Crazy what people will do for memorabilia, right? In this case the camera was a Leica M9—new M9 camera bodies go for around $7,000 anyway.
Seems like there isn’t a ton of overlap in the Venn diagram of Sylvester Stallone fans and potential Leica customers.
Planet Money (a great podcast about economics) recently published an episode about the “hundreds of billions of dollars of pent-up digital wealth” (quote from John Ossenmacher, who thinks you should be able to sell unwanted MP3s), ReDigi and the difficulties of reselling music bought digitally—from the iTunes Store, Amazon Music or other sources.
In the podcast, Caitlyn Kenney and Robert Smith talked about the antiquated copyright laws currently governing the resale of copyrighted material and explain the lawsuit and trial against ReDigi.
The podcast didn’t talk about one other aspect of the story, though. The idea of reselling copyrighted digital assets is fundamentally flawed at an economic level. Here is my premise:
The price of a copyrighted asset is the sum total of the cost of the usage license and the distribution cost.
There’s a big disparity between the distribution costs for physical and digital copyrighted assets. The cost of distributing a physical asset includes packaging, media, and shipping. When a consumer buys a physical copy of the new Fall Out Boy album at a store, the consumer pays for the usage license and for distribution. The usage license travels along with the physical media, so the value of that license is available to whoever possesses the CD. The packaging and media are inherently valuable because they are physical goods that were refined from natural resources. Again, the value of the packaging and the media is available to whoever possesses them. However, the portion of the price that covered the distributor’s shipping cost is used up. If the consumer decides to sell the CD at a later point, the CD’s value is equal to the original price minus the shipping costs and wear and tear on the packaging and media. In this case there is still quite a bit of value left.
The cost of distributing a digital asset includes server storage space, bandwidth to deliver the asset, and personal storage space. When a consumer buys a digital copy of the new Fall Out Boy album on the iTunes store, the consumer pays for the usage license, distribution, and for storage on a playback device. Because the consumer can effortlessly and cheaply make exact and infinite copies of the digital album, it doesn’t make sense for the usage license to travel along with any of the copies. It’s logical that the usage license should stay with the consumer who purchased the digital album—upon purchase, the value of the usage license is used up. The “physical manifestation” of the digital album exists on storage that the consumer purchased separately. The storage device is inherently valuable because it is a physical good that was refined from natural resources, but the consumer will not sell the storage device or any portion of it when selling the digital album. The portion of the price that covered the distributor’s delivery bandwidth (or shipping) cost is used up.
Let’s recap. After buying a physical CD, there is residual value in the packaging, media and usage license. After buying a digital album, there is no residual value left. I believe the same principle applies to computer games and ebooks as well—reselling copyrighted assets with no physical media doesn’t make sense. My college microeconomics professor would take one look at ReDigi and facepalm.
Marco Arment is a person who wrote about renting a Leica M9 and a 35mm lens, determined to find out what all the excitement was about, because:
Most fans describe Leica’s benefits in vague, unverifiable terms, much like a wine aficionado describing the taste of a $200 bottle of Pinot Noir.
Yes. Let’s get rid of all that arty, emotional nonsense and get down to brass tacks. Technical specifications should be the sole basis of every electronics purchase decision.
Every time I use the M9, I want to throw it out the window.
Okay then.
Still, I think there’s value in objectivity. There are talking points in the SLR/rangefinder partisan discussion, but let’s take a look at the specifications mentioned in Marco’s writeup.
It’s also just poorly suited to indoor use. The sensor is mediocre at high ISOs, especially compared to other full-frame sensors (even in 2009).
That’s the first verifiable term, save comments about price and explaining what a rangefinder is. I disagree that the sensor itself is poorly suited to indoor use (look at all the stunning photos of fleeting moments towards the bottom of this page), though the sensor’s performance certainly lags its competitors. I’ve been disappointed by the same trait, and my camera has an additional flaw where a discolored column of pixels shows up under low light, high ISO, and underexposure (visible on the right side of the third road cone from the left). Full-frame DSLRs would be able to outperform the M9 in this situation.
