Mindset

The human mind is a funny thing, especially so in those of us who, shall we say, don’t always see the glass as half full. There is a rhythm to the swings as well. Sometimes I think that I can take over the world while other times I quite honestly can’t get out of bed for fear of failing even at being awake. There’s an irony in the fact that when I was a kid I liked going on the swings during recess, but as an adult my mental swings are my nemesis. The funny thing is that this cycle of how I see myself is largely independent from the perception of me by the world at large. As far as most of you are concerned you generally either like my work or don’t.  I highly doubt that my fan base swings from tens of thousands of people down to zero in keeping with my mental state.

And of course I’m not the first person to have this problem. History is littered with stories of people like me, especially artists it seems. Or maybe it’s just the depressed artists that get the column inches.  To the end of coping with what I’ve come to see as an immutable part of my life I’ve read and I’ve talked and I’ve tried to figure it all out, or at least make some rational observations which I could remind myself of when I’m down to try to wrench myself out of it, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve encumbered myself with personal projects and daily tasks in order to keep my mind busy thinking about anything but itself. Lately I’ve been going to the gym almost daily as well. I’m certainly an idle hands kind of person. Those kinds of things help a little bit. They at least soften the valleys, but sometimes I feel like they may often soften the peaks as well. That’s the problem, the up times are highly addictive. When you’re at baseline or flying in manic-ville the depression almost seems like a worthwhile trade. Days of despair for moments of enlightenment. However I often wonder if the inspiration is all that inspired at all.  They feel that way of course, but so does the brilliance of people on a good acid trip.  Only when they come down do they realize the true mediocrity of their ideas.

I’ve also tried to predict the swings but it’s proved closer to trying to prognosticate the stock market.  But just like the stock market, rationality often has little to do with it. People, in this case me, get spooked. Or they get scared, or they get inspired, or they get frustrated by those things out of their control and a shift starts.  Like a change in the wind or like an avalanche or a stampede of bulls, there’s a certain inevitability to it all. As if I don’t have a choice; as if I’m just along for the ride.

Don’t know where I’m going with this or the point that I’m trying to make. Just thought it could be useful to put fingers to keyboard in yet another attempt to figure it out. As if it’s just that I haven’t figured out the puzzle yet.  Maybe the trick is to surrender to it instead of fighting it. You know, something like ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love the depression’. Somehow I don’t think it’s in me though. The fight is one of the only constants in my life and I can’t just let it win.

Macbook Air 13″ (2011) First Thoughts

My 2008 unibody aluminum Macbook, yes that one that they only made for about 5 months, was getting a little long in the tooth. So I gave my partner Heather my unibody as a replacement for her black Macbook and started looking at the upgrade options.

First off, I’d like to point out that at no point is my laptop my main machine. I’ve got a very powerful Hackintosh with 24GB of ram and 9TB of drives with which I do serious work. My laptop is usually just sitting next to me with my email up, or for skyping with the family, or reading the news on the bed. Occasionally however, I travel with it and use it to backup my cards and do some basic Lightroom adjustments and minor Photoshop before posting an image or two online.

An iPad was ruled out immediately. I had bought and sold one a few months ago when the iPad 2 was released. I was largely unimpressed. I like having a keyboard and create more than I consume, so I needed to move further up the chain. I knew I wanted something light, and I don’t need the juice in a Macbook Pro. Again, this isn’t my main machine. This left me to consider the new Airs.

With the i5 processors and 128GB SSD for a reasonable price, I was mostly sold from the start. The main question was deciding between 11″ and 13″. I love the idea of the 11″. Little tiny thing not much bigger than an iPad that you can run actually software on. However, in the end I went with 13″ for a couple of reasons. First, when working with pictures, the extra pixels make a difference. Especially the 144 extra vertical pixels, especially in Lightroom where the filmstrip takes up vertical space along the bottom. Secondly, the 11″ stock configuration has a slightly slower CPU, 1.6GHz vs 1.7GHz, which may not sound like much, but modern Intel chips do this neat trick where they overclock themselves when not using all the cores. The 1.6 chip overclocks to 2.3GHz where the 1.7 overclocks to 2.7GHz, and that extra 400MHz can make a difference when you’re rendering a couple hundred RAW previews which generally happens on a single thread.

So I stopped by the Apple store down on 14th street, and picked myself up the bottom of the rung 13″ with 4GB of Ram and 128GB SSD with my ASMP Apple discount. Came to about $1325 after tax.  Just for a minute consider the amount of computing power in a chasis less than 3 pounds which costs so little.  That’s about half what a decently set up original IBM PC would have cost, and that’s not even taking inflation into account.  Moore’s law is your friend.

