My D80 came Monday afternoon, so here’s my first thoughts. It’s a lot like the N80 I owned a couple of years ago. The metering and the af are better. The ergonomics and the build are pretty similar. I like the reprogrammable AE/AF lock and Func buttons. I set my Func to spot metering and my AE/AF lock button to AF On; I like keeping my metering and focus seperate. It does seem kind of weird that the Func default allows you to display ISO but not set it.

Battery life is good. Thirtysix hours and a couple hundred photos later the battery meter only shows one bar down. My 7D ate batteries like a contestant just kicked off the Biggest Loser, so this is a nice change for me.

Image quality is impressive, although the default image parameters are a little agressive on the contrast and sharpening. I changed that in the image parameters pretty quick. Fine JPEGS look really good. High ISO noise doesn’t seem out of line, but I don’t plan on using anything above 800 that much. If it’s that dark the Hexar RF focusses faster than any AF I’ve ever used, and Neopan 1600 keeps the mood right for dark scenes. Auto WB seems close enough.

Picture Project is junk, so I’ll be looking for something to process raw files. Right now I’m shooting RAW + JPEG Fine, so I’m just working with the JPEGS. I’m working on a laptop, so I don’t have a lot of processing power available for decoding RAW files. Given that, I’ll probably mostly work from JPEGs unless something goes wrong.

Enough with the talk. Here’s some photos:

Colin’s reflections on (rebuttal of?) my original post on Photo Poets is thought provoking. For one thing, I might have to start looking at chromasia.com again. Although I thought chromasia was brilliant the first time I saw it, I haven’t followed it for at least 18 months. Based only previous experience I would have put it in in the category of decidedly bad photo poetry. The quote from chromasia’s David rhymes quite well with a lot of the disatisfaction I’ve lately been feeling with photoblogs, though, my own included.

Regarding Zeiss’ marketing acumen or lack there of, I’d say that Colin’s “striking, strongly styled, technically advanced, yet repetitive and shallow, photoblog[er]” is exactly the market I’d go for with a product like the Zeiss Ikon. When you’ve upgraded from the digi rebel to the 20d/30d to the 5d, and you still feel that something is missing, then you are ready for the Ikon! That of course suggests that a bad photo poet knows at least somewhere in the back of their mind something about how vacuous their content actualy is.

Is Zeiss smart enough to tap into this anxiety? Maybe. After all, they are also selling premium manual focus Nikon mount lenses for those on the D70, D200 anxiety-upgrade path. Now that I think about it, if I upgraded my brand new D80 to a D200, I could use the SLR version of the Zeiss 35 f2 that I bought a couple of months ago for my hexar ;-)

My expectations for backup solutions are shaped by spending five years doing IT work. Consequently, a lot the solutions out there for home use seem either inadequate or just plain clunky. I know a lot of photogs use disk arrays of one sort or another, either RAID solutions or the poor man’s solution of just a bunch of external drives. Some folks incorporate DVD backups and even off site storage, but this usually amounts to giving a stack of dvds to the guy across the street or a friend in another state. Although this protects you from a house fire or similar disaster, it’s kind of clumsy and slows access to your backed up data. And lets face it; digital has already turned photographers into lab technicians. Do you really want to become a system admin too? In the enterprise world, data storage and back up now often involves network attached storage - multiple big drive arrays often geographically dispersed and hooked up via high speed network - with a secondary backup of tapes off site. The combination of the two provides you with quick access to backups that are online but offsite as well as distant offsite storage on a completely seperate media. Redundancy and quick access. Network attached storage, or NAS for short, is what I’d like to see come to the home user particuarly internet attached storage. There’s lot of ways to hook all that RAID or even all those external drives up to the home network, which is all well and good for quick access, but it doesn’t protect you from a local disaster. That’s where the internetworked attached storage comes into play. There’s a lot of companies offering online storage, but the cost per gig isn’t reasonable for photographic uses. See this NYT article for providers and prices: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/technology/07basics.html. Apple for example charge $100 a year for a gig of storage. A much cheaper solution is usually available from website hosting companies. I pay godaddy.com $75 a year to host this site and a few others. That gets me 100 gb of disk space, which is way more than I need for hosting this site, and enough transfer to handle all the site requests and access to my backup files. 100 gb isn’t enough for you to backup all your raw files, but it is enough to archives full res low compression jpegs of the selects. That 100gb of storage is always available no matter where I go in the world. In the last week I’ve accessed it from my apartment in Korea, over a wireless network in the Osaka airport and from the pseudo-inlaws house in Iowa. And the hosting company takes care of migrating all that data to new storage media when the old stuff goes belly up. I don’t have to worry about lubricants drying up in a seldom used external drive or about improperly stored DVD’s having data faults. I also don’t need to worry about finding a computer with the right interface to access some obsolete storage media. Ever wondered how you are going to get at your old ATA drives when they stop building ATA controllers? SATA and USB will probably be gone in 10 years. But the network won’t. The only problem? Getting the data there. If you haven’t ever noticed, your dsl or cable connection caps your upload speed at a much lower rate than you get for download. That means uploading 10gb of image files can take days instead of hours. So don’t fall behind. Luckily download speeds are much better.

