Category Archives: Photography

Another SSD for the HackPro

Hackintosh

Gearing up for Lion.

As OS X Lion will likely involve the usual amount of experimentation to get it working properly on the HackPro, I have added a fourth drive to the computer and its second SSD, so it now contains two SSDs and two HDDs.

The SSDs act as OS and application drives (boot and back-up) whereas the HDDs contain data and back-up data. They also contain OS Snow Leopard as EyeOne Match, the profiling utility for my EyeOne colorimeter, will not work with Lion.

In addition to having an SSD for experimenting with Lion, I also gain a super-fast back-up boot drive. On monthly testing of the HDDs as boot drives I have been increasingly struck by just how slow these are when booted from. After four trouble free months with my first Intel SSD it made sense to add a second. For the test phase I will partition it into two partitions, using Disk Utility; one will contain a straight clone of the existing SSD boot and application drive, and Lion, once released, will reside on the other until fully debugged. Thereafter both will be converted to Lion and Snow Leopard will remain on the HDDs for use with EyeOne Match.

The second SSD will continue to act as a low risk testbed for any new software changes or upgrades.

This is how things will look:

Drive topology after adding the second SSD to HackPro.

I strongly recommend you add an SSD to your work computer. Once you have experienced the speed there is no going back. I paid $230 for each Intel X25-M 120gB SSD.

The HackPro with two SSDs installed.

The incremental heat output and current draw of the second SSD are so low that no additional cooling precautions need be taken in the exceptionally well ventilated Antec Sonata III case with its generously spec’d 500 watt power supply. Installation, which means attaching the SSD to the provided mounting plate and the plate to the Antec’s slide in carrier, plus the connection of power and data cables took FU Steve all of twenty minutes. Carbon Copy Cloner took 27 minutes to clone the existing SSD Boot drive to the new backup SSD, and it needed but two more minutes to verify that the backup was bootable and to add the backup job (Boot->SSD Bak) to Carbon Copy Cloner’s list of automated, nightly backups. You really don’t want to forget that last step!

Partitioning:

As the new backup SSD will also be used as a test bed for OS Lion, to be released next month, I first partitioned it into 90gB and 30gB partitions, using Disk Utility. The latter partition, named ‘Lion Test’, at 30gB, will be more than large enough for OS and selected application testing.

Partitioning the SSD Bak drive to make space for OS Lion.

TRIM:

TRIM is the software code which helps manage garbage on an SSD drive. Apple’s just enabled it in OS Snow Leopard 10.6.8 (the last release before Lion) and it will be included in Lion. At this time the OS will only permit TRIM to be used on Apple installed SSDs. Let’s hope that changes, as many Mac users will be replacing the HDD in their MacBook Pro with an aftermarket SSD to avail themselves of the enhanced speed and lower power consumption. Even if Apple does not step up to the plate here, hacks already exist to make TRIM in Lion work with non-Apple installed SSDs.

Meanwhile, is there anything useful to be divined by comparing the space on the 3 month old SSD in my HackPro with the newly installed backup SSD?

Here’s are the drives inside HackPro as reported on the Desktop:

HackPro drives before partitioning SSD Bak.

In the case of the SSD drive pair, the base drive reports a little more space than the backup one, but not enough to make any difference. Both the backup drives, which include a full Snow Leopard OS, are bootable. So after three months of intense use of the first SSD (top of the above screen snap) there seems to be negligible difference in available space, suggesting that the absence of TRIM has made no material difference. However, be assured I will be looking into adding TRIM support once Lion is installed and will be explaining how to do that in these pages.

Update June 2012: For data on the newer, faster SATA 3 6gd/s SSDs, click here.

The ‘new’ Leica M9P

Cameras, Leica

What a scam.

It’s five years since I sold my first – and last – Leica and sadly the former German masters of design have given me no reason to regret that decision.

You thought $7,000 for a camera body with no lens, no autofocus lenses available and a sixty year old viewfinder design, allied with a noisy shutter was a lot?

You are a piker.

Because for a mere $1,000 extra you can have the 2 cent red paper dot on the front (you know, the one that says you are rich and screams ‘steal me and my owner’s wallet’) removed and the word ‘Leica’ engraved in script on the top plate like they used to do twenty years ago. And lest we forget, Leica has made the LCD glass tougher than the one made of pure cheese on the ‘base’ model. Such a deal.

Here’s the latest blurb from the antiquarians at Leica Camera:

Hey, but “Hang on a minute”, you say. I get one of the smallest cameras out there. The factory says so.

Uh huh. And for a bit less you can get a Panny G3 whose modern sensor will rival the M9’s dated Kodak one (so much for a ‘lifetime camera’), offers auto everything, is super quiet and comes with a great choice of lenses, some even branded (if not made) by Leica. No red dot at those prices, though. But you do get a pro-quality movie mode to compensate. As a point of reference, the red outline of the M9 is superimposed on the G3 body below.

