A costly picture.
So the Mars lander only ran $467mm. However, the previous two crashed at a combined cost of $900mm, so I suppose this first snap from the Mars lander is the most expensive picture ever:
Why search for signs of life on Mars when the need for some in Washington is greater?
Much anticipation leads to a failed product.
My primary interest in the Sigma DP1 was as a street shooter – meaning minimal shutter lag.
Well, I’m afraid they blew it, as the always objective DP Review reports.
Looks like I will be sticking with the Panasonic LX-1 for now.
What a disappointment.
Still, it never hurts to be curious:
A day at the races.
No question about it. My broad ranging disdain for sports makes two honorable exceptions. One, of course, is cricket – what Hermann Hesse was probably thinking about (in as much as Germans are capable of thinking about cricket) when he wrote The Glass Bead Game.
The other is motor car racing because, heck, I did graduate as a Mechanical Engineer. But not any old racing, mind you. Not that dough boy, corn pone tomfoolery known as NASCAR. Nor that Indy style stuff where they go round and round oval tracks, just like the NASCAR fellows. Fast? Sure. And loud. But that’s not racing.
Formula One is racing.
First, don’t expect the women of your dreams at a stock car track. Second, don’t even think of playing if you cannot afford the $20mm cost per race. And that’s for the also rans. Third, don’t expect to see stock cars at Monaco any time soon. And what, pray, is wrong with Monaco?
While the Monaco race is next weekend, I made do with a local track just to get some exhaust fumes in my lungs. The G5 is out of commission, darn it.
The Laguna Seca race track in Monterey is home to one world class event, almost as good as F1. It’s the US leg of the MotoGP motorcycle competition. That’s to bikes what F1 is to cars. And because it’s just a two hour drive from the old estate, that’s where you would have found me today, attending my relatives’ race sessions at the Skip Barber Racing School. Bottom line is my sister and her son had to sit in some boring class where some peroxided beach boy rambled on about apexes and racing lines. Once that time sink was over, into the cars and floor it!
Yours truly was the official event photographer for the family.
Now I confess to some fear of failure at this august occasion. I had mugged up the well worn manual for the 5D looking into the arcana of servo focus and multiple-exposures. Both features heretofore unknown to me. I figured you cannot get that close to moving cars – meaning the 200mm and 400mm lenses – and that I’m going to need some movement blur to avoid making the whole thing look stationary. So I turned the ISO down to a slow 100. Given that I leave this sort of thing to the pros in F1 – they do it all year after all – race car photography is a new genre to me. However, I do recall reading you have to pan along with the race car as it does its thing, to get a look of some semblance of speed.
After a mild coronary climbing the near vertical hill to the Corkscrew, one of the greatest corners in all racing, I waited a few minutes for the shakes to subside and had at it.
That seems to have come out OK, and that cheeky nephew of mine is even giving me the eagle eye!
The bottom line, though is: If I can do it, can’t anyone? Maybe this sports photography thing is just so much motor drive action and fast camera gear, with an itchy trigger finger?
No half measures here!
My preliminary ramblings about the Canon 100mm macro focused largely on ergonomics with a quick peek at image quality.
One of the advantages of the 100mm focal length is the doubled – compared with a 50mm – subject to camera distance, making lighting issues easier. But I decided I wasn’t about to do things half way, so I checked into ring light flashes for the 5D. Well, Canon wants over $400 for theirs to which all I could politely say was “No thank you”.
So a quick visit to that repository of thieves, cutthroats and crooks known as ePrey was called for and, lo and behold, simply dozens of ring flashes were on sale. After weeding through the offerings I finally found one which used a real flash tube (rather than poncy, underpowered, LEDs) and, best of all, mated with the ETTL circuitry in the 5D to make just about everything automatic.
