Eye-Fi and other bizarrities of the digital age

On the face of it, an eye-fi card sounds ideal - seamlessly upload images to Flickr and Picasa while walking around town. The reality is painfully different.

On a whim, when one of the office supply shops was closing, I went in and purchased their very last Eye-Fi card and slipped it into my car video camera (I have a DV camera on my dashboard to record idiots doing stupid things). When parked for the night, the car is well within range of my wifi. The card could not upload a thing as its wifi was too poor.

As the card is only produced as Secure Digital instead of Compact Flash, I had to obtain a converter to use it in my camera. It didn't seem to get on too well with my camera or was it the converter and thus was unusable.

Out of curiosity I dug out one of my infrequently used surveillance cameras which takes an SD card and tried it in that. No go - that didn't seem to get on too well either. I moved my car camera indoors to within 10 feet of my router and it picked up my router then began to transfer with painful slowness, one of the videos. A VGA video that took 2 minutes to record would take 10 minutes to upload.  That wasn't too promising.

In the end I put the card on ebay and sold it for pretty close to what I paid for it in the closing sale and enclosed the warranty information too. The buyer seemed happy enough. I'm glad I'm shot of it.

This brings me onto those SD to CF converters. They don't actually seem to be that reliable. I had to have two before I got one that only kinda-sorta worked.

Standardisation seems to have gone right out of the window - a different charger needed for every battery. Every camera takes a different battery - each model from each manufacturer takes a weird new battery - just like mobile phones.

The only positive thing to have happened in the past few years is that European governments got stroppy with the manufacturers of electronics and demanded standardisation with chargers. Hence most chargers now use micro USB connectors. That makes a load of sense though mini-USB would have been more robust and easier to insert. I wish they would get stroppy with them over batteries and demand standard battery sizes. I remember when the standard was 6v lantern battery, 9v PP3, D, C and AA and no other batteries were used. A standard for watch batteries would be good too - there are way too many varieties around. When the conversion charts couldn't find the battery in my watch, the lady in the shop and I started studying the available batteries for voltage and dimensions before selecting one that seemed to fit and work.

There's a lot in this new electronic age that just doesn't quite work. Eye-Fi is one of those things.

An open letter to Canon

Dear Canon,

For years we have used your products but you have started to lie on your laurels. The past 5 years has brought out nothing new and nothing really worthwhile.

Sure - you've rehashed the 5D several times, rehashed the 20D many times as well as rehashing the Digital Rebel many times. These are just rehashes of tired old products. A two year old could have been more innovative.

I am an avid photographer. I love photography. I am very disappointed by the cameras available in 2014 as they are so little different (insignificant tweaks excepted) from my 8 Megapixel 30D. When I go out taking photographs, do I take my 30D? Hell no. I'm more likely to use my phone camera (which is also 8 megapixel). Yes the 30D images are clearer and technically better. The problem is that the 30D and none of the current Canon line-up really cut it any more. I certainly wouldn't spend money on something that's not really any different from my 30D.

What can you do to rescue the situation? Think about it - a camera manufacturer whose offerings are eclipsed by a mobile phone camera! Let me offer you some suggestions and explain why my mobile phone is my camera of choice.

• My phone is small and almost always in my pocket. You need to make your cameras and lenses smaller. That Canon EOS M was an April Fool's joke, wasn't it. You do have something better that you're waiting to release that's actually compact, don't you?
• My phone puts GPS coordinates on every picture regardless of whether I'm in a cellular coverage zone or not. None of the current Canon cameras do that. Sure - you sell a GPS add-on unit that makes you look greedy and incompetent. GPS is just an itty bitty little chip that would run happily off the camera battery. I'm certainly not paying $1K+ for a camera then God knows how much extra for an add-on GPS unit that should have been built-into the camera.
• My phone uploads images via wifi as I pass through a wifi hotspot so that when I get to enter my blog, I can just select an image to include easily without having to mess about with moving my memory card from the camera to a reader or connecting my camera to the computer via a cable. It's all done wirelessly and before I even sit down. Sure - I could use one of those Eye-Fi thingies to do it and in fact I actually had one but found it so poor in use that I threw the miserable thing in the trash.

I suggest, Canon, that you pull your finger out and get to work. It's time to stop resting on those laurels - they're flat enough already. You need to start doing the following (perhaps some other manufacturer will do it first and I'll end up switching brands):

• Put a GPS logger into each camera
• Put a wifi connection into each camera. Bonus points if it works automatically with all wifi hotspots worldwide without needing a touch screen.
• Make a truly smaller mirrorless camera. I'm sorely tempted by the Nikon 1 system and that's a big hint about the direction I could well go in.
• Do some genuine innovation. Slightly bigger sensors, slightly more megapixels, live view - they don't count - that's just playing games.
• Invest in LED flash units.

Take note, Canon, I'm watching you closely and will happily jump ship if there's no great improvement from you when my 30D dies. I simply don't care about losing money selling the flashes and lenses - they've lost so much value already that I just don't care any more.

 

The Yellow Pages is something that's well past its sell by date. This is what happened to the Yellow Pages that was delivered to my house. I have no need for a chunky great lump of rainforest that's heavy and tricky to handle.

I'm amazed that such a waste of resources continues to be produced. All of these chunky great directories end up in the trash just like this one. I hate to think how many trees are murdered just to produce landfill like this. If I had a fireplace, it would probably have made excellent kindling but I don't so it just becomes landfill.

I rather suspect that if Canon doesn't shift its collective arse and produce cameras that are as easy to use and as useful as a mobile phone camera, that Canon will become a mere footnote in history.

Photography 101 - Finances

Why you should not spend money on photography if your intent is to make money from it. Included is an answer to criticisms of the previous video.

The great ink rip-off

It has been written about many times by many people but printer-ink is the biggest rip-off of modern times. It has been described as more expensive than vintage champagne.

The printer used here is an HP 7000 Wide Format printer - the one before they made the 7000i wireless printer. It works just fine so there's no reason at all to upgrade. Purchasing this printer was actually a bit of an error. At the time the attraction was that it was wide format and the idea was to print 11x14 prints to go into a portfolio or to hang on the wall of a local cafe for sale. That never happened so in fact an all-in-one printer would have worked better for me.

