Category Archives: Photography

You probably do not need a 5D

Canon 5D

Just an expensive way of publishing on Flickr?

Yesterday I wrote about my fifteen months with Canon’s 5D camera, explaining how, for the most part, it is just right for my needs. These focus largely on the making of large prints for display in the home or in exhibitions. The large, grain free sensor in the 5D makes all that possible. Nay, easy.

But the chances are that you do not need the 5D in the sense that I do.

From a pricing perspective, Canon positioned this camera above its semi-professional 30D but well below the full frame sensor 1D, which is more than twice as costly. The latter, with its heavy duty execution and very fast motor drive is probably just the ticket for hard working professionals, banging away thousands of snaps weekly in weather where a sealed body makes sense. Now the 5D has neither the rugedness or fast frame rate of the top of the line model, and is poorly sealed from the elements. It also has quite a few less pixels in the sensor, though many experts seem to be of the opinion that the 5D’s sensor makes a better compromise between pixel count and print quality. We are probably splitting hairs here.

So the 5D would appear to be the advanced amateur’s tool of choice; one definiton of ‘amateur’ being one who pays for his own equipment or does not generate a significant revenue stream from his photography. I have no doubt that thousands of weddings have been recorded using this tool, for very modest pay.

But wait a minute. You can get as good an 8″ x 10″ print – which is ‘large’ for most consumers – from a 5 mp point-and-shoot. How many of us have 18″ x 24″ wedding snaps on the wall, after all? You want shooting speed, no shutter lag and interchangeable lenses? You may get a pretty lousy viewfinder with the cropped frame Canon consumer SLR bodies but get a Nikon D80 or D200 and you get a proper viewfinder at half the price of a 5D. So now you have a fast camera with a great lens range at much less than the 5D.

Why pay more?

There is only one reason I can see, which is that you consistently want to make prints with medium format definition and detail. And those prints have to be big, meaning 12″ or more on the short dimension. That’s right about where cropped sensor originals begin to suffer when enlarged.

Now let’s face it. How many photographers, in a digital age, make prints, let alone big prints? I have no idea but would guess it’s under 1%. Most of us, of course, display our work on the web, whether in web sites or through picture sharing networks like Flickr.

So I checked my web site. Most of the snaps are 7″ x 5″ on my 17″ diagonal screen, whose display area is 14.5″ x 9″. By the time you add navigation controls, headers and menus, there’s a lot less than that available for display, unless you like things crowded. The typical file size of these web pictures is 100-200 kilobytes. A one megapixel point-and-shoot, in other words, is more than adequate to provide decent detail in this display medium.

So unless you just like the 5D for unrelated emotional reasons, or just have a bonus burning a hole in your pocket, save your money and go with one of the many cropped sensor alternatives at a far more reasonable price. Otherwise it’s rather like driving a Porsche to get the groceries. Nice, but hardly necessary.

Canon 5D in use

Canon 5D

15 months later

Click on my profile and you will see that the revenue I generate from this journal is zero. Zilch. Nothing. No ads, no banners, no conflicts of interest. When I write that something is good, it’s based in actual experience, not desire to generate click-through dollars. If the modest revenue I forego is the cost of full disclosure, well, it’s worth every penny. When I write that it’s bad, well, that’s because it is.


My outfit today. 5D, 24-105mm f/4 L, 200mm f/2.8, 85mm f/1.8, 50mm f/1.4, 15mm fisheye, aftermarket strap

So, some 15 months after buying my Canon 5D, what is good and what is bad? Recalling the original reasons for purchase, the primary drivers were to replace my bulky, clunky, heavy medium format gear, primarily used for landscape photography. Rollei SLR, Rollei TLR, Mamya 6 rangefinder. That the 5D accomplished with ease. A related benefit was that the body ended up replacing all my 35mm equipment as well, as the trade-offs against the rangefinder Leicas I had been using for 35 years worked well for me.

So let’s get the bad things, the design errors and compromises, out of the way first.

