The Online Photographer

The E-P1: Not Exactly What You Want?

Olympus E-P1 and 17mm (34mm-e) ƒ/2.8 lens

By Vlatko Juric-Kokic

Let me immediately join Eamon's camp: I'm also someone who wants a small and serious camera. I've been rooting for a more advanced E-4xx ever since the E-400 appeared. I talked to various Olympus people about it, but...no. Having seen the development of the series and now the E-P1, I can understand Olympus's reasoning and why there isn't a real digital OM. Nevertheless, a man can dream.

Olympus apparently gives a lot of importance to the E-P1. They brought journalists from all over Europe (and one from South Africa) to the launch in Berlin. Masaharu Okubo, the president of Olympus Imaging, came to deliver the introductory speech at the launch. The atmosphere was one of eager expectation. Unlike some launches I've seen, everybody rushed to see the camera when it was officially unveiled and you couldn't approach the display case for some time because of the people photographing the camera...

Finding the View and Zooming It Too

I've watched the furor over the matter of the "missing" optical viewfinder (OVF) on the Olympus E-P1—not only here but all over the web—with bemused curiosity. Maybe I just understand camera design a bit more thoroughly than the average bear, but, to me, it was a given from the very first that a Micro 4/3 camera wouldn't have an OVF. At least, not a built-in, all-purpose one. Not a surprise.

It's a case of classic opposing design parameters. My standard example of an opposing design parameter is a sailboat hull. You can have a hull that goes fast through the water, or you can have a hull that holds a lot of cargo. But you can't optimize for both at the same time. The more one parameter is optimized, the more the other is compromised. For a given amount of speed you can try to optimize capacity, and for a given amount of capacity you can try to optimize speed, but to say you want both to be optimized at the same time is oxymoronic, like saying you want long hair but you want it really short.

The situation is a little more complicated in the case of an OVF on a camera, because we're looking at more than just two parameters, but we should at least ascribe the problem to its real cause: the trouble is the popularity of zoom lenses.

Once you decide to provide interchangeable lenses, then you must provide a zoom. Photographers functioned well for 7/8ths of the medium's history without zooms to speak of, but now most people want them, and if a company wants to sell cameras then it has to provide a zoom or zooms. And once the decision is made to provide a zoom lens, then any non-TTL (through the lens) OVF is out. It's not just that a good non-TTL zooming optical finder is difficult to implement, and it's not just that any such finder would be large and expensive. The problem is that the physical bulk of lens gets in the way of the finder's view.

Even on a rangefinder Leica, some of the more recent premium primes are large enough to block a significant portion of the view. The picture above is a quick shot taken with a D700 and 28mm of the view through a Leica M7 .58 viewfinder. The gray bars are the framelines (they're brighter to the eye). Despite the "ventilated" lens hood on the 35mm Summilux ASPH lens, the lens blocks the lower right-hand portion of the field of view. (That strange-looking structure in the yard is a "square foot garden," in case you're wondering. I have a bad back, so I built it up in the air. Keeps the durn rabbits out, too.)

Zooms are bigger than prime lenses, even fast premium Leica primes. Big zoom, small camera? A built-in optical finder in a small or even medium-sized non-TTL camera is going to be blocked by the lens.

So the camera's designers have a couple of choices. They can stick to a single-focal-length fixed lens, in which case an OVF makes good sense. They can stick with a set of moderate primes (i.e., no superwides or super-teles), in which case they can still design a built-in OVF (that's the classic rangefinder solution), although it would be considerably more complicated, and compromises start to enter into it. Or they can dispense with the OVF altogether in favor of an electronic viewfinder (EVF) (this is what the Panasonic G1's designers opted for). Or they can dispense with the built-in OVF and provide a clip-on type suited only for one lens of one focal length (the Oympus E-P1 solution, so far).

But all this garment-rending and teeth-gnashing about the E-P1 not having an OVF is just...misguided. Mistaken. Not gettin' it. Just try imagining it—what is it you want? How would it work? What would the problems be? Try imagining it, and you'll see. You want handling like a Porsche or hauling like a semi? You can't have both at once.

The trouble is that the market as a whole demands its zooms. To murder the old saying about having your cake and eating it too, you can't find the view and zoom it too.

Mike

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That durn delicious zoom

Traffic Spikes and the Streets of Berlin

Our traffic spiked by just under 50% yesterday, which seems to indicate a very healthy interest in the new Olympus digital "Pen"—especially since TOP was far from the only place on the internet where people could go to find information about the new camera.

Personally I was very happy to see it...both the product itself and the interest it's generating. Not only because it's another vindication of the "DMD" article that I wrote so long ago at The Luminous-Landscape (DMD stood for "decisive moment digital" and the article was a call for a large-sensor compact for use as a complement to a DSLR), but because I feel starved for an injection of creativity into the current state of camera design. The current camera market is almost a mirror of the one that existed in 1993 except that digital capture has replaced film. Back then, most cameras were either black-blob Wunderplastik AF SLRs, or point-and-shoots. After the all-too-brief Renaissance of creativity in camera design that accompanied the incunabulist years of digital, I've been dismayed that camera design has largely settled back into that very same rut.