I brought it home and then agonized with myself for a couple hours over whether I should even open the box. $1300 is not a lot for what you get, but it’s certainly not pocket change. And how often do I NEED a laptop anyway? Shouldn’t I just save the money and take it back? I constantly get buyer’s remorse after large purchases. It’s like my father is constantly behind my shoulder making me feel guilty.  Well, I won’t build the suspense any longer, I opened the damn box up and here are a few of my thoughts based upon less than a day of use.

First off it’s fast. Like really fast.  But this is to be expected, it’s got a fast SSD in it. My first in a laptop.  So not only is everything nearly instantaneous, even the boot time isn’t more than a few seconds really, but it’s also almost completely silent.  The only thing I’ve found to get the fans going so far is skype video, but that’s to be expected.  I would say that if you weren’t doing serious photo or video work and instead using the computer for what other people use their computers for,( i.e. web, email, facebook, calendar, music) that this would make a fine primary machine as long as you can live within 128GB of drive space. You would probably want to get an extra external drive.  That said, it would probably be the fastest feeling computer most people have ever used. It’s that zippy.

Let’s talk about the screen. It’s got a nice resolution for the size (1440×900) and it’s plenty bright, but it’s still a TN panel, so there is still some color shift in both the vertical and horizontal axis. And I suspect the color depth is 6 bits per channel at best. There’s some serious dithering going on in the radial gradients on the login page. It’s better than my last Macbook though, and considering the size of the machine it’s in I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It wouldn’t work as your primary monitor, however, and sadly, Apple’s stock profiles suck. Whatever white point they use is way off from the 6500k that I work in.  Also as it turns out, the software that is used with my i1 Display 2 colorimeter is PowerPC based. So without Rosetta in this new OS, I’m up the creek on pulling this screen into shape.   So I’ll have to find a way around that profiling issue before giving this the seal of approval from a color point of view.

Battery life is impressive so far, I’ve not used it past 70% or so, but it looks like it’s between 5-6 hours of my normal use.  When I was on Skype earlier it quickly dropped the estimated time down from 6 hours to 2 hours. So be warned that it’s not limitless.  I have still not tried pulling some RAW images in to see how they’re handled.  On my old machine, loading in 150 images from my 5D2 and letting it build previews would quickly leave me with half my battery in only 15 minutes.  Hopefully this will be a bit better.

It’s obviously a light laptop, though somehow it doesn’t feel as light as it is to me sometimes. Pick up my old one in one hand, and the new one in the other and there’s difference, but it’s not the night and day difference that the thickness of the machines would imply. Maybe that’s just more of my lust for the 11″ which is another half pound lighter still. Also I’ve found when sitting on the couch typing, like I am right now, it’s almost too light in the base. Not quite enough to counterweight the screen to keep it stable under your hands.  I’m certainly not asking for it to be heavier, but it’s an interesting unintended consequence.

Overall,  so far, so good.  It’s fast, light, relatively small and does everything it’s supposed to do well. I’ll give it 100 RAW files to chew through tomorrow and get back to you on how it acts as a travel photo machine. My guess is that within the limitations of the screen and battery, it’ll do just fine. By far the nicest laptop I’ve owned when you average everything out. But then as technology improves, that’s exactly how it should be. Better, faster, cheaper.  Keep it up, guys.

UPDATE:
Ok, so I’ve imported 206 21MP RAW files into Lightroom 3 and rendered standard previews. The battery went from 48% to 42% in the 12 minutes or so it took, and the laptop fans didn’t sound like they were trying to take off for Madrid. All a huge improvement on my old unibody Macbook. Part of this is due to the more efficient/lower voltage CPU I’m sure, but I’ll give some credit to the SSD as well. No spinning means faster disk access and less juice used.

Now if I can just figure out a way to profile this screen without buying a new puck and we’ll be in business.

Self Promotion Voodoo

Let’s face it. We’d all love to have the problem of having too many ideal, high-paying clients.  However most of us don’t. Most of us have to toil away week after week trying to get people to notice us. I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago and he said he was amazed that people weren’t knocking down my door. I assured him that it just doesn’t happen.  I love when I see old timer photographrs speak and they always have a story that’s a variation on “I got off the bus from Kansas with the clothes on my back and a showbox full of pictures. So I walked right into LIFE magazines offices and the head of the photo dept gave me an assignment on the spot.  Of course I had to borrow his camera to do it!”  However in today’s climate, being good isn’t enough.  You have to be good AND get people to notice you. Just try to walk into Conde Nast with a shoebox full of your pictures and see how far you get.

