Photographs, Photographers and Photography

June 30, 2007

Keld and I

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:29 am

Memory is a strange thing

I wrote about the photography of the Dane Keld Helmer-Petersen here. His work deeply affected my sense of color and line when I was a boy and I had occasion to reflect on this when processing a batch of snaps from Laguna Seca racetrack, where I spent a pleasant day this week.

This was not one of those big events with high entry costs and unwashed, polyester-clad crowds emblazoned with Ferrari logos. Rather, this weekday event was purely amateur (though some of the budgets are far from amateur) and afforded the chance of getting close to drivers and cars, the latter mostly from the ’60s and ’70s. Back from the days when men were men and knew how to die in a race car.

Anyway, after sifting through my snaps, I came across one I rather liked:


Shell.

Now where had I seen this before? Ah, yes, KH-P did it some sixty years ago:


Texaco

Memory is a strange thing ….

June 29, 2007

Canon 20mm – some further thoughts

Filed under: Lenses — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:41 am

Not perfect – you get what you pay for, I suppose.

I wrote in somewhat lukewarm terms of the underwhelming definition of the Canon 20mm lens here.

I took a more objective view of the vignetting issue by banging out four snaps on the old estate, camera and lens dutifully mounted on a tripod, at the four largest apertures:

To best assess vignetting, look at the bottom right corner. The sky is misleading as the changing azimuth angle will provide some natural vignetting with any lens this wide. You can see that at full aperture, f/2.8, the vigneting is pretty awful, but rapidly falls by f/4 with full coverage at f/5.6 and below.

So unless you want to use the Photoshop CS2 Filter->Distort->LensCorrection->Vignette->Amount, (does anyone at Adobe have the remotest iota of common sense when it comes to designing menus – who would guess it’s under ‘Distort’?) f/2.8 is simply not useable. Realistically, if it’s a low light situation, vignetting is no big deal and tends to enhance the drama of a picture. But if you want full coverage to the corners, forget it. Regard the maximum aperture as useful for focusing only.

How about definition? Well, I concluded that my first sample was just not good enough, especially after nothing but great experiences with the 15mm fisheye, the 85mm f/1.8, the 200mm f/2.8 and the 24-105mm zoom. If I can get way better definition from the fisheye after doing all that pixel stretching with ImageAlign (making the lens like a 12mm rectilinear hyper-wide) then all cannot be right with my 20mm sample which clearly has poorer definition than the fisheye. So I bit the bullet and returned the lens to B&H. Moses, of that estimable store, didn’t understand when I explained the lens sucked, but when I pulled Schlecht on him he cottoned on and was very good about it. I had a replacement (with an older serial number, strangely) in my hands in seven business days. Thank you, B&H. Was the result a quantum leap in definition? No. However, overall the ‘bite’ of the image is improved, if still not up to any of the other lenses which, frankly, easily surpass it in this regard. Vignetting in both samples at full aperture is just awful.

The right answer, I suppose, is to get a used Leica 21mm Super Angulon R and adapt it to the 5D. That lens may only be f/4 but it’s fabulous, like all Leica glass. I used one on my Leicaflex SL for years. Unfortunately, the sheer bulk of the lens, compounded by a heavy brass mount and a huge front element, not to mention a complete lack of focus or aperture and exposure automation on the 5D, rules it out. The M Elmarit will not, of course, achieve infinity focus owing to the need for a short flange-to-sensor distance mandated by the rangefinder design. Plus, it’s way overpriced.

So mediocre definition would seem to be the Achilles Heel of this optic – that or I have been an unlucky victim of poor quality control. Canon has little incentive for improving the lens, with everyone being sold on bulky, slow zooms. Shame. Still, at f/8 it’s decent and it’s dirt cheap, too, at $400. If it was much more I would return it.

You can get an idea of the relative size of the 20mm in this picture where it is side by side with the 50mm f/1.4 – it’s not too bulky.

Notice that the 72mm Canon UV filter on the 20mm lens says ‘Sharp Cut’, implying a sharp cut off prior to the infra red range of the spectrum. By contrast the 58mm filter on the 50mm lens bears no such designation. This is rather mystifying (the 77mm filter for the 24-105mm is also ‘Sharp Cut’) as the sensor in the 5D (and probably in their other DSLR offferings) has a built in IR filter – something Leica should have learned before mistakenly releasing the M8 with no IR sensor filter, only to have to issue free lens filters to all buyers as IR rays wreaked havoc with color accuracy. No biggie – Canon’s filters are inexpensive and do the job of protecting my lens’ front elements.

Update: I ended up selling the lens – too much bulk for too little performance. Read all about it here.

