Nothing Special

Snow and Ice – The Morning After with D7000 and 70-300VR

2012-01-29T03:12:00.001-05:00

So yesterday’s post was all about yet another in a series of seemingly daily snow squalls or soft flakes or whatever chooses to happen or fall. I shot the D7000 with the Tamron 28-75 2.8 and really enjoyed it.

Today, I was downstairs grabbing some breakfast when I noticed the light was almost perfect to capture the latest coating of snow and ice (sn’ice?) on various surfaces in my yard. So I ran upstairs and swapped the Tamron for the Nikon 70-300VR to get more reach and started shooting out of all my doors.

Starting with the patio door … the sub was coming through a layer of ice crystal clouds, so it was much subdued. The Yellow Twig Dogwood looks simply spectacular with ice and then a coat of snow. It looks like candy …

Backing out a bit, we can see the coating on the Annabelle Hydrangeas and the various bushes in behind them. Forsythia, False Spirea and so on.

Sidebar: I’ve come to a style here that I like best of all so far. I use minimal capture sharpening in ACR with neutral picture control and neutral contrast. Black point and white points set to spread the histogram out to the edges. I add a bit more contrast in CS5 and of course I use the narrowest output sharpening dialed down to taste after I resize.

The ice does not show up at the tips of the branches all that well, but you can certainly see it. The lights and branches in my neighbor’s back yard show nicely as well.

Here’s another attempt to capture the “crystal entity” look of the tips if the yellow twig branches. This one comes close to rendering the glitter.

Here we get a nice feel for the richness of the wood when the sun hits it directly. I nice complement to the yellow branches of the Dogwood.

The softness of the snow comes through here, as the staircase is almost full now. The wind keeps the eastern end of the pool free, though, so the vinyl can continue to take its yearly pounding. The eyes are cool … even thought they signal an impending liner replacement at about 3 grand.

The snow and ice coats everything. The vinyl backs of these chairs have been taking a pounding now for 14 years, and they are like new. They weren’t cheap at the time, but over 14 years they were a heck of a bargain.

The moiré you are likely seeing on your monitor is only there because of the reduction algorithm used for the blog. Click on the images to see them at 800px and they are clean and wicked sharp. The 70-300VR acquit itself magnificently.

Rather delicate details in the following image …

There is enough grain in the snow from all the rain that I am not really trying here for the fondant look. But I do like to retain the 3 dimensionality by ensuring that gradients are rendered.

This soft snow on dead flowers is a poignant reminder that we are cycling through the seasons and each is very temporary. That’s kind of depressing :-)

I love the depth in this next one. It really, really worked.

This one manages to convey less depth than the one above. This is the incredible thing about photography … two seemingly similar images have far different impact based on very subtle differences in composition, tone, etc.

Out to the front door and I’m shooting the yard and driveway to capture the mess the snow and rain have made of the streets. There was someone in the ditch (deep and filled with deep snow) for about 5 hours last night. It was amazing to see the car buried there just off the road about 500 feet from my house.

Anyway … the car renders really nicely here.

The snow clearing trucks continue to roll through the neighborhood. Right by my neighbor's tree.

My neighbor’s Blue Spruce in all its glory.

The sun came out much stronger so I popped to the back yard again and shot this image of the Yellow Twig Dogwood. I think the softer lit ones work much better. As is always true. Sunlight sucks the color and tone out of almost any image. I’ve done what I could with this and I like it. But I like the ones above better.

So ... snow is predicted for many more days in the coming weeks, so I won’t get too excited about the nice temperatures. We’re hovering all the time around 1 degree and that has mercifully resulted in more rain than freezing rain. But we’ve had enough of both for a while.

I shot all of these images in live view mode by the way. I really like live view mode because contrast detect focus is quick enough and generally gets the sharpest possible images in good light.

Fun with Data – How many earthquakes were there last week, worldwide? ** Updated

2012-01-28T12:17:00.001-05:00

Updated on 29 Jan 2012

I’ve been reading a book this week called Learning SPARQL, shown at left. This book is an absolute steal in its Kindle edition. For less than 10 bucks, it provides a useful introduction into the world of RDF – Resource Description Framework.

This is a model for information that provides an incredibly flexible way to describe things and SPARQL is the query language that is used to get answers to questions about datasets that are expressed in RDF. The basic concept is the “triple”, which – expressed trivially – is a single fact about a thing.

So, for example, a fact might be that Ginger has red hair.

And since a triple is made up of three (duh) parts, we can formally describe that fact as Subject=Ginger, Predicate=HairColor, and Object=Red. This is not in any known RDF format; it is just a simple way of illustrating the power of modeling data that way.

There is a related concept called “linked data”, which really just means that you can link datasets together by some common value. Much like databases and their foreign keys. But URLs are pretty much ubiquitous, since the World Wide Web uses them to hyperlink pages together. To steal a phrase from the book, it wouldn’t be much of a web without links.

And there are SPARQL end points that allow you to query data sets over the web and get results back in a requested format, e.g. HTML, RDF/XML, JSON, etc. Some pretty cool stuff in there.

And so we arrive at the earthquakes. To quote from Learning SPARQL:

Professor Jim Hendler and his Tetherless World Constellation group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute converted a lot of the simpler data that they found through the US Data.gov project to RDF so that they could build semantic web applications around it. After seeing this work, US CIO Vivek Kundra appointed Hendler the “Internet Web Expert” for Data.gov.

DuCharme, Bob (2011-07-14). Learning SPARQL (p. 42). OReilly Media - A. Kindle Edition.

There is a lot of free data available on the Internet, it turns out. After reading this quote, I popped over to http://data.gov and found a menu that offered to let me explore some raw data.

Clicking on that menu item brings you to a list of datasets. I liked the first one on the list.

So I went there and found that I could download the dataset in a very familiar format – CSV.

This is, of course, a simple delimited text data format (comma separated in this case) that is presented in your browser like this:

Src,Eqid,Version,Datetime,Lat,Lon,Magnitude,Depth,NST,Region
nn,00366555,8,"Saturday, January 28, 2012 14:03:51 UTC",39.3858,
   -119.9548,1.4,8.50,22,"Nevada"
ak,10399820,1,"Saturday, January 28, 2012 13:21:59 UTC",61.0241,
   -152.2186,1.4,99.80,11,"Southern Alaska"
nn,00366553,8,"Saturday, January 28, 2012 13:12:18 UTC",38.2277,
   -118.8112,1.2,18.70,10,"Nevada"

Interesting stuff, but not very useful in this form. So I copied the URL in the browser address area:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs7day-M1.txt

And pasted it into the file selection dialog of the open menu item for Excel 2007.

(You did know that you can use URLs in any most situations where you normally select local files, right?) When I do that, Excel recognizes the dataset format and asks me how it is delimited.

Selecting delimited and comma does the trick. It loads in a rather unpleasant format, obviously.

But I quickly got it into something more palatable.

So what can you do with these data sets in such a simple format? Well, quite a lot, actually. Some questions and their answers:

How many earthquakes were there world-wide in the last 7 days?

Subtract 1 for the header row and the answer is 1014. I’ll bet most people would not believe that number happens in a week, but it does.

How many earthquakes were there last Monday, January 23rd?

After sorting, you select the first instance of the 23rd, scroll down, and while holding the shift key you select the last instance, thus selecting them all. You get the answer while holding the keys down:

148 rows means 148 earthquakes last Monday.

If you let go of the keys and that little tool tip disappeared, have no fear. The count is still visible for any selected area:

Note: There are much more sophisticated ways of exploring these data, even in Excel. I’m showing you brute force techniques so you can see how much information is expressed here without hiding it behind techniques with which you (or I) might not be familiar.

How many earthquakes occurred in Southern California last week?

That would be 95.

How many of those earthquakes were strong enough to be felt?

Here, we have to look up the Richter Scale to see what magnitudes can be felt.

Obviously, we must now search for all quakes magnitude 3.0 or greater. This gives as a list of the earthquakes that could have been felt, had someone been near enough the epicenter. If a tree falls …

Now, looking back at the sort I performed for the previous question, you will see that I also sorted in descending order by magnitude after I sorted by region. A method to my madness …

Looking at the dataset with that sort applied gives us the answer: zero. No one felt an earthquake in southern California last week because the highest recorded quake was magnitude 2.8. Of course, if one were standing right on top of the epicenter, that’s close enough that perhaps a slight tremor would be felt. But that’s not the point of the exercise. Pick your rules and query your data. The answers are accurate enough to be perfectly useful.

