In The Picture

The sculptors society

And now for something completely different

We spent last weekend around town and caught this exhibition near Darling Park, that's the 3-building complex down near Darling Harbour on the block down on Sussex St between Market and Druitt Streets. It's in the huge foyer, one level up from the street. It's free, and it's on for a bit longer. Details here:

http://www.sculptorssociety.com/PageDetail.aspx?CategoryID=11&PageId=85

There are 240 pieces dotted around the vast foyer, some of them very arresting.

Sorry, the last one isn't a sculpture but a skylight. Very artistic, mind you.

If you live in Sydney, or if you're juts passing through, go and have a look. It's free.

Kim

 

Will Nikon ever make serious digicams?

It’s been raining new cameras this month, 8 new Coolpix from Nikon and just 3 from Canon. 16 Coolpix this year, as Thom Hogan points out - http://bythom.com/ . We all know Nikon has long lagged behind Canon in digicam land, but does Nikon really think just making more cameras than Canon will close the gap?

Most of them come in flashy colours, have features only Paris Hilton addicts would want and sport a new 16 megapixel sensor. Why is Nikon focusing on airheads with its digicams, when it makes such great DSLRs? And why is Nikon following Sony and Fuji in the silly megapixel race?

Canon makes some decent digicams – viz the two I’ve reviewed recently, the SX230 HS and the IXUS 300/SD4000. Then there’s the S95 and the G12, and now the new a super-slim super-zoom IXUS 1100/ Elph 510HS which wraps a 12x zoom lens into a very neat package. Canon isn’t known for holding back on megapixels, but it has come back to 10 or 12 from 15mp a couple of years ago. The results shows this to be a wise move.

Canon dominates the top of this market, while Nikon seems happy to follow Sony in stacking its digicams with mega features that have little to do with photography. Yes, there are couple of exceptions but they’re pretty half-hearted. The P6000 was one of Nikon’s first attempts at making a serious digicam, but its mixed-bag image quality and performance disappointed most reviewers. The P7000 followed about 12 months ago and aped the Canon G12 in form and features.

It was another dud. Ken Rockwell, known for calling a spade a bloody shovel, called the P7000 'retarded'. ‘Nikon went out of its way to offer too many ways to do too many things, he wrote. ‘Nikon tried to put too many features in this camera, but never bothered to spend the time and effort required to put all these features into this camera in a way that we could find, use and understand them. There are too many different ways to do to many different things, nothing is organized from a user's point of view, so nothing is easy or clear. Ooops! Worse, the buggy firmware means some things, like the rear control dial or flash control options, don't even work as planned, further adding to the frustration. http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/coolpix/p7000.htm

Nikon hurried a firmware update to fix a few things, among them painfully slow menus, but that wasn’t enough to rescue the expensive camera from oblivion. DP Review politely suggested the Canon s95 or G12 or the Panny LX5 were better options.  http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/q42010highendcompactgroup/page18.asp 

Now Nikon has released the P7100. It might’ve fixed most of the things that were wrong with the P7000, but the world has moved on since then. As Thom Hogan puts it: ‘The P7100 has an extra control and a tiltable screen, so it must obviously be a new model. … With product cycles so short, some things don't get done that the company might have wanted to do. So they push them back to the next iteration of the product. The P7100 is claimed to write faster when shooting raw files, focus more reliably, and respond faster in the menus. Obviously, someone worked on the P7000 firmware in the last year.’

Meanwhile, Canon is probably readying the launch of its updated S95/G12 line, well before Christmas I suspect, and Nikon will be caught with its pants down once more.

Nikon’s other attempt at a decent digicam is the p300, with serious attributes like a fast lens, metal body, manual controls and >$300 price tag, so it looks set to go up against the S95 and LX5 until you see that Nikon didn’t worry about upgrading the tiny sensor or offering RAW. The reviews were decent enough but almost always there was an ‘if only Nikon had …’

Thom says: 'So we now have two "professional" (P) series Coolpix models that look compelling on paper, but neither of which totally delivers the goods. I can't really recommend the P300 over a Canon S95 or Panasonic LX-5 as a pocket camera.’ In other words: must try harder, Nikon. Canon must be laughing fit to kill.

Nikon has done a better job in the travel zoom category, it seems, since the newish S9100 came equal first in DP Review's recently released mega test.

