Category Archives: Photography

Nikon’s bizarre pricing

Nikon bodies

How to kick your loyal customers in the unmentionables.

The table below shows the new and current used prices for Nikon’s ‘serious’ bodies. I don’t use the word ‘pro’ as I am clueless what that means. Maybe it means paying full retail for something that is soon worthless?

We all know that depreciation with digital bodies is rapid, but imagine you bought a Nikon D3x in January, 2012 and are now selling it to get the yet higher definition of the D800, after deciding that’s something you cannot live without. Well, your $8,000 ‘investment’ just crashed to $2,800. That’s worse than Apple stock recently.

Maybe Nikon has some deep reason to financially emasculate buyers of its costlier hardware, because they must have known when introducing the D800 that the prices of the D700 and D3/D3x would crash. Quite why they had to price the D800 at a bargain basement $3,000 when at $4,000 they would have sold everyone they can make beats me, but they sure did a number on owners of the earlier bodies. Same for the D600. They could sell that body all day long for $3,000, like the D700 before it, and it would still be cheaper than the competitor from Canon with a like pixel count.

I take a more benign view of the situation as I’m not a ‘pro’, as defined above. As long as Nikon wants to cannibalize its top end offerings and trash resale values, I’m a happy camper. I can pick up a D2x for 14 cents on the dollar with a remaining life of 175,000 clicks. Or a D3x, with a whopping pixel count full frame sensor for 35 cents on the dollar with 275,000 clicks remaining. Works for me. Can I tell the difference from the D800 in an 80″ print? Nope. And I get a nice integrated hand grip free.


Discontinued March, 2012, just 9 months ago and already down to 35 cents on the dollar and falling.

Whether my technique is up to that big sensor, well that’s another question entirely.

The work ethic

Photography

Keep trying.

One of the key reasons which saw me immigrate to the United States over three decades ago was Americans’ work ethic. I had worked with them in London and was amazed at how much harder working and more driven they were than their English counterparts.

I share that work ethic to this day and when it comes to taking pictures I’m a strong believer that ‘a little and often’ is far more likely to result in consistently good results than occasional bursts of activity interspersed with long layoffs.

The artist and photographer Chuck Close, even though confined to a wheelchair for many years now, puts it well:

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.”


The work ethic at work. This is me, happy as a clam.

I have published hundreds of my snaps here over the past year and when I look back it is with mixed feelings. Dismay that I could not do better and renewed hope that I will. I hope you have enjoyed accompanying me on the journey.

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 3 of 3

Photographers, Photographs, Photography

Looking back.

Continuing from parts I and II.

Photographs:

September 29 – The annual dog parade always yields a cornucopia of material and in addition to publishing several snaps I disclosed here, for the first time to a global audience, my vote in the 2012 US Presidential Election.

October 13 – The Marin headlands provide their own rugged beauty as well as affording some of the most splendid views of San Francisco.

October 30 – Equipment maketh the man, and it appears that it’s just about impossible to make bad pictures with the 180mm AF-D Nikkor lens. Mine’s a bit of a beater but the optics are outstanding in every way at any aperture.

October 31 – This year’s Christmas calendar featured pictures taken over many years of the Transamerica building.

November 9 – SF’s Mission District yields riches on a stroll with the 24mm Nikkor.

November 23 – Sometimes you get lucky. An innocuous shot of a short order cook took on a deeper mysterious theme when processed.

December 22 – I reminisced about my Crown Graphic view camera and published a snap or two taken with that monster.

December 25 – Beautiful kids beautifully dressed offer subject matter for the 180mm Nikkor.

Photographers:

September 5 – Cindy Sherman‘s work was exhibited at SF’s MoMA and the show was splendid, showing this talented woman’s output over several decades.

October 15 – The Radical Camera show at SF’s Contemporary Jewish Museum did a fine job of displaying the work of the New York Photo League.

November 30 – Not all great wealth has to emulate the crass boorishness of a Trump, as this gorgeous advertisement from a premier watch maker proves.

December 5 – O. Winston Link’s railway images continue to delight and satisfy.

Photography:

September 26 – The iPhone 5 arrived and proved that changes at the margin are all that’s in store from the former innovators at Apple. A slightly better camera in a decidedly underwhelming device.

September 30 – The month closed with some gorgeous photography in Ralph Lauren’s clothing catalog.

October 9 – The Nikon D2x, at very low cost, joined the D700 chez Pindelski.

November 12 – proving that there’s one born every minute, Leica continues to make silly priced gear for silly people. Get this. $10,000 and it can’t even do color. “But dahling, the greys, the tones ….”.

November 29 – Finally, someone has made a full frame point-and-shoot. Unfortunately, Sony forgot to include a proper viewfinder.

December 26 – DxO Viewpoint offers a better mousetrap for fixing keystoning at a bearable price.

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 2 of 3

Photographers, Photographs, Photography

Looking back.

Continuing from part I.

