Monthly Archives: September 2018

Prescott, AZ

Photographs

Cowboys!

Dating from the 1860s, Prescott is in the center of Arizona, two hours northwest of Phoenix and was once the capital before Arizona became a state.


At some 5,000 feet above sea level temperatures are 10-20F cooler than in Phoenix, and snow in the winter is usual. The town is home to 40,000 residents. Prescott has been somewhat discovered in the two decades since I last visited it, long stretches of ugly strip malls sorrounding the city center testifying to Americans’ spirit of place. But the town center, the square dominated by the turn of the century courthouse, remains special.


The Courthouse.

I was using film on this visit and entry to the Courthouse dictates that one passes himself, his gonads and his film through a variety of irradiation gear because, you know, terrorists will almost certainly target downtown Prescott in their next go around. I asked the goon manning these devices to check with his boss man and he assured me my film stock would survive (status: it did) but no feedback on my privates or future prospects of child creation (status: uncertain). Kodak says that high speed emulsions risk fogging, but 100 ASA Ektar seems to have done fine.


Unending war. America’s commitment to world peace ceased in 1945,
that to unending war starting at the same time. We have yet to win
a conflict since that change in philosophy.



The Palace Saloon on Whiskey Row dates from 1877.


“Come up and see me some time”.
Inside the Palace Saloon. Here’s where the insane flexibility of digital is really missed.
No cranking the ISO up to 1600, so it meant jamming the Nikon F100 against
the pillar and praying that something would come out after a 1/2 second exposure.


Ten pointers and associated dignitaries and desperadoes adorn the walls of the Palace Saloon.


Ektar struggles mightily with the dynamic range here.


Wild West architecture survives on Whiskey Row.


Unpronounceable maybe, but the Hassayampa Inn dates
from 1927 and includes many fine Art Deco touches of the era.


The Elks Theater.


And serving the world’s finest hamburger, too. American Hype never ceases to amaze.

Nikon F100, 24-120mm AFD Nikkor, Kodak Ektar 100.

The 2018 iPad

iPad

Same size but faster.

With consumer protection laws having been destroyed by the current Pig Administration – along with civility, discourse, integrity, diplomacy, science, education and the environment – it’s little wonder that Apple gets away with its multi-layered planned obsolescence strategy for its older devices. Leading the charge is iOS which magically makes all older phones and tablets from Cupertino suddenly behave as if they are slogging through frozen molasses.

That symptom had very much affected my 4 years old iPhone6 which I upgraded to a used 128 gB iPhone 7 for a modest $345 after selling the iPhone6. The speed gains from the A10 CPU in the iPhone7 are very significant indeed. Why, it now performs as fast as the iPhone6 did four years ago.

A like infection of molassesitis also affected my iPad Air which, believe it or not, is approaching its fifth anniversary and after daily hard use remains as good as new. Except for the speed, that is. It’s now awful.

So it’s off to the local Apple Hipster Store to be met by a 14 year old sporting colored hair and tattoos, passing as an Apple salesperson (gender unclear) to pick up a new 128gB 2018 iPad. The ‘Air’ moniker seems to have been dropped and the top priced models are, Apple assures us, ‘Pros’. Uh huh.

Here are the comparisons of the current models:

A glance at pricing is an eye opener. I’ll focus solely on wi-fi versions as anyone with an iPhone can simply tether the iPad to the phone’s cellular service and get cellular connectivity. No need to spend an additional $130 on cellular circuitry in your iPad, incurring additional monthly fees in the process.

The costliest iPad, the 12.9″ iPad Pro costs $1149, which strikes me as an awful lot of money. By contrast, the 9.7″ regular iPad, albeit with 128gB rather than 512gB of memory and a marginally slower A10 CPU (same as used in the iPhone7) is just $429. No prizes for guessing which one I chose. Buying used makes no sense here as few recent iPad models are available used. People hang on to these devices a long time. My old iPad Air will sell for $180, making the upgrade cost just $249. That works for me.

