It's the 13th of April 2023. I'm Chris and you're listening to Tips from the Top Floor episode 933.
Music.
Hey, hello and welcome it's Chris and you are listening to Tips from the Top Floor,
the longest running photography podcast on the planet. I think it's like 17 or 18 years now,
Which is kind of crazy.
So what have I been up to lately? I've been doing recordings for various podcasts including Happy Shooting
and The Future of Photography which tends to be a bit more regular than Tips from the Top Floor.
We've just talked about your digital photography legacy.
I really liked that episode. And what else have I done?
I went to visit my parents for a long weekend which is always a bit of an endeavor.
Seven hours of driving one way, so that adds like two days to a visit.
Oh, oh, oh, and I've been working on a maker project for the upcoming Evi Workshop, which
is still the favorite, most important event for me in the year.
We've been doing this since 2009, annually. This year will be 33 people doing plus Boris, myself and Monika.
So 36 people in total doing nothing.
But photography stuff for a whole week in May. And one part that we established a few years ago
is to make something photography adjacent with our own hands. A maker project.
Because, I mean, this is where you want to be anyway. Being able to learn a craft and something.
So a couple years ago we made a large format pinhole camera out of cardboard.
Last year we ratcheted it up with a front bokeh generator, which was an electronics project.
And this year we... Well I can't say much because I don't want to spoil the surprise. That is part of it.
But it involves wood and a tripod head.
That's all I can say right now.
Yeah, this will be awesome. And I'll be able to show and tell and talk more about it once it's
over four weeks to the to the close the Geister workshop. Anyway, today good friend of the show
Alan Attridge is back and we will discuss a whole host of new developments and updates including,
an updated film photography book, a French influencer law, semantic segmentation in real
real time using AI. That's a mouthful. DP reviews, archive woes, a new film stock by Fuji and the Mickey Mouse, Leica and,
Dali coming to a browser near you. Well, let's go. Welcome to the show. Alan, how are you? Oh, we're going already? Yes, we're
right in the show. Whatever was before that is I will record this after we finished recording. Oh, okay. I know how
technology works now. Okay.
It's called editing. It's called editing. Just in case there's a disaster here and then I can
prefix that and prepare people.
I have no idea what we're gonna, well, do I have an idea what we're gonna talk about? So, Alan
Attridge, host of The Two Hosers,
photographer, filmmaker, cabinet maker extraordinaire. What else is there?
The Extraordinaire seems excessive. It's so much fun following your progress from the first, I'm not saying, compared to some
of the top shelf YouTubers that have done that for their entire life, this is a journey
where you can come along with someone who's teaching himself woodworking.
That's the idea. That was the basis of our show, the Two Hosers Photo Show, which we started 12 years ago.
The idea was that Adam, the guy I do the show with, had zero knowledge.
And so the idea was that the listener could associate with Adam and follow along and learn with him.
And that's kind of what I wanted to do with the woodworking, is I had a base, little bit
of knowledge. I knew enough to be dangerous to myself.
And to say that I taught myself, that's kind of the...
I guess a falsehood. I mean, I follow along all these brilliant people on YouTube who are excellent with their time and their skills, and very open to sharing. And if you pay attention and do what they say, you can, turns out you can build a pretty solid knowledge base.
Isn't that just so amazing? I mean over the last, I don't know, 20 years the whole game of learning something new, learning a new skill has completely moved over to online, to YouTube, to tutorials and we have all developed new skills that are now also include being able to tell a bad tutorial from a good tutorial.
So it's really amazing how this whole landscape in photography as well has changed, totally changed.
Part of that is your fault though, your fault and a couple of other people too, of course,
uh, David Hobby was a huge, he was the big one, the big game changer, because up to that point.
I mean, he was doing a blog, he started off doing the Strobist blog.
Um, but up to that point, anybody I ever encountered who knew anything was very
protective of that knowledge. Um, as, as sort of the sort of built in exclusivity of, of no,
I've got it. No one else can do it. In fact, when I was in, in, in film school, way back when
1998, wow, I need to catch my breath. Hold on.
Uh, 1998, there was a, a film productions, uh, audio house in town where I was going to school
and they, they'd done a few motion pictures, uh, like low budget things.
Um, I won't name them because I don't want to out these guys, but I basically
my, my, my, my, my teacher knew them quite well and I said, look, I don't want to be a sound guy, even though I'm doing a podcast years later, but I,
don't want to be a sound guy, but I would like to know all there is to know about everything really.
So I would love it. If I will volunteer, I'll come here, work here for free.