One thing that strikes me about Micro 4/3 and its close relatives is that it need not have an adverse effect on the SLR market. I should think that most photographers would use a Micro 4/3 camera like a sports car in the garage—not as their everyday driver, but as a second camera used to complement a DSLR. Its success need not come at the expense of the DSLR category.

I've spent a lot of time in the past 24 hours surfing the web to see peoples' reactions to the E-P1 announcement. Actually, I was halfway through writing a satirical "Guide to New Camera Announcements" before I broke it off, thinking that it might hit a bit too close to home for all of us! But I did come across some genuine howlers in my peregrinations, that's for sure. One fellow said, "You cannot truly create by holding a camera out in front of you." Really? He should spend a bit of time in a camera museum somewhere, and see some of the many hair-shirt Rube Goldberg devices with which the photographers of the past managed to be very creative indeed.

In any event, the next camera I'll be getting here is supposed to be the DP2, courtesy of a kind reader, but our preliminaries regarding the Olympus E-P1 are not yet done: one of our friends was able to spend an entire morning shooting with the new camera on the streets of Berlin yesterday, and he is writing up his impressions for us right now. I don't have an ETA for that, but it's something to look forward to if you're one of the many who are curious about the camera.

Mike

The Olympus E-P1, Briefly Held

By Eamon Hickey

First, a tiny bit of background: Like many, many others (notably, the publisher of this very website), I've been pining away for a small but serious digital camera for a decade or so now. (Yeah, a decade. Shame, shame on you, camera companies.) By "small but serious," I meant coat-pocketable or smaller, with DSLR-like image quality and, equally important, real responsiveness and controllability.

I've expressed this strong desire—I prefer not to describe my behavior as begging—to nearly all the big camera makers in one meeting or another over the years, and the nice folks at Olympus America, apparently remembering my ravings, gave me a short briefing on the new E-P1 a couple of weeks back. I only had it in my hands for about 15 minutes—nowhere near long enough to come to any conclusions about it—but I do have a few impressions, for whatever they're worth.

With the 17mm ƒ/2.8 pancake mounted, the E-P1 should be conveniently coat- or cargo-pocketable for most people (not pants pocketable). I wish it were 15% smaller yet (and told Olympus so), but with the 17mm, it's definitely in a different class of portability than even the smallest current DSLR. With the 14–42mm zoom, I think most people would say it's not conveniently coat-pocketable anymore, but it's still a fair bit more compact than a DSLR.

Made of stainless steel and aluminum, it feels polished and solid—what marketing folks like to call "premium"—but not Leica-premium. That's not a criticism—it's very well finished for a camera that sells for under $1,000. Though it uses a somewhat unusual dual thumb wheel control layout, rather than a thumb and forefinger wheel system, I think the E-P1's layout won't be meaningfully slower for manual operation (at least for me). I'll have to use it more, but my initial impression of the camera's magnified manual focus assist was also largely favorable—I think I could focus manually quite quickly in most conditions. I didn't check all the things I'd need to check to be able to tell whether some form of zone focusing is possible, so can't comment on that important issue.

I'm actually quite happy that the E-P1 includes reasonably sophisticated video capabilities. (Though I am no more young and was weaned on an old Minolta SRT-101, I'm a big fan of still/video convergence and have it in mind to write an essay explaining why, if I ever find the motivation.) Olympus showed me a fair bit of E-P1 video footage, which was very sharp, but I won't be able to know much else of significance until I can shoot my own footage under carefully controlled conditions.

Responsiveness is something that takes some reasonable amount of use to really suss out, but I'm initially optimistic. Olympus made a special effort to get shutter lag down into the range of a typical DSLR (i.e. under 100 milliseconds). Praise be to the camera gods, you can shoot raw images at three frames per second for ten shots before buffer stall. All very encouraging. My time with the camera was too limited to say anything concrete about the autofocus system, except that it was not obviously slow in any way. More testing definitely needed there.

On a matter of much smaller note, I thought the silver and black version was handsome. The beige version does not look better in person, in your humble reporter's completely subjective opinion.

My biggest concern with this camera is how well I will get along with using mainly the LCD for framing. (The optional OVF is perfectly okay, but I doubt I'd use it much—hinders pocketability.) I've been framing with LCDs for years, of course, with many point-and-shoots, but my expectations of those cameras were very much lower. Time will tell.

I could do a lot of the things I like to do with a camera with this little guy and just the 17mm. I'd be equally happy with a 14mm pancake. If Olympus (or Panasonic) also makes a thin normal or short tele—anything in the 25-to-35mm range—that opens to ƒ/2, they've made me happy. Maybe I'm just too easy. They revealed nothing of future plans, so I'm just singing in the wind here. I see this camera as an adjunct to my DSLR(s), not a replacement. For some things, the DSLR(s) will always be better.

So is the E-P1 my "small but serious" ideal, or Mike's DMD? Well, I don't know yet (and wouldn't begin to dare to speak for Mike), but I'm much more optimistic about it than about anything else I've seen before. Olympus has told me they'll try to get me a review sample as soon as circumstances allow. Can't wait.

Eamon

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Featured [partial] Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "...We do not all agree. In particular, some think the lack of viewfinder is a killer, and the rest of us think the lack of viewfinder is fine. So which of us should Olympus listen to? (Yeah, I know, 'my' faction, for each value of 'my'....)"

