Penmachine

While I'm on my blog break, more edited versions of my Twitter posts from the past week, newest first:

• My wonderful wife got me a Nikon D90 camera for my 40th birthday this week. I'm thinking of selling my old Nikon D50, still a great camera. Anyone interested? I was thinking around $325. I also have a brand new 18–55 mm lens for sale with it, $150 by itself or $425 together. I have all original boxes, accessories, manuals, software, etc., and I'll throw in a memory card, plus a UV filter for the lens.
  
  
• Roger Hawkins's drum track for "When a Man Loves a Woman" (Percy Sledge 1966): tastiest ever? Hardly a fill, no toms, absolutely delicious.
• Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came to my 40th birthday party—both for your presence and for the presents. Photos from the event, held June 27, three days early for my actual birthday on Tuesday, are now posted (please use tag "penmachinebirthday" if you post some yourself).
• I think Twitter just jumped the shark. In trending topics, Michael Jackson passed Iran, OK, but both passed by Princess Protection Program (new Disney Channel movie)?
• AT&T (and Rogers, presumably) is trying to charge MythBusters' Adam Savage $11,000 USD for some wireless web surfing here in Canada.
• After more than 12 years buying stuf on eBay, here's our first ever item for sale there. Nothing too exciting, but there you go.
• Michael Jackson's death this week made me think of comparisons with Elvis, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain. Lennon and Cobain still seemed to have some artistic vitality ahead of them. Feel a need for Michael Jackson coverage? Jian Ghomeshi (MP3 file) on CBC in Canada is the only commentator who isn't blathering mindlessly. But as a cancer patient myself, having Farrah Fawcett and Dr. Jerri Nielsen (of South Pole fame) die of it the same day is a bit hard to take.
• Seattle's KCTS 9 (PBS affiliate) showed "The Music Instinct" with Daniel Levitin and Bobby McFerrin. If you like music or are a musician, it's worth watching, even if it's a bit scattershot, packing too much into two hours.
• New rule: when a Republican attacks gay marriage, lets assume he's cheating on his wife (via Jak King).
• The blogs and podcasts I'm affiliated with are now sold on Amazon for its Kindle e-reader device, for $2 USD a month. I know, that's weird, because they're normally free, and are even accessible for free using the Kindle's built-in web browser, so I don't know why people would pay for them—but if you want to, here you go: Penmachine, Inside Home Recording, and Lip Gloss and Laptops. Okay, we're waiting for the money to roll in...
• Great speech by David Schlesinger from Reuters to the International Olympic Committee on not restricting new media at the Olympics (via Jeff Jarvis).
• TV ad: "Restaurant-inspired meals for cats." Um, have they seen what cats bring in from the outdoors?
• I planned to record my last segment for Inside Home Recording #72, but neighbour was power washing right outside the window (in the rain!). Argh.
• You can't trust your eyes: the blue and green are actually the SAME COLOUR.
• Can you use the new SD card slot in current MacBook laptops for Time Machine backups? (You can definitely use it to boot the computer.) Maybe, but not really. SDHC cards max out at 32GB (around $100 USD); the upcoming SDXC will handle more, but none exist in Macs or in the real world yet. Unless you put very little on the MacBook's internal drive, or use System Preferences to exclude all but the most essential stuff from backups, then no, SD cards are not viable for Time Machine.
• Some stats from Sebastian Albrecht's insane thirteen-times-up-the-Grouse Grind climb in one day this week. He burned 14,000+ calories.
• Even though I use RSS extensively, I find myself manually visiting the same 5 blogs (Daring Fireball, Kottke, Darren Barefoot, PZ Myers, and J-Walk) every morning, with most interesting news covered.
• I never get tired of NASA's rocket-cam launch videos.
• Pat Buchanan hosts conference advocating English-only initiatives in the USA. But the sign over the stage is misspelled.
• Who knew the Rolling Stones made an (awesome) jingle for Rice Krispies in the mid-1960s?
• Always scary stuff behind a sentence like, "'He is an expert in every field,' said a church spokeswoman."
• Kodachrome slide film is dead, but Fujichrome Velvia killed it a long time ago. This is just the official last rites.
• My friends Dave K. and Dr. Debbie B. did the Vancouver-to-Seattle bicycle Ride to Conquer Cancer (more than 270 km in two days) last weekend. Congrats and good job!
• My daughter (11) asks on her blog: "if Dad is so internet famous, I mean, Penmachine is popular, then, maybe I am too..."
• Evolution of a photographer (via Scott Bourne).

Labels: amazon, apple, backup, birthday, cancer, film, geekery, linksofinterest, music, news, olympics, photography, politics, religion, science, space, television, twitter

While I'm on my blog break, here are some selected, edited, and concatenated versions of my Twitter posts from the past week, newest first:

• A DJ is a fake DJ if he plays music that he composed and recorded himself.
• For photo nerds, a fun shootout from Poland of Nikon's 1960-era 58mm f/1.4 lens vs. a new (2008) autofocus 50mm f/1.4.
• The sunset is beautiful and calming. Wish I could say the same for the state of my digestive system.
• My kids are suddenly obsessed with Devo's "Whip It" and Lipps Inc.'s "Funkytown." Sounds like 1980 around here. They are also keen on "You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record)" and "We're Not Gonna Take It."
• Best tilt-shift time-lapse movie yet (check it out in HD).
• When Robert X. Cringely isn't trying to predict, he can be very wise. Here he is on SMS and Twitter.
• I'm uneasy about the proposed new Canadian Internet surveillance law.
• In case Iran distracted you, note that Obama is taking lots of heat from the U.S. gay community this week.
• Listening to "One Thing Leads to Another" by The Fixx (1983). That's one killer guitar tone, I tell ya. [...] Have moved on to "I'm a Man" by the Spencer Davis Group. Hard to believe Steve Winwood was only 18. Sounds like an old soul shouter.
• Sometimes when listening to a good podcast, I’ll pick a longer line at the grocery store so I can listen to more of it.
• I believe the commercial jingle for MTI Community College (on their site) may be the worst such tune ever made.
• Photos by Andy Ihnatko using the improved camera on the new iPhone 3GS. Tap-to-focus also invokes spot metering, which makes a HUGE difference.
• Since I took a break from blogging a few days ago, I'm tweeting and commenting on other blogs quite a bit more. Can't not write, I guess.
• Roger Ebert writes that right-wing TV blowhard Bill O'Reilly tells viewers, "You're right, but you're not right ENOUGH! I'm angrier about this than you are!" And that is corrosive.
• How the human brain perceives images.
• As 11:30 news ends, they say, "See you on the morning news at 4:30." Uh, sure.
• Is there anything that will more instantly provoke itchy eyes than a Visine ad?
• For recording a podcast with two people, the Blue Snowball USB microphone is okay, but there are better USB mic options now. If you want to use a single mic for 2 people, the Snowball is actually better in its omni mode than in unidirectional. Alas, to change its hardware gain setting you need to change firmware (available from Blue site), which is annoying. Look also at Samson's C03U, and don't ignore the possibility of using a small USB audio interface and traditional mics too. For two people you'll do best with two mics. Modern lavalier (clip-ons) like the Audio-Technica PRO 70 do very well there.
• DCResource on the tiny new Olympus DP-1 Micro Four Thirds camera.
• Is this real or a spoof?
• "Dancing Queen," "Brown Eyed Girl," "I Saw Her Standing There"—some songs work regardless of the audience.
• Any entrepreneur worth his or her salt talks about their actual business, not "entrepreneurism."
• Not chuffed; rather, chafed.

That'll do in the meantime, won't it? Oh, and happy Father's Day to my dad, other dads out there, and me!

Labels: geekery, linksofinterest, music, news, photography, recording, twitter

Here are three photos I recently uploaded to my Flickr account, each with an accompanying story but otherwise unrelated. The first one shows the practical applications of knowing how your camera works, while the others are just for fun. Click each photo to zoom it:

Two waterfalls:

Actually, it's two photos of the same waterfall, taken a few seconds apart using my Nikon D50 digital SLR and a 50 mm lens, showing how you can change an image by controlling the aperture and shutter speed.

• For blurry water: I snapped the left photo at f/22 (a small aperture) for 1/8 of a second, blurring the water with a long shutter speed. I didn't have a tripod, so I rested the camera against the edge of the fountain for stability.
  
  
• For frozen splashes: The right photo was at f/3.5 (a wider aperture) for 1/800 of a second, freezing the motion of the water with a short shutter speed. The camera was in the same place, but because of the fast shutter I didn't need to be so careful about not moving it.

Depth of field differences: It's not that easy to see, but the right photo with the fast shutter speed also has shallower depth of focus because of the larger aperture. That's particularly noticeable when you compare the concrete edge at the lower left corners of the two frames.

Where is this? The fountain is on Birch Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue in Vancouver, if you want to visit it yourself. It's pretty cool: two streams flow down on either side of a set of steps. This is the north side.

Drama at the birdhouse:

This isn't quite as dramatic as it looks at first glance. While the photos are in the correct order, the chickadee didn't eat the wasp—it just scared the insect away, with food already in its mouth.

We have chickadees raise babies in this birdhouse on our back porch every year. But this year this one bird (the mom?) looks especially beat-up and scraggly, and has looked that way for weeks. Is is just old, or did something nasty happen to it? Seems to be feeding the kids just fine, though.

I used a long focal length, higher ISO (sensitivity), and fast shutter speed (plus some patience) to get this series.

Exploded Coke Zero:

I guess our downstairs fridge was set a bit too cold. Good thing sugar acts as an antifreeze, so that it was the sugar-free (and non-sticky) Coke Zero that froze and exploded first. Still a bit of mess to clean up inside the fridge, though.

This photo required a flash, both because the room was a bit dim and because I wanted to highlight the glittery goodness of the unintentional Coke Zero slush.

Labels: animals, cameraworks, food, photography

Bad Astronomer Phil Plait likes the photography of Annie Leibovitz, such as this ad photo for Louis Vuitton bags featuring astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell. Despite her fame and the excellent work she's done in the past, I find most of Leibovitz's current work aesthetically repulsive.

A bit of a rant here. Annie used to take good photos, and she still occasionally does, but her advertising work (including this picture) and many of her portraits long ago strayed much too far into over-Photoshopped territory. One critic even called a picture she created last year the worst photograph ever made, and I'm inclined to agree.

I think this would have been a much better photo with the same people, all of whom I admire, plus the same truck and the same bag, outside on a sunny day, maybe on the landing strip at Edwards Air Force Base. Maybe in black and white. The example here is overlit, over-processed, oversaturated, and ingenuine. Their facial expressions aren't that great. And yeah, if they're supposed to be looking at and lit by the Moon, it's in entirely the wrong place in the image. Even a non-nerd can probably detect that intuitively.

Compare her classic portrait of Whoopi Goldberg in the bath (11th down on this page) to her recent Photoshop monstrosity of Whoopi (second down on this page).

I admire surreal photography and well-executed photo manipulation, whether using Photoshop or high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging. But Leibovitz isn't doing that. She and her team of assistants have manipulated the life out of her images. Much of her new stuff reminds me of velvet paintings of dogs playing poker. The astronaut ad is no exception.

Labels: controversy, photography, review, software

Photography website The Luminous Landscape has a fascinating, short essay on how photographer Art Wolfe went through a series of attempts (all shown) to get what turned out to be a great photo.

Aside from his attempts at different composition and lighting, perhaps what's most interesting is that Wolfe took enough pictures for his fisherman subjects to get bored. By the end they were no longer posing, just going on with their work, and that's when the best photo happened. The lesson: keep trying.

Labels: art, photography

Last week, for Mother's Day, I had some enlargements made to frame and put on our walls. The London Drugs photo lab did a great job—certainly better than anything I could have accomplished on a home printer, and on proper Fuji photo paper too. Most are family shots, though I did choose one of my more arty images to turn into a 12x18" print. Here's what we picked:

Some of those photos are digital, some film, some colour, some black-and-white. I don't think I would have so many favourite images to pick from, and be able to have them printed and framed so inexpensively, in any photographic age except this one.

Yet, in another way, they could have been taken almost anytime. Closeups of young faces, kids laughing on a snowy slope or a sandy beach, a fishing boat and distant volcano—all could have been 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years ago, and much the same. I guess that's one reason I like them.

Labels: family, home, photography

How the heck did I not know about Photojojo and the Photojojo Store before? Such awesome stuff!

Labels: humour, photography, shopping, web

As far as I know, no actual or suspected terrorist has ever scoped out a potential target by walking around or in it in plain view, with a big camera and lens, and taking pictures. The 9/11 hijackers didn't, the U.S.S. Cole attackers didn't, the bombers of the London Underground and Madrid and Bali didn't. The FLQ kidnappers in 1970 didn't. Ahmed Rassam didn't. Suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq and Afghanistan don't.

So ads like this one, postered at SkyTrain stations here in Vancouver as the 2010 Olympics approach, bother me:

The theme of the ad campaign is "report the suspicious, not the strange." It's an odd slogan. What's the difference between, "Hey, that's strange" and "Hey, that's suspicious"?

And the examples it gives are ridiculous. In this particular instance, if you see a camera floating in mid-air with a translucent, ghost-like figure beneath it, you should apparently call a paranormal investigator. But if you see a man with a DSLR taking photos of the security camera in the station, report that to the Transit Police, because he could be a bad guy.

Here's the thing. Taking photographs in public places isn't illegal in Canada. (Is a SkyTrain station a public place? Interesting question.) Neither is it illegal in the U.S., nor in Britain—though laws are more restrictive in the U.K.

A U.S.-based lawyer has put together a quick PDF card about photographers' rights, and it's also interesting to note that TransLink itself has responded to photographers' concerns about the campaign:

Specifically, the image of the photographer is not intended to say photography and photographers are bad. It's intended to say that a person who is intently making records of specific transit security elements like cameras should raise a flag as suspicious activity.

...but:

They're taking pictures of wiring, pipes, electrical panels. Well, I'm sorry, not many people go around doing that.

Really? Sure about that? Hmm?

The problem, of course, is that while TransLink staff and police may understand that intention (I hope!), the implication is that if members of the general public see a photographer taking pictures of something other than friends and family, they should be suspicious and report it. In short, that they should be afraid.

There's a more general message in these types of campaigns, and the way some reporters and photography enthusiasts are treated by authorities, too: that big cameras with big lenses are particularly evil, as this satire notes:

I don’t want to be too technical, but the focal length of the lens is directly correlated with hatred of America. It goes something like this:

You have a a cell phone camera, point and shoot, or 20mm wide angle lens: you are a red blooded American who wants to celebrate our national heritage by taking pictures of popular tourist locations.

A 50mm lens: you are also, by and large, a good American, but you have a disturbing interest in “understanding” the terrorists and why they attack us.

An 85mm lens: you loathe your own country and secretly admire the 9/11 hijackers for giving us our comeuppance. You are not a terrorist, but your camera should probably be confiscated and your pictures deleted, lest they find their way to al Jazeera message boards. Your middle name may be Hussein.

A 200mm lens: you are an al Qaeda henchman actively scouting for security vulnerabilities.

A 300mm lens: you ARE bin Laden!

This approach, of course, is the very opposite of sensible. If terrorists really were checking out a target, they would probably work to be as surreptitious as possible. Use small cameras, like the camera phone I used to photograph the ad poster. Memorize things and sketch them out later. Steal plans. Not plop down a big-ass tripod out in the open and carefully compose an image with a huge DSLR and a monster chunk of lens mounted it. At the very least, all that gear would make it hard to get away quickly and unobtrusively.

You know what I think has really prompted this security theatre? Spy movies and TV shows. That's where you see the telephoto lenses in the hands of the bad guys, and the good guys, for that matter. (Then again, James Bond prefers small cameras.)

What this approach fails to notice is that those are fiction.

Labels: controversy, olympics, photography, terrorism, transportation

Photo Synthesis is a new blog started this month that will showcase science photography from around the Web. Right now it's almost all insect macrophotography (close-ups), but I'm sure there will be different stuff soon. At least I hope so—many people get creeped out by giant close-up pictures of ants, no matter how cool they are.

Labels: biology, photography, science

I don't scour the Web for cancer news. Having cancer myself means the topic is enough on my mind already without reading too much more about it, and I don't seem to be the type to leap wholeheartedly into cancer advocacy as some do. Yet interesting stuff still comes my way.

It's also easier to read that stuff since my last CT scan was more encouraging than usual—even if today I'm having a worse-than-usual bout of side effects from my medication. I've been sitting on our recliner couch most of the day, and have to stay close to the bathroom all the time. (Hey, minimal carbon footprint!) So, some of my reading today:

• First, my friend Alistair sent a link to this comic, which reinforces that "curing cancer" isn't a realistic goal, because cancer isn't one simple thing. It's a bit of a bummer, really, but also a good reality check.
• Speaking of bummers, this series of photos (via Kottke) of a young cancer patient who kept herself going so she could get married to her high school sweetheart, but died five days later, is wonderful. Tremendously sad, yet uplifting too.
• I know this is a Big Pharma ad, but the Pfizer "Be Brave" commercial slays me every time.
• A couple of years ago, when I thought I might die soon, I posted about what I'd like to happen to my body once I'm dead. Now, I seem to be carrying on, but that stuff is still worth considering for anyone, and I discovered recently that it's surprisingly easy to donate your body for anatomical study and medical research at my alma mater, UBC. They even have a consent form to download right from the site. Unfortunately, "advanced metastatic cancers" may prevent a body from being useful for what they need, so that's a bit annoying. Maybe donating just my skeleton somewhere would be better. Fortunately, it looks like I have some time to investigate this stuff now...
• My Flickr pal e_hoogie has a rare genetic condition that makes her prone to all sorts of different cancers, and she's been treated for five different kinds, but she's still going, five years later. Inspiring.

As for me, I expect the side effects to calm down this afternoon or evening. I may go take some pictures in the yard right now. Maybe tomorrow I can get out and snap some more in the sun, and then go see one of my daughters read at her school for literacy week.

This is my third spring with cancer, and I'm glad to see it. Here's hoping for a bunch more.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, environment, photography, science, television

Well, there you go...

Labels: band, humour, music, neurotics, photography, sunrun, vancouver

After I took some pictures of the taping of CBC's "Q" last night, I let CBC know about them, and this morning, here was the result:

That's my photo as the headline picture on the "Q" home page. You can also listen to the podcast version (MP3 file) of the episode.

Labels: band, cbc, music, photography, podcast, radio, vancouver

I just acquired my first stabilized camera lens, and I'm impressed so far, especially because it didn't cost me anything. Here's the story.

Sent for service

Last year I had my relatively new Nikon 18-135 mm zoom lens (designed for the D80 SLR, but bought for my D50) repaired under warranty, after the autofocus became unreliable and the lens housing felt loose. Unfortunately, Nikon's low-end lenses don't seem to stand up especially well to the usual wear and tear of enthusiastic use, because recently I had the same problem again with the same lens: unreliable autofocus and loose feel with the lens mounted on my camera, less than a year after the repair.

