Category Archives: Photography

Ford vs. Ferrari

Photography

Race movie, sort of.




The insipid poster for the movie.

The early 1960s long distance racing scene was dominated by Ferrari’s wonderful 4 liter mid-engined V12 motor. A small, high revving engineering masterpiece it was set in bodies that only the descendants of Michelangelo could create. It won everything in sight.

However, during the early part of the decade, a drunken philanderer who had chosen his parents well, one Henry Ford II, decided that “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday” would work for the Ford Corporation and set to doing it the easy way. He would simply buy Ferrari and change the prancing horse on the hood to the familiar blue lozenge. No deal. The Commendatore was not about to yield his name to the crass vulgarian from across the pond.

So Ford had to make his own and did it the American way. He threw money at it. The car was large, the engine a crude, low revving 7 liter monster. A few million dollars later all Henry II had to show for the almighty American dollar was a bunch of egg on his face. The cars failed for every reason known – blown brakes, a gearbox made of cheese, awful aerodynamics and even overheating monster motors. The drivers needed work, too. Then Ford chanced on the greatest development engineer and driver of the decade, the Englishman Ken Miles, and the car started to take race shape. After more millions the Ford GT40s came in, line astern, at the 1966 Le Mans race, 1-2-3, and kept winning through 1969 when Porsche finally decided to show them what is what and who is who. Miles never won the Le Mans race and the movie goes on and on about how he was ‘robbed’ by the suits from Detroit who wanted a Real American at the wheel, which is ridiculous when you realize the winning car was driven by an Aussie and a Kiwi. The line astern stunt relegated him to second, for he had traveled a few yards less than the ‘winner’, though he was the fastest driver by a country mile (actually 3 miles as he was a lap ahead before being ordered to slow down). Vive La France!

The movie commits the usual Hollywood faux pas of trying to interject family relationships into car racing. Do we really care that Miles’s wife was a shrew from the Midlands? Or do we want to see cars racing? And that’s what makes this a far weaker racing movie than Steve McQueen’s ‘Le Mans’ which documents the Porsche 917’s win at the 1970 race, driven by an Englishman and a German. The best thing about the new movie, as is the case whenever he stars in a film, is the Welshman Christian Bale, doing a great Birmingham accent. The worst is Matt Damon, if you even notice his mechanical acting, that is. A truly underwhelming, if bankable, ‘star’.

The McQueen movie failed as there was insufficient audience for what is a pure racing movie, the best ever. Ford vs. Ferrari will fail because of awful marketing and a poorly developed script. And, well, it was so long ago who cares? This is, after all, the land of short attention spans.

But for the true motorhead it’s worth catching. Just try to do so at an IMAX theater for maximum visual and aural effect and close your eyes and ears when the shrew is on the screen.

Fifteen billion and perfect

Hardware

Not to mention dirt cheap.

My nephew just picked of one of these 65″ LG LED televisions at Costco (Amazon asks a little more but no subscription is required):




Fifteen billion pixels. Click the image.

With a 4K display and a 120Hz rapid refresh rate and built in OS and cable accessibility, he paid all of $500. It may not be OLED but for $2000 less, who cares?

Now, I spent more time than I care to admit this summer with my son practicing SAT college entrance exam math, and can inform you that a 16:9 ratio display with a 65″ diagonal has dimensions of 56.652″ x 31.867″. Thank you, Pythagoras.

A square inch of a 4K TV contains 3840 x 2160 or 8.184 million pixels. That figures to 14.775 billion pixels in the display, and not a one can be faulty. Now that is what I call manufacturing prowess.

And the price is give-away cheap. At 47 lbs the display is easily wall mounted, to boot. The only challenge is finding space for this monster.

How wide is the iPhone UWA lens?

iPad, Micro Four-Thirds, Photography

Incredibly so!

It’s not easy to convey just how wide the UWA in the iPhone 11 is. Apple states it’s 13mm FFE, so I decided to compare results with those from my Panasonic GX7 MFT body fitted with the 7.5mm MFT Rokinon fisheye (both now sold). As I have little interest in heavy spherical distortion (iPhone 11 UWA) or in the tedious fisheye effect (Rokinon), both images were corrected for linear projection, using my lens correction profile for the iPhone 11 (which reduces the FFE to some 14mm) and Fisheye Hemi for the Rokinon image. The defished Rokinon field of view computes to 12mm FFE.




GX7/Rokinon at left.

There’s much to be learned here. Both images were taken under identical fluorescent lighting with the cameras set to Auto White Balance. The Rokinon image is certainly 2mm or so wider, but there the Rokinon’s advantage ends. The iPhone does a superb job of auto white balance, rendering realistic daylight tones but, more importantly, take a look at the near cylinder on my classic BMW motorcycle. The dynamic range correction from the iPhone is superb. The MFT would need significant post processing to recover the shadows.

Except for distortion correction, both images are SOOC.

So yes, the UWA’s image is not quite as wide as that from a de-fished fisheye. But the advantage of the computational photography applied within the iPhone, which greatly enhances dynamic range, considerably outweighs the slight loss of width.

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.