Hello there, welcome to another issue of Morning Coffee.

Yesterday I started playing one of the most widely anticipated video games of all time: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. This is perhaps the first game that pushes the PS4 hardware clearly beyond what last-gen consoles were capable of doing, and it’s remarkable in its own right for being the last entry in Naughty Dog’s extremely popular Uncharted series.

Uncharted 4 has been a long time in the making. This series is the reason I bought a PS3 a few years ago, and I have to say I’ve enjoyed each chapter with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a ten-year-old kid. These games offer a cinematic experience that is easily on par with big budget Hollywood films, and now with Uncharted 4, Naughty Dog has raised the bar significantly, delivering a true work of art in video game form.

Not that it’s their first time, mind you.

Naughty Dog has a long and rich history of delivering masterpieces, but in my mind there’s one particular game that sits head and shoulders above everything else we’ve ever seen in the industry. That’s what I’d love to tell you about today.

Issue #41: The Last of Us (No Spoilers)

Let me preface this by saying I don’t consider myself a gamer in the popular sense of the term. I’ve only played a handful of PS3 games — literally — and I only bought the PS4 this week to be able to play Uncharted 4. I’m not crazy about beating skill-based games, or spending hundreds of hours building a character in a made-up universe — with perhaps one or two notable exceptions.

My ambitions when it comes to gaming are fairly modest: have fun, and experience truly compelling stories. That’s why I love the Uncharted series, and the recent Tomb Raider reboot. They’re just lots of fun to play, but they’re also incredible stories, told in a medium with an unparalleled capacity for immersion. If you’ve ever cried at the movies, you probably know what I’m talking about. Great games offer the same experience, only dialed up to eleven.

However, every once in a while there comes a game so remarkable that it fully and completely transcends the previously known limitations of the medium and becomes something else entirely. These are incredibly rare, and may come only once in a generation. The Last of Us is exactly that kind of game.

On its face, the premise of the game seems fairly simple: set in a dystopian future where a virus has wiped out most of the human race and turned them into fungi-shaped zombies, two mean-spirited scavengers are tasked with smuggling a teenage girl out of a quarantine zone. So far, nothing seems out of the ordinary: just another zombie-ridden survival game, right?

Wrong.

What sets The Last of Us apart from many other games is the depth and complexity of its characters. There are zombies in the game, yes, but the story is never about them. It’s not even about the Fireflies, a so-called resistance group that’s apparently looking for a cure. The Last of Us tells a story that is much smaller in scope, but much bigger in relevance. It’s the story of a broken man and a lost girl, both of whom stubbornly refuse to give up even in the face of insurmountable odds. It’s a story about family, and love. A story about growing up, and learning to let go.

Right from the beginning, The Last of Us punches you in the stomach with a scene so poignant and tragic that you have no choice but to instantly empathize with Joel, the main playable character in the game. By bearing witness to this traumatic event, we’re prepared to understand — if not quite forgive — Joel for any questionable actions he may go on to commit over the course of the story. And boy, does he commit them. Clearly, you don’t get to survive long in a zombie apocalypse by being nice.

Ellie, on the other hand, represents the polar opposite of Joel. She was born after the world had already ended, so this life is all she’s ever known. She hasn’t had to go through the incredibly difficult process of losing everything we take for granted, and that has given her the rare ability to remain innocent in a world dominated by cruelty and violence. While Joel broke a long time ago, Ellie somehow manages to bend instead.

And so, while there’s a fair amount of killing to do — both zombie and human killing, mind you — and lots of huge areas to traverse and gorgeous sets to explore, to me the most compelling aspect of The Last of Us is being able to witness the complex and nuanced relationship that slowly develops between Joel and Ellie. He teaches her to find the strength to do whatever it takes to survive, and she teaches him that there’s more to life than surviving. It’s a long and powerful journey during which both characters change profoundly — and hopefully, so do we.

I won’t get into any more specifics here, because if you haven’t played the game, spoiling it would be cruel. Suffice it to say that Naughty Dog managed to make Joel, Ellie and many of the supporting characters feel surprisingly like real people, with their own problems and ambitions, instead of random stereotypes. This is storytelling at its absolute, unequivocal best.

