Monthly Archives: February 2006

Limekiln

Photographs, Photography

A very special place.

I have been visiting Limekiln State Park for some time now. It is seventy miles or so from home, up Highway One, so no excuse is needed for the drive. Roughly midway between Cambria and Carmel on the central California coast, it offers magnificent ancient redwoods and waterfalls galore. Best of all, it’s generally deserted and though I have paid more than my fair share of California taxes, I do not feel too badly about the $6 entrance fee. It is a special place and sheer hell to photograph.

One reason is that you are simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the venue, meaning your first few trips result in lousy pictures. Then as you get to learn it you begin to appreciate the huge contrast range and begin to tackle it as best as you can. Unlike most landscape photography where the best lighting is early and late, Limekiln is best photographed between noon and 2 p.m., by which time the coastal fog has burned off and the sun is high enough in the sky to penetrate the dark forests of one hundred foot high redwoods. Then you get that magic light effect of sun dappled spots surrounded by this herd of ancient giants.

Up to now my best work there has been on 4”x5” film, which means 1-8 second exposures on my favorite Kodak Portra VC160 film with the 90mm Angulon wide angle stopped down to f/22 or smaller in the perennial quest for depth of field. That means the massive Linhof tripod has to come along with the Crown Graphic and all those film holders. Well, by the time you get there, what with lugging all that gear, it feels like the cocktail hour. Anything to stop the shakes.

So today I tried something different. No excuse was needed to try the new toy, the Canon EOS 5D, but the gear was minimalist at best. The camera, the 24-105mm lens (OK, so it’s the only one I have. I’m making virtue out of necessity here), my little alloy monopod and that wonderful Leitz ball and socket head which I seem to have been born with. Add an inexpensive quick release plate on the camera and the monopod and you have the kit I used today.

Now I’m still sticking with 6mp JPGs. Not that RAW scares me but because I’m a dumb ass. In all my excitement when I was placing the order with B&H, all those eBay medium format sale proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I forgot to order a couple of 1gB CF cards on which to store the large 13mB RAW files. The only CF card I have at home is a 256 mB used in the Olympus C-5050Z, the one with the one hour shutter lag, so I stuck that in the 5D while waiting for the big capacity cards from B&H to arrive. Boy, UPS must just love me. In fact the gate to the estate finally gave up the ghost today from all those deliveries…. JPG gets me 47 images, RAW 13. Now 24 is about right for me, so JPG it is for now.

I’m rapidly learning that to extract maximum dynamic range from digital your exposure has to be pretty much spot on. It feels like using slide film again. Maybe 1/2 stop tolerance either way. That means sharpening my skills as I’m used to the two stop latitude of color negative film. It also means that, in Limekiln’s dark interior, I finally used the built in LCD screen on the back of the 5D to optimize exposure. At least it was dark enough to see it. Several pictures were a stop out, so I erased them on the spot (that wretched 256 mB card!) and re-exposed. Two clicks on the Info button and you get a little picture on the camera’s LCD screen with the overexposed bits flashing at you. Now is that cool or what? The working dynamic was fascinating to compare with 4”x5”. Where the latter dictates f/16 or smaller apertures, meaning seconds of exposure. I cranked up the 5D to 400 ASA (oops! ISO. That dates me!) having learned that the big sensor in the camera shows no noise at this speed. 1 1/2 stops gained. Then I shot at f/4, the maximum aperture on the 24-105mm, as the lens is simply very, very sharp at all openings. 4-5 stops gained. Then I used the IS in the lens to cut vibrations for another three stops gained. That’s some 9 stops gained over 4”x5”, meaning I was shooting at 1/30th @ f/4, aided by the monopod. And the results are critically sharp. My back does not hurt and I don’t feel a day over 50 on arriving home.

Next time you visit here I shall be messing about with RAW. Is this a steep learning curve or what?

Fix that flap

Canon 5D

A simple workaround for the clumsy flash socket cover on the EOS 5D

When using non-hot shoe flash, like my studio Novatron flash kit, this is how the flash cord is attached to the Canon EOS 5D body:

Can you believe this design?

However, for less than $20, Nikon still makes a hot shoe flash adapter, the AS-15, which can be locked in the hot shoe on the camera and the flash cord is then attached to the front:

It makes hand holding a lot easier and you prolong the life of that very fragile flash socket cover. What were they thinking of?