One final series of questions …

How many earthquakes were there in Canada last week?

Let’s use the search function to find all occurrences of Canada.

There was but one, in southern Quebec. Hey, that might be fairly close to where I live. Let’s just see how far away the epicenter was from me. Well, first let’s see where it was in the first place.

I tried the following trick without knowing whether it would work at all.

Copy the latitude and longitude and paste into Google maps:

It works! You get a point on the map showing the lat and long and you get the nearest address on a street or highway.

That’s very cool. We’re starting to extend the value of the data rather far. Let’s continue …

How far is that from Ottawa, approximately?

Not very …

Driving it is a little circuitous:

But that tells us that the approximate 200km distance is less than the directions say ot is by quite a bit …

As a 3.2 magnitude, those in cottages nearby should have felt it a little bit. But it was much too far away from Ottawa for any of us to have felt it.

Conclusion

This little brute force exploration of a simple dataset from the US government shows you just how much you can learn from poking around in this stuff. If you wanted to build up your own database for this information, and you had only Excel, you could download it each day, paste it into the master spread sheet, sort it and then tell Excel to eliminate duplicate lines.

Of course, the full dataset is probably sitting on the end of a SPARQL end point somewhere, just waiting to be queried. But the point is that there is tons of free data out there and you can do a whole lot without any sophisticated tools.

Have fun.

Addendum 1 – Distance from the quake to me

My friend Sue posted a couple of responses that contained the actual distance of the Canada earthquake from last week to my suburb. And that distance was a mere 126km, or 78 miles as the crow flies.

That’s not far at all. Still, I felt nothing, so it must be far enough to prevent even a gentle swaying from being noticed.

Her other response contained a superb link to a Google site containing the formulas and a calculator for distance between two points described by their Latitude and Longitude. Very cool.

http://www.ig.utexas.edu/outreach/googleearth/latlong.html

Addendum 2 – Of the 1014 earthquakes last week, how many were strong enough to be felt?

Ignore the datetime subsort … we won’t be using it and sorting alphabetically reverses the natural date order of Thursday and Friday for example :-)

Only 141. That’s fewer than I might have thought.

Snow Squall – D7000 and Tamron 28-75 2.8

2012-01-28T03:16:00.001-05:00

I happened to have the D7000 with me recently when a snow squall hit rather suddenly while standing in a parking lot with the trunk opened. I took the D7000 out and shot a few images. I love the look of snow lining branches, and I like to try to capture the ambience of a snow squall.

Obviously, I shoot RAW, which means that I choose everything about the final image, and the contrast is the primary setting you need to render the snow squall as it really feels. The problem is that the image is washed out and there is no detail, so I am always tempted to add contrast and draw down the black point in order to pull out details. I did that for the first image I shot and I have to admit that, although the detail is superb, the image just looks wrong. It was much harder to see the building …

The next image is more accurate, because I was standing fairly close to the bushes and so there was less haze in the air from the heavy snow flakes.

Stepping back to frame the street as well shows better how the snow was fogging things up.

Since I was standing next to the front of the car, I simply turned around and caught the raised hatch with snow starting to pile up. heavy stuff still falling …

I love the clarity on this lens.

Sidebar: Why the 28-75 focal length? That’s not very friendly to APS-C sensors, since the EFL is actually 42-112.5mm. But in fact this is a superbly sharp lens, much like its sister lens for APS-C, the 17-50 … but not the variant with VC (vibration compensation.) This and the non-VC 17-50 are extremely sharp lenses and a pleasure to shoot. I do plan to replace this lens (or augment it) with the 17-50, which would become my walk around lens of choice.

Here’s a straight on view of the Home Depot, which forms an “L” with the Shopper’s Drug Mart, sharing a parking lot.

Turning to the right, I now face approximately west (ish) towards the town houses that adjoin this lot.

Turning 180 degrees again to face the drug mart, I capture a much better image. Or at least I produce a better image by allowing the contrast to back off a bit so that the snow dominates as it does when you are in it …

So when you process snow images, remember to recreate the fog effect of snow by backing the contrast off a bit from your normal amount.

Well flabber me gasted … Rogers, you have outdone yourself …

2012-01-27T21:41:00.001-05:00

For those that have followed this blog for some time, you know that I like to bust Rogers Cable’s chops now and again for their somewhat inconsistent Internet service. You also know that sometimes the issues are not actually the fault of the provider, but rather the fault of an old router. Remember that … and consider getting the Apple Airport Extreme … it really is as good as all the reviews say.

But one thing that cable Internet service does suffer from now and again is the overloading of the loop on which you find yourself. If too many people occupy the loop, you can get sufficiently high saturation of the bandwidth to really mess with your speeds. This, of course, affects everything and can be very frustrating. And it is at its worst in the evenings, when everyone is streaming and surfing.

So I was stunned this evening when I ran a speedtest just for the halibut.

That’s miles above my nominal 50Mb/s and the ping is super quick too. Holy crap … I have a fast link :-)

Thank you Rogers!

We're here for a good time, not a long time ...

2012-01-26T11:55:00.001-05:00

I noticed that Bill Gates has come out and said that he had a close personal relationship with Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace.

http://asia.cnet.com/crave/gates-spills-on-his-friendship-with-steve-jobs-62213171.htm?scid=nl_c_pp&sysrc=email_nds10026339_3182563510_2500118918

Their relationship was complex, as is easily imagined when they each led a company that was a thought leader for quite some time, and of course when they were in "coopetition" almost constantly for decades.

But what struck me was one of Gates's comments with respect to longevity. He feels that he needs at least another couple of decades to complete what he has started in his philanthropic work, including new drugs to -- for example -- eradicate Malaria.

His closing remark in the interview was:

But, you know, it reminds you that you gotta pick important stuff, because you only have a limited time.

This really struck me as applying to everything one does in life. Focusing on what matters leads to a far higher satisfaction with life in general in my opinion. Yet it is easy to forget this while wasting time in some battle or other with puerile fan boys on an internet forum.

We can't all move mountains like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs ... but we can certainly spend more time focusing on what matters and waste much less time interacting with people we would not cross the street to talk to in real life.

Definitely something to ponder.

Martin Prosperity Report Updated

2012-01-20T08:33:00.001-05:00

I’d never heard of this before. It maintains an index of countries based on what it calls “the three Ts of prosperity” … which are Technology, Talent and Tolerance.

Click to go to the report

Canada is #1 in the world for tolerance, although we fall a bit on technology and even more on talent. Still, we are in the top ten for prosperity, as one would expect.

The USA is #2 after Sweden, which takes #1. In fact, 3 of the 4 top spots are occupied by Nordic nations. That’s impressive. The UK is right up there as well.

In concert with my recent theme of pointing out the inequalities between the rich and the poor, I note the last few sentences that close the summary:

Our findings suggest that there are two distinct paths available to greater economic competitiveness. On the one hand, there are nations like the United States and the United Kingdom, where higher levels of economic output and competitiveness occur alongside higher levels of inequality. On the other hand, there are a greater number of nations like Sweden and Norway, where high levels of economic output and competitiveness occur alongside far greater equality. This suggests a high-road path to sustainable prosperity, where the fruits of economic progress are broadly shared.

The USA is the current poster child for inequality, with the rich fighting tooth and nail to ensure that getting sick still ruins lives. They are phenomenally accomplished at convincing the poor to vote against their own best interests time and again. And of course they have brought the fine art of the rip off to legendary levels, as the recent bank fiasco and the automotive bail outs so clearly illustrate.

I prefer the high road … I only hope that we in Canada can survive the onslaught of pandering to the USA that has our conservative government building super prisons, threatening to jail people for simple pot possession, buying expensive jets and so on … we need to remember why Canada gets the #1 spot in tolerance in the first place.

And yes, I think we also need to strike a better balance. Let’s see if we can maintain #1 in tolerance while actually boosting out technology and Talent rankings.

Edit: I realize in reading back over this article that some of that last part could be taken as anti-USA rhetoric. Well, it's not. I enjoy visiting the USA and I have huge respect for all that they have accomplished and all that they could accomplish given the right circumstances. But I also have deep frustration that the most powerful nation on earth manages to also run such a high imbalance between rich and poor and that they are taking capitalism to extremes that are leading to massive abuse. And unpunished no less ...

Edit 2: So very glad to see president Obama defining his reelection campaign along these lines … fairness of opportunity for all and addressing of the outrageous wealth gap in America. Just excellent. I sure hope he gets in again, because the other side appears to love the status quo of the ever-widening wealth gap.

