Category Archives: Photography

Americans pulling together

Photography

My letter to Governor Ducey of Arizona.

Dear Governor Ducey –

3/16/2020

Let me start by complimenting you on yesterday’s decision to close Arizona Public Schools through March 27. Your decision, along with ASU’s action to transition to online tuition, remove large populations from the crowd risks posed by public assembly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I believe that you should also consider issuing broader regulations that seek to limit public assembly regardless of the institution, wherever possible, and require all returning travelers from foreign lands to be screened upon re-entry to Arizona. Further, visits by relatives to elder care facilities should be strictly limited as they expose our most vulnerable citizens to infection.

We have all been reading about the process of ‘flattening the infection curve’, one which seeks to delay the onset of infection and better control the spread of that infection once it is identified. Waiting for infection and death, the way some nations have, is exactly wrong. Along with aggressive testing and quarantine approaches, nations like South Korea are showing that flattening the curve is a real possibility. We must act likewise now, not when all those nascent infections in our population are eventually disclosed.

One dismaying aspect of public behavior throughout the United States has been the practice of hoarding groceries and essential supplies. A visit to any Phoenix or Scottsdale area supermarket discloses that this practice is common here, one which is contrary to the concept of ‘pulling together’ and alien to the American Way. Hoarding substitutes greed and selfishness for community spirit, is counterproductive and unnecessary. It also hurts the oldest, those least able to participate in this aggressive, anti-social behavior.

Some examples.

American hens have been producing adequate supply of eggs for American consumers since we won WW2. Hoarding a staple with a short shelf life makes no sense.

American paper manufacturers have seen to it that adequate supplies of toilet paper have been available over a like period, maintaining Americans’ high standards of hygiene. Yet visit your local grocery store and they are out.

The situation is identical for hand sanitizer and on and on.

Yet the solution is surpassingly simple. Simply require supermarkets to limit purchases per shopper. I note that the AJs chain in Scottsdale has adopted this approach and many essentials remain available on their shelves. However, other major chains like Safeway and Bashas have not, and their shelves are empty of essential goods. Trying to directly control shopper behavior, the behavior of those ‘fellow Americans’ of mine who think only of themselves, is impossible. But placing requirements on supermarkets to limit purchases by customers is easy and comes at negligible fiscal cost. Add a complaints hot line for whistle blowers and a low cost solution presents itself.

Mr. Governor, for this senior citizen to visit a supermarket and find that staples like eggs and lettuce are unavailable is unconscionable. 15.9% of Arizonans are senior citizens, the tenth highest for any state. These Arizonans are the most threatened sector of the population who most require that hand sanitizer and the protein in that missing egg. I urge you to implement these simple, low cost requirements as soon as possible.

Finally, a recent study published by the New York Times discloses that the supermarket cashier is one of the highest risk centers for dissemination of viral infection. In a week of eight hour shifts I calculate that a check-out cashier has over 3,000 unique person-to-person contacts with shoppers, all within infection range. That’s far more than any school teacher or college professor. Yet I have not seen one of these risk centers wearing protective gloves or masks. Please consider making this a requirement, one which carries little cost and brings potentially great benefits in mitigating the spread of infection.

Please consider implementing my suggested measures as part of your fight against COVID-19 and thank you again for the great work you are doing.

Thomas Pindelski
Scottsdale

Three hundred bucks a year

iPhone

High end photography has never been cheaper.



The iPhone 11 Pro lens array.

The ever bubbling rumor mill has it that this year’s iPhone 12 Pro will come with a 60+ megapixel sensor and a fourth ‘time of flight’ lens which will enhance virtual reality viewing as well as providing more granular depth map data for selective focus effects, rendered in software.

I will immediately list my iPhone 11 Pro on Swappa and will sell it for $300 less than its iPhone replacement. This is the extent of my annual hardware cost, the equivalent of a few rolls of film plus some prints or another lens for a DSLR or mirrorless body. Photography has never been cheaper. And I get a new camera annually, comfortable in the knowledge that every iPhone camera has been better than the one which came before it.

