Comments on "The Best of What's New"

The great guys on the Digital Photography Life podcast raised some points that I found to be overly negative and not completely impartial. I wanted to rebut those points and raise an alternate perspective on these news items.

I’m very intrigued by the Lumix G1 / Micro Four Thirds idea. I’m not ready to call it the Next Big Thing, not yet, but it might be. Removing the mirror and pentaprism in an interchangeable lens camera system is a very remarkable evolution of camera design. Imagine if Nikon & Canon took this idea and ran with it. I don’t know if Micro Four Thirds will provide enough resolution and detail to satisfy D3X and 1Ds Mk III customers, but the “no mirror, no prism” idea is very remarkable. Remarkable, at the very least. I’m watching this new design closely.

It’s not completely unfair to ignore the video capabilities of either the Nikon D90 or the Canon 5D Mk. II in a photography-specific camera review. It is an interesting new feature, and not to be ignored overall, but it’s not a photography feature. Many photographers couldn’t give a rip about taking or processing HD video, and I find it refreshing to review these cameras on their photographic merits separately from their video merits. To be fair, there should be a very in-depth review of the 5D Mk. II and D90 strictly for video.

Is Facebook friendly to photographers?

I’m curious how other photographers out there interpret the different views concerning the new Facebook terms of service / privacy rules. On one hand, it seems atrocious. On the other hand, Facebook seems either misunderstood or completely naive on copyright issues.

I might buy the argument from Facebook’s perspective with regard to comments and messages, but they seem oblivious to photography and copyright protection. Am I missing something?

I’ve removed my images from Facebook for the time being. (I know, legally it’s too late and Facebook owns those images, which I couldn’t be more upset about.) I’ll post images on Facebook again once I am assured that I own the copyright to any images I post and Facebook only has permission to make posted images viewable.

Bokeh – say what?

Bokeh is a Japanese term, used in photographic circles when referring to beautiful blurry areas of an image. The problem in the US is … how do we pronounce it? Is it like bouquet or like boca?

Wonder no more!

Micro Four-Thirds

I’m very intrigued by the new Micro Four-Thirds format. The design ideas make good sense, and there’s no inherent aspect of the design that I can see that would dictate the image quality not being able to match today’s DSLR in the range of a Nikon D80 or Canon XTi, if not something more like a Canon 40D or Nikon D300.

The Panasonic Lumix G1 is a great first example, it seems. And stuff like this (search for “0.95″) make this seem like a killer backup camera / wife camera / mature child camera. If my kids continue to show interest in photography, I could see getting something like this for them at age 10 or 12.

Do you find the Micro Four-Thirds format interesting?

Nikon SDK available

Hallelujah!!! Hey Adobe, have you got yours yet? I would love to see Lightroom handle my camera’s advanced settings (High ISO NR for example) as well as Capture NX.

The long-standing complaint with shooting in the RAW image format is that only the camera manufacturer’s software can truly deal with the file properly. The files have encryption on the special settings like color profiles and noise reduction. Lightroom has “Camera Profiles” which approximate the camera’s color profiles, and there are lots of third party noise reduction tools, but this would all be easier on the user if Lightroom had access to everything in the raw file.

The other complaint is about the proprietary nature of camera manufacturer’s file formats. Thus, Adobe created the DNG (Digital Negative) file format and has submitted it for ISO standardization. I don’t think this move by Nikon makes this effort by Adobe moot, but it does make me wonder which format will win out for Nikon users 10 years from now.

Capture NX (and the equivalents from Canon et. al.) are too slow and too ugly to be useful, at least to me and many people out there.