Category Archives: Photography

The dumbwatch

Photography

As silly as it gets.

Have you ever seen a wearer trying to use one of those dated Casio Calculator watches, miniscule keyboard and all, strapped to his wrist? I have and I can assure you I could do the math faster and almost certainly more accurately than the user of this party conversation starter. Or stopper. That is if your idea of a fun party is one where soup-stained beards and pocket protectors dominate the sartorial equation.

The Casio could give you calculator power in addition to the date and time. Now we are hearing rumors that the B players who now run Apple are thinking of coming up with a smartwatch. Quite what it will do I’m not sure but the very limited screen space will likely present a filtered subset of data available to other devices, be they cell phones, tablets or computers. Maybe the weather, a stock quote or two, airline flights and so on. It’s no great fun looking at the small display of an iPhone for long, so now make that display one tenth the size and what do you have? A solution looking for a problem and a trip to the eye specialist.

Maybe, James Bond style, there will be a small camera built in, allowing you to take truly ghastly images for some purpose or other but except for the Grade school set – where a gadget’s life span is measured in weeks until the next one comes along – I simply do not see a smartwatch as a device with sustained selling or staying power. In other words, I’m not about to sell my mechanical wrist watch. It does only one thing, tell the time, and not very accurately at that, but it sure as heck is lot more pleasure to look at than a smartwatch. And I can make it out with ease.

Were I running Apple, I would be pretty concerned about Google’s nascent Glass(es). Innovative, unexpected, maybe groundbreaking. I would also be looking to my brains’ trust asking where our competitive device was.


Sergey Brin of Google models Glass.

Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 APS-C zoom

Nikon lenses

An interesting innovation.

Sigma has just announced an 18-35mm zoom for APS-C sensor DSLRs with a fixed maximum aperture of a speedy f/1.8. It works out to 27-53mm full frame equivalent.

It’s no lightweight at 29 ounces – 5 ounces heavier than the stellar 35/1.4 – but the finish appears to be the same, meaning excellent. Like that prime, the new optic will be programmable using Sigma’s dock. I would guess pricing at $900 for the lens and under $100 for the dock. The lens comes in Sigma, Nikon and Canon mounts. I’m sure my D2x would love one, but I am very happy with the inexpensive 35/1.8 Nikkor G prime.

It’s good that an independent maker can challenge the big boys on both quality and price. It seems that true innovation is mostly coming from Sigma and Fuji today.

Sample images appear here.

Lightroom 5 Beta

Lightroom

Out now.

Adobe has announced the free availability of Lightroom 5 and as in previous releases the enhancements are substantive. Lightroom 4 brought greatly improved Highight and Shadow sliders and the team at Adobe has been diligent in bringing the latest RAW converters to LR in a timely manner. Most recently, they distinguished themselves with a revised release of converters for the Fuji X series of cameras which use a non-standard arrangement of pixels, resulting in enhanced image quality. Impressive.


Click the image to go to the download page.

Adobe reckons to have the bugs out by the summer and they have to be commended on the way they obviously listen to users. The final release will allow conversion of your existing LR4 or earlier catalog(s) of images. The current Beta version does not permit conversion, so I simply imported a handful of RAW images to see what was of interest.

These were the significant new features which caught my eye:

Automatic verticals and horizontals:

One click in the Lens Corrections panels and keystone distortion (leaning verticals) is (reversibly) removed, automatically. You have a choice of verticals, horizontals or both and it’s instantaneous. Be sure to apply your lens correction profile of choice to render lines straight (meaning you are removing barrel or pincushion distortion) before using this tool.

Visualize spots:

A new control renders the image in high relief to make finding spots easier. Very effective, along with a slider to change the degree of ‘spotiness’:

Simply click on the spot removal tool to invoke, then click the ‘Visualize Spots’ box.

