The Online Photographer

Panasonic G1 in the House

Photo: Zander Johnston; Assistant: Matt Leeman

Just arrived Chez T.O.P.—here's the Panasonic G1 and G Vario 14–45mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 lens on the kitchen table*. Everyone I've shown this thing to so far has liked it. It has the most delicious shutter release noise...I don't think I'd mind if Peter King made all cell phones sound like this thing. And I actually rather like the EVF, as long as there's enough light.

(When I showed the G1 to my friend Nick, his face lit up and he said, "Where's its Mommy?")

Size comparison with a very spruce FT3. (Click to see larger.) The two outfits as you see them here tilt the scale at 618g and 990g respectively.

Also just in, direct from the Land of the Rising Sun, some true exotica...but I'll show you that tomorrow.

Mike

*Lest you think I'm getting fancy here, the sweep is not real background paper...it's three pieces of posterboard from the school supplies section of Office Depot, taped together. The top of the kitchen table is just too grungy even for me.

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ADDENDUM: Here's a somewhat more germane size comparison, with my old trusty Konica-Minolta 7D with its 28–75mm (42–112mm-e) lens. Note that the K-M lens is much faster, at a constant ƒ/2.8.

Nikon Price Bump?

I'm just passing this along—I know nothing. Rumor has it that Nikon has a price increase going into effect tomorrow. Or could it be just the end of the current series of rebates? I don't know. Yes, I know this could be viewed as being self-serving. I'm just sayin'.

Mike

Featured Comment by Thom Hogan:

The instant rebates officially expired today, so the D700 goes back to US$2999 MAP instead of the US$2699 that was being advertised. There were smaller instant rebates on consumer SLRs and Coolpix models that are also expired now. As of Feb 1, Nikon has no plan in place for any incentives for the month (and it usually takes a month advance notice for these to trickle into the system, so I'd say it's safe that there will be no rebates for the next few weeks).

Meanwhile, the new lens policies have gone into place. ALL lenses now have MAPs (minimum advertised prices). Most non-consumer kit lenses have had their prices raised, and from old street to new MAP that number can be as much as 20%.

Bottom line in the US:

DSLRS: no price increase, but instant rebates cancelled.

LENSES: price increases on all but kit lenses, ranging from a few percent to nearly 20%.

KIT LENSES: no price increases.

It'll be interesting to see how long this holds. NikonUSA seems to think that it'll hold through spring. Nikon is in danger of having a very bad 4th quarter without some return to discounts, but they had a pretty decent 3rd quarter (Oct-Dec) so perhaps they're not particularly worried about year numbers now.

However, I don't think the prices will hold. I'll predict that we'll see a return of discounts come April or May.

ADDENDUM by Thom, Feb. 02, 2009:

And no sooner do I write something...

On Sunday afternoon, Nikon sent word to dealers that the existing rebates on the D40, D60, D300, and D700 would be officially extended through March 28th.

Behind the Scenes

Jerry Spagnoli sent Robin Dreyer a dageurreotype he made at the inauguration, so Robin's wife Tammy went into David Bergman's Gigapan image and was able to locate Jerry in the crowd. He's behind his Deardorff 8x10, so Robin sent Jerry a screen shot to confirm. Jerry said it was him all right—right there next to Annie Leibovitz. Robin thinks it might mark the first time an 8-10 'Dorff has appeared in a Gigapan image.

You can see Jerry's shot here.

In a semi-related item, our friend Stephen Crowley posted a short video called "The White House Spray" at the Times. The video is crude, but gives you a very accurate impression of what a 30-second White House photo op is like for the photographers! Susana Raab, who sent me the link, says, "I love the part where the female photog says, 'I thought we were walking' as the herd storms ahead." Very enlightening.

Mike
(Thanks to Robin Dreyer and Susana Raab)

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Featured Comment by Charles Mason: "This is like a Where's Waldo. I found David Burnett with his Speed Graphic, too. Cool experience dragging around this image and seeing a million moments that all occurred at once."

Office Redesign at TOP Proves Controversial

Waukesha, WI — Despite periodic appeals to his public for funds, it has been revealed that Mike Johnston, Head Factotum and Chief Bottle-Washer of The Online Photographer, has recently spent profligately on office decor.

Among the alleged "necessities" for the office were a fine mustard-yellow injection-molded wastebasket by French designer Robert Maid, a spendy throw rug from Home Depot, a pair of antique Dynaco A-25 speakers from the 1970s that cost more than one hundred dollars—even though ones with chipped veneer often go for half that—and even a custom-made work of art.

"The old office just wasn't a fit for the style of the building. I'm sorry if it offends some peoples' sense of propriety, but I have to pay myself bonuses in order to keep getting good work out of myself," said Johnston, adding that he is "good people."

