A well thought out design.

Watching Brian dePalma’s splendid Prohibition Era movie The Untouchables the other evening I was struck by just how skilled reportage photographers were in that period. In one early scene, the Treasury Agent Elliot Ness orchestrates a raid on a suspected illegal liquor warehouse and as he prepares to smash open one of the wooden crates he believes contains the hooch, an aspiring press photographer, armed with a Speed Graphic and that enoromous flashgun with the almost as large one-use bulb, bursts in and takes a snap. His men want the reporter removed but Ness, sensing a ‘photo op’ lets him stay. As he picks up the axe to smash the crate, it’s what follows that leaves you lost in admiration. In a choreographed series of actions, the reporter realizes he has used one of the two exposures in his film slide. In the matter of a few seconds, you see him insert the dark slide, pull out the film holder, reinsert it reversed, pull out the second dark slide, change the flashbulb and snap Ness as he pulls out the contents of the crate …. a Japanese decorative umbrella. Ooops. But what the photographer had to go through to get his one chance at the front page is exceptional.

The camera was, amazingly, exceptionally well suited to hand-held use. It came with a decent rangefinder (I dismantled mine to clean the mirrors whereupon it became easy to use), an optical finder with interchangeable masks for different lenses, a wire frame finder easily extended from the body and ideal for reporters’ use and adjustable focus stops. You had a reasonable range of perspective controls thanks to the drop bed, and lens exchange was very simple and fast. Best of all the whole thing collapsed into a surprisingly compact rectangular box and the included carrying handle made for easy transport. It weighed less than the modern DSLR. A large chromed side plate accommodated the flashgun whose handle later did double duty in George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’ movies as a light sabre!

Until the roll film camera gained acceptance, the reporter’s tool of choice was the Graflex company’s Speed Graphic or later the Crown Graphic. I owned a Crown Graphic for a couple of years, interested in finding out just how it was to use a large format camera. I put together a slide show of my Crown Graphic – long sold – and you can download the 50MB file by clicking or touching the picture below:

Click the picture to download the slideshow.

Toward the end you can see where I made my own focusing cams for the wide and long focus lenses so as to ensure accurate coupling with the optical rangefinder for hand-held use. A fun project!

Tripod use was every bit as easy and the huge negative size meant that large prints of just about any size were easy to make with frightening resolution. Scanned at 4,000dpi the negative yielded no fewer than 320 megapixels! At 2,000 dpi, more than enough, it came in at 80 megapixels.

I eventually gave up on the Crown for a couple of simple reasons. First, it was impossible to find anyone to process my Kodak Vericolor originals without adding scratches, boot marks and hair lines. This meant endless retouching just as in the bad old film days. Second, getting a good scan of the originals at a reasonable price was also impossible. Drum scans, which would disclose every last detail in every last leaf on that giant sequoia were prohibitively expensive and the scanned files would average over 200MB. Guaranteed to disclose my iMac’s dual purpose design when processed – a computer and a toaster, all in one. But the Crown Graphic was an absolute blast to use. Both color and monochrome film stock remains available if you want to give it a shot. You will not lose any money when it comes time to sell your hardware, but you will need a good changing bag to load those film holders. Just about any lens will do, the large negative making the latest and greatest in optics overkill.

Here are a few snaps:

The (not so) poor man’s Leica at last?

If you told me to select just one lens for all my street snaps it would be the 35mm f/2 Summicron on a Leica M body. Optically unsurpassed, the problem with that combination is that it comes in at some $10,000, and the dated body design comes with a cluttered multi-frame finder. Further, the Leica is manual focus only and 35mm is long enough that focus often matters, especially at larger apertures. So even putting aside price, the Leica no longer cuts it for rapid action street snaps where auto-everything is the order of the day.

Sony has just released its RX1 camera and it is an intriguing design for street snaps. First, it comes with a full frame sensor in a very compact body – 4.5 x 2.8 x 2.6 inches weighing just 18 ounces. The Leica M9 without lens is 5.5 x 2.9 x 3.2 inches and 30 ounces, with the 35mm Summicron. Second the non-interchangeable lens is a 35mm f/2 design from Zeiss who have recently been distinguishing themselves with outstanding optics for full frame Canon and Nikon DSLRs.

There are some quibbles from reading the specifications. There’s no optical viewfinder which is essential for street work. Squinting at an LCD screen at arm’s length in bright light is not a prescription for stealth. Sony is asking $600 for their clip on finder, which is silly, and you can get the wonderful Voigtländer from CameraQuest for $209. I use the 28mm version and can recommend it without reservation. It’s unclear what battery life is like, but if the LCD screen can be turned off – assuming it’s the greatest power consumer – then over 300 snaps on a charge seems possible. Sony claims 270 shots when using the LCD. It is also unclear how responsive the camera is. The Leica’s shutter release remains the standard against which to judge, being beautifully sprung, predictable and fast – after you have futzed with manual focusing, that is. If the Sony is anywhere close then it’s a winner in my book.

The 24mp sensor looks to be the one from Nikon’s FF D600 which is known to be outstanding, especially at high ISO where it takes over from where the low light sensor in the D700 excelled. Focus is down to 5 inches and there’s a movie mode if that’s your thing. And, best of all, it says ‘Sony’ in large chrome script on the front so no one will ever take you seriously while you get your snaps. Sony makes TVs (OK, loses money on overpriced TVs) and point-and-shoots, right?

