• Nikon launches an 800mm f/5.6 which is becoming the biggest product of its catalog.
• Canon is still testing the all-new, all-beautiful 200-400mm f/4 (with integrated 1.4x f)
• Sony should renew its 70-400mm with an evolution whose content is still quite unclear.

These lenses will certainly be nearly impossible to purchase without winning the Lottery or holding a bank up (but from what I hear about their financial situation, even this may not be a viable option) but they may be attracting the attention of a few pro photogs and triggering some dreams from sports and wildlife photographers.

It’s now time to look back at the year behind us and try and see what is coming in 2012.

2011

Two features were really striking in 2011:

1. Natural disasters: The earthquake in Japan and the floods in Thailand have been claiming lives and hitting hard on the photography industry.
2. Sony had a glowing track of new products.

The Spring 2011 earthquake in Japan was right in front of major photo industries and we all remember that the consequences have been devastating for both the Japanese people and an industry whose main centers were very near the epicenter. Nikon was certainly among the first victims, but nearly all other companies stumbled.

As if that was not enough, Thailand experienced heavy floods that are just now beginning to really recede. Again, Nikon was a very visible victim.

The employees of all these companies fought for both their security and the well-being of their companies. Some of them even succeeded in avoiding some of the most visible impacts. For example, nearly no sales were lost during the Christmas season, but this came from hard work more than actual luck.

Despite these tough conditions, Sony has made impressive announcements both in the DSLR camera and hybrid camera markets. You may think what you want of the qualities of the new semi-transparent mirrors for the Alpha SLR series and of the APS-C hybrid NEX cameras with inter-changeable lenses, they both brought new features, new ideas and even new ways to look at a digital camera that all other photo companies now need to take into account.

The Sony Alpha 77 (and the Alpha 65) appeared as a major step forward and the NEX-7 and NEX-5n have been such a commercial success that Sony is currently reviewing their strategy to cash quickly on these.

Add to these that some actors left or nearly left the field (Kodak selling the last parts of the photography business, Olympus fighting for its life after the surprising financial decisions of its former management) and we have a pretty unusual year on our hands.

2012

So, what will a new year bring to the photographers? We all know that reading the future is an exercise that is both humbling and funny when you look back at last year’s predictions. But, there are a few elements that can already be plotted and should not be too far from the mark.

• Sony will extend quickly the lens list for the NEX family. Probably adding new cameras in the second half of 2012.
• Sony will produce two (maybe three) new Full Frame SLR cameras to replace the old Alpha 900. Resolution may be enormous since they will probably apply the technology from the existing 24-MP APS-C sensor, leading to something like a 33-MP sensor (or more if their engineers have a bit of fun with silicon wafers).
• Nikon, which has seen all its plans delayed by Mother Nature, will launch first a D4 (11 fps, 16 MP, up to ISO 102400 or ISO 204800) and a D800 (33 MP or 36 MP, up to ISO 25600, at 4 fps), then could well launch a replacement to the D7000 and D300s (either a D7100 with heavy body or D400).
• Nikon could also start at least a new entry-level camera around the end of 2012.
• Canon is going to replace the EOS 5D MkII (no surprise) but they could be preparing radically new products for entry-level photo markets.
• Pentax needs to find new directions now that it is in the hands of Ricoh. 2012 should be interesting: Either Ricoh will merely scrap the SLR business or they will launch a new family of cameras in 2012.
• Olympus cannot launch anything significant before they -really- find closure to their financial woes. It has already been so long that the chances of survival are probably under 50% now even if a buyer appears.
• Samsung is probably no longer trying to fight in the SLR market, but will keep adding to their hybrid line of digital cameras. They could become a major actor, annoying even Sony here.
• Panasonic will have a hard time finding ways renewing the 4/3 and µ-4/3 formats.
• Leica is in another world altogether.
• Sigma is already dead for the SLR, but they don’t know it yet.

All in all, I believe that the SLR market is condensing on a relatively small number of brands, while the hybrid market seems here to stay with even less players.