The closer the subject, the harder it is to frame the shot as intended. (This lens also can’t focus closer than 0.7 meters. By comparison, that Canon 35mm IS USM can focus to 0.24 meters.)
This is true, but is also a tautology. One tradeoff inherent in rangefinder cameras is that you aren’t looking directly through the lens (though the new Leica M has live view, which remedies this), so what you see in the viewfinder will never be exactly what is captured on the sensor. If the subject of your photo was closer than 0.7 meters, the viewfinder and the sensor would see different things indeed—so why design lenses to focus closer than that? Why not use that knowledge to free up one constraint in the lens design process? But, fair enough. If you need to take photos of things closer than two feet in front of you, a rangefinder is not the best tool for you.
But the M9 also has slow shutter response, a slow image processor, slow shot-to-shot time, poor battery life, and a small, low-resolution screen, even by 2009’s standards.
I can’t say I’ve noticed shutter lag on the camera (125 ms on the M9 vs. 73 ms on the 5D MKII), but the image processor is terribly slow. The shot-to-shot time is actually instant until you fill up the buffer, just like any camera, and if you’re constantly looking at the (awful, PenTile) screen the battery does drain quickly.
So what is the modern-day appeal with this old, poor-performing, too-simple brass hunk of antiquity?
Size.
The M9 is still the smallest interchangeable-lens full-frame digital camera. It’s not a lot lighter than a typical SLR (partially due to its tank-like construction), but the body takes up quite a bit less space. And then there’s the glass:
Not being able to see through the lens is worth not using internal camera space for a huge mirror to flop around inside the camera. I will pay that admittedly large premium for a body and a few choice lenses that fill only a third of a small camera bag. I will and I have, and it is worth every penny. If, in ten years, I decide that the system is no longer a good fit for my purposes, Leica bodies and glass have legendarily high resale value. The size advantage cannot be underestimated, especially when traveling.
Another specification that makes this camera inherently valuable is that there’s no autofocus.
When you’re pointing your camera at any given subject, every ray of light traveling through the glass is a product of chance. There’s an extraordinary amount of uncertainty in front of you. The camera should not be adding any additional uncertainty to the situation. A confused autofocus algorithm can be a nightmare.
Autofocus algorithms and sensors have come a long way in the past several years—a truly mediocre system on the 5D MKII gave way to really impressive systems on the 7D and 1Dx. Despite the huge improvement, I often find myself shooting in situations that choke the 7D’s autofocus system—like concerts, bars and alleys—but can be focused using a manual system easily. It’s pretty hard to compete with the human visual system.
I argue that knowledge of camera mechanics and sheer practice can increase the probability of properly manually focusing a camera to nearly 100%. If there’s enough light, stop down and set your focus range. If you’re at a concert, using a rangefinder, and a snap of the lead singer comes out fuzzy, you can make a slight focus ring adjustment and/or stop down a tiny bit to increase your chance of getting a better focused image.
If you’re using autofocus on a DSLR and the snap comes out fuzzy, you can try a great number of things:
But there’s still a non-zero (and depending on the situation, significant) probability that the autofocus system will not lock onto the intended subject or will not lock onto any subject at all. In addition to that non-zero probability, there’s the complexity of the listed actions to consider. Experience operating the camera can be really helpful, but that’s an awful lot of interface and a lot of options to consider when you’re being thrown around in a mosh pit.
You can, of course, turn off autofocus mode on any given DSLR. However, most DSLRs don’t have a proper focusing plate, and that alone can make accurate manual focus nearly impossible. Further, DSLR lenses are not always designed with the possibility of manual focus in mind and some therefore have focus rings with an extremely small amount of travel. This means that small focus ring adjustments can have a very large effect on achieved focus distance.
This discussion has led us to another important point. Because rangefinders are often so much less complex than a DSLR, it’s easier to know if you’ll be able to get what you want out of the camera. If you can trust yourself to know everything about a camera’s operation, and you can trust yourself to frame and focus the shot to your satisfaction, that’s a winning combination. An analogy would be driving a manual transmission car—a good driver knows what gear the car needs to be using in order to perform a given maneuver. However, back in the camera world, there’s no way to invisibly and instantaneously communicate on which part of the frame the camera should focus. There may never be a way.