Tuesday Night Storm … F550EXR

2012-01-19T00:43:00.001-05:00

Tuesday ran the gamut … freezing rain in the morning, rain midday … and pouring rain with freeze in the evening. Unbelievable mess …

The roads turned to pure ice and I needed some groceries, so out I went anyway. Traction control + excellent ice tires == BFD.

When I was done shopping, I slipped and slid my way back to the car in the downpour. Really unpleasant … but I stopped anyway to capture the skating rink it made of the parking lot. Wow …

Yes, you are correct of you spotted the recycle bin in my cart. The perfect size to fit under my sink on the left side (big pipe in the way.) The right side takes the garbage bin you see on the left of the blue bin … it fit perfectly as well.

By the way … I had a world-class brain fart when I shot the above image … I should have used –1EV compensation to protect the lights, but it was pouring so hard that I forgot. So none of the signs are readable as they should be … sorry about that.

By the time I shot that image, there were a number of drops on the lens. The rain was driven at an angle, so hitting the lens was inevitable …and my car was covered in ice in only 30 minutes in the store at most …

Opening the door to start it up showed me how much fun I was going ot have scraping yet once more … third time that day …

In that image you can finally get a glimpse of the rain …

Next up are shots of the driver’s window, which is completely coated …

And lastly for the evening is the wind shield … by this time, this ice was breaking up from the heater …

The next day it was beautiful sun and crisp. I left in mid afternoon to attend a meeting and it was rather cold … around –12 if I recall correctly. Here, the front yard has that fondant look again, but this time it really is that way. There is a crust of smooth ice form all the rain. Pretty, but yuck.

Car is still covered in ice …

And of course the trees have a beautiful layer of ice on the branches … a favourite motif of mine … these shot at the office as I was leaving after the meeting …

Hockey game tonight, so the parking lot next door got a lot of attention. Looks pretty in the late afternoon sun …

Every car in the lot has icicles hanging underneath from the freezing rain …

And so … the F550 handles images like these quite well. The base ISO pixel peeping is not as much fun as it is with dSLRs, but with 16MP there is plenty of downsizing room so the images look quite nice … and all that extra dynamic range has to go somewhere …

F550EXR and X10 versus P7100, S100 and V1 – these Fuji cams perform well above their respective sensor classes …

2012-01-17T01:24:00.001-05:00

Review after review has come out and slaughtered the F550EXR. Mediocre lenses and rather awful JPEGs at L size have held it back something wicked. But I tested mine thoroughly and I still shoot it exclusively at concerts almost a year later. In RAW, this thing is excellent.

On the other hand, the X10 has been bathed in an almost euphoric glow, despite having come out with at least one serious flaw, the ORB issue. That outlines the difference between the more experience audience that grabbed the F550 versus the rather inexperienced group of X10 owners.

So today, the DXOMark review of the F550EXR and F600EXR came out and the F550EXR has done very well. This site measures the sensor output using the RAW files to determine signal to noise ratio, dynamic range and color bit depth in order to enable a comparison of the sensor against others.

Update: The X10 is now available as well, so this is now a more comprehensive comparison.

Original article follows.

Their method for handling sensor resolution differences is to normalize everything to 8Mp, which works well for the kind of prints the majority of people make. The site now defaults to the “print” setting, which does the normalization.

So I thought it might be interesting to see how the F550EXR compares to two cameras that are in the next higher class with larger sensors. The Nikon P7100 and Canon PowerShot S100 both sport 1/1.7” sensors while the F550EXR sports a smaller 1/2” sensor. This should give the Canon and the Nikon almost a 1 stop advantage everywhere.

First, we look at the summary, and the F550EXR comes in 3rd, as expected.

But notice that the P7100 is only 2 points ahead. The Canon is further ahead, but we’ll get there momentarily. The review:

http://www.dxomark.com/index.php/News/DxOMark-news/Fujifilm-F550-and-F600-EXR-Twin-cameras-review

… has this to say about their overall scores:

Their DxOMark scores (39 for the F550 and 40 for the F600) are limited by the ISO range (scores for studio conditions, color depth and dynamic range could be better if Fujifilm provided an ISO 50 or ISO 80).

So this thing is competitive in normal shooting conditions … because ISO 50 and 80 aren’t used except in the brightest light.

SNR is next …

Note that the F550EXR stays with both and even exceeds them at 1600 and 3200 ISOs. This means that the marvelous BSI-CMOS EXR sensor in the F550 is punching far above its weight … what a great result. And this does not even try to use binning …

DR …

The S100 finally asserts its larger sensor while the P7100 continues to lay down. Now here is the thing about the EXR technology … it is meant to be used. And it was not used for these tests. So once we’ve processed that tidbit, we realize that there are about two stops of improved dynamic range available by splitting the sensor and capturing the highlights and shadows separately and then blending them. Since all the pixels contribute to the final image, we don’t lose any significant SNR!

All of which means that the F550EXR should beat the S100 and trounced the P7100 when shot using the EXR DR mode (PASM at M size and DR400 does it too.)

Now to tonal range (bit depth.)

Again, the F550 stays with the bigger sensors until 1600 ISO, where it again takes the lead.

Finally to color sensitivity. A very tough order for a tiny sensor at high ISO. And guess what?

Yeah … the drubbing is complete. Wow … almost total domination by the F550EXR and it was not shot in its best mode.

So allow me to bang the drum a little … I have been this camera’s biggest fan and now you all know why. This thing is a serious camera in RAW. It’s manual control works just great. I can shoot almost anything with it and it sees a lot of time on the tripod.

I am looking forward to the X10’s numbers for two reasons:

The sensor is much larger at 2/3”, so the X10 has the potential to spank a lot of cameras in the weight classes above
But … the X10 uses a traditional CMOS arrangement instead of the BSI (backlit) arrangement of the F550 … that may make no difference because of the size of the pixels, but we’ll have to wait and see …

Go Fuji! I hope that the F770EXR is even better. I would love to have the same performance or a little better with a 500mm lens … wow!

Updated article follows:

The X10 definitely punches above its weight in several categories, but not in SNR. The F550 has a BSI CMOS and the X10 does not, and as I speculated in the original article, the F550 is quite close to the X10, only 1/3 stops less noise. Of course, the X10 has the faster lens, so it can shoot at lower ISO, which is where the real wins are and why Fuji did not need to bother with the BSI design one supposes.

The X10 aplits the difference between the 1/2” F550 and the 1” V1 … which is pretty much an expected result, except that the F550 should be further back. it is punching well above its weight class.

Dynamic Range is impressive. The F550 matches its older contemporaries like the G12 and P7100, but the S100 moved ahead as shown in the original article. But that is with the F550 shot without use of hardware DR extension. Here, the X10 matches the V1, which is the next class up, and again without its hardware DR extension engaged. So it will clearly exceed the 1” sensor class and will match or exceed the u4/3” sensors. Impressive indeed.

Tonal range is again following the normal script. The F550 matches the next bigger sensors, but the X10 is a cut above, as it has a larger sensor again and some of the F550’s technology. But the V1 does eek out a victory here.

And finally, like DR, color sensitivity is one of the X10’s great strengths.

So the X10 is a camera to be reckoned with, especially once Fuji have addressed the ORB problem. The F550 remains a real surprise while the X10 is basically meeting its potential … but that should be enough for Fuji to send a scare into the competition.

If you like to shoot RAW … then consider these cameras as serious contenders for your wallet. Even in JPEG they are excellent when compared with their peers, provided you shoot the right settings.

One final word … someone asked on the Fuji forum why the X10 was not tested at 3200 ISO … well, you only have to look at the ISO chart to see that Fuji have again only bothered with analog amplification up to 1600 ISO. That appears to be their shtick with the X series of cameras.

So, as with the X100, the X10 “fakes” all ISOs above 1600, in RAW too. This works well enough for the X100, so one presumes that the simulated 3200 ISO is no problem for the X10. The reason they can get away with this is the extended dynamic range, which of course is predicated on a low noise floor. That also allows them to pull exposures up to simulate the higher ISOs.

Of course, Fuji cameras are complex enough to operate without throwing in yet another weird behavior … but that appears to be the price of shooting Fuji.

For concert cameras, there is simply no better cam than the F550 … and for general purpose short range shooting, the X10 will be the premiere enthusiast camera once the ORB issue has been addressed …

A great essay by Neil Postman

2012-01-16T02:04:00.001-05:00

I got a link in a comment on this blog from user BillX08 on the Fuji forum … that was to Dr. Spedman44’s Blog, specifically this essay.

