Photoclub Alpha

Sometimes earlier this year, early Spring I think, I had a vivid and detailed dream during a slow waking-up hour. It was the kind of dream which feels rational not random. I knew what I was doing in it – in control!

This time, I described the dream to my wife and son; he knows a lot about this stuff, and thought it was an accurate dream. It was possible. Now Sony is about to release the camera I was using in the dream.

Here is the dream.

I am walking across a kind of pier or boardwalk construction at the edge of water. It’s not in Britain. It’s warm and sunny, and it could be in the USA. The boards are raised above what would be the shore, and there are wooden buildings left and right of me. Ahead, I can see the lake water, and boat moorings with a jetty. To the left of me is the largest building, which is a shop or museum; something to visit. There are ornamental shrubs placed on planters or pots, and there are some notices or signs on the building. To the right, the wooden building is functional; it could be a boat house, a yacht club, or something like that. There are pine woods beyond.

My job is to move to the four corners of this scene, and other positions, taking care to make a complete set of images from a range of camera placements and angles. I’m using a wide-angle lens, and my camera is equipped with GPS which records the exact position and orientation of the camera for every shot.

I do not worry about people in the pictures because the software will ignore them, nor about the light, but it is a beautiful day anyway. I am taking the pictures for a project and this is paid work. This is actually what I do for a living (in the dream). I am visiting hundreds of the most frequently-photographed places in the world, and producing a set of pictures of each one.

But it’s not what I am doing which is the interesting bit. It’s what I know about it. In the dream, I have all the knowledge about what I am doing that I would have if it was real.

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Time and space

Here’s how my pictures are being used. Each set of images with its GPS coordinates is fed into a system which constructs a 3D model of the environment. It is capable of recognising identical elements seen from different angles, and uses the GPS data to help identify them. With two 2D views of a building from different positions, it can use the focus distance and lens angle information to compensate for small inaccuracies in the GPS data, and wireframe the exact design and scale of the structure.

It identifies textures and objects like foliage, text on signs, clouds, and people. Once my entire set of images from this place has been processed (I am aware they are being transmitted as I take the pictures) new photographs which never existed can be created. A virtual camera can be positioned anywhere within the area I photographed, and my few dozen still images from fixed positions enable a new view to be constructed with complete accuracy.

I’ve used the result (in my dream) and it has incredibly high resolution because of the correlated image information. It’s a bit like Sony’s multi-shot or HDR or panorama technology, but instead of aligning two very similar images, it maps the coincident key points of entirely different views of the same scene. Where a walk-through VR allows viewing all angles from one position, this allows viewing any angle from any position.

And it goes beyond that to add a timeline.

The system I’m working for gathers millions of photographs from people all over the world. I’m photographing these key locations because they are the most photographed in the world. Camera phone images now record GPS data, and also record the date. So (at this future time) do most digital cameras and video cameras.

The system can find images matching every location by trawling the web; from Flickr, Facebook or whatever is out there. It can analyse the images to see whether they actually match the location they appear to be from. For every location, the system gathers in as many more pictures as it can find.

The first result of this is more detail. The second is that the viewer can change the season or weather conditions in which the location is seen. It can be viewed at night, in snow, in rain, at sunset; whatever. My image-set provides the framework, but seasonal changes can be created from the ‘found’ images of the place.

The second result is the timeline. Old photographs of these places have been fed into the system. For some popular spots, it’s possible to track the environment backwards for over 100 years. Trees change size, buildings appear and disappear. By turning on ‘people’ (which the software can remove) the crowds, groups or individuals who were in the scene at any time can be shown. And the 3D environment is still enabled because all the old photographs are co-ordinate mapped to the new information.

I do not have to work all this out in my dream, because I already know it. I am working with this awareness. The entire thing is known to me, without having to think about it. I also know that future pictures captured from internet will continue to add to the timeline and the ‘people’ function, so in five years’ time the seasons and the visitors to this place can be viewed almost by the minute.

The dark side

Because this is a dream, I do not have to think or rationalise to get this understanding; it was included with the dream. As I wake up, I realise what I have been dreaming and then make an effort to ‘save to memory’. That also kicks in the thinking process.

