Jessica Ambats - Aerial Photography

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Sigma dp2 Quattro Review

Sigma dp2 Quattro Review, article.

Before the Sony RX100 and other cameras started seriously putting some effort into high image quality in a tiny camera body, for years there was the Sigma DP line.
They use a special sensor where the three colors are under each other in layers, instead of spread out in separate little boxes. This has given a special image quality which some people swear by, but it was limited by smallish resolution and the cameras tendency to be very slow to operate.

Well, they now brought out a new line, the DP Quattro cameras with large APS-C sensors, and remarkable design clearly signifies that some new is going on.

The cameras have a new sensor, a bit different. It's a bit complex, so I refer you to the article.
It may look like a changeable-lens camera (looks a bit like the Son NEX line), but "it s'not". The DP2 has a fixed 45mm-equivalent F:2.8 lens, which immediately seems a bit Blah to me. I prefer a bit wider lens, if possible together with a lens or camera with a longer lens for portraits and whatnot. And I think in this day and age, 2.8 is not at all fast. Heck, I think it's Sigma themselves who just came out with a remarkable standard zoom lens which not only is dang sharp, but also a F:1.8 lens! That is almost unheard of, especially since I believe the aperture does not vary over the zoom range.

... But then there are the DP1 camera with a 28mm-e wideangle, and the DP3 camera with a 75mm-e lens. Funny, I've asked before why nobody had made such a pair of matching cameras, and here they are! It may be hard to explain, now that zooms have become so good and so common, why not just use a zoom instead, but many enthusiasts, especially veterans from the film days, really prefer a good prime lens.

"Jet ereader", more Net Dadaist poetry

You know how I love the "Dadaist Poetry" (poetic nonsense) that the Internet somehow produces in mysterious ways. Sometimes some of it pops up in the otherwise excellent tablet article-scouring app Zite. Which is where I got this pearl. 
The original page is gone. (I miss Google's cache service, I sometimes saved important articles and interviews with that.) 
"According to Volokh, the banking institutions have taken control over your hair and make payments." LOL. 
The illustrations make about as much sense as anything in it. 
-Eolake



Nook Ereader Business Jets

You don’t have to do this is only advertising. The plan of sue is, if he is presented with facts to the internet. You will still get an email from a database of past customers, business jets it can bring. 6m in annual fees for the further steps that can truly say whatever they want. You as the privacy business jets of Internet Explorer may have resented yourself as a virus attacks your computer, you? Cultural factors are to so much competition, after stopping just before 1900 GMT on Tuesday. Dropping DVR services that are available to make it sell. There are many means of a bank of deep cycle batteries to produce power in the browser.

An Internet T1 line can offer to build business jets an Internet presence in the tapes. It is important that płytki cersanit it will be taken if things go! When you connect [a mobile phone] to the consumers nationwide get Web access. As a rule it’s best if a thing sounds too good to be known as a method. Gained skills can have more than one option business jets when seeking loans. If you are not typical results for people. You don’t need to know these people are just sales business jets talk. According to Volokh, the banking institutions have taken control over your hair and make payments.

A few of them for smaller and work properly. They theorized that Internet Explorer 8 and click on the planet came very close to individuals customers. The most common excuse is” safe”, where the apparent internet friend turned out to a velvety red hybrid tea called ”Royalty. Do you need to buy your business jets product and the solutions. Book The incident highlights how cheaply and easily mail.

Syria’s internet and cell phone which has affected class attendance, business jets academic performance. 5 percent over the last release with nothing showing as coming soon on 737s. An Internet filter is business jets a vast and infinite arena of Internet has happened over an Opt-in Opt-out privacy option. With these business jets tools do not exist.

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Feel wiser now? I knew you would.

Gates sees it from the other side...

Gates spends entire first day back in office trying to install windows 8.1, article.
After failing to install the upgrade by lunchtime, Mr. Gates summoned the new Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella, who attempted to help him with the installation, but with no success.
While the two men worked behind closed doors, one source described the situation as “tense.”
“Bill is usually a pretty calm guy, so it was weird to hear some of that language coming out of his mouth,” the source said.


I feel like saying to Gates what he himself used to say to people who said Windows was giving them problems: "Maybe you're doing something wrong. Have you thought of that?"
I read that almost 20 years ago, but it stuck with me due to the immense arrogance of the man.

One might hope he now will learn more respect for the customers, but I suspect he will find another way of shucking off responsibility for this too.

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(By the way, it seems to me that this is about the third time in a decade or so that we are told that Bill Gates are Stepping Down. I'm confused.)

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Old sig: 

If the Internet has no fences or walls

who needs Gates or Windows?

My personal Waterloo

[Thanks to my ol' pal Benny]

With less tentacles, but more legs, and pretty ones too, Here is ABBA.
Had almost forgotten how damn cute they were. (And how short skirts were in the seventies, I miss that.)
(Notice that the video image is a bit stretched (easily happens in conversion). The girls did not have fat legs.    :-)

Houdini Octopus

They say an octopus can move through any hole bigger than its beak!

Smartphones versus DSLRs versus film [expanded]

[Thanks to Bru]

Smartphones versus DSLRs versus film: A look at how far we've come, article. (The first page is here.)

Splitting the difference between candlelight and daylight, around 6 years of technology has made up for the massive difference in the size of the lenses and sensors between the best phone and the $2,000 DSLRs.

I was stunned.

This isn’t saying that the Nokia is a better camera than a 2007 Canon EOS 40D. It’s not. Detail makes up just a tiny fraction of the goodness of a camera, and none of what makes it a pleasure to use. The Nokia is much slower, can’t focus on moving targets, can’t easily defocus part of the picture, can’t change the perspective and feel of pictures by zooming or changing lenses, and can’t capture the same range of brightness in one shot that the latest SLRs can. Yet.

