A flashback.

When I take my boy for his karate lessons I invariably wander down the street and peek in at the camera store on 25th Street in San Mateo. It’s one of the few left. I’m not sure how they survive in the age of Amazon and online comparative shopping, but I invariably gravitate to the several display cases full of consigned used photo gear. Most of it is 35mm SLR film hardware, of little interest to anyone, and rarely seems to change between visits. I would guess that most sales are to photography students forced to use film by crank teachers who failed as photographers. There are a few interesting 4×5 sheet film cameras and the usual gamut of tired lenses, but the display which always catches my attention, for some reason, is the one with all those exposure meters.

It’s pure nostalgia. I used a selenium cell Weston Master V for several decades, even having the cell replaced by Quality Lightmetric in Hollywood when it died, and my Leica M bodies invariable sported a selenium cell Metrawatt MC or cadmium sulphide MR clip on meter which coupled to the shutter speed dial, requiring only that the indicated aperture be dialed in. Despite their small size these worked well, as long as you treated them gently.

Now every new camera comes with exposure automation built in, yet go the the Apple iPhone AppStore and what will you find?

Note the old time Sekonic exposure meter icon.

From the unattractively named Nuwaste, complete with typographical errors and a broken developer’s site link, comes the Pocket Light Meter app. And it works really well.

The meter can be used either with the front or rear facing camera in the iPhone and is close to a spot metering design. This means it meters a small part of the image, so if you are hoping for an overall averaging of the scene this is not for you. Indeed, an appreciation of dynamic range and an ability to determine whether you want detail in the shadows or highlights are required skills to make proper use of this tool.

You can see just how small the metered area is in this screen snap:

The red rectangle defines the metered area.

The cut-off around the red rectangle is so-so; it’s not razor sharp like, say, in the semi-spot meter in a Leicaflex SL of yore, which had the best manual in-camera meter ever made, but drops off steeply within one rectangle’s worth of the periphery. Not bad. Best of all, just touch the iPhone’s screen and the measurement rectangle will jump to the touch point, so taking multiple readings in a couple of seconds is trivial. Readings take under one second to stablize and touching ‘Hold’ freezes them, though the developer could usefully add an indicator that Hold has been enabled. So aficionados of the Ansel Adams Zone System, where you measure and determine the dynamic range placement based on your selected tones, will love this.

It gets better. Dial in the ‘Display additional info’ option and you get:

Additional display option.

You can see the selected area’s brightness in Lux and FootCandles, as well as EV readings at two ISO settings. Many sheet film camera lenses came with EV settings which, once you get used to them, are pretty handy as they permit locking of the shutter speed/aperture combination, so if you change one, the other changes to compensate. Great for tuning in just the right depth of field. Sadly no color temperature display option is available, which would make this a particularly useful tools for cinematographers seeking color balance betwen scenes.

The intrusive advertising can be removed by sending the developer $0.99. Otherwise the app is free.

Though the specifications refer to reciprocity correction, (correction for the non-linear response of film emulsions at low light levels), I could determine no such feature. The aperture range is f1 – f/512 and shutter speeds run from 32 seconds down to 1/8000, regardless of ISO. The ISO range is 6-102,400.

I tested this app on my iPhone 4S against the meter in the Panasonic G3 and it was in exact agreement under a variety of lighting conditions, including daylight, fluorescent and incandescent light. The developer says it works on the iPhone 3GS or later and all iPad2 models. I tested sensitivity to be down to 1/2 second @ f/5.6 at ISO320. Not Lunasix territory, but not bad either. The Gössen Lunasix meter’s claim to fame was that it could measure exposure by the light of the moon! The meter was about the bulk of five iPhones …. By comparison, the Panny G3 blows away both, easily measuring down to 20 seconds @ f/5.6 at ISO320!

At the price asked, anyone needing manual exposure measurement should not pass this by, so long as you make the effort to learn how to use a spot meter in the first place. The developer should consider adding a center-weighted or averaging option to make this app more broadly useful. But it’s a lot cheaper than even a very well used Weston Master, Sekonic or Lunasix.

Catch that thief.

This is clever. Given that most cameras record their serial number in the photo file’s metadata, this app allows you to track pictures published on sites like Flickr using that serial number, searching for it on the web:

Click the picture for the maker’s site.

