And some economics.

I dropped the three best snaps from yesterday’s foray with the Canon EOS 5D into Photoshop, added some unsharp masking (I use settings of 125/1/1 or thereabouts), bypassed the dust spotting step as there’s no film involved (hope that sensor stays clean!) and printed them on my Epson 1270 ink jet printer on Epson Premium Lustre Photo Paper. This has a nice mixture of sheen, for definition, and matt stippling to avoid looking too garish. Well, I have to say the results rival 4″x5″ film originals for creamy smoothness in large areas devoid of detail and equal or exceed medium format for sharpness and resolution. That creamy smoothness is simply not available in 35mm film originals at these enlargement ratios. The dynamic range, meaning the extremes from black to white, is clearly superior to either 35mm or medium format, reflected in the ability to capture lots of detail in poorly lit or low contrast areas. And I’m not even trying. These are auto-everything prints with the camera set as the factory shipped it, with definition set to JPG fine.

Mission accomplished. One quarter of the bulk of medium format and better quality than available on rapidly dying film. The EOS 5D is a stake in the heart of the Big Yellow God in Rochester. Goodbye Rolleiflex and Mamiya. We had a nice time together.

Take this image as an example. Extreme contrast range, white whites, cavernous blacks. In other words, a traditional printer’s nightmare. However, one click and the Epson puts out a perfect 13″ x 19″ print a few minutes later.

Looking at the EXIF data for the picture in Photoshop (˜File Info”) I learn it was taken at the lens’s shortest focal length of 24mm at 1/30th at f/6.3. Handheld of course, with lack of motion blur attributable more to Canon’s IS technology than the photographer’s (not so) steady hand.

You can clearly see the barrel distortion introduced by the optics reflected in the bowing of the cross beam in the ceiling, though I understand a RAW file will allow easy correction of this. If there is color fringing at the corners from this fairly wide angle setting, I cannot see it, though once again Photoshop CS2 provides for correction of such aberrations.

OK, so now I’m feeling better about blowing $4,500, even if the gear was free after all those medium format sales. But how expensive is it, as a 2006 state-of-the-art piece of equipment? 1969 is a significant year for me. It was when I started saving for my Leica M3, finally purchased, used, in 1971. At that time, there were but two camera stores in London – Wallace Heaton and the Rest. Wallace Heaton, you see, provided cameras to Her Majesty QEII, the wonderful Queen Mother and the not so wonderful Duke of Edinburgh. Indeed, you can see the Queen on a UK postage stamp, headscarf and all, her Leica M3 held with the hands of an expert. Luckily for her, Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar gave her that one free, so she didn’t even have to sully her hands with commerce at the Wallace Heaton store. Still, I suppose she still had to buy film.

Before those days of internet pop-up ads, Wallace Heaton published a small paperback annually, known to one and all as the Blue Book, named after the color of its cover. No prizes for originality, true, but an icon of the times. So I checked the price of the current Leica, the M4, in the Blue Book for 1969 and this is what I saw:

That £169.8.8, equal to $474.41 in real money back then or $5,799.05 inflated at 7% annually through today. And lest you think the Leica was premium priced back then, the best SLR then made, the Nikon F, sold for almost exactly the same amount.

So now I’m not feeling too badly about the $3,000 I paid B&H for the EOS 5D body.

And as for the long line of Japanese waiting to buy my Leica M3 at 40 cents on the dollar, let me repeat: “It’s not for sale”. Yet. Heck, when the Nikkei hits 30,000 you can prise it from my clutches for $5,000. Maybe.

One of the reasons advanced for digital photography is that it is cheap. After all, no film or chemical processing is involved. Now I have to say this strikes me as sheer rot for those seeking to make big prints for wall hanging. I average three pictures a roll of film that I want to print big. With 4″ x 5″ film more like 75%. That large, slow-working format encourages economy of effort and cuts waste dramatically. So if it costs $10 for a roll of processed 35mm film of 24 exposures, that figures to some $3 per processed success. Printing on an ink jet adds maybe $2 for the large sheet of paper and $2 for the inks, so we have $7 so far, all told. Now buy a matte, a mounting board, glass, the frame and hanging hardware and your all in cost for a beautiful 22″ x 28″ framed, matted print skyrockets to $70. How, pray, is the $3 saved on film material to this equation? So if you are buying digital to save on film costs, you need to rethink the economics.

