Adrift in the 21st Century
This photo is from last year, descending White Mountain Peak in eastern California in the middle of October. Meanwhile it’s 50 degrees and sunny outside my window here in New York in mid-December.
One of the benefits of being on the east coast is that we do have four full seasons. Of course as my photo suggests, you can have seasons in California too. You just may need to drive to a different part of the state to see them.
Serious photographers are careful planners. Photography is basically about light, so timing and positioning can be key. I’m just an amateur though, and most of my photographs are taken in the pursuit of other activities. Consequently, I don’t always plan things right.
Consider the shot below. It was taken on a hiking trip to Telescope Peak, almost two years ago. The purpose of the trip was to reach the peak, so I didn’t have time to carefully compose the photo or wait for the sun to move to a better position. I’d call it a nice scene, but not a particularly striking photograph.
This is precisely the sort of situation where post processing, using a tool like Lightroom, can make a huge difference.
Two days before Halloween in New York City, and there’s 3 inches of snow on the ground. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for this. In the mean time, I’m glad I have winter hiking gear.
I’ve had an Olympus XZ-1 for almost half a year now as my ‘carry-everywhere’ pocket camera. By most folks’ standards, it’s a large ‘compact’ camera. Compared to my Nikon D700 SLR though, it’s a decidedly more travel-friendly companion. In fact, when I went to England in June, I took both cameras, and ended up actually using the Olympus more, largely due to the convenience (when it rained, it was easy to quickly stick the XZ-1 in a waterproof plastic bag in m pocket, unlike the D700).
The usual knock on compact cameras is that the image quality, particularly when the light levels drop, don’t match up to their larger brethren. There’s a fairly simple explanation for this: the sensor in your average high-end digital compact is less than 40mm^2. The size of the sensor in your average DSLR is 350mm^2. Since the sensor’s purpose is to gather and record light, the smaller sensor records less light, and the less light you record, the less information your image has. In reality, things are a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.
I do a fair amount of walking and hiking when time permits. For the last 2 years or so, I’ve been taking my Nikon D700 camera along on most of those trips.
The D700 is considered by Nikon to be their lower-end professional model. When it came out, it basically offered the same sensor and performance as their top-of-the-line D3, but for $2000 less in a more compact body. The D700 was missing a few features compared to the D3, but on the basic criterion of image quality and operating speed it is essentially the same camera. In short, it is (or given the speed of digital development, was) a pretty fancy camera.
It’s been a busy few days.
Thursday at 5:30PM I took my final exam for my summer algorithms course. Then I went back to my grandparents’ place and packed. I went to bed around midnight.
Adobe Lightroom is pretty much the de-facto standard for DAM (digital asset management) and bulk editing among professional and serious amateur digital photographers. As a heavy user since the beta of version 1 in mid-2006 (we are currently at version 3.4), I can appreciate why that is. Lightroom offers a reasonably intuitive well-designed interface for editing and organizing large numbers of images. It has a number of minor flaws, but it compares favorably to pretty much every competing software package I’ve tried.
That said, from an architecture point of view, it seems that Lightroom could stand some improvement. My basic complaint is that the software is sluggish. Not tear-your-hair out slow mind you, but lethargic enough to be annoying. And this is when dealing with 12MP RAW image files, on a machine that has 4 2.8GHZ cores and 6GB RAM. That is to say image sizes aren’t that large, and the hardware is pretty current.
I’ve been looking, on and off for a serious compact digital camera for quite some time. It’s not that I’m unhappy with my DSLR, but I have developed a certain lack of enthusiasm for carrying it everywhere. The DSLR is large, heavy and obtrusive. People notice me carrying it. I notice me carrying it. For quality, it can’t be beat, but for activities where photography is the primary goal, it often seems like overkill.
My search began in earnest after a couple of trips last summer where I was forced to put the camera away in the pack to keep it from interfering with climbing. While this helped with climbing, it also meant that I missed photographing a number of interesting moments.
Digital cameras are responsible for many wonderful things. They let us capture manner of events that were not practical or possible before. They enable us to post-process and alter our images quickly and easily. They make it possible to share our images with just about anybody at no cost and little effort.
What they have not done, at least for serious amateurs, is save us money over their film predecessors. This of course flies in the face of conventional wisdom. No more buying film. No more paying the drugstore to process our images (or buying the chemicals and equipment and processing them ourselves). No more paying for prints of every image on a roll of film. Etc.
Just after returning from Europe, Sassan and I joined a number of photographers on the Foothill Photo Club’s annual trip to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of eastern California.
Summary
Day 1: Driving to Crooked Creek in the White Mountains.
Day 2: Photography at the Patriarch Grove and climbing White Mountain Peak (elev. 14242 ft.).
Day 3: Photography at the Patriarch Grove and driving back.