Category Archives: Photographs

The alleyway habit

Photographs

Always something unexpected.

When traipsing around any big, old city, taking the alleyway in preference to Main Street is something I can never resist. There’s rarely an instance where it does not deliver a surprise, like here:

Baseball window. G1, kit lens @28mm, 1/2000, f/6.3, ISO320.

This one was in a drab back alley off Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The blast of yellow was like nectar to a bee and, lo and behold, someone had made a hole in one of the panes.

A few seconds in PS straightened the leaning verticals.

Always take the road less travelled.

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!

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.

Street hype

Photographs

There’s one born every minute.

I came across a ridiculous piece of advertising the other day. It claims to teach class participants how to take street photographs. For the best part of two grand you get to meet a self-proclaimed ‘famous photographer’ who then pats you on the ass, sends you out to record your theme of the day in a big city and then graciously spends 30 minutes of his precious time with you ‘critiquing’ your snaps. Well, at $2000+ per hour, which is what his rate for a medium sized class comes to, I would be spending my even more valuable time with you too, and my trashing of your work – guaranteeing that you would have to sign up for a refresher course – would be at no extra charge.

I will never understand the concept of tuition which purports to teach you to see. Seeing is like musical or business talent. It’s a right brain function. You either have it or you do not. Technique, like any left brain function, can be learned, seeing cannot. You may, perhaps, sharpen your visual sense by using it more, but it’s still binary. It’s either there or it’s missing. It cannot be bought.

Thankfully for the world’s gear makers, the total disconnect between gear and vision allows them to sell tons of equipment to people most of whom really should be taking up other hobbies more suited to their skills. Like Morris Dancing or crochet. Just check any of the more popular chat boards to see what I’m talking about. The average participant there changes gear more frequently than a politician changes his mind yet cannot take a picture to save his life.

Anyway, here are a few recent street snaps and, whether you like them or not, this most ephemeral of art forms most certainly did not cost me the big bucks demanded by that ‘famous photographer’. Actually, my cost was a train ticket and a sandwich for lunch, plus some shoe leather.

Click the picture for the PDF download.

All snapped on the Panny G1 with the kit lens, the first in Monterey, the remainder in San Francisco.

Now please excuse me while I rattle up some business at $2,000+ per hour. There truly is one born every minute, and he really needs to have his wallet lightened.

SOMA

Architecture

One of SF’s most photogenic areas.

During the dot-com boom, the area South of Market Street (SOMA) in San Francisco saw rents skyrocket as legions of code monkeys sought to become the next Google. Most crashed and burned spectacularly in April, 2000 and the tech stock market has not remotely recovered in the decade since. Such are speculative bubbles.

Not that this was bad. The San Mateo bridge to Oakland is once more drivable thanks to the lane added too late for the boom and rents in SOMA have come back down from the nosebleed levels seen during the bubble, allowing artists and sculptors and generally creative people to once more return and make the place what it is. There are lots of great print and machine shops here, serving all needs from large posters, custom furniture, metalworking and photographic printing.

And what most typifies SOMA is a vital mix of old buildings made to look new again, vibrant colors, murals, local eateries and all of those great things that constitute a neighborhood.

You can get some sense of what I’m going on about by clicking the picture below, which will download a 3.2mB PDF to your computer. Suffice it to say that all the 22 snaps included were made on one dreary morning between rain showers earlier this week.

Best viewed on an iPad or in Preview on a Mac.