Olympus E-P1 'Digital Pen' Officially Announced

Following days of rolling leaks, it's finally official, at midnight tonight here in the wilds of the American Midwest: Olympus has released its long-awaited and much-anticipated Micro 4/3 camera, the "Pen" E-P1. By most estimations it's the fifth camera of the new breed of large-sensor compacts. The advantage of a large-sensor compact is that it can be as portable and handy as a digicam, while yielding results of sufficient quality to treat interchangeably with your DSLR pictures.


The retro-styled E-P1 hearkens back to Maitani's Pen 35mm half-frame cameras, as emphasized by Olympus in its teaser campaign. But it's a fully "convergent" appliance, with video and sound recording in addition to having the digital image recording functions of a still camera. Naturally, much of the press information has to do with all the nifty things the onboard processing can do (19 scene modes and so forth), and the fact that, in the words of the press release, "its diverse multimedia features offer something for everyone." (I've been disciplining myself all day not to make any snide wisecracks about "art filters" applied to videos. We'll see how I do.)

However, it certainly also looks like a mouth-wateringly appealing camera, for those of us who are mainly photographers. Eamon Hickey has actually spent time with the camera and lenses, so I will mostly defer to his report (which will follow this post, tomorrow morning). But here are a few random observations and points of interest from me, before I turn it over to Eamon:

• There's a full set of accessories, including straps and cases, a dedicated flash, two lenses, a matching optical viewfinder for the 17mm lens, protective filters, and lenscaps in three colors: magenta, green, and black. (I'm not sure about lens hoods.)

• The estimated street prices for the U.S. will be $750 for the body, only $800 for the body and zoom, and only $900 for the body, 17mm, and* the 17mm's matching optical hot-shoe-mounted viewfinder (such viewfinders can usually cost $150 0r more all by themselves). It would seem fairly obvious from that pricing structure that Olympus would like you to buy your choice of its matching lenses and not just the body.

• There are two dedicated adapters available out of the gate from Olympus, one for full-size 4/3 lenses and one for older manual-focus 35mm OM Zuiko lenses. Leica M, Canon FD, and several other adapters are already available for Micro 4/3.

• The two initial lenses, a fixed-focal-length 17mm ƒ/2.8 (34mm-e) that takes 37mm filters, and a 14–42mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 (28–84mm-e) zoom that takes 40.5mm filters, are available in either silver or black.

• It has body-integral image stabilization (a feature I personally have a big weakness for, comma, yikes).

• It has Olympus's Supersonic Wave dust reduction system, but is not weather sealed or splashproof.

• Hers and his? Olympus isn't marketing them that way, but the two available color schemes sure have that look to me.

The new E-P1 is obviously a deluxe product, on which a great deal of thought, care, and design effort has been lavished. I can't wait to read the coming tests and reviews, see the results it's capable of, and of course hold one in my very own hot little hands.

More to come.

Mike

*This according to the most recent, but possibly not final, version of the Olympus press release, as of 6/16/09.

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Featured Comment by Luke Smith: "E-P1 design theme:

"The Voigtlander 35mm VF works fine except for the greasy noseprints on the screen. The aspect ratio is a little off, but close enough for snapshots."

Featured Comment by Sam G.: "I can just picture photojournalists from the 1930s talking about that new 35mm format: 'What, no groundglass? That's a deal breaker.' 'You mean I gotta close one eye and look through this little viewfinder? Maybe my wife would like it but I don't think it could be used for anything serious.' 'Look at the size of the film! There's no way you could get a good print out of that.' 'Sure it could fit in my briefcase, but if I'm going to bring that I might as well bring my Graflex and get better image quality.'"

Mike replies: Sam, you laugh, but in point of fact that IS how photographers in the '30s reacted to 35mm. Back then, even rollfilm cameras (what we would call medium format) were sometimes referred to as "miniature," because of all the folding cameras used by amateur snapshooters. For a long time 35mm was considered a "toy" and only a few iconoclasts like Rodchenko and Cartier-Bresson attempted to commit to it for serious work. It wasn't until the '50s that it began to gain widespread acceptance, and not until the '70s was it really accepted for much professional work outside of a select few fields like sports and photojournalism—until then, pros from advertising guys to wedding shooters shot large and medium format for the most part. And many continued to. I knew a small-town portraitist in the late '90s, a very interesting guy of the WWII generation, who had never used a 35mm for his work—he just used them for fun and family snapshots. Even mass-production school portraits he shot on 70mm long rolls.

Column 100: Looking Forward, Backward, and Sideways

Introduction: I'd like to congratulate Ctein on his 100th post for The Online Photographer! For four decades, Ctein has been one of the world's leading technical authors in photography—and one of the few technical experts whose work is based so securely on firsthand experimentation rather than only  "readin' and regurgitatin'." We're lucky to have the benefit of his expertise here, and I'm grateful for his help and friendship. Here's to the past 100, and to the next!  —Mike

By Ctein

When Mike asked me if I'd write a regular column for him, I had no idea if I'd be able to sustain it. Three column ideas each month, especially given my penchant for writing long? I've always envied newspaper columnists and cartoonists. While I can aperiodically write great columns and come up with pretty damn funny cartoons, my well would run dry mighty quickly if I had to do it every day.

