Category: Photography

Why did the bridge camera die?

by philg

I was recently asked to provide advice for a teenager with a $600 budget for a camera to take pictures of horses at horse nerd events. This girl is not interested in photography as a gadget fondling activity, but she needs a lens with a reasonably long reach. It’s the same situation as a soccer parent. There used to a category called bridge camera, in which a single high-quality lens was mated to a reasonably large sensor. Olympus was a pioneer in this area with the beautiful E-10 back in 2000, which had a 35-140mm/2-2.4 (35mm equivalent) lens and a camera built around it. I wrote a review of the E-10 in 2001. This category flourished for a while, but seems to have died in favor of absurdly long-range zooms in front of tiny mobile phone-sized sensors (i.e., probably worse image quality than an iPhone 16 for most images because Apple’s camera software is superior to what the camera companies themselves have made) or massive overkill on both sensor size (“full-frame” or at least four-thirds) and system complexity (interchangeable lenses for people who want just one lens). The problem with a sensor that is too big is that it forces the lenses to be too big and heavy. The problem with a sensor that is too small is that image quality is compromised, especially in lower light conditions.

Here’s what I wrote…

There is no point in carrying a camera with a less than “1 inch” sensor (nowhere near one inch in size!). Most of the cheap point and shoot cameras have sensors that are the same size as mobile phones so the image quality isn’t any better than on a phone. The compact cameras that offer insane telephoto limits, e.g., 3000mm, have these tiny sensors and, therefore, a tiny lens will yield a high 35mm equivalent focal length.

Your friend needs at least a 200mm equivalent telephoto. The best current camera that meets these specs is the Sony RX10 IV, but it costs $1700 (35mm equivalent: 25-600/2.4-4). The original RX10 (original review), which doesn’t have as long a telephoto reach, is available for $469 used in excellent condition from MPB, which is a reputable company. So your friend should probably get this. When it is time to move on, the camera can likely be sold for at least $400 (It was $1300 when originally sold).

You can see that the latest cameras with 1″ sensors and the same equivalent focal length have very small apertures extended (f/16 vs. f/8 for the RX10). From https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-zs100-tz100

image.png

At f/16, the sensor won’t be getting much light so the ISO has to be cranked way up unless it is very sunny out.

I can’t figure out why the 25-year-old Olympus concept is carried on by just one company (Sony). Why isn’t the market crowded with $600 1″-sensor bridge cameras wrapped around high quality 24-200mm lenses? They could be branded “SoccerCams”. Is it because the average consumer can’t be educated into realizing that sensor size is relevant? A camera with a reasonable size sensor will never be able to offer “83x optical zoom” the way the Nikon P950 does (can it be that the 1/2.3″ sensor, mobile phone size, of this camera actually produces great pictures somehow?).

Maybe this is just another data point to support the rule “If Philip likes the idea it will be a business disaster”?

Separately, at least once every year I have to publicly beg Apple to make a camera or two! So let this post be the 2025 request. A Sony RX10-spec camera with iPhone software and interfaces for direct uploading to social media would be amazing. Also, perhaps, a pocket-sized one-inch sensor camera like the Sony RX100 (latest version has a somewhat crazy 24-200mm lens that is f/16 maximum aperture at 200mm; maybe a very high quality 24-105 would be better).

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Aurora Borealis viewing in Fairbanks, Alaska

by philg

The Iditarod starts at 3 pm Eastern today. As has happened 3 times before (2003, 2015, and 2017), the sled dog race begins in Fairbanks rather than near Anchorage. This is due to a lack of snow.

As we all get set up to watch the puppies run, here are some tips on traveling to Fairbanks, Alaska, one of the world’s best places for seeing the Northern Lights due to (1) reasonably clear skies, (2) reasonably easy travel, and (3) perfect latitude (coincides with peak aurora activity).

A tour operator says that April 11-20 is the best time to see the aurora because it is the driest period and also close to an equinox, which is typically a peak for activity. 2025 is right near the peak of solar activity (on an 11-year circle) so maybe April 2025 is the time to go! (I went Feb 20-27, 2025, which coincided with the World Ice Art Championships that was a nice bonus, but it probably would have been better to go in April so as not to suffer as much from the cold!)

