Category Archives: Photography

Quadcopter imagery

Movies, Photography

Stunning technology.

Quadcopter technology is becoming both reliable and inexpensive.

Checkout this stunning video of the Niagara Falls:


Click the image for the video.

Be sure to watch it in HD. It’s breathtaking.

The artist used a Phantom Quadcopter (Amazon has it for $479) and a Black Magic Hero3 camera.

The Phantom uses GPS positioning technology and has a maximum yaw velocity of 200 degrees a second, meaning it can spin a full circle in under two seconds. Maximum flight speed is 33 feet/second, meaning 30 mph, and it comes with a microphone.


Click the image for the DJI Phantom site.

The Hero3 camera shoots – wait for it – 4K video, and comes with wifi technology. It can record 12mp still images at 30 frames per second. Check out some of the incredible videos on their home page. Whether mounted on helmets, surfboards, birds or lions (!) the effect is overwhelming. Image stabilized, wifi, 4K definition and $400 at Amazon.


Click the image for the GoPro site.

So $879 gets you technology that cost Stanley Kubrick thousands times that when he made the first Steadicam movie, The Shining. That was in 1980.

Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 UD lens

Nikon lenses

Finally! Wide angle bliss.

I have been using the 20mm f/3.5 Ai-S Nikkor for a while now and it is both compact and optically excellent. But my first choice in a classic MF 20mm Nikkor was always the earlier UD of 1967. The snag is, it’s not easy to find a mint specimen.

The UD was a very special lens for its time. Until its creation, Nikon F owners made use of the mirror lock-up and separate optical finder needed to accommodate the 21mm design from Nikon’s rangefinder line. Hardly consonant with the SLR concept. Leica (with the 21mm Super Angulon for the original Leicaflex) and Zeiss (with the 21mm Biogon for the fabulous Contarex) adopted like strategies, mirror lock-up and all. All three came with the most awful, distorting viewfinders imaginable.

But the UD applied Nikon’s retrofocus research and resulted in a super-wide lens which needed no mirror lock-up or external finder. You saw through the pentaprism finder what the film would record. And it was massive, compared to their later 20mm designs – the 20mm f/4, f/3.5 and f/2.8, all MF and all excellent. Nikon lists the f/2.8 to this day.

So why bother spending all this time tracking down a pristine UD when all its successors are wonderful? Well, it’s that old fixation of mine. Metal. I believe lenses should be metal, not rubber or plastic mounted. I believe their ergonomics should fit the camera. And the D3x and D2x on which I use my lenses are very large bodies indeed. The 20mm Ai-S on the D3x is, frankly, rather dwarfed by the bulk of the body.

I searched some 18 months for a perfect UD specimen, being outbid several times on eBay as the UD seems to be attracting that vermin of the photography world, the gear collector. My sample, indistinguishable from new in every way, cost me $327 delivered, some $75 more than when I first started searching. By contrast, the Ai-S f/3.5 version can be had for maybe $250, or so. The CPU adds $30 and the Ai conversion requires a Dremel tool with a cut-off wheel, a small file and sweat equity.

Here’s the real thing:


D3x, 20mm f/3.5 UD Nikkor. Mine was made in September, 1973.
Production ceased in April, 1974.

Nikon pulled no punches here. This lens is simply outstanding optically and mechanically. Almost 50 years after it was designed it remains a bedrock of solidity and pure old-fashioned mechanical engineering. Handling, feel, balance on the big body – there’s no comparison with its smaller and lighter successors. No play, no wobble, just high integrity build and finish. A man’s lens. For sheer beauty of execution only the pre-Ai 200mm f/4 Nikkor-Q compares.

My example was pre-Ai, as were all 20mm UD Nikkors, so it necessitated Ai conversion. Forget about trying to find genuine Nikon factory conversion kits – they are rarer than hen’s teeth.


