Different views

After seeing a lot of interesting snaps by Håkan Dahlström (hey, those public Google profiles are really neat for a "general link" to someone!) on his Hipstamatic blog I bought the Hipstamatic app for the iPhone (and subsequently completed it with all the Hipstapacks you can buy afterwards - the app is 1.59€ and there's three or four Hipstapacks at 0.79€ each, it's really not a big investment).

Using this app is the only way to use the trash camera of my iPhone 3G (I suspect that mine is particularly bad because Håkan's and other's Hipstamatic photos are not as soft as mine, so maybe it's broken, I don't know - it was as crappy as that right from day #1.)

I'm using it with the "shake to randomize" setting enabled: when you shake the phone, the app will pick a random combination of it's lens, film and flash simulations. I do not check the appearance of every photo that I take (Hipstamatic is way too slow for that) - I simply take a couple of snaps and check them out at home. Here's a series like that from an evening walk at the Salzach river:

The app and it's success (just search for Hipstamatic on flickr or on Picasa Web Albums... pages and pages of photos!) and the fun that I have with it is an interesting experience: using a digital SLR camera and storing raw data, everything is about being in control. I think the fun of Hipstamatic is partly due to the fact that I don't have to worry about all of the parameters that are usually to be taken care of when making a photo, about giving up that control. I simply point it at something and take a photo. And very often, that "something" is an object that I would not make a photo of, otherwise.

And the other thing is of course that the impact of a photo is not just about the motif and the composition, but also about the entire appearance (I've written about that before). I began to get interested in that with the availability of film simulations en large for Lightroom from Life in Digital Film.

People wouldn't render their digital images into black & white, add artificial vignetting (after the lens makers tried hard to get rid of it for all the modern digital pro grade lenses), add color casts like that of aged film, etc. etc. if digital photography wasn't so plain boring to start with. In my opinion, most digital photos absolutely need post processing if they should be more than a neutral reproduction of reality. Maybe it depends on one's own view of photography: is it an art form for you? For me, it is. The days when I tried to present an accurate and neutral representation of reality are long gone. :-)

Fuji addressed this problem with the film simulations in their cameras (I only know about the ones in my Finepix S5pro, there may be others too). I like them, but while they are nice and produce very pleasing results, they are still rather neutral. I prefer to shoot raw and apply film simulations in Lightroom. Here's that golden pebble, this time with a Fuji Velvia 50 simulation, and it's simply amazing how much "punch" and feeling is there with one mouseclick.

Golden Pebble I. (FinePix S5Pro, 1/55s @ ISO 800; f/8, 53 mm (in 35mm) // click photo to enlarge

My point is: there is no way that the image could have come out of the camera like this. Even my alterations to my preferred film simulation (for the Fuji fans: F1c, with more punch thru more sharpness and harder gradiation) produce a JPEG that is rather boring - unfortunately, I threw it away right after importing because it was so boring, I didn't realize it could work as a bad example. ;-)

I wonder if more camera vendors will pick up the idea of film simulations (I don't mean the "landscape", "portrait", "vivid", "neutral" etc. profiles that are available in many cameras; they simple shift the color hues around a bit, have a little more or a little less contrast and saturation, but that's it). I mean - it's all just post processing! Hipstamatic does it with the normal image data from the iPhone, and I think that the specialized image processors in modern cameras can do a better (and faster) job with that - my D700 can shoot up to 8 frames per second, and that means it can also process up to 8 frames per second. I'd like to see that processing power utilized in a fancier way - the fun part with Hipstamatic is that it involves no extra time for processing.

Because sometimes, I'd like to pick up the camera and just "shoot along" and get some funny and unpredictable results (and no, I don't mean lack of skill here:-).

Lightroom 3 - bugs galore

Lightroom 3 bugs I found after using it for some 3-4 weeks (and I do not really consider myself a "heavy user":-)

• LR3 sometimes crashes immediately after start. I have no idea why and when and how it happens. Highly annoying.
• the filter state used to be remembered for each folder in the Library separately. Not anymore: the filter state can be locked, but if you don't lock it and move from folder to folder, LR3 forgets the filter state for the folders. That is quite a nuisance because I used to have the "month" folder only show the picks, and the "day" subfolders show picks + unflagged (I like to hide rejects immediately.)
• when you click the black X reject flag and move on to the next photo, the black flag will be lit for the next photo - even though the photo is not rejected, of course. That is an ages old bug that was eradicated in LR2.5 and is now back (makes me wonder what the code base for LR3 really is...)
• when you switched from Develop to Library with a 100% view, the Library view would take the refined view from the Develop module. Not any more - when you shrink to fit & expand to 100% again, the Library module will render the refined view again (even though nothing has been changed, since you're already in the Library module at that point.)
• The Develop module starts to render a 100% preview when I zoom in as I've configured LR to create 100% previews on import, and it spends a good time rendering those when I import. I have the feeling that preview handling needs a lot of improvement...
• Not really a bug, but a change of functionality that is annoying: the option to back up the catalog on startup was changed to back up the catalog on exit. While I consider neither of the two very good, the backup on exit is even more annoying: when I exit LR, I want to shut down my computer (and go to bed, usually:-) - the option to back up on startup allowed me to start LR, let the backup run, and check my emails in the meantime (if the new backup on exit would include a mode "backup, exit, shutdown the computer" I'd be all for it.)

It seems that the "Windows" rule applies: always wait for the first service pack before you upgrade your OS. In Adobe terms: don't use the ".0" version. :P

And a final note: performance. It sucks. My computer is not exactly brand new, but the performance of the develop module, especially 100% rendering, has become even worse than it used to be in LR1 and LR2. Library performance is better in LR3, but not the Develop module performance. I can't help but lament for the loss of Pixmantec's "Rawshooter" and it's unrivaled performance. It seems the only way to solve this problem is to throw some faster hardware on it... what a shame.