I just want to, I just want to be here and watch what you guys do in the, in
like the recording studio and the dubbing and like the ADR and all the stuff that you guys do. I just want to I'll help I'll
sweep the floors. I don't care. They said no, no, thank you. We don't want you looking behind the curtain. And I thought, Oh,
wow, that was my intro to that world of forget it. I know something you don't and it's gonna stay that way. And that
changed. And then and then I started reading Mr. Hobby. I met you and you have you have, I mean, on a personal note, you
You've always been very, very open with, hey, here's how you do this, or here's how I do this.
Why don't you try this? Here's what I know. Take it and run with it.
And that kind of inspired me to do basically this exact same process.
If anybody ever wants to know anything, I'm happy to tell them.
And what is this, besides them getting good at stuff, what is the side benefit to you?
Have you noticed anything?
Well, it's the karma principle at work. You give something, you get something.
I mean, that's pretty much... That's what it comes down to for me, you know?
But what do you get? I'll tell you what I got. I'll make this much shorter than it needs to be. I got better.
Yeah. Oh, oh, oh. Obviously, the teacher learns most. That's really the thing.
If you try to help other people understand something and be better at something, that's
a growth, that's a secret to growth for yourself.
Totally. Plus adding, like basically putting competition out there, I find to be a very healthy process.
It's as if, you know, you want to be the fastest lion, you better get out there.
So watching your YouTube channel, the Wood, what is it again?
Holtzfeller, give me the title again. Holtzfeller, I've been, well, you tell me, is
that a bad name? Should I change it?
Well, Holzfäller is German for like lumberjack. Lumberjack, that's the joke.
But I might just go with the old Yellow Pages. No, leave it. ABC 123 would work.
Leave it, it works. So here's my question. It's awesome to watch you become better in that process and you're documenting that.
Are you also planning to have a second podcast or a second YouTube channel up that documents.
Your changes over time of how you documented the photography of it, the videography of it, the editing?
Your shows changed. Initially, it was a lot of you talking to the camera and now you're doing more montages
that you talk over so you have more visuals.
Like the whole style has changed over the last 10 episodes.
That was my plan from the beginning, was to have the initial videos be longer and basically then
and then the later ones be referential to those earlier ones. It's becoming, it's always a show
and tell, but it has been more of a tell in the beginning, it's now becoming more of a show.
Yes, oh good point, never thought of it in that respect. And of course, as we know,
No, a picture says more than a thousand words, and that is true.
So the later ones, they're much easier to consume. The first ones have a lot of information in them.
Like you explain a lot of details, which people have to extract by watching now more.
But on the other hand, I think the entertainment value has increased this way.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I think part of it too is, at least my initial thought process was if people are going to
come along, there's millions of YouTube creators out there, right?
And so if you want to watch anything about, you can find anything you want on the internet,
on Google, on whatever.
And I wanted to make this a little bit more of a personal journey so you can associate
with me whether you like me or hate me or somewhere in between.
Maybe it's in between or whatever, but you can associate with that person and it becomes
a more personable story that you want to follow along.
And that was the beginning, we sort of introduced who I am, I hope, a little bit, and then get
a little bit more into the denser process.
So what's next for Holzfeller woodworking?
Well that's the thing, the next move is... How many other projects have you lined up? Are you going to change any of the videography again?
Are you moving ahead in that respect?
Oh boy, how is that going to change? Eventually I'd like... I think it's all fully planned out, right? All the detail for the next 20 episodes, right?
You do have a production plan, don't you?
No. Next one's going to be a birdhouse. Spoiler alert, I haven't even started yet.
It's a bird house, but for money.
So a money house, but it doesn't sound that good when you say money house.
A geldhaus? Is that what you say? That's a bank, right? The money house is a bank.
I don't think those exist anymore from what I'm reading the news.
This is actually a lot more of a logistical nightmare than I thought it would be.
The baseball team I play for, we have a couple of teams in the Bundesligas, in the German
in softball and baseball.
We charge admission fees, but it's a whole gray area right now, and so I proposed to our board,
hey, instead of actually having tickets and admission,
why don't we create, I don't like to say donation box, but like a admissions box.
A tip jar.
For people, kind of, but it's like that, you know.
But the idea is, we're called the Tubing and Hawks, and I know hawks have a nest, but a tip nest.
Ah, that's where the bird reference comes. I see.
I see. However, so I want to make it. And now the idea is that the front
will be made of plexiglass so that people.
I think people are more apt to tip once they see that there's other people have already paid.
So you'll glue a few bills to the inside to make it look like it's already full.
I'm going to put a few Canadian dollars in there. There you go.