The blog looks cool, but what I got from that article was mainly based on this graduation speech by Neil Postman. Neil opens by granting permission for reproduction of the entire speech without explicit permission, so I reproduce it here.

MY GRADUATION SPEECH
by Neil Postman

      Having sat through two dozen or so graduation speeches, I have naturally wondered why they are so often so bad. One reason, of course, is that the speakers are chosen for their eminence in some field, and not because they are either competent speakers or gifted writers. Another reason is that the audience is eager to be done with all ceremony so that it can proceed to some serious reveling. Thus any speech longer than, say, fifteen minutes will seem tedious, if not entirely pointless. There are other reasons as well, including the difficulty of saying something inspirational without being banal. Here I try my hand at writing a graduation speech, and not merely to discover if I can conquer the form. This is precisely what I would like to say to young people if I had their attention for a few minutes.

      If you think my graduation speech is good, I hereby grant you permission to use it, without further approval from or credit to me, should you be in an appropriate situation.

       Members of the faculty, parents, guests, and graduates, have no fear. I am well aware that on a day of such high excitement, what you require, first and foremost, of any speaker is brevity. I shall not fail you in this respect. There are exactly eighty-five sentences in my speech, four of which you have just heard. It will take me about twelve minutes to speak all of them and I must tell you that such economy was not easy for me to arrange, because I have chosen as my topic the complex subject of your ancestors. Not, of course, your biological ancestors, about whom I know nothing, but your spiritual ancestors, about whom I know a little. To be specific, I want to tell you about two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. I think it is appropriate for you to be reminded of them on this day because, sooner than you know, you must align yourself with the spirit of one or the spirit of the other.

      The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. But we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them-Democritus by name-conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology.

      About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. But not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the world so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.

      The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders-ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theater, no logic, no science, no humane politics.

      Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths.

      Now, the point I want to make is that the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us-in this hall, in this community, in our city-there are people whose way of looking at the world reflects the way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. Let me tell you briefly what these ideas consist of.

      To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question-these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

      To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind's most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence in distinguishable from another. A Visigoth's language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché.

      To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday's newspaper.

      To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word "idiot." A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.

      And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste that are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledged by the Visigoth.

      Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or a Visigoth. Of course, it is much harder to be an Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths. And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our class rooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the wall.

      And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We cannot know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. But I will tell you this, with which I will close: I can wish for you no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that among your graduating class the Athenians mightily outnumbered the Visigoths.

      Thank you, and congratulations.

Neil Postman is a critic, writer, communications theorist, and professor of communication arts and sciences at New York University. Educated at the State University of New York and Columbia University, he holds the Christian Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching and in 1987 was given the George Orwell Award for Clarity in Language by the National Council of Teachers of English. He was for ten years editor of Et Cetera, the journal of general semantics. His sixteen previous books include Amusing Ourselves to Death, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The Soft Revolution, and The Disappearance of Childhood.

Courtesy of Mortimer Adler's Center for the Study of Great Ideas

http://www.neilpostman.org/

So … what do you think? I enjoyed it and it is so easy to map people onto one or the other … but of course people will have elements of both. The point is to strive so that you end up valuing things that are valuable to the community as well.

In the same way as The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity defines “intelligent” people as doing things that benefit themselves and others, this essay shows Athenians as having a sense of community and a passion for knowledge that leads down the same path.

The Visigoths are clearly a nice strong blend of Bandits and Stupidity as defined in the basic laws. Bandits because they take and take and take, and stupid because they will take it all and there will be nothing left, thus ending themselves in the process. It is pretty hard not to see the latest bank and Wall Street fiasco / crisis as having been led by Visigoths …

So … interesting stuff.

Fuji F550EXR – RAW versus JPEG – The never-ending search for the best EXR output …

2012-01-15T13:27:00.001-05:00

The Fuji X10’s legacy for me will be a much deeper understanding of how the EXR sensors shoot in RAW, and of course a fairly good handle on how to process these images for best effect.

One thing that Fuji JPEG engines do well is color. But since I am not all that sensitive to specific colors, I don’t see that as much of a strength, except perhaps in some of the skin tones I’ve seen come from the Fujis.

On the other hand, I am extremely sensitive to tone and dimensionality. The more “3D” an image looks, the stronger my visceral reaction to it. The corollary is that I cannot stand images that have been over-processed … images where there is more fake data than real data.

Extreme example: Over sharpening. I have often critiqued images for being “crispy looking: in that I find halos around all objects to create a horrific effect that makes an image look like it was printed with a misaligned color separation process on shitty news print. For some reason, many people are not sensitive to that, but I feel revulsion.

This looks like:

The extra grain and halos on every branch do not belong there. They flatten the image down to a 2D parody of a photograph. Looking like a comic. I’ve seen more than a few images posted that have elements like this … some of the worst offenders came from the HS10 a while back. And that was bad processing, as I have shown with my winter images last year. The HS10 is capable of some very nice imagery.

The Fuji JPEG engines do not do this to this degree. But they do add some data … halos abound for example as soon as you hit standard sharpening on the X10. Below that, images look extremely soft. The only cure is ACR, and I found that it is still really easy to get halos for some reason. Edges just are not clean.

Not so with the F550EXR … in RAW, I can get razor sharp edges without halos, which is the goal. So let’s move on and compare the out of camera (OOC) JPEG with a RAW conversion, and with a third image that is a bit more processed.

I have three crops to show you, each comparing the OOC JPEG directly against the RAW conversion.

Some might think that the JPEG actually looks sharper because the halos give that initial impression. And monitors can get defocused such that the halos vanish, which is why halos are ok for print output. Ink bleed takes care of them and the image that is left looks sharp on paper. But the web is not paper, and halos stand out on most monitors, mitigating the dimensionality of the image. I.e. flattening it to 2D.

In this specific crop pair, you can see that I have struck a balance between noise and detail, with a very fine grained noise visible on surfaces. But that also allows very fine details to show through, and it does not add extra data to distract the eye.

You want the visceral reaction to be “liquid” … not “broken glass” …

Here, the texture that has been lost really robs the image of important visual cues. The garbage bin might be made of plastic, but it still has some texture. The snow, chair and fence all have texture, yet these details are fine enough that the jpeg engine basically smooths them over. The edges are also problematic. Top of the chair and bottom of the table rail both have white and black halos to define the edges. This wide-band sharpening can be useful for certain kinds of output, and here it is not all that visible when you downsize, but that data is not there and when taken too far, it erodes the image’s credibility.

At least, in my opinion.

This last one just shows that texture can be very subtle. For the most part, the only different between these two is white balance. I really prefer the RAW image as it much better represents late afternoon sunlight. The Fuji jpeg engine is well known for fairly cool white balance. I find the F200 and X10 to be pretty bad in this respect, but the F550 has really cooled this image as well.

Note: In the comments, poster Andrew suggests that JPEG users can improve the white balance for the X10 using the fine tuning. And that’s exactly what I would do … throw a little extra warmth into every shot. Thanks Andrew.

Now, you could be forgiven if you consider this all just so much baloney. After all, once downsized, these images are all going to look pretty similar.

Perhaps.

Remember to click through on these, as the blog sized images have been processed by the Blogger software, and that tells you nothing.

JPEG Out of Camera

RAW Conversion in ACR

RAW Conversion in ACR plus CS5 Tweak to Tones

Actually, even at these tiny sizes, I think you get a better feeling of depth in the last two images. But that might just be me …

Saturday the 14th – F550EXR, D7000 and ZS3 – a bright (bright), bright (bright), bright, sun shiny daaaaaayyyy …

2012-01-15T00:37:00.001-05:00

Brings back old memories, doesn’t it? Johnny Nash singing “I can see clearly now” …

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

Anyway … I digress.

I decided to reply to a thread on the Fuji Talk Forum that was created by user Sunshine_Boy (tell me that’s not karmic) and test the F550EXR against the D7000 and ZS3. It was a beautiful day today and absolutely perfect for such a test.

The two formal tests are here:
http://kimletkeman.blogspot.com/2012/01/fuji-exr-dynamic-range-test-mark-1.html
http://kimletkeman.blogspot.com/2012/01/fuji-exr-dynamic-range-test-mark-2-pool.html

This is the rest of the day / shoot recorded as left overs … just some images that compare the results I got … I like how all three cameras shot, and I think all are capable of shooting in this sort of weather, even though the conditions are clearly quite contrasty.

