Yearly Archives: 2012

My desk

Photography

Ordered chaos.

Inspired by Kate Donnelly’s site, referred to the other day, here’s a snap of my desk:

G3, Oly 9-18mm @ 9mm.

No punches have been pulled, no cosmetic arrangements added and, clearly, I need to do some dusting, as the cleaning lady is not allowed to touch anything here. The overall ethos at work here is consonant with my belief that ‘tidiness, like consistency, is the bane of small minds’.

This workspace reflects two of my interests – managing money and photography. Here’s what’s going on:

  • Three Dell 2209WA 1680 x 1050 21.5″ displays, color matched using an EyeOne colorimeter. I prefer the older coarser pixel pitch to the finer pixels in the latest ones, as it makes reading easier on my eyes. Supported on reams of paper because the world has yet to see a monitor that is as well designed as the one on the old iMacG4 ‘screen on a stick’ of ages past. Obligatory 3M PostIt notes come and go. My HP100 Hackintosh powering the Dells sits under the desk.
  • One artisan-made cup (the cup and the contents) of French Roast coffee.
  • The HP12C RPN calculator, used by Real Men whose ordered minds understand that input of variables must precede input of operators. 25+ years on that one. I occasionally badger HP for replacement rubber feet when mine fall off and, amazingly, they reply with free ones.
  • A classic Bic ball pen which is the only writing instrument I use.
  • The only phone in the house I use – the iPhone 4S.
  • A couple of inexpensive Logitech speakers whose sound blows away anything a stock Mac or PC can deliver.
  • An ancient DLO iPhone1 belt case, much repaired, and still fitting the latest model fine.
  • A Logitech USB Desktop Microphone, between the two displays on the right, used for emails and voice overs in the occasional video I make for this site. Outstanding voice quality for very little, putting the built-in microphone in my MacBook Air to shame.
  • My ‘wallet’, comprised of a small holder for a credit card, DL, etc., with some 25 years on it.
  • A couple of flash memory sticks under the center monitor, the ‘macho’ one being my son’s.
  • An iPod Nano in a LunaTik watch band which I never use but my son loves. I prefer a throwback to analog, mechanical days, one of the few concessions I make to ‘old times’.
  • An Edirol R09 digital sound recorder, in the $1 green canvas case at right, largely obsoleted by the iPhone.
  • A Kensington wired ‘Slim Type Keyboard for Mac’. With mechanical scissor switches for the keys, this one puts Apple’s offerings to shame and comes complete with the obligatory key pad numerate people demand. The keyboard cover protects against costly spills from the second item above.
  • An ancient Logitech MX900 bluetooth mouse, recommended by a fellow photographer, which goes through 2 AA rechargeable batteries in four days and that’s the only bad thing about it. The mouse rests on a 3M Mousepad, quite outstanding. I have experimented with tablet pads and they do not work for me.
  • Scribblings, jottings and prospectuses.
  • A magnificent Sligh pedestal desk with keyboard drawer – a rare concession to luxury.
  • No Border Terrier visible. I asked Bert, the resident hound, to put in an appearance but the modeling fee demanded was too high. These are hard times. You can just make out his little bottom on the snuggle ball at the right!

A long day

Architecture, Photographs

Reaching out.

Click any picture for the slide show.

Of the three lenses I own for my Panasonic G3, the kit zoom (28-90mm FFE) gets most use. The wide Olympus (18-36mm FFE) zoom is a distant second and the third, the Panny long (90-400mm FFE) zoom mostly gathers dust.

I have a strong belief in not owning things I do not use, so the other day I took the long zoom to San Francisco with the sole aim of taking ‘long’ pictures, along with the resolution that if the day was a failure, the lens would be sold. For me anything over 35mm FFE is ‘long’ so when using a 90-400mm lens I really need to think differently. There’s no thought of switching between the long lens and the other two; the visualization process is so different that my tired brain cannot cope with yet another set of variables.

So I set about my task by thinking and seeing ‘long’, and a few good things cropped up on a late afternoon with light to die for. Focal lengths shown are Full Frame Equivalents (FFE).

