Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Arnolfini Wedding

Paintings

The first recorded use of the fish eye lens.

If you had to choose the finest ‘photographic’ painting in London’s National Gallery, it would certainly be Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus‘. No photographer has ever captured the moment so well.

And your second choice from that collection would surely be Botticelli’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man‘ for its singular focus and color pallette.

But the Arnolfini Wedding would not be far behind. Painted in 1434 it is the oldest of the three and arguably the most technically complex. It’s all there – advanced perspective, lighting to put Vermeer to shame, tight composition.

All the indicia of wealth are there – the fine clothing, the costly surroundings, the little dog, the fruit carelessly disposed at left. The man is in charge, dour as he may be, the spouse newly pregnant looking up to her man in supplication. She is so much property. But there is sublime magic here and it’s in the convex mirror which Jan van Eyck has cheekily included right in the center. Look closer.

The first vision is of the backs of his subjects. Look closer and you see van Eyck and his assistant. And van Eyck doubtless got paid for painting himself. Wonderful. And the cheeky bugger has signed it ‘van Eyck was here’.

What photograph ever accomplished as much?

Lightroom 6

Lightroom

An upgrade in need of work.

Lightoom 6 became available yesterday and you can either be suckered into Adobe’s Creative Cloud rental offering or you can buy the stand alone upgrade for $79 if you use LR 4 or 5. Given that Adobe cannot keep even its crown jewel – the code to Photoshop – secure (a recent hack saw much of that code stolen, not to mention 38 million users’ details, by Ivan and his mates) I bought the stand alone upgrade and you should know Adobe does not make it easy.

The default upgrade path from within LR5 takes you to their Creative Cloud page and there is no link to the stand alone version. How thoroughly disingenuous is that? To get there:

  • Go to this link
  • Go to ‘Photoshop Lightroom 6 – $149’ and click ‘Buy’
  • Change your purchase from ‘Full’ to ‘Upgrade’ – Adobe misses no opportunity to try and cheat you
  • Select the version of LR you own – LR5 in my case
  • Check-out. It’s $79 for the upgrade in the US, doubtless much more abroad as you can bet they will not miss any opportunity to rip off their users

By contrast the CC rental version has Adobe dialing into your computer every so often to check you are legit. You really want to give access to your machine to these clowns to whom business integrity and honorable treatment of its customers are anathema? Further, over the usual 2 year upgrade cycle, you will pay $240 in rent compared with $79 for purchase. Sure, the $240 gets you Photoshop but that leaves your computer vulnerable to attack, so I recommend buying a used copy of CS5 or CS6 as the CC ‘enhancements’ are all noise. Alternatively, download the free Gimp which has most of PS’s functionality at an attractive price – as in ‘free’.

The download is 762MB and took some 15 minutes. The upgrade will ask for the serial number of your previous version so you had better have it handy or you will spend the next year of your life begging the customer-hostile people at Adobe for it. That’s if you can even get through to Mumbai. Good luck with that.

That’s the nasty stuff out of the way for a business which treats its customers like dirt, and always has. But then whatcha gonna do? Use discontinued Apple Aperture or, worse, the execrable Photos which just replaced iPhoto – great if selfies are your thing, I suppose? Nope, if you want timely RAW upgrades and an excellent processing, cataloging and printing app, hold your nose and buy LR. And as your latest digital camera will be replaced two years hence and you can bet the RAW format in its replacement will be incompatible with anything you have, LR (or PS) are the only game in town, with PS being a CC only product now. (I still happily use CS5 in the desktop version).

After download and input of the new and old serial numbers (LR6 resolutely failed to find LR5 on either my Mac Pro or my MacBook Air, which is about par for the course with Adobe software upgrades), installation takes another 3 minutes or so. The catalog format has changed so before you upgrade it make sure you have a good backup of the old one, just in case:

If you really like to waste time and clog up your processing resources, be sure to enable Apple Cloud sharing; I turned mine off faster than you could say Adolf Schickelgruber:

One of the most exciting aspects of LR6 is that someone placed a whoppee cushion under the slothful programming staff and finally got them to use your graphics card to help in sharing the load with the CPU in processing tasks. Or so they say – see Panoramas, below. CPU use was awful in the first place – just run Activity Monitor in LR5 or earlier and you will see very few of your CPUs cores being used. By sharing the task with the GPU (much as Apple’s FCPX 10.1 and later does) Adobe is promising to up the processing power. Go to Preferences->Performance and make sure this box is checked – mine was by default:

Under Catalog Settings I turn off automated back-up as I use Carbon Copy Cloner to do that – no need to trust Adobe with anything here:

LR6 trashed my Identity Plate (the logo displayed at top left in the app) and, wouldn’t you know it, refuses to allow me to edit it:

Oh, well. So this is what I now see:

Performance? The first switch from the Library to the Develop module takes a few seconds, like it always did; thereafter flips between the two are instantaneous, like they always were in LR5.

New features:

HDR processing has now migrated from PS to LR. You select the images to merge, go to Photo->PhotoMerge->HDR (or hit Control-H) and after about 20 seconds your HDR image is ready (timed with two Panny GX7 RAW files). Nice:

Note the processing options, above.

Photos->PhotoMerge->Panoramas (control-P) is another feature which has migrated from PS – can you spell ‘Cannibalization’? I merged 8 RAW Panny GX7 image into one (assembly took LR a scant 15 seconds) but the actual Merge process was bog slow at 10 minutes – much longer than it takes in PS CS5. Further, checking Activity Monitor I saw CPU use maxed out at 15% which is execrable, and given that I have an excellent GPU (the Nvidia GTX680) in my dual CPU 12-core Mac Pro it’s hard to see what, if anything, is doing the work here. While this was going on my Mac Pro pretty much locked up and I could do nothing else. Plus I had to help the process along by clicking the ‘x’ by the processing bar a couple of times, thinking the app had locked up. Bad job Adobe.


It takes 15 seconds to get here. Then 10 minutes to do the Merge.

It gets worse. While both the PS and LR merged files show identical resolution and export of either to a full size JPG took just 17 seconds, the LR6 version is all of 52.5MB in size, compared with just 28.6MB for the PS CS5 version. Clearly the Merge function in LR6 is not ready for prime time.

The best that can be said about the core functions in LR6 is that Adobe has managed not to screw them up. Of the new ones HDR is OK, Panoramas is a disaster. The Books module continues to only offer Blurb as the publisher and it’s far easier to use the separate Blurb app than the mess in Lightroom. So why upgrade? For the same reason you need to junk Apple’s Aperture – because new RAW formats will not be made available in either Apple’s failed product or in LR5 or earlier.

Speed in general: It’s pretty mind boggling to see how many writers are simply repeating Adobe’s claim that LR6 is faster. Mouthing a press release or lying because you derive revenue from touting Adobe products is not the same as testing and there is no discernible speed increase in LR6 compared to LR5. Indeed, cold starts are a few seconds slower and the first flips to the Develop or Print modules behave likewise. This on a dual CPU 12-core Mac Pro with lots of RAM and an excellent GTX680 GPU. If you are buying LR6 because you think it’s faster than LR5 you are a sucker who needs to learn that the vast majority of photo gear writers are conflicted putzes who share Adobe’s standards of integrity.

A cynical non-upgrade:

The overall impression I came away with regarding LR6 is: “What have they been doing these past two years? An HDR module (code lifted from PS), a Panorama module (code messed up and lifted from PS) and claims for non-existent speed incresases? That’s it?”

As for getting help (F1) within LR6, Adobe again illustrates it’s attention to detail and this is what I get:


Help(less) Lightroom 6.

Update May 9, 2015:

Adobe’s mendacity regarding GPU processing and purported speed gains is shown well in the chart below, based on a recent survey where two thirds of users saw no speed increase or a drop in performance:

Click the chart for the story.

Wake up call

Hardware

To Canon and Nikon.

Canon and Nikon, in their adherence to their DSLR flapping mirror upper-end camera bodies, are comparable to Kodak during its last decade.

Kodak, let us recall, invented consumer digital imaging but put it on the back burner as there would always be film. It had made them, all of Rochester NY and their many shareholders rich for a century. Why change now? The comparison with the head-in-the-sand behavior of Canon & Nikon with regard to upper end cameras is apt. Canon & Nikon know how to make mirrorless cameras but refuse to permit the technology to permeate to their top end offerings. Much more of this and their DSLRs will be to their future what film was to Kodak’s.

