Author: James Vornov

Yesterday, I wrote about how the Z7 might be such an all around success that it could replace the digital Leica rangefinders. It may replace my aging Minolta film scanner as well. During my winter break photography project, looking for new ideas and techniques, I ran across two presentations (here and here) by Vincent Versace on the Nikon ES-2 Film Digitizing Adapter. By the way, watch both. The first is a clean, more formal presentation, the second is a more typical Versace philosophy of photography course about digital, film and the meaning of life.

I got the ES-2 from B&H Photo in NY and a 60mm Nikkor Micro from KEH in Atlanta. I recommend both companies for honesty, customer service and quality product. So last night I quickly digitized a few images just to try it out. Turns out it’s been at least two years since I’ve shot any film, so my eye is attuned to the current quality of digital black and white. But this wasn’t a test of film, it was a tryout of digital transfer over film scanners.

Using the ES-2 reminds me of the time a long time ago when we made slide duplicates. The only way to get a copy of a 35mm slide used for lectures or scientific presentations was to bring it to the lab for copying. A simple method was this kind of adaptor where you took a photo of the slide with slide film. This is just taking a photo of the negative, moving analog to digital.

The camera gets set to base ISO, f8, autofocus on the emulsions side. The post-processing is simple, just invert the curve in any processing program and the negative is converted. Vincent uses Picture Control in camera or Capture NX-D.

Two very obvious conclusions:
1. Its way faster to capture an image with a DSLR than a slide scanner. The scanner is clearly an older technology used to capture point by point what can now be done simultaneously.
2. The improved resolution doesn’t really matter much. It’s a photograph of grain which, at 100% clearly shows how much better the D850 45 MP sensor can resolve compared to Tri-X. So compared to the scanner, the grain is crisper with the DSLR capture, but the image really isn’t any different. The dynamic range of the D850 was wider than every negative I tried, but I could see how some negatives might benefit from a two exposure combination.

The process definitely makes shooting film more attractive. I’ll probably bring a film camera on an upcoming trip to capture some film-appropriate images. It’s more that nostalgia since film provides a rendering that is even more different than digital than it was a few years ago. Digital imaging in the same format is now into large format quality territory with the improvements we’ve seen in sensors and lenses. So for landscape and documentary work, it seems that digital is far and away the best medium. But for the sense of gritty, you are there, 35mm film still provides its quick sketch of the fall of light and sense of movement.

Looking back on my history of writing on the internet, I came across this nice personal history written by another early EditThisPage user, Frank McPherson who wrote Notes From The Cave.

I don’t think it was the change to titles that did in blogging, it was the move to writing articles rather than journaling, a larger conceptual shift. Looking back through those early sites they were frequently posted links, comments and quick thoughts. And indeed, this is a space now occupied by Twitter and other social media. Social connections in the early days of blogging was easy since the world was small. Twitter and Facebook provided scale for both personal and private networking, so its natural that the infinity of small island blogs like this faded away.

Over the years, this site has been found because of long form reviews or observations that get ranking in Google searches. Any other readers are long time net friends and family. The photos I feature on most pages are decorative, they can’t be found by search engines. I have Flickr for my photographic social network, a place that seems to be recovering from Yahoo’s neglect at this point.

As Hal Rager at Blivet points out, we’ve been blogging for 19 years now since Dave Winer’s EditThisPage. I can’t say it’s been continuous over that time, but it’s been an ongoing project. I always get a kick out of reading the first page I wrote here: Imagination as Simulation

Over the years, I’ve started and stopped work on a long form version of ODB, which I guess most of the world would call a “book”, but the scope of the project has always proved to be overwhelming. The work goes on behind the scenes, with lots more reading on brain mechanisms of deciding, if you look back over the 10 posts I made in 2018.

I think I can see what the outlines of a workable synthesis, but the way the brain works seems to be very, very alien compared what we perceive. It’s not surprising since neurons and their networks aren’t accessible to conscious awareness, so they work very differently from the we would guess or by analogy to mechanical devices. It’s been clear for a long time, given optical illusions that most of awareness occurs automatically. In a way it looks like Sherrington was right, way back in the 20’s that it’s all down to reflexes that act to govern the body via analogues with the external environment. I think we now understand that the awareness is built up from differences between the expected state and the contents of sensory input.

And Scully the cat’s brain mechanisms seem to be very much like our own. Minus the symbolic environment we create through culture, as we are the social animals born with the mechanisms in place to use language.

And yes it’s a bit scary to realize that our perceptions and actions aren’t based on any kind of rational engine, but instead the brain models we’ve developed over a life time of sensory experience. We don’t choose what we see and we don’t choose how we react. Yet I think that it points to relatively simple approaches to deciding better, mostly by being in better, more informative environments that nurture our best selves. And taking time to use imagination as simulation to provide more options for better decisions. Coming full circle.

I ordered Nikon’s first mirrorless offering, the Z7 as soon as it was announced. I got one of the first shipments through my great local camera store, Service Photo here in Baltimore. I played around with it a little, and thought the image quality was the equal of the Nikon D850 in a smaller package. I had the FTZ adaptor to try my collection of Nikkor’s, but it kind of kills the small package. So when I traveled to Italy twice, I brought the Leica M10 as a small travel kit and one drive to Pittsburgh seemed best suited for the D850 since it has the tripod mounting plate attached.

