I want one of these!

They did mention that this is the first camera in this series, so maybe they’re doing like Apple has done with the iPad and are leaving themselves a nice upgrade roadmap.  All that means to me, though, is no early adopting on this camera.  What a disappointment.

Here are a few shots of the camera from Cinevate:

Here are a few shots from Thursday and Friday.  Shane Hurlbut is a director of photography for many feature films, including Terminator Salvation and The Greatest Game Ever Played. He shot an upcoming movie, Act of Valor using Canon 5D mk IIs for about 80% of the movie. He’s also teamed up with Letus to create a new series of DSLR cinema rigs.  Got to demo the rigs with the president of Letus and Julien Lasseur from Hurlbut Visuals. The series of shots of the model were from a workshop I helped with at the Westcott booth, presented by Andy from Unknown Photographer. A few people wanted to see the final shots to compare notes on the strobe techniques Andy used.

shoot first, focus later.

I was just checking out an interesting new technology rumored to be on its way to consumers later this summer. It’s called a light field camera, and it’s a fundamentally different way of taking photographs. It lets you shoot first and focus later. It also lets you shoot in 3-D!

Traditional photography records all the light coming from a specific direction at a specific point in space.  This is accomplished by the lens focusing directional, incoming rays of light onto the sensor or film.  A light field, on the other hand, is the light traveling in all directions.  It includes all the light rays in a scene.

For example, think of a scene lit with a single light bulb illuminating a table with a red apple on it.  Light travels from the bulb to the apple.  The apple absorbs all the spectrum of light except for the red which gets bounced off the apple.  This light, however, bounces in many different directions, which is why we can see the apple from many different angles if we moved around the scene.  A traditional camera would record the light bouncing off the apple from a specific angle.  If you were to move the camera around the scene, taking pictures from every possible angle, you could theoretically capture the entire light field.

Lytro is a new company that claims to have created the first light field camera.  Clearly, the new camera captures only a partial light field, as it would be impossible to capture an entire light field from a scene.  They haven’t released a lot of information yet about their product, and there is no specific release date or pricing information.  Also, there are no pictures of what the new camera looks like, though it allegedly is small enough to fit in your pocket.  Their web site does have a gallery of photos taken with the new camera, and it allows you to play with the photos, adjusting the focal point on the fly.

I’m curious how the lenses will work.  It seemed to me at least from the photos available in Lytro’s gallery, that the process can only duplicate a moderately narrow depth of field, typical of what is found on most consumer point-and-shoot cameras.  I’m also not sure how zoom and field-of-view will work.  I’ll be quite interested to see this tech in action once the cameras are available.

shoot first, focus later.

Photo By Lytro / Richard Koci Hernandez

• Trying out the Angeneux Optimo lenses. Sadly, $50K for a lens is outside my budget for the time being.
• Seeing the Kessler Crane Revolution head and Orion controller in action.
• Getting hands-on with the Cinevate stuff.  Most of my current rig is made by Cinevate, so it’s great to see the rest of the product line first-hand.
• Getting an up-close look of the new Red Scarlet in action as it wandered around the show floor.

• Checking out a promising-looking new powered cage by ECC Tools at the Oconner booth.
• Trying out the Phantom Gold super high speed camera. Again, sadly $150K for a camera is outside my budget for the time being.
• Meeting Vincent Laforet, Dennis Wood of Cinevate, and Mitch Aunger of Planet5d.
• Lots of 4K eye candy by Christie, Panasonic, and others.

Check it out for yourself:

And as a little bonus, here’s one I shot with my iPhone and the GoPro Hero, mounted to a chest strap.  I edited this one using iMovie on my laptop, so the result, while still far from professional, is a step up from what the iPhone can produce by itself:

“Web Typography” used to be an oxymoron. The palette of type faces was limited to a “safe” list of about three or four lowest common denominator fonts.  If you ever wanted something more imaginative, you had to save the text as a graphic.  This made edits more than tedious, and it ham-strung any hopes of your content being found by search engines.  So we stuck with our boring Arial and wrote typography off.

Well, things seem to finally be changing. CSS has already brought a decent amount of control for things like line spacing and precise text sizing. And now a new service is being tested to reliably bring thousands of new fonts to web sites, whether the end user has the fonts installed or not. River Design was selected to beta test this new program, and what better guinea pig to test it on than myself?

12 Bugs We’ve Found In iPhone OS 3.0

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1. Mail merge to Word requires 800 steps and doesn’t offer obvious things like filtering on category. I would think mail merging is an extremely common task, so why is this extraordinarily difficult?! and don’t even get me started on the troubles with mail merge formatting in Word…
2. Outlook is random in how it files names: first, last and sometimes last, first.
3. It randomly decides who it remembers for autocomplete while typing in an addressee for email.
4. The autocomplete for e-mail addresses is very persistent.  When someone gives me a new address, I’ll change it in his contact record, but autocomplete will never give me the new address… it insists on filling in the old address.  I’m sure there’s some cache that could be flushed, but seriously, that sort of thing should NOT be necessary.
5. It strips support for about half of CSS, making my life as a designer frustrating.  Yeah, I know, nobody else knows or cares about that one.
6. It is not clear at all what the differences/purposes are among groups, distribution lists, or categories
7. Searching for contacts can be rather random. This inexplicably got better for me for a couple of months, but then went back to being retarted.  For example, I will search for something like “brooks” and get zero results. Then I’d search for something like “mark” and I’d get my brother, who obviously has “brooks” as his last name. (!)  This happens for about 1/3 of my contacts, making searching useful only 2/3 of the time.
8. The only way to filter your contacts is to right click on the column header. Again, this is a pretty common task, yet it’s not even remotely intuitive, never mind accessible from any of the menus!
9. You can’t create an event in the calendar and link it to a contact, unless you explicitly “invite” that contact to the event, which then sends an e-mail to them, etc.  For example, I often want to schedule a phone call to a client, but you can’t do this.  Along with this, it would be very helpful to see a full history for each contact (including calls, meetings, emails…) OK, OK, so Outlook isn’t a CRM solution.  I know; it’s barely an e-mail solution!
10. The e-mail basically can’t be used with the preview pane open.  It eventually crashes in this mode.

OK, so I’ll limit the list to just 10.  But seriously, isn’t this supposed to be rather mature software by now?  So why do I use Outook, if I hate it so much?  So far I haven’t found a better solution.  Why is decent (and accessible) CRM so hard to come by?  I used Goldmine for years, and had a love/hate relationship with that.  It does a good job with a lot of the CRM-specific tasks such as complete contact history, but it didn’t handle e-mail so well.  Also, it provided no (official) way to do data backup or migration.

But the final straw reason why I left Goldmine for Outlook was that it’s the only application that will integrate with the iPhone.  Well for Windows, anyway.  Maybe I really should switch to a Mac.  Yeah, Outlook’s bad enough to nearly make that major of a switch worthwhile.  Guess that also says something for how great the iPhone is too!