Monthly Archives: April 2011

Milk

Photographs

A lovely mural.

Panny G1, Olympus 9-18mm at 10mm, ISO320.

This lovely mural makes its home in Burlingame in the Bay Area and has been recently restored to its former glory. Unfortunately it’s in the back of a crowded car dealer’s lot so the only way to snap it was with the ultra-wide Olympus zoom on the G1 and then fix perspective in Photoshop. Taken directly into the sun, the original is rather flat but a few seconds work with the Clarity and Vibrance sliders in Lightroom3 and all is well. The Olympus lens shows a total freedom from internal reflection highlights, even in so demanding a case.

A lovely reminder of times past when milk was still delivered to your front door. When I was a kid in London, this was still the case and we would give an apple to the Express Dairy milkman’s horse (!) which was always gratefully accepted. He had two – a sweet brown one and a not so sweet black one, so you were really careful with your fingers in the latter’s case!

The cost of gear

Hardware

Never lower.

Selling off my Canon 5D outfit gave me pause to reflect on the cost of photography gear. While it’s not something I pay much attention to, my ‘investment’ in hardware has, for many years, been less than zero. That is largely attributable to selling off my Leica equipment a few years back, most of it bought before the lunatic increases in second hand values seen in the late 1990s. Most items sold for at least twice what I had paid, some of the older ones for five times my cost. So even after splashing out on my 5D, a bunch of lenses and the HP DJ90 printer, I was well ahead of the game. While I denigrate the collector mentality which saw my Leica gear rise so greatly in value, living free is not so bad either.

My Leica M3. That was then ….

In 1971, when I got serious about street snapping and bought my first Leica, a used M3, a new M4 could be had for some $940, complete with the greatest 50mm lens ever made, the f/2 Summicron. If film is your thing you cannot improve on this combination forty years later. Today a new digital M9 with a similar optic will run you $9,000, or $10,000 with the even more street-suitable 35mm lens. That’s an annual compounded inflation rate of almost 6%. By contrast, the US CPI has an annualized increase of 4.5% over the same period, which makes Leica’s price inflation look reasonable. Stated differently, that M4 + lens, inflated at the US CPI rate, would cost you $5,200 today. Yet, when someone tells you that a modern M9 + lens runs you the price of a good used car you blanch and look elsewhere.

The M9 is a far more capable body than any of its predecessors and for the over-and-above-inflation price increase you get a full frame digital sensor, a ‘motor drive’ as there’s no film to advance, aperture-priority exposure automation, extremely high ISO capability, a thousand shots a roll and instant gratification. All missing from that M4 of yesteryear. That’s a lot of value added for the incremental $4,000 or so over an M4 at today’s prices. And you still get that dumb-as-it-gets removable baseplate.

Yet why do so few serious photographers buy it? The reason is simple. It’s not that the M9, in some abstracted sense, ‘seems’ expensive. It’s that everything else is so much cheaper. And if you take function and flexibility into account, the single-use Leica (street snaps only, please) pales when compared to like priced modern megacomputers in the guise of the big Canons and Nikons. Indeed, for just a few hundred dollars you have a choice of any number of DSLRs from the likes of Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Samsung, Olympus, Sony and Panasonic which will outperform that M9 in every respect – speed, automation, flexibility and so on – while yielding results indistinguishable in quality from the Leica’s to all except those who have shelled out the price of entry for the latter. The Leica has migrated from tool to fetish.

I’m thinking about this as I contemplate what to do with all the excess proceeds from my 5D sales. My little G1 outfit with 9-18, 14-45 and 45-200mm lenses, which ran me all of $1,650, can deliver 13″ x 19″ prints with ease, 18″ x 24″ if I try a little harder. I tried the 20mm f/1.7 pancake and returned this poor optic one day after purchase. It was, arguably, a luxury purchase, meaning I really did not need it, but I had all that cash burning a hole in my pocket, so blowing $400 of it on a toy seemed the thing to do.

Panny lists a 45mm Macro with Leica branding (right, pull the other leg) which helps them justify $800 for the lens. But my macro days are over. Been there, done that.

…. this is now. G1 and friends.

There’s also a tempting Panny fisheye lens which may entice me should I get the hankering to do QTVRs again, but the 9-18mm Oly satisfies my ultrawide needs for now.

