Polaroid is no more.
The technology of photography was never more magic than when you used Polaroid cameras and film.
Now, as the WSJ reports, Polaroid film is no more. Even with modern DSLRs capable of tethered shooting and near instantaneous screen display of a snap, nothing will ever match the magic of Polaroid.
You can read more about the Einstein of photography and the creator of Polaroid, Edwin Land, here.
Rumors abound – these you can be certain of.
With all that speculation about the iminent replacement for the Canon 5D, here’s my list of things I can pretty much guarantee will not be in the 5D Mark II:
Expect the announcement in late September at Photokina in Cologne.
An insanely great application.
Now and then an application comes along which truly must be graced with the Insanely Great accolade, especially now that Apple has ceased making insanely great products and prefers to focus on insanely great sales instead.
That application is Helicon Focus from some programming geniuses in the Ukraine which, by the time you read this, will doubtless be a part of the USSR again.
Simply stated, Helicon Focus asks that you make several pictures of a subject with the focus slightly different in each, so that your range of pictures has something sharp in each plane. The application then merges the images for one overall sharp one.
Pictures beat words, so here’s one of the six originals I took of that much abused currency, the US dollar. Doubtless it’s illegal to photograph currency, but when the subject in question is worthless, it’s no longer currency right? Here’s the first of six snaps, with the focus at the far end:
Now here is the composite of six originals, each with slightly different focus points, after processing in Helicon Focus. The slight image magnification is conferred by the application to allow for image size changes between the component pictures. It’s something you can adjust in the application’s Preferences. Suffice it to say that the default setting of 4% magnification seem to work pretty well, so make sure you leave a little space around your subject to allow for this magnification:
Look carefully and you will see an out-of-focus band around the ‘A’ in ‘America’ – I should have taken more snaps with smaller focus adjustments. The lens was set on manual focus and the camera on manual exposure.
You can either use a stationary camera and adjust focus or use a focus rail to move the camera. The latter approach avoids image size changes but as the program adjusts image sizes when blending, if you use the stationary camera approach, I fail to see the advantage of a focus rail. If you use ring flash you should use a stationary camera as otherwise your lighting intensity will vary between component pictures.
Mind blowing! Insanely Great!!
So any time you need extreme depth of field and your subject is stationary, this $30 application is just what the doctor ordered.
All six snaps were taken on a Canon 5D with the 100mm macro lens at maximum aperture, for minimum depth of field. Helicon Focus reads many formats, including the RAW originals used here. Processing (MacBook, 2.1gHz C2D) took maybe 40 seconds and the interface is completely intuitive.
For those with high speed motor drives I imagine you could just set the camera on Continuous and move the focus ring as you bang away.
Well done Helicon Focus and let’s all pray you avoid the clutches of Mother Russia. Heck, you can always ask the French to save you ’cause sure as hell we will not. And for those of you who enjoy locking up now and then, Helicon Focus also comes in a Windows version. Either way, an available premium version of the application takes advantage of multi-core CPUs so if you use a computer with Intel’s drop dead (Insanely Great!) Core2Duo or Core4Duo or whatever, your processing speed will be nice and fast.
I’m using the Canon macro at f/2.8, its maximum aperture here, so as to push the application hard; realistically you would expect to stop down to take advantage of the lens’s sweet spot as well as to reduce the number of exposures required. For this lens, f/8 to f/11 seems best. You can see some overlap issues on the right of the above image – something I will address in a subsequent piece.
Disclosure: After writing the above I was given a free registered version of Helicon Focus by Dan. While it’s always nice to get things free, remain assured that my objectivity is not about to get corrupted. Sure, like all of us I can be bought, but it will cost you a sight more than $30! Thank you Dan.
