Category Archives: Photography

Restoring enameled cookware

Cooking

Oven cleaner to the rescue.

Very occasionally I write about cooking tools in this journal. For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

Almost 12 years ago I wrote about the Sabatier non-stainless chef’s knife, and it remains as perfect as the day I bought it. Sadly, it seems that non-stainless knives are no longer available. Shame, they present the best possible cutting edge to your food, in exchange for a bit of love and care.

Great cooking tools are not the sole preserve of the gourmands who make France home, and Tojiro’s bread knife remains a marvel. The price of that tool has jumped around and is back to a bargain $20 as I write. It will beat the pants off your $100 German original.

Today I’m looking at restoring the original color and finish to a Le Creuset cast iron skillet. Get the 11.75″ one – only regrets will result if you chintz on the smaller one. The downsides of this tool are its high price and high weight, along with a tendency for the gorgeous flame finish (all Le Creuset cookware should only be bought in Flame. Nothing else looks right) to discolor with use. The upsides are that this is one of the few remaining Le Creuset tools to still be made in France (hence the price) and the fact that you can put it in an oven at broiler temperature comfortable in the knowledge that no damage will result. And your grandchildren will be passing it down to the next generation.

Mine was horribly discolored after years of brutal beatings.




Hard, baked on deposits.

Hot soapy water? Fughedaboutit.

A baking powder and water slurry? Useless.

Bar Keeper’s Friend cleaning solution? Bad idea. Despite claims to the contrary, just try rubbing some of this product between thumb and forefinger. Yup, it’s mildly abrasive, meaning that vigorous use will destroy the gloss on your cookware’s enamel.

So the hard stuff was called for.




The nasty stuff.

The makers say this oven cleaner is fume free (they lie), and take it from me. You want this nowhere near your kitchen surfaces. Off to the garage and give the pan a serious spray coat. The recommended cure time is 2 hours, cold, after which my pan’s surface looked like this – rubber gloves and paper garage towels are all that’s required:




80% clean after 2 hours.

OK, do it again:




Two more hours.

Now we are at 95% clean.

So, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Another coat and leave to stew overnight:




Aah!

Now we are very much in the land of diminishing returns, at 99% clean.

A thorough wash with soap and hot water is called for unless you want to grow another head and develop terminal cancer. But the gloss is there, as is the restored pride of ownership. A schmuck who uses a brassed up Nikon to broadcast his macho prowess is as bad a photographer as the lousy cook who takes no pride in the appearance of his tools is a chef.

A tripod mount for the iPhone 11

iPhone

Light, cheap and comes with a remote.

Amazon has these tripod mounts for iPhones under various names. I chose the cheapest, the Jansite, for all of $8.95. You can pay many times this sum if you like, which will make hipsters happy, but this does the job well for very little. The iPhone does not have to be removed from its protective case, and the tripod thread is the standard 1/4″ used on tripods since Henry Fox-Talbot was a boy.




There’s no need to remove the protective case.


The rear knob permits changes from landscape to portrait orientation.


I mate mine with an inexpensive, light Oben carbon fiber tripod which comes with a handy QR plate which is bolted to the Jansite tripod mount, and despite its light weight extends to some five and one half feet. The days of massive, heavy cantilevered Linhof monster tripods are over, and mine goes on sale as soon as I finish writing this. You do not need Brooklyn Bridge construction when your camera is almost weightless and comes with state-of-the-art image stabilization.

But wait! There’s more!




There’s a tiny button on the side of the remote for power. A blue LED confirms power-on.


The Jansite, for the crazy $8.95 outlay, comes with a bluetooth remote. This pairs with your iPhone in seconds (Settings->Bluetooth) and I gave up testing its range at 36 feet. So now you have the perfect night vision (Night Mode!) setup.

As for cases, hipsters will once again rejoice knowing their precious iPhone can be ensconced in $100 cases made from hides from select Schwabian bulls, but the $16 Lameeku provides all you need – decent protection for the triple lens assembly, a grippable leather exterior far superior to the slithery native surface of the iPhone and, best of all, room for the rest of your life in the slide out holder.




Your life in your pocket.