I’m admittedly terrible at this, well at least in some ways.  I got the web 2.0 side of things down. I’ve got a blog and twitter and facebook and all that.  And I try to constantly give my followers content which I hope they find interesting and share with their friends who in turn share it with theirs.  I’m also fine with the personal interaction.  I adore meeting new people and can talk to just about anybody.

With this in mind it may surprise you, but I don’t like self-promotion. I love lecturing about my work in front of a couple hundred people, telling the stories behind the pictures and how I ended up with a particular shot. But cold calling one person is enough to give me the sweats. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think a big part if it is a fear of being one of those people who get people to notice them and yet they’re not good enough to back it up with their work.  Even though I’m not that guy, my fear of being that guy or even being perceived as that guy is paralysing to me. Some people are shameless about this stuff and will hand a postcard to every person they meet. I’m not that guy, I find it obnoxious and I’m constantly trying to find the middle ground on getting noticed and remaining human. The funny thing is that though I find it arrogant for someone to constantly sell themselves and expect people to care, however my friend Beth pointed out that it’s just as arrogant to expect people to know who you are without telling them.

So you’ve got to get your name out there. Where do you start?

Some people send emails out to try to get people over to their site.  This is good because it’s cheap and relatively painless, except for the fact that you can easily slip into the spammer category. You buy addresses of people in the advertising, magazine, and graphic deisgn industries by subscribing to a service that keeps track of them, and except for the fact that it costs around $1000 per year, you’d think that this was ideal.  However in my experience, most if not a great majority of the people on the list have asked NOT to receive emails.  I can understand this from the point of view that they’re busy people who are trying to get work done without their inbox filled with links to 50 photographers sites. And even the ones who do accept emails, your ‘click through rate’ is usually in the area of 1%. So if not email, then how?

The old school version of email was postcards and mailers. My good friend Randy talked me into sending out postcards lately. Not too many, two targeted sets of 60 cards alternating every couple of weeks. So one person will get a card per month from me. It’s about building a brand awareness for me.  That they see new work and my logo. Hopefully they’ll think, “This guy is legit, we should call him”.  And cards are different from looking at a website because they’re a physical object which can be held and pinned to the wall. Humans are tactile by nature. The problem with cards is that they’re not cheap.  About $1 a pop to print at Moo (higher quality and lower count runs) as well as the 29 cent stamps and the labels to be printed. So that’s a couple hundred bucks a month, so call it $2400 a year. Plus the $1000 to buy the addresses in the first place. Not pocket change. However, here too there is a campaign of designers who hate cards. There are sites showing piles of them in the corners of creative’s offices, and even the other day I got an email about a site called First-Stop which will post your work, as long as you promise to stop sending out cards because of the environmental waste involved. You can’t win.  Some people like cards, some people like emails, some people like both, some people like neither.  No approach is right.

Over the past few decades, getting your stuff in the numerous semi-annual books was the way to go. You give them thousands of dollars for a page or two in a 2 inch thick glossy magazine the size of the old Sears catalog. The idea was that buyers would flip through that to browse photographers for a particular job. If you’re not in the book, you don’t exist. But with a number of books going in and out of fashion with people, who knows where your money is best spent. Plus it always felt like something more for fashion photographers anyway. Too glitzy, too much glamour. Not to mention too expensive.

And of course I know you all have your own portfolio website, mine is at http://www.billwadman.com for example. However how many other sites is your work on? Behance, The Creative Finder, FoundFolios, LeBook,  Taproll, Workbook, One Eyeland, even Flickr.  And those are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.  Most are free with paid premium upgrades. You know, paid features like “showing up in search results”. Thanks, that’s great.  But each of these is hundreds if not thousands of dollars to join, with no analytics or idea of how many influential people they have looking in the first place.  Great, I just spend $300 to get my site looked at by two creatives in India and one in Poland. That’s just super, and a fantastic use of my limited promotional funds. And how are you supposed to keep your portfolio up to date on 15 different sites anyway?  I thought that was the whole point of having your own site in the first place.

So if everyone you ask has a different opinion on what recipe of these options is your best bet, then personally I think you’ve got to go with your gut.  Sad, but true.  Personally I can’t afford to spend $10,000 a year on promotion, so pages in those books and premiere memberships to those sites are outside my budget.  But then I think, well maybe if I splurged on getting highlighted on FoundFolios, I’d get enough work that the return on investment would be positive.  However, it’s all a gamble right?  I might just end up with a couple of grand on my Amex card.

