One Grain Amongst the Storm

“Flaming (also known as bashing) is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users”

-Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

Recently, one of the myriads of non-descript crevices I keep drifting in on the net, ‘officially’ charged me with ‘flaming’ for a rather mundane discussion on competing models of Nikon and Canon cameras. Funnily though, the Original Poster of the thread was rather thankful to me about the suggestions I’d made. I was amused and perturbed at the same time as I’ve been a netizen since the text-only days of the Internet and I take pride in my netiquette. All along, I have carefully chosen my words, syntax and ideas, and thought twice before hitting the Post button. I am sure most folks will be hard put to recollect a single instance where I may have rubbed a co-participant the wrong way, leave alone ‘flaming’.

Now, those who know me well will tell you how impassioned I may get while defending my beliefs.  One of my seasoned friends and a senior tirelessly exhorts me against the hamartia. However, even he would admit that it takes some knocking to get me worked up and start spewing flames on the adversary. The source of consternation in the aforesaid incident, therefore, was neither the absurdity of the charge leveled against me, nor the absence or presence of worth in the models of certain brand, but the unwritten ‘rules of the forum’ which implied that the participants, lowly beings that they were, dare not raise an eyebrow to the cloths of the Emperor, a.k.a. the Administrator. And since the Emperor chanced to be the owner of certain brand of photographic equipment, anyone found even breathing against it would be charged with Capital Crime!

Since the summons had arrived in a private message, and it was condescendingly pointed out to me too, I offered that the proceedings be held in open court, in full public view of the participants of the forum. The appeal vanished as soon as it was posted, quite like my earlier ‘flaming’ expressions. Frustrated, I posted a ‘Goodbye’ message for the benefit of the odd sympathiser, who I believed had a right to the knowledge of my impending future disappearance. This also vanished as if charmed!

Well, the moral of the story is that while in the dingier sections of the fishmarket, you not only have to love the Administrator’s Dog, but the entire present, past and the future clan of the Dog! Fortunately,  few keystrokes away from the vain fiefdoms, I can surrender myself to the grace of communities like Photo.net. And although I have no plans of embracing silence anytime soon, words from an old poem by T. S. Eliot well up in my mind from nowhere:

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

Death

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

Death

Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning

Death

Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog

By this grace dissolved in place…. 

Actually, I owe the title to Scott Kelby rather than the ongoing Nikon Marketing teaser where something ‘Nikon’ is claiming to be Sexy, Hollywood and Marco Polo, all rolled into one, with Innovation thrown somewhere in between. I could have waited for a couple of days for the mystery to reveal itself with the countdown cards, each with a companion trait, but I figured it is unlikely to make any difference to my final thoughts on the subject. And the credit to Scott Kelby? Well, I’ve stolen this trick of attracting readers with ‘fake titles’ from his famous book ‘Digital Photography’!

Don’t go away just yet. It is not really that bad. I will take a plunge right into the middle of Nikon, Sex, Hollywood, Marco Polo and all.

The Nippon Kogaku K. K. started operations as early as 1917. And while they have not been quite the originator or the innovator the way Leica or Pentax have been, they have perfected and produced some of the finest cameras and lenses the world has ever seen. They started out making lenses for Leica and Contax and ventured into manufacturing their own ‘Rangefinders’ and small cameras. The ‘F’, launched in 1959, is famed to have triggered a revolution in single lens reflex cameras. indeed, the successive ‘F’ series have gained cult status among professional photographers and photojournalists the world over, thanks to their ruggedness and system compatibility. Their mettle has been tested from the Antarctic to the Sahara, and even in the extremities of space, as exemplified by the numerous voyages aboard NASA spacecrafts. Even after the world went digital, Nikons have retained their class and fan following. The D2XS, and recently the D3S, were chosen by NASA for photographic documentation of their unearthly ventures. Going by their feats, I wouldn’t have been shocked if Nikon cameras had gone ahead and claimed, “I am Neil Armstrong”, instead. But to have made it a bit innovative, or rather sexed it up a bit with a Holywood twist to it, what about:

My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the Cameras….

