Card Readers

One of the many things that the transition to digital photography has brought us is the ubiquitous card reader. So many types, so many choices.  For example, here’s the collection that I’ve been using for a few years:

Of course you could just plug the camera into the computer with the typically included USB cable, but traditionally that has been the less popular solution. Partly because often you’re using the camera with another card while the first card is being downloaded to the computer, but mostly because the USB interfaces on cameras (at least the Canon dSLRs I’ve used) have been pretty dreadfully slow. Even though they’ve been listed as USB2 for a number of years, you’re lucky if you get 8-10MB/s out of them.  This is just unacceptable when we’re talking about 16GB cards full of 500 images. Let’s face it, we don’t have all day. I’ve heard that the new Nikon D800 does USB3, but I haven’t found out if it’s any good. The growth of ethernet at the top end is also interesting, hopefully it’ll trickle down on the next revision.

And so, like many of you I’m sure, I’ve collected and shifted around from card reader to card reader over the years. My first serious reader was the Omniflash UNO! (lower left), I know it looks crappy, and it is in many ways, but for a while it was one of the only Ultra-DMA card readers available for anything approaching a reasonable price. The UDMA part means that it was reading pretty close to the maximum speed of USB2 around 30MB/s with the fastest cards. However the best part about these is that they were crazy cheap. And by cheap I mean like $6 each. So cheap that I used to buy them in multiples so I had spares when I broke them and could keep one in every bag. They were great.

However I ran out of good ones one day and didn’t have time to wait for a shipment from China, so in the meantime I went and picked up a new one at Calumet. In fact it’s their name branded PocketPro CF which I’ve been using for the past year or so and honestly it’s been trouble free. However it was over $20 and didn’t do anything the cheap ones didn’t do except last a bit long I guess.

With the purchase of my 5D Mark III and a really great sale at Best Buy one weekend, I switched from the 8GB SanDisk Extreme III CF cards I was using over to a couple 16GB SanDisk Extreme SD cards which top out at 45MB/s. Faster than USB2 can possibly go, and since I had built my nice new Hackintosh with USB3 built in I wanted to give it a go. So I picked up this cheap little IOGear USB3 SD card reader from Newegg. It looks like a USB flash drive to me, and it essentially is, only with a slot on the side that you pop a card into. It’s a little flimsy and I don’t really like the way the card sticks out of the side of it.  And for some strange reason, it wouldn’t let me write to the cards from my computer saying they were read-only. In fact, every card I tried said it was read-only. None of them had the write-protect switch flipped (though I tried them in all positions including the middle which some people online suggested), but still nothing.  I’ve got the reader built into the Macbook Air for travel situations so I’m not sure this thing will see much use going forward, but we’ll see.

So finally today I got delivered what I hope will be my one main reader for the foreseeable future. It’s a Kingston FCR-HS3 and as you can see in the picture above (upper right), it’s got a hole for just about everything, it’s USB3, and it just heavy enough so that I can have it towards the back edge of my desk under the monitor and it’ll stay out of the way without falling off. I did a little BlackMagic speed test and it read and wrote the SD cards at 42MB/s or better which is about what they’re rated at.  Looks like this will be the best of all worlds. I think the only thing I have a problem with at the moment is that the logo has a glaringly bright LED underneath which flashes during disk operations.  I’ll probably just cover over most of it with some gaffers tape. That should do the trick.

Revogirl and A Reminder On How to Live Your Life

I’m going to try to do this without sounds preachy or trite, but I’m not sure if it’s going to work.

As many of you know, my main computer is what’s called a ‘hackintosh’. That is, I run Apple’s Mac OS X on a computer I build from parts I put together myself. I do this for a number of reasons. Certainly the cost factors in (about 1/2 price), but mostly I do it, to quote JFK, not because it’s easy, but because it is hard. I like figuring out how things work and making them do things they’re not supposed to. That’s the true essence of ‘hacking’ that they don’t teach you in the movies.

In the forums on one of the sites I frequent on the subject, www.tonymacx86.com there was a user called RevoGirl who was one of the people who figured out the really hard stuff that’s way beyond me. Getting off-the-shelf motherboard bios software to talk to the Mac OS hooks and stuff like that. Real low-level assembly code that looks like a scene from Numb3rs. One day I ended up on her blog where she wrote in detail about all these things she was doing. Then on her ‘about’ page she mentioned that her name is Samantha and that she’s all of 16 and already had her college degree in engineering. I shook my head and sighed. Yep, she’s one of THOSE kids that make 37 year old guys like me feel like we’ve wasted most of  our lives.  All I could think was that if she’d done that much in her first 16 years, what is she going to accomplish in her next 16?

Well yesterday I logged onto the forums to find out that Samantha had died at 6:33AM that morning. Apparently she had leukemia and that a last ditch bone marrow transplant from her brother had failed. Even though I barely knew her online, the news got me quite upset. I have lost my father and grandfather to cancers in the last decade, so there’s still an open wound from that. But really it’s another reminder that so much of what we use our energy on in life, be it money or the latest iPhone or who’s got the biggest ring are just a big pile of crap when it comes down to it. None of it does you a lick of good if you’re not alive. I may sound like an old man, but the greatest asset you have is your health. Everything else is secondary.