June 28, 2007

About the Snap: Holocaust memorial

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:10 am

Holocaust memorial, Paris


Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX

Date: September, 1974
Place: Holocaust memorial, Paris
Modus operandi: Waiting a long time for this moment
Weather: Sunny
Time: 11 am
Gear: Leica M3, 35mm Summaron
Medium: Kodak TriX
Me: Really wanting to get this right
My age: 23

Unlike the warm and welcoming architecture of Paris, with its mansard roofs and lovely light, the Holocaust memorial is, appropriately, an ugly, spiky, unwelcoming place. Even the light seems harsher.

The old man on crutches had come to revisit bad times, maybe commune with lost friends. He walked about with difficulty, yet with consummate dignity.

I waited a long time. Eventually, this scene presented itself and the moment was right. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

June 26, 2007

Robert Doisneau

Filed under: Book reviews, Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:17 am

Book review

Pure joy.

That’s what I’m feeling, looking at Robert Doisneau’s magnificent pictures of Paris.

It’s impossible to adequately convey the pure joy of his photography. So many scenes from the Tuileries, goodness. A setting that elevates all those who traverse its perfection. I’m not well travelled enough to pontificate on its world standing but I fancy one might be hard pressed to find its equal in any city anywhere. I can state with certainty that New York isn’t in the running. New York is about money. Paris is about beauty.

And the passionate quality of his writing. He speaks of cameras as “Machines with insect eyes that are hostile to bombast”.

Of the Eiffel Tower he writes: “Going up the Eiffel Tower offers a panoramic view of Paris, which itself is no longer recognizable, since it lacks the all-important silhouette of the Eiffel Tower”.

Betraying his Marxist sensibilities (which in no way encroach on the pictures) he says: “I don’t much like the ritzy neighborhoods, where rebel barricades have never been erected”.

Just a very special photographer. Where, with Elliot Erwitt you smile to yourself often, enjoying the champagne in his vision, with Doisneau most of what you hear is your own belly laughs as another shot of tequila vision invades your brain.

No street photographer can live without this joyous book on his shelf. Next time you feel down, just pick it up. Cheap psychoanalysis.

June 25, 2007

The Tuileries garden

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:31 am

Maybe the most perfect urban space on earth

Young or old, happy or sad, no visit to this most perfect formal garden in central Paris is ever a disappointment. With the Louvre at one end and the Orangerie and Jeu de Paume at the other, what could be more perfect in the most beautiful of Western cities?

These snaps date from September, 1974 when as the archetypal, impoverished student I made my way for a week to Paris and back to London for some $150. Transport, lodging and food included. Six rolls of TriX and the M3 with the 35mm Summaron was my baggage.

These are pictures of a very special place.

June 24, 2007

About the Snap: Beached whales

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:53 am

Beached whales


Leica M3, 35mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64

Date: August, 1981
Place: Central Park West, NYC
Modus operandi: Wandering the streets
Weather: Overcast
Time: 2 pm
Gear: Leica M3
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: Gotcha!
My age: 29

What’s that old joke about the two American tourists in Venice, torn between catching the plane home and seeing yet another priceless cathedral? “OK, honey, you take the outside and I’ll do the inside”.

I imagine these two whales were visiting from some place it’s good to be from, in W C Fields’s words, like Arkansas or Mississippi. They had just ‘done’ the Natural History Museum (the same one in which Woody Allen wanted to “…. make interstellar perversion ….” with Diane Keaton in his fabulous movie ‘Manhattan‘) and simply had to take the weight off their tortured feet.

June 20, 2007

Taste and discretion

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:07 am

Often not pressing the button is the right thing to do

An interesting comment to this journal entry from reader Arun asked:

“What is the etiquette of photography – can a person, such as the subject of this photograph have any expectations of privacy? What if one caught a person in a moment of undignified pose, should one not publish such a photograph? Could a parent not want a random stranger snapshotting her children? And so on. If one is wandering around with one’s camera, searching for shots, what boundaries should be respected?

This is probably a culture-specific question, so what are the rules in America?”

In a 1964 case tried before the US Supreme Court, Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

I know it when I see it.

And that’s the thought at the back of my mind when I take street snaps. Obscenity or bad taste, they are much the same, sharing adjacent positions on the continuum which is culture. Arun limits his question to the US, but maybe it’s as fair to substitute ‘Western Europe and North America’ for ‘United States’, as the social mores are largely similar.

Take my picture of Max for example. To most Westerners it’s a funny picture of a dog. Yet one Japanese commentator a while back took offence, describing the picture in generally pejorative terms and referring to it as a “…. picture of a dog sniffing a woman’s behind.” OK, so he doesn’t get it and the comment, laced with personal invective directed at me, seems hardly worth worrying about yet …. what may be funny to a Westerner does not necessarily work elsewhere. To this Japanese, the picture was in bad taste or somehow conflicted with his agenda. To the many Western photo editors who have chosen to reproduce this picture over the years, it was a bit of fun, a light-as-air confection. And the subject couldn’t be further from the interpretation of that vituperative Japanese commentator to my Western eyes.

