Monthly Archives: April 2006

The Leica DP – Part II

Putting the digital Leica through its paces

Paso Robles in Central coastal California, close to my home, is a charming town of some thirty thousand people whose interests tend to focus on the outdoors, wine making and agriculture. As luck would have it, yesterday was the occasion of the annual Agriculture Show in the downtown square, so the Leica DP, neatly stashed in the glove compartment of the car, made its way with me to see what was happening.

I exposed all 53 frames available on the 1gB Sandisk Extreme III SD card, using the RAW format at the highest size setting, meaning the widesceen 16:9 format. That is really wide!

You may view twenty four of those snaps by clicking here, and you can return to this page by clicking he link in the title bar when you are done. Click on any picture to see a full screen view. Click on any full screen view to jump to the next snap. Click the title in any full screen view to access the thumbnail index. The pictures were processed in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS2, where they were converted to PSD files. These files were then droppped into a new project in Aperture where post-processing was applied and then exported to JPG format in iPhoto ’06. You can read about the Better HTML application used in conjunction with iPhoto ’06 to create these web pages here. I still prefer it to anything offered for web export in Aperture.

All snaps were taken with the DP set to ISO 100 using aperture priority. The aperture was set at f/6.3 whch resulted in shutter speeds of 1/125 to 1/1000th second. Somewhere along the way I must have touched one of the buttons as the aperture mysteriously changed to f/4.9, so I will have to address what caused that. All pictures were taken in a thirty minute time span.

Some observations. I forgot to set the DP to center weighted metering, leaving it at the default Multiple metering setting. The latter is confusingly denoted by a pair of brackets with a spot in the middle, whereas the center weighted mode has a pair of brackets sans spot. Silly. The result was that most of my pictures, focusing as they do on people in the shade, were exposed for the brighter background, necessitating some tweaking using the Highlights and Shadows slider in Aperture to bring up the shadows. The trade off is a little more noise in the shadows but nothing to worry about.

Picture-to-picture delay is some 2.5 seconds while the camera writes the RAW file to the SD card, and that’s with the fastest card on the market. While the camera has a burst mode, it’s not available if you use RAW, owing to the large file sizes involved and the limited size of the in-camera buffer. With a Leica M, picture-to-picture delay is some 1.5 seconds as you wind the film and reorient the camera so the Leica DP is a tad slower in this regard. If you are a Machine Gun shooter, stop reading now.

File sizes? Here’s the Mac’s Finder showing the SD card’s contents:

As you can see, each 16.1 mB RAW file is paired with a low quality 1.9mB JPG file and there does not seem to be any way of switching the JPG creation off. On the other hand, the space taken up by these JPGs is equal to six RAWs, so it’s not exactly a big deal, and the JPGs make for nice and quick web material, if needed. I use a Sandisk SD USB II card reader to load files onto the iMac, thus precluding the need to waste time loading the JPG files – I select the RAW files only. Plus that saves having to mess about with the custom cord provided by Panasonic which fits into a miniscule connector under a flap on the camera’s side – an accident waiting to happen.

Looking at the web pages of images, you will see that I have left many with the original 16:9 proportions, while cropping several others to the classical Leica 3:2 film format. I’m still learning how wide the widescreen format is, though it’s not a function of the optical iewfinder which accurately shows the 28mm width of the field of view. It’s just that I have to learn to get closer. As Robert Capa said “If your pictures are not good enough, you are no close enough”. After all these years I still have to remind myself of that.

How about definition? In PS CS2 after ACR processing, the images result in a 47.5 mB PSD file. On my 17″ diagonal iMac G5 screen the ‘Fit on Screen’ image is 7.3″ x 13″ in size and as sharp as you would need for a print that size. Switch to ‘Actual Pixels’ and the effective size becomes 37.5″ x 21.1″ which is huge. The merest amount of purple fringing is visible on bright white edges. Here’s the definition of a center portion without any post processing added.

Dial in 70/1/0 Unsharp Mask and you get the following:

These are both screen shots so the definition in a print would be markedly better, but even from these examples you can see central definition lacks nothing and there is no grain/noise. The modest level of USM is much less than dictated by the Canon EOS 5D’s full frame sensor, which need something like 250/2/0, so it’s a case of horses for courses when applying USM. One size does not fit all.