The reason Samantha was such an overachiever was likely that deep down she knew that she might not have another 16 years. What she had though was a purpose and a community of friends many of whom she never met. Her blog was taken down off of WordPress yesterday as well, though I’m not sure why, must have been by the family. Kind of sad really, the things she wrote about to help people are a big part of what she leaves behind and should remain available to keep helping. Though you can still read the first page which is cached by google, including a couple of the most recent posts by her brother about the treatment and her death.

So what’s my point? Well I guess it’s a few things.  Take care of yourself and maybe get some exercise if you don’t already. Go to see a doctor if you think something is wrong. But mostly my point is this: Do what you love with the time you have and, if you can, share it with the world. You never know who you’re going to inspire or effect. Life is like a giant game of billiards and we’re going to keep moving if we slam into each other once in a while. Ok, I’m done preaching for the day.

Canon 5d Mark III Corruption?

I had the weirdest thing happen to my camera yesterday while taking some portraits of author Noah Scalin. I was snapping away like normal.  On camera flash optically slaving an SB80 in one of those little 15″ softboxes (which worked AMAZING by the way, and like $40 at Adorama), everything was working just fine. I was about 50 pictures in when I caught the camera’s screen out of the corner of my eye, and the picture looked like this:

Artsy, right? But wholly not what the picture looked like. Looks like some kind of error reading the different channels off the chip. Not only the color stuff but also the weird noise over on the left edge as well as the fact that the top of the image was shifted to the bottom and the right edge to the left. And this was still in the RAW data when I pulled it into Lightroom. I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of shots with various 5D range cameras and have never had this happen.  A subsequent shot looked the same, but the whole thing righted itself when I turned the camera off and on.

I almost wish I knew what happened so that I can make it happen again when I want to.  Kinda has a cool psychedelic late 60’s thing going on that would take a while to replicate in PhotoShop.

Anyway, am I the only one or have any of you had this happen?

Simple Tips To Dramatically Improve Your Photographs

“How can I take better pictures?” is the one question I’m asked constantly. Usually by people who just recently moved up to an entry model digital SLR with a kit lens. Like a kid who has found their father’s gun, they have the tools, but they don’t have the experience to use it properly. It’s a dangerous scenario. Don’t worry though, taking better pictures isn’t that hard, and there are some really easy steps you can take that should improve your game immensely without a lot of effort.

1. Get Out Of The Sun
Anywhere under direct sunlight is a terrible place to take pictures. It generally creates very high-contrast images with ugly shadows and squinting subjects. These are  things you should avoid. So if you’re outside and need to take pictures of your friend for instance, what do you do? You do what Richard Avedon did, move into the shade. In the middle of the day there is plenty of soft, indirect sunlight in the shade of a building or under a tree. This is perfect, wrap-around light for portraits that you can’t really replicate even with thousands of dollars of studio gear. Believe me, I and many people before me have tried. The universe gave you a perfect studio, use it.

Unless you’re an expert, avoid direct sun except for the so-called Golden Hours after sunrise and before sunset when the sunlight is diffused through more of the atmosphere and closer to the horizon so it’s coming from the side instead of from the above.

(Intermediate Tip: If you absolutely must work in the middle of an open field, do yourself a favor and bring a diffuser. A diffuser is just a panel of translucent fabric that breaks up the hard light of the sun and transforms it into softer indirect light. A 5-in-1 reflector/diffuser is the next purchase after the camera, it’s just amazing how many things you can do with this simple tool.)

2. Simplify, Get Closer
Robert Capa used to say, “If you’re pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Granted he was a war photographer and a little bit crazy, but it’s a maxim that works for taking pictures of people and places as well.

Most pictures don’t work because they’re too cluttered with other things. Distracting backgrounds, other people, or simply too much distance between the photographer and the subject. Simplify the composition of the frame by getting closer to the subject either by zooming in (no ‘digital’ zoom though, that stuff is just terrible) or by getting physically closer. As I’m fond of saying, “Zoom with your feet”.

I’ve found that getting closer to my portrait subjects also has the ancillary benefit of making them open up to the camera, assuming the lens isn’t right in their face. When your subject is closer, you feel less like a sniper and more like another human being.

3. Camera Handling
Today’s hi-tech cameras are admittedly pretty amazing, and while they may seem like it, they’re not yet capable of taking the pictures themselves. That’s where you come in. Very few amateurs I see have good camera technique. Follow these basic guidelines and you can increase your odds of getting sharp accurate shots. It’s not a difficult skill set to acquire, but more a matter of mindfulness; like learning to hold the steering wheel at 10 & 2.

There was a National Geographic special a couple years ago about President Obama’s staff photographer, Pete Souza. While the whole show is great, what fascinated me most was watching how Pete held his camera. He was master of this stuff and it was obviously second nature to him. Even the big boys master the fundamentals.

First things first. Spread your feet a little and straight up so that your hands have a good platform to work from. Think of yourself as a walking talking camera tripod, or bipod more accurately. Next, keep most of the weight of the camera in your left hand. On a SLR style camera this usually means cradling the camera in your  hand from underneath near the junction of the camera body and the lens with your thumb and first few fingers wrapped on either side of the lens. This keeps the camera from bouncing around when you press the shutter. Work on holding the camera steady this way, as if you’re a waiter and the camera is a tray full of drinks.