So good taste, restraint and an appreciation of the cultural boundaries are good things to practice, but in a global community it is simply impossible to please all the people all of the time and, if your sole goal is to please viewers, then you are not a photographer but simply a user of a camera with a client – paying or not. This is why ‘professional’ photographers are not, for the most part, exemplars of quality, taste or great photography. The pictures are rarely their own, rather reflecting the desires of a paying customer. That’s not bad or good. It’s just fact. Extraordinary practitioners may shape taste and aesthetics becuse of a strong vision, like Hoyningen-Huene, but most commercial photography fails to reach these exalted heights.

In the Introduction to my first book, comprised of street snaps taken thirty years ago in London and Paris, I wrote:

“Why street photographs? It always seemed to me that the genre offered too much that was either humorless or contrived. Posed pictures trying to pass for spontaneity. Worst of all, much of the work out there was positively invasive when it came to respecting other’s privacy. Cameras cruelly stuck in the faces of the poor or destitute. Not for me. But make it spontaneous and inject a touch of humor and now you have a picture worth taking”.

And as for the limits of good taste well, like Potter Stewart, we all have our own built-in obscenity meters, with a dishonorable exception for paparazzi and those hiding behind the First Amendment and going by the dubious title of photojournalist. Their taste meters seem to be permanently stuck on zero.

We know it when we see it. At least most of us do.

June 18, 2007

Horst P. Horst

Filed under: Book reviews, Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:49 am

Book review

It may be the most extraordinary creative partnership in the history of photography. The master, George Hoyningen-Huene and his pupil, companion and life long friend, Horst P. Horst (actually Horst Bohrmann, but as an American resident at the time of war, you would have changed your name too).

The Baron (Huene’s father had been the chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia) and the young Horst met in the late ’20s, with Huene having been Paris Vogue’s Chief Photographer since 1926; an immediate attraction saw Horst become Huene’s photographic assistant. Horst’s photographic work began to be published in 1932 and Huene’s influence is palpable. When Huene blew off Vogue in a tiff in 1937, preferring to spend increasing amounts of time at the vacation home the two had built in Tunisia, Harper’s Bazaar snapped him up and Horst segued into his still warm spot at Vogue.

So you had the two best fashion magazines of the time – French Vogue and Harper’s – with the two greatest fashion photographers of the time. And the style they created – it’s often hard to tell Huene’s work from Horst’s – was to last until the 1950s when a brilliant, young British photographer named Norman Parkinson took fashion photography out of the studio onto the streets.

The cover picture of this magnificent book is of a lovely Jessica Tandy, every pore of her perfect complexion exposed. My favorite is the picture of Joan Crawford, demonized in a witch-like black number, and doubtless happy with the result. Horst had that way of getting below the surface of his famous subjects, unknown to them – note the backdrop, a huge photograph of Greek antiquities from Horst’s collection:

No wonder that Huene left his photography collection to Horst in his will. If you love the work of Irving Penn as much as I (Penn married Lisa Fonssagrives in the 1950s, a favorite model both pre- and post-war for both men) check out the photography of Horst and Huene to see just how they influenced modern ways of seeing.

The book is an essential in any photographer’s collection.

June 17, 2007

George Hoyningen-Huene

Filed under: Book reviews, Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:50 am

Book review

While Cecil Beaton was the ‘go to’ photographer at British Vogue in the 1930s, his counterpart at French Vogue was the aristocratic and temperamental George Hoyningen-Huene. (Cecil was temperamental but, try as he might, no aristocrat).

Where Beaton’s tastes tended to the frou-frou, Huene’s were solidly based in Greek classicism, as the wonderful pictures on display here show. His fascination with Greek sculpture and architecture is everywhere to be seen in his photographs, which are marvels of careful composition and lighting. The most reproduced is probably this one from his bathing costume series. The author William Ewing does a great job of explaining exactly how this picture was made (you will be amazed and I’m not telling!) and when you realize that the male model is none other than Huene’s long time companion and ace pupil Horst P. Horst, well, it’s icing on the cake.

Published some ten years ago in paperback, this book remains available from Amazon. When I tell you that all of Huene’s negatives went up in a house fire and the ones here are reproduced from prints, your heart may sink. No need. The quality of the reproductions is fine, including some dazzling color plates – I’m guessing on early Kodachrome – and the book is an absolute essential for anyone interested in the development of twentieth century photography (I almost wrote ‘fashion photography’ but Huene’s work is far more than that).

As for the equally wonderful work of Horst, well, more of him later.

Huene was also a major influence on the Vogue photographer John Rawlings, whom you can read more about here.