The size, simplicity, and achievable accuracy of the rangefinder camera system are a winning combination for me, despite the price. I understand that it’s a great system for me largely because I have a good deal of time and patience to devote to learning the system, and that DSLRs can make it trivial to capture great images. However, some of the design decisions inherent in DSLRs make them a little less than optimal for a small number of photographers. In my case, focus accuracy and speed in low-light situations trump sensor performance and feature set.
So there you have it: a reasoned, technical discussion of a case where rangefinder camera systems can be worth the price that Leica charges. However, I believe the assumption that camera purchasing decisions can be based solely the technical merit of any given camera is inherently flawed. Cameras are not light bulbs.
A wise man once said:
…businesses don’t get to pick the timetable for when their preferred model takes a permanent dirt nap.
AirPlay, a software tool included with Apple’s iPads and iPhones, is widely viewed as being potentially disruptive to the cable industry, because it makes it easy for people to view a broad variety of Internet content on a television. Time Warner Cable’s leader, however, hasn’t heard of it. Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.
—Head of Time Warner Cable Is Unfamiliar With Apple’s AirPlay - NYTimes.com
The time for cable to prevent itself from being solely a data pipe has all but passed.
It’s my opinion that many industries in the US aren’t doing enough to insure themselves against the future. During the past few decades, with a few notable exceptions, it seems that corporations increasingly rely on old, already-paid-for investments for revenue and don’t make new investments. Further, they ask for protections from the government, sometimes preventing new companies from entering the market, sometimes obtaining a government-blessed business model. These defensive business practices1 have a history in the US. Our auto industry is a chronic user of these strategies, having been bailed out by the US government in different ways over the last four decades. Indeed, the best electric car on the market does not come from the [Big Three](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manufacturers)).
The cable industry has shown symptoms of this problem in the past, going so far as to fund studies sympathetic to their position. That seems to be a common practice in the US, but the problem is more than just blatant obstruction—it’s ignorance too:
You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.
—AT&T Chief Regrets Offering Unlimited Data for iPhone - NYTimes.com
Dude, duh. What were you thinking, awake at night, when Google Voice (which includes a free SMS service) launched and when the Twitter iPhone app was updated to use push notifications (effectively allowing free messaging over any data connection)? European providers have recently launched a new messaging platform with multimedia and realtime video capabilities, but even this is arguably too little too late.
It’s hard to watch this happen over and over, but it’s also heartening—such oversight and laziness allows smaller institutions to grab some pie. I fantasize, though, about a maverick politician or regulator telling a whiny executive to deal with it.
John Broder responds to Tesla’s defensive…defense of the performance of their Model S in John’s test drive.
Takeaway: If a dying phone battery consistently takes you by surprise, you probably shouldn’t drive a car with a battery.
[previously posted on November 5, 2010 at srsly.thisisreal.net]
There’s a feeling when you go to a concert that you get when the first chord of every song is played. You know what song it is because you’ve listened to every song so many times that if you needed to, you could transcribe all of them from memory. You emit a celebratory yell that simultaneously signifies that you know exactly what song they’re about to play and that you can’t believe they’re playing that song, right now, in what seems to be the perfect moment, the perfect spot in the show, and makes the perfect combination of their old innovation and their new, mature masterpieces.
This is a picture of one of my favorite bands playing a song that got me through a lot when I was younger for the first time in all the times I’ve seen them.
That doesn’t even make sense. How can a song get you through a situation? How can a song that someone else wrote make you feel like you’re not the only person that had this particular problem? The writer was probably referring to his or her cat.
But, whatever it is, there’s something about seeing the band play the song that completes its statement, that completes the idea you’ve built in your head over years of obsessing over it. It’s a bittersweet ending to a part of you that you don’t necessarily want to let go, but has been outdated since you thought you loved that one girl whose name you can’t remember.
You recognize the band for their artistry and the magnitude of what they’ve created. You wish you could accomplish only a fraction of what they have. If you could make just one thing that means half as much to someone else as what they made means to you, you’d be a success.