Guess I’ll be keeping that Panasonic 45-200mm lens for a while longer. Funnily enough, on returning home I found that I had accidentally switched the OIS anti-shake button to ‘Off’ but for the most part lucked out. At 400mm FFE, handholding without OIS becomes something of a challenge. On a related note, the G3’s sensor, some two stops finer grained than the one in my earlier G1, allows the use of faster ISO settings – and shorter shutter speeds – without degrading quality, a significant advantage with longer lenses. 800 ISO is just fine, and 1600 ISO works well at a pinch, both allowing high quality 18″ x 24″ prints to be made.

Joseph O. Holmes

Photographers

A great street snapper.

Nothing gets my pulse racing so much as an entry hitting my RSS feed from Joseph O. Holmes, perhaps the finest street snapper working today. A few years back he did a wonderful series on the fishmongers at the now defunct Fulton Fish Market on the lower East side of Manhattan (sadly no longer available on line – see below) and it’s a rare occasion on which Holmes does not thrill with his fabulous color photography of New York City.

There’s a gripping interview with the photographer on the ‘From the Desk of’ site which you can read by clicking the picture below:

Click the picture for the interview.

I was especially taken by this quote:

Kate Donnelly’s site is a fine read and you can visit Holmes’s site ‘Joe’s NYC’ by clicking here.

Fulton Fish Market series:

I left a comment on Kate’s site lamenting the fact that Joe’s Fulton Fish Market series, some of the finest reportage ever and taken at a ridiculous time in the morning, was no longer on line, and Joe was kind enough to restore his pictures, which I first referred to five years ago, here.

Fuji X-Pro1 and Canon G1X

Fuji

Overpriced.

The recent announcement by Fuji of its interchangeable lens APS-C X-Pro1 leaves me in two minds, but let’s get one thing out of the way. This camera is not a ‘Leica killer’. At a costly $2,400 with one lens it’s one quarter of the price of the Leica M9 and simply does not compete with it, any more than a Mercedes competes with a Rolls Royce. Sure, the features may be similar, the fit and finish identical and the looks attractive but one caters to the buyer thinking he’s getting some exclusivity for his money, the other caters to the buyer with more money than sense.

The clumsily named X-Pro1 with 28, 50 and 90mm FFE lenses.

What your $2,400 gets you here is a camera with one interchangeable lens and no zoom. That certainly harkens back to the Leica rangefinder idiom in the days when zooms were awful and Leica’s viewfinder didn’t know a zoom from a hole in the ground. And while the Fuji adds autofocus (still missing from the Leica M9 with its 60 year old manual range/viewfinder) and a zoom hybrid optical/electronic finder, the optical finder’s magnification of just 0.37x is simply ghastly. Even Leica managed 0.72x in most of its M bodies and around 0.9x in the M3 and certain later variants. 0.37x, if it is to be believed, is a joke.

For this camera to be a useful street snapper – and like the Leica M it’s ill suited to other genres – then responsiveness will be key. The APS-C fixed lens X100 has poor focus speed and high shutter lag by all accounts, whereas the much cheaper X10 cures those ills but blows it with a silly, fingernail-sized sensor, good for small prints only. Though a zoom lens is currently unavailable and may be coming, the clunky use of fixed focal length lenses for a street snapper, and the delay occasioned by the occasional need to change these, is simply an anachronism in a modern, fast paced world. Significantly absent from the design is any anti-shake technology. A big omission for the price asked and for the primary use intended.

The X-Pro1 retains the well executed automation settings from the X100 (and the much earlier Rollei 6000 series medium format film SLRs, one of which I happily used for years). For shutter priority set the aperture ring to ‘A’, for aperture priority set the shutter dial to ‘A’ and for program automation set both to ‘A’. And it’s nice to have simple rings and dials for these functions, in addition to the over/under exposure dial on the top plate.

