Category Archives: Hardware

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After the Purge

Canon 5D

Equipment then and now.

I took a few moments to take stock of how my equipment has changed over the past quarter as a result of the move to full frame digital.

Before:
3 Leicas (IIIG, M2, M3)
1 Leicaflex SL for long lenses
1 Bessa T for the 21mm Elmarit
21, 35, 50 (3), 90 (2) and 135mm Leica M lenses
200 and 400mm Leica Telyt lenses
Rollei 3.5F
Rollei 6003
40, 80, 150 and 350mm Rollei lenses
Rollei extension tubes
Mamiya 6MF when I didn’t want to drag the Rollei about
50, 75 and 150mm Mamiya lenses
Crown Graphic 4” x 5” with 90, 150 and 210mm lenses
Canon 4000 35mm scanner
Nikon 8000 medium format scanner
Epson 2450 large format scanner
HP DJ90 large format printer

After:
Canon EOS5D
24-105mm Canon lens
1 Leica M3
35, 50 and 90mm Leica M lenses
200 and 400mm Leica Telyt lenses adapted to the Canon
Crown Graphic 4” x 5” with 90, 150 and 210mm lenses
Epson 2450 large format scanner
HP DJ90 large format printer

Quite a reduction in clutter! The original goal, recall, was to get medium format quality without the bulk and complexity. The 5D came though with flying colors on that front, equalling or exceeding medium format quality at 30″ print sizes, while making pictures possible that would never have been taken on film, thanks to Image Stabilization and a sensor which renders grain free ISO 400 images.

Now I’m keeping the Leica M3. Not rational, I know, but it has been a dear friend for more than thirty years and we are not ready to part company. Yet. However, it seems appropriate to focus on the need for the 4″ x 5″ gear. If you can actually expose the film in this beast, large sharp prints are trivial, owing to the enormous size of the negative.

So I compared 30” prints from both and, interestingly, there was little to choose. It seems easier to get a broad dynamic range from negative film than from digital, the latter needing more attention to exposure. Like using slide film. My large format Kodak VC160 negatives are scanned at 2400 dpi on a well tuned Epson 2450 flat bed scanner, using Silverfast Ai software. Doubtless drum scans would be even better but after waiting for two weeks for the film to be processed, I’m not about to wait two more for the scans.

For what are very similar scenes, the technical details could hardly be more different. Here’s the 4″ x 5″ picture:

This was taken using a 210mm Rodenstock Sironar lens, probably 4-8 seconds at f/22. A massive Linhof tripod was used for stability. That lens is similar to a 75mm on 35mm. Setup time to take the picture was some five minutes. Processing was by Calypso Labs in California – an outfit that literally needs to clean up its act, judging from the amount of dust on the negative. The scan on the Epson took approximately 20 minutes. The file is 250 mB (!). Unsharp masking in Photoshop was 45/1/0 – in other words not a lot.

Now compare this with the Canon EOS 5D snap taken a week later.

Here I can disclose the technical details with certainty – they are part and parcel of the file. The shutter speed was 1/15th with the camera hand held on a monopod. ISO was set to 400 to allow a faster shutter speed. That’s a nice attribute of the Canon – ISO is used to control shutter speed. Up to ISO 800 grain is simply not an issue. The lens was fully opened at f/4 at a focal length of 40mm. Setup time was maybe 10 seconds. So the lighting was identical – 1/15 @ f/4 @ ISO 400 is nearly the same as 4 seconds @f/22 @ ISO 160. The original most certainly did not need any dust retouched, and I did not have to wait weeks for the negative to come back. The file size is 73 mB. USM in Photoshop was 250/3.2/0 – much more than with film and reflecting Canon’s own recommendation that the user starts at 300/0.3/0 to overcome the softening effect of the anti-aliasing filter in the camera.

So as a landscape camera the 5D excels. Meanwhile the Crown Graphic is on probation. There will be rare occasions where something larger than 30″ x 40″ may be called for (I cannot immediately recall ever having made a larger print) in which case a drum scan and a professional printing house would be required, with goodness knows how long a lead time. That is, of course, if color film in this size is still made when the need arises.

A Gorgeous Bit o’ Bottle

Lenses

Just mind you don’t fall in the water.

Hearst Castle is the most popular tourist destination in central California so I took the precaution of booking a ticket in advance rather than be faced with a long wait for the tour bus which takes you some two thousand feet above sea level to Hearst’s opulent home. While I may have trashed Hearst for his part in dragging down the quality of journalism, a visit to his Castle on the central coast makes me feel a lot better about how he spent his money. As one of the tour guides pointed out, this magpie of a man expended some 78 of his 81 years collecting, starting with a trip to Europe aged three when he asked his mother why they couldn’t simply buy all the the things he liked. Got to like that!

While waiting for the bus – I chose Tour 2 which takes in the upper levels with all the living quarters, the kitchen and the two pools – I chanced on a fellow photographer using a pretty exotic looking Canon L lens finished in white enamel. Now I had seen these things at televised sports events but had never actually encountered someone actually using one, so my curiosity was piqued.

