Stunningly beautiful review by Josh, as ever:

Right off the hop, the Olympus 75mm f/1.8 may be a mixed bag depending on your goals. The 75mm lens is ideal for in-tight portraiture, blurry backgrounds, and dreamy photos. It’s not meant for anything a full-frame 75mm lens is normally used for. Ever since I purchased the Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro lens, the 75mm has spent the majority of its time in my camera bag. It’s just not an every day focal length. However, when it’s time to see my nieces and nephews, or when it’s time to venture outdoors for family photos, the 75mm quickly becomes my best friend.

This is the single most divisive thing about the Olympus 75mm lens. It is definitely an impressive tool in the right situation, and for studio sessions it could very well be the perfect lens. However, its awkward focal length makes it a specialty lens and as sharp as it is, its appeal in a Micro Four Thirds kit is somewhat limited due to its size, weight, lack of weather sealing and yes, price.

That said, if your usage could benefit from a fast lens in this focal length, the Olympus 75mm appears to be an absolute jewel and its sharpness and image quality are nothing short of astounding, particularly in Josh’s extremely capable hands.

It’s no secret that self-driving cars are relatively close to being a reality. At this point, it’s become more a matter of when than a matter of if, and that brings certain questions about their reliability and safety compared with today’s cars.

But if technology has taught us anything, it’s that humans are pretty terrible at precision-based tasks when pitted against machines. Elon Musk, one of the brightest minds of our time, believes once self-driving cars become the norm, it’ll be a question of time before current “dumb” models are outlawed:

“I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk told NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the technology company’s annual developers conference today. “It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you’re at … the car is going to be just like that.” So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”

I agree with Musk, but why society has conveniently decided to ignore this fact until self-driving cars arrive is quite frankly beyond my comprehension. Cars will always be around for some uses, but they’re far from a necessity in everyday life, particularly in large cities with comprehensive public transportation infrastructure. Besides, it’s not like there aren’t any safe, affordable, convenient, reliable and sustainable alternatives out there already.

Whoa. These portraits of legendary movie directors Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, drawn by Julian Rentzch, are absolutely mesmerizing. If you’d like one — and let’s be honest, you probably do — the limited edition prints can be purchased at Stellavie for 90€ each.

Via Coudal.

Rozena Crossman, writing at Messy Nessy Chic, tells the remarkable story of the Séeberger brothers:

No one would have guessed that Jules, Louis and Henri were of modest origins, originally fine art students until 1903 when Jules began shooting photos around Montmartre.

Eventually his brothers tagged along, as younger siblings do. Jules and Henri entered Paris’ annual photo contest in 1904; by 1905, the three of them created a family-run photography atelier at 33 rue de Charbrol in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. Postcards were their trade, and they traveled around France to capture the country at the turn of the century.

Four years later they were discovered by the head of the fashion magazine La Mode Pratique. Looking for a way to keep up with the latest trends, the magazine commissioned the Séebergers to shoot photos of socialites showing off their impeccable taste at the races in the Bois de Boulogne. The brothers called their new work “instantanés de Haute-Mode” or “snapshots of high fashion.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Six months ago, Jason Snell left Macworld and launched Six Colors. Six months ago, the Internet became a better, friendlier place. Here’s to many more anniversaries, Jason.

Great article by Simon Patterson over at FStop Lounge that seriously trolls Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

For example, the Sony A7R weighs less than half a Nikon D810 and the Sony A7II takes up about half as much space in the camera bag than a Canon 5D MK III. If we only want a smaller and lighter full-frame camera body, we’d definitely go for the mirrorless camera. But this is only part of the story. What about the lenses?

Much has been said about the advantages of mirrorless cameras but at the end of the day, a full frame lens is a full frame lens no matter how you slice it. And what that means, sadly, is that when you account for the lenses, you don’t get to save much in the way of size and weight by picking a Sony A7 II over a DSLR.

