Category Archives: Photography

Canon lens quirk

Canon 5D

Read this if you cannot insert your Canon lens in the camera.

Coming back from a little nature expedition today, I found I still had the 200mm L on the Canon 5D, so I went to replace it with the 24-105mm L which usually makes its home on the body.

The only snag is that it refused to even fit into the breech of the bayonet on the body. I checked for damage on the lens’s bayonet and there was none. Hardly surprising as I had not dropped the lens.

I checked against my other two lenses – the 200mm L and the non-L 15mm fisheye. All three have a small Phillips head screw some 20 degrees counter-clockwise from the red mounting alignment dot, viewed with the bottom of the lens uppermost. No other protrusions exist around the circumference. So, it must be the screw.

I located my smallest Philips head jeweler’s screwdriver and, sure enough, the screw was loose. A moment’s work and all was well.

So if you run into this snag, don’t panic. And carry a Phillips screwdriver with you. A tad frustrating on a $1300 lens.

Ugly sells

Photography

Why can’t American female executives appear attractive?

The latest in the daily amusement which is the saga of mismanagement by the Hewlett Packard Board of Directors is the release of her biography by ex-CEO Carly Fiorina. Seldom did a CEO so deserve to be fired as Ms. Fiorina, having destroyed HP’s culture and promoted the acquisition of failing Compaq Computer, a deal that ranks just behing the AOL-TimeWarner fiasco as one of the worst business combinations of all times.

So no love lost there, and at least HP lucked out (it cannot have been anything but luck, given their track record) and got a good CEO to rebuild shareholder wealth.

What is intriguing about Fiorina’s book is the cover picture. Nothwithstanding her lack of management and business skills, she is, even to her harshest critics – an attractive woman. Yet she chooses a cover picture which is, in a word, ugly.

The hair masculine, the gaze unyielding, the lips pursed, the face haggard, it’s a poor attempt at female business macho.

I asked a friend why anyone would use so ugly a photograph, given the power images have in our society, to promote their book. She made all clear to me.

“You see”, she replied, “In America to compete in the business world, you have to be one of the guys. In France, women naturally use their femininity to rise through the system. As for the looks and clothes sense of the English businesswoman, move on”.

Just when gender equality raises its head in the US boardroom, photography proclaims that its name is Ugly.

How sad.

HP DesignJet Z photo printer

Printing

Brought to you despite the Board of Directors.

If you have been following the financial news recently, you could be excused for thinking the Board of Hewlett Packard couldn’t organize a booze-up in a brewery. Depsite the twits in the corner office, the great engineers at HP continue to make innovative products. The most recent announcement is the HP DesignJet Z photo printer.

Long time readers of this journal will know how pleased I am with my HP DesignJet 90, which will make up to 18″ wide prints using fade-resistant inks. Having made some forty 13″ x 19″ and 18″ x 24″ prints in aggregate over the past six months on mine, ink levels remain astonishingly high – if those meters are linear this has to be one of the most economical printers available. Three cartridges are still showing full, the other three three-quarters full. Print quality is as good as it gets.

The new floor standing DesignJet Z comes in 24″ and 44″ widths and is focused on extreme color accuracy, courtesy of a built-in Gretag/Macbeth/X-rite spectrophotometer to automate paper profiling and ICC profile generation. I use an external version of the X-Rite to profile my screen and then adjust the ICC profile manually for the paper used with HP’s provided tools, as I explained in my review. Well, now the need for tortuous manual ICC paper profiling is gone. You can get some idea of HP’s target market by looking at the picture above – that looks like a photograph of a Tissot painting in the printer on the left.

These are not cheap. The base 24″ model will sell for $3,400, compared to $1,300 for the six ink 24″ DJ130. The price of the new printer compares favorably with that of the 24″ Epson 7800 at $3,000. The new DesignJet will come in eight or twelve (!) ink models, so you can see how totally focused HP is on color fidelity. As a point of reference, my six ink DJ90 goes to 18″ wide and sells for $1,050. This will be a great machine to fool all those Label Drinkers. Just tell them the print was made using traditional darkroom techniques, just like Ansel Adams used.

Which just goes to show that no matter how disfunctional your Board of Directors may be, you can’t kee a good engineer down.

