The Online Photographer

Real Innovation from Leica

Well, I have to say, this has got my spirits perked up quite a bit. Not only do we have the first products from the new Micro 4/3 system—plus some glimmerings of more to come—but apparently, sometime around now, Leica will introduce a whole new system called the S-System, comprising a new camera, the S2, and nine new purpose-built lenses, all centering around a "larger than full-frame" 30x45mm sensor.

Years ago, when I got back into writing about photography after leaving Photo Techniques, I wrote a column for the Luminous-Landscape called "Oldthink." The point was that digital was still in its horseless carriage era, with form-factors carried over from the last days of film (just like early automobiles had not yet discovered what automobiles would come to look like, but took their cues from the then-current design of horse-drawn vehicles).

Since then, I've written about what it a disappointment it's been that the early flurry of creativity in camera design shown in various bridge cameras and inventive styles of digicams had largely given way to the 1985 film model of camera design—cookie-cutter point-and-shoots on the one hand and digital SLRs based on film SLRs on the other. Not unworkable, but definitely not newthink.

Meanwhile, ages ago—eons, really—I wrote an article on a form-factor for cameras that I felt was so logical that it had to be imminent. I called it the "DMD," for "decisive-moment digital." Well, it was not imminent. As year upon year passed, I grew progressively more discouraged that no DMD ever materialized.

Except that now—rather unexpectedly at this late date, I must say—it apparently has. The new Micro 4/3 prototypes being shown by Olympus at Photokina (assuming it meets certain performance criteria, chiefly in terms of single-shot responsiveness—that is, to be a decisive moment digital it's got to be decisive)—appears very close to what I envisioned years ago as the "DMD." (Except for that yellow.)

The DMD at last? Mr. Ogawa from Olympus with the Oly Micro 4/3 prototype (Photo: Photographyblog.com)

...Now going back even farther in time, to 1996. As Editor of PT, I wrote an "Open Letter" to Eastman Kodak following the advent of the then-new Advanced Photo System. I made the case that for APS to really succeed, 35mm needed to be killed off—but that it wouldn't be defeated unless it were attacked from two fronts rather than one. That is, what was needed in addition to a more highly rationalized smaller-than-35mm format was a more highly rationalized larger-than-35mm format, to replace the antiquated, awkward 120 and 220 films. I postulated a horizontally-running, cassette-loaded film with sprocket holes on only one side and an image area that was 51mm in the long dimension. (Reminding you of anything yet?) The idea was simple and logical. It's that if you have a smaller format that's almost as good as the larger current standard in terms of quality and better in terms of convenience, you also need a higher-level counterpart that's almost as good in terms of convenience and distinctly better in terms of quality. Both together might be able to set a new standard, whereas either one alone couldn't.

Kodak wasn't interested in that, and rightly so, as it turned out, because it was already too late for film by then (and APS never took off). But I've revived that basic argument on several occasions by questioning the inevitability of "full-frame" or 24 x 36mm format for digital. Why stop there? Why continue to allow anachronistic 35mm systems to dictate all the parameters of our digital formats?

The upshot of all this is that I am delighted to see real innovation from Leica. I believe the S-System is not really "just another" medium-format camera, but rather a competitor for the "full-frame" 35mm-style cameras we're beginning to see now. The S-System could be a logical new standard for commercial studio, fine-art, and high-quality photographic work—that is, a logical "big camera" standard to complement a DMD-like small-camera standard. If digital has to boil down to two format sizes, I'd much rather they be Four-Thirds/APS-C on the one hand and Leica-S on the other than our current split system with tiny fingernail-sized sensors in all our pocket cameras and our "big" cameras relegated to 35mm-legacy horseless carriages, with all their "legacy" lenses and their legacy flange-back distances and their flippin' mirrors.

The Leica S2 won't do this alone, of course. It'll be too expensive for ordinary people to buy—a professional system from out of the gate, made for those who earn good money from studio work and can depreciate their equipment. Nothing wrong with that; that's life. And, as usual, success depends on implementation. That's always true. But here's what this camera and system is in terms of its concept: it's newthink.

And I like that.

British Journal of Photography's article on the S-System

BJP's pictures of the camera and lenses

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_____________________

Mike (Thanks to Amin Sabet, Eolake, Antonis R., and phule)

Ctein adds: I can argue it both ways (all crystal balls are bistable).

Arguing on your side, I could make an arbitrary case for something we could call 35mm format quality and something we could call medium format quality, as being relatively stable points in market demand. Currently, digital image quality is about twice as good as film got circa the millennium. That is, you can hold your own against a 35mm camera with a digital sensor that's about half that size, and full-frame digital can hold its own pretty well against medium format.

