Learning to See » Technology

PressPausePlay

Jon Roemer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:55:25 +0000

In a world of democratized media production what is king, where does value lie, and what becomes of quality?

Change, Flux, Reinvention

Jon Roemer — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:27:15 +0000

A Canon C300 at the AbelCine introduction. NY, NY, January 25, 2012.

It’s a weird time – I just redid my people print portfolio, first time in years. Yet, last fall was dominated by video work. So, as I redo books (architecture is next) I’m also thinking about video, cameras both still and video, upgrade paths, compromises, choices and where best to allocate resources.

My still cameras, Canon 1Ds Mark III’s, have served me well. Four years old, rock solid. The next generation has been announced and should be out this spring, the 1D X. Primarily, a still camera but with 2nd generation DSLR video (less moiré, less artifacts).

And then there is the C300, a video camera. Stunning images, easier workflow and handling than when shooting DSLR video and the ability to take all of my Canon lenses. And no visible moiré or artifacts.

The former promises a better focusing, higher ISO camera, with slightly better video workflow and (most likely quality.) The still quality is not likely to be noticeably better except in low-light or in AF challenged situations. The latter is orders of magnitude better on the video front – no more of the subject sitting down and moiré rearing its head and no more unusable shots because there are too many artifacts. Plus, it is better on the high ISO front and second system sound recording can be eliminated if desired.

Attendee tries out the C300 in stripped down mode. Looks and feels much like a medium format still camera - think Hassie or Mamiya. AbelCine, NY, NY, January 25, 2012.

While the options cost real money they also end up in the same ballpark when all things are factored in (old cameras sold, etc.) So, what’s it come down to? In the end, the same ever present question -> Who am I and what do I do? Not what do I do in terms of making the choice seen in the paragraphs above but what is it that I do as a person, as an individual, day to day, as one following my interests, and as one in the still motion world that is photography in 2012. In the end the question is not about equipment, it never is.

Gets You Misty Doesn’t It

Jon Roemer — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:34:29 +0000

A Kodak corporate video used as an intro for CEO Perez’s 2006 appearance at the All Things Digital Conference:

To see how far Kodak has fallen is to look back to the 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s when Kodak was ubiquitous. Even as a non-photographer you would have been hard pressed to go a day without coming in contact with it. Film on sale everywhere, Kodak advertising in every medium, and all of the products that came about because of the use of Kodak materials.

Somewhere in the mid to late 80′s the change in photography started and Kodak’s responses kept missing the mark. First versus Fuji with film and then with digital. It wasn’t for lack of trying – Kodak was there first on many things, digital included. But it was as if nothing they did could bring the flow of money on the corporate industrial scale they had known prior and they weren’t willing to be patient enough for any one of their digital investments to grow.

As seen above – they did have a vision of the future, with hindsight an impressively accurate one. But a big corporation is like a huge ship or a tanker, it takes many miles to make it stop and even more to make it change course.

Eastman Kodak Files for Bankruptcy.

Bottom edge, Kodak 35mm slide mount, 1977.

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle

Jon Roemer — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:25:23 +0000

Jumping to Lion.

Friday night, somewhat on a whim, I decided to upgrade my Mac Pro to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Lest that seem haphazard or foolhardy it wasn’t quite that spontaneous. A Mac Pro has four drive bays and I always have a full clone of my primary HD with the OS. I also made sure that my key software would be compatible and I jumped through all the hoops one normally would with an OS upgrade. My HD was freshly cloned, I repaired permissions, I made sure to unhook all external hard drives, and I copied all of the settings for my printers and the color profiles I have added to the system.

My Mac Pro was one of the first Intel Xeon models, a 2x – 3 GHz dual-core. It has performed well and I am amazed (knock wood) that it is still running and viable. Next fall it will be six years old. I will most certainly get a new one when the Mac Pro gets a refresh (the line hasn’t been updated since 2010) but until then I’ll tweak things a bit to get whatever boost out of it that I can.