Postscript: I shared the constituent RAW files for the above image with Dan Kozub of Helicon to see what was causing the slightly imperfect alignment visible in places. Dan wrote back that a new, enhanced version of the application would be out in about a month and would fix the issue. He advised me that he had tried it with my images and all was well – so at least it wasn’t me! In fairness to Helicon, this was a pretty extreme test given the closeness of the flower and the flower’s extreme angle to the plane of the camera’s sensor.
For some more practical ‘in the field’ tests, please click here.
You know it when you see it.
I was ruminating about our six year old boy the other evening. I was wondering whether he would be a good photographer. Which got me thinking about the broader issue of talent.
I suppose the word really means doing something well. While a liberal mind set dissociates that from material gain, a capitalist world dictates otherwise. Call me a philistine, but if you cannot make money from your art, you are not talented. Because the best and highest use of talent is to make it public and make it worth paying for.
What?
The greatest pianist? No, not some unknown whom five guests at a country house weekend enjoyed a while back. Horowitz. A supreme performer and an avid self publicist. As famous as they get. The best of the best. Were there better? We will never know because if they hid their light under a bushel we would have never heard them. Or of them.
The greatest photographer? No, not some unknown who showed a print or two at a country house weekend enjoyed a while back. Cartier-Bresson. A rabid self publicist. As famous as they get. The best of the best. Were there better? We will never know because if they hid their light under a bushel we would have never seen their work. Or seen them.
The greatest singer? No, not some unknown who sung a song or two at a palatial mansion weekend enjoyed a while back. Callas. A voracious self publicist. As famous as they get. The best of the best. Were there better? We will never know because if they hid their light under a bushel we would have never heard them. Or seen them.
Well, you get the point. Without publicity there is no talent.
That’s not to say that you cannot succeed without a talent in your chosen avocation.
No one without a tin ear would ever claim that Madonna can sing worth a twig. Yet she is a superb businesswoman and very successful. Money is her talent.
No one who is not blind or deaf would ever claim that Streisand can sing or act. Yet she is a superb businesswoman. Money is her talent.
No one with any aesthetic sense would ever claim that Mick Jagger could sing or dance. Yet his raw sensuality negated all of that. Fame is his talent.
The difference between the first and last three examples is that Horowitz, HCB and Callas will survive their demise. The likes of Madonna, Streisand and Jagger will not. And let us be grateful for that. Because, for the long term, talent is survival, not money.
First, fire all the photographers.
How many times have you seen it?
A sleazy politician calls a congressional hearing to attack the innocent and deflect opinion from his wrongdoings. Sitting at those long tables in the hearing rooms, be it in DC, London or Paris, the other end of the room will be replete with photojournalists all banging away at a zillion frames a second. For a picture of a sleazy ‘law maker’.
A pharma-fueled sportsman, fresh off a string of victories, is mobbed by photojournalists, all banging away at two zillion frames a second (sports being more important to the average consumer than his country’s constitution). For a picture of a zonker who escaped detection. (For the record, I have no complaint about the use of undetectable drugs by athletes. All I ask is that the same chemicals be made available to all competitors to level the playing field).
Thus, given that the snap of the sleaze or the zonker could as easily have been taken by one photographer using an Instamatic, the first thing any rational newspaper owner should do is to simply fire all the photographers and myriad hangers-on employed by his newspaper. The picture, mundane as it is, need only be purchased for pennies from some wholesaler of this kind of tripe. Or just reuse last year’s. No one will know the difference and it would be an act consonant with journalistic ethics as we know them.
The second, of course, is to establish a credible, paid, web presence with focused advertising. Which is why well managed papers like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times will survive whereas poorly run ones like The New York Times and The Washington Post are doomed. You are going to pay for their content, where opinion passes as reporting? No, I didn’t think so. The good writers at the NYT can move to Art Monthly and continue their fine work.
So, first, we fire all the photographers. The good ones will join cooperatives like Magnum, quality will rise and costs will fall. The bad ones will become paparazzi and will be subject to the rules of the jungle. One of their own creation. Or maybe they could get a job as a cop or security guard if all else fails.