DMD: The Decisive Moment Digital

Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles can be found on the Web about the “perfect” digital camera, articles like “ ’DMD’: The Digital Camera I’d Like to own”, by Mike Johnston at http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/DMD.shtml. The perfect digital camera is a matter of personal opinion. My DMD would be somewhat different than Mike’s, of course. But earlier this week on September 19, 2010, information began to trickle onto the Web about a camera that appears to be the DMD of dreams for thousands of photo enthusiasts: The Fujifilm FinePix X100. For more information, see http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n100920.html and http://www.dpreview.com/news/1009/10091910fujifilmx100.asp. Or do a search on this camera to turn up a week’s worth of reading. Photos of the FujiFilm FinePix X100 are shown below. The photos are from the FujiFilm site.

I have to admit that the X100 is damn close to my DMD. There are only minor things I would change about it. I’d like a wider lens, a 28mm equivalent and/or interchangeable lens capability. I would also be happy to see Fuji drop the video capability in order to lower the price of the camera. I don’t think that video is something that should be crammed into a machine made for still photography. Particularly when it raises the price of said still photo machine. People who are serious about shooting video buy video cams, so there’s no need to burden the rest of us with that capability and the attendant price.

I often check Ken Rockwell’s site at http://www.kenrockwell.com for information about photo equipment, both new and old. Oddly, there’s nothing of value in his comments on the X100. To quote: “Do I care? Not really. If everything tries to imitate the greatness of the LEICA M3, then why not just shoot the real thing? You can buy a real LEICA M3 for the same price as a D90, and you have no idea how nice is the real thing until you've shot with it. The M3 is much nicer than today’s LEICA M9.” And that’s all you’ll get from his site, which is the “odd” part. I believe that Ken is comparing apples to plums. The Leica M3 is a 35mm Rangefinder, a film camera. The Fuji X100 is a Digital camera. But I understand that Ken is being a snob about this, and that is fine with me, given the deep pile of other useful information on his site. After all, I have friends who are wine snobs, motorcycle snobs, computer brand snobs, and rock and roll snobs, and I don’t have to agree with their every pronouncement to appreciate what they bring to the table in general.

Gridiron

I don’t have much interest in watching American football. I played in High School, but it makes me a bit crazed when I to try to watch it on television or in a stadium. I always get a near-overwhelming urge to get in the game myself. In a number of ways, that would not be a good thing, so I avoid being a spectator. But making photos of a game is an interesting way to spend a couple hours.

The photos in this post are from a High School game in California. My son-in-law is the coach of one of the teams (blue uniforms) and the 1,400+ stills I shot of this game will be used for a season’s end slide show.

My “old” digital camera is limited to 5 frames per second. I captured .jpeg files only, which allowed me to shoot multiple frames without filling up the camera’s buffer before the play was over.

Moto

These photos are a couple of the frames I captured of my grandson racing his KTM motorcycle.

Both photos are of the same jump in the track. He likes to see photos of himself airborne. Because of the speed of the subject, the autofocus of my camera tends to get “confused” and hunts for the subject until the motorcyclist is gone, and I miss the shot.

I have found that it is much easier to get photos of this type using manual focus. I typically prefocus on a particular place on the track, than wait for him to come into the frame.

Grasshopper

After returning from my usual hike this morning (9/17/2010), I got the coffee machine running, then opened my email program. As I began to select the usual pile of messages for deletion, my granddaughter ran into my office saying, “You have to get your camera and bring it outside. There’s a grasshopper eating one of the flowers.” I followed her to the flowerbed and took a few photos of the bug she pointed out, using the Nikon 18-105mm VR lens that I usually have mounted when I’m hiking. It is definitely not a Macro lens, a specialized lens for close-up work, but I like using it for landscapes at the wide end, which is equivalent to 28mm on a 35mm film camera (or full frame digital), and the widest lens I have for the DSLR.

Ken Rockwell calls this a “boring” lens. I’m not sure why the Nikon 18-105mm VR lens bores him, though it is possible that it doesn’t cover a long enough range, but it works fine for me as my default walking around lens, and is also well suited for photographing my grandson’s motocross racing. What I don’t like about the Nikon DSLR is the occasional times when the Nikon autofocus system, purportedly the “best”, makes choices that I wouldn’t, and the photos I captured of the grasshopper illustrated that.

The photos above were made after I reviewed the first batch of photos, then returned to the flowerbed with the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 prime lens. The 28mm isn’t a Macro lens, either. But I like the results better.