(By the way, I have a couple of much older but higher-end Nikon lenses that continue to work flawlessly despite their advanced age and considerable use. The problem is either with the company's more cheaply made lenses or with the particular one I owned.)

Anyway, the lens is covered by Nikon's excellent five-year warranty. So once I sent the zoom in for its second repair, Nikon had a look at it and decided to send me a replacement instead: the newer 18-105 mm VR zoom, introduced with the new D90 SLR a few months ago. While it doesn't zoom in quite as far, the newer lens includes Nikon's vibration reduction system—that's what the VR stands for.

What is vibration reduction?

What Nikon calls vibration reduction (VR), other camera makers call image stabilization (IS) or shake reduction (SR).They're all the same thing. Vibration reduction is a new technology, emerging in commercially available optical devices only in the last ten years. It can be built into the lens (as Nikon and Canon do) or the camera body (as Sony and Pentax do), but both work basically the same way: motion sensors detect the tiny shaky movements you make when hand-holding a camera and compensate for them by moving lens elements (Nikon, Canon) or the camera sensor (Sony, Pentax) with tiny motors.

At slow shutter speeds or long focal lengths, that reduces shake-induced blur in your photos. The technology doesn't make moving subjects (people, vehicles, animals) less blurry, because it can only compensate for things that make the camera vibrate.

The results

But within its limitations, VR works quite well. Take a look:

When using VR, looking through the viewfinder can be a bit strange, because the image you see is steadier than your hands. It's even more noticeable on my dad's image-stabilized binoculars, which magnify the image quite a bit more than my zoom lens, and stabilize both eyepieces. You can feel your hands shaking quite a bit as you look through them, but the image moves in a much more "damped" manner.

The result is great, because both in a camera and through binoculars, you can see more clearly when VR is on. And when you take photos of stationary subjects, you can shoot with shutter speeds one or two stops slower (i.e. taking in only 25% as much light, maybe even less) and still get decently sharp pictures.

It's not the same as having a lens with a wider maximum aperture, or a camera with better low-light sensitivity (ISO), but it's another tool to help make better images.

Labels: cameraworks, geekery, nikon, photography, repairs

• Transom.org has some wonderfully comprehensive audio articles for podcasters, like the stand mic shootout, handheld mic shootout, and recording phone calls tutorial (via Doug Kaye).
• PhotoFunia lets you put your own face into various stock photos (via J-Walk). Some work better than others. A couple of sample pictures of one of my daughters and me:
  
• Mac OS iPhone project (via Melanie). It was bound to happen.
• Photographic shit disturber Ken Rockwell points to these two great posts about film photography from John Sevigny, on the theme of digital cameras: the thrill is gone: "Many of the film oriented products introduced at PMA [this week's big photo tradeshow] are far more interesting than anything digital that bothered to show up to the party. [...] My advice: get [a used Nikon] FM2 for less than $500, three or four lenses for another $500 total, and a 35mm film scanner for another $500. [...] Use the remaining $6,500 to fly to Brazil, China, Mexico or Thailand and spend several months photographing there."
• Isabella and Raul have started organizing Mental Health Camp, an unconference here in Vancouver about mental health issues, April 25, 2009 in Gastown. (UPDATE: It now has its own URL at MentalHealthCamp.org.)
• Remember that crazy Leica R9 SLR camera I blogged about in 2007? Well, Leica long ago stopped making the digital back, and now they're discontinuing the camera and lenses too. But not to worry: an all-digital, autofocus R10 will come eventually. And will be amazingly high-priced, just like its upcoming big sibling the S2.
• Rebecca posts about Rudyard Kipling's visits to Vancouver in the 1800s and early 1900s, and how much our city changed during that time.
• The Onion's "San Francisco Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers" is almost as good as the old "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory."

Labels: controversy, film, geekery, history, linksofinterest, mentalhealth, photography, podcast, recording, science, vancouver

Today I brought some rolls of black-and-white film photos, which I'd taken at Northern Voice and our vacation last week, to the Save-On-Foods one-hour photo lab at Metrotown in Burnaby. Since the film was not regular silver halide B&W, but the kind that can be processed in a colour print minilab, Save-On developed, printed, and scanned the pictures in an hour.

But at the end of the week, Save-On is shutting down its one-hour lab. That's the end of an era for me—I've been having film developed, as well as both film and digital pictures printed there, for about 20 years. It's a sign. Hardly anyone but photo enthusiasts uses film anymore. Since I started shooting film again last summer, I've hardly ever seen anyone else bringing film into the Save-On lab. Usually the attendant is reading a book.

There are plenty of other options nearby, including the inexpensive Costco one-hour lab down the hill, the nearby London Drugs, and maybe one or two in the mall. There are also numerous proper pro labs in the city that will process and print nearly any kind of film with loving care—and for a price. But I'll miss the corner of Save-On with its now-outdated big-ass sign featuring a giant model film roll and 60-minute stopwatch.

Labels: film, geekery, history, photography, vancouver

This other beach is pretty swell too. Yeah, we were supposed to be home by now, but we decided to take a side-trip before returning to the mainland.

Labels: animals, family, oceans, photography, travel

Even in the winter:

Labels: animals, family, oceans, photography, travel

This morning we looked out the window of our hotel room in Parksville, B.C. to see two bald eagles sitting on the sand as the tide went out. Later, when the family explored the beach, my wife Air found their talon marks, still fresh:

I assume they were resting, either before or after hunting, since they stayed in essentially one place for at least 45 minutes. Bald eagles aren't uncommon in our neck of the woods—we often see them flying from our front window in Burnaby, usually while they're being harassed by gulls or crows. But they don't often land in our vicinity at home.

However, last time Air and I came to the middle of Vancouver Island, in 1997 before our kids were born, we also saw a bald eagle from our hotel room at the bach. We also nearly ran one over with our car on the way to Port McNeill. Fortunately, we avoided anything like that this time: they are huge birds, and rather intimidating close up.

Labels: animals, oceans, photography, travel

Via Jason Kottke, here is a useful article on how to make great photos using your point-and-shoot digital camera—by learning from the great photographers who shot film decades ago with even more limited equipment.

You can only learn so much from people who frequently work in ways that are impossible for you. What if there were truly masterful photographers who worked with cameras with all the limitations of yours and more? Couldn't they be role models? Luckily, there are boatloads of them: every documentary photographer working from the 1930s to the 1980s.

The basics? Learn to compose, let black be black, use black-and-white when appropriate, photograph near windows with natural light, and take lots of pictures, then edit—pick the best shots from the many you have. If you get really good, you might regularly capture the decisive moment in single shots like Cartier-Bresson, but that will take time.

Labels: art, geekery, photography

More photos in my Flickr set and from others.

Labels: blog, conferences, friends, geekery, northernvoice, photography, podcast, vancouver, web

More photos in my Flickr set and from others.

Labels: blog, conferences, friends, geekery, northernvoice, photography, podcast, vancouver, web

Labels: photography, vancouver

If you have a Mac, Apple's $100 Cdn iLife suite of programs is perhaps the best deal in software today. That may be true even if you don't have a Mac, because if you buy one, iLife comes along free—and just a few years ago, the features of any one of its programs would have cost you more than the computer does today. So depending on what you do, it's almost like you're getting the Mac for free instead.

When it first appeared in 2004, for instance, GarageBand inspired me to start recording music again after a long hiatus. iPhoto is an extremely capable photo cataloguing program, and even as a pretty keen photography enthusiast, it's what I use to manage my collection. For me, iMovie, iWeb, and iDVD come along as bonuses.

iDVD is capable enough on the rare occasions I need to make a video DVD. The new versions of iMovie are still pretty weird, in my book, but they work, and I may warm to the new iMovie '09 now that it's improved over the confusing reboot that was iMovie '08. iWeb—well, as a web guy, it's never been my cup of tea, and I gave up on it a few months ago after giving it a good two-year chance to justify its existence. But some people might like it.

iLife '09 is the latest iteration of the package, and I picked it up last week, shortly after it became available in stores. I'll be reviewing the new GarageBand for Inside Home Recording sometime soon, but there are already some other impressions on the web. Jim Dalrymple at Macworld looks at the new guitar-focused changes in GarageBand, Rick LePage examines iPhoto's new emphasis on face recognition and location awareness, and screenwriter John August takes a crack at iMovie '09.

I have to agree with Fraser Speirs that iPhoto's new integration with Facebook and Flickr looks way too heavy-handed. I actually don't want photos, tags, names, and such synchronized between my computer and those sharing sites. Usually, I just want to push photos out from iPhoto, and maybe make changes on the Web, but I don't want those changes propagating back and forth. I often prefer to collect very different sets in the two places, and may need to name people on my computer but not online, for instance. So I don't think I'll be turning those features on, but will use my old methods instead.

In iLife '09, GarageBand makes big changes, especially in new features (like Lessons) that i didn't even know I'd want, while still keeping what makes it great. iPhoto adds extremely cool new stuff that I'll definitely use, and some other stuff I definitely won't. iMovie may have redeemed itself enough that I'll work with it again. iDVD? We'll, it's still there. And iWeb? Despite good progress, it's just not the way I work with websites (I create almost everything in a text editor).

I'm happy with what I've seen from iLife '09 so far. For $100, as always, it's a total steal.

Labels: apple, music, photography, review, software, video

When you have one child, it's easy to delude yourself about the magnitude of your influence on them. When our first daughter was young, for instance, I subconsciously assumed that she was the way she was largely because of the parenting my wife and I offered. As soon as her sister was born a couple of years later, we discovered how wrong we were.

Not that parenting (or family, or friends, or society more generally) is irrelevant, but parents of more than one child will tell you that their kids do seem to be born with certain personality traits, and they develop their own interests and approaches to the world as they grow. Children are little people, individuals, right from the beginning, not blank slates to be molded completely by how we raise them. Our daughters have a lot in common, but they're also quite different.

Math girl

As I've noted before, my younger daughter L, who turned nine yesterday, makes up her own homework in her spare time. A couple of days ago, for example, she was copying equations out of a Math 11 textbook. She's a little too young to understand them—after all, they're eight years ahead of her current curriculum—but she's certainly getting good at writing square-root signs.

My wife Air, who's a math teacher (hence the textbooks in our house), suggested that L try the Grade 8 book instead, only five years ahead, where some of the problems might be closer to her level. So this morning we woke up to hear our daughters arguing vociferously about subtraction problems.

Photo girl

Among her other interests, our older daughter M has liked photography for some time, and we bought her a little Pentax point-and-shoot digicam for Christmas 2007. She likes it, but she also enjoys using my big Nikon DSLR because of the higher quality photos it takes. She often creates some really good compositions, and of course her perspective is quite different from mine. Here are some of my favourites she's taken:

They're certainly better than anything I took when I was ten. Or, as in the case of the top left photo, four (!).

Labels: family, photography, school

Was the now-famous Vancouver fog photo taken by Scott Miller from the Vancouver Sun, or Blair Kent? As I show in this short video, the answer could be... both:

The two images were made at almost the same time, in almost exactly the same location off the Cypress Bowl road above Vancouver. But they are two different photos—the clouds have moved, and the tree in the corner shows a very slightly different perspective.

So, to Scott and Blair both: great pictures. I can't say which is better.

Labels: americas, photography, sunshine, vancouver, video, weather

Thanks to Buzz Bishop for posting this astonishing photo of our lovely city of Vancouver from Cypress Mountain, taken on the morning of Sunday, January 18 from above the fog that has enshrouded us for a couple of weeks now:

This picture was taken with a brand new Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera, taking full advantage of its remarkable resolution and detail in an amazing composition. Check out the large version. Wow. Who took the photo is an interesting question, with an interesting answer I talk about in my next blog post.

The distant peaks are probably Stewart Mountain near Bellingham (left, about 925 m tall) and Mount Constitution on Orcas Island (right, about 730 m) in Georgia Strait, both across the border in the United States.

P.S. Here's a whole set of photos from another photographer.

Labels: americas, photography, sunshine, vancouver, weather

• Some photographers buy old lenses (even manual focus, manual aperture lenses) for their brand new cameras. Here's why.
• This no-knead bread is apparently ridiculously easy, all the rage, and quite time-consuming to make.
• Darrell Fandrich lives near Seattle. He takes cheap Chinese pianos, puts a lot of work and experience into them, and creates a great piano, like "upgrad[ing] a Hyundai to run like a Bentley, for the price of a Honda."
• How to use Photoshop Elements 6 (which I don't own) to merge several mediocre group photos into a single good one.
• Since I have cancer, several people have told me (and told me, and told me) about DCA and essiac tea—among dozens of other potential cures and treatments. As I said about DCA a couple of years ago, I'm still going with the evidence, and it's not yet there for those particular treatments.
• Darren is a little frustrated with iTunes on his PC. And he draws a very cute sea kitten (actually, I guess it's probably a freshwater variety, so it would be, what, a pond kitten?).
• My latest camera collage is up to 8700 views, 43 comments, and 67 favourites on Flickr. Its predecessor from June has passed 41,000 views, 82 comments, and 217 favourites. And my original version from December 2007 has reached 11,500 views, 109 comments, and 39 favourites. Yep, we nerds love our camera porn.
• We've posted the first episode of the Inside Home Recording podcast for 2009: there are enhanced (pictures and links) and MP3 (audio only) versions, plus a separate full unedited half-hour interview with Peabody Award–winning producer Paolo Pietropaolo from CBC Radio.

Labels: cancer, food, insidehomerecording, itunes, music, photography, podcast, radio, science, software

My friend Simon scanned some old photos and sent them over a couple of days ago. They're of me and some of my friends (him included) between 1990 and 1992. We look younger than we thought we did at the time. And yes, the '90s definitely had its own fashion sense, even if we didn't think so then either:

The pictures include photos of The Love Bugs, the predecessor to my current band The Neurotics, which is still playing a pretty similar batch of songs more than 15 years later. If you'd been at the Starlight Casino in Queensborough, B.C. last night, in fact, you could have seen me playing guitar and drums just like in these images—but in a nice suit instead of a ratty t-shirt. Sebastien was there too.

Labels: band, friends, memories, music, photography, retro

I know this photo looks like a model train, but it's not:

It looks like a model because of a fake tilt-shift lens effect. Oddly, the idea came up twice in one day: Stephen wondered if I knew about tilt-shift photography, and the same day TiltShiftMaker showed up on the Web (thanks to Scott for the link to that). Since I don't own any tilt-shift (a.k.a. perspective control) lenses or a Lensbaby, a free online tool was the perfect way to fake it.

The picture is from Interstate 5 near Tacoma, Washington, in summer 2005. It is actually a real train on a real railway with real trees and the real Mt. Rainier in the background. It looks like a model because of the selective focus effect I applied to the original image with TiltShiftMaker—one reason we know models are tiny is that the depth of focus when we look at them is much shallower than for larger objects. Simulating that effect makes big things look small.

Look, I tried it on a bunch of other pictures too.

Labels: geekery, photography, transportation, travel, web

One way to get lots of people to see a photo of yours on the image sharing site Flickr is to take a good picture. That requires talent, skill, and dedication. A few of my pictures have become popular simply because they're good photographs—at least I think so.

But my most popular pictures on Flickr aren't like that at all. They're nerdy: pictures of wacky guitars or geek conferences, of old computers or Linux running on a Mac.

And what do you do to attract huge numbers of viewers and comments and favourites? Simple, go full nerd: just make a picture of a whole bunch of cameras and encourage people to argue about them. More than 38,000 views in six months, 208 favourite votes, and dozens and dozens of comments:

Old image of almost 25 cameras

State of the DSLR market - June 2008 (old)

An earlier attempt of mine at the same thing even had commenters threatening to kill each other about the kind of camera they like! But my favourite comment was from Axl Van Goks: "I like the black one with the buttons and stuff."

Since the digital camera market changes like crazy, my big collage from June 2008 was out of date within weeks. I waited for all the pre-Christmas camera introductions to shake out, and now I've made a new version that includes all the current digital SLR cameras I could find (almost 40) from Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Panasonic, Leica, Samsung, Sigma, and Fujifilm:

New image of almost 40 cameras

State of the DSLR market - January 2009 (new)

I expect the arguing to begin soon in the comments. The picture has 139 views and 4 favourites since I posted it three and a half hours ago. And yes, yes, I know, I know: they're not all strictly SLRs, but I think they're all of interest to SLR buyers.

Ah, art. Have at it.

UPDATE: My thesis appears to be correct. As a rule of thumb, the more cameras you put in a picture on Flickr, the more popular it is:

Links from John Gruber and 37signals didn't hurt either.

Labels: canon, controversy, flickr, geekery, leica, linkbait, nikon, olympus, panasonic, pentax, photography, sony

Here are my 200+ favourite photos from 2008, posted to my Flickr account. I took most, but not all, of them:

Labels: ego, flickr, geekery, photography

I like what the team at Digital Photography Review have to say about the world of digital SLR cameras (my emphasis below):

...the biggest issue facing manufacturers today [is that] ever-increasing sensor resolutions are simply not being backed up by lenses capable of delivering enough detail, [so what are] all those extra megapixels [...] supposed to achieve (other than take up storage space and slow the camera down). [...] we'd rather see manufacturers directing their R&D resources towards improving sensor efficiency, to give reduced noise and increased dynamic range, rather than continuing the megapixel marketing mania.

What Andy Westlake is saying is that, especially for the crop-sensor DSLR cameras most people buy, even the best lenses that Nikon, Canon, Zeiss, Leica, and others make don't provide enough resolution to take full advantage of all the megapixels packed onto the sensors in the cameras they connect to. Certainly the inexpensive lenses that most DSLRs come with don't do that.

For a long time, I used my 2006-era Nikon D50, which has "only" a 6-megapixel sensor, in reduced-resolution mode, taking pictures that were a bit over 3 megapixels. They were big and detailed enough for me as an amateur photo enthusiast, but I eventually moved up to the full 6 MP resolution when I got a bigger hard drive and didn't mind the extra room that larger files sucked up. So while I lust after the improved low-light performance and faster burst modes of newer cameras like the D90 and D300, their increased resolution on the same size sensor actually turns me off a bit, because of the extra storage I'll need for the images. (They do have reduced-resolution 6.9 MP and 3 MP modes, however.)

It is true that a 12-megapixel crop-sensor DSLR still gives you a significant real resolution advantage—when using quality lenses. But pushing up to 15 MP and beyond, as crop-sensor DSLRs are starting to do, seems to be going further than what our lenses are capable of. (As DPReview notes, that won't happen for full-frame DSLRs until they get into the 38-megapixel range, which I expect in the next couple of years.) In the point-and-shoot market, with even smaller sensors and smaller, lower-quality lenses, the problem is worse.

