Photographs, Photographers and Photography

May 31, 2006

Facades

Filed under: Photographs, Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 1:46 pm

Behind each facade lies a story

My catalog seems to include more than its fair share of facades. Walls. Fronts. Facades. Each speaks of a time and place and brings back memories. Each has its own story behind the front.

I can still smell the bread baking in this one.


Cambria, CA. EOS 5D, 24-105mm.

A few more of this sort of thing, taken over the past year as I was transitioning from film to digital, can be found here. Exactly half were on film. No, you can’t tell which half….only big prints will disclose the superiority of the digital originals.

In the studio

Filed under: Photographs, Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:53 am

Controlled lighting makes things much simpler

Over the years I have consistently taken controlled pictures of friends in what, for lack of a better word, would be best described as a studio environment. That may take the guise of soft northern window light at one extreme, or strictly controlled studio flash with umbrella reflectors and drop backgrounds at the other. For the latter I have long owned a small three head Novatron electronic flash outfit which has been superbly reliable and is easily (OK, so you have to lift the heavy storage case) transported to any location. Add Photek’s compact ‘Background in a Bag’, a support system for a 6 foot by 7 foot backdrop, and you are set for most eventualities.


Ollie the Pug. Leica M3, 90mm Elmarit-M, Novatron.

You can see a few of these by clicking here.

The pictures span a thirty year time frame, mostly taken with a Leica rangefinder (ideal for critical focus) with 90mm lenses ranging from the economical Elmar, made some fifty years ago and discontinued long ago, to the exotic Apo Summicron Aspherical which is current and ridiculously expensive.

May 30, 2006

Canon 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens

Filed under: Lenses — Thomas Pindelski @ 1:53 pm

Finally, a replacement for the magnificent Leica Apo-Telyt-R

Mention of the fabulous Leica Apo-Telyt-R lens in my column on the Leicaflex SL the other day prompts mention of its replacement which I have been using for a few weeks now on the Canon EOS 5D.

Available during the period 1975-98, the 180mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt was one of the first Apochromatic lenses available for 35mm cameras, meaning there was no color fringing to be seen no matter how big the enlarged print. It was a surprisingly compact lens, weighing in at 1.65 lbs with its built in lens hood. Full aperture definition was as good as that at any other aperture, meaning superb, or as good as you ability to hold it steady.


The fabulous Leitz 180mm Apo-Telyt R

While cursed with yet another clunky lens hood (why on earth did Canon abandon the earlier sliding lens hood? Another Canon lens hood in the garbage can), the Apo’s replacement on the EOS 5D is Canon’s superb 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens. The ‘L’ lens adds the benefit of automatic focus, to boot. As I sold the Apo-Telyt in a moment of foolishness a few years back, I have been using the fully manual Leitz 200mm f/4 Telyt on the 5D where it works well, but you have to stop down and focus manually. A legacy of my Leica M/Visoflex housing days. Closest focus with the Canon is down to 4.9 feet (compared to a rather poor 8.2 feet for the Apo-Telyt) and can be limited to 8.2 feet in the interest of faster performance when the close-up range is not needed. Weights of the two lenses are 1.65 lbs for the Apo and 1.68 lbs for the Canon, meaning the latter uses plastics where possible as it has automatic diaphragm and focus motors to conceal in its somewhat bulkier body.

Automatic focus speed on the 5D is simply startling. So fast you don’t even think of it, though I have taken the precaution of limiting auto focus area selection to the center focus rectangle in the interests of accuracy. There’s not much depth of field at 200mm and f/2.8! The only thing missing is vibration reduction. Now that would be nice to have!

Consistent with my commitment not to get loaded down with gear, I purchased a small cylindrical soft case for the lens which attaches to my belt and, because its overall dimensions are similar to the 24-105mm f/4 ‘L’ , when one lens is on the camera the other makes its home in the belt case. Each is fitted with a clear UV filter, so only a rear cap need be used – I would dispense with that also, but the rear lens element on the zoom is too exposed to take that risk, given my proclivity to thumbprint everything.


The Canon 24-105mm f/4 and 200mm f/2.8 lenses. The zoom is at its longest setting.

Why a prime lens rather than another zoom? Two reasons – weight and maximum aperture. Performance is less of a concern given the high optical standards of Canon’s ‘L’ lenses. I really do not need focal lengths between 105mm and 200mm and the 5D’s sensor allows image enlargement in this intermediate range without compromising definition. Further, any lens with a half-decent maximum aperture that zooms beyond 200mm is impossibly bulky. On the very rare occasions I need something longer I have my 400mm f/6.8 Leitz Telyt to fall back on.

The 200mm is a fine landscape lens, compressing perspective and focusing on essentials.


Canon EOS 5D, 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’, probably at f/5.6.

Best of all, as ‘L’ glass goes it’s positively a bargain, and chump change compared to the Leitz lens which it so ably replaces.


Canon EOS 5D, 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’, at f/3.5. No problem with background clutter!

May 29, 2006

Looking at pictures

Filed under: Book reviews, Photographers, Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:22 am

You can’t beat natural light

As we look forward to six dry months in central Caliornia, it’s nice to have a sheltered outdoor spot to look at pictures on those long, warm summer evenings.

This little walled patio on the north side of our home was a complete mess when we moved here a couple of years ago. As the US Government has yet to craft a method of taxing sweat equity, I set about fixing it up to make a pleasant enviroment to better enjoy the occasional book of pictures. The only taxes involved were iniquitous sales taxes which, wherever they may go rest assured it’s not to fix the local roads and freeways, which resemble those of a third world nation.

No matter. Get rid of the horrible hot tub that so spoiled this lovely spot, add a few rose bushes and magnolias, some mulch, a small fountain to set the tone and a few pieces of wicker furniture from the far east and you have the makings of a fine outdoor reading room. The tub was sold to a neighbor and the proceeds invested in what you see here. Throw in a Border Terrier and things are nigh perfect.

Yesterday evening I was leafing through Michael Kenna’s work in the beautifully printed ‘A Twenty Year Retrospective’ and couldn’t help but remark on how the prints looked so much better in the warm outdoor light. His photographs are reproduced in a gentle sepia which adds greatly to the overall feel. Kenna has a strong, consistent style and while the book credits him with works in many US public gallery collections, you would probably expect to find it on the wood panelled walls of classier business institutions like private banks and financial advisors.

