Category Archives: Photography

Click bait

Fuji, Hall of Shame

Thoroughly disingenuous.

‘Click bait’ is slang for web content with no substance with but one intention – to get viewers to your site and hopefully have them click through to something which earns you commission, even though the actual posting on your site has no substantive content.

Even quality sites are prey to this poor practice, and one of the worst examples I have seen is DPReview’s ‘Preview’ of the much anticipated Fuji X100. I’m not going to provide a link as the piece is so offensive as to discourage me from routing anyone else there but suffice it to say that, after allegedly handling an early prototype, which they laud endlessly for ‘feel’ and ‘quality” they failed to:

  • Take any pictures
  • Comment on responsiveness
  • Say anything about noise
  • Test the lens
  • Report on the quality of the sensor
  • …. and they even forgot to weigh the thing if, that is, they ever had it.

In other words, a marketing piece, pure and simple. Scandalous. DPReview is owned by Amazon and the latter, which prides itself on respecting its customers, can do better.

A far superior job (not difficult, given the hurdle posed by DPR) was done by the Norwegian site akam.no which not only got its hands on a very early prototype, but actually took real pictures with the camera and published them. While your Norwegian is likely no better than mine, you can still make sense of the test snaps on their site and suffice it to say that the definition of the lens and the high ISO performance both look very promising. Reading the related discussion at DPR discloses that the camera’s software is at a shockingly early stage of (in)completion, though it’s impossible to tell how old the prototype is. If it’s recent you can forget about seeing this camera on the market until the second half of 2011. The author of the Norwegian piece, Aethius, participates in the discussion which is well worth reading if you have any interest in the X100. He relates, among other things, that the software is so incomplete that the camera had to be restarted after every picture with many menu items garbled or missing! Not what I would call an alpha test model, let alone beta.

Click the picture for the akam.no review.

Aethius relates that this was an official tester from Fuji, his magazine having signed an NDA, which begs the question whether the CIA is in charge of Fuji’s marketing. It would take an organization which cannot distinguish Iraq from Australia to so bungle matters. Let’s see now – pre-release it in a nation where caribou outnumber humans, make sure it’s so buggy as to be scarcely worthy of attention, over promise and under deliver, raise the hype machine to the max practically guaranteeing dismay when the real thing hits retail, and make sure that only the worst things get said about it in the limited test and ensuing discussion. Buggy software, lens corrections yet to be completed and, worst of all for a camera whose primary (sole?) purpose is street snapping, it’s not especially fast or responsive according to Aethius’s comments in the discussion. Way to go, Fuji! Well, I suppose Leica needs the competition when it comes to rolling out buggy and costly hardware.

As for DPReview, you are a dishonorable entrant to this site’s Hall of Shame.

Eddie Rickenbacker’s

Dining, Photographs

For real men.

Real men ride motorbikes, hang out at local bars and think nothing of confrontation and a good fist fight. If that’s your sort of thing, and you believe real motorcycles come from America and Europe, then you owe it to yourself to visit Eddie Rickenbacker’s at Second Street and Minna Street, in the vibrant South of Market district in San Francisco.

The food is cheap and served in the usual gargantuan American helpings, drinks are inexpensive and the atmosphere is real. A BLT served with fries plus draught beer (get the Racer IPA) will set you back $17 with tip. This is a genuine old place with a long bar on one side, an unkempt set of tables on the other and with friendly help. No fake Tiffany lampshades and Armani wearers here. And did I mention that Norm, the proprietor, who could stand to lose 100 lbs or so, hangs out on a sofa at the end of the bar …. his breathing assisted by an oxygen bottle? Like I said, this is not for the chi chi set. The snaps below will give you a sense of the place.

Located at Second and Minna, SoMA. A post war Triumph is above the entrance.

Classic Indian in the window on Second Street.

A 1922 Motosacoche and a 1952 Moto Guzzi.

A gorgeous 1920s Excelsior leads the parade of bikes suspended from the ceiling.

