Ejecutive

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.

Yashica Electro GT Ilford HP5+ 400

Yashica Electro, Fuji Velvia 50.

From my first roll of Velvia, the Yashica Electro managed to underexposed most of them but I’m still very pleased with the result, correct exposure would’ve probably over exposed the car.

Thoroughly enjoying experimenting with film.

I first got into photography about seven years ago, photographing the local bird and wildlife population. I live on the Isle of Sheppey, which features the Elmley Marshes RSPB reserve, which is one of the best places to see breeding birds and birds of prey.

Back then, I had my dad’s old Nikon F401s and a borrowed Sigma 400mm lens. Me and a friend would drive out to the reserve and wait for all sorts of bird of prey to turn up, including Kestrels, Marsh and Hen Harriers and Merlins. Back then, the auto-focus was slow (at least on my F401s) and film was expensive, each roll of Fujichrome Sensia 400 cost £10 but it did include processing.

On a good day, I went through four or five rolls of Sensia, which were promptly sent for processing. After four days, I’d get the slides back mounted and in neat little boxes. Then began the incredibly laborious task of scanning the slides and then printing them. My friend had a Nikon Coolscan LS-30, which at the time was pretty state—of—the—art, it scanned in film one frame at a time, taking two minutes for each frame.

Then after it scanned, it was tweaked, cropped and sharpened in Photoshop, which took about five minutes, then printing it with one of the first Epson consumer photo printers that took twenty minutes to print to A4. So in total I had to wait four days to get the film back from processing, spend at over an hour scanning in each of the 36 frames to find good shots (if there were any at all) and then wait twenty minutes for an A4 print.

I usually tried to do most of my post—processing when there was something good on TV, so at least I had something to watch during the idle time waiting for slides to scan and print, but it was still insanely boring. Eventually I took less photos not because I didn’t have time to take the photos, but because of the insane post—processing time I just didn’t have when I went to university.

Roll—ahead a few years and Nikon and Canon are in the middle of a prosumer digital war bringing prices crashing down. The Nikon D70 was the first digital SLR to have a retail price of under $1000, and then the Canon 300D undercut that even more. These appealed to me, they have better quality than using the old scanner to scan in slide film, but instead of taking four days of waiting and then over an hour of work to get 36 shots, a full memory card of 200 shots could be downloaded to my computer in minutes.

So I got myself a Nikon D80, and an Epson R800 printer. As I didn’t have to care about film and processing costs anymore I took far more shots and threw far more away, but usually it only took me an hour or so to go through 500 shots, compare that to before where it took me over an hour just to scan 36 shots. The new Epson printer chucked out an A4 print in under five minutes, and cost far less at it too.

I was happy. Infact I was so happy I bought a large range of lenses, from a wide angle 12-24mm zoom, to a professional 70-200mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom. A big investment, but an enjoyable and worthwhile one.

I took this rather heavy kit, clad in a fetching Crumpler shoulder bag, to a lot of places, but most notably Japan, where I managed to grab a few shots on what was a rather rushed tour.

But I felt slightly unfulfilled with the shots it produced. I couldn’t put my finger on it, I had a few decent pictures, couple very nice ones too, but for some strange reason I didn’t feel completely satisfied with the photographs. I’ve only ever used SLR cameras, big, chunky and loud machinery that made great photographs but were as big as 35mm cameras got, I felt like I needed a change.

Everyone knows Leica, they’re exquisitely made rangefinder cameras used extensively by photojournalists and travel photographers. However not everyone can afford one, with a good second—hand copy of the M6 costing upwards of £1000. Fortunately, there is a cheap Japanese alternative in the shape of the Yashica Electro; cheap, well built, excellent light meter and great lens? I managed to pick up a GT model from eBay for under £25.

I had a roll of Kodacolor left, so I put it in and eagerly went out to shoot with it. The shutter is almost silent, meaning you can shoot people in public without them noticing. Feeling the gears move under your finger as you wind on the film is a strangely enjoyable sensation, and just made me want to shoot more.

I’ve now bought a number of different films, Fuji Velvia, Ilford HP5+, Agfa Vista, and I’m enjoying photography more than ever. There are still times when I use my digital kit, on sport shoots, nature shoots and when travelling far away, but now my daily kit consists of just my Yashica and a few rolls of film. Much lighter, much quicker and much more inconspicuous. Perfect.

I find serenity and beauty in lines and perspective. One of my personal favourites from my trip to Japan.

After Digg’s recent PR fiasco, you’d think other companies would learn that using the heavy handed approach on your community is a very bad idea. As Matthew Haughey explains:

If the Digg HD-DVD encryption key fiasco taught us anything, it’s that you can’t make rash top-down decisions and expect your community to be okay with it.

