The Online Photographer

New Olympus E-M5 Mark III Will Ship in Late November

At first glance, it looks like the latest iteration of the very capable mid-line Olympus Micro 4/3 camera, the E-M5 Mark III, will be significantly different from its predecessor. From browsing various "pre-reviews" and announcements on other websites, it appears that Olympus is doing two things with the new camera: 1.) positioning it to be a backup to the E-M1 II with many of the more expensive camera's features and capabilities, even rearranging the controls to bring them more in line with the E-M1 II's controls; and 2.) emphasizing small size and light weight, probably to better differentiate it from full-frame mirrorless (FFM) cameras. (This doesn't take a genius to figure out: the new tagline is "Empowering You to Break Free of Heavy Gear.")

As far as the "smallening and lightening" is concerned, Olympus is known for class-leading IBIS (in-body image stabilization), and the press release reserves a whole section for the new (smaller and lighter) mechanism in the E-M5 III.

It's commendable that Olympus looks like it is making no move to intentionally cripple the new camera to protect higher-end models. It appears to be giving the E-M5 III all the capability it can.

The new camera is expensive, though, considering the competition.

It will be available in silver and black.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Eolake Stobblehouse: "I have watched several preview videos about it today, and I’m quite impressed. This camera is right up my alley. It can do everything I want and more, it is lightweight, and the image stabilisation is astounding. And of course I already love the Micro 4/3 system."

Nigel: "After handling a Nikon Z7, I am starting to have some doubts about the viability of the Micro 4/3 system. One by one the reasons for using this system are falling away. Only the size advantage when you use long lenses remains as a clear reason to use Micro 4/3.

"The 20-MP sensor is starting to be a little long in the tooth in a camera which must compete with cameras with much the same characteristics but with larger sensors which also cost less. At my local dealers an E-M1 Mark II is bundled with a 'free' 60mm Macro. Removing the cost of the Macro with what I could sell it for on eBay, the E-M5 III costs more than the flagship. Something is very wrong with Olympus’s pricing.

"This camera I feel suffers from the D300/D500 syndrome. When the long-awaited upgrade to the best selling D300 arrived, it was too late. I, like many others, had gone elsewhere. I jumped over to Micro 4/3 and the then-evolutionary E-M5 Mark I. Technically it produced better pictures than my old D300. Now the Micro 4/3 sensor is lagging behind the latest APS sensors.

"Once the Z system has some more lenses and the equipment becomes available more readily secondhand, I am convinced I will be returning to Nikon. The Z system gear is quite lightweight enough for me to hike in the mountains with; the very reason I fell in love with the Micro 4/3 system, but with all the advantages of the 24x36 sensor."

New Film? And the Rising Sun

The word on the street is that there's a new film coming from Ilford, to be announced next Thursday. Watch this space.

What I want in my secret heart of hearts is a new film camera. I've long envisioned Pentax (now owned by Ricoh) launching an updated version of the classic Spotmatic, with a few features updated to modern spec. Such as, a 100% viewfinder, K-mount, TTL metering, an aperture-priority setting on the shutter-speed dial, and one new feature...a spot-metering button! Which the original was supposed to have (hence the name) but never did. The camera should not have anything on it that any modern or digital camera could do better. Just what is essential for exposing one frame of 35mm film beautifully and enjoyably. No motor drive, no flash. I guess a self-timer is okay, as long as it was mechanical. (Would it be possible to design a camera to use only B&W film? I guess that's not possible....) 

Great attention would have to be paid to two things: the visual "snap" of the viewing screen for easiest manual focusing, and superlative smoothness for the film wind lever. It should be very quiet*, and have built-in diopter correction, because add-on diopter lenses can be lost and wouldn't be available in the future.

In my mind the new camera would be called the "Rising Sun" and would have a small Japanese flag enameled where the marque name usually goes on the front of the pentaprism. It would be deliberately an homage to the classic metal, mechanical, manual (MMM) cameras of Japan's glorious past. I once defined the "Age of the MMM SLR" as being from 1959, when the Nikon F was launched, to 1978, when the electronified Canon A-1 came along. Although the A-1 seems pretty simple and straightforward by today's standards. Maybe 1985, then, as an endpoint?

Asahi, the original parent company of Pentax, launched the first Japanese SLR in 1952, although no Asahi camera was called "Pentax" (originally a model name, not a corporate name) until 1957.

Would a new film SLR for the early 2020s sell?

Well, of course it wouldn't. But it's lovely to imagine it would.

To the honor of Japan!

Mike

P.S. This post sets a record. The first line is the only news, but I just can't put up a post with two sentences in it, a mere 22 words. All that unfulfilled promise activates my loquacity gene. The rest of the post is filler, making this the most unbalanced ratio of content to filler of any TOP post ever. (I know what some of you are thinking. But be nice, now.)

*By the way, the loud shutter on the Pentax LX—its big failing in my book—was a feature, not a bug. In those days pro SLRs were supposed to be loud because models had learned to key to the sound to change poses. You'd get into a rhythm with the model, shoot-pose-shoot-pose. I think it was when the Nikon F4 came out that professionals were complaining the shutter was too quiet...models couldn't hear it.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Eolake Stobblehouse: "I'd love to see a new Spotmatic. In fact it was the gift of a Spotmatic which started me collecting old film cameras."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Well, if you built in an orange or red filter you could at least vastly reduce the camera's utility with color film :-) ! "

Mike replies: That would do it! K2 filter though. To think, I used to rate PX at 64 and put a K2 filter over it. It's a wonder I ever got a sharp photography in anything but full sun.

