Lightroom and Lightzone

I finally broke down and purchased Light Crafts LightZone photo editor. I've tried several previous demos but didn't buy for various reasons. In the past, I thought it was too expensive and too slow, and I had trouble really "getting" what LightZone is all about. Well, they had a sale this month (November 2007) that brought the price down. And I saw some video clips that demonstrate a couple of the key tools in LightZone and that helped me grasp the program's approach. It's still too slow, but I can live with that in return for its other benefits.

LightZone, oversimplified

What are those benefits? The main one is that LightZone is nothing but a photo editor, and it's a darned good one. As everybody knows, Photoshop is so powerful you can dispense with the camera altogether and just paint fairies and unicorns if you like. It was never intended to be just for editing images, and is still used for logo design and creative art work, as well as photo editing. That's why Adobe created Lightroom, which, unlike Photoshop, is designed specifically and exclusively to meet the needs of photographers. Even so, Adobe Lightroom remains a multi-faceted app that does a bit of everything, including photo editing, creating web sites, print managment. Lightroom's greatest strength is really photo processing and management, that is, with Adobe Lightroom, I can review, evaluate, tag, and process (edit) a lot of photos very efficiently. But Lightroom has its weakesses, especially as an editor, and that's where LightZone comes in. Well, for many users of Adobe Lightroom, that's where Photoshop comes in, but I hate Photoshop.

LightZone, like Photoshop, allows selective editing, meaning that I can select a region of a photo (say, the sky) and change the contrast in that region without affecting other parts of the photo. This is not possible in Lightroom, which has no selection tool.

But LightZone isn't just about selective editing. What has always fascinated me about LightZone is its key tool, something called the zone mapper. This bears a very rough resemblance to the tone curves in Adobe Lightroom. Here is the Lightroom tone curve:

And here is the LightZone zone mapper, for comparison:

I'm not even going to try to compare the two tools in detail. Suffice it to say that the the LightZone zone mapper tools is more flexible both at first glance and upon closer acquaintance. With the zone mapper you control sixteen different levels of luminance in your photo, with the Adobe Lightroom tone curve, you control only four. Now the tone curve in Lightroom, which is pretty similar to the tone curve in Photoshop, is a terrific tool. And you can adjust not only the four parts of the curve (highlights, lights, darks and shadows) but also, to some extent, the definition of these four parts, by moving the dividers. Still, you can target your adjustments more precisely and I think more easily with a single zone mapper tool than you can with the tone curve.

And there's more to it than that. In Adobe Lightroom, you get one tone curve and it affects the entire photo, willy-nilly. In LightZone on the other hand, you can have as many zone mapper tools as you like. And you can target their effects by using regions (masks). I've used the zone mapper, for example, to lighten shadows in subjects' eyes without lightening the rest of their faces, or to increase contrast in the background without affecting the foreground in a photo. The zone mapper stumped me briefly when I first tried LightZone, but if you watch their online tutorial, which takes just a few minutes, you'll grasp the zone mapper's use very quickly, and when you work with it, it is incredibly intuitive. As a user-interface device for editing photos, it's a stroke of genius. If I had to live with only one program, I very well might select Adobe Lightroom, because I need to manage my photos as well as edit them. But for editing, if I could have only one tool, I'd take the LightZone zone mapper.

Eat your cake and have it, too

Fortunately, I don't have to make these drastic choices. I am in fact presently using three programs to manage and post-process my photos: Adobe Lightroom, LightZone, and Google's Picasa. Picasa is used just to handle the JPEGs that I export from Lightroom or LightZone. Most of these get deleted from my hard disk after I upload them to the Web, so Picasas is really more of an uploader for me now than anything else. My main photo management program is Adobe Lightroom. I use it to review, select, and tag my photos, because these are things Lightroom does splendidly. If the photo is well exposed and needs little editing, I can quickly tweak the contrast and sharpen the image a bit in Lightroom. But when the dynamic range of the photo presents problems, and especially when selective editing is called for, I'm switching to LightZone to edit.

I'm happy to report that LightZone works well with Lightroom. It is possible to identify LightZone as the external editor for Lightroom. Adobe of course expects Photoshop to play this role, but you can specify any program you like. THat allows you to right-click a photo in Lightroom and select the "Edit in Whatever..." command. Unfortunately, there's a huge downside to working this way. When I issue this command in Adobe Lightroom, Lightroom does not simply open the raw image file (in my case, a DNG file) in LightZone, which is what I wish it did. Rather, LightRoom makes a copy of the raw file as a TIFF and hands the TIFF to LightZone. What's wrong with this? Well, these TIFFs are huge -- as much as ten times the size of the raw originals, which were themselves already rather large. So I'm using a different approach. I simply ask Lightroom to show me the file in Explorer (I'm working on a PC laptop), then I right-click that file and select Open in LightZone. This allows LightZone to work from the raw file directly and non-destructively. I don't get to use both Lightroom and LightZone to edit the file this way, but that's not a big drawback; there's nothing much that Lightroom can do that LightZone can't do as well or better.

Well, that's mostly true, but there is one exception. I've gotten rather fond of creating grayscale images in Lightroom not by clicking its Grayscale button but instead by desaturating all the colors. This gets rid of the colors without eliminating the color channels, in other words, Lightroom still knows that my daughter's jeans are blue -- even though they don't appear blue in the photo any more. This in turn makes it possible for me to lighten the blues and darken the yellows, iin other words, it gives me more control over a black and white conversion. I hesitate to say flat-out that LightZone cannot do something similar. It has a lot of options that I do not yet understand. But at the moment, I'm doing my grayscale conversions in Lightroom, and editing color photos in LightZone.

Tentative conclusions

What's the bottom line? Well, I haven't reached the bottom line, as I am hardly a Lightroom master, and as for LightZone, I'm still a novice. So I'm a good ways from making up my mind for good. But with that caveat, I'd say there are actually two bottom lines to consider.

The first question is, does one program produce better images than the others? The answer to this question is mostly no, but sometimes yes.

Mostly no, because for a typical well-exposed raw original that doesn't need a ton of post-processing -- in other words, the kinds of photos I always strive to take -- LightZone and Lightroom are both perfectly capable of getting the job done.

But sometimes yes, because LightZone can do lots of things that Lightroom simply can't. That's an objective fact. Now, whether you need those things is a question you have to answer for yourself. For the better part of a year, I was persuaded that I could get by with Adobe Lightroom alone. I think now that I was wrong, but I wasn't crazy wrong. Lightroom really can do most of the stuff most photographers want to do most of the time. But LightZone isn't really competing with Lightroom at all as a general purpose photo management and all-purpose processing app. LightZone instead competes with Photoshop, as a more powerful tool for editing individual images.

Here's a photo I edited in LightZone:

It's nothing special, but that's why I picked it. I also edited it in Adobe Lightroom. You can compare the results here.

The second bottom-line question is, which program do I personally find easier to use, or more efficient, or more fun? This is subjective, but not entirely subjective. Management tasks are Lightroom's forte and LightZone's browser isn't in Lightroom's league if you need to tear through 800 image files, rate them, and modify metadata. Conversely, if you want to make some quick, precise changes to the dynamic range and contrast of a file, LightZone's zone mapper is a better tool than anything available in Adobe Lightroom. I am pretty sure these two claims can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of most users.

But there are a lot of other factors that affect how an individual user feels about a program. It is my understanding that LightZone is written in Java. This accounts for some of the program's sluggishness. (Helps to give it plenty of ram.) It also accounts for some of the idiosyncratic look of the program's dialogs and certain other UI widgets. I think Lightroom is beautiful, LightZone, not so much. But I try not to make a fetish of prettiness. It might be fair to say that I like Adobe Lightroom's user interface better, but I prefer LightZone's tools. In addition to the crazy cool zone mapper, I like the way I can pile LightZone's other tools on top of one another. There's a lot of control there.

And what about Photoshop? As I said, I have decided I was wrong to think I could get by with Adobe Lightroom only. But is LightZone really a satisfactory surrogate for Photoshop? I dare say most Photoshop users (most of whom know nothing about LightZone) will say no, absolutely not. And it's true that Photoshop does many things that LightZone does not do. If I want to paste a pair of open eyes from one photo into a generally better photo in which so-and-so's eyes happen to be closed, well, that's not what LightZone does. LightZone is not going to be used by the front-page artists for National Enquirer, who routinely need to put chimpanzee heads on the torsos of infants. In this respect, LightZone is closer to Adobe Lightroom than to Photoshop, because LightZone, while more powerful than Lightroom, is still designed exclusively to process and adjust existing photos, not to create entirely new images. I can live with that limitation very happily.

My brother-in-law Tom and I were talking about depth of field yesterday. We disagreed - but it turns out we were both right. Tom said that the generally greater depth of field in compact cameras is a function of the smaller sensor size. I said that I thought that it wasn't the sensor size, but the smaller focal lengths of the lenses that matters.