I confess to being in two minds about that red stripe that Canon places on its best glass. On the one hand it tells fellow photographers that you are serious (or maybe just seriously rich) about your images. On the other, it smacks vaguely of driving around in a Rolls Royce or Mercedes. Rather ostentatious and an invitation to thieves everywhere. Short of resorting to brush and paint, there’s really no simple way of blacking out the offending red stripe, unlike the ease with which electrician’s tape can be used to take out the obnoxious markings on the camera’s body.

Mick M. responded that the lens was a 70-200mm f/2.8 L zoom, and an impressive piece it is. Hard not to be noticed with all that white paint which, I suppose, must leave the nature photographer for ever seeking camouflage. Mick then opened his camera bag to disclose a veritable cornucopia of Canon L glass. Let’s see, there was a 24-70mm zoom, an 85mm f/1.2 portrait lens (yes, f/1.2!), an extender for the zoom and a strange looking duck with an enormous, bulbous front element. Proferring it, Mick explained this was a 14mm f/2.8 ultra wide angle. Not a fish eye. A genuine wide angle. This, I confess, had me greatly intrigued, and when Mick explained that his cameras were a 20D and 10D, the fact that these have small image sensors led me to pounce.

“Why not stick that wide on my 5D and see what 14mm really feels like?”. It was the only trump card I held, what with the one body and just the 24-105 L on it.

What ensued was that the loudest sound to be heard in Hearst Castle’s parking lot was that of jaws dropping. Mick’s, when he held the camera up to his eye, and mine shortly after. Now I had used a 21mm Asph Elmarit on my Leica for many years, to the extent that in some ways it had become my standard lens. Despite the cheesy, distorting, plastic viewfinder it came with, the lens itself was seemingly perfect in every way. Sharp at all apertures, compact and distortion free, it left nothing to be desired optically. Point it into the sun and flare was noticeable by its absence. The Leica 21mm has moved on once I concluded that 24mm at the short end of the Canon’s zoom range was fine for my purposes, but not without a twang or two on the heartstrings. We had become firm friends.

I can only guess that there is some sort of macho rivalry between lens makers – maybe I should refer to them as programmers – when it comes to making the widest lenses. I checked B&H and Leica has a 15mm for their reflex camera (costing about as much as a new car, needless to add), Nikon has a 14mm, and the various after-market manufacturers have 14s and 15s aplenty. Given that all of these run $1000 or more, they can hardly be mass market items and about the only use I can envisage on a daily basis is for unscrupulous realtors looking to make interiors larger. “Here is the bathroom” instantly become “Here is the palatial bathroom”.

Nonetheless, the impact of the lens in the viewfinder was overwhelming, and framing with it, walking towards a subject, gave this user a distinct feeling of unsteadiness owing to the width of the field of view, far in excess of what the human eye perceives. To cut a long story short, Mick very generously offered me the use of the 14mm and I reciprocated with the use of my 5D into which he needed only place one of his digital film cards to have a go. I got first go and on arriving at Hearst’s home in the sky one of the first sights was the outdoor pool. The weather was just so, a wisp of a cloud or two in the sky and a pleasant mild day in California. How do people in the mid-west get through the winter?

Having a fair amount of experience with ultra-wide lenses I knew enough to avoid the bane of all these optics which is boring, extraneous foreground. You really have to get in close, so I proceeded to attack the pool with aplomb, forced to sight through the finder, never having used something this wide before. I can ‘think’ 21mm, but 14mm is like a scene from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ by comparison. And vertigo was the order of the day as I teetered on the edge of Hearst’s ten foot deep outdoor pool! Now you absolutely have to use the hood with this lens, if for no other reason than there is no way to protect the cyclopean front element with a filter. It is simply too bulbous. And here’s a snap of the pool taken with Mick’s lens.

Though taken directly into the light, the lens seems flare free with just one small internal reflection visible in the picture. An extraordinary piece of design and execution. Will I be rushing out to buy one? No way. It’s the sort of thing I would use once a year and is inconsistent with my desire to minimize equipment, but thank you, Mick, for your generosity in allowing me to take a few pictures with this gorgeous bit o’ bottle.

If you would like to see a travelogue of a few more snaps from Hearst Castle, please click here.

And for a cheaper, wider, better lens than the 14mm, just click here.

Excuse me while I examine my Portlait setting through the Glid

Canon 5D

Either someone at Canon has a great sense of humor or they need better English-speaking programmers

I checked out the Canon software that came with the 5D; it’s not bad but doesn’t seem to add much to my preferred working method which is to drop all the files into an iPhoto ’06 album (RAW included), preview them in iPhoto, then fix the best ones in Photoshop for saving in Extensis Portfolio 7 in PSD format – the industrial strength, bulletproof cataloging application I use.

Here’s what I saw in a couple of menus in Digital Photo Professional, a Canon application far less competent than iPhoto for quick image manipulation, and very slow in converting from RAW:

Now do these guys at Canon have a sense of humor or what?

