Lens thoughts

I wrote a bit on the 70-200mm f/4 lens that Nikon produced fairly recently, but apparently never
got around to posting it.  Here's what I had to say:

I've been reading some reviews on Nikon's new 70-200mm f/4 lens with quite a bit of curiosity recently. Mostly, I've been wondering how well it will suit my needs, as the 70-300mm VR has not done very well for me, hand-held, and the 70-200mm f/2.8 is awfully expensive (yes, yes, why am I saying that when I shoot with a D4? Well, there are almost always limits).

Rockwell's preview (misnamed a review, since reading it reveals that he has not yet had one to actually use) says the extra stop shouldn't matter, as long as you're shooting digital. And I've seen similar comments elsewhere.

Well, one reason I'm fortunate (or, to put it another way, one reason I went with a Nikon when I wanted to get a new DSLR several years ago) is that my dad also shoots Nikon. And, happily, he has the 70-200 f/2.8 (VRI), so I was able to borrow it to get a feel for some things.

Bokeh? Yeah, that extra stop is noticeable, but not obtrusively. I certainly don't think anyone should be getting the faster lens for the bokeh. But the extra stop can make a difference. My daughter started gymnastics lately, and I was shooting her practicing.

I just couldn't get a good shot of her (moving; when she was pretty static, the shots were fine) with either of my longer lenses. Going back through the shots, I saw that I was getting 1/60th to 1/200th shutter speeds, even allowing the ISO to climb all the way to 12800. With that long a lens, and with her moving, that just wasn't working, even shooting off a gimbal. I think I should be able to get enough better with (lots of) practice to make it work off the gimbal, but handheld is definitely out. And carrying the tripod and gimbal is a serious pain (and infeasible when, as is usually the case, I need to watch my son).

Anyway, the point is, shooting with the 2.8 lens worked out just fine. I'm not sure where that leaves me, but at least I know a lot more. (Certainly, amazon currently offering 2% back with 24-month free financing on the VRII 2.8 lens is looking awfully tempting. If only I knew when the VRIII or VRIV model was coming out.)

So, after that testing, and with the deal mentioned (last December, I think), I ended up getting the newer 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.  And I've been very happy with it, although 70-80% of the time, I think I'd be fine with the f/4 lens.  Which, I guess, is my way of saying that you should be fine with either lens unless you're shooting moving targets in less-than-full lighting.

Immigration, redux

One note I forgot to mention about the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate. A couple of days ago, NPR talked to Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Representative, and, IIRC, head of the House Judiciary Committee. While I think he's mostly a bit crazy (more or less required of current Republican office-holders), I did like one thing he brought up that's been almost completely ignored in discussions about immigration control.

And that is that a large percentage (I believe he said 35-40%, although I've definitely heard much higher estimates) of undocumented immigrants are not people who came over the border illegally, they're people who did minor things like overstaying their visa. So this whole big push to spend tens of billions of dollars and equip a fair-sized army on the Mexican border (the Senate bill would increase that force to 40k people. Compare that to the 135k soldiers who were in Afghanistan at the peak of that conflict) doesn't even address a large percentage of the problem.

In fact, given that Mexican immigration has dropped by an immense amount in the last couple years (for economic reasons. To whit, Mexicans can make similar amounts of money working there as they can here), I'd be shocked if the percentage of immigrants coming in on legitimate visas hasn't been on a steady increase over the last four to five years.

Oh yeah, and I just looked at the Republic supporters on immigration:
Lamar Alexander of Tennessee;
Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire;
Jeff Chiesa of New Jersey;
Susan Collins of Maine;
Bob Corker of Tennessee;
Jeff Flake of Arizona;
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina;
Orrin Hatch of Utah;
Dean Heller of Nevada;
John Hoeven of North Dakota
Mark Kirk of Illinois;
John McCain of Arizona;
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska;
Marco Rubio of Florida.

McCain isn't a big surprise, he's supported reform before. Rubio's no surprise, as he was trying to solidify his support in Florida, and was one of the sponsors of the bill. Chiesa's a little bit of a surprise to me; I suspect this might bite Christie in the butt at some point in the future (as he elevated Chiesa to the position) nationally (though I'm sure it'll play well at home). I'm a little surprised about Collins; while she's broken with her party in the past, I don't remember her doing so since Bush was elected.