Until recently, Nikon has generally resisted the more-more-more megapixels bandwagon with their DSLRs—more so than Canon, Sony, and others—and emphasized performance instead. But I wish all of them would look at the example of Panasonic's recent DMC-LX3 point-and-shoot: "Other cameras offer more pixels, more zoom, and bigger LCDs," says review Jeff Keller, "[but it] does deliver very good quality images for a compact camera."

That's what we photographers really want, isn't it? Good pictures? Especially if we're paying for megapixels that out-resolve our lenses, and are therefore largely going to waste!

Labels: controversy, geekery, nikon, panasonic, photography

Okay, so here's a movie (via Bad Astronomer) of Jupiter's moon Ganymede passing behind the giant planet. Pretty darn amazing and cool:

Now here's the really amazing part. The movie was assembled from a series of images taken not from a probe sent to Jupiter from Earth. Nope, they were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, in low orbit around our own planet. These pictures were taken, over the course of two hours in April 2007, from here, something like 600 million kilometres away from the subjects. The light from Ganymede and Jupiter took almost an hour to reach the Hubble camera.

Talk about your telephoto lens.

Labels: astronomy, movie, photography, science, space, video

Those of you who listened to my classical guitar recording of "What Child Is This?" yesterday might be interested in how I recorded it. I describe that in episode #65 of Inside Home Recording (IHR), our last one for the year. My bit starts about 36 minutes in, but there's lots of interesting stuff in the rest of the show too.

On a similar instructional note, over the course of several weeks this fall, when I was feeling well enough, I recorded almost 60 short instructional videos about how to use Apple's GarageBand audio software. They now form the Quick Start to GarageBand '08 course from Mac Video Training, a company co-founded this year by my former IHR co-host Paul Garay and Mike Kaye from Switching to Mac. The complete course costs $30 USD (about $40 Cdn these days) for download, and will be available on DVD in stores in the new year. (Earlier DVDs by different instructors are already at shops like London Drugs.)

Here's the introductory video:

Finally, the fine folks at TidBITS, a Mac-focused online newsletter that's been publishing since before the Web was invented (really!), have highlighted my Camera Works series here on some technical aspects of cameras and photography. I've written for TidBITS in the past, and it's a great resource you should all subscribe to. I can't even remember how long I've been reading it, but every issue teaches me something.

Labels: apple, guitar, insidehomerecording, paulgaray, photography, software, tidbits, video

What a lovely city we live in...

Labels: hdr, photography, vancouver, weather

It snowed a bit in Vancouver yesterday, and it is (for this mild city) pretty cold tonight—about -6°C right now, plus something of a nasty wind chill.

So, for the occasion, I went looking for photos of snowflakes, and via Pharyngula and New Scientist, boy did I ever find them. Researcher Kenneth G. Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology has even had his snowflake images appear on American postage stamps.

I've also posted some photos of Vancouver's Trinity Street Christmas Light Festival, which officially kicked off tonight. We had a (chilly) walk through that neighbourhood earlier this evening.

Labels: family, holiday, photography, science, snow

If you buy a non–high-end digital SLR (DSLR) camera, it will probably come with what's known as a "digital" lens. There's no such thing, really: lenses for any kind of camera are analog devices that bend light with glass—or maybe plastic—just as they have been since lenses were invented centuries ago.

What "digital" means in this case is that the lens is designed to be used with the most common type of digital SLR camera, those with crop-frame sensors. Crop sensors are smaller than the traditional 35 mm film dimensions used in more expensive full-frame sensors. So lenses designed for them project smaller circles of light. If you put them on a full-frame camera (that is, if they will even mount), this is what you get:

My AF Nikkor 18-135 mm f/3.5-5.6G digital ("DX") lens has a big black vignette circle around the image when zoomed out to 18 mm and mounted to my full-frame Nikon F4 film SLR. Click the image to see a representation of where a crop-frame sensor would fit in the image circle.

Lenses for traditional non-digital and full-frame SLR cameras also work just great on crop-frame models, but the extra money you pay for their wider image circles goes to waste, because the image around the edges doesn't get captured on the sensor. But I own one crop-frame lens for my crop-frame camera, and several full-frame lenses. Why?

The benefits of buying crop-frame digital lenses are that they're smaller, lighter, and cheaper—and they may offer focal lengths unavailable in their bigger brethren. But the benefits of buying full-frame lenses, conversely, are that they will still work fully if you later upgrade to, or want to borrow or rent, a full-frame camera body; and that they are generally better built because they are aimed at the professional photographers who tend to buy full-frame.

« Previous: intermediate f-stops

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

1. Ever wonder how great photographers capture amazing images? How do they happen to be there at the decisive moment? Scott Bourne's post at This Week in Photography about his recent photo "Cranes in the Fire Mist" tells you. There is some luck, yes, but much of it is long preparation and experience. Decades' worth, in Scott's case.

2. Today is the last day of voting for the Vancouver-area Best of 604 web awards put together by Rebecca Bollwitt, a.k.a. Miss604. The awards reception is tomorrow night. While of course I suggest that you vote for your favourites in every category, if you need a hint or two, my wife's podcast Lip Gloss and Laptops is nominated in the video blog/podcast category, and her personal site Talking to Air appears in the heavily competitive personal blog list. (Yeah, I got nominated for some stuff too, but why split the vote?)

3. If you listened to Canadian rock music in the '90s, you know the Vancouver band Odds. Well, they're back! After a hiatus of 12 years, earlier in 2008 they released a new album, "Cheerleader," under the name The New Odds. Recently they managed to get the rights to their original name Odds back, so (follow me here) Odds became The New Odds, and are now back to Odds again. Bass player Doug Elliott is a friend of mine, and also plays occasionally with my retro act The Neurotics, and appears on a track on my podcast. If you're on Facebook, join up as a fan on their new Facebook page.

Labels: band, blog, family, photography, podcast, vancouver, web

While my cancer treatment means I haven't been able to work for my employer, Navarik, for close to two years, I still make time to attend a few company events, including the Christmas party last night in downtown Vancouver:

This year my colleague Nathan and his wife had an excellent idea for our traditional employee gift exchange: instead of getting each other trinkets, we were to imagine what our assigned recipients would have liked when they were children. They would get to open the wrapping in front of everyone at the party, then say whether the choice would have worked for their childhood selves. Now that the unwrapping is over, Navarik will donate all the presents to a children's charity for Christmas. Perfect!

Even more perfect? Whoever was matched with me gave my childhood self a matching set of a toy camera with a toy microphone. How about that?

Labels: friends, holiday, insidehomerecording, navarik, photography, recording, vancouver

Beth is propagating a meme. If you use Flickr, go to the sixth page of your photostream and pick the sixth picture there, then post it to your blog. Here's mine:

The next people I'll tag for this meme? I'm supposed to pick six: Arieanna and Ianiv, John, Mark, Gillian, Dave, and Tony.

But hey, don't let that restrict you. If you want to join in, then have at it!

Labels: blog, flickr, meme, photography

If money were no object, I wouldn't be one to buy a fancy car or a mansion—I'd get something good in each case, but also something practical. It's the same with cameras.

I've used Nikon's top-end D3, and it's a fine instrument, but far more camera than I'd need. The D3x, just mistakenly announced today, would be even further overkill. Never mind the various medium format cameras and the upcoming ultra-luxe Leica S2.

So, if I were suddenly independently wealthy, I'd still get myself a new Nikon, but it would be the D700, which packs most of the power of the D3, including its wonderful low-noise, high-sensitivity full-frame sensor, into a smaller (we're talking relatively smaller here) package. I've also tried the similarly sized D300, so I think the D700 would fit better in my hand.

And I'd buy some great lenses too, of course, because that's where money is best worth spending. I'm still using an inexpensive but quality lens I bought in 1995, while the camera it went with is long, long gone.

Finally, I'd travel to beautiful places with my family, to make photos with them.

Labels: gadgets, money, nikon, photography, travel

The aperture and f-stops article in my ongoing Camera Works series has been popular, but it has also raised some questions. Here's one from Mike S.:

How much ISO would I gain?

I just read your blog on f-stops. Very informative and I learned things I had given up on. I do have a question. Keep in mind I'm not mathematically inclined. I am trying to figure out how much ISO I would gain, meaning lower ISO, if I shot at a 1.8 setting versus a 2.8? I currently only own 2.8 lenses and find myself shooting indoor sports at ISO 3200 at about a 320th of a second. My goal is to get the ISO to 1600 or lower while keeping the 320 [shutter speed] as a minimum. How would I figure this out? I wasn’t sure if 2.8 was double 1.8.

My answer is that lens at f/1.8 does not let in double the light of a lens at f/2.8: it lets in more than that. About 2.4 times as much light, in fact. We'll see why below.

As I described in that original article in August, the sequence of full stops runs in multiples of 1.4 (actually the square root of 2, which is 1.41421356..., but close enough), so if you start at f/1, you have:

1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, 45, 64

(You won't see f/45 or f/64 on normal SLR or point-and-shoot lenses, but they're not uncommon on large-format cameras.)

Each of those values lets in half the light of the stop to the left, and twice the light of the stop to the right. So in Mike's case, using a lens that can open to f/2 instead of f/2.8 will let him use either twice the shutter speed or half the ISO (light sensitivity) setting. But what about f-stops that don't fit that sequence, like f/1.8 or f/3.3?

Figuring out intermediate f-stops

This takes simple real-world f-stop math, but it's just multiplying and dividing, so it's not hard. The old area-of-a-circle equation (πr²) gives you the answers:

• If you're at f/2.8, the diameter of your aperture is 1/2.8 the focal length of the lens (or about 0.357 the focal length).
• If you're at f/1.8, the aperture is bigger, 1/1.8 (or about 0.556 the focal length).
• The ratio of the two aperture diameters, 0.556 to 0.357, is about 1.56 (just divide 0.556 by 0.357), so f/1.8 is about 1.56 times wider than f/2.8. (You could actually do this more simply: 2.8 divided by 1.8 gives you the same number, about 1.56.)
• From that area-of-a-circle equation, since the area (and the light let through) changes by the square of the diameter (or radius, it doesn't matter in this case) of the aperture, simply square that ratio value (1.56²) to get about 2.4.
• So f/1.8 lets in about 2.4 times more light as f/2.8, and f/2.8 lets in about 2.4 times less light than f/1.8.

What does that mean?

Here's how you can use that knowledge:

• If you stay at ISO 3200 and it works at 1/320 of a second at f/2.8, you can shoot 2.4 times faster if you go to f/1.8, which would be (320 x 2.4) or 1/768 sec (or 1/750, rounded to the nearest realistic camera shutter speed).
  
  —or—
  
  
• If you're adjusting ISO and keep the shutter speed fixed, you can shoot at 3200 divided by 2.4, or ISO 1333 (more like 1250 in real-world terms) if you click from f/2.8 to f/1.8.

This reveals something. In the old days of film, photographers used to think in terms of two variables: shutter speed and aperture. That's because the third one, sensitivity or ISO (also known previously as ASA), was fixed for each roll of film. You had an ISO 400 roll, or an ISO 64 roll, or a high-speed ISO 1000 roll, but that was it until you changed the film.

In the digital age, we now have that third variable, because we can adjust the ISO as much as we want, or even have the camera adjust it automatically for changing lighting conditions, so that each picture can use its own ISO setting, as well as its own aperture and shutter speed.

The simple version

All right, so here is the simplified version of what to do when you want to know how two different f-stops affect ISO and shutter speed:

Divide the bigger f-stop number by the smaller one (2.8 divided by 1.8, for example) to get the ratio of their diameters. Then square the result to find out the ratio of light let through. Next, multiply or divide your shutter speed or ISO by that value to figure out how you need to adjust it.

Or let your camera's meter figure it out!

The nice part is that while you have to square the aperture ratios to determine how much light is let through, shutter speed and ISO simply multiply or divide by 2: 1/500 sec lets in half the light of 1/250, and ISO 3200 captures twice the light of ISO 1600, so the rest of the math is straightforward

Another example

• I'm at f/3.3 at 1/2000th of a second at ISO 200 and I stop down to f/16 because I want more depth of field.
• 16 divided by 3.3 is about 4.85.
• 4.85 squared is about 23.5, so F/16 brings in 23.5 times less light than f/3.3.
• So I need a shutter speed 23.5 times slower to let in the same amount of light. 2000 divided by 23.5 is about 85.1, so I need 1/85 of a second (or 1/90, rounding off for most cameras) to get the same exposure.
• Or I can adjust the ISO: 200 times 23.5 is ISO 4700, and I can still shoot at 1/2000. I'll need a pretty new, high-end DSLR to get that high an ISO value, but it is possible.
• You can also combine things. If I decide to shoot at 1/1000 of a second, I can halve the ISO to 2350 at f/16, more in the range of regular cameras these days. Many won't let you set the ISO to incremental values like that manually, but they will do it in Auto ISO modes that keep shutter speed and aperture fixed and adjust ISO to match the exposure, as I mentioned above.

When you spin the aperture dial on your camera and see intermediate values—or if you have a lens with a physical aperture ring with clicks in between the full-stop values and a maximum aperture not on that scale, like f/3.5, f/4.5, or f/6.3—now you know what those values represent.

One stop can be expensive

People taking sports photos typically use a zoom or telephoto lens with a focal length of 200 mm or so. You can buy a very nice 70-200 mm zoom that opens to f/2.8 from Canon, Nikon, and others for between $700 and $1700 USD. Not cheap, but worth it if that's what you need to do.

But if you want a 200 mm lens that opens one stop wider, to f/2? Nikon and Canon make them. They're huge, and will set you back something like $5000. Back in the '80s Nikon even made a 300 mm f/2 lens. List price? $29,000.

Modern digital cameras with good performance at high ISO sensitivity, and lenses with image stabilization, now make it possible to get similar results (one stop faster) for much, much less money.

« Previous: shutters and flashes

Next: "digital" lenses »

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

For as long as I can remember, my parents have had this photo hanging on their bedroom wall:

I made a copy last night because my younger daughter has a project at school where she's discussing Germany, and she wanted a copy of this picture to illustrate Berlin, where it was taken. It was 1965, on my parents' honeymoon. My mom and dad were 26 at the time, and that's the city's mascot, a bear, between them. Here they are today (without the bear):

My dad still wears collared shirts most of the time, though my mom isn't into the bonnets anymore.

They look young in that first photo. My wife and I were the same age, 26, when we got married 30 years later. We didn't feel so young then, but we were too.

Labels: anniversary, europe, family, photography, school

• “[Obama] said he likes to go out trick-or-treating, but he can’t anymore. [...] He said he guessed he could have worn a Barack Obama mask.”
  
  
• America contains a strange dichotomy about teenage sex: "Social liberals in the country's 'blue states' tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in 'red states' generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an abortion."
  
  
• From the same post at The Slog, back in 1970 Aretha Franklin sang and played piano in a lesson in soul that today's diva singers could still learn a thing or two (or twenty) from. In particular, her melisma (one syllable, many notes) is hardly noticeable, because she uses it sparingly and for (perhaps instinctive) emotional emphasis, rather than as a special effect. Maya Rudolph nailed it in this SNL satire in 2006 (sorry for the lousy audio, but you'll get it).
  
  
• Darren, who never adds salt or pepper to a prepared meal, wonders why so many of us do, even before we taste it. Shouldn't food, he asks, be properly seasoned before it arrives?
  
  
• Lisa has some good tips for photography on rainy days (also at TWIP)—especially useful right now in Vancouver.
  
  
• It's inevitable that an article (via Pharyngula) about an estranged son of the despicable Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church provokes a nasty flame war in the comments, but to have Phelps's equally vitriolic daughter Shirley (who obviously keeps up regular ego-surfing) be the first to comment brings it to a new level. Nice work by The Ubyssey, by the way—their journalism and copy editing seem to have improved since my days at UBC a couple of decades ago.

Labels: education, food, linksofinterest, music, photography, politics, religion, sex, weather

Most of the trees up here in the Pacific Northwest of North America are conifers, so we don't get the full richness of autumn colours from changing leaves. But sometimes the deciduous trees we do have are still pretty awesome:

The air was clear after much rain earlier, so the colours were particularly vibrant. My HDR treatment on the image helps too—but it's still pretty close to how it looked out our front window this afternoon.

Labels: hdr, photography, vancouver, weather

My family are not art collectors by any means, but over the years my wife and I have acquired some original prints by artists of varying degrees of renown—some from the artists directly. Today she dropped by Vancouver's Portobello West fashion and art market, where among other things she picked up two photos of koi from a booth set up by North Vancouver–based Jeff Maihara.

The pictures fit well with some of the other artwork we already have in our house, but we haven't figured out exactly where to put them yet. Vancouver produces some fine photographers, including our friends Alastair, Kris, and Duane. I hadn't heard of Jeff before, so it's nice to find another one.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, Bill in Omaha had a weird dream about me and my bandmate Mark.

Labels: art, photography, shopping, vancouver

Sorry, I'm not keeping very good track of my sources for these:

• Eighty-four variations of the iconic Obama "HOPE" poster.
• "...incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always."
• "If I have grown more cynical in recent years, it is travel, I think, that has pushed me in this direction. Exploring other parts of the world is beneficial in all the ways it is typically given credit for [...] But traveling can also burn you out, suck away your faith in humanity. You will see, right there in front of you, how the world is falling to pieces."
• A $15 USB controller shaped like the classic Atari 2600 joystick.
• Fabulous video of the recent SpaceX launch—the first successful commercial orbital rocket launch ever. If you're interested, here's a Google Maps satellite photo of the launch facility in the South Pacific, midway between Hawaii and New Guinea.
• Why we can't imagine what it's like to be dead.
• Blues guitar legend Robert Johnson died 70 years ago. Someone might have recently discovered a new photograph of him, one of at most a handful existing.

Labels: death, gadgets, linksofinterest, money, music, photography, politics, space, travel

I'm still doped up on Tylenol 3's and pretty tired post-surgery, so am not up for much thinking or original posts. I'm also contemplating email bankrupcy again, mere months after my last one, as my inbox creeps up to 800 once more. Sigh. Anyway, here's some interesting stuff:

• What if all movies had cell phones? (There's a good reason No Country for Old Men was set in 1980, by the way.)
• A worthy quote in this electional season: "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." - Oliver Wendell Holmes (though it may be a folksier recasting of "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society").
• "Hey news executives! Try this newsroom pop quiz: Give each staff member a pencil and tell everyone to stop what they're doing and write out the tag that creates a hypertext link." (via Dan)
• Andrew Sullivan rounds up quotes from a number of last night's press and blogger reactions to the final McCain-Obama debate.
• Also from Sullivan, it's a bit sad how well this video reflects the approach of the McCain campaign right now.
• While Leica's upcoming S2 camera is quite large (especially the lenses) for a digital SLR, it has a medium-format size sensor, meaning that it is smaller and probably more ergonomic than most of its direct competitors, and that even the rumoured €10,000–20,000 price isn't as insane as it sounds. Nevertheless, the cost of a reasonably complete S2 system when it's released next year will rival that of a condominium. It also bodes well for future "lower end" (for Leica, at least) cameras from this legendary manufacturer.
• What's it like to write other people's term papers for a living? (via Kottke)
• The web comic Basic Instructions makes me laugh almost every single time a new one comes out.
• Vancouver locals Buzz Bishop and Darren Barefoot accurately summarize the Canadian election held this week, in which nothing much changed. The result (as I discussed earlier) bodes poorly for our country's environmental and climate policy, which is one subject we can't afford to waste time on, unfortunately.

