There’s an old Wall Street mantra of which I have long been a fan.
The subject is Loyalty and it goes like this:
“If you want Loyalty, get a dog.”
So when a new way of thinking in camera design comes along, I am more than interested. And I have no loyalty.
In this regard, I am worse than the common whore. If it works for me, I’ll go for it and dump yesterday’s infatuation.
What’s that, you say? You were with Leicas for over thirty years? Yes. Guilty as charged. They worked for me, for what I wanted to do, which was to take street snaps.
But then along came fast, small and automatic, with better image quality to boot, and like the street scrubber of old, I crossed the road to the better lit lamppost.
That lamppost was the Panasonic G1 for me. You can choose your own poison. Suffice it to say that there is no way I am going back to manual-anything. No, siree. I just want to press the button and get the instant gratification that we street denizens crave. A sharp moment of time.
So when Sony announces the NEX-5, I pay attention.
The Sony NEX-5 – APS-C in a very small box.
It’s an interesting piece. No viewfinder, of course. And an APS-C sensor. Though they still don’t get it – to make the lenses small you have to make the software fix the defects, not the gargantuan hardware they have opted for. But it is thinking outside the box as regards the body. Well done!
Sony may have lost its way in the last few years as their core competencies have become mass marketed and readily available. “It’s a Sony” now largely means “It’s overpriced”.
I rather doubt whether this ugly duckling will catch on, but I laud Sony for trying.
When I wrote about Google’s Culture of Theft just a few days ago, little did I realize how soon my suspicions would be confirmed.
From MacWorld.com
Dear reader, you do not collect this data by accident. It’s a switch in the system. You either decide to collect it or you do not. No accidents involved.
So when you next see your private data right next to your photographs in the public domain, you know where to go.
You like the ‘cloud’? Sure. So do I. Just go elsewhere than Google Docs. ‘Free’ ain’t everything you think it is.
This begins to show some of the potential for the iPad as a magazine reading device – beautifully laid out, an easily accessed table of contents and smart behavior in both portrait and landscape modes.
Many of the advertisements – an essential part of the VF experience with some of the best photography – are not yet interactive, meaning when you see that diamond encrusted Cartier watch you cannot just touch it to place it in your shopping cart, but that will come.
The old saw about advertising has it that 50% of it is effective, the problem being which 50%? Well, if interactive advertising doesn’t save magazines, nothing will. The advertiser will, for the first time, know the click-through rate, the location of the reader and hence the demographic profile, so will be able to finally determine the return on his investment. Indeed, given that he will be prepared to pay a premium for access to this ‘shelf space’ this sort of thing will actually hasten the demise of newsprint, and not a moment too soon.
And, yes, I have to admit it, I was the body model for Cristiano Ronaldo on the cover.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper is not only a repository of thoughtful news reportage, it has also just released a free new iPad app named Guardian Eyewitness.
The first release includes 100 photographs:
An especially nice feature is that clicking on Pro Tip tells you what makes the photo special:
Worth checking out – it’s the sort of quality content and presentation you will not be seeing from the knuckle-dragging right.
The Beautiful Planet app for the iPad gives you some idea of the future of books. While the navigation is rudimentary, basically being limited to broad geographical locations and seemingly random order of content once you choose a location, it works well as it showcases great photography and the viewer doesn’t much care whether the photograph was taken in Montevideo or Moscow.
But that’s not an approach which will work well for most art books, be they about paintings or photography. Context and background information are required to make the book truly useful.
One of the finest books in my small collection is Raphael by Pierluigi De Vecchi and while the quality of the reproductions and writing are both splendid, it’s never lost on me that the book weighs in at over 8 pounds. It’s simply not comfortable to keep it in your hands or on your lap for any period of time. As a long time fan of the Italian master, I have always kept images of most of his works, sourced from Google Images, in iPhoto and would take these with me on my now defunct netbook when traveling. There’s nothing finer than relaxing with the Italian master’s work before settling in for a night of the dreamless, with iPhoto giving me the option of musical accompaniment of choice.
So it was a moment’s work to synch my Raphael collection with the iPad, and I threw in two other Renaissance masters, Titian and Caravaggio, for luck. This is how the album looks on the iPad:
And here’s a specimen full page view:
What is significant here is that the iPad’s weight remained unchanged at 1.5lbs …. and each album of 70-100 images consumes maybe 75mB of storage. So ten albums, which will get you most of the greatest western art ever painted, run under 1gB. Not a lot.