Well, I've browsed around on the web this evening a bit and I have a clearer understanding now. Turns out these two things are pretty much heads and tails of the same coin. Wikipedia's article on depth of field puts it fairly succinctly:

To maintain the same field of view, the lens focal lengths must be in proportion to the format sizes. Assuming, for purposes of comparison, that the 4×5 format is four times the size of 35 mm format, if a 4×5 camera used a 300 mm lens, a 35 mm camera would need a 75 mm lens for the same field of view. For the same f-number, the image made with the 35 mm camera would have four times the DOF of the image made with the 4×5 camera.

If I get a few minutes, I'll borrow my daughter's compact Nikon and take a couple of test photos with it and my Pentax K10D. But the principle now seems fairly straightforward. The smaller the sensor, the smaller the focal length required to achieve the same field of view. This accounts for the so-called "crop factor" as a result of which the birds I photograph with my Pentax K10D and, say, a 300mm lens seem to be "bigger" (take up more of the photo's area) than they would if I use the same lens with a normal 35mm film camera, which has a larger image-capture area. But as we all know or at least think we know (see next paragraph), the shorter the focal length, the greater the depth of field, other things being equal. That's why portrait photographers use 100mm lenses and stand so far from their subjects: they're trying to reduce the depth of field. So as the sensor gets smaller, you need to use a shorter focal length to maintain the same field of view and thus the same depth of field. One of the reasons that the cheap compact cameras today so seldom take a "bad" (out of focus) photo is that their small sensors and short focal lengths give them extraordinary depth of field. I read an interesting note here observing that Ansel Adams and landscape photographers of his generation using large format cameras had to stop all the way down to f/64 (!) in order to achieve satisfactory depth of field - and even so, you can get greater depth of field today using a compact camera wide open. Looking it from the other direction, I would point out that it was the desire to be able to limit depth of field for creative purposes that was one of the main reasons why I switched to a DSLR.

Now I said above that the sensor-size explanation and the focal-length explanation are saying the same thing. Sorry, I lied. It turns out that Tom's explanation - that depth of field has to do with sensor size rather than focal length - is technically more correct. You don't have to read far into this article by Ben Long at creativepro.com to find out why. He provides examples of the same object photographed at two focal lengths. There is a city skyline in the background. In the picture taken at the shorter focal length, the city skyline appears to be sharper. In the picture taken with the longer focal length, there is a smaller field of view so you see less of the city skyline, and what you do see seems to be both closer and blurrier. But appearances are deceiving! If you ignore the foreground subject and examine one of the details in the background at the same size instead, you will be amazed - well, I was amazed - to discover that they are in fact equally fuzzy. The skyscraper in the background of the first photo (the one taken with the short focal length) appears to be in better focus only because it's relatively smaller as displayed on screen. So changing the focal length isn't really changing the depth of field. It's changing the field of view, and that in turn gives the appearance of changing the depth of field. Differences in depth of field really do derive from the size of the sensor.

On the other hand, as Ben Long quickly admits, as a practical matter, the focal-length explanation is more useful to working photographers, who after all, aren't going to change sensors in their cameras the way they change apertures or focal lengths.

Fireworks!

We watched fireworks last night. That the fireworks display actually happened is remarkable in itself, given the unending rain we've had here in Dallas for weeks and weeks. Our neighborhood's Independence Day parade - an ancient tradition - was canceled due to weather. But late in the evening, the rain let up and the skies cleared for a while, so decided to go. On the way out the door, I grabbed my Pentax K10D, as usual, and my tripod, which is not so usual, but which I knew would be necessary for this shoot.

We drove to the area near the Lakewood Country Club, which is not too far from where we live on the east side of Dallas. We found a good place to sit right across the street from the country club's driving range. Telephone lines are just barely visible in some shots but otherwise I had a clear view. I placed the K10D on the tripod, and in the Fn menus configured the camera's shooting mode so I could trigger the shutter with the infrared remote. The camera settings were simple: M mode, ISO 100, aperture f/11, shutter 2 seconds (sometimes just 1.5). I used my standard outdoors lens, a Tamron AF (IF) 18-250 f/3.5-6.3 LD Di. Because I couldn't be sure where in the sky the fireworks would explode I experimented a bit with the focal length. In the end 30mm or thereabouts seemed to work pretty well. I set the camera to manual focus and used the distance markings on the lens barrel to set it manually to just a bit less than infinity. I did have the camera's LCD display the photos for 1 second. After the first few fireworks went off, the instant review helped me quickly identify and resolve a couple problems: that the camera wasn't aimed quite right, focus wasn't right, initial shutter setting of 1 second was too slow, field of vision wasn't wide enough. After getting everything set up and resolving these initial problems, the biggest challenge was making a good guess about when to trigger the shutter. I'd watch the rocket go up and try to click just a split second before the burst.

Post-processing was remarkably easy. I cropped a few photos. Most of the photos got a slight adjustment on the clarity slider in Lightroom 1.1 and in the tone curves, I narrowed the dark tones to just 15% of the range and then made the extreme blacks very dark black, to provide a nice sharp background sky. But I did very little else.



Is it possible for a photo to be really good if it contains nothing but the burst of the rocket? I doubt it. Abstract colored patterns are interesting, and I suppose it's true that every burst is unique. But to be really compelling, I think a photo of fireworks would need to have something else in it, perhaps a compelling landmark like the Statue of Liberty (not handy here in Dallas) or at least the silhouetted head of a child. I had no landmarks available, not even a tree, and I'd have had to push my daughter into the street to get her into the shoots, and my wife would have objected. Still, it was a pleasant exercise. And since I was using the remote to trigger the photos, I got to enjoy the show personally as well and without the usual tunnel vision that I experience, say, when shooting sports.

You can view the entire gallery here.

Look sharp, be sharp

I frequently find myself wishing my photos were sharper. Now, I don't mean to make too much of sharpness. I know that focus and sharpness are not quite the same thing. I know that composition and exposure (and an interesting subject) are more important for the kind of photography I do than sharpness. Still, I've been wondering lately if I could get my shots to be sharper.

The answer seems to be yes, I can.

Not sure whether you can tell, given the way that Picasa Web Albums displays the photos, but this portrait of one of Catherine's team mates seems to be pretty sharp. Zoom in on it. Unfortunately, in Picasa Web Albums, you can't really zoom to 100% as far as I can tell. At 100% in Lightroom or Picasa, it looks as sharp as it does when its shrunk to show the whole picture in a small window. Looks pretty good even zoomed to 200%. At 100% every freckle on her face seems perfectly distinct. Noteworthy points: This photo was taken outdoors in pretty decent light, ISO 100. I used my Pentax FA 50mm (prime) f/1.4 lens, but at f/2.8, not the max aperture, in other words. The max aperture in many lenses is said to have a tendency to be soft. I was using a tripod, too, but I think that is likely to have had the least impact on the photo. With a shutter speed of 1/250 sec, I think this picture would have looked just the same if I'd shot it handheld - except that perhaps I would not have cut off the bottoms of her toes.


This photo of flowers on our porch also seems acceptably sharp. Noteworthy points: It was taken with my Tamron 28-75 lens at 38mm, in other words, not at the extreme end of the zoom, which the experts say usually tends to be soft. The shot was taken at ISO 100, which is as low as my Pentax K10D goes. Finally, the aperture here is f/11, allowing for reasonably decent depth of focus, even though the camera was only about two feet away from the flowers. I think these three facts (focal length in the "sweet spot" of the lens, the low ISO, and the moderately small aperture) are the key factors here in the photo's sharpness. Those three, and the K10D's built-in shake reduction. I was after all shooting at 1/30 second, handheld.

Now the preceding two photos were taken at ISO 100, which I'm beginning to think has something to do with sharpness, and not just with noise reduction. But this group shot was taken at ISO 400, and it too is reasonably sharp. But this one is interesting. At f/2.2, it has pretty shallow depth of field, and you can see that the focus is NOT so sharp in the face of the girl who is on the top of the pile. She is a little further BACK from the face of the coach that I was focusing on. Here again, I was using the Pentax FA 50mm f/1.4 lens. This is the lens I have been using lately for volleyball action, because of the big aperture. I did think to position the group here so that we were getting the benefit of the little bit of daylight coming in through the clerestory high up near the top of the north wall of the gym.

I should add that all of these photos were sharpened a little in Lightroom, but that seems to be absolutely necessary for all photos when you shoot Raw, as there is no in-camera sharpening whatever. But I didn't sharpen them very much, and in my opinion, Lightroom's sharpening never converts a soft-focus photo into one that is tack sharp.

Now, the trick is to take photos this sharp more often. Be nice to be able to shoot outdoors in good light all the time.

Prime vs zoom

In a recent thread at pentaxforums.com, there was a bit of back and forth discussion about the merits of prime (fixed-focal length) lenses versus zoom lenses. The old view - from decades ago - was that primes were superior and zooms were not so good. That's simply not true any more.

Here are just a couple comparison shots taken by my K10D using (a) the Pentax FA 50mm f/1.4, and (b) the Tamron 28-75 XR Di f/2.8.