Labels: environment, film, leica, linksofinterest, movie, news, photography, politics, school, telecommunications, web, writing

Last week fellow Canadian podcaster John Meadows, whose show is called "On the Log," interviewed me about my recent return to dabbling in film photography.

John's episode 38 (MP3 file) is titled "Film at 11." I talk about how I now approach making black and white pictures, as well as the cross-processed colour photographs I've taken in the past couple of months. Plus John and I discuss other differences between film and digital photography for archiving and backup.

The podcast is a good corollary to my recent talk at Vancouver's PhotoCamp and my Camera Works series here on the blog.

Labels: film, geekery, nikon, photography, podcast

Since I started taking black and white film photos again back in July, I've noticed something. People like them a lot, on average more than my other pictures.

I'm not sure if it's that I take these photographs differently, because I know they are single shots on a limited medium, and will lack colour, so I compose and shoot them more carefully than others.

Or perhaps it's just that they are striking purely because they don't have colour and people aren't used to that anymore, epecially online. Maybe if I converted some of my other pictures to B&W, they might get a similar response too.

I know I enjoy making those images. It's pricey compared to digital photography, but that's part of what makes them different too.

Labels: film, friends, geekery, nikon, photography

The camera collage I posted to Flickr a couple of months ago is by now my most popular picture there, viewed more than 15,000 times. (Yes, Flickr is a haven for gearheads, never mind the photographic art.)

My favourite comment on the page comes from Axl: "I like the black one with the buttons and stuff."

Labels: geekery, humour, photography

The shutter of a camera seems pretty simple. For years, I thought of it the way it's described: as a shutter curtain. You know, as a sheet (metal, cloth, whatever) near the back of the camera that behaves like this:

1. Most of the time, it's closed, to keep light from hitting the film or digital sensor.
2. Press the camera button, and the curtain swishes open (really really fast), exposing the film or sensor to light from the camera lens. Click!
3. Then, it stays open for the time you set (whether 4 seconds of 1/4000th of a second).
4. Finally, it swishes closed again (really really fast), returning the back of the camera to darkness. Click!

That's straightforward, especially once you have a grip on focal lengths and f-stops. But it's also wrong. Camera shutters are a bit more complicated than that, and understanding that complexity can help you make better photographs.

How does a shutter work?

If you have a point-and-shoot digital camera, or a camera in your mobile phone, you'll never see its shutter. That's partly because you can't get inside the camera to take a peek, but also partly because many small digital cameras don't even have a shutter. (I'll explain why below.)

But let's ignore that for now. In the long, long history of film photography, cameras had to have some sort of shutter, since that was the only way to achieve two important goals:

• Keeping light from hitting the film when you didn't want it to.
• Making sure that light did hit the film when you wanted it to, but only then.

Camera manufacturers spent over a century figuring out how to make shutters faster and more accurate. There have been many designs in that time. Some tried leaf shutters that are part of the lens, with blades that open like the lens's aperture. (Many medium-format cameras use in-lens leaf shutters.) But the type most photographers are familiar with is the focal plane shutter, which sits right in front of the film and, in its simplest form, behaves something like the curtain I described above.

Before the 1980s, many SLR shutters were fully mechanical, relying on springs and levers for actuation and timing. In recent years, only specialist and boutique film cameras such as the Nikon FM3a and Leica MP retained mechanical-only shutters, so those cameras are fully functional without any batteries at all, as long as you have an external light meter (or excellent intuition about proper exposure).

Higher-end modern film and digital cameras, such as all digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) models, still use focal-plane shutters. But like most film camera shutters made since the 1980s, they are electromechanical: their mechanical shutters are controlled by the camera's electronics. They always need batteries (or a power adapter) to work.

On SLRs, you can remove the lens and raise the mirror to see the front of the shutter; on film models, you can also open the back to see its rear side too. Take a look at such a shutter (mechanical or electromechanical) and you'll find that, rather than resembling a simple curtain, it consists of many parts, more like an airlock of some sort:

Rear view of the shutter (centre) on my Nikon F4 film SLR.

According to Nikon's promotional materials, the shutter on my F4 camera (the world's top-of-the-line professional 35 mm SLR when it was introduced in 1988) includes more than 200 components, which is more than some entire cameras of the same vintage. It remains one of the most sophisticated still-camera shutters ever made, with many miniscule levers and cams, a tungsten-alloy shutter balancer to minimize vibration, curtain components made of both metal and a carbon fibre–epoxy compound, and a maximum shutter speed of 1/8000th of a second.

Two curtains for extra speed

It's amazing that a physical shutter mechanism can open and close in 1/8000th of a second. So amazing, in fact, that it doesn't do that at all. Instead, pretty much every focal plane shutter you'll ever encounter has at least two curtains (which can comprise numerous parts each). One opens, the other closes. Here's how they're put together in my Nikon F4:

Nikon's diagram of how the F4 shutter works. Notice that there are two separate shutter curtains (one in front of the other), each made of four blades which are a fraction of a millimetre thick. The diagram doesn't show all the tiny levers, cams, springs, screws, fasteners, motors, and such needed to make this arrangement actually work. Diagram from the Nikon F4 Technical Guide, © 1988-1996 Nikon.

This shutter opens and closes from top to bottom, known as a vertical-travel design, which is also most common on modern digital SLRs and other cameras. When the camera isn't in use, both sets of shutter blades are down, keeping light from reaching the film. Here's what happens for relatively slow shutter speeds:

1. When you press the shutter button, the camera's mirror flips up.
2. Then the back four shutter blades slide up out of the way (very very fast), layering over each other like an elevator door opening on its side, but leaving the front shutter blades closed to keep light out. The film has not yet been exposed, but the shutter is now ready to do it.
3. Next, for the actual exposure, those closed front four shutter blades slide down (very very fast) to let light from the lens reach the film.
4. After the requisite interval (say 1/30th of a second), the waiting rear blades follow, sliding down again (very very fast) to cut off light to the film once more.
5. When everything's done, the front blades slide back up and the mirror flips down into position.

That last move both returns the lens image to the viewfinder up above via the mirror, and makes sure no more light gets to the film, even if you bump the camera around, because both sets of curtains are closed. To see it all in the real world, you can watch a modern Nikon D3 SLR do its thing in this high-speed close-up frame-by-frame photo sequence of its focal plane shutter in action. There are also some great, informative animations of the process at Digital Photography School.

If you're looking through the viewfinder during this time, the view momentarily goes black (known as the blackout interval) while the mirror gets out of the way, so one disadvantage of SLR camera designs is that you can't actually see what you're photographing at the very instant you take the picture. But that instant is pretty short: usually something like a tenth of a second for all the flipping and sliding and springing to take place.

Many older cameras used horizontal-travel shutters, which are usually slower because the parts have to travel a bit farther. And lots of electromechanical and mechanical shutters use fewer parts, some of which may be heavier or which might move more slowly for other reasons, but they all work essentially the same way, with two curtains that follow each other to expose the film or sensor, and then cover it up again after a short time.

However, when the shutter speed gets really quick, things change a little. How fast "really quick" is depends on the shutter design and materials, but in general for SLRs, the more you spend on the camera, the quicker the shutter. Nevertheless, somewhere around a threshold of 1/60th or 1/90th or 1/125th or 1/200th or 1/250th or maybe 1/300th of a second, even the most modern vertical-travel focal plane shutters with the lightest, thinnest, best-engineered blades can't fully open and close any faster. (Start calculating the forces on those accelerating and decelerating sliding plates of metal and carbon fibre, or pieces of rubberized cloth in older cameras, as they whip open and closed really really fast, and you'll see why.)

So, decades ago, camera designers figured out a clever trick. It's not as if the entire film plane has to be exposed all at once. For a 1/1000th of a second exposure, for example, if the front curtain starts opening, and then, 1/1000th of a second later, the back curtain begins following, even before the front curtain has moved very far, then the two curtains can move across the film plane like two cars on a highway, with a gap between them.

How fast is fast?

For fast exposures, the rear shutter curtain follows the front one like a drafting car on the highway, creating a moving slit of light.

The gap is then a narrow slit of light moving across the film (top to bottom or one side to the other, depending on the shutter design), which means that while the slit of light can take a relatively long time to cross the gap, any particular slice of the film (or digital sensor) only gets exposed for a short fraction of that time. The slit can move at 1/60th of a second on some old mechanical cameras, or more like 1/200th or faster on modern DSLRs—but any particular slice of the film (or digital sensor) only gets exposed for 1/1000th of a second as the slit passes over it.

High-end professional shutters like the one on my F4, and even on new pro cameras like the Nikon D3 and Canon EOS 1D Mark III (Canon, please clean up your camera names!), can fully open and close as fast as 1/250th or 1/300th of a second, and their maximum shutter speeds go up to 1/8000th of a second, which means the slit passing over the focal plane is really, really thin. Those maximums have been about the same since at least 1988, so electromechanical focal plane shutters reached some sort of physical limit a couple of decades ago.

(Okay, that's not quite true. Minolta managed 1/12,000th of a second with an even-narrower slit in 1992. The Canon 1D could open and close in 1/500th of a second, and maxed out at 1/16,000th, but it had a hybrid shutter like those I talk about below. No current DSLR, especially the full-frame variety, comes close to that.)

You can imagine a few circumstances where this design could be a problem: freezing photos of really fast-moving objects (nearby aircraft, for instance) requires fast shutter speeds. Even 1/250th of a second might be slow enough to blur a passing jet. But a faster shutter speed doesn't really move the shutter mechanism faster, so the moving-slit design could theoretically smear out the final image if the object is moving fast enough and you're not moving the camera to follow.

So, again in theory, a fast passing airplane could be in different positions as the slit moves, smearing differently if the jet is moving with or against the direction the slit travels. However, in practice that almost never happens, even for supersonic jets, unless you are a specialized technical photographer. But in the early days of photography, it happened more frequently:

In the comments below, Andy Baird pointed me to this famous photo, which he noted "was taken by Jacques-Henri Lartigue in 1913. His large vertical shutter couldn't move very fast, so the wheels in the photo are ovals, because they were imaged as a series of horizontal slices." The racing fans are even more distorted because Lartigue was panning to follow the car. It's a great effect, even if it wasn't intentional.

The same effect is common when capturing motion using some electronic camcorder video shutters, or even with the live-view video mode on the new Nikon D90. It's noticeable enough there that reviewers have called the resulting video jello movies.

The main circumstance where the slit is a problem for most of us is when we use a flash. So camera manufacturers generally make it impossible to take flash photos with really fast shutter speeds. Mostly. Here's why.

How does a flash work?

If you took photographs with inexpensive cameras in the 1970s or earlier, you remember flashbulbs and flashcubes: expendable, single-use (or maybe four-use) flashes that attached to your camera, and which basically created a contained explosion (with audible paf!) to illuminate your pictures. They were slightly safer descendants of the flammable flash powder used by old-timey photographers.

Those flashes were good for lighting up a dark room, but didn't freeze action very well, because they took a fraction of a second to heat up (requiring the camera to wait a moment after you pressed the shutter release before it really opened the shutter) and lasted about 1/30th of a second before fizzling out. On the good side, when using a moving-slit shutter for faster exposures, a flashbulb was essentially "on" for the entire time the slit moved across the film—as far as the film was concerned, an old-style flashbulb was the same as any continuous light, like a studio lamp, a bright house fixture, or even the sun. You could use a flashbulb at any shutter speed, no matter how fast (though some of the light was wasted at faster exposures).

My Nikon SB-600 Speedlight flash, a modern descendant of the first strobe flashes of the 1960s.

But in the 1960s Nikon came out with what was generally a much better design: strobe flashes that they called (and still call) "Speedlights." Other manufacturers soon followed. By electronically creating a small, high-voltage electrical arc, like a lightning bolt, inside a sealed tube of inert xenon gas, strobe flashes generate a powerful and very brief pulse of light.

Speedlight flashes are great. They run on batteries, are quite power efficient, and last for thousands and thousands of pulses before they wear out. Nearly every modern camera (except mobile phones) either has an electronic strobe flash built in, or has a "hot shoe" you can attach one to.

These modern electronic flashes also freeze action very well, because their pulses last at most 1/1000th of a second. At lower powers, the burst can be 1/10,000th of a second or even substantially less (the only way for the strobe to emit less light is for the flash duration to be shorter). So, most of the time, as far as an electromechanical shutter is concerned, flashes are now instantaneous: rather than being "on" the whole time the shutter is open, they create an instant "pop" of light at some time during the exposure, usually timed to be just as the shutter opens.

And so we run into our moving-slit problem. If your flash is instantaneous, at fast shutter speeds where a slit is moving across the film or sensor plane, the flash "pop" will only send light through the slit, and only during part of the exposure:

• If the flash is being used to light up a dark image, the resulting photo will be totally black except for one flash-lit band across the image.
• If there is some ambient light and you're using the flash for "fill," there will be a bizarre stripe of bright flash-lit exposure across an underexposed background image in the rest of the frame.

Neither is what you want.

If the moving shutter curtains only expose a slit of light to the near-instantaneous flash pulse, only that slit gets recorded on the film or digital sensor. The rest of the frame stays black or underexposed. That's bad, so modern cameras make it almost impossible to do.

Flash sync, or X-sync

So, you only want to use a strobe flash like everyone has now when the shutter is completely open, and you can only do that if the exposure is at or slower than the threshold speed we talked about above, when the rear curtain doesn't start moving until the front curtain is already all the way across the focal plane. On an old camera that could be 1/60th of a second. On a top-of-the-line pro DSLR, it might be 1/300th of a second.

That value is so important that, ever since the Speedlight revolution of the '60s, camera makers have called it the flash sync speed of the camera: the fastest exposure you can set where the focal plane shutter is completely open for at least an instant, during which the flash can fire and expose the entire frame. On some cameras with a shutter-speed dial, that value is either highlighted in red or indicated with an X (or, on my F4, both!), so it's also called the X-sync speed, or just the sync speed.

The slit exposure problem is sufficiently undesirable that "newer" cameras (i.e., most made in the last 25 or 30 years) generally won't even let you try to use a flash at shutter speeds faster than X-sync—they'll force the flash sync speed on you no matter what you do. If you turn on, flip up, or mount a flash on your camera, chances are it will set the shutter speed to the sync maximum (1/60th or 1/90th or 1/25th or 1/200th or 1/250th of a second, or whatever, depending on your camera). It will do that no matter what shutter speed you've told it otherwise, often even in fully manual mode.

Slower exposures are also fine with flash, and give you lots of creative options, from using fill flash to balance out harsh shadows, to creating nice motion blur while still freezing your main subject in sharp focus. Some let you control the flash's power, pre-pulse the flash to reduce "redeye" in your subjects (by making their pupils contract before the true exposure), or determine whether to fire the flash either when the shutter first opens or when it starts to close ("rear-curtain sync") for different effects. Therefore, cameras happily let you use flash at shutter speeds slower than X-sync, while blocking you from those that are faster.

Except when they don't. Which brings us to our last topic.

Wait a minute! My camera can use a flash at faster shutter speeds!

Here's a funny thing. My Nikon D50, an entry-level digital SLR introduced in 2005, has a 1/500th of a second flash sync speed. So did its predecessor the D70, and even the D1 from way back in the year 2000, as well as the newer D40. But other Nikon models (both old and new, many of them much higher-end cameras like the D3), have X-sync speeds of 1/180th, 1/200th, or at most 1/250th of a second.

Even the D40x and D60 offer only 1/200th flash sync, even though they are otherwise barely different from the D40, with its 1/500th sync! Other manufacturers show similar discrepancies. And even cheapie point-and-shoot digicams sometimes have flash sync faster than 1/250th of a second. Cameras costing $5000 and up, whose shutters have much higher total top speeds of 1/8000th of a second, have slower flash sync than cameras costing $600, or even $200! WTF? Is this a ripoff?

(Hint: no.)

Here's another funny thing. Some camera-flash combinations, usually on DSLRs using higher-priced external flashes from the same manufacturer, offer what they call "High Speed FP" (Focal Plane) mode, or something similar. With those setups, in most circumstances, flash photography is still limited by the usual X-Sync speed of 1/250th of a second or slower, but if you put the camera and flash into a special high-speed flash mode (controlled either from the flash, or from the camera, or both), you can use the flash at any shutter speed the camera supports, right up to 1/8000th of a second. But you have to specifically invoke that mode. If it offers unlimited flash sync, shouldn't it be on all the time?

(Hint: no.)

Let's tackle these two puzzles in order.

Flash sync with electronic and hybrid shutters

I mentioned back at the beginning that many point-and-shoot digicams, as well as all mobile phone cameras I know about, don't have shutters at all. Their instruction manuals might say they have shutters, but they don't: the digital image sensor is always exposed to light from the back of the lens—except when the lens cap is on or, as in many of those devices, if the lens aperture closes down when the camera is turned off.

Instead of an electromechanical shutter with light-blocking blades, these cameras have what is misleadingly called an electronic shutter. When you press the button to take a picture, the camera electronics briefly turn the sensor electronics on then off again. The sensor stays on for the exposure interval (1/30th of a second, or 1/1000th of a second, or whatever), so it's also a bit misleading to call it a "shutter speed" anymore, but we do out of tradition, and to be consistent.

This is a completely new way of doing things: film, of course, was always light sensitive and had to be kept out of the light right until it was processed. Electronic sensors can be told when to be light-sensitive, and can also turn on and off very quickly. And since there's no moving slit of light from shutter blades, if you're using a flash, it can fire and expose the whole sensor surface to light at once. So why don't all digital cameras use electronic shutters and get rid of those old mechanical ones once and for all?

There are always compromises with technology, especially in photography. Electronic shutters—or, more accurately, switchable digital light sensors—are complicated, because in addition to all the individual light sensor pixel photosites, microlenses, electron storage wells, and circuitry to move the data from them to the camera's electronics, they need additional electronics to control the switching.

The switching circuits take up space on the sensor surface, which means that:

• The manufacturer can't pack as many megapixels onto the sensor, or
• It won't be as sensitive to light because it captures fewer photons (meaning it doesn't perform as well photographing low-light scenes), or
• The images it produces have more noise in them.

Or all three. In addition, there are different types of sensors, such as CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor), with different sub-types in each of them, some of which are more or less suitable to including electronic shutter technology, at least with current manufacturing processes.

There are also different types of electronic shutters, with some (called rolling shutters) that behave a bit like the film slit, or like the scanning electron gun of an old cathode ray tube (CRT) television, "painting" the image from top to bottom. That sets its own limit on how fast the shutter speed can be with a flash.

