Saturday, 2 January 2010

Leica X1: A Small Pocketable Gem with a Big Heart

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© Andy Westlake

New Year’s Greetings!

On a noble quest to reinvent a tradition, Leica AG made a surprising move with three of their latest products. It is an expensive bet they are making, and it looks like they have found their path once again.

The S3, The M9 and The X1 are to Leica, what BMW offers with their 7, 5 & 1 series sedans; they are laying a new groundwork for their future path and they are taking it seriously; not only they are going back to basics to look for new answers as their core of these new products, they are rethinking big at the smallest details with their latest incarnations of Leica’s aging legacy, no longer they are relying on outside help to discover what they really can do.

With the rising sensation of pocketable photography, Leica has crafted a unique blend of beauty with their new X1 line; masqueraded on a minimalistic high-end (yet tiny) magnesium cast and its legendary optical performance; Leica has successfully unite art, science, technology & fashion that will change the shape of pocketable high-performance camera:

It’s impossible not to conclude that the X1 has the best high ISO performance of any ‘coat pocketable’ camera yet. But it’s also worth noting that in practical use, its advantage over the GF1 (or E-P1) is almost completely wiped out by the stop and a half more light the 20mm F1.7 can gather

Read DPreview’s 28-page excellent take on the Leica X1

Friday, 1 January 2010

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Thursday, 31 December 2009

Digital Photography’s Past is Photography’s Future

This year we see the rise of new ‘smaller yet bigger’ camera; the Olympus E-P1/P2, Panasonic GF-1, Canon G11 and the immaculately resurrected compion Canon PowerShot S90. It shares one common major improvement: better low-light capability.

Manufacturers have taken bold steps recognizing that racing on the megapixel race won’t win their customers trust; by addressing the heart of the matter, they are creating a brighter future for the imaging industry (which means both literally and technically).

We will see newer manufacturing technology that will give us even higher performing sensors, CCDs/CMOSes with higher ISO speed (better low-light capability), lower power consumption and friendlier to our environment. It will give us an entirely different platform to take pictures, simply there will be no relevance to compare it with film anymore. Down the line of the food chain, higher-capacity & faster memory cards (think 64gb instead of 16) will slowly populate the market, with newer file allocation technology phasing out the never-reliable FAT32.

We shall also see newer shutter technology that will cope with the faster sensor—imagine shooting open wide (f/2.8 with ISO 6400 in broad daylight—the shutter that we have today won’t go faster than 8000th of a second (1/8000), this will mean a radically new approach to the shutter mechanism will undergo some major changes.

Beyond the technology, photography is both an art & lifestyle, therefore fashion will come into the picture, old trends will reappear (retro finishing, film look, LO-FI like images) and what was the future look will become classics. Computer images will never be the same again (read about Avatar here).

Popular Photography asked a group of photographers in 1944 about what the future might hold for and one comment stood out from the crowd:

The war will bring photography out of its adolescence. In maturity, it will be an exciting, profitable and expanding profession.

Today’s the last day of 2009, tomorrow will be the first of 2010, happy new year, Joy and Peace for all beings!

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(like the deer, this will also make a good iPhone wallpaper, go and grab it!)

Read:

The Future of Photography as predicted in 1944 via aphotostudent.com, kottke.org

29 December 2009
1 is the magic number ★ stevehuffphoto.com

I came *THIS* close to purchasing an old Canon F f/1.0 sometime ago; the bulk and the price tag scared me away. But now I know why I was *THAT* close.

It was Dr. Walter Mandler who started this all; He crafted more than 45 high performance lenses for Leica, including the one used to capture the image above — later replaced by the faster f/0.95 ASPH in 2008.

Wikipedia: Walter Mandler or jump to Steve Huff’s blog for more f/1.0 photos.