And the biggest technique mistake I see people make is that they press the shutter with such force that the camera shakes, the result being blurry pictures. This is especially true if you’re taking pictures indoors without a flash (which you should try to master by the way; these shots look better than the flat bright pictures you get with on-camera flash). Practice pressing the shutter without moving the camera (The stable left hand underneath should help). Also try  half-pressing the shutter to lock focus and exposure. That way when you actually want to take the shot, the shutter will require only a tad more pressure and will be nearly instantaneous.  Most of all become deliberate and conscious of what you’re doing. Eventually this will become your natural way to shoot.

4. Edit Down Your Pictures
By far the biggest mistake amateurs make is that they don’t edit down their pictures. I recently had to look through 1262 pictures from a family member’s vacation. I wanted to see their pictures, but I would much rather have seen only 100 of their best. Editing is what art is all about. As technology allows us to make more content for less, this becomes even more true. When you only had 36 frames on a roll of film you were much more careful about each shot.  Now it’s a free for all.

For every image in my portfolio I may have taken hundreds of images. They weren’t all the same of course, but that’s where editing comes in. A photographer makes artistic decisions about which are the best pictures, and so can you. Go with your gut. Trust yourself, and do it in stages. First cull the bad pictures, then choose the best from each set of similar shots. Just by doing this you’ve probably got your images down to 1 in 4.

I personally then do one more round where I choose the pictures I wouldn’t really wouldn’t want to lose if my house burns down. That’s the set that I show to people. Not only will they thank you for not putting them through hours of monotonous shots, but since you’re only showing them your best they’ll think you’re a better photographer to boot. You’re only as good as the worst shot in your portfolio. They don’t need to know about the stinkers.

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So there you have it. Four quick tips that’ll make your pictures better overnight. Well maybe not overnight, but if you follow my advice and practice a bit, you’ll certainly put yourself ahead in the pack.  Be careful though, pretty soon you’ll start getting requests to shoot weddings for friends. Trust me, run.

The New iPad from a Photographer’s Point of View

So about two hours ago the nice FedEx man dropped off my new iPad. As many of my readers may remember, I was somewhat non-plussed by the iPad 2 and didn’t really see how it filled a hole in my computing world, and so I sold it a few days after buying it. Well it’s a year later, and a lot more people have bought iPads and I realized that as a photographer I need one to test my numerous websites and make sure everything works. So in this headspace I ordered an iPad 3 and I thought I’d take a moment and talk through what I think from a Photographer’s point of view.

I guess there are a few ways that a photographer would use this thing. One I can think of is as a portfolio or for viewing other people’s work. Next is as an organizing and editing device of some kind. And thirdly we have the gee-wiz stuff which doesn’t fit the other two.

Portfolio
Ok, let’s be honest, the only reason this new iPad is interesting is the new screen, and I’ll admit, it’s pretty great. 2048×1546 pixels of very tightly packed pixel glory. It really does get close to feeling like a living piece of paper. If you load up your photos using iTunes, it shrinks them down a bit before transfer. They’re still pretty big, around 4000×3000, but I don’t know why it doesn’t just send over the whole thing or at least give you the option. I’ve looked at a number of portfolio applications which look pretty nice, but I have yet to decide which $20 app I want to try. The reviews for all that I’ve looked at have been pretty mediocre. Any advice on this matter is appreciated.

So can this 10″ screen take the place of a printed book? Maybe for some people on both sides of the table. But it’s not without it’s problems. Most of that for me is the glare. If you have any light sources behind you be prepared for the mirror of death. I personally find this rather distracting and I think if there was gloss paper this reflective, it would probably be off the market by now. That said, it’s a HUGE step up from the last version and almost all other screens short of sitting a couple feet away from a good 30″ which still looks pretty good. And then there are those clients who still like paper. They’re out there.

For the record, the two versions of the picture above look almost identical in color and brightness. Something about taking a picture of a screen and a print at once made the camera in my iphone shift things a bit.

As far as websites go, they look great. Especially text which gets automagically rendered in super-high-def. As an artist myself, I’m a little concerned about posting 2048 pixel images on my website. That’s big enough to make a decent size print if someone were to do a screen grab. Too big to comfortably let out of my sight. I wonder how the rest of the industry is going to deal with it actually. Time will tell I guess.

Organizing and Editing.
So I’ve downloaded the new iPhoto. Neat? Sure. Especially the new little brightness/contrast slider bar widget they’ve come up with. And it’s definitely worth $5 if you’ve got an iPad 2 or newer. I could see it handy in a pinch, or as a laptop replacement on vacation when you just want to look through the pics, make a few adjustments and post them on the Facebook. It is not going to replace Lightroom and Photoshop, not for a long while for anything like the work that I do. First off, it’s a small battery powered ARM cpu. If my Intel i7 takes time with my 5D Mark II RAW files, this thing is not going to cut it. Plus Apple put a top end size of 19MP I think, which means stuff I work on would have to be downsized anyway.

The screen is great, but the editing tools are not going to have the responsiveness or control of a tablet anytime soon. So sure, global contrast and saturation, maybe some large regions, but I’m not going to use my iPad to do composites or local contrast edits. It’s not tough sensitive for one thing. It’s about the right tools for the right job. I just don’t shoot that way where I look at my files and tweak a little and they’re done. For some people this might be great. I could totally see my Mom using it for that, or an events photographer who just need to do a quick cut of an evening’s pictures.