Since most companies want to move the awful year of 2011 back in the nightmare scene, expect some serious technology push, probably for the easy targets: more pixels, more sensitivity, more gadgets. The chances of seeing a real technology revolution seem small.

Film or cards; Kodak or Lexar; Years apart, but the same attention to production quality.

What is an EVF?

EVF = Electronic View Finder.

Be ready to see this term used more and more, even for SLR cameras. Many a compact point-and-shoot photo camera already is equipped with an EVF, but it is most common in video cameras (and it has been for many years already). In the viewfinder, instead of looking at an image coming from a more or less complex optical system, your eye is pointed at a small LCD screen (or TFT, or OLED or whatever similar technology) reproducing the picture recorded by the CMOS imaging sensor of the camera.

After all, this is only what we already know well as the LiveView mode on the back LCD of nearly all the compact photo cameras (and many SLR too). But as a small picture in the viewfinder.

An LCD display + a viewing lens = an EVF.

In some case, you could add a small mirror for space reasons, but this is a minor variation to the original tune.

EVF and Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras

SLR viewfinder

A Single Lens Reflex (SLR) photo camera is organized around a very mature technology in which a mirror reflects the image through an eyepiece via a pentaprism (or a penta-mirror) as in the drawing on the left.

Of course, as the film (film plane and focal plane shutter) is hidden by the mirror, this one must be drawn up to take the snapshot.

All this is greatly simplified when there is an electronic viewfinder.

Advantages and drawbacks

Advantages et gains from an electronic viewfinder

The first positive side is mechanical and optical: If you remove the mirror and the pentaprism, the architecture of the camera will be greatly streamlined, lightened and its manufacturing cost will go down. For three different reasons (at least):

• reduction of the number of parts
• reduction of the assembly complexity (or of the amount of human work needed)
• increased ease of calibration (alignment) of the optical parts (an LCD and an eyepiece, rather than a whole bunch of parts)

Even better, the disappearance of a huge articulated and mobile mechanical system brings several positive effects:

• increase of the continuous shooting speed/cadence (there’s so much less hardware to move around for a photo)
• reduction of shutter noise (in a traditional SLR camera, most of the noise actually comes from the mirror up-swing and the shutter operation; It’s worth removing one of them)
• a lighter mechanical structure through reduction of the quantity of parts and since the enclosure is lighter because it has less stress to sustain in all these shocks and moves

Also, the electronic viewfinder exactly reproduces what the sensor sees. A 100% optical coverage on a viewfinder of fully optical design has always been reserved to the most expensive SLR cameras. But when you get an EVF, 100% coverage is totally natural and effortless. Luxury comes to you in the clothes (and price) of entry level.

Then, having an LCD display brings the additional possibility of adding all the data you can think of. Many brands already experimented with this and brought us some Electronic Viewfinders with features like:

• Histogram
• Artificial Horizon
• Zoom on a part of the image
• Telltales and technical displays (aperture, speed, ISO, etc.)
• Active AF zones (including face detection)

Fuji	Fuji X100
Sony Alpha SLT-A77

As a matter of fact, there is no other limit than what a computer screen can display: Data, image, etc. It’s only a choice from the designer.

And it’s not even the end of it. The EVF also has a major advantage when light is low: As far as the sensor can see something, it’s only a matter of amplifying light signal (like for the ISO sensitivity selection) to make the picture readable. If the photo is possible (even barely possible), showing it is possible. Think about it! A nikon D3s digital sensor could display what it sees even in the darkest dawn it can manage. Since the digital noise is only a marginal issue on an LCD display (even at 3MP resolution), you can see what the sensor will be able to grab even in a room too dark for comfortable framing with an optical viewfinder.

If you compare it with the lowest-priced optical viewfinders of entry-level SLR cameras, the EVF is an easy winner in those low-light conditions: These simple viewfinders where already unpleasant and dark, the EVF bring a new life to cameras used indoors.

Drawbacks and limitations of the electronic viewfinder

But all is not pink and shiny. EVF have the same problems as most point-and-shoot cameras find on the rear-side LCD displays used for LiveView.