Yet here we are, at Column 100, and I have a backlog of several dozen ideas that ain't gonna  go away unless Mike decides he wants me at least weekly. I'm amazed. Column 100, almost the third birthday. (By the way, I'm really looking forward to the cake, chocolate being preferred. And the surprise party.)

Old news about tomorrow
Eamon's recent column on "Alternative Futures" made me realize I had more to say on the subject of prognostication, an appropriate choice for the Centennial column. I've already written a couple of columns about this:

"A Brief History of Electronic Photography"

"The Shape of Things That Came"

I've been  one of those industrial consultants who's been paid quite well to predict the future. It's like picking stocks or handicapping ponies: it's easy to make fun of our truly boneheaded mistakes, but the real business is based on percentages. We don't have to be right all, or even half the time; we only have to be right a lot more often than average to make us (or rather, our clients) money.

I've made great predictions (reasonably accurate ones about DSLR designs and time frames 25 years before the products came to market) and truly lousy ones. The lousy ones are more useful; if we don't learn from our own mistakes, someone else will, and then they'll be better at the game.

In the mid-1980s, almost all knowledgeable consultants predicted the demise of rotating-disk hard drives. The dumb ones said that solid state memory would supplant hard drives in 15 years. The smart said 10–12. I was "smart." Yet, here I am 25 years later, surrounded by gently whirring spindles. Who ordered that?!

Solid-state storage prices are about where I'd have expected them to be, circa $1/GB ('80s dollars), in contrast to hundreds of dollars per megabyte back then. That part's right. What's wrong is that we couldn't imagine that disc manufacturers would be able to drive the production costs on a precise and complicated mechanical device down to 3 cents/GB ('80s cents). Storage costs have dropped faster than RAM costs, year after year, and the end is not in sight.

Old news.

The X Market
Here's where it gets interesting. Our prediction could've still been right. There is a certain overhead to manufacturing and selling that it's hard to undercut. That's why you see terabyte hard drives for $80 (2009 dollars) but not 10 GB drives for 80 cents. In 1985, you could reasonably predict that people would want several gigabytes of computer storage today. That would be hundreds of times what they had back then, but it was a plausible extension of existing trends and patterns, and it would make a hard disk business unsustainable, no matter how little a GB of disk space cost.

What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture.

We were sure this would be obsolete by now! Blame the X Market.

Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today. Instead we have the Web, ubiquitous digital cameras (with pixel counts considerably larger than we expected most people would demand), digitized and downloadable music, and home video and motion picture storage. Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product.

That's the part of futurism that's hard to predict. It's what keeps life interesting.

Ctein

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Terabytes

Featured Comment by Carl Blesch: "Here's another way I like to look at storage capacity and illustrate the concept of logarithmic growth in a way mortals can conceive. I was able to put all of my saved workplace computer files from 1986 (the dawn of the PC age at my company) through 1997—just over a decade—on a single 650 MB CD-R. My saved files from 1998 and 1999 fit on another CD-R (thanks, Microsoft fatware—especially for the PowerPoints with lavish illustration and animation). Then it took one CD-R per year until I left that job in 2002. Shortly thereafter, I took up digital photography (scanned film at first) and sound recording. The next year, I scanned an image on 120 film at a 16-bit depth and 4000 dpi, and it took the whole CD-R to accommodate that one TIFF. Similarly, a single CD-R held only one hour's worth of audio I recorded in AIFF. So the contrast: one CD for a decade of my life's work, vs. one for a high quality image or hour of high quality sound. Fascinating!"

Erwitt to Speak

D. Lykes Keenan, May 18 [Elliott Erwitt] [Leica M8.2, Distagon 18mm lens]

The Austin Center for Photography, in Austin, Texas, has announced that Elliott Erwitt will be its third "Icons of Photography" speaker on or around this coming September 24th or 25th (check the Center's website closer to the event for exact date and time).

If you live within driving distance of Austin, put it on your calendar.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Keenan)

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Arf!

Featured Comment by Karl Knize: "I've always enjoyed this guy's visual wit. Funny without making bad puns. Sophisticated without being opaque. I've been looking for an excuse to visit friends in Austin, and this is a good one."

Time to Order Your Odd-Format Ilford Sheet Film

By Oren Grad

Calling all funky format fans: the annual special order period for Ilford FP4 Plus and HP5 Plus sheet film in sizes to fit a wide range of antique and specialty cameras is now open. Prepaid orders can be placed until July 3, with delivery expected in September.

With a couple of last-minute additions, this year’s program offers these two modern emulsions in a total of 20 different formats that aren’t normally available from dealer stock: 2.25x3.25”, 6.5x9cm, 3x4”, 3.25x4.25”, 9x12cm, 4x10”, 13x18cm, 5x12”, 6.5x8.5”, 18x24cm, 7x11”, 7x17”, 8x20”, 10x12”, 11x14”, 14x14”, 12x20”, 14x17”, 16x20”, and 20x24”.

