As a Fox news reporter interviews an Amtrak spokesman about not having any photography restrictions in Union Station, Washington DC, they are told to stop recording by a security guard.
Are Photographers Really a Threat?
June 5, 2008 – 10:46 pm
Bruce Schneier on the increasing paranoia of photographers being terrorists.
Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?
Because it’s a movie-plot threat.
Sigma 50mm f/1.4 HSM
March 18, 2008 – 10:43 am
Of most interest to Nikon D3 owners, Sigma announces a fast standard prime lens with a HSM motor, filling a gap that Nikon has left wide open for years.
If it’s as good as Sigma’s 30mm f/1.4 lens for DX crop cameras, then this should be a big winner. I know I’d get one if I was buying a D3.
Make Your Own Pinhole Cameras
March 12, 2008 – 12:21 pm
Make your own stylish pinhole cameras that work with 35mm film. My favourite is the Peyote.
My Year, 2007
January 2, 2008 – 6:15 pm
My Year in Photographs
My most memorable photograph was this cityscape taken in Tokyo. The smog and buildings, especially the tall chimneys, reminds me of the opening shots of Blade Runner.
Following on with the Japan theme, this is a photograph of a temple in the historic town of Nikko, which we visited on a day trip from Tokyo. See more Japan photographs.
My favourite photograph from my visit to the Lake District this year, there is something I really like about the calm created by this. See more photographs from my travels around the UK this year.
2007 was also the year that I started shooting film again, and I’ve now amassed quite a collection of film cameras. Here’s one of my favourite film photographs taken this year, with a £1 Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.
My Year in Cities
This is a list of cities I visited and stayed at least one night in for 2007:
- Nottingham, UK *
- London, UK *
- Tokyo, Japan *
- Kyoto, Japan
- Nikko, Japan
- Dublin, Ireland
Cities marked with * were visited more than once on non-consecutive days. For once, I didn’t go to Aberdeen, Scotland at all this year.
My Year in Travel
The most enjoyable trip this year has to be the one to Japan with my old school buddy Stephen. We visited the sights in Tokyo and Kyoto, getting lost while wondering the streets on more than one occasion. Japan is truly a wonderful place. And it’s a strange place.
My other trip abroad was to Dublin with my ex-fiancee Kirsten. I loved it, Dublin has great food, great people and great music. The best part is that its big enough to accommodate a long weekend of snooping, but small enough that you don’t feel like you’ve missed out by just spending two full days there.
I also visited a lot of places in England this year, mainly around the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. Nothing beats driving in the Yorkshire Dales; hardly any traffic, winding roads, spectacular views, and a sense of wilderness really gets the blood running.
My Year in Technology
This has to be the year of the iPhone, the device that has revolutionised smartphones. It’s also the year in which I’ve moved to using a Mac full time, and a MacBook none-the-less1 from my old Dell computer with Vista installed.
The Nikon D3, which arrived quite late in the year, also deserves a mention as it has single handily brought Nikon back into the DSLR race with Canon. An honourable mention should also go to Fuji for bringing out the S5 Pro, a fantastic camera with a huge dynamic range and great high ISO performance, and also to Pentax and Olympus for bringing more competition to the usual Nikon and Canon dominated market.
And finally Asus, for bringing out the computer that no-one else wants to make, the Eee PC. No-one else wanted to gamble on a barebones laptop sold for just a couple hundred dollars, but Asus did and managed to turn out a fantastic product at the same time.
But for a whole year, I can only pick out three outstanding new consumer products (ignoring the fact that the D3 is, in fact, a professional camera). It has been a year of disappointments: Sony PlayStation 3, Blu-ray, and HD-DVD have all failed to kick off. Let’s hope next year starts off with another bang at MacWorld 2008.
The best of the stuff I bought this year must be the Dell 24″ 2407WFP-HC widescreen monitor–with it’s fantastic image quality and huge 1920×1200 resolution, the Epson Perfection 4990 scanner, and the concisely named Tamron SP AF17-50mm F/2.8 XR Di II LD Aspherical [IF], the optical bargain of the year.
My Year in Sports
In January I started a new fitness regime, and managed to loose 10KGs by June. I’ve also gone from someone who couldn’t run at all to now attempting to run 10KM in under 45 minutes (just need to shave another minute off my current pace) and starting to prepare for a half-marathon next year. So it’s looking very good.
I also started playing squash regularly in November, and along with running it’s become my major source of exercise ever since I left the gym.