Choices Are Your Job as an Artist

Deciding what to keep and what to get rid of is always a difficult task. For example, my mother has sold my childhood home (in fact she is moving out today after 34 years). So I had gone up to Connecticut a few weeks ago with the express purpose of culling through whatever was left there which had my name on it. Boxes and boxes of school papers and homework, notes and objects which were the butt of some inside joke in high school which I’ve long since forgot. Like most people in the city, I’ve got a limited amount of extra space to put boxes full of paper that I may never look at again, so I had to go through, one by one and be the judge. It was difficult and emotionally stressful, but in the end I was left with 2 bankers boxes worth of stuff which I had shipped down to my place in Brooklyn.

Sure, there are photographers like Jay Maisel who have rooms full of slides. Remember though, that’s 60 years worth of personal and professional work. He’s also got a 35,000 square foot building and an actual bank vault to keep them all in.

Nowadays, things are much more compact.  I consider myself a fairly prolific photographer having shot hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in the past 5 years. I shoot RAW on a 21MP camera, I edit 16 bit files and rarely flatten layers. Even so, I can just about fit every image file I have, all 70,000 of them,  on a 2TB drive. In fact my “God forbid my building falls to the center of the earth through the hole that spontaneously opened up beneath it while I was away” folder of hi-res final jpegs is about 12GB. That’s everything that I care about that I’ve ever shot and it would fit on my iPhone.

At a party a couple weeks ago I saw a girl with some entry-level SLR blasting off full-auto machine gun bursts of pictures while barely through the viewfinder.  Click-Click-Click-Click-Click-Click-Click “Sure, I’ll have another beer”, Click-Click-Click-Click-Click-Click. Don’t get me started on the fact that it was already pretty dark, especially for the f/3.5 or whatever her kit lens was. I felt like an old man with my hackles up. Part of me wanted to give her a stern talking to about all the photographers over the years who considered every frame precious and how she was doing harm to their memory, but don’t worry, I held my tongue. Mostly though I was thinking, “Why does she need 6 nearly identical frames of the same picture which she’s not taking with any seriousness anyway, and how the hell does she go through all those pictures?”  She probably doesn’t, she probably just loads them into iPhoto and uploads the whole lot of them to Facebook.

Digital makes it too easy now. You can literally take a 1000 pictures a day if you really want to. In fact, I know some people who probably do, and a subset of them who keep them all, every single frame. I know people with literally drawers full of terabyte size drives full of pictures. When you ask them about it, they usually say something about how they never throw anything away because they might need them someday. They’re image hoarders (A new reality show premiering next season on A&E). Seriously, these people have problems and they honestly believe that out of hundreds of thousands of pictures, one day they’re going to need some slightly out-of-focus test shot that they completely ignored the first time through. But allow me to let you in on a little secret: You don’t need to keep them all. In fact, I would argue that you shouldn’t keep them all.

Let’s take the example above from my shoot with Caroline a couple days ago. Three pictures, all fairly similar, but like in contact sheets of old, I CHOSE one and marked it in red for you. That’s right, I made a choice. Novel concept isn’t it.  And before you point out that I kept 3 of them to show you, I’d like to point out that I deleted at least 15 similar shots that didn’t make the cut down to three. Out of the 191 images I took that night, 72 of them made the first cut of one star which means “Might I ever actually use this picture? Yes”. The other 119? Show all images with zero stars. Select all. Delete.

I read an article somewhere the other day where scientists had taught a robot with a camera to follow the ‘rule of thirds’ which has been taught to every budding visual artist for centuries. There will come a time in the very near future where just taking a pleasing image won’t be enough. We’re already there in many ways, with billions of images getting created every day. Our problem isn’t making things, our problem is wading through the myriad of them to find the ones that matter. And that job rests on everyone’s shoulders. If all your doing is taking 30 pictures and throwing them all up on Flickr you’re missing half the point and only doing the easy part.

Your job as an artist is about making choices. To go more to the point, your ONLY job as an artist is about making choices. For as long as we’ve been painting on walls, but now even more than ever, art is about editing. You make a decision. You make a statement.  A statement about who you are and what you’re trying to say. Your job is to create signal and not just more noise. Always remember that.

 

Into the Fray: My thoughts on the Jay Maisel and Andy Baio mess

There has been a lot of nasty stuff said about the situation between Jay Maisel and Andy Baio. If you read photographic news but have been under a rock for the past few weeks, here’s the jist:  Baio made a version of Mile Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ called ‘Kind of Bloop’ using 8bit sounds like you’d get from an old NES. While he got the rights to the music from Sony, for the cover he had an artist friend of his recreate the iconic cover’s photograph of Miles, which was taken by Jay Maisel, as a very low-res graphic. Something like 64×64 pixels. Maisel’s lawyers called foul, and in the end Baio paid him something like $30,ooo and promised not to use it again.

