Category Archives: Photography

Photography is over

Photography

Lost in a sea of garbage.

Over nine years ago I wrote that photojournalism, as a profession, was dead. The iPhone killed it. Everyone is now a putative photojournalist and he will be at the scene well before the pro with his kit bag and boarding pass. You can read that piece here.

Now with online services where you post an image which promptly disappears, where everyone is a photographer, it’s not irrational to state that photography as a whole is over.

By that I mean the well composed, considered image, objects arranged in the frame just so in the interest of the best dynamic.

Film director Wim Wenders states it well:

“It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed, it’s that the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”

You can read the interview in The Guardian here.

The art and artifice of making a great image are no more.


In the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1973. Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, TriX. I spent many happy hours here in my youth.

Nikon D850

Nikon bodies

No, you do not need one.

The Nikon D850 may well be the most capable camera yet made. A jack of all trades it comes with extraordinary sensor definition, access to a vast array of the best in lenses …. and you do not need it.

While the stress which this body will place on your lens and computer gear is immense, what with a 46mp sensor and 7fps continuous frame rate which will dictate more money for the very best lenses, the fastest CPUs and SSDs and just about everything else in the chain, the bottom line is that for – I’m guessing here – 99.9% of users the camera is total overkill. That’s because those 99.9% display their images on iPhones and tablets and small computer screens. The technology in that sensor is wasted.

If you want to read a comprehensive review the folks at DP Review do their usually excellent job. Click here.

Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics last week for his decades long work in the field of behavioral economics. Scoffed at by classical economists for years, for they argue that man is a perfectly logical decision maker in matters economic, we all intuitively know that his views are right. We are irrational beings who do not make coldly objective decisions. A YouTube video, a 62 second clip of a discussion between Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, goes a long way to debunking those classicists’ belief that money is a purely fungible commodity.

Were it not for the realities of behavioral economics, cameras like the Nikon D850 would never have been made as the professional audience which can justify the technologies therein is too small to turn a profit. It’s amateurs who need the bragging rights of 46mp and 7fps, and it’s behavioral economics which make this body a profit center for Nikon. Those amateurs have only irrational reasons for owning this body. Heck, maybe Professor Thaler will buy one with his prize money?

iPhone X

iPhone

A solution looking for a problem.


Say hello to the future, for it is broken.

Apple’s much hyped tenth anniversary iPhone, the iPhone X, was hyped to market yesterday in a presentation from Apple’s over-the-top palatial new HQ in Cupertino. I have long given up watching these hypefests, sick and tired of the sleazy, self-congratulatory tone and now follow them using online text services. And follow them one must for any market investor must be aware of what is happening to a company which constitutes such a significant proportion of the major market indices.

The feature most hyped in the new phone, not available for many weeks yet, is FaceID, replacing the TouchID fingerprint sensor. Not an adjunct to TouchID, mind you. A replacement. This is claimed to be far less likely to go wrong but casually denies some of the troubling Constitutional realities of the technology. And, by the way, where are all the complaints about TouchID which I find works just fine on my relatively old iPhone 6?

Constitutional realities? The fascist masquerading as a cop in your hometown doesn’t like your face at the rally protesting his relative in the Oval Office and applies his nightstick to your head. While you are down for the count he uses FaceID on your iPhone X to unlock your phone only to find that you are a fully paid up member of the ACLU and a routine opponent of trigger happy cops with guns. It’s off to the slammer for you.

Next he finds that you are a strong supporter of DACA after searching your emails, that as a civilized human being you desire peace and solace for immigrants whose only language is English and who came here as babes in arms. Remember that bit which goes “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Well, there goes the gaol door key in the river. Fourth Amendment be hanged.

But other practical obstacles exist, none involving pigs with guns or oval offices. Sure, your identical twin can unlock your phone using FaceID but, let’s face it, that affects a handful of users, so no big deal. But you are a keen motorcyclist and actually like to protect the space between your ears, always wearing a helmet. FaceID? Fughedaboutit.

I suppose one should add, on a positive note, that the masked bad guy or gal using FaceID to call home asking how to set off that explosive vest will be at a loss, but most of these folks use burner phones from WalMart in any case. Why waste money on an iPhone when the savings can be put to work by procuring more C4?

FaceID is the ultimate solution looking for a problem and I expect it to encounter many.

But there’s an amusing, or troubling if you prefer, side note to these ruminations.

As I was following the live text updates yesterday, when a senior hypeman started the iPhone X presentation he picked up the new phone boasting of how it would recognize his face and unlock the phone …. only to have FaceID fail. Oily marketer that he is he smoothly switched to a back-up phone but it was too late. The market has priced in this technology as a competitive advantage over Samsung’s pathetic offering (FaceID uses 3D sensors so – it is claimed – that it cannot be fooled by a 2D photograph, unlike the Samsung system which can be thus fooled). The reaction of the stock, shown in the red rectangle below, was swift and brutal. It appears I’m not the only one who follows AAPL:

That’s a loss of market capitalization of exactly $22.02 billion in 30 minutes. Way to go, Apple. You need better carnival barkers, though your best has long departed this world.

As I said, a solution looking for a problem and finding one before the gadget was even in the stores. The key feature, and it fails. And they are asking $1,000 and up for the HypePhone. That’s more than even an Apple laptop. Pass.

The best bread knife – Tojiro

Cooking

Japanese. Think different.

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

Some nine years ago I extolled the French Sabatier chef’s knife, and it remains in service to this day, sharpened on a Chef’s Choice 130 machine which combines a coarse grinding wheel, a fine polishing wheel and a miniature strop/steel which re-establishes the edge with negligible wear to the blade. Being at the peak of the culinary expertise of the free world no one beats French cooking, so the choice of the Sabatier was simple. That non-stainless steel knife – yes, it rusts as quickly as you glance at it – seems to have been discontinued in favor of the modern stainless variant, but I’m sticking with old tech because it works so very well. Just like ignition points in my old Airhead.