Edge definition? Here’s the extreme edge at 16:9 and f/6.3 after applying USM:

Here’s the full frame image after downsizing and using ‘Save for Web’:

Bottom line? 13″ wide prints with this combination will be just fine, but expect some wide angle distortion toward the edges and some purple fringing on bright color edges. The latter can be easily taken out with ACR’s controls. You are stuck with the distortion. Is the lens as good as the 24-105mm Canon IS ‘L’ f/4 on my EOS 5D? No, but it’s close. Plus three Leica DPs would weigh less than the Canon lens alone!

The other thing I noticed is that the native contrast of the RAW files was very high. Sure, the pictures were taken in contrasty lighting but the image contrast for the most part was too high. I’m going to reset the in-camera Contrast setting from Normal to Low and see if that makes a difference in RAW images, or if it only affects the JPG clone. Otherwise, Aperture or PS CS2 controls are fine, if a bit of a pain to have to apply.

What else? Carrying the DP by the wrist strap is a joy. The small right hand finger grip (missing from the over priced Leica D-Lux 2 clone) helps a lot and, of course, holding the camera to the eye where it is naturally braced by the forehead, aids steadiness greatly, further helped by the integral vibration reduction. With the viewfinder mounted above the screen the LCD display is invisible with the camera at eye level, and not a distraction. The camera will switch the screen off at a user preset time to preserve battery power (there is no option to leave the screen off as this is, after all, a viewfinder-less camera!). That’s a shame as once the camera powers down, the lens retracts, although the camera remains ‘On’. A touch of the shutter release button is required to make the lens extend again which means a delay of unacceptable length for a street snapper. The ‘Power Save’ options are 1, 2, 5, 10 minutes or Off, with ‘Off’ meaning it never goes Off. So I’m going to switch to the ‘Off’ option and then reduce screen brightness to a minimum to preserve battery power. We will see – a spare battery may be in order as I suspect that the LCD display consumes a lot of juice.

The purpose of all of this is, of course, to recreate the Leica experience with a modern digital camera. The Leica DP comes very close. No, there is none of the sensuous feel of the advance lever or the silky beauty of the controls. I doubt the M2/3/4 will ever be bettered in that regard. Shutter lag is barely longer than with a rangefinder M Leica, size and weight far less. The lens, while no Summicron or Elmarit, is very, very good and the camera is truly pocketable. There is simply no excuse for not carrying it at all times. The small size, aided by the amateur chrome looks aid greatly in making the photographer invisible and, most importantly, you no longer have to wait for your film to be destroyed at the local processing lab. Or by the X Ray machine at the airport. And you no longer have to curse the ridiculous film loading system in the Leica M body – in its refusal to change this, Leica displays German arrogance at its worst.

You want classic monochrome? Two clicks in Aperture and here you go:

Best of all, the Leica DP is incredible FUN. Now when was the last time you said that about a camera?

In Part III I’ll try it out at ISO 200 and 400 and see what happens.

The Leica DP – Part I

Finally – a digital Leica

Preconceptions abound in our society.

Italians are great lovers.
The French cannot be trusted.
The Welsh are liars.
Poles are stupid.
Jews are smart.
The British cannot cook.
Americans are crass.

And so on.

When it comes to photography, the one that always jumps to mind is:

Leica makes the best lenses.

This is about as accurate as the little collection of bigotry introducing this piece.

What is ‘best’ is a function of the situation. If you want an interchangeable lens camera with tracking autofocus, for example, there is no best Leica lens. In fact, there is no Leica lens. Better look to the great Japanese manufacturers (or, more correctly, designers, as most everything is made in China anyway) for that.

Yet, I confess, that after over thirty years of using Leica M rangefinders with any number of Leica optics attached, that I am something of a bigot. You see, I do believe Leica makes (some of) the best lenses. Even the Leica company is beginning to realize that its salvation lies not in making bodies, but in supplying lenses for other manufacturers’ bodies. Small, undercapitalized, forever on the verge of bankruptcy, Leica Camera cannot hope to develop a competent modern body without massive out sourcing of electronic needs – LCDs, motors, microprocessors, software, you name it.

