Category Archives: Photography

Xmenu

Software

An elegant menu bar utility.

Xmenu is a handy menu bar utility which allows you to place your favorite apps in a menu dropdown box for rapid access. With two 30″ Apple Cinema Displays in use, along with the seeming acres of space they provide, I find using the Dock is less easy than accessing the drop down box provided by Xmenu.

Xmenu can be downloaded free form the AppStore here.

By default it shows every app on your Mac which makes it useless:


Just one of many pages in the default view – useless.

However, a quick peek at the help guide discloses that Xmenu is easily tailored to show just your favorites.

My User directory is named ‘Tigger’ and after you first start Xmenu you navigate to this directory:


The directory for the aliases of your favorite apps.

Back in your Applications directory you make aliases of your favorite apps (right click the mouse and click on ‘Make Alias’ then Control-drag these aliases to the Custom directory above. That will move (rather than copy) them over to the Xmenu Custom directory. You can then rename these aliases anything you want, mine looking like this:


Xmenu favorites in the Favorites directory.

Next in the menu bar drop down, go to Xmenu->Preferences and check the boxes as shown:


Now when you click the menu bar dropdown icon (which will have changed to a small cogged wheel) you will see just your favorites, with a click booting the app of choice:


Xmenu favorite apps in the dropdown menu.

Elegant, fast, accessible …. and free. What’s not to like?

The Leica Q

Cameras

Leica may finally have done it right.

The Leica ideal was always about street photography. Fast, quiet (well, OK, reasonably quiet), with great lenses and fairly robust bodies. And none of Leica’s digital M film clones has managed to capture the spirit of the M2/3/4 which were the definitive rangefinder film cameras. The digital variants were either silly and deeply flawed, like the M8 with it’s half frame sensor which rendered wide angle lenses useless, not to mention its host of technical issues/random lock-ups/purple casts and so on, or the cameras simply started getting fat. An M9/M240 body is nowhere near as svelte as an M2 and still retains a clunky, bog slow optical rangefinder with manual focus only, not to mention a far from silent shutter. Every time I read some hack going on about how quiet his M’s shutter is I laugh. It’s not remotely quiet, and only a mirrored DSLR user could accuse it of being so.

However, it rather seems as if Leica may have finally got it right with the Leica Q, announced yesterday. Sure, not cheap at $4,250 with a fixed 28mm f/1.7 Summilux lens and not especially small, but it’s full frame, reviews suggest the sensor/software are excellent and it has autofocus. Further, there’s a silent electronic shutter mode, no optical rangefinder to go out of alignment as soon as you look at it and the whole thing rather harkens back to those compact and capable Leica Ms of yore.

The top plate is surpassingly simple and the street snapper can disregard the movie mode and the LCD rear display. There’s a high quality EVF, finally, and the autofocus is reputed to be snappy and accurate. Why, there’s even wi-fi capability and an iPhone app for remote operation and the like. Leica’s association with Panasonic is beginning to bear fruit.

Automation follows the approach seen in the Panasonic LX100. Turn either the aperture ring to ‘A’ for shutter priority, the shutter dial to ‘A’ for aperture priority or both for program automation. The test shots I have seen from the lens suggests it’s a crackerjack and while it’s not exactly small, the overall price becomes more palatable when you look at what a 28mm Summicron or Summilux for the M runs. There’s a handy macro mode and up to 10 images can be machine-gunned every second for those of the video generation incapable of capturing the decisive moment.

That ‘not exactly small’ lens shows that not even the optical geniuses in Wetzlar can alter the laws of physics. You want a fast aperture and full frame coverage, this is the result and it’s why I am not getting a Q. You get a camera which is not exactly small with an outstanding optic, one that appears to be as good as it gets at any price. For this street snapper the right answer is Panny’s LX100 where you get the same ergonomics and f/1.7 in a far smaller body with one signal advantage. The lens zooms from 24mm to 75mm. Yes, the frame is one quarter the size so there’s more depth of field than you want (PS and the Magic Lasso tool easily fixes that) and at the extreme gargantuan prints from the Q will be easier to make, but the trade offs are all in the wrong direction – bulk and weight. And 4x the sensor size also means 4x the cost. Steal my LX100 and I buy another. Nab my Q and it’s debtors’ gaol. 

Finger loops come in three sizes and allow the carrying strap to be dispensed with. As for the objectionable ‘look at me’ red dot on the front, a spot of electrician’s tape will put paid to that.

A very exciting development and if the camera lives up to the early reviews Leica is to be congratulated. Now let’s hope they come up with a fixed lens 90mm f/2 variant for an ideal two camera street outfit. Why, like my two GX7s with 35mm and 85mm lenses ….

The factory’s web site is here.

