If you are interested in old cameras and have a bit of money to spend (or just enjoy browsing auctions), there is this absolutely huge antique camera sale on at Ebay right now. Tons of Rolleis plus some really rare large format camera (515 items in total).
I haven’t mentioned the new Nikon d3 yet. When it was released I was too busy, and after a while it had been so beaten to death on blogs and forums that it just wasn’t worth posting about. However this is a interesting little post by Cliff Mautner, who got to shoot a wedding with the new camera.
So far the only sample images I’d seen had been official Nikon samples and a few sports shots that got leaked. While these were impressive, they did not come with any commentary from the photographer; it is interesting to see a report from a wedding photographer who used the camera for an actual job, and not just advertising for Nikon. Cliff’s report is glowing, and serves to confirm that Nikon have a real winner here.
Well I’ve been busy putting together a new theme for the various blogs on A Darker Vision, and now after several weeks I’m ready to test it on a live blog.
The look will eventually become the site wide theme for DV, though I may add different colour schemes. It is designed for a screen resolution of at least 1024 pixels wide, though users still stuck on 800×600 will be able to view the blog just fine with just the second column (used mostly for advertising and non essential information) off screen.
During this test period, I’d be most appreciative if you could report any bugs or errors you see.
Today, I am in a black and white mood.
Of course I forgot to bring the Kiev 4 along with me, and so only the Canon 350D is immediately available. Now you can always take photos with your colour bayer array sensor digital SLR, but you immediately lose many of the benefits of B&W photography. Reduced dynamic range as well as less sharpness due to bayer arrays and anti-aliasing filters. If only there was some sort of full frame B&W sensor with a full 10 stops (or more) dynamic range.
Alas, there is no such thing (apart from one attempt from Kodak in the past); and the immediate future doesn’t hold much promise either, due to a complete lack of demand. The lack of demand is of course due to the fact that not many people want a camera that does only B&W, especially when it is extremely easy to convert your colour digital photos to B&W anyway (despite the drawbacks).
So I wish once again, for a modular digital system. Not something like Leica’s digital R system, where they separated digital camera, from a glorified lens holder. No I wish for a system where as much as possible is reused in the camera itself, with little more than a cartridge encased sensor being the easily replaceable part. I obviously a system like this is far off, and probably further than it needs to be, since camera companies benefit from the constant rebuying of bodies every time a new sensor is developed.
Now imagine a future where you buy one camera body. The range/cost is defined by the memory bandwidth, shutter speed, autofocus, etc. The sensor is not included, or comes with a basic 1.6x crop sensor, say 12 megapixels and usable ISO up to 3200. Now I decide to splash out and get a full frame B&W sensor for my camera, it is 12 megapixels as well, but with ISO all the way up to 25600. At the lower ISO’s it has a dynamic range of 12 stops, and it’s images are amazingly sharp. Add to this a 2x crop sensor, say 10 megapixels, perfect for nature and outdoor sport; a full frame high resolution colour sensor perfect for extra large prints of landscapes; a lower resolution full frame colour sensor could provide amazing colour rendition and dynamic range.
Suddenly you have system that allows you to carry one camera with you, yet gives you the flexibility to use a sensor that is most suited to the job at hand. Done properly, I would hope you could get the equivalent of 4 digital SLR’s for the price of 2, and throw in the chance of 3rd party sensors (want a Foveon sensor in that Canon body?).
I’m sure there are many technical issues I don’t know about, and these hurdles may never be passed, but one can dream.
It started with a leak from Amazon.com yesterday, and ended up with Canon making the official announcement today. The 40D and 1DsMKIII are now official, as well as a new 14mm wide angle lens and a new smaller simpler 4 stop IS system in two of their low end lenses. If pouring through numbers is your thing, then DP Review has all the info you need.
Obviously most of the buzz is around the new 21 mega pixels of the 1Ds, and of course the average Canon user is understandably happy that they now have an option that competes with Nikon’s D200. For me however the interest is in the IS, and most importantly the 14bit RAW files.
More Bits Equals More Detail
The 1DMKIII was the first Canon camera to come out with 14 bit RAW, and with the release of these new camera’s it is clear Canon intend for all their camera’s to have this from now on. For those that don’t know why this is a big thing, you need to understand how the camera stores the image. When the photo is taken, the sensor, which is actually an analogue device, needs to have its signal converted to a digital representation for storing. The resulting digital information used to be restricted to 4096 levels of brightness per pixel. While this seems like a lot, you need to understand that the levels are not linear. The brightest stop has half of these, with the next stop having half of what remains, and so forth until you reach the shadows where there are very few levels of brightness. This results in less shadow detail and is why many digital photographers suggest exposing to the right (another words exposing the image so that it is as bright as possible and then bring it down in post processing).
