News/Views
And So It Begins...
This is a little off-topic to photography at the moment, but I'll try to bring it back round by the end of the article.
As I've predicted, Apple has now fired back at the EU (European Union). The actual Apple statement is brief and to the point:
Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.
Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety. [source John Gruber, DaringFireball.net]
As I've pointed out before, the EU has a number of regulations that now directly relate to modern technology, and there's an under-the-surface political motivation behind those to keep American tech companies from dominating in Europe at the expense of European tech companies. (Note that the EU's "penalty" is based upon 10% of world-wide revenue, not European revenue for the offender, which is telling.) The above-surface motivation is to "protect European citizens." I'm personally not aware of any European citizens group contending that they're being directly harmed by Apple, for instance (Google is another story ;~).
Much of the discussion about regulating tech has to do with so-called "gate-keeping." For instance, you can only install applications on iPhones that come from Apple's App Store. The problem I (and Apple) have with what the EU is trying to do is that they're in essence trying to set themselves up as the world's gatekeeper. And in doing so, invalidating the whole reason for companies to build integrated products with ecosystems in the first place.
That last statement needs a bit of explanation, as I'm a fan of extensive ecosystems. However, if you can only profit from the core product in an ecosystem, those products are going to be much higher in cost to users and less likely to take root. Moreover, as we discovered over and over in tech's history—particularly with the computer/OS/application/peripheral construct—you also will run into no one taking responsibility for interoperability problems. The core product maker will point to the add-on provider, the add-provider will point to the core product maker, and the user problem will remain unsolved.
I believe consumers vote with their wallet. The fact that the Apple ecosystem has such a substantive uptake in the market is due to people voting with their wallet. Apple controlling their ecosystem is one of the ways in which they've been able to build better and better products that do things other companies struggle with. (Aside: I do wonder, however, why Apple hasn't said "sure, side load from somewhere else, but we won't guarantee it works, doesn't leak your privacy data, or even takes advantage of our recent technology additions. Those side-loaded products won't take advantage of our core, integrated features.")
Now let's bring this over to photography for a moment. Several US states—including California, which tends to set precedent due to its size—have been creating right to repair laws. As I've reported, NikonUSA now has set up a self repair site. It's still unclear exactly what that will entail, as at the moment we have one lens repair manual and the parts section has no parts you can buy, just a warning. Okay, it does have a number of lubricants necessary for lens servicing, but you might want to look at the prices of those ;~).
It's clear that, at least at the moment, Nikon has decided to try to comply with these new US regulations, but those regulations are still on the lax side, for the most part. However, where are Canon and Sony on this issue? Don't know. Are they waiting to be sued first?
The real gatekeepers of the world tend to be governmental in nature, either by law or by regulation. The problem with that is we're going from a more open global market to a more tightly regulated regional market in ways that are now impacting companies pretty directly. That's because the laws and regulations are getting tougher to protect perceived regional interests. It's most visible at the moment with the EU's fights with the American tech companies, but it's starting to spread to much wider regional regulation of products that are used globally. One has to wonder just how much the right to repair notion will cost NikonUSA, for instance, to provide their own user repairs. Up until now NikonUSA has used a prix fixe method for repairs that come to them; if the volume goes down because people are self-repairing, one wonders if they can continue the inherent prix fixe benefits or have to increase costs for repairs that NikonUSA performs. Fixed overhead is a real cost that has to be passed on somehow.
Another sample: I've long been an advocate of real-time communication with cameras. That requires going through a country-by-country certification process (for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and for any other radio frequency interference the electronics might cause). One reason why the Japanese camera companies have avoided adding cellular to their cameras is that it's not just a country-by-country certification process that's necessary, but a cellular vendor-by-vendor process, as well. It's very time consuming and costly, and Tokyo has (wrongly) decided that it's not worth it.
There's no clear, easy answer to what's going on in terms of regulations at the moment. Regulations, in theory, perform useful functions for us, and is one of the ways that rampant capitalistic profit-taking, among other things, is held in check.
