Yearly Archives: 2006

Fun with the B&H catalog

Cameras

Everything under the sun in one big book

Say what you may, a notebook computer cannot hold a candle to a book when it comes to browsing. Spill your cocktail on the former and you have just had a $2,000 drink; spill it on the latter and you come back to read a slightly crinkled copy tomorrow. Make the cocktail a gin or vodka martini and your carpet will never know the difference.

So when B&H, that estimable New York City business, sent me their big book of photo and related equipment, it was rather fun to browse it in book form rather than searching for something on a computer. Best of all, with a book you come across things you would never think of browsing for at a keyboard, because it would simply never occur to you to look for them.

I suspect B&H sent me the book because I blew all that cash on the Canon EOS 5D a while back, and more power to them. I cannot think of another business with such integrity and client service, and I’m not even Jewish!

So what interesting items are of note browsing these 322 pages? Well first of all, kudos to the team that puts this monster together. With some 15-100 items a page you are talking a lot of work here.

There are sections on everything from Audio/Visual, Computers, Lighting, Photography of course, Podcasting(!), Portable Entertainment (meaning iPod mostly), Satellite radio (where you can get to listen to potty mouthed smut and pay for it), Hard Drive storage, Surveillance Video (honest!) and many more. Here, in no particular order, are some items that caught my eye:

Stupidest, most over-priced item: Easy – page 128. A company named Visible Dust is asking $90 for an ‘Econo Sensor Brush’. No kidding. $90 for a brush. And that’s for the ‘Econo’ model. The Real Thing is $135. Go to the local art store, get a nice camel hair brush, soak it in your vodka supply to clean up any grease, and you have the same thing for $5. A fool and his money…. If things go really badly at the old estate I think I might start selling these. Mine will be the Organic CCD Rendition Improver with French Vodka Enhancement for a mere $75, or a Special on three for $125. The Special would include a bottle of Grey Goose (“A lifetime supply of brush cleaner for you and everyone else in your county”).

The thing no one needs: Page 129. The Zeiss Ikon rangefinder body for film at all of $1,617. True, it makes the Sensor Brush look cheap.

The camera you thought they didn’t make any more: Page 135. A Linhof 6×9 view camera, no lens, for $7,964. Probably made in China, anyway. You can get two EOS 5Ds for that price and have money left for a couple of top notch Canon ‘L’ lenses. Plus your snaps will be sharper.

The truly funky: Page 172. The Sea & Sea marine housing for the EOS 5D, a tad pricey at $2,600. Keeps things dry, I suppose, but what do you do about flash?

The ‘I wish I had one’ item: Page 190. The QT Quick Truss system. No, not for hernia, rather an electric roller system to move your studio backgrounds into place. A bargain at $1,839 for the biggest size, some 11′ square. OK, so maybe it is for hernia after all.

The $300 a fyard tripod: Page 165. $900 gets you the Gitzo Giant which elevates to all of 91.3″. Now that’s tall.

A close runner-up to Visible Dust: Page 267. How about shelling out $290 for a Tecnec LED clock/timer, with 4″ high digits. Let’s see, you can get 20 of those at Target for that amount.

The greatest bargain: Page 286. $22 gets you 50 JVC blank DVD, or 235 gigabytes of storage.

The ‘What were they thinking of?’ award: Piece of cake. Page 305. A gorgeous pair of Leica binoculars, watertight to 16.4 feet (no, not 16.5). $1,795. Ok, not chump change, I grant you, but we are talking Leica glass and my much older Trinovids testify to the sheer pleasure of using such an instrument. But wait. The description goes on to say “Elegant Black Leather”. In a waterproof binocular? Please….

Biggest choice in one category: Well, there are no fewer than some 150 digital cameras listed, from a 3 mp P&S to the mighty Canon 1DS Mark II N with its 17 mp.

“The item I was happiest to sell” winner: Page 143 – the Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED film scanner, for $1,900. A horrible use of dollars and desk top space. Hasta la vista, baby.