Back in 1976 Leica showed a working version of their Correfot autofocusing system at Photokina. That was the last that was heard of it on a camera. Either they failed to patent it or lacked the capital to enforce their patent so that, before you knew it, every major Japanese manufacturer had autofocus based on Leica’s (or was it Honeywell’s?) genius.

No, it takes major capital to make electronic gizmos and Leica cannot hope to compete.

When I moved from medium format to full frame digital, acquiring a Canon 5D from the sales proceeds of all that clunky 6×6 gear, the knowledge still rankled that a miniature camera, as the original 35mm cameras were known, was missing from my tool kit. ‘Miniature’ is the operative word, for whereas the 5D delivers medium format quality with a fraction of the bulk and weight of medium format, no one could accuse the body and lens of being compact. Try to stick it in your pocket and Mae West would be apt to remark “Is that a 5D in your pants or are you just happy to see me?”

I have long been searching for a digital camera which would combine those special features a street shooter needs, and I have some claim to the appellation, much of my early work having been street photography, pure and simple. You can see the results of these Leica years in my book Street Smarts. What are those special features? Well, the camera must be small and unobtrusive. Quiet of course. Must have a 28mm or 35mm lens. Must have the shortest possible shutter delay. And it must have an optical viewfinder. Plus, of course, that elusive Leica lens.

Let me present the Leica DP, or the Leica Digital Panasonic:

I wasn’t about to wait for the much rumored digital Leica M. First, who knows when, if ever, it will be available. Second $5,000+ paid to a near-bankrupt company for a body with a cropped sensor, which makes my 35mm Summicron into a 46mm ersatz wide angle, is not my cup of tea. So when the Panasonic company released its Lumix LX1 I spent the last of my excess medium format gear proceeds and got one. Something tells me Panasonic will last longer than Leica and while not chump change, the $480 I paid beats the $5k or whatever that the Digital M will go for. The lens is a 28-112mm (I’m using 35mm full frame conventions here) zoom, f/2.8 at the widest setting, falling to f/4.9 at the long end. I had no desire for a zoom, but there was no alternative. What attracted me most to the camera was that it came in chrome (I like to look as amateur as possible) and boasted a very short shutter lag. The latter has been the bane of all but the most costly digital cameras. Sure, the 5D has a lag similar to a Leica M, but it’s hardly a low visibility candid camera.

The biggest drawbacks were the lack of an optical viewfinder and reports that the sensor is very noisy. Well, an email to Cameraquest and $160 later saw a gorgeous Voigtlander 28mm optical viewfinder of bejeweled quality arrive in the mail. Some 3M Super Weatherstrip Adhesive and a few minutes of work saw the finder neatly glued to the top of the LX1, where it replicates the camera’s field of view pretty accurately at the widest setting of the lens. I was going to glue an accessory shoe to the top plate of the LX1 but the only useable space – between the mode dial and the pop-up flash – is so tight that I had to resort to simply gluing the finder directly to the top plate. By using weatherstrip adhesive the bond can be undone at any time with 3M Adhesive Remover, yet is robust enough that the integrity of the ensemble remains unthreatened. You can see just how tight the clearance is here:

Here’s how the assembly looks from behind ….

….and in close up:

Compared with the M3 the Leica DP is miniscule, weighing in at some 6 ounces plus some 2 ounces for the finder.

Here’s a top view:

Now for some tuning. The LX1 comes with the usual mind numbing collection of mostly useless digital settings. I set the lens at 28mm and the aspect ratio to 16:9. There are three ratios – widescreen 16:9 (like a movie), classical Leica 3:2 and standard digital 4:3. I like the widescreeen look so I went with that. Second, the mode dial was set to ‘A’, meaning aperture priority – you set the aperture, the camera does the shutter speed. I keep it at f/2.8, the maximum. That gives me a shutter speed range of 8 seconds to 1/1000. Stop down a bit and you can get to 1/2000. You will not miss that as the camera has built in vibration reduction, somewhat akin to the IS feature on some Canon lenses, and good for a couple of shutter speeds in terms of camera shake.