Monday, 28 December 2009

Hip Hip Hooray: Hipstamatic for iPhone

On the extreme side of fine-tuned, high-res & properly composed/framed/exposed photography, lies a genre that begets joy. Most of the time, everything is accidental, composition is point-and-shoot-lucky-if-you’re-in-the-shot, exposure is horrid by your instructor’s standard and out-of-focus is the new focus. But it’s fun. So much fun someone decided to resurrect an old phenomenon of another lo-fi camera sensation.

The result is something purely original, yet signified by a brilliant sets of feat that’ll make grandpa proud, drop dead simple you wish it arrived much sooner, it’s environmentally green too, so green I’m sure Al Gore & his photographer wife, Tipper will be snapping around their christmas dinner with this lovely gem. Yes, films are needed but is not limited to 36 frames.

So how do you recreate a hippies’ freedom of analog joy — with all the organic elements — for the 21st century vowel-loosing era? Put the iPhone to the picture, throw in a designer & a developer and you’ll get yourself a perfectly usable digital incarnation of this fading sensation.

Enter Hipstamatic.
hipstamatic.jpg

Pixel perfect graphics puts a pseudo camera into the screen of your iPhone, the front side to swipe lenses, films, gels & flashes; and the back façade gives you the plastic feel viewfinder, a flash on/off switch and its signature yellow shutter button.

One final touch of this finely crafted graphics? A drop-dead-realistic sound effect that makes everything feels natural.

So what makes this app so special? Clearly, pretty face alone can’t do justice, but throw in a handsome looking pictures — it’s 100% film like, the best I have seen on any digital media, a brilliant programming — it’s 100% analog camera like, the best classic to digital/iPhone transfer I have seen on any digital media, you got yourself a nice christmas gift. Thank you Santa.

Too bad, the $1.99 purchase only gives you the basics, you gotta pop in additional $2 to make it game: $1 for the BlacKeys Film Pack (B/W film, pixel perfect film bleed to wrap your 6×6 frames) and another $1 for Williamsburg Bundle that gives a you a Helga Viking lens, 3 color-gelled flashes & the brilliant Pistil Film that gives your hipsta-print a nice black border.

It’s a perfect $5 christmas gift for yourself, or your iPhone-using-paparazzo friend, yes occasional crash still happens and opting in high-res output gives you the never-ending wait to snap another around, but you’re in for a different kind of iPhone-photography game, people… and this time you might want to stay a little longer cause digital never felt & looked so finely analog.

Hip Hip Hooray!

update: Someone from Japan posted a very nice comparison of Hipstamatic’s different combination of lenses, films & gels.

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Update: Here’s the story behind Hipstamatic, and how the iPhone version came along.

Happy Ho-ho-ho-lidays!

25 December 2009

Joy and peace to all beings.

PS. (psssst!) This deer will make a nice iPhone Wallpaper, tell everyone about it =).

Monday, 21 December 2009

Avatar: Ancient Wisdom meets Technology

Updated with additional info on Simulcam, James Horner’s inspiration from Indonesian music and more links.

“Walking through a dream I see you, By light and darkness breathing hope of new life, Now I live through you and you through me, enchanted, I pray in my heart that this dream never ends.”

If I shall make a movie, I will not do it any other way. Avatar, opened last week has brought a new sensation to the festive season; James Cameron’s first after he spent nearly a decade scraping the underworld and creating documentaries — is nothing sort of spectacular, an out of this world imagination with a down to earth storytelling is every directors’ and moviegoers’ dream come true. He and the (rumored) $300 million team of artists, cameras & computer engineers has closed the chapter of generation: ‘Star Wars’ & opened a new page in the cinema history book.

If the story of a man falls in love with the indigenous’ first woman sounds remotely familiar and how their love began at the battle field with a happily ever after ending might sounds like a Disney movie, but make no mistake, this is not Pocahontas. This is a story of good that will ultimately triumph greed, love overwhelms evil.