Earlier in the day on Friday I had swapped out its OEM HD (a WD 250gb 7200rpm) with a new 2TB Hitachi drive. I didn’t need 2TB but this drive is highly rated and tested to be one of the fastest. The change proved easy (there were no permissions or software registration issues) and it provided a small but noticeable speed bump. Certainly to be expected with a ’11 drive vs. an ’06 one.

I think the ease of that switch along with an inkling to get going on Lion now that it is 10.7.2 and to jump into some iCloud features prompted me to make the leap.

Installation of Lion (you buy it via the Mac App Store) was quick and painless. It was done within twenty minutes. Instantly my system saw a big increase in speed. Booting up which took a couple of minutes (? – I never timed it) or plus another 30-45 sec. for email and my web home page to be up, running, and fully functional; now is done within 48 seconds with everything good to go. Programs open quicker across the board. Scrolling and other actions are lightening quick.

I like some of the new visual simplicity of Lion. All windows, scrolling, and GUI items seem to be tuned to making the content the king. It takes some getting used to what feels like reverse scrolling. This is similar to an iPhone or iPad where you scroll in a more logical/correct way, e.g. to scroll down the bottom of the page is pulled up. If you don’t like that behavior on a desktop you can always switch back to the old way in System Preferences. Similarly, moving back and forth between pages viewed in Safari is now done with a one finger swipe across the mouse, much the same way you would leaf through pages. The iOS influence doesn’t stop there, you can double-tap on an image or text in Safari to make it fill the window.

Notes:

-Immediately upon installing Lion I had one screen issue. Black boxes and bars where showing up as the mouse or a window was moved around the screen. Turns out this was because I had my desktop set to a jpeg image (flat grey, at 100, 100, 100). Switching that to an official desktop choice of dark grey (very close at 95, 95, 95) in the System Preferences corrected the problem.

-In prior OS upgrades information like custom saved printer settings, custom color profiles, software registration, and monitor calibration profiles were often lost. That is not the case with Lion.

-The only big bug I have hit so far is that Aperture would not send files to the trash bin in the dock. They would disappear into the ether. Some searching shows this to be a common problem and one thread in Apple Discussions has the solution. A reset to the trash bin needed. In my case, my Aperture library and all of my image files are on an external raid. To correct the problem the trash bin on my main HD had to be reset. ***Update 12/19/12 – Fix doesn’t hold. Problem reappears.***

-I have two Epson printers (a 3800 and a 7800) plus an Epson scanner (Perfection 4870 Photo). All work fine under Lion. The printers had to be deleted from the System Preferences list and then reinstalled. Both of the printers are connected via ethernet and the 7800 had to have its ethernet cable disconnected and the reconnected to get it to appear as a new printer.

One note about the scanner and Photoshop CS5. The scanner works fine running under Apple’s scanner import or Epson’s “Epson Scan” but you will no longer see the scanner show up in PS CS5. This was the case before Lion. PS CS5′s scanner interface, twain importer, no longer ships with CS5. You can get it from Adobe and install it but it will not appear within PS unless you force PS to run in 32-bit mode.

-I have a third printer, a Lexmark laser printer, and it had no hiccups. It was there working with no need to delete and reinstall.

-Canon DPP looks to work fine in Lion but Canon EOS Utility does not. For those of you shooting tethered you’ll need another route (e.g. tethering via Aperture). Canon is promising a Lion compatible EOS Utility in the first quarter of 2012.

-A quick check to FCP 7 along with Soundtrack Pro showed them to open and work fine. I was able to open an old FCP project and everything was intact. FCP X, of course, is fine as well.

-X-rite, née Gretag-Macbeth, Eye-One Match is not compatible with Lion. I knew that going in. X-rite has a listing of compatibility and upgrade paths here.

-NEC Spectraview II works fine but you’ll need to set it to save profiles to “per user of this computer.”

-Saving the best for last, hard to believe on an almost six year computer, but the speed bump in Aperture going from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion is ~25%. Processing out the same 206 raw files (Canon 1Ds Mark III) to jpegs averaged 13.73/min in 10.6 and 17.17/min in 10.7.