But as I mentioned, I’ve returned to photography these last few weeks and when leaving the house I’ve grabbed the Z7 with the new 50mm f1.8 lens and I’m finding that the images I can produce are a level I’ve never seen before. With the 45 megapixels, lack of antialiasing filter and lenses with that really wide mount, I get an almost large format feel to lots of the images.

This image is a scene a see several times a week as I drive to the gym in Owings Mills on Park Heights Avenue. The winter landscape had that gentle light coming at me, so I stopped in the middle of the road, opened the door, leaned out and grabbed this image. There wasn’t any traffic behind me, but the rear LCD let me frame at that awkward angle, resting the camera on the window frame.

The only real post-proccessing trick in the image was converting the RAW image twice, once at normal exposure and one at two stops under to get as much detail in the highlights and sky as possible. So its a single exposure HDR image if you wish, converted to a chromatic grayscale image using Nik Silver Efex.

It’s one of those images that I know I saw, I know I captured, I know I coaxed this out of the RAW file, but can’t quite believe the result. So I’ll give the Z7 a lot of credit.

Every year during the Christmas – New Year period when work slows down, I usually take on a project. My first web page was built many years ago when I learned HTML for the first time. I had planned to work on my long term project to write a book based on my explorations here at On Deciding . . . Better, but somehow I fell back into photography again. My Capture1 catalog tells the story. Lots of casual iPhone shots with a few collections of images associated with travel. Newfoundland this past summer, Milan this fall. But not much real image production.

I played around with a few iOS image tools, thinking that if I got images onto the iPad, I might spend more time doing the digital darkroom work. Fortunately, I noticed in a B&H Photo email that my photographic mentor, Vincent Versace, was doing some live sessions int the B&H Event Space. The series 21st Century Composition Theory sounds like its the basis of a new book or two from Vincent. His Oz books are out of print now because of the demise of the publisher, Rocky Nook. The sessions are a fine example of his approach to photography, using techniques familiar to those who have worked through the Oz books. The first session: The Journey is the Destination, a Live Fire Demo of Post Processing an Image From Vincent’s Most Recent TripI s a tour of creating an image, from color management in camera, through RAW conversion, photoshop processing, and printing. The second presents a computation photography technique using Nikon’s “Focus Shift” called ExDR Extending the Dynamic Range of Focus and Bokeh (the quality of blur) and How to Shoot For It. And the last is The Conversational Portrait showing how using silent shooting plus facial recognition can change the way you shoot portraits. But really, in a way the focus of the sessions is beside the point. It’s really about the overall approach to image capture and the cinematic post-processing in Photoshop.

Watching those videos swung me back int image making. For me, it was reminder of how much of the interest in an image comes after the RAW file is loaded into the computer. My entire artistic pursuit is simply framing interesting visual encounters with a camera and pulling that through to an image that tells the story of why a viewer might find it interesting.

And I’ll gladly admit it’s much more accessible than my thoughts about decision making, so in some way a pursuit of the easier path to truth by looking at what works.

Back in the day, I used to discuss investing and my portfolio here at OD…B. But the last 10 years have been uninteresting with an unrelenting bull market recovering from the disaster of the 2008 financial crisis up through the 2016-2018 “Trump Trade”. I believe that the run is coming to an end as the globalized economy splinters and Nationalism rises in the world.

Back in 2004, in the aftermath of the 2000 DotCom crash, I bought Apple stock. I had sworn never to invest in that failed company again, but with the success of the iPod with those white earbuds combined with the new iTunes Music Store, I bought into Steve Job’s vision of the Mac as a Digital Hub. In the end it was the iPhone that drove Apple valuation to it’s current stratospheric heights as the largest company by market cap.

Over the last few years, I began valuing Apple as a typical blue chip, based on its dividend payments. Apple became a huge company that was going to be judged on growing earnings and paying out a portion of the profits to investors. Apple’s been paying a dividend for about 5 years now. Initially yielding 2.5%. It’s been in a general range of 2 to 1.5%, but reached as low as 1.2% a few months ago as the market peaked. I looked at that and took it as a clue that the stock was overvalued.

Now this is combination with the original investment thesis I had in Apple, as the center of the home computing ecosystem. And the iPhone/iPad/Mac combo has done just that for me over the years. That iPhone camera connected to social media has killed both the camera industry and professional photography. The Apple Watch has decimated the mid price quartz watch market. But at this point, I don’t see the growth driver. I think the iPhone X is a nice iteration, but I see lots of older phones out there and a sentiment that some of this technology is just unnecessary. There’s a reaction against social media and connectedness.

And Apple has not introduced a new category killer since the Watch. The AirPods are a nice accessory and I seem them everywhere now. The HomePod and AppleTV haven’t gained real dominance because the streaming services and cable companies can’t be displaced by hardware.

Worse, Apples strategy of pushing prices up is now seeing consumer resistance. And if economic times turn tougher, it will be a completely untenable strategy. For years we’ve had stable prices for electronics with gradual improvement that made upgrading worth it from time to time.

So, I believe Apple’s stock price will fall back to where the dividend yield supports the value, back to yielding in the the 2 to 2.5% range. Then I’ll be a buyer as long as the company remains strong and the product lineup attractive.