June 16, 2007

About the Snap: Wrapped Heads

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:42 am

Wrapped Heads


Olympus Stylus Quartz, Kodachrome 64

Date: 1996
Place: Hong Kong, HK
Modus operandi: Jet lagged
Weather: Muggy
Time: 3 pm
Gear: Olympus Stylus Quartz
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: Awed by the electricity of this special place
My age: 45

There’s nothing good about the flight from LA to Hong Kong, unless you include the lovely Singapore Airlines stewardess waking you with a warm meal and a smile. You arrive so zonked out on jet lag that for the first day or two eveything is strange. Sorround that strangeness with the frenetic pace of the world’s most crowded place and you have a prescription for strangeness. And fun.

These statues were patiently awaiting probably illegal export to some loony collector in New York; long live free trade!

As this really was meant to be a business trip, I restricted my gear to the small, clamshell Olympus Stylus, as sweet a piece as Olympus ever made. When not in use the built-in cover slid over the wide angle lens and the whole thing slipped nicely into a pocket. Or suit. The lens may not have been the greatest – barely better than the one on its predecessor, the Rollei 35 – but it was adequate for little memorabilia like this. And how could anyone resist the wild surrealism of this scene?

June 15, 2007

About the Snap: Sunday paper

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:09 am

Sunday paper


Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64

Date: 1984
Place: Greenwich Village, NYC
Modus operandi: Getting some air
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 1 am
Gear: Pentax ME Super
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: See. Click. move on.
My age: 33

Mindlessly long work days on Wall Street would always drive me out on the streets of New York for some walk-about pictures at the weekend, not to mention the ever present risk of a good mugging. I adopted rough clothes and my ‘don’t mess with me’ tough guy walk (OK, actually looking over my shoulder, ready to run) – such was early ’80s Manhattan. The world’s richest city with no proper policing or law and order. On Wall Street or off.

Greenwich Village was still trying to be hip and trendy then, though the reality was that it was overexposed in the media and $1mm wouldn’t get you very much in the shape of decent real estate. Still, it was fun for its squiggly streets and outrageous personalities.

Here’s one of those wealthy Manhattanites grabbing the Sunday paper in his megabucks co-op downtown.

June 14, 2007

Pushing it

Filed under: Photographs, Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:18 am

Can you say ISO 3200?


5D, 200mm, ISO 1600, 1/60, f/4, -1 ev

One stop of underexposure and ISO 1600 – the sort of thing that would have film in tears. Par for the course with the low noise 5D’s sensor. I do wish the 200mm L lens had IS (1/60 is really slow with this focal length), but this will do for now.

June 13, 2007

Publishing with Blurb – Part II

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:00 am

Some comments on my draft book

I wrote about composing a book of fifty color snaps using Blurb here. My book was transmitted to Blurb on May 30 and was delivered to my door by UPS on June 7; that’s 7 business days if you count both first and last. Very reasonable. It came from Seattle, WA, whence UPS regular ground takes just one day to my central CA location, so it will take longer for those on the east coast or in fly-over country. Sadly, Blurb saw fit to charge me CA sales tax (add 8.25% to the cost) despite the fact that the book was printed out of state.

First, some Dr. Pindelski truth serum.

Blurb claims their paper is 80 pound weight:

Sure. And I’m going to cut your taxes. Trust me.

Out comes Dr. Pindelski’s BS Meter – in the guise of a $10 Chinese micrometer:

I measured the thicknesses of pages of the following, with the results shown:

HP Premium Plus Photo Satin paper, as used in the HP DJ90 = 0.0110″
The Ilse Bing book – a standard any photo book should aspire to = 0.0066″
Blurb picture page (average of 23 pages, also confirmed by measuring one) = 0.0044″
Blurb dust jacket = 0.0100″

Well, no way that the paper in the Blurb book is 80 pound weight. HP claims their paper is 76 lb., and I am inclined to believe them. So 76 lb. is equivalent to 0.0110″ thick. This results in the following:

HP = 76 lb
Bing = 46 lb
Blurb photo page = 30 lb
Blurb dust jacket = 69 lb

Indeed, the Blurb pages feel far flimsier than the HP paper so the feel of the pages is nowhere up to that of an HP DJ90 print or even a page in the Bing book. Let’s be nice and say that Blurb is no good at math, but do not expect 80 lb. paper.

How about the look and feel of the overall book? Though the paper thickness is disappointing, the dust jacket is beautifully printed, though mine had a 3mm divot off center, not the result of in transit damage as the cardboard box used for shipping was undamaged. Time to get out the payroll and blue pencil in the shipping department. The black cloth hard covers are very good and while I didn’t rip the book apart in search of stitches (I could see none) the whole feels substantial, opens flat and I guess will respond well to frequent handling.

On many of the pages in my test book I instructed Blurb to print on both sides with a grey border. Holding the relatively flimsy 33 lb paper up to the light you can see the image on the reverse, but in normal use there is no bleed through, so double sided printing is not a problem.