Of course, when it comes to telling a compelling, believable story, it never hurts to have the best voice actors in the industry, and The Last of Us most definitely does. The amazing cast led by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson deliver Oscar-worthy performances across the board, and help make this a truly unforgettable experience.

And last but certainly not least, there’s the wonderful Left Behind, a roughly 3-hour-long DLC that was released about a year after the main game. Left Behind helped bridge a particular gap in the story of the main game, and also gave us a lot more insight into Ellie as a character. It not only further developed the story of The Last of Us, but it also gave us the opportunity to spend a few more precious hours in the company of these characters we’ve come to know so well. In my mind, it is quite possibly the best DLC ever, and it’s only fitting that it would put one heck of a finishing touch on such a remarkable game.

The Last of Us will always be remembered as an excellent game, perhaps the crowning achievement of the previous generation of consoles. To me, however, it will go down as one of the most compelling and emotional stories I’ve ever experienced, and one of the most polished and inspired pieces of creative work I’ve ever seen.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the week’s most interesting pieces of writing.

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Top Five: The Panic sign, China’s twilight, Apple and podcasting, colorizing vintage photos, and being a whistleblower

As usual, this week’s selection is strong, and varied. In no particular order:

The Panic Sign | Cabel Sasser →

Panic put up a new sign on their headquarters, and it went exactly as you’d expect. Brilliant.

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China’s Twilight Years | Howard W. French →

This was an interesting take on the social and economic issues that China is likely to face in the future. Some scary stuff in there, definitely.

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Apple’s actual role in podcasting: be careful what you wish for | Marco Arment →

Marco shared his take on the recent rumors that Apple may be getting more closely involved with podcasting in the future. Lots of good points here, although Marco is definitely an interested party, so take them with a grain of salt. So am I, for that matter.

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10 colorized vintage photos of famous landmarks being built | Michael Zhang →

Your weird and oddly mesmerizing photography project of the week.

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Inside the Assassination Complex | Edward Snowden →

Terrific piece by Edward Snowden on what being a whistleblower is really like:

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

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Afterword

It’s been an interesting week. I’d love to stay and write a proper farewell, but I’m afraid I left Nate hanging from a particularly steep cliff, so I’m just going to head back now and give him a hand.

Have a wonderful Sunday, and thank you for reading.

Nice interview with one of my favorite actresses over at The Talks, from 2012:

It’s a weird obsession that I find very sad, because I think it’s okay to age. Who cares if you get older? It’s not such a big deal. I’m not very attached to my looks either. I know it’s weird because as an actress I should care, but I don’t. I’ve never done Botox - I don’t want to do it, it terrifies me. Maybe people think that I am crazy for not doing Botox, but I don’t care. It’s a form of insecurity. I think Botox is a form of madness. Some people will say it’s great, but I think it’s a form of neurosis, of sickness. It’s the same kind of obsession as people who throw up to stay skinny. People shouldn’t be so obsessed with their appearance; they should care about who they are.

Solid point, although comparing Botox with “throwing up to stay skinny” is a huge oversimplification and, frankly, quite tone-deaf.

That said, it is a testament to my fascination with Julie Delpy that she can get away with calling Forrest Gump “a stupid film”, and somehow I still like her.

This week on the show we had our first ever guest: Mr. Dan Hawk.

Among other things, we go over a very interesting article by Drew Coffman, we chat about the basic elements of photography and getting to know your way around a camera, and then we take on the whole digital imitating film trend in recent cameras. After that, there’s a bit of friendly banter about camera bags and my own review of the leather Brixton, and then we all drool over Dan’s RX1R for a while.

Nothing to fear, really, unless you’re currently going through a bout of GAS. If that’s the case, stay away from this one. You’ve been warned.

Ok, this was fun. What if all European countries had their own Captain America? Well, they would probably look like this:

Chris Plante makes an astute observation about Uncharted 4:

Uncharted 4 as a work of film is good, great even, and no less modern in tone and structure than what’s playing on television, let alone at a movie theater. And its minimalistic gameplay, early on, is just enough to keep the player engaged without distracting them from dialogue, which does the heavy lifting of playing catch-up on a story roughly 27 hours in. Were it a film, Uncharted 4 could make a handsome sum in royalties for the number of times it will undoubtedly appear at Hollywood conferences and summits, where it will be picked apart for lessons on how to create the future of interactive cinema.

