Yearly Archives: 2013

David Hockney at the de Young

Paintings

An exceptional show.


Buying the costly tickets.


The book of the show – highly recommended.

The David Hockney show at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park is exceptional in every way and a must see for any photographer. Only works by this prolific artist since 2002 are shown in what is the largest exhibition the de Young has ever mounted. Hockney makes use of modern and traditional technologies in inspiring ways and the New York Times’s critic was bang on in describing him as ‘… one of the greatest colorists since Matisse’, though it has to be added that Raoul Dufy is a kindred spirit.


My son Winston approaches the show with unjustified trepidation.

Among the many compelling images on display here are video displays showing Hockney’s iPad compositions in time lapse – quite riveting as you literally see the creation of the work (the artist explains that he discovered that the Brushes app actually records each image creation session) – as well as the huge wall displays of eighteen or more large LCDs showing the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside whence Hockney hails. The last eight years he spent there (he lives in Los Angeles) were exceptionally productive and one room, whose four walls show giant multi-panel paintings of a country lane in each of the four seasons, is perhaps the finest thing in the show. The images are, without exception, joyful and Hockney’s love for his native Yorkshire shines through.

There are also many portraits of his friends done in that somewhat flat and naïve style which maybe could be represented in less volume, but are charming for what they are.


Portraits. No photography allowed.

Another room contains no fewer than twenty-four large LCD panels with motion images of jugglers doing their thing. It’s a lot of fun and reminds us that Hockney never gets pretentious about his art or takes it too seriously. He’s too well grounded in his Yorkshire roots to permit that sort of silliness.


Jugglers.

One large room is dedicated to the ‘Great Wall’, containing Hockney’s clippings of great paintings since 1400 and showing how the use of the camera obscura from around 1420, where painters traced a projected image of the scene in a darkened room, started to affect ways of seeing. The camera may not have been invented for another four centuries but the room shows compellingly how seeing changed with the introduction of technology.

Highly recommended.

All images except the second on the Panasonic GX7 at ISO 3200.

Panasonic Lumix GX7 – Part V

Micro Four-Thirds

Wi-fi.

Part IV is here.

There are excellent descriptions of how to enable Wi-fi in the GX7 at CameraLabs.

I’ll add some personal experiences below.

Wi-fi:

Wi-fi on the GX7 means that you can send images to your portable device of choice – cell phone or tablet, iOS or Android – after first having downloaded the Panasonic Image App from the AppStore (iOS) or GameStore (Android). The app is free. Further, once the GX7 is connected to the device, you can control just about anything on the camera – focus (using the touch screen on the cell phone or tablet), framing rate, movie mode, you name it. However, you cannot send or receive emails while the camera and device are connected as they share a wi-fi circuit unique to the two devices. So if you download images from the camera to your device, you must then switch to your regular wi-fi or cellular connection before these can be sent out.

Here’s the order of events to get wi-fi working:

  • Turn on the GX7
  • Hold the wi-fi button on the rear until the blue diode lights up
  • Go to Settings->wi-fi on your device, find and activate the GX7 wi-fi connection – it’s named ‘GX7-204E2A’. The first time you do this you will have to input the password shown on the LCD display of the GX7. Thereafter you can simply save this password to your device.
  • Open the Panasonic Image App on your device – your device will take 10-20 seconds to connect to the GX7. Sometimes this fails so turn the GX7 off and on and the app on the device off and on. Re-pair the wi-fi and try again after doing this. It usually works by the second attempt, worst case.
  • The Panasonic Image App will now display on your tablet or cell phone exactly what the lens on the GX7 is seeing. Magic! You can now control the GX7 fron your device.
  • Take a picture by touching the camera icon on your device. Enlarge any image to full screen by touching it.
  • You can now download the picture to your device by touching Playback on the device app, whereupon all the images on the GX7 will be displayed on the device in thumbnail format. Touch any thumbnail for a full screen view.
  • The Panasonic Image App does NOT recognize Panasonic RAW images. You will see a preview with a symbol but you cannot email the image. Thus you must set the GX7 either to JPG or RAW + JPG. In both cases, the JPG file will be both visible on the device and can be emailed out once you revert to your normal wi-fi or cellular connection.


The GX7’s wi-fi connection seen on the iPhone.


The GX7 under remote control by the iPhone, seen on the iPhone.
You can move the focus rectangle using touch-and-drag.
Touch the camera icon (circled) to take the picture.


Image downloaded to the iPhone. The logo indicates
this is a RAW image which cannot be emailed.

I have successfully tried the above with two iOS devices (iPhone5 and iPad Air) and one Android one (Nexus7 tablet).

While steup is a bit clunky, operation is simple and effective. It’s a nice feature to have if you want to email images on the run or control the GX7 remotely.