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Today is officially the last day that Konica Minolta is in the camera (selling) business. Tomorrow (April 1st) it all goes over to Sony. I started using Minolta just over three months ago. In the last three months I have acquired three Minolta camera bodies and about a dozen lenses ranging from plastic toys (28-100mm) to perhaps what is the best lens ever produced by any lens manufacturer (the 200mm G lens). Today I feel as much a part of the Minolta-family as people who have been die-hard fans for over thirty years.
As I keep saying, the most popular (Canon or Nikon in this case) is rarely the best. Minolta consistently had better cameras (the design of the Maxxum 7 puts cameras in higher segments by other manufacturers to shame), newer technology (Autofocus, Anti-shake), better glass, and was perhaps the only camera company that wasnt afraid to innovate radically. What they lacked was good marketing strategy and advertising revenues. It is really sad when true innovators like Minolta go down like this.

The various forums devoted to Minolta have been quite emotional the last few months. Ranging from wild rumors of how Sony is going to ruin everything to truly sincere “thank-you’s” to the various people working at Minolta who are going to be without a job tomorrow. I just saw this post by an ex-Minolta employee on dpreview:

If you don’t know who Mr Kusumoto is well he’s the man who came from Japan many years ago with two suitcases full of Minolta cameras and started it all for Minolta. He was talking with the manager about something. When he was done about four of us techs who have been here a long long time watch him glance at us for an instant as he walked towards the door. He turned around and stared at us. In the most humblest words he said “I am so sorry”. He is a most honorable man. He made this company great! It was great working for someone who really cared about his employees and his customers. I walked over and extended my hand. He did the same. I thanked him and that’s all I could say without getting too choked up. Next tech did the same and so on. Sorry if this is a bummer but It is an end of an era. - Xtech

Tomorrow is a new day. Sony is in an amazing position to take over the DSLR market by storm. But Sony being Sony, they are just as likely to ruin everything just like they did with the Walkman. I doubt they will make any new announcement before May/June. Its going to be a long wait…

I have always been a little skeptical of the four-thirds system mainly because if the lack of cheap and high quality Olympus lenses. Inspite of everyone and their dog predicting the death of the system soon, Olympus and Panasonic seem to be the only companies that are even trying to innovate with digital SLRs these days. And this in times when all the big-shots (Nikon and Canon) are doing is increasing the size of the LCDs on their cameras!. First the radical Olumpus E330, and now the new Panasonic DMC-L1 can both be viewed as trend-setters in the industry. More on the Panasonic here.

With the death of Minolta, and the future uncertain with Sony, it is good to see atleast one camera company has the right idea. The new Panasonic has a dedicated shutter speed knob (when was the last time you saw one on a new camera!?), and even has a functional aperture ring! To top it all off, Leica announced support for the four-thirds system with their new 14-50 mm lens with image stabilization. If the camera+lens is reasonably priced (instead of the snobish Leica price), this is sure to be a killer camera.

Cant wait for Sony’s announcement on their new camera and lens lineup. I only hope they keep the Minolta design, ergonomics and glass and improve it in Minolta spirit, instead of Sony-izing everything…

This is probably the only blog I religiously read every day. Not only does it have a nice review of the latest photography/camera news, it also has interesting articles and mini-reviews well worth a read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in photography.

Over the past few weeks the homepage of Times of India has been posting picutures of hollywood and (sometimes) Indian celebrities. The pictures go with some absolutely ridiculous piece of news under them (such as, some one famous brushed her teeth today). What really bugs me with these photos is that about 9 out of 10 times the whitebalance on them is WAY off. The skin tones are horribly wrong, and there is either a greenish, or a bluish, or a yellow cast to the whole picture. I am amazed as to how a newspaper the size of ToI can let such a thing get by for so long. Tells you the state quality control with Indian websites…

Konica Minolta announced today that they are withdrawing from the camera and photo business. One of the most innovative and creative camera company is coming to an end. Luckily the Maxxum mount will live under the Sony name. As much as I would hate to carry a Sony camera, this is good news since it means my investment of A-mount lenses would eventually be worth a lot more. Also the bottom line is that my KM 5D will continue to take the same great pictures, and I have no intentions of replacing it for a couple of years at least. Time to pile up some more lenses while people are still dumping them for peanuts on ebay!