Old. A couple loonies and toonies. But so the idea is to have that.
And then it has to be able to open and be securely locked. And also there's a lot more going on than I thought.
And so I wish I hadn't volunteered.
To make this but also we open on Saturday so I better get going.
There you go. So and of course the filming of it makes the whole process about twice as long I guess.
That's a conservative estimate.
That does not include the editing.
Getting faster at the editing because I do, that's the one thing I think I have.
An advantage over most of the YouTubers. Oh, you do this as a profession.
Right, as coming with a film background, learning woodworking, it's OK, I know what to shoot,
how much footage to get.
This is when I started the podcast, 18 some years ago. This is when I started Tips from the Top Floor.
I had an audio background, so the whole recording and editing, that was not the big deal.
It was the talking about a topic every week.
That was the, initially three times a week, so I was crazy. You remember the very, like when I first started the hosers, you were working down the street
from my apartment back in the French Quarter there.
And you came by like a month in and saw my process and you were horrified at my lack of audio knowledge.
And of course I was probably very insensitive about it in the way I gave you feedback.
No, that's just German. This is me being a German, yes.
Very direct. Oh, I appreciated it. You said, okay, you said, hey, like, aren't you
using a compressor? And I was like, like to blow the dust out of my studio, like what are we talking about?
And, uh, and you set it all up. You, you got all set here. Here's what you want to do.
Here's how a compressor works. Again, back to being very, very, uh, open with
your knowledge. And you said, here's what you want to do.
Yeah. And, uh, and I, I did it. And so now my, I can hear, I don't urge anybody
to go back and listen, but if you listen to the early episodes. And like if it wasn't a one every from every
season of our show.
I can hear the difference in the quality as I got better at audio production.
Well, but this is an ongoing learning process and the amount of resources out there is just amazing.
So, no one has that excuse anymore that no one told them.
No. So, of course, links to Halsfjallraud's working and to everything is in the show notes.
Let's do the news. Let's go into what's up on the news right now.
And yeah, I've put together a little bouquet of things. I'll toot my own horn first just to get this going.
The Film Photography Handbook.
You'll remember the early days of that. 20, oh, when did I start?
I think that was 2015 when we wrote the first edition.
I had it in my hands yesterday.
I'm not even kidding you. Awesome. It's just been released in the third edition.
We have updated it twice, which I find so amazing given that film photography was pretty much gone for a while when digital came in.
For those who don't know the film photography handbook, it's pretty much if you want to
learn about film photography and if you want to learn to do film photography and develop
your film, that's all in there. When you want to learn. When you want to learn, yeah.
Of course. Of course.
So it's for experienced photographers, but new film photographers will have a good time.
There's hybrid process in their film digital workflows for digitizing negatives and using
current means of helpers in terms of different apps and that kind of stuff.
All the formats 35, 120, 4x5 large format and so on. And the updates this time, you know, this is
this kind of an innocent email from the editors asking, we think we might want to update it again,
just to keep it current with like films being taken off the market, new films coming on the
market, this kind of stuff, because we have tables in there for films and so on. And then this just.
And this is the second time for us that we update this book and it's like this
oh it kind of spiraled out of control and now we have a new chapter in there
an instant photography of Polaroid cameras and replicas and instax formats and camera backs and an entire new thing on color film photography and on
digitizing negatives. We had the scanning method in there but we haven't really,
We talked a lot about the digitizing using a camera with a copy stand and a backlight and a macro lens.
So that one is in there in a lot of detail now. And even a whole thing on crowdfunding for film photography projects.
So we have, yeah, so it's more work than we anticipated.
But hey- But this means you're seeing a real uptick in the interest in film though.
Oh, film is not dead at all.
I mean, there's a significant renaissance in film photography.
We see a lot of interest. If you look at Fuji Instax, for example,
that is their cash cow.
That makes so much more money than all their digital photography stuff combined,
their cameras and so on, and lenses and so on.
The whole analog experience with one of a kind images and stuff that you can actually hold in your hand as opposed to just
swiping across on your screen, that is so enticing to an entirely new generation.
So, yeah. My kids included. My kids have a lot of questions.
So I had shot film way back in the old days. We had a darkroom at my high school when I was in grade 9.
Sorry, 9th grade in America, but grade 9 we call it. And so we did black and white photography.
I learned enough again to get by and then put it away for a long time.
I shot film, but I had it all processed at a lab.
And then met you again way back in 2011. And then you were shooting a lot of film.
And I said, I wanna start this again.
But I had no idea where to start.
And film, and let me tell everybody, film, shooting your own film and processing it
and all that involved is an extremely complicated process made up of very simple procedures.