For what it’s worth, here’s Baio’s side of the story: http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Now, as all this was going on, a very popular photo blogger named Thomas Hawk out in San Francisco started writing all kinds of nasty things about Maisel.  People were incited to vandalize the front of Maisel’s building in Manhattan in defense of Baio, that kind of thing. A buddy of mine sent me this link this morning adding yet more fuel to the fire. Big giant flaming arrows of vitriol apparently being shot from all sides.

It’s all very ugly and people have been asking me what I think of all this. I’m not going to get into the mess that has precipitated because honestly I couldn’t care less. But I do have some thoughts on the original case which I figure I might as well air out. I’ll preface this by saying that I know Jay Maisel and Thomas Hawk though I have never met Mr Baio. Both of them have been nothing but nice to me, so this is not a comment on them as human beings. Also, none of what I’m going to say has much to do with what is legally right according to current laws, more my opinion of how it should be in an ideal world.

I think that the idea of making Kind of Blue with 8bit synth instruments is a silly, fun, and good idea.  Would I actually listen to it?  No.  I’m one of those crazy people with an $8000 stereo.  Lo-fi doesn’t appeal to me, but Kind of Blue is such a classic album, good on Andy Baio for making something happen.  I can’t imagine that he ever intended to make very much money from it, instead it sounds like it was more a silly labor of love.

While I think he would have been better off if he had asked Jay to use the photo first, Maisel’s lawyers apparently said it wouldn’t have mattered because he would never have approved of it anyway.  I’m also not entirely convinced that it’s the photo any more.  The artist, from what I understand, didn’t shrink the cover photo down to 64 pixels, instead he redrew it pixel by pixel to closely approximate the original photo on a much smaller, very low resolution scale. Is that still the picture? Baio does have an interesting section of his blog post where he keeps deconstructing it down to a handful of pixels to make the case of just where the line is when it’s completely unrecognizable as the original image. It’s hard to say.

Someone recently did set of chalk drawings based on my Motion series of photographs. Are they they same as my photos? Well they’re inspired by my photos, anything more specific than that is a judgement call.  If those drawings suddenly got picked up and the guy made a million dollars, yes I would be pissed. But mostly because I’d want people to know of my work.  In the Baio case, there’s no chance that the new 64 pixel version will ever compete with Jay’s original photograph in mindshare. That cover is one of the most recognized in the history of Jazz and it’s over 50 years old. Most of the people who worked on it are dead, the photographer happens to still be alive. It’s a cultural touchstone, it’s part of our collective history. I know it’s not legally true, but with something like that photo and that album, I think it should be in a place somewhere approaching public domain for derivative works. But the discussion of the absurdity of long-term copyright is a giant kettle of fish that I won’t get into for fear of pissing off a gaggle of lawyers down in Orlando.

If all of this happened to me, I would have contacted Baio, say I was flattered, explain my side of the story and then ask for a piece of the profits. I would not have asked that he immediately cease using the image and pay me damages. It’s both bad press in this day and age, especially for something so obviously marketed to very vocal geeks on the internet, and it’s also the nice thing to do.

I guess I’m too nice most of the time, but I think that we in the first world all need to step back and take a breath every once in a while. None of this stuff is life or death people.

 

Being a Camera Expert Does Not Make You a Photographer

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts this week, “Back to Work” with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin over at 5by5. If you haven’t listened to it, you really should go subscribe right now and start with episode 1, or S1E1 as Merlin would say. Anyhow, in this last episode Merlin said something like, “Being a notebook expert is not the same as being a writer” and I thought “Of course it’s not!” but at the same time I knew that there were plenty of people who don’t get that yet, thus this little essay.

Lately I’ve had a spate of inquiries from people asking for equipment recommendations. Cameras, lenses, printers, scanners, monitors.  And as anyone who has listened to our podcast can tell you, I have my favorites and I’m not afraid to pass them on. That said, there was a time not too long ago when I knew all the latest gear when it was released.  Specs, reviews, prices, you name it.  All at the tip of my tongue for the asking. This time however, I had to go do some research before I felt comfortable giving an answer that had my name on it. Canon, Nikon, Epson, Zeiss.  They’d all put out gear that I completely missed.  Part of this is because I haven’t bought anything new, other than a handful of hard drives, in a couple of years now. I’m out of the loop. The other part is that it really doesn’t matter. I already wrote about this last November in an admitedly snarky post called: Gear and How to Get Good so I won’t go into that too much here.