GKFroehlich: "From my perspective, you've nicely described the Nikon F3! It even has a mechanical shutter speed (1/60, I believe) in case the battery dies. However, it is missing the Japanese flag. By the way, each time I upgraded, I kept a single example of the older MMM (or MM) film camera, so I still own 1 each of the Nikon F2, F3, F4s, and F5. Never bought an F6, and never kept any older digital camera when I upgraded to a newer model."

Rodolfo Canet: "This post truly rings home: I've started digitizing my film photography these days, and all of it was shot with a...Spotmatic F! An example of just a couple hours ago. Nevertheless, my dream is different than yours. I wouldn't go back to 35mm film but the only way to get the 'look' of real medium format (6x6 to 6x9) without robbing a bank would be shooting film, but there's no new cameras to be bought nowadays. I dream of a nice, humanly-priced 6x7 film camera. Yes, I know that something called 'second hand' exists...."

Photographing Maphiyata Echiyatan Hin Win

The words are Lakota (the tribe known in old movies as the Sioux. "Sioux" means "little snakes" in Ojibwe, the "big snakes" being the Iroquois). The name means "Woman Who Comes From the Heavens." AKA the teenaged Swedish activist Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg, who has recently been the talk of...not "the town," but the world.

If I was naming her I'd figure out how to say "Woman Who Says Emperor Is Buck Nekked" in Lakota. Or something like hey, we have to live here after you're gone, so stop not talking about this.

Photo by Chad Nodland

Anyway, moving on to the point, there's a wonderful article on Emulsive called "Greta Thunberg: capturing the voice of the 21st century using 150-year-old wet plate photography." Pretty self-explanatory, actually.

What the title doesn't explain, the first three sentences do:

"The call came in on the afternoon of Monday 7th October. Shane Balkowitsch would have [a] little under 24 hours to plan a 15-minute wet plate photo shoot with Greta Thunberg at Standing Rock. Naturally, the first thing he did after getting off the phone was to start packing his studio up into the back of his truck—including his portable darkroom.

"It was going to be an intense 24 hours."

Standing Rock is a huge Indian reservation straddling North and South Dakota.

Inspired by John Coffer, Shane Balkowitsch only shoots wet plate—nothing else. Two days ago he wrote, "This past 24 hours has completely gone off the rails. My wet plates of Greta Thunberg have gone viral online. On Facebook alone there has been thousands of shares and tens of thousands of likes."

The article is more in pictures than in words. Most of the pictures (including the one here) are by Chad Nodland.

Fascinating being able to look over everyone's shoulder on this shoot. Have a look.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John (partial comment): "I’m a liberal and support environmentalists, but this hype around Greta Thunberg drives me nuts."

Arg: "The message is so important that the response had better not be to shoot the messenger."

EM: "Mike, thank you for linking to my little article. I must say it was a surprise to see it mentioned on these hallowed pages. Thank you so much for what you do, I'll slip away now and continue to admire from afar!"

 

Open Mike: Eat a Peach

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. wanders in fields not his own. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays.]

-

Dave Standish picking "Standish Selects"

They say you learn something new every day. And boy is that true. Here I am, 62 years old, and, until recently, I never even knew what peaches taste like.

True, I have long been glancingly familiar with those dissected corpses of long-dead peaches embalmed in syrup, entombed in cans on the shelves of supermarkets. All along, in fact, I thought that's what a peach was. And that produce-section peaches were what peaches tasted like.

Is that ever wrong.

A few weeks ago I got a bag of small yellow just-picked peaches in a paper bag from a neighbor, and I confess I did not appreciate the significance of the gift at first. They turned out to be entirely unlike anything I was previously familiar with: loaded with juice, melt-in-your-mouth, with a heavenly texture and a chorus of light, complex, delicate flavors. Heavenly. I ate one after another after another. I've never cared for peaches much, but that's because I never had peaches like those.

Then I read about white peaches. In her essential book Eating on the Wild Side (a must-have for those who eat), Jo Robinson says, "choose peaches and nectarines by their background color, not their blush. When white-fleshed peaches and nectarines are ripe, they have a creamy white background with little or no trace of green.

"There are also ways to choose some of the most nutritious peaches and nectarines in the store, even when the varietal names are not mentioned. Simply choose white-fleshed varieties rather than yellow-fleshed varieties—another exception to the shop-by-color rule[*]. Lab studies show that you would have to eat six yellow-fleshed Flavorcrest peaches to get the same antioxidant benefits as in one white-fleshed Snow King. The same is true for nectarines. The white-fleshed nectarine Bright Pearl has six times more antioxidants than the yellow May Glo. The white varieties are sweeter as well. (The added sugar in the sweeter peaches is not enough to cause a significant rise in blood sugar.) If you do nothing more than choose white peaches and nectarines over the yellow varieties, you will gain a nutritional edge" [page 280].

Honey too
I've told you before about my friend Dave up the hill. My many-times great-grandfather, William Bradford, and Dave's many-times great-grandfather, Myles Standish, came across the ocean together, from England, in a leaky old merchant ship called the Mayflower. Now he and I are neighbors and friends, and frankly I think I get the better end of that deal.

This past weekend was a mournful time of year...the end of green-bean season. I love green beans. Sad-face emoji. The broccoli and Brussels sprouts are still going strong, so there is consolation.

