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18 June 2021 - Podcast #748 - (20:55)
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Just about everybody walks around with a camera in their pocket or purse. So do big SLR cameras with interchangeable lenses still serve any purpose? They do, of course, but the landscape has changed.
It's really not about the hardware. Some photographers can be offended by remarks such as "Your pictures are really great! What kind of camera do you use?" This doesn't offend me, but it does tell me that the person asking the question hasn't thought about it much. Asking an award winning chef about the pots and pans used, a plumber about the tools used, or a seamstress about the sewing machine all exhibit a lack of knowledge about how artists and craftspeople create their works. It's them, not their tools.
The proper camera, lens, and lighting gear for a given job are all important choices, but one clever photographer once said "the best camera in the world is the one in your hand." It doesn't matter what camera is in your bag or at home on a shelf. If your camera bag full of $35,000 worth of gear is at home and you have a smart phone in your hand, the camera in the smart phone is the best camera you have. Make the most of it.
I have owned 4x5-inch sheet-film cameras, 120 roll-film cameras, 35mm single-lens reflex cameras, digital SLRs, digital point-and-shoot cameras, and smart phones. There's a digital SLR at home with specs that far exceed those of the digital point-and-shoot camera that I often reach for because it's small and light. And it's far better than the camera that's built in to my Pixel phone, but I've used the camera in the phone more than any other camera in the past six months or so.
Before going any further, let's take a look at some images to see if you can tell the difference between photos captured on a Canon 80D digital SLR and those captured on a Pixel 4XL smart phone.
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1: The first photo to consider is from Main Street in Bellefontaine, Ohio. I was standing on the front steps of the First Presbyterian Church, looking southeast at Citizens Federal Savings and Loan and the Logan County Courthouse. What camera do you think took this image.
2: This photo was taken from the water tower at Scioto Audubon Metro Park, just south of downtown Columbus, looking north. Which camera did I take with me when I climbed the water tower?
3: No TechByter article that touches on photography is complete without at least one cat picture. This is Chloe Cat, who you hear at the end of each podcast. She fell asleep while supervising me. A Canon 80D digital SLR, a Sony RX100 Mark 6, and a Pixel XL smart phone were all within easy reach. Which did I select?
4: Grandson Judah was playing ball and grandson Roman was watching through the fence. Before you decide which camera I used for this photo, I should mention that it has been cropped quite a bit.
5: And finally, one more photo of Chloe. She was sitting on her cat tree in the office, about 10 feet from the desk where I was working. A Canon 80D digital SLR, a Sony RX100 Mark 6, and a Pixel XL smart phone were all nearby. Which did I pick up?
You'll find the answers near the end of this article.
Some photographers say there's never any reason to use raw mode, even though many cameras offer it now. Others say that raw mode is the the only mode to use. I've never been in either of those camps, although I have generally used raw mode most of the time. That's still the case if I'm using a true camera. Raw mode is supported on some smart phone cameras when used with specific applications such as Adobe's Lightroom Camera. Raw mode images consume a lot of space on a mobile phone, though, in addition to making the process slower and causing the phone to run much hotter. So when I'm using the phone, the choice is usually JPEG.
You may be surprised to find that even cropped JPEG images from a smart phone contain sufficient data for full-quality on-screen images as well as for photographic prints up to 8x10 inches. Larger sensors and raw mode will always provide more data that's essential for high-end use.
Similarly, too many photographers try to convince or shame amateur photographers into using nothing but manual mode.
Some photographers have an odd way of looking at technology. "Auto" may be is condemned for years before being accepted. During the 1970s, professional photographers wanted nothing to do with 35mm cameras. Through-the-lens (TTL) exposure metering had been invented in the 1960s, but many photographers resisted it until the 1980s. Polaroid developed auto-focus lenses in the 1970s. Minolta had the first successful auto-focus system for 35mm cameras; Canon and Nikon quickly followed, but many pros said they could focus better manually.
Today's sophisticated multi-zone metering system can calculate balanced settings for shutter speed, lens aperture, and sensor ISO sensitivity in a few milliseconds. Most of the time the program mode works well, but there are still memes that disparage those who use it.
The key with any programmed mode is knowing when the program settings are likely to be wrong. That's when it's time to switch to manual mode. I've found that program mode is correct for all but the most extreme conditions and raw mode images make it possible to make significant adjustments later.
Putting a camera in everyone's pocket or purse has been great for those who like to take casual photos and share them, but less good for professional photographers. There are few average photographers now. The photographers who could do routine head-and-shoulders shots, family group photos in which people were stacked up like cordwood, an unimaginative wedding photos are mostly gone. A small number of talented photographers who know how to promote themselves well are profitable. Semi-pros who have day jobs do much of the rest of the work. And families take their own photos.
Technology has had that effect on no small number of businesses: Typesetters and printers, video and audio production, and many other businesses that depended on specialized tools that can now be emulated on computers. But it's a great time for motivated amateurs.
