Amazing.
Take a look at David Bergman’s 1,474 megapixel snap of the inauguration.
And you thought your big DSLR had a lot of pixels?
You can zoom in for detail.
Category Archives: Photography
The cult of Leica
Amusing writing.
There’s an amusing piece by Anthony Lane on the cult of Leica in the September 2007 issue of The New Yorker, a magazine renowned for using three words where one would do.
Click the picture to read.
Something’s afoot at Panasonic
The new Leica M?
Call me dated. Say I am out of touch. Ridicule my love of the mechanical age.
I have no problem with any of those accusations as all are true.
So when I wrote a while back, not a little intrigued, of the Panasonic G1, it was for no other reason than that this photographer’s schnozzer sensed a possibility in the making.
Revolution? Why, yes. A modern Leica M for the digital set because, whether you like it or not, we are all members. Meaning small, fast, quiet and with large aperture lenses for low light work.
And we all know who designs the lenses for the best Panny designs, don’t we? Can you say Leica?
These thoughts were brought to the fore when DP Review published its analysis of the Panasonic G1. To cut to the chase, it’s not ready for prime time any more than the L1 (which at least looked like a Leica M) was. But you have to respect where Panny is going with this.
Meaning they are inching closer to the Leica ideal – small, quiet, fast, unobtrusive.
Now all they need to do is throw the design book out of the window and …. take a hard look at the form factor of the Leica M – but 33% smaller this time. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a viewfinder that works in something less than California sunshine.
SDHC cards in the Canon 5D
Some surprising results.
SDHC cards are, let’s face it, the happening thing. With capacities up to 32gB and multiples of that in the offing in a postage stamp-sized medium, CF cards are not going anywhere. Add the fact that one vendor even offers an SDHC card with wireless transmission capability (though it does not support RAW files at the time of writing) and there’s reason to think that the greater bulk and inferior contact mechanism of the CF card (which depends on mating fragile pins with the card as opposed to the SDHC’s far more robust broad wipers) are headed for the technology waste bin. Finally, the burgoening netbook and flash memory markets are not about to use CF cards whereas every netbook and more devices have built-in SD card slots.
So, just for fun, I procured an inexpensive CF-SDHC card adapter ($25) and a bottom-of-the-line Kingston 8gB SDHC card ($18) and tried it in the 5D.
CF-SDHC Jobo card adapter, 8gB Kingston SDHC and 2gB Sandisk CF cards
455 RAW images on one card!
Side loading of the SDHC card in the adapter
While thicker than a CF card, the adapter fits the Canon 5D fine
The comparison, for timings, was a top-of-the-line Sandisk Extreme IV. I expected write times to be much faster with the Extreme IV, and they were. Taking 10 snaps in rapid succession in RAW on the 5D, the red light (indicating write status) on the rear of the camera remained on 16 seconds with the Sandisk compared with 39 seconds for the SDHC+adapter combination after taking the last picture. So if serial shooting in vast quantities is your thing, look elsewhere – the 5D has a 17 image RAW buffer so rapid shooters will find themselves bumping up against this – and slowing snap to snap times – with slower cards.
However, when it came to importing the images into Lightroom 2 (I used a Firewire CF card reader for the Sandisk and a cheap Transcend USB reader for the Kingston), import timings were 28 seconds and 26 seconds respectively. The SDHC card was faster! By contrast placing the SDHC card in the CF adapter and using the Firewire reader took 34 seconds – slower still. So SDHC import using an SDHC USB reader beats CF in Firewire!
Why bother? Because I like to use a netbook (with its SDHC slot) on the road and the built in SDHC card reader is a joy to use – no card adapter to forget. And because fast write times mean little to me, I am quite happy to have 450+ pictures available on one card which also fits a broad gamut of other devices in the home. And, maybe one day, Eye-Fi will produce an SDHC card with wifi built-in which supports RAW files. You won’t be seeing that in the CF format any time soon.
My only niggle is that it would have been nice had the adapter been end- rather than side-loading as the design requires removal of the adapter from the 5D to permit removal of the card. But overall, this is a fine value and I would guess the slower write speed in the camera would be made up for by the use of faster cards, if that matters to you. For me, it’s not an issue.
Sound recording
It’s a lot easier now.
When the hero of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 movie, Diva, sets to making his bootleg recording of the operatic soprano who never records, he is hiding the best portable analog tape recorder ever made, under his coat. Simply stated, the Nagra was the Leica of its time.
Actor Frédéric Andréi starts the Nagra
Seconds later, soprano Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez lights into Ebben ne andro lontana from Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally – you know the tune even if you have never heard of Catalani.
Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez – mediocre voice, non-mediocre looks
The movie is a splendid example of the very best in French film, which means it’s awfully good. Quirky, avant garde, beautifully filmed and a great plot.
I was reminded of the movie when asked for a recommendation for a really good digital voice recorder the other day. Naturally, I mentioned the Edirol R-09 which I am delighted to see Edirol has improved, enhancing the finish and redesigning the fragile battery door. We have been using ours for more than two years – with external microphones to mostly record my son’s piano playing – and remain delighted with the fine sound quality this device offers. Unlike our protagonist’s beautiful Nagra, it can fit in any pocket.
For anyone interested in just how good French movie making can be, Diva is highly recommended. For anyone liking great photography, it’s a must have movie.
Here’s a track of a friend playing Misty Blues, recorded on the Edirol, using nothing but its internal microphones. Editing was done using Audacity with the LAME MP3 plug-in to permit MP3 output generation. This is a wonderful, and free, sound editor which I recommend for easy editing of sound tracks.