As it turns out though, photographic excellence may not coexist with financial excellence. The fate of legends like Kodak and Pentax are rather sordid sagas of competition, marketing and psychological warfare. In the duopolistic scramble between Nikon and Canon today, Nikon cannot afford to lull themselves into complacency of success they are having with their DSLR cameras. They are frantically trying to gain a foothold in the curiously lost battle of compact cameras where Canon have been ruling, thanks to a slew of series and models which are good at what they do and are considered ‘sexy’ too, courtesy catchy shapes and colours. In fact, one of Canon’s famous series is even named ‘SX’, only a vowel short of the magic word! Big deal. Nikon now seem to have decided being rather direct about the sex part of the whole stinking thing. And within the sexy frame you have flashes of facts, fables and fictions a la Marco Polo. Very, very romantic!

Alas, if only the photographic equipment makers focused on producing cameras that remained sizable in the hands of photographers rather than chipmunks! If only the cameras just took great pictures instead of trying to churn out Holywood flicks, cutting out cheap audio albums, being internet browsers, turning into GPS navigators and mobile phone devices! If only, the cameras were left alone being cameras rather than being converted into skimpy, touchy, feely, sexy ipods with all modes merged into a single Sex-Priority mode that would auto-sense the sex of a subject and shoot even before you switched it on! Trust the Marketing gurus to induce you into asking just the same.

Never have the DSLR-bashers had it so good. Finally, there is the ultimate in point-and-shoot with sensors nearly as large as those in four-thirds DSLR cameras. And there is an electronic viewfinder to scan the world in ‘realtime’. Really high-tech. Why, you can change the lenses too! It is called EVIL, or the Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens camera. At the time of writing this the Olympus E-P1, a.k.a. the “PEN”, and the Panasonic GF1 are already hogging the eyeballs in the Internet space, if not the real world markets. Samsung too seems to have thrown the hat in the ring with the NX-10.

The whopping contraction in size has been acquired by hacking off the mirror mechanism altogether. In a typical SLR body, the light beams are reflected towards a pentaprism/pentamirror which in turn directs them through the viewfinder. Before you have the feeling that this is an elegy on the bygone mirror and prism, I would like to point out that many pros are given to use “mirror up” in their DSLR’s before tripping the shutter for avoiding vibrations caused by the snapping movement of the mirror. Thus, mirrors do have a negative side effect. Is this a reason to rejoice, then?

Not really. Although reluctantly, I am willing to let go the pristine real-life view of the subjects before I take the image in favour of the real-time electronic view, if it offers better and sharper pictures. Theoretically, it does. But it also seriously reduces the size of the camera. The problem is, they have bloated the sensor (for the standards of a compact camera)! And bigger sensors need bigger lenses! A typical zoom lens has several groups of glass elements inside them. Precision mechanisms and long barrels are required to move these elements to change the focal length. What is the point if I still have to snap a converter and use huge professional lenses to dwarfish bodies. How do they remain petite anymore? If the industry has to mint an entire series of miniaturised lenses for the EVIL format, what is the point in having a large sensor?

The evolution from Film to Digital SLRs has been a gradual one. The likes of Nikon started with the DX format (1.5X crop factor to 35mm) when they launched the D1 in 1999 and it was not till 2007 when they came up with D3, their first FX (full format 35mm) DSLR. It should not take one long to realize that the professionals looking for higher quality look up to full format cameras rather than the cropped DX version.

Yes, small is beautiful. But excuse me, it somehow appears to be a case of ‘Honey I shrunk the DSLR’! Just as everything in life, you set the limit somewhere. Can you really enjoy a HD movie on the small screen of your mobile phone? How effective are the mega dollar thrillers like the Star War series, the Jurassic Park saga or recently, the Avtar, on your home television panels?