But what I will add on to that essay is the idea that reading all the latest photo news websites and magazines helps no one but the people selling the gear.  Model A has a digital do-hicky that Model B doesn’t have.  So? I can think of 100 ways you could better spend that 5 minutes of reading that review or retaining that fact in your memory.

I used to be that way about audio gear.  I knew everything about everything. Read every review in Stereophile. My favorite was a Michael Fremer review of a turntable which cost $100,000 that ran on compressed air to reduce motor noise. I spent a somewhat insane amount of money on a two channel setup that I still have and use today, ten years later.  Is there better stuff out there now? Maybe, but not THAT much better, this stuff is analog after all.  Can I suggest a good 5.1 surround sound system for you? Hell no. Never owned one, have no idea what to buy, and probably never will.  Has any of this changed the way I listen to music?  Absolutely. I actually listen to the music now instead of worrying about whether I’ve got a balanced connection between my CD player and pre-amp. (It’s balanced if you were wondering).

The manufacturers are going to keep making the gear, don’t worry. When it comes the time to buy a new camera (or stereo, or car, or laptop) you’re allowed to spend an evening or two doing searches and reading reviews to figure out the latest and greatest. But please don’t obsess.  Choose one and then get back to shooting.

Someone can know every spec and every knob on every piece of photographic gear, but that doesn’t make him a photographer, that makes him a camera expert and the two are very different things.

A photographer takes pictures, he doesn’t read camera websites.

Out of (Your) Control

When you do work for clients, you often don’t get ‘Final Cut’. That is to say, you don’t get to have final say on how the picture looks.  This is one reason why I do my own post; I like having control as long as I can. Most of the time it’s not a problem and the differences between your picture and their version are ones of personal preference, not cringeworthy messes.

Here’s an example. I shot the picture above of a now very rich young Googler for a magazine article.  The art director wanted them shot on a solid light background so that she could flow text around, but also wanted to have a shadow behind him.  That’s fine I can do and did do that. However in my retouching I left some texture in the background because that’s how I though it looked nicest.  I pride myself on having my images sit just right in the tonal range. They didn’t ask for any changes so I sent over the final images. My original is on the left.

I found the final images on the magazine’s site and apparently they decided to blow out the background to pure 255 white. The photo on the right above. Had they asked me to do this I could have done it with a bit more subtlety and elegance. To me the final version looks cut out and pasted in.  Whatever, who cares? I got the paycheck right?  Well yes, and I’m really not complaining and am much better about this kind of thing than I was a couple of years ago. Except to say that at the top of the article it says “Photos by Bill Wadman”. My fear is that people will look at that and look at the pictures and say “Wow, that Bill Wadman guy is really bad and ham handed at retouching his images.  He’s an amateur. I’m sure not going to hire him!”  And THAT does bother me.

Letting it go now, not everything you do turns to gold I guess.

 

Priorities & Trade-offs

I’ve been thinking about our most recent Circuitous Conversations podcast where Dan and I give advice on what dSLR to buy. A question that the both of us get more often than we can count. I think that the conclusion that we came to was that you really can’t go wrong with any of them anymore, even the least expensive model on each of the Nikon/Canon line.

That said, I realized that we overlooked an important facet of that discussion, which is priorities.  What’s most important to you? While all of these cameras can capture a good picture, some do certain things better than others. For example, my priority is image quality when there’s light around. To that end I use a Canon 5D Mark II. It’s got a full frame sensor, 21 megapixels, and has very low noise within any reasonable range, and is reasonably small & light. While I don’t agree with Dan that Nikon’s UI is substantially better than Canon’s (I think they both have their strengths and it comes down to what you’re used to), even if I did like Nikon’s UI better, I would probably still use a 5DII because image quality is my priority and 12MP full frame cameras can’t compete (btw, I know about the 24MP monster but it’s big, heavy and really expensive which is why I switched from the 1Ds3 to the 5D2 in the first place). I’m willing to give up something in order to get what I want.

Similarly if I were into taking pictures of birds, I’d probably go with a cropped sensor in my camera. That way you get about 50% more distance on your lenses and a bit more depth of field to boot.  Or another, I never put my camera on continuous shutter. In fact, I rarely if ever take more than a picture or two a second. But if I were shooting sports, I’d need one of those hummingbird fast 10 FPS speed demons. The need for speed would trump the fact that it gave less detailed pictures.