20070425 lens tests

I actually took a couple dozen shots, indoors, outdoors, at different focal lengths and with different apertures. I used same aperture in comparative shots. I shot Raw+JPEG; the shots I've put up for review are the unprocessed JPEGs. Both seem to qualify as "prosumer" lenses. While the Tamron is more expensive, the Pentax 50 f/1.4 has an excellent reputation. So I think the comparison is fair enough.

I am aware that my tests were not "scientific". I didn't use a tripod. I didn't use completely controlled lighting. I was not photographing a test chart. This wasn't just because doing more careful tests involves more work - it's also because I do not believe that one or two shots prove very much. What matters most isn't how the camera performs in some carefully controlled test, but how it performs over and over and over again in something like "real life conditions." After reviewing the couple dozen photos that I took, I think these four shots are fairly representative. I've taken a hundreds of photos with both of these lenses, and the tests I did today are more or less in line with what I've been seeing in real shoots.

My conclusion?

At the pixel-peeping level - and of course at 50mm - the Tamron zoom lens is not as sharp as the Pentax prime. In the picture that has my checkbook sitting on some magazines, the grain in the checkbook is slightly sharper in the Pentax shot - viewed at 100% - than in the Tamron. In some photos of flowers taken outdoors, I THINK that the Tamron may be slightly oversaturating the colors, as compared to the Pentax lens. But I don't usually view my photos with a magnifying glass. The differences from one lens to another are so subtle that I had to study the photos carefully to find them.

And I'm not even sure that it would be right to say that the Pentax is simply superior at 50mm. I prefer the Tamron result in some photos - in these examples, I think the Tamron picture of the Pellegrino bottle is slightly "better." I also suspect that the lenses may have slightly different sensitivities. It occurs to me now that perhaps a better test would have involved bracketing the exposure on all the shots and picking the best result for each lens; but I don't have time now to go back and do that. The picture of the checkbook and magazines was taken at f/2.8. That's pretty clearly a good aperture for the Pentax 50mm f/1.4 - and equally clearly not the best aperture for the Tamron - so this might be a case of the Tamron being asked to play tennis with its weaker hand.

And that gets to the nub of the issue: how DO you compare lenses, really, I mean, when the results are worth comparing? I acknowledge that sometimes lens A clearly isn't as good as lens B. But I don't think the superiority of the Pentax prime here is overwhelmingly obvious. And if the prime does prove superior when the image is viewed under a microscope - the zoom lens can come back and say, "Okay, now lets shoot at 35mm, or 65mm!" In other words, the real issue is, is the superiority of the prime in its limited area of competence great enough to outweigh the fact that the zoom lens is so much more versatile? I wouldn't say that zoom lens's versatility should matter if the results of the zoom were lousy. But they aren't.

There are no doubt times when the advantages of the prime are worth the loss of the zoom. The Pentax 50mm can't shoot at 35mm or 65mm; but the Tamron 28-75 can't shoot at f/1.7. If I was shooting portraits, I'd use the Pentax lens, no second thoughts. But I don't shoot portraits very often.

David and Goliath: Lightzone vs Lightroom

Two things happen in ten days and the combination of the two is making me very nervous. First, Adobe Lightroom version 1 will finally be released. Second, my 30-day trial version of Lightcrafts' Lightzone will expire. I should perhaps add that only a week after that, the beta of Lightroom that I've been using for a couple of months also expires. So I can make it to the end of the month. But by then, I have to make a decision. Commit to Lightroom, or commit to Lightzone?

The safe choice is unquestionably Adobe Lightroom - or to call it by its official name, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Lightroom does almost everything and does almost everything pretty well. Adobe's developers have thought about what photographers need from the moment they click the shutter to the moment their images appear in print or on the Web and Lightroom provides photographers with a tool for every task. Lightroom's Library module is ideal for organizing, tagging, reviewing, and selecting hundreds of images at a time. In Lightroom's Develop module, you can edit your images using a rich set of features similar to Photoshops in many respects, but focused exclusively on the task of processing photos. Keyboard shortcuts abound. It's possible to make the user interface practically disappear so you can really focus on your photograph. It doesn't seem to require a huge amount of memory. It's nice to look at. And it's fast. I might add that there's a lot of buzz about Lightroom. The day it appears it will become the de facto standard for all professional photographers who are not already irretrievably committed to something else like Apple Aperture, Phase One's Capture One, or Adobe's own Photoshop-centric Creative Suite. There are more than half a dozen books waiting to be released on Lightroom this minute. A magazine. Multiple online training sites - even a Lightroom News site.

The thing that's making the choice of Lightroom difficult for me personally is a program called Lightzone, from a small Silicon Valley company named Lightcrafts. Lightzone looks like it has many fewer features than Lightroom and I guess, if you just counted total "features," it does. Lightzone lacks Adobe Lightroom's printing and web-gallery modes, for starters; but I don't care about those modes - I do my print and web work in Picasa - so it's not a problem for me that Lightzone lacks them. A bigger problem for me is that Lightzone's file browser is no match for Adobe Lightroom's Library module. But the big problem with Lightzone is performance. It's a memory hog. On the Lightzone forums, someone recommended giving Lightzone about two thirds of the memory you've got on your computer. I have a core duo Dell laptop (Latitude D820) with 2 GB of RAM. I have assigned Lightzone well over 1 GB of memory in its app preferences dialog. And I try to exit out of as many other programs as I can before using Lightzone. I generally do not open really large files - just Pentax Raw (PEF) files that are about 10 MB in size to start with. In spite of these steps, Lightzone is still a bit slow - certainly slower than either Adobe Lightroom or Picasa (the other program that I use for browsing and organing my post-conversion JPEG files). Every time I double-click a thumbnail to open it for editing, I have to wait five or six seconds.

Given those technical issues, why bother talking about Lightzone? Because the one thing that it does well, it does breathtakingly well, and because that one thing happens to be the most important thing of all: editing a photo. In this department, working on a single image, Lightzone can do everything that Adobe Lightroom can do and more. Unlike Adobe Lightroom, Lightzone has area selection tools; so you can select, say, just a person's face and boost the exposure there without affecting the rest of the image. And Lightzone's edits are applied in a fashion that amounts to layers. They're not Photoshop layers, to be sure, but they have a similar effect.

But neither selection tools nor layers would cause me to look more than twice at Lightzone were it not for Lightzone's most original feature, it's stroke of genius and reason for being: a feature called the zone mapper. The zone mapper is superficially so simple and at the same time so profoundly effective that it's rather difficult to describe. Lightzone divides your image's tones into sixteen grayscale levels, with white at one end (well, at the top) and black at the other, and fourteen shades of gray in between. These levels are tied to "zones" in your photo, and as you mouse over a zone, you can see areas of the image light up in a grayscale copy of your image called the zone finder. By moving the lines that separate the zones in the zone mapper, you can change the exposure and the contrast of the photo all at once. It's equally important to understand that you don't have to fiddle with all sixteen zones - not at all. In most photos, I can quickly figure out which zones correspond to the areas of a photo that I want to adjust, and I can make effective corrections very quickly. Here is a photo that I edited first in Adobe Lightroom. Note that the bird's head is still a bit dark. Now here is the same photo, edited in Lightzone. (The two photos are right next to one another in the gallery, so you can use the left and right arrows to jump from one to another if you like.) When I edited the photo in Lightzone, I was able to find the precise zone that affected the right side of the bird's head and boost the exposure slightly just there. Note also that in the Lightzone version, the cedar waxwing's characteristic yellow is a little clearer. Now let me very quickly concede that I am not an expert or even an intermediate level user of Adobe Lightroom and I do not mean to suggest that this photo could not have been corrected by a Lightroom expert just as well as I corrected it in Lightzone. I'm not knocking Lightroom! The point is that I am not an expert in Lightzone, either. In fact, I spent three or four times longer tweaking this image in Adobe Lightroom than I did in Lightzone. If you like playing with luminance, saturation, contrast, curves, vibrance, fill light, highlights, hues, exposure, tones, tints, temps, degrees, percentages, angles, hemoglobin counts and amortized rates of return, well, Lightzone appears to have just about as many of those dials and sliders as Adobe Lightroom does. But in Lightzone, they're a bit hidden away, and you might find that you very seldom need them.

I will warn you that, if you're used to Photoshop's tools or tools like them, you may be baffled by the zone mapper at first. That's your fault, not the zone mapper's. It took me about two weeks to "get it." Now I can't get it out of my head.

The advantages of Adobe's product are compelling and the disadvantages of Lightzone are undeniable. When I'm working in Lightzone, especially in the browser, I miss a number of Lightroom's nifty touches. But when I'm trying to edit a photo in Adobe Lightroom, I find myself not just missing but yearning for Lightzone's zone mapper and somewhat less often wishing that I could select an area and adjust the exposure there and there only.

