Category Archives: Photography

Hit with the ugly stick

Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

Hard to imagine something that looks worse.

I am a long time fan of Nikon’s hardware. Click here and you can access an index of the dozens of Nikon related articles on this blog.

And, for the most part, while it’s performance that matters, it never hurts if the hardware is pleasant to contemplate and Nikon’s aesthetics have been generally decent, if not stellar. Sure, there’s none of the elegance of Pentax or the beauty of early Leica M bodies, but Nikons like the legendary Nikon F brought with their designs a macho sensibility to complement their wonderful utility.

So I look at their latest mirrorless body, and I weep:



The Nikon camel – a horse designed by a committee.

And the ‘designers’ – if there were any – attached a quite stupendously ugly lens to this cobbled together excrescence of a body. Yeah, I know how to make good pictures, but with something this grotesque in my hands, the task becomes impossibly challenging.

Vote!

Ramblings

Time to clean the Augean Stables of Republicans.



Send Pig home.

Four years ago – goodness, it seems like 400 – I warned of the coming catastrophe which would result from electing Pig to the White House. It gives me no pleasure to see that I was right and it is a source of eternal shame that 60 million American morons were wrong. They have got what they deserve which includes:

  • 200,000 American murdered by an uncaring Pig
  • Millions more infected with the coronavirus
  • Record unemployment
  • Destruction of our system of laws
  • Destruction of the Unites States Supreme Court and of the judiciary
  • Criminality of mind bending proportions in the Pig family
  • Rule by American ‘Christians’ whose expertise is in looking the other way
  • Destruction of the USPS
  • An existential threat to affordable health care

It bears repeating what I wrote on April 14, 2020 when comparing Pig with Richard III:

A note to Pig voters: This blog is about Photographs, Photographers and Photography. It ordinarily eschews politics. However, at this time of national tragedy, a tragedy whose number of deaths has been compounded by a psychopath masquerading as President, it is every American’s duty to protest loudly and to work for regime change. If you voted for Pig last time and have come around to seeing the error of your ways, all well and good. We all make mistakes. However, if you still fall in the trap of believing that Pig is making America great again and propose voting for him again, not only are you emphatically not welcome here, your very presence disgusts me. Do the right thing. Go elsewhere with your stupidity, your ignorance and your bigotry.

* * * * *

Now we are all voting early as the US Postal Service cannot be depended on to deliver our ballots on time. And yes, I do still believe that, as Churchill once put it, “Americans will always do the right thing, having first tried all the alternatives”. So it’s not enough to vote. It’s the right thing to vote Blue up and down the ballot. Put aside partisan differences and minor quibbles. Forget nonsense about abortion and gun rights. Noise. These have nothing to do with the peaceful governance of a great nation.

Yes, your choice is between a murderous criminal grifter and his enablers or a 77 year old with a GPA of 2.9 who has accomplished nothing in his life other than being on the taxpayers’ payroll for 47 years. But there’s a key distinction. One is a Pig. The other is a decent man, mediocre as he is. Today decent mediocrity is what America needs. Kick Pig and his Slovenian Slut and their many anchor babies out of the sty in which they reside.

Sony a7C

Cameras, Panasonic

Small and full frame.



Great specs in a small package.

By far my favorite camera before I went 100% iPhone and sold all my ‘regular’ hardware was the MFT Panasonic GX7. Small, a Leica format design with an offset finder eyepiece and an electronic shutter stealth mode for silent operation. Paired with the stock 12-35mm Pro Zoom optic, which is excellent, it was the best thing until the iPhone 11Pro came along. I banged away with that GX7 for the best part of a decade and loved every moment of it. Once you set up the menus for your preferred way of operation it became a high quality point-and-shoot delivering excellent image quality and came with a small fill-in flash built in. Sweet.

If the GX7 had a limitation it related to the handling of high contrast subjects, where highlights were all too prone to burn out, even using RAW, dictating underexposure by a stop or two and recovery of the shadows in Lightroom. Panny had crammed 18 megapixels into the 0.375 square inch sensor and it showed. That’s 48 mp/square inch.

So when Sony announced the a7C the other day, it was of immediate interest. A GX7-styled body bit with a full frame 24 megapixel sensor, meaning just 16 mp/square inch. That’s a huge drop in pixel density, which augurs well for dynamic range. But what is especially surprising about the new body is its small size. Compare:

Panny GX7 – 4.8″ x 2.8″ x 2.2″, or 29.6 cubic inch volume, weighing 402 grams without lens
Sony a7C – 4.9″ x 2.8″ 2.2″, or 30.2 cubic inches, weighing 509 grams

Add a lens to each – the stock zoom – and weight increases by a few grams.

So the Sony’s specifications are impressive indeed. The question has to be asked. Does MFT still make sense, given the image quality trade-offs?

One big plus over the GX7 is battery life. Sony claims over 700 shots on a charge; I rarely managed 200 with the GX7.

Now if they added great iPhone features like phone calls, cellular connectivity, night mode, and insanely small size and weight, that would be really something. Oh, and a built-in flash would be nice. Also, at $1,800 Sony is asking too much. At $1,100-1,200 it makes sense. Heck, that’s as much as my iPhone 11Pro.

Meat cleaver

Cooking

A superior tool for any cook.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

Over a decade ago I extolled the benefits of a good chef’s knife, writing like many before me that it’s the key kitchen tool.

Well, for the last three years my chef’s knife has seen very little use and I prepare three meals daily. It has been replaced – nay, obsoleted – by this:




A superior tool.

This tool is superior to the chef’s knife in just about every way imaginable. The cutting edge is much further from the fingers. The leverage that can be applied on the broad-topped blade is an order of magnitude greater. Rocking the cleaver over vegetables, like onions, to dice and chop them up is trivial and safe. But as the dents in mine confirm, the last thing you really want to do with this tool is use it for hacking up bones. Yes, the steel is soft, meaning it both blunts and distorts relatively easily. I will gradually wear through my dents, but they remind me not to be silly. You never hammer this down on anything. Make noise with it and you are using it incorrectly. Want to hack up bones? Use a saw.

The blade is very thick which just helps with the impression of control and yes, it just fits the sharpening machine I have now been using happily for over a decade:




In the Chef’s Choice sharpener.

What about the Mezzaluna, you ask? After all, celebrity TV chefs are all over this tool:




An awful, single-use tool. Dangerous, too.

I have to tell you that this is one of the worst conceived single-use tools ever. First, all you can do with it is rock it back and forth on vegetables. Second, the unprotected blade will slice you up when you retrieve it from the drawer where you placed it, because it was just too large to hang on the wall.

And unlike the cleaver, it cannot scoop up chopped material for placement in the skillet (the chef’s knife’s narrow blade is also sub-optimal in this task), nor can you use it to gently crush garlic cloves to permit easy peeling – and subsequent dicing. Fughedaboutit. It’s a solution looking for a problem, strictly for poseurs. And if you think this is the right way to slice up a pizza pie, think again and get a pizza wheel. It’s nice having ten fingers ….

Brand choice for the cleaver? I don’t think it matters. Just do not waste your $100 on a costly, hard steel German one which will be hell to sharpen. Instead, get something like my $25 choice and make sure you have good sharpening hardware available. And make sure your cleaver of choice has a hanging hole in the blade, as you will want to hang it in an accessible spot. After all, you will find you are using it daily.

The cleaver rules. All I use the vaunted chef’s knife for today is to split open large melons or cantaloupes. Point in first, for safety, then rotate.