Broadmoor

Rather than belaboring the details of how and why I ended up at the Broadmoor, suffice it to say that a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend a weekend at one of the most beautiful/pretentious hotels in the world. The Broadmoor is in Colorado Springs, tucked right at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain, so while I spent the weekend worrying about not tipping the wrong person, I did not have to worry about finding a good place to hide in the event of nuclear war.

Lily Pads Blue

Of course there are photo opportunities all over in Colorado Springs, but some of my favorite pictures from the weekend were taken just outside the carport of the Broadmoor, where they have a very nice fountain filled with lily pads and fish. The red lily pads are admittedly a little garish, like the sort of flower that might spew something potent enough to make Spock climb a tree, but I think they make a nice contrast with the blue ones.

Lily Pads Red

Photokina, the world’s biggest photography equipment show is coming up, so there have been tons of announcements of new products in the lead-up to it…

• Leica has finally announced the long-awaited M8 digital rangefinder. I really like the idea of a (relatively) small, quiet digital camera with interchangeable lenses, but unfortunately since it’s Leica the costs are sky-high. It looks like you could run up $10K pretty quickly for an M8 and a couple of lenses. No thanks.
• In more down-to-earth news, Pentax has announced their new K10D, a 10MPix DSLR that looks to be roughly a match for my D200 except for the plastic body, but priced significantly lower. If I was buying into a camera system for the first time right now I’d be taking a long hard look at Pentax; the anti-shake built into their camera bodies coupled with their new digital oriented “pancake” prime lenses makes them look pretty appealing.
• When people start asking me what lens they should buy, I’m going to start recommending this one.

So earlier this week Nikon announced what looks to be another killer camera, the D80. For the “I’ve misplaced the manual and I need to know what this button does” preview, DPReview’s got your back as usual. For a more concise overview of the new camera and functionality, I’d look at Rob Galbraith’s take. For some commentary on what the camera means and how it fits into the market, Thom Hogan and Mike Johnston both have some pretty insightful articles up.

I’m not sure what I can add that isn’t already covered pretty well by those articles. I’m not looking at buying one since my needs are pretty well covered right now, but for an enthusiast-level camera this one should cover 95% of most people’s needs, including my own. Looks like another winner for Nikon.

By the way, sorry for yet another month+ between posts. Like I’ve said in the past, when things get busy the website’s pretty much the first thing to go. I’m hoping to post some more stuff over the next few days, including some photos and reviews from Lollapalooza last weekend.

I’ve found myself fascinated lately by the upcoming DSLR from Panasonic, the Lumix DMC-L1. I’ve run across a handful of pages related to this camera over the last couple weeks, and I thought I’d share them. DPReview have gotten their grubby mitts on one, and have a hands-on preview up. Panasonic have an interesting set of articles walking through the design process they went through for the camera. And there’s a screen grab of their lens lineup here. Looks like some interesting stuff in the pipeline.

I’m not sure why I’m so interested in this camera. I think part of it is that I really like my dinky Lumix point’n'shoot, and I’m interested to see what they can do with a DSLR. Part of it is that it looks to be a thoroughly modern camera in some ways (live view, ultrasonic dust filter, OIS) but they appear to have gone to great pains to make the handling and interface very… photographic, like an old manual film camera. Mostly though, I think it’s just because it’s so darn pretty.

I suppose this was probably inevitable, sooner or later. Nikon has announced that they’re seriously curtailing their film-based camera business, cutting their film body production back to just the new F6 and the entry-level manual FG10, dropping all but a handful of their manual-focus lenses, and stopping production of things like their large format lenses. Of course there are still tons of usable Nikon film bodies and lenses out on the used market for those who want them, but film seems to be moving higher up the endangered species list every day.

Yesterday, Adobe announced Lightroom, a “professional photographic workflow tool” similar to Apple’s Aperture. It won’t be released for some time, I think, but they released a Mac-only beta when they announced it yesterday. Far more experienced and qualified photographers than myself have weighed in on it, but I thought I’d give my impressions from playing around with the beta.

• This is definitely a beta, nowhere near release quality software. Not only in the sense that it has bugs, but that it’s missing tools (you can’t even crop with it). I’ve actually encountered surprisingly few serious bugs, but I haven’t used it that heavily yet (I only have a hundred or so images imported).
• Something I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere: This thing really doesn’t like Unsanity’s Application Enhancers. I have ShapeShifter installed on my machine since I’m not a fan of Aqua, and Lightroom was very sluggish in use at first. After adding it to the Master Exclude List in the APE control panel performance jumped up several notches to “tolerable”. (Dual processor 1.8GHz G5 for reference)
• Lightroom doesn’t seem to have the user interface flash that Aperture does. That may come closer to release though. The interface layout seems to be logical and clean, and more streamlined than something like ACR.
• The Grayscale Mixer seems like it will end up being very useful for getting good B&W pictures. I think I like it
• The organization tools seem a bit rudimentary compared to some other apps I’ve used, but I’m quite willing to admit that I just haven’t tried it that extensively.
• I see a couple of major advantages over Aperture right off the bat (at least on paper). First, Lightroom allows you to import your images into its database while leaving the actual files where they’re at on disk; Aperture insists you suck all of the files into its relatively opaque database file. Second, Adobe has said Lightroom will have an extensive plugin architecture by v1.0, which is something that’s helped turn Photoshop into the 800lb. gorilla it is.

It’s definitely good to see some competition in this arena; existing solutions like Photoshop are powerful, but almost too powerful and not streamlined enough for general use. Having several companies will result in better software for less. I’d recommend if you have a Mac and a digital camera (especially one that shoots RAW) to check out the beta.