I've been waiting to see what may replace my G1 on the shelves and Panasonic seems to have done an interesting job of diversification, model feature splitting and new features.
The new G10 seems at first like a dumbed down G1, but is actually quite a light weight coming in at about the same weight as the GF-1. So unlike the GF-1 the G10 gives you an EVF (not as good as the G1 or G2) and video.
Richard Butler at Dpreview has done a good write up of the G2 on their site.
well worth a read...
Sunday, 7 March 2010
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Tallin - Estonia in winter
Last weekend we went across the lake to Tallin (yes, I know some people call this barely salty barely tidal lake with an inlet to the sea a sea, but well I've just said what I think)
Being an ex-soviet place its only since 1991 we've been able to get there ... so, here's some images ...
The place has a long history, back into medieval times, so the town square of the old town is quite interesting.
climbing up to the ramparts of the old walled section of town you can get good views (even if you aren't making good panorama's with your camera)
there was this fella up there to show us around ...
The remaining sections of the old walls make interesting stuff for one like me from the "new world"
with towers looking very nice in the winter.
lots of olde churches in the old town too
and really cool stair ways up into the walls
Greek Orthodox is a major influence in the area ...
no matter how tough the weather, the little old ladies keep going to mass...
Looking around the old town there are lovely old homes ...
but clearing snow seems to be a drag
as you can see Tallin has had an amount of snow this year too...
sorry about the lack of chatter ... but there you are ... what was in my view :-)
Being an ex-soviet place its only since 1991 we've been able to get there ... so, here's some images ...
The place has a long history, back into medieval times, so the town square of the old town is quite interesting.
climbing up to the ramparts of the old walled section of town you can get good views (even if you aren't making good panorama's with your camera)
there was this fella up there to show us around ...
The remaining sections of the old walls make interesting stuff for one like me from the "new world"
with towers looking very nice in the winter.
lots of olde churches in the old town too
and really cool stair ways up into the walls
Greek Orthodox is a major influence in the area ...
no matter how tough the weather, the little old ladies keep going to mass...
Looking around the old town there are lovely old homes ...
but clearing snow seems to be a drag
as you can see Tallin has had an amount of snow this year too...
sorry about the lack of chatter ... but there you are ... what was in my view :-)
whats the point
This subject of this post is inspired by my (sadly many) problems in getting staff at professional image businesses to grasp some basic points about digital imaging. If I'm off track here I would appreciate someone setting me straight.
If I put a dot on a page, would you call that a point? I would ... here's a page with two points.
If it was arranged in a grid pattern each of the grid squares could become a pixel, which would also be a point, although it might not be the dot we started with ... but I'll get to that?
The problem is understanding how you name and describe your points, you know, the ones which make images up (not the points I'm making here).
Personally I can't really think of a reason to describe a lone and solitary point, and remembering names is hard for most of us, so having 18million is like remembering the population of Australia by name. Coordinates may be good, but that's so mathematical.
Now, while we're thinking, in the real world points must be somewhere and if they are somewhere we can measure that. God (in her wisdom) gave us the inch for measuring things (even the inch worm measures the marigolds right?), so why not use that as our basic measurement. Thus we can describe our points in some ways:
But I wish it were so easy, as there's people out there who consider that there are all sorts of points it seems:
the list goes on I'm sure (as I can see pica in some software too, so no doubt some olde typesetters out there prefer that). Where I see simplicity, others see confusion.
So what's my problem and how is this related to the above confusion?
Well here's a typical scenario, I've got some film (say a sheet of 4x5) and I want to get it scanned so I can get it printed on one of those fancy Durst Epsilon printers. I ring up one of the top 3 professional labs in a Capital City in Australia and ask the question:
Sad, this place used to be so good when they just dealt with my film on Durst Enlargers and printed onto paper with light from a bulb .... still, they've only been digital for 10 years now, can't rush this sort of thing. Awfully technical ...
To compound this I regularly see on the various internet forums when people ask questions about scanning and get drowned in TLA riddled answers.
I'm never quite sure why a question like:
needs an answer that mix n matches lashings of DPI, SPI and PPI unless the major purpose of the answer is to provide lots of EWV (which is extra wank value for those not in the know on that particular TLA).