The performance reminds you of who you were and how you got to be who you are right now. When you’re working too much, when you’re too stressed out, when you’re not really happy about your accomplishments so far, it reminds you of your humanity. It reminds you of your aspirations and makes you ask the question: “Why am I not doing exactly what I think I want to do?”
Back in August of 2010 I had a website design idea. I worked on the various parts of it but I never wrote much in that booklet and my shallow web programming skills prevented me from understanding what exactly I needed to do.
Almost two and a half years later, I’ve finally cobbled it together.
The seeds of the idea were planted when I saw cbowns.com (and if you follow the chain, emerick.org)—how nice is it to be able to point people to all the things you do on the internet? I promptly stole the idea and did something similar with my site. Then, inspired by what I learned about HTML5 (and later encouraged by what Jim Ray said about svgweb), I thought it would be cool to show how much activity occurred recently on any given site using a pie chart.
I know.
This would make it easy, for example, for my family to see if I’ve uploaded the photos from that recent vacation (I haven’t), because that would make the flickr slice of the chart would get larger. Additionally, it reminds me that I haven’t uploaded anything to Vimeo recently, and that I should write more on my blog.
Right now, there’s a php script (configured to run only once daily) that will check the RSS/XML feeds of the various places I live on the tubes (except Twitter, lol). It parses the feeds (using Magpie RSS and an XML parser I lifted from the comments of a php doc page), gathers relevant information, and stores the information for quick retrieval. When the page is loaded, simple JavaScript code reads data in a hidden table and then instructs Raphael.js to draw a pie chart. When I say “cobbled”, I mean “cobbled”.
It feels great to finally get this out of my brain. Adding to my excitement, perhaps foolishly, is that I haven’t seen anything like this. It seems new. It’s not perfect and there are things I’d like to change and add, but this is a start. Done is the engine of more, right?
Ideas are a dime a dozen, and opinions are as cheap as an insufficiently specific web search.
So what’s the point of this endeavor?
I already have a tumblr, two photo blogs, etc., etc. Well, to me, it seems like none of those places are a good fit for technical ideas, political opinions, or process documentation. It’ll be nice to have a place to be silly, a place to prove I’m a human and prove that I live every day and a place to geek out without diluting any of them.
I’m a critical person, (though maybe not hypercritical), so it’s hard for me to complete things that I write and put them up for other people to see. I’m also paranoid people will think what I say is dumb, but I have to remember that this is the Internet and everybody gets mocked. I’m sure I’ll say dumb things, but it’ll be nice to know they’re dumb instead of assuming. Any time I feel self-conscious or inadequate I’ll remind myself of the tens of thousands of abysmal photos that don’t even exist in my archive because they were so horrible.
It’s easy, and seemingly cheap to fail at photography, and thank goodness for that. Now it’s time to start failing bigger.
2012 felt like that unexpected chord change, that cadence in the chorus, where the song gets darker—not sadder, not angstier, but darker—before returning to the weird, melancholic juxtaposition of optimistic vocal melodies and brutally honest but somehow sage lyrics.
I have a lot of trouble expressing myself to others; I have trouble talking to others about my problems. I have trouble accomplishing goals I set for myself; I have trouble being honest about what experience and resources were available when even accomplishing those goals falls short.
No matter how certain I am that I’m doing the right thing, for some “right things”, I’ll always wish that wasn’t the right thing. No matter how much I wish those weren’t the right things, I don’t have the distance or context necessary to know for sure.
There are things that I wish would unhappen, but I know they won’t. There are things that I wish I had a chance to do over, but without the experience of doing them, I’d always have that wish. There are things I wish I hadn’t waited until this point in my life to do, but every second I spent wishing was a second I put off doing other things I wish I had accomplished by now.
No matter how arbitrary the definition, a unit of time has passed and, upon reflection, I’m not happy with the state of things.
Fuckin’ get to work, bro.
But I shouldn’t take myself too seriously, so that would you think, “That guy needs to knock it down a few notches,” if you saw me walking down the street. I should take myself just seriously enough so that you would think, “That dude is up to something.”
I’ve always wanted to be up to something.