You might be tempted to bring it to a shoot and dump stuff onto it as you worked. Maybe, but the camera connection kit is pretty slow from what I hear, and people who are really doing that will use a laptop so that they can backup to a couple of drives and that kind of thing. Plus, how do you get them to your big computer when you get home? iTunes? Ya, no thanks.

If there was a LightRoom Lite which you could use with small jpegs to do selects and ratings which could then sync back to your RAW images on your main machine when you got home, that would be awesome. I don’t think we’re there yet though. (EDIT: Apparently there is an app that does this called Photosmith, Thanks for the tip Gary!) Again, getting stuff onto and off of the iPad has been a thing for while. The cloud is great for text documents, but I can’t transfer an 16GB CF card that way.

Gee-Wiz
And here’s the section for all the other cool photo things you can do with an iPad. There are apps that’ll keep track of sun position at different times of the day. That’s pretty cool but more useful on my iPhone because I went for the wifi only iPad.

There are camera remote control apps too, I haven’t tried them yet myself, but have heard mixed thing about them. If you were shooting with a tripod can could control and then see the results of the shots within a couple seconds at full-res, that would be super. Not the way I shoot usually, but for landscape and still life people it would be amazing. Essentially like shooting tethered with a smaller lighter device.

Speaking of tethered, a lot of people including my Circuitous Conversations partner Dan, love the idea of the Capture Pilot software you can get to complement Phase One’s Capture One. Apparently you can do camera control, as well as essentially broadcast your shoot to a iPad so the client can be sitting off to the side and see while your shooting without sitting over your left shoulder. Sounds both neat and invasive to me, but what do I know.

Everything Else
So what about the rest of the stuff on it iPad. Well my old impressions haven’t changed much. I can’t stand typing on the thing, the new dictation feature is handy, but makes just enough errors that you’ve got to go back and fix as to be less than useful to me. Browse the web? Sure. Triage email? Sure. Read books? Yes, unless an e-ink screen is available, though the high-res does help a lot, the glare is still a problem.

Overall a very neat device and I’m sure I’ll find more uses for it going forward. Still, I’m writing this post on my 13″ Air instead of the iPad, so that might tell you all you need to know.

My Initial Thoughts on the Canon 5D Mark III

Canon officially announced the new 5D Mark III camera body today.  I haven’t gotten to try one just yet, and as such this is more of my first impressions based upon the spec sheet and a handful of hands-ons that I’ve read this morning.  Honestly, I’m feeling a bit underwhelmed about the whole thing, especially after a 3 year wait since the last one. That said, there are a few small features that have me doing a double-take. So let’s do a quick and dirty rundown of it’s Cool new features and it’s Whatevers, keeping in mind that I’m going to be looking at it based upon how I use my camera. I’m sure some of the features I brush off are must haves for someone else.

First the Cool

100% Viewfinder with new tricks
It’s about time. This is one of the few things I missed from my 1Ds3.  Hopefully it’s bigger and brighter as well, though we’ll see. They’ve also added heads-up style grid functionality and the ability to turn off all of the information if you want as well. I can imagine that being pretty cool. I almost never look at the exposure information in the viewfinder anyway.

61 Point Auto-Focus
Also desperately needed.  The 9 point system in the Mark II, which it inherited from the Mark I, was sub state-of-the-art way back in 2005. It was a big disappointment to me when they didn’t upgrade it last time. It hunts around too often, and can be a little sluggish when you really need it.  That said, I’m a center-point and recompose kind of shooter so 60 of the new points will be largely unused by me, but if that one in the middle is better, faster, and more accurate then I’m very excited.

New Shutter/Mirror
So the new camera does 6fps. That doesn’t matter to me, I never shoot in burst mode anyway, but what it does do is force them to upgrade the shutter and mirror system.  The one in the 5D and Mark II always felt really shoddy to me. They’ve never failed on me or anything like that despite over 100,000 frames on the old camera and 80,000 or so on the new one, but all the while it always sounded like there was an old drunk cartoon character inside my camera pulling it up and letting it slap back down into place by gravity alone. Not confidence inducing.  So if the need to shoot fast makes the mirror blackout time shorter and the whole thing feel tighter, then that’s good enough for me.

They’ve also added some silent shooting modes, which my 1Ds3 had and were handy while taking pictures during and interview and such.  Again, not everyday sort of feature for me, but could be very important in certain situations.

Locking Mode Dial
One of the little things I miss from the 1D series is the fact that it’s difficult to change shooting modes. You had to hold down a button with one hand while turning a dial with another.  That this does it make it less likely that you camera isn’t in the right mode when you bring it to your eye because the settings got shifted in your bag or while it was slung over your shoulder.  I can’t tell you how many times I would pull up the camera, take a picture, get garbage, only to then notice that I got moved from Av to Tv for example.  Well the new camera has a locking button in the middle of the Mode dial. I guess the question is how easily the locking button can be turned off inadvertently

Now the Whatevers

22.3MP Sensor with better Low-ISO performance
A very small bump in resolution over the 21.1MP in the Mark II. I’ll take all the pixels I can get within reason, but the step up won’t be noticeable. Perhaps if they also tweak the AA filter the files might be a little sharper out of the camera, but that’s never really been a big problem for me as I do so much post-production to my final images anyway.

