LensWork Technology Blog

We're Moving!

Announcing Our New . . .

We're not sure what to call it. Compendium seems the best term, but a bit over the top. Amalgam — too dental. Blog — too, well, bloggish. Corpus — creepy. Assemblage, collation, accumulation, gathering — oh, heck with it.

How about — Where We Put Lots of Miscellaneous Stuff We Think You Will Be Interested In.

Essentially, we are doing a bit of E-C-R-S, which stands for Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, and Simplify.

The idea is simply this: we are combining all the multifarious email and web communications we have with LensWork readers into one compendium. Rather than having separate . . .

• Podcast
• Tech Blog
• Ask Brooks Blog
• Weekly News & Info Emails
• Alumni News emails
• Twice weekly Alumni Spotlights
• Vision of the Heart blog
• Alumni Spotlight
• Podcast email announcements

. . . we are combining all of this into one, new project called LensWork Daily. This combined whatever has the advantages of:

• Giving our readers a single location for everything
• Much easier for us to create and post
• Design consistency
• Category tagging so you can see only a filtered subset of posts that interest you
• Cross-fertilization of our various reading groups
• Automatic RSS feeds to email, browsers or other aggregators (and we'll be providing tutorials for those of you who are not familiar with this)
  • You can receive new posts in your email
  • You can monitor new posts using your browser's RSS tracking
  • Or you can bookmark the main web page http://daily.lenswork.com and stop by whenever you want to catch up.

And most importantly, because LensWork Daily uses a post/comment format, you can add your thoughts to the discussion via comment posting and share ideas with the community at large.

http://daily.lenswork.com

We call it LensWork Daily because we have so much content to share that it works out we actually do something every day  — well, at least Monday through Friday. Because these things have been scattered in a number of different areas, we know some of you haven't been aware of all the content we publish. Now, with this unified approach, you'll be able to more easily keep up with all there is to see.

So, this blog — technology.lenswork.com — is being terminated and all its previous and future content can now be found at http://daily.lenswork.com. Pop over there and reset your bookmarks, RSS feeds, and take a look at our new combined, amalgamated, unified whatever-we-should-call-it!

Enjoy!

Brooks Jensen
Editor, LensWork Publishing

P.S. By the way, our regular website (www.lenswork.com) is still where you can go to learn all about the various products we sell, subscription information, etc.

And www.lensworkonline.com, our new membership website with content galore, is where you will find downloadable publications, full-content video workshops, the podcast archives going all the back to podcast #0001, epub and Kindle ebooks, audio and video interviews with photographers, iPad and Android editions of both LensWork and LensWork Extended, and lots more.

Roku on my Android

We gave up on cable TV a couple of years ago. We found we were only watching the Food Channel and Myth Busters. Quite honestly, it simply wasn't worth the $80 a month. Oh, and the occasional baseball or football game, but its hard to be a die-hard fan when your home teams are the Mariners and the Seahawks. So, bye-bye cable.

This became a very easy decision when we discovered the Roku box and streaming movies from Netflix. We don't watch that much TV anyway, and we get all we want via Roku and renting a disc now and then.

Enter the Android market. Some clever folks have created a apps for Android smart phones and tablets that will replace the remote control on the Roku box. What a fascinating blend of two seemingly unrelated technologies!

   

They work well and are much handier than the Roku's separate remote control. I always have my phone on me; I spend far too much of my life searching for the Roku remote. So, bye-bye Roku remote.

It's always a joy to let go of some technology as it's replace by some better and more convenient.

Toshiba Thrive

Stopped by Best Buy yesterday to look at the Toshiba Thrive tablet. This one looks to me to be a real winner. If you are shopping for a tablet and are looking beyond the ubiquitous iPad, take a look at this one.

Android OS, 10" screen, two cameras, stereo speakers, full-sized USB and HDMI ports, replaceable battery.

It's heavier (by a bit, but not much — 1.4 lbs for my Transformer versus 1.7 lbs for the Thrive) that the others in its size range, but the full-sized ports, replaceable battery, and better, louder speakers make at a contender. If I didn't already own a Transformer, this is the one I'd buy today.