And later:

In Uncharted 4, the series’ new directors, Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, have done what David O. Russell originally sought out to do. Their Uncharted is respectful to the core themes of franchise, but rather than design a game that people would want to play and replay, they produced something that will be watched and re-watched. Druckmann and Straley made a fantastic Uncharted movie, and, in some perverse fashion, the first great film adapted from the world of games. That it arrives in an era of Twitch, where watching others play video games online is nearly as common, Uncharted, intentionally or not, has finally, and cosmically, aligned with industry trends.

There’s no doubt the games in the Uncharted series are cinematic experiences just as much as they are gaming experiences. That said, I don’t think this creative trend is going to end anytime soon.

Uncharted 4 was released today, and it’s probably going to be the gaming industry’s best and most ambitious effort to date. This is the experience that will define the next generation of games. If you still haven’t got a copy, I don’t know what you’re waiting for.

This week we got into an argument over the new Leica M-D, and then we tried to figure out what the perfect compact camera would look like. It was an interesting conversation, and I hope some camera designers out there — ahem, Sony — are listening.

However, about halfway through the episode, my audio interface helpfully decided to give up and stop working. I’m not sure whether the problem was caused by Skype, Audacity, OS X, the hardware interface itself, or a combination of some or all of these factors, but the fact remains, for about half of this episode, I sound like crap. Sorry about that.

We tried to find a solution for the issue during our recording session, but unfortunately we didn’t quite manage to fix it. As a result, the rest of the episode was inadvertently recorded using my iMac’s built-in microphone — you know, the one thing every serious podcaster tells you to never use. So if I sound to you like I’ve been possessed by a terribly hoarse demon, now you know why.

The good news is, after the fact we managed to find an alternative recording workflow that allowed me to reclaim my voice, so any upcoming episodes should be back to normal — or as normal as Candid episodes have been in the past.

My review of the leather Brixton camera bag by ONA was published today on Tools & Toys. It’s been a while since my last review, and it’s nice to be back.

If you listen to Candid, you may know I’ve had a love-hate-love relationship with this bag. On one hand, it’s clearly the best-looking and best-made bag I’ve ever seen or owned. On the other hand, though, it’s too heavy to be used comfortably as a walkaround bag, which was one of the primary uses I had in mind for it when I bought it.

Aside from the customary overview of materials, build quality, compartments and so on, this review focuses specifically on what it’s like to live with this bag, and the tradeoffs you need to accept in order to enjoy it. These are things you definitely should consider before buying the leather Brixton, and I was a bit surprised to see that most reviews out there barely account for them. Hopefully I managed to shine some much-needed light on that aspect.

I’m definitely glad I bought the Brixton — it’s hands down the best bag I’ve ever owned — but it appears my search for the perfect bag isn’t yet finished. That’s OK though, after all, half the fun is in the search itself.

The latest member of the Leica family was unveiled this week, and it’s been making the rounds all over the Internet on account of its unique design philosophy. What can you say about a $6,000 camera that doesn’t have an LCD display, doesn’t shoot video, and doesn’t even shoot JPEGs? Lots of things, apparently.

The Leica M-D is supposed to be all about the process, and going back to “the sheer essentials of photography”. Simplicity. Photography in its purest form. Those are Leica’s own words, mind you.

The Leica M-D has an ISO dial where its LCD should be. Image source: Leica.

Simplicity is always a compelling marketing message, and I’ll be the first to admit that on paper, the M-D sounds great — or it would if not for that ludicrous price tag. However, cool concepts not always translate well into physical products, and the new Leica M-D seems to be the new poster child for this unfortunate problem.

The biggest issue with the Leica M-D — there are lots, but this one is particularly aggravating — is the new ISO dial. For context, here’s what Josh Ginter had to say about it:

Aside from the fact this entire camera looks to be, at best, a joke, and at worst, an insult, I can’t get past the positioning of the ISO dial. Are you supposed to reach over there with your thumb when your eye is to the viewfinder? Or are you supposed to set ISO before composing?

