Medium Format is about the Square

I made a remark about "seeing in medium-format" recently. I took it to mean that, of course, I needed a medium-format camera to get the shots I was really seeing. (Because the cure for photography problems is mo' gear, of course.) Since medium-format cameras are more expensive than a fully-kitted out Macbook Pro, I wondered about second-hand ones. Those were mostly film, or as expensive as settling for a 512GB SSD card instead of the full 1TB. Plus there's the whole thing where medium-format cameras can be used as dumb-bells if you can't get to the gym, and need a trolley to carry them around.

OK. Slight exaggeration.

For some reason I looked at the entry in Wikipedia on medium-format cameras. it told me that most of them were 6cm x 6cm, and some later ones were 6cm x 4.5 cm. Wait, what? Square? Like Instagram?

I hauled out my Panasonic DMZ-40TY-H4562 or whatever silly name it has, and clicked through the menus. Aspect Ratio: 3:2 (35mm), 4:3 (HDTV), 16:9 (widescreen), 1:1 (square). Whoa. The sun was out. I nipped into the park and took some photographs.

So here's a piece of fence in 16:9

and again in 4:3

and again in 3:2 

and this is what it should look like.....

Doesn't that feel more solid? The wider formats just go on about how much fence there is, but somehow, to my eyes, the square format gives a better sense of how the fence relates to the ground and open sky as well. There's no open sky in the 16:9.

The next one is just plain perfect. Ordinary, but perfect.

If that had been a 35mm shot I would have made a 'meh' and moved on. But that bank of gorse is so much more impressive when you can't see lots of open ground to the right. Here's a 16:9

and here's what it should look like

The photograph is about the water and the stream. We only need to see one post-war semi to understand that this is in a suburb somewhere. The top picture gives us too much detail we don't need.

Medium-format, yes. But it was about the Square, not the film or sensor size. 

Bye-bye Evernote and Dropbox

I got Dropbox and Evernote because I read about them on Rands in Repose. That was a long time ago in Internet Years. Something like (looks up account on Evernote) 8th October 2010. (Stone me guv'nor, 10 years.)

Now I use iCloud instead of Dropbox and Apple Notes instead of Evernote. Why?

Bloat.

About a year ago I looked at what was using my RAM. I have 4GB in my early 2015 Mac Air (blimey guv, I've had that for five years) so this is something I need to do, even though OS X handles memory way better than Windows 7 as disfigured by an FTSE 100 company.

Fire up Activity Monitor, look at the Memory tab, but order by the Process Name column, not the Memory column. This is because apps are now split into a number of processes. For instance, my Brave Browser with one tab open has one main process, two Helper processes, a GPU process, and six Renderer processes going. The main process is 240MB, and all the others take 504MB. That browser is taking 0.75GB of memory.

(I just closed Brave and opened Firefox at my Amazon Wish List. Main process 401MB, supporting processes 337MB, so still 0.7GB of memory. Re-opening Brave on my Wish List gets me 135MB in the main process and 270MB of supporting processes. Which is better. I bet if I open You Tube it bloats out bigly.)

When I did that exercise for Dropbox, it was using over 0.5GB of RAM. Just to sync some files in a Cloud. WTF? Since the iCloud process was already running - because Apple - this was a ridiculous use of resources. It took a few minutes to put the files I wanted backing in the iCloud in the iCloud drive directory, and then I could shut down Dropbox. I even uninstalled it on all my machines.

Evernote updated itself a couple of weeks ago. One of those OMG-they-have-so-changed-everything-WTF-did-they-do-that? changes. Every time Evernote does a major change its users lose control over more and more things. This one changed the fonts and graphicalised everything - like Office 2016 did and Apple Notes is. The feel of how the type appears on the screen in response to the keyboard is different. It was when I navigated to a large note which choked the viewer I began to think something was wrong. Yep, Evernote, which used to be whip-cracking smart and fast, now had a Renderer process that took around 400MB. The whole lot took up around 0.7GB, and Evernote has never been great at memory management.

Notes is running in less than 84MB, and even Pages takes only 153MB. How the **** does it need a 400MB renderer process to do what Apple does in 84MB? Makes me wonder what other dumb things they did.

Export all my Evernote Notebooks. Load them into Apple Notes. Close Evernote. I had cancelled my Premium membership a few months previously. I haven't uninstalled it, and I still have an account I can access via a browser. Moving to Apple Notes is one-way: it only lets you export to pdf files. Because Apple.

I blame SSDs. I see this at work, where people who don't have problematical unknown programs like SAS Base (oh, wait) are getting Windows 10 machines with SSDs and 8GB of RAM. Half of that is taken by Windows and security bloatware - McAfee and Tanium Endpoint plus all the supporting Windows services - so users are still trying to run their real programs in under 4GB. Everyone with one of those machines is agog at how fast they are - what do they have at home? - but that speed comes from the SSD, not efficient and effective use of the RAM. The fast disk swapping SSDs allow seems to make people lazy about RAM use and program bloat - who cares how big it is, it'll swap real fast on an SSD, and the clock speed will cover up the lousy coding.

So deeper into the Apple eco-system I go. Because third-party suppliers got lazy with their coding.

Why You Should Print (Some of) Your Photographs

All the photography websites say print your photographs, usually while holding up an A3 or larger print that has been through the colour-correction wringer in Lightroom or something similar. Mine were all A4 from a Canon MG7500, which was also the scanner for the film prints. Those are the ones with what looks like some fancy colour tweaking. Nope, just film, age, and the MG7500.

