Monthly Archives: March 2011

Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 MFT lens – Part I

State of the art?

Those in the prediction business usually have a hefty supply of egg at their keyboard, newly removed from their face. Egg-on-face is a common affliction for those who claim to see the future.

Some examples:

‘No one will need more than 637Kb of memory for a personal computer’ – Bill Gates

‘There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.’ – Ken Olson, 1977, Digital Equipment Corporation

‘Radio has no future.’ – Lord Kelvin, 1897

And, my favorite, given the nature of my day job, which is managing money:

‘Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.’ – Irving Fisher (1929)

So when I try to play at the prediction game in these pages, caution tends to be the order of the day. Heck, no one saw the internet coming so who am I to dust off the crystal ball?

But, sometimes, you luck out, and when I wrote the following five years ago in a piece titled ‘It’s the Software, Stupid”, even my sternest critics might agree that the closing to that piece was on the mark:

“And who will be the genius designing these new ‘lenses’? It won’t be a god the likes of Max Berek or Walter Mandler in Wetzlar. It will be some kid who is really sharp at coding who happens to like a superb picture from the one ounce piece of plastic passing for a lens attached to his camera. The great days of optics are yet to come and their designs will emanate from the keyboard of some unknown master even now getting his lips around the teat on that plastic milk bottle.”

Well, the 20mm Panasonic MFT lens is not quite a ‘one ounce piece of plastic’, but it’s close. And while Panny was still making toasters and LP players when the design geniuses at Leitz were creating some of the greatest optics in the Old World (before computers) they now find themselves using Panny’s brains in a quixotic effort to sell jewelry at prices only collectors can afford. Because the state of the art in optical design has shifted a few thousand miles east and is now in Tokyo, not in Wetzlar.

I first wrote about the Panasonic 20mm MFT lens six months ago, and proving my own dictum about egg-on-face concluded:

“So why am I not rushing out to buy one? Well, I very much intended to when it was first announced but, frankly, I have become so enamored of the kit lens with its exceptionally useful 14-45mm (28-90mm on full frame) zoom range in a very small package that I no longer want to be burdened with the task of swapping lenses when snapping on the street.

The little Panny now resides on my G1 and I’m busy cleaning the egg up.

Why did I buy it? Well, I like small and unobtrusive. I like cheap – the Panny is under $400. I like sharp – the Panny is that in droves. And I don’t like the prospect of waiting another year until the Fuji X100 becomes available at non-black market prices. Why, if Panny wakes up, it will make a small MFT body with a proper, built-in finder, like Fuji’s, and allow me to use my Panny and Olympus lenses on it. And I’m not the only one to notice that Fuji has a huge winner on its hands. Users want small, simple and fast and they are beginning to realize that clunky, loud, heavy DSLRs may not quite be what the doctor ordered. The iPhone is a whole lot easier to take with you than that DSLR outfit, which increasingly remains at home ….

Some historical context is also relevant. Since I started seriously street snapping in 1971, you would have found but one camera and lens slung around my neck – a Leica M and a 35mm Summaron or Summicron – for 35 of those 40 years. I did not need a zoom, (not like it was an option, in any case), I had no issues about getting in close and the gear delivered. Well, it delivered most of the time, except when I got the focus or exposure wrong because I was in a hurry. So a fixed focal length lens, modestly wide, is pretty much in my genes by now. Zooms are nice, although they come with lots of compromises, like bulky mediocre optics and smaller apertures, though Panny has done such a superb job with their 14-45mm kit zoom that there was little room for grumbling, even if the maximum aperture range of f/3.5 to f/5.6 was nothing to write home about. The lens focuses fast, it’s very small and the optical quality is outstanding at any aperture.