I couldn’t agree more with his overall assessment of the camera, but there’s a very good reason the ISO dial caught his eye: it doesn’t make sense.

The ISO dial on the new Leica M-D harkens back to the ASA dials on classic film Leicas.¹ This will be instantly recognizable to any Leica enthusiast, and it ensures consistency in Leica’s design language. It also looks really cool. However, there’s a fundamental difference between those old ASA dials and the one on the M-D, and that’s where the whole thing breaks down.

The ASA dial on the back of a classic Leica M3 film camera. Image source: Rama.

Classic film Leicas, like the legendary M3, were fully manual cameras that didn’t even have built-in light meters. On those cameras, the ASA dial didn’t actually do anything; it merely displayed information for the user. It served as a reminder of the particular film stock that was loaded into the camera, so that if you didn’t finish a roll one day and went back to shoot days, weeks or even months later, you could still pick up right where you left off.

Different film stocks have different sensitivities to light — also called speeds — so you need to know what kind of film is inside the camera in order to adjust your aperture and shutter speed. Those old ASA dials were, simply put, a commodity feature, no different from writing that same information down on a piece of paper.

Since light sensitivity is a property of the film itself, you’re effectively setting your ASA by choosing to use one particular film stock over another, and so there’s nothing more to set on the camera. Practically speaking, your ASA will remain constant until you finish the roll and change to a different film stock.²

These intrinsic properties of film and the constraints they place on the photographic process informed the design of the ASA dial decades ago: it needed to be prominently displayed and easy to see at a glance, but there was no need for it to be particularly comfortable to adjust since users would only set it occasionally, whenever they changed film rolls. With that in mind, the placement of the dial on the back plate of the camera was ideal: away from the main exposure controls so as to avoid changing it accidentally, but right in your face so that you’d see it every time you lifted the camera up to your face to shoot. It was a brilliant design.

The ISO dial on the new M-D, however, is nothing of the sort. Modern ISO dials need to be easy and convenient to adjust, because with digital photography you typically need to change the ISO a lot more frequently. The requirements for this dial have changed completely, and unfortunately the classic ASA design translates very poorly to modern digital photography.

This brings us to a sad realization: the Leica M-D isn’t a modern camera designed with simplicity in mind, but merely a poor attempt at replicating the look of the classic film Leicas of old, with little regard for how that design works with today’s technology. This isn’t good design by any reasonable definition of the word, and it certainly isn’t SWEET. It’s just lazy, and that worries me. Leica seems to be a company without a clear vision these days, and the M-D strikes me as yet another warning sign that the company has lost its way.

This isn’t a trivial thing to solve, either. Leica’s main problem is that the very values that once made it a timeless brand are at odds with the disposable nature of digital technology. That’s a very tough mountain to climb. What does the word Leica mean in the digital age? We still don’t really know, but I certainly hope the M-D isn’t it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Leica, and I hope they can reinvent themselves and find a way to help shape the future of photography, just like they did in the past. They are one of the truly historic names in photography, and the world is better off with them healthy and thriving. However, I suspect it’s going to take a lot more than a repackaged film camera to do that.

It’s hard to move forward when you’re shackled to a brilliant, successful past. It takes courage to break free of that legacy and venture into unknown territory, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do. If I were a betting man, I’d say the future of Leica looks a lot more like the SL than the M-D. I may not like it, but that’s what my gut tells me.

Whether Leica has the courage to look forward and let go of their past, we still don’t know. In any case, I suspect it won’t be long before we find out.

This week’s episode was packed with interesting stuff. First up we answer an excellent listener question about safety when traveling with photography gear. It’s a very important issue and potentially a very expensive problem if your equipment gets stolen during a trip, so we all share the different techniques we use to protect both our pictures and our gear, and minimize the risk of becoming a theft victim.

Then Josh briefly talks about his new MacBook and shares his first impressions of the new Sony 85mm f/1.4 GM lens, but the conversation quickly flows into a deeper discussion on the ethics of product reviews, trust, and bias. I have some strong feelings on this matter, as I’ve mentioned here before, so this was a great opportunity to explore them.

