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So I got one that works - although with the Sigma lens, autofocus is still dicey - and have been playing with it. This thing is a monster, and with the resolution (14.6 mpixels) you've got a lot of pixels to peep; manual focus with low DOF is extremely problematic until I get my Katz Eye screen with split rangefinder and microprism collar (a la old Film cameras). Anyway, though, here's a shot from this morning:

You can follow it back to flickr and see the big version. I'm still getting used to it, but this thing (with the battery grip) feels like a real camera, unlike most digital cameras in this price range.

Took me a while to figure out how to use manual focus "M" type lenses properly. Hint: You use them in "M" mode (not just manual focus, but the manual metering mode); then you hit the green button. This stops the lens down, meters, sets your aperture and shutter, then opens the lens back up. Works really well once you get the hang of it.

Anyway, expect a review sometime soon!

So I bought a K20D from Amazon.com. Got it on Tuesday after ordering it on Friday. Fire it up and test it - it's defective. I went round in circles trying to figure out what I did wrong - WANTING to believe that I was doing something wrong, but finally it was inescapable. Damned thing couldn't focus to save its life.

I look at Amazon's site, and they say that they will refund your money, but it can take from a couple of weeks to a month. There's no help for it, so I go through the return process, and there's a button for 'exchange this item'. I click that button. I got a rather odd email, so I went to the help page on their site, where you fill in your phone number and click "call me"... and they do. Like, right away. Really.

Spoke with a young lady that was very helpful, and she got things straightened out. So now it's Friday and I have the new camera already! I still have to ship the old one back, but THIS one WORKS. HooRay! (look for some pix soon) But Amazon amazes me - with the exchange, they sent me the new camera before I sent back the old one, and I had the replacement in my hands only 3 days after I reported the old one defective. They also sent me an email telling me they wanted to reimburse me for the return shipping!

And when you combine this customer service with Amazon Prime... wow. $3.99 for next day shipping. All I can say is that Amazon made a loyal customer with this particular situation.

I've been reading a lot written about photography by photographers lately, as I'm awaiting the Amazonian arrival of my new K20D and rediscovering my fascination with the medium. Professional Photographers are an odd bunch (I know, I was one, once) and have all kinds of interesting notions about photography and art. A common, plaintive cry I hear is "You don't ask an author what kind of typewriter he uses; why would you ask a photographer what kind of camera he uses?". Of course, this analogy fails catastrophically (approaching non-sequitur), because a typewritten manuscript has nothing to do with the final appearance of a book. Obviously a camera has some impact on the final appearance of a photograph, as does the lens, the film or sensor, and Photoshop.

It is true, as Ken Rockwell points out in his treatise "Your Camera Doesn't Matter", at full frame 8x10 or smaller, and on 1024x1024 constrained web galleries, it is nearly impossible to discern any meaningful difference between cameras (barring obvious malfunctions or defects). But does that mean your camera doesn't matter? I'm not so sure, and I don't think Mr. Rockwell means "it doesn't matter" in a categorical sense; I think he means that you can make wonderful photographs with any camera. That much is absolutely true.

Ken points out that scene in the movie Blues Brothers where Ray Charles takes a crappy old piano with a sticky action and makes it sing. I like to talk about the story (perhaps apocryphal, but in character!) about the time Minnesota Fats came into a big city pool hall and said he'd beat any man in the place at a game for $500, playing with a broom handle - and proceeded to do so. And yes, a great guitar player can make the crappiest axe in the world sound like it's playable. And it's true that a race car driver can probably outrun the police cruisers in a '72 Pinto.

So where is the problem? Well, the real problem with this discussion and presentation is that people just don't work like that. You don't get up in the morning and go off to take generic "wonderful images". Most people who really want to be photographers have a certain concept in mind. Recently, Scott Bourne made the "Shakespeare" comment - that is, when someone asked what kind of camera he used for a photograph (of an eagle!!!), he complained that you ought to ask Shakespeare what kind of quill he used to pen Romeo and Juliette. Don't get me wrong, I like Scott, and I love the images he makes, but let's get real: Nature photography, specifically bird photography, and very specifically raptor photography, is one of the most equipment intensive undertakings one can make in the photographic world, right up there with underwater photography. Scott makes no bones about the price of his equipment and his "long lenses". Long lenses - long, FAST lenses - are not cheap, my friend, and believe me, you won't be shooting those intimate head-and-shoulder portraits of Harris Hawks with a point-and-shoot. Now sure, you can rent a 400 f4 EOS lens and bolt your Rebel onto the back of it, but you still have to have the lens. You're not shooting owls and peregrine falcons with a Holga.

