Stunning and insightful piece over at Cinephilia & Beyond on the intricacies of Hitchcock’s absolute masterpiece. Now, the fact that Vertigo is a masterpiece will probably not come as a surprise, but still. Any excuse to dive deep into this timeless classic is good enough for me.

These are just ridiculous. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a Part II, which might be even better.

Unreal.

It must be Monday, because Michael Fraser just rendered my entire color film scanning workflow obsolete in one post:

I decided to try to improve upon the process, and to develop an entirely Photoshop-based process for colour negative scans. The three conditions for a successful process were:

1. Output as good as — or better than — what ColorPerfect can produce (it goes without saying that image quality should be the primary concern),

2. The ability to batch at least part of the process (it’ll never be ‘set and forget’, but if an entire roll could be ingested into Photoshop and at least inverted, with an easy way to finish the colour balancing, I’d be ok with that), and

3. Frame-to-frame reproducibility.

I’m intrigued to see where this ends. Judging by his results with the test image, it’s going to be a substantial improvement over my current Vuescan + ColorPerfect method.

The biggest shortcoming of the ColorPerfect approach, as Michael clearly states, is the lack of image-to-image reproducibility. This drives me nuts and if Michael’s new workflow does away with it — even if it’s just partly — it will be a solid win in my book.

Great collection of images by Zeit Magazin. I apologize for the German source but the pictures, that’s where it’s at.

Via Mikael Colville-Andersen.

Super-useful review by Tyson on the new version of the most popular Canon EF-mount to Sony E-mount adapter. I particularly loved his video showing autofocus speed and behavior — which, to be honest, was pretty disappointing.

The camera bodies in Sony’s A7 series are all amazing, but unfortunately it appears as though native E-mount lenses for the system are not quite there yet. While the few lenses available are all excellent, they’re also pretty damn expensive when compared to similar offerings for other systems.

One of the great promises of the A7 series has always been that you can use virtually any full-frame lens from any manufacturer, even manual rangefinder lenses. This is the only reason many professional photographers are even considering these cameras as an alternative to their existing Canon — and Nikon — DSRLs in the first place.

However, for that to be a viable choice, these adapters need to work much better than they currently do, and that means autofocus speed needs to get significantly faster. After all, if you can’t use all the great Canon glass you’ve been accumulating over the years to do the same fast-paced work you’ve always done, the appeal of these new cameras is significantly reduced. Manual focus is nice to have, sure, but it just won’t cut it for a whole bunch of working photographers out there, even with focus peaking and magnification enabled.

If the performance of this new Metabones adapter is as good as it gets with EF lenses, most professional shooters will be better off sticking with their Canon DSLRs, at least until the native E-mount lens ecosystem really flourishes — which, admittedly, is just a matter of time.

This totally made my day. Also, don’t forget to check out Mike’s site for many more awesome illustrations.

Matthew Butterick on the pitfalls of modern publishing platforms like Medium:

Medium is a new kind of type­writer—the bil­lion­aire’s type­writer. It’s not the only bil­lion­aire’s type­writer. So is the Kin­dle. So is iBooks. So is Twit­ter. What dis­tin­guishes these new type­writ­ers is not the pos­si­bil­i­ties they make avail­able to writ­ers, but what they take away.

Whereas the tra­di­tional type­writer of­fered free­dom at the cost of de­sign, the bil­lion­aire’s type­writer of­fers con­ve­nience at the cost of freedom.

Food for thought. Via Ben Brooks.

Fantastic piece by Quentin Hardy for The New York Times on the current state of Kodak, the company that was once the global leader in film photography and that filed for bankruptcy in 2012:

What happens after a tech company is left for dead but the people left behind refuse to give up the fight? At Kodak the answer is to dig deep into a legacy of innovation in the photography business and see if its remaining talent in optics and chemistry can be turned into new money in other industries.

Once a household name as big in its day as Apple and Microsoft have been for later generations, Kodak was part of everyday life, its film — sold in a yellow box — recording births, vacations, weddings. And then Kodak became a cautionary tale about what happens when a tech company is slow to change. For Kodak, the advent of digital photography was ruinous. Today it has $2 billion in annual sales, compared with $19 billion in 1990 when consumer film was king. It now has 8,000 employees worldwide; it had 145,000 at its peak.

The digital photography revolution was brutal on Kodak, but the company refuses to die. If nothing else, you gotta admire their resiliency. Via The Newsprint.

Great reporting by Joe Mullin of Ars Technica. Last year, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls received a patent demand letter from a company named AGIS, threatening to sue if they didn’t agree to license four of their patents. Hulls’s response was as hilarious as it was ballsy:

Dear Piece of Shit,

We are currently in the process of retaining counsel and investigating this matter. As a result, we will not be able to meet your Friday deadline. After reviewing this matter with our counsel, we will provide a prompt response.

I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient,

Chris

And that’s just the beginning.

Marco Arment:

The Apple Watch isn’t just a watch, interchangeable like any other. It’s an entire mobile computing and communication platform, and a significant enhancement to the smartphone, which is probably the most successful, ubiquitous, and disruptive electronic device in history.

Once you’re accustomed to wearing one, going out for a night without your Apple Watch is going to feel like going out without your phone.

I think his reasoning is absolutely spot-on, but I disagree with his conclusion. Yes, going out without your Apple Watch will feel a lot like going out without your phone, except your phone will still be in your pocket. There’s nothing important you’re left unable to do by leaving the watch behind, because you can just use your phone instead.

Actually, for the same reason I almost never pull my phone out of my pocket when I’m out with friends, I believe I’d be extremely likely to want to leave the Apple Watch at home when I go out. I don’t want to be interrupted by a million notifications all night long when I just want to have a good time and relax with some friends.

So, while I definitely appreciate everything the Apple Watch can do for me during the day, at night I still see myself wearing my nice dumbwatch instead. And if there’s something I really need to do I can just take my phone out, get it over with, put it back in my pocket and go back to my whisky.