Guess what thudded through my letterbox today. All 627 pages of Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Steve Jobs.

That takes care of the next two days.

Like many photographers, I’m obsessed by sharpness, by which I generally mean accurate focussing. I hate pictures in which the prime subject isn’t sharply in focus — which is one of the reasons I was fed up with this picture I took last Saturday of David Sainsbury, who has been elected Chancellor of Cambridge University in succession to Prince Phillip. It could — should — have been such an interesting picture. The light was lovely, and the juxtaposition of the man with the Senate House over which he will soon be presiding would have been perfect — if he’d been in focus. But I was using a Leica M8 while clumsily holding a gown and a bag and I blew it. (Of course you could quite reasonably object that if I’d been using a simple, auto-focussing point-and-shoot camera I’d have got the picture, and you’d be right, but my attachment to obsolete technology runs deep).

On the other hand, accurate focussing isn’t everything. One of my favourite books is An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson. It has some truly wonderful, insightful portraits, but by my reckoning in at least 10 per cent the subjects are slightly out of focus. And yet in most of those cases it doesn’t really matter. So perhaps my obsessiveness with sharpness is a symptom not of aesthetic sensibility but of nerdish perfectionism.

“From today, painting is dead” is an aphorism often attributed to Paul Delaroche, a 19th century French painter, upon seeing the first Daguerreotypes (though Wikipedia maintains there is no compelling evidence that he actually said it). But the phrase came to mind as I looked at the first pictures from the Lytro lightfield camera, which goes on sale next year. Based on some discoveries made by a Stanford student, Ren Ng, the camera turns the normal process of compose-focus-shoot on its head. Instead you just point the Lytro at whatever you want to photograph, and then you can retrospectively focus in on any part of the image. As the New York Times explains: “With Lytro’s camera, you can focus on any point in an image taken with a Lytro after you’ve shot the picture. When viewing a Lytro photograph on your computer, you can simply click your mouse on any point in the image and that area will come into focus. Change the focal point from the flower to the child holding the flower. Make the background blurry and the foreground clear. Do the opposite — you can change the focal point as many times as you like.”

The company behind the technology calls this “focussing after the fact”.

Since you’ll capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability – focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at anytime, after the fact.

And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay. So, capture the moment you meant to capture not the one a shutter-delayed camera captured for you.

It’s intriguing and counterintuitive — as some of the examples provided on the site demonstrate. And of course the magic won’t work on paper, so if Lytro pics are to be exhibited in all their counter-intuitive glory they’ll have to be displayed on computer monitors. Still, it’s an interesting development.

The camera comes in two flavours, depending on the amount of onboard storage you want. The 8GB model holds 350 pictures and costs $399, while the 16GB model holds 750 and costs $499. The devices start shipping in “early 2012”.

Oh — and they only work with Apple machines. For now.

The first love song to a robot?

Standing out, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Test shot of a 90mm Summicron f2 lens.

Interesting story from a colleague at lunchtime. His son — a young man — was driving in London for the first time. While stopped at a traffic light, he consulted a map on his smartphone. When the lights changed, he put the phone on the seat beside him and drove off — only to find himself being pursued by a police car with lights flashing. He pulls over and Constable Plod sucks his pencil and informs him that, under the Road Traffic Act 1988, Sections 2 & 3 and Construction & Use Regulations, Regulation 104 and 110, he has committed an offence. The punishment: £60 file and three penalty points on his licence — which, given that he is a young man, can be seriously damaging to his prospects of being able to rent a car.

He wasn’t, of course, using his phone as a phone but as a data device that happens to be able to display maps. And his car was stationary at the time, while he waited for the traffic-lights to change. But, according to Law on The Web,

The term “driving” has a very wide definition in motoring law matters. You can generally still be considered to be driving, even if you are stationary, sitting in your vehicle off the road, but with your engine running. Turning off your engine may be enough to prevent a successful prosecution.

If you are stuck in a traffic jam, then again you are still driving your car as far the police are concerned and you open up yourself to prosecution if you use your mobile phone other than through a hands-free kit. Every case is different and it is very difficult to lay down hard and fast guidelines.
Using a mobile phone

Most policemen believe that if they see you with your mobile phone or PDA in your hand while driving your car, then you have committed the offence of using a mobile phone while driving.

For there to be “use” of the phone there has to be some form of interaction with the device – so looking to see who is calling, or looking up a number, or dialling a number, as well as, of course, speaking or texting someone with it.

So far so bad (or good, depending on your point of view). It gets interesting when you ask whether the lad would have been prosecuted if he had been engaged in jabbing a postcode into a TomTom sat-nav device? The answer, apparently, is no. Why? Because the TomTom is not a phone.

But then, asked Quentin (who was also at lunch), what happens if — as Q does — you happen to have the TomTom app installed on your iPhone?

It’s gets murkier and murkier, the more you think about it. For example, it would be ok to use an iPad, because that isn’t a phone (even though you can put a SIM card into it and use it for mobile data), but not a Samsung Galaxy Tab, which happens to be able to make phone calls.

See here for details.

Lovely celebration of Flann O’Brien by Roger Boylan.

He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”

In fact, it’s every bit the masterpiece Greene said it was—a thrilling mix of wild experimentation and traditional Irish storytelling. Stylistically, “At Swim-Two-Birds” runs the gamut from mock-epic … to a kind of arch naturalism… The narrative is divided into three parts, described with admiration by Jorge Luis Borges: “A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists.” It’s an intricate puzzle played for laughs, a novel simultaneously subversive of, and reverent towards, the Irish epic tradition. It was ten years before the Luftwaffe’s draconian edits were reversed and the book was reprinted…