A factory modified UD Nikkor – note the protruding
ridge which abuts the aperture follower on the lens. Good
luck finding the modified aperture ring on the used market.

And conversion of this lens is tricky. Instead of just relieving the aperture ring to clear and activate the aperture follower on modern digital bodies, the lens has to have a protruding part attached to contact the follower, unlike other pre-Ai lenses. The easiest way to do this is to reverse the stock Nikon aperture claw, and cut off part of it until the dimensions are right. Nikon unwittingly provided just what’s needed for digital conversion, and the aperture claw I used has no purpose on modern Nikon DSLRs so its reuse has no negative effects. The modified, cut down claw will correctly contact the aperture follower as illustrated below.


The aperture follower. Very robust despite appearances,
the final thing is painted black to match the lens.


The aperture follower in use on the Nikon DSLR body.
Note the vacant claw retaining threaded hole to the right.

A note on ‘de-clawing’ the lens: Ordinarily, once I have converted an MF Nikkor to work on the modern Nikon DSLR, I remove the aperture claw on top of the aperture ring and store it. Because the two retaining screws are small and easily lost, I replace them in the vacant holes in the aperture ring, using a magentized screwdriver (any other way invites insanity). Do not replace the second claw retaining screw in the 20mm UD Nikkor (the other screw is used to retain the reversed claw). Doing so you will find that the screw countersinks too deeply into the innards of the lens and will prevent movement of the aperture ring.

The contrast in size with the later 20mm f/3.5 is striking:


The 1967 design pre-Ai UD and the 1977 design Ai-S.
No rubber or plastic on the UD.

The handling of the big UD on the large D3x and D2x bodies is ergonomic perfection.

How about resolution? At normal enlargement ratios neither lens will let you down in big prints. But the optical design philosophies could scarcely be more different. The UD is computed for maximum resolution at the center and hang the edges. Indeed, central resolution remains largely unchanged, and outstanding, at all apertures, being pretty much perfect by f/4.5. By contrast the Ai-S optic compromises central resolution, trading it for more even across-the-frame performance. The Ai-S never quite matches the UD in the center and the UD never quite matches the Ai-S in the corners. For reference, I have a 48″ x 36″ print made from a 20mm Ai-S image and it’s perfect at normal viewing distances, so it’s not as if any excuses need be made for the compact Ai-S variant of this lens.

Here are center comparisons at f/3.5 and f/8, UD on the left. I’m using my usual utility pole in the backyard, that exemplar of America’s infrastructure. The equivalent print sizes would be 40″ x 27″, something very few users will ever make, so if you think the UD’s edges are poor and the Ai-S’s center is so-so, bear in mind what you are looking at:


Centers at f/3.5.


Centers at f/8.

And here are the extreme corners:


Corners at f/3.5.


Corners at f/8.

I’ll trade central resolution for corner sharpness any day.

I used the same lens correction profile for the UD as for the Ai-S, after adding a CPU in the usual way. Comparison with the Ai-S showed almost exactly the same level of vignetting and optical errors, meaning wave/mustache distortion of straight lines at the edge. Both lenses cease vignetting by f/5.6.


UD at f/3.5 – no profile. Note wave form distortion
of top of fence and vignetting.


UD at f/3.5 with profile.

You can find the lens correction profile here and use of this profile corrects vignetting and renders straight lines straight, not wavy. Flare into the sun is almost identical, the Ai-S reproducing sharper magenta spots where the UD delivers one considerably smaller one, this despite the huge front element in the UD. In both cases flare spots are far less pronounced through f/5.6, becoming pretty objectionable by f/22 with the Ai-S, though easily corrected in post-processing. Contrast of the two lenses appears identical at all apertures.


The profile in use – Lightroom 5.


UD flare at f/22.


Ai-S flare at f/22.