One of the major obstacles to home printing is the cost of ink. It's worthless printing photos at home because of that cost. Sure, it's fast and the quality control is better than that at say Walmart (where it's non existent). Generally though and I worked this out using the costs for an Epson printer, printing at home was just not economical. It was handy if one needed a print quickly but in general it was better to get them made elsewhere. It seemed to be at least twice or three times the price to do it oneself. Where the kicker is - if it's just a single print then doing it at home is cheaper. If it's several then it's way cheaper to get it done elsewhere.

The major problem with printers is wastage. Put a sheet of paper in and it might go crooked or misfeed or the ink might not lay on it correctly. The last Epson printer ever used here was terrible - it would put the expensive pigmented ink onto the paper and the ink never soaked into the paper which meant that it would just brush off when it was dry. It didn't matter which paper was used. The result was the same. At $100 for a full set of ink cartridges, it wasn't more than a couple of sets before that printer was on ebay and good riddance. This location is now 100% Epson-free and will remain so until the end of time. That wasn't the only sour experience of Epson printers either. Ink falling off the paper was just the last straw for Epson.

Ebay seems to have good value inks. Bearing in mind an ink cartridge is a chunk of plastic (which is cheap enough) with some water and pigment inside, soaked into a sponge and you'll see why inks are so grossly overpriced. Full bottles of ink can be purchased for next to nothing - enough to fill a whole lot of cartridges. The plastic cartridges are churned out by various manufacturers.

The problem with the off-brand cartridges is that quality control is in the hands of the buyer. If the cartridge is bad, the buyer has to return it. With the name brands, quality control has to be done by the manufacturer or they cannot justify the ludicrous cost. Look at these two ink cartridges:

Both cartridges fit the HP 7000 printer. They're both 920XL cartridges. The grey cartridge is made by HP and the other is made by some other manufacturer. The difference in cost? Well, the HP cartridge was $35 in Staples and the other brand was $5.50 for two cartridges on eBay. That's quite an appreciable difference!

As stated before, buying the non name brand is a lot cheaper but quality control is in the hands of the buyer. In order to prevent people from using cartridges made by independent manufacturers and sold at honest prices, the printer manufacturers put chips in their cartridges making them into disposable electronic devices. Then they make the cartridges expire after a certain date or certain amount of uses and make them non-refillable. A fellow from one of the research outfits actually got 38% more printing out of each cartridge by disabling the chips. One of the problems with off-brand cartridges is that very often they don't read as having the same amount of ink as the named brand despite having the same weight of ink. In order to break the anti-competitive monopoly, Europe banned printer manufacturers from blocking other manufacturers from making compatible inks for their printers.

The black ink cartridge is $16 from HP direct. Staples wants $35. For $29 it's possible to buy a brand new printer cheap printer with ink cartridges included. Indeed in Britain at one stage, Lexmark printers were so cheap that people bought new printers rather than buying the ink to go in them.

People go on about the costs of import but honestly, they're nothing. I used to work in an import broking office. Let's take candles as an example. Candles are subject to 108% import duty. They're made so cheaply in China that they're imported by the container load and still undercut domestic candles. Importing is dead cheap too. A 40 foot shipping container carried from Shanghai in China to the port of New York by ship would take about 3 weeks to get there by sea. It would cost $4,000 for shipping it plus the customs duties on the contents. Think how many ink cartridges would fit in a 40 foot shipping container. That's 40 feet long, 8 feet high and 8 feet wide. That's 2,560 cubic feet. Even allowing for plastic-wrapped shipping pallets inside with cardboard boxes full of printer cartridges, that still means that a heck of a lot of ink cartridges will fit inside. My HP920XL cartridge measures 3 inches by 1.5 x 1.5. That's 6.75 cubic inches. 2560 cubic feet is 4423680 cubic inches. That would be enough space for 655,360 printer cartridges or enough printer cartridges to make importing from China very attractive. According to US customs, printer inks are zero rated for duty. 

Printer cartridges are so cheap to make and sell that the Chinese are shipping them airmail for very little money. As an example, I just looked and a full set of 5 cartridges for one HP printer is $16.84 shipped via airmail from Hong Kong. There's a minimum order of 6 sets but that still works out as dirt cheap. Compare that to the $35 for one single cartridge via Staples.

The public is being ripped off by all the ink resellers. Even HP charges $16 for the same ink cartridge that I can buy from China for less than a dollar. Wake up, people! Even airfreighting a meter square box of cartridges from Shanghai would be cheap enough to start up an ink shop in your town. Even charging $10 a cartridge for ink, you can undercut the big box retailers so massively that it's not even funny. 

HP etc is most likely getting their ink from China too. At about $1 a cartridge they're making something in the order of 1600% profit per cartridge. Printer ink is the great rip-off of the 21st century. Have a look here to see what I mean. http://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/ink-cartridges-for-HP-Printer/314853_211836895/2.html

Photography 101

This is the first installment of what is intended to be a series of videos on photography. In this installment, Zephod Beeblebrox introduces the series of videos and explains why professional photography for profit is a myth swallowed by suckers.

Why a Blackberry probably isn't a good choice for photography

I am guilty. I had a Blackberry. For email it was pretty good. The screen was minuscule and the keyboard gave rise to an RSI injury called Blackberry Thumb. For a bit of fun, I took the blackberry with me when I went to Britain. The photos it created are pretty appalling. On the other hand, the little town in Wales where I tried it out as a camera (thank goodness I had my real camera with me) proved that it was just as appalling for photography as it was for pretty much everything else save emails.

Needless to say, the town I went to was a fairly rough seaport town with huge drugs and alcohol problems.

The overall grottiness of the camera pretty much suits this picture. I have no idea what sin city is but it sounds like a brothel. Knowing the town, it probably is.

Since abandoning the town when I left to live in the US in 2005, it seems to have sunk more into the depths of depravity than I can even imagine. Just about every other shop seems to be a gambling den, a brothel, a bar or a sex shop.

There we are, what did I say - a gambling den. It's very interesting that in poor areas, vice is the main preoccupation of the population.

Hard to believe but in 2012 when I visited this little town in Wales, there was an HMV present. That's probably become another bookie, brothel, bar or pawnbroker by now.

It probably didn't help that the entire time I was in this town, it was either raining, threatening to rain or foggy. This is one of the problems with seaside towns.

A brothel. I believe there are quite a few of these sordid establishments around Britain. The only good thing is it concentrates all the hookers, pimps and Johns in one place - handy for the police to round them up.