In addition to the weight (as in lack thereof) advantages, a computer screen is transilluminated, so a well processed original will have tremendous dynamic range – inky blacks and snowy whites. And unlike using a netbook or laptop, as long as the original has enough detail a simple unpinching motion with thumb and forefinger allows me to zoom in on Raphael’s brushwork to enjoy some favorite detail. What is sorely lacking is context. While I have no particular need of the detailed narrative presented in the original book, what I would really like is some sort of index, and the ability to touch a painting on the screen ane be told about its history, location, etc. But given the slow moving art world, the myriad of complications regarding licensing and reproduction rights and so on, I’m not holding my breath. It will be ages, I suspect, before art books take advantage of the magical properties of touchscreen technology.
Further, it is obviously unlikely that the couple of hundred books of photographs I own will ever be converted to digital files. Most are out of print and one of the quickest ways I can think of losing money is to publish photography books.
So it’s time to take the law into your own hands, and remove the book from them at the same time, if you get my drift.
Mercifully Rube Goldberg lives, in the guise of a gadget named the Scan Robot made by some foresightful inventors in Germany and pointed out to me by fellow iPad owner and blog reader, Gregg L. Thank you, Gregg!
You can watch the hypnotic video by clicking below. The maker, Treventus, claims 25 pages per minute can be scanned, though I have yet to find out what the dpi resolution is.
I have no doubt that the device is anything but cheap, but once some smart person at HP or Epson twigs the market potential, we should see high volume production take the price down to the $1-2,000 range. Some other smart person will go into the leasing business and this consumer will be first in line for a lease, after which all my books will be in digital format. Let’s see – 250 books, 50,000 pages, 35 hours, $10 per hour for the student working the thing, $500 to lease it … and a $10,000 tax deduction when I give all the originals to the local library. That solves.
Now let me take this thinking further. My local library, the Burlingame Public Library, occupies a gorgeous building on the prime acre of real estate in the town of Burlingame in Northern California.
I would estimate the value of the lot to be $100 million. It houses 216,579 books with a replacement cost of, say, $5 million. So after sale, the city is left with $95 million and the taxpayer is relieved of the tax cost of probably 50 employees who will now be required to find jobs in the for profit sector. A win-win. What about that $95 million left over? Well, I would guess that the Burlingame Public Library has no more than 5,000 regular visitors and seemingly 20% of those are bums looking for a warm place to hang out during the day. The cost of a tablet computer for each member is $3 million and digitization of the library’s contents is, at say $5 a book, another $5 million. Yes, that’s right. Give every member a tablet computer at the taxpayer’s cost – it saves money net, which is the name of the game. Heck, go crazy and give every one of Burlingame’s 25,000 residents a tablet computer. Cost? A mere $12 million.
The Burlingame Public Library. Prime real estate, awaiting development.
Bottom line?
The City has $80 million left over which it can steal for other useless purposes or, God forbid, return to its taxpayers.
Apple’s iPad sales go up by 25,000 for this one library alone and you and I make money on the stock
All those new iPad users now have real incentive to ‘visit the library’ and, in true American fashion, will have no need to get off their burgeoning behinds
$5 million of unproductive payroll and overhead is removed from the tax bill
Developers redevelop the site for a for profit business (likely as not a larger Apple Store to handle the increased demand) and the tax base expands accordingly
Natural resource use plummets from all those saved 1 mile drives to the library. Air quality improves. Traffic falls. Road repair costs drop. Accidents and police costs fall.
Schoolchildren have online access to a vastly expanded library
Repeat for all those libraries – starting with the one on Fifth Avenue in New York which would make for some nice high end condominiums – and you begin to eat into that budget deficit. I figure that one would easily raise $3 billion for the city block on which it sits.
And, yes, the chances of any of this happening in my lifetime are zero.
But the art book’s future is clear and when the 21″ iPad comes along I propose to be one of the first to have all my art books on it. Along with the hundreds of DVDs and CDs I converted years ago.
Of course, I hope the Burlingame Public Library is still around then, as I will need the tax deduction from the gift I will be making of my whole collection. It’s not like I’m about to end up out of pocket on this little venture now, is it?