Cecily

Book reviews, Photographers

Not just your average queer.

I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of the multi-talented Englishman, Cecil Beaton (1904-1980). Photographer, writer, designer, he did all of these at the highest level.

Whether it was 1964 when My Fair Lady hit the big screen (Beaton designed all the gowns) or 1971 when his landmark show An Anthology of Fashion premiered at the Victoria and Albert museum in Kensington, or 1962 when at the tender age of ten, I first read his book, Photobiography, Beaton has always held a special place in my growth as a photographer.

Central to his development was a surpassing interest in fashion, and it has to be said that the classic Vionnet, Schiaparelli and Gres costumes on display at the V&A show were breathtakingly well exhibited. The Gres and a couple of magnificent Balenciagas stick in my mind even today. How did women fit in these? Beaton, of course, had all the right connections to secure loans of these high flights of couture from their rich and famous owners. Sharing an alma mater with Churchill (Harrow School) and a Cambridge graduate, Beaton occupied the rarefied, dandified world of fashion and aesthetes from day one. Even as a boy, he experimented, using his sisters and relatives as models, with exotic lighting and backgrounds, the latter of his own creation as often as not.

And before you dismiss him as just another pansy in a cultural subset seemingly dominated by them, take a look at his pictures of war torn London and you will see the work of a great, tough photographer, unafraid to risk life and limb. How can one look at his pictures of the ruins of St. Paul’s even today, and not feel hatred towards the German Master Race?

None of this is to deny that Beaton came in for his fair share of ridicule during a long life. His epicene manner did not help. In 1971 David Bailey made a vicious television documentary named Beaton by Bailey, where Beaton comes over as nothing so much as a tired old fag, none of this helped by Bailey’s reference to him as Cecily in a newspaper interview of the time. Not for nothing was this hatchet job dubbed ‘Beaton by Bailey’ soon after its showing.

Then there was the ridiculous ‘love affair’ with Greta Garbo. A homosexual and a lesbian. Straight out of the Tchaikovsky playbook and just about as successful. Add accusations of being a relentless self publicist and publicity hound – how else does one get known for heaven’s sake? – and you might view the man with faint ridicule. Yet just one look at the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady or any one of hundreds of his great photographs of royalty and fashion (no confusing those two!) and you see the work of a great and original artist.

Hunt down some of his work. It’s worth it.

Upstrap in action

Canon 5D

Goodbye to the garish, inept horror story that is the Canon strap.

Here you can see what I am going on about – fancy being a walking billboard for Canon? Heck, I just paid them nearly $5k for the gear – if they want me to wear that, they need to pay me. Plus free repairs for when it slips off my shoulder. The Upstrap has a broad rubber pad with nipples on both sides. It is far more comfortable and simply does not slip. This is the SLR model for cameras over 2.25 lbs. I used to use the lighter RF/DC variant on my Leica M2 and M3.

Here you can see how it is threaded so that the ‘tail’ can be folded in between the two sides and retained by the slider. Neat.

Recommended without reservation unless, that is, you prefer gold chains displayed on your chest.

Messing about

Canon 5D

Tailoring the EOS 5D to my working method.

No one could accuse the Canon EOS 5D of lacking adjustability. Or maybe I should say ‘tailorability’. What with all those custom function, buttons and dials, there’s probably more combinations than there are dollars in the US deficit. However, like most of these things, it’s an 80/20 equation. 80% of the benefit is derived from 20% of the controls. The rest can be largely forgotten in the interest of sanity.

First, I got a bit daring and did a firmware upgrade. I learned this does not involve opening that silly rubber flap on the left of the camera; rather, you drop the software upgrade from the Canon website onto a CF card in your card reader (we are talking to Mac users here; Windows users need to get a life and switch), insert the card in the camera, click a few buttons and you are done. I upgraded from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3, something about avoiding accidentally gargantuan file sizes when the camera is held vertically, as well as brightening the LCD display. The body of the 5D must have a pendulum sensor as when you pick it up the activity light on the back flashes. I’m guessing this sensor tells the camera whether it is being held horizontally or vertically so that the image can be suitably rotated for viewing on the built in, useless, screen. Seems like the sensor circuit must have been interfering with something. Glad they fixed that. Maybe. Anyway, when they add the ‘Can I make your coffee in the morning?’ option at least I will know how to do the upgrade.

