Day in the Countryside in Pissouri

Warning: this post is way off-topic, will only make sense if you played H-O-R-S-E as a kid, and, yes, I am making fun of myself. Last Sunday, my father, Elena and I took a drive around the Limassol and Pissouri area. After losing about 11 gallons of water from walking around in the sun, we stop in at the vacation home of a family friend to rehydrate before going home. This was a classic nice Cypriot second home – the small vineyard, the vegetable garden, the swimming pool and the olive-trees and hills in the background.

And also a basketball hoop. And a basketball.

I am 33 years old, I am out of shape, I apparently have patellar tendinitis and am expressly banned from basketball right now, it is 175 degrees outside in the shade, and I am supposed to chit-chat with the adults. So of course, 10 minutes later I am challenging the grandson, Leonidas, to a game of H-O-R-S-E. What can I say?

Leo is 16 and plays in the German First Division. I have no idea what that means, but the kid was automatic at mid-range – I don’t think I saw him miss all day from 12 feet or less – and pretty damn good everywhere else. His friend and sister also want to play.

So, to recap, I am about to play H-O-R-S-E against two 16 year old boys and a 12 year old girl.

Game 1 is won by Leo, though there is a bit of confusion about the rules which leads to me and Leo shooting the same bank shot about 15 times in row until I missed it. Game 2, I am stuck behind Leo in the rotation which means I am wiped out of the game before he even has a letter.

My father has wandered off to car because he is ready to leave. B-ball friends of mine already know what comes next: “hey, Leo, how about one more game”.

This time I avoid Leo in the rotation so he quickly clears out his friend and sister and it is down to Leo and me, both with no letters. We trade “H”s after a few minutes, but I am in trouble. If we stick to mid-range jumpers, Leo is going to crush me. I am shooting my brains out and just holding even.

So I start encouraging Leo to do funkier stuff under the theory that I am at least as good at the funky stuff as he will be.

BAD IDEA.

Over the next 5 minutes I rack up an “O”, “R” and “S” as Leo throws down a ‘lefty’ jumper, a Kareem free-throw line hook shot and a 3 feet behind the backboard all net.

My last chance for redemption is not going well at all. it is H-O-R-S vs. H, I am one miss from elimination and Leo is channeling Steve Alford. I consider trashtalking but given the cheering section of his grandmother, his father, his mother and his baby sister, that seems out of bounds. So I gamble that I can lure him out of his range where my 60 extra pounds, some of which could be muscle, might help.

What follows is 30 minutes of some of the finest H-O-R-S-E Pissouri has seen this summer.

I am en fuego which I need to be to hold the line on the edge of survival against the Cypriot-German shooting robot. At one point, he makes me hit 3 in a row from the top of the key to stay alive. I claw back with instant vacation home classics - 18 footer baseline jumper angled behind the backboard on the side of the swimming pool, 16 footer on your toes with your heels hanging over the edge of the pool, 23 footer across the corner of pool.

Eventually we are tied at H-O-R-S, I am drenched with sweat, my father is tired of waiting and is clipping grapes from the vineyard and Leo hits a “toss the ball ahead of you and pick it up into a MJ fadeaway jumper.”

This is a problem. This shot involves actual jumping and the last time I did that in June my knee exploded in pain. So when faced with setting back my recovery 6 weeks or conceding H-O-R-S-E to a 16 year-old, I clearly make the smart choice. I toss the ball, jump and fade away, fall off-balance, crush and break the lightpost on the driveway and look up to see the shot go in. As I apologize to his grandmother, it crosses my mind that I ought to be past the phase in my life where I break peoples' property during sports.

But my knee feels good and I still haven’t lost and so the high-stakes shooting goes on.

Finally, I hit the 24 foot off center jumper from outside the court on the stone walkway that I had been trying and missing all day. Leo rims it out and that’s it. (In fairness, that he nails that exact shot seconds later.)

So I thank Leo for the most fun hour of sports I've had in a while and for being totally unflappable and gracious. And his grandmother for not making me feel badly about breaking her house and for giving me ice cream. And his father for giving me a dry shirt to wear afterward.

And there is no way I am playing Leo when he is 17 and has another 2 feet of range because he will destroy me.

Field Report - First Take: Canon Elph 950 IS

Background: Last week, I finally replaced my beat-up 3 year old digital Canon Elph. This camera has been around the world to beaches and bars, crushed in my pocket, my laptop bag and god knows where else and was starting to get quite flaky.

I have historically used the Canon Elphs as my "fun" cameras - they fit in a jacket pocket or, in a pinch, in jeans and therefore can more or less always be kept around for casual photos - parties, going out, business trips - on occasions when I am just simply not going to pull out the full set of SLR gear which encompasses a bag of stuff and is generally unwieldy.

To bring myself up a generation, I purchased the top-of-the-line Elph, the 950 IS ($329 at Amazon) and 2 x 8 GB each of fast Sandisk Extreme III secure digital cards ($53 each at Amazon). These cards are both large and have a high transfer speed, speeding you up between shots, which you will want with this camera.