Speaking of weight, lots of folks are making a basic mistake about this in their reviews and comments. I so often see that this tablet weighs an ounce or two more or less than this other tablet, blah, blah, blah. Comparing tablets is not all that real-world in my way of thinking. If I want to save weight, I'll take my phone or my Kindle reader, both of which weigh a fraction of any tablet. If weight is not really an issue, then I'll often take my netbook and have full PC capabillities. That is, when it comes to a real-world decision about what I take with me at any given moment, it's a use capabilities/weight trade off. The spectrum of possibilities runs from smartphone to Kindle Keyboard to (eventually) the Kindle Fire to a tablet to my netbook to a laptop. Or sometimes, just nuttin'. It's against this type of thinking that the extra weight of the Thrive over other Android tablets seems insignificant to me.

 [For comparison, the Kindle Fire weighs 0.91 lbs., the Kindle Keyboard weights 0.52 lbs, and my Atrix phone weighs 0.3 lbs. The iPads 1/2 weigh 1.6 and 1.3 lbs respectively. And nuttin' weighs nuttin'.]

VLC Player

On the advice and recommendation of a reader's comments to my post the other day about Windows Media Player 12, I downloaded the open source VLC Player. Very nice. Very universal. I threw every type of file I could think at it and it played all of them flawlessly and smoothly. Video and audio. If there are limitations to this player, I didn't find them.

   

   

So, it can be done. Which begs the question, why don't Apple and Microsoft do it? Why are QuickTime and Windows Media Player (other than version 12) compromised? I do tire of these inane turf wars — particularly as a publisher trying to make something that everyone can access. I guess the next question is how do I get the entire world to install the VLC player? Nice thought, but it ain't gonna happen.

LensWork Extended on our new Sony LCD TV

We upgraded our TV to this century. Our new 40" Sony Bravia LCD is HD. We're happ'nin'.

I know, I'm slow to catch up with the rest of you. Perhaps all that follows is old news, but it was new to me. In setting up the new TV, I first needed to learn about HDMI connections. Hmmm . . . I also have an HDMI out on my tablet. Wonder what happens if I plug my tablet into the TV and look at, say, LensWork Extended.

[Cue the angels, high C in 4-part harmony, go . . . .] AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!

I am aghast, agog, ablownaway how great LensWork Extended looks. I mean it, truly amazing.

   

   

A few thoughts:

• In all my years in photography, I've never made a print this large.
• HDTV is 1920x1080 pixels. We encode LensWork Extended at the equivalent of 2666x1666 and have since the first issue of LensWork Extended way back in 2005. We were HD before HD was HD. In fact, HD has a ways to go to catch up with us. :-)
• So, LensWork Extended has more than enough pixel resolution to be seen on HD screens and still zoom in a bit without pixelating.
• Even the videos look great. We added the Sony sound bar for better audio with a sub-woofer and this makes the interviews sound fantastic.
• My TV has various "scenes" I can select (or customize) for Cinema, Sports, Photos, et al. They substantially change the tone, warmth, sharpness, etc. of the visual image. It's worth experimenting to find the best one. Cinema works best on my set for not oversharpening, but it a bit warmish. I made a custom "scene" that used no extra sharpening, only a slight warmth, and a touch of increased brightness in the shadows to preserve detail. The image on the TV now matches perfectly the image on the tablet which matches perfectly the image on my calibrated computer monitor. Sweet, and not much fussing to accomplish.
• I was really surprised how readable the text is on the TV, even from across the room on the couch. A two-fingered pinch zoom and the text was as large as I could possibly want — and never pixelates because it is not rasterized. One of the advantages of the PDF format.
• A 16' HDMI cable cost me $14. Couch potato, indeed.

I have no idea if this is the future of LensWork Extended or of the consumption of still images. I'm not sure people will want to see photographic artwork on their TV, but it is interesting that it works, looks great, and gets me away from my desk and the computer. I'd be very interested to hear if any of you have tried this and what you thought about the experience.

Windows Media Player 12 plays MOV files!

I must have missed this one — this really big one. Or Microsoft did an awful job of spreading the word.

I discovered by accident that my new Windows Media Player (version 12, available only with the Windows 7 operating system) will now play MOV videos. No more necessity to have QuickTime just to play MOV format files. Who knew?

