Photo by View from 5’2” on Flickr
I enjoy speculating about cameras and the future as much as the next guy. The trouble begins when the next guy doesn’t approach it as speculation or opinion, but rather as fact.
Starting something with “While I’ve not used either camera…” should only be followed by “…but I think I might prefer camera A because…” and not “…but clearly camera B is superior.”
Not really a fair comparison, but you get the idea.
OM-1n Viewfinder
And now…
Panasonic DMC-GF1 Viewfinder
First image courtesy www.mir.com.my. Second via dpreview.com
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. – Thoreau
You have too much stuff, and it may not bother you. I also have too much stuff, and it’s been bugging me for a long time. Yesterday I decided to do something about it. I’m calling it The Great Purge.
Everything in my house is being subjected to 2 conditions. Anything not meeting these conditions gets sold or tossed.
2a. I’m thinking of eliminating condition #2
I’ve got enough space for everything, so why bother? I read somewhere that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I’ve got a lot of treasures, or at least things that I think of as treasures. That’s a lot of places for my heart to go. Too many.
Another thing I’ve noticed is there must be some zoning law stating that every flat surface must have something set upon it. I’ve got every available surface covered with bowls, candles, planters, you name it. I don’t really like any of them. What value is there in a wire basket full of wicker balls? Bye bye.
So it begins. I am going through every room, closet, and drawer in my house. All of it gets run through the 2-condition filter and dealt with accordingly. I’ll be taking snapshots of most of the things I get rid of and posting them to tumblr.
If I do this right, I’ll end up with a lot of empty spaces in my spaces. I expect to fill them again, slowly, and this time with things that are meaningful in some way. It’s an experiment.
As someone who practically lives in Tinderbox, I love to see Mr. Bernstein write things like “I took an hour to improve the little arrows that represent pull-down menus in the key attributes table.” Tinderbox is so good at what it does that I ignore some of the minor interface things that might normally bother me. It’s nice to hear that at least one of those things might be going away soon.
He also writes that he “… can’t imagine how this can possibly be profitable.” I have no way of knowing one way or the other, but I do know that small aesthetic improvements are valuable - and always appreciated. I recently renewed my license for another year - gladly.
The need to pay attention to everything can be overwhelming. I don’t want to miss anything and I want to try everything. These needs are unsustainable financially and productivity killers.
I keep promising to hop (and stay) on the minimalist bandwagon and yet I keep buying things - all sorts of things - most of which I don’t really need.
The idea then is to counter all this nonsense buying with a combination of getting rid of stuff and taking whole segments of things off my list.
The first thing to go are video games. I buy every major gaming platform that comes out. Then I buy a dozen games for them and play them for a few hours. Then I never use them again. Besides, I’m a grownup and it’s probably not becoming of a grownup to spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours playing video games. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway. This includes games for the iPhone. iPhone games are going to break me, $1.99 at a time. Sometimes I buy them and never even play them. It’s a stupid waste of time, money, and attention.
I’m keeping the XBox 360 because I use that for watching Netflix movies. But does anyone want a like-new PS3? It’s the first to go. Who cares about Blu-ray anyway?
My Das Keyboard Professional arrived today and I’m typing on it right now. I didn’t need a new keyboard. I was perfectly content with the Apple Aluminum keyboards I use at home and office. But you know how it goes, someone on the Interwebs starts talking about a cool new Das Keyboard and how much they like the old clicky sounding keys and so on. Next thing you know, WANT! At $130, it’s not cheap, but my hands are on or near a keyboard for 8+ hours every day - why would I go cheap? I ordered one, and a set of Mac (Command and Option) keys to replace the default Windows keys. Replacing the keys was simple and quick.
The keyboard feels terrific. No frills, no silly multi-media keys, LCDs, or anything unnecessary. It’s a high quality, thoughtful design. And noisy. There’s no way I could use this every day in the office. Metadot, the maker of Das Keyboard, does offer a set of earplugs for sale, for just such a situation but the odds of that being a real solution is pretty slim.
If you prefer the mechanical, tactile feel of the old style IBM or Apple Keyboard IIs, the Das Keyboard Professional is a darn nice option. They also make an “Ultimate” version with no markings on the keys. I don’t have to fly my geek flag quite that high, though.
Recommended.
Apparently, I’ve not been paying attention to the progress being made in robotics.
When you think of SLR cameras what’s the first manufacturer that pops into your head? That’s right, it’s Nikon or Canon. It’s been that way for a long time. Today, though, we’re talking about one of the minor players - Olympus.