$120 and a few days later UPS dropped it off. It comes with three adapter rings, the 58mm one of which fits the 100mm Macro. Look closely and you can see there’s a real flash tube in there:
The body takes four AA cells and looks suspiciously like the body of a Vivitar 283 flash gun. Recycling time is 3 seconds with fresh alkaline batteries. The foot has a nice screw retainer and you can see the contacts for ETTL in the base:
Here’s how the whole thing looks on the 5D – the power supply and tube are incredibly light, weighing less than the lens itself.
Once the base ring, which rotates freely on the flash tube body, is threaded onto the lens, the tube assembly is free to rotate and, if you think about it, that’s no problem. The base ring has nice, coarse serrations for a proper grip and protrudes just above the body of the flash tube – nice.
Use is simplicity itself. ETTL balances exposure between flash and camera automatically, the lighting is shadowless, and all you have to do is frame and press the button. If the flash is in range the green LED on the rear illuminates after the picture is taken to show all is well. It would have been nice if it did this with the first pressure on the shutter release, but, heck, ‘film’ is cheap in the digital age, no?
Suffice it to say that the whole thing works perfectly out of the box, at one quarter of the price of the Canon branded device. OK, so the finish is more GM than Toyota, but at that price, who cares?
And because even our six year old could take sharp snaps with this little combo, here’s one which mixes sharp and blurred, courtesy of ETTL, which has mixed flash and regular light by using a slow shutter speed, adding blur to a subject swaying in the wind. Choice of a low ISO setting compounds the blur.
More later.
A welcome morning visitor.
Not only do these chaps make their home in the vineyard, an occasional visit to the garden has them displaying their magnificent ears for all to see. Naturally shy, this fellow made for the bushes when he saw the camera.
That vicious guard dog, Bert the Border Terrier, has given chase many times but, just as he closes in, they always seem to have another gear and leave him standing. Which is just as well, as I doubt he would know what to do if he ever caught up.
Taken though the kitchen window with the Canon 100mm Macro – for no other reason than that’s what was on the 5D when I grabbed it in haste.
Not your father’s macro lens.
For a preamble on macro lenses, please click here.
Over the past five years anytime I wanted to get really close to something meant using my Olympus C5050Z five megapixel digital. Quality is decent, it focuses postage stamp close and framing using the built-in LCD screen is dead accurate. Rack the lens out to maximum zoom and you also get reasonable subject-to-lens clearance for illumination purposes.
If nothing else, it has been used to list any number of film cameras and lenses on various auction sites, so it has paid for itself many times. Most digital cameras, especially the point-and-shoots, focus easily into what we think of as the macro range, so the Olympus is nothing special in this regard. Handy, though, and easy to use, with auto everything – focus, flash, exposure.
By contrast, here’s my latest Canon lens addition – macro with a vengeance.
With modern multi-coated glasses, charging extra for a lens hood must be as big a scam as global warming and ethanol, and I never use one on any of my Canon lenses except on the fish-eye and the 400mm, where they are non-removable. Why? Because they add bulk and make no earthly difference to the picture. And if you have seen the hood for this Canon, you will not want to buy it either. But I do use an UV filter on everything and have recently convinced myself that the German B+W ones are better made than their Japanese counterparts, so I paid up a few dollars more for the real thing. Seems I’m still a sucker for that ‘Made in Germany’ thing. The main reason I use a filter is that I think any decent photographer should throw out all his lens caps.
Now no one could accuse the Canon Macro of being pretty to look at – not like in Leica Summicron or Contarex Planar pretty – but its inverted cone design speaks of the Bauhaus, function and funky form. Construction is typical Canon prime – meaning good if not ‘L’ quality and a whole lot better than their crappy kit zooms. Best of all, at under $500, if you drop it you are upset but not destroyed. Try saying that about your Leica lenses….
Everything about the ergonomics of this lens is right. The 100mm focal length means you get a nice long subject distance to simplify lighting. You are twice as far away as with a 50mm macro, at the cost of depth of field. The short (about 135 degree) focus throw from infinity to 1:1 (the lens goes down to life size on a full frame camera) is very smooth and full time manual focusing is included if you use autofocus – very handy for a macro lens where small focus adjustments are the order of the day. The bulk and weight of the lens make for perfect balance on the 5D, meaning hand holding is easy.