As product reviewers ourselves, we may have a different perspective on this issue than the general consumer, so hopefully our insights and concerns will help raise awareness of some of the existing problems with honesty in product reviews these days.

Hello there, welcome to another issue of Morning Coffee.

Issue #40: I find your lack of honesty disturbing

Whenever I’m reading a product review, I expect one thing from the reviewer: honesty. I may not agree with every criteria or personal opinion, but a modicum of honesty is a must. It is essential for trust to be established, and let’s not kid ourselves, the reason most reviewers out there are able to make a living is precisely the trust they’ve built over the years with their audiences.

Honesty is also a two-way street. Just as we expect reviewers to give it to us straight, we too must hold up our end of the deal whenever we see some inappropriate behavior. We shouldn’t just blindly accept it and move on. We shouldn’t just give them a pass.

We probably shouldn’t use the Darth Vader disciplinary method, though.

Sometimes it’s easy to lose perspective. I’m well aware that reviewers, especially those who have a working relationship with the manufacturers of the products they review, are under tremendous pressure, and that pressure often translates into biases they may not be fully aware of themselves. That’s where we, the readers, come in. Sometimes it’s up to us to keep them honest.

This week I feel like I have to do just that, hence the lengthy commentary on the last linked piece below. There are some strong words there, but I assure you it comes from a good place. It’s not my intention to criticize those people’s motives, or to judge them. I want to make it very clear that I have the utmost respect for their work and trajectory, which is precisely why I expect better from them. We all do.

And now without further ado, let’s get to it.

Top Five: Moving to Medium, the upcoming tech bubble, the problems with East New York, color management in the Retina era, and reviewers vs the Sony 85mm GM lens

This week there’s a very strong selection, if I may say so myself. In no particular order:

On Medium | Marius Masalar →

My friend and co-host Marius finally decided to move his blog over to Medium, and he explained the reasons behind the change in this great piece. If you’re considering moving your existing blog or starting a new one on Medium, this is obligatory reading.

I personally disagree with Marius on the merits of using Medium as a publishing platform vs maintaining your own, but there’s no denying that the recent changes Medium implemented are making this more of a philosophical stance than a practical one. I definitely appreciate the convenience and polish of the Medium platform, and I’d go as far as to say that I’m not totally opposed to testing the waters myself down the road.

For that reason, I’ll be very interested to know what Marius’ opinion of the platform is a few months from now. If you don’t want to miss out on it, I suggest you subscribe.

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On the road to recap | Bill Gurley →

This is a great piece on the many problems with the way VC-funded startups operate these days. It’s admittedly a bit technical, but totally worth your time, especially if you have skin in the game. Via Josh Ginter.

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What the hell happened in East New York? | Kevin Heldman →

Terrific — and terrifying — investigative story by journalist Kevin Heldman. This is a co-production with The Big Roundtable, and it includes a 4-episode podcast you totally should listen to, plus a final written piece by Heldman. It’s incredible. Here’s an excerpt from the final piece:

For at least the last twenty years East New York has had the highest number of crimes and arrests in New York City — in every single category, for every single year. The crime is astounding: The average annual number of felonies committed in the seventy-six NYC precincts (averaging from 2000 to 2013) is about 1,059. East New York averages 2,622 felonies a year.

In misdemeanors, too, East New York is a leader. In 2013, the 75th Precinct recorded 12,510 misdemeanor arrests, by far the most in the city. (By comparison, in Brooklyn’s Bushwick precinct — gritty but gentrifying — there were 4,808 misdemeanor arrests that year.) Also in East New York in 2013 the police issued 1,890 violations (for lesser offenses like harassment, disorderly conduct, marijuana possession, and trespass) — the highest total in the city and more than double the city average.

In every single category, for every single year, for over 20 years straight. Wow.

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Looking at the future | Craig Hockenberry →

The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry published a standout piece on the importance of color management now that more capable high-resolution displays are starting to become the norm:

It also wouldn’t surprise me to see these wider color gamuts coming to the cameras in our devices. All iOS devices currently create images in the sRGB gamut, while professional gear can produce images in ProPhoto or AdobeRGB. High dynamic range (HDR) photos need a wider range of color, too.