And there's a bit of icing on the cake beyond that. Windows Media Player version 12 will also now play the MTS video format files that come out of my Panasonic cameras. No more converting them from MTS to WMV just to see what's there. Again, who knew?

Way to go Microsoft. A video player that plays videos. I like it!

Unfortunately, the turf wars rage on — iPad won't play Flash; WMV files on a Mac are problematic; the masses who still have Windows XP need QuickTime to play MOV files. It's a mess and I sure don't see it getting any less messy in the near future. Imagine if we didn't have JPG and PNG and had to have different still image file formats for Mac, PC, and iPad.

Dolphin

Remember those innocent days when the only two web browsers in the world were Internet Explorer and Netscape? (Whatever happened to Netscape?) Now there's a plethora — on my smart phone I can choose Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, the default browser, and now Dolphin. I just discovered Dolphin a couple of days ago. Quite honestly, until then I'd never heard of it.

But then, yesterday, Adobe updated Flash to version 11. Everything works fine on my computer (as expected) but on my Android devices there's big trouble. With this update, flash videos no longer play in either Firefox or Opera, my chosen browsers. Damn! They'll probably fix it — I'm sure they're highly motivated — but as of today it's broken. So, yesterday, I started looking for alternatives and stumbled across Dolphin. What a slick little browser!

If you've not seen Dolphin "gestures" in operation, it's worth taking a look. Quite simply, you draw a shape on your touchscreen and Dolphin recognizes that shape as a command to open a website. No typing, simply drawing! It also does a few navigational commands like going to the top of the page, zooming, etc.

I also like the speed dial page that acts as the browser's "homepage" where my most frequently used websites (e.g., www.lenswork.com, ahem) can be configured with a speed dial button. This is similar to Opera's "Start Page." Obviously, I'm only 24 hours in the playing with Dolphin on my phone and my Android tablet, but so far it's very nice, very functional, and could be my new favorite Android browser. I've only seen one hitch that is inconvenient and that's its inability to import my bookmarks from Firefox. They say this is a feature they are working on. Not a serious problem, but too bad its not already resolved.

Oh, and it plays Flash even after yesterday's version 11 update. Sweet!

MP3 problem. Help?

I'm having a dumb little problem with converting some analog recordings to MP3 files and wondering if any of you can help. I have some long recordings — several hours long — that I am uploading to digital files. I do this real-time by simply re-recording the analog file. I play the audio (cassette or reel-to-reel) and pipe it over via patch cord to an MP3 recorder. The resulting MP3 file I then open in Adobe Audition to clean up and save as the archive. Most of the time it works just fine, but on occasion an odd problem crops up.

With these very long recordings, occasionally I cannot open them in Audition. Actually, they open, but are truncated. The, say, 7 hour audio file will play just fine in any MP3 player, so it has all recorded. But, Audition only opens part of the file — perhaps 30 minutes, perhaps a few hours, but definitely truncated. No matter what I do, it always imports into Audition — or Audacity or Premier Pro or SoundBooth — as a truncated file.

I've tried various alternate encoding bitrates; I've tried encoding to WMA files; I've tried converting the truncated file to WAV using a re-encoder. Nothing will fix the file once it is corrupt. My only choice is to rerecord the entire 7-8 hours of audio and hope it doesn't fail. What is so mysterious is that the file will play for the full 7 hours, so I know all the data is there in the file, I simply cannot get to it. It's as though there is an "end of file" byte before the end of the file and once there, all is lost as far as opening the file for editing in any software I have.

Frustrating.

Anyone have a suggestion about how to open/edit these truncated MP3s in their entirety?

A bit of video learning curve

I've been on the hunt for another camera that will do video (my Panasonic G1 cameras do not). I was intrigued by the new Sony A77 and its APS-C sensor size. I assumed its noise factor would be an improvement even compared with a Panasonic GH2, the leading candidate in my quest for a new video-capable camera. In fact, the new images posted at dpreview.com this week show the GH2 is less noisy than the Sony at ISO 1600, in spite of Sony's APS-C size sensor. What a shock. Obviously, the cost of packing in so many sensor points so densely.