I start to wonder who was hiring me to do this survey-type photography, because in the dream that is one thing I don’t know. I realise how exciting it is to be able to use this Google-Earth or Google-Street type application to view not only any part and any angle of these tourist locations, but any season or time of day, and many past times in their history.

When I describe it to him, Richard suggests it’s probably Microsoft. He likes the collation of web-sourced images covering seasons, and maybe decades of past time. He thinks it is all possible and the core technology exists right now. I should patent it and give it a name!

But there is one thing which I understood just as I was waking up; the system can recognise people. Not just as people to be ‘removed’ from a scene or turned back on; it can recognise faces. The movements of one individual can be reconstructed within that location, and it can use a ‘cloud’ of gathered pictures taken at the same time to do so. This is not just virtual tourism and virtual history. In other locations – not beautiful waterside boardwalk quays – it is surveillance brought to a new level.

Sony A55 and A580

Sony’s new models with built-in GPS are the first cameras which will record the data my dream required. The GPS is not the typical latitude-longitude only. It also records height above sea level (elevation) and the direction the camera is pointing (orientation). The camera-data information records the focus distance and point of focus, and the angle of view of the lens (focal length), the time, and the measured light level and apparent colour temperature. Maybe in the A55 the spirit level function also records horizon tilt and position.

OK, the camera I was using in the dream was more like a 5 x 4 on a tripod. But that could be just a dream – like the giant fish which leapt on to boards and brought the jetty crashing down into the water a second before I woke up…

- David Kilpatrick

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The European press launch

David Kilpatrick recorded the proceedings at Le Meridien Lav Hotel, Split, Croatia on March 11th 2010 using a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder. Shirley Kilpatrick transcribed the audio, with subsequent editing to translate verbal output to read well as text. This is a multi-page document please use the PAGE navigation at the foot of each page to continue reading. It is a very long document.

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The Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras are ultra-slim interchangeable lens models, referred to as ‘ultracompact’ or ‘compact system camera’ models by Sony. The lens flange to film distance is only 18mm, compared to 44.5mm for the Alpha system and very similar figures for all popular SLR brands.

The Leica M and screw mounts, with under 1mm difference between them, are 10mm greater than this at around 28mm. Screw mount Leica lenses can be adapted to M even though there is only 1mm difference. With 10mm difference, almost any lens ever made for any camera – even the Robot system, original Contax, maybe even the Pentax 110 SLR – can probably be adapted to fit the E-mount. In fact it will accept 16mm and 35mm (half-frame) ciné, C-mount CCTV lenses, and subminiature camera lenses.

You name it, the NEX will be able to do it. Telescopes, microscopes, endoscopes, whatever. And Alpha lenses, and MD lenses. There is even enough ROOM with over 25mm the spare to fit a true retrofocus format reduction converter – that is, a 0.66X optical unit which condenses the image from a full frame lens to fit the APS-C sensor. It is already done in the video and ciné world, and these converters have a wonderful bonus. Your 24-70mm f/2.8 SSM lens becomes, with a 0.66X reducing converter behind it, a 16-46mm f/2. That’s right – the same way a teleconverter loses you a stop or two, a format reduction converter gains you a stop.

The Alpha System celebrates its Silver Jubilee or 25th Anniversary this month – though left uncelebrated by the inheritors of the Minolta AF legacy, Sony. They have no reason to draw fresh attention to the age of the system, as in four years they have taken it the same sort of distance that Minolta took the world’s first AF system in the late 1980s.

It’s not only Alpha’s 25th birthday. This is also the 25th birthday of modern AF SLR systems – all of them!

This is a multi-page article. See the links at the bottom of the page to Continue Reading after each page.

For Photoclubalpha and the historic Minolta Club of Great Britain, the anniversary does matter. A good many of you out there have been members since the launch of the system, often using the earlier SR and X manual focus systems before that. We still have a 1985 Minolta 7000AF and it’s still working just as it did when new.

25 years before the first Minolta SLRs appeared – a folding Minolta Six of 1935

I don’t mind showing my age to make a comparison. I was 11 in 1963 when I took my first pictures with an SLR camera. My father had bought himself a Pentax S3 – and the camera it replaced was 25 years old, a pre-war Zeiss Ikon Kolibri collapsible 16-on-127 model.

