No great new technology breakthroughs

If 2007 has been a disappointment on the hardware front for photographers it’s mostly owing to the lack of any new breakthrough technologies. Cameras added megapixels, generally for the worse, as too many on a small sensor means loss of sharpness. Imagine if one of those miniscule sensors in a consumer digital with, say, 10 mp, was translated to a full frame one. The typical 7mm x 5mm sensor is but one twenty-fourth of the area of a full frame one. So 10 mp would scale up to 240 mp on a full frame sensor! At that size, the pixels start to interfere with the wavelength of light and the result is that definition suffers. More is not always better.

Nikon finally added a full frame sensor in its D3 which is wonderful news for Nikon users, provided they have lenses to cover the full frame. Sony/Minolta and Panasonic seem to be getting ever more serious about their DSLRs and I would be delighted to see full frame digital cameras from both in 2008.

Except for the one issue of dust handling (and an LCD screen which is worthless in sunlight) I continue to be over-the-moon delighted with my Canon 5D and its pocket companion, the Panasonic Lumix LX1, with its glued on 28mm viewfinder. The latter awaits transplant to the DP1. Until the Sigma comes along, the Lumix is the modern Leica for this user. Smaller, quieter, cheaper than the M8 and with a great Leica lens, it does the job when the vast bulk of the 5D cannot be tolerated. I would expect the 5D to be replaced soon with a like body which adds dust removal for the sensor, like the other Canon DSLRs now boast. If you can live with the dust issue and don’t need 40″ x 60″ prints, the 5D looks to have a very long life indeed, especially in these times of rapid change.

My equipment has remained largely stable, with a few Canon primes added for good luck. Two of these bear comment. The 20mm – my second sample – is underwhelming in the extreme. Poor frame coverage wide open and with modest resolving power at best it’s an embarassment to a great maker of optics. Canon should dismantle any wide lens from Leica to see how it’s done. On the other hand, the 85mm f/1.8 Canon prime is every bit the equal of its predecessor in this household, the 90mm Apo Summicron-M Asph. At one tenth the price (yes, one tenth!) it’s the match of the German lens in every respect, adding auto focusing and aperture automation. A superb bargain. Plus if you drop it, you can get another for the price of filling up the gas tank in your SUV. Unlike the 24-105mm ‘dust pump‘ L zoom, the primes do not emulate a vacuum cleaner with the camera’s mirror box as collector.

For those with more sense than money, I recommend the Novoflex Magic Ball ball and socket head. New thinking, funky looks and very capable at a price which is a fraction of the ridiculous amount asked for those so-called ‘pro’ heads. After one year of solid use there’s nothing I would change.

If Sigma manages to pull its corporate finger out and give us the DP1 with a good, wide non-zoom, then any remaining reason for buying a Leica M8 goes away. The latter’s dated design, lack of focus automation and general bulk (what was small in 1954 when the M3 was introduced is now gargantuan), noisy shutter and poor quality control all around a crippled sensor which makes nonsense of your hyper-expensive ultra-wide M lenses, it really makes you wonder what they were thinking of at some $5,000 for a body without so much as a lens. If ever there was any doubt about my moving away from the M system, the M8 removed any remaining vestiges.

Printing continues merrily along with the Hewlett Packard DJ90. It seems to have been discontinued (though HP still lists it for $995 on its USA web site) but if you want big prints cheap, snap up a remaindered one. Far cheaper than the ones which replaced it albeit without the built-in spectrometer for matching print to screen. And the DJ90 uses dye-based inks, not pigments. I like dyes. The cheapest 18″ wide printer I can find comes from Canon at some $1900, so the DJ90 is an all time bargain.

My back-end for all of this continues to be the Apple Mac, albeit with a surprise change which saw sale of the iMac G5 in favor of a bottom-of-the-line MacBook. The Intel Core2Duo CPU is better and faster in every way, and a large, cheap 21.6″ Samsung widescreen makes things just so when processing pictures. Performance with Aperture is twice as fast – a very noticeable improvement. BUT, I have to report growing dissatisfaction with Apple. The Airport card in the MacBook failed in the first four weeks, only to be followed by intermittent (and very hard to diagnose) failure of the Apple 802.11n Extreme router. Both replaced at no charge, sure, but that’s a 100% failure rate on new Apple hadware acquired this year. Zero for three, Mr. iCon Jobs. Now the hold clicker on my iPhone earbuds has failed. Further, my initial caution about upgrading to Leopard was more than borne out with many reports of instability and incompatibility for an operating system which seems to be heavy on non-functional cosmetic glitz, comes with a criminally faulty back-up application (what could possibly be more important to get dead right?) and is simply not ready for prime time. I am sticking with OS Tiger until a few versions of the new cat have come and gone. Meanwhile, meet Leopard, the new Windows. (OK, nothing can be that bad, but I am miffed).

Back-ups continue to reside on external Lacie Firewire drives, controlled by SuperDuper! The latter’s value is greater than ever given Leopard’s shortcomings. Who would have thought it?

What of photographers? Among the great masters of the genre, I have greatly enjoyed getting to see again the work of Norman Parkinson and Guy Bourdin, fashion photographers and romantics both. Likewise, revisiting the austere classicism of those brothers under the skin, Hoyningen-Huene and Horst has been unalloyed pleasure. But maybe the greatest teacher this year has been Lord Clark in his Civilisation series which I bought mid-year. I last saw it 30 years ago. Clark opens our eyes to the Renaissance in such a cajoling, loving way that we can but learn from the old masters he so lovingly portrays. As photographers there are few better starting points for a visual journey. Finally, it would be churlish not to point out the work of Saul Leiter – an original if ever there was one.

But easily the most satisfying thing I did as a photographer in 2008 was to finally have my own one man show. That felt really good! Next time, though, I am getting a college student to mount, matt and frame the work. Life is too short to waste on this sort of thing.

And finally, this one’s easy. Gadget of the Year? It has to be the iPhone. A near perfect device out of the box, despite its revolutionary complexity under that elegant skin, it also happens to be a (not very good) camera. This is the future of mobile computing.

Vendor off the year, yet again, is the wonderful B&H. They always ship on time, when it say ‘In Stock’ on their web site it is and I’m awfully glad I am no longer a New York City resident when it comes to sales taxes. I had to exchange the first copy of my 20mm Canon f/2.8 lens (genuinely awful) for a second (pretty awful) and they gave me no grief about the process, which was handled expeditiously. Thank you, B&H. Runner-up? Not a photographic vendor, but I have been overwhelmed with the quality of support from that most reviled of vendors, AT&T. When I had an issue with consolidating my land line and cell accounts onto one monthly bill, AT&T said they would check back in a month to see all is well (sure, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you) and …. amazingly …. they actually did! And they didn’t even try to sell me anything when they called back. I did what any rational consumer of staples would do with a massive multi-quarter recession/depression facing profligate America. I bought the stock. For those of you who have spent the last century in a cave, the stock’s symbol is T.

Biggest disappointment of the year? Blurb’s lies about the quality of the paper used in their online books, which come printed on toilet paper rather than the 80lb material promised. Our culture may have institutionalized lying (politicians, doctors, lawyers, marketers, Wall Street, the military, etc., etc.) but that’s no reason to support liars with your money if you can help it.

Greatest irritation? Persistent spam ‘comments’ from morons predominately resident in Russia. None of these can get through, but will someone please bring back the Cold War?