The D7000 is shot in RAW with compensation used sometimes, the F550EXR is shot in RAW+JPG M size at DR400 at 100 ISO and again with compensation used sometimes, and the ZS3 is shot with iExposure set on, which provides the intelligence to save highlights and open shadows somewhat. It shoots only JPEG, so in some cases I processed the jpeg as if it were raw.

Starting on the left side of the back yard.

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/250s 0EV

F550EXR 100iso f/8 1/340s 0EV

ZS3 80ISO f/5.6 1/800s -2/3EV

Not really a full-fledged winner here … I’d say all did really well. I dialed in a little compensation on the ZS3 because it is an older sensor with fairly small dynamic range. I was pleased with this result. Because of the compensation, the skies look best of all with the ZS3.

The sun was blasting in from almost directly south, which means that the skies will wash out and we’ll get the sun in the image with flare etc. Let’s see how that goes …

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/7.1 1/800s -1/3EV

Well, that looks pretty decent. The shadows are a bit dark, but that was my choice. The D7000 has excellent shadow range, so I could pull them up more here, but this has a hint of silhouette and that looks right to me …

F550EXR 100iso f/7.1 1/450 0EV

The lens continues to be Fuji’s Achilles heel it would seem. Flare galore here, as would be true of the X10 as well. With ORBs on top of course.

ZS3 125iso f/6.3 1/1000s -2/3EV

Not bad. if not for the wild flare top right, it would have beaten the Fuji. As it is, I think I prefer this flare to the contrast killing broad flare of the Fuji.

Interesting how the all-purpose kit lens stomps both with ease. Fan-boys of small sensor so often speak of these kit lenses with derision, saying that you need great glass for a dSLR to beat cameras like the X10 and bridge cams. That is just total bull shit … extreme bias from people who have never shot these lenses on bodies like the D7000. Or maybe they have and just were not competent with the dSLR style of shooting. Who knows …

I have a spectacular Yellow Twig Dogwood bush over in the corner near the patio furniture. It’s best feature is bright golden branches all winter long. Makes pretty pictures on days like today.

These should be clicked through to see the details as they were meant to be seen. These smaller blog views don’t do justice.

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/200s -1EV

F550EXR 100iso f/5.3 1/280s -2/3EV

Shot a bit to the right of the D7000, showing more shadow. Handled it well, and the file looks nice even at 100%.

ZS3 80iso f/4.9 1/160s -2/3EV

This is a huge cheat in favor of the ZS3. I shot the branches higher up and caught a lot more of the beautiful golden color. This is the nicest of the three images … but what really matters is that all three did a great job.

I have a couple of enormous Annabelle Hydrangea plants growing beside the pool. Every year, they droop right in and I leave that over the winter for interest. Here, they have caught a huge snow load …

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/7.1 1/200s -1/3EV

F550EXR 100ISO f/5.3 1/340s -2/3EV

ZS3 80ISO f/4.9 1/400s -2/3EV

Hmmm … should it be this close? Very nice job by all three. I would not disagree with anyone who thought maybe the Panny won this one. Certainly, each has strengths.

A few random shots to close …

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/320s -1/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/6.3 1/1000s -2/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/5.6 1/800s -2/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/6.3 1/1000s -2/3EV

Conclusions

Well, it wasn’t really a test … but I can certainly conclude that any camera can make nice looking high contrast images with the right compensation and a bit of processing.

Friday the 13th … F550EXR and D7000

2012-01-14T23:42:00.001-05:00

My eldest is off to visit friends in the UK for a short while. He found a quite reasonably priced flight on Air Transat – a beautiful A330 by the way – for under $600 return to Gatwick. Not bad. He booked a train to catch it in Toronto and the cost still came out far cheaper than Air Canada. Of course, he flew on Friday the 13th, but everything went well anyway.

The night before, I poked the F550 out the window to see how the weather would be for our run to the train station in the morning. Not bad …

F550EXR 3200iso f/4.9 1/4s 0EV M size RAW

Earlier in the day, he spent some time on various web sites, printing off all the e-tickets etc. I shot a few images with the Afghan Girl lens at high ISO to see how it performed. It reminded me as to why I like the big sensors so much …

D7000 105mm f/2.5 Ai 5000iso f/2.5 1/160s 0EV RAW

I was up early and ready to head to the office when Nick suddenly woke up and asked me for the time. Apparently, he had forgotten to set an alarm but woke up literally 2 minutes before I was going to wake him. How interesting the mind and body are when something important is coming up.

We got outside and I spent 5 minutes shaving ice off the windows as we were in the middle of yet another freezing rain storm with lots of snow predicted for the rest of the day. I drove him to the station and dropped him there.

F550EXR 100iso f/3.9 1/110s

You can see at the exit to the platform shown behind him on the right that the conditions are blustery. We already knew that this did not extend to the Toronto area, so there was no issue with the flight or the shuttle between the downtown train station and Pearson Airport.

Also note how 3-dimensional this image looks … the F550 has the same wonderful tonality as the X10 does. It cannot handle as high ISO as cleanly, but base ISO is surprisingly close. It does not have the heavy halos that the X10 seems to have on edges ….

Anyway, I took off for work … driving on the slick roads. Traction control saves the day again … it is so very effective.

F550EXR 100iso f/3.5 1/90s

And when I came out of the office after 5pm, I was faced with a lot of snow on top of the rain. Yuck …

F550EXR 1250iso f/5.3 1/60s

Cleaning 3 or 4 inches of snow off the car … yuck …

F550EXR 320iso f/3.5 1/30s

The woman beside me had already been at it for a while … and this is the first time in my life that I have left my wipers up like this. Everyone else was doing it, so I thought I would follow suit, and the result was that they worked perfectly right away instead of me waiting the usual half hour before they would function properly.

Lots of blowing snow on the way home. It did not let up all night …

F550EXR 3200iso f/4.5 1/25s

And these are not X10-style ORBs … everything here is slightly out of focus, but it is also the best representation of what it was like to drive that night …

A short while after getting home, I tried capturing the progress of the snow …

F550EXR 800ISO f/4.2 8/10s (hand held)

F550EXR 800iso f/3.5 8/10s

The next morning, I woke up to spectacular sunshine and lots of fluffy snow on the ground. Lovely stuff.

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/320s

Since we’ve transitioned to a new day, I’m going to stop here and create a new post for that. Because I shot the yard with three cameras while testing their dynamic range in bright conditions …

That’s a moiré …

2012-01-14T14:02:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite songs by Dean Martin …

When the moon hits your eye
Like a big-a pizza pie
That's amore …

Wait … that’s not it … how about …

When the eel takes your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That’s a Moray …

Again … not where I was going. I digress …

Moiré is an interference pattern of false colors that is caused by patterns that interfere with the pattern and frequency on the Bayer sensor. In other words, when the two get too close together, you get interference patterns.

It makes sense, then, that moving closer or further from the subject will actually change the final result, eliminating the moiré at some point in either direction. Well, but a bit of a fluke, I got the absolute perfect examples of this during the shoot for my dynamic range tests. The D7000 has 16Mp on an APS-C sensor, and apparently does not have a strong anti-aliasing filter. I surmise this from the strength of the aliasing I got when shooting the chairs in my back yard. These have a plastic weave that is very regular and thus is the perfect candidate for creation of moiré.

My first shot was at 27mm EFL (effective focal length) and the second at 39mm EFL. The difference is startling …

As you can see … both chairs have a beat frequency that creates alternating bands of color that follows the contour of the chair. Very cool.

Now, zoom in just a bit and what happens …

The closer chair is now fine. But the one just a foot or two further away is still within moiré range.

That’s as clear an example of magnification versus interference that I could imagine.

Fuji EXR – Dynamic Range Test Mark 2 — Pool

2012-01-14T13:40:00.001-05:00

Looking down on my back yard through a completely open window allows me to shoot the pool without reflections off of glass.

I thought this might be an interesting data point since now we are dealing with a scene with high contrast, but not extreme as was the Oikos test. That was more like a wedding … this is more like what you shoot most of the time in snowy climates.

This test is also a bit different … I decided to shoot it at 0EV and to heck with the consequences. Interestingly, there were no consequences, as each camera handled the scene just fine.

