Out for "ice cream" with the tantalizing trio. The Sigma Pixie "Art" lenses.

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.dom  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on an unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership.

There's always something going on in downtown Austin. This past weekend one of those events was the "Gelato World Tour." I wouldn't have known about it but my swimming buddy, Emmett Fox, is the owner of several fine restaurants in Austin and was telling all of us about the Gelato Fest after workout on Saturday. They held it in Republic Square, which is usually a deserted block of land in the middle of downtown, next to the Federal Court building. I decided to drive down and check it out. 

The weather was hot and sticky with bright sun. I took along a Panasonic GH3 body and three new lenses. I recently bought the three Sigma dn "art" lenses for the m4:3 cameras. They are also available for the Sony Nex cameras...

All three of the lenses have f2.8 maximum apertures and all three of them have a smooth, shiny metal focusing ring that gives the lenses a very minimal aesthetic. I like slower lenses for general shooting. It's my understanding that it's many times easier to design and manufacture a very, very high quality camera lens with a modest aperture than it is to even add one stop of speed. It all has to do with the precision required in shaping and polishing the glass elements. According to a Leica expert (Erwin Puts) it requires eight times more precision for every doubling of a glass element diameter. The faster the lens the harder it is to make the elements meet the design criteria. 

"Snarkasm."

Snark-asm. The leaving of snarky, sarcastic, snitty comments on blogs. Love my readers. At least most of them. But there's always a hand full that are just......unpleasant. That's why we're going back to not allowing anonymous commenters. I realize some of my readers just want to stay off the grid and others are bothered by Blogger's commenting labyrinth and I am sorry for the inconvenience but I'm spending too much time moderating smugness and sniping to actually enjoy the process of blogging so I'm dropping that feature.

Wanna say something devastatingly cute, smug and insulting? Sign up for an I.D. and I'll gladly moderate your non-anonymous comment (that way at least you know I'll read it....) and then toss it.

To all the other 99.99% of VSL readers: Thank you for coming by and reading.

Knowledge. A good differentiator.

What is the archival potential of CF cards? How long do memories on a card persevere? Were cameras any worse in 2000 AD?

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.dom  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on an unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership.

Belinda walked into the studio yesterday holding a CF card in her hand. She handed it to me and told me she'd found it in a desk drawer. She wanted to know if I needed it anymore. I don't think she assumed that there were images on it because we're both pretty good about always backing stuff up. The card was a MicroTech 64 MB (megabyte, not gigabyte) card. Records show that it is one I bought in 1999 for a trip to Madrid for a company called Tivoli (now a subset of IBM).

I expected that a fifteen year old card would be corrupted by now but I stuck it into the card reader and opened up all the files in Preview. The files originated in a Nikon Coolpix 950. It was one of Nikon's swivel body compact digital camera, sporting a whopping 2 megapixels of sensor resolution and a 3X zoom lens. It took four double "A" batteries and its native ISO was around 80.  You can buy one used on Amazon now for about $35. If I remember correctly the cameras costs about $1200 when they were new.

I used that camera as well as a few other Nikon Coolpix swivel body variants do document trade shows back in the very early days of digital, in conjunction with film. The film shots were for posterity and the digital shots for uploads to news sites and web sites.

When I moved on to bigger cameras, like the Kodak DCS 660 and 760's I handed the Nikon 950 to Belinda to use for fun, social picture taking.

The two images above are of me and five year old Ben. We're playing the Pokemon version of Monopoly which nicely combines two of Ben's favorite games.

While the images were taken with direct flash I think the camera did a good job at exposure and it certainly did a good job getting everything in focus. The skin tones are nice and there's enough detail for a decent snapshot.

I guess CF cards are decent medium/long (10 years?) storage devices. I guess I'll figure out a use for this stack of newer Sandisk, high capacity cards sitting in a stack on my desk. The only camera I have left that uses them is the Sony R1 and I think a couple of 32 gig cards will be adequate for that camera for some time to come....

The Aztec Theater. San Antonio, Texas. Some sort of micro four thirds camera....

A blast from 2009. Lighting portraits with hot lights. Time lapse video of the shoot.

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2009/05/hot-light-shoot-at-zach-scott-theater.html

Knowledge. A good differentiator.

What did I read this morning? A blog by Ming Thein that sums up why I think my 16 megapixel GH4 hits the professional sweet spot...

If you haven't read Ming's writings yet you might really enjoy his site. This blog is about "sufficiency."

http://blog.mingthein.com/2014/05/08/beyond-the-numbers-whats-next/#more-7935

Have fun. And maybe circle back and let me know what you think...

Knowledge. A good differentiator.

And while we're on the subject of economics and change..... Get ready to lose your film printers.

I walked into my local Costco today to pick up some prints I'd ordered online. They were all profiled with the latest profiles and they looked perfect. My wife sent me along to Costco with a small envelope that had three 35mm negatives that she also wanted printed. Costco had printed work for me in the past and had done a nice job. I smiled at the clerk and asked her if she would help me remember how to do a print order. She smiled that oh I'm sorry to tell you this smile and nicely told me that they no longer could actually print from negatives. No prints from film of any kind. None.

When I got back home I started doing a little research on line. Prints from negatives have fallen dramatically for mass marketers like Walmart and Costco. So much so that Costco has started designing a new generation of stores with no photo finishing departments at all. None. And many others are following suit.

But it doesn't stop with film. My quick research shows that overall print sales in consumer mass merchandizing stores, grocery stores and drug stores chains is down by as much as 40% year over year. The decline seems to match, in slope, the same relative decline that happened when digital imaging eclipsed film cameras. The slope is quicker than many expected.

My feeling is that we've hit another inflection point in our society's transformation from artifact collectors to digital information consumers. We want the  visceral delight of seeing our digital images immediately, on our little screens. We are no longer interested (as a cultural) in getting the little envelope of actual prints and looking at them and then storing them somewhere until they retire from our memories.

You will no doubt write to tell me, anecdotally, of all the people you know who crave physical prints to hang on walls and send to aging aunts and grandmothers but that may be because you are a selective and self-selected audience and not representative of the mainstream demographic for whom the machine print 4x6 was a ubiquitous (pre-digital) sharing medium. People with the ability to chose have chosen. Images are meant now to be enjoyed on screen. Not as shuffles through an envelope filled with paper prints.