Category Archives: Photography

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.

Windows on the Mac Pro

Mac Pro

Hold your nose.

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

I have long used a single CPU 2009 Mac Pro – upgraded by me to a 3.46GHz Xeon 6-core CPU for speed – as a machine for delivering streaming quotes and financial news. It uses Mavericks, OS 10.9 and is reliable as a hammer. However, my application of choice is poorly supported on the OS X side and after many frustrations I decided to install Windows under Bootcamp to allow the better supported Windows variant of the software to be installed and used.

I opted for the 64-bit version of Windows 64 Professional Service Pack 1 as it’s well regarded and stable. Win XP is 32-bit, ancient and buggy, Win Vista is a disaster of epic proportions (can you say El Capitan?) as is Win 8/8.1. Win 10 is too new to trust and appears to add useless interface gloss on a Windows 7 base much as the asinine LaunchPad does nothing for OS X.

I paid all of $58 at Amazon for a plain wrapper version which comes with this dire warning:

Follow my instructions below and you can disregard the above, saving $50-100 over the fancy box version, and there are no issues with activation, provided you enter the 25 digit activation code correctly.

Users of the new Mac Pro (‘trash can’) cannot install Windows 7 using Bootcamp as Apple dropped support for anything earlier than Windows 8. Yet another reason to stick with a well upgraded classic Mac Pro.

I opted for a Bootcamp installation as that allows the OS to run at maximum speed. Bootcamp does not use OS X, addressing Windows 7 natively, much as a PC does. I have no need of the added expense or performance hits from virtualization technology (Parallels, VMWare or VirtualBox). But it’s important to use the right version of BootCamp and this advisory from Apple will allow you to download the right drivers for your Mac which will enable your keyboard, USB devices, wifi, display (if you are lucky), you name it.

You will need either a 16GB USB flash drive or an external USB SSD/HDD. These must be formatted as FAT32 drives using OS X’s Disk Utility; the drivers are copied by Bootcamp to this drive for subsequent installation to your Windows partition on your OS X drive.

Installation:

  • Start up Bootcamp (in the Applications->Utilities folder in OS X) with your USB drive connected to the Mac Pro.
  • Insert the Win7 disk in the Superdrive.
  • Check the Custom Installation (not Win7 Upgrade) box in Bootcamp and tell it to assign 60GB to the Bootcamp/Windows partition.
  • If the installation fails, click the small ‘Format’ icon with the Bootcamp partition highlighted in the scrolling list of drives/partitions. This reformats the selected partition from FAT32 to NTFS (you cannot use OS X’s Disk Utility to do this), which is what Windows needs to permit installation. It takes a second or two to execute.
  • Let the installation proceed – it takes for ever to get off the 0% reading and there is no progress report other than a few blinking dots. Microsoft at its best.

Now here’s the secret sauce.

As each step completes a green check mark will appear to its left. When the last row is checked, pump the Eject button on your keyboard and prepare to grab the Win7 disc from the DVD drive before the drawer shuts again. Fail to do this and the automatic restart will leave your machine with a black screen and a blinking white cursor.

Installation will now proceed and you will see lots of these:

When you are done you will be asked to activate Win7; I had to use a magnifying glass to make out the tiny serial number on the product label. Then it’s likely you may still need to install the proper display driver. The generic one in Win7 was useless for my 30″ Apple Cinema Display so I downloaded the right driver for my EVGA Nvidia GTX680 GPU here. The installation took at least a couple of hours – just leave your machine alone and do something else. There is very little indication of any progress in the Nvidia installer’s progress bar for much of the time.

To enable the numeric keypad on extended keyboards, hit the NumLock key. It works obverse to the way in OS X.

Now install the endless Win7 updates (definitely an overnight task) – as you can see there are many:

This is Microsoft so some will not take on the first try – try again:

Finally, be sure to install the free Avast virus/security software, the same you are already using on your Mac, right?

Now you should be happily (?) starting up in Windows – OS X restarts from the last partition it started from; if you want to revert to OS X hold the Option key through the chime and you will be able to elect the startup disk of choice.

Before installing my investment apps I noted that only 2GB of the 60GB I had set aside in the Bootcamp partition remained available. After downloading the free WinDirStat the app disclosed that two huge files existed on the Windows partition – hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys at 20+GB each. Pagefile.sys is virtual memory swapping which is unnecessary unless you have less than 4GB of RAM, so I turned down the 16GB default to 6GB – right click on Computer in the Start menu->Properties->Advanced system settings->Advanced->Performance Settings->Advanced->Virtual Memory Change->5000-6000MB. Phew! That recovered over 10GB. The other file stores the Sleep image and is best left alone – it means that any mouse movement after sleep returns you to your previous place.


WinDirStat shows a tamed pagefile.sys, freeing up disk space.

Now I could install my investment app, and all looks well:

Time to do all of this? Maybe 2 hours at the keyboard and 5-6 hours of the Mac Pro grinding away while files were downloaded.

As for the user interface, everything Steve said here about MSFT 20 years ago remains true. A tasteless product for a tasteless consumer. “Microsoft is McDonalds”. Too bad I had to install it.

Ecco Ristorante

Dining, Photographs

Superb!

Ecco Ristorante in Burlingame has been around since 1986 with the same chef and owner, Tooraj Sharif, a charming man and a great cook. The food is distinguished by subtle flavors and sauces, always beautifully served.

It’s an occasion place, and you mostly see besuited gents eating here, spending someone else’s money.


Click the image for Ecco’s site.

We always ask for our favorite waiter Paul, not just because he is a warm, effusive individual, but also because he runs a racing motorcycle accessories business and always fills us in on the latest dirt!