At the same time, there are aspects of image quality that we observed with film that really do seem to be sensitive to absolute size, regardless of the quality of lenses and films. It was hard to get the "clarity" in 35mm that one saw in medium format, even when objective measures of grain and resolution told you the 35mm should be as good or better. I suspect those factors still come into play in the digital realm. Bigger looks better, and the fact that most bench tests don't reflect that indicates a limitation of the bench tests.

All of this argues for you.

Arguing against it is that "decisive moment" may not be definable because both the arrow and the target are rapidly moving. I don't know how much sensors can theoretically shrink and still match film quality. I can say with complete confidence that it could go by another factor of two, no problem. In other words, no special technical breakthroughs, just already-known product evolution get you to the point where quarter scale sensors match 35mm film (more or less), and full-frame sensors start to rival 4x5 sheet film. There is absolutely no doubt we will get there, and fairly quickly (within a decade). And it's not even close to the theoretical limit. Declaring that we've hit the right size, market wise, may be rather premature.

Conversely, buyers expectations constantly increase. That was true with film quality as much as it is with digital. Putting aside the mysterious bigger is better factor, medium format image quality was worse when I started professional photography than 35mm was at the millennium. Yet 35mm and medium formats persisted in part because photographers expectations had been raised.

We see that happening in digital photography around issues like noise levels and color accuracy. Whether folks are being silly or not in their extreme demands, they are raising the bar.

Consequently, I think the whole business may still be in such flux that it's premature to declare that we've hit a sweet spot. Or...maybe not.

Leica S-System Rumor

The latest from the rumor mill. Emphasis on "rumor." You think Photokina's over yet? But hey, 30x45mm—now that would be "full frame"! If it's true, this is going to separate the eye surgeons from the dentists, baby.

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Mike

The Yankees Move On

Check out the Times's 360° panoramic shot of the last night at the House that Ruth Built. (A bit dull photographically, don't you think?)

Don't think I'm sentimental. The new Yankee Stadium, built by a billionaire for his millionaires to play in, like pretty much every other major sports stadium, is a fraud on the public: erected with public funds, it will seat fewer people but have far more luxury boxes so corporate types can live large without paying anything back into the tax base. (Sky boxes are tax deductible.) But at least the billionaire will get richer so he can keep hiring more millionaires, and the unwashed masses who actually pay for it all can watch the games at home. What's television for, after all?

Roughly 3,500,000 people attended the last game. (Well, that's how many people will be claiming to have been there 20 years from now.)

______________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Lambert: "'The House That Ruth Built....' Remember the Curse of the Bambino (Babe Ruth)? In the off-season of 1919–1920, the Boston Red Sox sold Ruth to the N.Y. Yankees, and legend has it that Ruth felt slighted and put a curse on the Red Sox so that they would never win another championship.

"In the early 2000s, the Yankees ownership entertained the idea of tearing down the house that Ruth built. Well, guess what? Ruth lifted the curse off the Red Sox and cast it upon the Yankees. I said this back then and everyone laughed at me. No one's laughing now, least of all spoiled Yankees fans. The Yankees have not been able to win another championship since. And the Red Sox have won two.

"The question is: Will the curse be buried in the rubble of Yankee Stadium, or will it live on? Stay tuned."

Nikon 28Ti

This morning's "Forgotten Camera" is by Bill Emory (yes, that Bill Emory) and was taken with a Nikon 28Ti.

Also on Photob.org, Gordon Buck's granddaughter attempts a complicated maneuver. Will she succeed—?

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Mike

Olympus E-A1 Concept

Olympus is showing a prototype at (P)hotokina of a future camera called the E-A1. Due in 2009, the new camera is said to be intermediate between the E-520 and the E-3. However, "in terms of quality and performance," says Olympus, "there is nothing mid-level about this model. It will inherit all the outstanding features of the E-3."

Read more at FourThirdsPhoto.com.

_______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Robin P.)

Nikon Nikkor AF-S 50mm ƒ/1.4 G

Whoa! Nikon has actually updated one of its plain old ordinary short-normal prime lenses!

Cool.

We approve. We're just a touch worried, though. The press materials all yawp about how this lens is supposed to "commemorate" 75 years of Nikkor optics and 45 million lenses produced. (Leica has made us permanently antsy about the word "commemorative.") So is this the beginning of a sensible, progressive, orderly updating of all of Nikon's primes for digital FX, or a one-off special-occasion bone tossed off to us nattery little complainers who can't get with Zoom Nation? It's got to be the former, right? Nikon, Nikon, say it's so.