Definition on the 8″ tall by 9.25″ wide (that’s all that’s usable, compared to the stated width of 10″) paper is superb – as well it should be given that the originals are 3000 x 2400 pixels in size. Two of the snaps used inside were also used on the dust jacket with no loss of quality. So when you see the book your first inclination is to pick it up – a very good thing. It immediately catches your eye. Nothing that screams ‘amateur’ from the outside.

The printing process results in a fragile image – meaning that when I was dragging the Dr. Pindelski BS Meter off the page, the micrometer’s super smooth jaws abraded the paper enough to remove the top layer of color. The inside paper is semi-matte and fingerprints are easily removed with a clean pocket handkerchief. The dust jacket is high gloss and even better in this regard.

Now for the most important issue – color matching. I leave On Screen Proofing switched on at all times in Aperture, as I like to see how prints will look on the HP DJ90, and because my screen is properly profiled, as is my printer.

Once more, here are the presets I used to generate the large JPGs for input to Blurb’s BookSmart application – I use the standard sRGB profile:

Bottom line is that I know my screen matches the print closely, so in a perfect world the book should match the print. I have no scientific way of reporting on this, but here’s a snap of the book lying on the source print:

The Blurb page is just a tad cooler than the original – not so much that you would notice on a casual look, though I would experiment more if Caucasian skin tone accuracy is key to you. For me this more than works.

Here’s another comparison snap with mostly blue and cyan content:

Given that the above snaps were taken with the same lighting on the book and the DJ90 print, the comparison has some value, if little scientific merit.

In the above I have tried the ‘two photographs per page layout’ and Blurb printed exactly what I submitted. There are many more templates in the BookSmart application, but few of interest to those seeking to make art books.

Dynamic range of the printed snaps is excellent – there seems to be no shift to the bright or dark end of the histogram, meaning shadow and highlight details match the HP print. Very well done, Blurb. Reproduced quality is simply in a different league from Lulu where I published my first book. The smoother, higher quality paper probably has something to do with it.

Page and cover composition is exactly as shown in the BookSmart application – what you see is very much what you get in this regard.

So, in summary, great color and dynamic range, nicely bound and with a superb dust jacket. The bad? They misrepresent the thickness of the paper (assuming HP is correctly stating the weight of their paper used as a basline for comparison, above) and the Blurb pages do, in fact, feel chintzy – not something you would be especially proud of in an art book, OK for family snaps, I suppose. I exceeded the 40 page count (coming in at 50) which drove the price up some $6 with taxes. 40 pages in the revised, final version will take care of that. Remove the dust cover and you will find there’s nothing on the spine – shame. Dust covers get lost over time and you will end up with an unidentified book on your shelf.

Cost? Exhorbitant – $57.35 delivered for one fifty page book. You can get discounts for volume, but it’s still a very costly proposition. Not Blurb’s fault, I suppose – just the economics of low volume publishing at work.

Mistakes I made: I used a grey background which does a lousy job of showing black printed words. Blurb uses white numbers for pagination and these show well, so I will switch to white text. I will stick to the grey background as it avoids the distraction caused by acres of white while not falling into the contrast-altering trap of a black page background. Other than that, I got what I saw on the screen.

Should you commit to Blurb? Well, it’s better than Lulu, but you need to be aware that Silicon Valley is awash with venture capital money for this sort of thing and, as we are in the late stages of Web 2.0 excess, the question remains whether this venture will survive? New online publishing ventures are announced often enough to suggest that only the strongest will live and while Blurb should not fail from a quality perspective – what they deliver is fine if not quite what they advertise – the competition is using pretty much the same technology for printing and binding, so quality of reproduction may not be the distinguishing feature.

Price competition is near non-existent, so it comes down to the deepest pockets. Blurb raised $12mm in venture capital last year in a second round. Assuming they blow all of that they will have to sell 480,000 books at $25 just to be cash neutral! Fancy doing that? Not trivial.

By all means try Blurb but don’t build up an inventory of book projects there expecting that they will survive for the long term. I hope they do, but only time will tell.

In Part I of this piece, one correspondent asked that I compare the print quality to that from Aperture; I cannot do that as I have never made a book using Aperture, owing to that application’s inadequate text composition tools.

June 12, 2007

A touch of the surreal

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:45 am

The Canon 20mm is just the thing in situations like this

Seen this weekend in …. well, it wasn’t Beverly Hills:


SF sofa. 5D, 20mm, ISO 250, 1/4000, f/5.6, -1.0ev

Here are the Aperture settings for processing – only Chroma Blur and the Edge Sharpen sliders have been varied (albeit considerably) from the defaults selected by the application. Chroma Blur corrects for the lens’s chromatic aberration (color fringing) whereas the high level of sharpening fixes the modest resolving power as best as possible.


