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Currently in my list of pocket gadgets: a GPS, a smartphone (with so-so camera), a "real" digital pocket camera, a PSP, an internet tablet, a bluetooth keyboard, an ipod, an MP3/wav recorder, and of course one or more Moleskine notebooks (usually two: one for work, one for personal notes, and sometimes a third for watercolor pencils). On the edge of these are the mid-sized gadgets, a ruggedized La Cie hard drive, an ASUS Eee laptop, an SLR -- not quite pocketable. Memory cards. Batteries. Earbuds.
The Moleskine and the keyboard, unlike the others, are defined by the limits of human design -- they just can't get smaller and be usable. I've no doubt that the others will collapse into something unified and smaller and instead of empty pockets I'll have some need for another generation of well-marketed pocketables. Heads-up displays for pedestrians, with integrated games? Some desperate need to keep the text of the Library of Congress within arm's length? Every episode of Heroes (and Hogan's Heroes) for ready reference? Water contamination meter? Celphone-camera detector (and laser disabler)?
Looking at street photos of a century ago, or even fifty or thirty years ago. What we don't see in those photos? Stuff. Kids with a couple of books, not a filled roller pack. People on the street without briefcases, backpacks, phones -- even in the financial districts.
In an hour or so I'm off to Spain. I'd like to think I'm packing light, and my clothes are light. It's the STUFF: no internet tablet, no mics or headphones, but the ASUS and the SLR (w/two short prime lenses), a strobe, two moleskines, the wee pocket digi, the recorder & GPS & ipod start to add up. Or do they? Total for everything: one half-filled backpack.
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There is little that can lead you to treasure good photography than to look at a lot of bad photography, interspesed with an occasional gem. Which is exactly what I was doing a few weeks ago on (where else?) flickr, where I was editing group pools.
When I started the New Black and White group, back in flickr's early pre-yahoo fog, there were no editing or moderation tools, it was slow and painstaking to remove each and every pic I felt didn't belong. And at first that was fine, as there were very few pics submitted. Two or three a day. I stopped messing with it, left it fallow -- came back to find a thousand pictures.
Edited those down to a few dozen, watched it fill up quickly again. Eventually the flood was far more than I could manage as anything less than a full-time job, so I ignored it for months until there were more than 55,000 photos in the pool, most of them "flickr noise" of the cute kitten variety.
Rather than even try to deal with all that, I started another group, Contemporary Black and White, and invited a few select members. I thought: at least I don't need to edit them (and I don't -- they've been contributing good stuff). But then I started wondering about the old one.....
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A few busy weeks coming up!
On the heels of Contact, I'm heading to Madrid in a few weeks to visit See See and to scout around the shows of PHotoEspaña (suggestion of "must see" shows greatly appreciated), followed by a zip up to the much-overphotographed Guggenheim in Bilbao and whats sure to be entirely too much fantastic food.
Isaac's birthday and graduation from Middle School are also approaching, even earlier -- and then as soon as I'm back from Spain, he's in for three weeks of rock n' roll camp while we also deal with Siggraph, California Extreme, Oshkosh (maybe), Gamefest, and yeah, the girl on the far right of the photo above is carrying an NVISION bag, where I'll be speaking about the future of real-time character animation and rendering (with special guests -- some incredible NVIDIA partners).
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It’s been a couple of years now since I wrote this entry on
digital Black and White conversions. I’m still using a variation of
the Caponigro conversion described there. What prompted me here was a
combination of events, including reconciling the many scripts and actions I
had on several different Photoshop-equipped computers, each of which had
diverged from ts brethren; meeting Bob Carnie at Elevator Digital in Toronto,
thanks to Dinesh;
this
APUG thread, which also included more info from Bob; and the latest
edition of Digital Photo
Pro magazine, which has run B&W articles as its cover story quite a
lot over the last year or two, and this one was no exception. What
surprised me was that DPP were freshly touting the old Gorman/Holbert
method (aka the Gorman
Method).
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High speed ftw! A quick $12.99 sale price later, and the LX2 is somewhere between 25-30% faster on RAW capture. Thank you OCZ and thanks Gary for the hint!
To my surprise, shooting time for ten "high quality" JPEG images remained about the same -- around 20 seconds -- indicating to me that for compressed pix, the limiting factor is the speed of the "Venus Engine" processor itself.