The redecorating is said to have run into the three figures, if you count the speakers. The useless expenditures have earned the online mogul a chorus of criticism.

"He's always going on at the end of every month about how we should make our Amazon purchases through his links, so he can get his precious kickbacks," said a reader who preferred to remain anonymous. "We thought he was spending that money to keep food on his table and his kid in high tops, and then he goes and spends twenty-one dollars on a poster? It's shameful."

The poster, an artistic representation of an unidentified guru giving some sort of enigmatic command [see below], actually cost $13.95 plus $6.99 shipping. Mr. Johnston was pleased at its high quality, calling it "worth the price."

Art experts said it is probably not a sound investment, despite its styliness.

Said another reader, "If they're not ethically questionable, expenditures like this are at least tone-deaf, in this economy."

Controversial artwork for which TOP head honcho is said to have paid 'well into two figures.'

In his defense, Johnston pointed out that other CEOs have recently purchased non-working commodes, and points out that the residential section of his office compound already had one of those. Maybe he'll think twice now about calling the plumber, for fear of appearing out of step with the times.

Or maybe not.

No reporters whatsoever contributed to this story.

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What I Learned While Printing

By Ctein

"Oh joy—another educational experience!"

That's a phrase I learned in college. It should not be said with a cheery demeanor.

My Long March is over. All 730 prints sold in my dye transfer print offer have been printed and all 450 orders shipped. If you haven't gotten your print order within the next 7–10 days, drop me an e-mail.

It was a learning experience:

• You can have too much of a good thing. I always thought that promoters who vowed "no more than X copies will be sold!" were just engaging in marketing hype and that putting a limit on my sales would be an act of hubris. Seems not. I'm never going to get myself in a jam like this again!

• Matrices wear out. For most photographic printing, the point at which you wear out a negative or slide is far, far beyond normal printing limits. Not so with dye transfer. After 100–150 prints, the characteristics of the matrix have changed enough that I can't pull an acceptable print. I went through 2–3 sets of matrices for each photograph in this run. Another argument for limited sales.

• The gods want me to keep making dye transfer prints. It's no secret that I've been a lot more interested in digital printing than dye transfer of late, although dye transfer still pays a lot more of the bills. Making 730 prints was going to use up about two thirds of my remaining paper, but I saw that as an opportunity. I could look forward to the day a year or so from now when I'd have no choice but to move on.

Within a week, I got contacted by two people offering me dye transfer paper that they'd had squirreled away. They'd never even heard about the print offer; it was pure coincidence. End result? Instead of having only one third the amount of paper I did when I started, I actually have more paper now than I did in September!

I know when I'm being handed a cosmic message, and I know not to argue with 500 pound metaphysical gorillas. I'm going to keep doing dye transfer printing for the foreseeable future, artistic druthers notwithstanding.

I'll also be doing another print offering in the fall. Next time, though, it'll be limited to no more than 100 of each photograph and prices will be at least 50% higher, to throttle back demand.

• Kodak made really crappy paper! I didn't realize how bad, though, until I started printing the same photograph hundreds of times. The variation in paper quality could be huge, even within one box of paper. I had to do lots of hand-weeding of defective sheets. Inevitably, some defective sheets slipped through screening; I couldn't avoid making some modestly-flawed prints. I've given some such prints to friends (like Mike) as gifts, but I've still got around eight pairs of prints that are slightly defective. Color and tone are perfect but they have minor surface defects that probably wouldn't be visible if they were mounted, matted, and framed.

Here's the deal. Email me if you want to buy one of these sets for the original sale price of $180. First come, first served, U.S. customers only. If you get the prints and they looked too flawed to you, you can return them. Return postage will be at your expense ($4.95, Priority Mail) and I'm going to deduct my shipping and handling costs ($10) from your refund. I figure that this will be enough to discourage looky-loos. And, to answer three inevitable questions, I will not drop the price further (I'd rather keep them as gifts for friends), I will not break up the sets, and I will not ship these outside the U.S.

• Now I know how to do mail order. My businesses is sufficiently bespoke that I previously did not obsess over the cost and time of shipping photographs. I averaged less than one package a week, and a typical job ran several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Faced with 450 orders, I had to get really good at this. I can now package and ship prints for a fraction of the effort and money. This lets me think about some new approaches to selling my art to my audience, and selling less expensive prints than ever before. Stay tuned; I'll be floating an idea or two for your consideration in the near future.

I'm done. I need a rest. I am going to take a rest. And tomorrow morning, for the first time in almost three months, I will be able to sit back and enjoy a leisurely cup of tea without thinking about how many minutes I can afford to take before I have to go set up the darkroom trays and start printing. Ahh, luxury!