SF sofa. 5D, 20mm, ISO 250, 1/4000, f/5.6, -1.0ev

June 10, 2007

The woeful state of consumer digital cameras

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:17 am

There is, in reality, very little choice when it comes to effective tools

A friend in England, a fine landscqape photographer who has had work published by the BBC, asked for upgrade advice relating to her 4 mp digital point-and shoot. Here’s what I wrote:

“I am, believe it or not, the worst possible person to ask about the right digital camera. I used film for the past 45 years and only went digital when Canon announced the large sensor-equipped 5D. It’s outrageously expensive, overpriced, and bulky, so I would not recommend it. However, as big prints are my ‘thing’, it was the only choice.

However, one site which I do read (it’s written by an Englishman, by the way) is DPreview. Though they take advertising dollars, they are very objective and never kow-tow to manufacturers, not hesitating to trash bad gear. Unusual for commercial sites.

They have a half decent ‘camera picker’ – click on ‘Buying Guide’.

What little I know is:

1 – Don’t get caught up in the ‘more megapixels’ craze. With the very small sensors in most digitals, once you have 6 or 7 mp, quality thereafter does not improve. You cannot get a quart out of a pint pot.
2 – Most digitals have zooms – only look for optical zooms. ‘Digital zooms’ merely electronically magnify the image resulting in simply horribly poor definition.
3 – Don’t buy small just for the smallness – it usually translates into cameras that are difficult to hold steadily.
4 – Look for an optical viewfinder. The LCD screen-only cameras (sadly, the majority) have screens that are very hard to see in daylight and, as you are holding the camera at arm’s length, will rob you of a steady hold afforded by a traditional v/f camera braced against the forehead. All digitals have LCD screens – few have an optical v/f.
5 – If you have ambitions to make larger prints (my standard is 18″ x 24″ but I would hardly advocate that) look for Optical Image Stabilization – motion sensors in the camera reduce the visible effects of camera shake which so take away from definition with bigger prints.
6 – Consider buying a small tripod and use the self-timer for vibration free pictures. With landscapes you are rarely in a hurry.
7 – Avoid ‘electronic’ viewfinders (a small, blurry, LCD screen you look at through the prism) found in many of the lower priced, fixed lens, SLRs. They are simply horrors to use.
8 – Forget about super telephoto zoom lenses. You don’t need them and they are of poor optical quality. Rather, with your subject matter, a really wide lens is far more important.

I ran the following parameters in the DPreview.com screen for you:

Wide lens at the short end of the zoom lens (28mm)
Image stabilization – Yes
Viewfinder – optical
Current model – yes
All other parameters – Don’t Mind

Only one camera came up!


Canon SD800IS. 28mm wide lens and a proper viewfinder, not to mention IS

This is what I would call ‘medium priced’ – $320 or so here.”

So with just a few rational parameters the choice comes down to one. How sad. When will digital camera makers start taking pictures with their mostly execrable creations and realize that what they make is not what the consumer wants? Or do they all reside in Detroit? Sure, the consumer does not know what he wants, but it’s hardly difficult to explain. Just use the came4ra you produce, and you will see just how bad it is.

June 9, 2007

Canon 5D sensor dust

Filed under: 5D, Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:48 am

Could this be the reason?

I was Googling the subject of sensor dust, which so seems to bedevil the 5D, and came across a very funny criticism by one user who may well come from eastern Europe, given the grammar. What it misses in terms of the Queen’s English it gains in clarity.

“Is vacuum pump, not camera”.

So it got me to thinking. Could the lens design have something to do with it? After all, per square inch of sensor, the 5D should gather no more or less dust than its siblings, cropped or full frame, yet the 5D seems to be a problem more often than the other models.

Part of it may be that users of the full frame sensor in the 5D are either consistently making big enlargements or pixel peeping in Photoshop just to appreciate the gorgeous definition of which this sensor is capable. Bottom line, they enlarge more, because they can, and more magnification means more dust becomes visible. On the other hand, a like-sized print from a cropped sensor camera requires a 60% greater enlargement ratio, so maybe this is not a good explanation.

Yet why is it that I can put away my 5D with 24-105mm in place – my ’standard’ lens – only to find that sensor dust has reappeared even though the lens has not been removed?

So I took the 24-105mm off the camera and, holding the rear to my cheek, worked the manual zoom ring. Sure enough, a ‘whoosh’ of air could be felt when the ring was activated vigorously. You can gauge the stroke here with the lens set at 24mm and 105mm, respectively:


Focusing seems to generate no air rush, probably because the lens uses internal focusing. Likewise for my 85mm f/1.8 and 200mm f/2.8 lenses. By contrast, the 15mm Fisheye and the 50mm f/1.4 use traditional focusing, but the throw is so short that no detectable rush of air could be felt using the ‘cheek test’.