Dealers participating in this year’s program are:

USA
Badger Graphic Sales, Kaukauna, WI
Hunt’s Photo and Video, Melrose, MA
Freestyle Sales, Los Angeles, CA
Keeble & Shuchat, Palo Alto, CA
The View Camera Store, Fountain Hills, AZ
Glazers Camera, Seattle, WA
Midwest Photo Exchange, Columbus, OH
Looking Glass Photo, Berkeley, CA

Canada
Big Camera Workshops, Burlington, Ontario
The Camera Store, Calgary, Alberta
Beau Photo Supplies, Vancouver, British Columbia.

United Kingdom
Silverprint, London
Morco, Nottinghamshire
Robert White, Dorset

 
A Canham 4x10

Oren

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This I Like

I just realized something. I was poking around on the Rangefinder forum and I came across a member who had a link, in his signature macro, that said "My ten favorites." I clicked on it.

I think I've done that before. Lots of times. I might even do it habitually.

If you think about it, one thing that's more important to photography now than ever before is editing. Kodak used to estimate that between four and six billion pictures a year were taken worldwide. That must have been in the '80s sometime. Recently, Photobucket alone passed seven and a half billion pictures online. Given the literally hundreds of photo-sharing sites on the web, it seems a fair bet that more than a billion photos probably now get uploaded every month. It's even possible that the number is much more than that. If you then postulate that only a small fraction of the photos taken get posted, then the numbers of pictures being made today might well be ten times what it was back when Kodak was able to count. Maybe more.

No one person can see more that a tiny, tiny fraction of all of them. So editing—self-editing as well as editing filters applied by publications and picture editors in any of a variety of situations—is even more important now than it was in the past.

And it was certainly important in the past. If a National Geographic story had an average of 16 photographs, and the feature photographer shot 650 rolls of film in order to get that story (those numbers are also from a decade or two ago), it's easy to understand how much the editing process was crucial to the result.

It's true that it's helpful to have other people edit our work. But it should be acknowledged that this is hard work, something that only a few (good!) friends will do for you—and that only a few good friends should have to do for you. Voluntarily. The desire to have help is not an excuse to inflict unedited masses of work on casual, innocent viewers.

As a viewer of photographs by unknown photographers online, I certainly don't want to have to wade through unedited work. The stronger the existing edit, the more I'm interested; I don't have time for anything else. At the very least, the photographer should make selections. People who shoot fifty frames of the same subject and post all fifty don't deserve an audience for their work, past whoever they might be specifically providing the pictures for. Showing me fifty unedited pictures says "I don't know what I like. Maybe there's a good one in here somewhere. You decide." No: you decide. It's your work. Take a stand.

But when people say, "Here are my ten favorite pictures of my own work," on the other hand, I'm predisposed to take a look. It interests me to know what they like of their own work. Because, let's face it, however much we might like to believe that all the creativity in photography is in shooting, a good part of the actual creativity of photography also resides in the selection of what pictures to show: it's the confident assertion, "this I like."

Mike

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New Canon

Featured Comment by Sam Tinson: "Good point Mike. I used to work as a picture editor at a photo-news agency and nothing makes a worse impression than a photographer submitting a huge edit. It shows a lack of confidence and takes up valuable time. On the other hand, I don't go with the habit of including your 'best shot' as a sign-off on emails etc.—unless it is a very, very strong image, it can encourage snap judgment, which is not always in the photographer's best interest...."

Featured (partial) Comment by Benjamin Derge: "Here's another thought: If we can't tell the good from the bad after the picture is taken, how can we ever expect to do it before the picture is taken?"

A Mom Goes Viral, Attracts Haters

Here's another one of those power-of-the-internet stories that are either delightful or creepy—I can never quite decide which. Maybe both.

Seems a former television anchorwoman in Missouri named Danielle Smith has a blog about being a mom. It's called Extraordinary Mommy. On her blog, she often posts family pictures, which included this family portrait:

It was taken by a photographer friend of hers named Gina Kelly. The Smith family used the shot as their Christmas card.

I guess Mr. Smith does look vaguely Eastern European, huh?

So recently, Danielle joined Facebook, and got back in touch with an old college friend. Before long, he sent her a message saying he'd just seen a picture. In the window of a grocery story. In Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Of Danielle and her family.

So of course he took a picture of it with his cell phone and sent it to her.

And, of course, she blogged about it...and the story went viral, on Duggit and Redaboutit and whatever. So then she started getting comments from people...most of which were friendly, from people who thought it was cool, or who were outraged on her and her family's behalf, or who'd had similar experiences, or who had photographic or copyright information or legal advice for her. As you might expect.

"However, quite a few [comments] were horrendous and nasty. I’ve been called names I hadn’t heard in years," she writes. "Seriously?...You just felt compelled to tell me my husband is the unluckiest guy in the world because he got ’stuck’ with me? Or that he is ugly? Or something even more hideous about my kids? You think I’m a terrible mom for posting family pictures? I’m a moron for not knowing this could happen?"

Personally, I guess I don't know where to come down on the delightful/creepy spectrum. It's pretty amazing, not only that the picture made it from Missouri to to the Czech Republic, but that it also made it back again.

The picture in the grocery store window, of course, is what stock photography is for. The Czech grocer probably just didn't want to pay whatever small fee he might have had to pay to license a stock picture (or didn't know that's what he should have done). If it were me, though, I just might be complimented, if I were in Danielle's position. I might request that the grocer pay a couple of hundred dollars in good faith to the photographer, and then let him keep the picture up.