However, Apple's statement about their just-announced features not making it to Europe indicates that there's increasing friction over how much regulation they'll accept and why. This is not going to end well.
My Start to Spring Cleaning
Yes, I know we're deep into spring already, but I'm finally back in the office after quite a bit of travel, looking around, and seeing a mess has built up.
A lot is involved with performing garbage collection spring cleaning. As a working photographer everything from logical to physical is involved, and tasks you probably don't have to perform for your photography, such as accounting, are also involved.
This year I've started my spring cleaning with my computer systems. For the moment I haven't decided to upgrade anything, but that will probably come soon enough. Thus, one of the first things I looked at was what was on those computers. In other words, photographic software.
I'm being ruthless this year. I found that I had a clutter of as many as a dozen raw converters taking up space, plus the inevitable plug-in and support software pileup that seems to happen regularly. Moreover, much of this requires constant tithing to keep up to date.
Therefore I've simplified my raw converters down to basically three. In order of preference/use: Adobe ACR (Photoshop), DxO PhotoLab, and Nikon NX Studio. (See my article on zsystemuser.com for more.)
There was a time when CaptureOne would have been that second choice, but the reason to have a second or third converter around has to do with having a clear, alternative choice of demosaic and controls. While CaptureOne provides the former—different color modeling—it doesn't really provide me the latter any more, and is certainly not worth the more-than-Adobe pricing they've adopted to me.
Similarly, I've simplified my noise reduction tools to basically Adobe's Enhanced DeNoise and the no-longer-sold Topaz DeNoise AI (plus I have DxO's Prime de-noising options in PhotoLab). No, Topaz I don't want to pre-process my images with your demosaic tools in Photo AI, particularly when they require me to make adjustments I'm not interested in (ditto with DxO's Pure Raw). It adds to workflow, takes time, and doesn't provide me the results I'm looking for.
The Nik tools are potentially on my chopping block, too. I haven't upgraded to Nik 7 Collection. I don't use the U-point tool, I don't need yet another HSL tool, though maybe the speed improvements might be useful. However, I find that I'm using a Nik tool far less often than I used to now, so I think the handwriting is on next year's wall.
I'm undecided at the moment about Ingest/Review. With Photo Mechanic also in the more-than-Adobe pricing mode, I'm finding that to be a real issue, particularly since the UI/UX is still geeky, clunky, and odd, new features aren't really being added, and I'm doing less sports work where the speed IPTC features of Photo Mechanic are unique and useful. FastRawViewer works fine for wildlife work, much less expensive, and has interesting evaluation tools that Photo Mechanic doesn't.
All in all, I've lopped over US$500 off my yearly software costs. Yes, this will make me less capable of speaking to all the software options (unless, of course, the suppliers want to put me on the review copy lists). But it will also allow me to start considering demonstrating why the products I've chosen were chosen and how well they really work.
Next up: going through the studio, the gear storage, the office, and all the spillover places (my home hall closet is simply full of bags), and figuring out which gear goes. I've already got a large pile, but that's going to turn into enormous soon.
I should be through with this year's spring cleaning just about the time that next spring rolls around...
Lust, Love, and In Love
Yes, I'm going to anthropomorphize hunks of metal, glass, and plastic, but we all do it, right?
Let's face it, we tend to talk about our photographic equipment with the same language we use about our significant others. That can run the full gamut of expression, but today I want to write about the positive side of that: how we express how well we like our cameras and lenses.
I thought about this as I was contemplating my yearly "get rid of gear" eradication program. I realized, for example, that I was still in love with some bits and pieces, but had just fallen down to loving others. As I considered this more and looked at how others were expressing their GAS (gear acquisition syndrome), I realized that we often go through predictable cycles.
For instance, when the design and marketing departments get their jobs right and announce something new, we often lust after it. We have to have it. It's perfect and does no wrong. Or at least we perceive it to be better than what we have and that it will do things we need doing.
