Paul's Perspective

Shooting wide, and the dual lens system

I received a Kodak V570 at CES last year. It quickly became my favorite camera due primarily to its key feature: the ultra wide lens.

The camera uses two lenses, coupled with two 5MP sensors, to provide an extremely useful focal range, while maintaining a conveniently thin form factor.

I’ve shot digital for ten years. I’ve always enjoyed the freedom of near-endless exposures, and the shot-guarantee of seeing the shot on the LCD as soon as you take it [instead of weeks later when you get a print].

But one bad aspect of consumer cameras that I got used to was the limited frame of view: the small sensors used in consumer cameras delivers the equivalent of a telephoto lens from a normal focal length lens.

A 35mm focal length is considered normal. Most cameras now have a 3x optical zoom that ranges from 35mm to 110mm or so -- normal to telephoto. Not wide.
[Those figures are “35mm equivalents” meaning they equate to lenses of such measurements on a 35mm film camera; the actual lenses differ, but the sensor is much smaller than film, and so… ]

The makers of consumer cameras have for the most part exasperated this by the increasing optical zooms from 3x to 10 or 12x lenses -- rarely going wider.

I’ve often shot multi-exposure panoramas -- pivoting as smoothly as I could, later painstakingly combining the shots into one wide image… useful, but not something I wanted to do regularly.

In 2001 or thereabouts, I shot a lot with a fish-eye lens adapter on a 1MP camera with a 3x optical lens: I zoomed in for the equivalent of an extreme wide angle. The shots were poorly exposed, distorted, and vignetted -- but I enjoyed the capability of capturing an entire scene in one exposure.

Then came the V570 and its 23mm lens. Ahh. that's the ticket.
Even 23mm does not let you capture as wide a field of view as you see: it does not come near to a 180-degree view [or whatever subset of that you can see]. But it is much more wide than most cameras, and I find it much more freeing to shoot with: I can photograph my whole family without all-but stepping out of the room; I can shoot my whole house while staying in my yard; even for landscapes, I love getting more of the overall environment into the shot.

My friend Dave Etchells has a good review -- with sample photos showing the wide angle difference -- on his Imaging Resource site.

You’ll note Dave’s reviewer does not rave about the photographic quality: it is not perfect by any means. But today “not perfect” can mean “plenty good enough.” I am more than satisfied with the V570’s shots. A colleague liked his so much that when he broke the first one, he bought another last month -- and he was a professional photographer and no stranger to judging image quality.

The camera is now available for a little over $200. I think it is well worth the money.

Some rezzed-down photos I took at a near-empty lake on Saturday:

After the jump:
An article profiling the Kodak engineer who came up with the idea for the dual-lens Retina system.
I wrote this for The Future Image Report [www/futureimage.com] in April this year.

A change of habits

Like most book buyers, my purchasing gets ahead of my reading, and I end up with dozens of new unread books on the shelves.
[Which is why I always tell family and friends not to buy me books as presents: not only are the odds against them choosing one that I personally want to read, but I already have many books that I have decided I want to read, to which I’ve commited my own money -- just not my own time.]

While I’ve gotten used to the unread books, and tapered off, somewhat, my new book buying in response, I’ve only started to realize that I am now doing the same with comics.
For example, I did not even read Scott Pilgrim v2 until v3 was out. [And I am glad, as they read very well together.]
And it is not just big expensive graphics novels: It's the same with $3 ‘pamphlets.’

Whereas I used to read most of a big weekly pile on the night I bought them, now I never read more than 2 a night. And I seem to be in no hurry to get to the latest issues of some sporadic titles: I took almost a month to read the latest “Desolation Jones” and “Casanova,” for example.
And it’s worse for new books: I still have not read the first issues of “Other Side” or “Criminal,” and now the second issues are out.
With those two in particular, I bought the titles for the creators but since realized I have little if no interest in the subject matters [Viet Nam and, well, a criminal] -- at least, not as subjects for ongoing comics. I get more than my dose of crime fiction from “The Wire” or the occasional movie such as “The Departed.” I'll still give the second issues a try...

And those are just the low-cost comics. On the pricier side, I have paid for but not read:
The Fate of the Artist
American born Chinese
Plastic Man on the Lam
Selina’s Big Score
Flight v2
Kickback [and I love David Lloyd’s art!]
The Originals [and I love David Gibbon’s art!]
30 Days of Night
Best American Comics 2006

That’s $100-200 at least in unread books!

I guess this new behavior is a combination of my tastes and interests changing with age, and a move from monthly serialized periodicals to stand-alone stories and collections.
[But I miss well-done serials that command my attention on a regular basis. That’s a subject for another post.]

This weeks book read, by the way: The Long Tail. We gave it away at our 6Sight conference. It is interesting, and a slick read, but very very very repetitive.