Return of the Sky

The title of this post is false, since the sky hasn’t been missing, so it can’t really return. But today appeared to be the end of the months-long foggy/hazy skies we endure every summer in the Riverside, California area. Since I was lazy this morning, I didn’t wake up early enough to really catch the sunrise at the best time. I was busy dreaming about motorcycle rides, looking for a specific part in a repair shop,  and talking to a girl I knew in high school (she was a girl then, anyway) and didn’t get out of bed early enough to catch the best light. The photo above is not a great one, but it shows a pale hint of the color and cloud definition I’ll see through the next three seasons. As far as I’m concerned, it is cause enough for a minor celebration…

Haze

The photos in this post were made in Sycamore Canyon (in Riverside, California) on the morning of August 31, 2010. The summer haze is easy to see in the middle distance.

That’s what we like to call it: haze. It is really a mixture of smog and low-lying mist.

Haze. We would prefer not to think about it. But the smog has become considerably thinner and generally less harmful than when I arrived on these shores in 1971. At that time I worked a graveyard shift for the Press-Enterprise. It was possible then to stand on top of Mt. Rubidoux before sunrise and watch the smog, a dark brown cloud, rolling slowly into Riverside's long valley.

One Million Monkeys

Warning: This blog post is a concert review. It is not the usual kind of post for my blog. My opinion about one of the performers is likely to anger some people. To those people I can only express this heartfelt sentiment: Too bad... Some months ago, Lisa asked me if I wanted to see Don McLean at the Fox Theatre in downtown Riverside. I said no. She went on to explain that Al Stewart would open up for McLean. I said yes.  I explained that I would suffer through McLean to hear Stewart. She shook her head, and said that she wanted to hear Vincent and American Pie. I'm fairly neutral about both studio recordings, though I've heard Pie about 80,000 times too many.  She reminded me of the McLean concert a few times in the 48 hours before the event last night (8-27-2010), and became progressively more annoyed with me when I said "Damn!" (or something +/- equivalent) in response, so the last time I followed the expletive with a statement that at least we'd get to see Stewart, so the entire night wouldn't be a waste.

	Al Stewart walked onto the stage with guitarist Dave Nachmanoff, and armed with two acoustic-electrics, they played one of the best 45 minute sets I've ever heard.  I won't say they "rocked" because rock ‘n roll does not apply. Stewart's songwriting still holds up from my viewpoint.
His music is very intellectual, accessible, and clearly of Scots Irish folk derivation, though extended well beyond the limits of the form. I very much enjoy his songs about things like the French Revolution, Airplanes, Basque Separatists, and Bogart Movies. It’s quite a rich tapestry of material. Nachmanoff is an amazing guitarist: physically as small as John Oates, he was playing an EC model Martin with what appeared to be a 3/4 length neck. Though it wasn't the same type of music, there was something about the way he was playing, or the sound, or something.....that reminded me of Django Reinhardt (!!!).
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After the break, McLean took the stage with a four-piece ensemble to back him up. He opened his set by committing murder on a three-song Buddy Holley medley. It was simply stunning. That's right. I was stunned by how bad it was. One by one, the songs were throat-slashed, bled white, then drawn and quartered. They fell into heaps of body parts that resembled exceptionally badly-executed paintings by Goya wannabees. He did finally, finally, finally finish the medley. To be polite, I brought my hands together three times in a vague pantomime of clapping. The band was composed of apparently proficient individual musicians, but forced into a group together they sounded bad. No unit chemistry. It was like listening to the first gig of a sub-standard bar band. It couldn't get much worse, I thought.  But it did. McLean's smug self-satisfaction was amusing for a few minutes. It reminded me of the idiot George W. in that it was entertaining for a moment, then pain-inducing for a near-interminable period of time. It ground on and on, like an unmanned tractor, as he played incredibly mediocre covers of sub-mediocre songs mixed with his own sub-mediocre songs that were constructed primarily of rhymes that could have easily been written by a committee of 5-year-olds. The only saving grace was the probability that the tractor would eventually run out of gasoline and lurch to a stop, presumably after the playing of the two songs I knew Lisa wanted to hear. And speaking of Lisa, something novel was happening with her. I couldn't bring myself to clap after the first medley, then I noticed that she wasn't clapping. We've attended many concerts together since 1981. That was the only time I've seen her refrain from clapping. She is more polite than I am. After the torture was over, I discovered that she had been ready to stand up and walk out, but was too polite to inconvenience the people seated at the end of the row of seats we were in. I wouldn't have been that polite, if I had known she was ready to go...  To be fair, in the realm of pop songs, both Vincent and American Pie are at least average lyrical constructions. I am reminded, though, of a possible explanation of how McLean composed them:  Give each of one million monkeys one typewriter and unlimited paper, typewriter ribbons, and time. Eventually one of them will write the Bhagavad Gita...