So if ever the word ‘bargain’ can be associated with Apple hardware, I do believe the 2018 iPad qualifies.

With a 9.7″ screen, the same size as in the original iPad Air, size is perfect for anything from book reading to stock analysis or movies. And it fits travel luggage just fine.

How do the CPUs compare? Geekbench data show the following:

The 163% CPU speed gain on single core operations (which dominate use) is comparable to the speed gain of the iPhone7 over the iPhone6.

One reason Apple’s iPad sales have been so weak is that the device is very long lived and very well made, retaining high resale value unlike your Android or Amazon Fire piece of junk. Further, Little Johnny in the classroom does not mind too much if he has to wait a few more seconds for his iPad schoolbook to open. His major upgrade reason is that he just dropped the device on the floor. The life expectancy is high even in LJ’s uncertain hands and his affluent folks are welcome to pony up an outrageous $99 for the Apple Pencil so that he can scribble away to his heart’s content. Until he loses it, that is.


Now that’s what you call a downward trend.

iPad sales have pretty much flat lined since 2014 when the original iPad Air hit the market. For far too long the device was overpriced and seriously lagging in hardware compared to its iPhone siblings. Now Apple seems to have woken up, slashed prices at the lower end (my iPad Air ran some $600 5 years ago – call it $700 in today’s money, and with just 64gB of memory) and brought the innards up to speed – a far better camera (though, really, only folks with plastic pocket protectors use an iPad for photography), a speedy CPU and lots more memory at non-gouge prices. Add the fingerprint sensor in the 2018 model I bought and you have iPhone-like speed and functionality.

Mercifully the 2018 iPad retains the coaxial headphone/earbud socket and dispenses with face recognition, the latter an idiotic technology and the ultimate solution looking for a problem. What on earth, pray Apple, is wrong with fingerprint recognition? How about redirecting some of those vast R&D monies wasted on face recognition on making Siri actually work? Or improving voice recognition?

Fingerprint recognition works fine on the 2018 iPad though the nice haptic feedback found in iPhone7 is sadly missing. The Home button on the iPad is still a mechanical micro switch, not a zero wear touch sensor. That said, after 5 years of daily use the Home button on my original iPad Air continues to work well. Also missing is ForceTouch, a nice iPhone7 feature Apple appears to be discontinuing (Hint: It’s called Margin Greed).

I’m looking forward to a happy 5 years with the new 2018 iPad, and to an Administration which will once more honor Consumer and Human rights. Meanwhile I console myself with the thought that the 2018 base iPad may actually be a bargain. And iOS 12, which I just installed, does not cripple performance. In fact, it works well.

Ektar! Watch out.

Photographs

A color brute.

I made mention of Kodak’s Ektar 100 film here when I first started messing about with film after a decades long hiatus spent genuflecting to the digital god.

This is not an easy film to use. The contrast is brutally high and even a smidgeon of over-exposure means highlights will blow out and there is no way the limitations of the film medium will permit their recovery in post-processing.

So I have learned to set the Nikon F100 to -0.3 stops exposure correction using the +/- control and expect that for the next roll I will migrate to -0.7 stops, meaning I am rating Extar at 160 ASA and recovering detail thus in Lightroom:

Here’s an image snapped in Prescott AZ the other day – any hint of over-exposure would have blown that roof out:

Sure, the sky came out darker than it really was, but Extar is about drama, not realism. I get enough of the latter from the NYT daily, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Nikon F100, 24-120mm AFD Nikkor, Kodak Ektar 100.

AF and AFD Nikkors

Nikon lenses

A curious bunch.

Before Nikon migrated to AF lenses with built in linear focus motors – the AFS series – they marketed the AF and AFD ranges which used a screwdriver linkage in the lens for focusing, the actual focus motor being in the body of better film and digital Nikon SLRs.


The Nikon screw drive motor coupling on the body and in the lens mount.
The film era F100 works well with these and just as well with the latest AFS optics.