If you break it all down, which which is what you do, especially in this book,
you tell people, you don't know what you don't know.
That's always in life. But so you don't know where to start.
What do you like? What do you buy first?
Like, what do you get? Well, you change back maybe if you're doing it, but it's probably in the book.
But you break this all down into into very, very simple things.
And then all of a sudden you put them all together.
And I won't say you've created a symphony, but you know, it's like with every new thing you will.
You will build something and the level of satisfaction that still comes out of
pulling that developed film out of the film tank, that's the moment for me.
It's like, okay, there's something on it, it's good negatives, they have the right density,
they look good, there's definitely enough stuff on there to digitize, to keep on working in Lightroom
or whatever you want to use. It's a very satisfying process. It's with everything where you put your
own work in. With your cabin, it's the same thing. You're building something and that is.
Going to be special for you. I explain this to my kids. This is how I raise my kids,
just in life, not photography or related. In general, I hear a lot of people talking about
the idea of happiness. And I personally don't buy into that idea of happiness. Happiness is fleeting.
McDonald's sells a happy meal. Good luck. In five minutes, you're not going to be happy.
But instead of happiness, focus on fulfillment. And that to me is, film photography is a great
example of that. I still love digital. We're done with this argument, right? Digital versus film.
Two separate animals. But there is something wildly fulfilling about shooting a roll of film.
Especially in times where things are becoming more and more virtual. And just the whole maker
aspect of it is fulfilling. Anyway, it's on the market now. It's out. There's a code if you get
Get it from the publisher, that's Rocky Nuke.
Let me see, the code is film40, F-I-L-M 40, that gives you 40% off.
And this is in English and German, correct? The film photography, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Third edition is out in German and in English, yes.
And then French soon. I'm working on the translation right now.
We do have weird translations for the book.
Let me check. We have an Italian translation for the film photography book,
I think the second edition.
There's usually a publisher making these deals and then telling us that, oh, by the way,
it's going to be translated too. So it's out in Germany. It's in Chinese. It's out in Chinese.
And yeah, German. So German, English, Chinese, and Italian, which is mind blowing.
Yeah, I bet. The fact that you've written more books than I've ever read. So I'm impressed.
Well, the translations I have not written. I have helped with the English translations
because I speak English, but the Chinese and the Italian, I totally have to rely on the translator.
So anyway. Look forward. To anybody out there, I suggest if you're thinking
about even shooting film, pick this up because it breaks it all down, makes it, it makes you want to
go out and shoot film.
And as I said, it was in my hand yesterday. I haven't looked at it in a while.
I was cleaning some things up. Oh, here's the book. Which edition do you have?
Which one is this first one?
I think it's number 002. Yeah.
We should, we should, we should update you. I'll, I'll make sure you get a copy of the new one.
Awesome. Want it in German or in English?
Well, I have it in English. I'll go German.
Let's do, give me the Quebecois one and we'll, that will be better.
That will follow sometime.
Yeah. Alright, let's go on and do a little quick fire round of news because there's a lot of things happening.
Here's a really fresh one which is photo adjacent, which is the French government is proposing
a new law, an influencer law, which.
Is aimed at increasing social media transparency. So that would include having to disclose Photoshop and filters.
And especially now, if you look at some of the AI filters that can make you 30 years younger without it looking weird
in a live video, that kind of stuff is happening right now.
Which, again, all the effects of this stuff, if you look at the Instagram disease, as I call it,
which means people are getting problems with their own body image and these kinds of things
because they're always presented with perfection.
And a lot of that is fake.
So that's kind of the idea behind that.
It's a proposal right now, so it still has to be signed off by the French Senate.
And they're looking at… Okay, so here's the penalties.
They are looking at up to six months of jail and up to 300,000 euros of fine.
Okay. For not disclosing. What do you think of that? Is this new?
This is a new problem where advertisers or influencers, we call them something else,
but they're lying to you? I remember back in the day, I mean, there was retouching, magazines aren't real, none
of this is real.
True, true, and you and I, we know that, because we are on the other side of that fence.
We know how the process works, how the sausage is made.
A lot of people will subconsciously just accept that as reality, for sure.
Right, but okay, so the argument like that my mom who is I assume in her 70s lifelong smoker she,
Always claimed that oh, yeah, we didn't know we didn't we didn't know smoking was bad for us as if we thought it was broccoli
Back then in the in the 60s. We thought smoking was broccoli.
They knew your folks knew your grandparents knew everybody knew it was an accepted risk
I don't like this is this gets into much deeper conversation about about society,
But why are we abdicating?
Advocating personal responsibility.
