Category Archives: Photography

Panasonic LX100

Micro Four-Thirds

Interesting variation on the MFT theme.

Panasonic’s LX100 will come to the US in November and it represents an interesting variation on Panny’s GX7. I use two GX7 MFT bodies, one with the 17mm f/1.8 Olympus lens, the other with the 45mm f/1.8 Oly and have never been happier as a street snapper. The wide lens body is perched on my shoulder and the strapless long one rests in a small canvas shoulder bag, ready to be grabbed at a moment’s notice. With these two fixed focal length lenses what I sacrifice in versatility I gain in maximum aperture and optical quality; both the Oly lenses are special and very reasonably priced.

The LX100 adds a fixed (no more sensor dirt!) 24-75mm f/1.7 to f/2.8 fast Leica zoom in a GX7-sized body. 24mm is as wide as any rational user regularly needs and 75mm is ideal for head and shoulder portraits. Best of all, the silent – and it truly is silent – electronic shutter is carried over from the GX7 and 4K video is added for movie makers. There’s a dopey add on lens hood designed by committee whose protective petals open to present sharp, easily damaged protrusions, but mercifully this does not come with the camera. The threaded front of the lens will take a 43mm protective clear filter which is just what the doctor ordered and it looks like the battery is the same as that in the GX7.

Many years ago I owned an LX1 which also came with a capable Leica-sanctioned zoom, but it had some issues. After a couple of minutes of non-use the extended lens would collapse back into the body, meaning increased start-up time next time around and the minuscule sensor made prints over 8″ x 10″ an iffy proposition. Further the LX1 lacked the LX100’s EVF, the one in the new camera being the same as that in the GX7, to whose quality I can gladly attest. I resorted to gluing an external finder on the body which did not even have an accessory shoe. Panny has come a long way since then. The LX100 has a large MFT sensor with some 13mp; the sensor in my Panny G1 was 12mp and quite capable of rendering 13″ x 19″ prints, with 18″ x 24″ at a push. Given the rapid advances in sensor technology since the revolutionary G1 hit the market a few years ago, sensor quality should not be an issue with the LX100. Best of all you get the capabilities of Panny’s costly ($1,000) 12-35mm f/2.8 MFT lens with a body thrown in free. The LX100 is expected to retail for $900 here. And for the ‘serious’ snapper, there are manual aperture, shutter speed and aspect ratio controls, plus manual exposure override – see the picture above. Only the zoom appears to be pushbutton operated, a shame, but those manual controls add substantial utility value.

There’s lots to like here. It remains to be seen how fast the lens extends when the camera is turned on (In days of yore, photographers got turned on. Now it’s cameras) and whether it stays extended. It’s rumored that only the ugly black version will come to the US, but I’m sure there will be no shortage of entrepreneurial Hong Kong vendors willing to ship the far more elegant chrome version. That may well have my name on it.

The iPhone 6

iPhone

Coming real soon.


Surely the dumbest advertising byline of 2014?

US supplies of the iPhone 6 Plus, the 5.5″ monster, are already backordered 4 weeks but I snagged my 4.7″ (38% more screen area than the iPhone 5) online yesterday and will pick it up at the local Apple Store next Friday, 9/19. I also checked the local Verizon store but the sales ‘help’ there was so hard sell and oily I felt more like a shower than a new phone after leaving in disgust. Suffice it to say that my 2 year contract on the iPhone 5 just expired, so the new one at $200 + tax will be paid for by the proceeds of sale of the old on eBayski, doubtless selling to Ivan Bollockoffski and his oligarch friends as has every previous one I have recycled there. Good luck with the embargo, comrade, and thanks for the $275. I’m sticking with Verizon as the 4G coverage on the west coast is good and as there is no price competition among US carriers. Do the math on Sprint’s lying ‘ownership’ offers and you will come to the same conclusion, not to mention the worst coverage of any of the major carriers. The only compelling reason I can see to choose AT&T over Verizon – coverage is comparable – is if you want to use voice and web browsing simultaneously. Verizon’s CDMA cellular technology prohibits that whereas AT&T’s works fine.


Ummm, (2.4/2.2)^2 is + 19%, Cupertino.

The camera lens in iPhone 6 is f/2.2, which makes it an immaterial 19% faster than the F/2.4 in iPhone 5, despite Apple’s hype to the contrary. Disappointingly, still picture OIS is only available on the 5.5″ iPhone6 (both models carry over movie stabilization from iPhone 5) but the addition of the thumbprint scanner, first seen in the iPhone 5S, is welcome for this user. You can’t forget to take your thumb with you and if the iPhone is stolen, the new Apple Pay credit card information can be disabled from any iOS (or Windows, for the clueless) device using Find My iPhone, without disabling the credit cards themselves. Apple Pay will so obviously take the world of retail by storm that I find it amusing to read pundits saying otherwise. The fact that Google’s earlier attempt failed miserably is irrelevant.