Unless, like most photographers, you never display your work properly mounted and framed.

First impressions – the Canon EOS 5D in use

Living in central coastal California brings with it many benefits. No big city problems, space to breathe, no pollution and beautiful countryside all around in what is rapidly becoming the Napa Valley of the south.

So it did not take much effort to take the EOS 5D for a short field trip along twisty Santa Rosa Creek Road from Highway 46 all the way down to Cambria.

First, I have to keep reminding myself that this camera was purchased to replace my wonderful medium format gear which, in turn reflected my split thinking about equipment. I love rangefinders, hence the Mamiya 6 three lens outfit (small, fast, quiet). I also like control over variables, thus the Rollei 6003 (big, heavy and noisy). So it’s a tad silly to compare the size and weight of the EOS 5D with the Leica M3, but instructive nonetheless, as both are ‘35mm’ cameras.

With the 24-105mm IS ‘L’ lens the 5D weighs in at just under four pounds, replete with garish strap announcing ‘CANON EOS DIGITAL’ in large woven letters. That will have to go. Not only is it an exercise in poor taste, it cannot be shortened enough to keep the camera at chest height, where it belongs. I have a proper strap on order from Upstrap.com.

The lens hood will be the second thing to go – the worst possible way of advertising ‘photographer’. I’ll check for flare and just let the UV filter take care of protection if flare is not an issue.

Finally, I wish the body was chrome, not black, but that is not an option. The last thing on earth I want to be mistaken for is a professional photographer and black cameras seem to scream ‘pro’. Imagine the three worst things you can say when asked what you do at a party: 1. I work for the IRS. 2. I am a proctologist. 3. I am a professional photographer. Ugh! All guaranteed to clear the room.

A rational 35mm comparison is with the Leica M3, 21mm, 35mm, 50mm and 90mm lenses. That gives a similar focal length range. I don’t have my 35mm as it’s out on loan, so I threw in the Bessa T body where my 21mm usually resides, and the weight comes out to a pound more. Swap the Bessa body for the 35mm and there’s nothing to choose. You trade the convenience of a zoom on the Canon for some of the fastest compact optics made – the 21mm is f/2.8, the others all f/2, compared with the f/4 of the 24-105mm. Now the Canon zoom lens very cleverly gains three stops through the use of the Image Stabilizer technology, but that’s another story.

Here’s the film gear on the scale.

Finally, overall bulk and looks. Ugh! As you can see the Canon is positively gargantuan next to the Leica – like the cuckoo placed parasitically in the poor warbler’s nest by its mother. Even without that ridiculous, poorly designed lens hood, it’s large. As for looks, the body is indistinguishable from any number of competing digital SLRs, meaning it’s largely an amorphous blob which screams ‘designed by computer’. It certainly will not feature in your dreams.

This is not a camera for people with small hands. The controls on the lens are large in diameter and take some getting used to. The zoom ring is not as smooth as one might like, though the manual focus ring is very sweet. The dim viewfinder, compared with the Leica, is remarkably uncluttered, with data readouts below the picture. They are not at all distracting. Indeed, I rather struggled to see these in daylight. What is startling is the speed with which the autofocus works and, at least with my first snaps today, the automatic focusing seems spot on. There is no shutter lag. None. You can take a first pressure on the shutter release to lock focus and exposure and the feel of the release is so well engineered that it could not be improved on. While much softer than the Leica’s, which is surely the gold standard, I would venture to suggest it’s better, as there is less likelihood of camera shake.

I‘m not a serial or bulk shooter so the three frames a second capability is of no use to me, other than it startled me this morning when I didn’t realize I had it on and took three pictures where only one was intended! 3 fps is fast. With no film to wind on, the camera is surprisingly quiet, not as quiet as the Leica, but the noise is largely devoid of metallic overtones, maybe owing to the plastic casing and well damped mirror. That makes it seem quiet. Clever. Well done Canon.

