Episode 417 – Guest: Joe Edelman

This week, I’m pleased to welcome back to the podcast Joe Edelman!
Joe can be found all around the interwebz…
On Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
We chat about his move from Nikon to Olympus,
shooting portraits on a Micro 4/3 sensor,
and the World Trade Centre, and the Oculus.

I’ve just discovered, after 10 years, how to find the number of actuations of my Sony a850. Turns out, Sony buries the information deep inside the EXIF metadata associated with each frame you shoot.
For the REALLY, HEAVY technical explanation, try the following on for size:

It is the actual number of shutter actuations from new, or since repair if Sony repair techs reset the internal counter. Yes, the number of actuations is buried in the exif data, but is stored as three bytes of info.

One byte gives a value from 1 to 256

One gives a value of 1 x 256 to 256 x 256

And one gives a value 1 x 65536 to 256 x 65536 (65536 being 256 squared)

Using exiftool you can get the value of these 3 bytes as a=?, b=? and c=?

The “a” value represents individual shutter actuations (1-256) (be aware that HDRs, panoramics etc., count as more than one actuation). Each time the “a” value goes past 256 it resets, but increments the “b” value by one.

So the “b” value represents how many times you have reached 256 actuations. This means that for example, if exiftool returns a value of 4 for “b”, you multiply 4 by 256 to give you 1024 actuations. But don’t forget, you have to add the value of “a”, which can be anything from 1-256 and you also have to add the value of “c”.

“c” only comes into play if your camera has over 65536 actuations. This happens each time “b” goes past 256. For “b” to go past 256 and start counting again, you would have had 256 x 256 actuations, hence 65536. Probably most cameras are below this, so exiftool will return a value of zero in this case.

The formula for calculating your shutter actuations is, therefore: SUM = A + (B * 256) + (C * 65536)

So, you have to do a little work to get your actual shutter actuations. Hope this helps.

If that’s all too hard, you can drag a RAW file from an a850, a900 and one or two of the 7-series cameras, onto this website and get an instantaneous readout of your body’s shutter count.

Carl sent us this story/portfolio of (what Joe informs me are referred to as) “lay flats”.
Some very clever ways to show off one’s gear in this lot!

Rob Coates saw this article about Robert Irwin’s continuing photographic travels.
And the Wildlife Photographer of the Year page is worth a gander, as well!

Adam sent us this classic, about why you don’t hire a $0.25 photo retoucher. Joe felt some of the criticism was unwarranted.

Also, the Instagram Photography Awards Winner. Enough said.

And Yashica’s ‘unexpected’ Y35 camera is worse than anyone expected…. or so says this blog post. Glynn is certainly happy with his. Joe is bemused by the whole idea!

But it did lead to an interesting conversation about Kickstarter photography projects.

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