The still camera in iPhone 5 was excellent and the one in iPhone 6 promises further improvements. Suffice it to say that I have made many 13″ x 19″ prints from the iPhone 5 with ease, if not impunity, and if ever you needed confirmation that the point-and-shoot was dead, this fact will testify to that in spades. Further, given that no more than 0.001% of iPhone users make 13″ x 19″ prints, it’s not like image quality is lacking for the remaining 99.999%, prints being far more demanding than any other display medium.


What were they thinking?

Confirming that the Shadow of Steve has long faded, Apple has managed to make an ugly protruding bezel for the lens in iPhone 6; the sounds you hear are those of El Jobso spinning in his grave. That said, some serious kaizen-like effort has gone into incremental improvements and the addition of time-lapse, better exposure control and a host of other features shows just how seriously Apple is taking the photography aspect of the iPhone. And with just cause. There’s a huge retention aspect to making users happy with their camera …. err, phone.

Wi-fi in the iPhone 6 now boasts 802.11ac technology and the result is strictly limited to boasting. My tests with the latest Apple wi-fi router and the 2014 MacBook Air, which share this technology, show that data throughput is unchanged compared with 802.11n. Oh! well.

Some snaps from the iPhone 6 once I have my hands on one next week. Best of all, the larger screen should see no more squinting at the oft used one in my iPhone 5 while retaining the ability of using a small belt holster, not a realistic choice for the 5.5″ model.


iPhone 6 belt holster – click the image to go to Amazon.

As before, I have opted for the 16GB model, the bottom-of-the-line; with iCloud Drive recently announced (cloud storage for all your files, not just music and videos) and with iTunes increasingly residing in the cloud, there seems little reason to buy an iPhone with more, costly, internal storage.


iCloud changes and iCloud Drive.

Now all I have to do is wait.

Disclosure: Long AAPL stock.

Ive and Newson

Photography

Two great industrial designers.

Apple just announced that esteemed industrial designer Marc Newson will be retained as a consultant to Jony Ive, their design leader. This can only be good news.

What distinguishes the interview below is one well prepared interviewer – Charlie Rose – and two subjects totally devoid of hype. Serious, dedicated and focused on their tasks, it’s a pleasure to watch. Jump to 28:00 for details on their collaboration on the Project Red Leica M:


Click the image for the video.

iPad Pro

iPad

Bigger and better.

The rumor that Apple will make a 12.9″ iPad for early 2015 sale is welcome indeed.

This will hopefully speed the migration of art and photography books to something of reasonable weight. Case in point, I’m reading Pierluigi De Vecchi’s splendid monograph on Rapahel and while the production values could not be improved upon, just lifting this tome to rest on one’s knees gives pause. It must come in at some 10 lbs.

Given the immense reduction in weight the iPad Air offers over previous versions, Apple should be able to offer generous battery life in the iPad Pro with little weight increase over the Air and the integrated touch screens coming to these devices will offer further weight savings. Price? My guess is under $1000 for the base model.

It may not be ‘think different’ but in this case ‘thing bigger’ definitely works.

Oklahoma!

Paintings, Photography

All that is good and great.

The screen was like nothing I could have imagined. It was simply vast. This was in 1956.

My dad had taken me to the Leicester Square Odeon cinema and the movie was Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! America. My first childhood inkling of my future home.

Back then actors had to sing (on pitch), act, dance, emote and generally be perfect to succeeed in Hollywood, and you can very much see survival of the fittest from the cornucopia of talent on display here, never less than in Shirley Jones (with her wonderful coloratura soprano) and Gordon McRae.

Yet maybe the greatest magic here is from that technological wonder of twentieth century film, Technicolor. Evidently there are two masters – a 2.55:1 on 35mm film and the real thing, the 2.20:1 70mm original. That’s the one I have and while sometimes characters are cut off at the edge of an already ultrawide image, the quality – today – is breathtaking. You can see just how wide 2.20:1 is from the black bars in the images below, taken from a standard 1.78:1 (16:9) TV screen.

I finally got me to watching it for the first time in 57 years, yes siree, and it is a wonder to behold. And how often can you say that a childhood memory is better today than it was over a half century ago? The widescreen images capture the vastness of the American prairie like no other system possibly could.


Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae.


Jones soliloquizes in gorgeous Technicolor.


Somehow she morphs to a much haughtier Bambi Linn at the start of the surreal dream sequence.


The dream sequence becomes a Western Can-Can with Rod Steiger, no less, with imagery Dali would approve.


Drama reminiscent of Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa‘.


Oklahoma!

An extraordinary accomplishment in American musical theater with cinematography, music, singing and dancing (choreographed by none other than Agnes de Mille) to die for.

Rodgers and Hammerstein at their very best.