When the Kolibri was made, 127 was the ‘vest pocket’ format of choice. 35mm was on the rise, but 35mm SLRs had not yet arrived. They were as much a thing of the future as digital SLRs were when the Minolta 7000AF was launched.

But within that 25 years, there was hardly a single camera system made with interchangeable lenses that did not become obsolete. Only the ‘frozen assets’ of the cold war kept some systems, like the Exakta bayonet and the Praktina, alive. New brands were launched, from the British Wrayflex and Periflex to the Italian Rectaflex and many German oddities. It was not unusual for an entire system to be come and gone within a few years.

Even in the following quarter-century, the high years of the Japanese 35mm SLR, the succession of lens mount changes was bewildering. Independent lens makers like Tamron and Sigma were forced to make systems using interchangeable mounts not just because the public wanted it. A dozen or more mounts were made for every lens and in the 42mm screw thread fit alone there were endless variants – Praktica LLC (Pentacon Electric), Olympus FTL, Pentax ES and more.

It was more or less a 25-year cycle – the SR system was announced in 1958, and really got underway by 1960. It was to be another quarter century before the AF system arrived. We are now a further 25 years on – can we expect a totally new camera system, once again, in 2010?

Minolta’s SR bayonet mount, introduced in 1958/9, actually remained basically unchanged all the way through to 2005 when the last manual focus model, the X-370S, was available. It survives even now as a mount popular in China where the Seagull range from Shanghai Optical includes Minolta fit models. That mount only ever had one major revision, to add a linkage for open aperture TTL metering. The introduction of programmed exposure and shutter priority was cleverly enabled by using the existing design of lens mechanism and improving its accuracy, while adding a simple reference lug to the ƒ-stop setting ring.

Nikon’s 1959 F-mount proved similarly easy to improve without any basic modification. Both these bayonet mounts celebrated half a century of production in 2008/9 – another landmark, which Nikon was able to celebrate but Minolta of course could not.

The press release from Sony this morning (Tuesday, January 5th) confirms the proliferation of entry-level bodies in the Sony Alpha DSLR range, and the continued emphasis on smaller cameras to suit upgraders from consumer digital cameras. While this leaves Sony in danger of being seeing as a Jack of one trade and master of none, and will not satisfy those waiting for an Alpha 700 replacement, it will no doubt increase market share and allow Sony time to create something worth investing in for later release.

My review of the Alpha 550 has caused controversy because of the blue sky noise. I might as well say that over the last week, I’ve used the 550 in a wide range of conditions – some very bad conditions included – and its failure to match ISO 100 finesse would not worry me at all. The performance at higher ISO settings is so much improved it’s worth putting up with the minimum of ISO 200, and a touch more noise than the best ISO 100 results from the Sony CCD sensors.

Even so, something was clearly happening during the period of sunnier weather used for my earlier A550 tests. I used Auto ISO initially, because I had not realised how readily the camera will select settings right up to 1600. Auto ISO has thrown up some surprises. Here’s something to consider:

Please note that although ‘process’ symbols are shown with these Adobe Bridge/ACR images, the defaults were restored and then each picture was set back to defaults. They are all shown relative to each other in density, the image preview built by ACR. There is no question of DRO or any other tonal setting interfering with the apparent exposure – DRO does not affect the .ARW file, ACR discards any DRO generated embedded preview in my setup prefs, and DRO was not being used anyway.

It has already been noted by other reviewers that the A550 has considerably more headroom without clipping, even compared to the A350 which was already a top-ranking camera for dynamic range. This is what I meant when I compared its default images to Canon with Highlight Tone Preservation switched on, or KM/Sony older models using the Hi200 setting. This can mean that the A550 is really ISO 100 at its lowest on-sensor gain setting, but the exposure system is programmed to underexpose by a stop and the post-processing (BIONZ) is set up to boost the gain.