I've learned that the end of green bean season is generally the end of peach season too, so I stopped by Dave's yesterday to see if he had any more peaches, and I asked him if he knew about white peaches.

Know about them? He grows them. There's a fruit-tree orchard out in the fields behind his house. Years ago he gifted a friend in New Jersey a bundle of white peach saplings, and later the same friend came to visit him here in New York and repaid him with a gift of twenty saplings of the same varietal, descendants of the earlier gift. It's an old heirloom white peach called Iron Mountain. Dave grows them completely organically. Not only have these peaches not been sprayed this year, but the trees have never been sprayed in their lifetimes. "I've been incredibly lucky," Dave said. I gather that means that he would spray if he had to to save the trees, but he has never had to.

To fight off deer, Dave takes the bag from the household vacuum cleaner and scatters the contents in the field around his orchard. The deer catch the scent of Chester, Dave's enormous and now ancient chocolate Labrador, and will not come across the line. He also has old Compact Disks on strings here and there—deer don't like fluttery, flashing things. He says they also don't like the color blue.

Jo Robinson says of heirloom peaches, "At the turn of the nineteenth century, Americans could choose from hundreds of varieties of peaches. Most of them are now extinct; all that is left is their glowing descriptions...." Farmers like Dave, committed to diversity, help keep rare varieties viable.

Anyway, when I asked Dave if he had any peaches left, he didn't go into the house—we went right out to the orchard, and Dave got up on a stepladder and started picking peaches. When he found a particularly nice one, he set it aside for me, joking that those ones were "Standish Selects." The rest went into a basket. He picked me a combination of ripe and not-quite ripe ones so I could feast on peaches for days. Which I have been happily doing. Several will go into my morning smoothie as soon as I finish writing this, too. (I have a bagful of peaches.)

The same goes for honey. Dave is also a beekeeper (among some of his friends, he is known by the nickname "Honeybee Dave"), and on another recent visit he greeted me by saying "want some honey?" as he thrust a jar of honey into my outstretched hand. Big deal, right?

But oh boy. When I finally got around to trying it, I was amazed. Again, I thought I knew what "honey" is and what it tastes like—it comes in little plastic containers shaped like a bear, it's clear, and it's bland. Dave's honey is another thing altogether. It has a distinctive, complex flavor that is absolutely wonderful. (I already used the word "heavenly.") Of course—typically—Dave makes sure the adjacent fields have plenty of the wild plants the bees (and he) favor, in this case a local trefoil, a kind of clover. As I was leaving with my peaches, he disappeared into the house and emerged with another jar of honey, saying, "this will taste different. Fall honey has different nectar sources, aster and goldenrod."

Dave's beehives

So anyway, my opinion is that people should beware of being fooled by canned peaches in the supermarket. Nothing wrong with those—eating them is much better than eating bready things laden with sugary goo that come in boxes—but they do not fairly display the manifold felicities of the fruit known as the peach. I think everyone should start eating organically-grown heirloom white peaches, picked ripe right off the tree by their neighbor up the road; I'm telling you, the popularity of peaches would soar.

Could be I'm just lucky.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave)

*Generally, darker-colored and stronger-colored fruits and vegetables are better for you.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "Good fresh fruit like that is a little like a religious experience. Everyone just kind of nods and files you away as a zealot as you try to explain how delicious it was. I spent the first ten years of my childhood in a rented farmhouse in California's central valley. We had an amazing peach tree that produced more than we could eat. Our neighbors had pomegranate trees. Never found pomegranate fruit in stores that tasted as good. In late summer my dad would head out with a friend to 'glean' the leftover ripe cantaloupe in the fields (those were truly amazing). So I share your enthusiasm, and you are indeed lucky."

Eamon Hickey: "I demand a picture of Chester."

Mike replies:

Chester has been in a bad way for most of the past year, but somehow he keeps bouncing back. He's very old for such a large dog—I think he's 15? I think Dave said he weighed 110 lbs. when he was young. (I'll have to check these numbers.) Dave said he was the ideal farm dog, patrolling the territory, chasing the deer, keeping watch, protecting the chickens. The last time I saw him he didn't lift his head when I greeted him, but he recognized me. This is a recent pic.

Keith: "As a child visiting my grandparents, we got milk, cream, and butter essentially straight from the cow. Honey from bees visiting clover. Home baked bread. Fresh veggies from the garden in season. Apples and pears from the orchard. I didn't know how good we had it.

"Honey can be anything from a pale off white, to dark amber, with the liquid consistency varying from thin and runny to thick, and then we get into the best of it, when it's mostly crystallized but still has a bit of liquid in it. The different flavours are amazing."

Jan Steinman: "Thank you for this topic! I am a small non-certified organic grower. We specialize in the 'weird and wonderful,' and have some 37 different varieties of tomatoes, two dozen varieties of peppers, about 40 varieties of apples, five varieties of pears…you get the idea. We mix tiny bags of uniquely coloured heritage cherry tomatoes for our local market, and many people say, 'I never tasted anything like this before!' It is so sad that food has become a commodity, developed mainly for the ability to withstand long-distance shipping, when it should be a local delightful treat. Keep seeking out local farmers who grow open-pollinated 'heritage' varieties!"