Now 14 bits goes from 4096 levels to 16384! This translates to better detail and tonality and one hopes, a noticeable increase in shadow detail. With Canon now having 14 bits as the norm, we can hope the other manufacturers follow suit, and in the end we all benefit.
IS for the caffeine lover
Canon’s new IS appears to be much smaller, and we hope cheaper, than the existing IS solution they have. They claim it’s effectiveness is equal to the old IS, and from the lenses they have decided to release it with, it seems clear that they intend to make IS available to as many people as possible.
I’ve been avoiding buying IS lenses due to the cost, but when these come out, my willpower may well be sapped.
AssignmentZero have an interview with Chase Jarvis on microstock & crowdsourcing, and his ideas on how it affects the photographic industry as a whole.
In a world where most pro photographers seem to be accusing microstock photographers of being traitors, Chase’s attitude is refreshing.
From the article:
This industry is changing so much that you should never say never. There are people who once said, ‘Oh, I’ll never put my images in royalty-free,’ and now they are. Those people who were saying, ‘Never microstock!’ are going to eat their words in the near future.
I’m waiting for that tipping point and then I’ll probably step into the market.
Just over a month ago, I wrote Selling your Photography; a far too brief look at some of the options available online for selling ones photography as prints. The aim, finding a online print seller who would sell your prints for you, without too much effort from your side. The saying “There is no such thing as a free lunch” is apt here and the results were predictably bad. While there are many sites providing the ability to sell art online, getting sales on them is always going to take work.
Today however, I will look at the actual prints that two of these companies produce. My reasoning went that, although I was selling prints on multiple sites, my own marketing efforts should be directed towards the site that gives me the best combination of print options, cost, profit and of course, print quality. It didn’t take much effort to whittle this down to just two sites, Deviant Art & Imagekind. Both these sites provide a large selection of sizes (with some limitations on both), both allow the artist to set the price (above a specified base cost).
Three of the four criteria are easily compared just by looking at the web sites; but the fourth, print quality, required that I actually order prints from both sites. I decided on an image that I thought would test the print quality in both resolution and colour accuracy; one of my newer photos, Autumn’s Warmth.
I’ve bought prints through DeviantArt before, the process is simple, the prices for artists incredibly cheap. The problem was the image aspect ratio. This was a 2:1 panorama, and Deviantart only provides one size in this aspect ratio, 8 by 4 inches. Deviantart offers a huge number of print size (a definite plus), but only in set aspect ratios; some ratios better represented than others (a definite minus if you love panoramas). The shipping options ranged from cheap to expensive and covered all my needs. Deviantart prints are on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with the options of Glossy, Luster and Matte.
Imagekind provides less size options, but the ratio of the photo is not limited. I chose the smallest print I could, which turned out to be 10 by 5 inches. The selection of papers is huge, and while the Epson glossy and enhanced matt are cheap quality options, I chose the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper. Shipping options were limited, with only two rather expensive FedEx options available. FedExing to South Africa was going to be more than I could afford. This is where Imagekind really impressed; I emailed their customer care person, and after discussing my problem with her, she organised that my print be shipped to me via USPO at a greatly reduced price from their standard FedEx rates.
So far so good.
Deviantart wins on cost, just over a $5 including shipping. Imagekinds print cost was more, and although I could have chosen a cheaper paper, the cheapest option would have still come in at about 3 times the cost when shipping is included. The larger the print size, the less of an issue this is, with both sites charging essentially the same price for larger prints.
Imagekind wins on sizes & paper types available. Also their customer service impressed me, though I do not consider this a win over Deviantart, since I have never had the need to ask anything from them.
Well both prints arrived at my local post office on the same day and I rushed over to pick them up. I’ll save my first impressions until after the more clinical look at the scans. Both prints were scanned at 300dpi, and the image cropped to one section of the print that I believe gave good indication of detail and colour accuracy. A crop of the original image is also included.
Remember these are 300dpi scans, the imperfections you see are close to invisible with the naked eye.