User-video Impacts U.S. election

It certainly sounds like hyperbole to say that YouTube decided the November 7 election and caused the control of Congress to change -- but that might not be all that much of an exaggeration...

While the U.S is almost always portrayed as harshly polarized into 'red' and 'blue' states, the truth is that the country is 'purple:' elections [especially the last two presidential ones] are close calls in most states: the coasts and the South are not Democratic strongholds, nor is everyone in the Midwest or the 'heartland' a staunch Republican.

This near 50/50 mix means that media is more important than ever in swaying middle-ground and undecided voters to cast a ballot one way or the other.

But while TV has long been a major [and expensive] factor in political campaigns, now the power of video is in the hands of just about everyone -- affordably.

This last election was particularly close: but while the long-out-of-power Democrats won a decisive majority in the House of Representatives, the race to control the Senate was too close to call for days after the polls closed.

Finally it came down to the undecided Senate race in Virginia, and the office held by U.S. Sen. George Allen... the man most famous of late for calling a campaign worker for his opponent a "Macaca" -- while that man was video-taping him.
How many people watched the video on YouTube? Nearly 400,000, reports the Boston Herald.
Of course those weren't all Virginians -- but the Senator lost his office to Democrat Jim Webb by about 7,000 votes, out more than 2.3 million ballots. [Webb is a former Republican and Navy secretary under President Reagan, showing again how closely the country is divided...]

The Republicans made use of YouTube as well, of course: the Herald reports that more than 1 million viewers downloaded well-produced clips of Sen. John Kerry's infamous botched "joke."

Another example of the growth of User video is the group-blog company Pajamas Media, which outfitted its contributors covering the election with 8MP Canon PowerShot A630s [$256 on Amazon], using the still camera's video capabilities to capture dozens of clips that were then streamed via YouTube.

We've long promoted the importance of non-professional video captured with ubiquitous camcorders, cameras, and phones -- and now that the capture is coupled with Web-based distribution and access, it is really a paradigm change [pardon the now-trite phrase].
Most recently at our 6Sight conference we hosted the session on "The Global Video Revolution."
The saying "the revolution will be televised" has become a cliché; but in this case web-based video was a prime factor in a "revolution" wherein leadership over the House and Senate shifted from the party in power for 12 years to it opponents.

That such dramatic change is done peacefully is the strength of democracy -- and now video is an even stronger influence on how the voters in that democracy exercise their franchise.
--From my Future Image Weekly Briefing

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

On Saturday I went to our tiny “public cinema” Indy movie house in Mariposa and saw “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” a fascinating documentary about a semi-famous manic-depressive musician/cartoonist.

For some reason the producer of the movie had come to this showing in our small town, and so after the film the 30 of us [the theater seats less than 60] got to spend more than an hour asking more about Johnston as an artist, and the difficulties of film production.

While I thought the subject of a crazy, screeching out-of-tune singer getting some fame [an MTV appearance, etc] must have struck this award-winning movie maker as an interesting film topic, it turns out that no, he is actually a sincere fan of the guy’s music, first and foremost. [And by the end of the film, I was left thinking that hey, there might be something there I could appreciate too…]

Also interesting is that he and the director were going to make a standard interview-based documentary -- and then only when they had started production did they find that Johnston had made psychologically revealing movies from the time he was a teenager, and had recorded an audio cassette of observations ever day of his life, even a tape of getting arrested for vandalizing the Statue of Liberty with Christian fish symbols -- and so there was an overwhelming wealth of material to work with.

Which proved doubly beneficial as weeks and weeks spent with the crazy artist himself resulted in not one minute of useful footage…[only 30 seconds of a magnificently loony dance that plays over the closing credits].

The movie just came out on DVD. A highly recommended study of insanity and creativity.

Democratization of Video: Pre-Revolution

This is a post I first wrote for our company blog at livefrom6sight.com:

The most powerful communication technology -- video -- has not been accessible to most people.

Most people could not easily or affordably capture or express something on video and then share it with a wide audience -- even with affordable camcorders and PC-based digital video editing.

But now, thanks to web-based sharing sites as exemplified by YouTube, that is changing:
Anyone can post a short clip, and thousands if not millions of people may watch it.

In 1999, I was over-enthusiastic about the possibilities of digital video for both production and distribution:
With my friends and family, I started to create my own 12-hour TV serial.

But dreams of being a mini-mogul faded after many months of trying to coordinate everyone’s volunteer time into a production schedule. It was like herding cats.

Also, many of my projections were wildly optimistic: developments I thought were a few years away have yet to arrive.

Nonetheless, it was the most fun I’ve ever had -- and I think most of what I foresaw in 1999 will still come to pass eventually.

After the jump: my still-very-lengthy business summary from the previous millennium, with some names changed to protect the guilty.
[Such as the show’s name is changed to just “the show.”]