I guess I can’t complain about lower noise, but honestly, noise is not really a problem I now have. I rarely shoot above 800 all that often, and when I do it’s more for fun or a special situation. I’m sure this is huge for wedding and photo journalists, but unless it makes mind-blowingly more clean files at low-isos (to which I often add grain as it is) then it’s a ‘whatever’.

New Video Codecs and Improved Quality, 60fps @ 720P
The 60fps thing is neat and I’m sure the new codecs will make my friend Claude happy, but I don’t really shoot video, and when I have done on my Mark II the results have been delightful.  There are dedicated video buttons on there too, and a headphone jack to monitor audio, but ‘whatever’.

Dual CF/SD Slots
Dual card slots, kinda neat.  I guess I could get an SD card and stick it in there to record backup jpegs or something, but I like the size and speed of CF. SD feels too small to me, I end up losing them all the time. Again, handy for essentially doing RAID-1 on shoot or as a physical backup if you run out of space, but not the kind of thing I’d spend extra money to get.

ON/OFF Switch and Lock Switch
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about the 7D style on/off and lock switches. I like that that switch was down by my thumb on the Mark II. I guess you could ignore the on/off switch by the mode dial, just leave it on, and use lock the same way you used to.  Just as long as the on/off switch doesn’t get thrown easily while getting the camera in/out of your bag.  If that’s the case, it’ll negate much of the usefulness of the Mode dial lock.

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And then there is the one bad thing on the list.  The price.  $3499.

I bought my Mark II right when it came out for $2699.  Canon has basically raised the price by 30% while in my eyes not really adding all that much in revolutionary features.  In fact, it’s a pretty mild update all things considered.

So let’s say you’ve got a Mark II. They’re going on eBay for about $2000 right now. Let’s say that by the time the Mark III is available they’re down to $1700 or so.  You’ve still got to pony up $1800 to get an upgrade to a better autofocus system and viewfinder? I tend to think of it as “Would I pay to upgrade my current camera, ‘Pimp-My-Ride’ style, with those features?” . I’m honestly not sure.  Maybe that’ll change once I play with one.

That said, if you’re thinking of taking the plunge and want to support the site, use the Amazon.com links below:

Canon EOS 5D Mark III 22.3 MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera (Body)

Canon EOS 5D Mark III 22.3 MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera with EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM Lens

Fear and the Dentist

I’m going to talk about something unrelated to photography today. Well not exactly, I guess it’s related to fear and can thus be applied to pretty much anything. Fear is a scary thing to paraphrase FDR, and I’m coming to believe that overcoming one can give you the confidence to tackle others.

I for one was, and I guess am, terrified of dentists. Pretty much anything to do with my teeth was enough to raise my heart rate just thinking about it. I think it started in my childhood. It seemed like every time I went to the dentist as a kid, I had cavities. I don’t know why that is, I must have genetically weak enamel or something. Even when I was brushing and trying to be good, still more cavities and the drilling and filling that went with them. Add to that 3 years of orthodontic work and a bit of oral surgery to go with it, as well as the extraction of 4 impacted wisdom teeth and what it adds up to in my mind is a scene from one of the SAW movies.

Well what this led to is avoidance. And avoidance is not a healthy thing to do. Some of you may think what follows is too much information, but i’m going to be open and honest on this one so bear with me. In the past 13 years of living in NYC I had gone to the dentist only twice, and to two different dentists. First one was back in 2000 or so for a cleaning and a filling at an office overlooking Rockefeller Plaza. A pretty bad experience overall. Guy was bad with a needle and overall made me feel crappy. Then in 2007 I was on a trip with my family and pulled out a filling with a piece of gum, which I rarely if ever chew. For the record I haven’t touched the stuff since. Well by the time I went in a couple months later to get it fixed, the guy had to drill away even more, getting dangerously close to having to get a root canal. Apparently I had a couple more little things he wanted to do but I just never went back. His offices were old and a little scary and he sang along with Simon and Garfunkel songs while he worked. He also told me stories of his father working as a dentist on the islands of the pacific in the Army during WWII. Apparently he has to run his drill with a foot pump. Nice guy in any other situation, but disconcerting to a phobic.

Now at this point many of you are saying, “Oh come off it, I’ve had root canal and lots of fillings, and I’m not crazy like you are, so get over yourself”. And that’s true if my mind were being rational about it. But fear is very often not about rationality, it’s about irrationality. It literally is about fear of fear itself. And while you might not be scared of the dentist, I’m sure there’s something that scares you just as badly. Public speaking scares the bejesus out of a lot of people but I kind of like it. I’m ok with snakes and spiders but cockroaches make me skeevy. I’ve got a friend who’s terrified of wet paper. Another for whom standing on a chair is unthinkable. We’ve all got our issue to be sure. And I’m beginning to think that they are a proxy for all of the things that make us scared or uncomfortable in our lives. For artists a lot of the fear is wrapped up in self-image. Standing up for yourself or your work, fear of failure, being scared that another idea will never come (that one is easy, it will). All of this is what makes art hard. It’s a personal pursuit and praise or attacks on the things you make are therefore taken personally. Sometimes it’s like trying to tease apart a rat’s nest of wires from behind a home theater. It’s all such a jumble that you can’t tell where one thing ends or begins. I’m not quite to the end yet myself, but I’m making progress.