Ask me what the best engineered lenses I have used are and I would unhesitatingly reply Leica and Rollei 6×6, though early all metal Nikon lenses were also excellent when it comes to build quality. No compromises were made in the designs of these lenses as their cost and weight attest. Now this Canon pro-grade lens is a different kettle of fish. It seems very light for its massive bulk when you first pick it up. The general feel of quality is for all to see and, notably, there is absolutely no wobble in the moving parts or barrels, which I have never experienced with a zoom lens before. It doesn’t feel as if it could survive the next nuclear blast, unlike its German counterparts, but time will tell. It focuses to about one quarter life size fully extended. Good to have. The switches for auto/manual focus and for IS on/off on the side of the barrel cannot be moved by accident. At $1,250 it’s a bargain. Have you priced Leica glass recently?

To push things a bit I exposed a couple of shots at one stop down and ISO 200, depending on the noise-free nature of the large sensor to avoid ‘grain’. The 1/250th second exposure computes to 1/2,000 with IS, so camera motion is not an issue. That bears thinking about. Consider how much sharpness is gained from the miracle of reduced image blur which IS confers. 16x enlargements (meaning 16” x 24” from the full frame) were noise free and very sharp in the center. As good as medium format? Too early to say but my first reaction is very positive. I need to take some snaps with lots of fine filigree detail to answer that. If you are one of those photographers who likes resolution charts as purportedly objective measures well, you had better stop reading, because those will never be seen here. My interests in the functioning of camera tools is strictly empirical. Sharpness or resolution are like obscenity. I cannot define them but I know them when I see them.

The peacock’s head, from the center of the frame, is equivalent to a 30x enlargement. Here’s the original:

No image sharpening was used other than that provided by the 5D on the Standard setting. Clearly, this lens has potential. You can just see digital artifacts, bearing in mind this is an enormous enlargement. This was at 105mm, ISO 200, one stop down – f/5.6. Autofocus was used. Out of focus highlights are unobtrusive.

Click here and you can see a dozen pictures from this morning’s ramble, including the peacock original. None of these had any post-processing applied and, of course, file sizes were reduced to make loading speed acceptable. Some involve challenging lighting, confirming the exposure meter works well. I used the default Evaluative Metering, making no adjustments to the camera’s choices. These were all taken at the highest quality JPG setting which means files are some 6 megabytes in size, which compares favorably with some 150 megabytes for high quality scans from 120 medium format film. Stated differently, an older G4 Mac will have no problem loading these files in a few seconds. My commiserations is you use Windows.

I have yet to experiment with RAW which evidently yields a file twice the size of highest quality JPG. RAW should allow easy correction of lens barrel distortion and vignetting, so I suppose that’s the way to go.

I made a few 13” x 19” prints on my Epson ink jet after completing the above. Of these, more anon.

The Canon EOS 5D arrives

With so much in excess equipment sales proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I splashed out wildly and paid the nice people at B&H in New York $20 more for Second Day shipping to the Templeton estate. This wild act of rash spending saw the Canon EOS 5D and the 24-105mm Canon lens arrive yesterday evening, where Bertie the Border Terrier and I dutifully placed it on the south patio so that we might contemplate what wonders this Pandora’s Box might disclose. Further, it was the Cocktail Hour, and nothing short of a second Japanese attack interrupts that.

This was a mixture of fun, as we enjoyed the delicious anticipation of what was inside, yet no less a period of deep apprehension. Setting aside my recent use of an Olympus Digital POS (in case you are wondering, that stands for Point Or Shoot, because with that camera’s shutter lag you cannot have both), for the last 40 plus years I have been loading cameras with film and adjusting but three variables – shutter speed, aperture and focus, and most of the time these adjustments have been manual. Often, it should be added, with incantations to the exposure God, praying that I would be within four or five stops of the right settings.