Finally, since the camera sensor remains exposed to light even when it's not turned on, unusual lighting situations, such as having the sun in the frame, can overload photosites and cause nasty "blooming" effects (scroll down here to see an example) that are at least as obnoxious as the slit-flash problem, as well as more subtle artifacts like banding or uneven noise.

As a clever compromise, on some lower-priced digital SLRs, camera makers have chosen hybrid shutters that use both focal plane curtains and switchable sensors. So for fast 1/500 flash sync, my Nikon D50 performs a neat trick:

1. It opens its electromechanical shutter blades the usual way for an SLR, but relatively slowly (maybe 1/125th or 1/180th of a second, I'm not sure)—but the sensor is still turned off.
2. While the shutter is open, the sensor turns on briefly for 1/500th of a second, like the electronic shutter on a point-and-shoot camera.
3. While the sensor is on, the flash fires.
4. The sensor turns off again.
5. Lastly, the shutter closes again at its leisurely pace.

While that can cause a few image quality problems, such a design let Nikon install a less expensive, slower shutter while still offering faster 1/500 flash sync. However, it seems that such a design was only possible on the 6-megapixel CCD sensor used on the D70, D70s, D50, and D40. Once the company started using 10-megapixel sensors for the D40x and D60, those cameras had to revert to the normal electromechanical-only shutters with 1/200 sync.

So, in short, electronic shutters have various compromises. Currently, quality higher-resolution sensors that work well in low light also don't have the circuitry to act as electronic shutters, even in hybrid designs. So, for cameras where reliable performance, image quality, and low-light handling are most important, manufacturers continue to use old-fashioned electromechanical bladed shutter curtains, at least for now.

High-speed flash sync

With some higher-end external flashes, certain SLR cameras support what's known either as High Speed Sync (Canon, Sony, and others) or FP Sync (Nikon), which lets you take flash photos at any shutter speed the camera supports, right up to 1/8000th of a second. That's especially useful when using fill flash in daylight, particularly with high-powered telephoto lenses in wildlife or sports photography. How you set up High Speed Sync depends on your particular camera and flash: the controls might be on the flash unit, or in the camera menus, or both.

How is it that the High Speed Sync gets around the slit-flash problem and the traditional X-sync limit I've been talking about this whole time? It's not magic. Remember that the reason X-sync is an issue is that the flash burst is effectively instantaneous, and so only illuminates the focal plane through the moving shutter slit at one moment, rather than the entire time the shutter curtains are moving.

But newer strobe flashes can fire repeatedly, and do so in extremely rapid succession. In High Speed Sync mode, the flash fires its near-instantaneous bursts of light over and over, thousands of times per second, for the entire time the shutter slit crosses the focal plane. Effectively, in High Speed mode, the flash fires repeatedly like a machine gun, paf paf paf paf paf..., and acts like it's "on" for the entire X-sync time of 1/200th or 1/250th or 1/300th of a second, even though the exposure for any given slice of the sensor might be only 1/8000th of a second at top shutter speed.

With the flash firing repeatedly thousands of times each second in High Speed mode, the light on the subject is effectively continuous, like a lamp or the sun. Flash illumination passes through the slit the whole time it is moving across the focal plane, so the entire subject is exposed to the film (or sensor) behind the shutter.

There are problems with that approach. It wastes a lot of light and power compared to the usual single flash burst, so the flash unit heats up, takes longer to recharge, and drains its batteries much faster. That's why it's not the default setting, and why only more powerful external flashes support it. A small pop-up flash on a DSLR that tried to fire repeatedly at full power might even melt, or at least suck the camera's battery dry pretty fast.

Old technology even in modern times

All current digital SLRs, as well as esoteric cameras like the Leica M8 digital rangefinder, use an electromechanical shutter of some sort, either as a hybrid design combined with an "electronic shutter" switching sensor, or with the traditional shutter alone. Most of the time, the old problem of the moving shutter slit still forces us to use a slower X-sync when taking flash pictures on DSLRs, even when cheaper point-and-shoot cameras can sync at higher speeds using electronic shutters. High Speed/FP Sync modes on DSLRs are one answer, but they are power hungry and only work with higher-end external flashes for some cameras.

I'm sure engineers at Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, and others are working on new ways to make flash sync speeds faster again. Electromechanical shutter designs started to hit their physical limits 20 years ago, but at the moment, having "slower" X-sync speeds of 1/200th or 1/250th or 1/300th of a second is a reasonable tradeoff with modern high-resolution, low-light digital sensors. Focal plane shutters have a century of design refinement behind them, and have proved reliable over decades of hard use, so they're not ready to be sidelined just yet.

Read more

Some useful resources:

• Wikipedia: The Science of Photography
• Thom Hogan: How digital cameras work
• Why digital cameras have mechanical shutters
• Nikon D3 focal plane shutter in super-slow motion
• Sync speed explained
• Photo.net forum: Mechanical vs. electronic shutter (image quality and sync speed)
• Photo.net forum: Mechanical vs. electronic shutters in DSLRs
• Wikipedia: Electronic flash
• Ken Rockwell: Sync speed
• High-speed sync for flash at any shutter speed
• Strobist: Control your world with ultra-high sync
• Photography 101.6: Shutter

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Next: intermediate f-stops »

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

It's not exactly a brilliant piece of photographic art, but it is pretty funny: this is the 10,000th picture taken with my Nikon D50 digital camera since I got it pretty much exactly two years ago. I didn't even take the photo, which is of "Bongo Neurotic," who was playing percussion with us yesterday; guitar player Sean borrowed my camera to snap it.

To reach 10,000 photos in two years is around 13.7 photos per day, on average, every day. Every. Single. Day. So while I like my film camera too, I'm glad I haven't had to pay for a roll of film (plus processing and printing) every day or two during that time.

Interestingly, the shutters on modern DSLR cameras are often tested for 100,000 or 150,000 or even 300,000 actuations—at my current rate, I'd have to keep going for between 10 and 30 years before the shutter wears out. I expect I'll probably replace the camera a few times in that span, assuming I even live that long.

Labels: anniversary, band, nikon, photography

• It's a fact: I find it astonishing that the governor of Alaska (Alaska!), and new vice-presidential running mate for John McCain, doesn't think that climate change is human-generated. I'm guessing her house isn't built on melting permafrost.
  
  
• I'll let Dan Savage give his trademark trenchant take on the other Sarah Palin news.
  
  
• This past week Canon introduced its new EOS 50D SLR (a nice upgrade from the 40D), and Nikon followed with its D90 (which supersedes the D80 and takes movies, a first for an SLR camera). While I use Nikon myself, and the D90 would be great if I needed a new camera, for people just getting into the market, I still think the Pentax K200D is an excellent deal.
  
  
• Speaking of photography, the always-snarky Ken Rockwell has (as usual) excellent advice on how to carry less stuff so you make better pictures. I should have heeded his advice when I went up Whistler mountain a few weeks ago. I took a bunch of photos, but only used one lens, even though I schlepped a whole bag's worth of stuff (plus a tripod I never unfolded) up there—just like the guys Ken was making fun of at the zoo.
  
  
• I'm a little too old to have ever been all that interested in going to Burning Man, but I'm particularly glad to have avoided this year's dust storm. Yuck.
  
  
• Looks like Americans won't be the only ones having an election this fall.
  
  

Labels: canon, environment, linksofinterest, nikon, pentax, photography, politics

Chris Pirillo, who organized the Gnomedex conference last week, posted a fun video compiling a bunch of photos from the event. As far as I can tell, most of the photos are from my Flickr set, which is cool:

He calls it "The Beginning of Human Circuitry." The groovy technobleep soundtrack is "Icarus" from Trash80.net, and the video was assembled using Animoto.

Labels: animation, conferences, gnomedex, kriskrug, photography, pirillo, video

Photos like this one are the reason I've been using black-and-white film to take some of my pictures recently:

Labels: conferences, family, friends, gnomedex, meetup, photography

Photo buffs (yeah, like me) will be interested to read two new gear reviews at DPReview today:

• Sigma's new 50 mm f/1.4 lens is unusual: the first genuinely modern 50 mm lens design in a long time, not from one of the camera manufacturers, and both huge and expensive compared to lenses made by Canon, Nikon, and Pentax (whose comparable lens is half the weight and price!).
• Canon's $8000 EOS 1Ds Mark III is the top of the heap for price and resolution among digital SLR cameras. It's taken awhile for DPR to review it, but it's interesting to see how it compares to Nikon's very different top model, the D3.

Labels: canon, nikon, photography, review, sigma

When you're shopping for digital cameras today, you'll see that they advertise lens focal lengths with numbers in "35 mm equivalent." Other specs might talk about a "crop factor" or "focal length multiplier" of 1.5 or 1.6 or 2.0 or more. What do those mean, and why didn't we hear about them back in the film days? Learning about 35 mm film will help us find out.

It's amazing how long 35 mm film (known as 135 film for still cameras) has been around. William Dickson, Thomas Edison, and George Eastman established its dimensions and specifications, right down to the distance between the sprocket holes, back in 1892—but that was for movie film. A number of still camera makers had the clever idea of using the same film stock for still pictures in the early 20th century, and it really took off among professional and enthusiast photographers in the 1920s, when Leica brought out its first tough little rangefinder cameras and excellent lenses.

What is a full frame?

35 mm film gets its name honestly: the strips are 35 mm (about 1.4 inches) across, including the sprocket borders. In movie cameras it runs vertically, and the individual movie frames are 22 mm wide (leaving 13 mm for the margins and sprockets) by 16 mm high. But still cameras like the Leica M series (introduced in 1954) and Nikon F SLRs (first appearing in 1959) ran the film horizontally, as well as doubling the size of the image, making it 24 mm high by 36 mm wide. Today we call a film frame or digital sensor of that size "full frame."

Movie film was useful because it came in long rolls that could hold a lot of pictures, and it offered a good compromise between convenience, cost, and picture quality—especially compared to the sheet film and glass plates used by those big view cameras, where the photographer had to hide under a cloth and use bellows for focusing. The form of the standard 35 mm film roll cartridge was established pretty early too, which means that you can stick a brand-new roll of Fuji or Kodak film in a 50-year-old Leica. (And if you could find a well-preserved 50-year-old roll of film, it would fit in a new Canon film SLR too.)

The dominance of 135

Over the years many other film types came and went, from rolls for the popular Brownie in the '40s to small 120 cartridges for flashcube-equipped point-and-shoots from the '70s, disc film in the '80s, and Advanced Photo System (APS) rolls in the '90s. Polaroid did well with magical instant prints, and a big contingent of professionals has always used medium- and large-format film for extra high resolution in their Hasselblads and big studio cameras.

But nothing has lasted as long or been as ubiquitous and diverse as 135 film. You could get it as slide reversal film, colour or black-and-white print rolls, infrared strips, or super-sensitive cold-treated stock for telescope photography. Speeds ranged from super-slow but fine-grained Kodachrome to ultra-sensitive grainy print stocks for fast action and low light. You could buy 35 mm rolls anywhere from pharmacies in New York City to kiosks trailside in the Himalayas.

For 135 film, the 24 x 36 mm frame size never changed, so you could put pretty much any film roll in nearly any camera you could find, from a $200 autofocus pocketcam to a $2000 Nikon F4. And the lenses that camera makers created, whether the tiny plastic globule at the front of a single-use disposable cardboard camera or a $10,000 Canon L series super-telephoto, used focal lengths that made sense for that standard frame. "Normal" lenses had focal lengths in the 40 to 60 mm range. Wide-angle lenses had shorter focal lengths, and telephotos longer ones.

And then, around the turn of the 21st century, digital cameras started taking over. That threw everything into chaos.

Smaller sensors, smaller circles, smaller lenses

If you go back to my lens focal length article, you'll recall this diagram:

Fields of view for lenses of different focal lengths on a full-frame camera.

It shows the different fields of view from different lens focal lengths. When I first talked about that diagram, I discussed those angle-of-view circles as the cone of light that each lens "sucks in" from the front of the lens. But the whole point of the lens is that it not only sucks in that light, but projects it out the back too, onto the focal plane at the rear of your camera. That's where the projected image circle falls on the film or digital sensor when the shutter is open.

For most of the past century, lenses for SLRs and other 35 mm cameras were optimized to project a circle of roughly the same size, to cover the full 24 x 36 mm film frame behind the shutter:

That means that a full-frame image circle has to be at least 43.3 mm in diameter, because that's the diagonal width of the full film frame. Whether you're talking about a 500 mm telephoto, a 24 mm wide angle, or even an 8 mm fisheye or 70-200 mm zoom, whatever angle of view they're sucking in, they have to project a circle 43.3 mm across onto the film plane. (Actually, it's usually a bit wider, just to avoid the inevitable light falloff at the edges of lenses.)

Most digital cameras, however, are different. Until a few years ago, it was prohibitively expensive to produce a full-frame digital sensor, and it's still a lot costlier than making something smaller. As recently as 2003, the cheapest full-frame camera you could buy was a $5000 Kodak digital SLR, and that was a big price drop from its predecessors. Even today, there are only a few full-frame SLRs from Canon and Nikon (and soon, rumour has it, Sony), ranging from $2500 to $8000.

Most people who buy cameras are never going to spend that kind of money, so the solution was to make the sensors smaller (and thus cheaper to manufacture). Most digital SLRs have sensors with dimensions called "APS-C" or "DX" size, which is roughly 16 x 24 mm. Cameras using the Four Thirds system developed by Olympus and Panasonic have even smaller sensors, 13 x 17.3 mm. Most digital point-and-shoot cameras use smaller sensors still.

What does that mean for lenses? Two different things:

• Lens makers can manufacture lenses that project a smaller image circle for those smaller sensors, or
• Existing full-frame lens designs can work with smaller sensors, but those sensors only capture the middle portion of the image circle.

What's nice is:

• Someone like me, who already had a couple of lenses for his Nikon film camera, can buy a Nikon digital SLR (a D50, in my case) and mount those lenses right on it. They work great, even though the camera has a DX-sized sensor in it. The full-frame lenses project an image circle that's too big, but that's okay: the sensor just picks up the middle of that circle, and ignores the edges. Same for anyone with recent film lenses from Canon, Pentax, or other makers.
• Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Olympus, Sigma, Tamron, and other lens manufacturers can make lenses optimized for the DX-sized or Four Thirds sensors—lenses that project a smaller image circle. For a given focal length, those lenses can be smaller, lighter, and less expensive because they don't need as much precision-ground glass to project that smaller circle.
• It's also possible to make reasonably priced zoom and super-wide-angle lenses in focal-length ranges that would be extremely expensive for full-frame cameras. Again that's because of the smaller image circle they project. I have a lens for my D50's DX sensor that is an 18-135 mm zoom, and it cost a few hundred bucks. A lens like that for a full-frame camera would be huge and cost thousands, if it could be made at all.
• For point-and-shoot digicams with even smaller sensors, the lenses can be really tiny and inexpensive, because their image circles are even smaller in diameter. So you can get super-thin and small cameras to fit in your pocket and still take decent photos—much smaller and thinner than any 35 mm pocket cameras ever were.

There are problems too. Smaller sensors tend to create more image noise, especially as manufacturers pack more and more megapixels into them. Bigger sensors, while expensive, can not only handle more pixels cleanly, but can also be designed to work better in lower light. Yet even aside from those issues, different sensor sizes make things messy.

What does "35 mm equivalent" mean?

It turns out that the focal length for a "normal" lens (neither wide-angle nor telephoto), where the objects in the photograph appear in proper proportion as we see with our eyes, isn't universal. It depends on the size of the sensor or film frame. And, as luck would have it, a normal focal length is about the diagonal width of a film frame.

So for a frame of 135 film, or a full-frame sensor, a normal lens would have a focal length of 43.3 mm. (Most often, lens makers create 50 mm lenses instead, probably for technical reasons I don't understand, but that's close enough.) However, for a DX-sized sensor, a normal lens would instead be 28.4 mm. For a Four Thirds sensor, you're looking at 21.6 mm, almost exactly half the focal length of a normal lens for a full-frame SLR.

Point-and-shoot digicams with smaller sensors use even shorter focal lengths for a normal view. And for all those smaller sensors, wide-angle and telephoto mean different things too—my wife's Canon A540 has a 5.8-23.2 mm zoom lens, for instance. The whole range would be super-wide on a full-frame camera, but for a sensor only about 10 mm across, that lens covers medium-wide to medium-telephoto.

(Incidentally, it works the other direction as well. Medium-format cameras like Hasselblads use a much larger film frame or digital sensor, so a normal lens has a focal length of 80 mm or even 120 mm.)

All this makes shopping for a digital camera complicated. 50 mm is a normal lens on a full-frame SLR, but normal is 33 mm on a DX sensor, 25 mm on Four Thirds, and perhaps 8 mm on a point-and-shoot.

For point-and-shoot cameras it's actually worse than that. With different-sized tiny sensors, even different models from the same manufacturer might have different focal lengths for the same fields of view, and most camera buyers aren't in the mood for making frame-ratio calculations in the store.

So most smaller cameras list their lens zoom ranges as 35 mm equivalents. On my wife's Canon A540, for instance, the only place you'll see that 5.8-23.2 mm specification is on the lens itself. Marketing materials describe the lens as a "35-140 mm equivalent" in 35 mm-film full-frame focal lengths.

What does "crop factor" mean?

There's another way to look at that same relationship between full-frame and smaller sensors. Look again at the image circles for the various different sizes of sensors, and compare that to the field-of-view diagram I showed for wide angle, normal, and telephoto lenses:

Left, sensor size image circles. Right, focal length fields of view.

Notice that, since the smaller sensors cut off the outer portion of the image circle, they essentially crop the picture to the centre portion only. And cropping narrows the angle of view of a picture, similar to using a lens with a longer focal length. But cropping does it at the focal plane at back of the camera instead of at the front of the lens. (You can even crop the image later, in a program like Photoshop, effectively turning a normal-lens picture into a telephoto shot—but at the cost of a fuzzier picture, because you delete pixels too.)

Since both a smaller sensor (cropping the image) and a longer focal length (closer perspective) narrow the angle of view of a scene, you can treat them as the same thing. A full-frame sensor (measuring 43.3 mm corner to corner) is about 1.5 times further across than a DX-sized sensor (measuring 28.4 mm corner to corner). That means the angle of view for a lens of any particular focal length is 1.5 times wider on a full-frame sensor than a DX sensor.

Remember that a 200 mm telephoto lens provides an angle of view 12° across on a full-frame sensor. But a DX sensor crops that down, dividing it by 1.5, so the angle of view is only 8°. That's the same angle of view as a 300 mm lens would have on a full frame, so you can say that the DX sensor makes a 200 mm lens behave like a 300 mm lens. Any lens used with a DX sensor will behave like a lens with 1.5 times the focal length. (Or, more accurately, the way a lens 1.5 times longer would behave on a full-frame sensor.)