Lightroom, Photoshop, Exposure, Luminar, and other digital editing tools do more than what photographers were able to do in the darkroom. For one thing, darkrooms had no undo button. For anything more than a trivial image, a test print was necessary. Because the test print couldn't be viewed accurately while wet, it had to be fully processed and dried.
Then the photographer marked the print for areas that needed to be lightened by dodging or darkened by burning. The next print might be right, but the process generally required more iterations, each taking 10 or 15 minutes. And when the final print was ready, creating another required the same process. It wasn't quick or easy, and color made the process even more difficult by adding the need for correct color balance.
Today's photographers can modify images and see the results instantly and the capabilities of software go far beyond what even the most talented darkroom artist could achieve.
If you've been creating digital images for more than a few years, revisiting some of the older image might be worth your time, particularly if you have old raw images — but even if all your images are in JPEG format. Applications such as Adobe Lightroom receive frequent updates that add new processing features and improve the basic handling of digital files.
Those who have old slides, negatives, or prints have a wide variety of options for digitizing them. The least satisfactory option involves scanning photographs, but that option is still far better than allowing the images to be lost. Digitized images can be widely shared with family members and stored online where they're safer from loss. Companies such as Scan Cafe can digitize many types of old media. Although images digitized as TIFF files offer more options for improving color balance and exposure, that's an expensive option. High-resolution JPEG files created with minimal compression are sufficient for most uses.
Image number one was taken with a Canon 80D digital SLR camera, which has what's called a "cropped" sensor — somewhat smaller than a full-frame sensor that is about the size of a 35mm film negative. Photos two and five were both taken with a Sony RX100 Mark 6 digital point-and shoot camera with a one-inch sensor. That sensor is substantially smaller than the one used in the Canon, meaning that digital noise is more likely to be a problem. Photos three and four were each taken with the camera in a Pixel 4XL smart phone. I can't locate the specs for this camera's sensor size, but it will be either 1/1.7, 1/1.8, or 1/2.5. All of those sizes are smaller than the finger nail on your little finger (unless you have really tiny fingers). The photo at the ball game is cropped.
I used raw mode for images one and two. The others were all captured in JPEG mode.
One thing that professional photographers knew was that the way to improve was to take more pictures. Digital photography makes it possible for amateurs to do this. After buying the camera, all photos are free. It costs no more to take 100 photos than it does to take just one. If you want to improve your techniques, take more pictures and then analyze them to see what worked and what didn't.
And enjoy living at a time when photography offers so much to so many.
A few weeks ago, we learned that the FBI managed to claw back about half of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to ransomware pirates in Russia. That's good news, but the problem hasn't been solved by any means and there are few hopeful signs. Caution is paramount.
Ransomware is often planted on a computer by convincing the user to open an email attachment or visit a website. The crooks have a lower chance of success if the computer's operating system, programs, protective applications, and user are all up-to-date and working well, but there's no guarantee. Wannabe pirates can buy essential attack tools on the dark web and many of the crooks are the products of countries with good technical education systems and few employment options for those who master the technology. Russia comes to mind.
Once malware is installed on a computer, it tries to branch out through the network and can infect other machines or extract data from them.
Not all the risky tools are on the dark web. There are legitimate applications that perform essential functions, but can also be used for illegal purposes. Developer Nirsoft offers many useful utilities and I've used a lot of them. ProduKey displays the ProductID and the CD-Key for Windows and for Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007. It can be used on the computer its running on or on a remote computer. It's helpful for people who have lost the product key and need to reinstall it. But it can also be deployed to pull product keys from other computers on a network, which makes it a valuable hack tool. Likewise scanners, applications that provide secure (SSH) connections to servers, and a host of other utilities can be used for good or bad purposes.
If you visit a malicious website that tries to install malware, you'll be the victim of what's called a drive-by hacking. These sites attempt to scan your computer for vulnerable services and ports. A firewall can be helpful, and Microsoft's built-in Windows firewall is adequate protects home computers, but beware of external devices that connect via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Far too many of these devices have only minimal security and can open a path to your computer and your network. Especially Internet of Things (IoT) devices should be suspect. They are often overlooked when performing security audits but they are vulnerable because security is usually an afterthought.
Devices on your network are trusted because they are local to your network. Smart phones need protective applications, too, because they're almost always linked to or synchronize with computers. Identify these devices and perform a security audits on them. Keep the firmware that runs the devices up to date and, if you no longer use an attached device, don't leave it on the network.
Somebody down the street or halfway around the world probably wants access to your computer. Be careful not to let them have it.
The official end of life for Microsoft's Internet Explorer is coming, but it's still a year in the future. All support will end for Internet Explorer on 15 June 2022, so now the browser is forgotten but not yet gone. The first version of Edge will be supported for a while, but Microsoft would really like you to start using the new Chromium-based Edge.
Internet Explorer was hated by website developers and Microsoft's initial effort to replace it with Edge didn't fare much better. Nearly all browsers are now based on Chromium. Not Firefox, though, and that is still my preferred browser. More about that next week. We are here today to bury Internet Explorer, not to praise it.