Donner Pass

The first photograph below isn’t necessarily a great photograph. I simply like it. I shot it with my Lumix DMC-FX01 on September 29, 2007 in Donner Pass. Yep, that place. Four of us from my riding group were on a four-day tour of Northern California. We had hit the road early on the 28th, riding from Riverside, through the Mojave Desert, then north on Route 395 along the east flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After a scenic detour through the Mammoth Lakes area, we stopped for the night at an inexpensive motel in Carson City, Nevada.  After dinner and a few beers, we went to sleep thinking about the road ahead: We’d ride further north on 395, then cut west across the Sierras, the northern end of the Central Valley, and the Coastal Range to the California Redwoods. After visiting the Redwoods, we’d turn back south along routes 101 and 1 through San Francisco and Big Sur on our way home. It didn’t quite go the way we planned, but what road trip ever does? In the darkness of that first night in Carson City there was a short but heavy rain shower, then the temperature pushed down toward the low side of zero.

I happened to be the first one to walk outside in the morning, anxious to pack my luggage onto the bike and get rolling, but that idea stopped dead in it’s tracks when I saw our bikes. I called the others out of the motel rooms. “Hey. Come look at the bikes.” We gathered on the sidewalk in front of the parking lot and stared at the line of four bikes. The rain and sudden freeze had encased them all in a thin sheet of ice. We stood rooted to the concrete and stared for a half-minute, muttering in stacatto bursts of swearing, then stared for another half-minute punctuated by muted expletives while we collectively and silently  wondered which bike would be the one that wouldn’t start. The hypnotic threat of bikes not starting finally lifted and we broke the ice off our machines. We started the engines one by one, listening while each bike turned over as slowly as a hundred-year-old man standing up out of a chair. We let the bikes idle for several minutes while we packed saddlebags and strapped luggage down. The ice melted off the cylinders and dripped onto the ground, and steamed up off the exhaust pipes. When we finally got on the road to Reno, it was cold. Damn cold. We watched the snow-coated fields along the highway, and pulled over to warm up three times in the 32 mile stretch. A photo of a snow-coated field beside Route 395 is shown below. It isn’t necessarily a great photo, either, but it illustrates the cold weather on the morning of September 29, 2007.

In Reno we took another break in the parking lot of a fast food joint. Once our fingers regained some feeling, we checked a road map and started plotting our next move. Rather than continue north on 395 where it was sure to only continue being cold, we’d go over the mountains through Donner Pass on I-80 and get to the Central Valley quicker. The Central Valley is always warmer than along the coast or in the mountains. It took us quite some time to get over the eighty miles of mountains, since we could only go six to eight miles before pulling over to warm up. At the stop where the Donner Pass photo was taken, we discovered that it was cold enough to take off our gloves and grab our exhaust pipes to warm up our hands. Normally, that action would have resulted in third degree burns. From the time we rode into the Central Valley to the end of the road trip the weather seemed warm to us, though it wasn’t. But it is the negative times that make the good seem so much better by comparison. And every ride since has been warmer than “the time we rode through Donner Pass”.

Camera Obscura

The photograph below is of the Wells Fargo building in downtown Riverside. I captured the photo from the third story balcony of the California Museum of Photography (CMP). The balcony provides a short walkway to the museum’s camera obscura. The lens of the camera obscura is pointed toward the Wells Fargo building.

The museum exhibits contain photographs by the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, exhibitions, and a camera collection numbering over 10,000, among other attractions. For me those things are the cake. The icing is the camera obscura. I don’t know why, but it is what prompts me to return to the museum, again and again. A camera obscura is a simple apparatus. It is basically a box with a lens mounted in one wall. Light streaming through the lens creates an image on the far wall of the box. It is a passive system. Once the device is built, it simply works. Nothing has to be done to “make” it create an image. In early versions, a pinhole was used rather than a lens. The image created by the CMP device, correctly oriented in software, is shown below. When I look at the image, I have to remind myself that this device was used to project images for many hundreds of years before the development of chemical photography, and the idea that razor-sharp focus is a desirable state developed in tandem with modern photography.

