Are you still sweating the small stuff?

Today, just before work, I killed a few minutes reading the latest bilious outpourings on some of the photo forum thingies. They're always good for a laugh. It's really hard to believe that people are stupid enough to say the things they do and then to put their names to it! In fact, it's very like Facebook in that people will post the stupidest things then be very surprised that what they say online can be traced back to them in reality. It's like the criminals that brag about their crimes online then are surprised when they get caught but I digress.

Lots of comments on the forum thingies indicate that way too many people spend way too much time sweating the really small and inconsequential stuff. It doesn't matter if your lipstick and nails aren't exactly the same shade of cerise. It doesn't matter what camera you have. It doesn't matter what other people say, think or do. It only matters what you do. 

By way of example, somebody was complaining about what one of the other bloggers had written on their blog. Blogs are opinions and personal views/experiences. This blog is no exception to this rule. This created a furious debate that looked pretty angry. I could almost hear people pounding their keyboard and thumping their desks in anger. But anger over what? A series of 1s and 0s transmitted over a phone line! It is totally absurd that people get so bent out of shape over such small things. It reminds me of the furore a few months ago when the head of one of the big black equality groups was dicovered to be white. Did it make a difference? No - it did not - she could have continued doing the job she had been doing yet she was pressured into resigning. It's all totally ludicrous.

I look around me and wonder when I see the rest of the human race whether God accidentally put me in the pan galactic lunatic asylum rather than where I was supposed to go. The photography forum "contributors" pretty much confirm that the world is a lunatic asylum.

Price fixing or an illegal cartel?

As many of my readers know, I'm interested in taking night sky images. In order to do this I need to add to or change my existing equipment. It seems that a new lens or a new camera or a different camera/lens combination all come to around the same price. I have thus been very interested by the Olympus micro-four thirds system on the basis of quality and convenience.

During my investigations I found that everybody is selling exactly the same package for exactly the same price. Now tell me there is no Olympus sponsored cartel or some form of price fixing! For prices to be this close - to the penny, there has to be some form of price fixing!

Interestingly, nobody is selling the camera as a body only option or an option that includes a good lens. The kit lens is pretty weak and is what kills any deal for me. I'd be interested solely in a wide lens between 8mm and 12mm or a zoom that went from 12mm approx to 45mm approx.

Well, I still can't do anything without money. I just have to wait until I get my motorhome sorted out.

Dynamic range and equivalancy

First off, let me just say that the whole issue of equivalancy is about the most juvenille load of old garbage I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. It's akin that that constant snobbery over megapixels. Let's look at some of the great photos of the past - anything by Ansel Adams for example. Nobody goes around saying FP4 - should've used TRI-X. They just admire the image. 

When digital images are considered, people peep at pixels, blowing tiny portions of images up to unimaginable proportions. The actual image is simply not considered. Instead, the technical specifications of cameras are discussed. People that do this know nothing nor care anything about photography. Such people are not photographers but gadget freaks - people that pride themselves on having the latest shiny gadgets. 

People engage in embittered debates from embedded opinions about the merits of one gadget versus anouther and their capabilities. Does it really matter whether one camera has more dynamic range than another to anybody bar a gadget freak? By the way, I despise gadget freaks to the point that I would welcome a firey chasm opening up and swallowing them forever.

Dynamic range to be simple is the number of gradations between the lightest and darkest area it's possible to represent in an image. Gradations in a photographic context are called stops but that's not imnportant for this article. While it's possible to agree that film has more of a range than digital, in no way does this demean any digital image nor a film image. Having used both film and digital, I can say that there is a difference but used well, it makes zero difference which medium is used.

Equivalency is another battleground that should not exist. Film and digital are different mediums. End of story. Neither can be equivalent to the other because they're so different. In any case, isn't it the image that is what they're both about. Taking a photo of the same scene with a digital and a film camera just to compare the merits of both is just plain idiotic.

The modern term for people such as those that fret the small stuff over camers is measurebaters. I still use a Canon XT. It's 11 years old. It still works just fine. I have considered getting something different for various reasons. I could get a whole new system or another camera of the same brand but more recent or I could get a new lens. The only kind of image I can't take with my current setup is star photos. Sure - I'd like to be able to do that but it is just one kind of photography. Maybe tax refund time will allow me to experiment.

In truth though, photography is my hobby while my life revolves around other things. I am tremendously annoyed by measurebaters as they serve to do nothing but repulse me. I truly question what kind of God allows such beings to slither like Eve's serpent upon the surface of this earth!

in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti

Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine,
et lux perpétua lúceat eis.
Requiéscant in pace. Amen.