More Artificial Common Sense: Topaz Labs GigaPixel AI

Written and illustrated by Ctein

I am, for the most part, not a fan of "sharpening for output" nor of upsampling programs. Sharpening for output has, for me, translated into harsh, unrealistic edges and a degradation of what I would (imprecisely) call photographic quality. It also seems to be fundamentally misapplied—the times when I do need sharpening output are when I'm printing very small, not very large, as the printer rendering algorithms tend to suppress very fine, low-contrast detail.

As for upsampling, I gave that a thorough inspection about a dozen years back in these very pages:

It's Bigger, But Is It Better?

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part II

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part III

The takeaway, if all that is seriously longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] is that the improvements were modest, nothing was superior under all circumstances, and Photoshop's built-in resizing algorithms worked, on average, as well as anything else. For the heck of it, I checked out the notion that upsampling to a printer's native resolution (360 or 720 PPI in the case of Epson; other manufacturers may be different) produced a higher quality print then letting the printer's driver handle this (which it does behind the scenes when you hand it something of a different PPI). It didn't.

In the years since then third-party programs have improved, but so has Photoshop. I haven't been induced to change my practices.

Except—a few years back, I watched a conversation between Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. Jeff, printing from Lightroom to an Epson 3880 printer, found that files upsampled from their native resolution to 360 or 720 PPI in Lightroom printed out distinctly more sharply than those upsampled by the Epson print driver.

Jeff noted that that didn't mean that another program (or printer) would yield the same results. I use Photoshop, not Lightroom. They are two different products with two different development teams, so they may or may not share the same upsampling code.

But…Jeff is another one of those Great Printing Experts, and 95% of the time we're in agreement (especially around the recommended settings for the Epson 3880 printer to produce the very best quality). I'm not going to ignore his four-year-old results in favor of my twelve, nuh uh. I needed to test out his assertion on my P800 printer, with Photoshop.

Big surprise (not), Jeff turned out to be right. A dozen years ago, I was probably right, but a dozen years is forever in the digital technology world. It pays to occasionally recheck one's beliefs.

Photographs upsampled in Photoshop to my printer's native resolution look distinctly better than those left to the printer's ministrations. Better and cleaner fine detail, more nicely delineated edges.

Not all photographs benefit from this. In particular, for those where some degree of grain/noise is an integral part of the image (sometimes true in my color work, more often true in my black and white infrared), improving the acuteness of a print didn't make it better, as it also enhanced that grain structure, which had been tuned to just where I wanted it. Most of the time, though, I followed Jeff's advice and was much pleased with the improved quality. And I still avoided third-party upsampling programs.

Then Topaz Labs came out with GigaPixel AI, the second of their machine-learning-trained tools. The first had been AI Clear, which had mightily impressed me with its ability to sort out detail from garbage, so I wanted to see what this pony's tricks were like. The samples on their website looked unbelievably good, even taking into account that they were cherry-picked, because advertising.

I downloaded the program and handed it a modest task, taking what was already a very detailed and sharp photograph and upsampling it to my printer's native resolution for a 17x22-inch print (about a 1.5X enlargement) with GigaPixel AI.

GigaPixel AI was effin' amazin'. I'm talking markedly better rendering of fine detail, both at strong edges and in subtle fine gradations, along with finer grain/noise (and less of it). All of this without artifacts or suppression of delicate tonalities! The results looked entirely natural and much better than Photoshop's upsampling. Below are sections from the Photoshop (figure 1) and GigaPixel (figure 2) renderings, at 100% if you click through to the standalone images. [Bear in mind that TOP's TypePad interface softens illustrations somewhat. —Ed.]

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

I looked at 17x22" prints from the non-upsampled, Photoshop-upsampled and GigaPixel AI-upsampled files, and there was a clear improvement with each step. In fact, the difference between Photoshop and GigaPixel was substantially greater than between no upsampling and Photoshop.

GigaPixel doesn't improve the prints from every single one of my photographs. Only about 75% of them. Sometimes the improvement is nothing more than finer grain/noise, where GigaPixel has subdivided blobby grains into smaller discrete ones.

At other times the improvements do look unbelievable. Take a look at figures 3 (Photoshop) and 4 (GigaPixel AI). Look at the improvement in both fine detail and noise, compared to the original file, which you're not even seeing because I can't figure out how to portray it at the same scale without upsampling. It's about what I'd expect going from a 20-megapixel camera to a 30–35 megapixel one.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

GigaPixel AI is a standalone program. It will accept a variety of input formats and will output JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. For fine printing you're going to want the 16-bit TIFF output, of course. I use GigaPixel AI last in my printing workflow, after I've done all my local corrections and pixel fiddling. I duplicate the Photoshop file, save it as a TIFF, and run that through GigaPixel AI. That way I preserve my options for resizing to my printer's native resolution, no matter what size I decide I'm going to print at.

GigaPixel AI occasionally blows up, sometimes globally, sometimes just in one small part of the picture. Not often, but it happens. Machine-learning systems can get very weird notions in their silicon noggins. When it's just some small bit of the photograph that's gone off the rails I resize the Photoshop file to the same dimensions as the GigaPixel TIFF, and paste that TIFF in a new image layer on the file. That makes it easy to do a comparison between the renderings, just switching that layer on and off. Sometimes I throw away the GigaPixel AI rendering or mask it so I can hide the parts where GigaPixel AI went wonky. This is not a frequent occurrence. Most of the time, GigaPixel AI wins with no fiddling.

What's the downside? You may not be able to run GigaPixel AI on your current system. GigaPixel AI demands substantial system requirements. GigaPixel AI performs an insane number of calculations while it does its image analysis. It can commandeer your GPU, if you choose that option, and it'll still take minutes to render an image. I think we're talking millions of calculations per pixel, tens of teraflops total, to upsample a single photograph.