Key specs

A couple of things to point out with the camera and then to the field report:

a) 12.1 MB DIGIC III sensor. To me this is the most remarkable thing about the camera. A 12.1MB sensor was the top of the pro-line, $8,000 camera sensor until a couple of years ago with Canon. 10 years ago, it probably would have cost $50,000 and only existed in very specialized commercial cameras. Now it is sitting in my point and shoot. (Yes, it is not exactly the same sensor that was in the SLRs; it is smaller, but it is still remarkable)

The Digic III refers to the third generation of Canon sensors which is the current class and is superior to the prior classes on topics like color rendition, dynamic range, etc. They are currently rolling it through their camera line and not even all their SLRs have it. The 950 is the only Elph to have it as of the time of this post I believe.

b) ability to record unlimited (except by your SD card) 640x480 video at 30 frames per second or 1024 x 768 video at 15 frames per second (this is close to 720p resolution, the lower end of HD; the frame rate at this resolution is below TV standard however)

c) Canon's image stabilization (IS), another feature derived from its SLR line, that allows you to handhold the camera in lower light conditions without a flash (it adds 2 to 3 stops for the technical geeks).

d) "Auto-ISO" - A feature I have never used before. Digital cameras can adjust the ISO (light sensitivity) of the sensor to allow you to shoot in less light without a flash at the cost of some graininess. Auto-ISO does this automatically on a shot-by-shot basis to give you the lowest ISO that will allow you to handhold. Great feature.

So now in the $450 total spending range we are rolling with what is, for today's standard, a full tricked out compact digital point and shoot.

Field Test Conclusions:

On my way to Cyprus, I had a layover in Warsaw for 8 hours and an old friend of mine was kind enough to show me around the Old Town and let me amuse myself. These comments are the results from this test. I shot how the average reader will (or at least should) shoot a camera like this: full auto-mode, with auto-ISO mode on, digital zoom and flash turned off for the outdoor shots.

So how did it do?

Overall, I was completely blown away by the camera.

Autofocus, exposure metering and resolution are, quite frankly, SLR caliber. Color rendition and dynamic range are very good, not quite SLR quality, but incredible for a point and shoot. The fact that this camera is $300-something is a testament to the ferocious effect computing is having on photography. Many of these capabilities were high-end pro-level just a few years ago.

At this stage, the main thing that will hold a camera like this back from SLRs is optics (the lenses) and that is a hard hurdle to pass, given that there is only so much light you can capture from a lens the size of a fingernail.

But unless you plan to pick up photography as a hobby and actually study and practice, go buy this camera, read a book on composition and leave the rest of the heavy lifting to the camera. It will do a better job on focusing and metering than you will.

Details and photo gallery follow.

Detailed Camera Conclusions:

Pros:

• Superb auto-exposure metering, better than my film SLR. I think this has something to do with it - I actually thought it felt "neural" in its decision-making.

  iSAPS Technology is an entirely original scene-recognition technology developed for digital cameras by Canon. Using an internal database of thousands of different photos, iSAPS works with the fast DIGIC III Image Processor to improve focus speed and accuracy, as well as exposure and white balance.

• Awesome detail with the 12 MB sensor. This will be a subject of a different post, but a lot of commentators are doing readers a disservice by saying pixels don't matter. The difference between 7MB and 8MB is in fact irrelevant, but the difference between 5MB or 6MB and 12MB is highly noticable
• Very good color balance and saturation. Not quite SLR standards but blows away anything I have seen from a camera that fits in my pocket
• Auto-ISO is one of the coolest features I have seen in a while. That plus image stabilization allowed me to shoot flash-free, outside well into dusk. Auto-ISO + IS was a bit over-optimistic about what it could accomplish in scenes with motion but this is a quibble
• Shoots great video for web / online video. It is not remotely comparable to a $1,000 HD prosumer video camera that can shoot really nice 1080 HD but given that this is a "side feature" of a camera a 1/3rd the price of the aforementioned video camera, still very cool

"Cons":

These are not cons in a conventional sense for a digital point and shoot. This is me now just comparing it to an unfair standard - a digital SLR - that is a different class of camera (and that can't fit in your pocket!)

• Lack of ability to change lenses and get great telephoto or wide angles
• While much faster than my old Elph, still much slower between shots than a digital SLR. It is not the best for action shots
• You still won't get the color pop and 3-dimensionality you will get with an SLR nor the equivalent smoothness that a $3,000 12MP SLR has. Realistically, most users won't notice, but a fine arts photographer will

Gallery:

Go here: http://pix.polemitis.com/gallery/5354521_tbx7u to see actual images and video with commentary.

Conclusion:

Buy this camera now if you need a point and shoot, whether you are a serious or non-serious photographer. It is a break-through camera in point and shoots.

Unless you get into serious SLR photography you won't need another camera until it breaks. And there is no technical excuse why everyone can't take at least a decent looking photo with this camera.

Next field test will come after I have had a chance to play with my friend's newish Rebel (the entry level Canon digital SLR). I look forward to seeing how that does.

Photography, The Background Piece

This is just a background piece to get us situated as I will occasionally post something the technical or non-technical side of photography. Most of you know that I have at times been a fairly serious amateur photographer. When I was younger I won several awards and had a scholarship to study photography. Since I left college, my output has been quite sporadic but I still have a pretty strong sense of what I like from an artistic and technology perspective.

I am more or less a Canon loyalist. The Canon-Nikon tradeoff was a matter of personal preference in the film era, but in the digital era, I think the momentum has shifted definitively to Canon. Canon has invested heavily in its proprietary sensor technology and, in my opinion, is now comfortably ahead of Nikon on the price-quality curve for digital cameras, across the spectrum from point and shoots to super-high end SLRs (single lens reflex – the ones whose lenses come off). No other firm is competitive at this point in digital SLRs, imho.

For serious work, I still shoot a 10 year old film Canon SLR, the mid-range Elan, and for fun pocket-size cameras, I have had a series of Canon Elphs.

Where have I been?

For those who have been checking in here and wondering where the finance notes have been, I apologize. I have not had much time to actually write, but I have been bookmarking my daily interesting reading via Tumblr. To see what has caught my eye, you can always check or RSS: http://antonis.polemitis.com

This blog will remain for original content, but to make things simple, http://antonis.polemitis.com also pulls in any blog entries from here so it is the complete record.