1955 Mustang Thoroughbred.

1930 Indian. They don’t make ’em like that any more and if you have
ever tried to kick start one that’s probably a good thing!

Indian Chief with complex leading link girder front forks.

1913 Henderson 4.

The obese proprietor, Norm, hangs out on the couch,
below the Moto Guzzi and a classic Indian, breathing with an oxygen bottle.
The waitress is compiling a food order with his help.

All snaps on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens at ISO800. Real Men don’t use flash.

Sad update: Norm Hobday passed away February 25, 2011. He is now in the afterworld, enjoying the world of the two wheeled afterlife. All speed, Norm.

Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 MFT lens

Hardware

Now that is fast!

Voigtlander (Cosina) has been making lenses for Leicas and a few other mounts for many years. Many of these appear to be derivatives of older Leitz designs and many have garnered positive reviews. For the most part they have been making lenses for full frame 35mm cameras so it was quite a surprise to see them come out with an MFT lens for the Panasonic and Olympus MFT bodies.

The Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 MFT lens.

You can see more at Stephen Gandy’s Cameraquest site. Retailing at $900 in the US, the lens is sold out with new supplies expected in a month or so. There are some excellent pictures taken by Andrew Fildes using the Voigtlander on an Olympus E-P2 body here and in addition to being a fine photographer, Andrew has taken almost all the snaps at f/0.95 so you can get a sense of the depth of focus at full aperture. To put the aperture in perspective, the depth of field of a 25mm f/0.95 lens is identical to that of a 50mm f/1.9 on a full frame body, so it’s like using an f/2 lens wide open.

A couple of warnings. The lens is huge compared to regular MFT optics, it’s heavy as it’s all metal. It has zero automation. As regards aperture that’s hardly an issue. If you buy an f/0.95 lens you aren’t going to be using it at f/8. On the other hand, the lack of focus automation strikes me as a big negative in street work owing to the time delay from manual focusing, and you will have to focus fairly carefully on nearer subjects to make sure things are sharp.

By contrast, the fortcoming Fuji X100 with it’s 23mm f/2 lens will have a depth of field equivalent to an f/4.5 50mm lens on a full frame body, so the Voigtlander has two stops less depth of field than the Fuji at maximum aperture. That’s significant and noticeable. Andrew Fildes’s pictures show the DOF well and it’s rare that you get a real photographer showing off gear so well. DPReview may be the best technical review site for hardware but it’s the very last place on earth you are going to go to for quality photography.

I have bought gear from Gandy in the past and he is honest and easy to deal with. He has been in business for ages.

New Panasonic fast standard lens:

Panasonic is rumored to be announcing a 25mm f/1.4 lens (50mm FFE) with full automation in February, and that sounds like a far more practical alternative to trying to manually focus the Voigltlander behemoth. The Panny will have the same depth of field as a 50mm f/2.8 on a full frame camera and sounds like just the ticket if the Fuji X100 disappoints. I rather miss out-of-focus backgrounds with the G1 owing to the smallish maximum aperture of the kit zoom. I would guess the price will be $700. There’s already a 25mm f/1.4 Leica Summilux for regular 4/3rds cameras at $900 but it’s bulky and not in keeping with the compact MFT design concept. The 20mm f/1.7 Panny is another option worth considering for the street snapper, at a fraction of cost of the X100.

Buildings

Photography

Little gear needed.

The days where you had to lug a field or view camera with a tilt front and adjustable back to correct for perspective distortion in architectural photography are largely gone. Now any competent digital camera with a dose of Photoshop thrown in can see to it that verticals cease converging and squares are square. There are also limited perspective correction tools in Lightroom 3 but the Transform tools in Photoshop are far more powerful. Once the image is exported from LR to PS, hit Cmnd-A in Photoshop to select the image and then the Transform tools in the Edit menu will come alive. To show the grid, which greatly aids alignment, hit Cmnd-‘ (apostrophe). The grid spacing can be set in Preferences.