I am not seeking to establish that the new EVIL format will fail. Far from it, we should witness the established players like Nikon and Canon flooding the market with their models sooner than later. The technology, however, is poised to replace the point-and-shoot, or more specifically, the advanced compact cameras –or “bridge cameras”, if you have it that way — rather than the DSLRs. Incidentally, the existing entry level DSLRs have already been shrunk to manageable sizes for those who hate the bulk of the bigger brethren of the race. You only have to try holding a Nikon D3000 or a Canon 1000D in you hands to realize this. Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop the www.wired.com from coming up with “5 reasons to ditch your Digital SLR” :

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/five-reasons-you-should-ditch-your-dslr/

Its an amazing piece of yellow journalism, indeed.

I caused some heartburn when I wrote ‘Go, get a DSLR‘ and I’m still busy wiping foreign froth off my face! A couple of connoisseurs who couldn’t bring themselves to descend low enough to put in a comment on this blog, called me long distance to tell me how very backward looking I was. DSLRs will be passé in a year or two, I was told, and I probably was not ready to acknowledge the advancements in technology. Was I an ostritch or something? See, what happened to all those doggedly sticking to film photography!

Sure enough. Unfortunately and fortunately, the goo doesn’t stick to the face of someone who drools at the scent of a new gadget! I, who have kept the date with Intel, chipset to chipset and with the nth upgrade to my console am none the God! Bricks to polyphonic mobiles, Razrs to Iphones, I’ve had them all: my battered bank account would bear testimony to that. Suddenly now I am the retro fool who wants to screech his gramophones and rewind his ISO 100 film.

Surprisingly, the very fact that I advocate Digital rather than Film SLRs is conveniently lost on my detractors. Why, if I am the rabid purist, did I not stick to Film SLRs? Come on, I will make it simple and tell you that! In case of Digital vs Film, two overpowering facts in favour of digital photography sealed the fate of the latter. One is the power of ‘instant review’. The second is, of course, the power of ‘delete’ and shoot ‘anew’ without any jolt to your wallet. I can throw in the power of increased dynamic range and ISO sensitivity also for good measure but this will sooner turn out to be a never ending slugfest of film vs. Digital. This has been made possible because of the innovative use of digital sensors in place of disposable films. Apart from this, nothing else has changed for the equipment otherwise refered to as “Single Lens Reflex” cameras. The same however does not hold true for the case of DSLR vs point-and-shoot cameras. With more compact camera models than there are stars in the Galaxy, none of them has been able to match the might of life-sized sensors and appendable lenses of a DSLR. My point is, I am not blind to new developments in technology but the broth has to settle before I start sipping it off my daily cup.

But this may change and how! The world is waiting with baited breath the advent of the Apple Tablet, “a cross between an iPhone and a laptop” with a 10 inch high resolution screen. Now, this is getting interesting! What if the huge facia could act as a lens with integrated glass elements and aperture, feeding an enormous sensor behind! That would certainly beat the Hasselblads, or wait, the resolutions of even View Cameras! And when that happens, I will be there indeed, in the overnight queue to grab my piece of the Tablet that will put the Nikon D3s and Canon 1Ds of this world to shame. Meanwhile, go get a Tablet that is a phone, a media player, a personal computer and an image snapping device all magically rolled into one!

I am no tiger in the woods. Forget tigers, I am not even a coyote in the woods! Yet, what exactly were the Internet sharks thinking when they stole my non-descript website url uspandey.com a year back? That I’d be running to them with two rucksacks of gold, one in each arm? Maybe Tiger Woods would do that if it saves his marriage. Certainly not me for a string of symbols, or worse still, for a string of zeroes and ones!

But the Internet is deeper than you think and the potent mafia is closer to you than you can imagine. Just to give you an idea, and sorry if you feel uncomfortable, every fetch and send to your bank account rubs shoulders with an infinity of cookies, trojans, worms and malwares. What I am driving at is that it didn’t take them long to figure I am broke and that, I probably will have to sell my kidneys to buy a decent pair of Nikkor lenses for my DSLR that I’ve been pining for! And they dumped me on the beach with the rest of the silt and probably carried a prize catch or two away. I, of course, mean the website url by ‘me’.