As is typical for Topaz Labs, Gigapixel has a 30-day fully-functional free trial, so you don't have to spend $99.99 to decide if it's worth it to you.

Topaz Labs sends me the stuff for free, but there's no question that I'd pay whatever they charge for this program. It's a four-star wonder.

Ctein

UPDATE Wednesday afternoon: Ctein wrote a reply to several commenters. Because not all the comments he responded to are among the "Featured" ones, I published his reply with the rest of the comments in the Comments section. To get to the full Comments section of this or any post, click on "Comments ([number])" at the bottom of the footer of every post. —Ed.

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 334th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Michael Elenko: "I was sold on GigaPixel AI somewhat out of desperation earlier this spring. I was curating a group exhibition and during the hanging, one print just didn't meet my standards for sharpness. I learned that the print originated from an iPhone 8, and that a friend of the artist attempted to upscale it to meet our print size requirements by using a Photoshop algorithm. I then got involved, tried other Photoshop algorithms as well as Lightroom's approach (which I usually favor), and was not satisfied. I then remembered reading about GigaPixel AI, downloaded a trial, and used it on the image file. The result was revelatory, and just in time for the exhibition opening. I've since purchased the product and am revisiting old-but-good work from 15 years ago."

I Just Sent...

...Today's "Sunday Support Group" post to the Patreon subscribers by group email (I'd been meaning to experiment with that functionality), to thank everyone for putting me over the initial goal of 750 supporters. As I explained, I only picked the 750 number in the first place because I thought it was out of reach. How nice that it wasn't.

Ironically, the newest supporters, the very ones who put the number over the top, might not have gotten the message. (You'll have to tell me—I'm not absolutely sure who did and didn't get the group email). In the Patreon system I think I'm only allowed to message people I have "financial relationships" with—that is, who have actually sent money. Don't blame me, I don't make the rules! So new signer-uppers who haven't yet made their first payment might have gotten left out. Not your fault.

So, to them—you, if you're one of them—a big thanks, the same thanks I sent to everyone else just now. You're very kind.

Warm thanks too to those existing subscribers who increased the amount of their existing contributions! And don't think I've forgotten about you, Eric P. Still mulling that over.

And wow, I should email my supporters more often—the messages I'm getting back are so warm and generous and friendly it's making me verklempt. Thanks, truly.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kjell: "I just got the message through Patreon telling me how you just now reached your goal of 750 patrons. I myself have made a small donation of $3 each month for a while now. I think it is about half of what your content is worth, but being cheap, I always love it when I get a discount. I would highly encourage everyone to donate a small sum. Think of it this way. If don't, you're kind of stealing it, but if you donate $1 a month you get a huge discount on the best photo content on the web. Also keep in mind that this blog is the only photo-related site on the Internet that never, ever writes anything about pool (or other related sports). And that is really worth something."

Mike replies: Yes, you're absolutely right, and people really need to keep the value of that in mind. For example, I never post anything like this amazing break by Jeffrey DeLuna of the Philippines at the 2019 WPA Players Championships in Las Vegas. Because, duh, it has nothing to do with photography. Most people will probably never see a break like that because I don't link to it, but that's...wait for it...the breaks.  :-)

Kjell replies: "I'm so glad I never had to see, or even know anything about that break. I can only imagine it would have blown my socks off, and I really enjoy wearing socks in the winter."

Keith replies to Kjell: "Not to nitpick, but I would like to point out that there are actually two photo-related sites that routinely write about pool. You might check out Kirk Tuck's blog, where he frequently posts...oh wait, that's a different kind of pool."

'The Era of Imaging Resource is Coming to an End'

Shades of Rob Galbraith and DPI.

Dave Etchells, the founder, publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of Imaging Resource—for the last two decades one of the largest and most conscientious of the traditional written-word photographic equipment testing and news websites—said yesterday in a long Facebook post that "the era of Imaging Resource is coming to an end."

The short summary of the reasons:

"The current market just can’t support the kind of deep testing IR has always done, nor anything close to the staff of employees and freelancers that we’ve carried";

"After 21+ years of 6.5 day workweeks, I have to step back and stop pedaling the bicycle."

...And what will become of the people?

"The IR writers and editors are available on the market. I’ve talked with DPR about taking on some of them as freelancers; I hope it works out."

"I’m seeing this as a chance to pursue intellectual property consulting (expert witness work for patent litigation). I’ve done a little bit of that in the past, and absolutely love it." (He adds that it pays well too.)

Is this decision final?

"There’s a slight chance that the brand itself could continue into the future, with just the two HQ guys William and Dave [I presume he means William Brawley and Dave Pardue —Ed.] doing all the review work themselves." But he adds, "I don’t know what probability to assign to that option."

Dave also mentions that he really wants to have a reason to continue traveling to Japan, and that he will probably continue his work on weather-resistance testing of cameras—which he says no one else is doing. He thinks it could end up making a nice retirement job.

Guerrilla marketing
A background reason for this is that traditional media, a category IR falls into, just isn't as important as it used to be for advertisers to sell stuff. The old model of conscientious experts conducting objective independent tests, whether in print or online, isn't considered as necessary as it once was assumed to be. Companies are supporting more of the short-lived, opinion-based, or tribal-affinity-based content that people like to consume these days. They've shifted more of their marketing budgets to social media influencers such as "brand ambassadors," who tend to be openly partisan, and who sometimes shade heavily into the sort of boosterism that used to be the province of hired PR corporations.