Two pawnbrokers shops in one small town. Right next door, a prepay mobile phone shop. This does not look great.

Yet another gambling establishment.

Since I was last there, the central bus station had undergone a complete transformation and I didn't feel like I was going to get mugged going in there. At least that's how I felt until I saw the price to visit a toilet there. I was lucky to leave with my scalp intact!

The central market where locals flock to buy overpriced, elderly produce that's been sprayed with glycerine to make it look shiny and fresh.

Finally, a Baskin Robbins. What on earth is that doing in such a dump of a town? Did somebody misplace it on the map and accidentally drop it there? I can't understand this at all.

This is a travel photo entry that didn't make it to my travel blog due to the general grottiness of the photography. Instead it remains on my photo blog as a classic example of why one should never use a low-quality cellphone camera. Compare the photos above with the one below from my Nexus 4. There's quite a difference. I would be and am happy to post photos from my Nexus as actual photography.

Buying cameras - the whats, the whys, the wherefores and the costs

Buy a camera? What do you mean you want to buy a camera? What on earth are you going to use it for? Isn't your $500 smartphone miracle of technology thingummy good enough any more?

Those questions will be left to those making the decision to by and willing to part with a large wad of their ready earned cash or perhaps a large wad of borrowed money for which more wads will have to be returned to the lender than was borrowed. Needless to say, this author thinks very dimly of all forms of borrowing, particularly when it will never have any return on investment.

What do you mean, never will have any return on investment? Well, how much do you want to spend? Do you realise that you're going to have to earn back that much in order to break into profit? How much profit do you think a single photo job will earn and don't give me that baloney about buying a camera and doing thousand dollar weddings every week. It's never going to happen. A newcomer is never going to get more than the crumbs that the professionals wouldn't touch and many professionals are going bust and going out of business. Perhaps you're going to compete with the $100 wedding photographers from Craigslist? How many of those are you going to have to complete to pay for the equipment - even if you get more than a single wedding? 

Let's look at the costs of the cheapest shoot and burn wedding session. You have to meet the client the first time to peddle your wares. Then you have to meet them again to shoot the wedding. Then you have to hand over the CD within half an hour or meet them again at another date. With gas prices of $3.20 a gallon that's 3 trips. Even if they live within a gallon's travel then that's 6 gallons (1 each way) or $20 of income gone instantly. Add another dollar for the CD and case. Maybe you stop for a snack on the way. It easily becomes $30 gone so the $100 wedding is only getting you $70. Add any extras and that $100 could easily become far less.

Now let's have a look at cameras. For the serious and determined photographer there are two ranges - the mirrorless camera and the camera with a mirror. Both are available with a wide range of sensor sizes. This is where things begin to get a bit problematic. It has been argued that the larger the sensor, the better the image quality. A better starting point is just how big do you want to print?

What size are the common prints? The standard always used to be 6x4, 5x7, 10x8. People want everything supersized now so perhaps 11x14 or 16x24. There really isn't enough room in the average house or apartment to hang the latter two sizes. 

That print is an 8.5x11. See how much of the wall in my small house it takes up. Certainly I could have a much larger print but it would be almost the size of an entire window. I could have several prints but would imagine 3 would be ample for this wall.

So, assuming most people's walls are bigger and they want to use an 11x16 or 16x20 print then how many megapixels are needed? By my calculation and using 150dpi as a good measure, a 16x20 would be 2400 x 3000 pixels. Oddly enough that's 7.2 megapixels so an 8 megapixel camera should do nicely.

People get so bent out of shape by pixel density. Below 75dpi it's not really possible to see individual dots. 150 is really handy. 300 is overkill. Unless you put your nose against the print and use a magnifying glass, in which case you really need to get a life, then 150 is perfectly fine.

Where does all that leave the vast majority of cameras? Right in the available range - that's where. Nothing has too few megapixels to use. From the Nikon 1 to the Pentax Q up to the so-called full-frame cameras. Honestly, people make way too much fuss about sensor sizes. The sole time - the only time - when sensor size becomes an issue is with noise control. That only comes into play when you want to use high ISOs. Having used digital cameras for years, I have to say - I barely ever use anything other than ISO 100. I would have no qualms in getting a camera that had poor high ISO noise control on the basis that it would be acceptable on the basis that it's hardly ever an issue.

That leaves you, dear reader, with total access to the least expensive cameras. Given that the chance of reselling any of this electronic and camera gear for anything approaching a realistic price is absolutely minimal, there's absolutely no point whatsoever in spending a ton of money buying it in the first place. In fact, the less you buy, the happier you will be when it's time to dump it and move on.

My personal preference at the moment is the Nikon J3. The J1 was good but the J3 has vastly improved noise control. With the two available lenses, the range is from 27mm right the way to 270mm in a very small package. The whole lot would fit into a very small space. Not just that but with the way prices are plummeting, it's very affordable. In the days of film, I carried two bodies, 6 lenses and the whole lot weighed so much that if I moved quickly I could hurt my back. I believe I carried around 40lbs of camera gear. This has been reduced in the J3 to very manageable proportions. The J3 weighs 7.1 oz. The two lenses - the 10 - 30 and the 30 - 110 weigh 4.1oz and 6.2 oz respectively. That means that the whole lot all told weighs 17.4 oz or 1.01lbs or 494 grams. This is a totally insignificant weight for such power and versatility! In terms of cost, that whole lot costs around $656 which is near enough the entry price for just the camera with a digital SLR setup. 

What kind of photographer are you?

The Texas tourist. The Texas tourist is ready for trouble and often sports a zoom compact and a .45 single action. Texas tourists don't take nothing off nobody nohow.

The urban tourist. The urban tourist is out to have fun and take photos with their friends but is prepared for things to go bad as they can in a second in a city. The Urban tourist carries a 9mm automatic and a zoom compact.

The Papparazzi - the Paparazzi photographer is ready for action. He carries a single camera and travels light. He is prepared to slip into a function and to defend himself if things go sour. His 9mm slips nicely into his pocket without causing an unsightly bulge.

The photo journalist. The photojournalist can be sent into inner cities where the threat of violence is everywhere. The photo journalist carried a well protected camera bag and a .357 Magnum in case some meth-head won't leave him alone.

The Urban enthusiast - he likes to take photos for fun. He is well aware of how bad cities can get. Perhaps in his wanders he accidentally wanders into a bad area - easily done. He carries a .357 Magnum to ensure he gets out alive.