In my case that means a Driver’s License, a medical insurance card, an ATM card and a credit card. All you need. Were Apple Pay ubiquitous I would do without the credit card. And just like the hipster $100 special, this will last 2 years (as have my last three) before you need to upgrade it, not because it’s worn but rather because Apple has come up with some startling innovation in its latest iPhone and, naturally, that will not fit the old case.

The genius of Steve Jobs

Android, iPad, iPhone

His greatest strategic decision is little recognized.

Samsung cell phones are made by thieves.

Samsung steals the design, UI, even the packaging from Apple. The Android OS which these devices run is made by America’s greatest thief, Google. Sure, the fine print says you agreed to it, and consequently your data are stolen and resold to anyone who cares to pay. And because thieves do not care for the welfare of their victims, Android sees to it that its infinitely penetrable code is open to bad guys to further abscond with your life and secrets. If you use Android, that’s a tacit admission that your data is worth to you exactly what Google paid you for it.

Daniel Eran Dilger has been writing technical articles for Apple Insider for as long as I remember. Invariably thoroughly researched, his latest series chronicles Jobs’s greatest stroke of genius, one which directly addresses these thieves and their nefarious ways.

Sure, we all know how the iPod took a clunky concept and turned it into a supremely elegant rendition, accompanied by one of the greatest advertising slogans ever:




October, 2001. “1,000 songs in your pocket”.

The iPod followed the 1998 iMac and between them the products turned around a failing company. The string of hits – the Apple II, the Mackintosh, the iMac, the iPod, and the greatest of all – the iPhone – rightly saw Jobs branded as the greatest visionary since Thomas Edison. Unlike Edison, Jobs never created completely new technologies such as the light bulb, the phonograph, the movie camera. Rather, he looked at what the market had to offer and improved those offerings with quantum leaps in design and user interfaces. Obsessing over the smallest detail, he reminds us that “don’t sweat the small stuff” is an expression dreamt up by those who have no attention span or standards.

When the iPhone was released on June 29, 2007 the army of buyers had already been astonished by the user interface, displayed by Jobs in his earlier presentation (January 9, 2007), with such seemingly magical features as scrolling, with that little bounce when the end of the list was reached. I recall gasping when Jobs first showed that off. As one of his friends put it when discussing his presentation of the first iPhone: “You had me at scrolling”. It was fun, it was new and it was breathtaking UI design. Samsung immediately stole that for it’s better cell phones (most of their money is made on low end devices for the third world). They had already long been stealing from anyone in sight, right down to emulating the easily removed cellophane in which Apple’s beautifully packaged products were ensconced. Jobs finally said “Enough!” and applied to make the scrolling/bounce feature trademarked. He lost, the judge denying his claim stating that it failed on grounds of obviousness ….

So in 2008, Jobs took another tack. He decided to bring the design of mobile CPUs in house, meaning that the ARM designs would hereafter be exclusive to Apple. The first such CPU was the A4:




The A4 CPU.

As Dilger explains, that CPU was first installed in 2010 and within 6 years was the brain in over one billion Apple devices. Moving away from generic Samsung chips, the A4 was installed in the iPad, iPhone 4, the fourth generation iPod touch, and the second generation Apple TV. The decision to bring CPU design in house was Jobs’s greatest stroke of genius and we are now seeing the fruit of that decision.

The most astonishing outcome of this decision is the latest A13 CPU, containing all of 8.5 billion transistors, we are told, spaced just 7 nanometers apart. It’s what makes computational photography possible in the game changing iPhone 11 and 11 Pro and will see the speedy demise of most mainstream digital camera manufacturers.

The day of the big sensor is done, with each sensor’s area in the iPhone 11 being just 5% (five percent!) of that in the gargantuan DSLR’s full frame carcass, yet delivering comparable performance. Along with the demise of big sensors and the bodies which house them, we will see the simultaneous demise of vast catalogs of enormous – and enormously costly – lenses, some claiming apertures as fast as f/0.95. Why? Because the f/2 or so apertures in the iPhone’s lenses are the functional equivalent of f/0.2 when you add in computational photography and such seemingly magical technologies as Night Mode. The traditional meaning of ‘aperture’, as in “f/1.4 is faster than f/2.8”, no longer makes sense.