I certainly understand Dave not wanting to work "6.5 day workweeks." I didn't stop pedaling the bicycle, but I started coasting it a lot more about five years ago, after realizing that I had been putting in 70+ hour weeks for a number of years. I'd start working in my bathrobe at 6:00 a.m., and not get dressed until just before the UPS guy came at 3:00 or 4:00 so he wouldn't think I was some kind of bum! Often I'd find myself up and working at 11:00 p.m. or even 2:00 a.m. (If you work at home, it's true that you're always at home, but it's also true that you're always at work. Insomnia? Might as well work.) Saturday and Sunday had become just two more working days; I think one year I took a grand total of something like 17 days off—and on those days, mostly just worried about what might be happening to my traffic. It gets old after a while. I work no harder than most people now. I try to take Saturdays completely off, and that sort of works (not today). As you might have noticed, I ended up taking two weekdays off in each of the past two weeks, and it got a little too quiet around here. That never would have happened in 2013.

Ironically, though, TOP, which started in 2005, might survive because it's so small. I'd be gone by now but for the 746 lovely people who are keeping me afloat. (Bless you!) That wouldn't be nearly enough to support an enterprise as involved as Imaging Resource, but, along with the shrinking income from other sources, it's been enough of a leg up for one dude and two cool dogs in a little house in rural Upstate New York.

Thank goodness for small blessings...like being small.

Best wishes to Dave and Marti and the entire staff of IR. We will miss you.

I'll keep you posted.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Nikon Z50

Mighty Nikon has announced its very first DX (APS-C) mirrorless camera. The new Nikon Z50 is a simpler, smaller, lighter, handier variant of the company's full-frame Z6 and Z7 mirrorless models.

As you can see from the picture above, the throat diameter—generously sized for full-frame—is proportionately large for the smaller sensor. That's not necessarily a problem from a lens design perspective, though, and at least Nikon's APS-C and FF mirrorless cameras will share the same lensmount, in contrast to Canon's R (FF) and M (APS-C) camera lines.

The smaller Nikon mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera (MILC) system, called Z DX in keeping with Nikon's longtime nomenclature for crop-sensor products, might turn out to be strongly biased toward consumer zooms in terms of dedicated lenses for the format. Two new such lenses were announced with the Z50—a compact 16–50mm (24–75mm-e) ƒ/3.5–6.3 VR standard zoom, and a 50–250mm (75–375mm-e) ƒ/4.5–6.3 VR telephoto zoom.

Hunka hunka
This is merely speculative and might turn out to be wrong, but, historically, Nikon's interest in producing dedicated format-specific lenses for APS-C has been about zero, at least since it abandoned its early fealty to the crop sensor and went with FF. Sort of the opposite of Fuji in that respect. So you might need to be happy with the "lenses as an afterthought" school of thought to be happy and at home here...

...Unless you want to buy something like, oh, I don't know, the just-announced four-and-a-half pound, eight-thousand-dollar Z 58mm ƒ0.95 NOCT and use it as a 87mm-angle-of-view equivalent on your new Z50. Then again, a whole lot of "camera consumers" just buy a body with a two-zoom kit and never think about lenses again, so, hey, could work.

Don't worry about how you'll carry your new NOCT
—it comes with its own case

Note that a life-sized block diagram of the lens elements is impressed in the foam of the case! This one's mainly for the collectors, "in case" (no pun intended) you're in any doubt about the target market.

The Z50's 20-MP sensor appears to be the same as the one in the D500, which gets high marks from users. Seems a perfect fit.

Each of us would have to handle one to be sure, but it looks like Nikon hasn't made this camera too small. I'm all for the Goldilocks principle when it comes to hand-fit; I'd rather have a nice built-in grip already there than have to add one like I did with my Fuji X-T1.

The prices will be ~$860 for the body, ~$1k for the body and the normal zoom, and ~$1,350 for the body and both lenses. Looks reasonable from here. Available for preorder; ships November 27th.

When you're ahead, don't give your competitors time to catch up
If you can tolerate a little meta-rumination, the biggest problem with Z DX might be "the Model T trap." Henry Ford honestly believed the Model T was the perfect car for Americans for perpetuity, so when it reached the end of its remarkable product run and sales slowed to a trickle, Ford not only had nothing ready to replace it, but Henry still believed no replacement was necessary. His beleaguered son, the much (and unfairly) maligned Edsel, beat his brains against the wall trying to get his cantankerous Dad to budge and allow him to bring the Model A to market; in the meantime, Ford Motor Company basically had no mainstream car to sell...for six years. That lapse was critical to Chevrolet, which used the opportunity to step into the breach. Had Ford worked vigorously to maintain its huge advantage, Chevy might be about as well known today as Handley Motorcars or LaSalle. Anyway, I don't know offhand how many years Sony and Fuji have been selling crop-sensor MILCs, but it's been a while now (I'd be interested to see a head-to-head with this and the similar but less-than-half-as-expensive Sony A6000, which now goes for $389[!]). Nikon might be too late to this game.

Still might be a swell camera, though. Nikons are almost always nice, even the ones that don't sell too well. I'll look forward to real-world reviews.

Mike
(for my friend Jerry L.)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Modern Color

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Open Mike: RTFM

["Open Mike" is the not always off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, except when Mike is a day late and a dollar short again.]