I'm an old fashioned guy in the digital age, so for me the thing which is centric to digital imaging is the pixel, you know, that little dot which makes up the screen you're looking at right now.
As I see it, digital images are fundamentally composed of pixels, which is essentially a fancy computer name for a dot.
Describe it any way you want, a pixel is a point to a computer and is a dot to me. It might be a coloured dot, it may have only grey tones, but it is a dot. Printers lay these dots down on to paper (often blurry and indistinct as to the left) and screens light up and show us each dot as a square (if its a TFT monitor as the image above) or a blurred dot if its a CRT.
Any digital image is a file composed of data to describe these dots.
If you're making a file you need to consider a few things; such as how many of these dots you're going to make. Naturally with a digital camera making the image this question is probably answered for you (though there seems no end of confusion of DPI in that area)
Thus as I see it, the centric concept in digital images needs to be pixels and DPI only enters into the discussion when you're scanning and when you're printing.
Scanners move over film and sample it (using a variety of techniques) into pixels. Since film has length and width (you can measure it) we get back to my friend the inch (not the worm, he's busy elswhere).
Now, unless I'm worried about how the dots on my piece of film will resolve into pixels and where a dot will be and if it will be two dots or not, then I'm totally not interested in Samples Per Inch, I am in fact only interested in knowing how many pixels will be made per inch of my film.
Thus I'm really interested in pixels, which are dots, so I'm talking DPI
Now I'm sure that someone out there will be worried that I've glossed over something really important here, but I don't think I have (unless you're doing research in scanner resolution).
Lets go back to the first image at the top of the page with the dots on the page, here it is zoomed in.
The grid on the page represents what the scanner does, it will divide the scan area into spatial coordinates and the scanner writes down the values it sees at each point.
Now if we had a blank white page with two dots on it and put it on a scanner, it will essentially assign numbers for what it sees inside each of the squares.
The left red square is empty, so it'll write down white in that square. Same for most of the squares, except for our two dots.
Even though you and I can see they're two dots because the scanner reads only each region (in my example each square) and assigns a number ... the left one will be some level of grey and the right one will be another level of grey. Sadly the left dot will contribute to the value of the square placed over the right dot. We will no longer have two dots but a bigger single blog. Cruel, but that's how it goes when you draw lines on maps without thinking (just like government does all the time).
Now if you wanted to make sure that you got the two dots as distinctly two dots you would need to increase your sampling, that's right the samples per inch (or for the lovers of TLA's) SPI.
Again the cognoscenti among you will identify that this is essentially breaking the image up into more dots. Yep, you guessed it, more samples is more dots, so again we have it boil back down to how many dots we have per inch.
With all of this going through my mind while I'm talking on the phone to the (probably lovely) lady at the lab I am still no closer to getting any answer as to how bloody many pixels I'm going to get out of my sheet of 4x5 when they scan it ...
Eventually I think to reverse engineer the problem and ask:
Why couldn't they just say so!
So my plea to all the printing / scanning bureaus out there is this:
If I put a dot on a page, would you call that a point? I would ... here's a page with two points.
If it was arranged in a grid pattern each of the grid squares could become a pixel, which would also be a point, although it might not be the dot we started with ... but I'll get to that?The problem is understanding how you name and describe your points, you know, the ones which make images up (not the points I'm making here).
Personally I can't really think of a reason to describe a lone and solitary point, and remembering names is hard for most of us, so having 18million is like remembering the population of Australia by name. Coordinates may be good, but that's so mathematical.
Now, while we're thinking, in the real world points must be somewhere and if they are somewhere we can measure that. God (in her wisdom) gave us the inch for measuring things (even the inch worm measures the marigolds right?), so why not use that as our basic measurement. Thus we can describe our points in some ways:
- how many dots we have in total or
- the size of our grid (say, 1024 x 768) or
- how many dots we have per inch.
But I wish it were so easy, as there's people out there who consider that there are all sorts of points it seems:
- PPI (points per inch, unlike the points per hour raised in parliment)
- DPI (our friend dots per inch, although I thought a dot and a point were quite indistinguishable, especially without my readers on..)
- SPI (samples per inch, a clever point which is important in determining stuff about scan resolutions, but nothing useful in describing a digital image)
the list goes on I'm sure (as I can see pica in some software too, so no doubt some olde typesetters out there prefer that). Where I see simplicity, others see confusion.