So what am I going to do at the end of February? I don't know. Two weeks ago, I would have said without hesitation that I was buying Adobe Lightroom. But Lightzone has been growing on me. I'm afraid that the price of the products doesn't make my decision any easier. Adobe Lightroom and Lightcrafts' Lightzone cost about the same. Lightroom's official MSRP is going to be $300, but between the end of February 2007 and sometime in April, you'll be able to buy it for an introductory price of $200. The full version of Lightzone, on the other hand, costs $250 right now on Lightcrafts' web site. There's a "basic" version of Lightzone that has all the editing tools but no browser that costs $100 less than the full version (i.e. $150 rather than $250). Perhaps I'll go with that. Lightzone may be overpriced, in some absolute sense. It's clearly not as polished a product as Adobe Lightroom. Bibble Pro is another alternative to Lightroom that's very powerful, well respected, and widely used. Its full version retails for a fraction of the cost of Lightzone. My wild guess is that Lightcrafts might do better if they lowered their price a bit - say, to $150 for the full version of Lightzone. I'd be really grateful if they'd do it before the end of February.

More musings on the differences between digital SLRs and compact cameras

Sigh, my Canon PowerShot S3 IS is now off to Akron, Ohio, along with the two lovely converter lenses. Yep, sold it on eBay. I'm feeling very comfortable with the new Pentax K100D digital SLR, but I feel like I'm finally coming to a balanced appreciation of what the different cameras can do. Here are a few more random observations.

1. I mentioned in my last post that that digital SLR's glass viewfinder is much nicer to use than the LCD in a non-digital SLR camera. I failed to mention that the Pentax K100D also has a much higher resolution back-panel LCD than the Canon S3 has. According to the excellent site DPReview.com, the Canon S3 has a 2-inch, 115,000 pixel LCD, while the Pentax K100D has a 2.5-inch, 210,000 pixel LCD. What this means is that I am able to make much better judgments about how my pictures are coming out from looking at the back of the Pentax than I could with the Canon. Or, to put it very practically, I am better able to tell when I'm doing something badly wrong. ADVANTAGE: digital SLR.

2. The digital SLR has a mechanical shutter that makes a noise when it operates. You can't do anything about that noise. With the compact camera, whether it makes a noise or not is up to you; so is the kind of noise it makes. I was usually fond of it making a shutter noise, which is a good thing, because it's what I'm used to now. But I could have configured it to beep or do some other things, or be silent. I don't see the inevitability of the noise as a plus. I would like, say, when shooting in a church, to be able to be silent. ADVANTAGE: compact camera.

3. I bought the K100D rather than the cheaper K110D because the K100D has shake reduction, Pentax's version of optical image stabilization. I'm glad I did. But I am quite sure that shake reduction does not help as much on the Pentax when I'm using a telephoto lens as it did on the Canon S3. At first, I thought perhaps Canon's IS was simply superior technically to Pentax's SR. Now I see a more obvious explanation. It's a simple matter of focal lengths. The compact camera's lenses have much smaller focal lengths, even though they may achieve greater magnification. Now, the shorter the focal length, the less camera shake matters. If you hold a twelve-inch ruler in your hand and twitch it slightly at your end, it will move only slightly at the other end. Do the same thing with a yard stick - or a ten-foot pole - and the movement at the other end will be much more pronounced. So image stabilization in the Canon may not be any better than shake reduction in the Pentax, but the Canon has less of a problem to deal with in the first place, so it's not surprising that it seems to do a better job. My brother-in-law Tom told me a while back that he doubted image stabilization would be adequate for shooting with a 300mm lens; he suspected a tripod is de rigeur at that focal length. I responded that image stabilization in my S3 was working fine, even with the 12x lens fully zoomed, which is supposed to produce an effective focal length of something like 450mm. I wasn't wrong, but neither was Tom. I suspect that, to take clear shots with a 300mm or higher lens attached to a digital SLR, you'd want to shoot with a fast shutter, and that in turn means either shooting only in bright sunlight or spending beaucoup bucks for a fast lens (that is, one with a bigger aperture). ADVANTAGE: compact camera.

I could go on, but I won't.

It seems to me now that the digital SLR is a good camera for hobbyists who really are into how you take good pictures, where the compact superzoom is for people who are satisfied that the camera takes good pictures. I am enjoying working with my Pentax very much and I'm not displeased with the pictures I've taken so far. But then I like the challenge for its own sake.

Superzoom vs DSLR, Revisited

A month ago, I tried to gather up my thoughts on the question of whether I should stick with the Canon S3 IS superzoom compact digital camera or consider purchasing one of the recently released, relatively low-price digital SLRS. In that earlier post I took a position that I suppose could fairly be called defensive. I had already purchased the S3. Now I was trying to persuade myself that I had made the right decision and at the same time talk myself out of the itch to get a digital SLR. The observations that I made in that earlier article were generally correct. In particular, I think I did a fair job describing both the advantages of the compact superzoom (cost, versatility, convenience) and the disadvantages of the digital SLR (cost, size, need for multiple lenses). But I think now that I failed then to appreciate the advantages or perhaps I should say the attractions of the digital SLR as well as I do now. What's changed? Well, in the last month, I've actually spent some time with two different digital SLR cameras: my brother-in-law's Canon Rebel XT, and my own brand new Pentax K100D. That's right, I changed my mind, or at least I've come to understand better than I did before the advantages of the digital SLR. I'm writing now not so much to correct what I said earlier, as to argue the other side of the case a little more fairly.

For me, the question now is, Should I keep the S3? What do I see now about the DSLR that I did not see earlier, or, if I saw it, did not regard as compelling?

1. The DSLR feels better

For starters, shooting with the Pentax feels better. I think there are four reasons for this.

First, the DSLR is bigger, and in some important respects, bigger is definitely better. The Pentax is easier to hold properly. I noticed with the Canon S3 that, until I put the converter tube on the base and left it there, it was almost impossible to hold it properly, with my left hand under the lens, partly because the lens kept moving in and out and partly because the whole thing was too small. Even with the converter tube attached, it was too small. The Pentax, on the other hand, fits my left and right hands nicely.

Second, the controls on the Pentax are more conveniently distributed on the body of the camera. The Canon S3 has a lot of very similar buttons plopped all over the case. When your eyes are on the subject rather than the camera, it's a bit tricky to tell the ISO button from the Fn button, or the Menu button from the Set button. It's very easy to hit Set or Menu by accident with your right hand, because there's really no place for the ball of the thumb or the thumb itself to sit on the camera comfortably. Nearly everything is done on the S3 with the right hand - zooming, touching control buttons, pressing the shutter - and this makes gripping the camera firmly a little more difficult. On the Pentax, there's empty space on the back of the camera on the right where my right thumb can lie safely. Zooming is done by the left hand. The other buttons are shared by the hands - Menu is a left-hand button, Fn is a right-hand button.

Third, the sharpness of the DSLR's optical viewfinder is simply much more satisfying than composing it on an LCD. I want to be honest here. This is not such a huge practical difference. After all, even the Pentax's digital viewfinder is a pretty small screen, so to a good extent, you are doing on the Pentax the same thing you do on the Canon S3: composing the shot, and counting on the various meters to get the focus and exposure exactly right. But gosh, seeing what you're photographing so clearly, so realistically, is great. It's tactile. I've gotten used to it very quickly on the Pentax, so much so that the LCD on the S3 strikes me not just as crude, but clumsy. The clarity of the optical viewfinder seems to go hand-in-hand with the fact that you must put your eye right up to the viewfinder and look at the subject straight on. Taking photos with the DSLR is straight shooting.

Fourth, the DSLR's shutter is more immediately responsive. I had gotten used to the "shutter lag" on the Canon S3, in fact, I was pretty good at anticipating facial expressions or poses so that I could depress the shutter a fraction of a second ahead of the shot I wanted to capture. Nonetheless, shooting on the Pentax, where shutter lag is comparatively absent, is like looking through the sharp optical viewfinder - a fact that makes working with the Pentax seem more natural, more direct.

Note that none of the advantages above means that the Pentax necessarily takes better photos. In fact, shooting under "normal" conditions - good lighting and reasonable proximity to a cooperative subject - I suspect that a competent S3 user will be able to take photos that were every bit as good as those taken by a low-end digital SLR. I have seen a fair amount of DSLR chauvinism on certain internet forums; it's ignorant and wrong.

2. The DSLR has some technical advantages

But the next two features do affect the quality of at least some photos.

The bigger CCD in the Pentax doesn't mean that the pictures it takes are sharper or that their color is better. But it does mean that the camera can do more with less light. Now, I have not yet had a chance to give this a real test, by shooting some more photos of my daughter's basketball team playing in the school gym, where the light is lousy and I can't use a flash. Nevertheless, my tests at home in low-light conditions give me confidence that I will be able to get less noisy, equally well-focused action shots.