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Thank you for the information. As the dye-transfer matrices are simply hardened gelatin, I had wondered if they would deteriorate over time with repeated impressions; now I know! Personally I have never done any 'production' printing more challenging than a dozen 24x36" inket prints for an institutional order. The quality control issues even for such a small project were not trivial. Just thinking about making 730 perfect individual dye transfer prints makes me shudder, especially after seeing via the Luminous-landscape video how labor-intensive the process is. The two prints I received are flawless, and Ctein is correct: the depth and purity of color displayed by a dye transfer print really has to be seen to be appreciated.

"Bravo, and enjoy a well-deserved rest."

Still Available New?

Floating around aimlessly on Amazon yesterday looking at photobooks, I was surprised to find that Larry Burrows: Vietnam is still in print. I thought it became unavailable long ago. Larry Burrows—an Englishman—was, as you probably know, perhaps pre-eminent among the photographers who died covering the war in Viet Nam (pre-eminent as a photographer, I mean; they are all equals in their sacrifice).

Longtime readers will also remember that a photograph of Burrows' Leica by Ronen Zilberman is perhaps the most poignant picture ever made of a camera. (It's probably one of the cameras he's wearing below, in fact.)

The book I have is Larry Burrows: Compassionate Photographer, which really is long out of print. The picture below, reproduced alone on a page approximately the size you see it here, is the last picture in that one.

Larry Burrows, Feb. 7, 1971

Mike

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Featured Comment by David: "Mike, I have the book—Vietnam—I bought it new several years ago. It's a big book so it does the pictures justice. And I can remember as clear as day the feeling of almost disbelief when I first looked at the photographs—that someone could compose, expose and make photographs of that quality in those rapid-moving conditions. The book is in storage back in J., so I can't check it and I don't recall the name of the sequence that covered the death of the man in the helicopter gunship. [The man is Crew Chief James Farley—the story is called "Yankee Papa 13." —MJ] I mention that because I think a lot of people think of that sequence when they think of Larry Burrows' pictures. But in fact it is the colour photographs that grabbed me the most. They seemed to have been taken by someone who had all the time in the world to get all the elements right, and who had a master's eye for knowing what the scene would translate to in two dimensions. Quite apart from his skill as a photographer I have a soft spot for him—as I suspect many do. For what it is worth, he and Werner Bischof are the two photographers who have enriched my life with their photographs."

Featured Comment by Mike Hess: "When I started out assisting a wedding photographer, it was for the experience (i.e., no pay). However, he did give me a great Christmas gift which was this book. It was the first real photography book (other than how-to) that I ever owned. It contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful images. The romanticized ideal of the war photographer is probably Burrows' fault. If it wasn't for marriage and common sense, I honestly probably would have tried to become one."

Our Intrepid Leaders

In case you haven't been reminded yet today of the nascent idiocy always a-bubble just below the surface of Congress, consider that Rep. Peter King (M-NY*) has recently introduced a bill to mandate that silent cameraphones emit a "tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone." His objection seems to be that otherwise, people with cameraphones might make pictures without their subjects being aware of it.

That's right. He's proposing that the government decide how all cameraphones must sound when taking a picture.

Oh, good idea. I can hear heavy construction equipment backing up from a mile away, ostensibly so it won't run me over by mistake. That's just the sort of thinking we need applied to cameraphones. Let's have a nice annoying shriek every time someone snaps a picture—cellphones just aren't annoying enough yet. Where's the counterbalancing noise pollution legislation? Who's going to introduce that?

Rep. Peter King of New York finds that "children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms."

King's so-called "Camera Phone Predator Alert Act" (H.R. 414) takes at least two recent subjects of public hysteria to reductio ad absurdii—the demonization of any adult showing even benign interest in kids, and the general persecution of photographers that began after the death of Britain's Princess Diana and has gotten worse as a result of alleged but unproven links between camera usage and terrorism. Bah and humbug. Note to Rep. King: These are actually perilous times, with real problems to deal with. You actually have important work to do—so quit dicking around and get to it!!

What an idiot.

I'm sorry. You perceive that my journalistic objectivity has crumpled. But some things just rise above the normal run of stupid—and this is one more.

I found out about this on Ars Technica.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Kee)

*That stands for "Moron of New York."

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Featured Comment by Cyril: "In the same spirit, let's re-introduce several-second-delays between when the shutter is pressed and when the picture is taken, so that people can be alerted by the mandatory shutter noise and move away before the picture is taken. This of course is only valid for P&S. DSLRs are more conspicuous and their owner will have been arrested long before any picture is taken."

