Camera
Gear of the Year: Eric’s Choice – Google Photos
| Photo: Eric Limer |
I fell in love with photography as a wordless creative outlet. After over a decade as a professional writer, most recently at Gear Patrol and now at DPReview, it’s unspeakably refreshing to create something without struggling for synonyms or getting tied up trying to articulate. Now and then, I’d order some prints and maybe put together a little photo book. Whatever struck my fancy. It was all just for me.
When my son was born last year, the game changed. I still like taking pictures of sunbeams with mirrorless cameras and processing them in Lightroom, but my photographic priorities have shifted a bit for the near future. I am more frequently a documentarian, an archivist and a media distributor than I am an artist. And nothing has been more helpful in that endeavor than Google Photos.
Like many Google services that have managed to avoid the Google Graveyard, Photos is, in some ways, a shadow of its former self. Google’s promise of unlimited cloud storage, a powerful gateway drug, is long gone. But, staring down the barrel of creating a practical workflow for culling, sorting, and, above all, sharing photos, I haven’t found anything that’s come close to being half as useful.
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Natural language search is a life-saver for those shots you forgot to bookmark.
Image: Eric Limer |
There’s no shortage of ways to share pictures over the internet, of course. But sharing them in a way that’s both collaborative and at least partway private is another story. There are, I’m told, some apps that aim to tackle this task specifically with parents in mind. I never bothered to research them because they can’t touch Google Photos’ biggest strength: most of my family already uses it.
The workflow goes like this. Almost every day, I take quickdraw, burst-fire photos and videos with my iPhone – by far the most sweatpants-friendly camera I own. Once a week or so, I dig through the camera roll to star the selects and add them to the album, shared with grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, that serves as our canonical selection of shots of the boy.
“Google Photos’ biggest strength? Most of my family already uses it.”
Finally, once every oh-god-im-almost-out-of-storage-on-my-Google-account, I endeavor to mass-delete the rejects to free up space but instead opt to increase my storage subscription. I now pay $3 a month for 200GB, up from $2 for 100GB. The next jump is 2TB for $10, and one I’m hoping to avoid.
My process runs a little counter to what Google seems like it wants from me. Whenever I open the app, I quietly cringe at its suggestion that I simply acquiesce to creating an auto-album of the person Google has somewhat chillingly learned to recognize from infancy to toddlerhood. But the whole point of curating an album is deciding what not to include. Besides, if I want the full firehose, I can always just search by his face. I refuse to tell Google his name on principle, as if it won’t find out or doesn’t already know.
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| Options stamped ‘1’ appear exclusively for storage-buying ‘Google One’ subscribers. Image: Eric Limer |
While AI organization and editing is certainly Google’s selling point for Photos (you get access to additional tools like Magic Eraser when you sign up to pay for storage), I basically never use them. I don’t want to ‘magically erase’ the mess; I want to document it. Besides, what’s more brain-ticklingly fun than trying to make a decent composition out of a background of blocks and blankets and trucks and stuffies?
Photos’ meager social elements, however, are some of my favorite features on the app. ‘Likes’ on a photo in a shared album, abstracted from algorithms and news feeds, are much more fun to receive, I find. And the notification they generate serves as a great reminder to catch up on adding more photos. While comments and likes are attached to the relevant photo, you can also view the activity on an album in one big stream. A cluster of photos, followed by a stream of hearts and a few comments. A feed that’s both absent of ragebait, ads and other trash but also mercifully finite — until someone adds more photos.
That collaborative capability is ultimately what makes Google Photos such an essential tool. I can use shared albums as an archive (and offsite backup) for my own photography, from iPhone shots to film scans. But I can also use them as a repository for pictures that would otherwise be spread across smartphones or lost to time by giving my family the necessary permissions to add photos to them as well. Though not without maintaining some curatorial veto power for myself and removing the ones I don’t like after it’s long enough that the submitters won’t realize they’re missing.
“Collaborative capability is ultimately what makes Google Photos such an essential tool.”
The most enticing alternative to Google’s app, one that occasionally calls out to me through notifications of its own, is Apple’s. A conscious contrast, Apple’s Photos app performs many of the same functions but with local AI processing power, instead of piping all these pictures of my family and my home and my life back to the mothership (though it does still want to sell me cloud storage). I’d consider switching on principle, but there are too many Android phones in the extended Limer universe to even bother scoping it out.
In a few years, when my son’s fine motor skills are a little more developed, I’ll hand him a disposable film camera or maybe buy him a top-of-the-line digital camera from a decade or so before he was born. Then, we can tackle a new workflow for pictures by him and not just of him. For now, the current setup suits me quite well.
Camera
Pentax K-1 and K-1 II firmware updates include astrophotography features (depending on where you live)
Yesterday, Ricoh quietly released firmware 2.50 for its Pentax K-1 and K-1 II DSLRs. However, the features you can expect to gain from this update may depend on your geography.
Ricoh’s English-language firmware pages for the K-1 and K-1 II state that firmware 2.50 delivers “Improved stability for general performance.”