If it wasn't, if it weren't for laws, we would still be going to a fine dining restaurant
and someone at the tables around us smokes.
I grew up in that time and this was not going away by telling people that it's bad for you.
So there's just two sides of this argument.
So that part's a physical, you know that, I understand, it's a physical smoke coming
out that's affecting other people.
I think the main question for me is not even is that a good idea or not, it's the enforceability
of it. How would you even go about enforcing something like that?
Well like when you enter a photo contest, oftentimes back in the day you had to provide
a negative. Or a raw file. Now a raw file.
But who's in charge of the Instagram raw files? Look at the, I don't know, Snapchat live filters that use AI to change your thing.
You can't, there's no raw file, there's no way to undoubtedly prove that what you're
seeing is real or not real.
Right. But assume it's not real.
That's it. Assume that all those influencers, easy for me to say, that you see are not real.
If you see these guys on the, every once in a while a YouTube ad will pop up about how
to lose 40 pounds in two weeks.
Well, that's not a thing.
Unless you're an amputee and then maybe, then I could see something happening.
But other than that, you're not going to lose 40 pounds in two weeks.
It doesn't matter what warnings you put on there.
You should know that.
Anyway, I think one of the main issues here is, well, one of the things they have to do
in order to be able to enforce anything like that is to define what an influencer is anyway.
True. Anyway, next up in the newsreel, have you heard of Sam by MEDA?
Now that you said the link, I have, yes.
So here's the thing. Meta, Facebook's parent company, they've introduced an open source AI model called SAMS.
Stands for Segment Anything Model.
And the initial claim, I read this in Petapixel, and I think their article missed the mark because they pretty
much said, oh, yeah, and it can cut out things from video and photos, which, like, OK,
we have been able to do this for a while now.
If you look at Adobe's subject selection kind of stuff, works relatively well.
So like an AI-based mask and this kind of stuff is in there.
But what that model...
Does and I think that is what where it's interesting is that it's offering semantic segmentation. So imagine you have a classic example person on the beach.
Click on them, selects the entire person, fine. Now imagine that you are trying to select someone
on a picture who is cut in two, cut in half by a table or something, right?
Something's going in front of them. So that model by Meta knows that the legs
are part of that upper body. They are, they belong together. So it's a semantic,
thing. It looks at the object, not at the boundaries and at the 2D pixels.
It understands objects and knows that this upper half of the building that's cut through by bridge visually,
Belongs to that lower half and now you can select the entire building and it works in real time in video.
And that's where it is becoming interesting. I think it's not perfect but,
Segmentation semantic segmentation in real time open sourced. We will see a whole lot of applications,
Also in the photo world, because I mean, that's one of the big issues with computational photography
is the bokeh generation, the artificial bokeh, foreground background separation.
That will be so much easier with an algorithm or with an AI like that.
Correction. Like you want to correct the entire person?
Is cut in like standing behind a tree and you just select the person behind the tree and collect
correct color or do other retouching on them. Yeah, so I think this is quite interesting.
Also the fact that they are giving this away. It is fantastic. I have used the, it's only,
very recently I started using the object selection in Photoshop. Up until then,
And I do it quite, I wouldn't say quite frequently, but one of the things I do for my previously mentioned
baseball teams, I create the game day magazine covers called the Spieltag Talk.
And so we do like a real kind of a sports illustrated looking fun thing.
And oftentimes I'll shoot the subjects in the studio and cut them out and put them in front of some cool something.
More of a design than I am faking them into anywhere. It's not often I do that.
But the point is, I need to cut these people out.
And it's basically this year, I started using the object selection.
And that's pretty much a one-click, it's a one-click operation now.
It is, and it does a phenomenal job. Up until now, it did a reasonable job,
but I could do better on my own.
It just took about 100 times longer. Now, it's so much faster.
And this looks like, to do in video too. I know Jeff Greenscreen is pretty upset with his invention being obsolete now.
Well, there's another AI company that has sort of began obsoleting this and it's RunwayML,
which they offer an online in-the-browser video editor that does things like that, where
you can have a person walking through a frame and you can green screen them by clicking on them.
And it's almost real time. But this one I think takes it one notch up.
So kudos. Have you followed the DP review, the demise of DP review?
I have. I've read a little bit about it.
I actually have more questions than answers. If you're looking for answers, you're out of luck.
What? Why? Why is it? So we can agree that at least in, let's say, the earlier days of our digital photography,
For me that's at least true, DPReview was a really important resource because I wanted
to see all those reviews and I was much more of a pixel peeper back then and you had all
these discussions and all the tech details and they have pretty much followed the entire
history of digital photography in a very detailed manner.
