Yearly Archives: 2006

Looking at pictures

Book reviews, Photographers, Photographs

You can’t beat natural light

As we look forward to six dry months in central Caliornia, it’s nice to have a sheltered outdoor spot to look at pictures on those long, warm summer evenings.

This little walled patio on the north side of our home was a complete mess when we moved here a couple of years ago. As the US Government has yet to craft a method of taxing sweat equity, I set about fixing it up to make a pleasant enviroment to better enjoy the occasional book of pictures. The only taxes involved were iniquitous sales taxes which, wherever they may go rest assured it’s not to fix the local roads and freeways, which resemble those of a third world nation.

No matter. Get rid of the horrible hot tub that so spoiled this lovely spot, add a few rose bushes and magnolias, some mulch, a small fountain to set the tone and a few pieces of wicker furniture from the far east and you have the makings of a fine outdoor reading room. The tub was sold to a neighbor and the proceeds invested in what you see here. Throw in a Border Terrier and things are nigh perfect.

Yesterday evening I was leafing through Michael Kenna’s work in the beautifully printed ‘A Twenty Year Retrospective’ and couldn’t help but remark on how the prints looked so much better in the warm outdoor light. His photographs are reproduced in a gentle sepia which adds greatly to the overall feel. Kenna has a strong, consistent style and while the book credits him with works in many US public gallery collections, you would probably expect to find it on the wood panelled walls of classier business institutions like private banks and financial advisors.

Anyway, with all that sepia going on, I grabbed that little jewel, the Leica DP, and took a couple of snaps to illustrate this piece. A few seconds with Photoshop saw the RAW images converted to TIF files whence two more clicks saw monochrome conversion and sepia toning.

The Leicaflex SL

Cameras

Simple, sturdy and with great lenses, you can pick up this behemoth for very little

While classic rangefinder Leicas continue to appreciate as doctors, dentists and investment bankers fill their display cases, fine cameras like the Leicaflex SL, which never really caught on, can be had very inexpensively.

I used one for many years, during the period 1977 though 1990, starting with a 50mm Summicron lens, adding a 21mm, a 90mm Summicron for portraits and the superb 180mm Apo-Telyt R for landscape pictures. As good an optic as I have ever used.

Provided you were in no great hurry and didn’t mind the noise, it was hard to take a bad picture with this camera. The camera was big and rather clunky, the wind lever had way too long an arc but the controls were nice and large meaning use with gloves on was no problem.

What I liked most was the semi-spot meter. The excellent microprism focusing circle also defined the exact area of measurement for the meter and was large enough that you didn’t get all nervy the way you do with a spot meter. It was a match needle design, meaning you had to align two needles, visible only in the viewfinder. Adding or deducting a stop for light correction was very easy with the camera at eye level, as the viewfinder displayed the selected shutter speed and was very easy to see with or without eyeglasses.

This was one of the last of the all mechanical cameras which have now largely disappeared, but proved very reliable in all weather conditions. True, the camera had looks only a mother could love but the lenses were superb regardless of focal length.

As Leica has since added all sorts of electronic gizmo connections in its SLR lenses in a futile attempt to keep up with the times, the earlier two cam mechanical lenses can be had very inexpensively. While the build quality never felt up to early Leica M standards (meaning M2, M3 and M4), I had no reliability problems, and the uncluttered viewfinder was a joy to use. A great starter camera for someone getting serious and willing to put up with the shortcomings of film.

Anchorage, Alaska. 1978. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron R, Kodachrome 64

New York City. 1985. Leicaflex SL, 21mm Super-Angulon R, Kodachrome 64

Lake Elizabeth, California. 1990. Leicaflex SL, 180mm Apo-Telyt R, Kodachrome 64

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.