Yearly Archives: 2012

Inside the Box

Hardware

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:

  • No flapping mirror. Cuts bulk, noise, vibration and wear.
  • One dial, one button. Yup. That dial simply exists to alternate between a handful of custom settings. The button is for taking the snap.
  • One fixed lens. You want wide, use the wide body. You want long, get the long one. Just like the guy on the sidelines for the soccer game. This greatly simplifies design and dramatically cuts bulk and weight.
  • A smartphone wireless interface through which those customized settings are conferred to the body, obviating the need for any body controls.
  • One large LCD display to show the settings dialed in under any custom choice.

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.

Let’s Be Wild

Photography

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.

Zite

iPad, Software

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.

The 2012 tech budget

Photography

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.


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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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