Monthly Archives: June 2008

Canon and Goebbels

Imitating the Great Liar

That infamous master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, remarked that if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Generations of politicians, lawyers and marketers (many of these know all about lying, of course) have taken that to heart, none more than Canon in their advertisement for their latest consumer grade DSLR. This sells for $750. Doubtless a competent and effective tool and you can see their slick ad here.

But that’s not the point. Clearly the TV ad is advertising their inexpensive mass market camera body.

No. What gets my goat is that there’s another video wherein Canon prides itself on explaining just how the ad was made – the second one of the choices on the right. A minute or so into it and we are told that no fewer than ten Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III cameras were used by the pros to take the snaps in the ad video. Last I checked those run $7,800 a pop or some ten times the cost of the featured product.

So how, pray, do pictures taken on a $7,800 camera end up misrepresented as having been taken on a consumer DSLR one tenth of the cost? And why, if the new cheap model is so good, was it not used to take the snaps in the ad? Never mind the carefully chosen words in the above (“….real photographs taken by Canon digital SLR cameras….”) the opening shot of the ad shows Mrs. Housewife clearly using the consumer DSLR, immediately cutting to the snaps taken by pros using the top of the line $8k honker. Not that you would know, of course. Anyone watching the ad would conclude exactly what Canon and its sleazy US management and lawyers intend – that all the pictures you see were taken on the camera shown.

Shame on you, Canon.

Macro Day

Finally a solid field test.

Flowers? Fughedaboutit! I don’t do flowers. Millions do, all better than me, so why bother?

Give me a choice between Yosemite and the local workshop (mine!) and the latter wins every time. Used motor oil smells far nicer than all that foul fresh air. And flowers.

So when it came to find a serious subject for my macro rig, I would have to suggest that that posits the issue backwards. I bought the rig because of my intended subject, rather than having to go in search of something to macrosnap (my word!). And given that I’m an engineer by graduation and a mechanic when time permits, it can hardly come as a surprise that my object of choice was the machine. Or machines, to get it right.

Those poor deprived masses who have never attended a motor race are missing three things, only two of which can be recreated in the home theater. Sight and sound. But unless Nintendo is about to perfect it – quite possible given the genius of the Wii – you cannot get the third, the missing ingredient. The smell. You have to go to the races to enjoy that. Same with horses I suppose, though I never trust anything which eats while you sleep and lacks a gearbox. And let’s face it, horses stink.

Thus Tuesday found me at Laguna Seca, not 2 hours north of the old estate which I call home, in the paddock, surrounded by some one hundred vintage race cars, from million dollar Ferraris to plain vanilla Austin Healeys. As a design maven I’m generally more fixated on the unity of form and function than I am with speed on the track, so my happiest times are spent in the paddock. As this is an amateur event, the teams are very friendly, and only too willing to show off their machines. You can get close to anything with no questions asked.

While the hand-held combination of Canon 5D/100mm Canon Macro lens/Ring Flash looks cumbersome, it is, in practice, very easy to handle and with the 5D’s magnificent autofocus most of your attention can be devoted to the subject rather than the technology. In bright sunlight, which was the case at this event, the ring flash – inherently shadowless lighting – acts as a dynamic range enhancer by filling in the shadows. The circuitry in the 5D balances the natural and artificial light sources, so original shadows are preserved and not unnaturally duplicated (as would be the case with off-axis flash) and the whole thing becomes a printer’s dream rather than a nightmare. Just check the natural shadows in the snaps below.

It was simply striking in the extreme how all this automation frees the photographer to focus on the subject. After several dry runs at home, my confidence level was such that I never once felt the need to consult the LCD screen on the 5D after the first snap. Unlike Apple hardware, It Just Works. Thank you Canon and thank you El Cheapo Chinese aftermarket manufacturer of the ring flash.

After some two years I have got sick and tired of all those landscape prints decorating the garage, so I reeled off a dozen of these on the HP DesignJet 90 and will have them mounted and framed by the weekend. As I write this the last few are rolling out to the accompaniment of the merry clack-clack of that wonderful printer and the foul smell with which HP sees fit to invest its printing inks.