James Cameron has clearly grown, borrowing from the ancient Hindu scripture, the movie borrows the concept of the ‘borrowed-body’ to narate the often distant voice of wisdom, deep within the blue skin & the big yellow eyes of the Na’vi lies a simple fact that we as human must know; we are all connected as one.

Clearly, we have distant ourselves from nature…so far, it is impossible for most of us to recognize the truth, Pandora might be just an imagination of one creative soul, but everything that we live on earth—as real as it is, as close as we are—yet, are often gone unnoticed that we simply destroy everything that is given for us. Avatar attempts to correct that mistake, the concept of God, prophecy and religion doesn’t exist but love, courage & faith become a tradition that is nurtured throughout the Na’vi that bounds every each of them to their beautiful planet.

How does one create a realistic world?

There’s a fundamentally different concept of dimension in Avatar, it’s a unique philosophical iteration on how they represent the world of Pandora onto a virtual 3D on 2D screen.

Jon Landau, Produser, & Cameron’s partner since Titanic:

It’s not a world coming out of a window, it’s a window into a world.

I was one of the lucky souls who were at the center stage of it; for nearly 3 hours on the night of Dec 17, I was blown away by what I could only describe as an out-of-this-world sensation, I wouldn’t be surprised as I have learned prior to the opening night that almost everything that was used to make Avatar was entirely new to the filmmaking industry, the technology, the approach & the equipment was practically invented for this movie.

Another reason why this movie looks & feels different than any other is the way the computer generated imaging (CGI) are produced; instead of moving wireframe 3D models and calculating the lights & shading of its texture, Avatar uses a performance capturing technology—a common technique of injecting live in videogames—actors are rigged with motion detection equipment on a soundstage with live-size marking of the scenes they are performing for, no more dubbing or mouse generated movement; with a Cameron made digital viewfinder & the production team’s brilliant software ‘simulcam’, the director is seeing the actor’s performance with a realtime rendering of how the movie should look in post production, directors have to wait for months for what Cameron see in realtime. This solution does not only allow Cameron to create a real life looking camera movements, but also allows the actors to perform live on-stage and animate & mimic they’re own digital character as they would have done in real life.

James Cameron:

It’s immersive. It wraps the movie around you. It’s not necessarily just for kids’ films either. It works in a dramatic sense because it gives you a heightened sense of reality. Whatever you’re watching has a kind of a turbo-charged level of audience involvement. In a science fiction film like this one, you’ll be able to inhabit that world, not just watch it but be in it. I think people want that. If people are going to get out of their homes and go to the cinema, the cinema better show them something it hasn’t in the past. (Q&A with James Cameron, Jan 11, 2007 by Rebecca Winters Keegan)

It is overwhelming. The number of technical excellence and inventions is so massive, it is overwhelming to even read the data, the new PACE/CAMERON Fusion Camera System, the rich sound & melody written by James Horner and how he committed his 1.5 years inventing a new sound world exclusively for Pandora, including a sound originated from my beloved home, Indonesia:

There were a lot of vocal sounds I took from various places. These were odd vocal sounds that I would manipulate digitally and there were interesting flutes, for instance, from South America and Finland that I wanted to be more abstract. I also have instruments invented from scratch. They were programmed. There were a lot of instruments that sound like flutes of different sorts, but they were combined with gamelan-sounding instruments. The gamelan is Balinese. The word itself means ”orchestra.” The individual gamelan instruments are these bell-like sounds. A lot of the percussion for “Avatar” is gamelan-based or sounds gamelan-based. So this has this sort of quality of ringing bells, like Indonesian music. It’s a very pretty fusion of different worlds that gives the place itself a quality that is magical. Using it for percussion, rather than drums or other things, gives a sort of magical glow to everything. And as I said there were a lot of instruments that I invented and worked on with my programs. I was very particular.

Read the rest of the interview here

The immensity of the efforts also comes at the end, an endless list of talented souls appears in the credit title that scrolls with Leony Lewis’ brilliant voice singing:

“Then my heart was never open, and my spirit never free;
To the world that you have shown me;
But my eyes could not envision;
All the colors of love and of life ever more…ever more.”