The Prepared photographer. This guy means business. Not only does he have his well protected camera and a .357 Magnum. He is also prepared for attack by wild animals or drug runners. This photographer can generally be found along the Southern US border, prepared to deal with drug dealers or on the Northern border, prepared to deal with Canadian insurgents.

What kind of photographer are you?

Calumet closing

Today was going to be an entry on another matter. That has been put back a day or two in light of today's events.

About an hour ago, the news broke that Calumet Photo - one of the largest camera chain-stores remaining in the continental US is closing after 75 years in business. There are no further details on this at the moment. This should not come as a surprise to anybody. Even the Calumet website is down with Google unable to locate the server.

According to rumors received, managers of various branches knew that this was going to happen, months ago. These things just do not happen overnight; closing an entire chain usually takes months of planning.

The photography industry is today in its greatest crisis ever. Cameras have been so oversupplied to the market that they have totally lost their value to the consumer. They have become expensive throwaway items. The public has tired of being scammed into upgrading and replacing, hurling more and more money into an abyss for maybe just a few measly extra pixels or features (that they were happily living without until some advertiser told them that they were thoroughly miserable without them).

What is happening is just like the sub-prime mortgage scandal that caused the great depression that we're currently wallowing in. Camera manufacturers conspired to be like the phone companies, producing new cameras on an ever increasing replacement cycle. Then after years of taunting customers with truly minuscule "improvements" they encountered a roadblock. Just about everybody now has a camera with an adequate number of pixels and they just don't want to upgrade or buy a new camera until their old camera dies. I myself use a Canon XT (2006) and a Canon 30D (2006). I also still have and use a Canon S1 IS (2004). So there we have it - my cameras range between 8 and 10 years old. They still work just fine.

In combination with this, people's requirements have changed. People want to post their photos online. They use their smart phones to take photos and to post them online. People don't want massive prints any more. They prefer all their photos to be in the cloud for instant access from anywhere. They don't need massive resolution any more. Most photos displayed are at most 1024x768 pixels. Even 10x8 tablets don't display at much greater resolution than that. Going to greater resolution is just incredibly anal because most human eyes cannot determine individual pixels at that resolution without pressing one's nose against the screen and looking like an idiot.

So, we have a proliferation of smartphones that take pictures of adequate quality which in themselves are of far higher quality than most film photographs were back when film was still used. We have a lack of requirement for prints. We have a lack of requirement for excessive resolution. We have a need for instant sharing of images.

This does not look good for camera manufacturers or for camera resellers. I posted a few days ago about my complete failure to sell Canon flash units. It seems that the resale value like that of cameras, because of the incessant replacement cycle has plummeted so much that people are beginning to put a halt on their equipment purchases. Years ago, lenses and cameras were an investment. They didn't change much. I remember buying cameras and lenses years ago and then selling them a few years later for pretty much what I paid for them. People are now realising that the technological treadmill is a scam. Look at the way people have stopped buying laptops and desktops and are now making do with what they have. I use an elderly Macbook from 2007. It's 7 years old. It does everything I want and bar flash no longer working on many websites, it's fine. It does my word processing, my web browsing, my email and my photo processing. I don't need more.

So the honeypot has run dry for manufacturers and resellers. Calumet is vanishing as did Ritz. Camera manufacturers are desperately trying to make their cameras more user-friendly by producing bolt-on wifi options etc. It's all too little, too late and at too high price.

Why should Joe Soap buy a camera that costs $300 when he can get a smartphone for about the same or even less and have all his photos upload instantly to Picassa, Flickr etc? The image quality is just fine. The phone has a capable LED flash. It photographs scenes and documents in enough resolution to be able to read the print. I myself have photographed legal documents and sent them for review, with my smartphone.

What can a camera do? Well, it can take photos that are nicer when viewed at greater size. The camera has to be connected physically to the computer to upload the pictures or the memory card has to be transferred from the camera to a reader and the reader connected to the computer. Then the photos can be uploaded. Then they have to be uploaded to the file sharing site. That's an awful lot of extra steps. Not to mention the extra cost of the camera.

The days of the mass camera market are numbered. The days of the mass camera retailer are numbered too. It echoes video rental stores and music stores. Videos and music are still produced. Nobody buys them in stores though. This is all part of an industry-wide adjustment.

Anybody that goes out to buy an full priced digital SLR or a full priced interchangeable lens compact is a fool. In ten months the price will be half what it is now. For the vast majority of people, a smartphone does everything better, faster and easier. I use my smartphone more for casual photos than anything else.

The flash is dead!

Flashes are history. They are of no particular use to anybody any more so why buy them?

The proof of the pudding is in the prices. Years ago, a really good flash would command a really high resale value. That's history. Nobody wants to buy used flashes even at half price now. An unused flash that just a couple of years ago cost over $550 won't even go for $275. This flash (some of it is still in its original plastic wrap even) has been advertised on Craigslist, eBay and Amazon with zero enquiries and zero takers. There has been zero interest. It doesn't matter what the price is. Nobody seem to care enough even to look at the adverts. The hit counters remain at zero. That just seems strange when a range of sale prices have been tried and identical secondhand units advertised in exactly the same manner seem to go for a lot more.

Why the complete lack of interest? It could be that nobody wants to buy a top of the range Canon flash. This cannot be true though because if it was then Canon would not have continued to develop the range to include a wireless flash triggering system to replace the current infra-red system.

Could it possibly be that the economy just sucks and people are no longer prepared to buy equipment? This is a definite possibility. Reportedly the camera companies are struggling with Digital SLR sales plummeting amid stiff competition from smartphones, zoom compacts and the new mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.

In the meantime, there are two of these flashes for sale and nobody seems to be paying the slightest attention. It has become such a waste of money advertising on eBay and such a waste of time advertising on Amazon that they're now occasionally advertised on Craigslist and left in a storage unit. Eventually that storage unit will probably be cleared out and if they're still there, they'll probably just get tossed in the garbage.

What on earth has happened to replace them? Camera manufacturers have been producing for years cameras with ever higher ISO. Higher ISOs have become freer of digital artifacts with the end result that they can be used without a flash.
This photograph was shot at 1600ISO, hand held in a very dingy night club. The actual exposure was 1/25th and the picture is not bad at all. Give that an ISO from one of the newer cameras of 128,000 and that exposure would have been 1/200th of a second. Use the latest of 256,000ISO and that's 1/400th exposure - enough to freeze even fast motion. Are flashes now just an anachronism dating back to the days of old when pioneer photographers used to pile magnesium powder into hand-held flash units that they would ignite manually.