ISO is set to 100 until I can figure out just how bad the digital noise is at higher speeds (the camera only goes up to 400 – just like TriX of old), and focusing is set to ‘high speed center area’ to further reduce shutter lag compared with the standard multi-area setting. I leave the auto focusing on but reprogram the AE/AF lock button on the rear to lock exposure only. That way scenes with, say too much sky, are pre-metered by pointing the camera down and jabbing the AE button. Focus can be locked separately, if needed, by taking the first pressure on the shutter release with the focus rectangle pointed at the area of interest, prior to final re-composition. All take much less time than manually focusing your Leica M and messing about with the aperture and shutter speed controls.

How is the key aspect of this combination, shutter lag? Well, accepting that the Leica M and the Canon EOS 5D are pretty much instantaneous, there is a very short delay with the Leica DP as focus take place. Not enough to bother about. The default setting for shutter sound made by the DP is described as ‘soft’ (a very loud ‘clack’) and the loud setting is something like a Pentax 6×7 going off. I switched the shutter sound to ‘Off’ and while you can just barely hear the shutter tripping in a quiet room, in practice you learn to judge when the picture has been taken from the feel of the shutter release button. Compared to a Leica M? Well, the M’s shutter noise is to the Leica DP what the Pentax 6×7 is to the M. The Leica DP wouldn’t disturb your next audience with the Pope in his chambers.

Hey! wait a minute, you protest. Why didn’t I buy the Leica D-Lux 2 which is, after all, a real Leica. Oh! do come on. I saved $300 on the identical Lumix and put some of the savings towards the viewfinder and a 1gB Sandisk Extreme III fast SD card, the better to write out those RAW files that the camera produces. You can opt for a variety of JPGs too, of course, but I feel RAW is the way to go with a noise challenged sensor. The 32 mB card shipped with the camera is a joke – it will accommodate 2 or 3 images. The 1gB Sandisk will store 52 pictures using the highest quality RAW setting with the 16:9 aspect ratio. That feels like two 24 exposure rolls of film from the old days, just right for a day’s street photography. Still, if you want to pay another $300 for a silly red label, have at it.

Drawbacks so far? Well, Aperture does not yet recognize LX1 RAW, so it’s back to that old dog Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Camera RAW for conversions. This combination has all the ergonomics of a Swiss Army knife but at least it yields high quality RAW conversions. Once converted to TIFF the images can then be dropped into the Aperture database. The camera is also very small, meaning it’s easy to drop. The provided wrist strap fixes that. Finally, apertures or shutter speeds (if you use aperture or shutter priority) have to be set using the built in LCD (the camera can be used in fully manual mode if you desire) but at least it’s easily readable in all but the brightest sunlight. That’s in contrast to the truly horrid screen in the $3,000 Canon EOS 5D body. C’mon Canon, wake up!

In Part II I relate some practical field experience with this little jewel. Meanwhile, I’m off to find one of those idiotic ‘Leica’ red stickers, beloved of dentists and investment bankers who collect jewelry, as it should double the value of my new Leica DP.

Competition lives

And it helps improve the breed, as ever

When I read the other day that Mamiya was quitting the photography business, having blown not a few Yen in developing its medium format digital camera, I confess my first reaction was unease. While Mamiya may have been guilty of poor market analysis – Canon’s 35mm format sensors being the equal of just about anything medium format offers at a fraction of the price – it is never a good thing to have less choice.

Take a look at today’s monopolists and their uniformly execrable products and customer service – Microsoft’s operating system, Adobe’s Photoshop, Intuit’s Quicken, the handful of oligopolistic US defense manufacturers, the US Government (the worst monopolist of all) – and you get the idea.

However, I thought a more analytical approach might make better sense of Mamiya’s demise, so I dug out the old 1976 Wallace Heaton Blue Book, the photography equipment catalog published by a famous London camera store, and did some figuring.

Here were your choices some thirty years ago:

First, 35mm SLRs: Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Leica, Rollei, Zodel (Zodel?), Olympus, Minolta, Miranda, Yasicha, Petriflex, Praktica, Mamiya and Exakta were listed in that order.

35mm rangefinder cameras included Leica, Minolta, Yasicha, Canon, Agfa, Dignette (what?), Nikon, Rollei, Olympus and Konica.

No digital cameras, of course.

Seventeen manufacturers all told.

Then I went to the B&H web site to see what’s out there today.