Sharpeners vs. Levelers

Robert Deutsch, writing in "As We See It" in the February 2009 issue of Stereophile (p. 3), says:

A psychological theory that I've always been fond of is the one that proposes the perceptual/personality dimension of Sharpening vs Leveling. As defined by the early Gestalt psychologists, Sharpening is an exaggeration of differences, Leveling a minimization of differences. In visual-perception research on this topic, when test subjects were presented with an asymmetrical figure, some later recalled it in ways that exaggerated the figure's asymmetry (Sharpeners), while others minimized or eliminated it (Levelers).

It seems fair to say that—like those who have a strong interest in wine, food, photography, etc.—audiophiles are devoted to exploring subtle differences; generally, we tend to be towards the Sharpening end of the continuum. But even among audiophiles, some will describe as "night and day" a sonic difference that to others sounds fairly minor: these are Sharpeners, whereas the wire-is-wire, bits-are-bits, all-amplifiers-sound-the-same folks are Levelers.

As you might expect, given that Stereophile is an audio magazine, Robert Deutsch goes on to explore the implications of this dichotomy for stereo enthusiasts in greater detail.

It's appropriate that he mentioned photography, I thought. Online (and it's important to remember that not all photographers or photography enthusiasts participate in the online world), we seem to have fallen into a habit of intense Sharpening: in the early days of digital, when pixels were few and noise ruled the day, the relative quality of digital "capture" was naturally a subject of great scrutiny. The internet has done nothing but intensify that tendency, sometimes to fanatical levels.

Lately, however, I've begun to feel a Leveling influence spreading over us like an oncoming change in the weather; more and more, all digital is not only looking really good, it's also starting to look really similar.

Michael Reichmann, who made his popular website's bones with very early and very timely comparisons between film and digital, recently published a brief article comparing the results from a digital pocket camera made under optimal conditions to those from a medium-format digital back, concluding that it was tough to tell them apart. I actually wrote a column in Black & White Photography magazine a few years ago saying much the same thing, although my points of comparison (an Olympus p/s compared to a 6-MP DSLR) were not quite so widely spaced. (I'd tell you what issue it was in, but I, uh, don't know. If you happen to remember or have the issue handy, let me know and I'll post the info.)

Discussing the "Sharpener vs. Leveler" idea privately, a friend said, "sometimes I'm a ferocious sharpener, sometimes I'm an indiscriminate leveler." Like him, I find myself going back and forth. I hope I do it appropriately, but of course that's a judgment call anyway. In the lens review a few posts ago, I definitely had my Sharpener hat on; at other times, I encourage people to relax about the technical minutiae and just look at the pictures—a Leveler tendency.

Interesting idea, I thought, and one that is certainly pertinent to many of our discussions in a number of different ways.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Gabriele Harhoff: "Mike, I believe you are referring to your article "The Light Choice" in Black & White Photography February 2005, where you compared the Olympus C-8080 to a Canon DLSR."

Mike replies: Thanks Gabriele!

Featured Comment by Al Benas: "I find that I turn into a leveler immediately after I make my sharpener-based camera purchase, and have no more financial resourses to change anything.  :)"

New Life in Old Glasses

Interest in using the Panasonic G1 with adapters to mount a variety of older lenses appears to be high. Stephen Gandy at Cameraquest quickly sold out his first batch of adapters, apparently just slightly in advance of their actual arrival; he has another batch coming on March 1st and has promised that a page on CameraQuest about them will go up tomorrow evening (I assume you will find it under Classic Camera Profiles —> Lens Adapters). Meanwhile you can get the Micro 4/3 to Leica M adapter from Japan Exposures. Remember these are not mass-market products, so the prices aren't low.

I'm pleased to say that a Panasonic G1 should be arriving at TOP in the next week, to be subjected to our typical putterings and natterings a.k.a. "review." (I also finally bought a new camera for myself, but I'm not going to tell you what it is until I've got some actual work done with it under my belt. That will probably be sometime during the Summer.)

These two nifty pictures come from a page on the Japanese site DC Watch. I can't read the page, but I think you'll agree the pictures are eloquent!

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko and Dirk)

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ADDENDUM: Coincidentally, DxOmark.com has just published its results on the G1 sensor.

Contax G Lenses in Leica M-Mount

Japan Exposures is offering pre-converted Contax G lenses adapted to Leica M mount.

The Contax G1 and G2 were premium AF viewfinder cameras with excellent Zeiss lenses. Unfortunately, they arrived on the scene just prior to the dawning of the digital age, which subsequently drove the company (Kyocera) from the field. What this has meant is that the fine Zeiss Contax G lenses have been effectively orphaned, and now sell cheaply because of their near-useless lensmount.

A few intrepid individuals have had their G lenses adapted for Leica M mount, and now Japan Exposures is offering pre-converted lenses for direct sale. They remove the optical cell from the G mount housing and add a rangefinder-coupled focusing helical and 39mm screwmount; then a simple LTM-to-M adapter makes the lenses usable on M-mount cameras. There are a few handling oddities, such as the fact that the apertures don't have click-stops.