Given the current high ISOs, it makes sense that flashes are now of ever less demand. It would further make sense that ever lower powered flashes are needed. Indeed, the simple LED flash on many phones which illuminates a scene so well could end up being the preferred method of illumination for digital SLRs. Already Canon has at least one flash with a built-in LED modelling light.

LED flashes have a lot to recommend them to be honest. They're small, low power consumption and they are fast. Typically the fastest flash from a standard unit is about 1/38,000th of a second. From an LED that could be as low as 1/1,000,000th of a second. A flash like that, assuming decent output could well freeze a bullet in flight.

Now why exactly are the top of the range Canon flashes not selling secondhand? It's hard to say because LED flashes have not yet been developed for DSLR usage. Not everybody wants to use high-ISO images with grain either. Is there something wrong with the advertising? That's unknown as the wording is copied from adverts that apparently sell. What is the issue? Unknown. All it means is that there's $1100 of electronic trash taking up space in a storage unit.

Twitter banned. Distraught Jack Dorsey turns to the bottle.

Forgive me, gentle readers, for straying from my normal presentation for this photography blog. Today I'd like to give you an account of something that happened today on my way from my office to my apartment.

It was dark. Trillian gathered her jacket around around her to keep out as much of the early March chill as she could and walked briskly, her heels tip tapping on the cold hard paving slabs. Above, a sodium streetlight flickered and buzzed ominously. Somebody had urinated against the wall and the smell of urine made her want to choke and vomit at the same time. Holding her scarf against her face she picked up speed to get past the odour.

A dog howled in the distance as a train clattered nearby. A lone police car sped past, its lights flashing. Meanwhile from the shadows eyes watched her. A rough and dirty hand with long ragged fingernails grasped an empty bottle. Trillian walked onward toward the railway bridge, unaware.

Trillian stepped onto the pathway underneath the railway bridge just as a train rumbled overhead, shaking the connectors loose on the lighting circuit. Wires dropped and dangled, sparking brightly as the lights died. She was in darkness. The smell of urine had become a lot stronger now

The smell of urine became almost totally overpowering and she could hear something shuffling and sliding toward her. She could not see where to run and stood, frozen in fear. Suddenly she heard a match being struck. A bright light flared. It illuminated a dirty, haggard face. Her pulse raced. Her heart was in her mouth. She was scared. She knew not where to run. A dirty hand grasped her wrist in an iron grip. A voice spoke. It was carried on a breath of alcohol and oral decay.

"This way Miss, lets get you onto the street. There's potholes in here." The voice said, bathing her in the fetid aroma of oral decay and alcohol. To that was added the scent of urine-soaked clothes and sweat that hadn't been washed off in months. As she was navigated with the aid of a series of matches she could hear the hobo's clothes making cracking noises.

They emerged on the far side of the tunnel, bathed by the light of a sickly blue neon sign. The grip on her wrist was released. She looked to see the face of the hobo. There was something familiar about the bloodshot eyes amidst the dreadlocked hair and the scraggly beard. "You look familiar" she said, looking the hobo up and down from his bare feet to his shiney combat pants and torn denim jacket. "Don't I know you?" she enquired.

Surprisingly, the hobo knew her name. "Trillian" he said. We used to visit the same Starbucks, five years ago. Suddenly she placed him "Jack Dorsey" she said - the guy that used to own Twitter before it was banned". He nodded. "Yes. After that, my empire crumbled, creditors demanded, shareholders demanded and I ended up with nothing. I've been on the streets ever since". Trillian remembered his disappearance which was tinged with regret because she owed him a coffee.

The ruins of the Twitter empire

Trillian remembered well the ban on Twitter. It started in Britain with a squabble over freedom of speech. Some lowlife had cursed at a politician and that had raised calls for Twitter to be regulated. Britain being already on the way toward becoming the totalitarian regime it wanted to be, regulated Twitter. In true Chinese style, all Twitter usage in Britain was now channeled through servers that could identify who was sending each message and where they were when they sent them. Slowly the rest of the world's repressive regimes followed suit. Russia then Turkey and so on.

The US was the last to implement regulation and control over Twitter users who by now were being rounded up by government detention squads for anti-governmental tweets in many countries. Slowly over the course of about two years, Twitter began to lose users. By the end of the second year, Twitter's user base was so low that advertising revenue ceased.

Trillian remembered the day when her Twitter account finally started coming up with an error about the service being unavailable. She had used Twitter for her photo blog. She had built up with automated follower adders about 15,000 followers over several Twitter accounts. Each account had been broadcasting the address to her photo blog. An extra account had been used to update her photo blog as a live feed with input from Foursquare. She'd used Twitter to update her Facebook account and of course her Foursquare updated Facebook via Twitter too. Suddenly all that stopped. The Twitterverse was silent.

Trillian worried about the impact this would have on her blog - not being able to reach new readers via Twitter; not being able to update her blog with a live feed. For days she was panic-stricken and watched her blog hit figures avidly. When were the figures going to drop? When was her advertising revenue going to be affected. How were people going to find her blog without Twitter? The questions raced through her mind.

A van pulled up almost silently appearing like a ghost from the darkness. The engine was off, the doors were open, the lights were off. Men in dark overalls and masks piled out and grabbed Jack Dorsey. In the dim light, Trillian recognised the men as being part of the President's special operations executive who had been tasked with rounding up undesirables. "You never saw us" a voice hissed at her as one masked man shook his head and another drew his finger across his throat as though it was a knife. She shuddered in fear. She knew what that meant.

Trillian walked away from the bridge, wrapping her coat still tighter around her. Memories flooded back. She remembered how she could find no effect of not having her photo blog advertised on Twitter. There was no increase in traffic despite the 15,000 Twitter followers. Indeed she suspected that most if not all of the 15,000 followers were actually just bots. Checking her page hits she found nobody really went to the contact page where her Twitter feed was located. Indeed she calculated that only 0.01% of her total all time photo blog visitors has ever visited the contact page. The vast majority of those she suspected were her own hits from checking how her pages looked.