It can be argued that art doesn't place constraints, and that good images that include raptors could be made with a point and shoot camera, and that's absolutely true. But if you're shooting a landscape that happens to include a raptor, you're photographing a landscape. You may love the picture as art, but if you're shooting a book about Eagles, you're going to need more than just distant shots of birds soaring above valleys. And everyone loves those photographs where you can count the ridges in the feathers and see the fierce, predatory gaze of those raptor eyes - assuming you're a raptor enthusiast, you'll want those images, as well.

You want to be an architectural photographer? You're going to need a tilt/shift lens or a 4x5 camera. Will you need it for every shot? Nope. Will you need it? Absolutely.

Some photographic disciplines lend themselves to certain equipment, and sometimes that equipment is not particularly specialized. If you want to be a 'street photographer', if you're drawn by images of people in urban settings doing urban things, you can get away with almost any camera. If you want to shoot candid images in subways, you'll need something with fast glass or fast film/sensor, or both, and unobtrusive to boot. You want to shoot coral reefs and great whites, you're going to need something waterproof. If taking pictures of bugs, flowers, and paint chips is your bag, you're going to want something with a good macro lens.

If you want to shoot studio portraits, you're going to need lights, backgrounds, and a short telephoto lens. Unless you're one of those talents that can redefine a genre, in which case, you're going to need backdrops of some sort, light of some sort, and a lens of your choosing.

So yes, any camera can make wonderful photographs. Let's say I take my Pentax Optio on vacation - it takes very sharp 3.2 MP images; great for snapshots. While on vacation, I use that camera to create a wonderful image of some fog rolling in between two mountains - an absolutely gorgeous image worthy of Galen Rowell. I get home and print out the 5x7 and it's beautiful. I really, really want a good 16x24, but when I get it back, it's all fuzzy and unsharp, because my resolution was too low. Or I shoot a great picture of a bear from a pedestrian bridge, but the animal is too small in the frame, so I crop it. Looks great at 640x480... The camera isn't really appropriate for those kinds of images. It's been said that the best camera for any shot is the one you have with you, and I'll certainly agree that it's better to get a good shot you can't enlarge than to miss it altogether, but the point is that equipment does matter. You shouldn't let that stop you from taking pictures with the camera you have; and no, getting a better camera will not make you a better photographer. That's the point. Just buying better equipment won't make you a better photographer, guitar player, painter, or pianist. Buying a camera with a higher resolution will let you make larger prints of mediocre photographs if that's who you are. So certainly don't let equipment stop you from taking pictures. The best way to become a better photographer is to take more pictures, and examine them critically.

But let's remember that when Ray played the lousy piano, and when Minnesota Fats played with a broomstick, they might have played better than all the people around them, but they didn't play their best. There's a reason artists want quality tools, and equipment can matter, a lot.

I just finished listening to the unabridged audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink". Gladwell is the author of "The Tipping Point", as well. Blink is an altogether more compelling book, I think. I listened to them on my daily commute, and Blink was interesting enough that I found myself digging out the iPod and earbuds while grilling steaks or doing dishes.

Blink attempts to describe and explain the way our brain works when we make very rapid decisions, and introduces us to some oddities in the system that supports such decisions. He gives us case studies that illustrate his points, and most of them are truly fascinating. His examples range from tennis coaches that can reliably tell when someone's going to double-fault even before they hit the ball, to art experts that can spot a forgery in an instant, to cops that mistake a billfold for a gun.

Gladwell discusses the effect of training on the decision system, and how experts teach themselves to differentiate things. He explains how our hidden brain/mind functions impact our perceptions - one of my favorites was his discussion of how consumers, when faced with two cannisters of identical ice cream, one square, one round, will choose the round container as the better ice cream. Another interesting and illustrative case study explains how Coke got derailed by misunderstanding the meaning of the Pepsi Challenge. He points out that people will typically choose the sweeter drink in a blind sip test, and will often reverse their decision if they have an entire can to drink - and that blind sip tests aren't the way people drink cola.

He discusses the Aeron Chair and how it affected office furniture in direct opposition to the 'consumer tests'. This segment illustrated how we have difficulty determining the difference between "I don't like it" and "I'm not familiar with it"; Often people initially dislike change, then after experience, like the new situation better than the old one.

He discusses how this system can break down under stress, and what physiological factors can impact that breakdown, and explains how three cops could misinterpret and mistake innocent actions for villainous behavior, and illustrates that it is probably a failure of training when this happens. He explains how in some cases more information is a bad thing - paralysis through analysis - and how understanding of the conceptual niceties of a situation at an internalized level prepares us to make the right distinctions between information that's important to the decision, and information that's not.

Gladwell reads his own work, and does an exceptionally good job of it. He's fluid and relaxed, and you forget that he's reading. He's got a wonderful voice that gets out of the way of the ideas while retaining the sense of personality that gives it life.

He finishes up the book with a discussion of the ways that these unconscious processes could be trained and retrained, and gives a brief explanation of how such training could make the world a better place, and frankly, I'm convinced. All in all, I rate this a "must read" for anyone interested in the functions of the human mind.

