Monthly Archives: October 2012

The Marin Headlands

Photographs

Easy.

Drive over the Most Famous Bridge in the World in the Most Beautiful State in America on the Most Perfect Day of the Year and all you have to do is press the button.

I gave the D700 to my 10 year old son again and again and now that he has learned to focus the 80-200mm MF Nikkor I am quite uncertain which of us took these! If you need a superb zoom, have a $130 budget and don’t mind manual focussing, get one. It will knock your socks off.

Looking northwest.

An abundance of ice plant.

Looking Southeast.

Looking North.

The Most Famous Bridge and the Most Beautiful City on the Most Perfect Day.

All snaps on the Nikon D700 with the Nikkor 35-70 AFD and 80-200mm Ai lenses.

Lytro – dead wrong.

Photography

A solution looking for a problem.

I wrote about the Lytro camera with considerable enthusiasm over a year ago. It’s now hitting the stores with zoom and manual options added.

Thinking it over and experimenting with their publicity photos taken on the camera I now conclude I was dead wrong.

The Lytro takes an image whose point of focus can be changed when viewed on a computer. The problem with that – putting aside questionable definition and so on – is that no one in their right mind wants to do that. In fact it’s exactly backwards. While the technology frees the user from the need to focus, as the focus point can be determined at the playback stage, in practice what the user wants is a small camera, likely as not in his cell phone, where everything in the picture is sharp. Like the Lytro that obviates the need to focus at the taking stage. But it’s at the viewing stage that the user wants to determine what should be sharp or blurred. But the user only ever wants one thing sharp. He does not want multiple choices. And he wants the image big and sharp where he chooses. Most of all, the last thing the consumer wants is to carry another gadget, especially one with the Lytro’s questionable ergonomics, these largely dictated by the need to use a long lens to confer the required shallow depth of field.

No, users do not want the choice of many sharp points of focus depending one where the image is clicked at playback. Users want one sharp point of focus with all else blurred. One click. So what is called for is processing software that permits that, maybe allied with data capture at the taking point to record relative subject distances when the image was first recorded. Trees were 50 feet away, person was 10 feet away, etc. At playback you click the person and the trees are rendered blurred.

Yes, I do the selective focus thing using the excellent Magic Lasso in Photoshop but no average user is going to want to do that.

Lytro has it exactly wrong. A gimmick which answers a question no one is asking. A solution looking for a problem. I give them one year and hasta la vista to all that venture capital.

The Nikon D2X – Part I

Nikon bodies

And oldie but a goodie.

The law of diminishing returns affects all technological goods. The desktop PC has peaked, hampered by its slowest part, poor broadband speeds. All modern cars are good, with even Korean products certain to last 200,000 miles with a minimum of maintenance. The smartphone continues to add bells and whistles but the iPhone 1 pretty much defined the genre five years ago. And the latest offerings from camera makers continue to regale us with more pixels and faster operation, while largely missing the increasingly essential things found on any smartphone – GPS and wifi.

The smart buyer, be it of cars or cameras and maybe even computers, focuses on products a tech generation or two old. The cheapest car is a lightly used five year old one which you can buy at 60% off original list price and drive happily for another 15 years, the first owner having paid you for the depreciation. That car has all the functionality and sophistication of the latest model save maybe its fuel economy, and if you do the math there is no way on earth your hybrid will be cheaper over its life than my ‘dated’ gas guzzler.

With pro-DSLRs the financial math is even more extreme. Case in point. I just bought a near-mint 2005 vintage Nikon D2X body for $760. This body sold for a stunning $5,000 7 years ago. It has 22,000 shutter actuations against a life expectancy of some 250,000 or, as a friend remarked:

If you took 300 snaps per trip, you only have 760 trips left.

So it’s not like I am about to worry about wearing the shutter out in one of the most robust bodies ever made. As a back-up to my full frame D700, the 12mp APS-C sensor in the D2X offers like definition within the confines of a 1.5x cropped frame. That’s not useful for ultra wide lenses, where the 20mm suddenly sees like a 30mm optic, but it’s jolly nice for a 50mm f/1.4 which becomes a handy, small and very fast 75mm portrait lens. And I’m talking the old MF Nikkor from the days when men were men – and women were men.

Read the tech blogs and you will discover that the D2X does not remotely match the high ISO performance of the D700. Indeed, its sweetspot is in the ISO 100-400 range. That’s fine for my purposes. Read on and you will learn that seven year old Sony sensor – the first CMOS sensor used in a pro-grade Nikon – has a stellar reputation for color rendering in that ISO range. Now that gets my attention. And it just happens to have extraordinarly fast autofocus when that is needed.

A related dictate for my purchase was that I did not want to scale the steep learning curve which is part and parcel of the modern DSLR. The controls and operation of the the D2X are identical to those of the D700 in most respects, so setup will be a cloning process of the preferred settings I have learned to love on the D700.

So there’s lots to look forward to here, not least being the fact that many aver that this is the best constructed digital era body Nikon has yet made, and I have a penchant for things that are well made.

Part II is here.

Heavy gear

Photographs

Sewer work.

The latest taxpayer funded boondoggle has come to town in the guise of new PVC sewer pipes, replacing the clay ones of old. Walking the pup on his evening ramble through the ‘hood the other day I was struck by the power and beauty of the hard used heavy equipment parked all over the local streets.

All snapped on the iPhone 5.

The images were processed either using Snapseed on the iPhone or in Lightroom 4 on the MacBook Air. The first just rolled off my HP DJ90 printer sized 13″ x 19″ and it would knock your socks off!

High Sierras Market

Photographs

The old days of film.

Leica M2, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.

Every now and then I have to remind myself just how awful film was. This time the reminder was prompted by a complaint from a friend who grumbled about how long it was taking him to scan old film images for his digital catalog. I suggested he leverage his time and farm out the awful task.

But the scanning topic reminded me that my now decade old Epson 2450 flat bed scanner was badly in need of cleaning. The glass plate on this excellent machine has managed to accrue lots of dirt on the inside, so in a fit of guilt I dismantled the device and gave it a thorough cleaning. While a flat bed, it nevertheless served well in the days of film, especially when I needed really high quality scans of 6×6, 6×7 and 4″x5″ film originals. (I used a Nikon 4000 scanner for 35mm). Coupled with the excellent VueScan app it allows for very high quality scans using relatively inexpensive scanners, and can be tailored right down to the type of film used. In my case, I decided to do a scan for old times’ sake from a 35mm negative and dialled in Kodak Gold 100-6. The Epson has backlighting making high quality scans of translucent originals easy.

The scan of a single 35mm slide took some 10 minutes at the archival, 64-bit setting (imagine how long a 4″ x 5″ original which is some 14 times the area takes!), delivering a 55MB file.

Then it was into Lightroom and Photoshop for the usual scratch removal and so on meaning that, start to finish, it took me a good 15 minutes to produce the image above. In that time I could have processed a dozen images from any digital camera with superior results and with no need for dust retouching.

So next time you get that urge for a film Leica or Hasselblad or Linhof plate camera, fughedaboutit. Unless your time is worth nothing, that is. Or the gear’s destination is the china cabinet where it belongs.

At least my scanner is clean now. I mostly use it to archive my son’s homework.