They said handling was fine and performance was snappy, and image quality very good except in poor light. The S9100 has an impressive 25-450mm (35mm equivalent) zoom range in a pretty compact body, along with a supersharp 920K screen. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/q311travelzoomgrouptest/page17.asp

What the S9100 doesn't have is any kind of manual controls, which confirms that Nikon isn't serious about making pocket cameras for serious photographers. The equal first place-getter Canon SX230 HS has full manual controls - see my review a couple of posts below. So in my book, Canon wins this contest as well.

Come on, Nikon - will you get serious please?

KIM

 

Canon PowerShot SX230 HS Image Gallery

I've posted a gallery of selected images from the SX230 under PAGES in the right hand column. Or click on this link:

http://briard.typepad.com/get_the_picture/powershot-sx230-hs-gallery.html

 

KIM

At long last, a great travel travel zoom that fits in your pocket - PART 2

More on Image Quality

Of course, the tiny sensor of the Canon has some hard limitations, but let’s put these in perspective: If you haven’t followed my blog, let me explain that I’ve been looking for the close-to-perfect pocket camera for a while now. Last year, I bought a Panasonic GF-1 and sold it soon after because I found its dynamic range too limiting, and because it didn’t fit into any of my pockets, not even with the pancake lens.

The Olympus option was bigger still, and more expensive at the time, and the sensor was the same. Even the new E-P3 still uses the same sensor, ‘essentially the same one as that which we first saw in the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 almost three years ago,’ as dp.review notes, ‘and in the face of rapid progress from other manufacturers, it's now looking distinctly dated.’ http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusep3/page24.asp .

As the DxO comparison shows, dynamic range is still the Achilles heel of the M43 sensors.

When I gave up the idea of a ‘good-enough’ pocket or EVIL camera, I bought a used Nikon D40x. http://briard.typepad.com/get_the_picture/2011/03/back-to-basics-photography.html. The lenses I mostly use on the D40x are the tiny 35mm f1.8 prime and the 18-135mm zoom, and the lot fits into a small bag and doesn’t weigh too much. The dynamic range of the D40x (D80) sensor is far superior to any M43 sensor yet made. http://briard.typepad.com/get_the_picture/2011/02/panasonic-lumix-dmc-gf1-evil-fun-part-2.html

The D40x option may not make a lot of sense until you accept that EVIL cameras aren’t pocket cameras but compact ‘systems’ cameras, i.e. you buy the bodies and add lenses and an external flash and so on. That means you need a carry bag, however small, to take them with you on your travels. The carry bag needed for the D40x might be a touch bigger, but we’re arguing about fine details now. The upside is that the D40x is a responsive DSLR with a built-in viewfinder and flash. And terrific image quality:

  SX230 Image quality

The Canon has the same issues with dynamic range as every other digicam ever made. Here’s a shot where dynamic range was a real challenge, and it shows exactly what I mean: blown out light areas and dense dark areas that won’t reveal any more detail no matter which photo editor you use – the info just isn’t there.

What about that lens? Even with DSLRs, serious 14x zooms are compromised from a design point of view, so what about this dinky little number? Frankly, it’s a real surprise. Yes, there’s a bit of barrel distortion at the wide end, and some purple fringing on occasion, but it’s consistently sharp right across the long zoom range.

Obviously, the DIGIC IV processor has a lot to do with that, sharpening, reducing the ever-present noise and filling in the blanks. The images look sharpened, but the sharpening isn’t overdone. You can see the artefacts when you take a close look, though. This is a 100% crop (click on the image) of a shot taken at full zoom:

On the whole, the IQ of the SX 230HS is almost on the same level as the Canon IXUS 300HS I reviewed a few weeks ago. The IXUS 300HS has a slight edge, to my eye, at least, with the images looking just a tad less processed. Is it the different sensor? Fewer pixels? Who knows. I've said before, the images produced by these cameras show far more similarities than differences.

One thing is for sure, Canon's new CMOS back-lit sensors do job very well. And, apart from fitting in your pocket, the SX230 has another advantage over EVIL cameras: it costs around $300. Given its price, compact size and the inbuilt 18-260mm DX equivalent lens, image quality really leaves little to pick on. This shot was taken before sunrise at ISO 800 with the lens fully extended:

The colours are quite true as a rule, with the image settings turned off or switched to neutral. It depends on your subject, of course.

Here's the dynamic range issue again, pretty bad blow-outs:

In less bright light, the SX230 does very well.

  The next image speaks for itself: A long shot in the dark, almost.

Build and Handling

A few issues here: With a camera this size and this capable, why did Canon not give the body a more user-friendly shape? Or at least a small grip on the right-hand side? As it is, the body lacks any kind of grip or grippy surface, and that’s annoying. As with the IXUS 300 HS, function has taken a back seat to form, a very pretty form in this case but Canon would’ve made more friends if it had given this competent camera a more functional body.