Technical articles – 10 years

10th Anniversary

Specialized guides.

Click on ‘Technical’ atop this site’s home screen and you will see:

Over the years several topics have captured my interest and as I believe that if you want to do something well you need to understand it at a fundamental level, I explored these in depth and, once I had meaningful data, wrote about them.


That prince among men, my dear love Bert the Border Terrier, demonstrates a large screen Seiki TV attached to one of my Hacksters. I miss that pup more than I can say.

When I got tired of watching my various Macs melt down – three G4 iBooks and three iMacs (a G5 and two Core2Duos) – I said “to heck with Apple” and built a Hackintosh. The machine was infinitely upgradable, very fast indeed and while its insides looked like the engine compartment of a Fiat it was a lot more reliable. My constantly upgraded Hackster saw me through many years of happy use and was eventually remaindered when lightly used Mac Pros became affordable. Issues? Just two. It got really old when, with every OS X upgrade, something in the Hack broke and needed …. new hacking. And Sleep never did work correctly without endless kernel panics. But the Hack community is large and vibrant and it helped keep things running. Just do yourself a favor and don’t make a Hack for income producing uses. There’s too much risk something will break when you need it most and, let’s face it, this is for guys who like English cars and motorbikes with the constant attendant care and feeding dictated by these beasts. You want’s a Lexus? You get a Mac Pro.


The best computer from Apple. Ever.

And my burgeoning series of Mac Pro articles contains not only everything you need to know about the care, maintenance and upgrade of the 2009 and later machines, it’s also superbly written and profusely illustrated. Based on solid practical experience you will never find me using words like “…. it seems that ….” or “…. it feels like ….”. These are the writings of an engineer not a ballet dancer.

At one time I published a comprehensive guide to CPU upgrades in the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pro, a high risk process, but after various cretins disclosed they had poor reading skills to accompany their grade school educations and started writing me threatening Comments I did the only two things possible: I removed those articles and I closed this site to Comments. I should have known better than to assume that my level of intelligence prevailed in the population as a whole and as for closing Comments, that was the single best thing I did since starting this journal a decade ago. Gentlemen (?), you cretinous wankers who wrote me those rude outpourings of undistilled vomit, I have but two words for you: “Up yours”. Your poison ruined the playing field for thousands.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of working Pros who know better than to tinker have availed themselves of my Mac Pro CPU upgrade service since then and not a one of them is unhappy with his investment. And nor is my educational charitable foundation which receives 100% of the net proceeds to fund scholarships for poor but bright mechanical engineering students. The last thing this world needs is more liberal arts graduates.


Just two examples of the many old MF Nikkors updated by the author.

The third technical area which absorbed me during the past decade was the updating of Nikon’s superb pre-Ai lenses to modern specifications by conferring Ai functionality and, more importantly, installing CPUs to properly record EXIF data to the related digital image files. This series is recognized as the definitive piece on the topic, is extensively read and referenced and when you read what I have written you will see why. In all cases my work was illustrated with images taken with these great Nikkors which remain mechanically the best thing Nikon ever did (that and the original Nikon F film camera). As with my Hackintosh and Mac Pro articles, you will find zero subjective claptrap with regard to the mechanical processes involved. Just hard data. This is a simple engineering exercise, not the New York Review of Books. My work brought with it tailored lens correction profiles for use in PS or LR for each of the lenses I upgraded. These are all free downloads here.


Still one of the very best printers ever made – the 18″ DJ90 or 24″ DJ130.

Finally, the HP DesignJet 30/90/130 wide carriage ink dye printers captured my attention and another set of definitive artciles on maintenance, fault diagnosis and repair put in place what the miserable management at Hewlett Packard could not. They remain widely referenced and I have had much fun time resolving issues with other users.

Sceptical about my claims? Here’s today’s visitor data for this journal:


Bots, crawlers and other trash excluded from the above.

The above constitute the core of the technical writing here and while the topics are very specialized, aficionados of great engineering may well find themselves migrating to a Mac Pro driving their DesignJet to print images from 50 year old Nikkor manual focus lenses. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that technical chain and it’s one I enjoy daily.

At the Movies – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Movies

Nothing new here.

As with books, the movies which most inspire the visual senses were all made a long time ago. The modern obsession with the action/adventure genre, along with attention spans shortened by video games and the like, largely preclude the making of beautiful movies. There’s no money in them and the Hollywood system no longer has time for art house movies.

But go back a few years and choosing just five of the most beautiful movies is not at all easy, for there is so much great work out there especially from the 1960s and 1970s.

In no particular order, then, these are the five which have most stimulated my visual cortex this past decade.

