Category Archives: Photography

Olympus fades

Cameras

Camera business sold.




The announcement.

The buyer is the same that bought Sony’s Vaio laptop business a few years ago. Ever seen one since? No, I thought not. And that will likely be the fate of Olympus cameras, too.

What is surprising is that this took a full decade after Olympus perpetrated one of the largest accounting frauds in history, hiding $1.5 billion in investment losses. Japan Inc. covered for that but could not cover for a failing sector – the stand alone camera business.

Over the years Oly has made some excellent innovative cameras, including the half-frame Pen F with the side flapping mirror and the compact OM1 in the film era.




The excellent OM1 – small, quiet and with a great selection of lenses.

But the failure of Olympus is not the result of accounting fraud. It’s the same cause that will see Pentax, Ricoh, Sigma, Panasonic and probably Nikon exit the camera business in the next few years, once corporate pride and loss of face are dealt with. The reason is a catastrophic failure to innovate. The high prices of even entry level DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, typically north of $600, puts them in square competition with the iPhone and its outstanding camera. The computational photography aspects of the cell phone’s camera moxy include variable depth of field, exceptional night imaging and the ability to instantly share images with the world. No traditional camera body, be it FF, APS-C or MFT can offer those features. And Apple is just getting started with its in-house designed Axx series of CPUs, now migrating to their laptops and desktops. And Apple’s in-house designs make it very much harder for the serial thieves at Samsung to keep up, fair reward for their crimes.

The other survivors? Canon, for whom cameras are a small revenue center and Leica, which changed its business model years ago. They now no longer make cameras, focusing on jewelry.

So goodbye, Olympus, and hullo, iPhone. It’s time to move on.

Apple to fire Intel

Macintosh

No more Intel CPUs.

I well recall the growing disaster of the IBM PC CPUs, the G3, G4 and G5.

Apple used these in their desktops and laptops through 2005, when Steve announced that Apple would be dropping the IBM CPUs in favor of Intel CPUs.

The best laptop at the time was the Apple Powerbook G3 which used the G3 PowerPC CPU. The problem was that as speeds increased with the G4 and G5 the CPUs ran hotter and hotter and Steve concluded that, as IBM was unwilling or unable to address the heat and high power consumption issues, a change was called for. Indeed at the time I recall using a G5 iMac and the machine could have doubled as a toaster. It revved up the fans at the slightest provocation and you just knew that its service life would be limited. I sold it and went to Hackintoshes when Apple switched to Intel. The Macs of the time were too expensive for my taste.

When the first Intel CPU Macs were introduced they came with a truly brilliant application named Rosetta. This ran invisibly and was an emulator which ensured that if you fired up a PowerPC application that it would run seamlessly under Intel’s architecture. That took years to develop, was invisible to the user, and it will be intriguing to see how Apple does like magic this time around.




The G5 iMac – the Apple toaster.

Now it seems that Apple is about to announce that it is switching from Intel to ARM CPUs in its laptops and desktops and the reasons appear similar – too much power consumption, too much heat and too slow a development cycle. And this time Apple will have total control over the CPU’s design, predicated on its years of expertise with the Axx series of CPUs in the iPhone and iPad. I can testify to the prowess of the A13 ARM CPU in my iPhone 11Pro which is a wonder and a great pleasure to use.

For the full story check out this Apple Insider article, which also includes details on the financial aspects of the switch. It is written by the estimable and always dependable Daniel Eran Dilger.

René Gruau

Art Illustration, Paintings, Photography

Master of sparsity.

For an index of articles on art illustrators, click here.

There has been no greater illustrator than René Gruau (1909-2004), an Italian master best known for his long association with Christian Dior, back when ‘couture’ meant something and the working class knew its place. Gruau (‘Grew-oh’) was of Italian birth but Paris was his abode. There, at the age of 14, he was already making a living from his marvelous drawings. Every major fashion house retained him and while his images remain in our subconscious few know who this master artist was.

His relevance to photography is that once the barrow boys (working class lads with a Pentax like Bailey, Donovan and Duffy, their fathers barrow boys from the East End of London, whose perfectly virulent English they inherited) started snapping the demand for traditional drawings plummeted. Not that this bothered Gruau for he was in a class of one, remaining happily employed for the rest of his very long life. And the barrow boys never came close to Gruau’s class, greatly devoid in their make up.

There is so much of his work out there it’s hard to know where to begin, but the following images are Gruau at his very best.




Just a splash of red.


Alluring, eye catching, perfect.


A sparsity of line not known since Matisse.


His greatest partnership was with Christian Dior.


Utter genius.


Bourke-White redux

Photographs, Ramblings

MAGA.

Morons Are Governing America.




Bourke-White by Annie Telnaes

Annie Telnaes, the WaPo cartoonist, does Pig best. That means she shows him red faced, bloated and ready to blow, like the pig he is.

For the story of the original image by Margaret Bourke-White, last referenced here when yet another moron was in the Oval Office melting down the economy, click here.

No pig for Pig

Ramblings

We are all vegetarians now.

While I have always regarded vegetarianism as something practiced by those with a screw loose, if that’s what is needed to take Pig out of the Oval Office, that’s fine with me.

(Note: The honorific ‘Pig’ is used without a preposition in deference to Pig’s spouse, the Slovenian Slut who, after 30 illegal years in the United States has yet to construct a grammatically correct English sentence).

Here’s the warning:



No more pig

The murderous bungling of Pig and his sycophants sees to it that not one freezer is to be found in these United States, and that meat supplies are about to disappear from the (mostly empty) supermarket shelves:



No freezers for pig.

Smart folks have bought these up apace, to store their accumulated beef(s). Once those supplies run out, freezers will be selling for cents on the dollar.

Meanwhile, we can all look forward to meat-free Fridays. And Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The virus may not kill all of Pig’s cretinous supporters, but vegetarianism likely will. For that we should all be grateful,