So far I have been taking pictures using the Standard Picture Style, meaning the camera adds three out of four parts sharpening and leaves everything else alone on JPGs. I added +1 to the Contrast setting as the images seemed a bit flat. Now they look great in Photoshop without the need to add contrast or mess with curves. At the same time USM needs came down from 150/1/0 to 100/1/0, suggesting that sharpness and contrast must somehow interact. Beautiful, large prints straight from the camera’s files!

Here’s a snap, taken earlier today, converted with the TLR B&W Action in Photoshop using those settings; the tonal range is nice and long:

Then I messed with some of the custom functions (‘CFn’). I set CFn 06 to 1/2 stop increments rather than 1/3rd. Who on earth thinks in 1/3rd stops? That’s confusing precision with accuracy. I set CFn 08, ISO Expansion, to ‘On’, meaning I add the 50 and 3200 ISO speeds. 50 is of no interest as even 400 is grain free, plus ISO 50 apparently compromises dynamic range, but 3200 might be fun. For some obscure reason the camera reports these as L and H rather than 50 and 3200, but it’s a small detail. The boys at Canon had thrown away their occupational psychology cookbooks when they added that feature. Then in CFn 16 I enabled the safety shift in Av or Tv (Aperture and Shutter priority). Meaning if I really screw up on the aperture setting in Av (I tend to think ‘Aperture’ rather than ‘Shutter Speed’, so I use Av or aperture priority), the 5D will adjust the shutter speed appropriately. Clever. That’s it for Custom Functions.

That leads to an interesting philosphical side track. I am convinced there are two types of photographic minds. The right brain artistic crowd who think ‘aperture first, let the shutter speed look after itself’ and the left brain formulaic set which thinks the other way. The right brainers think in terms of depth of field, differentiation, effect. The left brainers take sports photographs. At 8 frames a second. Substance over form.

On the exposure front I was noticing that several of my snaps were over exposed. So first I tried setting the exposure compensation to minus half a stop. You have to set the three position power switch to the third position to do this, so exposure compensation cannot be changed accidentally. A nice safety feature which is poorly explained in the instruction book. That, however, did not do it. So I switched to the 3% center area spot metering option and everything was sweetness and light. You meter on the key area, press the little asterisk-marked button on the back with your thumb to lock the light reading (an asterisk lights up below the viewing screen to tell you this has been done) and then press the shutter button. The last twenty pictures using this technique were perfectly exposed. So much for Canon’s much vaunted ‘Evaluative Metering’ – right up there with those great oxymorons ‘Military Intelligence’ and ‘US Democratic Party Tax Cuts’. In fairness, I have had a lot of experience doing this with the fabulous meter in the old Leicaflex SL, which was a semi-spot type. The even narrower angle of measurement of the EOS 5D’s spot mode just makes things easier, though I should add it’s not for the inexperienced. You have to know what to meter and why. In my minds eye I can visualize the center grey moving along the continuum of the dynamic range histogram…. Think of it like making love or riding a bicycle. Pretty intimidating until you get the hang of it, thereafter a lot of fun.

Here’s an example of that technique, also taken today – I metered on the rusty brown stain area on the side of the boat – a nice mid-point which I knew would wash out the white and benefit the blue:

So putting my preaching into practice, I swung by Montaña de Oro (“Mountain of Gold”) State Park today, just 35 miles south of home. Yes, yes, this was today also. A bright, 72F California winter day (if this doesn’t get you moving here nothing will), providing hugely contrasty lighting. Here’s spot metering at work:

The reading was from the foot of the, well…. foot, at the lower center right. No, I did not bracket. The dynamic range of the original is huge. The quality? 20x enlargements no problem.

As the advertisements said twenty years ago in National Geographic, ‘Now, It’s Canon’. They were just a bit premature, as digital was still a dream. No problem. I am gradually getting this machine to work for me and finding that post processing comes down to a minimum.

By the way, for an interesting interview on the topic of going digital with a really great British photographer, Patrick Lichfield, click here.