Non-circular healing brush:

You can now elect to define an irregular area for use with the healing brush. The old circular functionality is retained. The size of the irregular area cannot be varied with the mouse’s wheel, whereas the size of a circular spot can be, as before:

Variable aspect ratios:

This allows stretching or squashing of an image with a simple slider. Very useful, and ideal for obese Americans:

I have an image where fixing verticals loses too much content. So I first squeezed it in LR5 using the new aspect ratio slider, then applied the verticals fix and the result was identical to what I achieved in DxO Viewpoint, and in a fraction of the time. Very nice indeed.

No code bloat:

There are many enhancements to other modules like the Book and Slideshow ones (the latter now allows embedding of videos). It seems that LR is on a 2 year upgrade frequency and this new release looks very promising. I’ll let smarter (?) users help Adobe work out the bugs and I expect the upgrade will be the usual $100, which is a bargain.

BBC iPlayer

Photography

Finally in the US.

I have complained before about the unavailability of BBC’s iPlayer web app in the US. When some priceless program was shown on the BBC in the UK with no export contemplated, the only way to view it was to impose on UK friends for a copy, a laborious process.

It’s no great secret that the taxpayer-funded British Broadcasting Corporation puts out the best TV and Radio on the planet. While taxpayer funding is seldom an attractive proposition it does allow the continued existence of culture in a UK market increasingly dominated by the criminal vulgarian Murdoch, a man who has systematically corrupted legality, good taste and decency in any market and medium he has touched.

Sadly, the BBC has the business acumen of a third world country, thus iPlayer is not available in the world’s largest market. However, thanks to instructions from a (British!) friend, a fellow expatriate, you can now easily enjoy iPlayer from the US.

To accomplish this sleight of hand, click the picture below to go to Overplay.net.


Click the image.

Sign up for the SmartDNS service only, for $4.95 a month, cancelable at will. You will be issued two DNS numbers either or both of which have to be entered in your device’s DNS settings. This accomplishes the simple goal of fooling iPlayer into believing that your device’s location is in the UK, allowing you to access iPlayer’s programming. Overplay.net accomplishes this by routing your program demands through a UK-located server. Quite why the BBC does not offer a like service for a similar fee, preferring to cede the revenue to an outsider, is way over my head. It’s hard to imagine a more trivial technical effort. Licensing too tough? Bosh. Look at what Apple has done with iTunes, all third party content, whereas most of the Beeb’s shows are home grown. They mostly already own the rights.

Here’s the entry in OS X in System Preferences->Network->Advanced->DNS:


These work only with an Overplay.net subscription.

In iOS the entry is in Settings->WiFi>right arrow. This also allegedly works with Windows – good luck with that.

This approach will allow any of your devices to access iPlayer whether at home or travelling where wi-fi is available. (Streaming video over a cellular connection gets to be very costly, very fast, and is not recommended). If your need is for home use only over your home wi-fi, you can enter the DNS address(es) in your Airport Extreme router and not bother with individual machines. Go to Applications->Utilities->Airport Utility->Edit and enter the DNS address here:

iPlayer allows you to save content to a local disk, just like with a DVR. The web app retains programming for 30 days and a local copy will last 30 days from the date saved.

What are some of the best features of BBC programming? Well, sports fans will immediately appreciate the absence of cloying, saccharine US commentary which immediately defaults to personal stories in lieu of focus on the sport to hand. You know, some utter swill about how the athlete overcame his dyslexia through professional cycling, abandoned a vocation as the next Shakespeare and triumphed against all odds, even if loaded to the gills with steroids. I’m a fan of Formula One and the British commentary is night-and-day better compared to the trash put out by the same Murdoch in the US on his truly wretched Fox propaganda channel. My other interest is cricket and of course that game is largely a stranger to these shores, though there’s fun to be had on the Stanford campus down the road where expat Indians enthusiastically apply willow to leather during summer weekends. The BBC’s cricket coverage on both radio and TV sets the standard.

The drama and comedy content on the Beeb is in a class of one, of course, and there’s ample programming for the culture vulture.