On the software front simplification has also been the order of the day. Lightroom and Photoshop CS5 are a powerful team for just about everything I need, absent QTVRs. Panoramas, perspective correction, selective blurring, you name it. Plus LR’s superb cataloging and keywording. So no way to blow some cash there.

And when it comes to heat mounting my big prints, the old Seal press has about a thousand years left on it and the last I checked, they do still make them like that.

I guess I’ll just invest the excess, setting $1100 aside for the Fuji X100. Now that is one piece of gear I very much do not want to have to return for credit.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing to it. I simply have to take my dirt cheap gear and go make some more pictures.

Panasonic 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS MFT Lens

Micro Four-Thirds, Paintings

Staring me in the face.

It’s not for nothing that my mother gave birth to me on St. Thomas’s day and duly named me Thomas. For those into Christianity, Thomas was the ultimate skeptic. Judas, unlike his fellow scum in the banking sector today, at least had the courage to off himself. All but one of the remaining eleven apostles took Christ’s wounds for granted, but Thomas was having none of it. He had to check it out. I like that guy, and it took Caravaggio to truly do him justice and, as usual, he pulls no punches.

St. Thomas, that greatest of skeptics, checks for himself.

In a world where everything on the internet is taken as gospel, we could do with more like him.

So, having been duly skeptical about the hype surrounding Panny’s 20mm lens yesterday, and after returning the lens to B&H in disgust after one day and 434 exposures, I think it’s only fair to set the record straight. The good thing about being a skeptic is that you rarely get ripped off; the bad thing is that when something really good stares you in the face you tend to take it for granted. And that ‘something good’ has been staring me in the face for some 18 months now. I admit it. When it comes to the expression ‘kit lens’ I am prejudiced. Prejudiced as in ‘It’s a piece of plastic junk used to keep the price of a basic DSLR low’.

So my ghastly experience with the Panny 20mm f/1.7 MFT lens is a salutary lesson, one which taught me that the Panny ‘kit’ zoom is one of the great optics of our time. It’s appropriate, therefore, to devote a journal entry to that kit lens, the Panasonic 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS MFT Lens. I have been taking it for granted for far too long.

With some 9,500 exposures using this lens under my belt I can lay some claim to living in the real world of results, not in the theoretical one of chart and laboratory measurements.

Almost everything about this lens is right. It is small, it focuses very quickly, it’s sharp at any aperture and subject distance and it delivers every time. Let’s get the complaints out of the way first. It’s not a large aperture lens, meaning everything will be pretty much in focus at every aperture and most subject distances. You will not be adjusting the zoom ring with one finger because it binds and jerks. And, yes, there’s a lot of plastic in it, if that bothers you, though how that is relevant to the quality of your images beats me. Ever tried dropping your brass and steel (brassy steal?) $3,000 Leica Summicron on the sidewalk to see how well malleable, deformable metal survives gravity compared to plastic?

And, my word, this lens delivers.

You want blurred backgrounds? Hop into Photoshop CS5, use the lasso and ‘refine edges’ tools with Filter->Blur->Lens Blur and you have all the background blurring you need. Takes seconds to do on those special images. For a quicker, less nuanced result, you can just use the localised adjustment brush in LR3 and turn down the sharpness, using the slider, for the highlighted area. Don’t forget to hit Command-Option-O (it’s a toggle) to show the outlining mask as you do your outlining.

Point this lens into the sun, as in ‘the sun is in the picture’, and you will get an occasional flare spot, easily removed in Photoshop. Does the result lose contrast as a result? No.

Use this lens in poor light and you will be struggling with a compromise between noisy high ISO and movement blur. But compromise you can, and you will still get the photograph. At ISO1600 noise from the G1’s sensor is not nice, but a bit of post-processing and you can get a decent 13″ x 19″ print. One that works fine unless you like sticking your nose in the canvas.

So, Panny, thanks for one of the truly great optical masterpieces of our time. I don’t care how you got there, I don’t mind if you used plastic ‘glass’ and polycarbonate this and that, because I have an incredible hit rate with your optic on my G1. And I much prefer to cull images for poor timing/composition/realization than I do for wrong focus or flare. Further, the built in shake reduction (OIS) gets me the equivalent of two stops of sharpness (if not two stops less depth of field) so the f/3.5-5.6 becomes an effective f/1.7-2.8. Where I might use a 1/30th shutter with a non-OIS lens, here I can use 1/8th with the same result. What’s not to like? The 13″ x 19″ prints on my wall tell a story no LCD monitor can. This lens is superb.