Except for the last, every image accompanying this article was corrected using PS CS2->Edit->Transform->Distort. The Transform function in PS dates back to at least Photoshop 5 many years ago, so it’s not like you need the most recent version there is, and old versions like CS2 and before will run fine on modern Macs, automatically using Rosetta. As the perspective correction process will introduce some cropping of the original I purposefully include a good deal more in the snap than is otherwise required whenever I anticipate that perspective correction will be applied.

The Transform menu in Photoshop. This is CS2 but all later versions have it too.

When snapping architecture, an art form I greatly enjoy, I generally carry my Panasonic G1 with the 14-45mm kit lens and pocket that little wonder the 45-200mm zoom telephoto. This remains the only 400mm telephoto (full frame equivalent) which I think nothing of taking with me. Incredibly small, very sharp and with OIS built in to cut the shakes, it’s a miracle of modern optical and electronic technology. I may not use it that much but when I do, boy do I appreciate what it can do.

Mooching around San Francisco the other day I found more subjects with this little lens pair than seems decent. Splendid contrasty sun didn’t hurt, either.

Chevron Building, Stevenson and 2nd Street. 109mm.

The neo-modern flying saucer whimsy of the Chevron Building (1975) contrasts with the Beaux-Arts beauty in the foreground.

Bus stop on Fremont Street. 41mm.

Another touch of humor in what would just me another utilitarian municipal fixture otherwise.

Ooops! What was the architect thinking of here? 147mm.

Silly things like this can be picked out easily with a long telephoto lens. I added the vignetting in Lightroom – the 45-200mm does not vignette the corners, covering the frame superbly.

Old and new. 31mm.

The builders may have done a heavy handed job on the brickwork when they installed the new windows, but at least the old building survived. The monstrosity behind it just makes the oldie look better.

Reflections. 18mm.

Reflections are always fun. A healthy dose of Photoshop to fix the leaning verticals was called for here when round-tripping the original from Lightroom.

Oakland Bay Bridge seen through a street car on Steuart Street. 34mm.

One masterpiece of depression era engineering seen through another.

Don’t lease me. 23mm.

How badly do they want to lease this place after painting a broken window on it? Very droll. On Annie Street, north of east Mission Street.

With decent modern sensors, a fast ISO (I use ISO320 on the Panny G1 which is a good compromise between grain and speed on the smallish MFT sensor) and OIS, no tripod is needed, even with long lenses. At the long end of the 45-200mm I will always try to find that extra bit of support, be it a lamppost or parking meter, but it’s quite amazing what you can get away with and still come home with a sharp image.

Apple Magic Mouse

Macintosh

A trouble-free device.

For a company which prides itself on design, past mouse offerings from Apple have been pretty poor.

In the last decade we have had the clear plastic case single-click wired mouse which came with iMacs through maybe 2005. Then along came the Mighty Mouse with that neat little scroll sphere in the top and finally supporting left and right clicks. That one came in wired and wireless designs and after three of each I finally threw up my hands and gave up on the Apple Mouse. You see, the Magic Mouse worked fine until the scroll sphere would fail owing to the ingress of dirt and grease. While you could vigorously run the little ball around a bit on a piece of paper with the mouse held upside down, after about two or three attempts at this the scrolling feature would fail completely, and given that the mouse was sealed – except for the space around the ball – there was no realistic way of dismantling it to clean the innards. I even tried blasting contact cleaner into the small space around the ball and the thing would fail soon afterwards, shortly after my eyesight recovered from the backwash of toxic spray.

The Apple Mighty Mouse with the poorly designed scroll wheel.

One really nice feature of the Mighty Mouse was that when you squeezed the sides you could get enhanced actions; I had mine set to display the desktop. You could also program a push on the scroll ball to perform other actions and mine was set to display Dashboard widgets. Still, I thought no more of all these mouse failures until a MacMini came along to drive the home TV; Apple, squeezing the margins as usual, did not ship a mouse with the MacMini so I though, what the heck, I’ll give the new Magic Mouse a shot.