For those unaware about Minolta’s heritage, here is a brief history. Minolta was the first company to introduce an Autofocus SLR, wireless flash, first (and till date the only) to incorporate anti-shake in the camera body, and a bunch of other firsts. It was perhaps the only company that actually put some thought into the camera user interface. Nikon is really quite bad, and Canon just downright pathetic in terms of the user interface on SLRs. As long as Sony doesnt try to impose its “memory-stick culture” on these cameras, there is bright future ahead for the Maxxum/Dynax mount. Now if only they would make a formal announcement on what their plans are, it would silence a lot of speculation and fear on various forums.

Update: A day after the announcement the dust is starting to settle and more information is slowly coming out. According to Sony, they are aiming at a 25% share of the DSLR market. Also, ebay prices for Minolta lenses is already starting to rise. I saw an old Minolta 100-200mm/4.5 lens (good but not great) go for around $80! Just last week I almost bought one for under $30! I knew I should have gotten more lenses earlier :p

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to decide on a photo sharing website. flickr is extremely popular and the pro account has unlimited bandwidth and storage. It also has an amazing community with millions of cluncky but functional groups. However, I could never get myself to like the flickr user interface. Sure, there are quite a few intelligent features, but for the most part the UI is simply unusable. The amount of whitespace wasted on each page is absolutely ridiculous. The slideshow feature is really a joke (who would want a slideshow in a tiny part of the window!?). I even setup a flickr account for myself, but never really uploaded much.

pbase was one of the very first photo sharing sites on the net. It has some really cool features like searching the camera/lens database. Unfortunately the interface is somewhat antiquated (though very flexible), and they offer very little storage space.

And then there is smugmug. It has the best UI by far (though not very configurable for the standard account). They offer unlimited storage and a generous bandwidth cap per month. They have a fairly decent API for third party apps (though not as popular as flickr). Nice full screen slideshows, print ordering, and the option to upgrade to a power user for a highly customizable look are added benifits. The only thing that really goes against smugmug is the lack of a real photo-sharing community like flickr.

So, I was really jumping between smugmug and flickr and finding it hard to decide until I came across this thread on their smugmug’s support forum. This guy basically wants to upload 2+ terabytes worth of images, and is wondering if smugmug can handle this. Here is the response that he got from those incharge:

Wow, that must be close to 500,000 JPEGs! Quite a collection - I can’t wait to see them.

So we’ve always said “unlimited storage” and we mean what we say. We’re happy to take your photos and host them, but we need a little time to prepare.

Just so you know, this is something like a $20,000 first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling, and physical space. You’ll basically have two complete RAID arrays to yourself in our datacenter. Of course, you’ll only pay your $30, $50, or $100 per year, depending on your account level. Again, we’re happy to do it - but I want to be up front here and let you know that we need to order some equipment and get it installed to accept your photos. We’re not geared for accepting 2.5TB overnight.

We’ll also be buying extra image processing machines just for your batch of photos. Luckily, once yours are done, everyone else at smugmug will get to benefit from them, so I don’t consider that a cost to host you.

Does that sound fair? Can we ask you to hold off while we order and install the equipment and power required?

Thanks!

Don

Wow! This is called customer service. I immediatelly signed up for a standard account at smugmug

Here is my smugmug webpage. I’ll be adding pictures and organizing it in the coming weeks. Will also post links here, and hopefully have something like a photoblog that is linked to smugmug soon.

Finally, if you do decide to go with smugmug, use this referrer code while signing up MwBAowRs6Oiis - it will save you $5, and give this poor graduate student a $10 credit towards next year’s service.

About 30 years after going out of business, Zeiss Ikon is coming back with a new camera. It uses the popular M-mount lenses, and Cosnia and Carl Zeiss will make a range of T* lenses for it. The FAQ blatantly claims that “ZI lenses better than other M bayonet lenses on the market” (obviously implying Leica).

They are taking 1200 special orders for a limited edition camera right now with wide availability in 2005. Expected price should be around $2000 for the body only (ouch!). Another toy to add to the list of stuff I am getting the next time I win a lottery…

The really good thing is that all over the website they are hinting at future digital compatibility. This clearly indicates a digital camera in the pipeline…

I’ve been getting increasingly interested in Black and White photography of late. It started with trying to save some money on film and processing, but I guess I’m starting to see the charm and fun of B&W.

