I just got the memo : Wordpress obsoletes Blogger.
Most of the blogs I read regularly moved to Wordpress long ago. For some reason I stuck with Blogger for 114 of my wordy, graphic, painful posts (to write). Blogger’s editor is so rife with bugs that I switched to writing directly in HTML earlier this year. At least post previews sort-of worked.
To make the change all the more dramatic, Wordpress imports your entire Blogger blog automagically – text, formatting, images, categories, comments and all. The conversion was essentially perfect, I had to retouch a handful of posts only because I had abused blockquotes. If Blogger had an import feature, it would be a text box where you can re-type them.
Welcome to Wordpress:
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Gone to Wordpress
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Photograph like an engineer.
Analytical Solutions
I first studied mechanical engineering at a school that prides itself in being the deepest into theory out of four major universities that serve the Montreal area. Most of the time I spent on the school bench was devoted to the quest for the holy grail of engineering that is the analytical solution. As I look back, I think engineering scholars suffer from a “physicist complex”, in that deep down they wished they really were physicists and not engineers. Professional engineers get little kick out of playing pretend-physicist.
Numerical solutions are easier to get, sufficient for most of all purposes, and you could teach juniors how to set them up for a vast space of problems. Comparatively few people can set up theoretical arguments with sufficient modeling to come out with more useful precision in the end. Yet the analytical solution remains a source of pride for its author, even when he/she is aware of this.
Why? First, the analytical solution is an achievement that lifts the author above the ordinary. It’s a statement about his or her discipline and sustained concentration. Second, the analytical solution presents itself untainted by crude errors borne in the physical world. The solution’s limits were agreed upon from the outset by the stated simplifying assumptions and thereafter the solution is presumed to be free from error.
Thus the analytical solution is perceived to be more worthwhile, even when it is more painful and/or less useful.
Analytical Photography
Ack! What a blood-curling term we have here. Photography is art!
I don’t know what percentage of the population is made up of art historians, but I don’t think my family is a good barometer for popular interest. Within one degree of separation I count two art historians, yet within even two degrees I am the only engineer that I’m aware of. I mention this cultural bias to prepare you for what I’m going to say next.
Analytical art is not an oxymoron. There were periods in history, particularly during the renaissance, where artists were obsessed with technical minutia, for example harmonics, perspective and human proportions. They have argued about color for thousands of years. Recently (in terms of history) so-called “method” actors formalized the simulation of emotion even, to the delight of millions. Basically, analysis comes into play when art is concerned with depicting something real.
Most art today is not intended to promote analysis of its expression, however, and here is the defense of contemporary art. Displays of art now invite analysis of a hidden message instead. Nevertheless, many aspects of contemporary art involve advanced techniques and technology which must be mastered to make the art appealing and draw the audience to the message. This definitely applies to photography.
Analytical photography, I define now, is meticulous technical photography that would not be considered art today. In the current context, that means photography that has no message or doesn’t fit in a coherent body of work with an overarching message.
Engineer Photographers
There is a deepening interest in analytical photography today. Dozens of discussion forums filled with analytical content, huge vaults of perfect generic images, and a vocal community hungry for technical prowess are evidence of this in my opinion. This community includes professionals and amateurs alike, and for all the effort they pour into photographic analyses there are very few in it that produce artistically meaningful work.
I am part of this community. I do not produce artistically meaningful work.
At this stage I see myself as an “engineer photographer” and I mean it derogatively: a photographer in search of the analytical solution. This is a sort of manifesto for the moment.
My wish is to grow past this stage.
I first studied mechanical engineering at a school that prides itself in being the deepest into theory out of four major universities that serve the Montreal area. Most of the time I spent on the school bench was devoted to the quest for the holy grail of engineering that is the analytical solution. As I look back, I think engineering scholars suffer from a “physicist complex”, in that deep down they wished they really were physicists and not engineers. Professional engineers get little kick out of playing pretend-physicist.
Numerical solutions are easier to get, sufficient for most of all purposes, and you could teach juniors how to set them up for a vast space of problems. Comparatively few people can set up theoretical arguments with sufficient modeling to come out with more useful precision in the end. Yet the analytical solution remains a source of pride for its author, even when he/she is aware of this.
Why? First, the analytical solution is an achievement that lifts the author above the ordinary. It’s a statement about his or her discipline and sustained concentration. Second, the analytical solution presents itself untainted by crude errors borne in the physical world. The solution’s limits were agreed upon from the outset by the stated simplifying assumptions and thereafter the solution is presumed to be free from error.
Thus the analytical solution is perceived to be more worthwhile, even when it is more painful and/or less useful.
Analytical Photography
Ack! What a blood-curling term we have here. Photography is art!
I don’t know what percentage of the population is made up of art historians, but I don’t think my family is a good barometer for popular interest. Within one degree of separation I count two art historians, yet within even two degrees I am the only engineer that I’m aware of. I mention this cultural bias to prepare you for what I’m going to say next.
Analytical art is not an oxymoron. There were periods in history, particularly during the renaissance, where artists were obsessed with technical minutia, for example harmonics, perspective and human proportions. They have argued about color for thousands of years. Recently (in terms of history) so-called “method” actors formalized the simulation of emotion even, to the delight of millions. Basically, analysis comes into play when art is concerned with depicting something real.
Most art today is not intended to promote analysis of its expression, however, and here is the defense of contemporary art. Displays of art now invite analysis of a hidden message instead. Nevertheless, many aspects of contemporary art involve advanced techniques and technology which must be mastered to make the art appealing and draw the audience to the message. This definitely applies to photography.