The Zoom H2 has been a long time coming, following in the well-received footsteps of its big brother, the H4. Zoom has really pulled out all the stops on this product in pursuit of quality audio recording in such a small format. The device itself is about four inches tall, two and a half inches wide, and an inch and a half thick. In this package, you get some very serious audio mojo for on-the-go recording. Originally designed with three microphone capsules in the wire-protected top, Zoom delayed the product to re-design it with four capsules because it wasn't giving them the quality of recording they were looking for. Then they shipped it at the same price they'd originally planned on selling it for! I've been following this particular drama for some time; the H2 represents a potential solution for half the price of the next entry in the market.

There are quite a few high quality portable recording devices on the market, and most of them are in the $299 to $2000 range, and they provide quality stereo recording. The H2 weighs in around $200 and is chock full of features that podcasters and musicians should love. The box comes with the H2, a 512MB SD card, a pouch for the H2, an AC adapter, a triangular screw-in foot to stabilize it on flat surfaces, an audio breakout from 3.5 mm stereo to RCA connectors, a pair of throw-away earbuds, a screw-in 'handle' that allows you to clip it into standard microphone stands, and a windscreen that makes the device look like a small silver smurf with an afro.

The documentation is decent, with a pretty good "quick start" page that will get you going recording right away. The provided 512MB will record from 15 minutes at 24bit/48khz in four channels, to 213 minutes in 320bit MP3 stereo. Yes, I said "four channels" - the device has four microphone capsules, and you can record each of them on a different channel at 24 bits. This creates two files in the "4ch" folder, one with a name that ends in F, and one that ends in R - that's a pair of stereo recordings, one from the front pair, one from the rear pair. You can drop these into most audio software packages and mix them down to surround without much effort. It sports adjustable gain (low, medium, and high, accessible from a switch on the side) and AGC or Compression, a metronome, and a chromatic tuner. From 3.5mm jacks you can access line in, headphone out (more in a moment on that), and external mic in.

But back to the device. It has a small keypad on the front, and a small LCD. If you're like me and suffering from presbyopia, you'd better bring your reading glasses - the screen shows the recording levels and configuration options, and they put a lot of information in a teeny, tiny space. The keypad is your standard blister-pad type with the standard keys you would expect, record, play/pause, forward, backward. Then a pair of buttons that step between "90 degrees", "2CH", "4CH", "120 Degrees" - these are the microphone configurations you can choose to record with. The case of the device is plastic, but it doesn’t feel or look like cheap junk.

But you can discover the features from the manual or the Zoom website. The big log here, the bottom line, is audio quality. If quality mobile audio recording is something you need, then so is this device. The tests I've done were nothing short of amazing. Now, I'm not saying it can replace a $50k studio, don't get me wrong. On the other hand, the sound quality is every bit as good as I can get from my FastTrack Pro combined with my Macbook and some really decent MXL microphones. Far better than you can get from the onboard microphones of your video cam.

In fact, I can see this device becoming a big value-add for people shooting video. It's fairly simple to shoot video while capturing "wild" audio with the H2, then drop the H2's recording into the audio track in FCE or other non-linear video editor. I've played with this process using a cheap Aiptek "HD" camera ( I'll probably review that later, too ) and the H2, and the results are nothing short of amazing. I'll put together a sample and post it here later so you can judge for yourself, but when you consider the cost of the equipment used to capture the video and audio, the quality is phenomenal.

The stereo separation is very good whether you're using the front pair of mics or the back pair. The dynamic range is solid - again, amazing considering the context of small capsule condenser mics that are built into the device. I tend to use the 320kbps MP3 to record audio, and the encoding quality is very good. I've been unable to discern the difference between stuff recorded on the H2 at 320kbps MP3 and music recorded at 24bit/96khz on the H2 and encoded to 320 MP3 by programs on my Macbook. You can record directly at 24bit/96khz wav, and even though Zoom only claims mic response to 20k in the specs, there's a significant audio component well into the 24k range as displayed in Audacity's frequency analysis graphs. Although I don't have an audio sweep generator, so I can't test it to see how flat the response curve is, A/B comparisons with known microphones have been very positive; I recorded some samples with my MXL large-capsule and with the H2 at the same time and compared the result. The H2 performed admirably - perhaps better for some frequencies and program content, and stereo to boot.
When recording, the headphone jack becomes “live” - you can monitor the recording in realtime. This is incredibly cool in this device. I’m used to a monitor output when I record on the computer, but it can sometimes be problematic, and this device makes it transparent and solid. I found that it was live even while I was using the H2 as a USB microphone. The H2 will also serve as a solid portable interface for your computer.

All in all, I’d have to say this was one of the best $200 I’ve ever spent on random audio gear. It performs as promised, and far exceeded my expectations in quality and functionality. I don’t think you can make a better audio recording for $200, period.