Anyway, with all that sepia going on, I grabbed that little jewel, the Leica DP, and took a couple of snaps to illustrate this piece. A few seconds with Photoshop saw the RAW images converted to TIF files whence two more clicks saw monochrome conversion and sepia toning. The sepia toning plug-in can be found gratis, free and for nothing here and confers just the right Victorian feel to go with all that sunshine and wicker.

May 28, 2006

The Leicaflex SL

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:04 am

Simple, sturdy and with great lenses, you can pick up this behemoth for very little

While classic rangefinder Leicas continue to appreciate as doctors, dentists and investment bankers fill their display cases, fine cameras like the Leicaflex SL, which never really caught on, can be had very inexpensively.

I used one for many years, during the period 1977 though 1990, starting with a 50mm Summicron lens, adding a 21mm, a 90mm Summicron for portraits and the superb 180mm Apo-Telyt R for landscape pictures. As good an optic as I have ever used.

Provided you were in no great hurry and didn’t mind the noise, it was hard to take a bad picture with this camera. The camera was big and rather clunky, the wind lever had way too long an arc but the controls were nice and large meaning use with gloves on was no problem.

What I liked most was the semi-spot meter. The excellent microprism focusing circle also defined the exact area of measurement for the meter and was large enough that you didn’t get all nervy the way you do with a spot meter. It was a match needle design, meaning you had to align two needles, visible only in the viewfinder. Adding or deducting a stop for light correction was very easy with the camera at eye level, as the viewfinder displayed the selected shutter speed and was very easy to see with or without eyeglasses.

This was one of the last of the all mechanical cameras which have now largely disappeared, but proved very reliable in all weather conditions. True, the camera had looks only a mother could love but the lenses were superb regardless of focal length.

As Leica has since added all sorts of electronic gizmo connections in its SLR lenses in a futile attempt to keep up with the times, the earlier two cam mechanical lenses can be had very inexpensively. While the build quality never felt up to early Leica M standards (meaning M2, M3 and M4), I had no reliability problems, and the uncluttered viewfinder was a joy to use. A great starter camera for someone getting serious and willing to put up with the shortcomings of film.

Anchorage, Alaska. 1978. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron R, Kodachrome 64

New York City. 1985. Leicaflex SL, 21mm Super-Angulon R, Kodachrome 64

Lake Elizabeth, California. 1990. Leicaflex SL, 180mm Apo-Telyt R, Kodachrome 64

May 27, 2006

The Leica DP – Part VI

Filed under: LX — Thomas Pindelski @ 1:12 pm

Vibration reduction at work

The Lumix LX1 uses two motion sensors, one for vertical and the other for hoizontal motion. These feed the opposite of any motion they detect to the lens assembly to reduce the effects of definition-robbing camera shake on the image. Panasonic calls it ‘Mega OIS’ which sounds rather grand, no? A related benefit is that with the two shutter speeds thus gained – meaning you can use 1/15th where 1/60th was safe before – is that ISO 100 becomes in effect ISO 400, with attendant benefits on reduced sensor noise; as I illustrated earlier, the camera’s sensor is somewhat noisy at ISO 400.

Sceptical?

Here are two pictures, taken seconds apart, of one of my bookshelves, hand held, taken at the longest lens setting (to emphasize shake) and 1/4 second at ISO 100. Care to guess which one had vibration reduction switched on?

I use Mode 2 OIS, meaning the OIS is switched on the moment the shutter is pressed; I have no need of Mode 1 – on all the time – as I use my glued on 28mm Voigtlander optical viewfinder to compose, not the LCD screen. And as the camera always starts with the lens at 28mm no matter where it was when switched off or powered down, there is no risk of using an optical viewfinder not matched to the lens.

This wonderful vibration reduction system will add more quality to a picture than any amount spent on expensive glass without this feature. I like to think that my 28mm f/2.8 Lumix Leica lens has just become an f/1.4, which, in effect, it has. Anyone with a 28mm f/2 Leica Aspherical Summicron on their Leica care to challenge me at 1/4 second? 13″ x 19″ prints at two paces. And by the way, your competing camera and lens will have cost some ten times the price of the Lumix LX1. Too bad. Someone steals your rig and you have a problem. They can’t steal mine unless they requisition my jeans, because that’s where this little jewel resides.

Oh! and did I mention the widescreen capabilty you see above?

Miles Storey’s Mute photoblog

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:41 am

Bookmark this one

Photoblogging can be a culturally arid desert. Maybe it’s because everyone can post pictures to a blog, or maybe it’s the pressure to perform. The ‘one picture a day’ machismo that separates real men from the rest is, for the most part, inversely correlated with the quality of the work displayed.

That said, there are some truly fine photographers regularly posting pictures on line.

One of my favorites is an English photographer who makes Toronto his home and posts to his cleverly named Mute photoblog. Miles’s photography is as tight and clean as the design of his blog and scarcely a week passes when I don’t find myself thinking “I wish I had seen that”.

For sheer magic, try this or, for the surreal, how about this? For as long as I can remember he has posted the occasional picture taken with a camera aimed at the ground glass screen of his old Rollei. While the tendency is to dismiss this as so much gimickry, I confess to finding the results strangely haunting for their old world look and feel. Miles also has the ‘in your face’ street portraiture thing down cold and you will see great examples every now and then on his site.

Best as I can tell, Miles seems to pretty much post daily. (When he misses a day he actually apologizes!). Beats me how he does it in light of the consistently high quality of his work. Step by Mute and add it to your bookmarks.

In the flower garden

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:44 am

Modern equipment makes photographing things very easy

I have a love hate relationship with my garden. With a couple of acres of flowers, lawns and trees it would be disingenuous to say that upkeep is trivial. Far from it. And it’s not something you can delegate to one of the local butchers who poses as a ‘Landscape Maintenance’ expert. If the fellow cares to turn up at all, it’s hung over and wanting to discuss the inane arcana of some sporting event, likely as not. His equipment will almost certainly suffer one of its many routine breakdowns and he seems to think that his high school education, or lack thereof, makes his time worth $100 an hour. Bloody hell, it took me fifteen years in school and ten in the work place before I made that sort of money. So you can understand when I gag at the thought of this person and his like earning $200,000 a year. This sort of thing simply has to stop. Thank goodness for all those fine Hispanic immigrants keeping prices down. Indeed, on reflection, I have learned ten times more from the Hispanics who help me with the vineyard than I have from Whitey who buys my crop and makes it into wine. Plus their $10 per hour rate sounds about right to me.