Now let us turn our attention to Apple. Miserable as some of their software efforts are – Photos (see yesterday’s column) or the incessant dumbing down of OS X with useless bells and whistles – no such accusations can be leveled at their hardware efforts. The MacBook is the best laptop on the planet, the Mac Pro is a high end workhorse and the iPhone is the touchstone for quality and performance in the cell phone world. And the iPhone’s camera is simply spectacular, improving significantly with every new iPhone.

Unlike Canon and Nikon and the Kodak of yore, Apple refuses to rest on its laurels. Recall a while back that Olympus emulated Hasselblad’s earlier efforts in multi-image digital photography, with the sensor shifted a pixel or two between images which are then superimposed for better quality. The Olympus camera, as my review here disclosed, the EM5 Mark II, is an ergonomic disaster and I returned mine 24 hours after receipt. But that in no way invalidates the concept.


Click the image for the article.

Well, Apple has gone one better and acquired an Israeli company named LinX which adopts a like concept but takes advantage of the very small sensor size required by the iPhone and instead of using one sensor and multiple shots with pixel shifting uses multiple sensors with but one snap. Immediately the disabling aspect of the Hasselblad and Olympus designs goes away, namely that neither maker’s camera is suitable for photographing moving subjects, be it sports, people in motion or those swaying branches in the trillionth imitation of Ansel’s birches in Yosemite. Once the images are simultaneously recorded on the multiple sensors, they can be combined in software later. Brilliant and kudos to Apple for thinking well down the road and investing shareholders’ capital accordingly. Add folded zoom lenses, which use a mirror to avoid the depth demands of moving lens elements, and you have the death knell for the tired offerings of yesteryear from Canon and Nikon.

Will the annuitants wake up in time and change their ways? I think it’s already too late. The lead time and capital required to catch up with hardware leaders like Apple are too great. It’s all over bar the writing. Behemoths take a long time to die …. but in the digital world that is far less time than ever before. Just ask around in Rochester.

Apple Photos for OS X

Software

Another failure.


Another purported solution looking for a problem. Apple Watch, anyone?

Once upon a time – many years ago – iPhoto was a sweet application. Import of images was easy, addition of text always worked with no frustration and creation of customized web pages using either the built in code or aftermarket plugins was easy, fast and elegant.

Apple tried to get serious about still photo processing with Aperture but it was flawed software which never had the company’s full attention. The design was chaotic, with no logical work flow (the description ‘scatterbrained’ comes to mind), the machine demands were very high so you had to have the latest Apple hardware to make it run at half decent speeds (shock news there) and the application only worked with OS X.

The best thing I ever did with Aperture was to migrate to Lightroom which, even in its early versions, ran fast, was logical and far easier to use. Adobe has always done a great job of keeping current with the myriad of RAW formats coming to the market seemingly weekly, updates coming soon after new cameras are released. LR is now so capable that round trips to Photoshop for regular work are rare. Lightroom remains fast, compact and as useful on OS X as it is in Windows, the files readable in either. Adobe’s greatest challenge is likely in deciding where to draw the line in not cannibalizing its Photoshop cash cow any further.

I migrated to Lightroom in 2008 and frankly the signs for Aperture’s demise were already on the wall, with increasingly infrequent updates and interminable RAW delays, interspersed with constant bugs. It took many years for Aperture to die, however, the product finally being put out of its misery last year, but not before Apple cynically offered cheap/free versions for reasons I cannot fathom. Those who delayed conversion to the superior Adobe application(s) merely increased their conversion problem, which they are struggling with right now. Loyalty to software in a fast changing world is futile.

Now Apple has added Photos to OS 10.10.3 (Yosemite) and a like app to iOS. I downloaded OS 10.10.3 – mostly to see what else it would break – and toyed some with Photos. (If you use Trim Enabler for your SSD management and a ‘made for Apple’ Nvidia GTX680 GPU in your Mac Pro as I do, be sure to disable Trim Enabler as the chances are you will lose all video when moving to 10.10.3).

