Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

I shot a sample roll of Kodak’s new Ektachrome E100GX film. It is marketed as a fine-grained and sharp film, clearly to challenge the current dominance of Fuji Velvia and Provia 100F (RDPIII), with similar specs to Provia, at least on paper.

Here are a few small 256×256 crops of 2900dpi scans I made on my Nikon Coolscan IVED scanner. I deliberately exaggerated the grain structure by applying equalization in Photoshop.

Velvia	E100GX
Provia	Provia pushed 2 stops

Keep in mind this test is highly unscientific since the crops represent different scenes with different contrast levels and colors.

I used Bluetooth for the first time today, to Hotsync my Palm Tungsten T with my laptop using a D-Link DBT-120 USB Bluetooth adapter. Pretty spiffy, and not much slower than standard USB synchronization.

Update (2003-01-30):

I have also synchronized my new SonyEricsson T68i Bluetooth-enabled cell phone with Outlook, as well as with iSync on my iMac G4. The process is painfully slow (probably due to sluggish software), but the end result is pretty cool. It seems Bluetooth is where USB was in 1995, i.e. barely functional drivers and not that reliable (my Sony phone has a tendency to unpair itself from my Tungsten T or my PC), but it has potential. You will just have to wait a couple of years until driver support migrates deep into the OS (unless you use a Mac, of course).

If you read the Photo.net Leica forum, it’s striking to see how many people are trying to sell off their Leica gear, some of them apparently to finance a digital SLR purchase. I come from the opposite direction, but an interesting phenomenon to be sure. The Leica has taken the status of a fetish among certain photo snobs, what with all the special collector editions and all, and one would think it would be immune to purely practical considerations… Or maybe some people anticipate the resale value of these fine cameras will fall as photography goes digital and are trying to realize it now.

A wacko sect called the Raëlians claimed it has successfully cloned a human being. When I was an undergraduate in Paris, I saw some posters of the then nascent sect, with such fascinating captions as “Raël – the stars’ messenger” and such amazing feats of circular reasoning as “If Raël is not a major prophet, the equal of Christ, Muhammad or Buddha, his revelation is false. That is impossible.” Poking fun at them used to provide us with hours of entertainment in our dorm (granted, we were easily amused).

This isn’t amusing any more. While these people are not homicidal maniacs like the Aum Shinrikyo sect (which launched Sarin nerve gas attacks against the Tokyo subway), they must be stopped, and a comprehensive, global ban on reproductive cloning instated by the United Nations.

Galen Rowell

Sierra Club, ISBN: 0871563673 Publisher, Buy online

Galen Rowell was a world-class mountaineer and photographer. He passed away with his wife in an airplane crash on August 11, 2002.

He was a master of color landscapes and had the knack of catching unique combinations of light in the memorable photos that can be seen in his Mountain Light Gallery. Interestingly, he eschewed the large format cameras used by Ansel Adams and used exclusively 35mm cameras from Nikon (thus thoroughly debunking the orthodoxy that 35mm cannot be used for serious landscape photography).

In this book, Rowell lays out his relation to mountains, his artistic vision and his photographic techniques, in an engaging and lively style alternating between theoretical text and more illustrative intermezzos with detailed descriptions of the story behind each image (reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. Like Ansel Adams, he was a member of the Sierra Club, but ecological preoccupations are woven subtly in the text. He shows a photo taken near a 4900 year old bristlecone pine that was felled by a botanist who couldn’t be troubled to special-order a core sampling borer from Switzerland.

The photos in the book are gorgeous, but this is no mere coffee-table book (it is too affordable to be one, for starters). All in all, I believe this book is a must-read for anyone interested in landscape photography, even if you are not into the strenuous physical style he favored.