An ordinary life in an extra-ordinary place
Life
General ramblings
You could go to a salon to get your hair done; or you could save a load of cash by having your friend attend to your needs out on the street, while other friends eat snacks and provide criticism.
Ladies like this spend their day carrying around kilos of ingredients, and will spend several minutes concocting a snack to order, for just a few baht. Respect.
This time of year sees a load of activities in the Pattaya area. Last weekend was the ridiculous but amusing bed race which I did not get to photograph due to horse commitments. Here’s the event from two years ago if you want a reminder. Next weekend sees the Burapha Bikes, and during the week there is apparently some dragon boat racing although nobody seems to know anything about it apart from a poster. Then there is tennis and LPGA golf and no doubt other things I have yet to find out about. But this weekend there is the Bang Saen Speed Festival.
Bang Saen is a seaside town to the north of here and every year they close off the roads and hold four days of motor racing; so well done them.
I made the trip down there this morning, partially because my mother-in-law is visiting, but also because ace windsurfer and all-round nice guy Dean was driving in a four hour race.
The track is a street circuit very like Monaco, with no run-off areas to fall into if you screw up. But unlike Monaco, there was no glamour. Or so I thought until I walked into the pit area:
Very impressive chassis (on that Toyota).
I took a few more pit shots…
I decided I liked it in the pits and would probably hang around there for the next couple of hours taking similar racing themed shots. Of course, I was not meant to be there, but my long lens and amusing line in T-shirts has got me into similar locations before with no problems.
There was a tap on my shoulder. It was a man with a badge.
You are not meant to be here.
Ah, yes, well, I am a close, some would say intimate, friend of the driver of car number 37.
You are not meant to be here. You don’t have a badge.
It’s with my intimate friend.
And you are wearing flip-flops, not allowed in the pit area.
I started to tell him that the Swiss institute of testing the impact of cars driving over feet had concluded that his sneakers were no more effective than my flip-flops when it came to toe protection; but he would have none of it and I was thrown out. Damn, no more photos of models with little clothing cars parked in the pits.
The efficiency continued round the track where the best vantage points to take photos were marked “media only”, and I didn’t have a media badge; and when I tried to get in they threw me out. So I had to limit myself to little holes in the fencing, or sometimes shooting right through the fencing, like here:
Not too bad, given this is what I was shooting through:
My lens was too long, the viewpoints were minimal, and it was hot; but here are a few shots:
A four hour race requires driver changes, this is Dean about to climb aboard:
The drivers are very hot and sweaty after their stint, and the last thing you would want to see is a driver peeling off those damp overalls…
The Speed Festival lasts for two more days and there are worse things to do than eat seafood next to the sea whilst racing cars blast past a few metres away. Just don’t wear flip-flops if you want to take shots like this:
An urgent SMS from she who must be obeyed. “Is someone who talks over something (like a football match) called a voice over person or a commentator?”
I send the only response possible: “Someone who talks over something is known as a wife; but I think the word you are looking for is “commentator”.
No response. I can expect a verbal kicking later.
Panasonic GX1
The sea had a sunset reflection and I liked the silhouettes of the equipment on the bigger boat. Pointed the camera and then the fisherman and his wife paddled into shot for a fortuitous outcome.
My last job before retirement was something of a challenge. For reasons I will never understand, it had been decided to sell the company where I had spent more than four happy year years. For other reasons, which I will also never understand, I was asked to manage the transition process to the new owner.
Fairly obviously, a key component of the task was communication. Before the sale was announced, we had drawn up a detailed plan as to how we would communicate with everyone affected by the sale. On the day the sale was announced, all the staff were gathered together at our two locations and given a briefing. We told them what we knew, we told them what we didn’t yet know, we gave them names of people to talk to, and we undertook to keep on communicating with them throughout the process, and we did. We sent a letter to all our suppliers and contractors and government contacts; and of course there was the usual press briefing. Over the next couple of months we kept up this communication barrage and it was fundamental to what I like to think was a smooth transition. And of course, once I had finished the job, I was made redundant. Win!
Why am I telling you this trivia? Well, I was browsing a local forum last week and read that HSBC had announced that they were pulling out of Thailand. This could not be true. I have banked with HSBC for many years and have accounts in the UK as well as Thailand, I am a “Premier” customer, and surely HSBC would have informed me if they were about to pull the plug on my account.
So I wrote to my “relationship manager” in Hong Kong. He happily confirmed it was true and sent me the press release which helpfully contained media and investor contact numbers; but not a hint of any support for the HSBC Thailand customers who are about to be dumped. I would like to say that he apologised for not having prevoiously communicated this information to me personally, but he didn’t.
HSBC have now got off their lazy backside and put an announcement on their Thailand website. But have they made any direct communications with their customers? No, they haven’t.