The D7000 did a fantastic job as always … 100iso f/8 1/250s …

The F550 handled it perfectly, as should be expected with .. 100iso f/8 1/280s … (the meter is now matching the D7000 meter, which tells us that the wonky meter is an X10 thing, not an EXR thing in general) …

And again, the EXR out of cam jpeg is pretty good …

I’m not partial to overly dark shadow areas, but many people are so I fully expect a chorus of “the JPEG is better than your RAW processing” … no problem, each to his own.

And finally … the big surprise. Here, Panasonic’s iExposure is very effective, giving us a jpeg that is as good as Fuji’s. Since the ZS3 cannot shoot RAW, I thought it fair to process the ZS3 image a little, opening the shadows a bit and adding a touch of sharpening in ACR.

Note: Please ignore the little flare globules all over the image … turns out that there was a lot of dust on the lens as I have not shot stills in a dog’s age. I cleaned it and reshot some other images, but not this one. Which is ok, since it is the exposure that matters here.

Ignoring the flare, I actually prefer this image to both the Fuji images. This is something I have noted in the past … despite its quirks, the ZS3 is a marvelous camera for daytime imagery …

And finally, some crops to show you how close these really are … at least in the highlight areas. All did it fine … which pretty much tracks what I see on the forums.

The Panasonic would have failed this test if iExposure was not on. That would have required me to manage the exposure. But that’s the point … an experienced photographer wants control and can almost always get a good image. An inexperienced photographer wants automation that works. EXR works, and so does iExposure. And we know that other similar technologies work from Canon, Nikon, Sony etc …

Fuji EXR – Dynamic Range Test Mark 1 — Oikos

2012-01-14T13:04:00.001-05:00

If you haven’t tasted this spectacular Greek style of yogurt than you owe it to yourself to do so. Wow.

But I digress …

I was asked on the Fuji forums to perform a simple test of dynamic range to prove once and for all whether or not EXR technology has any real value at all. In other words, can other cameras do as well with their software based DR extension?

I am handicapped by the fact that I have only one serious compact camera that is not a Fuji, that being the Panasonic ZS3. It has the iExposure feature that seems to me to be very good at getting the right exposure, so I set that on. It shoots only JPEGs of course.

The F550EXR is the Fuji representative, and it is shot in what I now consider to be the proven best way to shoot any EXR camera, and that includes the X10. M size, DR400, lowest possible ISO.

The D7000 was shot the usual way … control highlights with –EV in RAW and process the result.

What was interesting is that I made one shot with the Nikon at –1EV (black background and sunshine lit white plastic container makes for some –EV as mandatory.) The Fuji was shot at –1EV and –2EV, and the –2EV image was used. The Panasonic was also shot at both, and the –2EV image was used.

The results are fairly predictable … the Nikon image was by far the best.

The Fuji did hold the highlights, but just barely.

In fact, the OOC JPEG is pretty good too …

And the Panasonic was hopeless. This is not a strength of that camera.

These results are pretty conclusive, although it is possible that some newer cameras like the S100, G12, P7100 etc will have better algorithms. And, of course, these others can also benefit from RAW.

The D7000 has a much larger sensor and was shot in RAW. It required very little recovery in ACR and the image is very detailed with excellent handling of the bright areas. The Fuji required significant processing to save the highlights, but the result is not bad at web sizes. The Panasonic blew the bright areas sky high even at –2EV.

Here are some crops for you see see how they would compare in an enlargement. Not much of a contest.

Remember that these images are equivalent to a 49” print viewed from 20 inches. The Fuji did remarkably well when you consider that it started as a 6Mp image. And it held the highlights, which was the most important requirement for this shot. Think of a bride in a white dress standing next to a groom in a black tuxedo and you now know why this matters so much.

For those carrying pocket cams around to weddings etc, EXR technology can make the difference between a bunch of great memories and a lot of disappointment. However, if you are willing to control exposures yourself and shoot and process RAW, then EXR does not have as much bearing on the result. It helps, in my opinion, but there is a small price in reduced resolution and the need to shoot RAW+JPG. And you still need to dial in compensation.

I’ll close with an example from a camera with really poor dynamic range, the Canon G10. I traveled on business with a coworker to Washington D.C. and we hit the mall to see what the fuss was about. If you have never stood on the mall and looked at the Capitol Building at one end in the later afternoon sun then you owe it to yourself to do that one day. Mind blowing sense of power …

Anyway … later afternoon sun blazing off the building in behind my coworker, who was wearing black and has dark black hair. The G10 of course could never have shot this successfully in JPEG, but I shot it in RAW and the result was perfectly acceptable.

Some of the tiniest photosites ever put into a compact camera and the dynamic range shown here has nothing to apologize for …

Note: There might be another test or two from the same shooting session … that’s why I called this Mark 1.

Fuji EXR with ACR – X10 and F550EXR and so on – FUNKY exposures in ACR

2012-01-14T00:30:00.001-05:00

So there was a huge debate in the last couple of weeks where a person on the Fuji forum stated that he wondered why some RAW files show up in ACR with completely funky looking initial exposures. The JPEG looks normal, but the RAW is severely overexposed. He went on to say that the exposure was easily fixed but that it was disconcerting that the initial exposures sometimes do not look right.

He was attacked incessantly by someone known for pseudo-scientific bullshit and several people had to chime in that yes, ACR and EXR are not a perfect marriage yet.

In some of my review parts, I further noted that some JPEG exposures seemed out of whack with the RAWs and that medium and large RAWs often end up with wildly differing exposures.

Something is definitely funky in the Fuji EXR RAW world.

So today I shot a couple of images within seconds of each other … ISO 400 DR400 JPG+RAW M size. Which means that the sensor is split and two exposures are recorded.

The exposures are essentially identical between the two … 1/32s versus 1/36s with the same ISO and aperture. So there should be no difference in the files. Indeed, the two jpegs match exposures perfectly. But the two RAWs … well … watch the video and be amazed. This, by the way, is a completely new behavior … and it is on the F550EXR. So this has been here all along … sheesh …

The X10 is basically the same … I still shoot RAW, but it is always an adventure

The middle class sucks an egg for decades … updated with the basic laws of stupidity …

2012-01-13T01:24:00.001-05:00

My cynicism has had a wonderful run in the last half decade or so … inflating wildly along with executive perks and salaries and in direct opposition to the top 1%’s tax burdens.

Here is another thoroughly disgusting exposé showing the disparity in the USA, which of course pretty much covers all of North America and probably a good chunk of Europe.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/01/12/mitt_romney_says_concern_about_inequality_is_just_quot_envy_quot_.html

Two quick excerpts to underline the poison in our system …

I doubt that you need this interpreted, but suffice it to say that the average salary (think middle class) was ahead of the game from the mid-50s through about 1975. We kept up for the next few years and then the wheels came completely off around 1990. The game changed and the dice were loaded.

So why are some people doing so well (the GDP has to go somewhere) and others (the middle class) doing so poorly.

Here’s a quote from the article …

Are we a poor country? No, we're not. We're one of the richest countries that's ever existed. Are we a poorer country than we used to be? No, we're not. But a very large share of the gains we've made over the past three decades have gone to a relatively small number of people.

It goes on to say …

If the gains had been broadly shared, then the burden of paying for that basic infrastructure and public services would have to be very broadly shared. But the gains have been very concentrated, and so if we're going to afford that stuff, a large share of the revenue has to come from the people who've gotten the money.

So … the rich got richer with the rich in government systematically cutting their (own) taxes … which means that the infrastructure had to suffer because the people who got the money are not kicking anything into the kitty.

And what about the middle class? Well, their jobs are all gone … offshore. The people are still here, but they are no longer in the middle class. They are the working poor.

Why do you think the government of the US has been borrowing 40 cents on the dollar just to function? Perhaps because there is no more tax base? That embarrassing debt ceiling crisis late last year shows us all just how precarious this system is. The governments are too far in debt, and they are spending like drunken sailors while allowing corporations to ravage the middle class, which in turn further reduces the tax base.

Greed. The root of all evil and deeply ensconced into every aspect of the system …

Oh well … time to go shopping. That ought to shut us all up for another decade or two while the money continues to get funneled where it can do the least good.

Update: I came across this essay on the basic laws of stupidity. It rings so true that it takes your breath away. The four sub-classes of people in the essay is one of many possible enumerations, but is one that explains stupidity as it interacts with other traits extremely well.

We have the stupid person, one who operates without rationality to cause losses to others and to himself. We have the intelligent person, one who operates with rationality to cause gains all around. We have the bandit, one who operates to cause a loss to others and a gain for himself. And we have the helpless, one whose actions result in gain for others but personal losses.

