The mind’s eye
I can never resist this sort of thing – a tight collection of shapes, reflections, textures and a little color.
The car’s price tag, visible in the original, states $28,888, so you can guess this was taken in the San Francisco Bay Area with its large Chinese population, the number ‘8’ being a symbol of good luck in that culture.
…. a little color there.
The beauty of the adjustments in Lightroom (I’m on 1.4.1) is that the results are seen instantly on the screen and the sliders for these are really quite intuitive – not something that can be said of the industrial might of Photoshop with its poor user interface. Further, unlike Aperture, which I no longer use, you do not need the latest liquid helium cooled MacPro with 16 gB of RAM and the latest $2,000 graphics card to run the thing at half decent speed – an old iMac G4 more than suffices and you can probably pick one of those up for $50 with a nice big screen at a yard sale.
Here you can see the bland original (underneath) and the final versions of this snap. The final adjustments can be seen here from Lightroom’s History panel – look at the right hand column of data.
That seems like a lot of work until you realize it took about a minute or so to do, aided by the nice large 21.6″ Samsung LCD screen attached to my MacBook. Exotic? Hardly. Available today for under $200 from many makers. Viewsonic now lists a 22″ screen for as low as $160 – a perfect accessory for the MacBook’s small screen whose gloss finish does little to help photographers. The aftermarket screens come with matt surfaces, as they should. Another example where Apple’s marketing focus does little to serve users. Unless you are in a pretty dark room, the glossy screen is a real pain to use, but Apple no longer markets a matt screen version.
The Vibrance and Clarity sliders are especially useful in giving your image ‘pop’, but I find it’s easy to overdo things. A little goes a long way. Unlike the 50mm Canon f/1.4 optic, the 24-105mm L zoom used here displays no color fringing. Instead you get severe barrel distortion at 24mm, not something that’s visible here.
A gentle presence
Having so enjoyed Mermelstein’s book it was a pleasure to find a YouTube video about this gentle giant among street photographers. Note that while his street work does involve sticking a camera in people’s faces, he has a gentle, self effacing nature which makes the whole thing palatable, and there’s no questioning the results.
Simply unacceptable color fringing.
When processing the picture included in yesterday’s journal entry, I was reminded again of the truly frightful extent of uncorrected chromatic aberration (color fringing) in Canon’s 50mm f/1.4 standard lens. For many this is a portrait lens on cropped sensor bodies, with an equivalent focal length of 80mm.
The picture on the right is unprocessed, straight from the camera at the lens’s sweet spot of f/8. The one on the left is after removing the chromatic aberration using the sliders in Lightroom. Even in these small pictures the amount of chromatic aberration is shocking – these enlarged snaps would make for a 30″ x 20″ print. (The small scale difference results from correcting converging verticals in Photoshop CS2).
Given the superb quality of the sensors in Canon’s DSLRs, isn’t it about time that some more attention was paid to fixing dated lens designs like the fixed focal length 50mm one? This sort of thing has been properly designed by any number of manufacturers decades ago and there really is no excuse for such poor optical engineering in a medium priced fixed focal length lens who many, suspicious of the bulk and poor optics in most zooms, still regard as their ‘standard’ lens. Especially old duffers like me who toured the world with a 50mm or 35mm on our cameras, because that’s all we could afford.
Now a glance at any news source will confirm that there are more complaining historians in the world than people with fix-it ideas. The fix here could not be simpler, or more lucrative for all concerned. Do a Panasonic. License Leica’s fabulous designs, Canon, forget about corporate pride, and make sure the final product is emblazoned with the Leica name. Use your mass manufacturing genius to drive the price down and I will be the first to have a fully automated 50mm f/2 Summicron-R Leica lens (made by Canon) on my wonderful 5D – the best 50mm lens ever made. Heck, if I’m feeling spendy I’ll even consider springing for the 50mm Summilux-R with its f/1.4 maximum speed – the second greatest 50mm lens ever made. And while Leica, 40 years on, still cannot manage to add autofocus to its SLR lenses, for Canon that would, of course, be de rigeur.
And while you are at it, Canon, feel free to replace your underwhelming 20mm f/2.8 (which I know and dislike) with Leica’s superb 19mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R, or even with the older 21mm f/4 Super Angulon-R which I knew and loved for many years. Leica and Schneider conspired on that design – can life get any better than that?
The first classic of the digital age
The Canon 5D was the first camera to bring semi-affordable full frame sensors to digital photographers and, I believe, will go down as one of the great classics of the early digital photography age, much as, say, medium format was defined by the Rolleiflex and 35mm film by the rangefinder Leica. The leap in image quality it offered from 35mm and the ability to regularly match medium format film for definition and detail with none of the pain of operation make it the greatest camera design of its time.
The new 5D Mark II is slated to arrive in the US around December and yet there is already a slew of lightly used 5D Mark I models for sale on the web. Maybe it’s the economy, but I would think the price will soften further once Mark II generates some serious upgrade volume.
Check the eBay and you will see that completed auctions average about $1,300 for a mint condition lightly used body.
But I want the 21+ megapixel sensor in the new 5D Mark II, I hear you say, which begs the question why?
Do you propose making prints larger than 24″ x 30″? Do you want to use the movie mode? Is cleaning the dust off the sensor a real pain? Well, if you answered Yes to these, you may need the Mark II. No one else does.