The result is that I look after my own garden. One hour every morning and one every evening keeps things shipshape and puts one more psychoanalyst out of business, which can only be a good thing. But the work can be hard and the frustrations are many, mostly involved with fighting a collection of moles, weeds, ground squirrels and various other invaders seeking to lay things low. Just like real life, I suppose. The majority is comprised of unproductive hangers on. A business parallel is appropriate. Goldman Sachs is the best managed, large, financial institution in the world. It has the smartest, hardest working people on earth seeing to that. Yet CEO Henry Paulson once famously remarked that 90% of his employees added no value. Just like the things I have to deal with in my garden.

Working on the garden is very much like managing money. Short term decisions may yield quick results but overall quality and returns are invariably compromised. Good work done today repays the effort a year or two down the road. So now I am beginning to reap the benefits of much missionary work invested in the garden over the past two years. Walking around the estate of an evening, Border Terrier in tow, the prevailing emotion experienced in surveying the results is one of simple, unalloyed joy. Unlike photography, however, the tools used for gardening really have changed little over the centuries. Sure, we fat, lazy Americans use power tools wherever possible, but when it comes to planting or weeding, good old fashioned sweat equity is the only investment that yields returns.

Every year about this time I make a few pictures of the garden and place them on our family web site. This serves a couple of purposes. First, it allows the historian in me to survey rates of progress. Second, it helps with overall design, as a picture viewed in the cold light of day on a computer screen tends to make for more objective assessment than a casual ramble around the property.

No, I am not about to bore you with images of flowers. For the most part, pictures of flowers and babies are things to share with your childern’s grandparents, not with those friends with the pained, slightly impatient smiles. But banging away the other day with the EOS 5D with that superb 200mm ‘L’ lens, I couldn’t help thinking how wonderfully accommodating modern camera technology has become. There are so few technical things to think about that all one’s concentration can be devoted to the task of composition. No need to worry about focus, camera shake, exposure, film choice or processing.

So before I knew it I had a couple of film rolls’ worth of snaps of the blooms in the garden on our web site, each sharp as can be and exposed just so. Now try doing that with the equipment available some twenty years ago. Of course you could do it just as well, but you would have to use a great deal of film to get the same results. And you wouldn’t have those for several days. And how exactly would you propose to have no grain in your 400 ISO film snaps, especially when you need all the film speed you can get to guarantee short shutter speeds in the prevailing breeze? The same breeze that makes the estate the haven it is on a warm California evening.

Young people coming into the photography avocation today are very fortunate not to have to struggle with all that gobbledegook about technique. Just bang away and learn from your mistakes – that’s a far faster learning method than anything in a book on technique. A fast feedback loop, if you like. And would my modern pictures be any the worse had I not spent 40 years using film? No, not at all. The learning of those years can be condensed into days with good modern equipment.

Canon EOS 5D, 200mm at f/3.5, ISO 400, hand held in the wind, probably 1/2000th or less

May 26, 2006

Shutter lag

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:15 am

It takes the Wall Street Journal to surface the issue

Not only is America afflicted with some of the world’s worst television – from situation comedy to news reporting, though it’s often difficult to distinguish the two – it can also lay claim to having the worst newspapers. As often as not, these mistake editorial opinion for news, so you end up reading some leftie’s opinion about put-upon losers as news reporting. Write enough of this sort of thing and you get a Pulitzer Prize.

In the digital photography world, the worst reporting involves avoidance of mention of a near universal problem in modern cameras. Shutter lag. The time it takes between pressing the button to recording the image. Read any number of reviews of digital cameras and chances are you will see no mention of this defect. I can only guess that this is either because of conflicts of interest (journalists accepting bribes in the form of free equipment or pushing advertising in their magazine) or because the reviewer hasn’t the faintest idea how to take a photograph.

So it was welcome news indeed to open the Wall Street Journal this morning – a fine newspaper which keeps its opinions on the editorial page – to see an article on shutter lag, of all things. They quoted some poor schnuck who blew big coin on a digital camera to record the whales on his Mexican vacation, but managed to record only sterile images of the sea, the leaping whale having just departed owing to shutter lag. What’s interesting about the piece is that it takes a business newspaper to disclose a design defect which makes most digital cameras worthless for all except maybe landscape photographers and realtors. Let’s face it, neither is exactly dealing with moving subjects. Earlier reporting by the Journal confirms that the primary use of digital cameras hasn’t changed from that for film cameras, meaning pictures of one’s family. Especially of the kids. Ever tried to catch that fleeting moment on your baby’s face with a modern digital point-and-shoot camera?

The Journal gets it wrong in saying this is a digital camera problem, citing the good old days of fast film cameras. As the latter developed more automation – focus, exposure and so on – shutter lag was already beginning to raise its ugly head. Simple cameras like rangefinder Leicas and better SLRs never had the problem, and it was one of the major causes for concern I had when waiting to go digital. With the Canon EOS 5D there is no shutter lag, but then you should expect no less from a camera that runs close to $5,000 with a decent lens attached. I was more than aware of the issue having used an Olympus C5050Z for three years or so, and learned early on not to use it to photograph anything that moved.

The Olympus C5050Z – a very competent camera for static recording, but useless for moving subjects because of horrid shutter lag

So it’s satisfying to report that Panasonic cured the issue in a point-and-shoot digital in the LX1. Unfortunately, they made two boo-boos. First, they never advertised this ‘feature’ which I discovered after much research. Second, they have just discontinued the camera. So if you want a fast, small digital point-and-shoot, now is the time to get an LX1. Read more by clicking on the ‘Leica DP’ entry on the left.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Wall Street Journal for good reporting.

May 25, 2006

Pentax does it right

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:52 am

How vibration reduction should be done

I have made no secret of my admiration for the camera designers at Pentax, having owned a Pentax ME Super and a Pentax 6×7 over the years.

The ME Super was my New York street camera during the years 1980-1987, when I lived in what was then a pretty dangerous New York City. Not caring to lose my Leica M3 to a chain snatcher, I acquired an inexpensive ME Super and a couple of lenses – a very compact 20mm ultra-wide, a 28mm wide and that miniscule 40mm ‘Pancake’ standard. A sweet outfit, with the added benefit of exposure automation.

The 6×7 represented my first foray into landscape photography and while it went off like Dirty Harry’s Magnum when you pressed the button, there was no arguing with the quality of the negatives that resulted.