Those who, more and more, are taking the output of the GDP without spreading it around, while destroying the middle class and thus putting entire countries in long-term peril, and whose actions results in constant pain and loss to entire classes of people, are obviously and clearly bandits by the essay’s definition. And since there is obvious increasing risk to entire populations, there is a significant overtone of stupidity in those people.

You cannot have infinite growth. You cannot just “take” forever without penalty. Something will give. You might escape the ramifications (because you took all the money), but those you harm will not. They will take it on the chin. As they do every day in what used to be middle class America.

Fuji X10 – Review Part 31 – Bye Bye Birdy, a comment on the tripod mount, and some final thoughts.

2012-01-12T00:41:00.001-05:00

Yes, the X10 has gone this afternoon to Toronto … and that’s the end of the shooting phase of the test series. There will be a few more articles trickling out based on archival images, but this is a done deal. Bummer … it’s an interesting puzzle.

One interesting aspect was how much came to light over the last 3 weeks or so with respect to RAW shooting. I will be able to perform some experiments with the F550 on RAW and RAW+JPG because the basic behaviors are very similar.

I had really wanted to document the wonky maximum shutter speeds … sheesh, every second partial stop sees the max shutter speed rise, regardless of ISO. What up wit’ dat? It really makes no sense to me at all, and is indicative of how little Fuji cares for some semblance of predictability in their exposures.

Here’s one issue that I have whinged over before … but here is a much clearer shot of it:

Note the position of the tripod mount … way over on the right side in this orientation. You have to shift the plate itself all the way to the left, else it does not sit flat because the little feet bumps are only a cm or so away from the tripod mounting hole … what a strange design.

Here, you can see that getting the tripod centered under the lens (for panoramas for example) requires you to shift the plate fully left and then clamp the camera with only part of the plate holding. This design just sucks.

Some Post-Review Thoughts

Very nice feel in the hand and shoots a lot like a dSLR as far as control goes
The case sucks in every possible way
I really like that it remembers the self timer from shot to shot but not across power cycles
I really hate that it remembers macro mode across power cycles … have engineering or marketing ever shot a camera for general purpose images?
I don’t like that images are overexposed in M size compared with L size … this is a serious PITA … you need to use compensation in M size to save highlights, and you should not have to
I like the performance at high ISO … it easily beats the F550 as it should
I like the L sized RAW performance at DR100 ISO100 … not perfect, but nice I mages can be crafted
My initial thoughts were that this camera was really fast shot to shot … well, it’s quite quick in jpeg but overall it is not quite as fast as I had thought … you still wait when shooting RAW
The flash does not rock my world … but the cam works really well with external flash
I hate the ORBs … they are always waiting to ruin an image …

I may add some more as I think of them.

Fuji X10 – Review Part 30 – External flash versus internal flash versus ambient light …

2012-01-11T00:56:00.001-05:00

This is the final part to this series, unless I find something to write about later on in the archives.

I pulled out the Nikon SB800 TTL flash for this exercise. I taped up all but the center pin since I wanted the flash triggered but I did not want the Nikon TTL pins to interfere with the Fuji TTL receptors.

The two external flash images lead off. The first is 1/16 power. The second is 1/8 power minus 1/3 stops. I.e. 2/3 stops brighter than the first image (I think :-) …

I bounced the flash at a slight forward angle with a Stofen Omnibounce clone as the diffuser. This throws light in all directions and effectively lights the whole room. I let the Fuji choose the shutter speed and it went for 1/60s for the external flash images.

These are simply fabulous. Perfectly clean tones and no noise at all. The room is lit with perfect balance and the color temperature is even and accurate. I did process these a bit to equalize the final exposure, and clearly there is a lot of latitude when using flash. I’m really pleased and I cannot stress enough how much most peoples’ party and family images would improve with a little bounce flash in the picture.

And this was without any attempt at TTL. I took a test shot, adjusted the flash and then nailed to perfect images.

I put the SB800 back where it belonged and shot a series of images with fill flash. I grabbed a CTO orange gel to try to balance the lighting and set the flash at –1/3EV. And the result is ok, but nowhere near as nice. To get decent shutter speeds (needed the room’s ambient light as I could only fill from the front) I needed 3200 ISO.

It’s not a terrible shot, but there are blown out areas all over and the color balance is wonky. Balancing the light is very difficult with CF and Halogen and flash. And the X10 seems to love overexposing if you let the meter have its way.

And finally … pure ambient light. The same shutter speed as the fill flash image, but even more overexposed. Interestingly enough, I like this image just as much as the fill flash image. Everything looks brighter, but I like that despite the blown background elements. It is almost a high key presentation, and that’s a good choice sometimes.

So there you have it … external flash is very useful for interior images at low ISO. If the flash is powerful enough to fill the room of course. And make sure that you bounce that flash …

Fuji X10 – Review Part 29 – Portrait in Terrible Light

2012-01-11T00:41:00.001-05:00

I haven’t played with the flash much at all, and on the eve of the end of this test series (the X10 goes home to Toronto tomorrow morning, sad to say) I though I should do something with the flash.

So these last two parts explore two aspects of flash photography.

This one is about shooting a portrait in absolutely rotten light. Backlit by strong compact fluorescent light and front lit by very low Halogen light a long way away. My eldest volunteered to show off his Canada tat for me to try this out. I shat RAW+JPG at 3200 ISO and the the backlight was giving fairly high shutter speeds. This was not helping the dark face, so I had a choice. Use flash fill (wrong color of light) or shoot ambient at +2/3EV.

I tested both and converted to black and white with heavy processing because of the massively horrid light.

JPEG with flash

RAW with Flash

JPEG Ambient

RAW AMBIENT

The flash images were much easier to process, although the mix of light temperatures forced me to go B&W. The ambient JPEG was horrid and I was not able to recover a nice image from it. The RAW worked out adequately, but the flash images spanked it.

So if you have a backlight situation, don’t be afraid to add flash fill … but be prepared to change it to black and white if the colors go wonky. The X10 handled this pretty well …. brutal light but three out of four of these are adequate.

Anyway see that little bloom on the door edge in the ambient shots? Cool …

Fuji X10 – Review Part 28 – Movie Modes Demonstration

2012-01-10T22:55:00.001-05:00

Created a little movie today showing the various movie modes mastered in Sony Vegas HD 11 Suite at 1080p 60i.

I show all 6 modes and of course the last three are slow motion. Kind of cool. I went with the stop watch on the iPhone for this test, which shows the clock slow down progressively more for the last three segments.

It’s only about 3:30 so it won’t take long to watch … enjoy.

Published Again this Thursday, the 12th of January 2012

2012-01-10T17:17:00.001-05:00

Same image as last week … Robbi Hay, editor of the Ourtown section of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper sent me a preview of the image in situ.

Fuji X10 – Review Part 27 – The last word on ORBs

2012-01-10T10:32:00.001-05:00

I just thought it might be useful to clarify the ORBs one little bit more. Two questions:

Does higher ISO account for ORB reduction?
Do they show up in movie mode?

The answers are no, and no.

High ISO helps with ORBs, but only because it allows you to have less light falling on the sensor. This is proven by the simple test below. An animated GIF that shows a 5 second exposure at 100 ISO, where the ORBs are breathtakingly huge, followed by changing only the shutter to 1.5 seconds, about 1.66 stops down, where the ORBs shrink noticeably, and finally changing only ISO to 1600, where the ORBs stay the same, despite a spectacular increase in ambient light.

So it is strictly a function of the amount of light reaching the sensor. Just to be clear.

Click through to see it at 800px … it is a bit more obvious what is happening.

Now, about movies. Well, Fuji still have really poor ambient lighting in dark situations like this, which is unfortunate. But at least the ORBs are not a bit issue. Of course, this will be because of how little light actually falls on the frame. I suspect they are shooting at far too low an ISO …

Anyway …

Fuji X-Pro1 Sample images are available … some thoughts …

2012-01-10T02:24:00.001-05:00

So the new X-Pro1 is out. A nice looking body with a new mount, the X mount. A cool new sensor that groups pixels 6 at a time instead of the Bayer 4 pixel grouping. And the groupings are random, which attempts to simulate film and thus head off moiré.

They say that allows this camera to have no AA filter, which should bring with it some fairly serious sharpness. Not quite Foveon sharpness though, since there is still the need for demosaicing the color for each pixel.

Anyway, the sample images are pretty, and Fuji broke a long tradition by including a high ISO image. Good on them.