To start with, even if the electronic viewfinder (EVF) is intrinsically better protected against sunlight, it is still very sensitive to bright light issues. If there was only one thing that the EVF-sensor pair does not like, this would be high lights and bright sun (sic!) highlights are easily washed white and overblown. You will find more white flat areas than nice clear zones. The worst comes when you add high contrast to the picture. The EVF has a very small dynamic range (this is not HDR!) and the designer must choose between high-lights and dark areas.

We tend to forget it, but the human eye is amazingly sensitive and adaptable. Behind a prism and a mirror, in the brightest mid-day sun light, it can marvelously adapt to over-exposure situations that totally saturate the purely digital EVF system.

Best (or worse), the eye is extraordinarily able to switch within a few hundredth of seconds from the darkest night to the most violent lighting without even thinking about the marvelous brain processes involved. On the contrary, the EVF system uses a gain correction which will change at any time the apparent brightness to track the actual scene brightness. What is clearly an advantage in a dark room, forces the system to include an auto-adaptation feature which will change the brightness of the EVF several times per second. According to what you point the camera to, the electronic viewfinder will change from lighter to darker display. Not really a problem, but this asks for some tolerance to a process which is not natural to our human eyes. You have to get used to it.

Additionally, but this is all very sensitive to the user (you!), watching a computer screen may be more or less comfortable in the long run. As a matter of fact, if you use the EVF for long hours (this is the case for the professional photographer waiting in front of the Cannes Festival stairs, for the photo safari amateur or for the intensive tourist photographer willing to bring everything on a memory card – don’t laugh, I’m sure you shoot it as much as I do), you may come back with a serious headache. This is certainly not an issue for everybody (and you’re not supposed to keep the camera to your eye if you want to immerse yourself in your subject), but this may become a real limitation to some people. At the strict minimum, you must take very seriously the setting up of the dioptric correction of the eyepiece (much more seriously than on your current camera) to limit the impact to a tolerable level. Unfortunately, the eye seems to get more prone to this issue when the photographers gets older… Our eyes are not equal in front of photo gear. Too bad, but true.

Sony Alpha : miroir semi-transparent et EVF

Last but not least, even if the electronic viewfinders improve in time (and Sony has shaken the market with a 2.3-million-pixel EVF in the Sony SLT-A65 and in the Sony SLT-A77 which has raised the bar to a whole new level for all the competition), the fine quality of a focusing screen in a common optical viewfinder stays incomparably better than what the best EVF can display today. Far better! This is the reason why they generally include an additional Zoom feature allowing to better judge focus through enlarging an area (On the opposite, a company like Zacuto proposes an enhanced edge sharpening to make the focus analysis easier or more natural).

If you let your camera focus for you, honestly, you shouldn’t care much about this. If you like to fine-focus your pictures (all the more if you use a USM, SSM or similar lens which allows easy manual focus correction), if you use wide-aperture lenses (which call for a very attentive selection of the focus location or AF area), you will be in a living hell playing with buttons to merely focus while you were used to just looking at the image in your old optical viewfinder. Interestingly, Sony keeping in its technological portfolio the marvelous AcuteMate focusing glass surface (bought from Minolta and still widely considered as the absolute best here), is the first to jump to the next technology.

While we talking about AF, we must stop and remind ourselves that the disappearance of the reflex mirror means that focusing is now done from the data directly available on the image sensor. Where the traditional SLR camera focuses just before the exposure, using phase difference sensors (high precision, high speed, and not very complicated), the EVF viewfinder seems to enforce the use of automatic focusing using the measurement of a contrast difference directly on the image (very consuming in terms of processor power, intrinsically less reactive). Sony, once again at the forefront, chose to insert a semi-transparent mirror to keep the fast phase detection sensors. But they are quite alone in this decision – for now.

(Temporary?) conclusion

The electronic viewfinder is no panacea. But it brings good answers to tough questions asked by the old reflex technology, starting with price reduction for the digital photo cameras which is always a major issue for the manufacturers.

