Monthly Archives: January 2012

A long day

Architecture, Photographs

Reaching out.

Click any picture for the slide show.

Of the three lenses I own for my Panasonic G3, the kit zoom (28-90mm FFE) gets most use. The wide Olympus (18-36mm FFE) zoom is a distant second and the third, the Panny long (90-400mm FFE) zoom mostly gathers dust.

I have a strong belief in not owning things I do not use, so the other day I took the long zoom to San Francisco with the sole aim of taking ‘long’ pictures, along with the resolution that if the day was a failure, the lens would be sold. For me anything over 35mm FFE is ‘long’ so when using a 90-400mm lens I really need to think differently. There’s no thought of switching between the long lens and the other two; the visualization process is so different that my tired brain cannot cope with yet another set of variables.

So I set about my task by thinking and seeing ‘long’, and a few good things cropped up on a late afternoon with light to die for. Focal lengths shown are Full Frame Equivalents (FFE).

Guess I’ll be keeping that Panasonic 45-200mm lens for a while longer. Funnily enough, on returning home I found that I had accidentally switched the OIS anti-shake button to ‘Off’ but for the most part lucked out. At 400mm FFE, handholding without OIS becomes something of a challenge. On a related note, the G3’s sensor, some two stops finer grained than the one in my earlier G1, allows the use of faster ISO settings – and shorter shutter speeds – without degrading quality, a significant advantage with longer lenses. 800 ISO is just fine, and 1600 ISO works well at a pinch, both allowing high quality 18″ x 24″ prints to be made.

Joseph O. Holmes

Photographers

A great street snapper.

Nothing gets my pulse racing so much as an entry hitting my RSS feed from Joseph O. Holmes, perhaps the finest street snapper working today. A few years back he did a wonderful series on the fishmongers at the now defunct Fulton Fish Market on the lower East side of Manhattan (sadly no longer available on line – see below) and it’s a rare occasion on which Holmes does not thrill with his fabulous color photography of New York City.

There’s a gripping interview with the photographer on the ‘From the Desk of’ site which you can read by clicking the picture below:

Click the picture for the interview.

I was especially taken by this quote:

Kate Donnelly’s site is a fine read and you can visit Holmes’s site ‘Joe’s NYC’ by clicking here.

Fulton Fish Market series:

I left a comment on Kate’s site lamenting the fact that Joe’s Fulton Fish Market series, some of the finest reportage ever and taken at a ridiculous time in the morning, was no longer on line, and Joe was kind enough to restore his pictures, which I first referred to five years ago, here.

Fuji X-Pro1 and Canon G1X

Fuji

Overpriced.

The recent announcement by Fuji of its interchangeable lens APS-C X-Pro1 leaves me in two minds, but let’s get one thing out of the way. This camera is not a ‘Leica killer’. At a costly $2,400 with one lens it’s one quarter of the price of the Leica M9 and simply does not compete with it, any more than a Mercedes competes with a Rolls Royce. Sure, the features may be similar, the fit and finish identical and the looks attractive but one caters to the buyer thinking he’s getting some exclusivity for his money, the other caters to the buyer with more money than sense.

The clumsily named X-Pro1 with 28, 50 and 90mm FFE lenses.

What your $2,400 gets you here is a camera with one interchangeable lens and no zoom. That certainly harkens back to the Leica rangefinder idiom in the days when zooms were awful and Leica’s viewfinder didn’t know a zoom from a hole in the ground. And while the Fuji adds autofocus (still missing from the Leica M9 with its 60 year old manual range/viewfinder) and a zoom hybrid optical/electronic finder, the optical finder’s magnification of just 0.37x is simply ghastly. Even Leica managed 0.72x in most of its M bodies and around 0.9x in the M3 and certain later variants. 0.37x, if it is to be believed, is a joke.

For this camera to be a useful street snapper – and like the Leica M it’s ill suited to other genres – then responsiveness will be key. The APS-C fixed lens X100 has poor focus speed and high shutter lag by all accounts, whereas the much cheaper X10 cures those ills but blows it with a silly, fingernail-sized sensor, good for small prints only. Though a zoom lens is currently unavailable and may be coming, the clunky use of fixed focal length lenses for a street snapper, and the delay occasioned by the occasional need to change these, is simply an anachronism in a modern, fast paced world. Significantly absent from the design is any anti-shake technology. A big omission for the price asked and for the primary use intended.

The X-Pro1 retains the well executed automation settings from the X100 (and the much earlier Rollei 6000 series medium format film SLRs, one of which I happily used for years). For shutter priority set the aperture ring to ‘A’, for aperture priority set the shutter dial to ‘A’ and for program automation set both to ‘A’. And it’s nice to have simple rings and dials for these functions, in addition to the over/under exposure dial on the top plate.

Finally, the price of all this retro-think is ridiculous. If the M9’s $10,000 price tag is simply silly, the $2,400 asked for the X-Pro1 is exorbitant. The difference between silly and exorbitant is that a select few can afford silly and not care about it, but all others have to think twice about exorbitant, meaning three times the price of the competition. If you want to pay a $1,500 premium for the admittedly gorgeous looks, then have at it. For $700 you can have your choice of MFT bodies from Oly and Panny with a capable zoom kit lens and any number of decent offerings from Canon/Nikon/Sony in APS-C.

