Category Archives: Photography

Full aperture

Lenses

f/1.4 is fast!

I have never owned a lens faster than f/2.

That said, the f/2s I have owned have invariably said ‘Leica Summicron’ on them, whether 35mm, 50mm or 90mm. Which is sort of like saying that all your sports cars have been Porsches, meaning the best of breed. At 90mm, that was an apochromatic, aspherical element lens and suffice it to say that the aperture ring on this lens only did two things – it changed the amount of light striking the film and it changed the depth of field. Definition at any aperture was the same, which is to say superb.

So I got to thinking what something faster might be like. Now f/1 is available from Leica only, and that means a second mortgage, so forget it. The f/1.2 lenses out there from Japanese makers have generally poor reputations, being more exercises in marketing, or keeping up with the Joneses if you prefer, so they are of no interest to me. But guess what? Canon just happens to make an f/1.4 for very little money and it’s auto-everything and a nice match for the 5D body. Plus, having grown up with film Leicas, I simply like the 50mm focal length.

So a couple of clicks on the B&H web site and the 50mm Canon f/1.4 was on my doorstep.

Much smaller than the ‘standard’ 24-105mm f/4 L zoom

The lens is well made, if not as solid as the ‘L’, meaning the extending focusing mount has a bit of play at the closest focus distance. Auto focus is every bit as fast as the ‘L’ and, strangely, the viewfinder image does not appear much brighter than with the f/4 L – certainly not three stops (8x) brighter. Naturally, as a fixed focus 50mm, it is much smaller and lighter than the L and the absence of Image Stabilization further reduces bulk and weight. The feel, with the lens on the 5D body, is just right – a smaller lens would not feel as good in the hand. The focus ring, if you elect auto-focus override, is a bit blah – it’s geared down approximately 2:1, making for slow manual focusing.

Surfing the web, comments about this lens vary from ecstatic to disappointed, the latter writers damning the optic for soft images at full aperture. How much of this is poor Canon quality control (how much can you expect for $300, after all?) and how much is poor technique I have no idea, but my first ever f/1.4 snap suggests this is a special piece of glass.

A long-suffering Bert the Border Terrier poses for Canon’s wonder lens

At any rational enlargement ratio, the above snap shows critical sharpness on the right front nails and the eye, which is how I wanted it. The nose, the crowning glory of the Border Terrier, is clearly unsharp, being a few inches closer to the lens.

I took three precautions to avoid definition robbing issues. First, I used a reasonably fast shutter speed of 1/60th second. Second, in the very low lighting in which this was taken, I cranked up the ISO on the 5D to 800, knowing that grain would simply not be an issue with the 5D’s sensor. The aperture was, of course, f/1.4. Finally, and I suspect most importantly, I used Canon’s spot focusing center rectangle to place focus where I wanted it, using a partially depressed shutter buttton to lock in the selected focus point. I wonder whether many users are using the default multi-point focusing feature of Canon’s DSLRs and ending up with the wrong focus point being selected? How on earth can the camera know what you want to focus on using this technology? Optimal auto-focusing depends on a focus point with contrast and detail, as those variables drive auto-focus accuracy. Point your auto-focus camera at a white wall and just watch the mechanism hopelessly try to establish optimal focus. Selecting the nails on Bert’s right front paw satisfied the dictates for accurate focus.

So this inexpensive optic seems like a nice addition to the 5D and some more extended work will disclose whether my first positive experience is borne out over the longer term. If not, I’ll just sell the lens for eighty cents on the dollar and put the loss down as the small cost of a worthwhile experiment.

One hundred yards – Part V

Photographs, Photography

Some of the best pictures are one hundred yards from your doorstep. Or less..

Given how much time we spend in our homes, it’s surprising that many photographers feel they have to journey to remote, exotic locations in search of picture opportunities. They arrive tired, are in a strange location which they have no time to ‘learn’, and leave frustrated. You must make the return flight and have to make do with whatever weather is around at the time.

By contrast, the circle centered on your home, with a 100 yard radius, provides some of the best photographic opportunities. You know the area, are rested and have no deadlines. There is no return flight. And you can wait for the weather to come to you.

Here are a couple more snaps, taken over the years, all within 100 yards or less of where my bed was the previous night. Today’s entry concludes this five part series.


10 yards. Encino, California. Leicaflex SL, 90mm.


Out of the window. Mayfair, London. M6, 90mm.

For more on this theme, please click here.

Second fifteen

Photography, Technique

Enough mounting, framing and hanging for a while.

The goal for my one man show in April, 2007, is to have thirty, framed and glassed large prints on display, maybe supplemented by a couple dozen matted but unframed ones in the saw horses in the gallery.

The first fifteen have been shown here before.

Once the QuickTime image loads – click below – cursor over any of the pictures on the walls and the cursor will change to a finger pointing to a globe. Click and you will be take to a high quality image of the picture. Click the ‘back’ button on your browser to return to the panorama.