The curious thing about this list is that everything on it except one — changing lenses — can be fixed with faster processing.

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I don't know how electronics will replace zooming or selective defocusing, but they probably will.

And so in 10 or 20 years, peasized embedded cameras will have replaced big, beautiful, specialized cameras, and I'll be a bit sad, because I like cameras as much as the results.

Update:
emptyspaces said...
That's an interesting article. For their tiny sensors, smartphone cameras are truly remarkable now.

But just try and get this shot with any smartphone out there. 

Canon 40D and a $200 lens I bought used, taken through a double-paned glass sliding door (and not a particularly clean one). Just saying.

Still, I have gotten a few pretty great shots with my iPhone 4 in certain light, just because it was the only camera I had with me. But I always wished I had a real camera with me once I started screwing with the shots in Lightroom.


Good point, and very nice picture.

Well, somehow and some day, phones will have zooms or tele lenses too.
And background blur can be nicely faked, just a question of easier masking.

It's true, we must remember all the things they still can't do. But we must also remember that these barriers are moving constantly. 

Just like in Hollywood vs digital. I've just ordered for rent Side By Side, a documentary Keanu Reeves made about digital/film film-making.

Me, I am always on the side of speed, effectiveness, convenience. Laziness sides with invention. Others are always on the side of the older medium. Either one can be an irrational and emotional stance, I guess.

I think it's Tarantino (and surely others) who gets *irate* about digital, like it's somehow forcing everybody to forever stay with the resolution of DVDs, instead of already now *enhancing* the quality and workflow of films remarkably. I just can't be having with that. Man is supposed to Think and Look a bit, not just... emote.



"The magic of movies is connected to 35mm." 
I'm sorry, that's like saying that paintings has to be made with oil paint, otherwise it's not art. It's just such an incredibly limited viewpoint.

I'm guessing many people have had very strong artistic experiences when they were young, and they subconsciously have an equally strong association between that extraordinary experience and the medium it happened to be served on. So when that medium is threatened, they react badly.
Another example is knee-jerk attacks on ebooks "because they don't smell like books". (The only time I notice the smell of books is when they've been keept in humid rooms and smell a bit of mildew.) Take the text out of the books, and you just have dead trees. 

Are reduced-frame DSLRs dead or just very sick?

What the heck is going on with professional/high-end DSLRs in the reduced-frame space?
The top Canon, the 7D, is from 2009!
And even worse, the Nikon D300 is from 2007!

Then compare this Canon 7D ISO 6400 frame with this one from Olympus E-M5. The Olympus one is much better, sharper, less noise, better colors... despite having a smaller sensor and being much more compact and half the weight.
Holy cow. Nikon and Canon are really falling behind, outside the full-frame arena.

Grain and sharpness comparison, above, Olympus E-M5, below, Canon 7D.

Despite the Olympus being about half the size and weight:

I should add that despite the compactness, the E-M5 (and even more so the E-M1) is a professional camera, it has all the bells, it's fast (10 frames per second and quick AF) it is splash proof, etc.

Color comparison, above, Olympus E-M5, below, Canon 7D.

The Nikon D300S falls somewhere in between, a bit better color and noise than the 7D, but still not as good as the Olympus on any count. 

Another issue is that many experts agree that neither Nikon nor Canon has come out with really good lenses for the APS-C lines. The excellent lenses were made for full-frame. That says to me that they never took the reduced-frame lines seriously for whatever reason. I don't know why, because the cameras were very good indeed. 

Small Format Professionalism

Small Format Professionalism, excellent article by Ctein about how bigger is not always that much better, and how small can be better than you think.
It's [the idea] that small format digital cameras are not suited to really serious professional photography, certainly not the kind that results in portfolio prints. Oh yes, maybe screenshots. But the hard stuff? You need a big sensor for that!
Nonsense. Balderdash. Hogwash. Bunkum.
Why can't we stamp this one out? Honestly and truly, real-world results just don't support it. They haven't for years. Not even by highly demanding aesthetic standards.
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There is also this interesting discussion.
I seem to recall Olympus saying, back when their first 4/3 DSLRs came out, they expected 4/3 sensors to some day equal medium format film.
Seems to me they are pretty much there. My prints from m4/3 pretty well beat anything I have from 645 medium format and match all but my best from 6x7 cm.
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Luck, and engineering

Bert found these cool items:
How lucky can you get?! (Amazing pictures.)

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What engineers can do these days.
"The ship is not big enough? Nooo problemo"

High school selections

Here's another one about high school. (Don't blame me, if you believe Hollywood, most Americans do what they do to impress their high school pals, even 20 years later.)

It's clear that in the US, geeks and artists and such have a hard time in high school, and are not "popular" (a concept I never really understood. It seems you can be "popular" even though nobody likes you?).

My experience was opposite, I found it far easier to fit in when I went to high school, because only those who didn't hate school too much, went. I think less than thirty percent at a rough estimate went on to high school. So while the environment was perhaps not exactly "intellectual", it was a lot closer, and I didn't see anybody get hassled.

I wonder, in the US, is there another system, so that most everybody goes to high school, no matter their desire or aptitude for learning? That would explain that difference.

Unusual watercolors by Lora Zombie

Unusual watercolors.
Art by Lora Zombie.

I think it's nice to see watercolor used, for once, to do something else than the pleasant, nostalgic landcapes it's always used for. 

That goes actually for most media: very few artists have the guts and imagination to step outside the genres the medium has proved itself good at, and popular in.