So let’s assume that cropped sensor Canon users for the most part avoid the 24-105 (the effective range of 38-168mm being far less useful to them than the 24-105mm on a full frame sensor). So 5D users, many of whom favor this lens, do indeed have a ‘vacuum cleaner’, or more correctly, an air pump, attached to their cameras. The only thing I cannot figure out is why 1D and 1Ds/Mark II full frame users rarely complain of this malady. Maybe they opt for the 17-40mm, 16-35mm and 70-200mm L lenses, all of which seem to have a superior reputation for dust sealing? In this regard, the 24-105mm is anything but ‘pro’ quality, though there’s no arguing with the superb optical performance.

For me the cure is probably to avoid using the 24-105mm in dusty, dry conditions, opting for fixed focal length lenses in lieu. Not very satisfactory.

Maybe someone out there has done some comparative testing of the issues and causes?

All this said, the net throughput even when sensor dust intrudes, is still exceptional, especially if a ‘roll’ needs the use of the stamp & clone feature in Aperture, which allows simultaneous removal of dust motes in the image from multiple pictures at the same time.

June 8, 2007

Ilse Bing

Filed under: Book reviews, Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:49 am

Book review

A photographer whose vision matches that of the best, but with none of their technical limitations, Ilse Bing deserves the renaissance her work is currently enjoying. Like Cartier-Bresson she did her best work in the thirties and, like him, insisted on using the small negative Leica, even using it exclusively in her studio advertising work.

From the cover photo to the colophon, this is one splendid display of the work of a great pioneering photographer. Like Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson, there is the wonder at all things new, the joy of discovering the sheer liberating qualities of a portable, small and fast snapshot camera. Just check the picture of Greta Garbo – I’m not telling the story here! You need this book.

Everything about this book, available from Amazon, is special. Whether the great photography, the impeccable reproductions, the erudite and well written essay by Larisa Dryansky – well, the whole production exudes quality, style and perfection. The quality Bing managed to extract from the poor monochrome films of the time has to be seen to be believed. I have not encountered so exciting a book of photography in ages, and it has replaced my well worn copy of Cartier-Bressons’s ‘The Man, the Image and the World’ as the ‘book on display’ in the ancestral home.

June 7, 2007

Canon’s 20mm f/2.8 lens

Filed under: Lenses — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:46 am

It’s nice to have a 20mm again


Chevy. 5d, 20mm, ISO 250, 1/500, f/11, 1 stop underexposed, processed in Aperture

No question about it, I miss my 21mm Leica Asph Elmarit, though who can afford one at $3k+ today beats me. The Canon 24-105mm L zoom is wonderful, if a tad bulky and heavy, and the 15mm Fisheye + ImageAlign works out to something like 12mm! So there’s a big hole between 12 and 24mm and the inexpensive 20mm Canon lens fills it nicely.

Anyway, that’s my excuse, and I’m an ultra-wide guy by nature. The Elmarit does that to you. Now this lens, at one tenth the price, is no Elmarit, but it’s more than serviceable. Plus you don’t have to deal with the crappy (sorry, no other word to describe it) plastic Leica viewfinder which, for all its cost, gives only a very rough approximation of what you will get on film. Sorry, film only for the Leica lens if you want all of its 21mm wide on the image. That disables it for me ay any price. If you want to get flare free snaps with biting corner definition at full aperture, and you are unaware that film is dead, the price of entry to the Elmarit world is justifiable. For me, this Canon 20mm f/2.8 does fine. By f/5.6 vignetting becomes very low and the corners sharpen up nicely; frankly, they’re not so great at f/2.8. At f/5.6 an 18x print will not embarass you, provided your original is sharp and well exposed.

Yes, it has some flare spots into the sun – see above – but the image retains high contrast across the frame. All I did was bring up the shadows in this snap, using Aperture. Exposure was for the highlight on the hood. Contrast is as recorded by the camera otherwise. Works for me.

A nice lens, not all that compact, and fully automatic – lightning quick auto focus (though hardly vital with a lens this wide) and easy manual override. I bought mine from B&H in New York along with an inexpensive Canon 72mm UV filter to protect that bulging front element.

Update: After some more experience I ended up exchanging the lens for another – read here.

June 5, 2007

Canon and collimation

Filed under: Lenses — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:53 am

An intriguing new feature in the latest pro Canon DSLR

It was a rite of passage when using my rangefinder Leica bodies – the M2 and M3. Should the rangefinder alignment go out for whatever reason, you would go outside, place the camera on a tripod, focus on infinity then remove the lens. Sighting the rangefinder, lateral out-of-alignment would be corrected by using a right angled flat bladed screwdriver on the roller cam, which is eccentrically mounted. Replace the lens, check, repeat if necessary.

Vertical alignment was even easier – with the lens in place, remove the small chrome screw next to the rangefinder window on the front and use a jeweler’s screwdriver on the slotted screw thus disclosed.

This was called ‘adjusting the rangefinder’.

Much the same your friendly Leica repair specialist would do, though for your $250 you would get a three month waiting list and the obligatory German accent should you actually be lucky enough to reach this exemplar of the mechanical arts on the phone. If lucky to get him, you could plead for the return of your body after the obligatory three month absence. Good luck.