Perhaps the clearest advantage of the DSLR is in the greater control it gives you over depth of field. The shorter lenses and smaller CCDs of the compact cameras inevitably provide lots of depth of field. The problem on a compact camera is reducing depth of field for artistic reasons. There's just not a lot you can do. To get control over the depth of field in a shot with the Canon S3, you may have to step twenty feet away from your subject and use the zoom lens, and, well, this is not always possible and a hassle even when it is. For a pretty clear demonstration of the superiority of the Pentax here, compare this photo taken by the Pentax K100D with this photo taken by the Canon S3. The goal of the shot was to get the middle ground in focus and have the foreground and background out of focus. It was easy to do on the Pentax; impossible to do on the S3.

In short, shooting with the DSLR feels better, to me, at least. And the DSLR can be pushed harder than the compact camera. The technical limitations of the compact superzoom are more obvious and there's not much you can do about them, besides wait until Canon releases the S4 next year with a handful of minor improvements.

The bottom line

If your budget maxxes out at around $500, then by all means, buy the Canon S3. It's a heckuva camera for the money, more camera than most amateurs need or know what to do with. But what if you have more than that to spend? Then the matter is not so easily decided.

One of the funniest movies ever made?

I've been looking forward to the release of the Borat movie for months. I've seen several clips of the Borat character (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) on YouTube and I thought them hilarious. When I read the reviews of the movie, my eagerness was heightened. John Podhoretz, for example, writing for the Weekly Standard, declared it "one of the four or five funniest films ever made." I like Podhoretz as a reviewer and know him as a guy who doesn't say things like that without giving them at least a moment's thought. Now that I've seen the film, I have my own evaluation.

It is a funny movie. Well, many parts of it are funny and a few are truly hilarious. The funniest parts are those in which Borat himself is the butt of the joke. I loved the scene at the B&B run by a kindly Jewish couple, and the scene with the unflappable driving instructor, and the scene with the guy trying to teach Borat how to tell a not joke, as in "Borat is one of the four or five funniest films ever made - not!"

There are other elements of the movie that are simply good traditional comic writing. Borat keeps asking the salesman where the "pussy magnet" inside the Hummer is, but in the end, he can't afford a Hummer, having a more limited budget ("between $600 and $650"), so he ends up with a very used ice cream truck, complete with a serving window on the side and the ability to play "Pop goes the Weasel" through loudspeakers. Now, in addition to a means of transportation, he also needs protection from "the Jew" while in America. He can't buy a gun because he's not a citizen, so he ends up with a bear. Let's just say that these two acquisitions - ice cream truck and bear - set up a very funny moment. But as I said, it's conventional comic writing, and all in all, not nearly as funny as the scene involving a cougar in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

In many other scenes, I was more uncomfortable than amused. Podhoretz says that the movie "skewers" everybody. Not so. I've already mentioned several folks in the movie who are not skewered, and there are many more. Borat is given the chance to sing our national anthem at a rodeo, but he sings the melody of the Star Spangled Banner to the words of the (imaginary) anthem of Kazakhstan, which go something like this:

Kazakhstan is the greatest
nation on the earth.
All other nations
are governed by girls.

He goes on to talk about the superiority of Kazakhstan in the area of potassium production. The audience did not find his rendition of their national anthem amusing, and I felt the same way about the scene.

Another uncomfortable moment comes at a dinner party, where a southern family is trying its best to be hospitable to this strange guy from Kazakhstan. At one point, Borat excuses himself, and after a short while, he returns to the table after a visit to the W.C. with, um, a stool sample. Okay, it's not a sample, it's the whole stool, in a plastic bag. We are, I guess, supposed to think that there are no toilets in Kazakhstan and that he's made it to the southern U.S. without learning how to use one. This is funny, I suppose, because poo-poo is funny, and because Borat's behavior outrageous, and because it's supposed to be funny to see stuffed shirts put on the spot. But the hostess isn't a stuffed shirt, in fact, she reacts with extraordinary composure. Earlier one of the characters at the table says he is "retired." Borat thinks the man said he is a "retard." I was in early high school the last time I heard a retard joke told with the earnest expectation someone would find it funny. Ironically, the hostess treats Borat's outrage calmly and patiently, as if he were mentally handicapped. Where's the humor in that? Being outrageous is easy, once you resolve that you are going to do it and you accept the minimal risks. People with no talent at all do outrageous things when they think great money is involved, as on the television show where people would eat cockroaches without ketchup. I felt a little sorry for the dinner guests, as I did for a handful of people who tried to deal with Borat in good faith. They were victims of practical joking identical in nature to that of the the show Candid Camera from fifty years ago, except that the setups in Candid Camera were less gross.

Finally, there are scenes in which real people (well, I'm given to believe that they are real people) are caught saying things that they probably would not have said on camera had they known the movie was going to become a sensation in America. I have no pity for the frat boys, but I didn't get the joke, either. I think it's hard to tell which is their controlling vice: racism or stupidity. Without exception, the movie picks on easy, safe and hackneyed targets, most of them from the south, which is the route he takes as he drives from New York to Los Angeles.

Which leads me to the most serious criticism I have to level against the film, which is not that it's unoriginal, but that it's dishonest and misleading. The scene at the rodeo, for example, begins with some old dope going along with a few anti-Semitic remarks that Cohen himself makes first. The scene moves directly from the old dope to Borat's singing of the national anthem, with shots of the unamused crowd. My point isn't to defend the old dope, it's to criticize Cohen for the satirical argument implied in the editing of this scene. Introducing the rodeo the way he does, Cohen clearly implies two things: first, that the old dope is one of that crowd, and therefore they must all be racist, Jew-hating rednecks. Never mind that the president of a real country (Iran) has called publicly for Israel to be wiped off the map. The greatest threat to Jews today came from the rodeo-loving, redneck south? Give me a break.

John Podhoretz, whose review I mentioned at the start of this post, compares the wrestling scene in Borat favorably with the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers' classic, A Night at the Opera:

The genius of Borat is that it works on you in all sorts of different ways. In one sense, it's a raunchy comedy in the tradition of Animal House whose highlight is a crazed and enraged wrestling match between Borat and his obese producer. They wrestle in a hotel room, then in the hallway, then in the elevator, then through the lobby and into a ballroom where an actual, real-world convention is having its annual dinner. The wrestling is wild, violent, cartoonish--and both men are naked. The sequence is a classic piece of slapstick--as indelible in its way as the Marx Brothers' stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera 70 years ago.

If I may be permitted to quibble, they don't wrestle in the elevator. They get on the elevator and then stand there, naked and awkward among the other passengers, until they get to the ground floor. That moment of restraint is perhaps the funniest part of this scene. But forget that. What I want to get to is the unfortunate comparison of this scene with the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. As it happens, quite by accident, I had watched A Night at the Opera with my family just a few hours before going to the theater to see Borat. That might have something to do with my lukewarm estimate of the new movie. The stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers movie can be compared to the wrestling scene only by someone who's momentarily lost his mind. The stateroom scene starts out funny and builds steadily, joke after joke, not letting you catch your breath before making you laugh again, until Margaret Dumont opens the door of Groucho's room and what seem like a couple dozen people spill out like a tidal wave of clowns. The naked wrestling scene in Borat starts out not funny but gross (with Borat's producer getting caught masturbating while looking at a picture of Borat's ideal woman, Pamela Anderson), and goes downhill from there. I reckon I've watched Night at the Opera - and thus the stateroom scene - twenty or thirty times. Even so, I laughed myself silly when I saw it again last night. I can't imagine finding the wrestling scene in Borat funny twice.

The funny thing is the way people who are normally pretty sober lost their minds about this movie. I am tempted to try to list all the films I can think of that were funnier than Borat, but it would be a long list. I'll mention only one movie that is both recent and, in a way, in the same vein as Borat. Team America: World Police was funnier, grosser, and more creative than Borat, and more daring in its satire. Borat picks on evangelicals, rednecks, and luckless folks in a small eastern village who have no means of recourse, and it doesn't attack so much as ambush them. Team America involves a full-front assault on Hollywood, Broadway and the cultural elites in Europe.

I was excited about Borat because of the skits I saw excerpted on YouTube. Borat could have been one of the four or five funniest characters in the history of Saturday Night Live. But this is not the first skit character in history whose transition to the big screen produces a movie that is less than the sum of its parts.

What to buy: compact superzoom or dslr?

Superzoom or DSLR?

Should I buy a digital single-lens reflex (dslr) camera or a high-end point and shoot camera? I ask the question for myself, but you may be asking the same question. I speak as a moderately serious hobbyist, which is to say, I am emphatically not a professional photographer. I want to add further that this essay has a heavy undertow of special pleading. I have already made my decision and answered in favor of the non-dslr (specifically, the Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3 IS). Although I have years of desultory experience with film slr cameras in the past, I do not now own, nor have I ever owned, a digital slr. But I have done my research and I share here what I have learned and think to be true.

What's a "moderately serious hobbyist"?