To finish my own story, there was a tooth on the upper right side of my mouth that was sensitive lately and I knew that I’d eventually have to go to the dentist to get it checked out. I brush twice a day and whatnot and I know my teeth aren’t falling out of my head or anything, but still the idea of going to the dentist was terrifying to me. I’d been trying to eat away at the fear slowly by working my way up to it and mentally desensitizing myself over time. Well a couple of weeks ago Heather and I were watching Band of Brothers all the way through of the first time. Very heavy stuff but very well done if you haven’t seen them yet, do so. And while watching reenactments of men getting their legs blown off and crying for their mommies I had the realization that my going to the dentist really wasn’t anything in the grand scheme of things.

So I started doing some research. Did you know there are dentists in New York City who will put you out with general anesthesia with an IV in order to work on your teeth? That pulled me back from the brink of fear because I thought, “Hell, I’m not THAT bad”. Back in the real world I did a google search to get the number for the guy I went to last time in Columbus Circle and the first link that showed up was a Zoc Doc page for him, so I clicked through and while they had his info there, they also had a list of other dentists in the area, one of whom was a young woman with nothing but 5 star ratings. I had only ever had older men dentists so I thought I’d give it a try. It was now or never and so I just made the appointment before I lost my nerve.

Well I went to that checkup last week and the first of 4 follow-up procedures yesterday. Yes, 4 appointments, there’s that many things that need to get done to get my teeth into shape, but nothing major. Just a few small cavities and an old filling that is causing trouble. It adds up to thousands of dollars worth of pain on my credit card but it serves me right for ignoring it for so long. Was I scared going for the checkup? Yep. Terrified. Couldn’t sleep the night before. Was I scared yesterday before I went under the drill? Yep. But the Dr gave me some Xanax to take before I got there. My pulse was still racing, but I will say that it was the best dental experience I’ve ever had. I didn’t even feel the needle go in and the Bose noise-reduction headphones they handed me helped a bit too. No way to get too upset while listening to Tony Bennett and Bill Evans. A must have record in my opinion.

For those in NYC who are looking for someone new. Dr Julie Hassid has been amazing and you can tell her I told you so.

So the point of me telling you all this little tale is to say that phobias can be overcome. Will I require drugs to go see the dentist in the future? Yes probably the next few times, but maybe I’ll get to the point where I won’t need the crutch. The main advance is that my fear is not a singularity anymore. It’s not a black hole which I do anything not to look into. It’s not an absolute, instinctual, reflexive “NO!” anymore. Going to the dentist is still not something I look forward to doing, but I can overcome that fear and do it. And if that’s the case with my paralyzing fear, now I’m kind of looking for that next thing to tackle. Maybe it’ll be heights.

Screw that, I’m staying on the ground.

Why Film is Not like Vinyl Records – aka Say Goodbye to Kodak

Well now it’s actually happened. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection this morning. The once juggernaut of the industry is now a very sick old man trying to sell it’s crown jewel patents to make some cash to stay alive just a little bit longer. It’s quite sad really, for Kodak the company, what’s left of its employees, and photographers everywhere. No word yet on if and how this will effect film production, but let’s all be honest here, film is going away and is not going to make an economical resurgence.

People point to the strength of the vinyl record business as proof that a niche product can re-emerge and thrive, but it’s a false comparison. I know a little bit about the record business actually as my father’s owned record stores and I myself have a degree in music and its production from Berklee College in Boston. Yes, there are more records sold now than at any time in the last decade. However it’s still only few percentage points of total music sold and there is evidence that the trend line has flattened out. This means basically that most of the people who are interested in buying a record player and phono preamp and records have already done so. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is super if that’s what you’re into (personally I’d prefer everything on SACD if I could get it, but that’s another story) And it’s also great for the small short run record plants around the country that were shuttered up in the 90’s. Those pressing machines are very mechanical and virtually indestructible, basically just a hydraulic piston, so I’m not surprised that a little oil and elbow grease brings them back to profitable life. Plus the vinyl blanks (basically just a 1″ think slab of vinyl about 6″ in diameter) are about as simple as can be.

The same is not true of film which is a very complex manufacturing process. It’s chemical, it relies by definition on very strict environmental and procedural controls. Even at its best it can vary greatly from batch to batch of the same stock. All of this means that it’s very much a product which thrives on volume production. The more you make, the cheaper you make it and thus the cheaper you can sell it. The prices of all films that I use have gone up a fair amount over the past few years. And that’s just the films I can still get unlike the Polaroid 55 and Scala which I can’t. When I started out in this field about 10 years ago the film counter at B&H here in NYC was 40 feet long, now it’s barely 10. Likewise there were at least 4 rows of darkroom equipment, now it’s less than 1 all the way in the back right next to the bathrooms.

And there is one of the big problems. Film is a two step process. There’s buying the film and then there’s getting it processed. There are still a few pro labs in the city but the prices have gone up and the lead times have grown. Used to be that you could get a roll of E6 medium format slides back in a couple hours, now to do it same day is an extra rush fee. Luckily I’ve still got a place in my neighborhood that will run my C-41 roll through the machine in 10 minutes for $4. But it used to be $2 only back in 2007 and Connie is giving me a deal because she likes me. Her costs for chemicals have doubled. CVS still has a photo lab, but the quality is crappy and I doubt it will be there in a year anyway. And I live in New York City!, can you imagine what it must be like to get film processed in East Haverton, LA?