Canon EOS-1D X

Jon Roemer — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:56:33 +0000

Canon EOS-1D X

Canon, never one to shy away from confusing product names, has announced their latest flagship camera – the *1D X. The web is already becoming inundated with information.

CPN Europe has a lot of information including a 12-page technical paper.

Canon Japan has a short film made with the camera which includes stills and video. At the very end it lists which lenses were used and what ISOs were utilized.

The camera looks to be intriguing, interesting, and a bit of a challenge to or, maybe better put, a practical recognition of shooters needs. For the first time Canon is lowering the megapixel count of its flagship model, in this case from 21mp to 18mp. This is being done in favor of lower signal to noise ratios and it should add another 2 stops of range over the Canon 1D Mark IV.

The 1D X is also a merging of Canon’s two pro lines, the 1D series and the 1Ds series. Canon themselves foretold this a couple of years ago – saying that once processing speed allowed there would no longer be a need for a sports optimized camera and a studio optimized camera.

Having shot with both the 1Ds Mark III and the 1D Mark IV I can see the value in splitting the difference between two. My clients rarely need a native resolution file from the 1Ds Mark III and the 1D X promises to still hit tabloid size at 300 dpi. Add in the 1D Mark IV better low light performance, its better focus, and better screen, then improve them all (Canon claims) and it should make the 1D X a great tool.

On the video front the changes look encouraging as well. Canon states that moire will be greatly reduced (“virtually gone” in some reports) and rolling shutter will be lessened. The 1D X will offer two compression options for video capture. Both are h.264 but one uses very little compression (e.g. ~6 min. of 1080p on a 16gb card vs. ~48 min as in the past.) There will be the ability to set sound levels before and during recording via a touch screen, two timecode options, and the clip length is expanded to 29 minutes and 59 seconds.

For those who wanted raw format video, xlr or sdi ports, in-camera sound monitoring via headphones, it’s not going to happen. But I wouldn’t have expected it with a body that is a stills camera at heart. There just isn’t the room, the available processing power, or the need. For that you might want to look to Canon’s big announcement on November 3rd in Hollywood…

Canon USA on the 1D X

Planet 5D beyond the press release

RobGalbraith.com

DSLRnewsshooter.com write up and news on expanded 1D X triggering options.

DSLRnewshooter first look (added 10-27-2011.) In the 14 minute video, the Canon rep states “no line skipping” in video mode on 1D X – that’s huge and will reduce if not eliminate moire and aliasing. Dan also tests a few accessories on the prototype body.

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*In the early 00′s Nikon had the D1x.

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Update – 12/12/11: Information on the Canon EOS C300.

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Related – 1/26/12: Change, Flux, Reinvention.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Jon Roemer — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:05:30 +0000

From "Young Egyptians Spread Their Message." Ed Ou for the New York Times.

I photographed Steve Jobs once. Some time in ’86 or ’87. Jobs was in a suite at the St. Regis in New York pushing NeXT computers. I remember getting there early and watching him prep.

I don’t have the photos (my employer owned them) and at the time I didn’t think to grab some of the extra prints. Maybe that says something… I saved odds and ends: Mario Cuomo at the opening of the Javits Center; Joe Raposo, Judy Collins, and a cat at a Purina Cat Chow event in Lincoln Center; Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in Fred’s car for AAA; Spanky from the Little Rascals promoting the Little Rascal motorized scooter. But no Steve Jobs.

I spent the 90′s with a shared NEC PC and then a couple of Dells until I hit a wall. A custom Dell configuration failed me. It couldn’t support a few scanners and an early digital camera. Many emails back and forth with Dell, including a couple from Michael Dell (yes, times were different then) and it turned out that Dell had not vetted the computer completely. They could not fix the issues and they could not recommend an alternative. At that point, about 1997, my Mac odyssey began.