Technically there are actually quite a few limitations. First, your shutter speed has to be 1/200th or slower to accommodate the 5D’s needs. Second, if there’s any depth in your subject you really need to stop down if you want things sharp all over. Third, because you have to use slower shutter speeds, in bright sunlight that means cranking down the ISO to 50 or 100. I found myself wishing more than once that the 5D had what I call a Kodachrome 25 speed. You know, ISO 25. Really slow. Finally, while the 100mm macro gives you nice lens-to-subject distance, you will struggle getting a parallel plane relative to high horizontal subjects. (Reread and work it out! It means standing on tiptoe ….)

Here are a few of the snaps whose primary goal was to focus on the abstract beauty of man-made machines.

What of the quality of the originals? My rejects were deleted owing solely to composition issues, never because of a lack of sharpness. As I use shutter priority (to avoid going faster than the maximum sync speed of 1/200th) the 5D selects the aperture and this seems to have varied from f/4 to f/22, with ISO anywhere from 100 to 320. Regardless of the aperture used, the originals are critically sharp (after the usual sharpening of the RAW originals in Lightroom) and easily scale to 30″ x 45″ on the screen. And not a burned-out highlight to be found. Stick your nose in the dozen 18″ x 24″ prints I just made and your biggest risk is personal injury – your schnozzer is likely to sustain cuts from the incredible sharpness and resolution in the print. You could probably improve on this with a large format camera – 4″ x 5″ say – but the ergonomics and miniscule depth of field that gear suggests would simply make the rig unworkable.

On a closing note, I am constantly reminded of Charles Coburn’s line in Monkey Business when a very curvaceous Marilyn Monroe, as his secretary, exits the room to the adoring glances of Coburn and Cary Grant. Grant looks quizzically at Coburn who shrugs and replies “Anyone can type”. With this rig, “Anyone can do macro”.

Form and Function

Not something to be found today.

Leather hood straps are de rigeur on any sporty automobile with claims to classic status but rarely are they as exquisitely crafted as this one with a built in tensioning spring.


Bonnet strap on an early Miller racer, c. 1925. 5D, 100mm macro, ring flash

About the snap: Gamblers

Date: January, 2000
Place: Bay Meadows race track, San Francisco’s South Bay Area
Modus operandi: Troubled
Weather: Indoors
Time: 2pm
Gear: Leica M3, 50mm Summicron
Medium: Kodak Gold 100
Me: Ugh!

Imagine if you can a system which takes money from those least able to afford it and legalizes it. The concept behind the Coliseum cynically updated.

Because that is what California has accomplished though its legalized gambling. Some is state sponsored (our government seeks to exploit its citizens’ weaknesses to make hay), some privately owned like the Bay Meadows race track just south of San Francisco. And, of course, if you are an American Indian you can trade on the white man’s guilt and the sky is the limit, Indian tribes being the largest casino operators in the state. Hardly surprising – congressmen are cheap to buy.

Into the gambling hall at Bay Meadows and there they were, like so many academics, whiling their time and milk money away.

The glow from the objects of their attention – TV monitors with all the latest odds – adds to the opium den feel of the whole thing.

Tools

Another fine lesson in macro.

A few years back I developed tendonitis, meaning that if I stress my wrists too much everything from elbow to wrist hurts like hell. One likely cause is that many years of woodworking as a hobby did a number on my tendons and, as I understand it, these are not things that readily mend.

In the event, it was probably a timely warning. I still had all ten fingers attached where they should be and, let’s face it, I wasn’t giving Chippendale any competition, so the woodworking tools were sold and the proceeds applied to converting the workshop to a home theater. Suffice it to say that all those newly white walls made for a fine photography exhibition space in addition to a great place to watch movies, play pool, throw the occasional dart and …. well, you get the idea. American leisure at home.

From those woodworking days, I recall that easily the best magazine addressing amateur woodworking is ‘Fine Woodworking’ published by Taunton Press, a specialty publisher with a very high end focus on content, presentation and photography. One of their editors, a superb woodworker, published this labor of love a few years ago:


Click the picture for Amazom. I do not get paid if you do that.

Not only are the tools depicted beautiful art works, the photography is stunning. Great care has been taken with settings, backgrounds and lighting and the whole thing is a masterpiece of table-top photography. Best as I can tell, Nagyszalanczy is both writer and photographer.