Any camera body on the market now will do almost all these things well. They’ll have plenty of pixels, enough FPS for most, be decent in low light, etc.  But if you’ve got a specific need, and it’s that important to you, that priority could easily dictate what camera you should buy.  Just something to keep in mind.

iPhone Advantages vs Droid Advantages

As someone who has owned both an Android and numerous iPhones I figured I’d write up the reasons why one is better than the other. Though in my mind there is no clear winner. Some of you might find this useful.

ADVANTAGE IPHONE
iPod app – This is currently still the standard for media playback, at least for music. It’s clean, it doesn’t crash. iTunes is bloated and slow, and it is annoying that you need to plug in to sync, but it’s still the standard. If you’re on your home network, why not do it via wifi.  Also, all this move to cloud music doesn’t make any sense to me. One of the main times I want to listen is underground in the subway where I have no network connection. Even when I have a 3G connection it sucks in NYC and I’ve got a 2GB bandwidth cap anyway. Screw all that, I’ll take my music locally on my device, thanks.

Hardware – This is probably the main iPhone advantage. The hardware is really pretty and feels like it’s worth the hundreds of dollars you pay for it.  I have to question the decision to make the back out of glass as well, but it does look nice. Honestly, if I could run Android on my iPhone reliably I might consider it.

Camera – The iPhone 4 has a pretty good camera if you’ve got enough light. It’s not the only camera I’d take with me on vacation, but I’ve already used it 10 times more than the camera on my Droid. I’ve tried a number of times to carry a little digicam around with me for reference shots or location scouting. The iphone 4 camera replaced all that for me. The old iPhone cameras sucked pretty hard though, so I’m only talking about the new one here.  And while the camera on my Droid wasn’t very good, I’ve heard that some of the newer Android phones have nice ones too.

Podcast apps – I know there are probably apps that do this on Android too, but I’m using iCatcher! to keep track, download, and listen to my podcasts. It goes and grabs the lastest episodes when I’m on wifi so I’ve got them when I’m on the train or headed to the gym. Very handy.  A lot of people also like Instacast which does the same thing. I think there are equivalent apps for Android, I just didn’t use them when I had one.

iTunes remote – Handy to sit down in front of my stereo and control the lossless music that’s getting sent over to my stereo in front of me.  There are paid apps which do this on Android but none of them looked quite polished enough for me.

Polish – Overall the experience on the iPhone feels more polished than Android. More seamless and less kludged together. Something about this leads to more faith that the phone’s not going to screw up.  I don’t think that’s true, but it’s how it feels.

Homogeneity – If you buy an iphone you get an iphone.  If you buy an Android device you get one of 6 different interfaces the manufacturers throw on top, maybe a good camera maybe not, etc. You know what you’re going to get for better or worse with Apple.

ADVANTAGE ANDROID
Gmail – This one is HUGE to me and the thing I miss most about my new phone. Gmail on Android is a native app which connects right to the gmail servers and does labels, archiving, drafts, threaded message, full search, etc. It’s like being on the full version of gmail. The Mail app on the iphone is frustration city. It only downloads the headers of some email so even though you can see the first few lines in preview, when you open the full email it says “This email has not yet been downloaded to your device”  Infuriating to say the least. The mobile webmail is an option but it’s slow and not push and not a real alternative to a native client except in a pinch. Android gets a HUGE +1 on this.

Notifications – If the iphone needs to tell you something it pops up a modal text dialog which you have to respond to before you can get back to what you’re doing. It’s intrusive and annoying if you’re in the middle of something else.  Android just pops an icon up in the top bar which you then swipe down to read. An icon for new email, one for SMS etc. Most android phones also have an LED which can blink like a Crackberry to tell you there is something that needs your attention without having to turn the phone on. It’s amazing.  On the other hand, if I want to see if I have mail on my iPhone I’ve got to press the power, swipe to unlock, type in my password, press home to get back to the home screen and then see if there is a badge on the mail icon. That sucks.  This is stuff that should have been fixed for years now. Better be in iOS 5.

Syncing of everything but Music – Everything but media is done over the air. Get a new phone, type in your google credentials and it gets your contacts, email, calendar, and alternately your facebook contacts synced in as well. It also goes and automatically downloads your apps too so your phone is largely right where you left off.

Updates – If there’s a new update, your phone lets you know in the notification bar and once you give it permission it downloads and installs it.  No need to plug into your computer.  In fact, the only time I plugged my Droid into my computer was to move movies and music.

Settings – Android app settings are in the apps. On the iPhone some of them are in the apps and a bunch of others are in the main Settings app and it drives me nuts.