I lost interest in the Sony. The GH2 still leads the field, but it is really more than I need. Great camera, but I'd rather have two or three (for multi-camera shoots) that are enough yet affordable rather than one that is great but overkill.

So, I went all the way back to the beginning and started over looking for a camera that might meet my video needs. I found it. The now almost-discontinued Panasonic G2 is the perfect fit for me. Uses my existing lenses; does 720p video (which is all I really need, see below); has the same size sensor as my G1 (12 megapixel stills); has almost the same noise characteristics at ISP 800 as does the GH2; has a stereo input jack for external microphones; and is at the end of its product cycle life so is inexpensive. I purchased a body-only for $299 at Amazon.com which will arrive here on Tuesday, just in time for my departure next Thursday to Carmel for the Uelsmann lecture and for my video tour of Chuck Davis' darkroom.

Here are some RAW noise comparisons from dpreview.com, however, in the real world I'd apply a little Noiseware Pro noise reduction.

   

Below is after Noiseware Pro noise reduction. I can live with this. No, I can thrive with this.

   

   

At ISO 1600, you can see that the G2 is a lot noisier than the GH2, but I rarely use it that high. What really surprises me is that it's about on par with the Sony A77! Of course, the Sony is a 24 megapixel image which will be a deciding factor for lots of photographers, but isn't important to me. I guess that's the cost of the extra pixels, the inevitable noise.

   

What is most impressive is how great the GH2 performs at ISP 1600. Wow! And a lot cheaper than a $2,500 Canon 5D MkII. Again, I assume, the advantage of the 5D MkII being is larger pixel count.

Relative to video, here was the learning curve from the week: If you are a Full Access member of LensWork Online, check out the interview I did with Doug Ethridge. The three-camera shoot of our interview was done with a somewhat dangerous mix of cameras. The video of Doug was shot with my Panasonic GF1; the video of me was shot with his Panasonic GH2; the wide shot video of both of us was shot with my snapshot camera, the Panasonic ZS3. All were AVCHD captured MTS files. Here are the details of the capture:

• GH2 (me) was shot at 1920x1080 at 16,589 kbps (1080p, full frame HD, AVCHD)
• GF1 (Doug) was shot at 1280x720 at 15,285 kbps (720p, AVCHDLite)
• ZS3 (wide of both of us) was shot at 1280x720 at 15,260 kbps (720p, AVCHDLite)

   

Although the GH2 has a much larger image and higher data rate that I'm sure would be an advantage for lots of full HD productions, these differences are nullified because of the size of the finished video we use. Constructed for playback on computer monitors, we size the final video at 960x540 — actually quite large for computer video and the context in which we use them. (By comparison, most YouTube videos are either 400x240 or 600x360.) In fact, any larger and some folks might find they can't see the entire video because their computer monitors are too small. So, the 720p format video camera (1280x720) are enough for my needs for our interviews and for production requirements for LensWork Extended. The new Panasonic G2 shoots 720p (1280x720) natively and will be great for this use.

There is one other cutting edge consideration that was worth checking out. I loaded up our streaming video on my Android tablet which I piped via HDMI cable into our Sony 40" LCD television. I wanted to see how the video looked there just in case people decided to view LensWork Extended on their HDTV. Looks great — not like full size HD cable, but great nonetheless. Even at that large size, the ZS3 pocket camera is only very slightly softer in focus that the other two, far more expensive cameras. The differences are so slight, I doubt anyone will even notice. I am fully satisfied.

So, a concluding word of advice from the pragmatist in me: In the race for more and more pixels and higher and higher definition video, it does appear that just as in other areas of life, "Enough is as good as a feast." I may have to fight off the seduction of 1080p video, but for actual work it appears that 720p has a lot more to offer than the camera sellers would have us believe — at least for those of us not doing feature films or episodes of House for commercial broadcast outlets.

Kindle Fire

   

Amazon announces the new Kindle Fire.

Looks like a LensWork Digital Editions device to me!

Amazon's web page went live this morning at 8am my time and they had my pre-order at 8:01. Supposedly shipping on Nov 15th. We will definitely work to make sure LensWork Portable Edition and LensWork Android Edition work on this exciting new device.