Yearly Archives: 2011

Rudy Burckhardt

Book reviews

A fine street photographer.

The Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) wisely chose New York as his home, well away from the stolid burghers of his place of birth. There he found the excitement of the streets as can only be found in a few of the great metropolises of the world – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, London – where else is there? His street snaps take three guises – candids, vernacular works (contemporary advertisements and the like) and architecture.

Click the picture for Amazon US.

All are done with a lovely gentle touch, with none of the occasional brutality of fellow traveler Walker Evans.

Recommended for all enamored of the street photography genre. This generously illustrated book is some $32 from Amazon, but I found mine for all of $11.95 at Edward R. Hamilton – they may have a few left, so hurry. The book includes an interesting essay on Burckhardt by Phillip Lopate.

The Panasonic G3 – Part I

Micro Four-Thirds

The best street snapper yet?

With today’s announcement of the Panasonic G3, scheduled to ship in June, Panasonic may have created the best street snapping camera yet. What follows is largely viewed from that perspective.

Some history. The Panasonic G1 was the first Micro Four-Thirds camera. Like the first iPad, there was so little wrong with the design that there have been few compelling reasons to upgrade. The GF1 and GF2 bodies deleted the eye-level finder, rendering the body largely useless for serious photography. The short lived G10 used a cheapened EVF and was discontinued shortly after release. The G2 added a movie mode and a touch screen – the latter the ‘push’ rather than the true touch type in the iPad and iPhone. A solution looking for a problem. The costly GH1 and GH2 bodies added sophisticated movie modes with the GH2 sporting the second sensor design in the G range, all the others having shared the one from that original G1. That sensor brought more megapixels and reviews suggest that the noise levels are now down to those in APS-C cameras.

The Panasonic G3 – complete with strange model designation.

While the G3 does not get rid of the faux prism hump, it is nevertheless of great interest to street snappers. My G1 has seen more pictures taken with it in my 21 months of ownership than any camera I have ever owned, and I have been banging away for some 50 years now, since I was a kid. My shot counter shows well over 10,000 exposures. So any improvements to the G1 make my radar screen. Nearly everything I have been reading about the G3 suggests it’s worth upgrading to one, especially as I now have no back-up camera, my Canon 5D gear all sold in favor of the smaller, lighter Panny and its three lenses – the Oly 9-18, the 14-45 kit zoom and the 45-200 Panny, all superb and all very light and small.

Here are the major changes in the G3 compared to the G1:

  • The body is smaller, the unnecessary hand grip slimmed down. Smaller is always better.
  • The battery is smaller at 7.3mAh vs. 9 mAh, or 20% less. As I routinely get over 400 exposures on a charge with the G1, getting ‘only’ 320 is hardly an issue.
  • The EVF eye proximity sensor is gone – this would switch off the LCD when the camera was raised to eye level. No problem. The only time I use the LCD it when formatting an SDHC card; otherwise it remains folded with the screen in to the body.
  • The focus mode dial top left is gone. I use AF all the time so I don’t care and there’s still touch manual focus when the shutter release is part depressed and the focus mount is touched. Apparently the MF enlarged area now appears in a window so that should make this even more useful.
  • The AEL/AEF lock button is gone. Not good, but there are two programmable function buttons in its place where the AEL function, which I use quite a bit, can be assigned.
  • All the dumb-as-it-gets scene modes have disappeared from the mode dial. Hooray. Let’s also hope they made the click stops more robust.
  • The single shot/motor drive/delayed action lever has disappeared and is now a menu choice. I use single shot only so it does not matter.
  • The mode dial now has two Custom settings – wonderful. I will set one at ISO 400, the other at ISO 1600.
  • As with the G2, the thumb wheel is on the rear, not on the front as with the G1. I cannot tell you how frustrating the placement of the one on the G1 is – I am still frequently depressing it accidentally, going into +/- exposure mode, when all I want to do is change the aperture (I snap only in aperture priority mode).
  • The square format mode has been dropped (no problem) but there’s still a choice of 4:3 or 3:2 – the latter essential for one brought up with 35mm Leicas. That’s all I use.
  • The body is rumored to use an alloy frame, replacing the plastic one. Nice, I suppose.

Sadly, no blue model is available, the silly choices being white, red or brown. All ‘Yecch’ colors. Black is the way to go.

As with all previous Panny MFT bodies, there is no OIS shake reduction. That’s built into select Panny lenses. Only Olympus MFT bodies have in-body OIS.

There’s some sort of setting to blur backgrounds which I have yet to understand. No matter – I simply use Auto Blurâ„¢.

