Category Archives: Photography

Shutter lag

Cameras

It takes the Wall Street Journal to surface the issue

Not only is America afflicted with some of the world’s worst television – from situation comedy to news reporting, though it’s often difficult to distinguish the two – it can also lay claim to having the worst newspapers. As often as not, these mistake editorial opinion for news, so you end up reading some leftie’s opinion about put-upon losers as news reporting. Write enough of this sort of thing and you get a Pulitzer Prize.

In the digital photography world, the worst reporting involves avoidance of mention of a near universal problem in modern cameras. Shutter lag. The time it takes between pressing the button to recording the image. Read any number of reviews of digital cameras and chances are you will see no mention of this defect. I can only guess that this is either because of conflicts of interest (journalists accepting bribes in the form of free equipment or pushing advertising in their magazine) or because the reviewer hasn’t the faintest idea how to take a photograph.

So it was welcome news indeed to open the Wall Street Journal this morning – a fine newspaper which keeps its opinions on the editorial page – to see an article on shutter lag, of all things. They quoted some poor schnuck who blew big coin on a digital camera to record the whales on his Mexican vacation, but managed to record only sterile images of the sea, the leaping whale having just departed owing to shutter lag. What’s interesting about the piece is that it takes a business newspaper to disclose a design defect which makes most digital cameras worthless for all except maybe landscape photographers and realtors. Let’s face it, neither is exactly dealing with moving subjects. Earlier reporting by the Journal confirms that the primary use of digital cameras hasn’t changed from that for film cameras, meaning pictures of one’s family. Especially of the kids. Ever tried to catch that fleeting moment on your baby’s face with a modern digital point-and-shoot camera?

The Journal gets it wrong in saying this is a digital camera problem, citing the good old days of fast film cameras. As the latter developed more automation – focus, exposure and so on – shutter lag was already beginning to raise its ugly head. Simple cameras like rangefinder Leicas and better SLRs never had the problem, and it was one of the major causes for concern I had when waiting to go digital. With the Canon EOS 5D there is no shutter lag, but then you should expect no less from a camera that runs close to $5,000 with a decent lens attached. I was more than aware of the issue having used an Olympus C5050Z for three years or so, and learned early on not to use it to photograph anything that moved.

The Olympus C5050Z – a very competent camera for static recording, but useless for moving subjects because of horrid shutter lag

So it’s satisfying to report that Panasonic cured the issue in a point-and-shoot digital in the LX1. Unfortunately, they made two boo-boos. First, they never advertised this ‘feature’ which I discovered after much research. Second, they have just discontinued the camera. So if you want a fast, small digital point-and-shoot, now is the time to get an LX1. Read more by clicking on the ‘Leica DP’ entry on the left.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Wall Street Journal for good reporting.

Pentax does it right

Cameras

How vibration reduction should be done

I have made no secret of my admiration for the camera designers at Pentax, having owned a Pentax ME Super and a Pentax 6×7 over the years.

The ME Super was my New York street camera during the years 1980-1987, when I lived in what was then a pretty dangerous New York City. Not caring to lose my Leica M3 to a chain snatcher, I acquired an inexpensive ME Super and a couple of lenses – a very compact 20mm ultra-wide, a 28mm wide and that miniscule 40mm ‘Pancake’ standard. A sweet outfit, with the added benefit of exposure automation.

The 6×7 represented my first foray into landscape photography and while it went off like Dirty Harry’s Magnum when you pressed the button, there was no arguing with the quality of the negatives that resulted.

The other day I was thinking about changes in camera design which made things so much easier for today’s picture taker. Small 35mm cameras, greatly improved film emulsions, ever better lenses and that sort of thing. But clearly digital imaging was the watershed that made everything much faster yet, to my mind, vibration reduction has saved more snaps from the reject bin than any feature since automatic exposure and focus. If your goal in life is big prints, then the old saw that the slowest shutter speed should be no slower than the reciprocal of the focal length for hand held pictures is simply wrong. You think you can get shake free pictures with your standard lens at 1/50th second good enough for an 18” x 24” print? I don’t think so.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of vibration compensating mechanisms and circuitry in still cameras – the Steadicam for film makers, after all, has been around for some 25 years, famously used by Stanley Kubrick in ‘The Shining’ in 1980 – but I was very conscious of its availability in some Canon lenses when I sprung for the EOS 5D. Most importantly, the ‘standard’ lens I chose – the 24-105mm ‘L’ – has this feature and it adds wonderfully to definition. Canon says it’s good for three shutter speeds slower than normal, meaning that the modest f/4 maximum aperture of the lens is not as limiting as you might think.

