The 10 most decadent dictators

The 10 most decadent dictators, article.
1. Kim Jong-il, "Dear Leader" of North Korea since 1994. The son of the communist state's "Great Leader", Kim Jong-il has super-expensive tastes, with 17 palaces and collections of hundreds of cars and about 20,000 video tapes. On one state visit to Russia, he reportedly had live lobsters airlifted daily to his armoured private train. He is believed to spend around $650,000 a year on Hennessy VSOP cognac and maintains an entourage of young lovelies known as the "Pleasure Brigade"

I'd say this at least makes Dear Leader sound less dangerous to other countries. If he likes luxury, he is a little lazy too, and also he knows that any major instability would threaten his lifestyle. I would be much more worried about a man who's a hard ascetic.

A sex toy... from Philips?!

A sex toy... from Philips?!

Excellent. I'm thinking this is a sign of the continuing softening of the global fear of sex.

And if they keep their nerve instead of being frightened off by any early protests that may happen, Philips will make a mint. The planned price for this little plastic thing is sixty pounds (and one for ninety)! Some similar merchandize by competitors is sold for a third of that. Not that I know anything about it, of course.

"Britain is key to a successful launch into a global market that could be worth more than £1 billion, says Justine Guest, the head of consumer life-style marketing for Philips UK. Britain was the guinea pig for two previous and somewhat controversial launches: the bikini trimmer and an all-over body shaver for men. Britain is more open than other markets tested by Philips researchers, including Germany, the US and the Netherlands and a popular TV series has paved the way. “Our research says that UK consumers are open to this story. Sex and the City changed the way people talk about it,” said Ms Guest."

Hell, what happened to the famously sexless and demure Brits? More open than Holland?! Gee.

Eliminate the Mode dial...

This is the picture of the main mode dial of the new Panasonic G1. I post it not because of how special it is, but because of how common it is. Every serious camera has one similar.*

And it suddenly struck me, is this really a wise design? It seems to me that by far most photographers have a favorite mode (like Programmed or Aperture Priority), and leave it on that almost always.

I know that I change ISO far more frequently than I change Mode, and yet none of my cameras have ISO dials. And for cameras which have auto-ISO (becoming more common), I wouldn't need one of those either.

So I think camera manufacturers could make cameras cheaper and more durable and less intimidating to beginners simply by eliminating this dial and putting the functions on the screen.

And while we're at it, like I've said before, more money and bulk could be saved by also eliminating the viewfinder, whether EVF or SLR or rangefinder. My favorite composing device is is a tiltable LCD screen. It gives a more flexible viewpoint and a better overview of the composition as a whole. In a viewfinder you tend to look at details and forget the overall picture.

*Except the newer top pro cameras like the Nikon D3 and Canon 1D. So perhaps there's hope yet. Good feature changes often have a trickle-down effect.

Women of Avalon

Women of Avalon blog.


Stephen Haynes said:
Original source of the photoshoot from which this was derived: MagicFluteNudes. (Others from the shoot in prior posts there.)

unbearable lightness said:
Thank you for the post. The Avalon blog has received hundreds of visits from your readers.

Fluffytek

Lin of Fluffytek blog send me some kind words about this blog, and like I often do, I then took a look at hers, and behold it's very cool. Only problem is it has some sexy pictures (that it appears she takes). You've been warned. :-)

I'm not likely to ditch my bachelor life, but if I do I want a wife like Lin, who apparently is liable to, upon discovering green goo seeping out of the light switches, run around the house screaming, 'The house is possessed! We’re all gonna die!'

People usually don't get it when I indulge in my more abstract humor, but I think I'd fit right in.

Flash prices (was: RAM prices)

I've ordered a Nikon D90 with UK dealer AJ Purdy, and they throw in two 4GB SD cards with the sale. How very nice of them, that's a good deal, I thought. And then I happened to look these cards up, and guess what they cost? Six pounds each!
Holy crap. I remember the first memory card I bought back in 2000. I think it was 64MB, and it was something like £170. Man, these things have dropped in a hurry! That's about 1/2000 of the price per MB in eight years.
I have stopped deleting pictures from the cards, I just fill them up and keep them as extra backup. That said, I haven't yet managed to fill up card recently!

By the way, unlike many gadgets, the Nikon camera is not spectacularly cheaper if bought in the US compared to the UK. Otherwise I might have ordered from Amazon USA. They will only ship to a US address, but I use a service I think TTL pointed me to originally, AccessUSA (MyUS.com). This service works great. They have lots of experience sending abroad with the least amount of cost and hassle with customs etc.

eeeMac?

Timo points to this hacked eeePC running Mac OSX.
Interesting, but it's likely a rather technical hack, and likely to stay so for the while.

New Panasonic M4/3 camera

New Panasonic M4/3 camera.
Earlier than I'd expected for the first camera, nice. It looks quite promising to me. It's only a good half kilo including the kit lens, this was the sort of thing I was hoping for when they announced the Micro Four Thirds standard. If it has good image quality and fast reacting autofocus, then we may have a contender.

