Monthly Archives: April 2013

The dumbwatch

Photography

As silly as it gets.

Have you ever seen a wearer trying to use one of those dated Casio Calculator watches, miniscule keyboard and all, strapped to his wrist? I have and I can assure you I could do the math faster and almost certainly more accurately than the user of this party conversation starter. Or stopper. That is if your idea of a fun party is one where soup-stained beards and pocket protectors dominate the sartorial equation.

The Casio could give you calculator power in addition to the date and time. Now we are hearing rumors that the B players who now run Apple are thinking of coming up with a smartwatch. Quite what it will do I’m not sure but the very limited screen space will likely present a filtered subset of data available to other devices, be they cell phones, tablets or computers. Maybe the weather, a stock quote or two, airline flights and so on. It’s no great fun looking at the small display of an iPhone for long, so now make that display one tenth the size and what do you have? A solution looking for a problem and a trip to the eye specialist.

Maybe, James Bond style, there will be a small camera built in, allowing you to take truly ghastly images for some purpose or other but except for the Grade school set – where a gadget’s life span is measured in weeks until the next one comes along – I simply do not see a smartwatch as a device with sustained selling or staying power. In other words, I’m not about to sell my mechanical wrist watch. It does only one thing, tell the time, and not very accurately at that, but it sure as heck is lot more pleasure to look at than a smartwatch. And I can make it out with ease.

Were I running Apple, I would be pretty concerned about Google’s nascent Glass(es). Innovative, unexpected, maybe groundbreaking. I would also be looking to my brains’ trust asking where our competitive device was.


Sergey Brin of Google models Glass.

Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 APS-C zoom

Nikon lenses

An interesting innovation.

Sigma has just announced an 18-35mm zoom for APS-C sensor DSLRs with a fixed maximum aperture of a speedy f/1.8. It works out to 27-53mm full frame equivalent.

It’s no lightweight at 29 ounces – 5 ounces heavier than the stellar 35/1.4 – but the finish appears to be the same, meaning excellent. Like that prime, the new optic will be programmable using Sigma’s dock. I would guess pricing at $900 for the lens and under $100 for the dock. The lens comes in Sigma, Nikon and Canon mounts. I’m sure my D2x would love one, but I am very happy with the inexpensive 35/1.8 Nikkor G prime.

It’s good that an independent maker can challenge the big boys on both quality and price. It seems that true innovation is mostly coming from Sigma and Fuji today.

Sample images appear here.

Lightroom 5 Beta

Lightroom

Out now.

Adobe has announced the free availability of Lightroom 5 and as in previous releases the enhancements are substantive. Lightroom 4 brought greatly improved Highight and Shadow sliders and the team at Adobe has been diligent in bringing the latest RAW converters to LR in a timely manner. Most recently, they distinguished themselves with a revised release of converters for the Fuji X series of cameras which use a non-standard arrangement of pixels, resulting in enhanced image quality. Impressive.


Click the image to go to the download page.

Adobe reckons to have the bugs out by the summer and they have to be commended on the way they obviously listen to users. The final release will allow conversion of your existing LR4 or earlier catalog(s) of images. The current Beta version does not permit conversion, so I simply imported a handful of RAW images to see what was of interest.

These were the significant new features which caught my eye:

Automatic verticals and horizontals:

One click in the Lens Corrections panels and keystone distortion (leaning verticals) is (reversibly) removed, automatically. You have a choice of verticals, horizontals or both and it’s instantaneous. Be sure to apply your lens correction profile of choice to render lines straight (meaning you are removing barrel or pincushion distortion) before using this tool.

Visualize spots:

A new control renders the image in high relief to make finding spots easier. Very effective, along with a slider to change the degree of ‘spotiness’:

Simply click on the spot removal tool to invoke, then click the ‘Visualize Spots’ box.

Non-circular healing brush:

You can now elect to define an irregular area for use with the healing brush. The old circular functionality is retained. The size of the irregular area cannot be varied with the mouse’s wheel, whereas the size of a circular spot can be, as before:

Variable aspect ratios:

This allows stretching or squashing of an image with a simple slider. Very useful, and ideal for obese Americans:

I have an image where fixing verticals loses too much content. So I first squeezed it in LR5 using the new aspect ratio slider, then applied the verticals fix and the result was identical to what I achieved in DxO Viewpoint, and in a fraction of the time. Very nice indeed.

No code bloat:

There are many enhancements to other modules like the Book and Slideshow ones (the latter now allows embedding of videos). It seems that LR is on a 2 year upgrade frequency and this new release looks very promising. I’ll let smarter (?) users help Adobe work out the bugs and I expect the upgrade will be the usual $100, which is a bargain.