Glenn Fleishman, writing on Six Colors:

The ability to have a relatively high degree of leverage — if one can attract good numbers of listeners and those listeners have an interest in the goods and services — makes an editorial site as much an advertisement for listening to the podcast as the other way around.

This is an interesting point. When you think of shows like ATP or The Talk Show, that generate multi-thousand dollar revenues per episode, is it still realistic to consider them side businesses? At what point do those shows eclipse their respective creators’ “main gigs”?

The tech industry is still shifting to accommodate podcasts — and, to a lesser extent, newsletters — in our consciousness. We still don’t have a well defined role for them and there’s not universal agreement on what their long-term significance in the great scheme of things will be, but it’s safe to say they’re not playing second fiddle to any other medium anymore, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Tom Vanderbilt has a great article on the meteoric rise of TripAdvisor:

Those reviews carry demonstrable weight. A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research found that for every percentage point a hotel improves its online reputation, its “RevPAR” (revenue per available room) goes up by 1.4 percent; for every point its reputation improves on a five-point scale, a hotel can raise prices by 11 percent without seeing bookings fall off. This has been a boon for smaller, midpriced, independently owned hotels. “Twenty years ago, the brands owned the sense of quality,” says Bjorn Hanson, a professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. “If I stayed at a big-name hotel, I knew what I was getting.” That sense of confidence in quality, argues Hanson, has been supplanted by TripAdvisor. Not only can there be variation within a brand, but suddenly that quirky hotel that was once the obscure favorite of a single guidebook gets lifted to market prominence.

There’s a flip side to this story. TripAdvisor has a huge influence over hotels, to the point where it sometimes may be considered unfair. This has become an industry where negative TripAdvisor reviews routinely cost people their jobs. A good friend of mine works as a hotel director and she always tells me that the single thing they fear most is a negative review on TripAdvisor. Due to the way ratings work, a pissed-off customer can single-handedly ruin a small hotel’s reputation on a whim, and they’re basically defenseless against that.

Via The Loop.

Rick Tetzeli, co-author of the upcoming book Becoming Steve Jobs, aptly dismantles the many myths surrounding Jobs’s public persona in a fantastic piece for Fast Company:

What emerged from these exclusive interviews—with Jony Ive and Tim Cook, Bill Gates and Bob Iger, and others, including Steve’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs—was a very different picture of Jobs. Steve was someone with a deep hunger for learning, who breathed in an education wherever he could find it, from his youthful pilgrimage to India to his key mentors and his longtime colleagues at NeXT, Pixar, and Apple. Powell Jobs goes so far as to call him a “learning machine.” He learned from his many failures and relentlessly applied those lessons. This wasn’t an obvious process—Steve always preferred to talk about the future rather than the past, so there are very few examples of him reflecting on his triumphs and missteps, or acknowledging a lesson learned. But like most of us, he tried to use what he learned to take better advantage of his strengths and temper his weaknesses. It was a lifelong effort, and, like most of us, he succeeded in some ways and failed in others.

A fascinating read.

Interesting comparison by Tyson Robichaud:

I think the 15mm is more a replacement for a lens like the 14mm or 17mm’s of the system, but seeing as I also have the Pana-Leica 25mm lens, I can more easily justify passing the 20mm along as well. I’ve already sold and reacquired my older, original 20mm, which I then sold again after getting the newer version 2, so I do have some type of connection to that lens as I feel it has been one of the best balances of size, speed and quality for the system since it’s original release all those years ago. That said, I think this new 15mm, coupled with my ownership of that 25mm lens, will not allow the 20mm to get the exercise it deserves, but that isn’t to say that we couldn’t also be having a conversation that for a more budget minded shooter, the 20mm could be an ample replacement for both the PL 15mm f/1.7 and PL 25mm f/1.4, so having to deal with these types of quandaries in a system is pretty awesome.

If you own several lenses in a similar focal length, streamlining your kit is always a good thing to consider.