Best of all, unlike all those macro lenses I illustrated yesterday, the length of this one does not change as it is racked out – meaning that no new obstacle to proper lighting presents itself. And auto exposure means no more figuring of light loss as 1:1 reproduction is approached – a loss of two stops in brightness owing to the extension of the lens from the sensor. That holds whether the lens is made by Canon or Ballspond Roadski optics.
How accurately does the lens focus on the 5D? I am using the center rectangle here which is the most sensitive focus point in the camera’s design. Placing the camera and lens on a tripod on the high tech Pindelski test bench with the camera at 45 degrees to the tape measure, here is the result with the lens autofocused on the line just above the numeral 3 with the lens at full aperture of f/2.8, set at its closest focus distance:
That looks pretty spot on to me.
Not convinced? Here it is much larger:
Far better than I could do with manual focus. Anyway, the next time someone tells you autofocus will never beat manual, smile quietly to yourself and walk away. The boob probably swears that film beats digital, too. There is little point in arguing with fools.
Now I am an empiricist by nature, not a test bench nerd, but with a lens whose primary use is for the very close-up subject, a few seconds doing this determines whether the lens is a keeper or not. Clearly, this one is a keeper. Thank you, B&H and thank you, Canon!
The Dr. Pindelski optical test bench? High tech at its best:
Because of the internal space needed to allow those elements to be racked out when focusing close, the 100mm Macro is necessarily quite a bit longer than that greatest portrait lens I have ever used, the 85mm:
So ergonomics, autofocus accuracy and sharpness are not going to be an issue with the Canon 100mm USM Macro lens.
Focus speed? Simply startling, with little noise. The only time I could trip it up is by focusing at the closest distance then recomposing on a subject at infinity with poorly defined details. The lens would hunt back and forth before locking in. For non-macro use Canon thoughtfully provides a focus limiter switch to prevent this kind of silliness. In practice, I have found that setting the 5D to servo-focus is ideal when this lens is used in the close-up range. This setting makes the lens focus continuously even after the first pressure is taken up on the shutter release button and you can hear the stepper motor working away to maintain the subject in focus. As I said at the beginning of this article, this is not your father’s macro lens.
As I already own the fast 85mm non-macro, I have little interest in using the 100mm Macro lens for any but macro subjects. To do otherwise would be like using an f/1 lens at f/4 – a waste of money. If, on the other hand, this is your only portrait-length lens, then use in the studio should be just fine.
The challenge now is to see whether I can take any snaps remotely up to the technical standards of this optic. Subsequent articles will determine that.
Click here for Part II.
A brief personal history.
This piece addresses macro lenses – those which provide significant image scale when focused close. Regard this as a teaser for the unfolding story of my macro photography experience.
In Themes have their uses I ruminated on the need for themes – goals if you like – in your photography, if quality results were to be the result. After thinking more about it, I decided to do something pretty foreign, photographically, (God knows, I am foreign enough ethnically) to my way of working. So somehow the idea of a series of macro photographs came to mind.
The earliest macro optic I recall knowledge of, as a teenager, is the Kilfitt Macro Kilar. It was for 35mm cameras and went to half or full life size, depending on the model. Given that it was 40mm in focal length, that would have made for pretty tight clearance between subject and lens, making lighting tricky, but it was beautifully made and an original idea. I don’t know, but I’ll bet the aperture was manually set or pre-set, so it must have been a real handful in use. But Kilfitt had a reputation for great optics. Famous bird photographer Eric Hosking frequently used a 400mm Kilfitt Tele-Kilar on his Contarex. A rare and costly beast, Kilfitt was known (like Novoflex) for making adapters for a wide range of cameras.