That 1.5-times multiplier is called the crop factor or focal length multiplier of a sensor, which expresses two things:

• The diagonal width of a full-frame sensor compared to the cropped sensor.
• How much longer a lens would have to be to project the same angle of view onto a full-frame sensor.

Neatly, those are the same number, because the ratios are the same. Both of them are like zooming in 1.5 times on a full-frame image, so you can only see the middle part.

The Four Thirds sensor is even smaller, about 21.6 mm across. Since that's about half the diagonal width of a full frame, lenses connected to a Four Thirds camera have a crop factor of 2.0, so a 200 mm lens behaves like a 400 mm lens. And a 25 mm lens behaves like a 50 mm lens.

Once you get to point-and-shoot digicams, the crop factors get silly. My wife's Canon has a crop factor of about 6.0, for instance (which is how a 5.8-23.2 mm lens becomes "35-140 mm equivalent"). So the math is the same. Which numbers you see depends on marketing considerations:

• Because point-and-shoot cameras come with a single zoom lens, and because their crop factors are pretty extreme, they're usually advertised in full-frame equivalent terms ("35-140 mm equivalent"). That makes it simple to compare cameras.
• Since digital SLRs have interchangeable lenses, they're usually advertised using the crop factor ("1.6 focal length multiplier") instead—you might be putting all sorts of lenses on them, and it's less confusing if those lenses advertise their actual focal lengths. That makes it simple to compare lenses.

Interestingly, if camera manufacturers used the same terms in describing sensor sizes as they do with resolution (megapixels), they'd have to say that a DX sensor is only 43% the resolution of a full-frame sensor, and a Four Thirds sensor is only 25%! That's another reason why crop factor is the term they prefer.

Tradeoffs

The math makes it seem like you can just shrink your sensor and get more telephoto power for free. That's not quite true:

• Smaller sensors are noisier, as I've already mentioned.
• It's harder to get lots of pixels on them without microscopic electrical interference degrading the image, so it's also harder to make small sensors perform well in low light.
• There are changes in the depth of field: for a given field of view and lens aperture, smaller sensors put more of the image in focus. That's fine if you want deep focus, but if you prefer those nice out-of-focus backgrounds I described in my aperture and f-stops article, it will be harder to accomplish with a smaller sensor.

There are also problems at the wide-angle end. I have a 24 mm lens that gives a very wide field of view on my film camera, but on my DX-format digital SLR (1.5 crop factor), it acts like a 36 mm lens, which isn't all that wide at all. For a similar view, I would need a 16 mm lens, or maybe 18 mm if I don't mind a little closer view.

Building a lens that wide which works on both DX and full-frame sensors is difficult and costly—Nikon and Canon make them, but they cost at least $1500. Now, you can get 16 mm or 18 mm lenses (or zooms that go that wide) for digital SLRs, for much less money. But they are "digital only"—being built smaller and less expensively, they project a smaller image circle, which means that if I put my 18-135 mm DX zoom lens on my old Nikon F4 film camera, there's a big black vignette circle around the image when I look through the viewfinder and take photos:

So a serious wide-angle lens for a DX camera could be pretty much useless on a full-frame camera, unless you spend a lot of money. And the problem only gets worse with smaller sensors like Four Thirds.

It's all relative to full-frame

The full-frame 35 mm film size, which camera and lens designers have been working with for a century or so (it became an accepted standard for movies in 1909), remains an excellent compromise between image quality and portability. Some people still prefer medium-format cameras, and will pay tens of thousands of dollars for a digital Hasselblad, and thousands more for lenses, all of which are beastly to lug around. Most of us are content with smaller-sensor SLRs and point-and-shoot pocket cams.

But most professionals and many enthusiastic amateurs are returning to that full-frame sensor size, and in the past few years cameras with sensors that size have become at least somewhat affordable (if you consider $2500 cheap). That will likely continue, and full-frame cameras will get less expensive.

So in a few years, we could be back to the same old 35 mm standard popularized by Leica more than 80 years ago. Even if not, it looks like we'll be speaking in terms relative to that old 135 full frame for a long time to come.

Read more

Some useful resources:

• Wikipedia: The Science of Photography
• Wikipedia: 135 film
• Wikipedia: Crop factor
• Ken Rockwell: Crop Factor
• DSLR Magnification
• Crop Factor Explained
• The Field of View Thing

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Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

Our friend Jeff works in publicity for various movies, including the upcoming stop-motion animated film Edison and Leo. He's just been profiled for E! Online by our fellow Vancouver blogger Rebecca, a.k.a. Miss604.

The photo used at the E! website is one I took of Jeff and his dog Dizzy (a.k.a. Podcast Puppy) last week with my film camera. We were hanging out at his house. I also took a more formal portrait yesterday, but E! decided to use the black and white one, which I think is a better picture anyway.

That's one of Jeff's fine homemade margaritas in his hand, by the way.

Labels: blog, edisonandleo, film, photography, vancouver

I've created a few high dynamic range (HDR) photographs recently, where I combine a series of exposures (usually 3 or 5) of different durations (and which therefore see different amount of detail in shadows and highlights) into a single tone-mapped image. But nothing like this:

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day, that image, by Hartwig Luethen, combines 28 (!) pictures of last week's solar eclipse (visible mostly in northern Asia). The dynamic range is so great that the final image shows not only detail of the stupefyingly-hot corona of the Sun (photographed at 1/1000th of a second), but also features on the face of the Moon eclipsing it, lit only by the reflection from us, the Earth (photographed with a 2-second exposure).

That's pretty nifty-keen.

Labels: astronomy, geekery, hdr, photography, science

The pupil of your eye is an amazing adaptation. In bright light, your brain tells tiny muscles at the front of your eyeball to close your pupils down to miniscule circles, and when that happens you're not blinded. If you're like me and need strong glasses, take your glasses off and you'll also notice that in bright light things are a little less blurry than otherwise.

In dim light, your brain tells the muscles to open your pupils up wide, and you can see better in the dark (although it takes the rest of your optical system a few minutes to adjust its sensitivity to compensate, and human night vision is pretty lousy compared to that of many other animals). When you get your eyes checked, the ophthalmologist's annoying eyedrops trick your eye muscles into opening the pupils all the way, so that the coloured part of your irises almost vanish around the edges. You might notice then that even with glasses on, you can't focus properly, or read a book or computer screen.

Building lenses to work like the human eye

Camera lens designers take many cues from eyes, and one of the main ones is having an iris (the lens diaphragm) inside the lens that can open or close to let more or less light through. Instead of using muscles and tissues, camera lens diaphragms have a set of thin, overlapping pieces of metal known as aperture blades, and instead of the pupil, the opening in the middle is the aperture:

There are seven metal diaphragm blades in this lens, which open and close the central aperture. Other lenses may have more or (rarely) fewer blades, and in some designs the edges of the blades might be curved so the aperture is more like a circle than a straight-edged polygon.

As in the human eye, the aperture lets the photographer (or the camera's exposure computer) increase or reduce the amount of the light that gets through to the film or sensor at the back of the camera body. But why would you want to do that? Why not let in as much light as possible all the time?

Depth of field, speed, and sensitivity

There are three main reasons to vary the lens aperture:

• To control the depth of field (also known as the depth of focus) of the image.
• To permit shooting at either a faster or slower shutter speed.
• To use greater or lesser sensitivity (often called "ISO") for your film or digital sensor.

Depth of field refers to how much of a photograph is in focus, like this:

On the bottom left, an image with little (shallow) depth of field, using a wide aperture (see the lens on top left). All you can see clearly is the laptop screen. On the bottom right, the same shot with greater (deep) depth of field, using a small aperture (see the lens on top right). You can now see my foot, the bed, and the dressers in the background.

In both photographs, the laptop closest to the camera is in focus. With little depth of field (on the left), everything in the background is blurry. With more depth of field (on the right), not only can you see the laptop in focus, you can also see my sock, a book on the bed, and the bedroom dressers in the background, also largely in focus. If you closely, you can even see that the reflections in the screen of the laptop are blurry on the left, but sharper on the right.

The physics of light rays, and the way they refract and diffract inside lenses and apertures, means that when the aperture is really small, the resulting image has greater depth of field—just like your eyes on a sunny day. (A pinhole camera, which has an extremely tiny aperture, offers such great depth of field that it doesn't need a lens at all.)

And when the aperture is really large, the depth of field is shallower, just like when you get eyedrops at the ophthalmologist's office—and can't even read a newspaper because it's so blurry. So depending on how much of your image you want in focus, you're going to set the aperture differently. For a portrait with a nice soft background, you'll choose a large aperture. For an image where both nearby and distant objects need to be in focus, you'll choose a small aperture:

Left, large aperture, shallow focus (even my younger daughter's hair is a little out of focus, but her eyes are sharp). Right, small aperture, deep focus (my older daughter's dress is in focus, but so is everything else, including the distant clouds).

Of course there's a tradeoff. The smaller the aperture of the lens, the less light gets through, and so either:

• You'll have to expose the film or sensor longer to get the same amount of light on it, or...
• You'll have to increase the sensor sensitivity (or use faster film) to collect the light more efficiently.

But that can work to your advantage too, even ignoring depth of field:

• If you're photographing fast-moving things (sports, cars, kids, aircraft, birds in flight) or otherwise want to freeze the action, use a large aperture so you can use a fast shutter speed, since you're letting in more light.
• If you want to minimize film grain or sensor noise, use a large aperture with lower sensor sensitivity or slower, more fine-grained film.
• If you want a long exposure (to make the water in a waterfall look soft, or to blur motion so it looks like motion, or to get streaks of light from cars driving at night), use a small aperture to let in less light so you can use a slower shutter speed.
• If it's really, really bright out (a sunny day on a snowy ski hill or sandy beach), use a small aperture to avoid overloading the sensor or film.

Small and large apertures now make sense, because they give you a lot of creative control over your images, and let you adjust your picture-taking to your subject, the light, and your photographic conditions. But why are the numbers that photographers use for them, like f/1.8 and f/5.6 and f/22, so strange? What do those numbers mean, and why do the larger numbers represent smaller apertures?

What is an f-stop?

The specific setting of a lens aperture at any time is called its f-stop. (We'll see why below.) On almost all modern cameras, including big single-lens reflex (SLR) models, you adjust the f-stop with buttons or control dials, but for most of the 20th century, photographers did so by adjusting the aperture ring on the body of the lens. Many lenses still include an aperture ring for compatibility with older cameras:

The aperture ring on my 50 mm lens here is set to f/8 (the "8" below the white dot), about midway through its range.

The f-stops available range from small numbers (like 1.8 or 2.8 or 3.5) to large (like 16 or 22 or 32). Counterintuitively, the small numbers represent large apertures (on this lens, f/1.8 is wide open and lets in the most light, for instance), while the large numbers are small apertures (f/22 is the smallest aperture, letting in the least light).

To show why, we'll do some really simple math. First, here's a diagram of where the aperture might be in a typical camera lens with multiple glass elements in it:

A lens looked at two ways: On the left, looking straight into the front, with the aperture open to a width of 25 mm. On the right, a cross-section of the side (with its multiple glass lens elements), with the lens attached to the camera, again with the aperture open to 25 mm, and showing this lens's focal length of 50 mm.

The f-stop setting of a lens is the ratio between the diameter of the aperture and the focal length of the lens:

Another way to write that is aperture diameter : focal length. In this example, we have 25 mm aperture : 50 mm focal length, which is 1 : 2. Another way to say it is that the aperture is (in this case) half the focal length, or f/2. A photographer would pronounce that "eff-two." Since the widest aperture of a lens is important to know, lenses are usually specified that way, so you could buy a lens labelled as a 50 mm f/2 or 50 mm 1:2 lens.

Yet another way to think of it is that it would take two apertures of that width to equal the focal length of the lens.

Let's look at a bunch of other f-stops for my lens:

My 50 mm lens set to apertures of (from left to right) f/1.8, f/4, f/8, and f/16.

At f/1.8, the aperture is about 27.8 mm across, and it would take 1.8 of them to equal the focal length of the lens. At f/4, you'd need four of the 12¹/₂ mm apertures to equal the focal length. At f/8, you'd need eight 6¹/₄ mm apertures to equal the focal length. At f/16, you'd need 16, since the aperture is only 3¹/₈ mm across.

But why isn't the lens aperture ring simply marked with those diameters? Why doesn't it read 27.78, 17.86, 12.5, 8.93, 6.25, 4.55, 3.125, 2.27 instead of 1.8, 2.8, 4, 8, 11, 16, 22? There's a good reason, and it's the clever part.

F-numbers work for any lens, however you measure it

The cool thing is when you start to use different lenses, or different cameras. For a given amount of light entering a lens, a particular f-stop always lets the same amount of light through to the sensor or film—and it doesn't matter what focal length the lens is or what kind of camera you're using!

Here's why that's important. We already know that when a 50 mm lens is set at f/2, the aperture is open 25 mm (see my diagram above). But what about a 200 mm telephoto lens (four times the focal length)? To be open to f/2, that lens's aperture would have to be open half that lens's focal length, an opening 100 mm in diameter (four times as wide). And a 24 mm wide-angle lens? At f/2, its aperture is open only 12 mm, or half its focal length.

So if the apertures of every lens were labeled with their actual widths, every lens would be different. The aperture ring on a 200 mm lens might read:

100.00, 71.42, 50.00, 35.71, 25.00, 18.18...

But a 24 mm lens would be:

12.00, 8.57, 6.00, 4.29, 3.00, 2.18...

Even worse, to take a photo of the same scene under the same lighting conditions, you'd set the 200 mm lens to aperture 35.71, but set the 24 mm lens to aperture 4.29—both to get exactly the same amount of light to your film or sensor. If you think f-stops are confusing now, imagine how confusing that would get.

Instead, I know that a 200 mm lens set to f/5.6 lets through the same amount of light as a 24 mm lens set to f/5.6, and the same as a 50 mm lens set to f/5.6. I even know that if I could get myself an 8 mm fisheye lens, or a 600 mm super-telephoto, those lenses would also let through the same amount of light at f/5.6. For a given brightness of a scene, any lens set to the same f-stop can use the same shutter speed and sensitivity to get a proper exposure.

That's why f-stops are a good way to measure aperture, and why we put up with having big numbers mean small openings. But there's one last thing.

Why those particular aperture and shutter stops?

Okay, so if we're going to use f-numbers, why aren't they a more sensible sequence, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... or at least 2, 4, 8, 16, 32...? Why those weird ones in the middle, like 2.8 and 5.6 and 11?

That's because each stop on the aperture ring doubles the amount of light hitting the focal plane, if you're opening it wider, or cuts it in half, if you're closing it down. (Most of the time, anyway—sometimes the widest aperture doesn't exactly double the light from the next-widest, just because the lens isn't designed to open any wider. So my lens opens to f/1.8 instead of f/1.4.)

Imagine your lens is set to f/5.6 and the light meter says a proper exposure is 1/250th of a second. You can open the lens up one stop, to f/4, and twice as much light gets through. So you can make the shutter speed twice as fast, 1/500th of a second, and still get the right exposure.

This explains why the shutter settings are the way they are too, as shown on the shutter speed dials of older cameras. Click your lens aperture ring one stop wider (f/5.6 to f/4), and you can click the shutter speed ring one stop too, to the next faster speed (from 1/250th of a second to 1/500th).

Click the shutter speed four stops slower (say, from 1/1000th of a second to 1/60th of a second), and you need to close the aperture of the lens four stops narrower (from f/4 to f/16) to get the same exposure.

There's a little bit of convention and standardization in all those numbers. Each f-stop, letting in twice the light, represents an increase in diameter of a factor of the square root of 2 (written as ), which is about 1.4142. Multiply 1.4142 by itself and you get 2. Multiply that by 1.4142 again and you get 2.8284. Multiply that by 1.4142 and you get 4. Multiply that by 1.4142 and you get 5.6568. Round that series out and you get:

1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22...

Look familiar? It's all in the physics of light passing through roughly circular holes. Increase the diameter of a hole by 1.4 times or so, and you double the light getting through. Why is that? That takes a bit more math. Remember the formula for the area of a circle from math class? To remind you, it's πr², where r is the radius of the circle, i.e. half the diameter.

If you want to double the area of a circle (and thus double how much light it lets through), you need to multiply the value of r² by 2. To do that, you multiply r by the square root of 2 (), or about 1.4. And when the radius increases by 1.4 times, so does the diameter, which is the width of the little pupil that lets light through the aperture blades of the lens. And that's why each f-stop on your lens is 1.4 times the value of the previous one. One stop larger, double the light. One stop smaller, half the light.

The same for shutter speed numbers, but there it's even simpler, because you don't need any area-of-a-circle calculations. Each faster shutter stop lets in half the light, because the shutter is open half as long. Take a one second exposure. To get half the light, make it 1/2 second. Half that is 1/4, then 1/8th of a second, then 1/16 (conventionally abbreviated to 1/15), then 1/32 (or 1/30, which is close enough for photographic tolerances), 1/64 (or 1/60), 1/128 (close to 1/125th), and so on. So your shutter speed dial reads:

1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1000...

My guess is, if history were skewed and photography had been invented after digital computers, things would be different. We've all gotten used to powers of two (like 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.), so we'd have those kinds of numbers on the shutter speed dial and on our digital camera LCD screens instead of the rounder numbers we see now.

Read more

Some useful resources:

• Wikipedia: The Science of Photography
• Wikipedia: F-number
• Understanding Camera Lenses
• Controlling Light

« Previous: f-stop teaser

Next: crop factor & digital lenses »

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

Here's a teaser for tomorrow's installment of Camera Works. In the two photos below we're looking (once again) at my main Nikon lens, front and back. It has a focal length of 50 mm, so it's a "normal" lens.

I know, without measuring it, that the open aperture you see letting light through the middle of the lens is 6¹/₄ mm across at this setting, which is f/8 on the lens's aperture dial:

Tomorrow I'll talk about how I know, why it has that diameter in the first place, and why, for lenses, 22 is smaller than 4.

« Previous: focal length

Next: apertures and f-stops »

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

Before I continue with my Camera Works series, here are the latest pictures I took with my new/old film camera. I used both black and white and cross-processed slide film with crazy colours:

Labels: family, film, photography, travel, whistler

I've never properly understood what the focal length of a modern camera lens really is. I'd bet that many amateur and even professional photographers don't either, even though we use the term all the time. This blog post is my attempt to get it straight in my own mind, at least in a simple enough way to help the rest of this series make sense.

While I wrote in my introduction that these articles would be short, this first one is longer than average because focal length is so important to understanding everything else about lenses and cameras.