The Deviant Art print is sharp and saturated. The colours are very smooth but as I have experienced with all Fuji Crystal Archive prints, they are not quite how I wanted them. I have found getting a print to look the way I want with the Fuji colour profile is difficult, this is most likely a deficiency on my part, and a greater knowledge of working with difficult colour profiles would probably make all the difference. Deviant Art wants you to upload the images with the SRGB colour profile, and this makes it even harder to get right.
The Imagekind print is far more noisy, and I can indeed see this noise with the naked eye. This is a noise I see with all ink jet prints on papers that don’t smooth the inks enough, and looking at the Imagekind media pack seems to reveal that this is at its worst with the paper I chose. That said the colours are correct, the image sharp, though not quite as sharp looking as the DeviantArt print.
Now back to the first impressions of the prints.
The DeviantArt print looks great. At first glance, it is contrasty and well saturated, the colours bright and shadows dark. It definitely has a certain wow factor. The feel of paper reminds one of your standard 1 hour print shop photo prints. Overall I was very pleased with the result; though the colours were obviously different from the digital file, the average viewer would not know this.
The Imagekind print came packaged in so many layers that it took me well over a minute to get it out. I thought I had been pleased with the DeviantArt print; but this was even better. The print had the advantage of being slightly larger, and also had a thin white border which seems to enhance the viewing. The colours were close perfect, and the image sharp. Though I could see the pattern of the ink jet printer if I looked really closely when taking in the image as a whole this was invisible. That Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper is something to behold, it looks & feels perfect, and managed to make the photo look more than just a photo.
The final result is a resounding victory to Imagekind, though if I had chosen a cheaper paper, this might have been closer. I obviously need to do some more learning with regard to colour profiles, and until that happens Imagekind will win every time. I upload an SRGB image, and the print I get is the same as what I see on screen.
Overall Deviant Art wins on cost, by quite a margin on small prints; with Imagekind beating them, often only narrowly, on every other aspect. I have no doubt that you would be pleased with prints from both these sites, and they are close enough that there is no truly better option.
First I must apologise for the lack of posts over the last two weeks. Work has been rather time consuming recently.
Last week a couple of site mentioned a new camera auction site, CameraGAS.com. You may well have already seen it by now; I still feel I should help promote it though. With a fixed $5 cost for listing a sale, this site looks like it could well become the preferred venue for selling camera’s and photographic supplies online. That is, as long as it gets enough support.
So go visit it, if you have something to sell or see something you want to buy, give it a try. Even if it doesn’t become the next EBay for cameras, maybe it will prompt EBay to reduce their costs, a move which would hopefully reduce prices and benefit all of us.
You’ve probably seen it on several sites already, the small thumbnail image, which when clicked opens up to the full size image over the current page. Well the javascript that allows this is called lightbox and the I have installed the wordpress plugin that allows me to use it here on this blog.
So Enjoy.
Earlier this week Mike from TOP wrote a brief rant about copyright; or more accurately, a rant about essentially unknown photographers actively making it known they don’t want anyone using their work without prior approval, without giving people any way to contact them in the first place.
What seemed to me to be a reasonable request has turned into what Mike called a Copyright Brouhaha, and now a third post, Keep Your Freakin’ Hands Off My Picture, is causing even more arguments in the comments section.
While the articles are worth the read, the comments are where the meat is. There are two sides; the one, seemingly made up of some professional photographers and lawyers, claims that what Mike is doing (especially in his Random Excellence posts) is, if not legally wrong, at the very least morally questionable. The other side is made up of the rest of us, and seems to belief that posting images of other photographers to showcase their work (including linking back to their sites if possible) should easily fall within the provisions of fair use and is most certainly a good thing.
Now I can understand where the Pro photographers and lawyers are coming from. The pro photographer is out there to make money, as much of it as they can. A lawyer’s job is to twist the law to his clients benefit, if a law has some leeway in its interpretation, then all the better. Obviously when asked whether something is fair use, the default answer is “probably not”, since avoiding possible litigation is considered more important than the original intent of the law.
To my mind, the idea of fair use is there to allow others to comment on, learn from, and praise existing works. All of these are impractical unless you have the entire image to look at, and while you definitely do not need a full size image, a thumbnail will definitely not do.
While I do not dispute that the lawyers are correct when they say Mike could find himself in court for his current use of copyrighted images, I do think this shows that copyright law, and especially the concept of fair use, is currently broken.