Cameras and boat anchors

Cameras

Kodak managed both in one go.

A friend is cleaning house and came across several cameras from the dark ages. A couple which needed a mechanic’s attention went to a nerdy friend (who could not take a good picture to save his life), the one with the micro-tool kit. The other two came my way for auction on eBay, where they will be listed this weekend.

One is prosaic. A 35mm Canon Rebel. The plastic content in this electronic wonder is so high that when I first took it out of the box it almost flew out of my hand. It’s that light. Both the camera and date-imprint batteries were shot so I replaced them (have you priced lithium batteries recently? Phew!) and ran a roll of Kodak Gold 200, provided by aforesaid m-i-l, through it and thence to WalMart for a CD ‘print’. All seems well and despite being made from the purest cheddar, the camera showed itself to be remarkably effective. Autofocus is snappy and exposure automation just so. I went through this little routine to maintain my standing as one of the three honest sellers on eBay. You know how that goes. When I say ‘works perfectly’ I have to first know that is true. It’s a nice piece but strictly a throw away camera in the sense that there is no heirloom value or exquisite engineering to ponder. In that respect it resembles most of its digital successors.

The other, however, is something quite special. Going by the splendid name of Kodak Medalist II, it’s no exaggeration to say that this tool, nay, weapon, competes with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge for uncompromising solidity. The American military was winding down when Eastman Kodak unleashed this beast on the world in 1946 and I suppose there must have been lots of aircraft grade alloys lying around ready to be recast into more peaceful tools.

The Medalist II (if it competed anywhere, it was in weightlifting where that Medal was earned) takes eight pictures on now defunct 620 film, sized 2 1/4″ x 3 1/4″. Technicians exist to convert it to 120 if needed, but to my utter amazement, B&H still lists 620 flm in several flavors, including Ektachrome, Portra, Tri-X, T-Max 100 and 400, Plus-X (!) and Fuji Velvia! Anyway, this camera makes a big negative.

What’s so unusual about handling this boat anchor, excuse me, camera, is the contrast it presents with my experiences in medium format. Heck, my first medium format camera was a Kodak – I was seven and it was a Kodak Brownie …. yes, you guessed it, 620. One speed (‘clack’) and three apertures, comprised of a drilled disc which was shifted using a lever, but it was as cool as it gets if you ask me. After that I proceeded to twin lens Rolleis, the massive and infinitely capable Rollei 6003 SLR and the sweet Mamiya 6. But none of those could pass the test the Medalist would discharge with aplomb.

It’s the Korean War. You are a Life photographer. The picture you just took of the North Korean terrorist aggressor may be your last because he is armed and you are not. But, his gun jams. With lightning thinking, you whip off the little bugger’s helmet and administer a fatal blow with the Medalist, doing the fallen enemy justice with one more exposure carefully focused on his cracked skull. Now you simply could not do that with the effete Rollei twin lens reflex or anything else in that format. Not until the Nikon F arrived, in time to document America’s first defeat, was there a camera of comparable heft.

Let me illustrate.

First there’s a double helical focusing mount which would do the Ferrari engineers proud. Is that beautiful or what?

A touch of lubricant on the alloy surfaces and all is sweetness and light.

Then how about the rangefinder which is surprisingly accurate?

And then the strap lugs, a design borrowed from the chaps who forged the Golden Gate.

And that neat distance and depth-of-field scale on the top plate:

Granted, the engraving quality would drive the boys at Zeiss and Leitz to the men’s room, but heck, it’s easier to clean blood and guts from than the chic stuff they made in Germany.

And lest you think that all this mass hides a lousy lens, think again. The five element, coated Ektar is not to be sneezed at.

As for the camera back, remember those magnificent tailgates that Detroit gave the world in its station wagons? The ones that would swing to the side or swivel down? Well, Kodak was there first for they designed a camera back that could be swung left or right, depending on which catches you released, or removed all together for cleaning. Just the thing after whacking that twit from Pyongyang. Too bad the Nikon F designers weren’t watching.