The other day I was thinking about changes in camera design which made things so much easier for today’s picture taker. Small 35mm cameras, greatly improved film emulsions, ever better lenses and that sort of thing. But clearly digital imaging was the watershed that made everything much faster yet, to my mind, vibration reduction has saved more snaps from the reject bin than any feature since automatic exposure and focus. If your goal in life is big prints, then the old saw that the slowest shutter speed should be no slower than the reciprocal of the focal length for hand held pictures is simply wrong. You think you can get shake free pictures with your standard lens at 1/50th second good enough for an 18” x 24” print? I don’t think so.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of vibration compensating mechanisms and circuitry in still cameras – the Steadicam for film makers, after all, has been around for some 25 years, famously used by Stanley Kubrick in ‘The Shining’ in 1980 – but I was very conscious of its availability in some Canon lenses when I sprung for the EOS 5D. Most importantly, the ‘standard’ lens I chose – the 24-105mm ‘L’ – has this feature and it adds wonderfully to definition. Canon says it’s good for three shutter speeds slower than normal, meaning that the modest f/4 maximum aperture of the lens is not as limiting as you might think.

Similarly, my Panasonic LX-1 comes with Panasonic’s version of vibration reduction in a very compact package and Nikon has offered the feature on some of its more exotic lenses for a while. However, with both Nikon and Canon, the execution is not well thought out when it comes to their interchangeable lens cameras. The problem is that the vibration reduction circuitry is part of the lens, not the camera, meaning only certain lenses have it.

It took a smart designer at Pentax to finally get this right. His answer? Simple. Build the circuitry into the body, not the lens, which they have just done with the newly announced K100D.

In this way, any lens, however adapted to the camera’s body, benefits from this wonderful feature, and you don’t have to double up on lens bulk as no lens contains any related mechanisms or circuitry. Now is that clever or what?

May 24, 2006

Not really luck

Filed under: LX, Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 2:58 pm

You make your luck. It doesn’t just find you.

My wife prides herself on knowing the charming town of Burlingame in the South Bay of San Francisco pretty well, so imagine her surprise the other day when a passer-by asked her for directions to the ‘English Village’.

It turns out that this is a collection of fifteen or so homes just around the corner from where she was at the time. Small homes, some 1500 square feet each, but each with an impeccable garden and lots of mock Tudor style.

So it didn’t need much encouragement on my part to leash up that wild beast, Bertie the Border Terrrier, and ankle around to said location. And, it has to be admitted, the place oozed charm like a politician looking for campaign donations, albeit with a lot more class. Needless to say, that little gem the Leica DP was in my trouser pocket, so it was a moment’s work to catch some nice details:

Round the corner and there’s another one:

And a third:

The old admonition to Always Carry a Camera fell into disuse with this photographer as nothing this small was this good until now. Even the Leica rangefinder was not small enough to permit this cavalier attitude. Once you have one of these modern digital gems, however, there really is no excuse for not carrying it with you at all times.

May 23, 2006

Recapturing the Leica spirit

Filed under: LX — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:17 pm

The ‘go anywhere’ Leica DP does it

I mentioned in my earlier columns on the Leica DP (click the caption in the left hand column) that this camera was a rational digital replacement for the film-based rangefinder Leica, not only because image quality was comparable, courtesy of the Leica lens fitted, but also because its small size (much, much smaller than an M with a 35mm lens fitted) and near silent shutter (nearly imperceptible if the built in ‘clack’ is switched off and dramatically quieter than the M) allowed it to be taken pretty much anywhere without arousing suspicion.

In the true Leica ‘available light’ spirit, here is a snap taken the other day at a south San Francisco Bay area American Music concert of Thomas Hansen performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The camera was set to its full aperture of f/2.8 at the widest lens setting of 28mm with ISO at 400 and using the RAW format:

Earlier, the intermission had yielded this passing snap:

I couldn’t help thinking that this sort of thing is a throwback to the early Leica days when available light photography was all the rage. By the way, the camera does such a great job of automatic white balance control that no color temperature adjustments had to be made to these images. The built in vibration reduction is good for two shutter speeds, so f/2.8 becmes an effective f/1.4.

May 19, 2006

Controls and confrontation

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:41 am

Say what you think. Dissemblers are losers.

In the old west, men used to settle their disputes with six shooters on Main Street. Justice went to the fastest. A cruel system, true, but one devoid of the greatest plague which subsequently infested this great land.

Lawyers.

But it’s not the lawyers who are to blame. Like any whore, they exist solely because the demand is there. Growing mightily since those Wild West days, Americans have lost the guts for confrontation. Instead, they started retaining agents, lawyers, to do their arguing for them.

These agents, of course, speedily recognized they were on to a good thing and before you know it you had class action shakedown experts (pay me now or pay me later) and the tort bar.

What, of course, accounts for this sad state of affairs is a lack of parental guidance. “Believe what you say, tell the truth, and be prepared to fight for it” gave way to “Here’s the number of a good lawyer”, as if the use of “good” and “lawyer” in one sentence were not one of the greater contradictions in modern English usage.

What made me think about this was an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day explaining how on line photography hosting services were employing people to try and screen out pornography. Now this must rank right up there with the comical attempts of the Chinese and Singapore dictatorships to control access to the internet. Evidently, there are teams of poor schnucks at hosting sites charged with reviewing tens of thousands of pictures daily to censor out the bad ones. Others have adopted computerized approaches to try and recognize offensive material. Snag is, a bare bum is, apparently, very much like an apple pie to these programs, so Aunt Minnie’s latest creation goes in the trash heap with the Playmate of the Month.

God, America and Apple Pie….and Playmates.

A moment’s reflection leads to the conclusion that third party censorship is wrong. Again we have delegated control to agents rather than taking responsibility for our own actions. Where the solution to the problem rests is with proper parenting. Teach the child was is good or bad and you no longer need some culture Czar to make your decisions for you.

Which translates, rationally, to a means test for parenting. When you have a child you make a significant commitment for 15 to 20 years to another human being. Our society has concluded that you need certification to own dangerous things (guns, cars) but cares not who has a child. A means test for parenting would take care of many of the problems in our society. Fascist you say? Ask a parent whose child has been murdered by a drunken driver or a drive-by shooter.

An extension of this theme, as it affects photography, was suggested by a friend the other day. It doesn’t hurt that she is also a fine photographer. That means I pay more attention to her writings. I had sent her an intriguing piece, compiled by experts, on the state of the art in digital camera sensors, thinking it was interesting to see how quickly digital has surpassed film in every respect. She wrote back to the effect that all this technological splitting of hairs has little to do with taking good pictures.