It would have been a mind-blowing experience to see a similar image during the time before modern photography, particularly depending on how the camera was oriented. The CMP camera image includes the downtown mall in front of the Wells Fargo building, so the image reflects the movement of trees and people on foot, bicycles, skateboards, etc. The CMP image can easily be considered a motion picture camera – without the ability to record the images. Though it is a relatively low-maintenance exhibition, the camera obscura does require some maintenance. What appears to be a decades-old staining is on the lens. I can see the dirt on the lens itself, and in the digital image, though it is quite minor. It makes me question a few things, though; 1. How is the lens cleaned? Is it restored with a soft rag, soap, water, and stepladder, or can the lens be removed from its mount? 2. How much difference will a lens cleaning make on the image? Will the image be noticeably brighter? 3. How often is cleaning scheduled? Is maintenance much more frequent than I assume?

A Red Rectangle

The red rectangle shown below is above the double-door entrance of the California Tower, a building in downtown Riverside.

My eye was drawn to the rectangle when I looked at the facade of the building (shown below).

Spanish Broom

A native of the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands, Spanish Broom is an invasive shrub in the Americas. It was imported in San Francisco as a decorative shrub in the mid-1900s. In the early twentieth century, it was planted along roadways throughout California to help stabilize the soil and prevent erosion.

The photos in this post are from the San Bernardino Mountains. I assume this is Spanish Broom, rather than the native California Broom, which is the smaller of the two. It’s very subjective, of course, but it seems that there are twice as many of the yellow shrouded plants than during previous years.

The broom’s thick perfume is reminiscent of honeysuckle, but there are distinct undercurrents of other scents. It isn’t an unpleasant smell. It’s long history of use in perfumery is understandable.

The photo above was taken two days later than the first two. The mist shrouding the peak in the background is a mix of smog and low-lying cloud.

Santa Rosa Blooming

The photos in this post are from April, 2010. Though I prepared them for the blog, I didn’t post them (and don’t remember why). The forecast for wildflowers this year seemed very good, but the bumper crop never materialized. For a related post, see A Quick Scout.

The scenes are beside a gravel pullout on Sage Road between Hemet and Aguanga, California.

My riding group uses the pullout for a rest stop whenever we ride Sage Road.

A few years ago, the wildflower blooming was quite thick in the Santa Rosas, and particularly strong at this spot. The photos above are what I could see of the relatively thin blooming this year.

A Head Shot

“He turned his head to stare at me and kept chewing that green stick…”

This one is from the Living Desert in Palm Desert, California.

A Look Back

After thirteen months, I'm taking a look back at this blog. Post titles are in bold type. Here are the highlights. Or at least the photos from the posts I picked... To view a post, click on the title.

Seascapes, May 2009. Big Sur. I took this one on a group ride through the Sierra Nevadas, the California Redwoods, and along the Pacific Coast.

Caribbean Sunrise Sequence, May 2009. Atlantic Ocean/Caribbean Sea.  Hot Air Balloons, June 2009. A balloon and wine festival in southern Riverside County.

Red Dragonfly, August 2009. This dragonfly was rather fond of the antenna of Lisa's car.  Eastern Sierra Nevadas Ride, August 2009. This lake was just outside the town of Mammoth Lakes.

Hermosa Beach, October 2009. A tour of Hermosa beach, Lisa's home town.

Riverside Views, November 2009. This is a view of the city from the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Preserve.

Early 2010 Photos, January 2010. This is a view from Mt. Rubidoux.

Vegas, February 2010. I took this with the D200 held out the window of our twentieth floor room at Harrah's.

Chasing Light, March 2010. This group of photos is from the Salton Sea at sunrise.

Bridge Art, April 2010. This one is about shape and color. Photos from the Anza Narrows Railroad Bridge, Riverside, CA.

A Walk Downtown, April 2010. This one is from the Fox Theatre in downtown Riverside. When I arrived in the city in 1971 and lived in the Mission Inn, this was one of three movie houses within easy walking distance.

Grand Teton - Yellowstone Trip, June 2010. This is from a road trip that Lisa and I took in May through Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.

Constant Gardener, June 2010. My flower gardens went mutant this year. Who knows what this may mean?...

FX01, A Retrospective Look

It’s really too bad that there is no way to know how a camera or other electronic device will work out until you’ve long since bought it. But now and then one gets lucky. The subject of this post, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01, is a case in point. The FX01 was given to me by my wife Lisa, as I was preparing to ride my motorcycle across the continent and back in August 2006.