Nothing has ever come so close for a story, graphics, cinematography, technology, imagination & creativity encapsulated to a 165-minute work of art, James Cameron’s Avatar is a must see, so perfect, it’s almost spiritual.

I see you, James. I see you.

A big pile of selected links (worth reading) about Avatar:

Full Credits for Avatar
http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/anorak-city/2009/12/avatar-how-many-people-does-it.html

Artists working on Avatar
http://mattejourney.blogspot.com/2009/03/artists-working-on-avatar.html

Behind the scenes from Avatar
http://www.kansascity.com/936/gallery/1632020.html

Creating the world of James Cameron’s “Avatar”
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2009/12/16/landau/index.html

Inventing Effects to Create the Avatar Universe
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_movie/2/

The technological secrets of James Cameron’s new film Avatar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/aug/20/3d-film-avatar-james-cameron-technology

A Brief Look at the Technological Advancements in James Cameron’s Avatar
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/08/09/a-brief-look-at-the-technological-advancements-in-james-camerons-avatar/

‘Avatar’ 3-D experience aims to immerse viewers in distant world
http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/avata-3-dexperience-aims-immerse-viewers-distant-world-1201/

Moving Pictures: The stories behind movies
http://www.movingpicturesmagazine.com/reviews/movies/avatar

Movie stills from Yahoo! Movies
http://movies.yahoo.com/photos//gallery/1924/avatar-stills#photo0

Technology behind 3D – CNET
http://news.cnet.com/2300-1026_3-6212076-1.html?tag=mncol

With “Avatar,” Technology Has Never Looked So Human in Film
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/with-avatar-technology-ha_b_399711.html

and a bonus….

A Beautiful collection of Hi-res (Full HD Size) Wallpaper for your desktop
(Google Link, BitTorrent required)

Avatar’s latest extended HD trailer

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ[/youtube]

Thursday, 17 December 2009

How a small group of committed people can make big changes

“Never underestimate the power of small group of highly committed individuals”.

If Walt Disney was the master of animation, we, citizens of the youthful Republic of Indonesia are the master of drama.

Earlier this month, Prita Mulyasari, a customer assistant of a private bank in Jakarta was convicted of defamation. She was ordered by the court to pay Rp 204 million ($22,000) as damages to Omni International Hospital, and spent 3-weeks in jail.

The Prita v. Omni case went to national center stage, bloggers unite and launched a “Pennies for Justice: Help Free Prita” campaign. Thanks to Y! Groups, Facebook, Twitter & the blogs, as of today (12/17/2009), Pennies donated from all over the country reached over Rp 592 million ($62,000). The plan is to pay the fine entirely in Pennies delivered straight to the hospital’s front door, today it is proven that nothing can beat the will power of small group of highly committed individuals.

Koin Untuk Keadilan was launched in early December, in a little over 2 weeks, the organizers have successfully mobilized drop points, volunteers & enough buzz to gather hundreds of million worth of hard-to-come-by Pennies (plus a Khong Guan [1. A household brand of biscuit manufacturer in Indonesia] biscuit can of foreign and no longer in circulation mints).

Never before in the history of this country that such a huge amount of money were gathered in such a short time in such a meticulous was; most importantly, this is a monumental moment to be remembered that Yes, we can stand up to injustice and not let the power walk away in arrogance. If Obama can, so can we, one Prita is enough.

I’m sure there are many more cases of injustice that we left in oversight, as well as many more touching stories that we has witnessed all over the world, what’s important is how we learn from it, and what can we do to overrule a case of injustice to an inspiration, how to flip arrogance and turn it to an act of wisdom.

More about the case here, and head over to the blog (Bahasa Indonesia) or Translated version by Google here for some interesting behind-the-scene stories, including a makeshift invention of how to count pennies more efficiently.