Of course that is right. Digital or film, it’s just a means to an end. I happen to be a digital convert simply because the time from snap to print is shorter, and I have one day fewer left on earth than I did yesterday. That makes digital better for me. Maybe not for you.

But to complete the circle back to the thrust of this piece, which is all about self determination and courage in one’s beliefs, she goes on to suggest that maybe there should be a means test for aspiring photographers. If all you propose to do is take pictures of garbage well, sorry, you cannot buy this camera.

I pretty much despise censorship in all its guises, yet make an exception when it comes to parenting. So I may be talking out of both sides of my mouth. But I must admit to giving my correspondent’s thought more than passing consideration because so much of what passes for photography out there is pure, unadulterated garbage.

Were we to be more outspoken about this, more willing to correct the inept and expose the frauds, in other words if we had more guts, well maybe photography standards would rise across the board.

May 18, 2006

The most fun I ever had taking pictures

Filed under: Photographers, Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:04 pm

Before digital came along, that is!

The seventies were a truly miserable time to be in England. Administrations alternated between the senile Conservatives, devoid of ideas and wedded to the status quo, and the Labor party, its members fuelled by the politics of envy. A weak Conservative Prime Minister, Ted Heath, caved to the blackmailing strikes of the miners. He alternated power with the socialist Harold Wilson who went along merrily with the trades unions funding his party, doing whatever it took to stay in office. Neither ‘leader’ had personal convictions worth a damn.

I had graduated a mechanical engineer from University College, London in 1973 intent on working for Rolls Royce Aircraft. There was only one small snag. The year I graduated Rolls went bankrupt, as ingested birds shattered the innovative carbon fiber turbine blades in its RB211 engine, rendering it useless. The engine was intended for Lockheed’s superb Tristar passenger jet and Rolls almost took Lockheed down with it. Well, the alternative for an engineering graduate who actually wanted to be an engineer was to work for some big government institution or become an academic. Hardly palatable alternatives for one dirt poor, ambitious young man. Realize that this was a country that accorded the sobriquet ‘engineer’ equally to the fellow installing railroad ties and to the chap at Rolls Royce. Still, I suppose the railroad ties did not snap like so much brittle chocolate.

So I decided to emigrate to the greatest country on earth, but there was a small matter of qualifications. The business of America is Business, and I didn’t know a balance sheet from an income statement. Taking advice from a smart merchant banker my mother somehow steered me to, I decided to get the UK equivalent of a CPA so that all those annual reports might make sense. It’s a damnable comment on the English educational system of those times that the very concept of an MBA did not exist, whereas in America it had been around for the best part of a century. It wouldn’t do now, would it, to teach business? Muddling through was the preferred method, preferably aided by good choice of parents.

So I joined one of those big accounting firms, got my CPA, which required grade school math skills, and four years later walked into the managing partner’s office and said I would like to emigrate. Sort of like Oliver asking for more, judging from this pompous twit’s response. “But Thomas”, he gravely intoned, “why would you want to go there? It’s full of Americans, for heaven’s sake”. I kid you not.

Well, I had had the privilege of working with those Americans as they visited Britain, over on tours from New York or Boston or Chicago, and I learned more from them about business in the four years with the accounting firm than in my whole life until then.

The last thing I did before taking that one way flight was to visit Paris. This was in 1977. I had no savings. My most precious asset was my Leica M3 and its 35mm Summaron lens with that clunky viewfinder appendage. So I borrowed fifty pounds from a sister, got on the ferry and next thing I was at Gare du Nord looking for my seedy garret. My first goal was to visit the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie to feast on three of the world’s greatest art collections. A related interest, of course, was to take pictures, so the M3 and a few rolls of film came along.

There was no draconian security in those days, of course. Photography was permitted everywhere and no one really minded very much. Especially if you were reasonably discreet. The Leica and I were a seasoned pair by now. We had been recognized time and again in the photographic press, culminating with the award of the Photographer of the Year prize by Photography magazine, the leading UK monthly, and, better yet, had been published in Leica Fotografie, the house organ where all things Leitz were good.

To whom did I look for inspiration in those days, photographically? Well, that’s easy. Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Kertesz, Brassai. In other words, I was a street photography junkie, though I didn’t know that word at the time …. Make it fleeting, let serendipity arrange the forms just so and click. Leica. 35mm lens. TriX. D76. A combination that had seen thousands of photographers through for years on end.

The Louvre was a magical place back then. I. M. Pei, great architect that he is, had yet to con gullible Parisians with the ugly pyramid that defaced one of the world’s great spaces, much as the Pompidou museum had already done a few blocks away. Care to revisit the latter and see how well it has aged? I don’t think so.

The forecourt of the Louvre before I. M. Pei. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

The first and prevailing sense one had on entering the museum through its vast facade was the smell of oil paint. Artists were permitted, encouraged even, to bring their oils and easels and practice by copying the works of the masters. The lighting was, of course, magic, like only Parisian lighting in the spring can be. And as this was before everyone had money, before equality had raised its ugly head, the museum was far from the zooed place that modern art collections have become. In the words of the philistine American to his wife, with but one hour to catch a flight, confronted with a priceless Italian church to view: “OK, honey, you do the inside and I’ll take the outside”. Drive-by tourism. No, people had more time to savor art back then.

What passed for fashion in the seventies. Mona at the Louvre. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

I forget the details, but suspect that I visited the Louvre on all but one day of the week I spent in Paris. And I also took pictures, the Leica by now a part of me. Second nature.

And until good, responsive digital cameras came to market, that’s the most fun I ever had making pictures.

Early porn. Louvre. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

In case you wonder, this painting is of Gabrielle d’Estrees and one of her sisters in the bath, c. 1595, painter (mercifully) unknown. Gabrielle d’Estrees was the mistress of that old frog, Henry IV. In her hand she holds a ring given to her by the king as a sign of their bond, and her sister is pinching her nipple indicating she is pregnant with the king’s child. Yeah, right. The surrealistic background image is of a servant sewing baby clothes.

Click on the link in the left hand column for details of the book that resulted. That will take you to a written presentation along with my commentary, so you can hear what I really sound like!

May 16, 2006

Fun with the B&H catalog

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:32 pm

Everything under the sun in one big book

Say what you may, a notebook computer cannot hold a candle to a book when it comes to browsing. Spill your cocktail on the former and you have just had a $2,000 drink; spill it on the latter and you come back to read a slightly crinkled copy tomorrow. Make the cocktail a gin or vodka martini and your carpet will never know the difference.