The “Haven’t you heard of full frame digital, bozo?” award winner: Page 143. The grandly branded Hasselblad Imacon Flextight 848 Drum Scanner, for $14,995. Yes, $14,995. It’s not made by Hasselblad, it’s not a drum scanner, and what the hell is your time worth anyway?

The “No one told me the sixties were over” champ: Page 162. The Cokin #201 Multi-Image filter. Pass the bong.

The gooks only special: Page 213. The Sony Indoor Pendant Mount Housing with Power, the better to hide your spy camera in. $330 for a box and cover. Just don’t ask the CIA for installation instructions. They pay $5,000 for theirs, yet still manage to place them on the wrong continent.

The “What the heck does that do?” gadget: Page 246. The Electrosonics Digital Hybrid Diversity Receiver. Sinister. No price listed. Could this be the answer to getting all those losers off the street in the interests of diversity rather than survival of the fittest? Naah. Probably another CIA budget boondoggle. “Hey, Joe. Check this out. I can get dirty pictures on it even in this lead lined room”.

The “I wish I had one even though I have no earthly use for it” gadget: Page 258. The Sound Devices Portable Digital Recorder with Time Code for $2,375. Shades of John Travolta in ‘Blow Out’.

And I’m just getting started. Anyway, it beats watching some dope read the 6 o’clock teleprompter, laughably masquerading as ‘The News’, while making $15mm a year and being revered by all as an Influential Voice. Reading a Teleprompter….

A real workout

Canon 5D

A real live ‘shoot’

Marty Paris is not only a friend, he is also a fine acoustic guitarist. So when Marty asked me to take pictures at his open air concert this weekend I was glad to oblige, though somewhat apprehensive about the high contrast lighting issues this opportunity would present.

I would like to tell you that I took ‘just the EOS 5D and a couple of lenses’ for the ‘shoot’ (ugh!) but then I only have a couple of lenses, so that’s what I took!

The group, comprised of two guitarists, a vocalist and a drummer, would be playing at the town square in Templeton, near my home, in the shade of the bandstand. A charming throwback to all that was good and great in Norman Rockwell’s America. People gambolling about with children and dogs. A hot dog stand. Sunshine and oak trees. Church steeples at every corner with the fire engine poised in case of emergency.

All well and good, but the bright sunlight meant blown out backgrounds from the huge contrast between lighting on the performers and the park setting. So I decided to make virtue out of necessity and used the Canon 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens (what a piece of glass!) mostly at f/2.8 to blur the background and give the pictures that studio look. Hardly the controlled environment of a studio, but the best I could do. The 5D was set at 400 ISO which resulted in short shutter speeds, mitigating the absence of the wonderful IS feature in the 200mm lens. Canon, are you listening? And prior experience with the 5D had confirmed that ISO 400 is grain free at any realistic enlargement size. Try that with color film!

I used that inspired little belt-mounted back up gadget, the exotically named Hyperdrive, to dowload full CF cards from the camera, alternating the one in the Hyperdrive with the one in the 5D. I ended up taking some 350 RAW pictures or some 6 cards’ full, and if you think that’s a lot, words fail me when trying to explain how many reasons there are for a bad picture in this environment. Clutter everywhere, closed eyes when they should be open, background noise, and on and on.

It took some 25 minutes to load Aperture from the Hyperdrive when getting home and, owing to Aperture’s superb user interface, only another three hours to cull the pictures down to the 85 best. That includes deletion of bad pictures, exposure correction and the occasional crop or straightening of the horizon. The only snags I ran into were that Aperture locked up on me twice when downloading from the Hyperdrive (no images were lost) and would take up to 20 seconds to load an image for processing. My iMac G5 has the modest Nvidia Radeon 6600 graphics card which is the major cause of the slow loading of an image on the screen. Then again, the iMac costs $1,500 rather than the $5,000 it would take to get a full blown Mac with a posh video card and Cinema Display. I can wait a few seconds for a picture to load at that price difference.