Why pay a lot of money for this when there are perfectly good alternatives in native M-mount? Don't ask us. Maybe you have a particular fondness for one of the G lenses? Maybe you just want to be different? Idiosyncratic reasons aside, Leica shooters might be particularly interested in the rectilinear Zeiss Hologon, a modern iteration of a rare classic design that was one of the glories of the G system—and that functions as a true 21mm-equivalent on the M8. See the website for pictures, and prices.

Mike

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Zeiss ZF / ZK Distagon T* 28mm f/2 Review

The Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm ƒ/2 lens for Nikon F (ZF) or Pentax K mount (ZK) is one of the recent series of manual-focus SLR lenses designed by Carl Zeiss in Oberkochen and manufactured under Zeiss QC by Cosina in Japan. I recently took it for a brief spin in Pentax mount, on a K20D with a 1.2X viewfinder loupe (i.e., magnifying eyepiece).

Zeiss seems to prefer older-style lens designs—witness the resurgence of rangefinder Biogons—and this Distagon is in some ways a quintessential old-fashioned Zeiss. It shows evidence of many of the typical flaws of traditional spherical wide angles: there is noticeable linear distortion (barrel type); the corners are worse than the center at wider apertures, and would doubtless be worse still on 24x36mm cameras; optimal correction has obviously been chosen for a focus distance closer than infinity, because infinity resolution is not terribly good; and performance at the widest apertures is noticeably worse than at the center apertures (ƒ/5.6–11). Yet large-structure contrast is outstandingly good and color transmission is superior, making for pictures that are viscerally satisfying in ways that lesser lenses can't match.

Flare seems decently if not outstandingly well controlled, and out-of-depth-of-field blur (bokeh) is also better than average without being class-leading, meaning it shouldn't bother most photographers except in extreme cases. I could not induce purple fringing. That doesn't mean you never will, but at least it seems well controlled.

Unfortunately the lens's worst flaw also happens to be the quality that I'm most allergic to these days (golden-eyes syndrome...sigh): surprisingly pronounced curvature of field. Its other flaws are mild in comparison. Most photographers don't even know how to see curvature of field in pictures, so it might not bother many buyers. But it's an Achilles' heel for the Distagon 28mm, and if you know how to see this property and you don't like it, expect it to ruin the occasional unlucky shot for you when it shows up.

Handling is fine, although I found the lens somewhat difficult to focus at times. The all-metal build quality is excellent, much better than most lenses these days.

Applications: This won't be the best choice for the landscape photographer, and as an all-around snapshooting lens it will be better suited to someone who uses it a lot and bothers to get to know it well, because performance is variable across the frame, up and down the aperture range, and to a slight extent depending on focus distance. It doesn't match today's super lenses for consistency in all conditions. Rather, this lens will reward the careful user who learns how to get the most out of it and takes care to use it in sympathetic conditions. The widest apertures especially will come with pictorial effects that will need to be understood in order to be applied with intelligence.

Recommended? No. This lens is in no way, shape or form a "dog"; in fact it's quite an excellent lens, of which owners could rightly be proud. Most of the flaws I've mentioned are present in most wide-angles to some degree. However, of the thirty or so major constraints that face the lens designer, size and selling price are #1 and #2—although I wouldn't want to have to pick which is which—and both of these parameters are significantly relaxed with this lens, which is both large and expensive. I would simply expect a modern 10-element interchangeable SLR lens this big (93mm long), heavy (520g), and costly (US$1,033 at B&H Photo as I write this) to be better corrected technically—more like its stablemate, the Distagon 35mm ƒ/2. I would expect it to be more, well, modern.

Still, there are significant consolations, because it also shows the traditional Zeiss virtues in spades: at middle apertures and middling focusing distances (i.e., not stressed), it is very sharp over the greater part of its field, with superb macrocontrast and rich, deep, subtly variegated color that can be beautiful and pleasing. The best results from this lens will surpass the best you can get out of many lesser lenses in richness, vividness, and a subjective sense of clarity. And this doesn't require pixel-peeping or golden eyes to see: non-photographers could notice it, and it should be readily evident to you.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Carsten Bockermann: "Yes, the curvature of field is quite pronounced as can be seen in the example below (Nikon D700, ƒ/2). Looking at the ornaments on the wall in the lower third of the picture you will see that they are much sharper towards the lower left corner than in the center, although the distance is just the same. Apart from that I find the ZF 28/2 an excellent performer. The Nikkor AI 28/2 is also a joy to use. It has somewhat more even illumination across the field but less contrast, which is most evident around bright light sources in the photos."

