An interesting travel and photography site.
I came across Let’s Be Wild when its editor Nick Zantop left a comment here. Checking his site out I found interesting travel content and good photography. The articles tend to be on the long side and the font a tad small for iPad consumption, but it’s worth checking out.
Click the picture for the site.
The site is just over a month old, judging by content.
A news consolidator for the iPad.
For the past year my default RSS feed reader on both the iPhone and iPad has been Reeder, a product well attuned to the touch interface and continually improved. I use it for RSS feeds I elect, thus making an efficient process of reading just those sites which interest me and making it unnecessary to visit to see whether updates exist. Reeder looks at your RSS feeds in Google Reader (yes, the company which :”Does no evil” and derives content based on those.
A new class of feed reader is coming along as an adjunct to Reeder, and one example is named Zite. If you wonder about the name it’s derived from German under the mistaken impression that Americans actually speak more than one language. (Had this been a News Corp app it would have been named ‘Scheiss’).
Zite also goes out to your Google Reader account (and Twitter and others) to look at what you are reading then returns stories based on the most popular sites within your interest areas:
So, for the most part, there’s relatively little overlap between what you choose in Reeder and what Zite chooses for you based on your Reeder feeds. The layout is magazine style and on my iPad1 everything loads quickly. Setup is a breeze, with the user choosing major categories of interest, which you can see down the right hand column:
Touch ‘Photography’ and you get:
Touch the story for the full text. Swipe left for the next page under the same Section heading.
There are links on the right of the iPad’s display (not shown above) which permit emailing or saving to Instapaper, etc. Nicely done.
The app uses the touch interface really well and I’m enjoying it greatly, not least for some of the unexpected source materials it presents. The one shortcoming I have asked the developers to address is that once read a story should be ‘greyed out’ to make the whole thing more efficient. With so many stories, I find that I was choosing ones I had already read before they were relegated to the dustbin of history.
Zite is free and I have not been troubled by any intrusive advertising.
Bad news – 11/2015:
Too good to last, Zite is closing down 12/7/2015, asking that you join some foul social network instead. Hasta la vista, Zite.
Monochromatic color.
West Mission Street, SF. G3, kit lens.
I had to bring up the green in the foliage, and this demonstrates just how effective the Magic Lasso tool and the ‘Refine Edges’ command are in Photoshop CS5.
Not much going on.
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As one who is disciplined about spending money, I always try to set a tech budget for the coming year. Only something truly unexpected and exceptional – like the iPad in 2010 – is allowed to blow the budget.
So here are my thoughts on the 2012 tech budget around here.
Photo hardware: It seems to me that camera hardware has three sectors. The full frame sensor cameras from Sony, Nikon and Canon when the very highest image quality is demanded. (We can disregard medium format digital here as the gear has very limited use and is impossible to justify on cost for nearly all users). The APS-C/MFT sensor offerings for ‘serious’ amateurs, though APS-C is in increasing trouble, offering the bulk and weight of full frame but the image quality of MFT. And cell phones, with the latest offerings from Nokia and Apple sporting outstanding lenses, so much so that a full length professional movie was recently shot using a Nokia cell phone – Olive. I regard the low end point-and-shoot sector as dying, ceding its market share to smartphones.[/column]
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I have never been happier with my very simple MFT kit, comprised of a Panny G3 body (whose sensor is noticeably better than the one in the G1 I used before), a 9-18mm Olympus MFT wide zoom, the 14-45mm kit zoom and the 45-200mm MFT Panny tele zoom. I really should sell the latter as I hardly ever use it. The sensor quality meshes nicely with my preferred print size of 18″ x 24″; were I to consistently need larger prints I would look at a used Canon 5D or the like at a bargain price – like the one I used before moving to MFT. If you can make a sharp 18″ x 24″ print you can display the related image on a TV screen of any size.
The iPhone 4S brought a fine Sony lens to Apple’s cell phone and a divinely simple user interface with a responsive shutter button. It will render prints up to 13″ x 19″ at a pinch and two years hence the iPhone6 will be even better.
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Mobility and capability combined. iPhone 4S with wifi hotspot, iPad, G3 with kit lens and obligatory spare battery.
