Could it be? Did I manage to put out another podcast after more than 1 1/2 years? It sure looks like it! Enjoy!
Summary: This is a conversation I recently had with Jim Sugar, one of the Olympus Visionary photographers. The subject matter is photography, of course. Topic-wise, the conversation is fairly wide-ranging, but it proves to be interesting in many ways, so it’s worth a listen. My thanks go out to Olympus PR for making it possible.
Back on August 15, I wrote about the “new E-1”, the Pro DSLR from Olympus that would replace the existing E-1. I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the launch party for that new DSLR, officially called the E-3, on October 16. The party was held at the Museum of Natural History in NYC, and it started at 5:30 PM EST.
This post is rather long, so I thought I’d summarize it for your benefit:
I was impressed with the quality of the event. Olympus rented an entire wing at the Museum of Natural History, and set up stations where we could talk with specially-chosen pro photographers about the E-3 and try out beta units of the camera. (The firmware isn’t yet finalized, so actual review units weren’t available.) There were food and drink bars (the cheese was fantastic) and all sorts of other goodies were spread all around (like a timeline display of all of the representative Olympus digital cameras, starting with their first model, and ending with the E-3). The event went nicely according to plan, and there was even a drawing where a lucky winner got an E-3 Pro Package (camera, speedlite, lenses, etc.) plus an all-expenses paid trip to India with one of the Olympus pros. I didn’t win it, unfortunately.
The atmosphere wasn’t one of hard sell. I could chat at ease with photographers and relax while looking at slideshows of photos taken by the pros or snacking on food. Ligia and I enjoyed ourselves. The weather was gorgeous. It had been sunny all day, and as evening descended on the city, the sky stayed clear, and a cooler breeze made it feel like a proper autumn night.
The E-3 surprised me in several ways:
Here are some more photos of the E-3, from various angles. The E-3 was launched with a brand new lens, the 12-60mm f/2.8-4. The effective focal range of this lens is 24-120mm, because of the 2x crop factor of the Four-Thirds system sensors.
I didn’t get a chance to play too much with the controls on the camera. One thing to say here is that Olympus built in a lot of buttons to allow for one-touch access to the camera’s most-used functions. I did find it a bit awkward to change the mode and ISO settings. To change the mode, I had to press the Mode button on the camera’s top left side, then rotate the back dial. To change the ISO, I had to press the ISO button on the top right of the camera, then rotate the front dial (located underneath the ISO button). Both movements felt odd, and I wondered how this would work out in the field.
To be fair, I don’t know if that was the right or only way to change those settings, and I can’t really judge the placement and ergonomics behind the controls after only a few minutes of trying out the E-3. I did like the idea of having two dials, one for the thumb and one for the index finger. I look forward to trying out a review unit for my usual 30 days, and then deciding if the controls work well or not.
I took a few photos at high ISO (1600 and 3200) and was pleasantly surprised by the low noise visible on the camera’s LCD screen, even at f/4. Since I used my own CF card to take the photos, I really looked forward to examining those photos closer when I got home. Unfortunately, one of the Olympus representatives present at the event saw me do it and erased my card. His reasoning was that the camera’s firmware is not yet final, and he didn’t want me to get the wrong impression about the E-3’s capabilities. Sounds logical, and he apologized profusely, but I still couldn’t help feeling it was a pretty stinky thing to do to me, right after I’d talked with an Olympus engineer from Japan who had no problem whatsoever with the photos I’d taken, and who actually encouraged me to go home and have a look at them on my computer. I have to say I was pretty disappointed about that, but I didn’t let it ruin my evening.
Olympus launched three new lenses with the camera. Two were new (12-60mm f/2.8-4 SWD and 14-35mm f/2.0 SWD), and one was re-engineered (50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD). They also launched a re-engineered FL-50 speedlite. I realized once more the big advantage of the Four-Thirds system when I looked at their lens line-up, which was on display at the event. They have a 150mm f/2.0 lens, and a 300mm f/2.8 lens. You may not think that’s much until you realize their crop factor is 2x. That means that they’ve really got a 300mm f/2.0 lens and a 600mm f/2.8 lens. Let that sink in for a bit. That’s pretty spectacular. No one has lenses with that focal reach and at that large aperture on the market. To think that you can get f/2.8 at 600mm effective focal length is mind-boggling to me. Wow.
Overall, the E-3 is truly the new flagship camera from Olympus. It represents the culmination of their efforts in many areas: the Four-Thirds system, AF, durability, ruggedness, optics and image processing. Now that it has arrived, I’m sure many people, including myself, can’t wait to try it out and see what it can do.
I put together a short video (about 4 minutes) of the party. It ends with the lens line-up and a cross-section of the E-3 with the 12-60mm lens mounted on. It’s pretty cool, and it gives you a unique look at the camera from the inside out. You can watch it below or here.
I’ve also got more photos from the event below. They were not taken with the E-3 (for the reason given a few paragraphs above). They were taken with my Canon 5D.
There were some really, really cool ice sculptures on display at the event. There was even a bar made out of ice, with the Olympus logo embedded in it.
The guts of the E-3 were on display.
Gene Hirschel of Internet News was there. I met him at the previous Olympus PR event, which announced the E-510 DSLR.
John Isaac is one of the Olympus Pro photographers, and he’s currently specializing in wildlife. He worked at the UN for 30 years as an official photographer.