When Panny went to the G2 and later models the 14-45 morphed into a 14-42, which sells for $150 less. Whether that’s because it’s a poorer optic or not, I cannot say as I have yet to try one, but I do know that my 14-45 is very much a keeper.

Until the recent Panasonic GH2 camera came along all Panny and Olympus MFT bodies (which is the same as saying ‘all interchangeable lens MFT cameras’) used the same sensor. The GH2 claims to improve on that sensor and, if they are to be believed, the 14-45 kit zoom will only move to strength with the additional benefits of an improved ‘back end’.

The kit zoom is highly recommended if it’s the only lens for your G-body and street snaps are your preferred genre. And I promise never to use the words ‘kit zoom’ as pejoratives again.

Pictures speak louder than words, so I took the kit lens out for a spin yesterday, just to heal the wounds left by the 20mm, and here are a few results:

Click the picture to see the PDF.

All taken at ISO320 on the G1 body with minimal post processing.

Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 MFT lens – Part II

Micro Four-Thirds

A massive disappointment.

I captioned Part I of this review with the words “State of the art”. I have had to go back and revise that to read “State of the art?”. There are several issues with my sample of the 20mm Panny and one is so fundamentally beyond correction that I can only say I am massively disappointed.

No, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke.

The variables not at issue here are the camera body, the technique or the subject matter. All are the same. I took the lens for a spin on the Panny G1, on which I now have over 10,000 exposures. I used the same settings as usual, though I mostly snapped at ISO100 rather than ISO320 to allow the use of a larger aperture in my preferred aperture-priority mode. The lens is f/1.7 fully open and I want to see how that works. I mostly used f/1.7 to f/2.8 and even at ISO100 I was over-exposing in the bright sun that favored my street excursion to San Francisco. That’s frustrating, but hardly the fault of the lens.

Some tests had disclosed that the 20mm is natively quite a bit sharper than my other three lenses for the G1 – the 9-18mm Olympus MFT, the Panny kit lens and the Panny 45-200 zoom. While those all need a sharpening setting of 100 in Lightroom on import to get the image just so, the 20mm only needs 55 for like results. So I set up an import preset with that sharpness setting and imported the snaps taken yesterday.

I’m using the lens with a stock B+W UV filter for protection and no lens hood. I have yet to see one scintilla of evidence that a hood makes any difference with modern multi-coated lenses and refuse to be bamboozled by purported ‘experts’ in the matter. The filter is not multi-coated and, in fairness, presents a far larger glass surface to the world than the front element of the 20mm which is minuscule by comparison.

I mention this because, on importing the pictures into LR3, the following were immediately obvious:

  • Flare is everywhere, even in modestly bright into-the-sun pictures. With the possible exception of a 1950 50mm Leitz f/1.5 Summarit with primitive coatings which I used when the dinosaurs still walked the earth, I have never used a lens which flares more. Not even close. A veil over the whole picture, and light spots everywhere. A catastrophe. See also ‘Flare update’ below.
  • The lens is disappointingly low in contrast. I have to increase LR3’s Contrast slider to 50 from the default 25 to equal the kit zoom.
  • All my pictures are one stop over exposed except for those taken indoors in very low light. Those tend to under-exposure of 1/2 stop.
  • The orientation sensor does not work. All vertical snaps (40% of my total) have to be manually rotated in LR3 after import. What? I can forgive Oly this fault in their excellent 9-18 ultra-wide MFT zoom as their lens was not designed for Panny bodies, but a Panny lens on the Panny G1? Inexcusable and a real time waster at the processing stage. Not one single review I have read has mentioned this. Does any of these reviewers actually take and process photographs?
  • But, worst of all, for someone who needs fast autofocus for his preferred subject matter, fully 30% (yes, 30%) of my pictures showed that I had depressed the shutter button before the lens had established proper focus and the result was garbage. This really got my goat as there was some great stuff lost forever. I mentioned yesterday that the lens takes twice as long to focus as the kit lens and it seems that the difference crosses my critical point of need. My focus failure rate with the kit lens? Just 3%. Max. Why not set the camera to only allow shutter release when focus is established? That’s about as rational as insisting the US Government manages your retirement monies. Have you seen the returns on Social Security? Please. The problem is that the 20mm defaults to infinity focus after every snap so it has just too much work to do with its slow focus motor for what I do – meaning a typical subject distance of 5-7 feet.