Well, fuck you HSBC. Yesterday I opened an account with Bangkok Bank and I will use them in future for my banking in Thailand. I shall close my accounts in the UK and place my funds elsewhere. Not that you will care. Wankers.
Gentle reader,
Those of you who are regular visitors to this organ will no doubt have initially welcomed the increase in posts this month, only to find that the majority of them were concerned with camera tech, a subject in which you probably have no interest. How disappointing for you. Probably of little comfort for you to know that January marks a new high in visitor numbers to Pattaya Days, mainly due to a link to my GX1 review from the DPreview site which has a zillion visitors per second.
Anyway, I have got all this gear stuff off my chest now and I can assure you that there will none of that nonsense in February (apart from on the 8th, you have been warned). Instead, we will revert to the usual petty whining and trivial chatter for which this site has rightly not become famous. Of course there will also be photos; and some of them may include creatures with four legs. And there will be grammatical errors, because otherwise genuinej became (sic) restless.
Thank you for your patience, normal service is about to be restored.
*completely trivial
Some time ago I wrote a review of the Fuji X100. To save you the trouble, my conclusion was: “as a carry everywhere camera which produces beautiful photos even when the light is low, which is discrete and non-threatening on the street and is a pleasure to hold and operate (usually), then it is hard to beat”.
More recently I wrote a review of the Panasonic GX1.To save you the trouble, my conclusion was: “I think the GX1 is the best compact system camera on the market right now”.
It would appear that I am an overly effusive in my praise. Cut the bullshit Spike, which one of these cameras is best?
I freely admit that I bought the X100 based not on any need, but because it looked beautiful and took beautiful photos. It was a slower than my GF1, the interface was crap and macro was a non-starter. But the viewfinder was spectacular and the images that popped out of it were so much cleaner than the GF1; especially at higher ISOs.
If you are not in a rush, The X100 will be a willing companion and reward you with some lovely photographs. And I have enjoyed it in that mode, although I have at times been tempted to throw it against a wall in frustration thanks to its shitty interface.
And now there is a GX1 in my life and the failings of the X100 are amplified. The X100 is a slow to focus, especially in low light. The GF1 was faster, the GX1 is faster still. I was taking some social event photos at the weekend. I have been using the X100 because of the quality of the output, the downside of this is having to ask your subjects to talk amongst themselves while you try and persuade the damn thing to lock focus. This weekend, in frustration, I pulled out the GX1. Instant focus lock, even in the semi-darkness. Refreshing.
The interface of the X100 was designed by a committee; on crack. A charming idiosyncrasy becomes wearing over time. The GF1 was better, the GX1 is way better, with tactile buttons, touch screen, quick menus and four programmable function keys. The knurled knobs on the X100 are all very well; but if the rest of the controls are buried in menus you can’t reach because the button is too small for your finger….
Ah, but the viewfinder. Well indeed, the X100 hybrid viewfinder is a thing of joy and the GF1 viewfinder is the opposite of a thing of joy. But the GX1 viewfinder is a much improved beast, although the vote would still go to the X100 on that one. Oh, and it also wins on the silent shutter issue; given that it has one and the GX1 doesn’t.
Lenses? The X100 has one and it is very good. The GX1 of course has access to an entire world of lens-based goodness, so it is not a fair comparison; but worth noting in passing that the X100 gives you a camera and the GX1 gives you a system.
But, but, what about the images I hear you not asking? The X100 stood clearly above the GF1 on that one. Lovely smooth images with good colours straight out of the camera. Similar could come out of the GF1, but you had to work on them; and they never had that Fuji look.
So how does the GX1 stack up? Let’s have straightforward daylight shot, a medium where the Fuji shines:
Fuji X100
Panasonic GX1 with Panasonic 20mm lens
Both are clean with no base ISO noise. The Fuji’s colours are a touch more vibrant out of the camera and overall I prefer the look of the Fuji image; but enough to justify having the camera…?
Moving indoors and let’s take an ISO 1600 shot. Against the GF1, the X100 was a clear winner, but how will it do against the GX1?
Fuji X100
Panasonic GX1 with Panasonic 20mm lens
Both have retained colour well, we will need to look closer to check the noise:
Fuji X100
Panasonic GX1 with Panasonic 20mm lens
The Fuji still wins, with noticeably less noise. But the Panasonic is not far behind and bit of noise reduction in Lightroom could clean up both of them.
The much improved image quality of the GX1 has narrowed the gap to the X100, but the X100 still has a slight edge.
So, to summarise:
In the blue corner we have the X100. A thing of beauty which has slightly better images, a silent shutter, an hybrid viewfinder and some shiny knobs to twiddle. On the downside there is the sluggish focus, the wanky interface and the hopeless macro.
And in the red corner we have the GX1. A thing of less obvious beauty with almost comparable images and a good viewfinder which can handle any lens. Fantastic focusing, slick, customisable interface and support for manual/macro focusing. On the downside there is….nothing major I can think of.