Many Alpa SLRs, beautifully made in Switzerland, came with Kilfitt lenses, so the name has a long and storied tradition of providing optics to the best. Others came with Swiss Kern lenses, most famously the 50mm f/1.9 Macro Switar which focused down to some 7 inches, so maybe 1:8. Gorgeous Swiss engineering, it had the coolest depth of field indicators – colored dots would show up on the barrel as the focus was changed. I can’t swear to this but I think the lens also opened its diaphragm as you focused closer. Optical laws dictate, after all, that at 1:1 a lens loses 2 stops of effective aperture, owing to the illumination drop off in the much extended optic, before light rays strike the film or sensor. Zeiss Ikon conferred this same feature – a piece of mechanical engineering genius – upon several of its lenses for the Contarex, most of which focused especially close, if not in the macro range.
Macro range? Choose your definition. For me it’s where I start seeing things I otherwise missed, so I suppose 1:4 and larger.
The first macro lens I handled was a Nikon Micro-Nikkor (never did understand why it wasn’t named a macro-Nikkor) for the Nikon F SLR. It handled well and was made in the days when lens barrels were still metal rather than plastic. That feels good even though plastic makes far more sense when it comes to cost and impact resistance. Independent tests at the time raved about it. If I recall, it focused down to half-life size (1:2) and a 25mm extension tube got you to life size, or 1:1. By all accounts it was a decent all rounder, boasted a speedy f/3.5 aperture and decent resolution at infinity, with minimal field curvature.
The first really close focusing lens I owned – hard to call it a macro – was the Corfield 45mm Lumax on my Periflex 2. While the camera accepted Leica rangefinder screw thread lenses, it dispensed with the usual cam coupled rangefinder mechanism, opting instead for a small drop down mirror, like an inverted periscope. This, through a separate eyepiece, provided a strongly magnified (if upside down) image of the center of the point of view. Great for focusing but there was no way on earth you could frame accurately at close distances, and the lens focused down to some nine inches. Nice idea though, and nicely made in Britain.
After that the closest I got to anything was using the 50mm Dual Range Summicron with those funky clip on eyeglasses for the Leica M. That got you down to some 19.5 inches – close but hardly macro. No mean feat with a rangefinder body, though, especially when you realize that correct framing was maintained all the way to the closest focusing distance. To compensate for the extra extension in the helix, Leitz mounted the lens head in a truly massive, brass base. The eyeglasses clipped to the top of the lens and failsafes ensured you could only use them in the close-up range and that you also had to use them to get into the close-up range.
Macro lenses have changed quite a bit since the above and are now easier to use than ever, as my forthcoming pieces on my experiences will show.
The low stress way.
I doubt there’s a bird I don’t like. Even the turkey vultures which call this area home, with a face only a mother could love, once on the wing are a thing of beauty.
The other day on our daily ramble, Bert the Border Terrier and I observed a red tailed hawk being mugged by two crows and a California Blue Jay. The jay actually landed on the hawk’s back, in mid-air, and gave him one almighty peck. He came out of the sun, rear three quarters and high, like a Spitfire in days gone by. The evil intruder promptly exited stage left. Just like in days gone by.
The little incident (I don’t carry the 5D with a 400mm lens on our walks, so no picture!) renewed my interest of snapping some action at one of the several bird boxes scattered around the estate, so being a lazy bugger, I set the 5D up with that old stand-by, the Vivitar 283 flashgun, together with that sweet little wireless remote.
Now I wasn’t about to hang about outside while the birds obliged me, so I left the whole thing high upon the old Linhof tripod and repaired to the kitchen, to watch things with those Trinovids, wireless transmitter in hand. True, real pros would have built a blind complete with air conditioning, but I’m a simple fellow at heart and it took the residents of the box some five minutes to return to business as usual. In fact, ten minutes later the bluebirds were using the 5D as a handy perch!
Flash was essential to light the shaded area, and the 5D’s less than stellar shortest flash sync shutter speed meant that a short light duration was called for. The 5D was at 1/180th, but the flash is no more than 1/1000 second in duration and that prevails in this instance. So motion blur is simply not an issue, precarious as the Linhof may look at maximum height. The chair in the picture was required as I am shorter than Michael Jordan.