So when B&H, that estimable New York City business, sent me their big book of photo and related equipment, it was rather fun to browse it in book form rather than searching for something on a computer. Best of all, with a book you come across things you would never think of browsing for at a keyboard, because it would simply never occur to you to look for them.

I suspect B&H sent me the book because I blew all that cash on the Canon EOS 5D a while back, and more power to them. I cannot think of another business with such integrity and client service, and I’m not even Jewish!

So what interesting items are of note browsing these 322 pages? Well first of all, kudos to the team that puts this monster together. With some 15-100 items a page you are talking a lot of work here.

There are sections on everything from Audio/Visual, Computers, Lighting, Photography of course, Podcasting(!), Portable Entertainment (meaning iPod mostly), Satellite radio (where you can get to listen to potty mouthed smut and pay for it), Hard Drive storage, Surveillance Video (honest!) and many more. Here, in no particular order, are some items that caught my eye:

Stupidest, most over-priced item: Easy – page 128. A company named Visible Dust is asking $90 for an ‘Econo Sensor Brush’. No kidding. $90 for a brush. And that’s for the ‘Econo’ model. The Real Thing is $135. Go to the local art store, get a nice camel hair brush, soak it in your vodka supply to clean up any grease, and you have the same thing for $5. A fool and his money…. If things go really badly at the old estate I think I might start selling these. Mine will be the Organic CCD Rendition Improver with French Vodka Enhancement for a mere $75, or a Special on three for $125. The Special would include a bottle of Grey Goose (”A lifetime supply of brush cleaner for you and everyone else in your county”).

The thing no one needs: Page 129. The Zeiss Ikon rangefinder body for film at all of $1,617. True, it makes the Sensor Brush look cheap.

The camera you thought they didn’t make any more: Page 135. A Linhof 6×9 view camera, no lens, for $7,964. Probably made in China, anyway. You can get two EOS 5Ds for that price and have money left for a couple of top notch Canon ‘L’ lenses. Plus your snaps will be sharper.

The truly funky: Page 172. The Sea & Sea marine housing for the EOS 5D, a tad pricey at $2,600. Keeps things dry, I suppose, but what do you do about flash?

The ‘I wish I had one’ item: Page 190. The QT Quick Truss system. No, not for hernia, rather an electric roller system to move your studio backgrounds into place. A bargain at $1,839 for the biggest size, some 11′ square. OK, so maybe it is for hernia after all.

The $300 a fyard tripod: Page 165. $900 gets you the Gitzo Giant which elevates to all of 91.3″. Now that’s tall.

A close runner-up to Visible Dust: Page 267. How about shelling out $290 for a Tecnec LED clock/timer, with 4″ high digits. Let’s see, you can get 20 of those at Target for that amount.

The greatest bargain: Page 286. $22 gets you 50 JVC blank DVD, or 235 gigabytes of storage.

The ‘What were they thinking of?’ award: Piece of cake. Page 305. A gorgeous pair of Leica binoculars, watertight to 16.4 feet (no, not 16.5). $1,795. Ok, not chump change, I grant you, but we are talking Leica glass and my much older Trinovids testify to the sheer pleasure of using such an instrument. But wait. The description goes on to say “Elegant Black Leather”. In a waterproof binocular? Please….

Biggest choice in one category: Well, there are no fewer than some 150 digital cameras listed, from a 3 mp P&S to the mighty Canon 1DS Mark II N with its 17 mp.

“The item I was happiest to sell” winner: Page 143 – the Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED film scanner, for $1,900. A horrible use of dollars and desk top space. Hasta la vista, baby.

The “Haven’t you heard of full frame digital, bozo?” award winner: Page 143. The grandly branded Hasselblad Imacon Flextight 848 Drum Scanner, for $14,995. Yes, $14,995. It’s not made by Hasselblad, it’s not a drum scanner, and what the hell is your time worth anyway?

The “No one told me the sixties were over” champ: Page 162. The Cokin #201 Multi-Image filter. Pass the bong.

The gooks only special: Page 213. The Sony Indoor Pendant Mount Housing with Power, the better to hide your spy camera in. $330 for a box and cover. Just don’t ask the CIA for installation instructions. They pay $5,000 for theirs, yet still manage to place them on the wrong continent.

The “What the heck does that do?” gadget: Page 246. The Electrosonics Digital Hybrid Diversity Receiver. Sinister. No price listed. Could this be the answer to getting all those losers off the street in the interests of diversity rather than survival of the fittest? Naah. Probably another CIA budget boondoggle. “Hey, Joe. Check this out. I can get dirty pictures on it even in this lead lined room”.

The “I wish I had one even though I have no earthly use for it” gadget: Page 258. The Sound Devices Portable Digital Recorder with Time Code for $2,375. Shades of John Travolta in ‘Blow Out’.

And I’m just getting started. Anyway, it beats watching some dope read the 6 o’clock teleprompter, laughably masquerading as ‘The News’, while making $15mm a year and being revered by all as an Influential Voice. Reading a Teleprompter….

May 14, 2006

A real workout

Filed under: 5D — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:35 am

A real live ’shoot’

Marty Paris is not only a friend, he is also a fine acoustic guitarist. So when Marty asked me to take pictures at his open air concert this weekend I was glad to oblige, though somewhat apprehensive about the high contrast lighting issues this opportunity would present.

I would like to tell you that I took ‘just the EOS 5D and a couple of lenses’ for the ’shoot’ (ugh!) but then I only have a couple of lenses, so that’s what I took!

The group, comprised of two guitarists, a vocalist and a drummer, would be playing at the town square in Templeton, near my home, in the shade of the bandstand. A charming throwback to all that was good and great in Norman Rockwell’s America. People gambolling about with children and dogs. A hot dog stand. Sunshine and oak trees. Church steeples at every corner with the fire engine poised in case of emergency.

All well and good, but the bright sunlight meant blown out backgrounds from the huge contrast between lighting on the performers and the park setting. So I decided to make virtue out of necessity and used the Canon 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens (what a piece of glass!) mostly at f/2.8 to blur the background and give the pictures that studio look. Hardly the controlled environment of a studio, but the best I could do. The 5D was set at 400 ISO which resulted in short shutter speeds, mitigating the absence of the wonderful IS feature in the 200mm lens. Canon, are you listening? And prior experience with the 5D had confirmed that ISO 400 is grain free at any realistic enlargement size. Try that with color film!

