Kodak ads

Photography

Some classics.

In an interesting article in The Atlantic titled The Triumph of Kodakery the author includes several classic early Kodak advertisements.

A search of the web discloses many more. What is striking about these is not only the clarity of the message, but also the artwork. The message remains relevant today, the artwork has rarely been surpassed.

The first four, which are very old, do not use a photograph in the advertisements, but only the churlish observer would object to that. No history of photographic innovation can deny Kodak its rightful place at the head of the long list of inventive geniuses in the last century.

A new desktop look

Photography

Clutter be gone!

I wrote about the new look I had adopted for this journal on the iPad and iPhone here.

Since making that change I have been increasingly frustrated on returning to the old desktop theme, replete with sidebar, drop-down boxes and clutter. Cramped and tired, it was due for an overhaul.

After a bit of searching I came across the Book Lite theme (link at the bottom of the page), the single column theme you are looking at. This relegates all the links to the bottom of the page and presents a far cleaner page to the reader. After a bit of tailoring to use more of the display’s width, replacement of the inept WordPress Search function with Google Custom Search – the latter accessible through a link at the top of the page, and a few other tweaks, things were looking pretty good, so I put the new look into service.

Links now appear at the bottom of the page.

Here’s how this page looked in the old style:

On those rare occasions where posts include long text paragraphs, I will break text into two columns (a real pain to do) and the new look serves that presentation well. For the technically inclined, the theme used supports widgets, making arrangement and inclusion of links at the base of the page a simple matter. The ability to translate content – however poorly – using Google Translate has been retained, as have all other link functions from the old theme.

Going forward I will be adding more multimedia display tools, including scrolling photo galleries and enhanced video integration.

Inside the Box

Hardware

No new thinking.

If you look at the hand-held SLR, it really has had no radically new thinking since Pentacon had the idea of installing a pentaprism and Pentax added an instant return mirror and auto diaphragm for largely uninterrupted viewing. That was 60 years ago. A few decades ago Honeywell invented autofocusing and now everyone (except Leica, of course, who helped invent it) has it. While those early variants were exclusively mechanical designs, the later ones have added batteries and motors to replace the thumb and fingers and a digital sensor replaces film. But the basic design, that of a flapping, noisy mirror in a bulky box, remains the same.

But as electronics have added a host of new capabilities, DSLR bodies have grown buttons, sockets and dials on seemingly every surface. Take a look at the new Nikon D4:

Nikon D4. Not a smooth surface in sight.

In fact, my first reaction on seeing this was to laugh. It is so exactly wrong in every design respect that the only thing that comes to mind is the inventions of Rube Goldberg:

Rube’s voting machine.

Sure, the Nikon can take a bazillion pictures a second, removing the last vestiges of skill from the sports picture taking process, and can be tuned to any number of picture taking situations, but the thinking is all wrong. If you watch a sports photographer at work, he never adjusts anything. He has his rig set for shutter priority automation and autofocus, carrying a spare battery and a few cards for image storage. Then he bangs away. Better still, watch his UK counterpart on the sidelines at a pro soccer game. Likely as not his camera, with one lens attached at all times, is shrouded with a plastic bag to keep out the rain and the only thing he does is point and shoot. Likewise the fashion photographer. The strobes are set just so, the camera’s settings are frozen and all he does is encourage the model to wet her lips or lean this way and that.

Both these professionals have no need of the myriad settings on their pro-DSLR body. They default to a menu of standards and care not one whit for all the options. And this is where high-end DSLR makers get it so wrong. Rather than recognize the working method of just about every snapper out there, they prefer to give you all the options, forcing you to decide, thus belaboring their designs with all those buttons and dials.

No question that these pros need the flexibility the body provides, but they need only one specific subset of all those options. So here’s how modern cameras should be designed:

  • No flapping mirror. Cuts bulk, noise, vibration and wear.
  • One dial, one button. Yup. That dial simply exists to alternate between a handful of custom settings. The button is for taking the snap.
  • One fixed lens. You want wide, use the wide body. You want long, get the long one. Just like the guy on the sidelines for the soccer game. This greatly simplifies design and dramatically cuts bulk and weight.
  • A smartphone wireless interface through which those customized settings are conferred to the body, obviating the need for any body controls.
  • One large LCD display to show the settings dialed in under any custom choice.

None of the flexibility or ‘tuneability’ of the original concept is lost. Ergonomic form and function are restored. And weight is cut as all those mechanical adjusters, mirrors, prisms and interchangeable lenses disappear. Nothing really new here – it’s just a sophisticated version of what point-and-shoot cameras have been trying to achieve for ages with their mode dials – one setting for ‘landscapes’, another for ‘portraits’, a third for ‘sports’, and so on, but done at a far more accomplished level.

And realization of that concept is getting closer daily. The market is filling up with capable mirrorless designs, EVFs are improving by leaps and bounds, custom settings are here, but the smartphone interface is still largely lacking. You see it in some of the iPhone apps (like Camera+) which integrate the software with the hardware at an amateur level (allowing both pre-taking adjustments and post processing in one app), but there is no reason why this approach should not be extended to professional gear.

And unless the likes of Nikon, Canon and Sony start thinking Outside the Box, the will soon find themselves Inside the Box which is called Bankruptcy. Hey, it happened to Kodak. It can happen to you.

Let’s Be Wild

Photography

An interesting travel and photography site.

I came across Let’s Be Wild when its editor Nick Zantop left a comment here. Checking his site out I found interesting travel content and good photography. The articles tend to be on the long side and the font a tad small for iPad consumption, but it’s worth checking out.

Click the picture for the site.

The site is just over a month old, judging by content.

Zite

iPad, Software

A news consolidator for the iPad.

For the past year my default RSS feed reader on both the iPhone and iPad has been Reeder, a product well attuned to the touch interface and continually improved. I use it for RSS feeds I elect, thus making an efficient process of reading just those sites which interest me and making it unnecessary to visit to see whether updates exist. Reeder looks at your RSS feeds in Google Reader (yes, the company which :”Does no evil” and derives content based on those.

A new class of feed reader is coming along as an adjunct to Reeder, and one example is named Zite. If you wonder about the name it’s derived from German under the mistaken impression that Americans actually speak more than one language. (Had this been a News Corp app it would have been named ‘Scheiss’).

Zite also goes out to your Google Reader account (and Twitter and others) to look at what you are reading then returns stories based on the most popular sites within your interest areas:

So, for the most part, there’s relatively little overlap between what you choose in Reeder and what Zite chooses for you based on your Reeder feeds. The layout is magazine style and on my iPad1 everything loads quickly. Setup is a breeze, with the user choosing major categories of interest, which you can see down the right hand column:

Touch ‘Photography’ and you get:

Touch the story for the full text. Swipe left for the next page under the same Section heading.

There are links on the right of the iPad’s display (not shown above) which permit emailing or saving to Instapaper, etc. Nicely done.

The app uses the touch interface really well and I’m enjoying it greatly, not least for some of the unexpected source materials it presents. The one shortcoming I have asked the developers to address is that once read a story should be ‘greyed out’ to make the whole thing more efficient. With so many stories, I find that I was choosing ones I had already read before they were relegated to the dustbin of history.

Zite is free and I have not been troubled by any intrusive advertising.

Bad news – 11/2015:

Too good to last, Zite is closing down 12/7/2015, asking that you join some foul social network instead. Hasta la vista, Zite.