Trillian pondered for a moment, as the rain that had begun as a mist a few moments earlier turned into a steady drizzle that quickly soaked her hair and began to run down the back of her neck. Twitter hadn't got her any web traffic despite the phenomenal number of followers she'd had. Twitter as a feed had not generated more than one contact enquiry. She began to wonder whether Twitter ever really had any purpose behind it. Indeed, she really wondered whether any of the effort she had put into something that had looked so promising had been worth the bother.

Trillian reached at long last the stairs to her apartment complex and entered out of the rain. Did she really care that the renowned head of Twitter had been rounded up by a goon squad? Not really, she decided. She had put Twitter on because it was there. It had soaked up a lot of her time and had got her no profits nor even any increase in readership. Trillian entered her apartment for the night.

Camera sales crash through the floor!

Maybe it's a little of an exaggeration but it seems than none of the camera manufacturers are doing at all well at the moment. On the other hand, photography using smartphones is roaring away. People are turning to their smartphones now as their primary photography tool. This is happening so much that digital compacts have all but vanished and the prices of ultrazoom digital compacts has plummeted.

Let's take a closer look at why this has happened. Let's also take a closer look at what manufacturers can do to halt the decline.

On a smartphone, there's plenty storage for videos and photos. All the photos one wishes to take can be stored on the smartphone. My smartphone - the Google Nexus 4 - uploads photos from the camera to Picasa web albums automatically. When needed in a blog article, they come straight from Picasaweb to the blog with no uploading or linking needed. It's very nice. It's also possible to write blog entries and upload photos on the go. Adding photos to all of the online services like Twitter, Facebook etc is all very easy too.

How about a camera? It takes better photos yes but to get photos from a camera to the computer I have to pull the card out of the camera or connect the camera to the computer then transfer the files. Sometimes this works automatically but not always.

The major issue with cameras is their almost total lack of usability. If I'm out taking photos and want my friends to see them, I have to rush back to my computer to upload them. There's no instant gratification.

How do the camera manufacturers fix this problem? Simple - do what a load of other wifi gadget makers do and reach an agreement with public wifi service providers. Eye-Fi, for example, allows uploads using an Eye-Fi card via the AT&T wifi networks without a login needed. Similarly Nook devices can use the same AT&T wifi networks without logons needed. What is needed is a menu setting on the camera to select the photo-sharing network of choice. Somehow account information and a password need to be entered - this can probably be achieved by simply coding it on the SD card using the computer or via button pushes on the menu. WiFi can easily be added to a camera and set to operate either automatically or when a button is pressed. Imagine sitting at a cafe while the photos upload to a selected photo sharing website without having to do a thing. Maybe even to multiple photo-sharing sites.

One of the major problems encountered by digital SLRs is that using an Eye-Fi card that uploads only JPEG images is that often if the photography is JPEG + RAW, the JPEG images are always full size. It would be better to have a choice of JPEG image sizes to be bundled with the RAW in order that only smaller JPEGs can be uploaded in order to save online storage. Very few people need an image online of greater than 1,200 x 800 pixels or 1024 x 768 pixels.

With images uploaded automatically either via WiFi to the photo sharing sites or via bluetooth automatically to the user's phone to be shared, a huge obstacle to ease of use is eliminated. This integration with web or phone needs to be seamless. Perhaps it needs to be initiated by bluetooth and the phone just copies the file sharing networks the phone uses.

Unless something like that is done soon, the future of digital SLRs and zoom compacts are numbered. The camera manufacturers need to start thinking about making something else other than cameras. How hard can it be to add something to the menu?

Making money from photography

How on earth do you make money from photography - there're lots of people doing it, aren't there?

No - not at all. There are a lot that claim they make money from photography and in their minds they probably do. I am reminded of some friends of mine from college. We, being young and foolish, went to the amusement arcade and played the one-armed-bandits. One of them was somewhat of an expert on playing them and advised us all. My philosophy was I'd blow £5 ($7.50) and walk away. Really and truly all I wanted to play was the shoot-em-up space invaders games. He wanted to gamble so we all joined in and watched the expert lose his money then we followed his advice and lost most of ours too. At one point I had almost got all my money back in "winnings" from the machine at which point he announced that I'd made a profit and should take everybody to the pub for a beer. Then I pointed out that I still had less money than I walked into the place with. That was when I should have walked away. Like a fool I didn't and the one-armed-bandit walked away with it. Now the moral of that story is that it's very easy to see a little return on investment as actually income. It's not - it's a partial offset of capital outlay.

The camera companies are in business to make money. They are out there to sell the image that if you buy an expensive camera, you will make money using that camera. This is why all the camera unveilings are so glitzy. Look at the images put with the cameras on the website. It's all selling the image that if you have that camera, you can also take photos like they have on their website. They have dancers, well lit scenes etc. It's all sales - selling you the illusion that you will make money. Money is, of course, never mentioned but rather implied by the glitz and glamor.

The vast majority of photographs online are now not taken with a digital SLR but rather with a compact (these are fading from production) or by the more currently prevalent smartphone. The number of photographs taken has exploded over recent years. When photography was done on film, it was normal for a casual photographer to use maybe one roll of film every couple of years. Enthusiasts might use a couple of rolls a day and professionals up to half a dozen rolls a day. Now the interesting thing is that even people that would never have picked up a camera back then now have cameras on their phones. They use those cameras and send photos via online services. Amazon has a feature for most smartphones where it's possible to take a photo of a product and then Amazon will tell you how much the product costs at Amazon. Whether people realise it or not, everybody has become a photographer.

This is a photo I took in my car after buying some Vegan cheese. It got sent to friends almost immediately. This is just how ubiquitous cameras have become.

Many things have happened within a very short interval. Photography has transitioned from film to digital. Cameras have started to be included in just about everything and just about everybody now has a camera. Not only that but compact cameras have all but died out, replaced by cameras built into phones. The original poor quality of the digital image now surpasses that of film to the extent that many movie theatres now show solely digital content. Many cameras have scene detection built in which combine with framing aids that tell the photographer how to take the photo. It has got to the point that anybody can take a really good photo without really trying. Even underexposed faces are lightened automatically by the camera.

With that background, is it surprising that I doubt seriously that professional photography can limp further into the future as a genre by itself. To sell, photography needs a gimmick. It's no good to have a studio in the main street and to charge people for photos or photos of themselves with fluffy bunny foo-foo. Those can be obtained for next to nothing at various locations and people can do self portraits with their smartphones. Look at any dating site and see how many people photograph themselves in the bathroom mirror or how many use self portraits.