Of course people do feel differently when they have small children, and I understand that too.

But the one thing about the story I'm certain of is that perfect strangers have no cause to be rude in their comments to Danielle. People in general really do need to learn to be polite, civil, and considerate on the internet, as well as everywhere else. Not just because they might get in trouble for doing the wrong thing, but because being courteous is the right thing.

The e-world, not to mention the real world, is getting more crowded all the time, and the less we feel like being polite to each other, the more important it's going to be for all of us to act that way.

Mike
(Thanks to Vance Cowan)

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Random Excellence: It's 'Jbara'

Nicholas Jbara, Project Runway Season 5 winner Leanne Marshall in her Brooklyn Studio

Talk about a rip...even if unintentional. Remember that great Melody Gardot album I recommended the other day in Jazz Notes, "My One and Only Thrill"? Turns out that somehow, somewhere along the line, the name of the photographer, Nicholas Jbara, got misspelled on the album cover! An error we, too, perpetuated. I heard from Nick this morning, who said, "nothing like losing all my potential contacts."

Anyway, for what it's worth, it's Jbara, not Jhara. And here's his website.

Nick Jbara, cover shot for Melody Gardot's My One and Only Thrill

He did say he's very proud of the cover shot. "I love that album so much—I'm glad to have been even a small part of it."

Apologies to Nick for not getting the facts straight (the fact that we have an excuse is no excuse). Although he did also mention that he'd never seen TOP before and is now "a new addict."

Mike

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'Most Viewed'

The "most viewed photo" on Yahoo! is this mug shot recently released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation showing former music producer Phil Spector, who is currently serving a minimum of 19 years in prison for murdering a young woman he enticed to his home. (Evidently they don't let him wear his wigs in the penitentiary.) He apparently committed the crime for no other reason than a thrill. Taken June 5th.

Mike

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Random Excellence: Michael Itkoff

Michael Itkoff, Perch on ice, Lake Wallenpaupak, Pennsylvania

From the series Between Two Lakes.

You know, print might be dying*, but it's still really nice for any photographer to get a good cover:

 

Photo courtesy The Orion Society

Michael graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in Photography in 2004.

Mike

*I say this tongue-in-cheek. Print will be around for a few more years yet.

As always, "random" means randomly encountered.

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Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin

Photos © Jim Marshall, All Rights Reserved

If you're one of the few people with $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket in these not-so-flush times, you could have a 16x20 dye transfer print of Jim Marshall's picture of Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, surely one of the iconic images of the decade of the 'sixties in America, and one of the great photographs of the rock and roll era.

Without the little red dot in the corner, of course. (I guess that's there so I can't claim I took it. Unless the JM stands for Johnston, Mike. Yeah, dat's it.)

Not so expensive but still expensive, Jim's portrait of Grace Slick and Janis Joplin is more than halfway through its edition already. You gotta admit this would be a great portrait even if its subjects were anonymous.

These and many other Jim Marshall photographs are now available through Marshall Photo, online.

Oh, and the dye transfers are made by none other than our very own Ctein*.

Mike
(Thanks to Frank Doris)

*He gets paid up front, though, so nothing in these purchase prices goes to him. In case you might be wondering. You, too, could have your own pictures made into dye transfers if you want.

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Featured Comment by Edward Taylor: "It hurts me to look at these photos. In the 'sixties, I was into two things—music and photography. I was working for various newspapers and magazines in the Philadelphia area and was very busy. Virtually every Friday and Saturday night, and many other nights, I would go to a 'concert.' I use the quotes because concerts back then were completely different than today. Most took place in small venues which held only a few hundred people or less. I went to The Electric Factory in Philly a lot, as well as places like The Main Point. There were no concerts in stadiums in Philly. I did see the Monkees and the Beatles at the Civic center, but that was as big as it ever got. I was even at Woodstock. I remember sitting on the stage at some of these concerts. I often was close enough to talk to the artists. I saw The Who play Tommy before it was a record. I was six feet from Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane. My best friend at the time had a huge crush on her. I saw Dylan, and Clapton, and The Byrds, and Janis with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Hendrix, the Stones, and on and on. I got coffee once with Joni Mitchell. Back then the performers were real people who did a show, then you could often find them hanging around out back. They were approachable.

"The reason it hurts to see photos like the one above is that even though I was a photographer with great equipment, it never occurred to me to take a camera with me to any of these events. Work was work, and when I was done work, I put my camera down and went out to enjoy myself. But, photography never felt like work to me, and I really don't know why I did this or separated the two. I took my camera to family events, etc., but not Woodstock. Anyway, when I think of the photos I could have had—not to mention the zillions of dollars they would be worth today—it hurts.

"Moral—always keep your camera with you."

