Wallace Koopmans Artlog

While playing with the Pentax Q I allowed myself to mostly forget about the technical and pretend that I don’t know much about photography.  Some might argue that would be quite easy, but taking this position allowed me to experience the Q how I think it is intended.  Pentax seems to have broken most of the rules that have governed digital photography.  The last ten years have seen incremental advancements in technology making each new camera slightly better than the last.  With the Q Pentax appears to have said OK things in the world of cameras are pretty good lets start over.  What I mean by this is that as people are agonizing over whether to choose a camera with a slightly smaller sensor to get a smaller camera, Pentax has just said forget about the sensor size you want small this is what it takes.  Nikon has done a similar thing with their new 1 system cameras the j1 and v1 and used a sensor much smaller that APSC but which is still 4 times the surface area of the Q’s sensor (116mm vs 28.5mm).  The Internet is rife with information and arguments about how sensor size affects high ISO low light performance so I won’t bother with that but just present where the current state of the art appears to be, all be it in a very tiny camera.

So here are some examples of the high ISO performance with details, I haven’t applied any luminance noise reduction to the images but have left the color noise reduction of Lightrom at the default 25 for the RAW files.  I also haven’t done any distortion correction correction to the RAW images.

ISO 1600 f3.5, 1/40 sec RAW and a 1 to 1 crop

This one was shot as a jpeg with no further processing.  ISO 3200 f2.5 1/60 sec, and the 1 to 1 crop follows

ISO 6400 f4.5 1/60sec RAW again no luminance noise reduction applied and the 1 to 1 crop

So what are my conclusions from what has to be admitted as a very short 3 hours with the camera.  It’s smallness defines it.  I don’t think that I was able to show how small it is through pictures which seems odd.  You would think you can just put it beside something of a known size and there you are, but it isn’t quite that simple.  It changes the measuring stick of small.  I’m not entirely sure how to define this camera because there is a trade off with the size and I think that is in the absolute image quality.   Perhaps I’m not able to pretend hard enough to let the tech geek in me forget about the image files and only see the pictures.  I’m not sure that the Q will attain main stream acceptance but I’m also not sure that was what Pentax was going for, the build quality of the Q is extremely high and it just looks cool.

 These files where shot as Jpegs in camera and imported into Lightroom.

The thumbnails link to full size samples but because of file size restrictions I have had to compress the original files to under 2Mbytes each.  This is a small amount of compression as the original files are not much bigger so any effect of the processing should be minor. 

Fuji has released yet another camera that has peaked my interest, the Fuji X10.  It is a small fixed zoom lens camera (28-112mm equivalent) with a maximum aperture of F2.0 at the wide end and F2.8 at the telephoto end.  All this information is readily available elsewhere so that’s not really what I want to post about.  One of the new features of the X10 apparently is that manual focus is performed in the form of  the sub command dial.  This may seem new and innovative but it is actually something Fuji has done before. The Fujica 35SE used a thumb wheel back in 1959 in combination with a coupled rangefinder.  In this form I can say it works very well, the only problem for me being that that same location changes my aperture on my DSLR and it takes me a moment to get that through my skull.  How well the modern implementation works remains to be seen especially without the rangefinder patch.  When I first started writing this post most of the scant info about manual focus mentioned the main command wheel for focusing but after reading more info from Fuji itself it seems that it is the sub command dial which will not be as easily done with a thumb or even one handed. 

I would like to celebrate the birth and death of photo apps all at once.  Nothing brings a fad to a quick end like overuse.  I should disclose my hypocrisy right up front, one of the first pieces of software I downloaded to my new phone was a photo app that adds that alternative process look to an image and makes sharing it online simple.  And that’s the part I really like,the ease of sharing, but not every image needs to have an added layer of  faux  film.  I’m sure that millions of pictures are yet to be taken and processed this way but a little restraint couldn’t hurt.  Now I’m off to the app store.

With “Satchel” I’ve created a framework for a narrative without leading to a specific one.  The viewer is needed to complete the work, bringing their own experiences and visual memory.

In order to see the entire image and get a sense of the scale you will need to go to the deep zoom version of the image here.  Satchel

Well it’s back to the drawing board.  My “lets see what we get and go from there” attitude didn’t pay off with much of a result to start.  There was just too much light leaking in.  So it’s going to require a major redesign with some baffles and better sealing around the lens board.  Some other modifications I’ll make is better tension of the film and a better film mask so that I can get more exposures from a single roll.

Here is the result and if you consider this is the best that I was able to get, by far, you can see that I need to do a lot more work.

Here is the original post when optimism was high. Lego Camera

I went to Clayburn Village to see the Old School Market which had a fun mix of antiques and new craft items from many different vendors.  I picked up a couple things myself and took a few pictures.

Well that worked out.  I performed the little trick with the Spectra camera where you take a picture and don’t release the shutter.  Then you open the camera up release the shutter and close it again.  At this point you can take a second exposure on the film.  I imagine you could continue to do this as long as you don’t over expose it into whiteness.  Now I need to come up with another idea to use this technique on.

I took some pictures for a woodworker, Marcel Daigneault, that  I recently met so that he could use them for a portfolio and maybe a website.  After I was done I showed him some wood that I had but I really had no idea what it was.  He took the wood and incorporated it into a box that he made for me.  The wood I had forms the dark bands that circle the box.  I’m thrilled with this object of art and it is now prominently displayed in our living room.

It’s not an actual holiday unfortunately but it is a community event where every one with a Pentax digital camera is encouraged to take a picture and upload it to http://www.pentaxforums.com/gallery/pentaxium-world-pentax-day-february-2011/

Here are a few I took today for the occasion.  P.S. I had to wait for a very long train.