The sun was just out of the frame in both images and no lens hoods were used. Both lenses have UV protective filters, which probably does not help matters. The UD is single coated, the Ai-S multicoated. The UD only shows a minor loss in definition from diffraction at f/22 – remarkable. To put this further in perspective, the UD is 1-2 stops sharper across the frame then the current 16-35mm AFS G zoom, which costs $1,300. So much for optical progress ….

If you have a big body Nikon and yearn for the days of mechanical engineering which Nikon has never surpassed, the 1967-74 UD Nikkor is for you.


The finished job. The red dot on the CPU serves as an alignment aid when mounting the lens.


Correct EXIF data in LR5, read from the CPU.


Winston hammers away at his latest Lego kit. D3x, 20mm UD Nikkor at f/4.

A few early snaps appear here.

The USPS is back

Photography

A new business opportunity.

Among the many much maligned arms of the US government, the Unites States Postal Service comes in for more than its share of abuse. Of course, many of these wounds are self-inflicted, like backing druggie bike racers with taxpayer money or raising the public’s ire with endless streams of junk mail deliveries. Yet, on reflection, I challenge anyone to begin to match the efficiency and low cost of the USPS, delivering millions of pieces of mail daily be it to Wall Street or Po Dunk, Iowa. And that with a success rate that you can only dream about. The complexity and scope of the post office’s undertaking are breathtaking. When did you last have a piece of mail lost? Yet we read daily that the USPS is on its last legs, destroyed in mail by email and in package delivery by the likes of Federal Express and UPS, both far costlier and not that much better. Remember that last smashed parcel accorded the tender care of the brown truck driver?

But I see a new business opportunity for the USPS and it’s courtesy of the very same US government.

Daily we learn of more snooping, more abuse of our constitutional rights, more clandestine dirt. With USG’s traditional sound judgment the snoops are now being found to have spied on Facebook messages, those messages between a collective with an average IQ in the low double figures. Well, gag me with a spoon. Now we can be comfortable that Latisha’s Facebook posting to Jamal debating the quality of the local Big Mac will be rapidly disclosed as a coded plot to blow up something or other. This makes it so much easier getting to sleep at night, knowing that we are all safe from burger bombers and that a mainstay of American commerce and global dietary disaster can remain in business.

And this is where the USPS and snail mail come into their own. I was reading a noir suspense novel the other day, set in the 1950s, and every time the French resident key character and anti-hero wanted to preserve secrecy in communications with his crooked London buddies he would …. write them a letter! Even then the telcos appear to have kept logs of calls, but stick it in the mail and there is no trace. And the global mails did one heck of a job exporting America’s intellectual property to the east, be it nukes to Moscow or electronics to Japan.

One of the key tools the spies of the time used to effect their snail mail treason was the Minox camera.


Note the minimum focus distance.

Easily hidden in the palm of a hand, vest pocket or lady’s garter belt (!) the Minox first came to life, appropriately enough, in subsequently Communist-controlled Latvia, in 1936. The bad guys took to it like Russians to vodka, and before you knew it no self respecting spy was without one. Minox made a whole range of accessories to support the minuscule images rendered by the camera – there was even a darkroom enlarger – with the negative being but 8 x 11mm, meaning a 4″ x 6″ print required an enlargement of almost 13 times to see the light of day. Not exactly your modern full frame DSLR definition, but it worked at a pinch for images of nuclear fission devices and the new fangled transistors coming out of Bell Labs.

I sold many of these during my student years in retail, but to put that in context the retail store was in a ritzy part of London and the Minox was invariably bought by rich guys with two seaters and three girlfriends. No one, you understand, ever ended up using the Minox, except for 007 and his buddies. Very few cassettes ever came back for processing and our film sales were almost non-existent, but the camera itself sold well. It was beautifully made, a real jewel, with many later model variations. Each came with a metal lanyard which doubled as a measuring device for the very close focusing lens – just the thing when you were busy at the Department of Defense making snaps for the Commies or Mr. Morita by the light of a 60 watt bulb.

