Monthly Archives: May 2006

The Leica DP – Part VI

Panasonic

Vibration reduction at work

The Lumix LX1 uses two motion sensors, one for vertical and the other for hoizontal motion. These feed the opposite of any motion they detect to the lens assembly to reduce the effects of definition-robbing camera shake on the image. Panasonic calls it ‘Mega OIS’ which sounds rather grand, no? A related benefit is that with the two shutter speeds thus gained – meaning you can use 1/15th where 1/60th was safe before – is that ISO 100 becomes in effect ISO 400, with attendant benefits on reduced sensor noise; as I illustrated earlier, the camera’s sensor is somewhat noisy at ISO 400.

Sceptical?

Here are two pictures, taken seconds apart, of one of my bookshelves, hand held, taken at the longest lens setting (to emphasize shake) and 1/4 second at ISO 100. Care to guess which one had vibration reduction switched on?

I use Mode 2 OIS, meaning the OIS is switched on the moment the shutter is pressed; I have no need of Mode 1 – on all the time – as I use my glued on 28mm Voigtlander optical viewfinder to compose, not the LCD screen. And as the camera always starts with the lens at 28mm no matter where it was when switched off or powered down, there is no risk of using an optical viewfinder not matched to the lens.

This wonderful vibration reduction system will add more quality to a picture than any amount spent on expensive glass without this feature. I like to think that my 28mm f/2.8 Lumix Leica lens has just become an f/1.4, which, in effect, it has. Anyone with a 28mm f/2 Leica Aspherical Summicron on their Leica care to challenge me at 1/4 second? 13″ x 19″ prints at two paces. And by the way, your competing camera and lens will have cost some ten times the price of the Lumix LX1. Too bad. Someone steals your rig and you have a problem. They can’t steal mine unless they requisition my jeans, because that’s where this little jewel resides.

Oh! and did I mention the widescreen capabilty you see above?

In the flower garden

Photography

Modern equipment makes photographing things very easy

I have a love hate relationship with my garden. With a couple of acres of flowers, lawns and trees it would be disingenuous to say that upkeep is trivial. Far from it. And it’s not something you can delegate to one of the local butchers who poses as a ‘Landscape Maintenance’ expert. If the fellow cares to turn up at all, it’s hung over and wanting to discuss the inane arcana of some sporting event, likely as not. His equipment will almost certainly suffer one of its many routine breakdowns and he seems to think that his high school education, or lack thereof, makes his time worth $100 an hour. Bloody hell, it took me fifteen years in school and ten in the work place before I made that sort of money. So you can understand when I gag at the thought of this person and his like earning $200,000 a year. This sort of thing simply has to stop. Thank goodness for all those fine Hispanic immigrants keeping prices down. Indeed, on reflection, I have learned ten times more from the Hispanics who help me with the vineyard than I have from Whitey who buys my crop and makes it into wine. Plus their $10 per hour rate sounds about right to me.

The result is that I look after my own garden. One hour every morning and one every evening keeps things shipshape and puts one more psychoanalyst out of business, which can only be a good thing. But the work can be hard and the frustrations are many, mostly involved with fighting a collection of moles, weeds, ground squirrels and various other invaders seeking to lay things low. Just like real life, I suppose. The majority is comprised of unproductive hangers on.

Working on the garden is very much like managing money. Short term decisions may yield quick results but overall quality and returns are invariably compromised. Good work done today repays the effort a year or two down the road. So now I am beginning to reap the benefits of much missionary work invested in the garden over the past two years. Walking around the estate of an evening, Border Terrier in tow, the prevailing emotion experienced in surveying the results is one of simple, unalloyed joy. Unlike photography, however, the tools used for gardening really have changed little over the centuries. Sure, we fat, lazy Americans use power tools wherever possible, but when it comes to planting or weeding, good old fashioned sweat equity is the only investment that yields returns.