And they have built a huge archive of tests and these kind of things.
Well in terms of digital photography they were there before I was and so in my world
they've always existed.
So the story is Amazon owned them since 2007, they bought them, they had some integration
with reviews and links and affiliate stuff and so on but felt quite hands off so it was
never like huge branded Amazon and so on and now Amazon has decided that that's not needed
anymore. They are laying off people as the entire tech industry does. And so the DP review fell by
the wayside and that created a huge uproar in the community. Even people like me who haven't been.
There a lot in the last five years, but there's a history with that site. And I have every now
and then watched some of their YouTube videos, some tests and stuff. And generally a thing that,
yeah it kind of belongs to this community and then there was an uproar and then Petapixel actually picked up the two hosts and gave
them a new home as in the if you go to youtube.com slash petapixel now that's a
new channel that will be filled by Chris and sorry anyway so and then And then there was the next wave of people going,
hey, but we need to archive this.
If this is a huge archive of information that can't just be deleted.
So the internet archive, archive.org, Wayback Machine, and so on, these guys have said, yep, we
are going to try to archive that. We're talking about millions of pages.
I mean, it's a lot of stuff there. So they announced to archive it and make it available as a single archive somewhere.
But then, and this is the latest development, this is the update, apparently someone at Amazon
has heard the outcry of the community and they have now announced that first of all they will
continue posting articles for a while. Not clear, the official cut-off date was two days ago, we're
We're recording this on the 12th of April, so 10th of April was the official cut-off date.
So that was sort of extended. And the second thing is they also announced that they want to provide this archive to,
for free. So Amazon is keeping that archive online. So, sort of half good news.
I haven't gone deep into why they're canceling it or shutting it down. That happens, things change.
I do know. I have a very good feeling why. If you look at cameras,
Because the thing that you and I and a lot of us have been preaching forever is that
the tech isn't that important.
It's you the photographer who is important.
And I have the feeling that for a few years now we've been tech wise at a point where
that is actually true where it doesn't really matter in the same price point you can pick
up any camera and it'll be good enough for whatever you need.
A lot of people feel that and the influx of smartphone photography, which is pretty much
taken over, is, is, is, is fueling that as well. So we are looking at a time where there.
Isn't that much need anymore for in depth tech reviews, because every camera has enough
megapixels and has enough dynamic range and has colors that are nice. And the autofocus, That's my big one.
That's the big... For sports, yeah, sure. Of course, they will always be specialized. But this is a niche.
This is becoming more and more of a niche, the tech nerdery about photography.
Yeah, no, I can... I haven't read a lot recently because it does for exactly what you said.
It is a little bit, through no fault of their own, a little bit repetitive.
It's okay, yeah, it's got this, it's got this. It's like, hey, guess what?
You should buy this camera.
All of them, every one of them. You're fine. Don't worry about it.
So that I get, but what would be in it for Amazon to completely delete the archives?
I know they're not now, but what was their initial thought process?
Oh, again, big, big layoff round, as in all the tech companies, and Amazon is a tech company.
So they're, I'm not really sure.
Or, I mean, probably, probably, uh, some people in the office are looking at the bottom line
and say, yeah, it's not making enough.
Let's get rid of it.
Possibly. Okay. You can just leave it there. Is there, is there a digital rot that's going to happen? I don't know.
No. Okay. I'll talk to Jeff next time we have coffee. I'll, uh, Jeff B.
I don't want to give away, I don't want to give his whole name, but I know a guy at Amazon named Jeff B.
No, he's not at Amazon anymore. He's out.
Yeah. Oh, as far as you know. That's right.
That's right. Alright, next on the list is, well, is it good news?
Fujifilm is planning to launch a new color negative film, which awesome, wonderful, new
films, but it looks like that might be replacing the Superior X-tra 400.
So which is, the Superior X-tra 400 is kind of the go to the DM market and pick one up.
Is the Kodak Gold of Fuji pretty much. Right. Right. It's a standard well balanced for daylight
negative film ISO 400 and that new one is called the Fuji film 400 color negative film.
So I don't know why they're doing this. It's certainly generating some news in the film
community. It might guarantee us a fourth edition of the film photography book
because that we need to update the film, the film tables of course. What is
this gonna cost if I walk into a DM here? I have no idea. I haven't, I haven't, I
have done all my film shopping for years in the, on the online and I I have mostly not bought these kind of films,
not because I don't like them, but because a few years ago,
someone donated to me like four kilos of 35 millimeter
expired color negative film, which is awesome.
So I'm still feeding off that.