It’s a chunky camera, with the body made of solid metal. Only the silver rim - also metal but quite thin - looks a bit flimsy where it opens for the flash and the ports. Apart from that, this camera is very well-constructed. The MASP/modes dial is very solid, so are the other buttons, and the screen is gorgeous. The lens makes no noise when zooming in and out. The size and weight of the SX230 actually help you hold the camera steady, which can be a challenge with smaller digicams.

The layout of controls is well done, from the shutter on top and the zoom ring around it to the crisp 16x9 display and the big MASP mode dial. And navigation is pretty good too: unlike the IXUS 300HS, the SX230’s body has enough buttons on the back despite the same size wide screen, so it’s not hard to set this camera up for shooting exactly how you want it. If you don’t know how you want it, a large collection of scene modes and special effects is provided.  

Performance

The flash spoils the show by popping up when you turn the camera on – Canon, what is this stupid feature doing on a camera like this? The best way to stop it is to keep a finger on it, but it doesn’t answer the question.

The camera starts in a instant, and focusing is pretty snappy as well. Shot to shot times are a bit more tardy but choosing continuous shooting mode is a simple way to get around that problem. 2.5 frames/sec isn’t all that fast but it’s fast enough - you don't buy a camera like this to shoot sports action. The zoom ring has a smooth enough action and is well-judged for the long range, and the best news is that the Image Stabilisation works really well.

Anytime you shoot at less than 1/30 of a second, the orange shaking hand warning will come on, but the camera copes with slower speeds OK most of the time. With a usable option of ISO 800, that makes it a versatile little machine that you can use in a variety of situations without problems. The range is F/3.1 - 5.9 so it gets a bit slow at the tele end.

The battery is barely good enough for 200 shots which is not exactly generous. The only positive here is that, for reasons I can't fatheom, the SX230 uses the same battery as my old IXUS 960IS, so I have a spare already.

Final thoughts

As an all-round, take-anywhere, all-in-one camera, the SX230 is hard to beat. The IQ is not serious challenge to low-end DSLRs, but it can come surprisingly close as this shot shows:

On the whole, I agree with DP Review whose reviewers said: ‘Images from the SX230 are amongst the sharpest and most consistently well-exposed of the cameras in this group test. … considering the breadth of its zoom range, sharpness is impressively uniform.’ They added: ‘The new sensor and processor deliver excellent image quality in just about any situation we tested the camera in, and when you add excellent optical quality and video performance into the mix, the SX230 HS is a very compelling camera.' http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/q311travelzoomgrouptest/page3.as

It’s almost ridiculous to find a huge zoom range like this in a pocket camera, and it would be just as ridiculous to pick on some of the obvious compromises that follow - slightly bigger size and more body depth, for example. If size is a big issue, Canon's new IXUS 510HS provides 12x zoom in a smaller package but you'll lose the MASP controls.

That there are so few nits to pick is an indication that the SX230 does most things pretty well. Sure, it doesn’t break records in any particular discipline, but then it’s really more an accomplished pentathlon champion than a sprinter. 

Kim

 

 

 

CAPE DON – Lighthouse ships and oil tankers

The weekend weather promised to be unkind but turned out better than expected. We stuck close to the city, in case the rain won the day. We walked around the Glebe foreshore where we saw the dragon boat crews practising hard, boys against girls. Just click on the images to see larger files.

Then we headed over to Balmain,and we had just consumed our sambos and beers on the pier at Louisa Warf when we saw a huge oil tanker under the harbour bridge.

We wondered where it was going, until it became clear that it was heading toward Greenwhich. Yes, Shell Oil still has tanks on the headland there, right in the midst of this residential area a few miles form the city. Hard to believe but ...

A huge fence around Shell's facility made it impossible to get closer so we went to Ball's Head across the bay for a better view. There's an old defunct coal loader with a collpasing jetty and a couple of rusty ships tied up close by.

The one at the front is the MV Cape Don, a Lighthouse Supply and Navy Aids Maintenance Ship. So we were informed by young Daniel, one of the volunteers who're helping to restore the almost 50-year-old vessel. The MV Cape Don was built in 1963, one of a unique class of ships purpose-built to service navigational aids including manned lighthouses, primarily around the West Australian coastline. She was built as a mini-liner, with the lavish passenger accommodation necessary to carry technicians, relief lighthouse crews (sometimes whole families) and officials, often for quite prolonged periods.

