Category Archives: Photography

Of current interest

Cameras, Photography

After the clearance.

I made mention, a while back, that my gear cabinet now looks like this:





The superb camera(s) in the iPhone 11 Pro had seen all my MFT and FF gear off to eBay before all that hardware became so many worthless door stops. In terms of dynamic range, versatility, image quality, night mode, Deep Fusion, tons of computational magic and compactness, nothing compares to this superb camera …. which also happens to do lots of other things when called for. Your DSLR is as sophisticated as a hammer in comparison.

I have no regrets about that decision as I am not a collector, a species which I have never understood. Why you would want a machine in the home which is never used for its intended purpose beats me, and always has. Further, all those unused shutters and gear trains will die almost as quickly as the electronic components in modern hardware, leaving you with useless junk.

So the other day I found myself thinking what of the hardware on the market holds any interest for this photographer after, that is, upcoming iPhone Pro releases.

Well, one obvious choice is the medium format Hasselblad which weds a decent sized sensor with large pixels (meaning low noise) in a compact package.




50mp and little change from $9k with the 45mm lens.

The camera is light. Weighing in at 2.6lbs with the 45mm (35mm FFE) lens – it’s a relative featherweight for this sensor format – it has no flapping mirror, a near silent shutter and auto-focus. Reviews suggest it’s not that fast to use so studio and landscape genres suggest themselves as prime subjects.

The other camera of interest is the Leica M10-D, a street snapper where Leitz has mercifully deleted the LCD screen every camera seems to come with, allowing the snapper to get on with the job of pressing the button. That’s totally in keeping with the original Leica M aesthetic and design intent back to the M3 in 1954 and earlier.




24mp and a whopping $11,290 + tax with the 35mm Summicron.

In all my years of using digital bodies I have never used the LCD screen for anything other than formatting the card. If you cannot visualize what you are photographing until after the event and need instant confirmation, well that’s fine, but not my working method. Viewfinder, focus, compose, click, move on. Check the technical details later. 2.1 lbs for the combination which is almost as much as the Hasselblad.

Think about that.

But the Leica has a disabling feature for these aging eyes. No auto focus. In this day and age paying $3k for an MF lens with a rangefinder of middling accuracy is simply not on.

As for all the rest of them, all those tedious DSLRs and mirrorless bodies with no computational intelligence and nothing to distinguish one from another …. yawn.

Butt ugly. $60k+.

Mac Pro

Had to get the wheels, too.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

There’s a new American Express card out named the AMEX Plutonium, and of course they sent me one. It’s a sweet deal and there’s no charge for the radioactivity, which decays quickly. There’s no credit limit and if you spend $1mm a year they waive the annual $50k fee. And the interest rate is only 10% a month, which beats the local Mob’s.

Well, says, I, better get with the action and earn that freebie, so I decided to splash out on the new Mac Pro. Yup, it’s butt ugly, but I have a mechanic who will gut one of my spare regular Mac Pros and install the hardware inside that elegant box. And he’s only charging $5k to do the work! Too bad he doesn’t take AMEX.

Anyway, to jolly things along I decided to max out the new MP’s specs, so here’s what I ended up with:


Had to get the Apple monitor – it’s only twice the price of the identical Dell. Loaded her up with 768GB of memory at only 3x the market rate, a snip at $10k.


The stand is only $1,000 more. Had to have it.


Ugly as sin, so I’m having it rehoused.


Forget the stock legs. I’m going with the rollers for a mere $400 more.

I hope it arrives soon as it should allow me to email and play Pong much faster. I also charged a new Rolls and a Bentley on the Plutonium – a man needs variety – so now I am well on the way to the free annual fee. I’m going to show the new Roller at local shows with the new Mac Pro in the passenger seat.

Looking to the future

iPhone, Photography

Small sensors rule.


Apple’s latest acquisition.

Let’s face it, the photography world needs yet another 35 mm f/1.4 or 24-70 mm f/2.8 lens for full frame as much as it needs a hole in the head.

The future is not with more optics but with better computational photography and Apple knows this better than anyone, with the dramatic improvements in quality visible in the output of the iPhone 11 Pro. Yes, those Sony optics and sensors in the iPhone 11 Pro are tremendous but the secret sauce is in the code. Any phone maker can buy the optics from Sony. Only Apple has the code and the fabulous A13 CPU to drive all those instructions. So Apple’s latest acquisition makes eminent sense while the competition at the major SLR manufacturers continues to make optics no one needs. Like the Pentagon, these camera makers are fighting the previous war.