That kid programmer at Panasonic knew that the optimal design compromise was not the Wetzlar way, where you struggle mightily to make a bunch of lenses cast a flat picture. That’s costly, takes a lot of fancy glass and it’s just plain wrong. Better, make a half-decent optic loaded with aberrations, then have the camera’s computer fix what ails it. By the time your Panny original file hits Lightroom or Photoshop, all those nasty spherical and chromatic aberrations have been well and truly removed by a few chips and a bunch of code in the camera’s body. Purists aver that this is wrong. They say there should be no software correction as it simply means the lens is bad. Then again, these are the same people who get off on critiquing the out of focus areas in a picture (I kid you not – these twits go on about ‘bokeh’ like it has something to do with a good photograph). Let’s move on and leave them to their mental masturbation.

Tomorrow I’ll publish some snaps from this little wonder but meanwhile, a few quick words:

  • It’s very sharp at all apertures.
  • It’s slower to focus on my G1 than the kit zoom – 1/2 second compared to 1/4, but still five times faster than your Leica M
  • Unlike the kit zoom, it’s not silent. You can hear it in a quiet room. Not an issue for non-movie snappers.
  • It comes without a hood which is great. Hoods are a waste of money and space with modern glass.
  • It will not make your G1 pocketable, but it gets close. It’s that small.
  • Construction quality is outstanding.
  • Used correctly the manual focus ring gets you critical focus in any light condition, thanks to the auto-magnification in the EVF. There is simply no way any RF camera can compare, and those who tell you otherwise have simply not tried a G-bodied EVF or do not know how to use it.
  • And take it with you you will, as camera and lens weigh little more than your crappy point-and-shoot. And the only good camera is the one you have around your neck.

The Panasonic 20mm on the G1, with the kit lens. Did I say ‘small’?

Now, without furter ado, I’m putting my money where my mouth is, my shoe leather on the sidewalk, and will return with some snaps tomorrow.

Before I go, here’s one from the Old World:

Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX. Taken in 1976.

Part II is here.

Street hype

There’s one born every minute.

I came across a ridiculous piece of advertising the other day. It claims to teach class participants how to take street photographs. For the best part of two grand you get to meet a self-proclaimed ‘famous photographer’ who then pats you on the ass, sends you out to record your theme of the day in a big city and then graciously spends 30 minutes of his precious time with you ‘critiquing’ your snaps. Well, at $2000+ per hour, which is what his rate for a medium sized class comes to, I would be spending my even more valuable time with you too, and my trashing of your work – guaranteeing that you would have to sign up for a refresher course – would be at no extra charge.

I will never understand the concept of tuition which purports to teach you to see. Seeing is like musical or business talent. It’s a right brain function. You either have it or you do not. Technique, like any left brain function, can be learned, seeing cannot. You may, perhaps, sharpen your visual sense by using it more, but it’s still binary. It’s either there or it’s missing. It cannot be bought.

Thankfully for the world’s gear makers, the total disconnect between gear and vision allows them to sell tons of equipment to people most of whom really should be taking up other hobbies more suited to their skills. Like Morris Dancing or crochet. Just check any of the more popular chat boards to see what I’m talking about. The average participant there changes gear more frequently than a politician changes his mind yet cannot take a picture to save his life.

Anyway, here are a few recent street snaps and, whether you like them or not, this most ephemeral of art forms most certainly did not cost me the big bucks demanded by that ‘famous photographer’. Actually, my cost was a train ticket and a sandwich for lunch, plus some shoe leather.

Click the picture for the PDF download.

All snapped on the Panny G1 with the kit lens, the first in Monterey, the remainder in San Francisco.

Now please excuse me while I rattle up some business at $2,000+ per hour. There truly is one born every minute, and he really needs to have his wallet lightened.

Intel improves its SSD

Change continues at a hectic pace.

No sooner do I install a 120gB solid state boot/app Intel X25-M drive (SSD) in the HackPro than Intel announces many improvements and a price reduction. This message will likely be repeated often over the next few quarters and Intel is to be commended.

Intel SSD in the HackPro. Two 1 tB Samsung HDDs to the right.