The others, I don't really know much about, as far as what they've been saying on immigration, although just on gut instinct, Hatch surprises me.

Focus on stacking

I just wanted to mention, briefly, that I've been playing around with two different focus-stacking tools, Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker.  My trial period with both is about to run out, and I still haven't decided which one I'll get.

Neither one is clearly better than the other; at least, not if you don't need the advanced features of each (which, thankfully, I don't).  Both have trouble with hand-held attempts at stacking and give similarly-good results with mechanically-generated stacks.

I should also give a bit of a shout-out to the Camranger, which I've mentioned before.  That's what I'm using to generate my stacks, and it is just a fantastic piece of equipment.  My only reservation is durability potential.  No, I've had no trouble with it, but just wonder about the sturdiness of the plastic.

Still, I've been very happy with the results I've gotten out of the equipment and software.  Neat stuff.

Handling immigrants

I don't have a lot to say about the immigration bill that's been getting bandied about for a while, and that just passed the Senate today.  But I did want to point out the hypocrisy in adding $30B in border "security" spending to placate the same group of people who have been going nuts for the past several years telling us that the end of the world is coming if government spending doesn't get reined in, pronto.

All men are (not?) born equal

I don't know a whole lot about adoption, and just found out something that surprised me greatly.

It turns out that it is much more expensive to adopt a white child than a black one. I must admit that this just blew my mind.

The story mentioned that it is likely driven by there being less demand for black children, and the adoption agencies change the pricing to encourage quicker adoption of the black children. A noble goal, I think, but awfully disturbing in implementation (and implication).

I wonder what drives the lower demand. Is it a simple matter of racism in action, that most white people don't want to adopt black children? Is simple numbers, that there are more white people, and therefor more of them doing the adopting? Is it economically driven, that adoption is expensive and more white people can afford it? Does it have something to do with there being more unwanted children from black women (I don't know if this is the case, but I've certainly read many things that at least suggest that it might be)?

I have no idea, but I'd be very curious to find out.

DOMA delenda est

I'm not a terribly close watcher of the Supreme Court (the current court composition, especially Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas, tends to piss me off), but I was encouraged by what I heard yesterday.

They struck down DOMA, which was great, and halted implementation of Prop 8 in California. The latter was good, as far as it went, although I was a bit disappointed (not surprised, mind) that they didn't decide in a way that would keep other states from doing the same.

Essentially, they said that the defendants (various anti-gay bigotry groups) had no standing to defend the state's decision, if the state itself wouldn't defend it.

So a tiny bit of disappointment there, but mostly I'm pleased with the decisions.

Two minor bits of amusement, related. When talking about it, just before the announcement, I was stuck watching CNN, and they decided to show a graphic highlighting which states have approved same-sex marriage and such. What I found so amusing was that the states that allow same-sex marriage were colored RED. Very ironic decision, there. (The states that don't allow it were uncolored.)

The other funny bit came this morning on the radio, when they interviewed a woman who wasn't so pleased with the decision. She said that she was against it because she didn't think gays should be allowed to marry (unsurprising, a bigot), and, more amusingly, that the Bible said that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that shouldn't change. I wonder how much of the Bible she's actually read. The only passages I'm aware of that specifically talk about marriage (beyond stuff like, "Jesus went to a wedding") talk about it as between a man and many women (stuff like, "If your brother dies, you must marry his wife", and the many early men mentioned as having two or more wives (Lamech and Abraham, for instance)).

Anyway, Yay, progress.

Pro-portions

I've been reading comments on one of the articles I linked before, and I'm seeing some fairly common thoughts.

One is dealing with the size (understandable, as users really don't care all that much about the size of desktop computers), asking whether a unit merely 1/2 the size of the old Mac Pro (vs 1/8th) might have been better.

