Category Archives: Photography

Blurb revisited

Printing

Much better second time around.

Ask me what the best ways to show your photographs are and I will reply big prints, well printed hard copy books, a PDF on a tablet and last a computer display. I suppose TV screens work, but it just does not feel right to me.

I wrote over five years ago about publishing your own photography books with Blurb and came away disappointed. The price was overwhelming and everything else – paper quality, print quality, the divot in the cover – were underwhelming.

But times and technologies change so I decided to give Blurb another shot. Lightroom 5 added a Book module which integrates with Blurb but I simply exported my files to JPGs (2,000 pixels on the long side) then imported them into BookSmart, an app which can be downloaded from Blurb at no charge. The app comes in Mac and PC versions.

The app is really well engineered and while my 60 or so snaps imported oversized, requiring each be reduced to fit the page, the process was easy and fast. Note that if you want a spine title the book must be at least 80 pages. I decided on softcovers and paid a little more for the premium lustre paper. The weight and texture of the paper are serious art book quality and the printing is excellent. Printed images are just a tad more contrasty and darker than originals on a computer display, but nothing to complain about. The crop marks shown within the app are dead accurate. Even monochrome images show good if not great blacks and you can make out the lustre of the paper in this image:

I make these books for friends as Christmas gifts and, like my annual calendars, they show work solely taken during the year. This discipline prevents raiding the catalog for oldies and inspires me to come up with new things. I recommend it.


A scan of the book’s cover. Actual quality is far better.

With shipping, 60 page books, printed on both sides, with images on the front and rear covers, cost me $45 each after using a 20% discount coupon. As the paper is finally satisfyingly thick I see absolutely no sign of bleed through from opposing images. A contrast with my original experience. I messed about some with the Lightroom module but find the BookSmart app far easier to use and it’s not like exporting images to JPGs for import to BookSmart takes any appreciable time.

Recommended.

Olympus 45mm F/1.8 MFT Zuiko – Part I

Micro Four-Thirds

An outstanding short telephoto lens.

So enamored was I of the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens that I decided to add the 45mm f/1.8 optic. I paid $350.


The 45mm on the GX7, next to the 17mm.

This makes for a superb, light and compact outfit with the two classical film era focal lengths of 35mm and 90mm, FFE. For a street snapper, that little outfit is good for 99% of daily needs.

Rather than build an exposed bayonet for the lens hood (extra), Olympus decided to hide the bayonet under a weakly attached plastic, chromed ring:


Bayonet exposed.

This is so weakly held in place and the lens so ugly were it lost, that I immediately attached a piece of chrome flue tape to make sure it does not fall off, This is especially recommended if, like me, you do not use a lens hood. If the lens hood fits as poorly it will soon be lost. It seems Oly simply cannot resist adding some asinine feature to most of its products – take the collapsible barrel on the 9-18mm MFT zoom and the retractable focus collar on the 17mm/1.8. But the optics of all three are so good that these eccentricities are but minor annoyances.


Flue tape in place.

How light is the lens? At 4.1oz it’s a featherweight, almost identical in weight to the 4.2oz of the 17mm. The 45mm appears to use more plastic in its construction, but who cares when the optics are so good? Length is 2.3″ against 2.2″ for the 17mm – it’s tiny.

Focus is almost as fast as the instant focus in the 17mm. It’s as near silent as it gets. There is a slight ‘bounce’ around the sharpest focus point, missing from the 17mm and much more pronounced in the 9-18mm, but nothing that gets in the way of rapid execution.

Much as it makes sense to compare the 17mm with the Leica 35mm Asph Summicron, the 45mm is the equivalent of the 90mm f/2 Apo Summicron, one of the finest lenses I have owned. (I bought mine years ago for $900 and sold it for some $2,000 when the Leica Ms moved on. Today it remains available, now for $4,000, which is plain daft. All 18 ounces of it. I owned mine for some 5 years, which computes to a compound annual return of 17.3% for those into such things, confirming Leicas are for China cabinets, not for real world use.) What both Leica lenses lack is AF, of course, and both will leave a mighty hole in your savings, one dug deeper still once you add an M body to use these with. Definition-wise it’s tough to comment as my catalog only contains film snaps from the Leica optic, a medium far inferior for capturing detail than modern digital sensors. However, purely subjectively, the 90mm Apo Summicron is the better lens wide open, though add a touch of sharpening at f/1.8 for the Oly in Lightroom and there’s nothing in it. Well, OK, there is something in it – the $3,650 burning a hole in your pocket if you are an Oly man.

The Olympus lens shows very minor vignetting which disappears by f/4, and mild pincushion distortion at all apertures. Accordingly, I created a lens correction profile for use on Panasonic bodies with RAW files and you can download it here. Install the profile as I explain and its application becomes automatic when images are loaded into Lightroom (3, 4 or 5), so it’s a ‘set and forget’ thing. Definition at f/1.8 and f/2 benefits from a little sharpening in LR (I use ’80’) otherwise the default setting of ’40’ for the GX7 body is fine, until you get to f/22, at which point diffraction takes the edge off sharpness. Setting sharpness to ’80’ at f/22 once again does the trick.

In practical terms there’s absolutely no need to stop the lens down unless you need depth of field, and one of the signal appeals of the wide apertures this optic offers is the very absence of depth of field, with backgrounds rendered pleasantly out of focus.

