Light and Shade II

My laptop is broken. The video card has failed, and it’s certainly not worth having it fixed. So that means it’s new laptop time - or at least it will be when I can afford it. In the meantime, I’ve managed to get my ancient laptop going again - it’s a Celeron 550, with 192MB of RAM and a pathetically small hard drive - and a completely knackered optical drive. It runs - well, crawls - XP. Time to see if Damn Small Linux will make it run any faster as a temporary browsing machine…

They just don’t seem to get it, do they? Carlsberg are to close the Tetley brewery in Leeds, home since 1822 of Joshua Tetley’s finest. OK, it’s far from the greatest bitter in the world, but it’s as much part of the fabric of the city as the Corn Exchange, the Town Hall or Leeds United. Well, probably more so than the Whites, actually… but the point is that for all that it’s a national brand these days, it remains a local brew. Never mind that those brewers who actually promote cask beer don’t have declining sales. The decline in sales is probably more to do with the marketing directions Carlsberg has taken and the fact that they’ve ignored the local and regional importance of Tetleys as anything - rebranding the brewery as Carlsberg was never going to be anything other than cultural suicide. So now they intend to finish the job. Tetleys brewed in Northampton? Who would want to drink that?

Utter, utter madness.

Photoshop CS4 has a new B&W mode, and I’ve been fiddling.

I’ve taken an existing small JPEG (for speed) and applied just the presets - results are as follows:

Man Traps and Spring Guns

A pic from the weekend…

…the Ken Rockwell of photography.

There’s a very funny skit at DPReview that’s well worth a read, but what is it that gets people so wound up about Ken? I personally think his site is pretty amusing, but then I don’t take much of it at face value - as he warns visitors not to. But some people really take umbrage - my pet theory is that Nikon owners don’t have much of a sense of humour, but if not, why do they use Nikon cameras in the first place?

This week’s “Fuckwit of the Week” award is presented jointly to a bunch of sad arseholes who don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about.
Canon have launched the EOS 5D Mk II - sure, it’s not the perfect camera for all uses, but then such an animal doesn’t exist. Instead it’s a camera that offers exceptionally high resolution, with specs upped in all areas from the frankly brilliant 5D, my favourite camera of all time. Including Rolleis…

So what are these twats saying?
“It’s not very exciting.” Really? A camera that brings the highest level of resolution to a much more affordable price point. A camera that offers HD video as a little extra - not exciting? Well fuck off to Alton Towers, pillock.

“3.9 FPS isn’t fast enough.” For who? How many people shoot regularly at higher speeds? Sure, there are some, and this camera’s not for them, but for most people, it’s more than fast enough, surely? Except those who are more worried about the size of their equipment than what to do with it…

“It’s too expensive / a rip-off in the UK”. Well, it’s not a cheap camera, for sure, but it’s less than the 5D was at launch and about the same as the D30 was all those years ago - and it’s a lot more camera than either. It’s also pretty competitive with the Nikon D700 and the Sony A900. And above all, it’s a fucking “recommended price”, not what it’ll actually sell for. How hard is that to understand?

And there’s more of very similar. Yet how many of these wankers were actually in the market for a full-frame DSLR? None, of course - they don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about.

It takes a rare talent to cock up such an excellent race as yesterday’s Belgian Grand Prix, with thrilling racing and plenty of incidents. But it seems that the FIA have an embarassment of riches when it comes to such talent, and they’ve totally fucked up what should’ve been a golden opportunity for the sport to recover from recent negative publicity. There are those who insist that it’s all down to Hamilton not driving a red car, but I always prefer to believe in cock-up before conspiracy. In this case, it’s a sodding great cock-up in that it has reinforced the conspiracy theories amongst thousands of F1 followers, and can only do the sport immense damage in the long run. So my inaugural Fuckwit of the Week award goes to the FIA race stewards.

According to Zeiss themselves, “ZE” lenses are coming. Now I assume that’s not a reference to Mamiya’s ZE range of 35mm SLRs, nor to the Olympus flavour of Four Turds, but to Canon’s EF mount. If so, it should open up choice a little more for Canon users, particularly for ultrawides.

Went to Birmingham for the second time in a week on Saturday evening, intending to have a balti at the Royal Naim on Stratford Road, for years my favourite balti house by a long way. And it was gone! In fact Stratford Road seemed stripped of Balti Houses, and Stoney Lane not much better. There were still a fair few on Ladypool Road, thank goodness. So what has happened to the Balti Triangle, and especially the Royal Naim?

This is one that is almost inevitably put about by 4/3 devotees, who can be a very strange lot at times. However, the heart of the myth is that there’s little difference in physical size and further that the difference is eroded in practice due to cropping required to make the images from 3:2 format cameras fit standard paper sizes - one site claims APS-C is only effectively 14% bigger than 4/3.

So, let’s look at the facts, shall we?

The dimensions of Canon’s APS-C sensors are 22.2 x 14.8 mm - that’s 328.56 sq mm. (I use Canon for a comparison as the dimensions of the imaging area are known - Nikon quote total sensor dimensions.)
The dimensions of the 4/3 sensor are 17.3 x 13.0 mm - or 224.8 sq mm.

So the difference is 103.66 sq mm, which means that the APS-C sensor is 46% bigger than the 4/3 one.

Now, let’s look at common paper sizes.

6″x4″ plainly is in a 3:2 ratio. 7″x5″? Well, that’s 2.8:2 or 4.2:3, so cropping on either format.
10″x8″? 2.5:2, or 3.75:3. A4? 2.83:2 or 4.24:3. And so on - it’s clear that there’s no magic advantage for 4/3 for popular sizes.

So it’s clear that unless you’re incapable of elementary maths, 4/3 suffers from a pretty significant size disadvantage compared to APS-C. Does that matter? Well, it means that for a given pixel count, the pixels have to be considerably smaller, leading inevitably to greater noise.