The lens has eight elements in seven groups, silent-wave focusing, focuses to .45m, weighs 290g, takes 58mm filters, and will ship with a lens hood.

Cool. Now keep going, Nikon.

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Mike

Recommended This Week

(UPDATE: Amazon is now sold out of the remainder. If you go to the link and click "Available from these sellers" and then click on the "New" tab, there are two sellers advertising "multiple copies available" [TSCBOOKS and BORDEEBOOKS].That means that each of these sellers has some remainders, albeit at a somewhat higher price. Note that these sellers may still appear to have copies available even after they sell out, so don't be too disappointed if you take a shot at this and miss.  —MJ)

This week's "Recommended by M.J." book is Aftermath: Unseen 9/11 Photos by a New York City Cop by John Botte. It's a remainder—i.e., a closeout, a new book sold at a bargain price—that you can buy for $9.99. At that price, no one is making any profit from it whatsoever, so if you're one of those who object to the book for that reason, don't be troubled. There's been a lot of controversy swirling around this book, and I personally think it's a shame, if not an injustice, that the author has been so relentlessly criticized. He was a crime scene photographer with the NYPD and a talented amateur documentary photographer whose work was admired by Bernard Kerik (then Police Commissioner, since disgraced), who sent Botte in on 9/11 to document the scene.

John Botte has taken it on the chin every which way for all kinds of things, which strikes me as yet another playing-out of the always popular game "blame the photographer." He was "on the clock" while photographing at the site; some people feel he should have been "helping," as if documenting at a disaster scene isn't one of many valid ways to be useful. He's been accused of "profiting" from 9/11—right, as if one photobook is any kind of effective way to cash in (anyone who's put out a photo book is shaking their heads. More photo books lose money than make money, and the very fact that this one is remaindered points to its not being one of the latter). And never mind that being on the scene damn near killed the photographer—it ruined his lungs and his career (he's been on disability since 2003), and led to more medical bills than the book will ever begin to compensate him for. He's even been criticized because the book has the same title as art photographer Joel Meyerowitz's book on Ground Zero—which Meyerowitz, incidentally, started shooting on the 23rd of that September (Botte was there from the 11th onwards).

The Botte book is, among other things, the only book of pictures of the 9/11 disaster shot with a Leica camera (an M6) in black & white, which led to Leica issuing a John Botte commemorative M7, mainly to present to Mr. Botte for his heroism. (The camera, as far as I know, has been withdrawn from public sale. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) Sadly, this has let him in for even more criticism, as people with nothing better to complain about accuse the photographer—blameless as can be—for further "profiting" from 9/11. Here's what renowned Leica repairperson Sherry Krauter said about John Botte's camera: it "was made specially for John to pay tribute to his fallen colleagues, and to John himself who sustained life-threatening injuries in his service with the NYPD at 911. This camera is not being produced by Leica in any quantity whatsoever, nor will it ever be. This camera was made specifically for John and is the only one of its kind.

"John is one of the most talented individuals to walk thru my door in 30 years of repairing Leicas. The old adage that states, 'If a picture is worth 1,000 words,' John's are worth 5,000 words! He had an opening at the Frankfurt airport at the first anniversary of 911. It was one of the only shows I know of that was held over for an additional term. Several million people were able to view his work. He is an extremely talented photographer. I look forward to John's book, Aftermath, which is the only book of its kind, shot entirely using Leica cameras and black and white film."

(A final note: If you want to express outrage about John Botte or his book or his Leica, please go do it elsewhere. I think it's bullshit. The world needs more documentary photographers, not fewer, and anyway, this post is just to recommend a remaindered book that is being cleared out at a loss—I assure you, its author is not profiting from it.)

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___________________

Mike

Quote o' the Day

"The unusual wins out over the usual."

—Thad Abell
—(Photographic advice to his son Sam Abell)

________________________

Mike

The Amazing Gift of Woo Lai Wah

By Mike Mitchell

On my way to the basement to do some laundry, I noticed a package on my porch. It was in the usual spot where I ask delivery people to put things if there's no answer to the doorbell. Strange, though. I wasn't expecting anything; everything I'd ordered recently had been delivered.

When I came back upstairs I picked it up. It was for me, not my tenants, and it was from Hong Kong. There was no return address and the customs declaration on the side simply read "camera part." Very strange.

I took it upstairs and opened it and said to myself, wow, I used to have one of those:

So I'm thinking, what in the world is going on here?