It looks like a small DSLR camera, but it's not, because the whole point with the M4/3 standard is that there's no room for a mirror, and that this allows for smaller bodies and lenses. Instead it has an EVF (Electronic View Finder) which hopefully has enough resolution to be useful. The EVF on my old Nikon 2400 is dreadful, highly pixillated. But for me, I'd have done just fine without the viewfinder, I'd prefer a tiltable high-rez LCD (update: I see now that it actually has that also, goody). Pressing the camera against your face just limits the camera's potential points of view, seems to me.

Omitting the viewfinder might also allow them to do even better as regards weight: this camera is only barely lighter than the Olympus E-410, and the latter is an SLR camera after all, with mirror and prism.

It seems the EVF is very good though. Imaging-Resource writes:
"Knowing that this would have to compete with the true optical viewfinders on digital SLRs, Panasonic has wisely selected a rather impressive EVF display. Using a responsive Liquid Crystal on Silicon design that is alternately front-lit by a trio of red, green and blue LEDs some 180 times per second, this display has an impressive 800 x 600 pixel resolution with full color at every pixel location, and no gaps between pixels. (Most electronic viewfinders have adjacent red, green and blue dots for each pixel, and gaps between pixels, resulting in a perceived loss of quality and "graininess" that makes them off-putting)."

See below, compared to an Olympus E-410, which is the smallest DSLR. The G1 is not really dramatically smaller, is it?
But then it seems to be aimed at giving a pretty full DSLR-like experience, rather than a "big compact" experience. I might be interested more in the latter. Like the Sigma DP-1, only without all the grim limitations of that one.

Update: because of my short attention span (if I were in school I'd be put on Ritalin for sure) I tend to read long articles in many bits over the day, so an article like this I often update many times over several hours. Sometimes I intend it originally to be just a short notice, but then I add observations as they occur to me. Just so you know.

Imaging-Resource had a positive early impression of the focusing speed of the G1. Their preview article also contains some interesting data about focusing systems. Seem that as processors become faster, contrast based focusing (taken directly off the imaging sensor) may become much more prevalent in the future, because it's inherently simpler and more accurate.

I-R is also pleased with tentative and brief testing of pre-production camera samples vis-a-vis image quality and noise. So all in all the first M3/4 entry may be a stronger one than anybody expected. Neato. It should be available in November, price unknown yet.
DpReview also has a big preview article. (Am I the only one who finds white text on black to be harder to read?)

Panasonic says that they have made it as much like a DSLR in order not to alienate Japanese buyers, and they made it not-too-small in order not to alienate US buyers... isn't it a pity that people are so conservative?

Publishing or conversation?

Regarding the post about the Minox spy camera, somebody wrote to me:

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I thought your column was not really worth the space and time of writing and publishing it. You don't have any particular knowledge or experience with the camera, and you've never seen any photographs made with it, but you're expressing disbelief that it could have been used for anything real? That makes it a seriously uninformed opinion. Who cares?"

Fair enough, I can see that point.
Except I was not giving an opinion, I was just expressing that there was something I didn't understand. And like often happens, lo, my readers helped me out.

When writing proper articles for proper publications (paper or online), one has to be careful to make research and only publish proper informed and considered opinions. But a blog, at least this blog, is not a proper publication and does not contain proper articles. It just contains "posts", which is a thing closer to a conversation than publication. It's very informal to me at least. It's just chatting.

Of course it may change nature from post to post. And a medium may be considered differently from person to person. I once had a correspondent who berated me for not leading in e-mails with "Dear (his name)". He regarded e-mails as letters, whereas I regarded them as conversation.

About quotes and judgement

"The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods."
-- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 1976

Graceful, perhaps, but won't it give young hopefuls the impression that they can do what you do without any heard work?

Of course, probably this is a quote not from Ms Kingston herself, but from one of the characters in her book. This means that perhaps it's not a reflection of the beliefs of the author. I think one might want to be careful with this.

Stephen Fry once attacked with great rancor the people quoting from Hamlet: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be". He pointed out that this was stated not by Shakespeare but by the character Polonius, who was a bit of a fool in Fry's opinion.

Of course another problem is that foolish things may be stated by wise people, and vice versa. Not to mention that adjudicating what's foolish and what's wise is something I find more and more difficult the more I mature. I actually suspect that letting go of judgement as much as possible may be the wisest course of all.

For example, the very same "neither a borrower nor a lender be" statement... Indeed I have been in trouble as both a lender and a borrower. I have quite big amounts of money out there which I'm not at all certain I'll ever see again. However, to learn from this that loaning or borrowing should never happen? I just don't see how the world would do without that, the way it's set up currently. Just for one thing, almost nobody would be able to buy a home or start a business.

I guess one has to just rely on case-by-case judgement and not on blanket policies.

Mike Mitchell

Thanks to tOP for pointing to Mike Mitchell. Here's a guy who really works with the light, which is so central to photography.
A pity his site is so over-designed, and takes over the browser. I almost didn't bother to browse it. Like TV is made for advertisers, not the viewers, so web sites are designed for the designers to show off, not for the visitors.

Lines, and Peripheral Light