I'm not a professional photographer, and nor am I the kind of hobbyist who would join a local photography club. I like taking photographs, from time to time, but I like looking at views which would make good photographs even more. A lot of the views I like just can't be captured on an iPhone, or what I suspect is the ⅔ inch sensor of my Panasonic. 35mm with a 50mm lens captures what I see pretty well, but what really does it is medium-format. My eyes see in medium-format. That's expensive eyes. The latest Fujifilm X-S10 seemed to get close, but even that costs £1,300 with the 18-55mm lens.

Why print your photgraphs? It makes you look at what you have done. That is when you realise that there's something about that quirky shot of the Stage Door. There is - it's full of rectangles. I didn't rate it much when I first took it.

Today a print is a commitment to the image: in the past, when we got 4x6's of everything (unless you were a real pro and got contacts, but those weren't actually cheaper than 4x6's) the commitment was to an enlargement. Now as much as printer ink costs - the printers are practically free - photographic enlargements cost way more. You thought very carefully about enlarging and framing. Now an A4 print really is not that expensive. An A3 colour-corrected one is not cheap, because it's twice as much ink and a decent A3 printer is at least £500 or so. And weighs a ton, and takes up a lot of space. A4 prints can be put in a folder with transparent sleeves, and a very pleasant sensation it is to pick it up and leaf through it from time to time. If there's a weak choice, it quickly becomes apparent, and it's dead easy to replace it with a better one.

I was not looking for those stand-out, once-in-90-days, shots that the professionals show you on their websites, Instagrams and You Tube channels. They are not showing the hundreds of meh shots they took to get the stand-outs.

I was looking for photographs that looked good, and/or that meant something to me. The one of the Thames Police boat is not an outstanding photograph, but it reminds me of the couple of years I spent working for the Riverbus project and spending a lot of time on the river and with the Thames Watermen who drove the boats. The one of the two groups of people standing on the dockside under a bright blue sky is partly about the day I drove round half the Algarve, and partly about what it says about the community that lives there.

That's all I had to do. I'm an amateur who can take a decent picture now and again. There's more enjoyment from looking at those on paper than there is on a screen.

Printing your photographs helps you recognise what you've done that has produced an image that pleases you for one reason or another. And that makes you appreciate your own ability.

Photographs I'm Printing (34)

(Olympus OM-10)

Taken around 07:15 at Embankment Station during the week, back in the early 1990's. In 2019, there would have been a person in the frame all the time.

 

Photographs I'm Printing (33)

(Sony-Eriksson cameraphone)

Cameraphone. Look at the detail on that water. It's a railway bridge (duh!) near Utrecht. Cannot remember the name of the town it's near.

 

Why Orchestral Music Doesn't Sound Super-Sharp On Any Hi-Fi

To understand how and why orchestral music sounds on hi-fi, first understand how orchestras are seated.

 

The bass is on the right (as the listener sees it), the mid-range in the middle, and the treble on the left. All the loud noise is on the right, and all the delicate sounds are at the top or on the left. Orchestral instruments are also loud<;, which is why a classical solo violinist can fill the Albert Hall without an amplifier. A full-strength orchestra at high volume can be over 100 dB. And nobody else gets heard when the brass section lets loose.

A lot of orchestral pieces have passages where a theme or phrase is passed from one group of instruments to another with slight variations: from flutes to clarinets to oboes to violins to bassons. A lot of those groups are between the middle and the left and half-way up the soundstage.

As I write there's a particularly soulful bit of Bruckner going on. It's all in the darker tones: middle C and lower: violas, cellos, oboe, clarinets. All in the middle and right.

If the composer has the orchestra playing a chord around middle C across the instrumental groups, the result will be a splotch across the soundstage. Because the instruments are literally positioned across the soundstage.

There are maybe two or three orchestras in the world, or maybe all of history, with string sections that change notes within a millisecond of each other, and all hit the exact same position on their (fretless) fingerboards. Seriously. Same with the wind players: it might be the same horn, but there will be tiny differences in the moment they start playing and in their breathing. The orchestral sound has smear built right into it. That's why it's such a relief when just one or two instruments play a soprano phrase: it sounds precise.

And this is before we even consider the difference between the way smaller ensembles are recorded - with one mic per instrument and other sound isolating methods - and the way orchestras are recorded with Decca trees and two other mics each side high up to add width.

If you are used to Nils Frahm, John Digweed or even Corelli and Bach, and then listen to even the best recording of Bruckner or Schumann, you're going to think something just went wrong with your hi-fi.

Nope. That's what orchestras sound like. All that gear that picks apart every bit of the sound and separates it from the others? Not going to work on the London Symphony Orchestra at full blast in Wagner. Many of the hi-fi reviewers are into rock, indie, jazz, electronica and perhaps some contemporary composed music: that stuff is well-treated by the kit they review. Heck, my mid-range system sounds fabulous when fed Nils Frahm, Chico Hamilton or John Jenkins. Not so sharp with even a modern recording of Dvorak or Bruckner, though much better now I have the speakers well-positioned, but I can't un-pick the clarinets from the oboes.

Photographs I'm Printing (32)

 

(Olympus OM-10)

Because what else would you have in the middle of a lake in the middle of Helsinki? Every capital city lake should have a broken-up boat there.