This essay is addressed to moderately serious hobbyists, folks who not only enjoy taking photos, but moreover, want to take better ones and are willing to spend not just money, but time and effort learning. Now, if you are a really serious hobbyist, then go away; you will have your own opinions on these matters and will only want to argue with me. For those of us who are only moderately serious, photography is a keen interest rather than a passion. The moderately serious hobbyist may aspire to have a photograph bought and/or published (I've had both honors), but moderately serious hobbyists do not think of quitting their day jobs and becoming professional photographers. And more to the central point of this essay, moderately serious hobbyists, for the most part, are on tighter budgets than very serious hobbyists. There are exceptions, of course. Some people just have lots of money to spend on their toys.

Now some people are not hobbyists at all; some people are not "serious" in the way I'm using the term. If you are a professional photographer, you will almost certainly need the advantages of the dslr and you will find a way to pay for them. You may also want a compact camera for carrying around, but for you, this would be a second camera, so you don't face the either-or choice this article discusses, and thus I am not talking to you. On the other hand, if you are mainly a birthday-party snapshot taker, well, there is nothing at all wrong with that, and in fact, you are really in luck, because you have better cameras available to you cheaply than have ever been available before, and also because you certainly do not need a dslr. You don't need to read further, either.

"Point and shoot"?

Before I get to dslrs, let me say a word about the alternatives. These are often called "point and shoot" and cameras. I dislike the term, not just because the disparagement implied in the term is no longer justified, but even more because the literal meaning of the words "point and shoot" is simply inappropriate. For one thing, you can pick up a dslr and point and shoot and I suspect many amateurs do. But my feeling is that, if you just want to point and shoot, you shouldn't spend $1000 or even $400. Buy a mainstream consumer-level compact camera for about $150. In my view, if you're planning to spend three times that much for a high-end non-dslr camera like the Canon PowerShot S3 IS or the Panasonic Lumix FZ7, you should be aware that these cameras come with nearly as many technical options and controls as more expensive dslr cameras, and if you buy one of these excellent non-dslr cameras, you owe it to yourself and to the camera to learn how to make use of those options. The fact is, the non-dslr cameras are not appreciably easier to use than dslr cameras are. In fact, the opposite may be the case. So I want to frame the contrast as between dslr cameras and cameras that I will simply call high-end non-dslrs. Rob Sheppard, in his Digital Zoom Camera Handbook (2005), calls the non-dslrs "compact cameras." I can go with that term, too.

I want to add one more small point about the cameras I'm putting up against the dslr. I'm thinking mainly of a class of advanced compacts usually called superzooms or megazooms. These include the Canon PowerShot S3 IS and the Panasonic Lumix LZ7. The superzoom is distinguished by the presence of a built-in moderately high-power optical zoom lens, usually 10x or 12x. The 12x zoom on a PowerShot S3 is said to be the equivalent of a 432mm zoom lens for a conventional slr - in other words, a pretty powerful lens for non-professional photographers to have at their disposal. And if that's not enough for you, there are converter lenses available that will take that 12x image and multiply it by a factor of 1.5, or 1.7 (a lens from Sony), or 2.2 (the Raynox DC2020). Canon's 1.5x converter lens for the S3 gives the user the 35mm equivalent of a focal length of 648mm and the results are excellent. But it's not just about the telephoto range; the cameras I'm talking about also have truly outstanding macro and super-macro capabilities. So the superzoom offers, in one compact camera, the versatility of a full dslr kit - that is, a dslr with several different lenses. I'm focusing on the superzooms because the dilemma is heightened when the user (like me) wants maximum versatility. The Canon PowerShot G7 is a 10 megapixel advanced compact camera that has a great number of features in common with the PowerShot S3 IS - but the G7 costs more than the S3, and the G7 does not have a 12x zoom. If you don't care about the zoom, you might very well ask yourself whether you should get a G7 or a dslr, but in my opinion, if you're choosing between a G7 and a dslr, the advantages are starting to break in favor of the dslr, which, without additional lenses, is closer in price and capabilities to the G7 than it is to the superzoom S3. In short, if I didn't care about the zoom lens so much, there's a good chance I'd have bought a dslr already.

What is so special about dslr cameras?

Which brings us inevitably to the questions, what is a dslr? and what makes it special or different? A dslr is a digital camera that is designed on the same optical principles as the old-fashioned film slr or "single lens reflex" camera. The key advantage of the original slr was that you actually looked through the lens when you composed your shot; in other cameras of the time, you generally looked through some sort of rangefinder or a second lens. Looking at the subject through the camera's lens eliminated the problem of parallax, that is, the slight difference in perspective between what the lens down here sees and what your eye sees through a viewfinder up here, about three inches away from the lens. Parallax isn't a huge problem if you're photographing sunsets or seascapes, but it can be when you're shooting candids up close. The film slr also made focusing and eventually metering more precise and more intuitive or natural. The digital slr works the same way: what you see in the viewfinder is precisely what you will capture when you click the shutter. The fact that, with the original slrs, you used the camera while facing your subject, made them especially good choices for quick shooting, news photography and candids. The slr was, in fact, the original point and shoot camera.

But forget about all that. We don't care about the original slr, we're talking about the digital slr. And the truth is, the slr qualities of the dslr are not the qualities that matter the most. These days, the dslr differs from the high-end point and shoot cameras in a number of simple, practical ways that have little to do with the way that the optics work - at least down here in the under-$1000 market. What distinguishes dslrs in this market from the high-end compact cameras? Lots of things, but three matter to the moderately serious hobbyist the most: lenses, size and price.

Lenses

The single most compelling distinction of dslr cameras today is that dslrs allow you to purchase and use a very wide range of lenses. They allow this because dslrs have lens mounts that have been standardized for decades. Many dslr cameras (like the Pentax K110D) will actually take lenses that were made decades ago, in other words, lenses you might already own, if you used to take pictures with a conventional slr camera. If you already have a collection of lenses that can be used with a modern dslr, well, you have a strong incentive to buy a dslr now. Even if you do not, if you spend $600 today on a Nikon D50 with a built-in lens, and you then spend a couple hundred dollars more for an additional lens or two, you may throw away the body of the D50 in a year or two, but the lenses you have now will work with the dslr you upgrade to in a couple of years, in other words, next time you buy, you'll be looking a buying just the camera body without the lens. When you are only spending a couple hundred dollars for a lens, this may not be such a big deal. But a major reason to get into dslr photography is so that you can start investing in very good (expensive) lenses with the idea that you're amortizing the cost of the lens over the next ten or twenty years. If you buy a cheap dslr now and a couple of pretty good (cheap) lenses, you may find yourself wanting in a year or two to upgrade everything, not just the camera body.

In the world of non-dslr cameras, on the other hand, there is always a built-in lens. (For that reason, these are sometimes called fixed-lens cameras.) And while many of the superzoom cameras (certainly the Canon S3) accept add-ons in the form of converter lenses, there are no widely-shared standard lens mounts, which means that your options are severely limited and your lens purchase cannot be regarded as an investment. I am happy that the Canon converter lenses I bought for my S2 work just as well with my S3, but as far as I know, the Canon converter lenses for the S2 and S3 do not work with any non-Canon cameras, and I have no guarantee that they will even work with the S4, if such a camera is released, or any other advanced compact camera I might buy in the future. And when in the future I do move up to a dslr, well, none of my current equipment moves with me. As a practical matter, this means I'm less willing to spend a lot on add-on lenses, because I am not sure I will be able to use them for more than a couple of years. And my reluctance to spend much for lenses translates into a reluctance on the part of manufacturers to develop a wide range of high quality, expensive add-on lenses for non-dslr cameras. Better lenses mean sharper, clearer pictures - other things being equal.

Nevertheless, I hasten to add that it does not appear to be true that lenses for dslr cameras are simply better, say, because they are bigger. Advanced compact cameras now have very good lenses indeed, due to advances in lens-making technology, and these lenses are capable of taking very good pictures. My brother-in-law, who is an outstanding amateur landscape photographer, put it nicely: "I think people say that dslr's have better lenses, but I expect they mean that better lenses are available for a dslr, but at an exorbitant price."

Size (and its implications)

Which brings us to size. Go to a store where they sell both types of cameras (say, Circuit City or Best Buy) and you can identify the dslrs from 50 feet away, because they are much bigger. Size matters, although it's not an unqualified plus.

The dslr can't be much smaller than it is and accommodate all those conventional lenses. And if you start with the lenses as a given, well, the next thing you know, you've got to make the CCD or sensor in the dslr bigger than the one in the advanced compact, in order for the conventional lenses to produce images at the appropriate size. Here's how Rob Sheppard puts it, just after he has noted that advanced compact cameras (non-dslrs) have very small sensors:

Lenses only need to produce an image on that small area, so they don't need to be as physically large [as the lenses used in traditional 35mm cameras]. The smaller, the sensor, the smaller the lens needs to be. As lenses decrease in size, focusing mounts and other parts of the lens structure diminish physically as well.

