Category Archives: Photography

NYC in the snow

Photography

Some superb old images.


Click the image for the article.

It’s an image worthy of Manet at his finest, at once realistic and impressionistic in its rendering.

The New York Times has started digitizing all its images back to inception in 1851. Early fruit of its labors is on show in the linked article – click the image above – and is from pre-WW1 New York City, and while the photographers are unknown the images are startling in their beauty and immediacy. And yes, I can confirm that the crossing at Broadway on the north side of the Flatiron Building is still windy as heck to this day.

Panasonic FF mirrorless imminent

Panasonic

A new FF entrant.

DP Review has an interesting interview with a Panasonic representative, talking about the forthcoming full frame S1 (24mp) and S1R (47mp) bodies.

While Panny is coy about the maker of the sensors, meaning it’s not Panny, that hardly matters. Panny and Nikon no more make all the parts in their hardware than Mercedes and BMW do in their cars, where everything from shocks, wheel, electronics, brakes, windows, seats, etc. is sub-contracted. That does not stop them from making good products.


The Panasonic S1R.

Panny’s timing is perfect. With Nikon having just introduced the mirrorless Z6/Z7, bodies which really dictate a move to the new compact lens line, Panny will be identically priced. The new user will have to pay for a body and lens and you can bet that if Panny wants decent market share that prices will be identical to Nikon’s. Best of all the bodies will hit the market with a large range of lenses from Panny (the MFT optics are excellent), Leica ($$$) and Sigma, the latter for those who do not care about bulk, weight and poor auto focusing. The target market is stated as being the working pro. I would wager that the bodies will take adapted MFT lenses with full functionality, restricting the sensor size to that of MFT. Not nuclear physics and nice to have, the 47mp sensor becoming 12mp, perfectly adequate for all but mural sized prints.

It is heartwarming to read of Panny’s experiments with ergonomics described in the article, something very reminiscent of Leica’s approach in designing the landmark M3 in the early 1950s, the best handling camera of the time. Panny also puts significant stress on the quality of the EVF and the camera’s durability, both required if they are to compete with Nikon. Further, given the high quality video implementation in Panny’s high end MFT bodies it seems the video maker has much to look forward to here. Panny really knows video.

From a hardware perspective there has never been a better time to be a photographer, even if the cell phone revolution has saturated the world with execrable photography.

Electronic surprises in 2018

Motorcycles, Photography

Some great devices.

The digital world marches on and much as I fight the tide with a solid adherence to an analog, mechanical universe, there’s no denying that digital technology is superior in every way, despite having the personality and charisma of a washing machine.

One of the costliest additions to the digital household at the beginning of the year was a 65″ LG OLED TV. Thinner than an iPhone it starts very quickly, delivers blacks the likes of which were heretofore unobtainable on a television and, unsurprisingly, is reliable as a refrigerator. While I confess to being slightly discombobulated with the occasional exhortation on turn-on to update the operating system, the device is a delight to use. (Eventually I simply turned off the internet connection and am bugged no more). We are rapidly approaching the day where that 100″ projection screen setup I installed in the vineyard home will become affordable in a big screen TV. The price one year ago was $2,697. The set now retails for $2,349, a modest drop of 13% reflecting the difficulty of making fault free large OLED panels. And did I mention it’s thinner than an iPhone?


The 65″ LG OLED TV.

That big screen TV was accompanied by a pair of special electrostatic loudspeakers, as capable of rendering shoot-’em-up action as they are in plumbing the depths of Horowitz’s Steinway. There is a lot of overpriced trash in the high end speaker sector. Martin Logan has been around for ever and appears financially stable.


A very special loudspeaker – the Martin Logan ESL.

And because those electrostatic panels are not that good at moving the large volumes of air dictated by low bass notes, the main speakers are accompanied by the desirable adjunct of a powered sub-woofer.


The Martin Logan Dynamo 700 subwoofer. Low notes are rendered correctly.

But it’s always something and both the main speakers and sub-woofer demand lots of clean power so the Parasound stereo amplifier, 5 year warranty and all, joined the team:


The Parasound integrated stereo amplifier.

This outfit has quickly become second nature, taken for granted like a good camera and lens.

And speaking of cameras and the analog world, what could be more analog than film? I blame two friends for my film rediscovery this year, the one a film fanatic and prof at CalTech, the other an AV technologist in Boston with a fine eye who sent me some rolls of Kodak’s Ektar. I went about the hardware discovery process in the best American tradition. I threw money at it. So I snapped up a Nikon FE, A Nikon N90S and a Nikon F100, to see which spoke to me loudest. The FE was lovely but I really missed AF as my eyes are not what they were. The N90S came in a lovely compact package but refused to speak to my old chipped MF Nikkors on those increasingly rare occasions where I brave manual focus. But the F100 proved to be the bee’s knees, a perfect melding of digital technology (AF, auto exposure) and film. Money? Film bodies are so inexpensive that after selling the FE and N90S I was but $150 out of pocket.


The finest film camera made. The Nikon F100.