Except in the summer, you’ll probably have to fly through Seattle. Unless you live in Seattle, Delta Airlines might be a better choice for the total trip than Alaska Airlines because Delta has more overall network capacity to recover from a staffing or maintenance issue.

Spend the first day at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s Museum of the North and watch the movie about the aurora ($20 if you’re foolish enough to work; free if you show your EBT card). Stop by the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in downtown and pick up a guide to aurora viewing that includes a map of good locations. Inside the visitors center try to refrain from shouting out “Like Jeffrey Epstein, that Piper PA-22 didn’t hang itself”.

My Lyft driver (Uber pays a lower percentage of the revenue to drivers and is, therefore, so disfavored by drivers in Fairbanks that Lyft is the only service available in winter), who was also an aurora tour operator, explained that moisture/clouds tend to hang over the city but that as soon as you get to the first ridge going north the weather tends to clear. This also has the advantage of getting you away from the city’s light pollution. We had great luck at the Cleary Summer, about 30 minutes from downtown:

There are some cabins with skylights to rent right there, The Overlook at Cleary Summit, and that might be the smarter way to do a trip (watch the aurora while lying in bed; splurge by also renting a hotel room in downtown Fairbanks and bouncing back and forth depending on weather and desire to be close to restaurants and museums). Some friends organized a trip based at Pike’s Waterfront Lodge, which is right next to the end of the big runway at Fairbanks International Airport! The Overlook has Starlink Internet that should be better than what we had at Pike’s Lodge (Alaska is plagued by a telephone/Internet monopoly (“GCI”) that will make you take back all of the bad things that you said about Xfinity, AT&T, and Verizon). Getting up the hill to Cleary Summit wasn’t too challenging. We had a full-size van from Avis with studded tires. A regular AWD SUV with good winter tires would have worked as well.

Our first night of aurora viewing wasn’t that exciting. We drove 30 minutes up to a turnout on the Elliott Highway. With our naked eyes we saw what looked like white-gray thin vertical clouds. Photographed with an iPhone 16 Pro Max steadied via Ulanzi/Gitzo, however, a spectrum of colors emerged (exposures of about 5 seconds on the left and 30 seconds on the right; it probably would have been smarter to download and use Halide or a similar “pro camera” app that would have allowed more bracketing):

On the second night, we went to Cleary Summit (a big parking lot with the challenge of retaining one’s night vision as cars came and went with headlights on):

About 15 minutes later (pretty much fully automatic, with the iPhone choosing to expose for 5 seconds):

We never did see the red/pink colors in the above photos with our eyes, but we did see green, albeit not as saturated as in the above photos. Our hotel had an aurora chaser’s movie on permanent repeat in its library. The filmmaker gets very excited when he can see red with his naked eye and points out that he hadn’t seen that color for years. Unless a scene is bright you’re going to see it with your rods, which are monochrome, rather than your cones. The most common aurora frequency is green and our visual systems are very sensitive to green, which means you have a decent chance of seeing green. Partly because nobody has built a camera that works like the human visual system at night, the aurora industry is based largely on fraud. Here, for example, is a tour operator’s example of what you’ll see after paying $9000+ for two people:

Maybe an Alaska resident does occasionally see something like this, but a tourist is unlikely to see a color other than white or green on a one-week tour. Two perspectives:

  • “the Northern Lights are one of the few things that look better in a photo than in real life”
  • “looking at pictures of the Northern Lights before going on a trip is like watching porn movies to figure out what married sex after 10 years will be like”

The tradition of overselling the lights goes back at least to 1865 when Frederic Edwin Church painted the following (based on sketches and descriptions from Isaac I. Hayes, who did not sing but who spent years in the high Arctic):

If you are going to visit in the winter pack as though you were going ice fishing. I thought that I’d be okay with clothing that I wore for walking a dog in Maskachusetts in 10F temps. The temperature north of Fairbanks was closer to 0F, however, and watching the aurora involves minimal movement. Wool socks and insulated snow boots were useless on the first night so I stopped at Prospector Outfitters and got battery-powered socks for the second night. Felt boots such as Sorel or Baffin would have been a smarter choice (I had Sorels back in the Boston area, but I left them in the garage and squirrels used them as a house/outhouse). Electrically heated gloves would be the smart way to go for finger comfort. I was using an Apple Watch as a remote trigger (to minimize camera shake) for the iPhone camera and I don’t think that could have been done without exposing bare fingers for every photo. Maybe a remote shutter release with a physical button would have been usable with gloves kept on.