  • The LCD screen is unusable in sunlight. If you need to change most settings, find a shady spot.
  • The camera is bulky – you think twice before taking it with you, compared to four times with film-based medium format gear.
  • The sensor attracts dust quicker than socialism attract losers.
  • The viewfinder readouts are useless in bright sun. So try to change ISO (which is meant to be visible in the finder and the top panel) and you have to once again resort to that shady spot.
  • The egonomics are so-so. The camera feels great in my (largish) hands but the plethora of small buttons is an abomination. Canon needs, as a minimum, to move ISO (a very frequently used control with the grainless 5D sensor) to a good old-fashioned, click stopped dial visible to all, not some minute set of digits on a useless LCD screen or a hard to read panel on top.
  • It could be quieter, though it’s a church mouse compared to a Nikon F, say.
  • The less said about the factory strap, the better.
  • Matrix focusing is a problem looking for a problem. Inept at best. I use the center rectangle focus area only.
  • Garish product names on the camera – black electrician’s tape fixed that.
  • The price remains far too high, owing to the absence of competition.
  • IS in selected lenses only, rather than in the body, where it belongs.
  • Not as well made as the early Leica M2/3/4, but what is?

A long list, written by a grumbler obsessed with the man-machine interface.

But there’s lots of good things, several probably unique.

  • It does not use film. No more processing scratches, endless scanning, the nightmare of waiting for results.
  • That magnificent, grain free, sensor. Use RAW and the dynamic range is comparable to the best film can offer, so long as you expose for the highlights, not the shadows. The sensor has a nasty tendency, seemingly common in digital, to burn out highlights.
  • 18″ x 24″ prints on my HP DJ90 easily equal anything the best medium format gear had to offer, and with a far greater success rate. Compared to 35mm film there is simply no contest.
  • Critically accurate auto focusing with that central rectangle, superior to anything a well tuned optical rangefinder can offer.
  • Outstanding, definition improving, IS in the 24-105mm Canon lens (the only IS lens I own, so I cannot speak for others). Worth two shutter speeds.
  • Small file sizes – some 12mb if you use RAW.
  • Nice, large CF cards for image storage – something this human being can easily grasp. By contrast the SD cards used by many are simply too physically small to be handled with ease, even if their storage capacities are comparable.
  • Dirt cheap, superb lenses (and that goes for the ‘L’ and non-‘L’ ones in my little outfit) – that is for someone coming from the Rollei SLR and Leica rangefinder worlds. Optically good enough that the price premium for German lenses no longer makes sense.
  • Replaces both medium format and 35mm film gear, with a huge attendant reduction in bulk and weight.
  • Excellent selection of metering modes includes a really accurate spot metering variant.
  • Breathtakingly fast autofocus with my five Canon lenses. Beyond anything you could possibly accomplish with any manually focussed camera. With the 200mm f/2.8 you have a camera whose optical qualities surpass even those of my old Leicaflex SL and the magnificent Leica Apo-Telyt-R 180mm, f/3.4 lens.
  • Excellent battery life – easing the worries that the prospect of dead batteries brings.
  • Free, if you sell all that Leica gear to Japanese collectors like I did.

Would I buy it again today at the US price of $3,799 with the 24-105mm ‘L’? That’s some 13% less than I paid fifteen months ago. Yes, but I would still grumble at the price. With the 30D body selling for $1,600, compared to the $2,800 for the 5D, the $1,200 premium is simply too high for the sole distinguishing factor of a full frame sensor. At $2,000-$2,200 the price smells about right, and it would quickly get there were someone at Pentax, Nikon, Olympus or Sony to pull their finger out and offer a full frame competitor.

Listmania

Photography

No, we are not talking about the great Hungarian composer/pianist

Humans love to make lists. Whether they are Democrats (win election, raise taxes, claim credit for economy), Republicans (win election, lower taxes, claim credit for economy), shoppers (butter, eggs, blame politicians for prices) or photographers (blame anything and anyone when the picture does not come out). Lists can aid failing memory or can force fulfillment of commitments. They can educate, cajole or just nag.

My list, as a photographer, is mentally revised from time to time, and focuses on The Most Important Inventions in Photography. It’s more fun, though, to write the list down as that makes for amusing reviews years later, generally accompanied with statements like ‘Boy, how dumb was that?’ and ‘What was I thinking of?’. So, as of now, here’s my list in attempted chronological order which, I’m sure, you will correct where errors are involved. Because list entries must have reasons, I have appended those also.