I lifted it out of the box to examine it but immediately my attention went to what was underneath it:

A folded piece of paper. I could see writing through the back side. A letter. I unfolded it and began to read:

(Please click to see larger)

As I started to read it my heart began quaking! By the time I was three quarters down the page I was bawling, wailing, sobbing, even laughing. My feelings were heartshots ricocheting off inner walls, ricocheting off each other, ricocheting off the very boundaries of my own little world. The metaphysical whiplash lasted for days.

I’ve never been to China. I’ve never done pictures of the President and his family. But the shows referred to were "Other Lights" at the Corcoran Gallery in 1977 and the paintings were at the David Adamson Gallery in 1997, 20 years apart! From a Chinese friend of a friend, I've learned that the name Woo Lai Wah is definitely a woman’s name and definitely the way it would be spelled in Hong Kong as opposed to mainland China. I have not been able to locate her so far.

The actual "photo thing" is what's called a bulk film loader. When I was one of four high school photographers at least two of us used them. In the darkroom, you'd put a hundred feet of 35mm film into it, slip the leading edge through a felt-lined slit and then screw down the red top. You could then turn on the lights. Then you’d open a little compartment on the side and tape the leading edge to a spool that went into an empty 35mm cassette like the ones Kodak still sells in yellow boxes. Then you'd close the compartment and crank the film into the cassette. The benefit was that it was so much cheaper, a big benefit when we were high school photographers 45 years ago!

I started to recall those days and I vaguely remembered that we each put our names on them with one of those Dymo labelers where you’d turn a dial to an individual letter, squeeze the handles and the letter would be punched into a strip of tape. Could it BE? I picked up the loader and turned it on its side:

Then I remembered! I had three of these, one for each type of film we used, Tri-X, Plus-X and Panatomic-X. Thus the "Mr. Mitchell Tri-X." This was unquestionably mine! And the crank was even still with it, rolled up in the bubble wrap beside it. But how did it get half way around the world?

As one of my photographer friends, Brett Littlehales, pointed out later, it was even amazing that the tape had lasted for 45 years. He also observed in a typically exuberant way, "the chances of this happening are…are…like winning the lottery…no!…no!…more like winning the cosmic lottery!"

And if there was a "prize" in this lottery, it was not so much the object itself, but the letter and the awesome mysteries of unfathomable spiritual connections, and the very gesture itself from this dear, dear person and the timing! It’s impossible to communicate how much I really needed what has been given to me by this delightful miracle. My closest friends have helped a great deal to uncover the deepest gifts in it. Blessings that are all quite personal but suffice it to say that this whole sequence of events, that is still reverberating through my life, has been a kind of crucible in which something very deep in my own heart is being refined, reconstituted, even healed. Something that is essential to "making things worthy of many peoples."

_______________________

Mike M.

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Featured Comment by Craig Norris: "One of the continuing great pleasures I've had in my many years of working and living in Asia, is the simple beauty of a heartfelt communication that reaches its target.

"Recognising that there is a language barrier to overcome, people of different cultures (like me and the many Asian people with whom I cross paths) make a greater effort to be clear in the message sent, and more careful in the listening. I've got the mental picture of Ms. Woo's sons, daughters, nephews and nieces all contributing to the translation of her humble yet heartwarming thoughts into English.

"Woo Lai Wah's message penetrates in a powerful way because of its unquestionable goodness, pure purpose and simple unadulterated directness. Thanks for sharing it.

"By the way, in the second last paragraph, there's a term 'Gwuy lo'...in 'my family who have gone to classes to learn to say Gwuy lo things for your happiness.'  'Gwuy lo' is the colloquial Cantonese term for white foreigners. Literally translated, it means 'white devil'—not an undeserved term for the white man, if you read about the Opium Wars of the 1800s."

Featured Comment by Rodger Kingston: "The only response I can think of that is worthy of this story is silent reflection on the goodness that resides in people, if only it were allowed to express itself, and how I might strive toward such a state of grace in my own life."

Forgotten Camera: Stan Banos

This morning's Forgotten Camera is "Bush in the Bust," taken by Stan Banos with this lovely square-format 35mm Tenax....

Also, a picture in the "Kids" category by Nevin Yung from Hong Kong.

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Mike

Errata Editions Announced

Big news in the small world of photo book collecting: Jeff Ladd, who wrote Part IV of our series on Great Photo Books You Can Buy New and who writes the excellent photobook review blog 5B4, has announced a labor of love that he's been working on for months and thinking about for much longer: Errata Editions.

A number of years ago, responding to the ever-escalating market for collectible vinyl LPs, several vendors started producing lovingly-made reissues of great classics. Expensive at $30 or so each, they still cost only a fraction of what vintage originals cost—and in many cases were more practical, since they were better made and adding wear to them wasn't such a dire issue.