And you can buy 13 of those for the price of one M9P or a mere 11 for the price of one regular M9. That way, when your Panny blows after 50,000 exposures you recycle it and pull the next one out of its box. Better still, get smart, buy one, and upgrade to a G4 in 18 months. It will be even better.

As for logo removal, my roll of black electrician’s tape should last the next five generations in Dr. P’s lineage.

A fool and his money are easily parted.

Pentax Q

Cameras

Aptly named.

Some wag at Pentax must have named their new forthcoming toy camera, for the ‘Q’ designation is nothing less than a loud Question as to who on earth needs this?

The Pentax Q. Or is that Q?

It’s truly depressing to see Pentax make a camera with a minuscule digital sensor and interchangeable lenses. The very thought of the mistaken market research that went into the decision to commit significant amounts of capital to engineering and producing this camera and its five lenses for a market which does not exist boggles the mind.

Look at the specs. The sensor is one eighth the area of the MFT ones found in Panny and Oly offerings. The lens still sticks out a lot. There’s no eye level finder but you can blow another $250 on top of the $800 for the camera to buy a bulky optical one, limited to one focal length. To make matters worse, the standard lens has a full frame equivalent length of 49mm – way too long for most snaps and the zoom alternative destroys what compactness the body offers.

This is what happens when you design cameras by committee and market research – both functions doomed to report the past and incapable of encouraging original thought. Heaven forbid that Pentax might actually ask photographers what they want. That advice would be free and on point. The folks at Pentax obviously do not read their Santayana, denying the wisdom of “Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it”, having made an almost identical error with their short lived, overpriced and ill considered Pentax 110 film camera. This was another toy, using a truly ghastly film format but engineered at a level way in excess of the capabilities of the medium. And while I’m at it, who on earth designed that execrable extending flash in the Q? My boy can do better with Lego bricks.

Pentax’s previous exercise in stupidity, the 110 film camera.

If I were Pentax, a business on its last legs and likely not here for the long term, I would take one last great risk and return to my roots of truly original design. Spotmatic or ME Super, anyone? Forget the me-too DSLRs, Pentax. You have little to offer there. You are RC Cola to Coke, doomed to remain on the lower shelf, scraping for pennies. What Pentax could have done, given the company’s undeniable design skills, is take a hammer to Fuji’s poorly executed, over-priced and over-engineered X100 and made a fixed focal length APS-C or MFT snapper, with a proper EVF or optical finder, a speedy wide angle f/2 or f/1.4 lens and sold the thing for $500. Don’t these people realize that there is an enormous demand from decent photographers (meaning they can take good pictures, not that they are moral!) who are sick and tired of lugging bulky DSLRs around and just want something small, sharp and super-responsive, at a reasonable price?

Pentax Q lenses – two ‘Toys’, a fisheye and a bulky zoom, plus the standard one.

To compound their silliness, Pentax is offering two self-described ‘Toy’ lenses where you will be able to pay hundreds of dollars when you could just buy a piece-of-crap Holga for $10. Better still, forget the $10 and mess up your image in Photoshop. Why, you don’t even have to wait for the processed film to come back that way.

And finally, they are making a fish-eye which, I predict, will sell no more than a dozen world wide. Sure, every snapper really needs one of those.

The picture below shows the size of the Pentax Q (red rectangle) superimposed on the Panasonic G1 (my current snapper) and G3 (on order) – you get a picayune sensor in exchange for a very small reduction in bulk. The thickness dimensions vary little:

Pentax Q outline superimposed on the Panasonic G1.

Pentax Q outline superimposed on the Panasonic G3.

That equation does not solve for this photographer.

500gB iPad

iPad

It’s happening.

The two biggest disabling issues making it impossible for serious photographers to use the iPad as a portable photo processing device are the paucity of good photo processing apps and the iPad’s low storage capacity.

The former issue is being rapidly resolved as new processing apps geared to touch screens seem to be appearing wekly.

The latter has finally been addressed by some clever people at Hitachi.

Click the image for the Hitachi site.

The device, priced at $200 and available in 4 weeks, will behave as a wireless hard drive for your iPad. So, if it works as advertised, that means that you should be able to download your RAW files to the device and then process the images from your iPad. Whether direct download from a USB card reader to the G-Connect is possible is unclear, but if it is and if delivers as promised, I’ll be in line.

Given that the primary (only?) reason to buy a 64gB iPad over the 16gB one, a poky 48gB storage increase, is if you want to store lots of videos or RAW files on your iPad, why not get this device instead? The price increase is the same, the weight penalty minor – it’s likely little larger than a notebook HDD – and you can use it as a wireless disk with any computer.

The Lytro camera

Photography

The next step.

The other day I wrote of how analog photography – film and chemical based – reached its technological zenith under the auspices of Edwin Land. His instant color prints were the culmination of the process of making a permanent, paper image. Thereafter, digital technology took center stage.