Now my Panny G3 is not exactly something I would really miss were it stolen. It’s not ‘throw-away cheap’ but it’s close and, if stolen, likely does not warrant the expenditure of time and effort to recover it, though I suppose the psychic satisfaction of catching a thief might be worthwhile. But if I owned something silly-priced like a Leica M9 or S2, or a digital Hasselblad, then this app would get my attention. As for the iPhone, whose content has value far above the cost of the hardware, ‘Find My iPhone’ does the trick at no extra cost and stories abound of the flat footed set apprehending thieves.

For UK residents, there’s a like app named StolenCameraFinder.

Something to bookmark should that awful day ever come.

Miracles do happen.

Five months after OS X Lion was released xRite has finalized its Intel version of the application used with the i1Display 2 colorimeter for profiling displays.

I had no issues with the earlier Beta version, other than an error message when restarting the computer which was meaningless, but it’s nice to know this has been finalized. All those photographers still maintaining a running version of Leopard or Snow Leopard so as to use the earlier PPC/Rosetta app can now migrate to Lion. It runs fine on a Core2Quad, Core i3 and Core i5 Hackintosh, so it may even work on your stressed out MacBook or iMac!

Click the picture for the download site.

If the click link fails for you (this is for US consumers) try the xRite site.

Not that many choices.

I suppose this really has to be divided into two sections.

Desktop and Laptop:

These are the ‘serious’ platforms photographers use to process pictures and not a lot has happened here in 2011.

It’s as well to start with the worst new software for desktops by awarding that dubious distinction to OS X Lion which, in one fell swoop, dumbed down a robust predecessor, OS Snow Leopard and destroyed all PPC functionality. Apple accomplished this by deleting the 32-bit kernel in earlier OSs and the wonderful Rosetta code which made it possible to run Power PC apps from the G3/4/5 CPU days on a modern Intel Mac. Given that including this functionality would have been trivial, you really have to wonder what Apple was thinking of. Millions of users of Intuit’s Quicken through 2007 were left dead in the water, scrambling for an alternative, and jumping through hoops to convert their data files and hundreds of thousands of photographers had to run a parallel Snow Leopard machine to allow them to use their xRite display profiling software. xRite finally fixed that, and no prizes for taking so long, Intuit never will. So why even upgrade to Lion with it’s childish UI? Well, if they dropped Rosetta/PPC support, Snow Leopard will be next. Mercifully, much of the dumbing down can be reversed and much of the Snow Leopard experience reclaimed, though much tinkering and wasted time is involved.

The dumb-as-a-brick LaunchPad, confusing touch screens with desktops, one of the ‘features’ of Lion.

Not satisfied with kicking millions of its loyal users in the nuts, Apple went one better and ceased shipping software on physical media. You want an application in the AppStore? You had better have high speed broadband working. And the poor vendors who cave to this extortion have to hand over 30% of their revenues to Apple for the privilege. No wonder the smarter ones continue to sell direct through physical distribution. How long before Apple prevents any app not downloaded from the AppStore from working?

For this photographer the Wow! application of 2011 was the addition of Content Aware Fill by Adobe in Photoshop CS5. It’s now simple to remove clutter. Where agonizing hours were needed with the clone stamp to remove clutter, it can now be done in seconds.

Before CAF – original.

After CAF. Click the picture to download the video.

If nothing else, the video will show you just how speedy this technique is in practice.

Combine CAF with the ability to easily select and blur backgrounds using the Magic Lasso tool, and you have the perfect pair of tools for making vibrant street snaps where, as often as not, clutter and ‘everything sharp’ backgrounds detract from a dramatic photograph.

Other than that, looking through my Applications directory I see little else to raise the pulse of the desktop user.

iDevices – iPad and iPhone:

When the iPad came out I was one of the first to write that this would become a compelling creative tool, when all the pundits were saying this is purely a consumption-only, couch potato device. This is gradually happening as programers are coming to grips with the touch interface and arguably none has done it better for photographers than Snapseed.

Maybe for the first time for this worker, processing as picture is actually fun.

The above image being processed in Snapseed on the iPad.

Snapseed is ridiculously cheap, intuitive, a blast to use and very much my iOS Software of the Year.