1 – Roll film, especially once unstable, combustible nitrate stock (great for making fuses for Molotov Cocktails) was replaced with inert modern plastics. Roll film made the camera both easily portable and capable of recording many images in quick succession, though you might argue the latter attribute was its biggest drawback, especially when you contemplate Gary Winogrand’s work. Credit George Eastman, Kodak’s founder, with that one, in 1888.

2 – Modern multi-element lenses that rendered most optical aberrations insignificant. Small film (see #1) means big enlargements, so optical magic was called for to allow reasonable enlargement of the images on the roll. Hard to date this one, but multi-element lenses were available well before roll film. You might argue that ‘modern’ really did not apply until anti-reflection coating (later ‘multicoating’) came along, or zooms, or aspherical surfaces, but I would disagree. By the time the Leitz Elmar and the Zeiss Tessar were commonplace in the 1930s, little was left for optics to improve, whereas film was continually improved until its demise a couple of years ago. So maybe circa 1900 for this one?


The personification of the 4 element, 50mm lens. After this improvements were marginal

3 – The coupled rangefinder. Now you could focus your small camera accurately, leaving only camera shake and bad exposure to mess things up. The idea came, like many good things in our lives, from the military, who used rangefinders to shoot at people more accurately, but some genius came along and linked the device to the focusing ring on the camera and everything was suddenly in focus. Probably around 1915, but it took until 1954 for the device to be perfected – meaning parallax adjustment and a super sharp delineation of the rangefinder patch which was finally integrated into the viewfinder. Contax had tried it in their 35mm cameras with mediocre execution. Leitz Wetzlar got it dead right in the Leica M3, then added perfection where improvements seemed impossible in the M2 a few years later.

4 – Kodachrome. A quantum leap in technology with an exceptionally fine-grained, fade-free emulsion. Make that Color Film. This one made big color prints from roll film cameras a possibility. While the product is all but discontinued, it can still lay claim, in its final iterations, to being the best color film ever. 1939 saw the first rolls for sale. With entrepreneurial insight that they sorely lack today, Kodak put up the cash for that one and it took two Jewish musicians to do the job. No one ever said that God apportions grey matter evenly across the world’s peoples.

5 – Automatic exposure. Search me who invented this but I do recall that one of America’s very early manned space shots saw the astronaut John Glenn take an automatic Minolta Himatic 35mm rangefinder point-and-shoot with him, so all he had to do was focus. Now only focus and camera shake remained to ruin a snap. No idea when this came about but I’m guessing in the 1950s or so.


NASA’s space camera before they realized how easy it is to milk the taxpayer for Hasselblads

6 – Autofocus. Now only camera shake remained to spoil the picture. My memory is poor on this one, but Leitz messed about with their Correfot system, originally invented by Honeywell, some time in the seventies, before ceding primacy to the Japanese. An invention of sublime subtlety, it may have caused as many wrongly focused pictures as ever there were before but at least the lens was focusing on what it was pointed at. Operator error remained a foe which modern face recognition technologies are trying to address. Never overestimate the intelligence of your customer.

7 – The digital sensor. Kodak again, in the mid-1980s. Though digital sensors predate Kodak’s first 1 megapixel sensor of that year, Kodak’s was the first practical use of the technology which would go on to kill its annuity income stream from one hundred years of film sales. I doubt this was the sort of creative destruction they were thinking of at the time. A few years later and most written communication would be obsoleted by image sharing.

8 – Anti-shake cameras and lenses. Now you had no reason for a bad picture. Other than your native talents. I have no idea who invented this but it sounds awfully like something the military (meaning the US military) would have built into its aircraft spy cameras. Now given our predilection for invading the wrong place at the wrong time, quite why the military felt it needed the attendant level of detail that anti-shake conferred upon its images is lost on me.


Canon’s 24-105mm L lens with IS

9 – Minituarisation. This one just sort of happened over the last one hundred years until we are now at a point where cameras cannot get much smaller owing to the finite size of our hands which, at least for now, we need to operate the camera with. The point and shoot pocketable digital camera is infinitely superior in every way to the 1901 Kodak, yet fits comfortably in your (designer) jeans’ pocket. Why, it’s almost as small as the Minox which predated it by some fifty years.


The palm-sized Minox spy camera

10 – The Internet. Well, I know who didn’t invent that one – that guy currently cleaning up on global warming. Call it the early-1980s. Now the audience for your pictures was expanded from those close to you to the whole world. And that may just be the greatest photographic invention ever.