How many photographers that want to shoot film are prepared to do all their own processing? Let’s be honest, most of these chemicals are pretty noxious. Kodachrome was a 6 step process from what I recall and the constituent chemicals were so nasty, complex, and expensive that Kodak just stopped making them a couple years ago. Mass outrage on the web and in media, but I didn’t see any other company come in and offer to buy the patents to make Kodachrome. It’s just not profitable, and that’s what it all comes down to.  Don’t get me wrong, I like film too. I love the look of old 50’s Kodachrome especially when it’s by Saul Leiter. But I’m just being rational.  I’m sure there will remain a few boutique companies who make batches of film and chemicals for the die-hards. Places like Photographers’ Formulary, but it’s going to be very very niche.

Also, I think that people’s love of records has as much to do with a reaction to the fast paced “everything at your fingertips” nature of the modern world as it does the sound. People like the idea of slowing life down. Listening to one album at a time, having to flip the record after 20 minutes, just like their parents did when they were kids.  The same is true in the wizbang automatic world of modern cameras to be sure, but I don’t think all the way back to film is what people are looking for. I think they’re the market who is so interested in the recent crop of cameras with physical manual controls and retro styling. All the convenience of digital with the styling of your grandfather’s Leica.  Which I’m all for by the way. That new Fuji X Pro 1 while having a terrible name is a pretty sexy piece of kit.  Expensive for what you’re getting at around $2400 for a body and lens, but very attractive.  If I had it to do I’d still go for an M9 though. If only it was half the price and still used a thumb lever to cock the shutter. Oh well <sigh>

And finally, film was designed for printing, something that not too many people do very often anymore (Though I think they should). Scanning film yourself is a massively time consuming and frustrating affair, not to mention the post scan dust cleaning and color correction.  Sending them out is easier, but still takes a while and is expensive if you want it done right.

I’m not a big fan of making my digital pictures look like they were taken on film however.  Leave sloppy edges for when you actually shoot film. And don’t get me started on the Hipstamatic revolution. Ya, let’s take my nice 5MP nearly perfect reproduction of the scene and make it into a 600px grainy, out-of-focus, color shifted mess. Silly if you ask me.  That said, I do add a bit of grain to low ISO photographs from my 5D2. It’s like the whole thing is a little too perfect. Requires a little dither to look organic and ‘right’. So go out and shoot some film while you still can, because someday soon it’s not going to be an viable option.

Canon 5D Mark II Review Redux

I’ve had my Canon 5d II for over 3 years now, having gotten one a couple months after it came out in 2008. Still today it’s largely without peer. Full frame, 20+ MP resolution, low noise, all for a little over two grand? Yes please. As a photographic tool it’s just outstanding in almost every respect, holding it’s own against a 60MP monster back in March. Overall I’ve been very very happy with it, in fact I just did a check of my total shutter actuations and I’ve apparently taken 76,627 pictures over the course of the 3 years. For someone who shoots weddings and events, that’s a months work, but for me I’d say that it gives me enough experience to take another look at it’s foibles.

As I’ve said above, as a photographic tool, it’s great.  The image quality is terrific, usually limited by the lenses you put in front of the sensor. I’ve made big 30×48″ prints that look fantastic even up close. Battery life is fantastic as well.  I don’t shoot a ton each day, but if I’m going away for a week’s trip, I don’t even bother bringing the charger and I’m rarely less than half full when I get back. Maybe there’s room for even a little more dynamic range in the next revision, but then I’m just complaining to complain.

That said there are things that drive me nuts every time I pick it up. First is sound and speed of the mirror.  I know it’s a big chunk of glass and this is not a 1D body, but honestly, every time I press the shutter I expect pin, rod, or spring to come loose and pop out of the viewfinder. Not solid in the slightest.  It wasn’t when I got it and it’s not now. There’s also a pretty big viewfinder blackout where the mirror is out of position.  Honestly, these two little things go a LONG way to making a camera feel more professional.  Everytime I pick up a 1D or Nikon D3 I’m reminded of where the extra three thousand bucks must be going.  And I had a 1Ds3 which I sold to get the 5D2. Very similar sensor, smaller size and weight, better screen, 1/3rd the price. It’s a no brainer, but I still miss the feel of the big brother.

It’s a little thing, but the fact that you can only do 3 shot +/- 2 stop bracketing is sad.  Nikon cameras will do up to 7 shots at +/- 3 stops from what I understand.  And this is software guys, it’s not like it’s a whole lot of engineering work to do.  Give a programmer the morning to write the code and the afternoon to get the bugs out and then roll it into the next build of the firmware.

I find that tethered shooting is unreliable.  The connection to the computer times out quickly and is hard to get going again.  I’ve seen this both in the Canon software and using Lightroom 3 to do the work.  In this day and age, that should be kids stuff.  I’m not sure which side the problem is on, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

1080p video is great, though I rarely use it.  The 7D however can record at 720p at 60fps which you can then slow to half speed to do some slow motion work, however the 5D can’t do it. I’ve heard it’s a hardware limitation in some way, but annoying because the 5D should be the more powerful camera.