Errata Editions' "Books on Books" series hopes to do something similar for genuinely rare and generally unobtainable photobooks, conveying the substance of the originals and the feel of an ownership experience. I urge you to read about the project on 5B4; Jeff and his business partners, Valerie Sonnenthal and Ed Grazda, are taking a very interesting approach, not creating facsimiles but in essence creating new books that have as their illustrations every page of the original books, "so the viewer can see not only all of the photographs, but the page layout, typography and all aspects that make up the original including all of the written texts."

The first four titles are Eugene Atget, Photographe de Paris; Walker Evans, American Photographs (1938 edition); Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait; and Chris Killip, In Flagrante. The books will be distributed by DAP through ordinary bookstore channels starting in early 2009. Pricing is expected to be $40 per volume.

A noble project and a fine prospect, sez me. Jeff will be blogging from on press in China starting Monday. I'll post links.

_______________________

Mike

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A Proposal for an Investment Strategy

By Ctein

I would like to make a suggestion, with all appropriate modesty, that would alleviate a considerable amount of current financial woe. First, some background.

Most stuff isn't really worth anything! Beyond the basics of food, clothing, and shelter that one needs to survive, the rest is pretty much discretionary. It's all about how badly you want it. Soft currency, hard currency, promissory notes—none of it has much intrinsic value. Gold bugs treasure their hoards, but gold's nutritional value is insignificant, it makes very uncomfortable clothing, and it's not a good structural material. A bar of gold bullion is attractive, true, but 12 bars are not 12 times as attractive.

Gold is worth something because a large number of people have decided that they will give you stuff you want in exchange for gold. But it's not like one ounce of gold gets you one loaf of bread, now and forever. (Yes, it's really good bread!) It's whatever people decide it's worth today. Ditto, oil wells. Even real estate. That was a "hard" investment. I mean, everyone needs land and there's only so much of it, right? You can't go wrong with real property.

And I have this lovely bridge to sell you...

So, gold bugs have been routinely disappointed, the dot-com became the dot-bomb,the real estate boom burped.

It has to be this way! If one ounce of gold really was worth one loaf of bread now and forever, it might be worth hoarding because it wouldn't go moldy on you, but that would be it. The value has to change relative to what you really want or else there'd be no way to profit. The trick is to buy and when it's low and sell when it's hot. What goes up will eventually come right back down, because ultimately it's human whim.

Hence, investors always need the Next Big Thing. They moved on to commodities. Prices skyrocketed. Now they're coming down again, big surprise. Investors are on the prowl for a New Thing.

...And what would you pay for pie-in-the-sky!?

I suggest photographs. They have just as much intrinsic worth, relative to market prices, as most of this other stuff. In many cases are a lot more portable, and they're certainly more attractive. They even do have some modest utility value, for covering up the stain on your wall.

It makes just as much sense as investing in tech stocks, mortgages, or rice. And like those you can generate more, lots more! Let's not forget the potential of futures ("I will gladly pay you today for a hamburger next Tuesday.") This could be a really big bubble, just the shot in the arm the economy needs! Think of what a gilt-edge Tanaka, or a blue-chip Pierce, or an AA-rated Ctein could be worth! And this rising tide floats all boats, because as the easy pickings get grabbed up by the early investors the later ones look for the less likely commodities. Even Johnstons would grow vastly in price. [Hey! —Ed.]

Like all bubbles, eventually it would burst, and the early investors (and, I emphasize, divesters) would make out like bandits and the later ones would get screwed. Meanwhile the suppliers, like us and our agents and galleries, would get to be part of that banditry, salting away our not-so-hard-earned rewards in non-photographic assets. (Big mistake, plowing your returns back into the same thing the bubble's built on. Not a good long-term strategy!)

I think this has huge possibilities. Any investment firms or brokerages out there, drop me an e-mail as soon as you read this. Get in on the ground floor. You can guarantee I won't be disappointed!

_______________________

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Christopher Lane: "Ctein, My day job is in the financial industry (lucky me) and you are absolutely dead on with your analysis which is the most cogent I have seen anywhere. The money is always looking for a place to flow and right now those routes are getting fewer and fewer. I totally agree with you; however, I would broaden your proposal a bit. I suspect that the entire art market is going to get a shot in the arm from this meltdown. That includes photographs and photobooks. As you point out, the intrinsic value of art is to cover up bad patches in your wall and look at while you eat your grill cheese sandwich. ;~)"

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Ctein: '...gilt-edge Tanaka.' I like your thinking.

