Paul Lester Photo

OK. I’m ready to face it. The iPad is a very limited device. It’s great for listening to music, browsing the Internet, and checking e-mail. It falls short in some areas … such as the way that I would like to use it, as a traveling companion onto which I would like to load photos and post blog entries.

My friend Robert suggested that I try Photoshop Express for iPad from Adobe. Fair enough. I downloaded it from the iTunes App Store. Total cost: $0.00. It’s a free application. You’ll have to pay an additional $3.99, I think to get the noise reduction module.

When I first downloaded it, I edited some simple pictures that I had on the iPad that I had taken with my iPhone. I was happy that I was able to adjust exposure, crop, color saturation, brightness, tint, change to B&W, sharpen, etc. It had quite a few features for a free app. I was excited. I decided to risk $30 and buy the iPad Camera Connection Kit. My dongles came today.

Eagerly, I grabbed up the M9, went outside and took a few pictures. I remembered having read that the iPad was able to read RAW files as well as JPG. I wondered if it would read DNG. After taking a few shots of clouds, I came back in, removed the card from the camera, placed the dongle into the iPad and lo and behold, it read the card. No muss. No fuss.

I opened the PS Express application, clicked on the import album and attempted to open one of my DNG files. I was greeted by a dialog saying:

The photo is too large to be opened.

Hmmmm. OK. I’ll go back out and shoot with JPG. I’ve shot with JPG before and I ain’t scared of it! I switched to JPG Fine, went back out, took some more photos. Repeat.

The photo is too large to be opened.

Hmmmm. I don’t like this, but I’m going to try JPB Basic (I never shoot this as there is a remarkable difference between this and RAW, but not with fine.). Clouds, here I come. Repeat

The photo is too large to be opened.

Can anyone see a pattern here? WTF? This is the worst image that I can get out of this camera. Let’s have a look-see and see what sizes they are on the hard drive.

DNG (Compressed) 6.8 MB – 5212 x 3468
JPG (Fine) 4.5 MB – 5216 x 3472
JPG (Basic) 2.8 MB – 5216 x 3472

Now, the compressed size is not the ‘real’ size when it comes into memory, so lets just look at megapixels: JPG = 18 MP, DNG = 18 MP. Sure, the JPGs will come out a little less because of compression. So, when these are expanded into memory, they are certainly almost full size, or about 18 MB. There’s probably a way to find out, but for the purpose of this, I didn’t need to know the exact size, truthfully.
A quote that I found on another Adobe forum that explains the problem:

JPEGs may only start out being a few megabytes, but when they are decompressed and converted to a bitmap for display, their size increases dramatically. A 3456×2304 pixel image that’s 4.5 MB as a JPEG is 10 MB as a RAW file type, and becomes almost 23 MB as a bitmap. .

Well. That told me one thing, an important thing: This would not work with the M9. The files, even at their crappiest, are too large. Just for fun, I decided to see if the S90 files would fit. I imported a RAW + JPG Fine and it worked. The major difference here is that the size of the Canon’s photos are 10 MP, about 55% of the size of the M9 files, 3648 x 2736 (9.98M). Now, those pictures of clouds had turned into thunderclouds!

Off I went to Google to see if anyone else had had this problem. Sure enough, people shooting a Canon G10 had similar issues. Sigh. I found this thread on Adobe’s forum. Long story short … it’s not going to work with the M9 or the D300. The Canon S90 would be just fine. OK. Back to the drawing board.

I’m pretty sure that I’m asking too much from the iPad.

I was pretty excited to finish the first roll shot with the rental lens. Sure, there were not any award winning shots on the roll, nor even any good ones for that matter. I was just out snapping away, happily, shooting at f/1.1.

After I developed the film, using my normal process, I let the negatives dry, cut them up, then scanned. Unfortunately, there was a lot of ‘stuff’ on the film. I removed the negatives, gave them a good bath with some film cleaning solution that I have and … nope, still there. What went wrong in the process?

Well, the topic of this post is “Points of failure”. It could have happened anywhere. There could have been something on the film from the beginning (doubtful), something on the felt that scratched the film as it existed the canister, dust in the camera, particles in any of the three solutions (developer, stop bath, fixer), lots of dust where I let them dry, anywhere. Mind you, I’ve never seen this issue before, so I don’t know where to start to fix it.

My first thought was that the fixer was exhausted, but I’ve seen that before. The negatives just end up looking cloudy, but that wasn’t an issue. They looked very clear and clean. I posted a photo on APUG and one of the users answered right away and said that he thought that it was particles on one my solutions. I wondered about the length of the ‘particles’, but then thought that the length could have been extended by my squeegee dragging across the emulsion.

I didn’t have a loupe or a magnifying glass so I couldn’t actually see the particles in the emulsion, but I will have a look when after I purchase one this afternoon. I’m curious. I have mixed a new batch of fixer and will use developer from the new bottle that I have. It’s all one-shot anyway, so that should not be an issue.

Well, no relationship is perfect. Film certainly has its points of failure, probably a few more than digital, but no reason to stop using it. It just makes me a better detective. I’m sure that my next roll will be back to normal, though, if it is, I will have no idea what change made it work, but I won’t really care … as long as it works.

That said, I did get some shots that I liked, save for all the crud, from the Voigtlander. This one of Hobbs was shot at f/1.1 at about 1/30 of second. It was pretty dim in the room.