The camera owners already used to the optical viewfinder of entry-level cameras will immediately recognize the many advantages and all the more if they are occasional photographers or if they come from the compact point-and-shoot camera world.

Expert users (not even pros) will certainly have more mixed feelings, even if the most advanced electronic viewfinders like the recent Sony ones progressed in great strides. As I read in one of the recent articles about these new photo cameras, Sony brought enormous (not incremental) progress but this is still an electronic viewfinder. Not perfect, but with enough advantages to balance the drawbacks.

Now, you may have to read the post again to choose which ones are the most important for you. But there is a big problem left: We usually choose our photo camera inside a relatively dark shop (perfect, ideal conditions to demonstrate an EVF) and we use it mostly during our Summer holidays (the worst conditions to use an EVF). Some people may be unpleasantly surprised if they do not think twice before choosing a camera.

If you did not have enough yet, you can always go back to the manufacturing of a Canon 500mm tele-lens (in a much older video) or you can make a virtual tour of a Canon lens manufacturing plant.

Is a UV filter harmful?

First, I would like to demonstrate once again the critical importance of having a very good quality filter rather than the usual plastic junk. Too often, we forget that the filter is degrading the image quality and that the better the lens, the worst the impact. To clearly show this impact, LensRentals tried to stack up to 50 filters on the same lens. the result is so immediately obvious that you don’t need to go pixel-peeping at 100% scale:

But even one filter will decrease image quality.

Of course, if you want to compare the impact of the impact difference between a pro filter and a cheap run-of-the-mill filter, you can stack just 5 pro UV filters and 5 cheap UV filters. Here again, you’ve got food for thought before you buy your next photo filter:

I insist! this last test does not use 50 filters, but only 5 UV filters and the result is immediately perceptible to the naked eye of the non-expert, even if you’re not looking for it. With only one filter, you can do the test by your own and decide that using filters is a matter of thoughtful choice.

How Polarizing Filters Work?

This is one of the best and simplest explanations and demonstrations of the operation of these basic filters: A Polarizing Filter on the left and the Neutral Grey Filter on the right.

Source: PetaPixel.

For a long time, we saw round and square filters, filter holders, gelatin or gel filters in colors or in grey hues, progressive graduated neutral density filters, stacks of filters, surprising little colored objects which were used to reinforce the sky, the clouds, the grass, the trees, the mountain glaciers, the lakes reflections, and which were used to smooth the sky, the clouds, the grass, the trees, the mountain glaciers, the lakes reflections. In short, apart from a few specialists as admired and as venerated as Mayans High Priests (apparently, without the need to practice human sacrifice to support their credibility, though), nobody really knew what all this was about. OK! I may be slightly off the board here (though I am sure I never heard of a photographer sacrificing live animals before shooting a landscape picture). Some people had learned a few tricks and recipes, but it was most incomprehensible to the masses like you and me.

With the advent of digital photography, everything changed: Photoshop or The Gimp or any other photographic software was able to replace all colored filters and the photographer could drop his collection of gelatins into the junk bin before going to simpler (or more complex) issues. We ran for the software manuals

But this was an error! If it stays true that the immense majority of filters are already in the first Photoshop-like software package, this is not a general rule. Colored filters are trivial to apply in Photoshop. Graduated filters are so easy that kids can use them. Color correction, exposure correction are but a click away in Photoshop and easier than a bunch of fragile gel filters attached to a complex holder. And if you do it wrong, just Undo it and try again.

But there are two optical filters that are still totally unavoidable even with the best software (and I am not speaking about the useless UV filter whose main application is protection against frontal shocks):

• Polarizing filter
• High-density neutral grey filter

Polarizing

A polarizing glass selectively filters light detecting its polarisation (a physical property quite difficult to perceive in most conditions but easily measurable on reflected light). The filter will reduce brightness of reflections without impact on the rest of the picture, an aspect that is inaccessible to Photoshop. It also plays a great role on slecting the desnity of the blue sky which varies in function of the sun light angle.