A couple of days back someone on photo.net posted a link to an interview with some Zeiss rep talking about the market for the Zeiss Ikon. It’s exactly the kind of lyrical marketing gobbledygook you usually hear about high end mechanical gear, rangefinders in particular. One stand was their assesment of their potential market. Apparently one of their primary market segments is the largely untapped “photo poet” segment. Photo poet? Is this some weird translation of a concept that sounds a lot less silly when said in French of German? Or is this a real thing? I’ve been jet lagged pretty bad for the last few days, so this pretty much slipped my mind until auspiciousdragon picked it up. A few days later this idea of photo poets stills seems pretty angsty, but I think I’ve got my mind around it now. I know exactly who these folks are. Heck, I think I might have been one. At first I was conjuring up visions of new wave HCB’s with Leicas (er Ikons), pale blue scarves and $300 bags full of TriX and a cell phone with their trust fund managers on speed dial. I couldn’t quite pin down the mean age though, and this seemed a litte unfair to HCB, although from all appearances the guy did have a slightly silly, scarfy affectation to him. No, Photo Poets are those people that run really emo photoblogs featuring lots of urban landscapes, lens flare and found objects. The look can be either holga or rebel xt, but the result remains the same. Confusion, boredom and a lot of angst. You know the type. They can be pretty interesting sometimes, but after a while you hit saturation, and then it becomes like reading one too many stream of consciousness novels in a row. On the Road was fine, and maybe even Dharma Bums, but then you went on to read Vanity of Dulouz, and they all started to seem really silly and if not undercrafted at least under structured. I’ll be the first to admit, I went through this phase, both literally, and I mean that literarily, and photographically. I read all the books, took plenty of moody photos of dumpsters, and I know the motivations by heart. The bad photo poet, and most are by definition bad, is enthusiastic about photography, usually fairly talented, but hasn’t really developed a vision yet. Their photoblogs might have a detectable style, but perspective and insight are lacking. You get a stream of consciousness, their consicousness rendered photographically. And after a while you realize that despite their talent, these folks lack the confidence in their work to craft it into a story. Without a story, the only thing left to hold your attention is the potential insight of their consciousness, which is a heavy burden for any artist to carry. Zeiss might be on to something by marketing to this group. A nice hefty, metal, pricey camera with a pedigree makes a pretty good prop for the confidence. I know, I’ve leaned on one at times myself. I own one of the lenses Zeiss is hocking for the Ikon, and it’s pretty darn good. I’m betting the camera isn’t too shabby either. If nothing else it’s got a distinctly funky, retro look going for it. Can it turn bad photo poetry into something good, don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

As many viewers already know - btw, there’s something like 150 of you out there - I’ve left my teaching job in Korea. Kate and I are back in the States at an undisclosed location in the Midwest. Secrecy is a hallmark of the English Teacher Relocation Program, dont’ want the Korean English Teacher Reclamation Squad busting down the door in the middle of the night.

I’ve tried DSLRs before, namely the Canon 10D and the KM 7D. Both were pretty decent light tight boxes, but, man, they were crummy cameras. You couldn’t argue with the image quality in most situations, the typical digital highlights issue aside. A camera’s a lot more than a light tight box though, or at least a good one should be. Squinty viewfinders, short battery life, long start up times, wonky AF systems, and generally bad human interface issues do not make for a good camera. Given that a lot of photography depends on issues not even vaguely related to technical quality, a camera with useability issues is like a ferrari with steering wheel covered in porcupine skin, quills included. I was pleased when the D200 was announced. I’ve always liked the controls on Nikon’s AF cameras. They’re almost as good as a manual camera. And the D200’s viewfinder seemed to address one of the other major issues; the issue of battery life and start up times seems to have been resolved in most of Canon’s and Nikon’s recent models. The price of the D200 was on the upper edge of my spending limit though, and it’s a little too big for day to day use. So when Nikon announced the D80, I thought, hmm, I might get one of those in a couple of months. Well, when I saw them in stock on B&H’s website yesterday, I ordered one immediately without really think about it. Blame the jet lag - I’m still recovering from the 24 hours in transit from Korea, not to mention the 14 hour time difference. My D80 will be here in a couple of days, along with a 30mm F1.4 sigma lens and 2gb card. If I end up liking it, maybe some of the hexar gear will end up for sale. If not, anybody interested in a 20% discount on a barely used D80?