So when we're asking the chicken vs egg question about dslrs - which came first, the larger sensor or the lenses - the answer is clearly, the lenses. You cannot stick a lens designed for a conventional 35mm lens on a compact digital camera. Dslrs are physically bigger because they have to be to accommodate those lenses, and once the lenses are in there, you've got to have the bigger CCD. Now, there may be an inherent advantage to a bigger CCD, especially as the number of megapixels gets larger. Now, there are already 10 megapixel cameras (like the Canon G7) available for consumers; but most experts believe this is overkill. Remember, the Nikon D50 entry-level dslr is only a 6 megapixel camera. Unless you're printing posters of your photographs, 6 megapixels is a perfectly reasonable resolution for hobbyists.

Is the dslr's bigger camera body better than small body of the consumer point and shoot or the medium-sized body of the superzoom? Depends. For many ordinary folks, the small size of the lower-priced point and shoot cameras is a plus, because they want to put the camera in their pocket or their purse. For other users, the larger size of the dslr or even the advanced compact cameras like the superzoom is an advantage, as it provides a better grip, support for add-on lenses, and more controls on the back. Because the Nikon D50 is so much bigger than the Canon S3, the Nikon can leave some space empty on the back of the camera for your thumb and the ball of your hand to rest. The back of the Canon S3, on the other hand, is crowded with buttons, and there's a chance that you'll hit one of them by accident. But these differences, too, seem somewhat accidental. The Canon S3's form factor (like every other aspect of the camera) is a nice compromise: it's big enough to have a nice feel in hand, but small enough to carry with you almost everywhere - just not in your pocket! If you could get a lens for the compact camera that was just as powerful as a lens for a dslr but half the size, why would you not? The question is hypothetical, of course. I cannot get the equivalent of a 3000mm lens for my Canon S3. But I ask the question in order to make the point that size, in itself, is not necessarily an advantage. The original slr swept the field in part because it was smaller than the large-format cameras that were common before it. The large-format cameras had their advantages and continue to this day to be used for certain kinds of photography. But the relatively compact slr was a nice compromise between size and image quality. The same can now be said of the advanced compact cameras.

There's one final point to make about size, or rather, about the relationship of size to lenses and the kinds of pictures you can take. The smaller lenses found in advanced compact cameras have fewer aperture choices and shorter focal lengths compared to dslr lenses taking the same shot. The PowerShot S3 IS has a widest f-stop of f/2.8 and a smallest f-stop of f/8. Because of these technical limitations, the compact cameras have, by default, much greater depth of field than digital slrs. This can be a good thing. In snapshots, we often want maximum depth of field, so that everybody in the picture is in focus. It's easier with a dslr to go wrong here than with a compact camera, one of the things that slr photographers work hard at is getting greater depth of field. On the compact camera, however, as you get better at taking photos, you will have the opposite problem, that is, you'll find yourself working hard to restrict depth of field. Perhaps you want to focus on Grandmother as she blows out the candles on her cake, and you want everybody standing behind her to be a bit blurry. That's much harder to achieve with a compact camera. One way to increase the depth of field is to step away from the subject and increase the focal length, by using the camera's built-in zoom. But moving away from the subject and shooting with the zoom may be hard to do if you are shooting in your dining room.

Buying a dslr

At the present time, the single biggest difference between dslr cameras and the advanced compacts as consumer products is price. This is a bit like saying that the main difference between a Jaguar and a Honda is price. The Honda will get you where you are going, too, but there has to be a reason people keep buying Jaguars. I hasten to add that, when I speak of the price of the digital slr, I do not mean the base price of the body plus a basic 18-55mm lens; I mean rather the price you would have to pay to come close to matching the overall capabilities of the superzoom, both in terms of image quality and in terms of the various kinds of photos you can take.

The current rock-bottom price to break into the dslr game with a new camera seems to be about $600 - although if you catch a bargain online, you can pay less than that. For this amount, you will get you a Nikon D50 (if you find a bargain) or a Pentax K110D - both excellent cameras, to judge by the reviews. But for that price, you get one lens, and it's a very basic, standard purpose mid-range lens (probably 18-55mm), good for taking standard shots, but not a lens you'll be able to use to shoot wildlife or across-the-street candids. And for this price, you may not get a flash, optical image stabilization, macro capability. And you certainly won't get video, as this is simply not a capability of dslr cameras.

Some of these defects are either less important than they seem or easily remedied. If the dslr you buy has only a hot-shoe for a flash attachment, well, those attachments aren't expensive and you can shoot without until you can afford one; but it does add to the overall cost. I don't honestly care much about video, either, and would be happy to sacrifice that capability in order to get a better camera for still photography.

The lack of optical image stabilization (OIS) in the lowest-priced dslrs is more problematic. It would not keep me from buying either the Nikon or the Pentax, but I think I'd miss it. You can get OIS in the Pentax model K100D for $100 more than the K110D, but you won't need it initially. Image stabilization isn't a big deal if you're shooting in good light and close up. You need it mainly when the light is bad or, especially, when you're using a high-power zoom, which these cameras don't come with. The excellent OIS in the Canon PowerShot S3 IS makes it possible for me to use the 12x zoom while holding the camera in my hands, provided I can manage to stand still and shoot with a fast shutter. Nikon's lack of built-in OIS means that, if I wanted it, I'd have to pay considerably more for lenses that have this feature. For this reason, if I were going to buy a dslr today, I think I'd probably buy the Pentax K100D. That in-camera IS will make it possible for me to buy high-quality used lenses at reasonable prices and have the benefit of image stabilization with all of them. On the other hand, the more I use my camera, the more clearly I see that a good tripod is a photographer's most valuable accessory.

So, $600 gets you equipment with which you can step outside on a nice day and take very nice photos. I should add that, with this camera, you will be able to take a range of shots - not just snapshots from 8 ft away, but vacation pictures including beautiful landscapes. You can even expect to take decent action shots, say, your daughter playing volleyball. Here the dslr's advantage in ISO, aperture and shutter speed will to some extent offset the fact that you don't have a zoom lens. However, the quality of those shots will not be noticeably (perhaps not even technically) superior to the same shots taken by a competent photographer using an advanced compact camera.

Buying a superzoom

By contrast, standard street price today (11/13/06) for a Canon PowerShot S3 IS is about $400, and you can get it for less if you search for a bargain online. And consider what you get. The basic S3, right out of the box, gives you many very good features, including

- a good 12x zoom
- image stabilization (useful when you use that zoom)
- outstanding macro and super-macro capabilities
- excellent burst mode (continuous shooting)
- high-quality stereo video at 30fps (or even 60fps, for a smaller image)
- panorama mode, useful at the Grand Canyon and elsewhere
- a flexible LCD that can be pulled out and twisted

In addition to the above excellences, the S3 can take lovely snapshots, has a decent built-in flash, and, of course, has many many modes, including shutter priority, aperture priority, full manual, and a variety of creative modes. In a word, the camera is versatile. And all of this versatility costs $200 less than the basic, much less versatile dslr. To make things even better, you could take the $200 you saved and buy the Canon converter lenses, so that you have the ability to take better wide-angle shots (buildings from across the street), or to zoom in tight from farther away when shooting candids or nature shots. But let's forget about the add-ons available and focus just on what you get out of the box. The 12x zoom lens built into the S3 is said to be the functional equivalent of a 432mm zoom lens on an slr. This comes as part of what you get for $400. By contrast, if I bought the Nikon D50 for $600, the next thing I'd really want would be this 80-400mm zoom lens from Tokina. It's selling today for $640 - just the lens - at Amazon.com, and remember, Amazon's prices are usually among the lowest you can find. My impression is that it's possible to get a 400mm lens for an slr for less money than that, but even if you find one for about $200, you're paying, oh, $800 to get a dslr kit that is still less versatile than the PowerShot S3 that costs half as much - and it does not take better-quality pictures.

And versatility isn't everything. The convenience of the high-end non-dslr can't be matched in a dslr, not at any price. The convenience of the Canon S3 comes from the fact that all these features are built into one relatively compact body. Grab the thing and go. To take good pictures, you will most definitely need to know how to use your camera. But that's true of the dslr as well as the compact superzoom. The more you carry you camera around, the more you shoot, and the more you shoot, the better you get (assuming you're trying hard and paying attention). You won't need to carry around a separate lens bag and change lenses if you see a nice shot that you cannot get close to.

You can't future-proof your purchase

You can't future-proof your purchase, at least not on a tight budget. I suppose that, if you were to spend $10,000 on dslr equipment and lenses, you would be getting stuff you really could use for the next decade or two, stuff that would be reasonably future-proofed. But a $600 dslr is only slightly less likely to be obsolete next year than the $400 compact camera. For example, both of the entry-level dslr cameras I'm talking about take 6 megapixel images. There are much higher-res non-dslr cameras available today (like the 10 megapixel Canon G7). Now, the megapixel count has more to do with selling cameras to naive consumers than with the image quality of the camera's output. But all things being equal, I would like to have more information about every shot rather than less. If in two years, most low-cost consumer cameras have 10 megapixel sensors, well, I'm going to feel bad about my crappy Pentax K110D or Nikon D50 with its measly 6 megapixel resolution. The thought that my daughter's Christmas camera might take a better shot than my dslr will keep me up at night. I might add that, while the Nikon D50 is the choice available today, there have been leaks that the D40 is coming. It's likely to be a step down from the D50, but if I'm looking to get into dslr photography on the cheap, that might be a better choice than the D50. So, the question isn't just, To dslr or not to dslr? You also have to ask, if you think a dslr is in your future sooner or later, is it sooner, or is it later? Just three years ago, Canon made history by releasing a dslr priced at $1000. I could buy a better camera than that original Canon right this minute on Amazon.com for under $500 (after rebate). That price may not be there by the time you read this article, but you see my point. Quality is going up, prices are staying the same or going down.