Addedum: yesterday saw the publication of dpreview's test of the Sigma DP-1 which is probably the closest competitor to the LX-2 and considered by many, in anticipation of it, as the compact streetphoto heir apparent. To my great surprise, the Sigma is significantly slower than the LX-2 -- the only got a little over 7 seconds per frame in RAW while the LX-2 turnaround was only 4.5 seconds (even faster than what I was getting). The Sigma does have a three-frame buffer, though it's not clear to me if you can use it in regular shooting mode. And a hotshoe for Martin Parr & Bruce Gilden fans.
Addendum #2: And on the heels of that, another review lamenting the DP-1's lack of speed, this time by Edward Taylor on The Online Photographer -- "My main complaint about the camera then was that it was painfully slow. It was and it is...." Hmmm.
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As I expected, I've gotten more used to the LX2.
In the clichéd and time-honored tradition of pointing Leicas at brick walls to prove that their lenses are top-notch, here's a closer sample of an in-camera-sepia JPEG. The right-hand area shows a detail from the picture on the left -- pixels at one-to-one size (if anything, the image here is degraded just because it's a web-compressed pic. It was also hand-held).
As long as I'm willing to put my thumb on the monitor, it's fine in the hand. During the past week I've been shooting with it at the ION Conference, using it as a notepad to keep track of presentation slides. In the hand for an hour at a time and I've gotten used to the idea. No hand strain. In JPEG, it's also plenty fast.
Tomorrow I'm taking Gary's advice and trying a much faster SD card for shooting in RAW mode. If it can get the differentials indicated on Rob Galbraith's benchmark site, there might be as much as a 4x acceleration, which will keep me quite happy (even a modest improvement might be enough).
For my Contact Photo weekend, I'd expected the Sunday to be the shorter of the two -- instead under the bright sun I was able to visit MOCCA, the remaining Queen Street galleries, the Gladstone, the Drake, drive across town to the Corkin, and still take a leisurely pace back to the airport.
Of the work I saw, there were only a few standouts, but they were well worth the trouble...
]]>(By request of Ralph, a set of photos for the monthly SP salon)
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Spent most of the day running back and forth through the rain to see as much of Contact Photo as the rain would allow, and last night chasing around the Lanch Event. Tomorrow I'll hit the MOCCA portion before returning home. Fell asleep -- coffee in hand -- just as the early-evening weather outside my hotel room was surging past the drizzly form shown here into a real driving storm.
I also had the pleasure during the morning of driving across town to visit the Bob Carnie & Kevin Viner at Elevator Digital, where I got to see their big print line including their digital fiber-print mural-scale line, which they believe was the world's first. These are large-format images, printed on black & white traditional darkroom paper -- a good deal bgger than what the well-known Devere digital enlarger can produce.
I also got a glimpse at the results from the Canon imagePROGRAF iPF9100 60" printer, which delivered gorgeous B&W results straight our of the bx -- that is, on the supplied Canon profiles without tweaking.
To my surprise, when I awoke two hours after dozing away, the view was dazzlingly different: the towers lit by an orange sunset and framed by a deep blue sky. Surprising what a couple of hours can do if you'll just willing to stay put (sleeping helps).
What about the photographs? I'll write more about them in the next entry.
]]>I'm writing this for (new) EVE players, so I'm not really going to explain terms or basic game info, though I'll insert links along the way to wikis and so forth.
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After returning from China I gave myself a few weeks to see if Panasonic would announce a new LX3 at February's camera-business trade show. No dice, so I promptly ordered a new LX2 to replace the stolen LX1. Here are a few notes, comparing the two.
Okay, I suck. Not a single post since my return from China. Of course, I have tons of excuses, including the fact that I was back in the office for less than one hour before hustling off to the airport for yet another business trip; or that GDC came in the middle of this period; or that I was sick in bed for weeks; or that it's beta time and much software needs writing; or that I keep catching myself putting my web energy into (giant sucking sound....) Facebook; or that a large slice of the remaining time has been happily spent on family and wonderfulness. All true.
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Almost time to say goodbye to China, now that I'm back in Beijing. Also time to say goodbye to:
If I can just keep my laptop and 5D working for two more days....
(Followup: I remind myself, a bit, of my old second (third) cousin who raced motorcycles and cars and kept soldiering on through the many hospitalizations as just part of the passion....)
Which doesn't begin to compare to what happened to Michael :(
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