Yearly Archives: 2019

Looking to the future

iPhone, Photography

Small sensors rule.


Apple’s latest acquisition.

Let’s face it, the photography world needs yet another 35 mm f/1.4 or 24-70 mm f/2.8 lens for full frame as much as it needs a hole in the head.

The future is not with more optics but with better computational photography and Apple knows this better than anyone, with the dramatic improvements in quality visible in the output of the iPhone 11 Pro. Yes, those Sony optics and sensors in the iPhone 11 Pro are tremendous but the secret sauce is in the code. Any phone maker can buy the optics from Sony. Only Apple has the code and the fabulous A13 CPU to drive all those instructions. So Apple’s latest acquisition makes eminent sense while the competition at the major SLR manufacturers continues to make optics no one needs. Like the Pentagon, these camera makers are fighting the previous war.

It’s the likes of Sony and Nikon who should be buying these businesses with their smarts, not Apple, if they are to have any chance of survival. I think those chances fall daily. These companies are like Kodak whose board of directors believed film would never die.

Apple has already shown with its latest cell phones that the need for bulky digital gear falls daily. To all those skeptics who say that small sensors will never equal the output from big gear, I would remind them of what Oscar Barnack accomplished with the Leica a century ago. “Small camera, big picture“ applies as much today as it did when Oscar was a lad.

The photography future is with small, leaving just a few masochists to hump around heavy equipment bags and tripods. Increasingly, their results are indistinguishable from those produced by cell phones in capable hands.

Desperation at Nikon

Nikon bodies

Shameless revenue grab.

Time to hire the investment bankers at Nikon and sell the parts while they have some value left:


Gimme the money. Click the image for the story.

There is no comparison with like action by Apple. An iPhone with its intricate weather sealing and complex internals is not something for the local butcher to fix and, last I checked, Apple was not going out of business. Also, unlike Nikon, their 80 million iPhones sold annually do not arrive faulty or with serious design flaws. Quick, how many iPhone recalls do you remember?

Nikon is failing owing to Apple’s superb iPhone cameras, made by Sony, with Cupertino brains. That’s why they are making this pathetic revenue grab. Amusingly, the picture in the linked article testifies to Nikon’s incompetence – the stripped camera is being handled with bare, greasy fingers.

It has long been Nikon’s policy to refuse repair at the factory places for ‘grey’ market imports – the sort of thing companies like B&H was offloading in boatloads when they were not allegedly cheating on sales taxes. Now you will not be able to get your Nikon fixed anywhere but at Nikon. So when your $5,000 D6 ‘professional’ behemoth fails, get in line or do as Jaguar owners of yore did. Buy two. One for use, the other in the repair shop.

Horst in colour

Photographers

A master.

One of the pleasant outcomes of the V&A’s Horst show was the scanning and printing of his colour transparencies.

Introduced in 1935, and much improved shortly thereafter, Kodak made Kodachrome slide film in sizes up to 11″ x 14″. Horst opted for 8″ x 10″ and the Vogue magazine archive of his slides holds many originals never before printed.


Click the image for the video.

The video explains that high quality drum scans of these originals preserved all the detail and dynamic range, something only recently improved upon by large format digital imaging. However, the vaunted curators really need to go back to curator school. Early in the video you see old copies of the magazine handled with cotton gloves. All well and good. Now jump to 4:22. Yup. Those fish and chip greased up fingers are used to manhandle the priceless originals. Let’s hope those drum scans are well backed up because the originals are not going to make it at this rate.

One of the key points the video illustrates is that Horst, during his 60 year career at Vogue, made the transition from monochrome to colour seamlessly, unlike many others. (Ever seen an HC-B colour snap? Ugh!). Horst’s classical, static compositions, using simple sets, helped but this master excelled at everything photographic. The video is well worth watching, especially if this is your first introduction to Horst’s work.

Lies for WASPs

Photographs

Fool me once….


The latest unstitched invitation.

There are no blacks, Hispanics or Chinese in LL Bean’s world. Or maybe they know I am none of those and choose the cover image to suit their algorithm. No, their cover models are always white, in their late twenties, suffer from inherited wealth and smart choice of parents and oh! so happy in their blissful unawareness of the working world.

And there’s always a dog. They must know I love dogs. Maybe they bought that ‘intelligence’ from the thieves at Google as I have been known to surf dog images. Especially those of Border Terriers.

And the teeth – the dog’s and the WASPs’ – are always perfect, as befits American marketing at its best.

I have put up with LL Bean’s pandering for years and even visited their mega-store in lovely Freeport, Maine when we were checking out the ‘BBC’ colleges (Bates, Bowdoin and Colby) in that remote state, coming away suitably impressed. With the store and the schools. Heck, I bought their clothing for years, both for myself and my son.

Now, no more. Every Item of clothing bought in the last year or two has failed prematurely. If it has buttons, they come off soon after purchase. And I am about as likely to sew on a button as I am to change a diaper, which is to say not at all. Seams split as soon as you look at them. Though sized correctly, the arm seam on LL Bean’s ubiquitous polo shirts splits after a few months wear, and that’s at $45 a pop. Amazon’s ‘Essentials’ line runs all of $15 each, the seams never split and they last forever. Which is a good deal longer than LLB’s. For all I know Amazon’s are made of the same Chinese cloth, if stitched elsewhere. What I do know is that I get three for the price of one. LLB’s slippers? Aptly named as the insoles in LLB’s slip out after mere weeks of wear. I did not know these were a DIY project when I shelled out for them. They could at least have included a tube of adhesive.

So keep sending those WASP catalogs, LLB, as I love the cover images, so expertly crafted and targeted, especially those of the dogs. But I will not be darkening your order desk again. You have fooled me too many times.

A peaceful lunch

Motorcycles

In the desert.


Before the rumble.

Not disclosed in this image is the violent aftermath, the result of my pointing out to the pig riding the Harley that his machine was 90% made of Chinese steel. The other 10% is the Japanese parts. He took umbrage and I had to lay out his 400lbs of blubber using nothing more than my bare fists. Real Men do not need tire irons.

iPhone 11 Pro snap.