Why would Sony do this? Perhaps they read the many posts referring to the Alpha 900 and 700 ISO settings. The on-sensor gain controls the main ISO steps, but a rather cleaner post-process gain adds the 1/3rd step intervals. Experienced Alpha 900 users set ISO 320 manually because the sensor is at its optimum at roughly ISO 160 (DxO tests bear this out). The standard ISO 200 setting can produce more noise than ISO 320 because two different digital stages are used to produce the gain.

In search of superior high ISOs, they may have realised that the early gain stage (on the chip assembly) is inferior to the later BIONZ processor, and you can indeed get better high ISO by underexposing a lower ISO setting, then processing it with clipped blacks. That’s a Nikon technique, which has served them well. It’s also a technique used by experienced DSLR owners.

Now consider the four shots above. They are all taken at ‘ISO 200′ but the camera was set to auto ISO. Other shots in the same set show ISO 250, 500 etc confirming the auto ISO was in operation. They are taken in the afternoon in Scotland, so it is fairly near to the end of the day for sunshine by 14:49hrs, around an hour away. But the two locations at 50 minutes apart, 14:00hrs and 14:49hrs, should not have the extreme variation in exposure shown here.

Just what is going on for an exposure of 1/400th at f/11 to look correct at ISO 200, with the dark sandstone buildings of Jedburgh at the end of October? 1/400th at f/11 is the ISO 200 exposure for full sunshine in midsummer (aka f/16 light). You hardly ever find f/16 light in Britain unless you are on the beach, surrounded by pale concrete, in a field of golden corn or out on a lake.

50 minutes later, exposures range from 1/60th at f/11 to 1/100th at f/11 – that is, more or less, from two to three stops more. In fact these exposures are in line with what I would expect, it’s the 1/400th at f/11 which is the odd one out. I have no evidence to suggest that my CZ 16-80mm has an aperture which fails to stop down consistently.

Now look at some sky samples:

Here is an in-camera JPEG version which shows less noise – the in-camera process is equal to using much stronger NR in raw conversion than I would normally choose for ISO 200:

Now for the same processed from raw – notice that despite the noise, it is slightly more detailed or sharper:

This is a reprocessed second version of the original noisy sky instance. Here, I have used Adobe Camera Raw 5.6r1 defaults, which include some basic sharpening and also 25 on the chroma NR scale. No exposure adjustment is made at all. This view, by the way, looks more or less due north and it is not a case of a brighter sky underexposed; also, the stone and the chimney pots look normally exposed.

This is the 1/100th at f/11 shot, processed exactly the same way. It’s interesting in that I expected to see much lower noise, but in fact it’s much the same. The sky density is similar as well. The view is slightly more towards the east. While my Alpha 380, 200, 100 and even 700 shots are capable of showing blue sky noise at ISO 100 and as much as this as 200 it’s not as obtrusive.

Finally, this is the 1/60th exposure – perhaps more what would be expected at ISO 100 in this light with f/11. Here, I have set -1 EV exposure reduction in Adobe Camera Raw to get much the same final sky tone density. The noise is lower.

Checking other images I’ve taken since, I am now suspicious about the Auto ISO function in the Alpha 550, and whether it reports the gain applied to each shot accurately. It’s hard to reconcile the same ISO 200 setting shown in EXIF with the range of exposures encountered, and the actual exposure of the raw file. Yet ISO 250 was also selected for this shot taken a few minutes before the chimney shot:

This is also included in the main report (click image to view full size on pBase). If I darken the sky as much as the other examples, I get noise similar to the 1/60th ISO 200 clip, or better.

Since making these tests, I’ve started using the Alpha 550 only on fixed ISO settings, with some misgivings as intermediate gain like ISO 250 or 320 might possibly be yielding better results. I just feel something is happening in the BIONZ stage, perhaps involving analysis of the Auto ISO images and compensation for deviations from the reported EXIF Auto ISO setting. This is just a hunch. Fixed settings seem to be equal to the worst case from Auto ISO. Here’s a textbook example, 1/125th at f/16 for a blue sky on November 3rd, facing due north, at 14:19hrs, ISO 200 fixed setting, ACR 5.6 defaults as above:

The answer seems to be to overexpose your manual ISO 200 shots by not simply one stop, but as much as two stops when shooting raw. At least if Adobe Camera Raw is used, recovery of normal tones (not burned out highlights) will fully restore the exposure from 1 or 2 stops over depending on the subject.