Would I go again? Sure, but I would want to have some kind of anchor activity in Fairbanks, either seeing friends or doing an exercise program or taking a class or something. Alternatives include Iceland, but it is surrounded by water and, therefore, seems likely to be much cloudier than Fairbanks. Arctic Norway (e.g., Tromsø) is a possibility, but it might be more challenging to travel to for an American and probably more expensive (Fairbanks has a McDonald’s, a Walmart, gasoline at just over $3/gallon, etc.). I would go back for the experience, not to try to compete for best picture with the people who live in the Arctic and are likely to be there on the 20 best nights of the past 10 years.

Crash course in Aurora #Science from Pike’s Lodge:

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Classic film gear can be repaired in Austin, Texas

by philg

One of the casualties of our move to Florida was a knob that locks down the quick-release plate on my old Arca-Swiss B1 ball head ($350 in pre-Biden dollars! Adjusted for inflation back to 1995, that’s equivalent to 740 Bidies today).

To my delight, I learned that Arca Swiss still exists and a lot of the good old film stuff can still be repaired by Precision Camera Works, the legendary Chicago-based shop that moved to the Austin, Texas area during coronapanic (2021). They can fix the Fuji G617, which might be my favorite film camera (a 4-shot point and shoot on 120 film. Here’s the full set of stuff PCW works on, mostly names that will bring tears to the eyes of older photographers:

One worrisome page on the site advertises an apprenticeship. I wonder if the shop is really just the one guy, Bob Watkins, who has been doing this since 1976. It is tough to imagine a young American with a sufficiently high IQ to do the work who’d be interested in doing this kind of work. Our nation’s average IQ is falling (probably also conscientiousness, which is heritable) and smarter Americans aren’t usually interested in working with their hands.

So if you have a beloved old film camera don’t delay on sending it in for an overhaul (“CLA” for “clean, lubricate, and adjust”).

What if you want to go in the opposite direction entirely? You’d think that a good full-height tripod that holds a phone and can’t hold a traditional camera would exist, but I haven’t found one. As a consumer, you’re supposed to cobble together and tighten down the following items:

  • legset
  • ball head
  • phone clamp

A Hong Kong company called Ulanzi seems to be the solution. The winning combo seems to be their ST-27 phone clamp, which has an Arca Swiss base, and their U-80L ball head, which is rated to a ridiculous 22 lbs. Just over 50 Bidies right now. What about the legset? Maybe the Slik CF-634 4-section carbon fiber tripod is ideal because it extends almost to eye level (factoring in the ball head) and folds down to 19 inches, which means it will have a chance of fitting in a roll-aboard suitcase. This is a straight copy of the Gitzo, I think, at less than half the price. (Gitzo has a rich French heritage, but they were acquired by the same company that owns Manfrotto and now the tripods are made either in Italy or China. Slik started in Japan, but maybe everything is now made in Thailand while still designed in Japan?)

Note that the replacement for the ball head that kicked off this thread seems to be the Z1+, which is only $422 and can purportedly hold 60 kg! Maybe the good old days weren’t so great…

Arca Swiss still makes 8×10 film view cameras! Imagine someone from Gen Z having the patience to deal with 8×10 sheet film!

