Rangefinder Magazine
February 2006

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Digital Photography John Rettie
What's in Store for '06

THIS COLUMN IS being written just as information on new consumer digital cameras is being released at the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Of course, we’ll have to wait another month before details on new pro-level cameras are released at PMA; nonetheless, it’s worth keeping an eye on what’s happening in the consumer world since many new features appear first on consumer cameras. Those features that prove useful inevitably find their way onto professional cameras. Based on products from the show, it appears digital cameras have almost become a commodity—most of the new ones, with one exception, were “me-too” products with little to differentiate them.

That exception was Kodak, which grabbed the headlines in USA Today on opening day with a surprisingly innovative camera. The new Kodak V570 features two Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon lenses and two image sensors. No, it’s not a stereo camera. Instead it’s a camera with a decent 23mm equivalent wide-angle lens and a 3X optical zoom (equivalent to a 39–117mm). Like other super-slim cameras, the lenses do not protrude from the body: All the mechanisms are self contained, and light travels to the sensors through prisms.

Kodak’s innovative V570 digital camera includes two lenses with two image sensors.

Kodak has adapted this unique two-lens system because it’s difficult to design a high-quality zoom lens with such a wide field of view. The company’s engineers decided this route was the most effective. (As an aside: It obviously means the cost of sensors has dropped substantially since the camera sells for under $400 despite having two 5-megapixel sensors.) Kodak is marketing the camera as a super-slim 5X zoom camera. It achieves this wide zoom range by digitally zooming between 24 and 38mm before switching to the optical zoom lens. Naturally, the image quality of the digital zoom portion will not be as good as the optical zoom. But fortunately, users who want maximum quality can disable the digital portion. The camera also includes a built-in panorama function where two or three images are stitched together automatically in camera.

I’m looking forward to trying the camera, as I have a continuing need for a slim camera to carry around at times, and wide-angle shooting has always been the problem with point-and-shoot cameras. This sort of camera should appeal to real estate agents.

The Kodak V570, like more and more consumer cameras, does away with an optical viewfinder and instead relies on an LCD screen. The V570’s LCD is only 2.5 inches in size, whereas one new camera features a large 3.5-inch screen that all but covers the rear of the camera, leaving little space for control buttons.

In another trend, Pentax has joined the list of manufacturers offering image stabilization system built into the camera rather than the lens. We have to wait to see which manufacturer will be the first to include this in an SLR body.

Samsung announced a new mobile phone with an 8-megapixel camera with a zoom lens and flash. It’s bigger than most phones but should deliver decent images. Come to think of it, the new Kodak V570 is about the same size, so Kodak could easily add a phone to its camera without much difficulty. It makes one wonder which established camera manufacturer will be the first to introduce a camera phone.

Aperture

Judging by the reaction of many professional photographers, the most significant new program introduced last year was not the latest version of Photoshop but Aperture, from Apple. It’s a fascinating program that attempts to redefine the digital workflow used by professional photographers. If you’ve seen the ads, they show an incredible workspace spread across two 30-inch LCD monitors. In many ways Aperture tries to mimic the workflow we used when we shot film. There’s a light table, stacks of photos, markers and even a loupe. Apple clearly states that this program was designed by photographers for photographers and is in no way a substitute for Photoshop. Instead, it is a photo browser and a cataloging program. Since it also works efficiently and quickly on RAW images, it could be considered a processor as well.

The loupe is one of the neatest innovations in Apple’s new Aperture program.

I have seen Aperture being demonstrated by an Apple consultant, and it’s obviously a very powerful program, although it has some quirks and will need fine-tuning. Apple has already issued one minor upgrade that fixes some bugs and speeds up the program.

Because it is an extremely heavy graphics program, Apple recommends a modern Mac with a G5 processor, a good graphics card and plenty of RAM for optimum performance. Surprisingly though, it does run on a PowerBook with at least a 1.25GHz G4 processor. I know that for a fact because I received a copy of Aperture a few days before I wrote this column.

Bob Rose will be doing a full report, so I’ll leave that to him. However, I have to admit that based on a very quick first look, I’m more impressed with Aperture than I thought I would be. It does not run too slowly on my 1.5GHz PowerBook with 1GB of memory. Admittedly, I have only tried it with JPEG files, as that’s what I shoot mainly.