1/28/09 Carsten adds: Sean Reid of Reid Reviews just published his review of the ZF 28/2.

Maximum Photoshop Performance

By Ctein

My previous column "Speeding Up Photoshop" described how I cut my times for memory-intensive Photoshop operations, like panorama building, by 25–30%. The key was putting the fastest hard drive I could find (the Hitachi 320 GB 7200 RPM drive) in my Macbook Pro and using the very fast Other World Computing (OWC) Mercury Elite-AL Pro 750 GB eSATA drive for scratch.

Recently, OWC released a 4 GB memory module that let me kick my RAM up to 6 GB. The memory module is state-of-the-art and so costs $200. It's worth it!

Coincidently, our friend Lloyd Chambers launched a new website loaded with useful tips for improving Photoshop performance. Our results were largely consistent, although he is running Photoshop CS4 under Mac OSX 10.5 and I'm still running Photoshop CS3 under MacOS X 10.4. Whatever you're running, you should benefit from upgrades like these.

Photoshop CS3 (Win/Mac) and CS4 (Mac) can use three quarters of a gigabyte of RAM between 3 GB and 4 GB as additional working space for plug-ins and any free RAM above 3 GB as scratch space in preference to the scratch hard drive. Lloyd's "Medium" benchmark generates a 16 GB scratch file and my panorama test generates a 23 GB file. An extra 2 GB of RAM doesn't seem like much compared to that, but as we will see, 2 GB makes a huge difference.

Maximum performance requires three Adobe Photoshop plug-ins: "DisableScratchCompress," "Bigger Tiles," and "ForceVMBuffering." DisableScratchCompress may not make much of a difference if you have a fast hard drive, but it won't hurt. Bigger Tiles instructs Photoshop to process data in larger chunks. On my system, Lloyd's medium benchmark clocked in with an abysmal 900 seconds without that plug-in. Adding a plug-in cut the time to a little over 400 seconds, putting it in the middle of Lloyd's test group.

I shouldn't have needed ForceVMBuffering, according to the technical notes. Photoshop CS3 and MacOS 10.4.11 should be using the RAM as scratch space when it's available. My initial test results, though, showed no performance gains with 6 GB of RAM. Lloyd suggested this plug-in might solve the problem, and it did. I recommend installing it unless you're positive that Photoshop is making use of all your RAM. The only disadvantage of running it is that other applications will become sluggish, because the OS will have to swap code blocks when other apps need memory space.

Even with 4 GB of RAM, ForceVMBuffering made a difference: Lloyd's benchmark time dropped to 275 seconds. With 6 GB of RAM, it was an astonishing 220 seconds. That's better than any configuration that Lloyd tested, and almost twice as fast as the no-VM-buffering time.

Panoramas like these eat up a lot of time. They are not only computationally intensive, but Photoshop generates a scratch file approximately equal to the final size of the panorama multiplied by the number of photographs you're merging.

How could my system, with a slightly slower computer, slightly less efficient OS and application, and a much slower scratch drive perform better than Lloyd's? Part of the answer lies in the effect of RAM buffering. Without it, Photoshop was doing a high level of scratch drive reads and writes. With it, Photoshop still wrote a 16 GB scratch file, but reads dropped to zero. All the data that Photoshop actually needed to run Lloyd's benchmark was being held in RAM! That's why performance jumped so amazingly; it made scratch drive performance much less important.

The unanswerable part has to do with the fact that data flow in computers is not simply the sum of the components. It is a complex choreograph of competing data resources and demands, and much of it is beyond your obvious control. Apparently my laptop's configuration is very well balanced. Lucky me! Your mileage may differ, mine certainly will on my next machine.

Things as simple as rearranging partitions and workspaces on multi-drive systems can make a profound difference. I tripled DVD burner speeds on my four-drive Windows box merely by optimizing which drives held the system, system cache, applications, data files, and application scratch space.

How did panoramas fare? On the 4 GB system, without RAM buffering, my test took 550 seconds to run, and disk reads were persistent and intensive. Installing ForceVMBuffering dropped the time to 510 seconds. 6 GB of RAM got me a 430-second time. That's a reduction in time of 20%, on top of the improvements my previous upgrades gave me.

Scratch reads dropped to a moderate level. With more RAM to buffer the data, they would have probably dropped to essentially zero, as with Lloyd's benchmark. That might yield as much as another 20% improvement. Lloyd notes that it appears that Photoshop can make use of RAM above 8 GB for buffering, at least with CS4 and Mac OSX 10.5.

My system upgrades, collectively costing approximately $500, have roughly doubled my speed on the most time-intensive Photoshop operations. My machine outruns any stock Macbook Pro, no matter how expensive or recent.

Ctein

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Gigapixel Tokyo

The digital image above doesn't seem particularly impressive...