But, it seems Flickr (or it’s parent company Yahoo!) has been very heavy handed with Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, a prominent photographer in the community. Rebekka found that a company was stealing her photographs and selling them through their website and eBay. She posted to Flickr about it, and gathered hundreds of comments. However the Flickr Staff have seen fit to delete that photograph, giving the reason Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account..

Never mind that there weren’t any threats made by Rebekka at all, it seems Flickr got a little pressure from some lawyers about the public humiliation of a company and decided to blindly follow it rather than risk legal action. This is a sure fire way to drive a community to the edge, picking a company/lawyers over them when clearly the community is in the right and the company is wrong.

Flickr has since apologised for it’s rash decision to delete the photograph, although unlike Rebekka, I view this as no amends for it’s actions. My opinion of the Flickr Staff and Yahoo! have been reduced substantially, and I will probably not recommend their services as eagerly as I did before. This is not the end of Flickr by any means ¹ and I hope it will continue to thrive and improve. But most of all, I hope it learns that you must respect your users and the community, and realises that while it may be relatively easy to get users and build a community, but make one wrong move and it might just come crashing down on you.

The first big official Nikon announcements for PMA have been made, both of which are upgrades on existing products rather than out and out new ones. A D40 DSLR upgrade and a 55-200mm lens upgrade.

D40x

The new D40x is exactly the same as the old D40 except it now contains the sensor and processing engine of the D80. This means it now has a 10.2 mega-pixel sensor as predicted, and a slightly faster 3 FPS burst rate.

Ken Rockwell will get his hands on a D40x this Wednesday, so I’m going to have to speculate on it’s performance based on what we’ve seen so far with Nikon’s cameras.

I suspect it’ll have the same image quality as the D80 and D200. If you take a shot of the same thing with the same settings and same lens with all three cameras, you’ll get exactly the same output. However I expect the D40x will retain the old D40′s 420-segment Matrix metering rather than the D80′s 1005-segment version, although the difference in metering will be minimal. Both the D80 and D40 over-expose images compared to the D200 and the D40x will be similar to the D40 and D80.

As it’ll have the same output as the D80 and D200, it should have the same high-sensitivity noise performance too, which is a great shame. The best thing about the D40 was the super-clean ISO1600 shots it produced. This made it a great indoor or night-time camera, especially when in tandem with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens, which will even auto focus with it as it’s HSM. The D80 and D200 have pretty average high-ISO noise performance, and I wouldn’t personally use it at ISO1600 if I could avoid it.

What I suspect Nikon is doing is to set a low price DSLR to compete against the higher priced but similar mega-pixel count Canon, Pentax and Sony alternatives. Most consumers will mainly look at the mega-pixel number to decide which camera to buy, and when you can get a D40x with 10 mega-pixels for a significant amount less than a Canon 400D, if I was an uninformed consumer I know which one I would go for.

But this is not to say you’ll be disappointed with the images from the D40x. The D80 and D200 produce superb low ISO pictures, and the extra pixels will allow you to crop a bit more. Nikon have posted some samples of the D40x and they do look very encouraging.

55-200mm VR

The most interesting thing about the D40x samples however, is that most of them are taken with the new 55-200mm VR lens. This is Nikon’s first consumer VR lens¹ with a US list prices of $249.95² it’s a very cheap lens aimed squarely at consumers. But if you look at the samples taken with the D40x, you could be fooled into thinking it was the 70-300mm VR, or even the 70-200mm VR lens which costs many times more.

This lens seems to be a fantastic light travel-zoom to compliment heavier and faster zoom lenses. It has the sharpness and VR, which helps a bit with the small aperture, and it only weighs 335g. While a 18-200mm VR would be more convenient, it seems the 55-200mm trounces that lens at the long end, where it still remains very sharp.

There is still some confusion over the specifications though. It’s not specified whether it’s a VR or VRII, although it’s probably just VR. One Nikon site specifies it with a seven-bladed aperture, but on another it has a nine-bladed aperture. Also, the old 55-200mm lens didn’t have real AF-S capabilities. Instead of having a ring type motor directly rotating a floating lens element, it just had a normal motor like that driven by old screw AF-D type lenses, except this was built into the lens body. This meant it was pretty silent at focusing, but was slow and didn’t have full-time manual over-ride like that of real AF-S lenses. I suspect this is still the fake AF-S.

I await Ken Rockwell’s review as that should clear up any ambiguity with this lens, and also give us some sample shots not taken by Nikon.