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At this time, the only thing that would tempt me to get another camera would be if Apple were to release one, competing head on with the likes of Sony/Panny/Nikon/Canon in the crowded prosumer field. This is a heaven sent huge revenue opportunity for Apple, which exactly matches their business model. Take an existing, chaotic field filled with inept designs, make a better mousetrap and clean up. Plus the replacement cycle, unlike with TVs, is 2-3 years, which is what Apple needs. The Apple camera would dispense with the idiocy of complex controls and hard to read on screen menus, offer Siri voice control and have one button. To take the snap. So that’s a $500 potential budget item.
I like to make large prints and have no reason to upgrade the HP DesignJet 90 dye ink printer. It has a small footprint, delivers outstanding image quality using fade free inks, and is easy to fix when it breaks, which is rarely. It’s also a lot cheaper than current wide carriage offerings from HP, Epson and Canon, and spare parts are easily obtainable. A ten year device on its sixth year here. The only complaint is that a fresh print smells like the locker room of Chelsea Football club but, unlike with that motley crew, the HP is a winner and the stink dissipates after an hour or so.
Tripods have seen the advent of light materials like carbon fiber in recent years, but as I never trek with one my old alloy Linhof fits the bill and, at last count, had three legs just like the competition. In 2011 I added a Glif tripod holder for the iPhone 4S for a few dollars, so now my 50 year old tripod can hold my new iPhone for movies and the like. Our son loves to insert the 4S in the Glif and attach the assembly to the old Linhof.
The back end of photo hardware, the computer to process and disseminate snaps, has never looked better and while it’s all fast and reliable Hackintosh gear here, realistically any Mac or PC made in the past 3 years or so will fit the bill, if not as robustly. The newest CPUs from Intel – SandyBridge – add speed to the earlier Core2 line and use less power, but it’s not like they are essential. The 2012 upgrade from Intel – IvyBridge – offers small increases in performance. Intel’s high speed data interface – Thunderbolt as Apple calls it – will come to PCs in 2012, [/column] [column width=45% padding=5%]
which means that Hackintoshes will benefit through the simple insertion of an inexpensive aftermarket card; right now, however, there are so few peripherals out there using the interface that it remains a solution that has yet to find its time. Unless you like to shell out $1,000 for silly priced glossy screen Apple monitors, that is. But Thunderbolt technology is exciting, offering data throughput rates an order of magnitude faster than USB, so a couple of years from now we will be able to copy a 5gB movie file in a few seconds. But the technology has yet to hit prime time.
The MacBook Air remains the best laptop on the market, is very light and competitively priced, and works well with Lightroom and Photoshop on the road. It will continue to get faster, the SSD will get larger and the battery life will improve further, but these are slow changes which suggest no reason to upgrade my 11″ 2010 model. Maybe a couple of years hence, and it’s the first Apple laptop I have owned which does not fry the user’s lap. The DVD and traditional spinning disk drives are not missed.
The most exciting hardware coming to market in 2012 is the iPad, version 3. This will likely sport a Retina Display with four times as many pixels as the displays in versions 1 and 2 and a far better camera. The one in iPad 2 is poor. Best of all, the likely inclusion of the A6 four core CPU will enhance the ability to smoothly redirect images and movies wirelessly, as I described here. The iPhone 4S does this well, but the battery life is too short, an area where the iPad excels. Budget $600 for the 32gB model.
Processing software:
My ‘go to’ app for storage, cataloging, keywording and printing is Lightroom3. For more demanding processing, generally the blurring of backgrounds or the straightening of leaning verticals, I round trip files from LR3 to Photoshop CS5. When odd shapes need outlining for processing I have not found an application from anyone which holds a candle to CS5’s ‘Magic Lasso’ and ‘Refine Edges’ tools. It would be great if Adobe was to add these tools to LR3 whose selective editing tools are crude by comparison, but that’s unlikely to happen as they risk cannibalizing their cash cow, Photoshop.
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Everything in one place. Lightroom 3.
I no longer do HDR or deep focus work, but the apps I like there, and both permit roundtrips from LR3, are Photomatix HDR and Helicon Focus. When it comes to correcting lens distortion I use either the canned profiles within LR3 or make my own using Adobe’s Lens Profile Creator, free software which integrates nicely into LR3.
Right now I don’t see any immediate desktop app breakthroughs on the horizon. iPhoto remains the standby for family snaps, though I do wish Apple would cease messing it up with silly features like face recognition.[/column]
[column width=45% padding=5%]Things are different on the iPad, where some great photo processing apps are beginning to appear. Snapseed does an excellent job with the touch interface and Big Aperture has made a first pass at providing selective focus tools, though the outliner is crude compared to the Magic Lasso in CS5. Still, it’s a start. The cost of these is so low that they are impulse purchases which need no budget.