Microsoft announced the "retirement" of Internet Explorer 11 in mid May. All support for Microsoft 365 via Internet Explorer will end in mid August. Next June, it's officially gone. Presumably, it will be possible for anyone who wants to continue using IE to do so, but it's hard for me to think of any reason that someone would want to do that.
The new Edge browser is a massive improvement over the original Edge and a sea change from IE.
Take compatibility: Internet Explorer forced website developers to create convoluted code to fit IE's quirks. Many of those sites still exist, so Edge has an Internet Explorer mode that supports those sites. This really isn't necessary because any decent website developer will also have included code to work with Chromium-based browsers, Firefox, and Safari.
Edge also has far better security than earlier Microsoft browsers. It includes protection against both phishing attacks and malware on Windows 10 with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen. It also offers Password Monitor, which scans the dark web to identify if your personal credentials have been compromised.
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If you prefer Microsoft's browser or just want to try it out, now is the right time to upgrade to the new Edge. If you have a Windows 10 computer, it's probably already installed. For those who don't yet have it installed, Edge can be downloaded from Microsoft's website. And if you'd like to get a bit further ahead, try downloading the Beta, Dev, or Canary channel version.
Sean Lyndersay, writing on Microsoft's blog, says the conversion process will be more complex for business users. Many businesses developed their own applications that depended on the security nightmare known as ActiveX. Because many of these apps have not been replaced or rewritten, Edge's Internet Explorer mode includes support for ActiveX. Lyndersay explains: "You may have a surprisingly large set of legacy Internet Explorer-based websites and apps, built up over many years. In fact, we found that enterprises have 1,678 legacy apps on average." He says that Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge will be supported through at least 2029.
Microsoft has offered a variety of cloud-based computing options, but there are whispers that there will be more significant advances before Fall this year. It's apparently intended primarily for enterprise users and it's unclear what implications there may be for home and small-office users.
There were questions when Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and said that Windows 10 would offer lifetime updates, but the company said that updates forever meant updates forever. In other words, when you buy a computer that comes with a Windows license, that computer receives operating system updates for the life of the machine. Forever. No exceptions.
Mary Jo Foley, writing for ZD Net, says "As I reported last year, Cloud PC, codenamed 'Project Deschutes,' is an Azure-powered service that will enable customers to use their own devices as thin clients that can access a remote Windows desktop and use software like Microsoft Office. Microsoft plans to sell Cloud PC as a managed Microsoft 365 experience at a flat per-user price. This is an important difference to existing Windows Virtual Desktop pricing, which revolves around Azure consumption."
So it looks like this won't affect home users or anyone who wants to operate a computer on which Windows has been installed. But it also looks like we're re-inventing the past.
When I began working with computers, it was with dumb terminals that connected (sometimes over phone lines) to remote computers. The dumb terminals had no computing power of their own, so "thin clients" are a bit more robust. But still the concept of centralized computing isn't new. In the 1980s desktop PCs turned that model on its head. Are we about to flip-flop back?
Take a look at Mary Jo Foley's article if you'd like to read more.
Mining is dangerous work. Mines collapse. Coal mines can explode. Cryptocurrencies are mined, too, on computers. That can be a hazard to your computer and also to the planet. Cryptomining depends on the process of verifying transactions by solving extremely complex math problems. Doing this work earns cryptocurrency.
Because cryptomining take a lot of computer power, it consumes a significant amount of electricity. That makes it potentially hazardous for the planet. Cryptomining is also lucrative, but it needs more computing power than most people have, so criminals try to gain an advantage by using other people's computer. Maybe yours.
Cryptomining malware can be embedded in network servers and web applications to hijack your computer's processing power. A white paper by Neustar Security describes the evolving threat and describes how you can avoid the problem. I mentioned that cryptomining consumes a lot of resources. According to the BBC, cryptomining for Bitcoin alone consumes more electricity than Argentina uses.
The white paper describes how cryptomining malware can be installed on personal and corporate computers as well as how to protect yourself, your computer, and your network from misuse. If you'd like to read the full white paper, it can be downloaded from the Neustar Website. (You must provide a valid email address to download the file.)
I wrote that the Earth is a roundish planet that's been divided up into degrees of latitude and longitude — east to west there are 360 1-degree divisions, north to south there are 180 1-degree divisions. Every 1 degree east to west and north to south whole-number degree lines intersect. If you ignore the intersections that occur over water, you're left with about 11,500 intersections that a person might be able to drive or walk to.
The Degree Confluence Project had started gathering images of these sites. Ohio has 11 confluences and all have been photographed. Montana has 38 and only 5 had been photographed. Now pictures exist for all of them. North Korea has 18 and none had been photographed 20 years ago. Now three are listed as "incomplete" and the other 15 are still blank.
It was an odd project then and still is. If you'd like to see the photos, drop by The Degree Confluence Project.