A while back I wanted to pair with facepainters to do facepainting and photography. I advertised in various places and got a grand total of 3 facepainters making contact. One never could manage to come to an interview and after her second cancellation, I told her that I thought she would have just as much difficulty turning up to work as she had in turning up to an interview. Another agreed to do it then pulled out just before the first session, claiming that it wasn't going to work for her. The last one was a timewaster who always claimed her paints were going to arrive and never ever seemed to receive them. That's despite the paints cost $1.99 in just about any Walmart. My rule was I do the photography, the facepainter supplies the paints. I paid the stall expenses and we split the takings 50/50. That was a totally wasted summer. Not one single facepainter turned out not to be a total flake.

So what about other ideas since photography by itself just will not sell. I never could come up with any to be honest. My best attempts at making money from photography are my books on photography and my blogs on photography. They do make a little money but nowhere enough to live on. Nor have they even offset anything much of the cost of equipment. Why I purchased more equipment than I needed or wanted was simply because somebody had sold me on the idea and convinced me that photography was a winner as a business idea when their actual aim was somewhat less wholesome.

In terms of sales of photography, the best I managed was 3 bookings in 5 years. Oh, I did all the usual advertising stuff and websites etc. Money went out in bucket loads all to no avail. The website showed no hits from one week to the next despite having been optimized. The only hits were when I landed on the site using other computers on other networks to test the hit counters. The phone never rang with people enquiring about photography. The website was never visited. I had advertising on the sides of my vehicle. I had flyers, I had a portfolio in my car at all times. People would ask to see my website so I'd hand them a business card so they could see it. The hit counters never changed. I would have understood it if people viewed my work and said it sucked. Nobody even attempted to look. It wasn't the photography. If it had been the photography then somebody would have had to have seen it or to have asked to see it.

Of my 3 sales, one turned out to be a fraudster. I should have known better. It was a dodgy area of town. They had pit bulls in their front yard. They wrote a check drawn on a closed bank account. The other two were much better. One was a government agency and the other was somebody that wanted photos for their boyfriend. I met the latter a couple of years later and they wanted more photos but never got back in touch. A grand total income there of a loss of about $220 on one and income of $225 on the other two so in total my income was $225 offset by a loss of $220 so basically $5 actual income over 5 years. That's from straight photography. What a waste of time and effort!

Now having painted that dismal picture, I do actually make money from photography. Photography is a supporting item to my writing ventures though. I wrote two books on high-speed photography. They make money. I saw no reason to withdraw the first edition when I published the second. If I do a third I will not withdraw the first or the second. Those books make money. They don't make huge retire rich sums of money but they do make a few hundred dollars a year. Similarly this blog makes money. Again, not huge sums and it doesn't actually pay for my internet connection but all combined, it makes money. In fact I'd say that the books and blogs have made far more money than I ever made in my entire life from photography.

If your idea is to make money from photography then you need an angle. What's your angle? Mine is writing. I write and include photos. Wedding photography is allegedly a big payer - the angle there is the fantasy. Having said that, wedding photographers have been wiped out by digital which means any money can blaze away taking thousands of photos and come out with the half dozen that the professionals always used to provide. If you're going to sell just photography then you're always going to struggle to come up with the price of a Big Mac.

For all those who do not wish to listen to my cautionary tale, let me further add to the tale. I have been trying to sell the stuff I just don't use. In the time I had the photo business, I spent probably about $8,000 on equipment which is now worth maybe 10% of what I spent. Not only have the cameras reduced so much in value that the only way I'd get the purchase price back is by donating them and taking the donation as a tax break but other things have reduced in price. I had a bunch of light stands and other studio stuff. I ended up bundling about $500 of stuff for $175 as a job lot. Nobody was interested. I advertised it for months on craigslist. Forget eBay and Amazon - they want money every time and I'd have been well out of pocket. I'd set a deadline in February that if it didn't sell by January that it'd go into the garbage skip down the road. It finally sold in December.

I see things going on eBay etc for low prices. I put exactly the same advert up and yes, it does go but for half what the previous low price was. As an example, Nook Colors were going for $75 so I put mine up and it did go - for $25. At that kind of price, it was debatable as to whether just to cancel the auction and toss the damned thing in the garbage instead. I think after postage and auction fees I had maybe $10 for my $100 Nook Color.

Right now I'm investigating how much I can just donate to get rid of. A few days ago I heard somebody asking whether they should buy a grip for their camera. My question was had they been able to get the photos they wanted without it. If so then what imaginary problem would a grip solve. It's too easy just to buy garbage equipment. Unless you are making an absolute mint from photography then you absolutely do not need more than one or at the very most three lenses. You absolutely do not need more than one body. Do not buy an expensive body. Buy the cheapest body you can find - it will depreciate with the glide ratio of a grand piano. Whatever you buy has to pay for itself so the less you buy, the sooner you will be into profit. Don't get the Fancy Nancy Canon flashes that are about $700. Get a cheap eBay Yonguno flash that'll set you back maybe $60. Nobody cares what your equipment looks like. Nobody ever asked what equipment was used to take Moonrise over Hernandez. Nobody but an gear worshipper really cares.

The $10,000,000 question as to why I started a photography business? Well, let's say it wasn't something I wanted to do personally. I wanted just to have a camera and take a few pictures occasionally that people might hang up in a cafe and sell on my behalf or cover maybe a function for people I knew for whatever came my way. I did not in any way want a business license nor a "business". That got imposed on me and although I tried, I never could and still cannot see any way on earth photography on its own can make any money. I'll be honest, I was delighted when I finally realized I was trying to live out somebody else's bad idea and since they weren't around to insult any more by dumping the miserable affair, I could ditch it. Thus I ditched that business license in December. I don't need it for my books or my blogs.

High Speed Photography

High speed photography is a bucketload of fun. I tend to prefer the destructive side of high-speed imaging or as one can say to describe it politely: photographing materials failure. There is definitely not much in the way of artistry involved. The lighting is basic. The techniques are complex and it will give you a headache in more ways than you can possibly imagine.

Before anything else, let me plug my two books on High Speed Photography. This is the first edition which is still available and should get you started. This is the second edition which expands on the first edition and corrects a few minor details that I wasn't that keen on. The 3rd edition (if there is a 3rd edition) will eliminate the reference to a website that I no longer operate, listed on the back cover.