The early Minox A had no coupled meter, but you can get a good sense of the accessory range in this 1955 advertisement. My snooper’s favorite is the binocular attachment:


The Minox A in 1955 – the spy’s favorite at the height of the Cold War.

Note the 50 picture capacity – and in cassette-loaded film at that. Very impressive. No true snoop used the tripod stand – a dead giveaway. He used the lanyard to determine image distance and focus.

Here’s another scan of the 1967 Wallace Heaton ‘Blue Book’ – the catalog put out by this long defunct upmarket UK photographic equipment vendor – multiply the price by three to get US $:



‘Your sort of man’ – contemporary advertisement.

As you can see, the Minox of the time was remarkable full featured. For comparison, the Nikon F with 50mm f/1.4 lens sold for twice as much at the time.

True blue spies would go the extra step of having the Minox’s already diminutive negative further reduced to microdot size, say 1-2mm across, a technology much beloved of spy thriller movies of the time. Goodness knows how they handled the drop in definition which ensued. Maybe they had to write a lot of letters to contain these miniature negatives? And the medium of choice for transmission of these state secrets was none other than the mail, the USPS doing its patriotic bit before ceding control to the foreign carrier, be it the Bundespost or Pochta Rossii.

Anyway, as the USPS has not been well served by its marketing arm in the past few decades, I’ll kick things off with a dynamite slogan which will see traditional full rate business boom overnight:

“USPS. For when you are tired of the only part of your government that listens – the NSA.”

They could offer a free starter cassette of Minox film to all takers.

And there will always be clients for the USPS’s low tech solution:


Jamal – tomorrow’s radical USPS customer in training.

Best of all, when the USG closes down, like today, the USPS remains open. ‘Essential service’, don’t you know.

Nikon D3x, 35-70 AFD Nikkor.

Butterfly

Film, Photographs

In Carmel.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

Nikon D700, 20mm MF Nikkor. Kodachrome 64 filter in DxO Filmpack 3.

A friend of the blog has asked how to determine which filter to use to emulate a particular film with this application from DxO. There is no way. DxO’s flaky software cannot possibly know as it does not determine the characteristics of the sensor in the digital camera used. Thus it cannot determine the offset needed to emulate a particular film look as it does not know the starting point. I’m using it because they just made version 3 free and because it’s fun dialing in the alternative (alleged) film looks. Use what you want but just because it says ‘Kodachrome’ does not make it so. Like most things from this vendor – check their frequently nonsensical lens ratings, for example – I would keep my wallet well in my pocket, if I was you. Even their Viewpoint perspective control software which I profiled here a while back is much improved upon in stock Lightroom 5. But free is good.


From the DxO website. Rediscover the magic of pure BS.

Mac Pro 2009 – Part XVIII

Mac Pro

Doubling data storage.

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

Preparatory work:

In an earlier article I illustrated how to install an Apricorn PCIe card which accepted a SATA III 250GB SSD to hold the OS, apps and the Lightroom catalog. The two existing 120GB SSDs were striped using RAID 0, and became the backup for the new 250GB SSD. Drive speeds and capacities doubled after this enhancement.

SATA III Hard Disk Drive:

A like approach applies to installing a larger data hard disk drive. The Apricorn card has one additional SATA III socket, permitting attachment of a large HDD, which has to be powered separately. My two data HDDs, each 1TB in capacity, are filling up, being 70% full. Spinning disk drives write data first to the periphery of the disk platters, gradually filling up toward the spindle. As rotational velocity drops as the spindle area is approached, data retrieval progressively slows as the disk fills up. So, at 70% full, I reckoned that it was time to do the same with the HDDs as I did earlier with the SSDs.

Thus I bought a Western Digital Red ‘server class’ SATA III 2TB HDD to serve as the primary data repository, with the two SATA II 1TB WD drives striped into one backup drive using Disk Utility and thus enjoying a doubling in backup speed. For details how to convert drives to RAID 0, refer to the earlier article.