So what's my problem and how is this related to the above confusion?
Well here's a typical scenario, I've got some film (say a sheet of 4x5) and I want to get it scanned so I can get it printed on one of those fancy Durst Epsilon printers. I ring up one of the top 3 professional labs in a Capital City in Australia and ask the question:
what do your scans cost and what is the maximum DPI you can scan at?Typically I get an answer in megabytes.
(which is not helpful to me without knowing heaps more such as: how many points this is going to provide, what film format is being scanned and if those megabytes are going to be delivered in 8 or 16 bits per pixel / point / dot whatever ... seldom is this information that is asked for or even comprehended when you introduce it)Sometimes after a brief discussion I'll get an answer like:
Ohh, yes, I understand its 300dpi.which the cognoscenti among you will be able to quickly identify as being quite unlikely, and certainly unlikely to be yielding many of those megabytes previously offered.
Sad, this place used to be so good when they just dealt with my film on Durst Enlargers and printed onto paper with light from a bulb .... still, they've only been digital for 10 years now, can't rush this sort of thing. Awfully technical ...
To compound this I regularly see on the various internet forums when people ask questions about scanning and get drowned in TLA riddled answers.
I'm never quite sure why a question like:
should I scan my film at 2400dpi or 4800dpi?
needs an answer that mix n matches lashings of DPI, SPI and PPI unless the major purpose of the answer is to provide lots of EWV (which is extra wank value for those not in the know on that particular TLA).I'm an old fashioned guy in the digital age, so for me the thing which is centric to digital imaging is the pixel, you know, that little dot which makes up the screen you're looking at right now.
As I see it, digital images are fundamentally composed of pixels, which is essentially a fancy computer name for a dot.
Describe it any way you want, a pixel is a point to a computer and is a dot to me. It might be a coloured dot, it may have only grey tones, but it is a dot. Printers lay these dots down on to paper (often blurry and indistinct as to the left) and screens light up and show us each dot as a square (if its a TFT monitor as the image above) or a blurred dot if its a CRT.Any digital image is a file composed of data to describe these dots.
If you're making a file you need to consider a few things; such as how many of these dots you're going to make. Naturally with a digital camera making the image this question is probably answered for you (though there seems no end of confusion of DPI in that area)
Thus as I see it, the centric concept in digital images needs to be pixels and DPI only enters into the discussion when you're scanning and when you're printing.
Scanners move over film and sample it (using a variety of techniques) into pixels. Since film has length and width (you can measure it) we get back to my friend the inch (not the worm, he's busy elswhere).
Now, unless I'm worried about how the dots on my piece of film will resolve into pixels and where a dot will be and if it will be two dots or not, then I'm totally not interested in Samples Per Inch, I am in fact only interested in knowing how many pixels will be made per inch of my film.
Thus I'm really interested in pixels, which are dots, so I'm talking DPI
Now I'm sure that someone out there will be worried that I've glossed over something really important here, but I don't think I have (unless you're doing research in scanner resolution).
Lets go back to the first image at the top of the page with the dots on the page, here it is zoomed in.The grid on the page represents what the scanner does, it will divide the scan area into spatial coordinates and the scanner writes down the values it sees at each point.
Now if we had a blank white page with two dots on it and put it on a scanner, it will essentially assign numbers for what it sees inside each of the squares.
The left red square is empty, so it'll write down white in that square. Same for most of the squares, except for our two dots.
Even though you and I can see they're two dots because the scanner reads only each region (in my example each square) and assigns a number ... the left one will be some level of grey and the right one will be another level of grey. Sadly the left dot will contribute to the value of the square placed over the right dot. We will no longer have two dots but a bigger single blog. Cruel, but that's how it goes when you draw lines on maps without thinking (just like government does all the time).
Now if you wanted to make sure that you got the two dots as distinctly two dots you would need to increase your sampling, that's right the samples per inch (or for the lovers of TLA's) SPI.
Again the cognoscenti among you will identify that this is essentially breaking the image up into more dots. Yep, you guessed it, more samples is more dots, so again we have it boil back down to how many dots we have per inch.
With all of this going through my mind while I'm talking on the phone to the (probably lovely) lady at the lab I am still no closer to getting any answer as to how bloody many pixels I'm going to get out of my sheet of 4x5 when they scan it ...
