Category Archives: Photography

Canon – you need to fix your glass

Lenses

Simply unacceptable color fringing.


5D, 50mm f/1.4 at f/8 – after and before correcting for green and red chromatic aberration

When processing the picture included in yesterday’s journal entry, I was reminded again of the truly frightful extent of uncorrected chromatic aberration (color fringing) in Canon’s 50mm f/1.4 standard lens. For many this is a portrait lens on cropped sensor bodies, with an equivalent focal length of 80mm.

The picture on the right is unprocessed, straight from the camera at the lens’s sweet spot of f/8. The one on the left is after removing the chromatic aberration using the sliders in Lightroom. Even in these small pictures the amount of chromatic aberration is shocking – these enlarged snaps would make for a 30″ x 20″ print. (The small scale difference results from correcting converging verticals in Photoshop CS2).

Given the superb quality of the sensors in Canon’s DSLRs, isn’t it about time that some more attention was paid to fixing dated lens designs like the fixed focal length 50mm one? This sort of thing has been properly designed by any number of manufacturers decades ago and there really is no excuse for such poor optical engineering in a medium priced fixed focal length lens who many, suspicious of the bulk and poor optics in most zooms, still regard as their ‘standard’ lens. Especially old duffers like me who toured the world with a 50mm or 35mm on our cameras, because that’s all we could afford.

Now a glance at any news source will confirm that there are more complaining historians in the world than people with fix-it ideas. The fix here could not be simpler, or more lucrative for all concerned. Do a Panasonic. License Leica’s fabulous designs, Canon, forget about corporate pride, and make sure the final product is emblazoned with the Leica name. Use your mass manufacturing genius to drive the price down and I will be the first to have a fully automated 50mm f/2 Summicron-R Leica lens (made by Canon) on my wonderful 5D – the best 50mm lens ever made. Heck, if I’m feeling spendy I’ll even consider springing for the 50mm Summilux-R with its f/1.4 maximum speed – the second greatest 50mm lens ever made. And while Leica, 40 years on, still cannot manage to add autofocus to its SLR lenses, for Canon that would, of course, be de rigeur.

And while you are at it, Canon, feel free to replace your underwhelming 20mm f/2.8 (which I know and dislike) with Leica’s superb 19mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R, or even with the older 21mm f/4 Super Angulon-R which I knew and loved for many years. Leica and Schneider conspired on that design – can life get any better than that?


A big enlargement to make things yet clearer – color fringes before correction

A bargain and a classic

Canon 5D

The first classic of the digital age

The Canon 5D was the first camera to bring semi-affordable full frame sensors to digital photographers and, I believe, will go down as one of the great classics of the early digital photography age, much as, say, medium format was defined by the Rolleiflex and 35mm film by the rangefinder Leica. The leap in image quality it offered from 35mm and the ability to regularly match medium format film for definition and detail with none of the pain of operation make it the greatest camera design of its time.

The new 5D Mark II is slated to arrive in the US around December and yet there is already a slew of lightly used 5D Mark I models for sale on the web. Maybe it’s the economy, but I would think the price will soften further once Mark II generates some serious upgrade volume.

Check the eBay and you will see that completed auctions average about $1,300 for a mint condition lightly used body.

But I want the 21+ megapixel sensor in the new 5D Mark II, I hear you say, which begs the question why?

Do you propose making prints larger than 24″ x 30″? Do you want to use the movie mode? Is cleaning the dust off the sensor a real pain? Well, if you answered Yes to these, you may need the Mark II. No one else does.


Two classics – Canon 5D and Leica M3

1929 Redux

Photography

“Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it”. Santayana

In 1907, the crash immediately preceding the one prior to the 1929 Depression, John Pierpont Morgan is credited with personally saving the financial system when he led a band of capitalists in infusing private capital into a doddering stock market. The loans were repaid and America went about its business in due course. Since then, various US governments have repeated his actions but, sadly, using your money and mine to bail out crooks both on Wall and Main Streets.

So after yesterday’s greatest ever one day percentage decline in the Dow index, it seems only appropriate to recall how Wall Street (or, more correctly, Broad Street) looked back then.


A magnificent picture of the limits of greed. Photographer unknown.

The building at left – 23 Wall Street – served as J. P.Morgan’s headquarters until the 1990s when it was sold and converted to residential housing. It’s at the corner of Broad (where you can see the Stock Exchange) and Wall (not visible, Wall is behind you). Morgan purposely limited its height to two stories as the ultimate statement of WASP wealth and power.