If you spend any time listening to people who still use film cameras, you’ll hear the Olympus OM system mentioned frequently. It seems to have an almost cult-like following. Of course anything with a cult-like following piques my interest, so I started looking more closely at the old OM cameras.
Most of the massive OM system
The OM-1 was announced in 1972 and seems to have been very well received. The camera was designed to solve 3 problems: size, weight, and shutter noise. All sorts of magical engineering went into making a small, light and quiet SLR. Yoshihisa Maitani is the man behind the design. He was quite famous for the Pen and XA series of cameras at Olympus. There are not too many rock star camera designers, but Maitani was one of them. I read somewhere that he carried a diamond-tipped pen in his pocket so he could sign his name right into the bodies of cameras when his fans would stop him on the street asking for an autograph.
Anyway, I bought an OM-1n, OM-2n and some lenses off Craigslist for next to nothing. The OM-1n, according to the seller (a geologist) had been dropped down a volcano, and it looked like it. The bottom plate was smashed in and barely fit onto the body. The mirror was stuck - half-way retracted. I wrote it off, but brought it into a local repair shop (Peter’s Camera) along with the OM-2n, which I planned to have CLA’d. It turns out the electronics on the OM-2n were not repairable. With an electronically controlled shutter, there was no fixing the camera. Surprisingly, Pete gladly accepted the challenge of the OM-1n.
I just got the the camera back and it works perfectly and looks great. I guess there’s not much you can’t fix on an all-mechanical camera. Pete straightened out the bottom plate, adjusted the shutter speeds and meter, and cleaned everything up nice. I ran a roll of Tri-X through it today, and it’s drying now. So far, it’s impressive. The body is no bigger than a Leica M, and not much louder. The viewfinder is bigger than I expected. I’m still getting used the shutter speed being on the lens mount but that shouldn’t take long. Overall, it seems to be a great camera, just like they said it was. Tomorrow I plan to shoot a roll or two of color film and try out the other lenses.
Cameras are fun.
Original photo by osiris555, chosen at random from the Flickr HDR pool
I spend a lot of time looking at photographs, mostly on Flickr. There are a few contacts that I follow and I also enjoy browsing the Interestingness area. What I’ve noticed though is that many of the “interesting” photos (according to Flickr), aren’t. That is unless you enjoy photos that have been Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. Good lord, it’s nothing but vignettes, abusive mid-tone contrast, and the ever popular, disgustingly overwrought HDR shots.
I’m all for experimentation and am guilty of the above (except HDR, yuck) but I’d like to think that someday I could live without any of it and still make a decent photograph. My tastes run different than most, apparently.
Do me a favor, shoot for a month and then skip the heavy-handed Photoshop (or Lightroom) step and just crop and maybe adjust curves and sharpen a bit. Or maybe shoot some film, scan and upload whatever you get. Throwing a half-dozen effects at a ho-hum photo, as tempting as it may be, doesn’t make it interesting.
What I find interesting in a photo is the subject, composition and context. But that’s just me.
I double dare you.
Once every summer the entire family (on my mother’s side) gets together for what we call “Christmas in August.” This way we avoid the whole issue of multi-family and ex-family scheduling that normally plagues the holiday season. I’m not a terribly social person, but it’s always good to see everyone and it’s also a great opportunity to take photos.
This year someone suggested we do a group portrait. There were about 40 people to include. I had the M7 with me and fortunately a 28mm in the bag. We were outdoors, which would’ve likely been the only option anyway. The problem was that by the time I got back from my car with the camera everyone was already lined up facing directly into the setting sun. I just shrugged, composed, focused, said “One, Two, Three, Smile!” and fired. The resulting shot is not a very good portrait, but it’s still an important picture. The more I shoot, the more I think that context and subject are all that really matters. Technical quality is just a bonus.
A photo’s technical quality may be a bonus, but I still want to improve. Next time I’ll be a little more forceful with positioning people, even for an informal portrait. No direct sunlight causing everyone to squint! Also, with that many people, each person makes up a very small portion of the image. I’d prefer something a little less grainy and a bit higher resolution than the XP2 400 speed 35mm film I happened to have. I’d use either a larger format film or reasonably high-resolution digital. When framing the shot I left too much room at the edges, knowing that the Leica’s framelines aren’t always exact and I didn’t want to accidentally leave anyone out. This meant I had to crop a bit too much for the final image, making things worse.
Next year’s portrait will be better.