No, it doesn’t end there. The Net is bristling with smalltime crooks and fraudsters of every imaginable hue. I specially love the kinds who disclose how you just won a lottery of $1,000,000,000 and how a bunch of shameless customs officials are holding the booty for a mere $1! They take over where the Sharks quit.

So I get this mail from best-domains-on-earth or some bullshit.com telling me they will be selling my favourite domain in an auction soon. However, they say, if I pay certain $$$s it would be mine again. Déjà vu. I almost hit the delete button when I notice it is not the same outfit from down under which approached me the last winter. You know what, curiosity killed the cat! So instead of brushing it off but thinking about it the entire week, I did a ‘whois’ for the lost url. Surprisingly, it was lying there, as I said, dumped on the beach with the rest of the silt, unregistered with anyone. This cat wanted a ransom for the fish he never was in possession of! Before I realized, my fingers had fished out that nemesis of my life, a.k.a. the credit card, from my pocket and I had booked the domain again for a mere $5! I am hard put to put it to some use but at least it will not be misused or hawked around the stinking alleys of Internet. The clock, of course, has come a full circle.

Everyone has legs, everyone walks. Do some people walk better than others? You bet! Hundreds of languages would bear testimony to the thousands of rhymes alluded to mesmerizing walks of the damsels, ladies, princesses, queens…. I hope I don’t get sued by some overzealous feminists. I’ll throw in the gaits of heroes, warriors and princes for good measure….

Talking of walking, it occurs to me that some people can walk faster, as does, Usain Bolt. Excuse me, you say, isn’t Bolt a sprinter? I’d insist however that Bolt’s kind of moving his body at those amazing speeds is a kind of walking. Further, some people have mastered stunning arts, all thanks to their legs. Gymnasts, ballet dancers, ski-dancers, karate kids and kick-boxers are all a visual feast to watch (except probably the last two types who are best enjoyed from a respectable distance).

Why am I going mad with this legs thing? You see, folks, I am trying to pull an analogy. All I want to do is to juxtapose the legs with cameras that most everyone has in their hands most of their waking times these days. Yes, I am talking of those tiny holes in most mobile phones. Many of those mocams, to coin a word, are being put to service profusely. You see the point? Just as the accident of your having legs doesn’t make you a great walker (forgive me if you regularly kill dozens with that feat -pun intended), your ownership of a mocam doesn’t make you an Ansel Adams. The reason I am mad with this mocamtography thing (sorry for coining again) is that I stumbled upon this wannabe-learn-photography thing on the web address of a respectable institution where the writer had meticulously put images shot off a mocam, a point-and-shoot and a DSLR, neatly in a row, and argued that there really wasn’t any difference among the shots of these three at a smaller scale and you need to buy an SLR camera only if you intended to send your images to the National Geographic or something like that, which you obviously don’t.

He could not have been more wrong.

If you harbour even the faintest desire of learning photography, go get a DSLR. Hold it, you think, they don’t come cheap! But friends, just as money doesn’t grow on trees, photography doesn’t grow on mocams! Whoever said there are free lunches in the world?

Photography is capturing of Light in a controlled manner onto a photosensitive material such as a film or a censor as the digital SLR’s have. The light is controlled by two critical mechanisms called the shutter and the aperture. The shutter is like a curtain that has the censor covered and opens for a short determined period to allow the light to hit the censor. The amount of time may vary from an hour to 10,000th of a second or could be more either way. The aperture consists of a number of blades arranged to form circular openings of variable shape. The hole as it changes its size varies the quantity of light entering and hitting the censor in a given period. Because of the behaviour of light as perceived by various tenets of Physics, the size of opening of the aperture has significant impact on the depth of focus that an image would have. There is a third equally important element called ISO Sensitivity of the film/censor and together the three have the final say on how a photograph is going to look. However, since the advent of digital photography, the ISO Sensitivity of a censor can be changed on the fly, and we need to be less and less worried about it as compared to the olden days when one had to rush to a dark room, carefully take out the film and pop in a roll having a different ISO sensitivity. However, clean noise free images at high ISOs (think 6400 where 100 is normal) are the reason why those BIG DSLR’s with BIG Dollar price tags exist, apart form many other matters that you would eventually discover.