Full Format, Pocket Size

Photo: Wikimedia

Sean Reid has published Part 1 of his Sigma DP2 review at Reid Reviews (note that Reid Reviews is a pay site). Sean begins by making the case that the DP2 parallels the Rollei 35 series of 1966 ff.—a camera for people who weren't interested in smaller format size but wanted one that was pocketable (in contrast to, among other things, the then-current Olympus Pen). He makes a persuasive case for the parallel, and has some other interesting observations about format. The DP1 is also reviewed at Reid Reviews.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "The Nikon 35Ti (circa 1993) was roughly the same size and weight but offered auto-focus and auto-exposure. I used one for a few weeks. It was more fun in theory than in practice. Using a pocket camera is like using a pocket computer (such as a cell phone with keyboard): You give up a lot of control and flexibility in exchange for convenience. They all suck to some extent, so the question is which one you think sucks the least."

Random Excellence: Nat Fein

Nat Fein, Lyndon B. Johnson, Rally inside the old Madison Square Garden

Prints from the Nat Fein estate, including the famous "The Babe Bows Out," can be purchased from vintagephotos.com.

Mike
(Thanks to William Barnett-Lewis)

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By Mikkel Aaland, From O'Reilly

Reviewed by Ctein

Photoshop CS3 RAW
(U.K. link)

Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure
(U.K. link)

When I started out as a reviewer, I tried to be scrupulously "objective" and never let personalities enter into my judgment. I will chalk it up to the obsessive perspective of youth: One gets a notion and that's just the way it is. Or maybe it was my scientific training: One strives to avoid letting personal feelings about researchers enter into evaluations of research (often difficult to do, but a laudable goal).

The thing is, that wasn't how I lived my life. I patronized stores that treated me well and were run by decent people. If a manufacturer went out of their way to be nice to me (as an individual, not a reviewer) when I had a problem, I was inclined to buy more of their products. So where did I get the notion that the nice people shouldn't be rewarded in my writing?!

I don't think I got a clue until I was in my 40s. Whatever. Nowadays, what I think of a supplier definitely affects how I consider their merchandise and I have no problem letting that affect my reviews. I'm being paid for my professional judgment, and my judgment is that this matters. I don't let pettiness (everybody should get cut slack for having a few bad days) nor maliciousness (they aren't bad just because they didn't buy my manuscript) enter into the equation.

Mikkel's been a friend of mine for about two decades, and O'Reilly is comprised of some of the nicest and most generous people I've ever met in the publishing business (and, no, they haven't bought a book from me, dammit). So, when they sent me Photoshop CS3 RAW and Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure, I hoped for the best.

I was not disappointed. I am a very heavy user of Adobe Camera RAW and in no way a user of Lightroom (nor Aperture). Naturally, I picked up Photoshop CS3 RAW first and started skimming through it. I'm only 40% of the way through it and already I've learned several very useful things. Some are basics I just hadn't noticed: I didn't know I could zoom the Loupe in Bridge, and I didn't realize that the Option key previewed clipping in ACR the way it does in Photoshop. Both of these apply to almost every photograph I edit.

Some of what I learned is definitely not basic: I'll suffer less highlight and shadow clipping in ProPhoto RGB color space than AdobeRGB, my default space? Okay, I really need to look into that. And, although I'd been using Synchronize in ACR when working with panorama and HDR stacks, I didn't realize just how much it could synchronize for me (flawed pixel removal?!) or how useful it could be for bulk-correcting photographs.

Understand that I'm not even into the meat of the book. I am so glad I'm a reviewer and O'Reilly gave me a copy of this, because I probably wouldn't have thought to buy it on my own and I would have been much poorer for that. Highly recommended.

Then we come to Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure. The conceit is a charming one. Mikkel and O'Reilly put together a small group of professional photographers and Adobe techies and send them off, expenses paid, on a photo expedition. For this edition, the destination was Tasmania. What a sweet gig!

A sweet book resulted. Not only do you get Mikkel's encyclopedic knowledge of how to use Lightroom, but you get the particular and specific experiences of a dozen seriously good photo-educators (e.g., Katrin Eismann and Charlie Cramer) tossed into the mix.

My situation reviewing this book is entirely opposite from Photoshop CS3 RAW. I'm not a Lightroom user, because I've never been able to figure out what good it might do me. Bulk administering of photographs is not my thing, and between Bridge, ACR, and Photoshop I felt I had my workflow pretty well in hand. I figured reading Mikkel's book might give me a clue.

Indeed, I picked up a couple. Lightroom's library and printing capabilities are never going to mean much to me; I don't make that many photographs, and I've never produced a final print that didn't require local corrections far beyond the capabilities of the adjustment brush. But, the way in which Lightroom integrates the browsing capabilities of Bridge with the photographic information and adjustment abilities of ACR intrigues me. I do spend a lot of time hopping back and forth between Bridge and ACR. Food for thought.

Although the Lightroom landscape is unfamiliar to me, I can tell you that Mikkel's explanations of just how the ACR-type development tools work are clear, complete, and very useful. They confirmed some details I'd had notions about but couldn't find explicitly clarified elsewhere. I'm betting that the rest of the book is just that good.

Another book I wouldn't have bought on my own initiative but that I'm really glad to have. And another book that's highly recommended. Buy both!