Here’s what I got from Macworld’s lengthy piece on Intel’s latest:

  • 30% price drop
  • Sequential write speed more than doubled – holy moly!
  • Redundant chips included in case any of the main ones fail
  • Capacitors added so the write operation can be concluded if the power fails – wow!
  • Capacities up to 600gB – but at a price – $1,069
  • Despite the lowest industry failure rate of 1.4% in the current model, the new one aims to improve on that statistic, which is already far lower than for conventional HDDs.
  • Intel is putting its mouth where its money is and using these in its servers.

My advice? Wait for these to hit Amazon and rush out and get one. There’s simply no going back once you have used one, be it in your laptop or desktop computer. The new model is the ‘320M’. HDDs are to storage what film was to photography 10 years ago.

The iPad as drawing tablet

Move over, Wacom.

Photographers who do much outlining work with the Lasso tool in Photoshop often end up using a Wacom tablet. This is an electrostatic tablet with a pen; the pen is dragged along the surface and activates the on-screen pointer in Photoshop.

I never found much use for my small wired Wacom and gave it away a few years back. As I find I’m using the Lasso tool now and then to blur backgrounds, I find I have a hankering for a pen tablet again.

iPad to the rescue! A combination of the Pogo Stylus and Mobile Mouse is all you need. And the iPad is wireless. Mostly I use my finger for outlining, controlling the Lasso tool in PS from my iPad, but if more accuracy is called for the Pogo Stylus can be useful. With the enhanced outlining in Photoshop CS5 I find my finger suffices nearly every time. If you already have an iPad, Mobile Mouse is about the lowest incremental cost of entry to to a tablet outlining tool there is and outlining with an iPad is far smoother than with a mouse.

Rollover the image (use Safari or Chrome to render – does not work on an iPad):

Cyclists after and before using the Lasso tool in PS CS2 and Mobile Mouse.

I also livened up the processed image, as a rollover discloses. Take a careful look at the hair of the beauty on the right ….

Auto Blur updated

CS5 meets Auto Blur.

Auto Blur is my moniker for making sharp backgrounds out of focus, an occasional dictate when using small sensor digital cameras, which tend to render everything sharp. You can read about the technique here.

One of the enhanced features in Photoshop CS5 is the outlining abilities of the Lasso tool.

First you do a rough and ready outline thus:

A first rough outline with the Lasso tool.

I use a mouse but if you are serious about doing lots of this sort of thing then a pen tablet would likely be a better tool. Then you click on Refine Edge and in the first box click on Smart Radius, moving the cursor to the right until the outline is just so:

Refined Edges.

The red circle indicates the tool which is selected after Refine Edge is applied; it’s dragged around the areas of extremely fine detail – like the girl’s hair – to make them perfectly defined against the background and reduce the edge halo effect.

The small error at the lower right is easily corrected in the Lasso tool and you are done. Mess some with the other controls if needed. The enhanced outlining is noticeable, not least for the incredible speed of operation – there’s minimal need to make small, time consuming adjustments. Then I simply clicked on Select->Inverse to select everything except the outlined figure, and applied Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur.

This is a typical G1 image with the kit lens at 18mm fully open at f/3.9. Everything is sharp. Rollover the image to see what I’m talking about (renders fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac) – this took all of 30 seconds to do; refresh your browser if the picture is not visible:

Thumbsucker before and (mouseover) after AutoBlurâ„¢ with CS5’s Refine Edge tool (left) and CS2 (right).
Note the absence of halos at the edge of the outline in the CS5 version compared to the CS2 one.

The CS2 version took far longer to do.

The outlining in the CS5 version is not only better, it took a fraction of the time to accomplish. This is the sort of real world value added which continues to see me as a great fan of Adobe products. I’m adding CS5 to my toolkit, even if I only know 5% of its power. Heck, a few Auto Blur later and it will have paid for itself!