...Until you consider that it's a detail from the tennis court in the middle of this shot of Tokyo city!

It's been a while since we checked in with Julian Kalmar's Photoart-Kalmar, where he has this cool new 6.2-gigapixel ultra-panorama stitched and focus-blended from 602 raw images. Spend some time with the Zoomify feature (but not too much time—you could spend hours looking at just this one picture).

Talk about pixel-peeping!

Mike
(Thanks to Nicolas Von Staden)

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Featured Comment by Justin Ribeiro: "In the vein of gigapixel panoramas, David Bergman made a 1.4 gigapixel image at the inauguration using a Canon G10 and a Gigapan Imager. I'm always amazed at the software that makes such images possible with digital. I often wonder, is any one out there using the same software but say applying to scanned large format negatives?"

Recent Reid Reviews

Our friend Sean Reid at Reid Reviews has just added three more lens tests to his ongoing series—this time focusing on three "one-off" 50mm lenses for rangefinders: the Leica Summarit, Cosina/Voigtländer Color-Skopar and C/V Heliar Classic collapsible.

Just as a curmudgeonly aside, who would buy a 50mm Summarit over a Zeiss Planar? Note those prices. I can see preferring one marque over another; I can see paying more for better; I can see settling for not quite as good if it's cheaper; and I can see preferring a new lens in a market awash with great used ones. Planar vs. Summicron might be a legitimate debate, although, having used both extensively, that too is a no-brainer in my view. Albeit less of one. But a Planar is faster, considerably cheaper, and optically better than a Summarit. I can't see a single comparative advantage to the slower lens—it's not even lighter. Faced with that choice, who considers a Summarit? Is there a thriving anti-Oriental xenophobe niche market that I don't know about?

All right then, grump mode off.

Sean also recently published Part I of his Panasonic G1 review, as well as an epic comparison of fast 50s for Nikon F mount cameras. (Reid Reviews is a pay site.)

Mike

P.S. Although, if you have a Summarit 50, I'm sure you had a very good reason for getting it....

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Featured Comment by Sean Reid: "The 50 Summarit performs quite well in most aspects. I think Mike's point is that the Zeiss outperforms the Summarit in some technical respects while costing less. But I personally would never think of the Summarit 50 as a dog. Rather, there are a lot of excellent 50 mm RF lenses out there and so competition is pretty fierce. Another standout bargain in 50 mm RF lenses is a good copy of the CV 50/1.5 Nokton."

Mike adds: No, not a dog—it seems like a fine little lens. It's just pretty far down on the value-for-money scale is all, and doesn't compete well in its class, which makes it an also-ran. By the way, I don't know if this is true or false, but the rumor I heard years ago was that Leica was considering redesigning the 50mm Summicron to bring it up to date, but decided that the selling price would be just too high at the time for a lens of the Summicron's specification; so they opted to make a no-holds-barred, price-no-object 50mm Summilux-M instead, which they did. The price on that one is high too, but not too high for its specification for people who want the best. Seemed like the right choice.

Sean: I agree that the Summarits are excellent lenses, on the whole. Some may also like the fact that they're slightly lower contrast than some of the Zeiss and (faster) Leica lenses. Horses for courses really. The small number of us still using RF cameras are spoiled for good choices when it comes to many focal lengths.

Mike: That's true. Have you used the Zeiss Biogon 28mm ZM lens much? I know you reviewed it some time ago. I wasn't thoroughly impressed with the SLR 28/2, but that little ZM lens is awesome—it really has that ineffable je ne sais quois, as my friend Gordon would say, with B&W film at least.

Sean: Yes, I certainly have used the ZM 28 (on the R-D1 and M8) and it is indeed excellent. The current 28 Summicron is exceptional as well and so is the little CV 28/3.5 Skopar. Cheers.

He Shoots, He Scores!

Smile? Even before President Obama signed his first executive orders, a pen was immortalized. Photo by Doug Mills/NYT.

One thing nobody really tells you is that when you're in the Washington Press Corps (an unofficial name loosely applied to all the journalists and photojournalists stationed in Washington, D.C. by news organizations from around the country and around the globe—and there are thousands upon thousands of 'em), mainly you just don't have a lot to do. Tuesday was a big exception, of course. But for the most part you're taking pictures of fundamentally boring stuff, and you're usually competing in red-tooth fashion with far too many other guys to do it. You're herded around, confined to the ropes, challenged for credentials and passes, and struggling, usually in vain, to somehow distinguish your shots of the boring photo-op from nineteen other guys' shots of the boring photo-op. Not to say there isn't good work done in D.C., or that there aren't lots of good photographers there. But that's the life, for the most part. Except on the good days.