While a seemingly Rube Goldberg solution it has proved to be solid and reliable with millions of lenses made. The line started around 1986 and one or two are made to this day.

What is odd about the AF and AFD lenses (the later AFD versions added an enhanced metering chip for better results with flash; otherwise all else was identical) is just how much construction quality varied across the line. I have a half-dozen:


My small AF/AFD collection – 20/2.8, 50/1.8, 85/1.8 and 80-200/2.8 ED IF rear row;
35-70/2.8 and 24-120 f/3.5-5.6 front row.

The mechanical stand-outs here are the 80-200 and 35-70. The former is a two ring zoom, the latter a push-pull design which wears less well, the action becoming sloppy with age. Both are fabulously made and optically as good as it gets. The 80-200 is still sold new at over $1,000, my mint sample running me just $476. The limited range 35-70 is long discontinued (1987-2005) and is often found for under $200. Both are wonderful bargains.

The mechanical quality story with the others is quite a bit different. All these optics have proper aperture rings, a feature sadly deleted from the latest AFS line where apertures are set using one of the command dials on the body of the camera. The 50/1.8 is a piece of garbage. Cheap materials, rattling internals, awful controls. And dirt cheap at $70 used, mint. The 20mm ($230) and 85mm ($270) are mechanically so-so, but focus fast with the 85mm especially pleasant to use in the portrait studio where acquiring focus on the subject’s eyes is a piece of cake with AF especially fast.

And the 24-120mm is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. It comes with fairly pronounced barrel distortion, rather wobbly construction, an unspectacular f/5.6 at the long end yet it’s invariably found on my D700 or F100 when I want to lug only one optic along. The 24mm comes in especially handy for architectural images and the barrel distortion is easily removed in LR. At well under $100 for a mint one, it’s hard to pass by.

Where Nikon did not compromise is in the optical quality of these lenses. All are at least as good as their MF predecessors with the 80-200 considerably better (and bulkier) than what came before. It’s a weapon, not a lens. The 85mm, with its chintzy external plastic, can almost match the classic 85/1.8 MF at full aperture, equalling it at f/4 and below. And even that piece of garbage, the 50/1.8 is almost as good as the classic 50/2 MF – it’s 1.5 stops less sharp at f/2 compared to the old MF optic, but usable wide open even in the extreme corners. Finally the 20/2.8, which scarcely needs AF owing to large depth of field, is almost as good as the classic 20/3.5 UD MF …. made 21 years earlier.

If MF is not for you, or you are just feeling lazy, none of these economically priced AF/AFD Nikkors will let you down. Just make sure your body comes with the screwdriver coupling or AF will be lost. Sadly, none of these will AF on the new FF Z6/Z7 mirrorless bodies, which lack the screwdrive motor in either the body or the related adapter.

For an index of my Nikkor pieces click here.

Eggleston lives

Photographers

Bizarre.

Drive a few miles north from Dewey-Humboldt to Prescott on Highway 69 through central Arizona and you will see this seemingly abandoned Technicolor building perched amongst the desert magnificence:

William Eggleston (1939 – ), a one time Harvard professor, was the first photographer to have an exhibition of color snaps shown at MOMA in NYC. ‘Snaps’ is especially appropriate here because Eggleston’s choice of subject matter was supremely banal, all focus being on color. A poor photographer with a new vision which has been fooling the art crowd ever since. His prints were made using the long-discontinued Kodak Dye Transfer technology (think Technicolor for stills) and early originals command well into six figures

You can see a collage of his work by clicking this image:

Click the image.

When I tell you that his most famous image is that of the red ceiling in the top row, at $250,000 a pop, you will be able to draw your own conclusions. Eggleston waxes lyrical about the ‘blood red color’ in the original print, and so would you at that price.

Anyway, I was reminded of Eggleston’s banality and artlessness when passing this awfully painted building in the desert and could not resist pulling over for a couple of snaps.

Nikon F100, 24-120mm Nikkor AFD, Kodak Ektar 100. Processing and scanning by Sharpphoto.net.