Finally, the price of all this retro-think is ridiculous. If the M9’s $10,000 price tag is simply silly, the $2,400 asked for the X-Pro1 is exorbitant. The difference between silly and exorbitant is that a select few can afford silly and not care about it, but all others have to think twice about exorbitant, meaning three times the price of the competition. If you want to pay a $1,500 premium for the admittedly gorgeous looks, then have at it. For $700 you can have your choice of MFT bodies from Oly and Panny with a capable zoom kit lens and any number of decent offerings from Canon/Nikon/Sony in APS-C.

What is wanted by the street snapper is a camera with a modest zoom range – say 28-70mm – a decent aperture, maybe f/2.8, anti-shake, a fixed lens is fine, a hand operated zoom and a decent finder, optical or EVF, married to an MFT or APS-C sensor. Responsiveness is paramount. Canon sort of gets it with its new $800 G1X, but the zoom range is too long at 28-112mm, sacrificing speed in the process for a disappointing f/5.8 at the long end. Responsiveness is also currently unknown, the optical finder appears to be the same crappy one from the G9/10/11/12 series, though the body at least includes anti-shake and the sensor is almost APS-C sized. So that’s a lot closer to the street snapper’s demand for functionality than the dated approach of fixed focal length lenses, fast as they may be, adopted by Fuji on the X-Pro1.

The ‘almost right’ Canon G1X.

However, these are encouraging developments. If the Fuji enjoys robust sales, one of the mass manufacturers will likely get it right and produce a sub-$1000 fixed lens, big sensor, responsive snapper with a modest range fast zoom, the latter manually operated. Electric zooms simply don’t cut it in real life street situations. Goodness knows, we have been waiting long enough. Right now the street snapper chooses from:

  • Panasonic G3 or GH2. $630/900 with kit zoom. Traditional DSLR looks but with EVFs, MFT sensor, marginal ergonomics on the G3, decent lenses for the most part, attractively priced, very responsive, needless prism ‘hump’. Ugly as sin to look at.
  • The Olympus MFT range, all damned by the absence of a viewfinder other than the frightful clip-on EVF designs. Attractive looks.
  • Fuji X100. $1,200. No zoom, APS-C sensor, sluggish, overpriced. Gorgeous looks.
  • Fuji X10. $600. Nice fast zoom, responsive, attractively priced, very small sensor. Forget about cropping and large prints. Gorgeous looks.
  • Fuji X-Pro1. $2,400 with one lens. Zooms may become available later, APS-C sensor, unknown responsiveness, exorbitantly priced. Fixed focal length lenses only for now. Gorgeous looks.
  • Canon G1X. $800. Almost APS-C sized sensor. Unknown responsiveness, crappy optical finder, attractively priced, slowish zoom, no manual zoom ring. ‘Wouldn’t-kick-it-out-of-bed-for-eating-crackers’ looks.

So none of these gets it quite right, but it is very encouraging to see that makers are slowly ‘getting it’. Once manufacturers start realizing that fewer features on a better executed body are what the user wants, then the right camera will follow. And if it looks half as nice as the three Fuji models, it will be an object of desire in itself.

But while the new Fuji may make those who value looks over function happy as can be, it doesn’t seem to be the answer to the street snapper’s ideal. Close, but no cigar.

The Caltrain terminus

Photographs

Guaranteed results, every time.

Located at Fourth and Brannan in south east San Francisco, the Caltrain terminus is my destination when taking weekly trips to the city. At a modest cost for the round trip from the Peninsula, including lunch and a revitalized psyche, that’s a whole lot less than visiting a shrink and, unlike that futile exercise, my trip invariable culminates in great memories, food and snaps. And as I take my push bike along, I get fit in the process of riding around the city on the Bay.

Further, I can work at my day job on the trip thanks to the hotspot on the iPhone which gives me roaming wifi and the iPad which gives me a screen I can actually make out. Some of my best investment ideas have originated on such journeys, aided by the good mood that the prospect of street snapping creates and the gentle rocking of the train, which is how man was meant to travel.

And, truth be told, I almost never fail to start the visit off on a high note, as the assembled greeters in the terminus building are a never ending source of wonderful, often moving, images.

Here are some recent ones.