Monthly Archives: July 2006

At the beach with Eugene Boudin

Paintings, Photographs

The painter who taught Monet leaves an indelible impression.

Eugene Boudin (1824-1898) is more famous today as having been Monet’s mentor than as a painter in his own right.

Yet reading John Rewald’s definitive book The History of Impressionism (unreservedly recommended) some 30 years ago, I found myself drawn to Boudin’s subtle art enough to explore it more. And, as happens, the impression his work made on me must have planted a deep seed for when I started getting serious about taking beach pictures again a couple of years ago I was shocked to realize just how much Boudin’s work had permeated my way of seeing.

His canvases are invariably small and frequently in what we now think of as widescreen – a perfect match for the infinite horizons a beach offers. And while the great English photographer Tony Ray Jones saw the English at the beach in his book A Day Off with a familiar air verging on the satirical (pink skinned Anglo-Saxons rushing out for a spot of sun with handkerchiefs on their heads, the corners knotted just so, trousers rolled up to the knee for a quick paddle, no sunblock in sight), Boudin’s fascination was not so much with individuals as with how people at the beach were part of the greater landscape. His elegantly dressed ladies with parasols speak of an earlier era, true, but their placement in the canvas is what makes the painting great.

Boudin’s vision was not limited to these somewhat formal arrangements. He could really let fly when it came to man made things – take this example:

Even in his desolate landscapes, the magic is there. Subtle, it does not shout at you like some Monets may, and there’s less technical exhibitionism on show.

So here’s a small sample of some beach snaps I have taken in the past couple of years, Boudin everywhere doing his thing with my grey matter. I hope you enjoy them.

Sunhat. Pismo Beach, California, 2004. Leica M2, 50mm chrome Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.

Dune Buggy. Oceano Dunes, California, 2004. Bessa T, 21mm Asph Elmarit. Kodak Gold 100.

Umbrella. Cayucos, California, 2006. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm fisheye, ImageAlign.

A plug-in for filmies

Software

Now retro-tech can make your work look like Sarah Moon’s.

First I should explain that ‘filmie’ is a new noun used to describe those poor boobs who mourn the passing of film. They rue the passing of a tired technology, messy chemicals and a medieval production cycle. So if you are a filmie, read on. Indeed, I might be mistaken for one of those twits with all those recent ramblings about Kodachrome.

Back in the Sixties, French photographer Sarah Moon discovered Ansco’s GAF500 color film. Nominally rated at 500 ASA – it was actually a bit slower but the marketers got to it first – it made over-exposed and over-developed TriX look fine grained by comparison. The film was very low contrast so everything looked sort of …. filmy, if you get my drift. Had it been around in Georges Seurat’s day he would have put down his paint brush, shaken off incipient carpal tunnel, and used a camera instead.

Seurat does GAF500. Or was it the other way around?

Sarah Moon does Seurat

Moon was working for Pirelli doing their calendar when she took the above; someone at Pirelli decided mechanics preferred their women blurred and grainy so they retained her to do the photography. I confess I have yet to meet such a mechanic, but maybe they are all French?

GAF500 has been unavailable for decades and the original slides made with it will long since have faded. I took a roll to Paris once and confirmed what Georges and Sarah knew. It was a great film.

Pindelski does Seurat. Eiffel Tower, Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, GAF500

Well, I’m obviously not the only filmie around as a company named Alien Skin (What? Hard to think up a less appealing name) has come up with a product named Exposure which, they say, will allow your digital pictures to look as if they were taken on GAF500. Or Kodachrome. Or lots of other emulsions. Now at $100 I’m not rushing out to buy it, but it’s nice to know that if I ever get another GAF500 urge I can indulge in grain excess using this product. The demo is fully functional for thirty days, by the way.

Pindelski does Moon. Pentax 6×7, Kodachrome, Alien Skin’s GAF500 conversion

And here’s a babe in monochrome:

Pindelski does Bailey. Alien Skin’s TriX conversion

I actually think I like the ‘Cross Processed Agfa Optima’ version:

Pindelski does drugs. Alien Skin’s Agfa Optima conversion

Finally, the glamor lighting version.

Alien Skin’s glamor lighting conversion

Fair’s fair. The AS people (oh! dear) do that one really well.

Canon EOS 5D firmware update

Canon 5D

Version 1.1.0 is now available.

You can download it from Canon here.