Speaking of the 7D I’ve got to bring up the 5D2’s auto-focus. It’s pretty bad.  It was pretty bad and outdated when the camera came out 3 years ago, hell it was somewhat outdated when it was the AF system on the original 5D 6 years ago.  The less expensive 7D which came out a few months later got an updated AF system which is a little embarrassing.  Canon, couldn’t you have waited a few months and gotten it into the 5D as well?  It’s fine for the most part, but in lower light situations it’s useless. I’m a center focus point single shot user anyway so I rarely use the fancier tech but for the times when I’ve tried it I’ve mostly given up.

I’m sure there are more, but that’s enough for now, I’ll be sure to add to the list if I come up with anything.  That said, there’s not really any camera on the market within my budget that I’d rather use, so for an old camera it’s doing ok.

Photographers No Longer Power Users?

Almost 3 years ago I build the desktop computer I’m still using as my primary editing machine. Sure, I added an SSD a couple years ago, upgraded the video card to one which was more Hackintosh friendly, and doubled the RAM because it was on sale a few months ago, but essentially it’s the same computer based on Intel’s original i7 ‘Nahalem’ platform. A 920 CPU to be exact. Well Intel has finally released its successor, the so-called SandyBridge-E and you know what?  For the first time in my life, I’m not itching to upgrade my computer.

Recent History
For those of you who want particulars, let’s back up for just one second and retrace Intel’s path. You can alternately just jump down to “What does this all mean” below.  To break it down simply, you could say that Intel has two different consumer lines: One for ‘normal’ people and one for ‘enthusiasts’. Usually the ‘normal’ platforms are a slight bit slower with fewer memory channels which limits you to less system memory slots and smaller caches. Very similar, but there are differences.  The ‘enthusiast’ platforms tend to be almost identical to the Xeon server chips which Apple for instance uses in their Mac Pro.  The only real-world difference is that the Xeon’s are able to be used in Multi-processor configurations. So if you buy a single processor Mac Pro, you could get the same amount of number crunching power for a lot less money.

Ok, so here is the short history.  Back in late 2008, Intel released the original i7 ‘Nahalem’ which I’m still using.  A few months later they released the ‘normal’ version based on their ‘Lynnfield’ core.  Both were great platforms but the former had 6 memory slots and the later 4. Being a Photoshop guy, I like RAM, so I was glad that I went with the ‘enthusiast’ part.  A couple of years of more incremental upgrades and Intel finally comes out with the ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor last January. It was great, really fast, ran cool, and if you got the more expensive ones (2600k), it overclocked like the dickens.  You could build a great little machine around it, but it only offers 4 memory slots max, which limits you to 16GB of RAM if you use 4GB sticks. I know there are 8GB dimms, but they’re still way too expensive (about 4 times what the 4GB dimms cost) and a year ago were doubly so.  16GB of RAM sounds a lot, but I don’t want to be stuck there if I keep the new computer for another 3 years especially since it would be a step back from the 24GB I’m running now.

So finally last week Intel released the replacement for the original ‘Nahalem’ part called ‘Sandy Bridge E’  where the E stands for enthusiast or extreme or some such.  The first ones they released were 6 core monsters starting at $500 for the cpu alone. They give a 20-30% improvement in Photoshop benchmarks which is because Photoshop isn’t well multi-threaded, meaning it’s going to waste much of the power of the extra cores.  And that’s in a benchmark which measures how long it takes to run a bunch of filters and conversions. Not the kind of thing I’m doing for 98% of the time I’ve got a stylus in my hand. Frankly, I’m a little be disappointed.

What does this all mean?
Well, first of all it means that I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my machine any time soon.  I’ve got 24GB of RAM and my i7 overclocked to 3.4Ghz so I’m still doing just fine in the number crunching department. Would the new CPU speed up RAW file conversion in Lightroom?  I’m sure it would, but not enough to justify spending $1000 on the hardware I’d need to make the leap.

I guess the bigger question is if we’ve gotten to the point where photo editing (even the 16 bit 20+MP files with 30 layer stuff that I’m typically doing), no longer requires the latest and greatest.  I can remember when photo, 3D rendering, and video were the trifecta of use-cases that people would alway pull out when someone asked why ‘faster’ was better. You might say that we’re down to two. And even then, you can certainly cut video on a Macbook Air, you just wouldn’t want to render it on one. That’s all a little bit crazy to me.

I’d say that if you’re running a quad-core CPU and 16-24GB of memory and have an SSD as your boot/applications drive, you’re in the butter zone.  Yes, faster machines exist, but I doubt the difference in real-world usage would blow your hair back.  I’m sure there are a handful of editors out there who are building panoramas from multiple 60MP medium format files and require more than this, but that’s way at the end of the curve.

Now, I’m not suggesting that can use a Macbook Air as your main editing station. It’s maximum of 4GB of memory and slower dual-core CPU are designed for small size and lower power usage. Though they make a fine travel machine and for use tethered on set in my experience. Just don’t expect a lot.

That said, a quad-core Macbook Pro or 27″ iMac with an SSD and enough RAM would be just fine.  That’s actually a little tough for me to say, it’s been so long that I’ve been fighting for faster machines.  I guess the only problem with those computers for photo editing is that their screens are good and not great, but you could alway plug them into a nice pro NEC panel.  Yum.

For me, I’m going to stick with the two machine scenario. My one big 3 year old hackintosh desktop with lots of internal drives and a little 13″ Air for travel. I guess I’ll just keep reading anandtech.com and hope that intel surprises me with its next trick, Ivy Bridge.