It’s the likes of Sony and Nikon who should be buying these businesses with their smarts, not Apple, if they are to have any chance of survival. I think those chances fall daily. These companies are like Kodak whose board of directors believed film would never die.

Apple has already shown with its latest cell phones that the need for bulky digital gear falls daily. To all those skeptics who say that small sensors will never equal the output from big gear, I would remind them of what Oscar Barnack accomplished with the Leica a century ago. “Small camera, big picture“ applies as much today as it did when Oscar was a lad.

The photography future is with small, leaving just a few masochists to hump around heavy equipment bags and tripods. Increasingly, their results are indistinguishable from those produced by cell phones in capable hands.

Desperation at Nikon

Nikon bodies

Shameless revenue grab.

Time to hire the investment bankers at Nikon and sell the parts while they have some value left:


Gimme the money. Click the image for the story.

There is no comparison with like action by Apple. An iPhone with its intricate weather sealing and complex internals is not something for the local butcher to fix and, last I checked, Apple was not going out of business. Also, unlike Nikon, their 80 million iPhones sold annually do not arrive faulty or with serious design flaws. Quick, how many iPhone recalls do you remember?

Nikon is failing owing to Apple’s superb iPhone cameras, made by Sony, with Cupertino brains. That’s why they are making this pathetic revenue grab. Amusingly, the picture in the linked article testifies to Nikon’s incompetence – the stripped camera is being handled with bare, greasy fingers.

It has long been Nikon’s policy to refuse repair at the factory places for ‘grey’ market imports – the sort of thing companies like B&H was offloading in boatloads when they were not allegedly cheating on sales taxes. Now you will not be able to get your Nikon fixed anywhere but at Nikon. So when your $5,000 D6 ‘professional’ behemoth fails, get in line or do as Jaguar owners of yore did. Buy two. One for use, the other in the repair shop.

A dirt cheap eReader

Photography

Kindle Fire 7.


The magnetic charger adapter – circled – protrudes very little.

I had yet another Kindle reader fail the other day. The previous two (Paperwhites) were rendered useless by trashed MicroUSB sockets, the latest, a costly Voyage (still sporting that awful MicroUSB connector), decided to go nuts and the screen started delivering crazed images.

So I thought I might try an iPad Mini until, that is, I saw the price. $400. Are you crazy, Apple? Never discounted, it’s over $100 more than a base full size iPad. No thanks.

I was reluctant to go with another Paperwhite owing to the fragile USB socket when I chanced upon a clever solution in the guise of a magnetic MicroUSB adapter. Costing all of $7, the small, chrome end piece goes in the Kindle’s socket and thereafter the cable is attached magnetically for charging. Elegant and inexpensive, you will never need to trouble that fragile connector again.

Then, by chance, I spotted that the base LED Kindle, the Fire 7, was selling for $30. Thirty dollars! At that rate I can replace it annually for a decade and I’m still way ahead of the cost of an iPad. And as my sole use for the device is as an eReader, paying up for lots of added functionality is money wasted. Sure the Fire 7 is replete with Amazonia, ads for this and that, direct links to the shopping site, and on and on. But, hey, one swipe and you are in the Kindle reader app. I downloaded free Wikipedia and Dictionary apps and that’s it. You really do not want to trust your contacts, calendars and so on to a device which runs a (modified) version of the Android OS, a system designed with thieves and hackers in mind, and not in a good way.

The LCD screen, which is perfectly adequate for reading all day long, means that you cannot read in direct, bright sun, but I can confirm that with the brightness cranked up to 80% I get a solid 7 hours of reading time. That’s barely adequate for a cross country flight, but the iPhone can always fill in for the last hour while the bus driver at the controls tries to find the landing strip and the cabin waitresses regale you with offers of free miles. What sort of masochist would want more time on an American flying cattle car?

Weight? 10 ounces, same as the iPad Mini, compared with 7 ounces for the Kindle Paperwhite.

And yes, you can comfortably hold the Fire 7 in one hand above your head lying on the sofa, a key requirement for this reader.

The Fire 7 comes with modest storage, netting to 10GB once the OS and apps are installed. This is more than adequate for ereading with each loaded book consuming 1-3 MB. That’s thousands of books and there’s no need to have them all loaded at one time. If more storage is needed, simply install an inexpensive MicroSD card in the provided slot. Up to 512 GB can be installed, with a quality 32GB card running Under $10.