I used that inspired little belt-mounted back up gadget, the exotically named Hyperdrive, to dowload full CF cards from the camera, alternating the one in the Hyperdrive with the one in the 5D. I ended up taking some 350 RAW pictures or some 6 cards’ full, and if you think that’s a lot, words fail me when trying to explain how many reasons there are for a bad picture in this environment. Clutter everywhere, closed eyes when they should be open, background noise, and on and on.

It took some 25 minutes to load Aperture from the Hyperdrive when getting home and, owing to Aperture’s superb user interface, only another three hours to cull the pictures down to the 85 best. That includes deletion of bad pictures, exposure correction and the occasional crop or straightening of the horizon. The only snags I ran into were that Aperture locked up on me twice when downloading from the Hyperdrive (no images were lost) and would take up to 20 seconds to load an image for processing. My iMac G5 has the modest Nvidia Radeon 6600 graphics card which is the major cause of the slow loading of an image on the screen. Then again, the iMac costs $1,500 rather than the $5,000 it would take to get a full blown Mac with a posh video card and Cinema Display. I can wait a few seconds for a picture to load at that price difference.

85 is a lot of photographs to end up with but the goal was to give each performer twenty or so pictures to choose from. You can see the snaps here.

Some practical notes from this little assignment. I set the focus sensor in the 5D to the center rectangle. I was not about to trust the camera’s system to guess optimum focus at f/2.8 with the 200mm lens when depth of field can be as little as an inch or so. I would generally take an exposure reading (using center weighting) from the concrete floor of the bandstand and lock it before composing, then locking focus with a first pressure of the shutter release on the performer’s eyes prior to final composition. This is all very fast once you get the hang of it. Despite all this I got the exposure wrong in several pictures, but RAW is so forgiving that correction in Aperture was easy without any noticeable quality loss. In particular I find the Highlights & Shadows slider in Aperture far superior to that in Photoshop as it produces far more realistic results and introduces far less noise into the image.

The slide show was generated using Aperture’s web creation function and this took far too long compared to using iPhoto. Some three hours. Apple really needs to speed this up.

The next morning I made four 13″ x 19″ prints on the HP DesignJet 90 plus five CDs with the slide show, and they were at Marty’s door by noon. I was trying to emulate what, say, a wedding pro might be faced with in delivering timely results to his client. The workflow above was encouraging in two respects. The percentage of overall time spent on processing compared to photography was relatively low and the processing experience was markedly stress free. So the 5D + RAW + Aperture + HP DesignJet proved to be a powerful and effective set of tools.

Was my ‘client’ pleased? Well, there were a lot of gurgling noises on the phone when he called back, so you be the judge. Now maybe I can get him into my studio.

May 7, 2006

The designer as star

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:20 am

It’s great to see the designers of innovative producets credited

Panasonic will soon release their L1 interchangeable lens SLR to market. The camera is notable for a couple of things. First, there’s the compact Leica M ‘look’, owing to the flat top, the result of using a mirror and prism design pioneered by Olympus in the brilliant Pen F half frame some thirty years ago. Second, the continuation of the Panasonic-Leica collaboration with the Panasonic vibration reduction system integrated into the ’standard’ Leica zoom lens.

The last time I remember this sort of thing was when the inspired designer of the jewel-like Olympus Pen F and OM1 cameras, Yoshihisa Maitani, was featured prominently in advertisements, also some thirty years ago.

You can read interviews with the concept designer Makoto Nakamura here and with mechanical designer Yoshiyuki Inoue here. The interview with Inoue is reminiscent of the first advertising for Toyota’s Lexus LS400 which focused heavily on obssession with detail.

This will probably be the ‘Digital M’ for most Leica aficionados as the lens+body pair will list for $2,000 compared with a rumored $5,000 for the Digital M body alone. And with modern autofocus, no one needs the heretofore superiority of rangefinder focusing any more.

May 3, 2006

The Leica DP – Part V

Filed under: LX — Thomas Pindelski @ 2:43 pm

Noise Ninja does a number on high ISO noise

A kind reader suggested that Noise Ninja from PictureCode might be a worthwhile product for cutting ISO 400 noise produced by the sensor in the Panasonic LX1 (or Leica DP as I prefer to think of it, once modified with a proper optical viewfinder).

I downloaded the Photoshop CS2 plug-in and gave it a shot. PictureCode has a long listing of profiles created for many different cameras, so I downloaded that also, not really feeling up to a lot of messing about with the product’s myriad sliders, and this is what I got – the Noise Ninja version has the grid pattern as I have yet to buy and register the product:

This is the 400 ISO interior snap taken in RAW mode, best quality. While there are trade offs – look at the loss of detail in the red pin-striped shirt, you can dial in just enough noise reduction to get the color artifacts out – the standard profile might have overdone things a bit. Again, these are the size of 22” x 39” prints, so less noise reduction would be needed in regular sized prints.

Noise Ninja strikes me as a useful adjunct in the toolbox for the occasional image where ISO 400 is used indoors. Remember that the OIS vibration reduction system in the camera is good for two shutter speeds, making your ISO 100 equivalent to ISO 400, so it would be a fairly rare image that needed ISO 400.

More interestingly, Noise Ninja also has profiles for film and scanner combinations, so those plagued with noise in small 35mm negatives now have a useful tool to look to.

Rather cheekily, PictureCode provides a canned profile for the Canon EOS 5D; cheeky as the sensor in that camera has exceptionally low noise properties already.

I’ll take a look at vibration reduction, what Panasonic calls OIS, in Part VI.

Still movies

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:38 am

Some of the best still photography is in movies

Once I realized that the carpal tunnel problems I was having – meaning wrist pain when working my hands hard – were not going to go away, I sold all my woodworking equipment and set about converting the woodworking shop to a home theater, with the following result:

Completed in time for last Christmas, I have maintained my commitment to watching a movie a night ever since and must say I have rarely had so much fun. 1,000 watts of surround sound and a 100” screen are not that difficult to enjoy!

So with some one hundred movies added to the growing collection at home, I stopped to think what was it that I enjoyed most on the big screen, forcing a narrowing down to just three movies.

Easy.

Luchino Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’ (1971)
Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968)

and

Walter Hill’s ‘Streets of Fire’ (1984)

On reflection, the common thread running through these films includes a surpassingly simple plot (writer goes to die in Venice and becomes infatuated with a young boy, gunman seeks revenge, tough guy rescues former flame from kidnappers), magnificent music (Gustav Mahler, Ennio Morricone, Ry Cooder) and stupendous settings (Venice, the great American West, ‘50s Chicago).