The man below is the sculptor of the many amazing crystal figures on display at the event. I have a photo of one of them below, and they’re also featured in the short video I made. I’m terrible with names and I didn’t catch his.
Guess who took this photo of us? It was Anne Day, and she used my 5D. I consider it a privilege, especially after I saw some of the other people whose photographs she’s taken. Have a look at her site and see what I mean.
Here’s Anne Day in person:
I took this as I rested on a table, watching slideshows of travel photography. The blue light of the LCD projected reflected in my glass of tonic water.
I caught Ligia thinking about something when I took this.
If you thought Ligia’s photo was out of focus, you’re going to get a real surprise out of the next one. The thing is, I LOVE out of focus photographs. There’s a certain sweet spot that varies with lighting, distance and focal length, but if you get it just right, the colors really pop, and the shapes become very interesting. These are people at the launch party. I’m probably going to share more of my out of focus photographs in the near future. I’ve been accumulating a lot of them within the past several months.
To demonstrate the E-3’s dust proofing, they buried two cameras in sand. They’re supposed to still work without any problems after this happens to them. I didn’t try them out, but it’s very likely that they worked just fine afterwards.
Gary Kralle (one of the other Olympus Pros), John Isaac and a friend were talking when I took this photo. Gary came up to me afterwards and we chatted a bit about cameras.
I love abstract shots that emphasize bokeh. Here are a few that I took at that night.
When we left, there were swag bags ready for us. Here’s what was inside: a travel document holder, a pen, a paperweight, a coaster, and lots of details on the E-3. All were emblazoned with the Olympus logo. Pretty nice!
Michael Bourne, thank you very much for the invite! I look forward to reviewing the E-3 properly when it becomes available.
More information:
Around noon today, I saw Scoble’s Twitter about Google’s purchase of Jaiku, and left two comments on his blog post. Basically, I said that Jaiku’s purchase made sense, but that Google probably considered Twitter and found Jaiku to be less expensive. I use both Twitter and Jaiku myself. I tried using Jaiku as my primary microblogging service, but came back to Twitter.
The thing about Jaiku is that it has more built-in features than Twitter, no questions about that. Its built-in feed integration service doesn’t even exist at Twitter, where we have to use the third-party Twitterfeed to get similar functionality. I wrote an in-depth comparison of Twitter and Jaiku back in July, and I invite you to have a look at it (see Part 1 and Part 2 of “The value of microblogging services”).
The kicker could be even more interesting though, and I don’t know if someone else has already touched on this. We all know about Facebook’s ridiculous $15 billion valuation, right? Well, Google’s purchase of Jaiku has just burst that absolutely ridiculous bubble. Jaiku offers functionality very similar to Facebook’s, but without all the annoying hype.
I bet you the price Google paid for Jaiku was very reasonable, much like the price they paid for FeedBurner. I for one am glad Google pays sane prices for their acquisitions, unlike Microsoft. The only time I think they splurged was with YouTube, but they paid for the users there. (They obviously didn’t pay for the content, since most of it was and still is pirated from TV and movies…)
I hope Facebook’s valuation drops down to some normal amount now, something like $500-750 million. By the way, I’m not on Facebook and I don’t intend to join it any time soon. I’m also not on MySpace.
I continued to work on replacing photos hosted with third party services. The list of modified posts is provided below. This has proven to be a huge effort. I had to locate the photos in my digital library — not all of which is keyworded yet, though I’ve got location information for all my photos — but I also chose to re-process, keyword and re-title the photos. You see, most of these photos were keyworded through bulk uploaders, for the purpose of displaying that data on third party photo sharing sites, not for my own library. Clearly that effort was wasted, but I didn’t know that back when I did it… Where applicable, I am also re-writing some of the text.
I want to make sure that the content I provide here at ComeAcross is truly top tier, as much as possible. What does that mean? Well, it means I spent my entire weekend, including Monday, working on the posts listed below, and on the posts listed in part one. I still have more posts to go. I don’t mind doing this — actually, I look forward to it — but I do hope that you, the reader, appreciate the effort that goes on behind the scenes. 🙂
Also see Photography, take two, part one.
Over this weekend and the last several days, I’ve gone through posts that contain photographs, and replaced all of the images with ones hosted directly at ComeAcross. In the past, I’ve used photos hosted with third party photo sharing services, and I realize now that’s a folly.
If a third party service goes down, which is very likely with beta services, my photos become unavailable. Even if that service is not in beta, a simple action like closing one’s account shuts down access to all of the photos uploaded there. It’s much more practical to host the photos together with my website. That way, I am fully responsible for making sure that all of my content is accessible. If something goes down, I can take care of it. If I need to change web hosting providers, I simply transfer all of my files over to another server.
It’s not as simple to transfer one’s content with photo sharing services, no matter what they may promise. Image and meta data portability is still not 100% there, and it doesn’t help when a photo sharing service advertises their API’s availability for more than a year, yet fails to put it out for public use. It also doesn’t help when said portability is rendered useless by the amount of compression used on the uploaded originals, or the deletion of meta data embedded in the originals…
You see, everyone is ready to promise the world to you when they want to sell you on something. Quite often, that “world” is nothing more than an empty little shell. I speak in general terms here, from the things I’ve learned through my various experiences — mostly recent ones…
At any rate, I’ve still got to modify a number of posts, but I thought I’d point out the ones I’ve already worked on. They’re quite a few, and I’m happy with the results so far. Here they are:
Also see Photography, take two, part two for more updated posts.
Raoul Pop 