Category Archives: Photography

Serious magic

iPhone

Night Mode

With the nights getting colder, it’s time for the annual overhaul of the propane heater on the patio. This exceptionally bad design dictates that something fails annually. Over the four years of ownership, the pilot has got clogged, the tilt switch failed and finally, this year, the pilot had to be completely replaced as it was beyond redemption. (The main burner will not ignite if the pilot is faulty). $18 and some sweat equity did the trick. Quite why so commonly used a device should stick with 1950s technology last seen in the Eisenhower administration defeats me, but the chances are if you eat at an outdoor restaurant equipped with these propane heaters, half of them will not be working. The lead chap at Chernobyl probably cut his teeth on propane patio heater design.

As an example, the tilt switch, which is a safety device intended to disable the main burner in the event the heater is accidentally tipped over, uses a mercury switch last seen 50 years ago in domestic HVAC systems. It is designed to fail and I simply bypassed it when it did so. The risk of a tip over in my location is zero. One thing less to go wrong.

The spark starter finally failed this year and I have given up on replacing it in favor of a wand type gas lighter. Simple, fail proof and cheap.

To cut a long story short I finally got the heater working and when it works it really is an object of wonder, putting out amounts of heat that electric alternatives can only dream about. A 5 gallon propane tank last for many hours.

Add the firepit (no pilot, no sparker, no tilt switch and bog reliable as a result), which also uses bottled propane, and you have a pretty jolly setting for watching the TV at night. As we fired up another episode of the wonderful ‘Endeavour’ series about the early life of Inspector Morse, starring that fine Welsh actor Shaun Evans, an actor far superior to the overrated John Thaw in the BBC original, it struck me that it was time to again report on the magic of Night Mode in the iPhone 11 Pro.

Winston enjoys some late night TV.

The sole illumination for this snap was the two propane sources plus the smallish flat screen TV some 10 feet from my son. This image is ‘straight out of camera’ and hand held. Night Mode kicks in automatically when needed.

The just announced iPhone 12 Pro further improves Night Mode by enhancing focus accuracy using the newly added LIDAR detector. I can’t wait.

iPhone 12 Pro

iPhone

Another nail ….



Hastening the demise of the DSLR.

…. in the coffin of DSLR and mirrorless camera makers. Yes, Zeiss just released an Android based mirrorless which will run you $6,000 and will get you hacked at no extra charge. A fool and his money …. But innovative?

The point is that innovation in traditional camera design is notable for its absence. Nikon makes ugly ducklings cobbled together by a committee, Sony makes more models than you can shake a stick at and Canon is focusing on multi-megapixel high ISO sensors no one needs. ISO 100,000 and 80 megapixels? Essential, no? And they all cost more than the iPhone which can be upgraded annually for less than $500 and does lots of other things than just take pictures.

You can read my iPhone 11 Pro user review here and the iPhone 12 Pro comes with no surprises, kaizen being the order of the day. Perhaps the most interesting new feature for photographers is the addition of a LIDAR detector. The newly added Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging sensor makes nighttime focusing even more accurate, building on the already stellar Night Mode missing from your $3,000 mirrorless SLR.

Suffice it to say that the iPhone 11 Pro saw me selling my two Nikon FF bodies, some two dozen Nikkor lenses and two Panasonic GX7 bodies with four more lenses. I would have sold the china cabinet this lot needed for storage, but a small thing called COVID got in the way.

On the phone front there is 5G, a not-ready-for-prime-time feature awaiting the build out of US networks, but, hey, trendy as heck.

More when my iPhone 12 Pro arrives here, my order delayed by the wait for my favorite Lameeku wallet case to be released… Yes, the iPhone 12 Pro is differently shaped than the iPhone 11 Pro and that may be the greatest new ‘feature’ of all, for any change to the iPhone’s awful handling can only be an improvement. When Steve released the slab sided iPhone 4 in 2011 – a form factor emulated by the iPhone 12 Pro – he stated that his goal was to emulate the quality feel and experience of using a Leica. What he did not mention was that the iPhone was a fraction of the cost of the Leica rangefinder and did not break down. These two attributes carry over to the iPhone 12 Pro. There is still no optical zoom lens, but I would think that will be added next year when Apple perfects the periscope zoom design which will fit within its existing case designs.

Hit with the ugly stick

Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

Hard to imagine something that looks worse.

I am a long time fan of Nikon’s hardware. Click here and you can access an index of the dozens of Nikon related articles on this blog.

And, for the most part, while it’s performance that matters, it never hurts if the hardware is pleasant to contemplate and Nikon’s aesthetics have been generally decent, if not stellar. Sure, there’s none of the elegance of Pentax or the beauty of early Leica M bodies, but Nikons like the legendary Nikon F brought with their designs a macho sensibility to complement their wonderful utility.

