Riffing in the key of Ricoh

Gregory Simpson explains how he found himself to buy a Ricoh GRX.

And, truth be told, when Ricoh released the GXR in late 2009, my impression was one of disinterest. Although I found the idea intriguing (a user replaceable sensor), I didn’t much care for the execution — I simply had no need for any of the camera’s available lens modules.

I you read the other writings from Gregory, you’ll realise he is not a big fan of digital. Yes it is a tool, but the trend of treating digital cameras like consumer electronic let him (and other photographer) disappointed. But…

In actuality, my interest wasn’t fully aroused until a second year passed and Ricoh released yet another new module for the GXR — one with a new sensor designed specifically to take advantage of M-mount lenses.

Read the rest.

A strange copyright case

DPReview has a report of a strange copyright case where a picture has been found infringing on another picture because they have a red bus on a monochrome background of the London Big Ben and Parliament. Not the same vantage point nor even the same bus. The bigger problem is that the court found it infringing. Read it and now worry. A very unfortunate precedent.

A few thoughts on time stamps

George Jardine (a Lightroom export) wrote A Few Thoughts on Time Stamps, how he manages time stamps and deal with timezones.

It is a personal thing, and my personal choice is using UTC in the camera and timezone in the library to have the local time (local to the location of the picture). This raise a problem in Ligthroom, but it works in Aperture. And it matches with geo tagging using GPS traces.

Kodak filing for bankruptcy

Kodak just filed for bankruptcy in the US. This was almost expected as business has been declining over the years, being unable to make a come back from the decline of film.

The film division, still profitable after a reduction of costs, simplification of the product line like abandoning Kodachrome development isn’t big enough to sustain the rest. After deciding in November 2011 to sell their image sensor division to an equity firm, it sounded obvious that Kodak management didn’t know where to go.

Now several concerns:

First, what will happen to the film division? I’m sure that this is part of what they will try to offload for cheap. It is not growing anymore, quite the opposite, but they still have good film products and it would be a great loss to lose them.

Second, their patent pool is like a nuclear warhead that they are gonna sell to the highest bidder who will use it for patent warfare. Kodak has been known to litigate in the past to try to bring in some cash, unsuccessfully.

We’ll see how the reorganization goes.