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Stuart Air Show 2024

by philg

In honor of Veterans Day, a few snapshots from this year’s Stuart (Florida) Air Show…

First, let’s see what can be done with the latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max. The “5X” lens (120mm-equivalent) works out reasonably well for very large aircraft and for formation/smoke displays:

Things quickly get pixelated with cropping:

How about using the Canon 800/11 lens profiled previously here for air show work? Here’s the heritage flight:

Maybe one of the positive things that will come out of the Election 2024 Nakba is that Donald Trump will bring back the A-10 Warthog:

Mike Goulian (yellow) and his former protégé Rob Holland (red/Black) were there. The 800mm lens is actually too short for these tiny planes unless one gets (white?) privileged access to a press stand. Heavily cropped:

Every glider needs two jet engines, according to Bob Carlton (the “Foxjet” pilot):

Getting back to the machines that impress everyone except the Houthis… the F-22 (see this lecture about F-22 fly-by-wire from our MIT class).

How about a show version of the F-16?

(If Greta Thunberg hadn’t been busy with a Queers for Palestine rally she would have no doubt objected both to the gratuitous waste of Jet A fuel and the fact that the F-16 is the workhorse of Israel’s air force.)

How about some relics of the old days when the objective in war was to actually win? P-51, T-28, and MiG 17:

Let’s finish with Nathan Hammond, whose night airshow performance is always the highlight of Oshkosh, and Bill Stein:

The Stuart airport (KSUA) is about to get a huge boost from the Trump Dictatorship v2.0. Any time that Trump spends at Mar-a-Lago the PBI airport will become painful to use. The (fuel-selling) FBOs at PBI will be as angry on January 20, 2025 as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Separately, seeing all of this military hardware makes me wonder what our military is for. If our borders our open then any enemy can order its troops to walk across our southern border and then attack the U.S. from the inside. That said, I am impressed with the bravery of every veteran who has flown a military aircraft, in which there are usually plenty of ways to get killed without enemy involvement.

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Canon RF800/11 lens for eclipse totality

by philg

The Canon mirrorless 800/11 lens is light enough to pack for Eclipse 2026 in Spain (or Iceland if you feel extremely lucky with the weather).

How well does it work for photographing totality? The magnification seems about right for photographing the full corona. Here is the entire JPEG out of the camera at 1/250th of a second and ISO 400 (no need to spec the aperture because it is always f/11):

With an exposure of 1/13 of a second, the corona gets quite a bit larger:

The camera was set to autofocus and fixed at ISO 400. It was mounted on a cheap light Slik ballhead tripod that I happened to have available in Boston (we flew from KBED to KHUL (Houlton, Maine, the last stop in the U.S. for Eclipse 2024) and these pictures were taken from the ramp at KHUL).

It’s tough enough to aim at 800mm and I certainly wouldn’t want any higher magnification without a star-tracker camera mount.

I’m generally negative on trying to photograph the eclipse. The great images are nearly all stitched together laboriously in Photoshop based on multiple exposures, e.g., one long enough to capture some details in the moon itself and the farthest reaches of the corona and some short enough to show detail in the corona right near the surface of the sun. It’s better to leave the documenting to the nerds with infinite Photoshop patience and bulky equipment and park yourself with a great pair of binoculars to simply enjoy the show.

Here’s a Photoshop special from NASA in 2017 that looks great but bears almost no resemblance to what you can see with your eyes or with a camera in a single image:

Here’s the ultimate example of the “f/8 and be there” principle of photography (an experienced photographer’s technical-sounding advice to a beginner):

Kendall Rust (Facebook post) says she took it in Jonesboro, Arkansas and that this is straight out of the Canon camera, though it looks like a Photoshop wizard created it! CNN shows a remarkably similar image and credits it to Bobby Goddin:

Here’s yet another:

Unless you’re Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin, though, I’m going to stick with the “just enjoy totality” advice and take some images of things that happen around you just before and after totality. (What if you are Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin? My advice is that you abandon your hatred of government-created inequality and load up on Powerball tickets the next time the jackpot reaches $1 billion!) Here’s a quick iPhone picture of the pseudo sunset:

But if you’re going to ignore my advice, the Canon 800/11 seems like a great choice! It’s cheap, light, and does the job pretty well.