The effects of a polarizing filter on the sky in a photograph. The picture on the right uses the filter.

If you keep only one filter, this will be a polarizing filter.

Only one remark: If you find an old pola-filter from silver-analog-film times, check first if it is a linear pola. Films were not very regarding, but digital sensors can only react to circular pola filters. Note that this remark becomes less and less important since all current filters are actually circular polarizing filters.

High-density neutral grey

The other useful filter is a high-density neutral grey one. You can easily see through a low-density (pale) neutral grey filter but it is not very useful with the extreme range of sensitivity that our photo cameras exhibit today: Just rotate the sensitivity wheel a little or drop back to Photoshop. But, if you take a ND400, you’ll immediately notice that even if you can still see something through it, it nearly black now. The filter is so dense that it has the same effect as dropping the sensitivity though the floor a lot below the usual minimum of ISO 100. Consequence: Long exposures even at mid-day: Instead of 1/200s, you’ll need 5s exposures (1000 times more). Welcome to motion blur even on slow objects and under the mid-day sun.

The most common application (or the most commonly used) is landscape photography incorporating motion blur of sea water or white water river, as in the examples below.

photo credit: -Chiotas-

photo credit: ciccioetneo

photo credit: dahon©

Beware!

To answer a question from Sébastien, I will also remind you of some elementary precautions to apply when using a filter (any filter).

• Always buy a high-quality filter: You use a luxury pro lens with fluorite or ED glass optical elements; Don’t drop any plastic sheet in front of it if you want to avoid re-introducing ugly additional effects (like optical distortion and chromatic aberration). Unfortunately, the prices goes with this requirement.
• If you use a wide-angle lens (this is often the case for landscape photography, isn’t it?), select a low rim filter to avoid seeing it obstructing slightly the field of view (generating a small vignetting effect). Here, again, it comes with a price (all the more for the polarizing filters which are mechanically more complex).
• For neutral grey filters, beware of the chromatic shift introduced by the denser and cheaper filters. It is often easy to compensate in a software suite, but the filter may easily be slightly blue or orange (depending on brands).

So, what? Two filters in the bag, this is no problem.

Of course, with five lenses, you may have five different screwing diameters. But this is still much better than the whole collection of the past.

TinEye was always a little limited by the small number of searched web sites, but the results were absolutely great: They even find look-alikes, pictures that are quite similar but not identical (even deformed, re-colorized, cropped, etc.)

Notice the small blue camera

But here comes the web heavy-weight. Competition is going to heat up significantly: Google starts a very similar option in Google Image Search, which uses the small blue camera appearing on the right of the search bar when using the Chrome browser (and probably all browsers in the near future).

I tested this image search service to look for an image I know quite well (a giraffe photo I shot in South Africa in 2007 that I know is already quite pirated on the web – I found it in a number of different places but for those interested I have another giraffe photo which is even more pirated even if it is much less beautiful than this one, I think).

As a photographer, I’d like to find all the people who made a copy of my work and check if -a least- they took the time to attribute it to me (not enough, it’s copyrighted) or to give a link back. For YLovePhoto readers, I thought it would be interesting to do the test, review the results and share my impression about the service.

There’s no doubt in the results:

• TinEye: finds one copy on a French SkyBlog where the size was altered.
• Google: recognizes a giraffe, provides some basic data about the animal, finds some similar images (12 giraffe photos including 2 which have a very similar attitude) and finds 2 pages of blatant copies of my own photo (all sizes including a black and white modification). The two copies on my own web site are present in the list but not the one originally found by TinEye.

Temporary conclusion: Kudos to Google! But, TinEye is no junk and we should not forget it right now.

My recommendation to Google: Your results will be even better if you purchase TinEye (the founders will be happy to receive 50 millions US dollars) and keep the results presentation which are really great.

Aperture Revealed – 120 fps – HD from Camera Technica on Vimeo.

The same at a slower speed:

Aperture Revealed – 240 fps – HD from Camera Technica on Vimeo.

Thanks to Camera Technica for these videos.