-

It stands for—of course you know this—"Read The [expletive deleted] Manual."

Once upon a time, one of my standard pieces of advice for new camera buyers was that they spend a solid hour or two (!) familiarizing themselves with their new camera. (That amount of time dates this advice. Now I would have to say a day or two, or a week.) I had a litany of stern admonitions about how this was difficult, and required self-discipline, but that it was worth it—it would pay continual dividends over the entire time they owned the camera. Of course, part of that was reading the manual, thoroughly and carefully.

Earlier than that, I also recommended two to five minutes of practice time with one's camera every evening. Get the camera out; work on things like how you hold it for a horizontal vs. a vertical, your stance, which way you turn the lens to focus farther or closer, how you change the exposure settings. (Those things? Also dated.) The idea was that if you get the camera out of the bag for two minutes, you'll probably practice with it for ten. And the goal was mastery, getting the "feel of the wheel"—that is, getting to the point where camera handling becomes second nature and no longer requires conscious thought.

I stopped giving that bit of advice. "Empirical research" (i.e., asking people later) indicated that virtually no one took the advice. So why offer it?

Leicas are great
It's been a long time since handling any camera was second nature for me. Nowadays, efforts to tame the device routinely intrude on the process of photographing that I remember—that intense focus on seeing, moving, and reacting without a single conscious thought to the camera or what your hands were doing to operate it.

Cameras used to be friends. Now they're adversaries.

Some kudos are in order here along those lines. I don't often take Leicas seriously any more, because they're so danged expensive. I can't identify. I've always kinda hated the human tendency to show off while also going along with the Joneses. Everybody is free, but they have to do exactly what everybody else does to show they're different from, and better than, everyone else.

But Leicas are actually great. One big reason is that Leica is the only camera company that actively works at making control interfaces that are simple, clean, and comprehensible. You'd think big company like a Panasonic or an Olympus could make a completely separate line of cameras that strive for the same goal, without abandoning their main lines; but they don't. No one else does it. Apparently only rich people deserve simple, clean, and comprehensible.

And Canikon deserve kudos, too, but for a different reason—consistency. It's not like models and control configurations never change or features are never added, but both those companies work hard to maintain consistency of handling and operation from model change to model change and year to year to year, within their own universes. Once you're familiar with Canon DSLRs, you know a new Canon DSLR of roughly the same price tier is going to feel substantially familiar to you, and your time-to-adapt is consequently going to be shorter. Props to both those companies for that.

Do what I say, not what I do
And speaking of non-compliance to good advice, as I was earlier, a natural question: do I even take my own advice and RTFM any more? I do not. What I do with a new-to-me camera is sit in my armchair and diddle through the menus, setting things the way I think I like them. Every now and again I come across something too inscrutable to comprehend. What I do about that is think, I'll look it up in the manual...

...Someday. But the manual is an inch thick and has tiny print and was written by someone who either a.) can barely write or b.) barely understands the camera better than I do already or c.) isn't even a photographer. So "someday" never comes and I never get around to that. (Mitch Hedberg joke—someone passing out flyers on a city sidewalk is saying, "here—you throw this away." Similarly, me telling myself I'll do something later is actually saying I'm not going to do it, only without admitting that to myself.)

Presumably, Ansco's "Cyko" printing papers
predated Alfred Hitchcock and Norman Bates!

I once had a camera (the Panasonic GF1, I think) that had a control wheel that was also a button—you pressed the control wheel in and it changed some setting. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that. If you RTFM you'd know, but if you don't, well, who randomly presses on control wheels to see if anything happens?

Then there's the embarrassment of accidentally getting lost in the settings of your own camera. This doesn't happen all that often, but it reliably makes me feel like an idiot when it does. I remember the first time I ever accidentally changed a settings on a camera and couldn't figure out how to get back to where I was before. It was on a newfangled electronical EOS Canon, at a wedding, and after missing some of the action struggling to figure out how to get the settings back to where they were before, I had to remove the battery and resort to the default settings, which I used for the remainder of the afternoon. I remember being cross and thinking that this won't do. But that turned out to be merely the opening shot in a battle that was to get hotter over the years.

Finally, there are those little funky "gotchas" that are the result of the camera not quite working in the way it should—things that were programmed in by the manufacturer that don't make a lot of sense. Another camera I owned automatically changed the JPEG style to something funky when you switched to a certain drive mode, which I did accidentally one time. It mystified me for half a day and I had to ask about it on a forum before I figured out what was going on. My friend Oren is good at ferreting these things out. So is the "hive-mind" of the Internet, of course, which makes it sensible to read reviews of cameras you already possess and use—which was also something I used to make fun of back in the days of yore when knights roamed the land on the trail of giants.

I wish I had kept a list of examples over the years. That would have been entertaining.

But if I were organized enough to do that, then I would be organized enough to always RTFM in the first place!

Mike
(Thanks to c.d.embrey and Joslin Hall Rare Books)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Marcin Wuu: "Talk about a coincidence. I'm doin' a video on RTFM right now. I got one fact that you might find interesting. The manual for Canon EOS R has 644 pages. RTFM really gets a new meaning now. (My Hasselblad's 2000FC/M manual is 28 pages long by the way. Blows me mind, it does.)"