Similarly, my Panasonic LX-1 comes with Panasonic’s version of vibration reduction in a very compact package and Nikon has offered the feature on some of its more exotic lenses for a while. However, with both Nikon and Canon, the execution is not well thought out when it comes to their interchangeable lens cameras. The problem is that the vibration reduction circuitry is part of the lens, not the camera, meaning only certain lenses have it.

It took a smart designer at Pentax to finally get this right. His answer? Simple. Build the circuitry into the body, not the lens, which they have just done with the newly announced K100D.

In this way, any lens, however adapted to the camera’s body, benefits from this wonderful feature, and you don’t have to double up on lens bulk as no lens contains any related mechanisms or circuitry. Now is that clever or what?

Not really luck

Panasonic, Photographs

You make your luck. It doesn’t just find you.

I pride myself on knowing the charming town of Burlingame in the South Bay of San Francisco pretty well, so imagine my surprise the other day when a passer-by asked her for directions to the ‘English Village’.

It turns out that this is a collection of fifteen or so homes just around the corner from where she was at the time. Small homes, some 1500 square feet each, but each with an impeccable garden and lots of mock Tudor style.

So it didn’t need much encouragement on my part to leash up that wild beast, Bertie the Border Terrrier, and ankle around to said location. And, it has to be admitted, the place oozed charm like a politician looking for campaign donations, albeit with a lot more class. Needless to say, that little gem the Leica DP was in my trouser pocket, so it was a moment’s work to catch some nice details:

Round the corner and there’s another one:

And a third:

The old admonition to Always Carry a Camera fell into disuse with this photographer as nothing this small was this good until now. Even the Leica rangefinder was not small enough to permit this cavalier attitude. Once you have one of these modern digital gems, however, there really is no excuse for not carrying it with you at all times.

Recapturing the Leica spirit

Panasonic

The ‘go anywhere’ Leica DP does it

I mentioned in my earlier columns on the Leica DP (click the caption in the right hand column) that this camera was a rational digital replacement for the film-based rangefinder Leica, not only because image quality was comparable, courtesy of the Leica lens fitted, but also because its small size (much, much smaller than an M with a 35mm lens fitted) and near silent shutter (nearly imperceptible if the built in ‘clack’ is switched off and dramatically quieter than the M) allowed it to be taken pretty much anywhere without arousing suspicion.

In the true Leica ‘available light’ spirit, here is a snap taken the other day at a south San Francisco Bay area American Music concert of Thomas Hansen performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The camera was set to its full aperture of f/2.8 at the widest lens setting of 28mm with ISO at 400 and using the RAW format:

Earlier, the intermission had yielded this passing snap:

I couldn’t help thinking that this sort of thing is a throwback to the early Leica days when available light photography was all the rage. By the way, the camera does such a great job of automatic white balance control that no color temperature adjustments had to be made to these images. The built in vibration reduction is good for two shutter speeds, so f/2.8 becmes an effective f/1.4.

The most fun I ever had taking pictures

Leica, Photographers, Photography

Before digital came along, that is!

The seventies were a truly miserable time to be in England. Administrations alternated between the senile Conservatives, devoid of ideas and wedded to the status quo, and the Labor party, its members fuelled by the politics of envy. A weak Conservative Prime Minister, Ted Heath, caved to the blackmailing strikes of the miners. He alternated power with the socialist Harold Wilson who went along merrily with the trades unions funding his party, doing whatever it took to stay in office. Neither ‘leader’ had personal convictions worth a damn.