Unfortunately, Aperture will not run on my five-year-old Power Mac G4 desktop system. If it did, I might be tempted to use Aperture as my main browsing program. For the past couple of years I have been more than happy using Camera Bits’ Photo Mechanic as my primary browser. I like it because it loads really fast, and I can quickly go though images from a shoot as if viewing images in slide sleeves. It’s possible to caption them and produce printed contact sheets or upload them to a website in a user-friendly format.

I know Aperture can do these things as well and over the next few months I will learn the program and see if it’s worthwhile to switch from Photo Mechanic. So far, the feature I like best is the loupe because it works so smoothly. You can instantly zoom in up to 800% on any area of an image without opening it in another window or program. I have always found this to be a drawback in Photo Mechanic, so this one feature might sway me to switch

After Apple announced its latest Power Mac G5 desktops, I came very close to buying one. However, I want to wait until Apple introduces the Mac with Intel processors before upgrading. I’m still very happy with my “old” G4. Regular readers of my column may remember that I upgraded from dual 450Mhz processors to dual 1.0GHz processors using a PowerLogix board a couple of years ago. That upgrade has kept the machine running at an acceptable level of performance for the work I currently perform.

Who knows—I may discover that Aperture works acceptably well on my PowerBook and I’ll switch to it rather than wait until I upgrade to a G6 or whatever Apple calls its new Intel-based desktops. I guess it’s a testament to the quality of Apple products that the G4 I purchased in 2000 is still running reliably.

Buffalo LinkStation

If you shoot RAW and JPEG files simultaneously, it’s easy to use 20MB of space or more for each image. This means an 80GB hard drive will fill up with only 4000 images stored on it. I’m still shooting JPEG on my camera, and each file is only about 2MB. I can store 40,000 images on the same drive, which is an enormous difference in numbers.

Whatever format one is shooting, the question of how to store and retrieve all these images is becoming more and more important. Fortunately, the cost of storage keeps going down. I’ve seen 250GB drives on sale after rebate for as low as $70. It’s certainly very tempting to store everything on a few hard drives rather than DVDs as it makes them quickly and easily available at any time.

The Buffalo LinkStation is a network hard drive.

Until now I have been using external Firewire hard drives for extra storage. Recently though, I tried out a 160GB Buffalo LinkStation (HD160LAN) network hard drive that is plugged into my Ethernet network. It is then available to any computer on the network, even those connected through a WiFi router.

At first I could not save all the files created on my Mac; some had file names containing “illegal” characters and some of them were too long, with more than 32 characters in the filename. A prompt response from Buffalo’s tech support informed me that as long as I did not need to store any old Mac OS 9 Classic files, I could make a change in the way the Mac reads the drive and all would be fine. I hope newer models (my LinkStation drive is over a year old) from Buffalo are more user-friendly when it comes to storing Mac and Windows files on the same drive.

In the coming months I intend to look into numerous different methods of storage, including RAID systems. Like many photographers, the number of digital images I now have since going all-digital (five years ago) is becoming unmanageable; I’ve been using my (human) memory to remember (more or less) where things are stored. It’s time for some serious digitalasset management.

Quick Book Review
The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers Keeping track of photographs has always been a challenge. Some photographers have always managed to maintain a decent filing system so they can always lay their hands on original negatives or prints when needed. In theory, creating a decent filing system for digital images should be easy, and it is if you meticulously follow a procedure to safely store them so they can be easily found without searching manually though loads of folders.

Digital Asset management for photographers is described in detail in this book.

Peter Krogh is a commercial and editorial photographer who has mastered this task. In this book (The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers published by O’Reilly, 296 pages, $34.95) he describes how to arrange a hardware setup with numerous hard drives and backup systems in place. In many ways that’s the easy part.

Deciding on a file naming system that can expand as the years goes on is more of a challenge. Krogh explains how he names files so the system can be expanded. Much of the book is dedicated to describing how to use the latest version of Adobe’s Bridge program, included with Photoshop CS2, to set up keywords and prepare images for archiving. He only briefly discusses other DAM programs as he discusses the differences between browsers and cataloguing programs.

If you’ve reached the stage where you cannot remember exactly where images are located on your hard drives or your backup CD-Rs, this book could prove invaluable in guiding you along the right path in creating an effective digital asset management system.

Further Information:
Aperture
Apple Computer
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
(800) 531-3378
www.apple.com/aperture

LinkStation
Buffalo Technology,
www.buffalotech.com

The DAM Book
O’Reilly Media
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(800) 998-9938
www.oreilly.com