea of installing a pentaprism and Pentax added an instant return mirror and auto diaphragm for largely uninterrupted viewing. That was 60 years ago. A few decades ago Honeywell invented autofocusing and now everyone (except Leica, of course, who helped invent it) has it. While those early variants were exclusively mechanical designs, the later ones have added batteries and motors to replace the thumb and fingers and a digital sensor replaces film. But the basic design, that of a flapping, noisy mirror in a bulky box, remains the same.
But as electronics have added a host of new capabilities, DSLR bodies have grown buttons, sockets and dials on seemingly every surface. Take a look at the new Nikon D4:
Nikon D4. Not a smooth surface in sight.
In fact, my first reaction on seeing this was to laugh. It is so exactly wrong in every design respect that the only thing that comes to mind is the inventions of Rube Goldberg:
Rube’s voting machine.
Sure, the Nikon can take a bazillion pictures a second, removing the last vestiges of skill from the sports picture taking process, and can be tuned to any number of picture taking situations, but the thinking is all wrong. If you watch a sports photographer at work, he never adjusts anything. He has his rig set for shutter priority automation and autofocus, carrying a spare battery and a few cards for image storage. Then he bangs away. Better still, watch his UK counterpart on the sidelines at a pro soccer game. Likely as not his camera, with one lens attached at all times, is shrouded with a plastic bag to keep out the rain and the only thing he does is point and shoot. Likewise the fashion photographer. The strobes are set just so, the camera’s settings are frozen and all he does is encourage the model to wet her lips or lean this way and that.
Both these professionals have no need of the myriad settings on their pro-DSLR body. They default to a menu of standards and care not one whit for all the options. And this is where high-end DSLR makers get it so wrong. Rather than recognize the working method of just about every snapper out there, they prefer to give you all the options, forcing you to decide, thus belaboring their designs with all those buttons and dials.
No question that these pros need the flexibility the body provides, but they need only one specific subset of all those options. So here’s how modern cameras should be designed:
None of the flexibility or ‘tuneability’ of the original concept is lost. Ergonomic form and function are restored. And weight is cut as all those mechanical adjusters, mirrors, prisms and interchangeable lenses disappear. Nothing really new here – it’s just a sophisticated version of what point-and-shoot cameras have been trying to achieve for ages with their mode dials – one setting for ‘landscapes’, another for ‘portraits’, a third for ‘sports’, and so on, but done at a far more accomplished level.
And realization of that concept is getting closer daily. The market is filling up with capable mirrorless designs, EVFs are improving by leaps and bounds, custom settings are here, but the smartphone interface is still largely lacking. You see it in some of the iPhone apps (like Camera+) which integrate the software with the hardware at an amateur level (allowing both pre-taking adjustments and post processing in one app), but there is no reason why this approach should not be extended to professional gear.
And unless the likes of Nikon, Canon and Sony start thinking Outside the Box, the will soon find themselves Inside the Box which is called Bankruptcy. Hey, it happened to Kodak. It can happen to you.