- Albeit tethered to a 24″ monitor with a separate mouse and keyboard most of the time. ↩
Photographs of Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination
December 29, 2007 – 1:53 pm
Spectacular photographs captured by Getty photographer John Moore of the final moments of Benazir Bhutto’s life, and the aftermath of her assassination.
Nikon 18-55mm VR lens
November 20, 2007 – 11:35 am
Nikon has performed a veritable U-turn and announced its newest standard range zoom lens will have VR image stabilisation. The precisely name AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR is the first lens announced after their new AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, which doesn’t have VR as Nikon believed that VR wasn’t required on short zooms.
However, the success of in-body sensor stabilisation from the likes of Pentax, Sony and Olympus, and the new, cheap kit lens from Canon with IS probably forced Nikon’s hand to compete with a cheap VR zoom. This new lens combined with the 55-200mm VR lens would make a good stabilised zoom kit on a budget.
Lightroom 1.3
November 16, 2007 – 8:25 am
Lightroom 1.3 update includes support for new cameras including the as yet unreleased D3 and D300, and also fixes printing issues in Leopard. The biggest news is the release of a preview SDK for exporting images, so hopefully plugins that will let you upload to sites like Flickr within Lightroom will start to appear.
A History of Photographic Tampering
November 16, 2007 – 12:51 am
Examples of photographic tampering from 1860 with before and after photos.
Photographs: Wounded
October 9, 2007 – 3:37 pm
Having my arm in a sling for a short period of time some years ago opened my eyes to others around me in similar situations. It was then I began to consider the possibility of producing a series of photographs of people on the street in similar situations. [...] Photographically it became a challenge to turn interesting looking injuries into interesting photographs. These are not photographs you can set out to take. Sitting outside a hospital would be cheating.
Jesse Marlow has a book out documenting how people cope with their injuries on the street called Wounded. He’s put some photographs on his website from the book.
Preview of DxO Version 5
October 6, 2007 – 7:15 pm
A preview of the new features in DxO Version 5 coming out in late October for Windows and November for Macs. Free upgrades for anyone who ordered after August 1st, 2007.
Photographer Killed in Burma
September 28, 2007 – 3:14 pm
Kenji Nagai was gunned down by soldiers as they opened fire on anti-government troops in Burma. His dying moments were captured and shows him continuing to film as he lay dying with a soldier pointing a gun at his chest.
Update: There is a video of the Nagai being shot, a loud crack can be heard when he is pushed to the ground which contradicts the Burmese government’s statement that he was shot by a stray bullet.
Nikon D3 and D300
August 23, 2007 – 11:08 am
Amidst a lot of fanfare Nikon launches their new flagship camera, the D3 — its replacement for the venerable D2xs, and the D300 — the replacement for the incredibly popular D200.
A couple days ago, Canon upped the ante with their new EOS 40D, fixing the major complaints with the 30D and then one-upping the D200 on image quality as well. However Nikon kept smug about their plans, they didn’t rush any press releases about a mythical forthcoming camera to try to up-stage the Canon announcement like Sony did, and after all this time we knew they had something big in store.
D3
The D3 is the first Nikon DSLR to have a full-frame sensor (or FX as Nikon calls it). Its a 12.1 megapixel sensor, which on the face of it might not be much competition for the likes of the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III’s 21.1 megapixel sensor, but the lower pixel density should produce less noise at the higher ISO ranges, especially as the D3 offers a ISO25600 boost range.
Noteworthy points:
- 12.1 megapixel full-frame sensor.
- ISO6400 native, and upto ISO25600 boost.
- 9 frames-per-second — faster than the old D2hs with a 4 megapixel sensor.
- New auto-focus system — CAM3500 with 51 focus points, 15 cross-hatched.
- 14-bit A/D converter — should give better tonality.
- 3 inch LCD with Live Preview — has very high VGA resolution which should make Live Preview quite useful.
D300
The D300 is the replacement for the D200, a camera that sold far better than Nikon ever hoped for. This isn’t without reason, the D200 is a fantastic camera, it beat off the competition — mainly from the Canon 30D — with ease, only loosing out with noise levels at high ISOs, but the build quality and design of the D200 were second to none. The D300 has big shoes to fill, made even bigger by the new Canon 40D which made the D200 less competitive. But my, if Nikon have finally managed to solve the high ISO issue, it should beat the competition out of the water.
Noteworthy points:
- 12.1 megapixel DX sensor.
- ISO 3200 now native, and ISO 6400 with boost.