So right now the 2012 budget appears to be $500 for an Apple iCamera, if it even appears, and $600 for iPad3. As in 2011, more will be spent on travel to photo locations and on making and mounting prints than on hardware or software. That’s how it should be.
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A flashback.
When I take my boy for his karate lessons I invariably wander down the street and peek in at the camera store on 25th Street in San Mateo. It’s one of the few left. I’m not sure how they survive in the age of Amazon and online comparative shopping, but I invariably gravitate to the several display cases full of consigned used photo gear. Most of it is 35mm SLR film hardware, of little interest to anyone, and rarely seems to change between visits. I would guess that most sales are to photography students forced to use film by crank teachers who failed as photographers. There are a few interesting 4×5 sheet film cameras and the usual gamut of tired lenses, but the display which always catches my attention, for some reason, is the one with all those exposure meters.
It’s pure nostalgia. I used a selenium cell Weston Master V for several decades, even having the cell replaced by Quality Lightmetric in Hollywood when it died, and my Leica M bodies invariable sported a selenium cell Metrawatt MC or cadmium sulphide MR clip on meter which coupled to the shutter speed dial, requiring only that the indicated aperture be dialed in. Despite their small size these worked well, as long as you treated them gently.
Now every new camera comes with exposure automation built in, yet go the the Apple iPhone AppStore and what will you find?
Note the old time Sekonic exposure meter icon.
From the unattractively named Nuwaste, complete with typographical errors and a broken developer’s site link, comes the Pocket Light Meter app. And it works really well.
The meter can be used either with the front or rear facing camera in the iPhone and is close to a spot metering design. This means it meters a small part of the image, so if you are hoping for an overall averaging of the scene this is not for you. Indeed, an appreciation of dynamic range and an ability to determine whether you want detail in the shadows or highlights are required skills to make proper use of this tool.
You can see just how small the metered area is in this screen snap:
The red rectangle defines the metered area.
The cut-off around the red rectangle is so-so; it’s not razor sharp like, say, in the semi-spot meter in a Leicaflex SL of yore, which had the best manual in-camera meter ever made, but drops off steeply within one rectangle’s worth of the periphery. Not bad. Best of all, just touch the iPhone’s screen and the measurement rectangle will jump to the touch point, so taking multiple readings in a couple of seconds is trivial. Readings take under one second to stablize and touching ‘Hold’ freezes them, though the developer could usefully add an indicator that Hold has been enabled. So aficionados of the Ansel Adams Zone System, where you measure and determine the dynamic range placement based on your selected tones, will love this.
It gets better. Dial in the ‘Display additional info’ option and you get:
Additional display option.
You can see the selected area’s brightness in Lux and FootCandles, as well as EV readings at two ISO settings. Many sheet film camera lenses came with EV settings which, once you get used to them, are pretty handy as they permit locking of the shutter speed/aperture combination, so if you change one, the other changes to compensate. Great for tuning in just the right depth of field. Sadly no color temperature display option is available, which would make this a particularly useful tools for cinematographers seeking color balance betwen scenes.
The intrusive advertising can be removed by sending the developer $0.99. Otherwise the app is free.
Though the specifications refer to reciprocity correction, (correction for the non-linear response of film emulsions at low light levels), I could determine no such feature. The aperture range is f1 – f/512 and shutter speeds run from 32 seconds down to 1/8000, regardless of ISO. The ISO range is 6-102,400.
I tested this app on my iPhone 4S against the meter in the Panasonic G3 and it was in exact agreement under a variety of lighting conditions, including daylight, fluorescent and incandescent light. The developer says it works on the iPhone 3GS or later and all iPad2 models. I tested sensitivity to be down to 1/2 second @ f/5.6 at ISO320. Not Lunasix territory, but not bad either. The Gössen Lunasix meter’s claim to fame was that it could measure exposure by the light of the moon! The meter was about the bulk of five iPhones …. By comparison, the Panny G3 blows away both, easily measuring down to 20 seconds @ f/5.6 at ISO320!
At the price asked, anyone needing manual exposure measurement should not pass this by, so long as you make the effort to learn how to use a spot meter in the first place. The developer should consider adding a center-weighted or averaging option to make this app more broadly useful. But it’s a lot cheaper than even a very well used Weston Master, Sekonic or Lunasix.