Eventually I think to reverse engineer the problem and ask:
ok, what's the largest print you can make from my sheet of 4x5to which the answer is:
oh, we can produce an A0 print at 300dpi from 4x5Right, I now reach for my calculator and plug in some numbers ... A0 is about 33.1 × 46.8 inches so they're going to have 300 dots per inch on the print which is 14, 100 pixels ... which will come from my 5 inches of film length so that's around 2820 dpi scan ... or a wee bit better than my Epson 4990 gives me (which I believe is good for a genuine 2400dpi scan)
Why couldn't they just say so!
So my plea to all the printing / scanning bureaus out there is this:
please try to grasp the point of DPI, it'll save us all a nasty headachethanks
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
snowy river, beautiful scenery and making good images
Just last week the snow was still here and looking soft and fluffy.With time on my hands and the snow looking perfect I thought it was time to stop looking out the window at the perfect winter weather and join it.
This is just down the road from where I live and has got a bit of a hill, which I thought would make a great test of my skis in soft powder snow.
Especially after the last debacle I thought it might be nice to actually enjoy things.
This weekend just gone the weather has indeed turnef warmer (and foul) so looking at these images today makes last week seem all the more winter wonderland.
Lovely
Now an interesting point here is that all of these images were taken with my OM 10 camera with a Olympus 21mm f3.5 lens. Personally I love wide angle lenses for scenery and I still enjoy using my cameras with negative film, especially on a bright and contrasty day like this.
Back to the snow conditions, we've had an unusually large amount of snow here in Kouvola this year with absolutely perfect conditions. The temperature has been consistently below zero and so the snow has remained soft and powdery.
the hill there didn't present enough slope for my ski's (Åsnes combat, just a great all round BC ski) to get much flotation (even though I have the 220cm length) and as soon as I got to about that first left turn I just sank in .. to about my thigh.
:-)
but it was really worth being down there as you can see
some person had been skiing down that bit a few weeks before looking at the track, and a bunny rabbit (well ok a Hare) had been hippity hoppity along the path. The light is (as you can see) just bewdiful and being Finland and being winter the sun never gets high in the sky. I slogged along (no, its not easy going in thigh deep powder snow) over there to the right to get closer to the river and see what the place looked like there
peeking through the branches (you can perhaps just see the river over there under the sun through the pine tree) its a lovely warm day and some of the snow is just starting to fall off the trees (especially where the squirrels have been chewing the branches)
I can't help myself here and have to toss in a few comments about photographic stuff. Its just so good to look at images like this and not see blown high lights despite having massive amounts of provocation. The colour negative just handles things fantastically. Not only that, but the sheer amount of detail captured by my 35mm film is just amazing, take a look at a 100% pixel peep of that first top image:
gee-uhhst stunning innit? I encourage the photographically inclined to click on that and notice how much tree and twig detail (and pepper grain in the sky) is present. Compare it to the first image back up above.
Keep in mind this is a camera made in the 1980's with a lens from about the same year too and scanned with zero attention on fully automatic settings on my 7 year old scanner.
Makes me really wonder what the hell has gone on with the digital camera revolution. Sure, noone wants to be sitting round scanning film (especially me), but with excellent post development scanning stuff around like the Noritsu system we could all have access to great digital images and high quality printing from our images. My scanner gets a very detailed 5500 x 3600 pixels from each 35mm neg.
Wouldn't it be lovely to just drop off a roll of film and pick up 21 Megapixels on CD ... no work, no hassle, go do the shopping come back and pick it up ... thank you very much
Not bad and you'd need a camera like a Canon 5D MkII (costing a couple of thousand) to beat it. Considering this is supermarket negative (3 rolls for $6) you do need to shoot quite a bit to make that purchase worth your while. Well anyway, that's just flogging a dead horse now and not really the point of this article.
So, back to the day :-) ... with the river before me I skied up yonder around the bend ... following in someone elses tracks
there was a large flock of grouse on the ice just up around the bend, but not having a telephoto lens with me you'll just have to imagine that
:-)
PS scans were done in a hurry with my coolscan in automated batch and 8 bit with nearly nothing in manipulation. So if the images don't leave you gasping in their colour rendition and contrast its because I didn't put much effort into it
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