We are here today, dear friends, to mourn the passing of Google's Picasa. Often neglected and often ignored, Picasa has been one of the wonders of the digital age. Able to cope with every file format and every brand of digital camera, Picasa has for many years been the software of choice for photo manipulation and cataloging on most of my computers.

Running Linux - Picasa's there. Running Windows - Picasa's there. Running Mac - Picasa's there. Running BeOs - you're an oddball! Picasa was one of those universal applications that was actually pretty darned good.

The future is apparently Google Photos but that means uploading photos to Google's cloud. I don't know about you but I have more than 15GB of photos (more like 50GB) and I have no intention of buying space on Google's servers to store them when I can pay for a hard drive and store it in a firesafe.

Google's cloud has several problems - as in fact do many.
1. It requires a constant internet connection. No connection, no photos.
2. It uses a lot of data. A single 8 megapixel RAW file is 8MB. Now imagine taking a hundred or so photos on a day out. That's almost a gigabyte. Now think of people like me, in an area not served by telephone lines nor any form of cable service who is reliant upon cellular or satellite connections. That kind of data is expensive! 10GB on HughesNet is $80. 4GB of cellular data is $40.
3. You are reliant upon the data being available. What happens if Google goes bust or if they decide they don't want to offer photo storage any more? They dumped Picasa so why shouldn't they dump Google Photos too?
4. Privacy - do you really want that saucy photo of you and your wife in matching balarina outfits online where hackers and government stooges might be able to find it?

This whole move toward cloud storage worries me greatly. It's not just the reasons above but also the way the population in general is becoming increasingly guillable. Why is Google offering online photo storage? It's dead business for them - the first 15GB makes them no money so what's in it for them? How are they making money from it? If they're not making money from you then there's no reason for them to care about keeping your data for you. There's no contract to enforce either. It's also not beyind the realm of possibility for somebody to read something that isn't there into the things you store online and to find enough "evidence" to produce a convincing case against you for whatever.

I for one will mourn the loss of Picasa. I have yet to see another photo program that I like as well. Aperture was good but clunky. I mourn the loss of Aperture too.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam,
ad te omnis care veniet.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Help me! I have 250,000 photos!

Once in a while, I lack ideas for my blog. Today was one of those times so I headed over to one of those iniquitous photo forums to read what kind of assinine drivel was being published. Seriously, if those people realised how easy it was to trace them from their postings then I'm sure they'd be unhappy. It's as bad as Facebook - if people all realised that the asinine drivel they post can be seen by their employers, I'm sure they'd say something like "so what". The problem is that the "so what" attitude that is very prevalent is the undoing of so many people. It's as though there's a mental block that people have - they cannot see that what they post online can be read by people that might be able to make their lives difficult in real life.

So, today somebody posted they had 250,000 photos and had taken them all over the last 4 years. I though I was bad with about 20,000 photos. The problem is that because digital means that photos now do not have an individual cost, people just aim their cameras and keep shooting in the hope of getting a good photo. They don't realise that 20 very similar photos of a grapefruit just aren't that exciting and will never be worth any money whatsoever. The media is full of garbage about people selling photos for lots of money. Fact is - nobody can be bothered to disprove garbage like that. It gets posted, reposted and becomes yet another internet "fact".

Film because of its cost makes judgement more important. People will look at a scene and ask "is this worth photographing" and they'll ask "can I just buy a postcard instead". Because people took fewer photos, they took more considered photos. The photo albums of old had mainly photos of family. Vacation photos were of important and intreaguing things, not a blow-by-blow photograph of everything. Nobody wants to see your breakfast - not even you. Nobody wants to see your hotel room - not even you. Nobody wants to see what your holiday conquests look like - not even you.

Let's just face it - if you take too many photos then it'll just be so much of a nuisance to look through and you'll end up just forgetting about the interesting ones. To resolve this, apply two simple rules to all you photography.
1. Never take more than 1 photo of a subject - if the subject is badly posed or bad, it'll be the same in every repeat photo.
2. Limit yourself to only photos that are worth taking. 

Today I have taken 4 photographs and I used my cellphone for those. They simply illustrate what's happening on my bus conversion blog. I have not taken photographs with a DSLR on continuous of any of my subjects. To be blunt - who wants to see a million images of a piece of steel I just welded? Over the last week have taken no photographs.

Which do you prefer to see? 

I'd bet you prefer the carefully framed photo on the right - taken in Vilnius, Lithuania. The photo on the left looks more like Facebook garbage.

Going forward, I'd like my readers to take fewer but better photos. Be the curator of interesting images rather than the hoarder of every image.