And don’t be fooled by that little red window with the sprung cover. Its sole purpose is to key the first frame; thereafter, the internal toothed shaft counts exposures automatically using a shutter interlock to preclude double exposures. You still have to cock the shutter manually, but intentional double exposures are delegated to a separate lever to the right of the eyepiece. Nothing wrong there.

OK, so the Medalist is no Leica M, trading mass for class, but my goodness, what a magnificent showpiece.

Now, Kodak, how about recreating some of this design genius in your contemporary wares. Surely, all the great industrial designers do not reside at Apple?

Label drinkers

Photography

The world is full of them.

A friend was visiting the other day and, once that most important of hours came to pass, namely the Cocktail Hour, I did the dutiful thing and prepared a couple of martinis. My avocation is for the gin martini, having come of age in Britain, but my friend preferred one made with vodka. No problem.

Well, once the magic libation began to take effect, he complimented me grandly on the magnificent drink and enquired of the name of the vodka maker.

“Why, Belvedere, of course” quoth I, “Is there anything else?”. This stuff sells for megabucks, by the way.

“But of course”, responded my guest, “I can always tell the great vodkas”.

Suffice it to say that what he was drinking was bottom shelf Gordon’s, ($10 the bottle), the vermouth made by Gallo ($2.99).

My friend, you see, is a Label Drinker.

They are everywhere.

In the sound reproduction world fortunes have been made by peddling ordinary copper wire advertised as ‘Oxygen free with all molecules aligned’ at twenty times the price of the stuff at Home Depot. The Label Drinker can hear the difference, you see, between HD speaker cable and the $50 a foot exotic which, he knows, at that price has to be good. Put a blindfold on him and things don’t look so good of course.

In wine, the Label Drinker is everywhere. Here in the States, John Q Public has wisened up and is buying Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, realising that he gets 95% of the flavor and 100% of the alcohol that the $30 variety sells for. The grapes from my vineyard go into a $38 a bottle wine, if you must know, and I wouldn’t be caught dead paying that sort of amount for a bottle of Zinfandel, pride of authorship notwithstanding. Mercifully, TBC is rarely available in Zinfandel.

Cars specialize in LDs. The Ferrari must be better at four times the price of the Corvette. Even if the latter is faster, stops better, uses less fuel, is dirt cheap to maintain, and on and on.

And in better sushi bars in America what do you see the Japanese ordering? Why, Coors of course. None of that mass market Kirin garbage when you are abroad.

In photography, the Label Drinker has several sub-species.

The most comical, of course, is the Leica fetishist. He thinks nothing of paying a $150 premium for a Leica DLux-2, which is nothing more than a Panasonic Lumix LX1 with a red Leica logo. $150 for a logo. A fool and his money are easily parted. Go Leica!

A more modern manifestation is the film Luddite. Like the guy who will tell you that LPs sound far better than CDs (he can usually pass the blind test as all the clicks, pops and scratches readily distinguish vinyl from CDs), this type of Label Drinker will swear up and down that nothing, but nothing, matches the tonal range, depth, emotion, blah, blah, blah, of film. But of course.

Which brings me to another recent LD episode. I was showing a bunch of 13″ x 19″ prints to another friend the other day. I like to keep a collection lying around to try them on viewers. Only snag was, this viewer was also a photographer. Of the Old School. You know what that means. “So what did you take these on?” he asked, trying to appear as cool and disinterested as possible. “Why, on 4″ x 5″ film of course”, I replied. “Can you even imagine using anything else for landscapes”. “Absolutely not”, he agreed, a flush coming to his cheeks, as he warmed to his subject. “I use it myself. Nothing beats the tonal range, does it?” Don’t even think of getting this fellow onto the subject of the superiority of monochrome over color. Life’s too short, bores too long.


A bunch of prints….

I have yet to summon up the courage to admit to my lie and tell this Label Drinker that everyone of the dozen or so pictures was taken on the Canon 5D. Not a piece of film in sight. And even had they been on film, they would have been digitised at some point though scanning. How else to print them?

But let’s not be too harsh on Label Drinkers. They can make us a lot of money while providing much innocent fun along the way. My exhibition prints, you understand, are always taken on film.

Postscript: For confirmation from no less august a source than the Wall Street Journal, download their piece on the same topic – which addresses the topic of fake expertise when it comes to wine – by clicking here.