However, astute Pentax users noted that Ricoh’s Japanese-language firmware pages (translation) indicate that the update also includes a limited feature called “Astronomical Photo Assist,” a collection of three new features designed for astrophotography: Star AF, remote control focus fine adjustment, and astronomical image processing.
Star AF is intended to automate focusing on stars when using autofocus lenses. Rather than manually focusing on a bright star and changing your composition, it promises to let you compose your shot and let the camera focus.
Remote control fine adjustment allows users to adjust focus without touching the lens and requires Pentax’s optional O-RC1 remote. Astronomical image processing will enable users to make in-camera adjustments to astrophotography images, including shading correction, fogging correction, background darkness, star brightness, celestial clarity, and fringe correction.
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| Astronomical image processing on the K-1 and K-1 II will enable users to make in-camera adjustments to astrophotography images, including shading correction, fogging correction, background darkness, star brightness, celestial clarity, and fringe correction. |
According to Ricoh, Astronomical Photo Assist is a premium feature that must be purchased and costs ￥11,000 for an activation key (about $70 at current exchange rates).
Although these astrophotography features appear to be Japan-only for now, a Ricoh representative tells us, “Ricoh Imaging Americas confirmed that the premium firmware features for the PENTAX K-1 and PENTAX K-1 Mark II will eventually be available to US customers.”
Firmware update 2.50 for both the K-1 and K-1 II is available for download from Ricoh’s website.
As part of our twenty fifth anniversary, we’re looking back at some of the most significant cameras launched and reviewed during that period. Today’s pick was launched seven years ago today* and yet we’re only quite recently stepping out of its shadow.
The Nikon D850 is likely to be remembered as the high watermark of DSLR technology. We may yet still see impressive developments from Ricoh in the future (we’d love to see a significantly upgraded Pentax K-1 III), but the D850 was perhaps the green flash as the sun set on the DSLR as the dominant technology in the market.
Click here to read our Nikon D850 review
Why do we think it was such a big deal? Because it got just about everything right. Its 45MP sensor brought dual conversion gain to high pixel count sensors, meaning excellent dynamic range at base ISO and lower noise at high ISOs. Its autofocus system was one of the best we’ve ever seen on a DSLR: easy to use and highly dependable, with a good level of coverage. And then there was a body and user interface honed by years of iterative refinement, that made it easy to get the most out of the camera.
None of this is meant as a slight towards the other late-period DSLRs but the likes of Canon’s EOS 5DS and 5DSR didn’t present quite such a complete package of AF tracking, daylight DR and low-light quality as the Nikon did. With its ability to shoot at up to 9fps (if you used the optional battery grip), the D850 started to chip away at the idea that high megapixel cameras were specialized landscape and studio tools that would struggle with movement or less-than-perfect lighting. And that’s without even considering its 4K video capabilities.
In the seven years since the D850 was launched, mirrorless cameras have eclipsed most areas in which DSLRs once held the advantage. For example, the Z8 can shoot faster, autofocus more with more accuracy and precision, across a wider area of the frame and do so while shooting at much faster rates.
But, even though it outshines the D850 in most regards, the Z8 is still based around what we believe is a (significant) evolution of the same sensor, and its reputation still looms large enough for Nikon to explicitly market the Z8 as its “true successor.”
Nikon D850 sample gallery
*Actually seven years ago yesterday: we had to delay this article for a day to focus on the publishing the Z6III studio scene: the latest cameras taking precedence over our anniversary content.
| Photo: Richard Butler |
We’ve just received a production Nikon Z6III and took it into our studio immediately to get a sense for how the sensor really performs.
Dynamic range tests have already been conducted, but these only give a limited insight into the image quality as a whole. As expected, our Exposure Latitude test – which mimics the effect of reducing exposure to capture a bright sunrise or sunset, then making use of the deep shadows – shows a difference if you use the very deepest shadows, just as the numerical DR tests imply.
Likewise, our ISO Invariance test shows there’s more of a benefit to be had from applying more amplification by raising the ISO setting to overcome the read noise, than there was in the Z6 II. This means there’s a bigger improvement when you move up to the higher gain step of the dual conversion gain sensor but, as with the Z6 II, little more to be gained beyond that.
These are pushing at the extreme of the sensor’s performance though. For most everyday photography, you don’t use the deepest shadows of the Raw files, so differences in read noise between sensors don’t play much of a role. In most of the tones of an image, sensor size plays a huge role, along with any (pretty rare) differences in light capturing efficiency.
As expected, the standard exposures look identical to those of the Z6 II. There are similar (or better) levels of detail at low ISO, in both JPEG and Raw. At higher ISO, the Z6III still looks essentially the same as the Z6II. Its fractionally higher level of read noise finally comes back to have an impact at very, very high ISO settings.
Overall, then, there is a read noise price to be paid for the camera’s faster sensor, in a way that slightly blunts the ultimate flexibility of the Raw files at low ISO and that results in fractionally more noise at ultra-high ISOs. But we suspect most people will more than happily pay this small price in return for a big boost in performance.
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