1 – Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde, directed by Luchino Visconti. 1971

Based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name, Death in Venice chronicles the last vacation and death of one Gustav von Aschenbach in fin de siècle Venice. Visconti’s work was always rich and lush with Italianate color and from Bogarde, a lightly regarded British comedic heart throb, he coaxed one of the very greatest performance on film. Never less than lovely to look at the movie is a treat for the ear, too, much of it set to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The movie demands attention and patience, both amply rewarded. I originally saw it on its first run in Mayfair as a young man of 18 and recall well stumbling out into the Belgravia streets simply dazed and overcome with emotion.

2 РStreets of Fire, starring Michael Par̩, directed by Walter Hill. 1984.

You could not find a visual masterpiece as culturally removed from Death in Venice as this rollicking good time. Set seemingly in 1950’s Chicago and filmed almost exclusively at night, the imagery – set to a raucous Ry Cooder rock track – is startling and attention getting. Even the video game generation will get this one. The youngest movie here.

3 – Barry Lyndon, starring Ryan O’Neal, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1975

This three hour long movie is not for those in a hurry, and visually it remains unsurpassed. Rather forgotten in a Kubrick oeuvre whose admirers prefer ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Shining’, this lushly filmed and costumed period piece is balm for the eyes. If your visual senses matter to you, this is probably the movie to see above all others. If nothing else, Marisa Berenson (the niece of that great Renaissance art expert and charlatan, Bernard Berenson) has never looked lovelier. Handel’s Sarabande dominates the sound track and could not be bettered.

My son, aged 13, had already watched it – all rapt attention – thrice, which tells you something about how you should bring up a kid in today’s world. He will be successful as a result of his attention span, not despite it.

4 – 2001: A Space Odyssey. The star is the English cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968

In the previous column, one on photography books, I made mention of the adjective ‘breathtaking’ as one which is abused yet remains useful for lovers of good English. And ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is nothing if not breathtaking. It does not hurt that the movie includes simply the most stunning cut in world cinema, the moment when the monkey hurls the bone/weapon victoriously in the air and Kubrick and Unsworth cut to a space station set to Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. Breathtaking. And if you have never quite understood Varese’s music, this is a good place to start.

5 – Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, directed by David Lean. 1962.

Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
T.E. Lawrence: It’s clean.

A rare moment of humor in a film which you should see, if at all possible, in a revival movie theater on a huge Cinemascope screen. I saw it thus twice when it played in the Carnegie Theater in Manhattan, close to my home on 8th Avenue and 56th Street in the mid-1980s and it really is the only way to do it justice. And speaking of great cuts, the one here is in the same class as Kubrick’s money with the femur. Lawrence, showing off his disdain for pain, snuffs out a match with his bare fingers and Lean cuts to the infinite vistas of the desert. That is special and Maurice Jarre’s music is the icing on the cake. One of O’Toole’s earliest movies and one for which he was cruelly denied the Oscar.

If there was ever a more physically perfect leading man than O’Toole, I cannot think of one and it’s lovely to hear him speak in the proper English of my youth, not the grammar school garbage emerging from the mouth of the average English speaker today.

* * * * *

With the exception of Barry Lyndon, made on Kodak film (Kubrick opting for the pastel rendering), all were made in Technicolor. No surprise there. ‘Death in Venice’ comes on an SD DVD only (a so-so print) as does ‘Streets of Fire’ (an excellent print). The others all come in Blu-Ray options and there really is no alternative but to get these.

You can see all my movie reviews here.

Photography books – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Book reviews

10 years of inspiration.

When I write ‘Photography books’ I am not referring to tomes dealing with the dry arcana of Photoshop. Rather, I mean books of photographs by great photographers, books meant to inspire and improve one’s own vision.

On that basis very little of substance has been published during the decade I have been writing this journal and one might go further and say that very little of substance has been published since Henry Fox Talbot was knee high to a grasshopper. The same goes in most fields of endeavor. There are only a few great, memorable buildings in the world. A few great leaders. A few cars. A few scientists. A few artists. A few great composers. You name it and Pareto’s principle is not 80/20 but rather 99/1. 99% of most every genre is garbage.

And so it is with photography books.

Click here and you can see the contents of my library of photography books, some three hundred all told. They lie merrily around the abode in absolutely no sort of order, an approach based in the simple belief that a good photography book should always come as a surprise. A long lost friend made new again when savored after a long absence.

And while reading devices like tablets and cell phones have obsoleted most books the one genre which remains untouched by this technological upheaval is the art book. Can you imagine enjoying Raphael’s frescoes or Cartier-Bresson’s masterpieces on a poncy 11″ display? No.

What are the qualities which makes a photography book great? The one which must surely take first place is repeatability, by which I mean that every time you return to it you see something new. Your pulse rises and you ask “How did he see that?”. So if forced to name just five favorites for the proverbial desert island, a location devoid of the culturally arid expanse that is Facebook, the choice is surpassingly simple.