SLR film cameras: Canon, Contax (now defunct), KonicaMinolta (kaput), Leica, Nikon, Pentax, Phoenix, Sigma, Vivitar and Voigtlander.

35mm film cameras: Canon, Contax (now defunct), Fantasea, Goko, Kalimar, KonicaMinolta (now defunct), Leica, Lomographic, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Rollei and Zeiss.

Digital cameras: Bushnell, Canon, Casio, Epson, Fuji, HP, Kodak, KonicaMinolta (gone), Mamiya (gone), Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Rollei, Samsung, Sanyo and Sony.

Make that twenty four active manufacturers, or some 40% more than there were thirty years ago. And many of these are consumer electronics companies first (Canon, Casio, Epson, Fuji, HP, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo and Sony), and camera makers a distant second.

So while Canon could do with some serious full frame sensor competition, the capitalist world as seen through the metric of choice of photo gear seems to be ticking along just fine. Those that fell by the wayside, KonicaMinolta, Mamiya, Miranda etc. just failed to make products enough people wanted, which is as it should be.

Look, the alternative is GM – a company making products no one wants with its hand out to the government, aka the taxpayer’s pocket. I prefer a good bankruptcy myself.

Early photographic vision

Uccello and Carravaggio had it down 500 years ago

As a boy growing up in London I lose count of the number of visits I made to The National Gallery in London. Whether going through my Impressionist period, High Renaissance or early Renaissance, there was always something there to fascinate and to intrigue. While photography had always been my first love in the visual arts, I think I learned more about seeing from gazing at the art in this great collection than from any number of photography books.

Some of these experiences left deep impressions. When asked which of the works on display I liked most, nay, desired to possess, the choices narrow to a few. Titian’s ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (1512) (Do Not Touch Me) of course. I have always been captivated by the dynamic use of diagonals – Christ, Mary Magdalen, the tree, the lovely warm light, Christ’s daring near-nakedness. You can feel the motion as he grabs the shroud to prevent Mary pulling on it. It is hard to conceive of a more perfectly balanced composition and if you think you cannot get away, as a photographer, with lampposts growing out of people’s heads, well just look what Titian did with that tree!

I have always felt that The National Gallery has way over-restored its Titians to near-Cibachrome color intensity, and that clearly shows here, but the magic of the picture saves the day.

So when it comes to lessons in composition, just check a few Titians out.

Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man (1485) is simply arresting. It’s one of the smallest paintings on display at 16″ by 12″ – the size of a regular photographic print. But you walk into that gallery and there’s only one thing you can see. The certainty of the gaze, the confident bearing, the red cap accent, the somewhat rushed rendering of the tunic, all to good purpose. It places all the focus on the eyes. When I first saw this – I was probably fourteen at the time – I made such a bee line for the picture that I nearly knocked over one of London’s dowager ladies in my rush. It’s that good. I frequently fantasized about pinching this masterpiece – how hard would it be to make off with a 16″ by 12″ canvas, after all? To this day the use of daylight and the way shadows model the face leave anything Vermeer did with lighting in, well, the shade.

As a photographer it is simply impossible not to like Caravaggio. Versions of The Supper at Emmaus hang in both the National Gallery and the Louvre, the diners’ ragged clothing rendered just so, the worms in the fruit on the table and, of course, Caravaggio’s signature lighting. But great as that painting is, it is simply eclipsed by The Conversion of Saul (St. Paul). In London’s Swinging Sixties the 21mm lens on a 35mm camera was de rigeur for any self respecting trendie. You saw its abuse everywhere, especially on record sleeves of the more extreme rock groups. Wild perspective, severely receding lines, objects very close to the lens, distortion galore. Well just take a look at this. Caravaggio had the 21mm figured. What is breathtaking about this canvas is how little space he has worked in. Painted in 1601 the canvas is simply enormous – some 7 1/2 by 6 feet. In other words, the horse is rendered at almost life size. Why so large? Caravaggio was a student of perspective. He knew that viewers would get too close to the painting, but that, by doing so, the grandeur of his ultra-wide angled vision would be correctly rendered and the perspective distortion would disappear. And so it does. The painting is immensely involving. You are there. Like a movie in a theater compared to the same thing on television, you have to see this live. Not reproduced.