In the photo above is the Kodak DC 3400 on the right, and the camera that replaced it, the FX01. Note the size difference between the two cameras. The Kodak was a 2MP digital camera, and built like a brick to take abuse. It also handled like a brick. And there was no way to consider it a “pocket” camera. But it fit in the glove compartment of the truck and in the saddlebag. The FX01 was truly a pocket camera. It easily fit into a jacket pocket, and weighed nearly nothing, so it was rarely out of my reach. I have captured over 26,000 frames with it without major problems of any kind. I recently found “ghosts” on the photos and thought the sensor might be going south. It turned out to be a dirty lens – the first time I’ve had to clean it in four years.

The Menu system (shown above) is simple. My two grandchildren mastered the menus (and all other controls) on this camera between the ages of 2 and 4 years. The secret to that was simple. I let them take photos with it, and only showed them features when asked. This is not a testament to the beating it took at the hands of toddlers, since both children were oddly careful with the camera. But it did take a beating in my pockets, in my backback, and in the motorcycle's saddlebags.

There was little control with this 6MP consumer point-and-shoot camera, but a tripod helped. Also helpful was the exposure compensation control shown in the photo above.

In all, the FX01 I have is still running strong (and with a cleaner lens) after several succeeding generations of digital pocket cameras have passed it by technologically. And it can still capture a good image. Now that’s something. My experience with the longevity of digital cameras has been good, so far. It is quite unlike my experience with CD/DVD players, which seem to need to be replaced as often as boxes of Kleenex...

Out West

Recently, Steve Vaughn commented about living "out west". I know what he meant (it doesn't hurt that I met Steve when I was 4 years old and entering the public school system). He and his wife Darryl moved to Richland, WA from the East Coast last year. He is an avid fly fisherman, and in a good location to explore the many rivers in Washington and Oregon. While he is here, working in Richland, and living out west there is so much to see.


I like to keep track of the Vaughn's near-epic move to Washington and how they are settling in, etc., on Steve's blog, Nomads at http://nomadslvaughn.blogspot.com/.


"Out West" is the way I thought of it when I was young, since I lived in the northeast. It was towns like Durango, Cortez, Cheyenne, Sundance, Tucson, and Santa Fe. It was Conestoga wagons and Apaches, Winchester rifles and Lakotas, cattle drives and Dodge City, gold rushes and railroad booms.


 My vision of the world is centered in the West, now. "Back East" is where I grew up. I first realized that when I rode my Road Star to Long Island and back in 2006. On the ride home when I crossed over the border between Kansas and Colorado, I suddenly thought, "I'm home, I'm back in the West".


But though I've been here since 1971, I have an idea similar to Steve's about being here in the West: There simply isn't enough time to see everything...  


The photo below was captured on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01 in August 2006. The view is east from Ghost Rocks in Utah, just off Interstate 70. There is no mistaking this for anything other than a view of the West. 

Constant Gardener

California Poppies I'm not sure what happened. I bought several varieties of flower seeds last fall; California Poppies, Vinca, Phlox, and Cosmos. Thought I'd get a jump on the spring and planted a large seed bed. The poppies did well, though they've now generally died back. But they grew nearly twice their average height. The Cosmos are now over four feet tall.

Cosmo Lisa brought home 3 miniature Mums last fall. I planted them in the front flowerbed, along with the Vinca, Phlox, and Geraniums, figuring they wouldn't grow much taller than their neighbors. But they are quite large plants now, each with at least 50 blooms.  There must be something in the soil. Something that doubles plant size. Even the Phlox and Vinca are twice their usual size. The mutations have ruined my landscaping plan, though - I had everything laid out according to relative maximum heights...

Zinnia The Constant Gardener part:  Everything is way too overgrown now. I spent six hours today thinning out, weeding, potting the mutant "miniature" Mums, and replacing thinned plants with new Vinca and Zinnias. The Vinca does well in this climate. Maybe this planting will last through to Fall... About The Photographs The digital photos in this post were made with a Nikon D200. Photos were resized for Web display. The other particulars are listed below. California Poppies - Nikon manual Series E 28mm 1:2.8, 1/200, f/8, ISO 200. Cosmo - Nikon AF VR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G,  1/640, f/5.6, ISO 400.  Zinnia - Nikon AF VR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G, 1/100, f/14, ISO 400.