1 – Steam, Steel and Stars by O. Winston Link.

‘Breathtaking’, like ‘gay’, is a once charming word which has lost all meaning, overuse and abuse having confined both to the status of grammatical detritus. Yet used in the traditional sense, the one in which maybe a Spitfire pilot might have used it about his machine when battling the Hun in the skies over London in 1940, Steam, Steel and Stars is so obviously the greatest chronicle of a bygone age that this photographer has seen. It is breathtaking.


Click the picture for Amazon US.

More than documentary, it’s a passionate memoir of the last days of steam seen through the eyes of a photographer who spared no effort in lighting his subjects – be they trains or the people charged with their care and nurture – invariably at night. And it’s literally breathtaking when you realize that as often as not his miles of cabling for the complex flash apparatus used would be severed by the very subject illuminated, as the train thundered over the wires. An absolute masterpiece and you cannot call yourself a photographer if it’s not in your library.

2 – Henri Cartier-Bresson – The Man, the Image and the World.

Realistically, just about any HC-B book will do. It’s the images which matter not the invariably blathering, pseudo-psychological texts which accompany them.

Those lucky enough to own his first – Images à la Sauvette – probably have the finest précis of the man’s oeuvre, and if you want the early HC-B, still mightily influenced by his painting teacher, the surrealist André Lhote, that’s a fine place to go. Sadly, it’s rare and costly, so the choice here – more comprehensive in its coverage – is a suitable alternative.


Click the picture for Amazon US.

When negotiating with the prickly Charles de Gaulle, France’s greatest post war leader, Churchill once remarked “I have the cross of Lorraine to bear”. But even WSC knew that a world without the French, a world without Paris, without Parisian culture and gastronomy and clothing and light and sheer style, would be a worse place. And complain as one might about the cowardice of the French in the face of the Germans in 1940, of their Vichy government and its collaborationist ways, if you do not love France and its culture you simply do not get it. We have their weakness to thank for the fact that Paris, that most perfect of cities, survived unscathed. Krupp’s guns were directed at the land of my parents and then on the land of my upbringing, but mercifully not at Paris.

And it’s hardly a wonder that the greatest slice-of-life snapper ever was French. Arguably he could not have originated anywhere else.

3 – Paris by Night – Brassaï.

And speaking of Paris, never was that wonderful city done greater justice than in Brassaï’s – yes, breathtaking – slim tome of night pictures. More than breathtaking, it’s magic and is likely the only book I own where you can smell the city. In Paris de Nuit the Hungarian émigré, to use modern vernacular, absolutely nailed it, in that most welcoming of cities for artists and revolutionaries.


Click the picture for Amazon US.

I confess to being so fond of this book that it’s within arm’s reach, as often as not.

4 – Horst, His Work and His World.

Another émigré who was to leave his definitive stamp on the world of photography is Horst P. Horst. The young German had wisely changed his name from Horst Bohrmann when immigrating to New York, where his talent was immediately noticed – first as a model then as a photographer at American Vogue. American Vogue may not have had the style of it’s French counterpart but it had great couturiers galore in Horst’s time and, of course, Americans were rich and willing to support them. (British Vogue can be largely dismissed as English women of the period were clueless about clothes sense. Horses and tweeds may go together but it’s not a pastime supportive of haute couture).


Click the image for Amazon.

Horst is the master of the formal, carefully staged, studio portrait, his work putting the efforts of the likes of Cecil Beaton to shame. The famous corset image, above, is of none other than Lee Miller who went on to becone a great photographer (and lover of Man Ray, no less) in her own right. Her experience of seeing the Nazis’ death camps almost destroyed her as it would many a man.

In much the same way that Brassaï’s images of Paris at night will never be surpassed, one can comfortably place Horst’s studio work in the same category of excellence.

5 – Nature’s Chaos by Eliot Porter.

This lovely book was a 1990 Christmas gift from a great American capitalist and his playwright wife with the charming inscription “These photographs remind us of your work”. Roy and Carol had always made their magnificent Venice Beach home open to me with its expansive displays of art and sculpture and their generosity in turn inculcated in me that great American spirit of philanthropy.

Their inscription was more politeness than accuracy, as I am generally completely clueless about nature photography, but the book is special. Porter has published many books of his images, and this one is as fine as any. There is nothing remotely picture postcard about his work which tends to abstraction and thoughtfulness.


Click the image for Amazon US.

So there you have it. My five most favorite photography books, ones from which I have learned much and continue to learn more. And ten years earlier I very much doubt that short list would be any different.

Click here for an index of all my book reviews.