Following is a brief list of why absolutely you must have an SLR or a DSLR if you are serious about your photography. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the cameras simply as SLR and Consumer Cameras, with mocams only being a severely low rung adaptation of the latter.

1. Consumer cameras are Auto-everything. If this sounds great then they were invented just for folks like you! Go ahead and enjoy them. However, if you want to take control of your composition, think of an SLR which will normally allow you to take charge of the exposure, metering, shutter speed, aperture, ISO sensitivity and even the flash. In short, you have to decide whether you instruct the camera most of the time or the camera instructs you all the time!

2. Human eye is a highly complex organ which can dynamically focus at near or far objects in a twinkle, in different lighting situations. Cameras, although an imitation, are not that lucky. The act of focusing in a camera is achieved by the lens attached or fixed to it. Till date, no company has invented a lens which will work perfectly in every situation. SLR cameras, or Single Lens Reflex Cameras, being cameras with detachable lens system allow for switching the lens to your heart’s content, limited probably only by the size of your wallet. I have, of course, established and reputed companies like Nikon and Canon on my mind when I say that. Talking of lenses, SLR lenses also have provision for attaching critical filters like a polarizer.

3. With an SLR camera you are actually seeing the world through the lens and there is absolutely no shutter lag when you pull the trigger. On the contrary, the consumer cameras send a tiny replay of the scene on their LCD screens and have various degrees of shutter lags, depending upon their cost. The latter also have an annoying tendency of freezing for several seconds while they are struggling to save the file.

4. Thanks to the marketing blizzards, most consumer cameras are bursting with mega pixels today. However, their censor sizes unfortunately remain minuscule. This brings in serious picture quality issues like noise, over-processing and unreal colours.

5. Most consumer cameras have their apertures starting at F8 or more. It is the impact of the severe crop factor of their censors. You can forget about seriously isolating your subjects. Thus even if some models allow for manual control, the impact of aperture related controls over the image remains pathetic at best.

6. Due to the minuscule scale mechanisms of consumer cameras, low shutter speeds are required to compensate for the inherent small aperture openings in low lights. It makes shooting even simple objects difficult unless you use the on-camera flash, which may result in really flat and unsavoury images.

So, invoking my analogy again, if you would rather use your legs to just keep moving yourself around in an unconcerned way, you would be doing something very natural. However, if you want to accomplish better than that and thus be remembered, learn interesting uses. Lift yourself above ordinary pointing your mobile camera and shooting your subjects dead!

(Post moved from my other blog)

Years ago when the doomsayers were busy swearing that every computer on this earth will pop away into fine ionic dust come Y2K, my stoic scientist friend wouldn’t even bat an eyelid. He suggested I get a webaddress instead, long live the computers. A lesser mortal that I was, I still had to unravel the mysteries of ‘Shell’ vs. TCP/IP accounts, which I’ll never be able to come to terms with anyway.

Y2K came and went without causing any serious dent to the credibility of computers. Encouraged, I wrote a webpage of my own on Geocities one day and went around the town telling everyone about it. Hundreds of emails shot off my outbox. My friend’s countenance bore a knowing smile. But I wanted to be happier. I wanted to be more professional. I bought a domain which added dot com right next to my name. uspandey.com.

One day I got an innocuous looking mail from Mr. Shylock. It said I needed to pay double the amount of registration for a renewal. I paid. The message was repeated the next year and the next. I was crestfallen. I grit my teeth and let go the dot com extension.

I have moved to dot net since and “yet God has not said aword”. But I am amused at the ways of the Shylocks of Cyberworld. The dot com is doing the rounds with different squatters who are all trying to sell it back to me for hundreds of dollars! Little do they know how bitterly I hated the name given to me by parents once! Thanks for taking it away, ladies and gentlemen! Wish you had purchased all possible extensions so that I could have started totally afresh.

(Post moved from my other blog)