Focal lengths for film and "full frame" digital cameras

Things were a little simpler in the pre-digital age, when most people were using 35 mm film, but those numbers are still unintuitive for most people. For those film cameras, and for the very few high-end modern digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras with so-called "full-frame" sensors, picture-taking enthusiasts know a few things:

• If you want to get a decent-sized photograph of something far away, you need a telephoto lens, one with a long focal length, like 135 mm or 200 mm or 300 mm, or even more.
• If you instead want a picture of a group of people in a small room, or the whole of a panoramic landscape, you need a wide-angle lens, with a short focal length, perhaps 35 mm or 28 mm or 21 mm, or even less.
• For photos that look similar to what you might see with your own eyes (i.e. near and distant objects look in proper proportion), you need a normal lens, with a medium focal length around 43 mm or 50 mm or 55 mm.

But why is that? What is the focal length of a lens, and why does it have anything to do with how close or far from your subject you need to be in order to fit it in your picture?

What is focal length?

For a simple, single-element lens, the focal length is the distance between the middle of the lens and the focal point, where parallel light rays get concentrated to a point. As a kid you might have tried burning paper (or, less kindly, insects) at the focal point of a magnifying glass, for example:

PLEASE NOTE: None of my quickie diagrams here are drawn to accurate scale.

Things aren't quite so simple for camera lenses, because they're made not of one piece of glass, but of several glass elements stacked next to each other to allow for variable focusing, correct for distortions and aberrations, and so on. And usually they're not trying to focus sunlight to a burning point either; rather, they project an in-focus circular image onto the focal plane of the camera, which is where the digital sensor (or, formerly, strip of film) sits:

Photo above: With the lens removed, shutter open, and mirror flipped up, you can see right through the body of my Nikon F4 camera to the focal plane at the back, where the film would be.

All those extra pieces of glass result in all sorts of focal length ratios, indexes of refraction, and ultimately equations, which when you run the numbers spit out the focal length of the lens. But it's fundamentally the same basic idea as the focal length of a simple lens, and the way I like to think of it is this:

• For a lens with a focal length of 50 mm, if you turn the focus ring to infinity (i.e. as far as the lens can focus), then the focal length is the distance between the main glass element of the lens (wherever that may be inside the lens itself) and the film or sensor surface at the back of the camera. And in this case that's 50 mm (5 cm, or about two inches).

Similarly, in a 200 mm lens, the distance is 20 cm, or about 7.9 inches. In a 21 mm lens, that lens-to-sensor distance will be 21 mm, which is 2.1 cm (less than an inch), and so on^*:

Again, please keep in mind that real camera lenses aren't built quite like this. Rather, I imagine them being built this way to help understand how the camera works.

By the way, it turns out that when you focus closer than infinity, such as on a person a couple of metres away from the camera, the main lens element needs to move away from the film plane very slightly (usually only a millimetre or two for a normal lens) to keep the image sharp. So that's why you see lens elements move in and out when you turn the focus ring:

Photos above: My AF Nikkor f/1.8D lens at infinity focus (left) and closest focus (right). Notice how the lens element moves forward, away from the camera body (which would be on the right when attached) as you focus closer.

There are also lots of ways that lens designers use multiple glass elements in modern lenses so that the actual lens-to-sensor distance doesn't match the focal length (hence those equations I talked about a few paragraphs back).

But let's pretend they don't do that, okay? Because we still don't know why shorter focal lengths are wide angle and longer ones are telephoto, do we? Let's figure that out.

Focal length and angle of view

Imagine three lenses with different focal lengths: 200 mm, 50 mm, and 21 mm. Each has to bend incoming light a different amount:

• The 200 mm lens bends the light at a very slight angle, to get it to focus 200 mm (20 cm) behind the lens. (This distance from the focal plane also explains, in part, why telephoto lenses stick out farther from the camera body than normal or wide-angle lenses.)
• The 50 mm lens bends it more, at a steeper, medium angle, because the focal plane is only one-quarter as far away.
• The 21 mm lens has to bend the light a lot, at a steep angle, to get it to focus a mere 21 mm behind the lens, almost ten times closer than the 200 mm lens.

Okay, we know (sort of) what's going on with the light behind the lens, inside the camera. What about the light the lens collected in front of the lens, before it got all bent? Let's extend my simplified mental picture of each lens to the left a bit, out to the subject of the photograph:

Follow the lines of the bent light backwards (to the left in my diagram), out to the subject for each lens:

• Because the 21 mm lens is bending the light at such a steep angle, it's essentially sucking in light from a much wider area in front of the camera. For a regular film camera, that angle of view is about 74° across.
• The 50 mm lens, with its shallower angle, sucks in light from a narrower field in front of the camera: 46°, in this case.
• The 200 mm lens projects its image with a very narrow angle, and so sucks in light from an area only 12° across in front of the camera.

The angle of the cone of light that each lens is sucking in is known as its angle of view or field of view. Imagine pointing each of those lenses at a city skyline:

Remember, I didn't draw these diagrams to an accurate scale. Please don't measure the circles and tell me they're the wrong size (or that they're not circular, for that matter).

The 21 mm lens will see the whole skyline: a wide-angle view. The 50 mm lens will see a few buildings, which is a normal view for your eyes. And the 200 mm lens might see a few floors of a single building: a telephoto view.

Ta da! Now you know why each type of lens has a certain focal length.

Further questions

Okay, great, so a lens's angle of view depends on its focal length. Spiffy. You might be wondering a couple of other things, such as:

• Why aren't the price and complexity of a lens directly related to the focal length? Normal lenses (with medium focal lengths) are both less expensive and less bulky than either telephoto ("long") or wide angle ("short") lenses. That seems weird.
• Why do zoom lenses, which let you rotate or slide the barrel of the lens to change the focal length without changing lenses, have compromises in size, weight, price, and performance compared to fixed–focal-length ("prime") lenses?

The answers to those questions require knowing more stuff, which is why next time we'll talk about apertures and f-numbers.

^*SEMI-RELEVANT SIDE NOTE: From this simplified perspective, you can understand why some old fisheye super-wide lenses from the '60s, which had focal lengths of 8 mm or less, forced you to flip up the mirror inside the camera to use them. The rear lens element had to sit 8 mm (less than a third of an inch) from the film plane, so those lenses had to stick waaay back into the camera body—so far that they would hit the mirror and crack it if you didn't move it out of the way.

Newer fisheye lenses use multi-element design tricks to keep the rear lens element in front of the mirror and avoid that problem. But no, I don't know the math of how that works, so I'll just think of it as lens-design magic for now.

Read more

Some useful resources:

• Wikipedia: The Science of Photography
• The Field of View Thing
• Tips and Trick: Focal Length
• Understanding Camera Lenses

« Previous: introduction

Next: f-stop teaser »

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

Late next month, on Saturday, September 27, we'll be holding another BarCamp attendee-organized tech conference here in Vancouver. It's already sold out. Part of the event will be PhotoCamp, dedicated to all things photographic—the most recent one of these in Vancouver was at Northern Voice in February.

My wife Air and I are both going. I'm not yet sure if I'll be in good enough shape to participate all that actively, since I will have chemotherapy earlier that week, but I'll almost certainly be much, much better than I was last year, when I was just out of hospital, about 50 pounds lighter than I am now, and she had to push me there in a wheelchair.

Anyway, BarCamp and my recent rekindling of an interest in photography more generally have prompted me to start a bit of a series here on the blog. If I'm up for it I may provide a summary at the PhotoCamp part of the meeting.

Focal length, f-stops, and crop factors demystified

I want to explain some basic photographic terms: those words and numbers I've been using since I started taking pictures seriously in the '80s—but some of which I've only vaguely understood. I'll do so in a series of blog posts aimed at digital photographers, but I'll use my film-based Nikon F4 camera to show what's going on, because it's conducive to being partially disassembled, to show the workings of its parts.

I won't be tackling this stuff in excruciating technical detail: I'm not an engineer or lens designer, and the last time I studied optics was at least a couple of decades age. But I want to demystify some of the funky terminology photo enthusiasts throw around all the time—for myself as much as anyone. Even experienced photographers I know, who have developed an intuitive sense for exposure settings, composition, and lens choices, don't always know the answers to such basic questions as:

• When we talk about a lens's focal length, what do we really mean?
• What do aperture f-numbers like f/1.4 or f/16 represent?
• Why do those f-numbers and shutter speeds have the values they do, and how are they related?
• Why do most digital cameras have a crop factor (like 1.5, 1.6, or 2.0) for their lenses, while film cameras don't?
• Where do ISO and EV numbers come from, and what do they indicate?
• Why is the flash sync shutter speed of most cameras much slower than the fastest shutter speed you can use without a flash?

Short tips to help make better pictures

Knowing this stuff is not pure geekery. If you like photography, understanding why these terms exist and have the values they do will help you take better pictures.

I plan to keep the blog posts as short as I can, sticking to the core of each topic. Inevitably I'll probably also get some of my explanations wrong, so I hope those of you who understand the subject better will correct me in the comments. I'll start with focal length in the next day or two—and I hope I have it figured out in my own mind by then!

Next: focal length »

Labels: barcamp, cameraworks, geekery, photography

Black and white photos make for compelling images, because they are inherently unrealistic, without any colour information, so you look at them differently. And as a photographer, you create them differently, with different composition and exposure, if you know they will be black and white in the end.

There are numerous ways to create excellent B&W (or, to be accurate, greyscale) images from colour digital originals using Photoshop or similar software tools—but there is still something to be said for black and white film photography.

When I first got into photography in the 1980s, and when I didn't plan to process and print the film myself, I would use Ilford's XP2 film for black and white, because unlike most B&W films, any regular colour photo lab could process it using their automated C-41 chemical machines. And I found myself a roll of XP2 for the first set of photos I took with the Nikon F4 film camera I bought recently.

What I didn't know is that the two big film manufacturers, Kodak and Fuji, also make similar chromogenic black and white films that can be processed using C-41: BW400CN and Neopan 400 CN respectively. I don't know when those were introduced, but I don't think they were around 20 years ago along with Ilford. I also discovered that many local photo retailers (even non-specialist, non-pro stores) carry at least one of the three—London Drugs has triple-packs of Kodak BW400CN for a reasonable $4 or so per roll, for instance.

While I've tried cross processing of slide film pictures taken with the F4 camera recently, and the wacky colours there are fun, I think I'll be spending most of my film shooting time in black and white. I'll see whether I prefer the Ilford or Kodak (and maybe Fuji) stocks when I do.

Yes, I may try some traditional black and white silver halide film (which requires different processing), but the C-41 black and whites are just so easy to take it to the local supermarket for one-hour processing, printing, and scanning to CD. It's almost like the instant gratification we're used to in the digital era. Or as close as I can get while still using film anyway.

Labels: film, geekery, nikon, photography

Frightening if you were the doughnut, anyway:

Photo by teh Boris, featuring the Mouth of the Travis.

Labels: doughnut, fear, food, friends, humour, photography

I said I'd show you the first photos with my new/old Nikon F4 film camera. Here they are. Just for extra retro appeal, my first roll of film was black and white, using an expired roll of Ilford XP2 film:

I took all of them with a single fixed-length prime lens, my Nikkor 50 mm f/1.8, the kind of lens all cameras used to come with.

P.S., I told you the camera was big. But it really is a marvel of electromechanical engineering—the promo materials say it has more than 1700 parts, including the clever tiny LCD and LED panels inside the camera body showing exposure information.

I'm sure modern cameras have a variety of equally interesting stuff, but what's cool about the F4 is that it's designed to be disassembled so you can actually get at the guts. The focusing screen, shutter, mirror, film winding mechanism, and so on are all easily visible, so it's much easier to understand what the camera is doing when you take a picture.

Labels: film, geekery, nikon, photography

Yesterday I got an online notice that my eBay purchase Nikon F4 film camera had cleared Canada Customs. I thought that might mean it would take a few more days to arrive, but the Canada Post truck showed up with it this afternoon. I made some camera nerd unboxing photos with my digital SLR if you'd like to see them.

I have to say this: wow. For a 20-year-old design, the F4 is an amazing camera. It weighs a ton, because it's both huge (freakin' huge) and made of thick metal under the rubber covering, but it feels great in my hands. It's remarkably responsive, easy to figure out for anyone who grew up with the dials, knobs, and buttons of an analog SLR, and fast.

I'd also forgotten what it's like to look into a bright, full-frame, 100%-coverage viewfinder with minimal clutter. Compared to the finder view in my D50, it's expansive, and having only one central autofocus point plus a couple of etched circles (to show where the different types of light metering act) means there's a lot less other stuff busying up the view.

All my Nikon-mount lenses fit and work—even ones with technology designed more than a decade after the camera ceased production—although the newest, designed for a smaller digital sensor and lacking an aperture ring, is limited and vignettes heavily. Most surprising, my SB-600 flash functions pretty much fully, including reading lens focal length, working with through-the-lens (TTL) metering, and acting as an autofocus illuminator (which the camera otherwise lacks).

Running the motor drive at top speed yields a full paparazzi kssht-kssht-kssht-kssht-kssht, much faster than my lower-end D50 digital SLR from 2006. Autofocus is surprisingly quick too, though not up to complete modern standards. Unlike my D50, the F4 has mirror lockup, dedicated buttons for exposure and focus lock, depth of field preview, and an eyepiece shutter on a removable viewfinder pentaprism.

I loaded the F4 up with some Ilford black-and-white film and took it along while my younger daughter and I walked to the store and the park this sunny afternoon. I also picked up a new camera strap at Kerrisdale Cameras, since none of my current ones have the keychain-style metal rings at the ends that work with the F4's teeny tiny metal strap connectors. And I'll have to track down a rubber eyepiece ring, since that's the only stock item missing from the camera.

Of course, the key frustration with any film camera is that you can't see your pictures right away—I'll have to wait to finish the roll and get it processed, just like I did my entire picture-taking life from childhood until I bought my first digital camera in 2002. And yet that also forces me to think a bit more: How will this look in black and white (for this roll)? What's the best angle for this shot (I can't waste film trying a bunch of different ones)? What works in this light at this film ISO setting (since I can't adjust that)? What kind of depth of field and shutter speed do I want? And so on.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure comes from something I haven't had in more than 15 years: an SLR camera with analog controls for every feature, not multifunction digital buttons and mode dials and four-way controllers and LCD screens. Other than the lack of a manual film winding lever, and the info LCD inside the viewfinder, the F4 has the same kind of excellent tactile controls and analog displays photographers relied on for decades, from the first Leica rangefinder shooters to the astronauts walking on the moon.

There's definitely a difference adjusting the lens opening with an aperture ring on the lens, and the shutter speed with a dedicated dial on the top of the camera, than with the one or two thumbwheels on the handgrips of modern digital (and even film) SLRs. In the digital era, only the otherwise imperfect Panasonic Lumix DMC-L1 and Leica M8, with their retro aesthetic, offer anything like that.

Obviously, I don't have any of my photos from the F4 yet. But I'll link them up when I do.

Labels: film, gadgets, geekery, leica, moon, nikon, photography

Last year I created a little composite image of the various interchangeable-lens digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras then available from Nikon and Canon, the two leading camera manufacturers. It turned out to be one of my most popular pictures at the Flickr photo sharing service, of course because photo enthusiasts like to argue about Canon vs. Nikon almost as much as Mac and PC people do about their computers.

It became out of date pretty fast, with models discontinued and new ones introduced. But people kept looking at the image and commenting. So I decided to go further and create a similar composite visual chart of DSLRs currently available, as of the end of June 2008, from all the major camera makers: Nikon, Canon, Sony/Minolta, Olympus, Panasonic/Leica, and Pentax. The pictures are all the companies' publicity photos, sometimes sourced directly from their websites, sometimes from others such as DP Review and DC Resource:

No wonder people are confused about which camera to buy! Prices here range from around $500 (with lens) to about $8000 (no lens). The smallest cameras in this bunch are the Leica M8 (off by itself on the lower right, and not an SLR, see below) and the Olympus E-420 (top of the fourth column, see this review for real-life size comparison photos). The heaviest are the two pro monsters, the Nikon D3 and Canon 1Ds Mark III, in the lower left.

I have excluded a few other makers, such as Fuji and Sigma, and rebadged models from Samsung (nearly the same as some Pentaxes) and Leica (almost identical to the Panasonics). These images reflect the main line of SLRs (plus the M8) as of this writing.

Relative camera sizes are not exact. The positions of the various models vaguely reflect my impressions of a combination of price, features, and market segment. That's quite subjective, so you could easily argue with my placement of some of them. Take the image as a general guideline. Look down the columns to see how different cameras from a single manufacturer compare from low-end to high-end; look across the rows to see roughly comparable cameras (in features, price, or both) from different makers that compete with one another.

Nikon and Canon are (currently) alone in providing full-frame size semi-pro and professional DSLRs: the D700, EOS 5D, D3, and EOS 1Ds Mark III. The Leica M8 is the real outlier—not an SLR at all, but a digital version of the classic Leica M rangefinder; I put it here because a significant number of photographers looking at the high-end Nikons and Canons might also consider it.

The most crowded market segments are the introductory level (with something, and sometimes several confusing models, from every manufacturer), and the midrange enthusiast section (with some interesting choices like the D80, D300, 40D, A700, E-3, DMC-L1, and K20D). With all the choices, this might be the most interesting time in the history of single-lens reflex cameras, certainly in the digital era.

I also left out some models. Canon's pro sports-focused 1D Mark III, which looks and works essentially identically to the 1Ds Mark III, is one—the difference is that the "s" indicates a larger full-frame sensor (Canon needs a serious simplification of its naming scheme). The Nikon D40 is also the same body as the D40x (and the D60), but with a lower-resolution sensor. Some of these models, such as the D40x and the Canon XTi, may be theoretically discontinued now or soon, but remain widely available.

Finally, there will probably soon be updates rendering this composite chart at least partially obsolete. Canon is expected to replace the three-year-old EOS 5D any old time, Nikon might do the same for the similarly aged D80, Sony may release a full-frame DSLR (since they make Nikon's full-frame sensor, I believe), and Nikon could bring out a D3x or similar model with a higher-resolution full-frame sensor like the 1Ds Mark III. I'll let you know.

Labels: canon, gadgets, geekery, leica, nikon, olympus, panasonic, pentax, photography, sony

I've been writing more about photography lately, largely because I've been doing more of it, especially weird stuff like high dynamic range pictures—it's a hobby I can play with even when I'm on chemotherapy or otherwise ill. I've been happy using my Nikon digital SLR and small lens collection.

This week, Nikon introduced a new high-end DSLR, the D700. Of course it was fun to read about, but my D50 is just fine; the D700 is far beyond anything I need to use, and at $3000 is well out of any price league I'm likely to be in for a long time.

One thing I have been wanting to try is cross processing, of which I've seen some great examples in Kris Krug's photostream at Flickr. Cross processing, however, requires a film (not digital) camera. It usually involves taking slide film and instructing your film lab to process it using the same chemicals used for print film. Like HDR, cross processing creates some bizarre, surreal effects, as in these pictures from Kris. Taking some black-and-white shots might be fun too.