Not least of the F100’s beauty is that the controls and layout are almost identical to those of the D700, Nikon’s first FF DSLR and one I reverted to after selling the big and clunky D3x. Sure the D3x delivered 24 sharp megapixels, but I really did not need those, any more than I needed the truck-like weight. The D700 boasts but 12 high quality megapixels and boy do they ever work.


The Nikon D700 – available for very little in mint condition.

Finally, long time readers will know that I am a confessed long time motorcycling addict. My 1975 BMW R90/6 is now in its 29th year with me and absent newer shocks remains pretty much in original condition, right down to the antique but perfectly capable mechanical points ignition. The sole nod the BMW makes to the electronic world is a couple of $1 relays to preclude frying of the wiring harness when the 120dB Italian FIAMM horns are worked to alert left-turning morons in cars that a two wheeled human being is headed their way.


My 1975 BMW R90/6. A product very much of the mechanical age, with awful instrument lighting.

But this year the miserably weak instrument lighting, a small sub-chassis containing a myriad of minuscule incandescent light bulbs prone to failure and hell to access for replacement, gave way to an LED harness. This was invented by a lady rider who had grown mightily frustrated with the constant failure of her stock lighting harness, not least the fact that if the generator bulb fails that it takes the whole ignition system with it. Who thought that up? Anyway, that frustrated lady rider happens to have a spouse who is expert in CAD/CAM and he came up with an LED bulb chassis which is a drop in replacement for the stock one, is so bright that I can finally, after 29 years, see my high beam indicator in bright sunlight, and which will certainly outlast me and the bike.


The stock and KatDash LED lighting harness for the BMW Airhead.

And while I am mixing analog and digital, you should know that both my tachometer and speedometer failed within weeks of one another at 63,000 miles, expertly repaired by the geniuses at Palo Alto Speedometer at considerable expense. At least I will not have to crack the instrument housing again. For all their charm and charisma, no one could accuse analog devices of coming with low maintenance costs.

iPhone you ask? Why yes, I was forced to upgrade my iPhone 6 by a felonious maker who made it so slow with software ‘upgrades’ as to be useless. I switched to a used iPhone 7 for a net cost of $300, thus denying said felon my money while reclaiming the lost speed at reasonable cost. No more new iPhones for me.

Nikon – a magnificent legacy

Cameras, Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

The Nikon Museum in Tokyo.


Click the image to go to the interactive Google view.

Nikon honors its legacy in the extensive displays in the Nikon Museum. When Nikon abandoned the Zeiss Contax lens mount replacing it with the F mount in its first – and best – SLR, the peerless Nikon F, it was as much a statement of intent as it was an act of courage. The wisdom of that decision persists to this day when even the earliest F mount lenses can be mounted on the latest Nikon D850 DSLR.

Now with a new, wider mount in the Z6/Z7 mirrorless offerings, Nikon has finally begun to abandon the flapping mirror in favor of what is already acknowledged as the best EVF in the business, the one found in the new Z bodies.


A display of rangefinder bodies which preceded the Nikon F. The related lenses put Nikon on the map.

Leitz, Wetzlar used to be the owner of the legacy crown, snatched from it by Nikon with the Nikon F which saw the rangefinder Leica M bodies migrate from being workhorses to becoming silly Veblen goods. The working pro gives these not even a passing thought, no more than an enthusiastic driver thinks about Rolls Royces.


The Nikon F. The camera which changed everything. This camera did to the German
camera industry what Honda did to British motorcycles.

4mp is all you need

Technique

The lunacy of the pixel race.

These images are of the same subject with the two best lenses I own – the ‘pro’ Lumix 12-35mm at 25mm (50mm FFE) on the Panasonic GX7 and the Nikon D700 with the 50mm f/2 HC MF Nikkor. The GX7’s sensor is 16mp on 3/4 sq. in., the D700 has 12mp on its 1.5 sq. in. sensor. Both at 400 ISO and f/5.6.

The image below enlarges the center 40x, so a 40” x 60” print. Note the greater warmth of the Nikkor optic. To properly display focal length in the EXIF data I have installed a CPU in the Nikkor lens, which has nothing to do with its optical quality. No extra sharpening – just the default of 25 in Lightroom, no other processing:

These images display maybe 1 mp of the sensors’ pixel counts.

In the next image I have increased the GX7 sharpening from LR’s default of 25 to 70. The Nikon image is unchanged, using default sharpening:

The results are indistinguishable as regards definition.

Here you can compare the shadow details – GX7 at left. The D700 has one of the best sensors for rendering shadows in the business:

The results are again indistinguishable.

The madness of the sensor pixel race, with FF sensors now approaching 50mp, dictates that users upgrade their lenses as all the ‘faults’ of older optics are now on display when pixel peeping. The reality is that no one makes 40″ x 60″ prints and that users would be better off sticking with modest sized sensors and old lenses. The 50mm f/2 HC Nikkor used in the above dates from 1973 and can be found in mint condition for $50. A mint Nikon D700 with low shutter actuations can be had for $450 or less. And you will not have to wait all day for the images to render in Lightroom owing to the modest file sizes.

4mp is all you need.