Photographs:

May 1 – I’m no fan of monochrome, largely regarding it as a cop out for poor vision, but I get into the reminiscence thing in Once upon a time ….

May 13 – Everyone has a magic moment now and then and mine took place with A snap over lunch at a Mission District brew pub.

May 22 – I don’t much reminisce about my film days, but trust me, you will love Paris, 1974 because it’s all about the most beautiful city in the world.

May 28 – An earnest walk along Mission Street saw me doing a number on Papa Hemingway.

May 31 – A visit to Hayes Valley saw one of those serendipitous discoveries of a little known and utterly charming area of the City by the Bay.

June 2 – Filoli is a wonder, not least for the fact that I like to drive there on a summer’s day and imagine that, yes, I really am Blake Carrington of Dynasty fame. I even figured out what it would take to buy and privatize the place.

June 10 – Bernal Heights on the west side of San Francisco was an incredible discovery, and I started writing about it here, with a piece on the four legged world following. Given my love of dogs this was probably the most fun I had taking pictures in 2012.

Photographers:

May 17 – Paul Bock shared some of his lovely work with me and my readers.

July 5 – English photographer Martin Parr did a number on the people, ‘culture’ and food of the deep south and it’s hard to blame him, as I spent a miserable year of my life in North Carolina surrounded by people who had married their cousins. There’s every reason to believe things get even worse the further south you go.

August 20 – The 120th anniversary of Vogue brought with it some splendid photography.

August 28 – The man who took the most famous photograph in human history passed away.

Photography:

June 23 – Ever focused on being better/faster/cooler than the MacPro, my computer builder FU Steve made sure that The HP100 goes ballistic was, indeed, a reality for my Hackintosh.

June 14 – Walter Mandler was a god, and I really got into it here.

June 24 – I love musicals and what better place than to start than at the top with Lenny?

July 10 – after the usual installation hassles, I was able to confirm that Photoshop CS5 (and Lightroom 4) run at more than adequate speed on the 2012 MacBook Air, making for an excellent portable rig. The 2012 MBA delivers a great increase in speed over my previous 2010 model.

July 20 – a focus on essential hardware in the event of an all consuming fire saw me choosing the 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor-S as the lens to take with me.

July 29 – my infinitely upgradable Hackintosh saw the installation of Mountain Lion. Apple’s OS upgrades have never been cheaper – ML cost $20 – or less worthwhile, each conferring additional unnecessary frou frou, Mercifully, the OS remains robust and stable.

August 5 – America excelled again, placing a camera on Mars. It’s fashionable to write America off and tell everyone in earshot that the future is in China or some other hole passing for existence in the Far East. Utter rot. Last I checked MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Princeton and Penn were all in America. All are richly endowed, and the whole world continues to try to gain entry to these, the finest schools on earth.

August 13 – The exercise in serial boredom and commercial excess which is the Olympic Games was relieved by a splendidly humorous piece that only the British can do. It saw HM The Queen parachuting into the Olympic Stadium, after slipping the watchful eye of her bodyguard, none other than 007.

Canon EOS-1D C camera

Photography

An interesting development.


Note the lens – no noisy click stops for movie use.

When Canon introduced the Canon 5D Mark II a few years ago no one expected it to become a leading movie camera. Delivering high quality footage from its video mode at a bargain price compared to professional movie cameras, it quickly became a favorite for aspiring movie makers on a budget.

Canon has now created a full time movie camera which will revolutionize how many professionals work, the EOS-1D C. The first applications which come to mind include fashion and wedding photography. The reason is that this movie camera makes movie images whose stills are capable of delivering high quality prints. No more ‘decisive moments’ – just let the camera run then select the best frames for printing. For the wedding snapper he gets both the movie – increasingly demanded in the business – and the ability to print high quality stills for the album.

While this body does not deliver RAW quality images you can bet that is just around the corner, likely awaiting the development of faster GPUs to process all that data in-camera while still delivering the requisite 24 frames a second. Canon really should speak with nVidia on that one.

Although the video below is a Canon promotional piece, it is very much worth watching. This will change how many stills photographers work. What’s that? You rue the passing of the skill of timing in taking a good still image? Get with the action. Now you too can be Cartier-Bresson. The Decisive Moment is so yesterday, swept away by technology.


Click the image for the video.

The video is HD and repays watching on a large display.

Using the lower 4K (4096 x 2160) setting you need 8.85mp of storage for each frame. That figures to 221mp a second (!). The recording format is Motion JPG though an even higher definition H264 format, using the full 18mp is available. The above video states that the camera chews through 1GB of storage a minute (I come up with a different answer, but Canon doubtless knows what it’s talking about), but with 128GB storage cards now available and affordable, that’s not a big issue. The rumored price is $12,000 which is not much for a professional grade digital movie camera in a very compact package. Add a compact stabilizer of the kind used by aerial photographer Jason Hawkes and you have a Steadicam at a fraction of the cost and bulk of the real thing.

Price? The Epic-M RED camera, with comparable specs, will set you back $24,000, twice as much.