The Cape Don was retired in the late 1980's when Australian lighthouses were automated.What an interesting find just a couple of weeks after climbing up the lighthouse on the headland at Palm Beach.

More here: http://www.mvcapedonsociety.org.au/

http://www.volunteering.com.au/latest_news/volunteer_life/html/edition3/doing_and_giving.html

Here's our guide Daniel on the modest bridge of the Cape Don

And here's a lot of hardware in need of restoration below deck

And here's the Pacific Leo polluting Greenwhich. Old coal loader in the foreground.

And here's a different perspective on Sydney from the eastern side of Ball's Head, with Port Jackson and Goat Island on the right.

Sydney's an interesting place, no question about it.

Kim

At long last, a great travel zoom that fits in your pocket

Part 1

The search for the perfect go-anywhere-catch-any-scene-fits-in-your pocket-doesn’t cost a fortune camera is a lot like the search for the perfect woman: neither one exists. The good news is that some women get close, and I’ve found a camera that gets close as well – just as hard as most of you know well enough.

The SX230HS has earned good reviews from most sources, and just now it came tops in DPReview’s latest travel zoom group tests. Together with the Nikon S9100. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/q311travelzoomgrouptest/ . I decided to review the Canon because the Nikon is a fully automatic Point & Shoot, while the SX230 has full manual controls.

The compact market is getting mighty crowded

It’s the crowded space where big digicams and small Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens cameras have been converging. The EVIL makers have been working hard to make their bodies even smaller, and have now reached the natural limits of their designs. The size comparison below is enlightening: 

Panasonic GF-3                          108 x 67 x 33

NEX C3                                       110 x 60 x 33

Olympus PEN MINI E-PM1             110 x 64 x 34

Canon PS SX230HS                      105 x60 x 33

 The bodies are all within millimetres of each other, and not much bigger than the Canon which is big for a digicam but not for a superzoom. Just as with women, the body is less than half the story. In the case of EVIL cameras, the lenses let the bodies down, and that is the penalty the designs carry for using decent sized sensors. Here’s what I mean:

   

I won’t continue the analogy with women in case it causes offence. Let’s just say that there’s a huge imbalance here between the ultra-slim body and the enormous lens here, and this is a modest 18-55 lens. Here it is side-on:

 And the Oly E-P3 with its retracting lens doesn’t fare much better:

And here’s the Canon’s retractable lens, all the way out to 400mm in 35mm speak, and please note that all of the black rings disappear right into the body until we see this:

Even the Sony with the pancake lens does come close:

The bottom line is: the Canon SX230 fits into a normal pocket, something even the smallest EVIL bodies with the smallest pancake lenses cannot do. This Canon’s lens goes from 5 to 70mm, which translates to 28-390mm in the old 35mm format, or 18-260mm in APS-C/Nikon DX speak.

Whichever way you look at these numbers, that’s a colossal range in a pocket camera. Look at the photo above of the NEX-C3 with the 18-55 lens, and the problem is clear: a bigger sensor is a nice idea, but the lenses designed for these sensors will be big as well.

Image quality

That’s the usual stumbling block with the tiny sensors of digicams. The Canon has a (by today’s standards) modest 12mp sensor, CMOS type, backlit. It’s better than I expected. As always, click on the images to see larger files.

The dark side of the road, from across the road, late afternoon

Close-up, even hgot some bokeh!

Manly from Balmoral - that's a long way across the harbour

a shot snatched early on an overcast morning - ISO 800

AT night indoors - ISO 1600

I'm really impressed so far. Part 2 will have to wait until next week, though.

Kim

 

The Italian Job – a nostalgia trip

The paper said there was an Italian festival on at Five Dock, an inner suburb of Sydney, last weekend. Leichhardt is better known as the home of Sydney’s Italian community, and Haberfield next door to a lesser extent. Five Dock is next in line, a bit of a stretch though. Still, the promo promised Italian food and wine, and I imagined Italian music and beautiful young ragazzi dancing in the streets. This is what we found instead.

Yes, Turkish Gozleme, the traditional spinach and cheese wraps, prepared by seasoned operators. We've seen them before, at virtually every fair we've been to in Sydney. It was the same with the other stalls: most of them were the same stalls that you see at all the fairs. The global village destroys the real village. Welcome to the world of Walmart and McDonalds and Bunnings.

The saving grace was a brace of Italian cars, and these were cars I remembered from my teenage years in Germany. Cars of character, cars of beauty, cars of distinctly Italian style.