You can watch on an iPhone, iPad or iMac, and one of the best options is to use a MacMini connected to your big screen TV to enjoy shows on a large screen. Better yet, use something reliable and cool running like a HackMini which can be built for low cost. As far as I can tell, AirPlay is not implemented, meaning you cannot simply route content from a laptop to a TV connected to an ApppleTV device.


BBC Radio 3 – the last repository of all that is culturally great.

Best of all, I can now drop the premium pricing plan for my cable feed which I pay simply to get two Formula One races a month. Plus there are no commercials. What’s not to like?

The Hackintosh for 2013

Hackintosh

More attractive than ever.

Apple’s MacPro is now seriously obsolete. Memory is a slow 1333Mhz, USB 3 is not supported, Thunderbolt is not supported and the best video card option is the ATI Radeon 5870, now a generation behind and sporting but 1GB of memory. With 32GB of CPU memory and the 5870 GPU, along with one 1TB HDD, the rig will run you just shy of $4,000. Displays are extra.

Here’s the current Hackintosh build, not bleeding edge, just leading edge, which uses Intel’s i7 IvyBridge CPU, easily overclocked under warranty from stock:

That’s some $1,060 with no HDDs and no displays, keyboard, speakers or mouse. A keyboard, speakers and mouse of choice will add $100 and the rule here is anything but an Apple keyboard (foul chiclet keys) or mouse (the carpal tunnel special). Add $20 for OS X and $70 for a 1TB HDD to make things comparable and the all in cost becomes $1,250. Unless heavy video editing is contemplated, the $200 GPU can be omitted with the Hack using the excellent Intel HD4000 onboard GPU which comes with the CPU. Perfectly capable for LR and PS use. Further, 16GB of RAM is more than adequate, bringing the price down to $940. The power supply used is massively over-spec’d at 850 watts, but the marginal cost over a smaller power supply is so modest that there is no reason to compromise. You can spend as much or as little on storage and displays as you like, whether Mac or Hack. An exceptional value.

Apple has hinted that a new MacPro is in the works for 2013 and if this is true I expect that it will be far costlier than the current MacPro, Apple knowing that these are mostly used by design and video professionals spending someone else’s money. I also expect the new MacPro to be much smaller thus compromising cooling and it will, of course, use many proprietary parts meaning that when something breaks chances are the whole box will be out for repair. Meanwhile, the hospitalized Hack needs but a trip to Amazon or your local electronics store to fix what ails it at very low-cost in very short time indeed. It is a great comfort knowing that Fry’s Electronics is a 30 minute drive from my home though, like the umbrella never seeing rain, nothing ever breaks in my Hack.

Best of all, while there is still a need for a tinkerer’s mindset as Hacks can have quirks at the software – if not hardware – stage, the free tools available for today’s builder have never been better. It’s still not a plug-and-play experience, but it’s getting close.

The Hack build above sports a very quiet case (recommended by a reader – thank you PB) with superior cable management, adds two Thunderbolt sockets, front panel USB3 support, 32GB of memory which is more than anyone needs, an outstanding GPU ideal for still photographers and the best wifi in the business.

My slightly earlier SandyBridge i7 CPU Hack uses many of these parts and the only time it is restarted is when an OS X upgrade dictates that. Otherwise it’s on 7-by-24 and runs as cool as the proverbial cucumber no matter what it is tasked with. Used very hard, it is, in a word, as reliable as a brick.


Massive, silent cooling fans inside Corsair’s Obsidian case.

For the first time builder, the support community is so broad and so helpful that the risks of DIY are negated. Your sweat equity will total 1-3 hours of fun assembly time and another 2-5 hours installing OS X. What’s not to like?

Intel’s CPU for 2013 will be the yet to be released Haswell which will have lower power consumption (irrelevant for a desktop machine) and maybe the usual 7% or so speed increase. Integrated graphics will again be improved and a new motherboard will be required to accommodate the new CPU. I do not see any of these enhancements as a valid reason for delaying a Hack build.