Definition? The lens just sparkles when it isn’t flaring or getting the focus and exposure wrong. No issues there. It’s as sharp and aberration-free, after Panasonic does its in-camera magic, as anything I have used. And that’s all the good news I have to report.

So what are my exit strategies?

Well, maybe I could discard the UV filter and the lens would stop catching flare rays. Or I could get a multi-coated variant. OK. Happy to learn I’m at fault here.

I suppose I could set the camera to underexpose by one stop when the 20mm is fitted but, honestly, it’s one more thing to remember for a guy who is happy just to recall his name in the morning. Contrast? More of the same. Bottom line is that every time you change lenses you are going to screw up and with the Panny’s smallish sensor, proper exposure and contrast are critical if you want to make large prints. I make a lot of those.

The need to turn every vertical image 90 degrees in LR3 does not make me happy but at least it has nothing to do with image quality and I’m prepared to live with that.

But the one thing I do not think has anything to do with sample variation, which cannot be excused with that old chestnut beloved of owners of British cars – “I got a bad one” – is the focus speed. It does not cut it for street snaps. Not even close.

The 20mm is going back to B&H today, where it can make a less demanding user happy. I am so not looking forward to explaining the above to the good people at B&H.

Fuji had better make more X100s really soon. I remain on Amazon’s waiting list, for what that is worth.

I include below some snaps I like from yesterday’s foray and remain bitterly dismayed that so many good images are forever lost. I mean, I was having a really good day, seeing fast, clearly and on point. The Panny 14-45mm kit lens, crappy feeling zoom ring and all, has it all over the Panny 20mm. It just shines by comparison. I can always blur backgrounds using Photoshop CS5. Had you told me that all in one week I would be praising Photoshop and simultaneously trashing Panasonic, I would have pointed you to the local shrink, and I would have been wrong.

The last time I felt this disappointed was when a date told me she didn’t like opera …. with the same result. I dumped her. And like Panny’s 20mm she was lovely to behold. Life is too short for women with poor taste …. and bad lenses.

Click the picture to view the PDF.

Flare update: I tried the lens into the sun with and without the filter, just before returning it. No difference – meaning it flares just horribly. There is clearly something very wrong with this aspect of the design of the Panny 20mm. As another test, I compared two screens of unprocessed RAW imports in LR3, the one taken on the 14-45mm kit lens, the other with the 20mm. The flatness and poor native contrast of those taken on the 20mm are startlingly obvious. This is just as noticeable with pictures taken in the shade as with those in the sun, where flare makes matters even worse. So this optic does not just have a problem with flare; its inherent contrast is poor – almost like an uncoated lens made over 60 years ago. It’s not subtle or something that only a critical eye can detect – it’s obvious. The images it produces are flat.

After buying gear from them for over 25 years, this is only the second item I have ever had to return to B&H. The first was the first example of my Canon 20mm EF lens which, like this Panny, drank from a bowl. Its replacement was marginally better. Replacing the Panny is simply not on the cards, as I don’t fancy another kick in the groin. By the way, I eventually gave up on the mediocre Canon 20mm and sold it. Canon makes some great lenses (85EF, 200L, L zooms, 400L) but has a well earned reputation for making some real stinkers at the wide end.

Second return ever to B&H.

Independent ‘reviews’: This piece might as well have been named “Never trust what you read”. It’s unconscionable that not one review of the many I have read focuses on the shortcomings of this lens, especially the critical one of its slow focus. All they go on about is distortion, aberration and vignetting. Charts this, resolving power that.

What, after all, is a pancake, semi-wide’s primary purpose in life? It is to take snapshots.

It’s not for studio portraits.

It’s not for landscapes.

It’s not for cathedral interiors.

It’s for snapshots.

And snapshots mean it has to be fast, not fast as in large aperture but fast as in speed of focus. The modern camera-aware subject does not permit manual focus for the street snapper. It has to be auto everything – focus and exposure. And because the street snapper cannot order up the light, it has to be highly flare resistant because 50% of the time when it’s sunny the sun will be shining into the lens, not on the photographer’s rear end.

In that context, all the reviews I have seen of the Panasonic 20mm lens have been a waste of time to read, written as they are in some laboratory by non-photographers.