Right, I get most of my film, actually I just, I steal it from your office when you're out looking, so.
Yeah, and I wouldn't even notice because there's so much of it.
No, no, it's good. It's an excellent price. Yeah, so I don't even know what this would cost anymore.
I mean, back in the day, if you wanted to go shoot a roll of film
and get it processed and get, you know, 24, 36 prints, whatever it was, it would, soup to nuts,
It would cost you about a buck a print.
By the time you bought the film, get the processing done and get...
I mean, the film isn't officially... the film is listed on like B&H Photo and other
sites already, but it's listed as not available yet. So the price is not fixed yet. The rumor
I've heard is that you'll be buying them for like in the US for about a 10 or 10 per roll.
Okay. So film prices, they don't sell as much anymore, of course. So...
Sure. Sure. Film prices have gone up. Of course they have.
So that's the rumor right now. We'll soon find out.
If they're going to all this effort to replace something or make a new, introduce a new film, there's got to be,
obviously, they're smarter about this than I am. There's got to be a market there.
And so I take this as encouraging news.
Well, it could also be that there's some chemicals that are not feasible to get anymore
because they're too expensive or too poisonous or whatever and they have to change the emulsion
and they use this as an excuse to beat the drum.
And get some publicity out of it. Possible, again, I'm not working for Fuji's, I don't know.
The canister is green, so I get it.
Okay, I see what they're doing. All right, next one up. If I say the word Mickey Mouse camera,
what comes to your mind if you do an image search on Google Images for Mickey Mouse camera?
If I do a Google search for Mickey Mouse camera, I'm going to be put on a list that I don't want to be on.
No, you're buying something out of cheap plastic for your kids, like Mickey Mouse head as a
camera, the ears, the Disneyfication. Did I have a Mickey Mouse camera as a kid?
I went to Disneyland a couple of times when I was a kid. You probably did.
I did. I think there was probably a Kodak put something out like the little the little what was the
one the 130 not the not the 134 was the little one 10 film 110 110 that you could pretend
you were a spy in a car a novel and so I think we had that it was about four bucks to buy,
by the camera, which included the film, I think.
That's what I imagine. Possibly, possibly. Yeah, so Mickey Mouse camera.
Yeah, when I read this, I thought of these and then I clicked the article and it's a
Mickey Mouse camera by Leica.
Right. This is funny. So we're not looking at a Mickey Mouse lookalike camera, of course.
So what they've done is they have a limited edition, as they do a special limited edition
of the Q2, which is an awesome camera. And they have like where you'd normally have the leather,
around the camera. That's where they put Mickey Mouse 100th anniversary Mickey Mouse Disney.
Anniversary edition with, they call it the 100 years of wonder. Again, 500. 500 is the limit.
And the leather part is now like, looks like parchment paper that they draw the comic
strips on and some original Mickey Mouse drawings and things like that. Okay.
So they made this strictly so that you would talk about it on your show.
Which I'm doing, I'm giving them free. Yeah. Uh, well, let me put a damper on that
cause it's, it's, it's, it's a bargain.
I think it's a bargain. 6,200 euros. Come on. Right.
Yeah, I don't I don't actually know who this is for. And and it's and it's about at least here in Europe, I think it's like a few hundred
bucks more expensive than the basic q2.
So right, you're paying you're paying you're paying several hundred bucks for the styling
and having Mickey on your camera.
Well, on the flip side, if you're a potential camera thief, this is going to look like something
you're not going to waste your time on.
So you can walk in through any anywhere you want. So here's the aspect theft protection.
Yeah, I'm with you there.
Okay. All right. Last but not least. Play it with Edge Browser.
No. That's Microsoft's web browser, which is Chromium-based.
So it has the same engine under it that Chrome has, or Brave browser have,
and other Chromium-based browsers.
And they were the first ones to integrate Chat GPT into the browser.
So you can, in Edge, even on the Mac version, you can go click on the Bing logo and then open up Bing with which is
Microsoft search engine with chat GPT integration so you can ask it things like,
yesterday I've recorded happy shooting and we I tested it and put in when is happy shooting live
because we do a live stream once a week and it told me that it first told me oh happy shooting
by the way is a podcast about photography with Chris Marquardt and Boris Nienke and it.
I don't know where live is but there is a web page happyshooting.de live where you might find
out more so it went it was really helpful and a conversational chatty tone and then it gave me
like what links it visited and other potential questions to ask by a mouse click and so on so
So they have been in bed with open AI and getting their AI on board and trying to become
a more interesting browser because their market share is like under 5% right now, I think.
I'm literally just hearing that it exists from you right now.