And the simple answer is that it wouldn't be. It would add expansion capability in some form, true. But your options are to go over, under, or next to the existing "core". None of those options work well. Going over means you're going to have some components getting a huge amount of heat thrown on them. Going under means you have accessibility (for repair/replacement) issues (and you're moving the most valuable parts into a less-stable position). And going "behind" means you break the thermal core, because it stops being symmetrical. Suddenly, some of that heat is escaping towards the side, instead of up.

I think the whole core is understanding that the heat sink drove the entire design, and that's why it's so forward-thinking, because heat requirements will have a hard time going down, while there are a few ways to improve the airflow with this basic design.

Plus, thunderbolt will cover just about any eventuality that you might need (assuming the graphics cards can be upgraded, which is, it's true, not a given).

Pro Power

I've been meaning to write about Apple's new Mac Pro since it was announced at WWDC. I'm not sure why I haven't.

I've been thinking about getting a Mac Pro for a couple of years now, mostly because of memory issues (my iMac tops out at 16GB, and while the upgrade to 16GB was substantial, I still find myself wishing for more). A lot of that is driven by keeping lots of things open at once, for sure, but especially by photo editing.

So, anyway, because of that, I've been checking the tea leaves for what to expect, and the new model still caught me off-guard.

Here are two reviews worth perusing (especially for all the pictures):
Ars Technica
Apple Insider

Having a rack in my house, I wouldn't've minded the thing being rack-mountable. Not needed, but would have been welcome. So a bit of a loss there.

Also only has four RAM slots. This is actually a bigger problem, as it seems likely to top out (for the next year or two, anyway) at 64GB. Not shabby, of course, but was hoping it would be expandable to more. We'll see what happens here. One thing I definitely wouldn't want to see is an inability to add larger DIMMs as they become available (assuming no additional pins needed, of course; if they are, then of course that wouldn't be possible); I've been screwed by that a couple of times.

The last potential problem I see is that it wouldn't be happy being stuck under a desk. Not only because the striking design would be wasted for lack of visibility, but also because it'll be pumping out a lot of hot air, and you need that air to get far away.

Beyond that, though, I think it's brilliant. It was, of course, entirely predictable, doing away with the optical drive, although I didn't think it'd be gone quite this soon. And I like the forward-thinking nature of doing all the expansion via thunderbolt (although there are definitely cost issues there). But I think the cooling design will work for a very long time, and they even claim that it'll share the cooling when one or more of the main processors is working at less than full load. I'm not sure about the latter part, but it looks very promising anyway.

This is definitely a forward-thinking machine, and I expect that other companies will put out copies pretty soon. Although I'm thinking Apple will have huge advantages of scale with it (especially if they come out with cheaper versions than the probably-$10k model shown at WWDC); it should be able to go from a fairly small processor up to the heavy workhorses in the model shown.

The one thing I worry about is if they'll have a model in my price range; I don't need two stupidly-powerful GPUs for my use and wouldn't pay for them. But, this architecture, if done right, could still put something into the sweet spot for purchase for me.

And the one bit of complete speculation. They made such a big deal about being able to drive three 4k displays with it. Will they announce an affordable 4k monitor upon release? That would REALLY get me stoked; I'd love to get one of those for photo editing.  In fact, that would be a bigger deal for me than anything they could do within the computer.  There are even intimations (screen backgrounds within 10.9 Mavericks) of a double-resolution 27" display; that would be even better.

Practical lighting

Most of the photography books have been long on theory, and short on practicality, but a book I just ran across breaks that trend quite well.  The book is Shooting in Sh*tty Light: The Top Ten Worst Photography Lighting Situations and How to Conquer Them (yeah, the title is a bit much), and it's focused on how to work with bad lighting situations.

The only negative I can say is that some of the solutions discussed require having an assistant to hold things for you (pretty unlikely, if you aren't a pro).

But I still think it's a pretty neat book, and I can't wait to read the rest of it (I've gotten through two of the ten sections, so far).

Update: I forgot to mention that one of the things I liked was that it said that the first thing you should do, is, if it looks like a sh*tty lighting situation in advance, try to convince the customer to change the setting (timing, placement, etc) so that it won't be so bad.  But then it acknowledges that sometimes you can't do it.