Lest the reader wonders at my sense of apprehension, then it has to be pointed out that the camera in my hands for most of those forty plus years was a Leica M2 or M3. And because I know a good thing when I see my negatives, the lenses on those Leicas always said ‘Leitz, Wetzlar’ on the front. For all of Leica’s problems, they remain the standard against which to judge to this day. And what lenses. The distortion free 21mm Asph Elmarit. The ’standard’ 35mm Asph Summicron. Any number of 50mm Summicrons. The ne plus ultra 90mm Apo Asph Summicron, perhaps the most perfect optic ever made. And finally, one of the very sharpest, the 135mm Apo Telyt, now winging its way back after a one year loan to a friend on the east coast. Throw in a couple of Telyts used on the idiotic Visoflex housing and you can see where my heart lies, optically speaking.

Before the great day arrived I had done a spot of studying and had procured a nice little Firewire card reader for the iMac; all this talk of plugging the camera into your computer strikes me as so much nonsense. Just remove the card and place it in the reader. Further, I had also learned that the swines in marketing at Macromedia/Adobe had ensured that Photoshop CS would not read RAW files from the 5D, so I had grudgingly upgraded to Photoshop CS2 which does. Unfortunately, the latest Adobe Camera RAW software is not backwards compatible with the earlier version of the application. I had also spent some time on Canon’s web site studying the interactive tutorials on the 5D and digital photography in general and found them useful and entertaining. Most importantly, they took out some of the apprehension I was suffering from the oncoming blizzard of knobs, dials and menu options.

Now Bertie’s take on this was, as usual, philosophical. “What have you got to lose?” he asked rhetorically. “Heck, the gear in that box was free, after all, and you can always sell it for little loss if it’s not for you.” By now the sun had almost set and the Martini glass, sadly drained, was now home to a lonely cocktail onion. So I gave the onion to Bert (we are dealing with a pretty sophisticated animal here) and set about the box, hoping to snap at least one picture before sunset. You know the sort of thing – “My first picture with my new toy on the day I received it”.

So we opened the boxes up, stuck the lens on the body, popped in the battery (nice that they ship it partly charged), inserted a memory card and stuck our head out the front door. Notice the strict adherence to American Attention Span with regard to the instructions.

And this is what we saw:

Canon EOS 5D. Picture 0001.

And that, dear reader, is why I live in California.

Anyway, suitably drained after this emotional experience, Bertram and I headed for the home theater to watch Hitchcock’s Frenzy, to learn better how real pictures are taken.

The EOS 5D is here, it looks like it works and there’s more to come….

….where my mouth is.

I have written quite a bit about the imminent demise of film in these columns. Now is the time of reckoning, where I make the move from my point-and-shoot-one-second-shutter-lag-digital to the real thing. My drivers are medium format quality without the bulk, full frame digital sensor, no shutter lag and the convenience of not having to process and scan film, in that order.

Let’s face it, if you want a full frame 35mm digital camera your choices are not great. Until a while back there were two from Kodak and one from Canon, all very expensive. Kodak, being the second worst run American company, just discontinued theirs, of course. That leaves only Canon, with a $7,000 very costly and very bulky offering. I cannot remember the model designation but it’s something like ‘2006 Model 15B we-just-upgraded-it-twice-this-month mega-digital something or other’.

Then, late last year, Canon capitalized on its lead with larger light sensors and released the EOS 5D for some $3,000. Now it may well be free with any purchase of two boxes of Corn Flakes two years hence, given the rate of depreciation of these digital wonders, but Canon’s exclusive offering makes it look positively cheap compared with the professional model. The smart people at the company priced it right – expensive enough that you can console yourself that it is a ‘professional’ camera, whatever that means, but cheap enough to attract a host of keen amateurs. Like me.

So I waited a while to let the initial bugs get sorted out, meanwhile pondering whether the sale of my medium format equipment should proceed immediately, given that film is unlikely to be available in this format for much longer. The value of this gear is important to me as I propose to make this whole change a zero cost affair. Enough with net equipment spending!