The premium for these allegedly more robust drives over the standard Green and Black versions is a few dollars. Mine cost $105 plus tax. The warranty is three years, by which time these will have halved in price. Are these really more robust than plain vanilla drives? I have seen no data to prove it, but for a few dollars extra I’m not losing sleep over the hype. The estimable Tom’s Hardware site finds the Red to be a middling I/O performer but outstandingly cool and quiet, with low power consumption. That’s a trade-off I will take any day.

Power and data for the HDD:

I had earlier installed a powered USB3 card, with power sourced from the optical disk drive area – click here for details. Thus, to power the new HDD all that was required was to split the power feed to the USB3 card using a Molex 1-to-2 Y cable, then a Molex to SATA power cable to energize the drive.


Cables – Molex splitter top, SATA power middle, SATA data bottom.

If you do not already have a powered USB3 card installed then power can be run directly from the spare unused connector in the optical drive area, the cable routed as I show in the USB3 article. The data connection is simply made with a SATA data cable connecting the spare port in the rear of the Apricorn SSD PCIe card with the data connector on the new HDD. The cable outlay is under $10.

Power use and supply limits:

Are the power supply limits of the PCIe slots being exceeded? No. The four slots can draw a maximum of 225 watts through the slots and an additional 2 x 37.5 watts from the two backplane connectors intended to power GPU cards. Here are the maximum PCIe power consumption data for my configuration:

  • nVidia GTX660 graphics card – 140 watts (37.5 from the backplane board, 102.5 from the PCIe slot).
  • Orico USB3 card – probably 10 watts
  • Apricorn PCIe card with 250GB SSD – 4 watts
  • WD Red 2TB HDD – 10 watts

So that’s a total power draw of 127 watts out of 225 watts available through the PCIe slots. That’s very conservative at 56% of capacity.

What is of greater concern is the use of top end GPU cards like the nVidia GTX780 and ATI/AMD HD 7950 and HD 7990.

  • GTX780 – 250 watts – 75 from the backplane board, 175 from PCIe – OVERLOAD!
  • HD 7950 – 200 watts – 75 from the backplane board, 125 from PCIe
  • HD 7990 – 375 watts – 75 from the backplane board, 300 from PCIe – OVERLOAD!

Meaning that if you use one or two of these cards and drive them hard (why else buy them?), you must use an auxiliary power supply, which can be located in the DVD drive cage.

However, if you accept that a card of the calibre of the GTX660 is as much as you will ever need for still image processing (it is), then power consumption is not a concern.

Placement of the HDD:

The final issue is where to store the new HDD, as all my regular SATA II ports are taken. One option is to store the HDD in the optical drive area, but that area is poorly cooled and not the best choice.

I opted to attach the HDD to the top of the PCIe fan case using Velcro. In this location the power and data cables are easily connected and there is ample cooling. Velcro makes removal of the HDD easy. Rather than attach the Velcro directly to the HDD – heat and Velcro adhesive do not make for long term stability – I attached the HDD to the spare disk drive sled which became available when I replaced one of the 3.5″ HDDs with a 2.5″ SDD. I used the OWC sled to attach the SSD instead.


WD Red 2TB SATA III HDD installed in a stock Mac Pro drive sled.


Cables neatly arranged with cable covers and tied into a harness.

The stock HDD sled is a perfect fit between the processor cage and the existing HDDs in their regular locations. I used industrial grade Velcro whose adhesive and hook-and-look surfaces make for very strong bonds and made sure to clean the mounting surfaces with a swipe of isopropyl alcohol to remove dirt and grease before attaching the Velcro.


Velcro in place on top of the PCIe fan housing.

