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Telling Time
9 March 2015
It's a new day, particularly for Game of Thrones fans, anybody doing medical research, students looking for a notebook and people who are tired of dropping their phones. You can hear all about it in the Apple Keynote.
Swiss Movement. The time-honored way of telling time.
There really wasn't much for photographers in today's presentation, although that tiny little Apple Watch face promises to be another venue for our work.
But we would like to stand up and applaud a few things.
The first is ResearchKit. As we listened to how it solves the problem of finding participants for studies (which has always been a problem), we wondered if the groups would be limited to owners of iPhones. When we heard it would be released as open source, we smiled at the elegance of the solution. And the depth of Apple's commitment.
We had much the same reaction to Apple Watch. This invention elegantly extends the iOS ecosystem in a less awkward way than a phone. It's primarily about communication (in some novel ways, too) although it also appeals to our vanity.
We were also impressed that the company has dropped the price of an Apple TV to $69. For streaming from your device to the big screen in the room, there's nothing like it. And considering the quickly deteriorating state of broadcasting today, streaming is becoming an essential service.
Among all the innovations in the new MacBook notebook (and there are a few), the one that impresses us most is the terraced battery formats. Again you see the company devising an elegant solution just where other outfits would give up, blaming cost.
We don't predict the future here because a little mystery is always good for the story. But Apple not only seems to know what time it is, it seems to be able to set everyone's clock, too. Spring forward, indeed.
(We shot the illustration with a Nikon D200 and a Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens mounted with a BR-2 macro adapter ring. Exposure was ISO 800 at f8 and 1/60 second. The DNG was processed in DxO Optics Pro 10 using PRIME noise reduction the exported JPEG edited in Photoshop CC 2014.2 to remove scratches from the crystal and add a vignette with Alien Skin Exposure 7. -- Editor)
Update (12 March): We admit it. We were annoyed with the shallow depth of field on our hand held shot above, which we centered on the type because we just can't avoid reading when we look at something. And let the watch hands blur near the bottom of the frame. Not something you can easily see in the LCD.
But rather than reshoot, we thought we'd let the iPhone 6 Plus take a crack at it. Highlights blown but resolution wasn't an issue (at least for our 500 pixel images).
iPhone Version. Just the built-in lens, no macro, although we cropped the image significantly and boosted the saturation (but no vignette because of the blown highlight).