Dilger tells us that the major competing CPU, used by Samsung and Android, is the Qualcomm Snapdragon which is already two generations slower and requires larger batteries (that’s a ‘feature’, in Samsung ads) to satisfy its electrical thirst. Despite two years’ development, Qualcomm has been unable to improve the performance of its CPU.




The garden at night, Night Mode and A13 CPU at work. SOOC. LR reports
1/8 sec. at f/1.8, ISO 1000, but I am no longer sure what that all means. Hand held.

Meanwhile, Samsung has abandoned its efforts to steal Apple’s FaceID security technology, unable to clone it, while Google’s Pixel has done a poor job of stealing Apple’s older fingerprint recognition. Stick a protective plastic sheet on your purloined Pixel’s screen and any fingerprint in the world will open the phone. That seems appropriate. What, after all, would you expect from the world’s premier thieves? At the same time Apple has been undertaking a multiple year effort to rid itself of all Samsung content in its devices. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Apple has had three major CPU makers for its desktops and laptops. The Apple II used the Motorola 68000 family, the Mac switched to IBM’s more powerful but hot running PowerPC CPUs and current hardware uses Intel chips. As the saying goes on Wall Street, “If you want loyalty, get a dog“.

Jobs’s decision to bring mobile CPU design in house will eventually see Apple’s desktops and laptops move to the ‘A’ series CPUs used in iPhones and iPads, allowing Apple to sidestep Intel’s interminable delivery delays and have a far less costly CPU in its devices. And performance will only improve.

The A13 is now approaching the fastest Intel CPUs in performance, and we can expect the same stellar gains in battery life in the MacBook as the iPhone 11 sees over its predecessor iPhones. Apple already uses A series chips to control the touch bar in its MacBook Pro. The writing is on the wall.

Dilger’s series of exhaustively researched articles is recommended to those who want a deep look inside the genius of Steve Jobs.

iPhone 11 Pro image, standard lens.

At the library

Architecture, iPhone, Photographs

Not a right angle in sight.




The ultrawide optics does its thing.

My local library is one of those wildly abstract and severe designs which denies the existence of the ninety degree angle. This sort of architecture is fodder for the camera, as the above image discloses.

One of the complaints I have seen aimed at the ultrawide optic in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro is that it is fixed focus. Such opinions are expressed by those with no training in the physics of photography. A 1.54mm focal length lens (13mm FFE) will render everything sharp all the time, as I illustrate here. There is no need for focusing. And if you want to change depth of field, Focos awaits. The other complaint is that saving the image in RAW format is not possible. Only compressed JPG is available. What this opinion denies is the extent to which computational photography and Apple’s always-on SmartHDR technology obviates the need for RAW. (RAW is available in some camera apps like Halide, not in the stock Camera app). Finally the third complaint – excessive lens distortion and vignetting – is justified, but easily resolved with one click in LR or PS or ACR using my lens correction profile. Apple’s claim that they left distortions uncorrected for the UWA lens to emphasize its ‘wideness’ is so much rot. They clearly rushed the product to market along with a disastrous series of iOS 13.x releases, each replete with bugs.

It is the small file sizes of JPGs for the UWA – and indeed JPG is standard for all three lenses – that is one of the unsung secrets of the camera’s design. As the data for the above image disclose, the RAW image is some 12mp (3024 x 4032 = 12.19 mp), whereas the JPG is a mere 2.88 mp. Now a file from your enormous Nikon D850 with its 50mp sensor and no less gargantuan optics will come in at some 150mp when converted to TIFF or PSD, which is what LR or PS has to do before you apply any processing corrections.




EXIF data for the above image.

And by contrast, so sophisticated is SmartHDR in the iPhone that those corrections are rarely called for. So suddenly LR performs once more like the spring chicken it once was, loading those 3mp files in a trice and creating full size previews in like time, whereas your D850 image dictates ever larger capital outlays on more storage, faster storage and improved GPUs. Why, process just seven of those images and there goes a gigabyte of storage …. And while you are processing all of those bytes, I have crafted a blog entry, written a suitably inflammatory narrative and am out on the street searching out new subjects for my camera. Plus, you are $5,000+ out of pocket and your shoulder is sore. I suffer from neither affliction.