Every year about this time I make a few pictures of the garden and place them on our family web site. This serves a couple of purposes. First, it allows the historian in me to survey rates of progress. Second, it helps with overall design, as a picture viewed in the cold light of day on a computer screen tends to make for more objective assessment than a casual ramble around the property.

No, I am not about to bore you with images of flowers. For the most part, pictures of flowers and babies are things to share with your childern’s grandparents, not with those friends with the pained, slightly impatient smiles. But banging away the other day with the EOS 5D with that superb 200mm ‘L’ lens, I couldn’t help thinking how wonderfully accommodating modern camera technology has become. There are so few technical things to think about that all one’s concentration can be devoted to the task of composition. No need to worry about focus, camera shake, exposure, film choice or processing.

So before I knew it I had a couple of film rolls’ worth of snaps of the blooms in the garden on our web site, each sharp as can be and exposed just so. Now try doing that with the equipment available some twenty years ago. Of course you could do it just as well, but you would have to use a great deal of film to get the same results. And you wouldn’t have those for several days. And how exactly would you propose to have no grain in your 400 ISO film snaps, especially when you need all the film speed you can get to guarantee short shutter speeds in the prevailing breeze? The same breeze that makes the estate the haven it is on a warm California evening.

Young people coming into the photography avocation today are very fortunate not to have to struggle with all that gobbledegook about technique. Just bang away and learn from your mistakes – that’s a far faster learning method than anything in a book on technique. A fast feedback loop, if you like. And would my modern pictures be any the worse had I not spent 40 years using film? No, not at all. The learning of those years can be condensed into days with good modern equipment.

Canon EOS 5D, 200mm at f/3.5, ISO 400, hand held in the wind, probably 1/2000th or less

Shutter lag

Cameras

It takes the Wall Street Journal to surface the issue

Not only is America afflicted with some of the world’s worst television – from situation comedy to news reporting, though it’s often difficult to distinguish the two – it can also lay claim to having the worst newspapers. As often as not, these mistake editorial opinion for news, so you end up reading some leftie’s opinion about put-upon losers as news reporting. Write enough of this sort of thing and you get a Pulitzer Prize.

In the digital photography world, the worst reporting involves avoidance of mention of a near universal problem in modern cameras. Shutter lag. The time it takes between pressing the button to recording the image. Read any number of reviews of digital cameras and chances are you will see no mention of this defect. I can only guess that this is either because of conflicts of interest (journalists accepting bribes in the form of free equipment or pushing advertising in their magazine) or because the reviewer hasn’t the faintest idea how to take a photograph.

So it was welcome news indeed to open the Wall Street Journal this morning – a fine newspaper which keeps its opinions on the editorial page – to see an article on shutter lag, of all things. They quoted some poor schnuck who blew big coin on a digital camera to record the whales on his Mexican vacation, but managed to record only sterile images of the sea, the leaping whale having just departed owing to shutter lag. What’s interesting about the piece is that it takes a business newspaper to disclose a design defect which makes most digital cameras worthless for all except maybe landscape photographers and realtors. Let’s face it, neither is exactly dealing with moving subjects. Earlier reporting by the Journal confirms that the primary use of digital cameras hasn’t changed from that for film cameras, meaning pictures of one’s family. Especially of the kids. Ever tried to catch that fleeting moment on your baby’s face with a modern digital point-and-shoot camera?

The Journal gets it wrong in saying this is a digital camera problem, citing the good old days of fast film cameras. As the latter developed more automation – focus, exposure and so on – shutter lag was already beginning to raise its ugly head. Simple cameras like rangefinder Leicas and better SLRs never had the problem, and it was one of the major causes for concern I had when waiting to go digital. With the Canon EOS 5D there is no shutter lag, but then you should expect no less from a camera that runs close to $5,000 with a decent lens attached. I was more than aware of the issue having used an Olympus C5050Z for three years or so, and learned early on not to use it to photograph anything that moved.

