sourcefrog : photo

yes it's the way of the future

posted Thu 21 Sep 2006 in /photo | link

"rib-bones, back lit and char-blackened, lonely and gloomy..."

Stephane pointed me to Sara Dickerman's interesting Slate article on photography on the cover of Gourmet magazine, and their strikingly spare, challenging images. We've been getting into more food photography recently: it captures a moment, it gives a good subject with subtle detail, it really makes one think about light and shadow.

posted Tue 18 Jul 2006 in /photo | link

Alight

posted Tue 13 Sep 2005 in /photo | link

galah breakfast

posted Fri 15 Apr 2005 in /photo | link

Canon EOS 20D

I bought a Canon EOS 20D just before the holidays. It is really beautiful: a work of art that makes art.

I'll write more later, and pick a couple of good images to put up here. A few brief points:

It's very fast; catching an expression flashing across someone's face or a bird in flight now depends on the photographer's reflexes, not the camera's lag. This comes down to an optical viewfinder, fast and well-guided autofocus and fast electronics. 5 frame continuous shooting helps too.
Usability design is superb. I was a bit skeptical of the iPod-style jog dial/button on the back, but it works very well: using your thumb, thumb knuckle or finger you can quickly apply exposure compensation or flip through the menus or replay pictures.
One gap in the interface design is in handling sensitivity (ISO). This is a key exposure parameter for digital cameras, along with aperture and exposure time; in low light I change as frequently as the other two. But there is no permanent display on the top panel, and none at all in the viewfinder. I'd like a small dedicated 4-digit display on both of them.
Quality on screen or on small-medium prints is great, but to be fair that's true of most cameras for the last few years. What is new is that this is true even up to 1600 ISO, making it very good in available light (indoors, or in a forest.) I haven't tried a large print yet.

posted Wed 5 Jan 2005 in /photo/tech | link

Mugga Lane

posted Sun 14 Nov 2004 in /photo | link

Treasure

posted Sat 13 Nov 2004 in /photo | link

Mural of girl's face, Canberra

mural
Mural, Canberra, unknown artist

posted Sat 13 Nov 2004 in /photo | link

Flame/smoke

[more]

posted Thu 4 Nov 2004 in /photo | link

Votive

posted Sun 24 Oct 2004 in /photo | link

More opinions on 4/3

dpnow writes of the possible advantages and disadvantages of the Four Thirds standard.

posted Sat 23 Oct 2004 in /photo/tech | link

Interview with Olympus engineers and thoughts on 4/3

Olympus are running an extended interview with the engineers who worked on the Four Thirds system and the E-1 and E-300 cameras. It gives an uncommon insight into the design tradeoffs.

Most DSLRs available in 2004 are based on 35mm SLR cameras, which allows some reuse both by manufacturers and users. However, producing a sensor the size of a full 35mm frame is quite expensive, so cameras tend to have a "crop factor": only the center of the image plane is actually used to capture images.

Olympus have chosen to go with a new all-digital system based on a sensor somewhat smaller than that used in mid-level DSLRS from other manufacturers.

Manufacturers are fairly free to change sensors at will between fixed-lens camera models. However, for DSLRs customers expect to be able to reuse lenses between different generations of cameras. So by picking a particular sensor size and designing lenses to match, Olympus are committing to this size for perhaps ten years, which is an eon in electronics. Engineering tradeoffs can be tough, but particularly so when you're going to be stuck with them through four or more generations of technology.

Lenses specifically and bodies designed from size can be smaller than those based on the 35mm format, and therefore faster, lighter and cheaper at a given quality level. (Or the optical quality can be improved at a given price point, etc.)

On the other hand, a smaller sensor means that at a given resolution level, each sensor site must be smaller, and therefore possibly able to gather less pixels, and so less sensitive. At a given level of sensor technology, aperture and speed, larger sensors ought to have lower noise.

Or does it? Much of the light coming through a 35mm SLR lens falls outside an APS-sized sensor, and so is essentially wasted. The Olympus cameras should get more useful data bits per photon entering the lens.

To cut a long ramble short, the Olympus engineers seem confident that they will continue to be able to improve within 4/3 system, achieving quality comparable to medium-format and then large-format silver-halide cameras. Worth a read.

posted Mon 18 Oct 2004 in /photo/tech | link

Falling in the crack

Ed:

[Black and White is] too explicit to really be art, but not explicit enough to be porn. So, in the end, it's a miserable failure.

posted Mon 18 Oct 2004 in /photo | link

Death by prettiness

Mike Johnson writes on photo.net of scenic fatigue, which is what I was trying to get at a while ago.

What instigated these thoughts was that I recently spent several hours poking around on a large picture-posting site (I won't name it explicitly, to try to avoid hurting anyone's feelings). For the most part what I looked at are amateur pictures, and not even polished, finished presentations — just a large mass of random pictures that people have taken, and, for some reason, liked. So it wouldn't be proper or fair to criticize too harshly just because what's presented isn't always art.

When I first start looking at large numbers of snapshots, I can get excited about possibilities, and my mind is full of comments I might make to the photographers. But after a while, a particular kind of fatigue sets in.[...]

I get this feeling quite strongly, and it has pretty much turned me off sites where people post random photos. Partly it is this fatigue, and partly it's just that other people far better photos of sunsets than me: they're more creative, more patient, more skilled, have better gear, better luck, or whatever.