Now I’m a photographer and an American. That says when I list things on eBay I support the listings with the very best pictures, knowing that a good picture really is worth a thousand dollars. Forget words. Not American. So I spend the best part of a day with the Novatron studio flash, umbrellas, backdrops, you name it, and take revealing, detailed pictures of my wares. All on my little Olympus 5mp digital, the one with the one second shutter lag. All of this culminates in no fewer than eighteen listings on Fraud Central, excuse me eBay, the ultimate destination for sellers. Only America could conceive of a multi-billion dollar business where you can lie about your wares and be pretty much assured of free passage. Why so many auctions? Because history proves that you make more from breaking up sales into small parts. The ‘outfit for sale’ thing reduces your market and selling price.

Well, pretty much everything sold for top dollar and the household is now replete with packing boxes containing fine Rollei and Mamiya medium format equipment. It’s good to know that these superb tools are going to good homes and that UPS will make some money. I have $6,000 in the bank and B&H Photo Video in New York has a $6,000 order. And yes, that’s another $435 in sales taxes not paid to the thieves in Sacramento.

The first claim on these funds is my wife’s. I have long known that if you are to buy yourself a toy, budget 100% more than you plan to spend. That’s the cost of a face-saving gift for the wife and keeps things humming along smoothly on the marital front. And in case you still think this is money poorly spent, just take one look at the object of my affections and you will know otherwise:

The next time you will be reading this I should have the camera in my hands and a few shots to show for it.

So why the insistence on full frame and why not a Leica? First, I like my wide angle lenses to be wide angle. A 21mm which becomes a 35mm on any one of a number of digital SLRs out there is senseless. Secondly, I like differential focus. That 90mm on full frame is 55mm on crippled frame. Suddenly your portrait lens has added one stop’s worth depth of field. After over 40 years with 35mm, I know how the depth of field feels with all my lenses. I do not propose to relearn that. So that ends the full frame vs. crippled frame debate. Finally, I want medium format quality and basic physics tells me that’s easier to do with a large original (or sensor) than with a small one.

And what happened to waiting for Leica? Nothing would make me happier than simply moving all my superb Leica glass from the M2 and M3 rangefinders to a digital M. Well, I concluded a while back that the lack of entrepreneurial vision and capital at Leica means we will not see a digital M for many years and even then you would be paying $6,000+ for a crippled frame sensor. Sure, the excuses everyone makes against full frame sensors with wide angle lenses that place the rear element too close to the ‘film’ are well known. We are told by these Luddites that the light rays strike the sensor at too acute an angle, causing definition problems. The solution is simple, but it takes some genius at Canon to implement it. Cameras can electronically sense focal length – that’s why you can see the exact focal length at which you took a picture displayed in the EXIF metadata stored with your digital snap. So when the focal length gets short, have a small vacuum device bow the sensor backwards, thus flexing the edges to a perpendicular angle to incoming peripheral light rays. Hard you say? Is not Canon the company that gave us lens gyroscopes (Image Stabilization), eye controlled focus (the camera focuses where your eyeball is pointed), full frame sensors, lenses with diffraction gratings to cut bulk, and on and on? And vacuum backs intended to keep the film flat are as old as the earth. Well, what’s called for here is a vacuum back that distorts the film. And let me tell you, there is no way on earth that Leica has the capital or the distribution to develop and market that.

Now I’m not about to sell all my Leica gear. First, it is not dependent on the continued existence of film to retain its value, unlike all that medium format gear I just sold. There are any number of Leica equipment fetishists out there, many in a newly recovering Japanese economy, that value retention is simply not an issue. Second, I still enjoy using the M rangefinders and can see that continuing for a while at least. Third, maybe Voigtlander/Cosina will come out with a full frame version of their Epson RD-1. In which case the Leica bodies will move on to pay for the new digital body and those phenomenal lenses will get another lease on life. So it’s premature to sell this gear.

In the meanwhile, with the goal of learning a complex piece of new equipment and making it work for me, I have loaned my M2 and 35mm Aspherical Summicron to a friend for a year. That should focus the mind wonderfully. Mine and hers! And yes, I still have the M3 if I need a quick fix.