One of the major drawbacks of images, be they film or digital, is the depth of field problem. Getting just the things you want sharp continues to be a major issue. Cameras have gone from large film formats, with accordingly long focal length lenses and limited depth of field, to the other extreme of minuscule sensors and very short lenses, where almost everything is sharp all the time.

I have written about this depth of field problem often in these pages. Because I favor a small sensor camera, the Panasonic G1, and because my favorite genre is street snapping, I am always bedeviled by DOF issues. Mostly, because of the short focal length lenses dictated by the small MFT sensor in the G1, that means too much depth of field. When background clutter intrudes, I use Auto Blurâ„¢ to blur the background. It doesn’t take long, though it is, frankly, a pain in the nether regions to have to do this. While your level of blurring is binary – blurred or sharp – the effect is fine as long as you do not overdo it. This following street snap is a typical example of where blurring the distracting car in the foreground improves a picture. Sure you can do progressively increased blurring if you take it in steps but life’s too short and I don’t take snaps for the equipment or technique obsessed.

The Kiss. 24th and York Streets, San Francisco. Panasonic G1, Olympus 9-18 MFT @ 18mm, 1/1000, f/7.1, ISO 320

At the other end of the spectrum – close-ups and macros – there’s never enough DOF and an elegant solution dictating the use of many selectively focused images exists in the guise of the wonderful Helicon software. But forget about using Helicon if your subject is moving.

Some digital camera makers are beginning to address the issue of enhancing background blur – Sony has a software based version in some of its point-and-shoots and I believe there’s something in the new Panasonic G3 which I have on order. I haven’t delved into the details yet as my primary drivers in getting this body are a less noisy sensor and a faster autofocus speed. Both are desirable for street snapping, the former because sometimes you have to crop an image, the latter for obvious reasons.

The purpose of this preamble is to look at the exciting next step in selective focus photography, which is coming soon from Lytro. The start-up, founded by Stanford graduate student Ren Ng, and well funded with $50 million in capital, is promising to release a consumer version of its Lytro Light Field camera soon. One of the best uses to date of variable focus photography has been in the medical field of Computer Axial Tomography to make CAT scans of a patient’s body. Moving the patient through an X Ray beam, multiple images are recorded allowing the diagnostician to look at the body as if it was sliced open, the location of the slice being whatever is needed. Light Field photography is different, and considerably more elegant.

Ren Ng’s PhD disseration is remarkably clear and well written. Even if the math may leave you cold the issues are clearly addressed. You can download the thesis by clicking below:

Click to download Ren Ng’s PhD dissertation

An additional set of microlenses is installed in front of the regular digital sensor, to record the position of light rays at the aperture and on the sensor. This positional data makes it possible to record depth information with an image, information which traditional film and digital photography discards. While Ng is in no sense the ‘discoverer’ of this technology, which has been in academic journals since the time of Leonardo as he relates in his thesis, it looks like he may be the first to realize it in a consumer camera.

This is not idle theorizing. Ng’s thesis (2006) includes illustrations of a Contax 645 modified to include the light field receptors:

The results are simply stunning. Your first click on the images will, I guarantee, make your jaw drop – click the picture to go there (does not work with an iPad):

Click the picture for the interactive Lytro gallery.

To me that’s comparable to the excitement I experienced when first seeing a black and white picture show itself in the developer tray under the red light in the darkroom, or to seeing that first Polaroid print develop in my hand. I just tried it on our 9 year old and his reaction was the same.

In the gallery, take a look at the picture of the four models posed in the studio. You can select which one you want to be sharp. So, if you can do that, the next rational step is to select a range of sharpness and rates of focus drop off. Because the recorded image has information relating to depth and position, it follows that this is possible.

The implications for photography and camera design are earth shaking. As all image depth data is stored with each image courtesy of the micro lens array adjacent to the digital sensor there is no need to focus your image when you take the picture. Focus delay is literally zero. So once that high quality f/1.0 lens comes along at a decent price, and is used in conjunction with a small sensor, it can be very compact indeed. You will simply bang away at f/1 for every image and then select what you want sharp at the processing stage. Camera shake will be a thing of the past, given the sort of short shutter speeds which result. No focus mount, no focus rack, no focus motor, no focus battery drain, no clunky extending lens. Think about it.

You can sign-up to reserve a camera:

Needless to add, I have already done so.

So why didn’t Nikon or Canon do this when the idea has been around for ages? Well, can you name one significant photography innovation from the Japanese? Look where innovation has come from – roll film (George Eastman/Kodak), 35mm (Oscar Barnack/Leitz), anti-reflection coatings (Carl Zeiss), Honeywell (the Correfot which became autofocus), polarizing lenses (Edwin Land/Polaroid), instant photography (Edwin Land/Polaroid), the SLR pentaprism (Zeiss Ikon), digital sensors (Bell labs) – not a Japanese in sight. And now Lytro – Chinese/American. OK, we can credit Pentax with the first instant return mirror in an SLR. Hardly earth shattering.