"I realize that you present this with tongue firmly in cheek. But, in fact, photography is a (slowly) rising star in the art market. Within the past 15–20 years a completely new crop of centimillionaires and billionaires have driven the prices of other art works into space. Witness just this week the 2-day Sotheby's London auction of works by 'artist' Damien Hirst that produced £111.4 million. (Hey, where else can you find a dead adult shark preserved in an acrylic tank of formaldehyde? It's either art or an appetizer.)

"So while newly-minted Russian and Chinese billionaires have their private bankers waving paddles at this stuff other more mortal art investors are looking for better, more accessible values. Photography has become one of those 'bargain' opportunities. Sotheby's auction of Andreas Gursky's '99 Cent II' for $3.34 million in 2007 set the new high-water mark for photographic art work sales. But it looked like an eBay deal to many art investors looking for bargains in new art spheres.

"(A neighbor and good friend, now an octogenarian, has been collecting photographs for 40+ years. A tour though is collection is like a walk through the George Eastman house. Although he calls it a 'modest' collection, another mutual friend, a museum curator, estimates it's worth between three and six million dollars.)

"So dust-off those old dye-transfer Apollo launch prints and head to Sotheby's, Christy's, or Philips de Pury, Ctein. BTW, do you happen to know a lab that can produce gilt-edged prints? I can't find one locally."

Mike adds: For a recent dissenting viewpoint on that, Ken, check out this article from the Financial Times about contemporary art. To quote, "...my suspicion is that it [contemporary art] will fall further and harder than perhaps any other asset class, save perhaps subprime mortgages." (Thanks to David Emerick for the tip.)

Nikon D80 Best Deal

Kind of funny how quickly the bloom goes off the rose, isn't it? It wasn't so very long ago that photographers were tripping over each other to get to the new Nikon D80. And now, in the Great Sell Off preceding the Next Big Thing, you can get a D80 for virtually an entry-level price—$595.92, to be exact.

Seems like a steal. The D80 still strikes me as being a really nice camera. Not world-leading, nothing earth-shaking, but: plenty o' megapixels, good viewfinder, crisp responsiveness. Excellent pictures. Fun to use. Add this lens for basic VR (a.k.a. IS), this one as a nice walkaround normal prime (yeah, yeah, I know it doesn't "test out," but hold your cards 'n' letters, it's a nice lens), or this one for an all-purpose zoom with great technical image quality. The D80 just feels good—good size, good weight, good "grippability," good ergonomics. As legions of owners will attest, it's pleasant to use and takes great pictures. And it's cheap right now. Till they're gone.

____________________

Mike

P.S. And don't forget the Nikon D200, for that matter. Only $850 off its new price. That's off.

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UPSHOT: Well, nobody bought a D80 (or lens, or D200) as a result of this post, but hey, at least I'm tryin' to look after your wallet for ya. One of us has to try to be sensible, after all. ;-)  —MJ

Harmony

This morning's Forgotten Camera, by Mike Chisholm of Southampton, England, features a £7.50 "Harmony."

Also new: a Family Snapshot by Ken White.

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Mike

Reading Pictures: More on Error Mimicking

To begin with, I need to apologize...the other day, in this post, I talked about "a mimicking error" as if it were a common term. Obviously, that should have been error mimicking...and neither one is a common term after all, although I could swear I read about it somewhere. The idea is that something that is not an error seems like an error (i.e., mimics it), creating ambiguity; and, more specifically, now that we have Photoshop, there are cases arising in which things look just like they've been put together in Photoshop when in fact they haven't been.

Case in point is this recent Getty Images shot by Stuart Franklin (not the Magnum photographer) which was published on page 15 of the June 12th, 2008 Express, a free ancillary publication of the Washington Post (wrongly credited to the AP in the byline). Here's the whole item:

The picture looks so much like a bad Photoshop kludge that it was featured on the popular website "Photoshop Disasters." However, it's not a botched Photoshop collage at all—it's a perfectly straight photograph, if perhaps ill chosen and awkwardly cropped. Take a look at the whole frame (from the Getty Images website):

Including the men's feet makes their relative positions more clear. Here's another frame near the one above from the Getty Images catalog:

In the original Express presentation it amounts to a fascinating optical illusion. First of all there's the accident that Phil Mickelson (the golfer on the left) appears to be looking up at the head of Tiger Woods' club. But the real illusion is that the hard in-focus edge of the right side of Tiger's torso (viewer's left) appears to be the top edge of the shirt sleeve on Mickelson's upper left arm (viewer's right). This makes it look like Mickelson's arm is in front of Tiger's body, a clear impossibility. In the original image, put your finger over the offending edge and see if the picture doesn't resolve itself more sensibly. 