In thinking about how much my iPhone has integrated with my DNA and in how much I couldn’t survive without my Mac Pro or my MacBook Pro when working on location, it’s actually two other thoughts which come to mind with Jobs’ passing.

This past year with the Arab Spring, demonstrations, and calls for democracy; it was common to see photos where in the mix of all that was happening a Mac laptop or an iPhone was present. Jobs must have seen these, the two examples here were on front pages of the New York Times, and he must have seen in them a culmination of his vision to truly *change the world. It wasn’t just about changing the culture in the United States or making a profit. It was about giving the world the tools to institute change.

My other thought is to my personal experience in switching from PCs to Macs and how, with hindsight, it shows what has always been at Apple’s core – the user experience. When I got my first Power Mac not only did it run all my peripherals seamlessly but when you opened it up it was a sight to behold. Brushed metal on the inside with slight circular patterns to it. Everything neatly arranged and easy accessible. It was the opposite of my PC experience. Going inside a PC was like trying to find your way through the back room of a storage facility. The think different here was Apple recognizing that a Power Mac user was going to open it up, otherwise they wouldn’t need a Power Mac. So, Apple made the experience positive – aesthetically and functionally.

I can’t help but think that up above there’s a room somewhere with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Edwin Land, and others. When yesterday’s news spread Bell got on his phone, rang his assistant, and said, “Mr. Watson – come here – Steve’s arriving.”

Jalalabad, Afghanistan; volunteers build a wireless network with off-the-shelf components. Keith Berkoben/Fab Folk

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*When hiring John Sculley, a former Pepsi CEO, Jobs asked him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Young Egyptians Spread Their Message from the New York Times. The photo ran on the front page, above the fold, on February 9, 2011.

US Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors, from the New York Times. The photo ran on the front page, above the fold, on June 12, 2011.

Everything is a Remix Part III

Jon Roemer — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:51:57 +0000

Kirby Ferguson has just published part three of his four-part series looking at innovation.

Everything is a Remix Part III

Parts I & II are in my blog post – Genius.

We Can Be Hipstas Just For One Day

Jon Roemer — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:17:22 +0000

I am probably the anti-hip. Not to say that I’m square, I hope I’m not, but I wouldn’t claim to know all the current trends, what’s in fashion, what’s not, or to be searching that out for my look. That said I’ve been playing with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone for a couple of weeks now and having some fun with it.

The concept is to turn your iPhone camera into an analog instamatic from the days of yore. Think 126 film in a Kodak or earlier. On a certain level, as a photographer, I want more control over the focus, white balance, and exposure than the app allows but that is going against the concept of the app. It wants you to select a lens and a film stock and then let it do its thing. In other words, be a little surprised at what it comes up with, a small compromise for some instant photo mojo.

Oil patterns on road. Click images to enlarge.

New studio.

Lost shoe.

Getting nowhere efficiently. Chevy Volt siting.

Bix.

Thunderhead.

Lightning, storm passing to the south. Princeton, NJ; June 1, 2011.

All of the above are straight out of the Hipstamatic app except the first and the last. The oil on the road needed some contrast work and the lightning shot had a black edge toward the bottom which I took out (from the iPhone’s rolling shutter.) This image is about the limit of what you can do with the iPhone and this app. It was after 9pm, the camera is handheld, and timing it with the flash of light it is the bare minimum of what’s needed for exposure.

The app only makes square photos (maybe I am square? maybe square + mojo = hip?) and it comes with a number of default lens, film stock, and flash options which you can combine. It’ll make images at screen res up to print res (~6.5″x6.5″ @ 300 dpi.) You can buy more lens/film/flash packs as an in-app purchase. The first image was shot with the “Jimmy” lens and “Blanko” film stock, the rest with the “John S” lens and “Blanko” film stock.

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Update – 8/2/11: I added a Hipstamatic post tag.

Putting the sRGB Back in WordPress

Jon Roemer — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:09:40 +0000

WordPress 3.x admin window showing duplicate images created for a blog post.