This realization has been a long time in the making, but its seed was planted when I was taking the photo shown below—I was standing there, composing and adjusting camera settings through the viewfinder, and waiting for cars to drive out of the frame when I noticed that there weren’t any people in my shot. A few people saw my conspicuous composition process and avoided the direction that my rain-wetted UV filter was pointing. I realized that there is no reason for complete strangers to take my photography—a phrase I am still not comfortable with—more seriously than I do, no matter how many people are better than me, have nicer equipment than me, or have actually gotten paid for their work.
I’ve had delusions of grandeur my entire life. My aspirations have always been to become significant, in a significant manner. Now it’s time to stop telling myself, “You can’t do that. You’re not qualified. You’ll never be the best at anything,” not because I am qualified, and not because I am necessarily capable of becoming the best.
I have told people on many occasions that they could do anything they put their mind to, because based on personal experience, I firmly believe that. During my time on this planet, I went from zero musical ability to all but replacing the drummer at church in around a year. In three years, I played for the jazz band at my high school, and in five I played snare in a collegiate marching band. By year 8 I had gone on tour with a punk band. I went from earning a high school diploma to earning a master’s degree in engineering in five years. By age twenty-three, I owned a home. A year after starting my big boy job, I had designed from scratch, conducted, and documented an experiment, and then travelled internationally to present it. Five months after purchasing my first DSLR, I took photos at a concert put on by one of my all-time favorite bands, and was honored that the band selected two of my photos for use in the album art of a subsequent release. I took semi-unique self-portraits each day for an entire year. Now, finishing year four at my job, I have been lead author on two publications, second author on four, and am attempting to move forward with a promotion. Historically, I’ve put my mind to things that ended up getting done.
However, as a child, I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I would have completed all of that by this point in my life. I imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would have accomplished much more.
Indeed, accomplishment measurement by comparison inevitably results in perceived failure. My best friend was always better at drumming than me, by leaps and bounds. He got all the hard, desirable songs in jazz band (not only because he deserved them, but also because I wasn’t capable of playing them), and got a good scholarship at a school known for its yearly jazz festival. Many of my high school friends got perfect scores on their ACTs, and continued on to MIT, Harvard, and many other Ivy League schools. One friend is researching quantum computing, and several have gone on to medical and law school. Whenever I take my camera out in public, I constantly hear about a nebulous acquaintance who shoots for National Geographic, and my flickr stream is full of cameruosos. My boss is probably the most prolific researcher where I work, and I’m really just riding his coattails. I could be doing so much better.
If looking solely at that list of accomplishments, it seems kind of impressive. However, if focusing on those who are accomplishing more and doing better, it’s not hard to become jaded by context. This isn’t to say that there’s no value in perspective or that one should in any way inhibit access to inspiration. I only mean to say that, as a friend once pointed out, in a world of billions of people and instantaneous, global publication, being the best at any one thing or any number of things is not always a healthy expectation.
That said, it’s time for me to put that belief—that I can do whatever I put my mind to—to use in my present and future, rather than my past. There’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same. Seriously. Just make sure your metrics of accomplishment aren’t bullshit, like mine were for so many years.
Nothing is keeping you from slamming your front door after walking back from the bus ride home where your sizzling brain blocked out all the smells, sounds, and extraneous, harmful thoughts floating around in that steel hot dog of people and pounding out 1047 words that make you feel better about your existential funk. If you wanted to take out your old point and shoot out and put colored saran wrap over the lens, dress up in wigs, leg warmers, and mascara, and recreate the decade where your biggest problem was a mound of ripped leotards—inevitable casualties from long nights of partying—that is your prerogative. No one will know about you finding a piece of discarded cardboard and using a sharpie to make a drawing of the doodie your cute widdle doggiest of dogs just made in the open case of your “gaming rig” until you put it on a public bench, with a post-it note that says, “it’s yours, take it!”, and hide behind a bush to wait for some delighted fool to pick it up and take it to hang up on his dorm room wall.
There is literally nothing stopping you (or me!) from accomplishing something you can be perfectly happy with. You just have to give yourself permission to be okay with progress instead of perfection.
p. 6 / 6
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