I was lucky that the Morgan Bank was my client in the 1981-1983 period but less lucky with my assigned seating in the Board Room, which has to have had one of the longest tables ever made. For some reason the usher always insisted on seating me right opposite the glowering, mutton chopped oil of JP himself, staring down on me from Protean heights. To this day all I can remember of those tedious and boring meetings is Morgan’s censorious glare. We could use him today.

If you continue west a few yards on Wall Street you come to Trinity Church, burial place of America’s first and greatest Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. I used to visit it often. Each time I would pass the shoeshine boy outside the Church and was always reminded of the (perhaps apochryphal) tale attributed to financier Bernard Baruch who, upon receiving a stock tip from the boy in early 1929, promptly went out and sold all his shares. He survived the Depression and prospered mightily. When asked his secret, Baruch honestly responded “I made my money by selling too soon”.

In January 2008 I followed Baruch’s advice.

Schadenfreude? No. Santayana. “Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it”.

Strange that many years later I would end up working for America’s other great Treasury Secretary, Bill Simon, but that’s a story for another time.

Grain is dead

Canon 5D

From the Canon 5D Mark II.

Vince LaForet’s work with the new Canon 5D Mark II at 1600 and 3200 ISO confirms that, for all practical purposes, grain is dead.

Click the picture for large JPGs at high ISO speeds from the new Canon body. In many you will see color fringing near the corners suggesting Canon has some way to go to better Leica in its optics, albeit even L lenses are mostly chump change compared to those from Germany. The fringing (correctable in post processing in Lightroom or Aperture) is especially noticeable in the snaps taken with the 45mm TS-E and the 15mm Fisheye (which I own and love). High time Canon started adding in-camera processing to fix this sort of thing. Obviously, the body ‘knows’ which lens is mounted and it’s not like Canon is ignorant of the aberration patterns in their optics. Adding a lens ‘map’ for each lens doesn’t sound like nuclear physics.

What you will not see is grain.

It would seem that the resolving power of Canon’s latest sensor significantly exceeds that of many of its lenses. I would suggest that use of any of the consumer zooms on this body is a complete waste of time – the proverbial Coke bottle lens on a Hasselblad. The cheaper non-L primes are fine (I love the fisheye, the 50/1.4 and the 85/1.8) but ‘kit’ lenses are a no-no. Garbage in, garbage out.

So, if you want grain, you are going to have to add it at the processing stage!

Signs of intelligence at Leica

Cameras, Leica

A medium format DSLR.

With all the money wasted in making the underwhelming Leica M8, a dated and obsolete 35mm format SLR and the silly rebadging of Panasonic point-and-shoots, you would think it was all over at Leica. With its modest resources the company is foolishly trying to compete against the vast capital of Canon, Sony, Nikon, Pentax, etc. all of whom make cameras far superior to anything from Leica at a fraction of the price.

Well, finally, Leica has taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and is Thinking Different.

The Leica S2. A 30 x 45mm 38 megapixel sensor and a new range of lenses.

Clearly a premium product which should appeal to many professionals, this camera would seem to compete directly with the Hasselblad H range of digital cameras and, I would guess, would be priced similarly, meaning $30,000+ for the body alone. The DSLR format (much like the Pentax 6×7 in concept, but digital) makes for a far easier to use camera than the more tripod oriented Hasselblads and the lens range promised is impressive.

The sensor is made by Fujitsu, and unknown quantity, so it will be interesting to see how it performs. Much of the design work seems to have been done by Phase One, an established presence in larger format digital cameras. That’s encouraging.

Of special note is the fact that all the lenses will have leaf shutters which are ideal for flash sync, as they will properly expose the whole frame with flash at any shutter speed. Of course, the inclusion of a shutter in each lens makes the lenses costlier and Leica lenses are already very expensive, thanks to an overpaid, lazy, unionized German workforce. In fairness to Leica, the many Leica lenses I have used over the years have, without exception (OK, the 1930s 50mm f/2 Summar was a real dog above f/4) been superior to just about anything out there. The Apo-Macro Summarit f/2.5 120mm (equivalent to 85mm on a full frame camera) looks especially mouthwatering. And, joy of joys, Leica has finally discovered autofocus, some 20 years after Japanese SLR makers added this great technology to their interchangeable lenses. I would guess the lenses will retail well north of $5,000 each though who knows what the dollar price will be once the kindergarten known as the US Congress gets through with destroying our currency.

Promised for the summer of 2009, if the company survives that long, you can read more at Leica’s poorly designed, lugubrious web site – if you have the patience to get through all the mindless and time wasting flash videos.

If the camera ever gets into volume manufacture, it could fairty be said that this is truly the first innovative camera design from Leica since the M3, which I used for some 30 years. That game changer first sold in 1954 ….