So I look at their latest mirrorless body, and I weep:



The Nikon camel – a horse designed by a committee.

And the ‘designers’ – if there were any – attached a quite stupendously ugly lens to this cobbled together excrescence of a body. Yeah, I know how to make good pictures, but with something this grotesque in my hands, the task becomes impossibly challenging.

Vote!

Ramblings

Time to clean the Augean Stables of Republicans.



Send Pig home.

Four years ago – goodness, it seems like 400 – I warned of the coming catastrophe which would result from electing Pig to the White House. It gives me no pleasure to see that I was right and it is a source of eternal shame that 60 million American morons were wrong. They have got what they deserve which includes:

  • 200,000 American murdered by an uncaring Pig
  • Millions more infected with the coronavirus
  • Record unemployment
  • Destruction of our system of laws
  • Destruction of the Unites States Supreme Court and of the judiciary
  • Criminality of mind bending proportions in the Pig family
  • Rule by American ‘Christians’ whose expertise is in looking the other way
  • Destruction of the USPS
  • An existential threat to affordable health care

It bears repeating what I wrote on April 14, 2020 when comparing Pig with Richard III:

A note to Pig voters: This blog is about Photographs, Photographers and Photography. It ordinarily eschews politics. However, at this time of national tragedy, a tragedy whose number of deaths has been compounded by a psychopath masquerading as President, it is every American’s duty to protest loudly and to work for regime change. If you voted for Pig last time and have come around to seeing the error of your ways, all well and good. We all make mistakes. However, if you still fall in the trap of believing that Pig is making America great again and propose voting for him again, not only are you emphatically not welcome here, your very presence disgusts me. Do the right thing. Go elsewhere with your stupidity, your ignorance and your bigotry.

* * * * *

Now we are all voting early as the US Postal Service cannot be depended on to deliver our ballots on time. And yes, I do still believe that, as Churchill once put it, “Americans will always do the right thing, having first tried all the alternatives”. So it’s not enough to vote. It’s the right thing to vote Blue up and down the ballot. Put aside partisan differences and minor quibbles. Forget nonsense about abortion and gun rights. Noise. These have nothing to do with the peaceful governance of a great nation.

Yes, your choice is between a murderous criminal grifter and his enablers or a 77 year old with a GPA of 2.9 who has accomplished nothing in his life other than being on the taxpayers’ payroll for 47 years. But there’s a key distinction. One is a Pig. The other is a decent man, mediocre as he is. Today decent mediocrity is what America needs. Kick Pig and his Slovenian Slut and their many anchor babies out of the sty in which they reside.

Sony a7C

Cameras, Panasonic

Small and full frame.



Great specs in a small package.

By far my favorite camera before I went 100% iPhone and sold all my ‘regular’ hardware was the MFT Panasonic GX7. Small, a Leica format design with an offset finder eyepiece and an electronic shutter stealth mode for silent operation. Paired with the stock 12-35mm Pro Zoom optic, which is excellent, it was the best thing until the iPhone 11Pro came along. I banged away with that GX7 for the best part of a decade and loved every moment of it. Once you set up the menus for your preferred way of operation it became a high quality point-and-shoot delivering excellent image quality and came with a small fill-in flash built in. Sweet.

If the GX7 had a limitation it related to the handling of high contrast subjects, where highlights were all too prone to burn out, even using RAW, dictating underexposure by a stop or two and recovery of the shadows in Lightroom. Panny had crammed 18 megapixels into the 0.375 square inch sensor and it showed. That’s 48 mp/square inch.

So when Sony announced the a7C the other day, it was of immediate interest. A GX7-styled body bit with a full frame 24 megapixel sensor, meaning just 16 mp/square inch. That’s a huge drop in pixel density, which augurs well for dynamic range. But what is especially surprising about the new body is its small size. Compare:

Panny GX7 – 4.8″ x 2.8″ x 2.2″, or 29.6 cubic inch volume, weighing 402 grams without lens
Sony a7C – 4.9″ x 2.8″ 2.2″, or 30.2 cubic inches, weighing 509 grams

Add a lens to each – the stock zoom – and weight increases by a few grams.

So the Sony’s specifications are impressive indeed. The question has to be asked. Does MFT still make sense, given the image quality trade-offs?

One big plus over the GX7 is battery life. Sony claims over 700 shots on a charge; I rarely managed 200 with the GX7.

Now if they added great iPhone features like phone calls, cellular connectivity, night mode, and insanely small size and weight, that would be really something. Oh, and a built-in flash would be nice. Also, at $1,800 Sony is asking too much. At $1,100-1,200 it makes sense. Heck, that’s as much as my iPhone 11Pro.