Or when you get lucky. It's kind of unfair that Salgado doesn't even hang out in Washington most of the time, and yet he was right there when Reagan got shot by John Hinckley. Although I'm not sure "lucky" is the nicest term for such an undesirable event.

Anyway, readers of the Times dead-trees edition awoke this morning to see this rare meta-photo of photo-dawgs clustered around...well, the pen Obama used to sign his first executive order. There's always that line in there somewhere...the boundary at which the significant and the historical somehow crosses over into the trivial and the contrived. You never really know where that line is, and yours is not to question why....

It's not the photographers' fault. They tell you to get a picture of the pen, what are you going to do? You get a picture of the pen.

"However long we are keepers of the public trust, we should never forget that we are here as public servants," Mr. Obama said. Photo by Doug Mills/NYT.

Of course, sometimes, what happens is that you go to take a picture of a stupid pen and you end up finding something all on your own that lands at the top of Page One, splashed across three columns. He shoots, he scores! And incidentally, I'm normally one of those never-crop guys, but I have to admit that the top picture is a lot stronger the way the editors ran it.

Kudos to Doug Mills.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Greenwood)

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Featured Comment by Bruce Robbins: "I could well be wrong here and I haven't read the story but I think, rather than being told to get a pic of the pen, one photographer has just thought it looked like a good shot and the rest have dived in to cover themselves. That's the way the press pack usually works...."

Mike replies: Could be, Bruce, could be. I don't really know either....

No Comment

Make your own at Obamicon.me.

Mike
(Thanks to Jake)

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Featured Comment by Ctein: "Too much fun. I really need to get some work done.

"See my other results here."

The Actual 'Hope' Poster Photographer

Following up on the "HOPE" poster mystery, Tom Gralish has uncovered the original photograph and the photographer—it's Mannie Garcia, a Washington D.C. freelancer who was working as a stringer for the Associated Press. (A variant from the same shoot, above.) The picture was taken in April of 2006 at a function at the National Press Club where actor George Clooney was attempting to draw attention to the situation in Darfur.

Tom's following through with Mannie, which I'll be watching for on Tom's blog.

Mike
(Thanks to Carrie)

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The College Years

Many of us have been on one side or the other of this exchange: back in 1980, fellow Occidental College student Lisa Jack asked her classmate Barry Obama to pose for a roll of pictures for her portfolio. She went searching for the old negatives when he became a candidate for president, but she put them in a safety deposit box until after the election so they couldn't be used for political purposes. TIME magazine has a slideshow.

Keep those old negatives!

Inauguration Satellite Image
And here's another really wonderful photograph—a picture of the capital Mall from space, taken just before the Inauguration yesterday, that you can scroll around in and zoom in on. Fun, although the clots of crowds look vaguely like patches of microbial growth.

Mike
(Thanks to Joe Cameron and Randall Teasley)

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James Danziger Finds the Source of 'HOPE'*

Last week, James Danziger writes, he solved the biggest photographic mystery of the 2008 election: he found the photographer who took the photo that was the source for Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama HOPE prints.

His search began last fall, when he recognized that Fairey’s prints were becoming the definitive visual of the campaign, and he began asking everyone from Amanda Fairey, the artist’s wife, to Holly Hughes, the editor of Photo District News, if they knew who took the original photo. No one could seem to pin it down. Shepard Fairey was on record as saying it came from a Google Image search, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) track it back to the source....

READ ON at The Daily Beast

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Commentary: The reader who sent this item to me says, "I am a graphic designer and a photographer but I would never, ever! use a photograph I found on Google Images for a design without finding, asking and crediting the photographer." Danziger notes late in his article that the Fairey rendering is technically a "derivative work" and Fairey's use of the photo therefore falls under Fair Use, but how would you feel if you were the photographer, Jim Young? And does it make any difference that Shepard Fairey appears to have donated the work to the world without asking for or receiving any compensation for it?

Mike
(Thanks to els)

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*Or did he...? See below:

Featured Comment by Other MJ: "HA! Their scoop is totally wrong. Here is the source image:"

(Here's the Hope poster for comparison purposes:

I have to say I think Other MJ and the other commenters who linked to the same image have it right and James Danziger has it wrong...what do you think? If so, then the search would be for the photographer who took the picture used at the intrepidliberaljournal.blogspot.com site. I checked with them, and they know nothing about the photograph—they just found it using a Google image search. —Mike)

Big Prints and Viewing Distance

Remember "The Gadget Show" test that compared 17-meter-high prints hung on the side of a building? I've written a little more about viewing distance this month in my Photo.net column.

By the bye, if there are any British readers of Black & White Photography magazine reading this, I'm sorry to say that my column in the Christmas 2008 issue will be my last one for that magazine. I haven't counted exactly, but I believe I wrote more than 70 columns for them!

Mike

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