Nikon D4s review

From Digital Camera World

Hi, I’m Angela Nicholson, head of testing for Future’s photography portfolio and today I’m going to reviewing the Nikon D4S, the upgrade to the D4.

Nikon tells us that the Nikon D4S has a new full-frame or FX format sensor with 16.23million effective pixels. The Nikon D4 has 16.25 million effective pixels – so there’s very little difference and the pixel pitch is the same.

Nikon isn’t willing to divulge how the Nikon D4S’s sensor design differs from the Nikon D4’s, but the combination of it and the new Expeed 4 processing engine has allowed the company to increase the native sensitivity range by 1 stop making it ISO100 to 25,600.

The headline grabber, however, is the maximum expansion setting, which has been pushed to a whopping ISO 409,600.

Achieving an image at this setting is impressive, but the results aren’t especially pretty and there’s banding visible even at quite small viewing sizes.

However, it’s worth remembering that this is an expansion setting, so Nikon isn’t intending for it to be used routinely. It’s designed for use in one-off situations when getting an image in near darkness is essential or a huge bonus. It could prove useful to photo journalists working in war zones or disaster areas for example.

More of this article here

 

Norman McBeath at the British Library

That great Scot Norman McBeath has alerted us to the aquisition of a body of work he has completed with the poet Robert Crawford. This is from The British Library website 

Photogravure © Norman McBeath

The British Library is delighted to announce it has acquired the first English verse translation of Crichton’s Latin poem. The book is a new collaboration between the poet and academic Robert Crawford and the photographer and printmaker Norman McBeath. The source of the text is taken from the two volume anthology of Scottish-Latin poetry Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637), a copy of which is held at the Library at shelfmark 1213.a.7. Robert Crawford’s impressive translation will hopefully generate wider interest in this sadly neglected poem. The poem is accompanied by eight evocative photogravures by Norman McBeath which perfectly capture the enigma and splendour of that fascinating city.

Venice is published by the Edinburgh based Easel Press in an edition of twenty copies and will be available to consult in the Library’s reading rooms shortly.

– See more at here

What makes an image popular?

By analyzing millions of images from Flickr, an MIT researcher has discovered some of what makes an image popular—

Hundreds of thousands of photographs are uploaded to the internet every minute through various social networking and photo sharing platforms. While some images get millions of views, others are completely ignored. Even from the same users, different photographs receive different number of views. This begs the question: What makes a photograph popular? Can we predict the number of views a photograph will receive even before it is uploaded? These are some of the questions we address in this work. We investigate two key components of an image that predict its popularity, namely the image content and social context. Using a dataset of about 2.3 million images from Flickr, we demonstrate that we can reliably predict the normalized view count of images with a rank correlation of 0.81 using both image content and social cues. In this paper, we show the importance of image cues such as color, gradients, deep learning features and the set of objects present, as well as the importance of various social cues such as number of friends or number of photos uploaded that lead to high or low popularity of images. Find out what your image scores on the popularity score here                                                                                                            

Mine got 3.827 (I don’t know if that is good or bad, check yours against my score)