Yeah. So again, Bing search engine was always a joke, but they are, they've put Google on
alert. Google has it said that Google had a had a code read because of being
integrating AI into the into the search. Anyway so the reason I'm bringing this
up in a photography context is that they are now also going to integrate DALI
into Edge browser. So you'll have a tool in there that will allow you everyone to.
Type in what picture you want and then it spits out four pictures created by Dali.
To use in say your blog posts or whatever. Whichever I don't even know what the licensing exactly is and so on.
So this is this is news I have tried yesterday in in the Edge version on the Mac version
of edge but it wasn't in there yet so I don't really know what the terms are but
I think it's it's getting that that kind of esoteric technology in front of a lot
of new people that wouldn't have had access before. That does sound very very cool. I hope this is headed.
I say hope, I mean there's a plus and minus to it, but one of the things where I think
this kind of thing will come in very handy is in video, is shooting B-roll footage of
really boring things, which if we could now generate those to cover up our edits and sort
of illustrate our point, that's going to streamline the process.
You could use this for storyboarding for example, right?
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, so yeah, to do a storyboard ahead of time of what you are going to shoot, which
I've never particularly done, A, I don't like it and B, I'm not very good at sketching.
And so this would probably be a very good example of a great use of this.
I gotta go storyboard something. Are we done here?
Well, next Holzfeller woodworking video, fully storyboarded, like the entire process.
The birdhouse gonna look like? You could have edge, Dali's edge integration give you ideas for what it should look like. Make a birdhouse
for the Tubing and Hawks that has plexiglass in front and takes
money and looks cool. It needs a bit of a Black Forest look or something to it.
I was actually going to ask you.
What are you doing with the old invisible camera? Because I might just use that to hold the money.
It's, it's, I can, I can almost see it from here.
It's in that, in that cabinet.
I just introduced my kids. My kids are now nine and 11 years old.
And I just introduced that to them. They watched the video and thought it was the greatest thing of all time.
Um, yes, my, my, my daughter is a fan of a particular, uh, book and movie series.
And once I told her that connection, she could not believe it.
So that's off the air situation we'll talk about. But the.
No, like I now I'm imagining what would so way back in the in the old days.
And I think all these things in terms of video and movies and stuff like that.
But very beginning, like around like 1981 or 82, Francis Ford Coppola basically revamped the whole the whole movie industry
was shooting like video on on like for rehearsals for the
like the Outsiders, for example, a movie he made, and and people couldn't believe it was mind blowing. And then so I imagine
what would Kubrick have done with this back in the day, like if he was shooting 2001, or anything that he would do, he
was infamous for shooting a million takes of nothing. What
what would he have done? What will the AI Kubrick do with this AI in the future. That's what I want to know.
Runway ML, we mentioned this earlier, now has gen two out, which is their video generator. It's a dolly for video. Okay,
so there's a whole new visual language developing in front of our eyes that uses AI to create things out of thin air. And it's,
it's, it's we're living in exciting times, I think.
I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with this. And also, scared to death.
At the same time, everyone is...
Crapping their pants. Anyway, we are at the end of this episode.
Alan, thank you so much for your time.
You are at the... is it the Two Hosers or Two Hosers? I always have...
It's just TwoHosers.com. TwoHosers.com. See? Occam's Razor, Chris.
I have... Yeah, I don't go to the website. I have it subscribed in my podcast client.
And your YouTube channel, holzfellerwoodworking.com. It's easier to go to the show notes
and click the link that I'll definitely put there.
Thank you so much for your time.
And thanks for having me. Have a good one!
Music.
And that was it for today. Thank you so much for listening, thanks for subscribing and thanks for leaving a rating
or a review wherever you get your podcasts.
You're awesome. And of course, thanks to Alan for stopping by.
Make sure to visit the Two Hosers podcast and his YouTube channel Holzfeller Woodworking.
Link is in the show notes. As always, you can leave feedback for the show at tfttf.com slash hi.
For example, let me know if and how you're planning to use DALI in your photography or,
if you'll test Fuji's new color negative film tfttf.com slash hi.
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Thanks to all of you who support your favorite creators. Find out more at tfttf.com slash support.
Oh, and of course, Patreon supporters are first in line.
You will get to listen to new episodes before anyone else does.
What else? Oh, I also finished booking hotels for the Eastern European Electric Photo Road Trip in September.
So that one is getting closer and closer. Still two spots open.
Find out more at discoverthetopfloor.com. discoverthetopfloor.com.
And now go out and take amazing photos.
Be nice to each other. Make sure to spend some time with your family.
Music.