The simplified mode dial on the G3.

But the most important changes are under the skin. First, Panny claims that the speedy autofocus in the G1/G2 is now even faster, and comparable with that found in most DSLRs. This may actually make that slow focusing dog, the 20mm Panasonic lens, useable. I returned mine after a trial run which delivered 30% of my pictures out of focus. For comparison, the kit lens has a focus failure rate in my hands of maybe 1%. Second, the new 16mp sensor, likely a variant of the one found in the costly $900 GH2 body, has been installed. That probably means one to two stops less noise and should substantially clean up noise at 1600 ISO. My G1 with kit lens ran me $640, whereas the G2 is $700.

I have ordered a black body only for $600 and will write more when I have had a chance to wring it out. The learning curve should be low, owing to the similarity in the bodies, and I already know my three lenses are just fine for what I do, so I’m optimistic that things should work out well, with the G1 moving to the role of back-up body. Mechanical noise? No way of telling until I try it, but let’s hope it’s the same or less as in the G1, which is a very quiet camera. Indeed, the low frequency of the noise emitted by the G1 puts any M Leica to shame.

Part II is here.

No more black market

Fuji

My days as a spiv are over.

Let me step back. The sole reason I ordered the Fuji X100 from Amazon some three hundred years ago was that it was an affordable digital Leica M2. The latter, fitted with a 35mm Summicron lens, was the street snapper’s ideal in the last decades of film. The X100 promised to be its equivalent in a digital era. Make no mistake. The marketing materials, the sales pitch, the schtick, it was all about being a poor man’s digital Leica. Right down to the branding which had it putting that finderless toy, the Leica X1, to shame. Made in Germany, that one you know. Uh huh. Maybe Fuji should have named its offering the M900 to confer greater credibility? And maybe an even more ridiculous price?

For those not attuned to the finer subtleties of the English tongue, the definition of a spiv is attached for reference:

The genus saw its best (or worst) days during the second world war and in bombed out London could pretty much get you anything your heart desired …. at a price.

Now like most, I’m one of those chaps who prefers not to pay full retail but had you told me that I would be a black market merchant a few weeks ago I would likely have shown you the exit. But two things happened.

First, after a spot of reading I determined that the Fuji X100 would simply be a replay of the Panny 20mm when it came to focus speed. Those few souls afflicted with the street photography bug who can actually take a picture reported that the camera simply did not focus fast enough. That’s not to say the Fuji X100 is not beautifully made, nor is it to allege that it has poor image quality. By all accounts it comes up aces on those metrics. So it has appeal to many, me included.

However, I do not buy cameras solely for looks, and IQ from the smaller sensor in the Panny G1 is perfectly fine for large prints. But, most importantly, the G1’s focus response with the kit zoom is fast and the forthcoming Panny G3 suggests that whatever ails that tiny sensor is about to be fixed. And I can continue using the excellent kit zoom from the Panny on the G3 if the latter delivers.

So by the time Amazon despatched the X100 I had made up my mind to return it, sight unseen. While not chump change, $1200 is not something I am about to lose sleep over, but I just could not bear the prospect of yet another huge learning curve concluding in blurred street snaps as with that Panny 20mm.

Wait a minute, I hear you say. You sold the thing without so much as trying it? What qualifies you to make any conclusion based on hearsay? Simple. The economics of the risk/reward equation do not solve. It would take several hours of my time to get familiar with the camera and its software, hours worth considerably more to me than the modest cost of the hardware. At best I reckoned there was a 30% chance of the camera meeting my needs, specialized as they are. So the economics do not remotely solve. Had the odds of the X100 being a fast focuser been better, I would have opened the box. Elementary, my Dear Watson.

Now that X100 was scheduled for 2-day shipping from Amazon and it was not lost on me that new samples were selling for $1600 owing to the supply backlog. Well, would you leave $400 on the sidewalk were you to spot a like sum lying around? I thought so. Heck, nor would Bill Gates. So I determined to advertise the camera and make my first and likely only black market profit.

Well, as luck would have it, Amazon cocked up delivery royally and the package got stuck in Utah for two days. That’s what happens when residents of a state forswear alcohol. By the time the thing arrived, the black market premium had eroded to $175. Thanks a lot, Amazon. Anyway, it’s winging its way to a happy owner as you read this and I have $175 toward the G3 – and no learning curve in my future. And a 15% gain on no cash out is not so bad, either.

I got an interesting lesson in supply-demand dynamics and some happy user paid a modest premium for unobtainium.

But my days as a spiv are most certainly over. And I don’t even dress flashy, like.