An early fifties FIAT 500, lovingly restored. As always, click on the images for a larger file

The later and better-known 500 topolino

The later again FIAT 850, here in ABARTH guise with the bored-out engine and beefed-up suspension.

Yes, FIAT did produce cars of great beauty, courtesy of Pininfarina: the 124 Spyder.

Bertone was the studio that gave Alpha Romeo its beautiful bodies, here the GT Veloce

Change of pace

The ultimate Bambino convertible - though black was not one of the original colours, I'm sure.

This FIAT 1500 was the first car I ever drove after I got my licence. Thanks Evelyn, wherever you are today.

This is a much newer Ducati, but have a look at the background: There's a very serious and clear warning about the dangers of riding motorbikes. Quite accidental of course.

Please help preserve things of style, class, individuality and anything else that's an endangered quality or species in this global world.

Kim

Nikon D5100 – stress testing

Had a chance to test the AF system, and it came through with flying colours. Literally. We were eating our Sunday sandwiches in a park at Canada Bay when the seagulls descended on us. Some left-over bread showed them to be ravenously hungry, fighting over the crumbs and catching bits of bread in the air with their beaks. Please click on the image for a larger file.

There's not a lot to add, except that I'd forgotten to switch the AF mode to 3D tracking from Dynamic Area mode.

A different tough test for a camera is capturing clouds on a sunny day. No problem for the D5100.

The last 2 photos were taken with the Sigma 8-16mm ultra-wide lens.

Barranjoey Lighthouse and Smugglers’ Cove

Last weekend, the NSW Parks & Wildlife Service put on an open house for the old lighthouse, which sits on the Barranjoey headland at the northern end of Palm Beach, about 40km from the city of Sydney. Some 10,000 years ago, the headland was cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels until the gradual build-up of a sand spit reconnected the island to the mainland. To the east (left) lies the ocean, to the west Pittwater.

  In the early days of the colony, Pittwater served as a safe entry point to Sydney for smugglers of grog and tobacco, so the government established a customs station here in 1843. In 1868, two wooden lighthouses know as the Stewart Towers were built at either end of the headland to guide ships in. The towers were later replaced with the current lighthouse, which was built from sandstone cut out of the headland nearby in 1881.

  The light source in the new tower was a fixed red dioptric of 700 candlepower with four oil wick burners. In 1932, the Barranjoey Lighthouse was converted to automatic operation and an acetylene gas light source, which produced 6,000 candlepower. 1972 saw the final conversion of the lighthouse to electric operation.

Up the spiral staircase

The tiny but potent lightsource of today

Automation meant that lightkeepers were no longer needed, but that left the buildings open to vandalism vandals which did a lot of damage. Tenants were encouraged to occupy them during the 1950's, and I met two of them in the nineties with my late wife Benita who was a historian with a special interest in the area. We lived in Avalon at the time. 

Jervis & Bridget Sparks lived in the lightkeeper’s cottage until about 1999. There was no electricity or running water, but they seemed pretty happy enjoying one of Sydney’s best views on a peppercorn rent. They moved out after the site was changed hands from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to the National Parks & Wildlife Service. 

‘My wife and I had enjoyed 30 years at Barranjoey,’ Jervis wrote, ‘had written the history of the lighthouse, been awarded the Pittwater Medal for our services to the community and it was time to close that door and open a new one. The forces of bureaucracy were intransigent and inexpugnable, and we had better things to do with our lives and money.’

Jervis releasing a dove? [Photograph: Jervis Sparks]

View from the lighthouse across to West Head and Mackerel over on the lfar left. The lower building is the one Jervis and Bridget lived in.

Robern William Russell, the lighthouse keeper in 1920 [photo by Lorna Coe]

Some of the old bits and pieces, including a crude generator

If you're wondering how you get up there, it's on this goat track, known as the Smugglers' track. There's a very rough road going up there from the beach, which Jervis and Bridget used in their 4-wheel drive, but it's closed for maintenance at present.

The view from the car park down below

More here http://www.lighthouse.net.au/lights/bulletin/9903/Bulletin%20Mar%2099.htm

Footnote:

The correct spelling of Barranjoey has been the subject of much debate. The original plans for the lighthouse spell it as 'Barrenjuey', but once it come under the care of the Lighthouse Service, it was known as the 'Barranjoey Lighthouse', and this spelling is accepted today.

AWESOME SHOT

Not mine, but I wish it were. Click on the image for a bigger file.

Paul Wilkinson, National Geographic