You might call this "edge swapping," where the edge of one thing looks like the edge of another. It reminds me of the problem of "tonal mergers" in black-and-white photography. For anyone not aware of that phenomenon, a tonal merger is when two objects or areas in a scene have the same tone of gray (even if they're different colors in real life) such that the form of one or the other is difficult to discern in the B&W picture.

The picture was hotly debated on the Photoshop Disasters site, with some readers insisting that it had to be (that is, it is "obviously") a Photoshop job. They're wrong, if understandably so. For us, it's good to be reminded from time to time that photographs are not always easy to read (despite the fact that most pictures we see are chosen in part because they are easy to read). As photographers, we now need to be on the lookout for aspects of our pictures that might look as if they were done in Photoshop when they actually weren't. Like other forms of error mimicking (a term I appear to have coined—sorry again!), "apparent Photoshop" is in essence a type of ambiguity—one of many—and photographers and editors alike need to be aware that it can happen.

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Mike  (Thanks to Chris Combs, a picture editor at the Express)

Big Photobook News! Big, I Tell Ya!

This week's "Recommended by M.J." (right sidebar) is an "opportunity window" in the photobook collecting field...a very hot title that had apparently come and gone, but has been (temporarily, we assume) revived in a second edition identical to the first. You can see a bit of the work here. The price of this will go nowhere but up just as soon as this goes out of print again, which it will probably do soon, so if you have any interest you should absolutely strike whilst the proverbial iron is hot.

Also new to maison TOP is a very interesting-looking new National Geographic title by the renowned Sam Abell, whom we last encountered when his work was appropriated by artist (and cheeky fellow) Richard Prince. Called The Life of a Photograph, the new book appears to be an extensive portfolio tour with some working variations and a discursive running commentary, beautifully presented—I'll be delving into this one seriously this week and reporting more about it when things around here let up a tad.

Finally, there's some new, different, significant, and I think very exciting news in the photobook arena that has just been announced. I've known about it for months—or at least have been hearing about it, without particulars—and have just been waiting until I could tell you about it. I'm preparing a big post about it now that I hope to have up by tomorrow evening or sooner. Well, maybe Friday. It's genuinely big news if you care about photobooks. So stay tuned for that.

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Mike

Canon Hits 'Refresh' on Two of its Most Important Cameras

In our little nook of the photography world, it's amazing how central, and how important, the Canon 5D has been over the course of its relatively long life. Virtually everywhere you look you can find good and great photographers using the 5D, and the percentage of the best work that it has been responsible for far outstrips its market share. For a long time it was the only opportunity in its category, and its image quality really has been, and remains, a cut above. Only recently have competitors managed to edge past it, sidewise.

For that reason if nothing else, Canon's pre-Photokina announcement of the Canon 5D Mark II is significant. But there is something else, of course. There's a lot else. For one thing, Canon says the "EOS 5D Mark II achieves the highest level of image quality of any EOS Digital SLR released to date." No mean statement from a company whose bread, butter and beer is the vaunted image quality of its cameras. It has an all-new full-frame (i.e., 35mm-size) 21.1-MP CMOS sensor and Digic-4 processing engine, for ISO speeds up to three stops faster than the 5D and what Canon promises is "significantly lower noise." There are three RAW modes offering different pixel counts and file sizes. There's live view and, within live view, a special super-silent shooting mode that apparently (apropos our discussion of shutters recently in the monolight thread) doesn't use the camera's shutter (I'm not sure about that, so don't quote me). There's also a high-DR mode and automatic falloff correction (I assume with JPEG only?), and the finder features 98% coverage. Size and weight are unchanged.

"Answering the question of where SLR technology is going next," as Canon puts it, the 5D Mark II will shoot HD video up to 4GB or 30 minutes, "whichever comes first." The class of professional being tarketed is apparently wedding shooters, although of course we're more interested in it as a camera for art photographers, landscape and nature shooters, and (very) advanced amateurs.

A fetching honey acting fetching in a video sample

And it's a lean, clean, highly refined machine. Looks to us like a no-nonsense shooter's tool of the highest order, with image quality (IQ) as the top priority...and, um, video.

The Canon 5D Mark II will ship at the end of November. It's keenly priced, too, at $2,700 for the body and only $3,500 in a kit version with the EF 24–105mm ƒ/4L IS USM zoom lens, which amounts to about $250 or so off the current street price for the lens alone. Consider that Canon's first "affordable" DSLR, the landmark, 3.1-MP D30, which came out almost exactly eight years ago and is just about the same size and weight, actually cost just about the same only a few months after its introduction (its initial list price was $3,000). Canon's come a long way, baby—and ain't we lucky.