By the way, a RAW file saves as 8.4 mB in JPG, 36.4 mB in 8-bit TIFF and a whopping 72.8 mB in 16-bit TIFF.

Digital Dust

Canon 5D

Or I’ll be blowed!

Mooching around some of the Canon digital fora out there one recurring complaint seeems to be how much dust the EOS 5D attracts to its viewfinder.

Now while most of my pictures over the years have been snapped on rangefinder 35mm film cameras, with few dust bearing surfaces between subject and film, every SLR I have used has been plagued with the occasional speck of dust or a hair in the viewfinder. The 5D is no different. I suspect the increased use of plastics in modern cameras makes matters worse as they seem to retain static charges more, but when I did get some dust in the 5D’s viewfinder the last thing I was going to do was blow it away.

When the maid vacuums the carpet she does just that – she vacuums. She does not blow. Blowing on dust in your camera seems the exactly wrong thing to do. You are a) Hoping to dislodge it, and b) Praying it magically exits the camera rather than getting embedded or relocated elsewhere inside. Ideally what is called for is something like those suction gadgets dentists use to remove waste water from the patient’s mouth. Until something smart like that comes along – and imagine the liability issues in a country whose residents have long ago ceased taking responsibility for their actions – you can blow (!) your money on one of the Digital Camera Cleaning Kits. For your eighty dollars you get a small bottle of Miracle Solution, probably 2 cents worth of isopropyl alcohol, a 5 cent rubber tipped blower and a Digital Brush. The latter, you should understand, grows on Digital Camels only, hence it’s price.

Me? I’ll continue using the $5 anti-static film cleaning brush I have used for years when scanning film, holding the camera just so to let gravity do its thing with the dust, and I’ll continue to avoid changing lenses in the middle of the Sahara in a sandstorm. I hate to admit it but the dust in my 5D didn’t know any better and exited stage left after I gave it a gentle shove. Oh! yes, and I’ll keep the change.

For some new thoughts on the causes of sensor dust, please click here.

Hearst’s Castle

Canon 5D

The only good thing to come out of yellow journalism

If the state of American journalism was headed solidly downwards in the 1930s, publisher William Randolph Hearst made sure that the pace to the bottom of the cess pit was accelerated. His populist, sensationalist brand of reporting bequeathed to the modern consumer prime time television news that focuses exclusively on the latest murder/rape/divorce, or the tribulations of some famous sports figure who has taken one steroid too many. Bread and circuses.

However, you can glean more useful information from one page of any American newspaper than from one hour of the so called prime time ‘news’ on television. Unless, that is, you read the New York Times or Washington Post, whose reporting sources tend to be Hollywood stars, supremely qualified to report on geopolitics and the fiscal state of the nation.

Thank you, Mr. Hearst.

However, Hearst’s millions did leave us with one fine attraction, namely Hearst Castle on Highway One in central California, some 20 miles from my home. Taken as a whole it’s something of an abomination, the ultimate in ‘check book collecting’, but digested in smaller pieces each of the many rooms packed with antiquities is a fine thing to behold. The Castle was Hearst’s lifetime hobby, and his architect Julia Morgan was adding to it throughout his life. Hearst would buy a medieval ceiling on one of his European jaunts (he probably wanted to read the British press to see what was really going on), bring it home and tell Morgan to build a room around it. Now that’s thinking big!

Driving by the other day on the way to see the elephant seal pups a few miles north on the beach, I took a picture from Highway One with the castle rising magnificently in the distance on top of the hill some mile and a half away. I had despaired of ever getting this right on film, as the long lens required only emphasized the atmospheric haze, but as I had my 400mm Leitz Telyt with me I gave it a shot anyway. I finally get to try RAW, I thought.

So I set the EOS 5D on RAW, the film speed at ISO 400 and the f/8 setting on the lens yielded a 1/500th second shutter speed. The result, after dropping the snap into Adobe’s Photoshop CS2, which automatically opens Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), was disappointing. The haze had washed out the picture, and the Telyt lens, I know, does not lack for contrast.

However, a few tweaks of the sliders in ACR made things look better so I saved the file in PSD format and added the usual unsharp masking and a small tweak to the levels control and look what emerged:

Now I must confess that, so far, I have not found the Canon EOS 5D’s Fine JPG images lacking in any way. The quality is outstanding, large prints a breeze and whatever JPG processing the camera does appears unobtrusive. Digital artifacts are invisible. Best of all, the file size is relatively small – some 4 mB or so. By contrast the 5D’s RAW file is 14 mB and the processed PSD version balloons to a ridiculous 73 mB. Now that is large. So RAW appears to have a place for challenging subjects that need a lot of manipulation, but the extra processing time is not justified, for this user, on the average photograph. JPG Fine quality equals or exceeds anything from medium format and processing is fast and easy.

Still, it’s nice to know RAW is available in the overall tool kit. Now I want to retake this picture early in the morning with the castle rising from the mist as California’s sun gradually makes it visible.