- 14-bit A/D converter.
- Blisteringly fast 8 frames-per-second with the grip, or 6 frames-per-second grip-less.
- Same 3 inch LCD with Live Preview as the D3 — nice.
- Same auto-focus system as the D3 — very nice, the auto-focus of the D200 was often found lacking.
Competition
Nikon have finally made a professional DSLR body that can compete with Canon, if purely down to the fact that its full frame. The D2 series had issues with high ISO noise, something which Canon were always good at. Hopefully with a new image processor, and now noise reduction being applied at the sensor level instead of in post-processing, we should see Nikon catch up to Canon in that respect.
I’ll reserve final judgement until we have sample images, but I’m very hopeful that Nikon have got it right this time.
Canon Confirms 1Ds Mark III and 40D
August 20, 2007 – 11:42 am
Canon confirms what Amazon have already leaked, which are the specifications for the new 1Ds Mark III and 40D
Canon 40D and 1Ds Mark III Specification Leaked
August 19, 2007 – 11:46 am
Amazon have leaked details about the upcoming Canon 40D and 1Ds Mark III. I’ve saved screenshots of the 1Ds Mark III and 40D pages as they’re sure to take them down. Note that they’re both nearly 1MB in file size.
- 21.1-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor
- Large 3.0-inch LCD display with Live View and seven brightness settings
- 5 fps at shutter speeds 1/500 second or faster (for bursts of up to 45 Large/Fine JPEGs or 15 RAW images)
40D (screenshot):
- 10.1-megapixel CMOS sensor
- Large 3.0-inch LCD display with enhanced Live View and broadened color gamut
- 6.5 frame-per-second continuous shooting capability (for bursts of up to 75 Large/Fine JPEGs or 17 RAW images)
Details of a new Canon 14mm prime have also been leaked by Amazon (screenshot), which looks to have been specifically designed for the 1Ds Mark III.
The Closed Format Dilemma
August 9, 2007 – 12:37 am
In 20 years time, I want to be able to find a particular photograph or video I’ve produced with relative ease, and more importantly, be able to open it. I take photographs mainly with Nikon’s NEF raw image format, which is a closed standard that Nikon is reluctant to share. While many companies and individuals have managed to reverse–engineer it, Nikon change the format with every new generation of cameras, and as its a closed format, its likely that the third-party software wont be able to read it. While there are no guarantees that I’ll be able to open the files 20 years on, its likely that I will be so its not of a big worry.
But closed film formats are a small worry compared to the problem that is DRM. Imagine this — you buy a track on iTunes with DRM, only iTunes and the iPod can play it. Ten years down the line, someone other than Apple takes over the online music industry and you buy their device and use their music store. You want to be able to play your iTunes Music Store track on your new system, but you can’t because of DRM. iTMS is one of the only music stores that uses DRM and lets you burn the track to a CD, so all is not lost1 that is if Apple still exists and produces iTunes, or you can run an old version on your current system. The reality is even worse with subscription based music services — stop paying, and all your music is gone, if the music store folds, your music is gone, and if you want to use a computer or portable player that doesn’t support the DRM used by the store, you have to switch subscription services or buy all your music again. Not nice.
So now, I try to make sure everything I produce is in an open format, but its just not always possible. I write applications with C#, an established ECMA standard, but I wouldn’t call .NET exactly an open standard. Sure there’s the Mono project, but everything I produce is designed to run exclusively on Windows or as a website. However there is always a balance to be found, and .NET is comparatively more open than VB6 and a lot of its predecessors, and programming software and languages moves so quickly I’d be surprised if code I write today is still of any significant use twenty years down the line.
- Except for some fidelity from the conversion to audio CD and back to MP3 or whatever you’re converting to. ↩
Wedding Photography 101
August 4, 2007 – 8:28 pm
Word gets around and your cousin decides that it would save her a lot of money if you would take the photos of her wedding. She says that she has seen your shots and thinks that you would be a great photographer for her big day. You would like to do it, because after all, you just love taking photos, and you feel that while you haven’t shot a wedding before, it can’t be that different or hard.
Bottom line: don’t do it without any experience.
Sigma Boosts HSM Lens Range
July 25, 2007 – 1:39 pm
Sigma have added HSM focusing (AF-S) to their 18-50mm f/2.8 and 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 lenses, making them compatible with the Nikon D40 and D40x auto-focusing and also have full time manual focusing override.
Considering theses are optically very close to my prized Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8, this is a very good move by Sigma.