Like the Mighty Mouse the Magic Mouse uses a sensor for tracking. I wasn’t too impressed with the specifications on paper as all that multi-touch technology seemed counterintuitive on a mouse, but came to like the Magic Mouse when used on the sofa with the MacMini.

Apple Magic Mouse. No scroll wheel, no side buttons.

Scrolling with the MagicMouse is accomplished by dragging one finger vertically on the surface; side scrolling by swiping the same finger laterally. Only one finger is needed though Apple’s System Preferences ->Mouse pane shows two being used for sideways scrolling. When you are using a mouse to control a MacMini whose primary purpose is to play DVDs and Netflix, you don’t need to access features like the Desktop or the Dashboard with its widgets. On a desktop work computer these are very nice to have. Needless to add, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to try the Magic Mouse with my desktop HackPro – the desktop computer for the rest of us. At first, System Preferences->Mouse simply refused to recognize the Magic Mouse, even though System Profiler confirms that the minuscule IoGear Bluetooth adapter I have installed in one of the HackPro’s dozen USB ports enables Bluetooth. The HackPro runs OS Snow Leopard 10.6.6 and you need at least 10.6.4 for the Mighty Mouse.

IoGear Bluetooth adapter – smaller than a fingernail.

So I resorted to that repository of all that is Apple OS hacking, InsanelyMac, and one suggested solution was to install the SteerMouse utility; this I duly did, rebooted as instructed and, lo and behold, the MagicMouse was now recognized as a Bluetooth device, even though I did not even enable the SteerMouse utility, which appears in the Systems Preferences pane. So now I had a working MagicMouse but still no easy way of accessing the desktop or Dashboard using the mouse, as the side buttons of the old Mighty Mouse were no longer available to do this. Well, I had never used the ‘Active Screen Corners’ function of OS X, found in System Preferences->Exposé & Spaces->Exposé. It takes seconds to do and you get many choices for what each screen corner does.

Active screen corners in OS X

Now when I drag the mouse cursor over one of the screen corners the related action is invoked. Lower left gets me the Desktop and so on. I use a three display installation with the HackPro so ‘corner’ means the outside corners of the left- and right-handmost displays. It works well, but takes a bit of getting used to. I’m getting the hang of it.

Why use the MagicMouse in preference to the excellent RF Microsoft Mouse I have been using for well over a year now? (Yes, I know, ‘excellent’ as an adjective for a Microsoft product is not something you see that often). Mostly because the cursor action is smoother and because you don’t get the occasional bout of wild behavior which has the cursor become very jerky. This seems to occur when Time Machine is running one of its incremental backups, suggesting some sort of interference with CPU or GPU cycles. The MagicMouse does not display this erratic behavior.

The MagicMouse comes with new iMacs and only you can decide whether its shape and workings are right for your hands. One thing you can be sure of – there’s no scroll wheel to go wrong.

MagicPrefs: If you want a whole order of magnitude more programmability for your MagicMouse, download and install MagicPrefs. This utility installs in the System Preferences pane and gives you more options than you can shake a stick at. How is this possible? Well, the MagicMouse is really a touchpad, like the one on your laptop. It senses touch electrostatically, meaning that every square millimeter of its surface has an ‘address’ whose actions can be tailored. Using MagicPrefs, first you can crank up the cursor speed beyond the poky maximum Apple give you. If you use two or more displays, it’s worth it. Second, you can program gestures to access functions. For example, I have the middle click (where the scroll ball used to be) set to show the desktop and a single tap just above the Apple logo to display the Dashboard. The programmability is vast and there’s something for everyone. Do it right and you will no longer miss the side buttons of the older Mighty Mouse.

MagicPrefs at work.

In other MagicPrefs panes you can even define the location of scroll zones, meaning that left handed users can program scroll and touch zones to suit their dominant hand, as well as reversing left and right clicks. There is also a host of Drag, Pinch and Swipe motions. Extraordinary and free.

Disclosure: Long AAPL call options.