85 is a lot of photographs to end up with but the goal was to give each performer twenty or so pictures to choose from. You can see the snaps here.

Some practical notes from this little assignment. I set the focus sensor in the 5D to the center rectangle. I was not about to trust the camera’s system to guess optimum focus at f/2.8 with the 200mm lens when depth of field can be as little as an inch or so. I would generally take an exposure reading (using center weighting) from the concrete floor of the bandstand and lock it before composing, then locking focus with a first pressure of the shutter release on the performer’s eyes prior to final composition. This is all very fast once you get the hang of it. Despite all this I got the exposure wrong in several pictures, but RAW is so forgiving that correction in Aperture was easy without any noticeable quality loss. In particular I find the Highlights & Shadows slider in Aperture far superior to that in Photoshop as it produces far more realistic results and introduces far less noise into the image.

The slide show was generated using Aperture’s web creation function and this took far too long compared to using iPhoto. Some three hours. Apple really needs to speed this up.

The next morning I made four 13″ x 19″ prints on the HP DesignJet 90 plus five CDs with the slide show, and they were at Marty’s door by noon. I was trying to emulate what, say, a wedding pro might be faced with in delivering timely results to his client. The workflow above was encouraging in two respects. The percentage of overall time spent on processing compared to photography was relatively low and the processing experience was markedly stress free. So the 5D + RAW + Aperture + HP DesignJet proved to be a powerful and effective set of tools.

Was my ‘client’ pleased? Well, there were a lot of gurgling noises on the phone when he called back, so you be the judge. Now maybe I can get him into my studio.

The designer as star

Cameras

It’s great to see the designers of innovative producets credited

Panasonic will soon release their L1 interchangeable lens SLR to market. The camera is notable for a couple of things. First, there’s the compact Leica M ‘look’, owing to the flat top, the result of using a mirror and prism design pioneered by Olympus in the brilliant Pen F half frame some thirty years ago. Second, the continuation of the Panasonic-Leica collaboration with the Panasonic vibration reduction system integrated into the ‘standard’ Leica zoom lens.

The last time I remember this sort of thing was when the inspired designer of the jewel-like Olympus Pen F and OM1 cameras, Yoshihisa Maitani, was featured prominently in advertisements, also some thirty years ago.


Maitani.

The Leica DP – Part V

Panasonic

Noise Ninja does a number on high ISO noise

A kind reader suggested that Noise Ninja from PictureCode might be a worthwhile product for cutting ISO 400 noise produced by the sensor in the Panasonic LX1 (or Leica DP as I prefer to think of it, once modified with a proper optical viewfinder).

I downloaded the Photoshop CS2 plug-in and gave it a shot. PictureCode has a long listing of profiles created for many different cameras, so I downloaded that also, not really feeling up to a lot of messing about with the product’s myriad sliders, and this is what I got – the Noise Ninja version has the grid pattern as I have yet to buy and register the product:

This is the 400 ISO interior snap taken in RAW mode, best quality. While there are trade offs – look at the loss of detail in the red pin-striped shirt, you can dial in just enough noise reduction to get the color artifacts out – the standard profile might have overdone things a bit. Again, these are the size of 22” x 39” prints, so less noise reduction would be needed in regular sized prints.

Noise Ninja strikes me as a useful adjunct in the toolbox for the occasional image where ISO 400 is used indoors. Remember that the OIS vibration reduction system in the camera is good for two shutter speeds, making your ISO 100 equivalent to ISO 400, so it would be a fairly rare image that needed ISO 400.

More interestingly, Noise Ninja also has profiles for film and scanner combinations, so those plagued with noise in small 35mm negatives now have a useful tool to look to.

Rather cheekily, PictureCode provides a canned profile for the Canon EOS 5D; cheeky as the sensor in that camera has exceptionally low noise properties already.

I’ll take a look at vibration reduction, what Panasonic calls OIS, in Part VI.