This fixes the following:

1. Enhancement of direct printing with specific printers.
2. Correction of the communication errors that occurred when shooting with EOS 5D and EOS Capture software after shooting about 138 shots.
3. Correction of the phenomenon (their word; what they mean is ‘error’) in which the flash mode settings are changed from E-TTL to M (Manual) when EOS 5D is used in combination with Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2 and Speedlite 580EX.

Of these #2 is probably of most interest. I wrote about Canon’s Capture software here. I haven’t actually taken 139 shots in a row using Capture – indeed, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon – but it always pays to keep current on these things.

I have installed the upgrade on my 5D and it seems fine.

Some outdoor HDR experiments

Technique

It looks like a steady tripod is essential to do things right.

As regards image quality my invariable goal is to secure a level that permits the making of Really Large Prints so with this goal in mind I took the Canon 5D to the local Main Street yesterday, seeing as it was Independence Day, to experiment with High Dynamic Range photography with a view to learning what it takes to preserve image quality.

It bears adding that my goal with HDR has nothing to do with some sort of distorted presentation of reality, with exaggerated colors and tonal ranges. Far from it. Simply stated, all I wish to accomplish is good scene details, from shadow to highlight, where ordinary one shot photography will not do. Typically, this means the use of HDR is germane to high contrast scenes. If you want truly garish HDR results you need go no further than Google. Some of these efforts make Thomas Kincade’s genuinely foul painting look tasteful by comparison.

To try to see if this sort of thing could be done with a hand-held camera I set the 5D to take three exposures, each 2 stops apart, with the camera set on multiple exposure motor drive. Then all it takes is to take a manual reading of a mid-tone area, focus and keep the shutter button depressed. The 5D bangs off three exposures in one second, one correctly exposed, and one each 2 stops over and under. You can do less than 2 stop steps, but 2 seems to be the done thing in the HDR world.

When I got home I had 36 pictures on the CF card, meaning 12 sets of three each. Because of Aperture’s superb engineering, I dropped these RAW files into Apple’s application and seconds later all 36 snaps were on the screen. Then, dialing in Stack->Auto stack, I told the program to stack all images three or fewer seconds apart and, hey presto!, I had 12 stacks with three images each. Seconds later I had exported one of the stacks as high quality JPGs (12 mB each) to a new folder on the hard disk. Opening up Photomatix’s stand alone progam I executed Automate->Batch Process and told the application to ‘Align Images’ before processing, which took some 2 minutes. Photomatix exports the HDR JPG in a new sub-folder where the images reside, and the JPG can then be dropped on Photoshop for final adjustments – meaning the highlight slider in Levels is moved to the left, Smart Sharpen is applied (300/1/0 for the 5D is what Canon redommends) and the file is saved.

Back into Aperture, import the result and add it to your stack as the first image and you are done. It’s nice to keep the original RAW files as doubtless some day a better HDR application will become available, thoguh I find it hard to criticize Photomatix.

Here’s how it looks:

The Aperture screen with the HDR image on left with source images.

And here is a larger view of the result:

The HDR processed result.

As you can see, the very natural looking result preserves a full tonal range despite the extremely harsh midday sunlight. But there is a snag. Look at the car’s wheel rim and you will see that the images are misaligned. I didn’t get this problem when doing indoor tests on a tripod (see the previous columns) and examination of the other HDRs from this outing disclosed the problem in varying degrees in each picture. What appears to be happenning is that I am slightly twisting the camera between pictures, probably reacting to the noise of the motor drive. As a result, whereas the centers of all images are sharp, the peripheries show clearly overlapping images. So for this photographer, at least, it seems a tripod is de rigeur for mulit-image HDR pictures. The indoor shots taken with a tripod disclose no image degredation when compared with the originals.

Here’s one more example of what HDR can do for tonal range:

The Aperture screen with the HDR image top left, with source images.

And here is a larger view of the result:

The HDR processed result.

There’s less edge blurring in this one – I must have been steadier – but when you enlarge the result it’s still there.

It’s no great secret that I think Ansel Adams was a mediocre photographer, at best. What made his pictures jump out at you is his superb darkroom technique. He would think nothing of spending days over a print, messing with chemicals, paper grades and manual dodging and burning. If the poor sap had only waited, he could have snapped up a copy of Photomatix and saved himself a lot of trouble. His example is instructive, though. Good technique cannot make a great print from a poor original.

After these few experiments with HDR I think I understand what good technique means. Now I have to take some good originals!