Click here

I ran out of conventional wall space in the home and the theater so I had to resort to hanging the final fifteen, now that they are framed, in the garage, which offers lots of unused white walls. Not the greatest display space, perhaps, but it beats having the framed pictures standing up against various walls, waiting to be accidentally kicked.

Here’s a fish eye snap of the ‘gallery’ – not high quality but you get the idea:

The production line process I mentioned in my piece on framing made this a reasonably efficient proces, fourteen steps in all, viz:

Cut the mounting tissue* (30 minutes)
Mat* (30)
Name and sign all the prints* (15)
Build frames (33)
Install glass (7)
Clean glass (60)
Install print/mount/mat sandwich* (7)
Insert framing points (15)
Drill holes for wire eyes (15)
Install wire eyes (30)
Install hanging wire (60)
Mark wall at standard heights – 70″ for the landscape prints, 73″ for the portrait format ones (30)
Knock in hangers (15)
Hang prints (7)

* Cotton gloves are worn in the asterisked steps, all of which involve print/hand contact.

Aggregate time for each step is shown in parentheses, above. The total of three hours and 21 minutes does not include the time taken to make the prints – reckon on 15-30 minutes per print. Excluding the printing time, the time per mounted and framed print is around 21 minutes with this production line approach, which is not as bad as you would think, considering that the final product is a professionally mounted and framed print with real glass. (Lucite or perspex may be lighter and less fragile, but attracts dust horribly and just looks cheap with large prints).

Each step is done 15 times before moving on to the next. Phew! It may be tedious but going through this process print by print would take infinitely longer. If you need to make a lot of exhibition prints, I commend this approach to you.

Why all this focus on time? Because time spent framing is time not spent taking pictures.

Zealotry

Dining, Photography

To some extent, we are all guilty.

If you accept the modern definition of a zealot as one who advocates the use of a specific technology regardless of its suitability, then I confess I am guilty.

Until digital came along, I was a Leica zealot. Once disgust with Microsoft came to bear, I became an Apple zealot.

I would argue my motivation was simply that something better had come along.

In the case of Leica, superior point-and-shoots – which is what the M Leica is all about – came to market at a fraction of the cost with far greater capabilities.

With Apple it was far easier. The Mac worked. Windows did not.

And now I am a fan of both digital image making and Apple computers. To the exclusion of all else? Not a bit of it. If something better comes along for my purposes, I will move on.

Some Leica film users stick with their old cameras because it’s in their comfort zone. I have no issues with that. It may be that they are limiting their options but that’s not my business. Whatever works for you and makes good snaps possible, have at it.

But here’s what works for me – that sweet little pocketable Panasonic Lumix LX-1.

So, apropos nothing, here are two snaps taken the other day. One is at a favorite restaurant in San Luis Obispo named Novo on Higuera Street, which has a gorgeous patio setting over the river. I asked for the ‘special’ and this magnificent production, halibut on a bed of spinach with that exotic pink mushroom, subtle in size (a rarity in corpulent America), sublime in taste, was presented:

Then, wandering down to that great sausage shop on Marsh Street in this lovely Victorian town, what did I come across?

This great old car company is run by an Englishman named Peter. An American success. He came here some 25 years ago as an illegal immigrant, employs 10 people, now has legal status and works on the finest English machines you could dream of. And it simply does not get any better than an S1 Bentley. We will forgive the missing hubcap and those frightful whitewall tires.

Always carry a (pocketable digital) camera.

Bigger and faster

Canon 5D

A 2 gB CF card joins the Canon 5D.

When I first got my Canon EOS 5D I opted for two of SanDisk’s fastest 1 gB cards, the so called Extreme III, costing $103 each in February, 2006.

As digital tends to result in more pictures being taken, and as I shoot only in RAW on the 5D, given the ease of processing RAW images in Apple’s Aperture, I found myself running out of space on these cards more frequently than I like. Each holds 58 RAW images.

CF card prices continue to come down apace in price so I have added one 2 gB Extreme IV card, $91.95 after rebate to my CF card collection. Twice as much storage for less than a 1 gB card just 9 months earlier!

SanDisk claims the Extreme III can write data at no less than 20mB per second; by comparison, the Extreme IV is rated at ‘up to 40 mB per second’. Now ‘up to’ probably is some sort of ideal scenario and I have no idea if the card is faster as, with the 5D’s huge internal buffer I don’t need to care, but there’s no denying the capacity increase.


With an empty 1 gB card


With an empty 2 gB card

Now 120 photographs in one session is a lot for this photographer, but not having to change cards in ‘mid roll’ is one less thing to worry about. Further, these cards are so reliable in use that I am far less concerned about data loss than when I first got the 5D – the argument being that it’s better to store images over several cards to reduce loss if a card goes bad.

The largest card on the SanDisk web site is a 16 mB Extreme III which would store no fewer than 960 (!) RAW images, albeit at a punitive cost in excess of $1,000. Which, I suppose, means it will be $200 in twelve months’ time. Maybe I will be writing this piece again in a year, extolling the virtues of a thousand image card….