One of the things that comes with B&W is that you need to develop your own films, or be prepared to spend a fortune on getting a single roll processed. But the good thing is that developing B&W is really easy and fun! Thanks to the awesome documentation on Ilford’s site (particularly this document), and the helpful folks at Nikonians, I managed to develop my first roll recently. While the results werent mindblowing, it was great to see actual pictures on the negatives once the process was done.

Unfortunately I dont have access to a real darkroom or enlarger right now. I’ve heard from many people that making your own prints is where the real fun is, and cant wait to try that out. Until then I have to be content with with scanning the negatives using the Minolta Dimage Dual Scan IV scanner that I got sometime back.

One amazing resource for all B&W related stuff is the Black & White Magazine.

Its been a while since I last posted here. In the last month I’ve shifted to a new apartment, been to the Gold Rush state, attended the biggest Computer Graphics conference, learnt about B&W film development, done quite a lot of carpentry, watched a whole bunch of cool movies, and discovered the original hazelnut spread.

This post has nothing to do with all of those. This post about the TimeCatcher’s World website. It has easily one of the best nature photographs I’ve ever seen. Vibrant colors (thanks to velvia), amazing scenes, absolutely brilliant! Will I ever be half as good as these guys!?

“This site is dedicated to the beauty this planet has to offer… Photography has the power to bring all those incredible images right into our home and has given us the drive to create this project… Numerous scientific research has proven this site to be a real feast for the eyes. You may experience the will to quit your day job and travel. We cannot be held responsible for such actions. Viewer discretion is advised.” - Timecatcher Team

Nikon finally announced their new consumer Digital SLR, the D70 today. The specs look amazing! Unlike the EOS 300D, this is not a crippled sibling of its pro-cam brothers. Several things are better than the D100, and comparable even to the D1. Well, all this is still only on paper - it needs to be seen how well the camera performs. But I would not worry too much about that - its a Nikon after all! And all this only for $999 (body only)! Only problem is the build quality - it is plastic (I can live with that).

The first review of the D70 is up at digitalreview.ca. There is also some info on dpreview (the full review would take a few weeks, i guess). Also the forums are buzzing with activity: here, and here.

The price of entry level digital SLRs has halved in the last year. The features have increased. The era of hobbyist Digital SLRs is finally beginning to dawn on us. Another couple of years, and film will be all but dead (for most hobbyists atleast).

In the early 1900s, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii conducted elaborate photographic surveys of the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. The thousands of pictures that he took of people, architecture, transportation, etc. are one of the best record of the Russian Empire before the Revolution. What really intrigued me about this is that all this work was done in color!

He developed a really ingenious technique of photography. Using three filters (red, green and blue), he took three pictures of a scene on ordinary ordinary black and white glass plate negatives. These pictures were then projected using the same filters to get a single color image. Very neat work!

The Library of Congress came to possess huge collection of these triple-negative plates and photographer Walter Frankhauser guided in cleaning and alignment of about 120 plates to get hi-res color pictures. Now it is possible to easily view these pictures the way they were meant to be seen - in full vibrant color! Make sure you check out the Library’s online exhibit, The Empire that was Russia. Do explore this site for a while - it is well worth the time!

The quality of this work is simply amazing, specially the color. Most digital cameras today come nowhere near the vivid color these images display. That brings us to, is Digital Photography correct today? This is one of my advisor’s favourite topics of discussion. I would not go into details here, but one thing that is obvious is that digital cameras should not try to mimic film cameras. Digital has far greater potential that film ever had, and a new way of thinking about Digital Photography is needed to make use of it.

Well, back to the topic, Frank Dellaert (at CMU, now at GaTech) made use of vision techniques for automatic alignment and colorization of the plates. Though his results are not as good as the 120 that were manually done, he has almost the entire slide collection colorized. Addison Godel has a decent gallery that he generated using Photoshop.

The picture on this page is �The Bukhara Emir�. Click on it for a bigger picture. Notice the vivid color in his dress.