Here is an overexposed image, taken at 1/80th at f/10, ISO 200, in mid-day sunshine:

Below is what the sky looks like in a normally exposed image (1/250th at f/10), processed using Adobe Camera Raw defaults (including sharpening at 25/1/25/0 and NR at 0/25), looks like:

And here, finally, is what an adjusted ACR process from the overexposed image looks like with sharpening turned off, NR set to 25/50, exposure and brightness determined by the simple process of using Auto (which can be set as a default in ACR if you want to consistently make generous – over – exposures ‘to the right’):

This is much more how I expect to see a sky looking from the base ISO of a 2009 DSLR release, viewed at 100 per cent. From this stage, different types of sharpening can be applied to suit resized versions for different purposes.

Results with other raw converters, as more become available for the Alpha 550, may be finer in noise structure than ACR or may offer less scope for overexposing – ACR is well known for its ability to recover highlights. I do not intend to go much further into this with tests of converters, but I hope I have shown how the ‘true ISO’ of the A550 is difficult to pin down especially in Auto ISO mode, and how it is possible to benefit from the great high ISO performance of the camera (just use it!) and at the same time secure good low ISO results for travel and landscape shots where a clean blue sky is important.

It’s important to note that in-camera JPEGs will not necessarily show similar noise levels. If they do it’s not so easy to fix without using NR software. I prefer to shoot raw for many reasons.

So, why not be very happy with the Alpha 550 as a choice? Here are two pictures. You can view the full size Alpha image, and the Nikon D3S image resized to match 14 megapixels, by clicking on the smaller size here. Of course the Nikon image is better, though 1/250th at f/5.6 and ISO 400 is more of a step away from 1/250th at f/9 and ISO 200, and I’m not sure the light was SO different on the two occasions:

- DK

My review of the Sony Alpha 550 was supposed to appear at the end of November, allowing one week abroad in good weather with plenty of subject-matter, in Tenerife. Sadly that trip had to be cancelled, and the Nikon D3S arrived for review on the day we were meant to have travelled. So, with far too much work to do on the D3S, I’m “going to press” here with my initial thoughts based on a fairly short time using the Alpha 550.

There are 11 pages in this review, please use the Next Page navigation at the end of each page to continue reading. A sponsor link appears before the end of each page – “Get camera lenses at Shopping.com’s affordable deals.” Our thanks to Shopping.com for spotting and sponsoring this review!

This review has been updated August 2010 – see the second to last page for new Adobe Camera Raw Process 2010 results, a massive improvement with Alpha 550 files.

In an unusual move, probably designed to cut down the work of rejecting submissions which fail to make the grade, the on-line picture library Alamy has published lists of cameras (by make) which will NEVER produce a file acceptable to pass their Quality Control. It includes all the Sony Cyber-shots ever made as far as we can tell! They say: “Check your camera – do NOT submit any images from camera models featured on the list below. Camera models featured on this list do not produce files that are capable of passing Alamy’s QC standards.”

Peter Crouch cuts a striking figure on the football pitch at the best of times and when recently asked to train the UK Sony ‘Twilight Football’ team ahead of their big game on the 22nd September, the outcome was some simply stunning imagery. (Editor’s note – continue reading to see the ‘stunning imagery’… but have somewhere handy to put the hair you tear out)

I don’t have an Alpha 500 or 550 here yet, even though Photoclubalpha has been second in the Google search results for ‘Sony Alpha 550′ for some time and remains so as I write (the New York Times is first). That’s not bad for a Wordpress blog website which does NOT employ the services of the dozen or so ‘search engine optimisation’ experts who contact us each week! Hopefully we’ll have a review camera very soon, preferably the 550.

In the meantime, a few samples have been posted on various sites which show the raw conversion engine of the camera/s (not necessarily the JPEG compression stage, as always seems to be assumed) has been radically revised. Sony call this ‘enhanced BIONZ’ and I think there’s a clue to how it has been enhanced in the relationship of Sony Europe and DxO Labs, the French company which specialises in in-camera process analysis and development.