In conclusion, the GX1 is a clear winner and my X100 is going on eBay next week.
The Canon 1D is a pretty amazing piece of machinery. Consider the shot below (and yes, I know I promised no more polo; sorry):
The polo pony is heading towards your intrepid photographer at considerable speed. I point the camera at it and half press the shutter. The camera immediately locks focus, and it also starts a process in one of its many onboard computers to calculate where the horse will be if and when I want to take a photo. It’s called predictive focusing and it is needed because:
If I press the shutter to take a shot, there is a very small delay while the lens is stopped down, the mirror is lifted and the shutter is opened. During that delay time, the horse will have moved closer to me and if the focus is based upon the position of the horse when I pressed the shutter, then the shot will be slightly out of focus. So instead the camera works out how fast the horse is coming towards me, the direction of travel, whether or not is accelerating or decelerating, and, after allowing for the delay that will occur before the shot is taken; predicts where the horse will be at the time the image is captured.
I find that rather mind-boggling; but it gets even more technically impressive if I keep my finger on the button.
To take the first shot, it had to take a meter reading for the exposure, lift the mirror to an upright position, shut down the aperture of the lens to the F stop required, move the glass in the lens to the predicted focus position, and then open the shutter for the appropriate length of time to capture the image. Then close the shutter, open up the lens aperture and drop the mirror. Job done; but if I still have my finger on the shutter it will immediately do all that again (including recalculating the focus and aperture), and it will do that for up to ten shots every second. Quite extraordinary. And quite necessary; the shot above was one of seven in a sequence, the rest are boring. Without ten frames a second, I may have missed this moment.
Of course, to make all this work you also need a lens with a good wide aperture and a focusing mechanism which will work in speedy unison with the messages coming out from the camera body; a 300mm F2.8 perhaps.
Then all the photographer has to do is point the camera in the right direction, anticipate,and be ready to pump the shutter when the time comes; and out will pop photos like the above. Oh, and you need about $10,000 to buy the camera and lens combination.
A little on the pricey side, is there not a cheaper solution, a Panasonic GX1 perhaps? Let’s find out.
First thing to note is that DSLRs like the 1D use something called Phase Detection to obtain focus and cameras such as the GX1 use something called Contrast Detection. Traditionally, Contrast Detection has been considered inferior because, unlike Phase Detection, when it is out of focus it doesn’t know whether it is front or back focused. So it moves the lens one way and checks. Oops, wrong way, and it goes in the other direction in a series of iterative staggers until focus is obtained. This made it much slower than the DSLR solution. But progress, particularly by Panasonic and Olympus, means that the likes of the GX1 can focus on a static object as quickly as, and often quicker than, a DSLR. Once obtained, Contrast Detection focus tends to be more accurate and is not plagued by the calibration issues that many DSLR/lens combinations suffer from (been there, been frustrated by that).
In practice I can’t differentiate between the 1D and the GX1 in terms of focus acquisition time on a static subject, they are both almost instantaneous.
But what if your subject is moving?
Prowling Walking Street at night, I had already established that focus tracking on the GX1, even in the near dark, works really well:
Next step was to try something a little faster; motorbikes on Pratumnak Hill:
Not in the same league as the “got focus in a nanosecond and will never let go, not ever, not even if you paid me” 1D, the GX1 nevertheless found focus reasonably quickly, locked onto the subject for several seconds (although it sometimes lost interest and wandered off), and then delivered a sharp shot when required. Certainly acceptable and much better than my previous failed attempts with the GF1.
And so to the big one, polo. To be fair to the GX1, I could only sneak shots when the pack was doing something unexciting at the far end of the field, and I had to take every shot with approximately ten kilos of Canon swinging from my neck. But I did manage to grab a few, e.g.:
Panasonic GX1 with 100-300mm lens at 300mm (effective 600mm)
Grabbing focus was a bit of a chore, especially if trying to pan a sideways shot, and maintaining focus while waiting to take a shot was hit and miss. When I did take a shot I could usually only get one before the focus gave up; although it occasionally staggered through the three per second it was meant to be taking.
What to conclude from all this? The GX1 is a stunningly fast camera when taking static subjects and does a good job of tracking slow to medium speed objects. If you wanted some shots of a high-speed event, and were not weighed down, literally and contractually, to having to concentrate on gathering shots with another camera; then I am sure it could give you enough keepers to serve as a record of your attendance, whilst simultaneously annoying the crap out of you when you missed certain shots.
If you really need/want to nail endless perfect images at sporting events, then you are going to have to pony (sic) up for a monster DSLR and associated fast lens. If you are just an occasional sports shooter, then I reckon the GX1 will give you enough pleasing images to satisfy you without having to drain your energy reserves and your bank balance.
Recent Comments