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The film flame is alive in Holland

by philg

For the old and nostalgic, or the merely old at heart, Fotohandel Delfshaven in the Netherlands (they’ve moved to downtown Delft, actually) is a great destination. There’s a gallery/showroom downstairs and a team of guys upstairs who try to get everything back to working condition. The store also sells some broken cameras for those who just want to decorate a bookshelf. They sell film and arrange processing:

The front of the shop contains an early smartphone camera prototype:

If you were inspired by astronaut Tom Hanks’s bravery in going to the moon on Apollo 13, why not buy a prototype of the electric Hasselblad that Hanks would have used if not for the unfortunate oxygen tank explosion?

What’s inside a ‘Blad?

For maximum taste and subtlety points, a gold-plated Leica:

I prefer the red Rolleiflex:

You don’t have to be rich to come away with a working film camera. $250-500 should suffice for a high-quality restored example. If you adjust 1960s or 1970s prices to Bidies, you’re actually paying far less for one of these cameras than it cost new.

Delft is a great town and I highly recommend a visit to Fotohandel Delfshaven (or come over to our house and I’ll pull a subset collection out of the closet!).

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60th anniversary of Mercury 8, with Hasselblad camera on board

by philg

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Mercury 8 mission, which orbited the Earth six times while photos were made with a Hasselblad camera. A good time to remind iPhone owners what a camera used to look like! From the Hasselblad Manual by Wildi:

Loading the film is as simple as using Instagram:

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What’s interesting about the iPhone 14 for photographers?

by philg

Apple released some new products today. Who is excited about them and why?

Aside from being able to talk on the phone, check email, and receive text messages, my main interest in a mobile phone is the camera capability.

“Apple’s iPhone 14 and 14 Pro: Imaging tech examined” (DPReview):

The Pro models gain larger sensors for their main cameras, jumping from 12MP Type 1/1.7 (7.5×5.7mm) to 48MP Type 1/1.28 (9.8×7.3mm) quad-pixel chips. The aperture is reduced from F1.5 to F1.79 but this is brighter in equivalent terms than before: the sensor is nearly twice the size, which more than makes up for the ~0.3EV slower F-number.

The camera will primarily deliver 12MP images by combining quartets of pixels to give the 2.44μm pixels discussed in Apple’s presentation, but can also deliver 48MP ProRaw files, from the individual 1.22μm photosites.

There’s a larger sensor, too for the non-Pro iPhone 14 and 14 Plus. These receive main cameras with comparable specs to those in last year’s iPhone 13 Pro. Specifically this means 12MP Type 1/1.7 (7.6×5.7mm)

My dream is a chunky phone with a Four Thirds System sensor (17x13mm). The iPhone 14 Pro models are thus approximately one third of the way to my dream, as measured by sensor area.

When would this matter? Here’s an iPhone 13 Pro evening photo from one of the new waterfront neighborhoods of Oslo:

If you download this and zoom in you’ll see how fuzzy the faces are. That’s the limit of what clever hardware and software can do to try to patch up the deficiencies caused by using a tiny sensor in low light.

Compare to this image taken at 2 pm (daylight savings time):

Readers: Aside from this sensor size increase, which is simply catch-up to the better Android phones, what is new and interesting from Apple?

Related:

  • “Apple’s iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus Bring Enhanced Cameras” (PetaPixel): “The dual-camera system upgrades and features on the iPhone 14 include a new Main camera with a larger ƒ/1.5 aperture and 1.9 µm pixels, enabling photo and video improvements in all lighting scenarios for better detail and motion freezing, less noise, faster exposure times, and sensor-shift optical image stabilization. … There is a new Action mode for smooth-looking video that adjusts to significant shakes, motion, and vibrations, including when video is being captured in the middle of the action.”
  • speaking of Android, the co-creator Andy Rubin provides a good example of the risks of being married in California; from the Daily Mail: Former Google exec who ‘got $90M severance’ amid sexual coercion probe ‘ran sex ring which lent out women he paid to own for orgies and filmed them,’ claims estranged wife … Andy Rubin is being sued by his estranged wife Rie, who seeks to have the couple’s prenuptial agreement voided in a complaint unsealed on Tuesday … ‘This is a family law dispute involving a wife who regrets her decision to execute a prenuptial agreement,’ said Rubin’s lawyer, adding suit is full of ‘false claims’ … Rie, who is also seeking a divorce from Rubin in family court, is demanding a jury trial and asking that the prenuptial agreement she signed be voided, thus allowing her to collect on the $350 million her estranged husband earned during their marriage.
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How to use a television as a digital picture frame? (2022 edition)

by philg

From 2012, Best LCD television for use as a digital photo display?:

  • must be programmable so that it comes on in “photo display” mode so that there is no need to monkey with a remote control after a power failure (or maybe default to photo display mode if a USB stick is plugged in); I have found the deep menus of modern HDTVs to be truly painful
  • must be programmable to shut itself off at midnight, for example, and back on at 8 am (to save power)
  • must be daylight-viewable (means LCD is better than plasma?)
  • must have low power consumption (implies LED-lit)?
  • [2022 addition] keep each image up for at least a few minutes

From 2010, Why don’t people use a small TV as a digital picture frame?

From 2014, Can Google Chromecast do a simple slide show?

What’s the answer to these questions today? I talked to some A/V installers who charge over $100,000 for a typical home setup and they couldn’t think of any way to have a TV turn itself on at the same time every day and start showing images of the consumer’s choice. Their only idea was the LG Gallery TV, but I think that is designed to show art and images from LG’s servers, not your own USB stick or local NAS share. Also, supposedly it is impossible to change the settings for transitioning from image to image, including both effects and timing.

I looked at the manual for the latest and great “Evo” LG OLED TV. It seems to have the same limitations as when I looked at Samsung and LG 10 years ago. The TV can turn itself on at the same time every day and tune to a particular channel or display a particular HDMI input.

(i.e., if you had a dongle that continuously went through the contents of a USB stick and turned it into 4K video, the TV could be programmed to show it)

How about the $4,300 Samsung “The Frame” TV? It doesn’t have an “on timer”, only an “off timer.” (But in theory it can turn itself on automatically via a motion detector?) It sounds as though displaying your own pictures can be done, but via a tedious importation process of one image at a time.

How about a $7,000 Sony 8K Mini LED TV that isn’t even available yet? The web-based manual suggests that it offers the same features as LG, i.e., to turn on and tune to a channel or input.

Since the TVs won’t do this for the $thousands that have been handled over by consumers, what about the dongle feeding an HDMI input idea? A December 2020 article on the subject says the dongles are called “media players” and describes the “Micca” product line, but these are limited to a feeble 1080p. The Amazon Fire TV stick might be able to do it with a cheap app that pulls images from Flickr. It will generate a 4K signal. China comes to the rescue with Rikomagic’s mini PCs and Android devices, sometimes with various apps, e.g., that can pull from Dropbox. All of Rikomagic’s products seem to have 4K HDMI output. I can already feel the pain of more devices to maintain, though, and also see this getting stuck and having to be rebooted. Not to mention lots of extra wires and periodic removal of the TV from the wall to get to the dongle, etc.

At this point, you’re thinking “Of course, the TVs can’t do this because who besides a handful of digital SLR nerds would ever want this?” In fact, however, a huge number of TVs are purchased for this exact role… in-store advertising, a.k.a., “digital signage.” Because, apparently, you can’t plug in a USB stick and have the TV do the rest, there are a lot of vendors happy to sell you the few lines of software that Samsung, LG, and Sony left out. Rise Vision is an example and it seems to be priced at about $120 per year per TV (i.e., over the life of a mid-priced mid-sized TV, more will be paid to Rise Vision than to the TV manufacturer).

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Photography suggestions from the Google

by philg

If you remembered to put your Canon mirrorless system in the back of the Rolls Royce for the trip to the Bal Harbour mall, here’s the Google Maps suggestion for where to stop and take pictures… Haulover Nude Beach (note camera icon pin):

From February 24, 2020 (from the same date… “Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco’s Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns” (NBC): She said there’s no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns. “That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here,” Pelosi said. “Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation.”), at the Bal Harbour Shops:

The red vehicle at top left is a Ferrari Enzo, available as a 20-year-old used car for about $3.5 million.

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