Take double care with those ghastly Molex connectors. It’s common for a pin or socket to come loose and recede as the two are mated, making for a bad connection. Ask me how I know. If you find you have two in-line Molex male-female connectors, as here, I advocate cutting them off and crimping the wires using a crimping tool and crimp connectors. Superior in every way.


The installation completed.

Thereafter it’s a simple issue of moving data over, using Carbon Copy Cloner, from the existing 1TB data HDD to the new 2TB drive, and then using Disk Utility to make the two original 1TB drives into one 2TB RAID 0 drive, setting the latter up as the backup drive in CCC and cloning all data back from the new 2TB HDD to the RAID 0 2 x 1TB pair of HDDs. As usual, I am careful to recreate the daily scheduled CCC back up task from Data HDD to Data HDD Bak, as use of UUIDs for these disk dictates that step.


The new SATAIII HDD is correctly reported by the SMART disk utility.

Additional storage:

Need yet more storage? You can convert to 4TB HDDs. All that’s called for is money. They run around $200. Further, Seagate just announced a new storage technology known as Shingled Magnetic Recording which allows yet more data to be crammed into existing platters, starting at 5TB. You can bet we will see 8 or even 10TB per drive before long. Astounding! Rumors of the spinning HDD’s death are greatly exaggerated and brilliant electronics engineers are doing some very innovative work here.

The bottom line is that the Mac Pro owner wishing to have a minimum of external clutter and cabling can easily run internal storage up to 20TB at present, and much more down the road. That should keep most users happy, unless they work for the NSA. If yet more is needed, use external USB3 cases loaded with as many HDDs as you need, but for my more modest storage needs having everything inside the Mac Pro’s case is perfection. A CrashPlan cloud backup covers for earthquakes and fires at the Mac Pro’s location.

Measurements:

I illustrate drive Read and Write speeds below for the original 1TB SATA II HDD, the new SATA III WD 2TB Red and the two original 1TB HDDs striped into one HDD (as seen by Finder) using RAID 0.

A) Original 1TB 7200rpm HDD running at SATA II speed:


Original 1TB 7200rpm HDD running at SATA II speed.

B) New 2TB WD Red 5400-7200 variable rpm running at SATA III speed:


2TB WD Red 7200 rpm running at SATA III speed.

c) Original paired 2 x 1TB SATA II HDDs striped as one 2TB HDD in RAID 0 (WD Green 7200rpm) – outstanding performance with speeds tripled:


Paired 2 x 1TB SATA II HDDs striped as one 2TB HDD in RAID 0.

I opted for larger 256K block sizes when striping the two older 1TB drives, as most of the activity is writing large photo files:

Here is Disk Utility after creating the new 2TB striped set:

Sound levels:

Addition of the WD 2TB Red drive makes no change to noise measured at ear level, two feet distant from the Mac Pro on the floor. This remains at 42-43dB – a low level susurrus of white noise.

Temperatures:

As you can see, the 2TB Western Digital Red SATAIII HDD runs very cool – it’s the orange trace, below. This temperature chart was run during the clone of the newly populated Red (‘WDRed2TB’) back to the newly created 2 x 1TB Raid 0 striped HDD pair (‘BackupHD’) – the pink trace. The Samsung 250GB PCIe SSD (‘Sammy’ – brown trace) runs warm, likely owing to its proximity to the Zotac nVidia GTX660 graphics card, which runs hot. The Northbridge chip – blue trace – runs warm by design, and remains 70F below its operating limit.

Spot the drives:

Green arrows designate drive locations.

The seventh is an SSD hidden in the optical drive cage, lower right.

Here is the drive topology and back-up design:


Drives in the Mac Pro’s case and in the Cloud.


All drives are inside the case.

Replacing trashed grommets:

The soft rubber grey grommets in the Mac Pro’s drive sleds both help retain the drive screws and confer a modest level of vibration damping. They rot and disintegrate with age. You can buy replacements here – the cost is for a pack of four:


Replacement rubber disk drive grommets. Click the image to go to the site.