But the surpassing attribute of all three is easily identified and is the primary reason I am so attracted to these masterpieces.

Stunning still photography.

Still photography? In a movie?

‘Death in Venice is little more than a series of stills, making up a movie. Lush beyond belief, it’s what makes Visconti such a favorite at the old abode.

‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ emulates the Visconti style, or maybe I should say that Visconti emulates Leone, the western having been made first. Some close-ups last for minutes (minutes!) on the screen.

But Walter Hill’s ‘Streets of Fire’ is the most photographically arresting of the three. Set in a permanently dark, wet Chicago, mostly under the elevated subway (the ‘El’ in local parlance), it’s all neon, reflections, brooding atmosphere.

To illustrate, here are some stills.

The bad guy makes his first appearance in the music hall, intending to kidnap the star heroine:

Outside the police station, the good guy is seen driving by in his hot rod:

Abstract expressionism at its best:

The good guy returns, ever the loner, after rescuing the girl:

A wonderful shot of the diner around which much of the action centers, seen through the support struts of the El – incredibly atmospheric:

Before the final confrontation between the forces of good and evil, Hill pulls off an overhead tracking shot which equals that incredible one in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ where the camera rises way above Claudia Cardinale’s head to show the new western town being built. Here Hill may not have the advantage of Morricone’s soaring score, yet he does something magical from a photographer’s perspective. He starts with a shot of the bad guy holding up an air horn to summon his evil team:

Then, as the camera rises, he switches focus to the evil hordes assembling in the background, the change in focus transforming the bad guy’s face into a death mask:

The movie has a nice symmetry to it, ending where it started with the heroine giving a driving performance of a Ry Cooder rock number in the broken down hall.

And there’s that neon again, the background to her singing reminding one of nothing so much as a work by the futurist Marinetti.

Finally, the picture of the heroine on stage with a foreground of clapping hands – a scene which might as well have been lifted from one of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies in the late 1930s:

The only thing wrong with this movie is that there is so much of this kind of thing that much is easily missed on a first viewing, but I cannot think of a better reason for an aficionado of film to rush out and install a home theater.

As for photographers, it’s simply a must.

As a fan of the 16:9 widescreen format, can you wonder I like that little jewel, the Leica DP so much?

May 1, 2006

The Leica DP – Part IV

Filed under: LX — Thomas Pindelski @ 1:46 pm

Sensor noise at 400 ISO

Harley Davidson motorcycles are ridden by Real Americans who pride themselves on their rugged individuality. This means they all wear identical clothing, place piss pots on their heads – a reflection of the value of the protected part – and sport beer bellies. However, spotting one of these expensive pieces of their infatuation outside the local burger joint today, I whipped the Leica DP out of the pocket of my (rugged individualist Levi 501 Button Fly) jeans and snapped a picture of the motor with the camera set to ISO 400 – the exposure was 1/1250th second at f/4.5 using RAW.

As I mentioned in Part II, the camera automatically records a 16 mB RAW file and a medium definition JPG file, both being 3840 x 2160 pixels.

Here’s the whole image (is the Widescreen format wide or what?):

After converting the RAW variant to PSD, I created center crops from both the PSD and JPG files – the original picture is sized at 22” x 39”.

Here’s the version from the RAW file:

And from the JPG:

The RAW file is clearly holding better detail and, strangely, the JPG has exaggerated cyan (look at the reflected sky) and is almost a stop overexposed. Applying 70/1/0 Unsharp Masking in Photoshop CS2, a process that tends to exaggerate grain, gives a very sharp RAW image with tight, smooth grain/noise with no color artifacts. (I have not included the USM versions here). A 16x print would be quite acceptable. The JPG version shows color striations in smooth areas and the general loss of definition makes the grain less visible, albeit to the overall detriment of the image. So for bright light, RAW is the choice – this was taken in full sun.

Inside the same hamburger joint, where the Harley rider could be seen perfecting his figure, matters are quite a bit different. This time the exposure, reflecting a mix of natural and fluorescent light, was 1/80th at f/4.5, once again using the RAW format and ISO 400.

Here’s the whole image:

The sensor has done a fine job of color balancing and the scene looks natural.

Enlarging to actual pixels, as before, meaning a 22” x 39” print, gives the following results:

From the RAW file:

From the JPG file:

The RAW file is the sharper of the two, but displays a lot of grain – like over-processed Tri-X rated at 800 ISO. The grain is smooth but verging on intrusive. By contrast the JPG image appears much better, grain is blurred (as before) at some cost in sharpness, but the image is much more pleasant to look at.

After applying 70/1/0 USM on both, the results look like this:

From the RAW file:

From the JPG file:

The JPG is much better; at this point the grain in the RAW versions becomes objectionable.

Bear in mind these results are at a huge print size – 22” x 39”. Scale that back to a 16” x 20” print, after lopping off the sides to fit and you have a decent result, with grain visible but well controlled in the JPG file. While I have yet to try it, the highest quality JPG setting should further reduce the barely visible color artifacts at this print size.

So the Leica DP needs a bit of care in low light situations at ISO 400 to produce the best results. As ACR cannot get rid of the grain in the RAW original, I would opt for highest quality JPG (which gives over 230 images on a 1gB card!) and then use USM in Photoshop for the best results. In bright sun it’s RAW all the way and there’s little grain to worry about. All of this suggests that the DP’s sensor begins to struggle in low light at ISO 400, and it’s certainly no Canon. In the wonderful EOS 5D, the ISO setting is just a ‘crank it up to whatever you need’ control, at least up to ISO 800, yielding superbly grain free results in all light situations.

Then again, you cannot stick the 5D in your genuine, macho, Levi 501 Button Fly jeans, and will never be able to use Cleavon Little’s great line from Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles: “Excuse me, ladies, while I whip this out”.

More seriously, it seems to me that the circle from Leica rangefinder film camera + Medium Format film camera, representing the speed and quality ends of the spectrum, to their digital equivalents – the Leica DP and the Canon EOS 5D, has now been closed. The Leica DP compares well with the Leica M, offering small size, unobtrusive operation and good print quality, but limited when it comes to huge enlargements. The Canon EOS 5D equals or betters medium format film with far greater operational convenience and is the tool of choice when the very best results are called for.

More on sensor noise in Part V.

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