Resolving the dilemma

So, open and shut case - the high-end compact superzoom camera gives you much more for much less, right? Well, yes - maybe. If you buy a dslr, you will get some real advantages. For one thing, the sooner you get into the dslr world, the sooner you start spending money on lenses that you can keep for a very long time. The autofocus in dslrs is supposed to be better, generally, than the autofocus in compact cameras, especially in certain difficult-shooting conditions, like inside a gymnasium. The dslr is likely to support higher ISO settings (1600 or 3200, compared to 800 for the PowerShot S3). The dslr probably has smaller aperture settings (f/16 or higher) and a slightly faster maximum shutter speed (1/4000 for the Nikon D50 vs 1/3200 for the PowerShot S3). The dslr probably takes RAW format pictures. RAW format doesn't make the pictures better, but it does give you more of a chance of saving a shot that was well framed but badly exposed.

But that's not the end of the story, either. You now have to ask whether the superiority of the dslr is significant enough to you for you to abandon the versatility, convenience and price advantage of the non-dslr. This is a question only you can answer. But I'm tempted to say that, if you are unsure, then the answer is no, the superiority of the dslr is not significant enough to you for you to buy into that market today. I want to emphasize that the high-end non-dslr camera is not a toy. Take a look at this web site, which compares pictures taken with a $400 PowerShot S3 and a $5000 Canon 5D dslr.

The bottom line is that the dslr is a costly purchase. Don't be fooled by the $600 price tag. That's like being told that there are dishes on the menu at the gourmet restaurant near downtown that are under $30. Don't think it means you can take your date there and get out for $60! The $30 just buys the entree. Salad, wine, dessert, coffee and possibly even bread will cost extra. If you get out for less than $100, it's because you worried all through dinner about the budget, and how much fun is that? And remember also, if you're on a tight budget, when you switch to a dslr, there's a huge opportunity cost. While you're saving up to buy a decent zoom lens next year, you are missing shots that you simply can't take with the dslr that you could have taken with the superzoom. I could not have taken this picture of a female cardinal, standing eight or ten feet from the bird, without the S3's 12x built-in zoom. And I couldn't have taken these pictures of a great egret fishing without using the S3's zoom + the Canon 1.5x teleconverter lens. True, once I move into the dslr world, I can start to look forward to the day when I can afford a telephoto lens that is much more powerful, and much sharper, than the converter lenses I have for my S3. But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and, to me, anyway, a pretty good bird picture today is worth two really good bird pictures at some indefinite point in the future.

Let's be unreasonable!

There is an intangible here: technolust. Notwithstanding the compelling logic of the argument above, I'm stuck with the fact that the idea of owning a dslr simply has more sex appeal than the idea of owning a camera that I know somebody thinks is for hobbyists. Never mind that I am a hobbyist. Technolust is not rational!

I've been through these arguments again and again with myself. When I began, I certainly believed that digital slr cameras were simply and obviously better, in the same way that a $40 bottle of wine with a nice label is simply and obviously better than a $20 bottle of wine, except that I couldn't afford $40 bottles of wine and didn't get interested in the pretty label until the price dropped closer to $30. I know now that this is an ignorant prejudice. Nevertheless, I confess without hesitation that, if I had $1000 lying around handy, I'd run out tomorrow morning to buy one of the dslrs I've been talking about and an extra lens or two. It would be my way of proving to myself and the world that I'm serious about my hobby.

Conclusion

Perhaps fortunately, I don't have $1000 lying about, at least not handy. Cost is a major factor in my decision, so I have to try to be rational. If the compact superzoom is a compromise, I know that at least it's a very good compromise, because within the $600 to $1200 price range, the quality of my photos has more to do with my skill as a photographer than with the quality of the camera. A lousy camera might keep me from ever taking a good picture, but the advanced compact cameras I've been talking about are not lousy, they are, in fact, good. And now that I've got good equipment, spending more money on great equipment is not going to make me a better photographer. I've read it over and over again, and I believe that it is true: If you are taking mediocre pictures with a decent compact camera, you're going to take mediocre pictures with a dslr. I know it smacks of sour grapes, but until I can afford a dslr, I am taking comfort in the well-known Ken Rockwell article, "The camera does not matter."

Coming Zune. No, wait a minute. It's here.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft's Zune music player is creating no splash at all. PC Magazine's web site doesn't mention the product at all on its front page today. PC World gives it a positive review, but the upshot of the review is signaled in the title: "Microsoft's Zune Won't Make You Dump Your iPod." Ouch. John Dvorak agrees, the machine is doomed to fail.

I'm sure somebody out there, perhaps writing for the Dubuque Telegraph, thinks it's an iPod killer, but I haven't been able to find anything by anybody that exhibits even a little bit of excitement. We're a month and a half from Christmas, and I am pretty sure nobody lined up last night to be the first on their block to get a Zune.

The Zune might be well-made. Everybody does say that the display is nice. But in photos, the overall design makes it look to me like the Soviet entry in the MP3 player wars. I can't believe somebody thought brown was a good idea.

Even the name is goofy. I guess "Splurd" was already trademarked by somebody. "iPod" is meaningful and hip. But what the heck does "Zune" mean? Or forget meaning, what does Zune make you think of? I suppose it's supposed to make you think "tune," but I figured that out only after thinking about it a bit. Or maybe "zoom" + "tune". They didn't even spell it right. "Zoon" would have been hipper.

What are these people thinking? Don't they like, know any kids under 25 that they could ask for help on stuff like this? I'm actually feeling sorry for Microsoft.

How to steal a (digital) election

For those who have no idea of how the high-tech voting process can be hacked, there is an excellent article over at Ars Technica, perhaps the best computer site on the Internet. Actually, it's a great article even if you do have an idea how this would be done.

Keep Democracy low tech!

In a blog entry over two years ago, I said that only two kinds of people are in favor of electronic or computerized voting machines: people who are selling electronic or computerized voting machines; and people who know nothing about computers. I was wrong. There are three types of people who favor these devices: the two I just mentioned, and a third group - people who don't understand democracy.

Computerized voting machines are not inherently safer than traditional paper ballots, any more than your digital photo collection is safer than the old photos you've got in boxes. Nor are computerized voting machines inherently more secure. The old folks who volunteer as poll workers may not understand what it would take to commit fraud with computers, but that hardly means it's not possible, and poll workers do understand that. Voters do, too.

And that is the nub of the problem. Ordinary voters know that they do not know how computerized voting works, how secure it is, and so on. What voters cannot know, they cannot trust, and if voters cannot and do not trust the voting process - trust it not in their brains but in their bones - then our democracy is in deep trouble.

If you have ever volunteered to be a poll worker in an election, you probably have a pretty decent idea what would be involved in committing fraud with the ballots. You know that it's not impossible, but it's not easy - and it would be pretty tricky to keep your fraud a secret. You know that it's possible to audit the ballots - counting actual ballots from the box and comparing the count to the number of signatures in the poll register that voters sign. Even blind voters can put their hands on these things and feel them, and normal sighted voters can see all this with their own eyes. But computerized voting machines make the entire process invisible. You click a button for candidate X and trust that it counts as 1 vote, but there's no obvious way for you to know.

There's nothing that can be done about this. Making the machines "more secure" the way I try to make my client's databases more secure is not the answer. It is not enough for the county precinct chairman - or rather, the IT advisors to the county precinct chairmen - to trust the machines. That's almost irrelevant, like the question of whether the referees thought the game was called fairly or not. What matters is whether the voters trust the machines, and there is no way they ever can or will. Machines may provide printed receipts, but these receipts are almost comical. For the receipts to be trustworthy, you'd have to expect voters to review the receipt before committing or submitting their selections. After the voter leaves the polling place, the receipt is worthless, unless, of course, we eliminate anonymous voting and start tying individual ballot records in the voting database to known voters. If you're going to ask voters to review a printed ballot prior to clicking the "Submit Ballot" button, why not skip the expensive middleman and just give the voter a paper ballot to start with?

The only thing that computerized voting machines have going for them is speed. But it is far more important that elections be fair and trustworthy than that the poll results be posted in time for the ten o'clock news the same day. It would do our democracy some good, in fact, for people to be told to sit and wait for a day to find out who won.

No election is ever perfect. But voters trust traditional ballots because they know that large scale accidents are unlikely. But even computer-savvy voters can't know this about computerized voting machines.