Now while I may be a proud owner of signed copy of ‘An Eye for a Bird’ by the great Eric Hosking, one of the finest bird photographers ever, I have long known that I am simply not going to challenge the best of the best in this genre; but a few happy snaps make the realization easier to live with. On the other hand, given that his famous owl picture was taken by the bird as it flew through a light trigger, I can honestly say I worked harder than Hosking did on this one – I was the one who pushed the button.
These are small birds – the above snap is from one half the original even though the 400mm Canon lens was at its closest focusing distance, so it’s as if I was using an 800mm lens!
And if you really believe that good photos can be taken with lousy gear, this is an example where only the best equipment could do the subject justice. Time to get the Rot out of your thinking.
No, not the planet.
Everyone knows this one:
And here’s today’s version:
Maybe not as powerful a rendition as with that Raphael but a good effort nonetheless, the towel replacing the hair. Notice how the towel has been cleverly sculpted to imitate the shell in the original.
And if you are wondering where you saw that backdrop before, look no further than Hearst Castle’s pool:
Hard to believe, really.
I confess that the two words in the title of this piece are ones I would never have seen writing together. To me processing is simply a mechanical step that stands between the snap and its realization. A necessary if boring interlude which should be made as fast and automated as possible to let the picture show itself to the world.
If the increasingly rapacious hardware needs of every latest version of Aperture saw me abandon the product rather than spend more money on newer, faster computers seemingly every six months, then I can only report that my first few months with Lightroom have been nothing short of bliss. Relatively speaking, that is. I still hate to process but now I don’t have the endless frustrations of spinning beach balls and lost originals that were becoming Aperture’s specialty.
First, Lightroom runs happily even on our ancient G4 iMac and second, it simply cooks on my current bottom-of-the-line MacBook (1.83gHz C2D, 2gB RAM). Second, while the interface may lack the polish of Aperture’s, who cares? You no longer need Aperture’s pretty screens to distract you while you wait for the beach ball to disappear. In Lightroom you are already three snaps down the road of production and output. In other words, Lightroom is an industrial grade tool for users who need fast, reliable throughput.
Even round trips to Photoshop are not that bad. Once CS2 is loaded (it takes 30 seconds on the MacBook as it’s running in Rosetta PPC emulation mode) a round trip to take advantage of special features not currently available in Lightroom takes a minute or so. Mostly this is to use ImageAlign or the Transform function to correct skewed and leaning verticals. Other than that, pretty much everything I need to fix a picture is in Lightroom, and I would hope that distortion correction will be added to the next full version of Lightroom in a few months.
A related benefit is the easy ability to craft import and processing presets – nothing more than one click settings which confer a bunch of preferred adjustments on your image, with full preview and undo abilities. I should add that I use RAW exclusively for my source images, whether from the 5D or LX-1.
So I’m not about to say processing is fun, but Lightroom simply makes this step as painless as anything since Polaroid gave the world instant snaps.
Accidental lighting.
This building in San Francisco’s charming North Beach neighborhood is being patched up but all I could see were rays of light falling on the wall. Plus, of course, a touch of Bonnard in that strangely inclined table.
A bird that has it right.
In a world run by small minded bureaucrats who make useless rules to ensure job tenure, you can only agree with this bird’s scofflaw attitude. And who cares if you loiter in a tight alleyway anyway?
I used ImageAlign to correct the tilted verticals – this was in a very tight alleyway so I had to tilt the camera up quite a bit to get the snap. ImageAlign helped remove the tilt, via a round trip from Lightroom into Photoshop CS2. I could have done this using the Transform command in CS2, but ImageAlign is so much faster.
Wise words.
Seen at the Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco.
I really couldn’t put it better myself.
Another neo-Hopper.
I actually had to use the LCD screen to frame this, as the lens was zoomed to maximum, invalidating my glued-on optical viewfinder.
A recurring theme for me is the loneliness of the big city, crowded as it may be. You have to love the native widescreen format of the LX-1 for this sort of thing.
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