I wish I had not wasted my time with Photos. I use iPhoto for quick snaps which have no place in my ‘serious’ Lightroom catalog and generate occasional web pages for our family albums. The conversion process from the iPhoto catalog was seamless, and the iPhoto catalog remains accessible. Thank goodness.

Much of the sorting capabilities of iPhotos remains – Photos, Albums, Projects – to the point where you really wonder what has changed. Then you realize that there is no Web page output – you can create bulky ‘m4v’ slideshows, but not traditional thumbnail/big image web pages. The decent processing controls in iPhoto have been dumbed down for the iOS generation – people with poor visual sense and undemanding presentation standards.

You can find (normally hidden) adjusters for Sharpening, Definition, Vignetting, White Balance and Levels, and like these the excellent Highlights and Shadows adjusters are hidden, the assumption being that anything other than a slider is too much for the pea brained iOS mentality of the user. Stupefying. Yes, you can still print from Photos, but I recommend exporting the original to Lightroom or Photoshop and doing the job properly where you will see a professional and familiar User Interface.


The controls are there if you can find them.
The dumbing down of the UI continues apace in Cupertino.

Annotating images with text is a joke. It has gone from buggy in the last version of iPhoto to near useless in Photos. The only available choice is for the text to appear on the image itself and there’s no way that I can find of using a neutral background for the text, meaning it inevitably gets lost in the image. Sorry, but EXIF data alone do not cut it for family albums.

Of course, iPhoto, while still usable, is dead. New RAW formats will doubtless not be supported so unless you propose to stick with your existing gear, it will be curtains as soon as you upgrade. And given the modern 2 year life of digital cameras ….

You have to wonder why Apple even bothered here. Or maybe not. Given the shallow mind set of the typical iOS consumer (‘selfies’, for goodness’ sake), it’s what he deserves.

King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks

Photographs

Towering might.

The giant sequoia that grow here at elevations of 5-7,000 feet are the oldest known living things, with ages up to 3,200 years. A half-day drive from San Francisco, these adjacent national parks are less favored by tourists than Yosemite, which is all the better. However, quite why many parents see fit to bring their infants remains a mystery – their children would be safer at home and certainly cannot comprehend what is on view here. And their incessant screaming hardly helps with the spirit of place.

I spent a couple of days there with my son, staying at the only game in town – the Wuksachi Lodge – and we had a great time in the 50F daytime crisp weather. At this time of the year several roads remain closed but the major throughway – The Generals’ Highway – was clear with no snow in sight.


Winston atop the 6,725 ft Moro Rock overlooking the Great Western Divide.
The thin air at this altitude makes for a solid workout on the way up.


Sunning among the giants.


Fallen giant. Beetles have created an abstract art form.


The General Sherman tree showing fire damage to the bark from hundreds of years ago.
A youngster at 2,200 years or so, the Sherman in Sequoia NP is 25 feet in diameter and weighs over 2,000 tons.


We enjoyed picture perfect weather.


Many sequoias grow in close proximity to one another.


Thick bark confers fire resistance and high tannin content prevents disease.


Siamese twins.


The Generals’ Highway runs through the parks – a miracle of roadbuilding.


The light snow cover on the peaks testifies to California’s drought.
Instead of building a water pipeline from nearby Canada, our politicians – devoid of imagination or business acumen – are enforcing conservation.


Death from toppling over is the major cause of the giants’ demise, owing to the shallow root structure.


The 1,700 year old General Grant tree in King’s Canyon – sequoias routinely shed branches as they grow.

All snaps taken by my son Winston on his Panasonic LX100 except for the first, taken by me on an iPhone 6.

Big boys:

Local roads:

If you enjoy a nice drive the route below is recommended – it goes through both parks and skirts their west side along Dry Creek Drive (a B road, but drivable) via Three Rivers in the south-west corner, as beautiful a loop as you could hope for, and mostly deserted on the weekday we did it. The pointer denotes the Wuksachi Lodge – maybe the most overpriced motel in America:


Click the image for route details.

Bikers should check out The Mountain House in a lovely location where Dry Creek Drive and Highway 245 meet.