Analytical photography, I define now, is meticulous technical photography that would not be considered art today. In the current context, that means photography that has no message or doesn’t fit in a coherent body of work with an overarching message.
Engineer Photographers
There is a deepening interest in analytical photography today. Dozens of discussion forums filled with analytical content, huge vaults of perfect generic images, and a vocal community hungry for technical prowess are evidence of this in my opinion. This community includes professionals and amateurs alike, and for all the effort they pour into photographic analyses there are very few in it that produce artistically meaningful work.
I am part of this community. I do not produce artistically meaningful work.
At this stage I see myself as an “engineer photographer” and I mean it derogatively: a photographer in search of the analytical solution. This is a sort of manifesto for the moment.
My wish is to grow past this stage.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Moore's Law in Action
The guys at "ifixit" have taken apart one of the MacBooks...
It's really astonishing how small the computer inside the computer is.
It's really astonishing how small the computer inside the computer is.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
New MacBook shocker
I don't post about non-photo technology very often, but this is really special. The new MacBooks are as plainly awesome as computers get. I didn't expect this, personally I always liked the "Pro" so much better.
Apple has got to be afraid that MacBooks will steal sales from MacBook Pros now that they're so close. I guess the gamble is that MacBooks will steal more sales from the crappy plastic Uninspirons over yonder. I sure would dump mine in a heartbeat if I could.
Icing on the cake : it's an all-Nvidia line up in this family of notebooks that makes up ~30% of the volume in the USA. Not only that, but graphics is also the main differentiator between the basic model and the "Pro" model. It's a good day for GPUs today.
Discovering Fun
This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving. Here’s a short visual diary, free from photo-babble.
We packed up the family+dog and drove up there, made good time too with just 5.5 hours.
Vermont was pretty much like this the whole way.
We went apple-picking and the MacIntoshes were phenomenal.
Mommy building up enthusiasm.
In the afternoon we took my daughter to slide for the first time – she’s 9 months now.
She didn't get it the first time.
But after a couple of times... that's pretty cool!
Ok. I’m ready, let’s do it!
That’s my toy.
It's better alone with grandma.
Cheers,
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Op-ed: The Leica M8 would make more sense as a B&W camera
Hello,
My name is Olivier and I am addicted to the idea of owning a Leica M camera.
My problem (trying to service my addiction ;^) is that I can’t justify it. I have no interest in debating the issue of price, except that the non-trivial cost warrants a thoughtful and level-headed justification. At this time in October of 2008, the M8.2 fixed just about every known issue with the camera except the most important one: the less-than-stellar digital imaging system.
There are four basic things that are wrong with this system…
Entertain this thought experiment if you will… what if the M8 lost its Bayer color filter array? Change nothing else, just strip away the CFA and turn the M8 into a black & white camera.
Let’s see how this would affect the four issues I listed above:
My name is Olivier and I am addicted to the idea of owning a Leica M camera.
My problem (trying to service my addiction ;^) is that I can’t justify it. I have no interest in debating the issue of price, except that the non-trivial cost warrants a thoughtful and level-headed justification. At this time in October of 2008, the M8.2 fixed just about every known issue with the camera except the most important one: the less-than-stellar digital imaging system.
There are four basic things that are wrong with this system…
1) IR sensitivity pollutes images with either a magenta or a cyan cast. This distortion of the source data is really permanent damage to the image – correcting the cyan cast inevitably amplifies noise in the red channel.One thing that I think is not wrong with the M8 is the 1.33x crop factor. It offers an excellent balance of quality overall, without skewing the system towards telephotos too much. I imagine the cost would rise with a 1.0x sensor, which would only serve to make justification more difficult. The Leica lens stable is full of good choices for the 1.33x factor too, for example the 28/75 pairing for which many interesting permutations are available.
2) Risk of developing color moiré pattern from high-frequency detail. Again the source data has to be improved for outputs to be free of moiré.
3) Poor performance at sensitivities above ISO-800 compared to the competition today. The benchmark to compare against is not color negative film, that’s a don’t-care, it’s modern professional DSLRs in the same market category (D700/5D-II)(ignoring that they cost ½ as much). The M8 needs to see a 1.5 - 2 stop improvement to be competitive in this environment.
4) While good, resolution is not class-leading. Leica lenses deserve better.
Entertain this thought experiment if you will… what if the M8 lost its Bayer color filter array? Change nothing else, just strip away the CFA and turn the M8 into a black & white camera.
Let’s see how this would affect the four issues I listed above:
1) IR sensitivity is much less of an issue. Magenta casts appear as luminance variations that are not as distracting, cyan cast appears as light fall-off. Full-resolution IR photography becomes an option using a filter on the lens to block visible light.The result of this single modification, a simple ECO for Kodak, would be a stunning black-and-white M8 camera. One that can stand its own in the modern competitive environment, and would now be priced appropriately taking its tradition into account (assuming the price is the same).
2) Color moiré is no longer possible. High-frequency detail is recorded simply as fine detail, in all its glory.
3) Sensitivity improves by 1.5 - 2 stops as the color filtration no longer consumes light; all wavelengths contribute to luminance.
4) Real world resolution improves by 1.5x - 4x depending on situations because no interpolation is necessary to produce image pixels. 10MP is a terrific resolution for a monochrome sensor.
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