Black and White is dead

Photographs, Photography

Time to move on and get with the real world

My subscription to LensWork magazine – a bi-monthly small format photography magazine which holds itself in higher regard than the Kennedys – was up for renewal and, I confess, I thought long and hard before paying for one more year. The reason? Each 90 page issue is completely devoid of color photography. This is the oh! so serious world of High Photographic Art, you see.

Let me tell you that the leading contributor’s work over the past year was a book of pictures of tramps. Now a tramp is a tramp is a tramp; he is not a street person, a mendicant or disadvantaged. He is a tramp. No one forced this choice on him and he is neither to be respected or adulated. These tramp snaps were reproduced in volume (sadly, high volume) with obligatory excess contrast in search of drama. Now do you get the drift of this sometimes fine publication? The tramp series said absolutely nothing new and the use of Club Mono was, well, tediously predictable for such cliché subject matter. The sum total of photographic art was, in other words, untroubled by this derivative, poorly printed work.

So why waste money on a publication whose dominant content appears to be snaps of derelict steel and coal town in America’s Rust Belt, longing for the good old days of tubercolosis and black lung? Because, maybe twice a year, a great photographer is discovered in its pages. That almost makes the very high cost of this rag worthwhile. Take Dan Normark’s outstanding work as an example.

Anyway, putting my gripes behid me I renewed with the promise to the publisher/editor that this would be the last time if no color crops up in the publication over the next twelve months. One has to draw the line. And if they can do Club Mono so well, why not some color?

We live in a world defined by color. A lot of photographers, choosing the easy way out, opt for monochrome and then wax lyrical over how some ink jet printer or other has purer blacks and whiter whites than the other guy’s. Please. These people sound like a washing detergent ad. The result is that you see a lot of truly miserable work, matted in acres of white with the obligatory thin black frame, signed, as often as not, in pencil. The latter is mute testimony to the monochrome worker’s recognition that membership in Club Mono dictates this sort of thing if you are to be taken seriously.

So why are all these hard working photographers excluding 90% of the content of their photographs by making monochrome prints?

  • Because it’s far easier to take a good moochrome picture.
  • Because the man in the street can’t get it at the local drug store.
  • Because you automatically get the ‘art’ premium associated with this form of pretentiousness.
  • Because you have neither the talent nor guts to see in color.
  • Because color is infinitely more difficult to do well.
  • Because someone else who is ‘arty’ does it.
  • Because it worked for Ansel Adams and Bill Brandt.

And on and on. Not a good reason to be found.

Take a look at the current issue – #69 for Mar-Apr, 2007. There is a lovely set of pictures of Hanoi, moving and expressive. Some are of street scenes at different times of the year. They simply scream for color. But no. This is Club Mono.

So I’m voting with my feet. Add color, Mr. LensWork, or subtract one subscriber. And next time you see a Club Mono snap, just ask yourself how much better it would have been in color.


South Beach, Santa Monica, CA. Pentax 6×7, 105mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64

The power of RAW

Software

RAW offers a vast range of adjustments without destroying image quality

Here’s a case in point where RAW originals really make sense.

I was traipsing along through the charming side streets of Burlingame in the Bay Area of San Francisco when this neat wall sconce presented itself. Now I did have Bertram the Border Terrier straining at the leash in the other hand, so I did a pretty lousy job of holding the camera level. Add the high contrast of the scene and I knew some post processing would be de rigeur.

Here’s the original – if this was a film scan it would be pretty much past saving, the highlights comprehesively blown out (not hard to do with digital!), the perspective badly in need of repair, everything tilted.


Wall sconce. Lumix LX1, RAW, 16:9 format

Rather than recount the adjustments made in Aperture at length, here’s a snapshot of what I did:

I also had to roundtrip the file from Aperture through Photoshop, where I fixed the lens distortion and perspective, tilting the top of the picture towards the viewer to correct for the low angle from which the picture was made; Aperture does not (yet) provide these adjustments.

And here is the result:


Cropped for 4:3 format

The highlight details (look at the textured stucco wall finish) have been nicely recovered with a combination of the Exposure and Highlights sliders. While Aperture does not support Lumix LX1 RAW, I used the workaround explained here to give me the full range of RAW adjustments.

The ‘repaired’ version will scale nicely to an 18″x24″ print, something you would not dream of doing with the original.