Once over the initial reaction and with the new gear in our hands, we often then hit the love phase. Yes, it's basically what we wanted, and we have a mostly positive relationship with it. Over time, though, one of two things happen: (a) love fades, or (b) love blossoms.
For a "love fades" example, the Sony RX100—pick any of the seven iterations as your starting point—triggered a whole bunch of initial positive reactions among photographers. Many of those were associated with the "quality camera fits in shirt pocket" aspect of the RX100. Any serious photographer wants to always be ready to photograph, and here was a camera that was providing true carry-always ability.
Then we started using the RX100 and the initial lust quickly turned to something else. Note that the six updates of the basic camera all tried to deal with one or more of the irritations that users reported, but some of those changes created new irritations, and now Sony is iterating things as a completely different beast (ZV-1). Worse still, a number of the most frustrating problems weren't dealt with by Sony (e.g. number of images/charge, terrible small controls and clumsy UX, less-than-20mp-capable results). The primary reason Sony could get away with that for so long was that all the other camera makers abandoned the serious shirt-pocket camera market. Thus, it was love it or have nothing.
Over time almost every RX100 user I know fell out of love with the camera (including myself). Most gravitated to something somewhat bigger in order to get past all the problems that Sony had presented us. Okay, our "better" replacements don't fit in a shirt pocket, but maybe a jacket pocket instead?
Of course, as smartphones got more capable in photo ability, some just abandoned the idea of a dedicated camera completely and started using their iPhone/Galaxy/Pixel as their shirt pocket camera. And the more that happened, the more the camera makers ran fleeing from the scene.
My current "love blossoms" examples are, as you'd probably expect, mostly Nikon gear. For example, the Z8 and Z9 pair. Here all the updating Nikon has done keeps refreshing the products in ways that felt like our love was being returned (oh dear, too much anthropomorphizing?). We started using the Z9, ran into some things that didn't feel or work right, and then Nikon went about (mostly) fixing those and adding more capability. Not just once, but four times now. It's difficult to fall out of love with someonething that seems to adapt to our desires and needs.
Overall, the various camera makers all seem to be in different positions today in regards to this lust/love thing. Canon seems less desirable these days for reasons that are tough to fully explain, but abandoning the M system and not replicating those models in RF didn't help. The "no R1 but here's an R3" thing didn't play as well as I think Canon thought it would. And lenses? Don't get a Canon user started on that subject.
Fujifilm has parlayed into the more megapixels desires to achieve love. I call this the Trophy Wife of cameras syndrome, and it plays well with those that have aged along with their dedicated cameras.
You have to love Leica, otherwise you can't explain why you paid so much money for something that isn't quite as good at some things than less expensive gear.
Nikon users are bifurcating in terms of their love: Z8, Z9, and maybe the Zfc/Zf users are still in love, while the Z50, Z5, Z6, and Z7 users are feeling neglected.
The m4/3 crowd appears to have taken the "til death do us part" pledge.
Finally, Sony users are similar to Nikon users; some Alpha models are still being loved, while others are feeling neglected. Curiously, the former jealousy thing that Nikon users had for Sony models has now inverted, with Sony users now jealous about things they see in Nikon (particularly all those useful firmware updates).
I started thinking about this topic back around Valentine's Day (for obvious reasons) but given that cameras are mostly bought in this spring-to-summer and later Christmas holiday periods, I postponed the article to when you're most likely having these feels. (For those over 30, the term "feels" is Millennial slang for an overwhelming emotional reaction, which pretty much describes how most people justify buying a new camera these days.)
That said, here's the punch line: the last new Canon camera was launched in May 2023, the last new Nikon camera came along nine months ago, and the last new Sony Alpha was announced seven months ago. So most of you are probably pining for something, anything, to lust after. If you didn't pick up one of those recent Canikony cameras, you may be out of love with what you've got and looking for a new love.
Ah, Spring...