I had graduated a mechanical engineer from University College, London in 1973 intent on working for Rolls Royce Aircraft. There was only one small snag. The year I graduated Rolls went bankrupt, as ingested birds shattered the innovative carbon fiber turbine blades in its RB211 engine, rendering it useless. The engine was intended for Lockheed’s superb Tristar passenger jet and Rolls almost took Lockheed down with it. Well, the alternative for an engineering graduate who actually wanted to be an engineer was to work for some big government institution or become an academic. Hardly palatable alternatives for one dirt poor, ambitious young man. Realize that this was a country that accorded the sobriquet “engineer” equally to the fellow installing railroad ties and to the chap at Rolls Royce. Still, I suppose the railroad ties did not snap like so much brittle chocolate.

So I decided to emigrate to the greatest country on earth, but there was a small matter of qualifications. The business of America is Business, and I didn’t know a balance sheet from an income statement. Taking advice from a smart merchant banker my mother somehow steered me to, I decided to learn about finance with another degree on the wall. It’s a damnable comment on the English educational system of those times that the very concept of an MBA did not exist, whereas in America it had been around for the best part of a century. It wouldn’t do now, would it, to teach business? Muddling through was the preferred method, preferably aided by good choice of parents.

Well, I had had the privilege of working with Americans as they visited Britain, over on tours from New York or Boston or Chicago, and I learned more from them about business four years firm than in my whole life until then.

The last thing I did before taking that one way flight was to visit Paris. This was in 1977. I had no savings. My most precious asset was my Leica M3 and its 35mm Summaron lens with that clunky viewfinder appendage. So I borrowed fifty pounds from a sister, got on the ferry and next thing I was at Gare du Nord looking for my seedy garret. My first goal was to visit the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie to feast on three of the world’s greatest art collections. A related interest, of course, was to take pictures, so the M3 and a few rolls of film came along.

There was no draconian security in those days, of course. Photography was permitted everywhere and no one really minded very much. Especially if you were reasonably discreet. The Leica and I were a seasoned pair by now. We had been recognized time and again in the photographic press, culminating with the award of the Photographer of the Year prize by Photography magazine, the leading UK monthly, and, better yet, had been published in Leica Fotografie, the house organ where all things Leitz were good.

To whom did I look for inspiration in those days, photographically? Well, that’s easy. Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Kertesz, Brassai. In other words, I was a street photography junkie, though I didn’t know that word at the time …. Make it fleeting, let serendipity arrange the forms just so and click. Leica. 35mm lens. TriX. D76. A combination that had seen thousands of photographers through for years on end.

The Louvre was a magical place back then. I. M. Pei, great architect that he is, had yet to con gullible Parisians with the ugly pyramid that defaced one of the world’s great spaces, much as the Pompidou museum had already done a few blocks away. Care to revisit the latter and see how well it has aged? I don’t think so.

The forecourt of the Louvre before I. M. Pei. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

The first and prevailing sense one had on entering the museum through its vast facade was the smell of oil paint. Artists were permitted, encouraged even, to bring their oils and easels and practice by copying the works of the masters. The lighting was, of course, magic, like only Parisian lighting in the spring can be. And as this was before everyone had money, before equality had raised its ugly head, the museum was far from the zooed place that modern art collections have become. In the words of the philistine American to his wife, with but one hour to catch a flight, confronted with a priceless Italian church to view: “OK, honey, you do the inside and I’ll take the outside”. Drive-by tourism. No, people had more time to savor art back then.

What passed for fashion in the seventies. Mona at the Louvre. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

I forget the details, but suspect that I visited the Louvre on all but one day of the week I spent in Paris. And I also took pictures, the Leica by now a part of me. Second nature.

And until good, responsive digital cameras came to market, that’s the most fun I ever had making pictures.

Early porn. Louvre. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

In case you wonder, this painting is of Gabrielle d’Estrees and one of her sisters in the bath, c. 1595, painter (mercifully) unknown. Gabrielle d’Estrees was the mistress of that old Frog, Henry IV. In her hand she holds a ring given to her by the king as a sign of their bond, and her sister is pinching her nipple indicating she is pregnant with the king’s child. Yeah, right. The surrealistic background image is of a servant sewing baby clothes.

Click on the link in the left hand column for details of the book that resulted. That will take you to a written presentation along with my commentary, so you can hear what I really sound like!