The Olympus C5050Z – a very competent camera for static recording, but useless for moving subjects because of horrid shutter lag

So it’s satisfying to report that Panasonic cured the issue in a point-and-shoot digital in the LX1. Unfortunately, they made two boo-boos. First, they never advertised this ‘feature’ which I discovered after much research. Second, they have just discontinued the camera. So if you want a fast, small digital point-and-shoot, now is the time to get an LX1. Read more by clicking on the ‘Leica DP’ entry on the left.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Wall Street Journal for good reporting.

Pentax does it right

Cameras

How vibration reduction should be done

I have made no secret of my admiration for the camera designers at Pentax, having owned a Pentax ME Super and a Pentax 6×7 over the years.

The ME Super was my New York street camera during the years 1980-1987, when I lived in what was then a pretty dangerous New York City. Not caring to lose my Leica M3 to a chain snatcher, I acquired an inexpensive ME Super and a couple of lenses – a very compact 20mm ultra-wide, a 28mm wide and that miniscule 40mm ‘Pancake’ standard. A sweet outfit, with the added benefit of exposure automation.

The 6×7 represented my first foray into landscape photography and while it went off like Dirty Harry’s Magnum when you pressed the button, there was no arguing with the quality of the negatives that resulted.

The other day I was thinking about changes in camera design which made things so much easier for today’s picture taker. Small 35mm cameras, greatly improved film emulsions, ever better lenses and that sort of thing. But clearly digital imaging was the watershed that made everything much faster yet, to my mind, vibration reduction has saved more snaps from the reject bin than any feature since automatic exposure and focus. If your goal in life is big prints, then the old saw that the slowest shutter speed should be no slower than the reciprocal of the focal length for hand held pictures is simply wrong. You think you can get shake free pictures with your standard lens at 1/50th second good enough for an 18” x 24” print? I don’t think so.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of vibration compensating mechanisms and circuitry in still cameras – the Steadicam for film makers, after all, has been around for some 25 years, famously used by Stanley Kubrick in ‘The Shining’ in 1980 – but I was very conscious of its availability in some Canon lenses when I sprung for the EOS 5D. Most importantly, the ‘standard’ lens I chose – the 24-105mm ‘L’ – has this feature and it adds wonderfully to definition. Canon says it’s good for three shutter speeds slower than normal, meaning that the modest f/4 maximum aperture of the lens is not as limiting as you might think.

Similarly, my Panasonic LX-1 comes with Panasonic’s version of vibration reduction in a very compact package and Nikon has offered the feature on some of its more exotic lenses for a while. However, with both Nikon and Canon, the execution is not well thought out when it comes to their interchangeable lens cameras. The problem is that the vibration reduction circuitry is part of the lens, not the camera, meaning only certain lenses have it.

It took a smart designer at Pentax to finally get this right. His answer? Simple. Build the circuitry into the body, not the lens, which they have just done with the newly announced K100D.

In this way, any lens, however adapted to the camera’s body, benefits from this wonderful feature, and you don’t have to double up on lens bulk as no lens contains any related mechanisms or circuitry. Now is that clever or what?

Not really luck

Panasonic, Photographs

You make your luck. It doesn’t just find you.

I pride myself on knowing the charming town of Burlingame in the South Bay of San Francisco pretty well, so imagine my surprise the other day when a passer-by asked her for directions to the ‘English Village’.

It turns out that this is a collection of fifteen or so homes just around the corner from where she was at the time. Small homes, some 1500 square feet each, but each with an impeccable garden and lots of mock Tudor style.

So it didn’t need much encouragement on my part to leash up that wild beast, Bertie the Border Terrrier, and ankle around to said location. And, it has to be admitted, the place oozed charm like a politician looking for campaign donations, albeit with a lot more class. Needless to say, that little gem the Leica DP was in my trouser pocket, so it was a moment’s work to catch some nice details:

Round the corner and there’s another one:

And a third:

The old admonition to Always Carry a Camera fell into disuse with this photographer as nothing this small was this good until now. Even the Leica rangefinder was not small enough to permit this cavalier attitude. Once you have one of these modern digital gems, however, there really is no excuse for not carrying it with you at all times.