When you choose to take a sunset, you have to really engage with sunsets — learn how to look at them, learn how to distinguish among them. What are the best sunset pictures? How to they work? How does yours stack up? Instead of taking one sunset and being satisfied, you ought to take a hundred sunsets and choose one.

What I want to do is make a good representation of how the moment felt to me. This is something I won't get from looking at any number of other photographs of similar scenes, however technically or aesthetically excellent. And it's still a challenge; merely taking a random photograph at a moment doesn't necessarily capture that moment.

posted Mon 11 Oct 2004 in /photo | link

Canoe polo

I wouldn't have believed there was such a sport as Canoe Polo, but apparently there is.

canoe
polo
Canoe Polo, CISAC, Canberra, 2004-10-03

update: Ed says his favourite esoteric non-erotic watersport is underwater hockey. Wow.

posted Thu 7 Oct 2004 in /photo | link

Olympus E-300

Olympus have announced a new consumer DSLR, the E-300. It uses their 4/3-system sensor and a mirror viewfinder, so is remarkably compact for a camera at this level. I've wanted to switch to a DSLR for a while, and maybe this would be it. I have looked at the E-1, but it's just a bit too expensive for the amount I'd use it.

This seems to be the E-1 scaled down and with some more amateur features added, such as scene modes. (I'd personally be happy with just PASM, but I guess it's necessary for this market.) It does have a built-in pop-up flash, which plays well with the compact size. The RAM buffer might be smaller than that of the E-1 and it's missing the splash-proof triple seals.

The sensor is a bit smaller than on the competing Canon 300D and the Nikon D70, as a tradeoff for having a substantially smaller body and lenses. I wonder if the smaller sensor is going to cause substantially more noise at any given ISO. On my current Minolta 7i there is noticeable noise at ISO 400 and 800 is often barely usable.

So far (29 Sep) a few people have seen it at the Photokina expo, but there's not much on the net aside from the Olympus press release and spec sheet.

The physical design of the camera looks intriguing, and it looks like it will fix a few annoyances in digital cameras to date.

There's no top LCD, as there is on the E-1 and many other digital cameras today. All the information is available on the review TFT or through the viewfinder. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff: there's already a large display on the back, and information in the viewfinder, so I'm not sure a top display is really needed. If it keeps the price and size down, by all means pull it out; the only downside is probably higher current drain when the TFT is on.

Playback is just through a single button, so presumably you can pop back into shooting mode just by half-pressing the shutter. Putting playback on a mode dial always seemed pretty pointless to me.

There are hard buttons for all the common functions, plus a single rotating control: exposure, WB, resolution, ISO, autofocus mode and point, flash mode, meter mode, (maybe more). It's probably a good tradeoff between interface simplicity and quick access; I hope it will let the user keep out of the time-consuming menus. So all in all it looks like quite a step forward in interface design; let's hope the photo quality is as good.

Olympus have some opinions of Japanese pros on the E-1 — the automatic sensor cleaning and compact lenses seem like the strong points. It looks like the lens system and sensor have carried over from the E-1 to the E-300, so hopefully it will do just as well.

Ted's Cameras are now advertising it at a price of AUD 2000 (approx USD 1400) (to be confirmed), available in November. That would puts makes it a little more than the EOS 300D, and below the Nikon D70 and EOS 20D.

Links:

posted Sat 2 Oct 2004 in /photo/tech | link

Civic duty

Voting activist, Portland, August 2004.

(It's probably too late to register in either the US or Australia, but I still like the photo.)

posted Thu 23 Sep 2004 in /photo | link

Omne vivum ex ovo

posted Wed 22 Sep 2004 in /photo | link

Celebrate Pirate Day

posted Wed 22 Sep 2004 in /photo | link

Technique vs Art

Ed writes of the need for both technique and creativity in art, and in particular photography.

I've been shooting a bit with Stephane's old Minolta SLR: manual focus, manual drive, analog auto exposure. I think it's a good experience; it's certainly fun.

(As John Safran shows, most of the westerners who bandy the word "zen" about probably don't realize just how much whacking with sticks is involved. I include myself in that category.)

posted Fri 10 Sep 2004 in /photo | link

Write-only journals

In Paul Graham's latest essay he mentions that he writes down a lot of things he never goes back to read. I do this too. I suppose a lot of people do.

I like writing on paper with a fountain pen. The relative slowness of handwriting compared to speech or typing constrains me to thinking in a particular way.

I think I'd like to start a time-lapse journal, recording something every December.

It occurs to me that you can take photos in a similar way. The world is so saturated with images that you'd have to be very skilled and lucky to take something that stands out. Even photos that are technically very good and creatively composed jostle for attention with a million others just as good. I think the thing is to remove the comparison; enjoy looking at them or taking them for their own sake.

(Or at least this is true for a dilletante like me; if photography is really your vocation and passion things may be different.)

(If you can find someone to pay you for making photos or software or whatever then of course you need to pander to them to some extent, without being too bashful about whether you're original or not. Originality for its own sake is very rarely commercially succesful. More accurately: you can be commercially successful without being original, because the innovator is likely to mess up the commercial aspects.)

posted Thu 9 Sep 2004 in /photo | link

Martin Pool's blog

Rainbow Lorikeets in the rain

Cheetah

Fruit salad and fur