A quick peek at the sample images shows that we are not really able to judge much yet. The opening shot with the 18mm f/2 prime is at 200 ISO (looks like this sensor does not do 100 ISO) at 1.9s and the sky is kind of grainy with what looks like banding. Shot at f/10 in A-Prio mode for some strange reason. Aperture as high as f/10 should not be needed on an expensive prime. Weird …

The image is pretty and the color is nice. The silhouetted elements at the bottom are quite blurred. Perhaps a cheap tripod was used … that would not surprise me.

What is curious is the fairly heavy banding of the gradient from the bright parts at the bottom left into the dark parts of the top right. My TN panel clearly shows banding. The IPS monitor is better, but zooming in on the data shows that there is a surprising amount of posterization of colors.

Nothing smooth about that. The other issue that worries me is the CA. For a prime that will cost almost as much as the X10, the lights are not pretty at all.

These could be preproduction images, but I suspect that the lenses are a done deal. Of course, at typical sizes, people won’t notice much. But the X10 has a real issue with edges of things like branches, with halos and CA mitigating sharpness. I hope that this camera won’t suffer similar issues.

Caveat: Fuji took the unusual step of using Velvia film mode, which makes the color stand out but also uses a stronger tone curve. This may have affected the outcome somewhat.

The 1600 ISO image is quite attractive, but the background is even more obviously grainy. Not sure why that is, but I’ve tested the X100 and it seems nice and clean up to 3200 and quite usable at 6400 …

This one was shot at a more reasonable f/2.4, which is wide open on the X mount 60mm macro lens. The subject part looks nice, as it was intentionally shot for limited depth of field. This one is also Provia and the shutter came out to a resonable 1/58s … which of course eliminates the need for a tripod for many people. (Critical sharpness is always better with a tripod, but 1/focal length tends to make for reasonable sharpness hand held.)

Looks great at web sizes. But again the background seems noisy for 1600 ISO on a modern sensor. And again I see some posterization that is disturbing.

When you get even closer (354% here) you can see that this is not fun noise to deal with. I like noise that is fine grained. This does not give me that impression. This looks more like nasty JPEG compression issues.

Note: This was shot at –2EV, which tells me that the JPEGGs continue to be metered very hot in the X series. I really don’t like that very much …

The file size of a 16Mp camera without compression would nominally be 48MB. The file size of this JPEG FINE image is 4.557MB, which is 10.5:1 compression. That’s the highest compression I have ever seen for a FINE image. The busiest image of the samples is 7.250MB, and is thus 6.6:1 compression. That’s still fairly high compression for JPEG FINE. Perhaps this is where these artifacts are coming from …

Let’s peek at one more. Since the lack of AA filter is supposed to be a huge plus where sharpness is concerned, let’s get close to the subject on an image that has the potential to show this off.

The image on the sample site is shown rotated 90 degrees counter clock wise, but frankly I much prefer the image in this orientation.

What is fascinating here is that the background is perfectly smooth.

Now that’s more like it. Shows how great this thing might be.

This was shot at 200 ISO and f/13 (macro shot needed more depth of field) with the PROVIA film mode. DR100 was used, and that is good too, since it allows lower ISO. Shutter was 1/8 so I presume tripod was used.

Straight from the cam, the subject looks pretty awesome. The clarity and cleanliness combine for a beautiful 3-dimensional rendering. The tones are perfectly rendered with no posterization in sight. This is how images should look on large sensors.

Fuji cannot be faulted for their honesty. You can see the issues that are present in the JPEGs at high ISO and in night shots with gradients. RAW is where this thing will be most interesting. Of course, with that kinky new matrix, I’m sure that we are 6 months away from ACR support, unless Fuji got smart this time and opened discussion with Adobe with preproduction hardware available …

Bottom Line

Some concerns about high JPEG compression. Looks like skies are posterizing in JPEG FINE, and that’s not acceptable. But an easy firmware adjustment, so no big deal.

The CA on the lights is small enough that it won’t matter much, but for night shooter of architecture who want to print big (and of course this sensor should support that at this price point) there is no way that JPEGs should show any CA. Again, something easily addressed in firmware and of course in RAW with a proper lens profile (again, Fuji should be addressing this with Adobe NOW.)

So those minor glitches should be easily removed …

The real star here is the absolutely liquid presentation of that last image. Gorgeous tones and smooth gradients make for an amazing dimensionality that you see in the very best lenses and sensors. This thing could be a huge player if this is how the images will look most of the time.

Nyan Cat …

2012-01-09T03:15:00.001-05:00

No idea what this is all about, but I stumbled onto it from my friend Dana Peters’s channel and I thought it might amuse some of you.

I’ve not seen this dulcimer played before and I like the fact that the woman plays three parts. Nicely done …

Nothing Special

Snow and Ice – The Morning After with D7000 and 70-300VR

Fun with Data – How many earthquakes were there last week, worldwide? ** Updated

How many earthquakes were there world-wide in the last 7 days?

How many earthquakes were there last Monday, January 23rd?

How many earthquakes occurred in Southern California last week?

How many of those earthquakes were strong enough to be felt?

How many earthquakes were there in Canada last week?

How far is that from Ottawa, approximately?

Conclusion

Addendum 1 – Distance from the quake to me

Addendum 2 – Of the 1014 earthquakes last week, how many were strong enough to be felt?

Snow Squall – D7000 and Tamron 28-75 2.8

Well flabber me gasted … Rogers, you have outdone yourself …

We're here for a good time, not a long time ...

Martin Prosperity Report ** Updated **

Click to go to the report

Tuesday Night Storm … F550EXR

F550EXR and X10 versus P7100, S100 and V1 – these Fuji cams perform well above their respective sensor classes …

A great essay by Neil Postman

Fuji F550EXR – RAW versus JPEG – The never-ending search for the best EXR output …

JPEG Out of Camera

RAW Conversion in ACR

RAW Conversion in ACR plus CS5 Tweak to Tones

Saturday the 14th – F550EXR, D7000 and ZS3 – a bright (bright), bright (bright), bright, sun shiny daaaaaayyyy …

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/250s 0EV

F550EXR 100iso f/8 1/340s 0EV

ZS3 80ISO f/5.6 1/800s -2/3EV

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/7.1 1/800s -1/3EV

F550EXR 100iso f/7.1 1/450 0EV

ZS3 125iso f/6.3 1/1000s -2/3EV

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/200s -1EV

F550EXR 100iso f/5.3 1/280s -2/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/4.9 1/160s -2/3EV

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/7.1 1/200s -1/3EV

F550EXR 100ISO f/5.3 1/340s -2/3EV

ZS3 80ISO f/4.9 1/400s -2/3EV

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/320s -1/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/6.3 1/1000s -2/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/5.6 1/800s -2/3EV

ZS3 80iso f/6.3 1/1000s -2/3EV

Conclusions

Friday the 13th … F550EXR and D7000

F550EXR 3200iso f/4.9 1/4s 0EV M size RAW

D7000 105mm f/2.5 Ai 5000iso f/2.5 1/160s 0EV RAW

F550EXR 100iso f/3.9 1/110s

F550EXR 100iso f/3.5 1/90s

F550EXR 1250iso f/5.3 1/60s

F550EXR 320iso f/3.5 1/30s

F550EXR 3200iso f/4.5 1/25s

F550EXR 800ISO f/4.2 8/10s (hand held)

F550EXR 800iso f/3.5 8/10s

D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/320s

That’s a moiré …

Fuji EXR – Dynamic Range Test Mark 2 — Pool

Fuji EXR – Dynamic Range Test Mark 1 — Oikos

Fuji EXR with ACR – X10 and F550EXR and so on – FUNKY exposures in ACR

The middle class sucks an egg for decades … *updated* with the basic laws of stupidity …

Fuji X10 – Review Part 31 – Bye Bye Birdy, a comment on the tripod mount, and some final thoughts.

Some Post-Review Thoughts

Fuji X10 – Review Part 30 – External flash versus internal flash versus ambient light …

Fuji X10 – Review Part 29 – Portrait in Terrible Light

JPEG with flash

RAW with Flash

JPEG Ambient

RAW AMBIENT

Fuji X10 – Review Part 28 – Movie Modes Demonstration

Published Again this Thursday, the 12th of January 2012

Fuji X10 – Review Part 27 – The last word on ORBs

Fuji X-Pro1 Sample images are available … some thoughts …

Bottom Line

Nyan Cat …

Martin Prosperity Report Updated

The middle class sucks an egg for decades … updated with the basic laws of stupidity …