But easily the strangest use of perspective on view in The National Gallery belongs to a visionary whose work preceded that of all the above, none other than Paolo Uccello. In 1450 he painted three enormous panels depicting the battle at San Romano in which the Florentine army defeated Siena some twenty years earlier. The three panels are some 6 feet by 10 feet in size. One (the weakest, and that’s a cruel critique) hangs in The National Gallery. The others hang in the Louvre and the Uffizi. Fitting that three of the greatest masterpieces of the early Renaissance should hang in the three greatest Renaissance collections.

Appropriately, the best hangs in the Florentine collection, but look, if you gave me the one in London I would have no issues with finding wall space for it. I assert that there is more to be learned, as a photographer, from this one painting than from any number of academic studies on the use of perspective. By the time this painting was made, artists understood the rendering of perspective well. Uccello just chose to disregard the rules, dramatically foreshortening perspective, predating surrealism by some six hundred years. The repeating motif of the lances, the purposeful abuse of sizing (look how small the dead soldier in the left foreground is), the steep, tilted, climbing background with the horsemen rendered way too large, the detritus of battle painted in seemingly random perspective. It’s magic. Simply the greatest lesson in the (ab)use of perspective on canvas.

As photographers, we have a lot to learn from the masters.

And no, I harbored no fantasies about making off with the Uccello. It’s just too big to stash under a genuine English raincoat.

Boxers

Book review

I confess that I approached ‘Boxers’ by Carol Huebner Venezia (an American photographer, the exotic name notwithstanding) with great anticipation. The publicity talked of how the photographer had got inside the psyche of the professionals in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn where many famous fighters had trained. Further, the publicists intoned, she counterbalances the tough end of the sport with pictures of fighters in Italy. I quote:

“Boxing offers those working class men who learn the sport a slim chance of realizing the American dream. But the price for social standing and above-average income is often broken bones and chronic health problems. In contrast, in Assisi, in the center of the Italian boxing world, boxing is about athletic competition and the art of the sport.”

Well, based on what I see here, she never made the remotest emotional contact with her subjects in either location. Indeed, some of the best pictures have no boxers in them – one of a young child in the ring and another of swinging sacks, or whatever you call those things, that boxers pummel. Nary a boxer in sight. Great pictures though.

Despite the high fallutin’ text, based largely in academic drivel, the woman’s inability to get inside the brains (or what’s left of them) of her subjects is mystifying. It’s not as if she didn’t try, as the pictures span over a decade.

Let me quote from the introduction just to reassure you I am not making this up:

“If we look at the group of pictures as a whole, there appears to be a clear impulse to movement both in the single photographs and as a sequence”. What? Nearly every picture in the book is stiffly posed in a pale imitation of August Sander. Sander is much lauded in the introduction let it be said, and the comparison only goes to show the photographer in a negative light.

One of the few snaps with movement is of the swinging medicine (yes, now I recall what they call them) balls in a deserted gym. Why these should be moving when there is no one in sight beats me, but it’s a neat idea, I suppose.

Here’s another Doozie from the intro:

“The objective approach of this photography avoids pathos or any explicit critique of society”.

Please.

So that’s where our higher education monies are going? To pay boobs to write claptrap like that? What a travesty. Time they got a real job and learned to write English.

Lots more of the above garbage is to be found in the introduction. No need to dwell there.

On to the pictures.

There are a scant thirty all told, one of which, the one so badly exposed that no facial details can be discerned, also appears on the cover. Not exactly what you would call value in a $30 paperback. Fully half of these are static portraits, some in what could be a studio setting, of half naked guys who, absent their gloves, could as well be construction workers. Or fit investment bankers, come to think of it. The remaining pictures are generally so irrelevant to the genre that I really wonder why the woman bothered? Maybe she liked to go to Gleason’s for the vicarious pleasure of seeing all those muscles, the camera as an excuse, but the guys in the ring clearly did not accept her as one of their own. Heck, she’s probably the wrong gender and color anyway.

I would like to say something positive about this book. I cannot. I just feel I have been ripped off.

Update May 18, 2009: This book is so unquestionably bad, the photography so regurgitably awful, that I finally consigned my copy to where it belongs. The garbage bin. Good riddance.