Maps/Navigation – Google maps on Android kicks the iPhone maps app in the ass. You can rotate the map on the screen, get a 3D view of cities, it cached places you go to often for offline use, streetview, a scale to measure distances, etc. It also features a completely free navigation app which took the place of a GPS device when I rent cars on vacation.

Widgets – I didn’t use too many widgets on my Droid but I did have a calendar Agenda widget which was great. It listed the next 5 or 10 items in my calendar right there on my home screen where I can’t miss them.

Free Apps – A lot more of the apps on the Android market are free.  I think I bought 2 apps total.  On my iPhone I’ve spent $25 on apps in the first few weeks of owning it.

Headphone output – This is probably specific to my Moto Droid and not true of all Android phones, but the headphone output used a much better amplifier than the iPhone does. I generally use harder to drive in-ear monitors or fancy big phones and the Droid output was a good step above in clarity, separation.

Micro USB for power – I like the idea of standards and most if not all Android phones use the standard Micro USB cable to connect to power and the computer. So you don’t need to find a dock connector cable. Though iphones/ipads/ipods are so popular, you can usually find one.

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It may seem as though Android should be my winner just by looking at the size of it’s list. But honestly when you weigh them out I’d saw it’s a draw.  I’m currently using an iPhone 4 mostly because I just joined a family plan on AT&T and there were no good Android phones with the stock UI available at the time.  And this is the problem with Android for me; Too many cooks.  I like the idea of Google setting out certain phones which are the ideal like the Galaxy IIs is right now. Fast, nice hardware, Google experience. Too bad it’s on T-mobile and Sprint. Argh.

Honestly, if Apple fixes notification in the next few months (which I think they will) and someone figures out a way to write a native Gmail app which rocks, then I’m fine on either.  Though the maps on Android do really kick some ass.

Manual Focus Mess

Up until recently, if you were a photographer your first camera was probably manual focus. If fact is was probably manual everything.  Something like a Pentax K1000 that I started with. People still love cameras like this.  Friends of mine shoot with old manual Nikon F’s and I myself use a Leica M, Hasselblad V, and 4×5 from time to time.  It’s fun to slow down and take your time.

Before the mid 70’s auto-focus didn’t exist. You didn’t have a choice.  For many photographers the answer was just to have a lot of light and stop down the lens a bit and guestimate the focus or use a hyperfocal distance to get enough of the scene to be sharp. That’s what Cartier-Bresson did.  He’s stop down to f/8 or f/11, set focus to hyperfocal and just snap away.

My problem with manual focus now has a number of prongs. First is the more of a cultural one which is that times have changed and shoots move quickly, and when shooting people I often don’t have the luxury to spend a second or two focusing manually.  It’s time consuming and the camera usually does it better than I ever could. People expect you to shoot fast nowadays.

The second reason I don’t use manual focus much on digital is that I can’t do it well enough.  The more information your sensor captures, the more precise you focus has to be. It shows all of your flaws. Focus you may have gotten away with on 35mm film is going to be very soft in a 25MP digital file at 100% on a computer screen.  That problem is even worse when you’re talking about medium format as I found when Dan and I did our format comparison a few months ago with a couple of 60MP P65+ backs. The only way to really tell what was in focus was to shoot tethered and zoom in. And there’s no way I could reliably do that manually, despite the fact that AF on those MF bodies kinda suck.

And the viewfinders in these cameras still don’t feel as big and nice as the ones in my old film cameras. I just can’t tell critical focus in there.  My father’s old Canon AE1 had a split prism in the focusing screen.  Why did they stop including those?  They were great. You could tell if something was in focus by lining up two images like in a rangefinder. It was great.  I know there are companies which sell split prisms for the 5D, I just can justify spending the hundreds of dollars they cost.  When I got this camera I replaced the screen with Canon’s matte option which makes focus more obvious at the expense of a bit of light. Since I shoot with fast primes most of the time I’m willing to make that trade-off. That said, I still don’t trust my eyes. I don’t know if it’s that I’m getting old or what, but I can’t look through the viewfinder and focus on a persons eye from 8 feet away and trust that it’ll be sharp at f/1.8.

The reason I started thinking about this in the first place is that Zeiss recently released a 35/1.4 for the Canon EF mount.  I love the look of Zeiss lenses and their T* coating.  Better than Canon L glass? Eh, different.  Is that difference in my head?  Maybe. Do they feel glassy smooth to focus? Oh my god yes.  I tried out their 50mm a couple years ago and the problem I had is the one I’m discussing here. I just couldn’t reliably focus accurately enough to make it worth it.  The best Bokeh in the world ain’t worth a damn if the part of the image you want in focus isn’t in focus.

Am I the only one who has this problem?