Canon USA 5D Mark II Press Release

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Also widely anticipated (because of the widespread disappearance of the G9 from dealers' shelves and online sellers' catalogs), Canon has introduced the G10 premium compact digicam. With 14.7 (!) megapixels, a wider lens, a huge (3") viewing screen, RAW capability, flash, an improved optical finder, ISO speeds on a handy dial, exposure compensation on another dial, and a 5X zoom that extends to 140mm-e, this seems to be the Canon engineers' very robust attempt to give the market every last little thing it wants.   

Although it will sell like hotcakes, we have to admit we're not quite so sanguine about this one, especially with the Panasonic G1 looming on the horizon and looking rather menacing. Canon seems to have taken the original Gx concept about as far as it can go—or possibly just a little further. If the 5D Mark II puts IQ über alles, the G10 crams every imaginable feature around an overstuffed, overly small sensor that still has inherent limitations despite its admittedly high degree of technical refinement and optimization. The camera sure does tick off all the boxes in terms of features, though. It has so many modes (26!) and capabilities that it really requires quite a sophisticated photographer even to understand it all (leading to an idle and somewhat snarky question—wonder how many G10 buyers will actually master this camera in all its subtle capabilities? And how many buyers will use it through an entire ownership period without ever really knowing everything it can do, and how to do it?). But we'd best shut up and wait to see and try it before damning with faint-ish praise.

The G10 will be available in October and will cost $500.

Canon USA G10 Press Release

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Mike  (Thanks to Jason at canonblogger.com)

Featured Comment by Bahi: "When Canon says that a new camera offers 'the best image quality and lowest noise of any EOS model to date,' there should be little doubt that we're going to see some astounding results from this camera in the hands of talented photographers using natural light. As you mention, the 5D really punched above its weight and was used by photographers who often owned 1DS MkII's but chose the cheaper, more luggable 5D to get low-light shots that were rendered beautifully.

"It's not just an issue of low noise—there was something very convincing about the tonal detail in work shot with the 5D, which I also see three years later in D3 and D700 files—a much more pleasing look than was typical for digital cameras of its class. Remarkably, the effect is very clear even when these pictures are displayed at the one-megapixel resolutions we typically see on a screen. So much of the writing about current SLRs and their lenses concentrates on sharpness and acuity but richness of tone really distinguishes the best cameras."

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "If anyone is interested, here are some sample photos taken with the Canon G10. As you might expect, they all look great. Canon is bright enough not to post examples of the G10 at its worst. I feel obliged to point out, however, that all of the samples are at ISO 80, and that upon close inspection, many have blown highlights. (They're small, but they're there nonetheless.) Tiny sensors struggle with high dynamic range scenes, and the G10 is no different.

"I also managed to locate a sample from the EOS 5dMkII at ISO 6400. It's noisy, but quite sharp. If a G10 photo at ISO 200 looked this good you'd be delighted.

"Complain all you want about these cameras' features or lack of them, but when it comes to fundamental image quality, Canon still delivers the goods."

Forgotten Camera: John Edward Bain

Today's "Forgotten Camera" is a salute to Nikon film cameras by John Edward Bain. Also posted, a Personal Favorite by Dennis Noble.

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Mike

Photoborg from the Ashes

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This morning I think I've revived and resuscitated Photoborg.org, which got started early this year and limped along for a bit before spluttering out and getting put on indefinite hold. I think I just didn't have a very good idea of what it should be. And I don't know if I do now, either, but I guess we'll see.

It started off as an attempt to be a commercial site, but I guess I'm just not a very commercially-minded guy. What can I say? It's a curse.

To see what I'm up to now, try clicking on the "About Photoborg" and "Submit a Picture" tabs. I'd be interested to know what you think.

For starters, I'm going to migrate the Forgotten Camera series over to Photoborg.org, although I'll post reminders here when new ones go up. The first one—the first one over there, I mean—is by Hoainam Tran. Or, more precisely, it's of Hoainam. Well, you can see for yourself.

The good thing about this is that "Forgotten Camera" is now an ongoing series, with no deadline. So if you missed your chance before but still would like to participate, now you can. 

I've also posted a picture by Chris Gage, with his nice, evocative description of his dad that makes me smile every time I read it.

Finally, can anyone help me with something? I'd like to add a bit of code at the bottom of each post allowing people to share it with friends if they want to, but I find I don't know how to write the code. Anyone willing to show me how to craft a few short, sweet lines of HTML?

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Mike

Blog Notes

We set a week-long attendance record last week, with an average of 22,453 visitors per day on the main blog page from Monday through Sunday. Thanks everyone!

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Mike