Still movies

Movies, Photography

Some of the best still photography is in movies

Once I realized that the carpal tunnel problems I was having, meaning wrist pain when working my hands hard, were not going to go away, I sold all my woodworking equipment and set about converting the woodworking shop to a home theater, with the following result:

Completed in time for last Christmas, I have maintained my commitment to watching a movie a night ever since and must say I have rarely had so much fun. 1,000 watts of surround sound and a 100” screen are not that difficult to enjoy!

So with some one hundred movies added to the growing collection at home, I stopped to think what was it that I enjoyed most on the big screen, forcing a narrowing down to just three movies.

Easy.

Luchino Visconti’s ˜Death in Venice” (1971)
Sergio Leone’s ˜Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968)

and

Walter Hill’s ˜Streets of Fire” (1984)

On reflection, the common thread running through these films includes a surpassingly simple plot (writer goes to die in Venice and becomes infatuated with a young boy, gunman seeks revenge, tough guy rescues former flame from kidnappers), magnificent music (Gustav Mahler, Ennio Morricone, Ry Cooder and Jim Steinman) and stupendous settings (Venice, the great American West, 50s Chicago).

But the surpassing attribute of all three is easily identified and is the primary reason I am so attracted to these masterpieces.

Stunning still photography.

Still photography? In a movie?

Death in Venice is little more than a series of stills, making up a movie. Lush beyond belief, it’s what makes Visconti such a favorite at the old abode.

Once Upon a Time in the West emulates the Visconti style, or maybe I should say that Visconti emulates Leone, the western having been made first. Some close-ups last for minutes (minutes!) on the screen.

But Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire is the most photographically arresting of the three. Set in a permanently dark, wet Chicago, mostly under the elevated subway (the “El” in local parlance), it’s all neon, reflections, brooding atmosphere.

To illustrate, here are some stills from the great cimematographer Andrew Laszlo:

The bad guy makes his first appearance in the music hall, intending to kidnap the star heroine:

Outside the police station, the good guy is seen driving by in his hot rod:

Abstract expressionism at its best:

The good guy returns, ever the loner, after rescuing the girl:

A wonderful shot of the diner around which much of the action centers, seen through the support struts of the El incredibly atmospheric:

Before the final confrontation between the forces of good and evil, Hill pulls off an overhead tracking shot which equals that incredible one in ˜Once Upon a Time in the West” where the camera rises way above Claudia Cardinale’s head to show the new western town being built. Here Hill may not have the advantage of Morricone’s soaring score, yet he does something magical from a photographer’s perspective. He starts with a shot of the bad guy holding up an air horn to summon his evil team:

Then, as the camera rises, he switches focus to the evil hordes assembling in the background, the change in focus transforming the bad guy’s face into a death mask:

The movie has a nice symmetry to it, ending where it started with the heroine giving a driving performance of a rock number in the broken down hall. Both are by Jim Steinman – the fabulous ‘Nowhere Fast’ to open and the even better ‘Tonight is What it Means to be Young’ to close this masterpiece of a movie:

And there’s that neon again, the background to her singing reminding one of nothing so much as a work by the futurist Marinetti.

As for the ending lyrics, beat this:

Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We’re dancing for the restless
and the broken-hearted
Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We’re dancing for the desperate
and the broken-hearted

Let the revels begin (Tonight is
what it means to be young)
Let the fire be started (Before
you know it it’s gone)
We’re dancing for the restless
and the broken-hearted
Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We’re dancing for the desperate
and the broken-hearted

Say a prayer in the darkness for the magic to come
No matter what it seems
Tonight is what it means to be young
Before you know it it’s gone
Tonight is what it means to be young
Before you know it it’s gone.

Finally, the picture of the heroine on stage with a foreground of clapping hands, a scene which might as well have been lifted from one of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies in the late 1930s:

The only thing wrong with this movie is that there is so much of this kind of thing that much is easily missed on a first viewing, but I cannot think of a better reason for an aficionado of film to rush out and install a home theater.

As for photographers, it’s simply a must.

Update December, 2017:

Streets of Fire is finally available on BluRay. Amazon has it.