At Shake Shack

Dining, Photographs

Up market burgers.

A recent review of mass market burger joints suggested that Shake Shack had the best ones, so I rode the old motorbike to the local one in Scottsdale, avoiding the Porsches and Bentleys, and had at it.



$12.20 and a 19 minute wait.


Big winner for me – the place is dog friendly!


Lots of families and no white trash. The prices keep the latter away.


Porsches and Bentleys.


Table tennis while you wait.


Danny Trejo lives.


Eating off the floor.


An enjoyable, social setting with well behaved people on a gorgeous Arizona day.

It may not be La Grenouillère, but it’s still jolly nice – and the burger was indeed excellent.

iPhone11 Pro snaps.

Night Mode optimisation

iPhone, Photographs

A modicum of care does the trick.

Night Mode is one of those brilliant enhancements in the iPhone 11 which obsoletes every ‘serious’ camera on the market.

Those 8 billion plus transistors in the iPhone’s A13 chip are put hard to work taking multiple images and then stitch together the best bits for a stunningly good result. And the device’s outstanding HDR technology makes sure that the dynamic range is constrained to what the technology can handle. No highlights are burned out.

Still, a modicum of care will be repaid with the best possible images. If you use the iPhone’s default Camera app, Night Mode is automatically invoked when needed. You cannot force it ‘on’.

When Night Mode is active a yellow flag appears at the top left of the iPhone’s display and the image ‘seen’ at the time of exposure remains frozen on the screen. When processing is complete some three seconds later – and you are warned to keep the camera still – a second image appears on the display showing what was recorded. If you notice a significant shift between the locations of objects in the second image compared with the first then it’s more than likely that the result will be blurred. I obviate this problem by using a monopod, which eliminates vertical motion which is the real killer here. I don’t bother with any attachment device, simply holding the iPhone tightly against the top of the monopod. The results are peerless, as these two images from the garden at night illustrate. The extreme dynamic range will only embarrass your DSLR or mirrorless monster. Don’t bother. Get an iPhone 11 – these are SOOC, naturally:

Back to the future

Cameras, iPhone

Minolta pointed the way.

Given that they have yet to have an idea not stolen from someone else – meanly mostly from Apple – I spend little time in reading about anything from Samsung.

But their most recent theft is surprising only for how long it took them to think of it, for their latest ‘high-end’ phone (there’s an oxymoron for you) steals from a 2002 inspired design by Minolta in its 2mp Dimage digital point and shoot.



The elegant Minolta Dimage of 2002.

This elegant design had one truly original feature, in addition to its neat packaging in that small square case. It used a periscope optical zoom, vertically oriented inside the case, with light rays deflected through the associated right angle with a mirrored prism. This allowed the incorporation of an otherwise lengthy optical path within the tight confines of the body, a small 3.3″ x 2.8″ x 0.8″. For comparison, my iPhone 11 Pro in its case measures 5.5″ x 3″ x 0.5″.

This cutaway view shows how it worked:



Illustration of the ‘folded’ optical path.

We can expect to see this sort of thing in a future iPhone as modern technology has made things even smaller 18 years after Minolta’s inspired design. Optical zooms beat digital zooms as there’s no pixel degredation as magnifications increase.

Now if there’s a criticism to be leveled at the iPhone 11 Pro – in addition to its poor ergonomics – it’s that there’s no lens at the long end. Sure, there’s a 10x digital zoom, but you can do that just as easily in Lightroom, with all the attendant issues. So you are stuck with ultrawide, very wide and normal, call it 12mm, 24mm and 50mm FFE, all superb but none of them long.

So if Apple can add one of those ‘periscope’ optical zooms and make the 50mm a 50-200mm optic, well, that’s going to be all she wrote for the few remaining sales of silly-priced and even sillier-sized DSLRs.