WordPress v3 works well and has attempted to think through everything. When it comes to images though a bit more is needed. WordPress automatically creates duplicate images at different sizes whenever you upload an image for a blog post. The idea behind this is great, it saves you the trouble of manually creating multiple sizes for thumbnails, feature images, post snippets, and the like. It also makes short work of linking everything; it’s all there done for you.

The problem lies in the fact that WordPress neglects to embed the color profile or the metadata in the duplicates. There’s not much you can do about the metadata (if that’s a concern then you should create your own image variations) but there is an easy way to re-embed the color profile associated with the original image file.

First off, what am I talking about and why do this? The web runs on sRGB when it comes to image files. sRGB is a background color space and is the lowest common denominator. Its gamut reflects the original CRT monitors and the bulk of the displays still in use (even LCD’s.) There are certain web browsers which are more color sophisticated (they display an image accurately if it has any embedded color profile) but there’s no guarantee that people are using them or that they have configured them properly. There are also differences in operating systems. Mac, despite of its reputation for graphics, assumes your monitor’s profile if none exists in an image file where Explorer assumes sRGB.

What all of the above means is that all bets are off when your images are viewed online and the only way to get accuracy and consistency is by having the correct color profile embedded in your image files.

1. Start off with an image in the sRGB color space and have that setting embedded in the image file. If you are converting from raw files then your raw convertor will allow you to select the color space of the processed file, if you are using Photoshop’s Save for Web there is a check-off box to convert to sRGB and embed it in the image file.

2. Go about your WordPress business as usual, make your blog post, upload your image files.

3. Go to your Mac OS Library (sorry this is Mac based info. only) and open the Scripts folder. Inside that open the ColorSync folder, and within that you will find the Embed script. Copy the Embed script to another location (e.g. your desktop and you can rename it if you like.)

4. Open your ftp client, navigate to your WordPress folder and open the Uploads folder (most likely blog/wp-content/uploads.) In Uploads go to the current year and month and in there you will find the image file(s) you just uploaded and the duplicates which WordPress created. Copy the duplicates to a folder on your desktop.

5. Open the duplicates folder, select all, and drag the files onto the Embed script. You will be prompted to select a color space, select sRGB. The sRGB profile has been reinserted into your files.

6. Upload the files back to where they came from in the WordPress Uploads folder on your server and you are done.

It sounds like more work than it is. It saves you having to open and re-save each file and it’s still less work then creating your own duplicate versions of files and having to manage and link them. It ensures that all of the duplicate images on your blog (thumbs; small, medium, & large versions) will look like the original you uploaded.

Since the question will come up – with color profiles there are always two options -> to assign or convert a color profile. In this case, by re-embedding the sRGB profile you are essentially assigning it. This is because it has been inadvertently left out, you are replacing what is missing.

Black-Hat Ops

Jon Roemer — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 23:25:48 +0000

Black-hat services - who will you hire? What will they do?

Just over a year ago I published a post called, A Conspiracy of Blog Comments. I had had my WordPress blog only a month or two but I could already detect a trend – odd comments leading to similarly designed shell web sites which pointed to under-the-radar products at Amazon. Engine lifts, electric cellos, etc. It made me wonder who would put the time, effort, and money into setting these up for such obscure items.

In this morning’s NYT Business section the lead story, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, pries back the lid just a bit on what the industry calls black-hat services – SEO companies which are hired to stack the deck in terms of Google rankings. The article deals on a larger scale, JC Penney and its search rankings, but the fingerprints are similar to what I saw happening with blog comments, products, and Amazon.

I find this seamy underbelly interesting. It makes one think of dark alleys, persistent rain, and Blade Runner-esque visions of the future. Large corporations hiring questionable companies in corporate backwaters to set up bogus sites, seeding the Internet with links to those sites, all with the goal of funneling traffic. It’s a lot of work, the scope is huge, and it doesn’t appear that it can be completely automated like email spam. Who is doing this and where are they located? Are there blog comment sweatshops out there? The black-hats…