Controls include an Aperture Priority auto exposure mode and the lens has a real aperture ring – excellent! That remains the optimal design in my opinion, not the modern Canon and Nikon DSLR approach which dictates the use of fiddly control wheels while removing the aperture ring from the lens. There’s a built-in pop up flash which is nice to have, if hardly relevant to street snapping. There’s also a nice clickable exposure compensation dial on the top plate for corrections up to +/- 3 stops which is hands-down a better way of doing it than using LCD menus. Very handy.

Chimping the test snaps at DPReview compared to the Nikon D600 (taken with the outstanding 85mm f/1.8G lens) shows little quality difference, though the Sony’s lens displays modest barrel distortion. Once Adobe comes up with a profile the barrel distortion can be easily corrected on import into PS or LR. Noise is barely visible in 16x enlargements even at ISO 6400.

The biggest stumbling point is the price. At $3000 with a good aftermarket viewfinder this is a very costly camera indeed. That sort of money gets you a full frame Nikon D600 with a similar sensor and a fine lens or two. Admittedly, that’s comparing chalk and cheese, but the D600 can do street snaps at a pinch, if less unobtrusively, and can also do lots of things that the single purpose RX1 cannot. However, at $3,000, that’s still less than the Leica 35mm Summicron alone!

Pink Hair. When there’s no time for manual focus, AF is the ticket. Panny G3, kit lens, ISO 1600.

The invention of an American genius.

This wonderful advertisement for Edwin Land’s Polaroid SX-70 instant camera is thrilling to watch.

Almost eleven minutes long, and reveling for a considerable part in the fabulous technology of the machine, there is no better way, other than using one, of appreciating what Dr. Land had accomplished with his magic machine. The sheer simplicity of the SX-70’s user interface would not be rivaled until the iPad came along forty years later, and having used both, I can assure you only one is magic, and it’s not the product designed in Cupertino.

The film was made by Charles and Ray Eames, whose other accomplishments include architectural and furniture design. Talent is seldom evenly distributed.

Film for the SX-70:

A bunch of criminally insane people in Holland got together, bought out the old Polaroid film making hardware and got down to making film for the SX-70, and you can still buy it here. Bless them!

Incredibly useless.

It takes quite an effort to accomplish all of these design criteria:

• Make the ugliest camera since digital was invented
• Equip it with a microscopic sensor in a body the size of the MFT competition
• Trash your reputation and an expectant, loyal user base

Nikon, with its new mirrorless V1 has accomplished all three at the highest possible level of failure.

Nikon V1 – camel as camera.

It’s said a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Well, the V1 is a camel of a camera, doubtless with lots of costly market research thrown in. Steve Jobs has famously stated that Apple uses no market research. Rather, it gives the consumer what Apple thinks they need – the Next Great Thing. But had you told Nikon to listen to their user base and give them something useful, like an APS-C camera with an EVF and a range of small, fast lenses, they would doubtless have deferred to the committee. And you would still have ended up with a V1.

The funniest part? They will make an adapter which will allow use of gargantuan Nikon-mount lenses on this piece of crap.

At least Fuji’s equally worthless X10 is pretty to look at. And if you don’t think looks matter, how do you feel about your picture taking chances when you have to fight the gag reflex every time you pick your camera up?

For those looking for portability and other uses for their pocket camera, get an iPhone 4 or, better, next month’s iPhone 5 with an 8mp sensor.

Bloomberg nails it.

Bloomberg has an interesting piece on how Nikon and Canon are missing the boat by not offering a mirrorless DSLR.

Click the picture to read the article.

As an early adopter and buyer of the first EVF interchangeable lens MFT DSLR, the Panasonic G1, I tend to agree that it’s the future. The EVF will only get better, it’s cheaper to make than the prism/mirror combination used in old tech, and there are no moving parts and no need for complex retrofocus lens designs to clear flapping mirrors.

While I tend to take this quote – “Mirrorless cameras accounted for 40.5 percent of SLR sales in the country in July, surging from 5 percent in early 2009, according to BCN.” – with a bushel of salt, there’s reason to believe that mirrorless DSLRs are gaining market share. Apochryphal data are mostly useless (just because your local bookstore is full does not tell you whether it’s booming or having a going-out-of-business sale), yet I constantly read that big DSLR owners are dumping their heavy gear for something they actually will take along on the next trip. I know, having done likewise with my (quite superb, I hasten to add) Canon 5D outfit with no fewer than eight lenses, in preference for the Panny G1 with but three compact zooms. Yes, it almost always goes along with me, not something that could be said of the 5D.

Still, I keep hoping that someone at these two dominant gear makers is working on an APS-C or full frame EVF design with a silent shutter and fast focus – things now found in several models in the Panasonic range. The disappointing Fuji X10, with its miniscule sensor almost got it right. What’s needed is a fast lens with a 28-90mm zoom range, compactness, silence, no shutter or focus lag and a proper sensor, not some nail clipping. The lens doesn’t even have to be removable. Price it at $750 and you will be rich. Canon and Nikon – are you listening?