The other night saw my boy Winston and I celebrating his splendid boarding school entrance exam score and Paul took an absolutely lovely snap of us, which I felt I had to share:

Snapped on my iPhone6.

Video with telemetry – Part II

Photography

Adding high quality sound.

In Part I I described an inexpensive way of making in-car videos with telemetry overlays. Using a capable and inexpensive Sony Action Cam, sound was recorded using the two forward facing microphones and was not especially good, with lots of wind buffeting in the cabin of the convertible used, and generally poor sound quality. Given how small the Action Cam is, that’s hardly unexpected.

Sony’s manual is indescribably bad when it comes to explaining the use of external microphones. There is one passing reference to them but no indication where to plug them in or words about what works. After much searching I determined that the external mic shares the same 3.5mm socket used for an external power supply, and the only reason I came to conclude this earth shattering finding is that there’s an almost invisible microphone symbol on the access door underneath the camera which also conceals a Micro HDMI-Out socket (to route movies to your TV set) and a mysterious expansion socket whose purpose I have yet to divine. Quite how Sony can make such a fine product and not spend a few minutes documenting connectivity is a mystery to me. But then just about everything about this terminally confused corporation is a mystery.

It gets worse. Sony provides a small screw-on baseplate which adds a standard 1/4″ tripod socket for the Action Cam. The snag is that, once attached, this blocks the access door where the microphone (or power supply – you can choose one or the other, not both – what were they thinking of?) socket is. A moment’s tinkering disclosed that it’s possible to reverse the tripod plate and it still just clears the access door. While the plate now juts out, looking generally ugly, it does not intrude on the lens’s field of view and the whole thing is pretty solid. This is how it looks on the 1/4″ RAM Mount plate:


The power/mic socket is circled.

There is just enough room for the microphone plug:


The external microphone is plugged in.

Sure, hunt around a lot and you will find that Sony makes a skeletal frame for the Action Cam which allows proper tripod mounting with access to the sockets in the base. However, reviews at Amazon disclose that this silly-priced accessory is flimsy and made to fail. Pass.

Now for the choice of microphone. Something with a directional (not omni-directional) sound field to cut down on extraneous sounds is called for here. The microphone will be moved to the rear of the vehicle, where the engine is, using a 6 foot extension cable to better capture the glorious sounds of a high revving flat six. Further, a self powered mic is essential as the additional drain on the Action Cam’s small battery would be unacceptable with an unpowered microphone. Recall that the extension mic makes it impossible to use an external power supply with the Action Cam as the same socket serves for both mic and power.

To alleviate power issues, I bought a couple of spare rechargeable batteries and a charger for all of $18 – the Action Cam does not come with a charger:


Click for Amazon.

The cells are easily inserted in the back of the Action Cam, even with the camera mounted on the inside of the windshield.

Reading a handful of Amazon reviews disclosed that the best price:performance microphone is the Takstar SGC-598 for all of $33.


Click for Amazon.

The mic is directional, compares favorably in reviews to the ten times costlier professional Rode, uses one AA battery (allegedly good for 100 hours – yeah, right!) and has the frequency response and sensitivity distribution I was looking for:


Takstar frequency response and sensitivity.

Further, the mic has a bass cut filter to reduce wind roar and includes a sponge sock for the same purpose. There’s also a +10dB sensitivity switch, though with the mic in close proximity to the motor it’s not required in this application.


Orange arrow denotes my power-up reminder label. Red circled LED glows red
when the battery is dying. Green oval denotes anti-vibration mounts.

I stuck a large ‘Power!’ label to the body of the mic to remind me to power it on before use. The rear green LED illuminates when the mic is on, changing to red when the battery is low. There are eight rubber anti-vibration ‘springs’ upon which the mic is suspended in its mounting frame and a further eight spares are included in the box in the event of wear and failure. A thoroughly well thought out product at a great price.

The mounting base is a standard camera accessory shoe with a locking knob. As luck would have it, the removable covers for my vehicle’s optional hard top are the exact diameter of the locking knob, so it’s a matter of moments to pop one of these covers off and insert the mic in the opening thus disclosed, for a perfect and secure fit. Sometimes you get lucky. For those looking for the right vehicle to fit this mic, you can figure it out. (Hint: It’s not an SUV).


The Takstar securely installed – literally ‘plug-and-play’

Now we are ready to ….errr, truck.

The Light L16 camera

Cameras

Thinking outside the (DSLR) box.

The last time a seriously funky camera concept came around I wrote excitedly about it, promptly doing a 180 a few months later describing the device as a solution looking for a problem. I was right second time and the Lytro company making this ‘after the event focus’ camera has been through multiple management changes and recapitalizations since, as it heads for bankruptcy. Its technically appealing technology had little popular appeal.

Now something perhaps even funkier has come along, the Light L16 which by using 16 lenses seeks to emulate FF DSLR quality with a 52mp image in a breast pocket-sized package. It will retail for some $1700, if it is ever made, that is. The makers claim that, like the Lytro, after the event depth of field adjustment is permitted (Lytro, to be exact, permits retrospective focus point selection, but the results are conceptually similar).


The Light L16.

My attention to the L16 was drawn by A friend of the blog who read my revisit to Ed Hebert in the preceding column here, where I mentioned that Ed had just earned his Masters in Information Technology, with a concentration in Digital Media Arts and Web Technologies. He writes:

” Of personal interest to me was the fact that Harvard now offers a degree of “Masters in Information Technology, with a concentration in Digital Media Arts and Web Technologies”. When I went there the first time, I was laughed at for suggesting a course in photography. When I returned 20 years later on a fellowship, there was a single course in photography that limited admission to 18 students (over 300 applied).”

The MIT Technology Review has an interesting piece on the Light L16 here.