Ctein

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Rudy Mancuso Gets Justice in the End

Rudy Mancuso, The Shot Heard 'Round the World

"The Man Who Shot 'the Shot Heard 'Round the World,'" by Joshua Prager of The Wall Street Journal, is a touching story. Photographer Rudy Mancuso, who took a famous baseball photograph, lost track of his negative and never got credit for his picture over the years, only to have both restored to him at the very end of his life. A good short read and a nice tale of justice and vindication for one photographer.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp, Josh Prager and others)

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Featured Comment by Joshua Prager: "Hello. A friend just alerted me to your blog post about my article. Thank you!

"I read your reader comments and thought I could help answer some of the questions. First, the ball is indeed visible. It is about half-way between home plate and third base, just a few feet in fair play. (I have the ball circled in my book.) Second, I agree that it is by no means baseball's greatest photograph. What I wrote is that it is arguably baseball's most famous photo and that the moment it preserved was baseball's greatest. Third, the newspapers did not at first run the photograph. But after it appeared in the New York Giants yearbook and those ads, it gained steam and began popping up in countless written accounts of the game. And finally, I have a chapter in my book (Chapter 17) describing how the baseball writers scrounged about for ways to properly describe the game and its meaning. In this chapter I discuss how it came to be called 'The shot heard round the world.'

"P.S. I have a great respect for photography. Your readers might be interested to know that I was the reporter who in 2006 identified the only anonymous winner in the history of the Pulitzer Prize—the Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi. That article is on my website."

Featured Comment by William Barnett-Lewis: "Thank you for the link. It's good to know that sometimes things can end right, at least.

"That image is a good, evocative image but I'd suggest reading this for the story of what I consider the greatest baseball photograph of them all."

Sunday Open Mike: Sound! Music!

I haven't kept up very well with my resolution half a year ago to write about topics other than photography once a week on Sundays. What usually happens (I hope this doesn't betray my utter lack of foresight) is that I'll think of some appropriate topic during the week, and think to myself, well, it's not Sunday, better wait till Sunday, and then on Sunday I either can't remember what it was I wanted to write about or it seems like there's not enough time to write about it. I guess you can tell from that that I don't have many weeks' worth of post topics already prepared and queued up for publication (although I have a couple of nice book reviews from Ctein that will go up soon, possibly tomorrow).

Anyway, breaking with tradition to return to tradition, here's an off-topic post covering a few recent audio products I like.

Computer speakers?
I personally went from listening to music on my computer just using its sound card and built-in speakers, to trying to improve the musical output of my computer, to simply hooking up my hard drive to my main stereo. I now use a single preamp that includes a USB input from my computer (it has its own DAC) and a tubed line input from (oh, I can hear the howls already)...a phono preamp. No CD player; I listen to digital files and vinyl. The latter only occasionally, the former most of the time, but I enjoy having both.

If you're looking to improve the sound from your computer, especially if you need the portability, try the excellent Audioengine A2 powered computer speakers (they also come in white). They're tiny—only 6 inches (15.2 cm) high—and cheap, only $200. Curiously, some of the complaints about Micro 4/3 cameras might be echoed when talking about the A2's, in that they're no substitute for full-sized speakers and yet they're miles ahead of most of the drek that passes for outboard computer speakers, some of which I find literally unlistenable. While they might not be the thing for a permanent installation, they're very portable. And they sound wonderful. (You will need to replace that soundcard, or get yourself at least a cheap non-oversampling [NOS] DAC.)

Audioengine makes bigger speakers and of course the obligatory "sub-" woofer (almost all computer "subwoofers" are simply woofers—nothing sub about 'em), but the little 15-watt-per-box A2 is the sweet spot. One word of warning: the volume knob turns the speakers on, and there's a three-second delay before the signal starts. Don't crank the volume knob up when you turn them on and you don't hear any noise! Oh, and you might want to site these directly on your desktop—normally tiny speakers will sound a little better if you get them closer to ear level, but in this case the boundary reinforcement doesn't hurt.

Best thing about them? They make MP3 files sound better than they have any right to sound. And who needs equipment that "reveals all the limitations of the source" when you're listening to MP3s?

UPDATE: Yes, Soundsticks are nice too.

'Phones—head-, not cell-
If you prefer to do your listening a little more privately (and even more portably), the new "i" (for improved) versions of the old Grado headphones are still outstanding values. In a field just chock-full of fly-by-night companies, the business started by inventor Joe Grado is still run by a Grado—Joe's nephew John. Also very unusual is the fact that the entire lineup of their headphones are each easy recommendations at their widely varying price points. I'd probably pick the $150 SR125i as the sweet spot, but not by much—everything from the $79 SR60i to the former top-of-the-line RS1's are fine performers and good value (there's now an RS1i and a much more costly flagship model, the GS1000i, but I haven't heard 'em. I remain skeptical that anybody needs to spend $695 on a pair of headphones, never mind a grand.)

Of course, be warned—buy a decent set of headphones, and you're half a skip away from needing a headphone amplifier. And from there it's a short step to spending all your time on Head-Fi, and we'll never see you here at TOP again. 

We get esoteric and start having fun after the break...

Olympus 'Digital Pen' Leaked

The web is awash this morning in Olympus Micro 4/3 leakage...check out this page at Xitek.com for a summary. There is surely much unhappiness at Olympus over this, but hey, once it's out there, it's out there....

Mike
(Thanks to many tipsters)

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ADDENDUM: Optical viewfinder for the 17mm pancake.