Ernie Van Veen: "I just sold all of my Canon gear—every last bit—and bought a Sony RX10 IV to use as my main camera (the iPhone XR is my other camera). The RX10 is great, except that learning to manage the plethora of focusing options (both automatic and manual) has me frustrated enough to want to throw the camera off a cliff. I can get it doing what I want, and then some seemingly inconsequential unrelated change will ruin it all. As far as I can see, the manual is only available online as a help-style website (!), and was written, apparently, by a trainee radio news journalist. I'm sure I'll work it out in the long run, but, until then, as they say in the movies, I'm freakin' out man!"

Alex Monro: "I'm probably a bit weird these days. I not only read the manual, I carry it around in the camera bag. I've even been known to read the manual before buying the camera, thanks to downloadable PDFs."

Gordon Haddow: "The most expensive camera I bought came without a manual. It cost $2,000 in 1989; in today's dollars it would be about $4,170. The lens came with a one-page manual. It was a Wisner 4x5and a Nikon view camera lens. The most difficult thing was learning to see upside-down and reversed and to remember to close the shutter before pulling the slide (did that countless times). Now I have to buy a second manual from Tom Hogan to learn how to setup my camera and use it."

Ed Hawco: "As someone who Ws (writes) the FM, I can tell you that I have never seen a camera user guide that was anything better than grim and frustrating. They are very much written from an engineering reference perspective instead of being task-oriented, which would be more helpful. On the other hand, it clears the way for aftermarket books written by people who know how to write and can understand the needs of the user. But they only appear once the camera has been on the market for a while, and typically only for cameras that are commercially quite successful, which justifies the expense for a third-party to write and and publish the book."

David Lee: "I remember reading somewhere that when Ralph Gibson was shooting film Leicas, he used to put back the shutter speed and aperture to certain setting. That way, when he started shooting again he could adjust both without having to look at them and keep his eye on the viewfinder. Try that with a digital. Regarding camera manuals, I download the PDF version and open it in Goodreader on my iPad. Then I make all kind of annotations in yellow and red.

"Funny you mentioned Lamborghinis. A few years ago, in the city I live, a young bride was given a Lamborghini by his new husband. She took it from the dealership and drove it to her university, just a few kilometers away, and crashed it. The car burned instantly. You can still see the black spot in the pavement."

Mike replies: I think Ralph came up in an era when camera-handling skills were one mark of a real photographer, something photographers worked on and boasted about. He told me once about a show-off session (if I can call it that) where Robert Frank wowed him with some camera-handling virtuosity.

Ramón Acosta: "Funny how thick manuals have never scared me. When on friends cars I would ask, 'why is your thermometer using the wrong units?' Or 'why is the time wrong?' The answer was always, 'I can’t figure out how to change it.' I open the glove box, look for the item, and in less than five minutes everything is how it should be."

Mike replies: When can you come to my house? I've still never sync'd the phone to the car, among other things.

Soeren Engelbrecht: "I work a lot with user interface (UI) design (apart from being an enthusiast photographer). Here's a recent anecdote:

"A friend of mine has had her phone for about two years. She complained to me: 'I took this picture at a concert, but the singer is all white'—a classic case of a small object on a large, dark background being overexposed. She had been trying for a long time how to figure out how to set the camera to handle this—including asking a 30+ year pro photographer. The camera app in the phone has a 'pro' mode with maybe 25 different settings/features, and the two of them had been trying for a long, long time to understand how this would work. The solution: Even when the camera is in 'simple' mode, just tap where you want to measure the light (and focus).

"And why didn't they discover this? Because the design lacked 'affordance'—there was no indication at all that this was even an option. You have to RTFM to get it. It's hard enough with settings/controls being hidden in menu systems, but this was literally invisible to the user.

"My perfect case of 'affordance' is the design of the controls for seat adjustment in a Mercedes: You literally have a scale model of the seat, where you manipulate the individual parts (headrest, etc.)."

Quote o' the Day: D.M.

-

"I’m not sure how many more menu
systems my brain can absorb."

—My friend D.M., on his latest new camera

-

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bruce Alan Greene: "I shoot movies for a living and that means working with many different cameras that I don't own. And with it, learning many menus. I now understand why the Arri Alexa is the most popular. It's not just that the image quality is good, it's that it has the simplest menu with the fewest choices and 'features.' And the most commonly used features are directly accessible via a little LCD on the side of the camera (Frame rate, Color Temp, ISO). I think some still camera manufacturer should study their philosophy.  :-) "

Dave Jenkins: "Me either. I made the switch to digital cameras in 2003, and it seems I’ve done nothing since but learn software and menus. My internal hard drive is about maxed out."

Speed: "In the early days of the personal computer we had a saying. Nobody wants the computer to do more than five or six things. But everybody wants it to do a different five or six things. It is the same with cameras. And reviewers who dive deeply into the menus and complain loudly that some obscure feature possibly useful to a handful of photographers is missing don't help."

Rod Thompson: "Working in a camera retail environment, I have to admit, it more about learning camera (singular), than photography (global) these days. I defy anyone to have a real working field knowledge of every camera system out there unless they make it their obsession. We run field trips that often boil down to extended menu exploration to get needed functions operational."

Bear.: "My problem is that even if I RTFM, the FM is not written in any language I am capable of understanding. For example: 'To store setting select menu options: AP - K2 (d1) - C1.' WTF!? Fortunately, I don't change cameras enough for it to make a difference. I use trial and error and hope I don't lose the settings I finally decide on when I turn the danged thing off, leave them there, and hope for the best."

hil: "Gave up too. Leica M-D now. Easy-peasy."