Category Archives: Photography

End of Empire

Hall of Shame

Doing a Thatcher.

When Steve Jobs was dying and passed the reins at Apple to Tim Cook my instant reaction was that he was ‘doing a Thatcher’. That strong and successful British leader had ceded the reins of power to a weak nonentity as successor and the general reaction was that this would only make her look better in retrospect. Indeed, in public life, there are any number of such examples – Thatcher-Major, FDR-Truman, Churchill-Eden, Reagan-Bush, de Gaulle-Pompidou. Each transition succeeded loudly in emphasizing the greatness of the predecessor.

And that suspicion has not only deepened since Jobs died some four and a half years ago, it’s being shouted from the rooftops today. Since he rode Jobs’s coattails to record iPhone sales with such stunning innovations like a bigger phone display, a lighter iPad and the Apple Watch with its thrilling selection of bands, we see the culmination of this unimaginative Apple CEO’s leadership in today’s announcement that Apple has invested $1bn of its shareholders’ monies in …. a cab service – an amount which buys Apple but 4% of the company based on its $25bn valuation:

With Apple just having recorded its first quarter of falling revenues since Jobs returned at the helm in 1998, this on the back of a greenmailing investor in the guise of Carl Icahn teaching Cook about shareholder dividends and returns, Apple has decided that its best and highest use of money is to buy into a Chinese Uber-variant named Didi because, after all, there’s a billion of them out there waiting to hail a ride …. on their knock-off Android phones. A Doodoo ‘investment’ (‘bribe’, inept as it sounds, might be closer to the mark, if equally unproductive) if ever there was one.

Meanwhile Apple Mail is broken, El Capitan is a disaster getting worse with each version, Siri’s AI is fundamentally deficient, iOS voice recognition badly lags GOOG’s and the predictive corrections in the iOS keyboard are worse than useless – and positively embarassing when some doofus ‘correction’ slips through and you tell your girlfriend she’s a slut when you meant to compliment her cooking.

Steve, where are you when we need you?


Doing a Thatcher, and spinning in his grave.

Cook, when not donating money to transgender causes, has made a point of making Apple a ‘nice’ place to work, devoid of conflict and tension. I expect to learn that Apple HQ has transitioned to unisex bathrooms any day now. Recall this is the man who, when first CEO, gave all Apple workers Thanksgiving week off …. That same ‘niceness’ thing, the craving for popularity which Jobs never had, was the reason he immediately fired Scott Forstall – the driver behind both OS X and iOS (and, indeed, Siri, which he would have made great had he been given a chance). Forstall was the proverbial irritant, a disruptive force and one with which Steve was perfectly at ease, having been cast from the same mold. When you fire people like that, you forever lose the competitive edge. Apple has managed to do just that under its current leadership.

Mediocrity

Hardware

Tim Cook’s Apple.

Along with blazing innovation – a larger iPad, the failed Apple Watch – what lands in my inbox the other day?

There was a reason Steve Jobs famously remarked that Apple did not do focus groups or customer surveys. The company was not Procter & Gamble, selling dish detergents. His company was in the business of innovation, meaning it told people what they needed – iPods, iPhones, iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks – not asking what they wanted.

Now we have a CEO focused on trying to thwart the US government’s attempts – marketing disguised as customer protection – to keep Americans safe while making ever fancier watch bands, as Apple becomes just another mediocre non-growth business.

NIK collection now free

Lightroom

From Google.

Google has announced that the excellent collection of processing plugins from NIK for Lightroom and Photoshop is now free. Click the image for the download site:


Click to go to the download page.

While this probably means that development of the code has ceased, who cares? They are great now and are not about to get any worse. If you use the desktop versions of LR and PS like I do, preferring not to pay rent to rapacious Adobe for its CC cloud versions, then you will not have every upgrade breaking your plugins’ functionality.

Two bargain classics

Canon 5D, Nikon bodies, Photographs

From the Big Two.

Now that digital bodies seem to arrive almost quarterly from the big manufacturers – and seemingly weekly from the tedious ‘instant obsolescence’ Sony which still gets very little right – it’s interesting to look back on the early days of full frame DSLRs. I was lucky to own both of the models mentioned below and would unhesitatingly buy used ones today.

My first serious DSLR was the Canon 5D and lightly used bodies now sell for under $500. Though the modest sized 12.8mp sensor is small by modern standards it’s hard to beat the color rendering and unless you need video or truly enormous prints (of course you don’t – face it, you put your stuff out on the web) the 5D cannot be beaten when it comes to price:performance today.


The outstanding original Canon 5D.


Barn. Templeton, CA. Canon 5D, 24-105mm f/4 Canon L.

Nearly every Canon lens is excellent and of the fixed focus ones the 35mm, 50mm and outstanding 85mm f/1.8 are recommended and very inexpensive new or used.

Nikon was slow to the FF game and its first affordable body was the D700. It came with a 12.1mp Sony sensor which was exceptional in most regards but especially when it came to low noise at higher ISOs. Those large pixels helped with that and, as with the 5D, low noise prints up to 18″ x 24″ were par for the course. $800 gets you a good one but insist on a Nikon USA model (distinguishable by the small ‘USA’ sticker on the inside of the body when the battery is pulled) because that’s the only kind Nikon USA will service in the USA. Alternatively, if you have a good aftermarket Nikon service shop available, provenance is of no consequence. There is a truly vast array of Nikon lenses from 1960 on available, MF, AF, fixed focus, zoom, you name it, any price point. The superb 50mm MF f/2 Nikkor-H can be found in mint condition all day long for $60 or less and you can take it from there.


The immensely capable Nikon D700.


Baby carrier. Nikon D700, 180mm f/2.8 AFD Nikkor.

The D700 is usually reckoned to have a shutter life of 150,000 – and replacements are cheap – with lightly exercised bodies a dime a dozen. Again, as with the 5D there’s no video, and the build quality is excellent.

No one needs more than 12mp in a DSLR as no one prints any more (well, I do and 12mp is just fine; heck the iPhone6 is good for 18″ x 24″) and both these cameras’ sensors boast excellent dynamic range, low noise and outstanding color rendering.