However, my last film SLR, a Nikon F601, died several years ago (the film transport crapped out while we were taking family Christmas pictures). I still use a couple of the lenses I bought for it on my digital D50, but I currently have no way to take film photos. Fortunately, now that we're well into the 21st century and the digital era, used film cameras are ridiculously cheap. As long as you're not going for a Leica or a Nikon F6, it's actually difficult to spend more than a couple of hundred bucks on even a very nice older film body.

So yesterday, Canada Day, I hunted around on eBay a bit and found this:

It is a used, slightly but deliciously worn Nikon F4s, which was Nikon's revolutionary top-of-the-line professional camera from 1988 to 1996, when it was replaced by the F5. The photographer at my wedding in 1995 (likely the year the particular one above was made) used the F4, as did many photojournalists, sport photographers, and other professionals a couple of decades ago. I put in a bid for the F4s above, and I won.

I've tried out a used F4 in a local camera store before, and unless you've handled a top-shelf professional DSLR—film or digital—the heft of the thing is a little hard to describe. Like the current flagship Nikon D3 or Canon 1D, it is large, extremely solid, heavy, and yet still very nice to hold. While it is a fully electronic, autofocus and autoexposure camera, all the controls on the F4 are analog: dials, buttons, and levers. There is no external LCD panel or menu system. It feels like you could hammer nails or fend off a robber with it and keep taking pictures afterwards.

Although it was designed when I was in my early years at university, there are numerous ways the F4 outperforms any camera I've ever owned, including its fast and precise continuous shooting frame rate (5.7 frames per second, almost twice as fast as my D50), and at least basic compatibility with (as far as I can tell) every F-mount SLR lens Nikon has ever made—from the earliest manual-focus models from 1959 to the latest autofocus ones from 2008—including all the ones I own. The F4 is midway through the line of professional Nikon F cameras made over the past 50 years:

All this for just over $200. That's about the price of a nice pair of boots, a decent set of men's clothes, an 8 GB iPod nano, or a low-end zoom lens today; $100 cheaper than Nikon's current low-budget student manual SLR, the FM10; about a third as much as the current intro-level Nikon or Canon digital SLRs (or what I paid for the D50 in 2006); and a mere 10% of the $2000 cost of a new F6—or of the F4 itself at introduction in September 1988.

My new/old F4 should arrive in a week or two. Now the question is: where do I buy slide or B&W film in Vancouver these days?

Labels: film, gadgets, geekery, leica, nikon, photography

It was a long, enjoyable Canada Day for me, even though it included a 3 a.m. wakeup to take my wife and kids to the airport for a trip to Disneyland, another trip a few hours later for our friend Leesa to fly towards home, and, later, nightmarish traffic to Vancouver's North Shore for a barbecue:

Labels: airport, friends, holiday, photography, travel, vancouver

Over at the Your Geekiest Photos photo pool that I set up at Flickr a few months ago, we have accumulated quite a collection, but it could be bigger. Don't forget to join up and add your own.

Dig deep into your archives—it would make a nice birthday present for me.

Labels: geekery, history, memories, photography

Today I had a meeting with the trial nurse for my upcoming resumed chemo treatments next month, followed by a series of blood tests, an appointment with my oncologist and the nurse again, then a CT scan. In between, I had some time to kill, so I had lunch at White Spot, then took time to walk around the Fairview neighbourhood and experiment some more with high dynamic range (HDR) photography.

Here are the results:

For each photo, I set my Nikon D50 camera to take three bracketed exposures: one at the default exposure the camera estimates, one two stops darker, and one two stops lighter. Then I used Photomatix Pro on my Mac to assemble them into HDR images, then tone-map them into the pictures you see. It's fun.

Labels: art, cancer, chemotherapy, hdr, photography, software, vancouver

I accompanied my older daughter's school field trip to Burns Bog in Delta, south of Vancouver, today. We had fun, and managed to avoid any heavy rain.

I also took the chance to create some more high dynamic range (HDR) photos. That involves taking three or more pictures at different exposures, and then combining them in software using a technique called tone mapping.

You can see what that does below.

On the left you can see my camera's calculated single optimum exposure, the "best pick" the camera would normally make. Nothing wrong with it. But on the right is the HDR version I created, combining the left-side exposure with two others, one brighter and one darker:

The extra vividness of colour I chose to put into the tone-mapped HDR is obvious, but if you examine the large version, you can also see a lot more detail in the shadows and highlights of the image. That's the high dynamic range we're talking about—in a normal photo, some of the shadows might be totally black, while some of the highlights might be blown out to total white.

Tone-mapped HDR photos involve a lot more decision making than traditional pictures, because depending on how you manipulate the image, its appearance can vary widely, from slightly enhanced (the way filters and darkroom work used to punch up film images) to strangely surreal (more like cross-processed, solarized, or otherwise highly altered film images).

So far I've been photographing nothing but plants in HDR for some reason, but I will play with the technique some more and post additional pictures to my Flickr HDR set.

Labels: geekery, hdr, park, photography, school, vancouver

I get emails out of the blue sometimes, and yesterday a guy who found me via Flickr asked my advice on buying his first serious digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera. He's already quite a good photographer, with a keen eye, and he's trying to decide between the Nikon D300 and Canon EOS 40D.

He likes the Canon's interface, but prefers the features of the D300, as well as the more vivid colours it produces (at least in JPEG mode). He wants low noise, good low-light performance, and good ability to take landscapes, high dynamic range (HDR) photos, and macro (closeup) pictures.

When you're starting out buying an SLR, what you're doing is committing yourself to a camera system, particularly with lenses. Chances are you will keep and use the lenses for much longer than you use that camera. For instance, I have a Nikon D50 I bought in 2006, but my lenses include a zoom that I bought in 1995 for my old film Nikon, and which still works great. I've been using Nikon SLRs since the early 1980s—had I chosen Canon or some other camera back then, I'd probably still be using that brand, just because of the inertia.

Both Nikon and Canon are good choices—but don't forget Pentax's K20D (Pentax provides some of the best values in both SLRs and quality lenses these days) and even Sony's A700 (Sony took over Minolta's camera business, and offers very nice Zeiss lenses too, some of the best available). I'm not a fan of the four-thirds system from Olympus and Panasonic/Leica, but you might like it.

The D300 is about 50% more expensive than the 40D (around $1800 Cdn vs. $1300 Cdn), so that might make the decision for many people. (The closest competing Nikon is actually the aging D80.) One way that price difference could affect your decision might be with lenses: if you can only afford an expensive body (like the D300) with cheaper lenses, you'd be better off getting a less expensive body (like the 40D) with better lenses like Canon's top-end L series. Again, the lenses will be around your kit longer than the body.

And for any camera you get, rather than buying yourself a standard zoom lens, I would recommend getting one or two good-quality prime (non-zoom) lenses instead. They are better optically, faster (i.e. have a larger maximum aperture letting in more light), and will also make you think about your compositions more carefully.

So I said to my questioner that if he doesn't have a brand preference for other reasons, and if he can afford the Nikon D300 with a quality lens or two, then I'd recommend it over the Canon 40D. The D300 offers excellent low-light performance, an amazing LCD screen (much better than anything Canon has), and lots of other features. Not that there's anything wrong with the 40D, but by most objective measures the D300 is superior.

As far as lenses go, if I were starting from scratch, I'd get a basic fast prime like the $140 Nikon 50 mm f/1.8 or the $500 digital-only Sigma 30 mm f/1.4. For a second lens, I'd look at either a general-purpose stabilized zoom like Nikon's well-reviewed $750 18-200 mm, or (more likely in my case) a moderate telephoto prime that can also act as a macro lens, such as Nikon's $900 Micro-Nikkor 105 mm f/2.8. If I had more money to spend, I might get both of those, or go crazy and buy the $1500 manual focus Zeiss Makro-Planar 100 mm f/2.

Canon has similar standard prime, telephoto-style macro, and zoom lenses. So do Pentax (prime, macro, zoom) and Sony/Zeiss (prime, macro, zoom, or Zeiss zoom).

It would be a pleasant luxury to be starting an SLR system from scratch, and to have maybe $4000 to spend on it. But no matter how you start, if you're a photography enthusiast, you'll get more lenses and other accessories (flash, battery grip, tripods, etc.) over time. Just don't cheap out with your lenses to start, and you'll be happier in the long run.

Labels: canon, gadgets, geekery, hdr, leica, macro, nikon, olympus, pentax, photography, sony

Here are a couple of photo collages. The first one shows two views from the same place in my kids' schoolyard, one from today and one from this past winter:

The second came to me via Jodi, who explains at her blog how to search for and assemble your own similar Flickr meme collage:

1. Penmachine in action, 2. 2006 07-22 HOOK typeB [16], 3. talking to air, 4. alive and bright, 5. Lavender crème brûlée with fresh berries, 6. hawaii lava, 7. The Glenlivet, 8. Kari Byron, 9. Auroville 014 - Colour Purple, 10. St. George's School - 1931, 11. Disco Girls - 5, 12. derek jarman's gaff

P.S. I answered the questions in reverse order.

Labels: ego, flickr, linkbait, meme, photography, snow, vancouver

Photography has been one of my hobbies since I first borrowed my dad's Pentax SLR in the 1970s. I bought my first Nikon in high school, worked on the school annual and student papers, went to a summer photo camp, and so on.

But I've never ventured into some of the more specialized areas of photography. In particular, I'm interested in macrophotography and HDR (high dynamic range) imaging. Macro (extreme close-up) pictures require specific equipment, such as a dedicated macro lens, close-up lens accessories, lens tubes, bellows, or lens-reversing hardware—so I haven't tried it yet.

HDR, on the other hand, works by simply taking different exposures of the same scene and combining them with tone mapping software such as Photomatix. After trying some varying exposures in Burnaby's Central Park yesterday with my Nikon D50, I downloaded a Photomatix demo demo today and got the following result:

My picture doesn't have the bizarro look of some extreme HDR frames, but it does have a colourful, painting-like pop that most regular photos don't, as well as lots of shadow and highlight detail. I like it.

Labels: geekery, hdr, nikon, photography

Back in 1986, a group of kids from my all-boys' private school (St. George's School in Vancouver) and a couple of affiliated girls' schools (Crofton House and York House) took a Spring Break "art tour" trip to Italy, with whirlwind visits to Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice, Turin, and so on.

I have photos in an album somewhere, but Anne Pewsey Richards, who was also on the trip, has done much better. She posted a bunch of pictures to Facebook, and gave me permission to repost them at Flickr. If you thought my glasses were big the year before in my geekiest photo, check them out here with the accompanying sunglass clip-ons:

Anne's group shot also includes some prime '80s hair and fashions. (I'm on the far right, squinting—shoulda worn the clip-ons.)

Finally, you can see that I was a camera nerd, with the Nikon, big zoom lens, and obnoxious camera strap, even then (again, I'm far right—guess I had the contact lenses on there):

I'm sure there was no way at all that local Italians could tell that we were tourists. There are several people in her photos (Anne included—but she noted that she's lived in England since the early '90s) whom I have not seen even once in the intervening 22 years.

I also haven't been back to Europe since this trip.

Labels: europe, friends, memories, photography, retro, school, travel

• A huge ton of links on how to find images online (via J-Walk).
• More tons of links to cool photo sites (via KK).
• There will be a Da Vinci's Inquest TV movie in June. Yay! (I'm still steamed that the series was cancelled a couple of years ago.)

Labels: davinci, linksofinterest, photography

Via Kottke, here is a gallery of UPI photos of a thunderstorm meeting the volcanic plume from the Chaitén volcano in Chile this week. Check out picture #11:

Whoa, as Keanu would say. I never knew the Spanish term for thunderstorm before, but it's pretty nifty: tormenta eléctrica.

Labels: americas, disaster, environment, news, photography, science

More than 15 years ago, the house I was renting with a couple of roommates was burglarized. The thieves stole the usual kinds of things—CDs and other stuff that's easy to fence—and included among that was my Nikon FG SLR and lenses. I had insurance, which replaced that camera with the early-'90s equivalent, the F-601.

The new camera came with a pretty decent Nikon lens, a 35–70 mm zoom. But a few months after I got the camera, the zoom ring on the lens became loose and didn't work properly. I sent it in for warranty repair, and then used the lens through two additional cameras (another F601 I bought after the original got dropped, and my current D50) until last spring.

That's when the zoom ring started misbehaving again, and I replaced it with a new Nikon lens, an 18–135 mm zoom that has worked very well for me, and is usually the kit lens for the higher-end D80 SLR. Until the past few days, when the zoom intermittently stopped autofocusing properly. The barrel of the lens also started to feel a bit loose. So I've sent it, like its predecessor, off to Nikon for repair.

I supposed there's a reason the lower-cost lenses aren't as robust as their professional siblings, but it's not like I abuse them. And that old lens did work great for me for a decade and a half after its initial repair. I still have it downstairs, in fact. Maybe if I can get it to behave I can use it while the other one is in the shop—but there's really no need. I have three other lenses that seem to be working just fine.

Labels: geekery, nikon, photography, repairs

As I mentioned a few days ago, my band The Neurotics played, for the 15th year in a row, at the Vancouver Sun Run, which as of this year appears to be the largest fun run in North America. There were over 59,000 registrants for the 2008 race.

As part of the photos I took downtown today, here's me behind the drum kit, with Swingy Neurotic (a.k.a. Doug Elliott) on bass:

Thanks to Dilly Neurotic (a.k.a. Sean Dillon) for snapping that one. We all look a bit chubbier than usual because it was freaking cold for late April in Vancouver (just above freezing), so each of us had at least three layers of clothes under our costumes—I was wearing a T-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and a chunky sweater underneath my Union Jack shirt and glittery jacket.

Rock on, Sun Runners!

Labels: band, music, neurotics, photography, retro, sunrun, vancouver

I finally saw Juno tonight. My kids and I watched it on DVD together. Yes, it's a very good movie. You can read the reviews for that.

As somebody who lives in Vancouver, what I really noticed was how obviously Vancouver it is. You can see it in the locations—the residential architecture and subdivisions, the trees and lawns, and especially the light. As in so many things filmed here, like The X-Files and everything else, the light is different from what you see in productions filmed in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, or other film centres.

It must be the combination of our latitude, weather, proximity to the sea—cloudy or sunny, rain or snow—it looks like here. Maybe Seattle might look similar, yet somehow things filmed there don't look the same.

Does anyone have a line on why that might be?

Labels: environment, film, photography, seattle, vancouver

Check out this beautiful set of pictures of city lights from Doc Searls. He took them while flying on a commercial jet up the U.S. East Coast:

It's a shame that we waste so much energy radiating light out into space, but it's pretty.

Labels: airport, art, canon, docsearls, environment, flickr, photography

Over at Inside Home Recording, we recently started IHR TV, additional short video tutorials that augment our regular longer audio podcasts. As part of that effort, we used some of the money we get from sponsors and advertisers to buy two Panasonic HDC-SD5 high-definition camcorders. (Bought online, two of them cost only very slightly more than a single one at local retail stores.)

The last camcorder my family had, which sits half-broken in our basement, was an old Samsung analogue Video 8 tape-based machine, from 1998. Given the improvements in other consumer electronics, from personal computers to digital cameras to televisions, over the past decade, I'm not sure why I'm so surprised at this little camcorder, but it's a remarkable machine.

Consider, first, that it can record at 1920x1080i "Full HD" resolution, with something like six times the detail of our old camera, using a very nice mechanically stabilized Leica lens. It stores that information not on tapes, but on the same SD cards used by the still cameras and audio recorders we have at the house. The whole camera is only about a third larger, and almost exactly the same weight, as the old Samsung battery—being smaller than my hand, it almost gets lost among its accessories in our camcorder bag.

Perhaps most remarkably, Panasonic has put real thought into simplifying how the camera works. There aren't many buttons and dials, they're clearly labeled, and everything is easy enough to figure out that the manual (which is long and detailed, but only averagely written) is only necessary for some of the more detailed settings. The SD5 even takes pretty nice still photos.

Those huge HD videos, however, require a lot of horsepower to edit: only one of the computers in our house (my Intel MacBook) will even import the massive AVCHD video files directly. And, following the trend in pocket still cameras, there is no longer a viewfinder: you have to look at the pop-out LCD screen to frame your shots. Like too many consumer electronics today, the camera also comes festooned with garish and difficult-to-remove little stickers advertising its features, the software it comes with, and so on. I removed those immediately.

It lacks a couple of pro features that would be useful: the only sound-in is from the stereo microphone, so you can't connect an external mic or line-in sound, which is something I'll work around with a separate audio recorder if needed. (Very cleverly, though, the microphones can focus in on your subject as you zoom the lens, and electronically filter out some wind noise. Nifty.) Similarly, while it comes with cables to send sound and video out to a TV or other device, you can't record video from any source other than the lens, so I can't, for instance, use it to digitize any of our old footage.

With devices like these, it's no wonder people can now smuggle broadcast-quality video out of the world's war zones and trouble spots. We'll see what I can do with this camera and my mediocre video skills for our modest little podcast.

Labels: geekery, leica, panasonic, photography, podcast, video

For no particular reason, I recently created a Flickr photo group called Your Geekiest Photo, and added mine, from 1985:

If you have a dark, dark nerdy picture in your past and don't mind revealing it to the world, I'd appreciate if you joined the group and added it. If you're not already a member of Flickr, you can sign up for free.

Labels: flickr, geekery, linkbait, photography

A couple of years ago I spotted Kris using a handstrap with his Canon DSLR at Northern Voice 2006. Such a strap can be quite convenient when you don't want to use a full neck strap, and in recent weeks I've thought that getting one would make my grip on my Nikon D50 a little more secure.

Alas, Nikon's own leather strap is stupidly expensive (more than $100 in Canada—you can buy a whole decent point-and-shoot camera for that!). The Canon version was much cheaper, but requires a camera with a bottom strap loop, which few have. Luckily, there was a perfectly acceptable no-name alternative at Amazon. I had to have it shipped to a friend's U.S. post box, since it wasn't available to be shipped to Canada. I received it early this week.

If you look at my camera bottom photo, you can see there's an extra strap hook on the other side of the grip mount, so you can use both the hand and a neck straps at the same time.

What that does mean is, if you use the regular neck strap that way, your camera hangs sideways, but that's fine once you get used to it. Also, the grip mount is well built plastic with key metal bits, but it's fairly large, so if you already have a big SLR, especially with a battery grip, you're heading into the massive Nikon D3/Canon 1D size territory. So check the size of your camera bag before you get one.

Labels: canon, gadgets, nikon, photography

Here are my latest photos from MooseCamp, which was the first day of Northern Voice. I've also posted some wacky night pictures from the way home.

At MooseCamp I had a chance to try out a Nikon D3 camera belonging to Matt Mullenweg. It's extremely impressive, probably the most solidly built camera I've ever held. But it is freaking huge—more massive than some medium-format cameras, I think. In contrast, John Biehler's new MacBook Air is shockingly light. Hold one and you'll understand what the fuss is about.