We’re quickly reaching a point where more pixels don’t make better photos. Think about how much Apple likes to tout the camera and how better saturation improves photos. These new displays are the first step in a process were wider gamuts become a part of the entire iOS photography workflow. The number of places where your code assumes everything is sRGB will be both surprising and painful.

As a photographer, I’ve been asking for better color management in iOS for almost a year, and it looks like I’m finally about to get my wish. As a developer, I may be in for a painful transition, but I’m more than willing to power through the pain in order to reap the benefits.

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Five minutes with the Sony 85mm f/1.4 GM | Josh Ginter →

Josh had a chance to test the new Sony lens for a few minutes, and he came away impressed with its quality. However, there were also a few caveats to consider, like its poor AF speed and loud noise. And then there’s the weight aspect:

In comparison to the Batis 85mm f/1.8 however, the GM is far and away the heavier lens. I went into my little hands-on after watching this video from Jason Lanier. If you skip to the 19:50 mark, you’ll see Jason hand both the Batis and the GM lens to different passersby to see which lens is heavier. Each person in the video says the weight difference is either “imperceptible” or “negligible”. Perhaps each person was amped up and filled with excitement when holding the lenses, causing their muscles not to feel a difference between the two. Regardless, I flat out disagree with each of those people. There is undoubtedly a weight difference, both on the spec sheet and in use. Spec-wise, the GM lens is 28.82 ounces, while the Batis comes in at 16 ounces. That makes the Batis just more than half the weight of the GM. It’s noticeable. Not detrimental, but noticeable.

I’m so glad Josh decided to set the record straight here. I’ve long had a problem with reviewers like Lanier or Steve Huff, whose reviews usually contain nothing but praise. The 85mm GM lens is definitely a great, stunning piece of glass, but it’s not perfect, and it is indeed heavy. However, you’d never guess it by reading or watching those reviews.

Take Steve Huff’s, for example, which I found to be particularly offending in this regard. He doesn’t even mention the Batis lens in the entire piece, not even in passing. In fact, Steve’s main conclusion in the weight department is that the Sony lens is lighter than the gargantuan Canon 85mm f/1.2 L lens. Seriously.

When it comes to product reviews there’s some wiggle room, of course, because certain aspects are subjective. You can prefer one type of bokeh to another, or find the AF speed fast enough for your needs, whereas others may find it lacking. That’s fine, but we as readers expect reviewers to be honest. And while it is technically true that the Sony GM lens is lighter than the Canon, it is profoundly misleading to use that statement to imply that the Sony lens isn’t heavy.

However, while Steve Huff’s claims about the weight may be misleading, Lanier’s are downright false. You just can’t say that there isn’t a noticeable weight difference between the Batis and the GM when one is almost twice as heavy as the other. That’s not misleading, that’s flat out lying to your audience.

And then there’s the matter of the AF noise.

Amidst the usual torrent of enthusiastic praise, Steve Huff states in his review that his copy of the lens wasn’t noisy at all. For reference, the folks over at LensRentals recently inspected 40+ copies of the lens and found that every single one of them exhibited loud AF behavior, to varying degrees. Call me nuts, but I’d take their word over Steve’s any day of the week.

When reviewers downplay, ignore, or flat out lie about the negative aspects of a product, they’re doing a great disservice to their audience. That being said, it is ultimately your responsibility as a reader to take any grandiose claims with a grain of salt and, if it comes to that, cull your product review sources accordingly.

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Afterword

Life is back to normal these days, and even the weather seems to be in better spirits. The cold and rain of the past few weeks are finally giving way to sunshine and more gentle temperatures, and it won’t be long now before coats are once again stored in the closet, hopefully to remain there for good this time.

I really like spring in Spain, and everything it represents. I’ve said so before. It’s probably my favorite time of the year: sleeves — and skirts — become shorter, streets light up with people every day, and there’s always something exciting to do. If you’re a street photographer, this presents ample opportunity to capture the magic of life as it’s lived. It’s wonderfully energizing.

It also couldn’t have come at a better time, because I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump lately. Now that the days are longer, though, my spirit will hopefully rise to the occasion. It certainly won’t be for lack of trying.

Thank you for reading, and have a lovely Sunday.