Aaah, Leica ownership. Like owning a Jaguar. You need two. One for the garage while the other is in the shop. You also need two mechanics in case one breaks down.

So lo and behold, what does the new professional grade Canon 1D Mark III offer? Why, a modern electronic version of this same feature. I quote from the awesome (as in 720 page!) B&H Digital Photography catalog which the local fork lift operator just delivered:

“AF Micro-adjustment is another example of the flexibility of the Mark III’s AF system. If a critical photographer ever finds that his system seems to consistently focus slightly in front of or behind the intended subject, the AF Micro-adjustment (C.Fn III – 07) allows the user to adjust this in fine increments to put the sharpest plane of focus back where they’d (sic) like it to be. It even allows different adjustments for up to 20 different Canon EF lenses if necessary”

So it sounds like Canon has not only added an overall adjustment to correct for an incorrectly adjusted focus sensor, they have also made it possible to key this adjustment to your lens of choice, recognizing that manufacturing tolerances would, inevitably, result in mis-collimated lenses. So you adjust things in the camera rather than at the manufacturing stage, suggesting a very smart way of keeping the cost of lenses within reason.

Now this latest Canon camera holds no interest for me. It uses a cropped sensor, making my wide angles less wide. Even if it had a full frame sensor I would not be a buyer as I simply do not need battle toughness or 10 frames a second capability, nor the massive bulk of the fixed battery grip.

But it’s nice to know that this feature will be coming to more ordinary bodies down the road, as these things inevitably do.

For some stunning Canon publicity images from this new camera, which claims a sharper sensor than its predecessor (these are clickable BIG downloads), click here. Make sure you check out Sample Image 7 – taken on the 85mm f/1.8 – the cheapest optic used and quite superb, as I know from personal experience.

June 4, 2007

About the Snap: Bermuda

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:53 am

Bermuda


Leica M6, 20mm Orion, Kodak Gold 100

Date: July, 1999
Place: Bermuda, near St. Catharine’s Fort
Modus operandi: Gazing about from the passenger seat of a scooter driven by my wife
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 1 pm
Gear: Leica M6
Medium: Kodak Gold 100
Me: Stop! Stop! Stop!
My age: 47

There’s not a lot of good things I recall about 1999. I spent much of that year working for a bunch of hillbillies at a big bank in Charlotte, a city whose cuisine may be worse than even England’s in the 1960s. Not to mention the foul humid summers and freezing cold winters. And people who would say one thing to your face, another behind your back. Fughedaboutit! Before you could say “Where’s ma grits?” we were back on a one way flight to San Francisco.

Not, however, before we took a one week side trip to the lovely island of Bermuda. That, and the return to civilization later, were the high points of the year. Good British food (strange, I know, but true), French wines and Cuban cigars. There’s a lot to be said for those. Add a spectacularly beautiful place which limits tourists to 25 mph scooters, and you have a fine venue for any photographer.

My wife did most of the driving during our week there, while I rode pillion and took in the sights. One of the best was the annual cricket match between North and South, one of the oldest fixtures in sports. Another day found us at St. Catharine’s Fort, one of many built by the British to keep out marauding Americans. The Fort never fired its enormous guns in anger, the Yankees doubtless having concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.

Leaving the Fort we were tooling along when I caught the above out of the corner of my left eye, proceeding to shout with all my might to the (admittedly gorgeous) driver (aka my lovely wife) to stop the scooter as I wanted to take a snap. I ran back and just one click recorded the magical combination of clouds and color. This one hangs over our mantlepiece and works well in an otherwise simple room.

The lens and camera used bear comment. The body was the much unloved Leica M6, which had a rangefinder that would flare out in just about any light and a built-in meter that could only be read at eye level. No so smart for candids. I sold it a while later with no regrets, reverting to my M2.

The lens was far more interesting.

No thanks to the jerks running my employer (my stock options, if I had them today would still be worthless – 8 years later ….) all I could afford in the ultra-wide area for my Leica was a Russian Orion 20mm, which ran me some $200 from a reseller in England! This came with a massive and very good finder and recessed all the way into the M’s body, after fitting the obligatory screw-to-bayonet adapter. Maximum aperture was a modest f/5.6. You had to reach into the lens to adjust the aperture, so forget about a protective filter. The aperture ring was hard to grasp, the settings were not click stopped and were most certainly not linearly spaced. Further, the lens did not couple to the M’s viewfinder and the finish of the whole thing would make even a Chinese tool maker blush. In other words, an ergonomic disaster, quite the worst piece of equipment from that perspective I have ever used. But it took nice sharp pictures and we got on fine for many years until more money than sense saw it replaced by the ultimate 21mm exotic, Leica’s fabulous f/2.8 Aspherical Elmarit. That’s a story for another time.

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