The basics are you need a flash that will dial down to 1/128th power or whatever the lowest power you can achieve. I've used a Canon 580EX2 for these photos dialled down to 1/128th power or around 1/20,000th of a second illumination. The briefer the illumination the better. These days I would recommend NOT getting a genuine Canon flash but rather one of the cheaper Chinese clones or even an old Vivitar 283 as they're a tenth of the price and do exactly the same thing.

This is my favorite photo - a pellet from my air pistol has just entered the glass and exited the other side. What you're seeing is the shock wave of its passing through the colored water. One flash used to illuminate this and a sheet of black paper behind. 

This looks more dramatic than it actually is. A lightweight airgun pellet captured as it was stopped by the middle crayon. It didn't have enough power to break the third. 

Turning the table. Instead of smashing things up with an airgun pellet, I shot the pellet at a razor blade and photographed the pellet as it was cut in two. Interestingly the pellets at this range even had time to tumble given the number I saw that were not cut neatly in half lengthwise. That surprised me greatly.

So, having shown you a few photos of high-speed imaging (all of which are in the books), what equipment do you need? These were all shot with a Canon XT, a Canon 580EX2, a Canon 18-55 (non IS) lens with a cheap ebay skylight filter to protect it from fragments. I used black paper, some wood, paint and an air pistol. The air pistol was mounted in a little stand I made for it. The photos were all taken after dark in a semi-dark garage. A tripod and a light stand were used as well as an audio trigger. This picked up the sound of the gun firing and fired the flash. It had a delay unit built in that allowed me to dial in a delay so the pellet had time to travel before the flash fired.

Read all about it in the books. I suggest this book as being the best for you. 

Rear curtain synch

Most digital cameras have something called rear-curtain synch. This means that the flash fires just before the second curtain of the shutter closes. Perhaps I need to go back to basics for people that didn't fully understand what I just said.

Most cameras have a shutter that opens and closes to let light in for a brief period in order to make the exposure. This can take one of three forms. Some cameras (which won't be discussed here) have a leaf shutter which is a blind that raises and falls over the film. This means that the top of the film does indeed have a fractionally shorter exposure than the bottom. Some cameras have a vertical travel shatter or a horizontal travel shutter. A few have the shutter built into the lens. Just to complicate matters, some electronic cameras don't even have a physical shutter.

Digital SLRs and some of the Interchangeable Lens Compacts have shutters. As these are universally horizontal or vertical travel, where there are two shutter curtains, it's possible to use rear curtain synch. In normal operation, the flash fires as soon as the first shutter has fully opened. With rear curtain synch, the camera knows that the flash is going to be between 1/15,000th of a second and 1/40,000th of a second. Thus, about 1/20,000th of a second before the second curtain closes, the flash is fired. As normal flash synch speeds are up to 1/250th of a second, any variation is unnoticeable.

In this photo, the shutter speed was 1/15th of a second. The movement is the green blur. That happened before the flash fired. This is in contrast to a normal flash exposure which would have frozen the green part of the image and the rest would have been blurred. It was just something that I tried and didn't get great results with and never really felt the urge to try again. I have seen great results with this technique but they're few and far between. In the camera and flash catalogs, there are plenty such photos and they look great. Real world application, however? I have yet to see anything really that benefits from the technique.

It just seems to me that camera manufacturers are piling capabilities into cameras and flashes, not because anybody really wants or needs them but in order to persuade people that they do need them and that they really do want to pay extra in order to have them. All 90% of people need from a flash is that it illuminates the scene well. Canon's has a lot of facilities and then costs $700. An equivalent flash without all the bells and whistles will do everything most people really need and will cost maybe $70. This is what I call trashing a camera range. Canon has trashed their entire camera range by adding too many features and jacking up the price too far.

Spy cameras - very James Bond

When Rachel and I were in Macon, Georgia a few days ago, the television news had an item about somebody secretly recording Supreme Court proceedings on a hidden camera that had been sneaked past security. I am entirely unsurprised by this as with the advent of digital, cameras have become very concealable. I commented on this article first, here: http://www.britinthe.us/2014/02/ocmulgee-national-monument.html

A long time ago, in the dim and distant past, I had occasion to need cameras capable of recording covertly. Most recorded video though some record stills also. In this article I will show some of these cameras.

This is the pen camera. It's rechargeable and unscrews to reveal a full sized USB connector. It can be used to take video or still images. On video it takes about 90 minutes before running out of power. Video is stored on internal flash memory.

This is a tricky-dickie little beastie. This will take video or stills or record audio. It doesn't have a USB socket but does have a jack socket that connects to a USB cable. It looks just like an ordinary watch and records about 90 minutes of video. This would certainly get past any security people looking for cameras.

This is a pair of sunglasses? No - not really - the central dot between the lenses conceals a video camera. This can be worn reasonably inconspicuously to record video. Eat your heart out Google, Google Glass is merely a clone of this idea. I have had these glasses for several years.

This is another camera. Again, it's tiny. This takes a micro SD card. Again it records for a couple of hours but the big difference is this camera can be hidden somewhere and is sound activated. Thus, if there's any noise, it starts recording and it records excellent quality VGA video. It's very good for use in court cases.

This is an electrical socket? No - there is a camera hidden in the center. Again, this is sound activated and records video. This can simply be attached to any wall with double-sided tape. Recording is done on a micro SD card. VGA video again.

This is a very nifty little clock. It's a digital clock that does work. The whole thing runs off AAA batteries or it can be mains powered. It'll run for a couple of days on battery power. The indentation on the slider on the left is in fact a stills camera. It's motion activated and will time stamp each frame. I have used this countless times as who looks at an inconspicuous clock as a surveillance device. I've captured unauthorised intruders on this very successfully.

The next question on your lips is going to be how much were they. The answer is they were dirt cheap. I don't think the whole lot cost more than $100. With the exception of the clock, everything came from eBay. The clock came from B&H.

I don't have any current image samples from them. The old images are all evidential and thus not suitable for public display. I have no intention of powering up any of these devices again unless I have a specific need.

So, spy cameras in the Supreme Court? I see no reason why that should not be an every day event. I've seen them concealed in buttons, bow ties, coins, brooches, pendants, rings, books, potted plants, picture frames, televisions, lamps, flashlights, binoculars. You name it - it's out there and available cheaply on eBay.