What is wanted by the street snapper is a camera with a modest zoom range – say 28-70mm – a decent aperture, maybe f/2.8, anti-shake, a fixed lens is fine, a hand operated zoom and a decent finder, optical or EVF, married to an MFT or APS-C sensor. Responsiveness is paramount. Canon sort of gets it with its new $800 G1X, but the zoom range is too long at 28-112mm, sacrificing speed in the process for a disappointing f/5.8 at the long end. Responsiveness is also currently unknown, the optical finder appears to be the same crappy one from the G9/10/11/12 series, though the body at least includes anti-shake and the sensor is almost APS-C sized. So that’s a lot closer to the street snapper’s demand for functionality than the dated approach of fixed focal length lenses, fast as they may be, adopted by Fuji on the X-Pro1.

The ‘almost right’ Canon G1X.

However, these are encouraging developments. If the Fuji enjoys robust sales, one of the mass manufacturers will likely get it right and produce a sub-$1000 fixed lens, big sensor, responsive snapper with a modest range fast zoom, the latter manually operated. Electric zooms simply don’t cut it in real life street situations. Goodness knows, we have been waiting long enough. Right now the street snapper chooses from:

  • Panasonic G3 or GH2. $630/900 with kit zoom. Traditional DSLR looks but with EVFs, MFT sensor, marginal ergonomics on the G3, decent lenses for the most part, attractively priced, very responsive, needless prism ‘hump’. Ugly as sin to look at.
  • The Olympus MFT range, all damned by the absence of a viewfinder other than the frightful clip-on EVF designs. Attractive looks.
  • Fuji X100. $1,200. No zoom, APS-C sensor, sluggish, overpriced. Gorgeous looks.
  • Fuji X10. $600. Nice fast zoom, responsive, attractively priced, very small sensor. Forget about cropping and large prints. Gorgeous looks.
  • Fuji X-Pro1. $2,400 with one lens. Zooms may become available later, APS-C sensor, unknown responsiveness, exorbitantly priced. Fixed focal length lenses only for now. Gorgeous looks.
  • Canon G1X. $800. Almost APS-C sized sensor. Unknown responsiveness, crappy optical finder, attractively priced, slowish zoom, no manual zoom ring. ‘Wouldn’t-kick-it-out-of-bed-for-eating-crackers’ looks.

So none of these gets it quite right, but it is very encouraging to see that makers are slowly ‘getting it’. Once manufacturers start realizing that fewer features on a better executed body are what the user wants, then the right camera will follow. And if it looks half as nice as the three Fuji models, it will be an object of desire in itself.

But while the new Fuji may make those who value looks over function happy as can be, it doesn’t seem to be the answer to the street snapper’s ideal. Close, but no cigar.

The Caltrain terminus

Photographs

Guaranteed results, every time.

Located at Fourth and Brannan in south east San Francisco, the Caltrain terminus is my destination when taking weekly trips to the city. At a modest cost for the round trip from the Peninsula, including lunch and a revitalized psyche, that’s a whole lot less than visiting a shrink and, unlike that futile exercise, my trip invariable culminates in great memories, food and snaps. And as I take my push bike along, I get fit in the process of riding around the city on the Bay.

Further, I can work at my day job on the trip thanks to the hotspot on the iPhone which gives me roaming wifi and the iPad which gives me a screen I can actually make out. Some of my best investment ideas have originated on such journeys, aided by the good mood that the prospect of street snapping creates and the gentle rocking of the train, which is how man was meant to travel.

And, truth be told, I almost never fail to start the visit off on a high note, as the assembled greeters in the terminus building are a never ending source of wonderful, often moving, images.

Here are some recent ones.

Lightroom 4 Beta

Lightroom

Meh!

You can download the Beta version of Lightroom 4 here. Windows XP users are SOL.

After a quick look and comparison of pictures on identical monitors side-by-side against LR3, here are my observations:

  • Not a major upgrade unless you do movies.
  • RAW Import and preview generation speed no different from LR3.
  • Despite renamed sliders for Highlights and Shadows I found I could exactly replicate the effect of these in LR3.
  • Enhanced local adjustments nice to have; overall adjustments, while renamed, add little to LR3 viewed on 2 monitors side-by-side.
  • The localized Sharpness adjustment range is still frustratingly narrow, requiring export to Photoshop if you want real control.
  • Export to Blurb is nice – if you like Blurb – but there are canned export plugins for other services for LR3 – I use the one for Shutterfly.
  • No Content Aware Fill added. Still need to roundtrip to CS5 to do that.
  • GPS? Only my iPhone 4S has that so of little use.
  • Soft proofing no biggie – you could do that through Mac Preview in LR3. And you cannot soft proof on your secondary display, only in the main one, which is kind of stupid.
  • ‘Adjust Print Brightness’ is BS as you cannot preview it – at least I cannot find out how – and it’s no excuse for proper printer setup.
  • No crashes or hitches (OS X Lion 10.7.2), though switching to the Develop module rapidly refreshes the screen a couple of times – easy fix for Adobe.
  • No help files – click Help and you get LR3 Help.
  • ‘Email a photo’ implementation sucks as it does not access the Contacts app on my Mac, meaning you have to input the full email address, and setup is awfully clunky. Adobe needs to integrate this better to make it useful. Right now it’s faster to export a JPG and drop it on Mail app.

The localized Develop adjustments panel in Lightroom 4.

Email setup in LR4 – of course you know your SMTP Server and Port, right?

While I will be upgrading after all the usual debugging is concluded, simply to keep current, the best thing that can be said is that Adobe appears not to have broken anything in what is already a robust and stable cataloging/basic processing/printing tool for RAW files.