As it happens I like to cook bread and chanced on a fine Italian bread baking book by Carol Field. I’m having a blast working my way through it and, for the first time, find myself ordering groceries from Amazon. Have you tried finding durum wheat flour in your local store? Amazon has it, needless to say, which is why they will take over the world. One recent, successful effort saw a couple of loaves of Pane di Altamura exit the oven, a bread which hails from the heel of Italy and comes with a very hard crust.


Pane di Altamura, along with the now recycled Taiwanese bread knife.

But try as I might, sawing away with my Taiwanese bread knife offered more threat to my fingers than to my carb intake. The knife, properly sharpened, is next to useless.

When it comes to tools, the Japanese and Germans excel. Cars, cameras, power tools, knives – both nations massively recapitalized by the US in the late 1940s brought new thinking to tool design and ended up dominating their respective genres. Heck, this blog would have little to write about on the hardware front had there been no German or Japanese engineers. Sure, the easy answer when it comes to bread knives is to blow $130 or more on a Wüsthof, but that’s kind of offensive to my frugal ways, and there’s a far cheaper alternative which Just Works:


The Tojiro has at it with the Altamura crust – paper thin slices, effortless, total control.

I suppose all those centuries of seppuku, samurai sword feats and the occasional ritual disemboweling have allowed the Japanese to perfect their knife making expertise – I mean, when you are slicing your abdomen in half or beheading a fellow zealot you really want to do it just once – but the modern cook is the beneficiary of Tojiro’s skills. Price? You can get six or seven of these for the price of one fine killing machine from the Master Race and it is absolutely superb.

The wonderful selection of Tojiro’s specialty kitchen tools can be found here.

Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 Power OIS MFT lens – Part I

Micro Four-Thirds

More bulk and weight, but maybe worthwhile.

I have been using the stock 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit zoom which came with my Panasonic G1 for almost a decade now, and took years to write about it, taking it for granted. Only Panny’s miserable 20mm f/1.7 optic prompted a piece on the kit zoom, which finally appeared here and while I have continued to grumble about the rough zoom ring everything else has been sweetness and light(ness). That groundbreaking G1 body has long since been replaced, now with two GX7 bodies which I continue to find perfect for my needs, and as a traveling outfit those bodies with the 14-45 kit zoom and the 45-200mm long zoom are a powerful and lightweight combination. No FF snapper I know regularly travels with a 400mm lens yet the latter MFT zoom, 400mm at full chat, fits in any travel bag with impunity.

However, during my month long travels with my son to visit his future college choices in New England I found that my grumbling about the rough zoom ring on the 14-45mm was regularly being joined by a chorus which complained about the slow maximum aperture, especially at the long end, and the limiting 28mm FFE focal length at the short end. Put it down to all those magnificent spired buildings and the dark chapel interiors. While I have purposely kept the MFT hardware to a minimum, preferring to concentrate on utility over versatility, the Market God or some other mysterious force saw me buying the 12-35mm f/2.8 Panny posh variant the other day, which adds width at the wide end and a constant f/2.8 aperture throughout the zoom range, while sacrificing the FFE 90mm long end for a more modest 70mm.

Nothing here is going to vie for current reporting as the posh variant has been available for some 5 years now, but as a long time user of MFT with many readers also using the format, I thought some comments would be of interest. As usual there is nothing on video use here – where the posh lens has its share of critics – as I do not make videos.

First impression out of the box is of a ‘pro’ quality lens. Where the kit lens is utilitarian in appearance, the pro speaks of a step up in quality. Ford vs. Porsche, if you like. Fit and finish are stepped up from the kit zoom, the zoom ring is (finally!) as smooth as can be and the fully extended lens barrel at the long end displays no wobble, unlike that in the kit lens. Yes, there’s a lens hood but I opted for a B+W haze filter instead. On the rare occasions a hood is called for I shield the lens with a hand, which does the trick while saving bulk.



Two GX7 bodies fitted with the stock kit zoom on the left, the pro zoom on the right.


Both lenses at maximum zoom.


Front view. Note the increase in filter size from 52mm to 58mm.


The least appealing aspect of the APS-C digital format is that the savings in lens bulk compared with FF hardly seem worth the trade-offs in sensor size, and the most remarkable aspect of the smaller MFT-sensor hardware is the small size of the lenses compared with APS-C. Now this advantage is being pushed to the limit with the Panny pro zoom as the images above show. The pro zoom looks like the proverbial cuckoo in the warbler’s nest on the diminutive GX7 body, yet the total camera + lens weights testify to the continued benefits of the MFT format:

  • Panny GX7 with 24-45mm kit zoom: 22 ounces
  • Panny GX7 with pro zoom: 25 ounces

So the cuckoo’s bulk does not result in a material weight penalty.

Part II, with many images, appears here. I paid $710 (the lens was $1300 when introduced all those years ago) and there’s a costlier variant with improved zoom and OIS, Mark II, available for close to $1000. Another option is the fixed lens Panny LX100 with its very fast continuous f/2 Leica-branded zoom (you can be sure the innards never saw the inside of a Wetzlar production line) covering a range of 12-37.5mm for a modest $525 or so. I wrote about my son’s here and while it’s a fine value combination I find the small size just a tad too fiddly for my largish hands. There are some more technical field notes on the LX100 to be found here. It’s a serious contender for the ultimate travel camera and, as a friend remarked, you get a great lens with the body thrown in free.