I constantly read about how MFT camera X or compact camera Y is not pocketable. This, I confess, leaves me confused. What, pray, is the utility value of a camera when it is in your pocket? What is important in a light traveling kit is that a spare lens is pocketable. One on the body, one in your pocket. The two Olympus f/1.8 lenses, the 17mm and the 45mm, are so small that they will fit even in the pocket of a jeans wearer, unless he is a hipster opting for skin tight fit. That is pocketability.

In Part II I will publish some snaps taken with this lens using the Panasonic GX7.

Lightroom 5.3

Lightroom, Photographs

Fixes a frustrating bug in OS X Mavericks.

Each major release of an operating system from Apple brings with it renewed fears that the ceaseless dumbing down of the user interface will bring with it new horrors, more disabled third party software and much time wasted on remedies. Indeed, since OS Leopard, 4 releases ago, I cannot think of any ‘enhancements’ in subsequent versions of the OS which have moved the needle on my satisfaction scale – with the possible exception of the addition of the frequently frustrating AppStore in Snow Leopard – and the loss of the excellent Rosetta emulator and additions of such primal idiocies like LaunchPad leave one scratching his head along “What were they thinking of?” lines. After breathing a sigh of relief once the ever more massive upgrade is completed and the anomalies sorted, the best one can say of recent OS X releases after the pain and wasted time required for installation is “Thank goodness nothing is broken”. For Hackintosh aficionados the problem is far greater, as every major OS release – and some minor – has brought with it massive upgrade headaches, one factor which contributed to my migration from that excellent breed to a used Mac Pro.

For most photographers Adobe is the vendor of choice for photo processing apps and their recent track record of upgrades puts even Apple’s shambolic performance to shame. Minor changes since PS CS3 have added little value, and the recent move of CS to a Cloud model means that you have to keep making monthly rent payments for the privilege of using Adobe’s PS until the undertaker comes along, or lose access to your catalog. Sure, CS6 is backward compatible for now, but would you like to bet how long that continues? Then there’s the small matter of Adobe losing a big chunk of its Photoshop code to hackers the other month, along with 10, 30, 100 or 500 million customers’ credit cards, depending which of their press releases you care to believe. Let’s at least hope that the code thieves come out with a better, cheaper product.

That said, Adobe has done an excellent job of keeping Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom (which uses the same RAW decoder) current with regard to the many new cameras coming to market, and their latest LR release adds many. If you own LR, which can still mercifully be run locally from your machine with no rent payments due to keep the software active, you can continue to use LR as your catalog/point of entry application for your files, round-tripping to your locally installed CS3/4/5/6 with no rent due to Adobe. Anything later than CS2 runs on Intel Macs without Rosetta.

The only significant bug I have noted in moving to OS Mavericks is that Lightroom lost the very useful feature of showing file counts in the Metadata panel. Now, mercifully, Adobe has fixed what Apple broke by issuing LR 5.3 which restores count data, as shown below:



LR5.2 metadata in Mavericks.


LR5.3 – counts restored.

I find this data very useful for tracking my activity levels. If I find them dropping I tell myself it’s time to get up, grab a camera and get out more.


A break from Xmas shopping. Union Square SF, GX7, 17/1.8 Zuiko MFT.

Olympus 17mm f/1.8 MFT Zuiko – Part III

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs

Some snaps.

You can read my review of the Panasonic GX7 here.

Part II of this lens review is here.

AF speed:

By way of preface, I can state categorically that the AF focus speed of the Olympus lens on my GX7 body is as close to instantaneous as is possible regardless of the lighting. Whereas I had a 30% rejection rate with the 20mm Panasonic because the lens did not focus in time, the rejection rate with the Olympus, based on the 193 images I snapped the other day, none at an aperture smaller than f/2.5, was zero. Such rejects as there were resulted from poor composition, weak subject matter and so on.

For the street snapper little more need be said.

Flare:

Before getting into the serious street stuff, let’s dispel any issues concerning flare, the other debilitating ‘feature’ found in the Panasonic optic. This unexciting image was shot with the sun in the frame, shining directly into the lens:


Minimal flare.

No modern lens I own, not even the 35mm f/1.4 Sigma for the Nikon, can hold a candle to this performance. One other note. The Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens delivers exceptionally high contrast images (which goes hand in hand with its outstanding flare resistance), so much so that I found that I often had to turn down contrast (Down with the Highlights slider, Up with the Shadows one) when processing the RAW images in Lightroom 5.

Sharpness:

Resolution? The only thing to report here is that 18″ x 24″ prints, a medium far more demanding than any electronic display, are par for the course at any aperture you care to use. Stopping the lens down need only be done when more depth of field is required.

Is the lens as sharp as Sigma’s monster 35mm f/1.4 on my (even more gigantic) Nikon D3x? No. I doubt anything is, if you have the patience to actually find an example of the Sigma whose AF is properly adjusted – it took me three before I got there. Then again, the Sigma with no camera body weighs more than the GX7/17mm combination and the Olympus focuses noticeably faster.

Is the Oly sharper than the Panny 20mm? Who knows, given the Panny’s inability to lock in sharp focus in a reasonable time?

Pictures:

Here are some snaps from my outing, all taken in San Francisco on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the city alive with shoppers and tourists. All were taken between f/1.8 and f/2.8, using RAW originals processed in Lightroom 5, with ISO from 400 (Kodak TriX lives!) to 3200. Mostly these are straight out of the camera, with no post processing other than RAW conversion to JPG and automatic application of my lens correction profile :


Lighting up. Nothing beats a 35mm (FFE) lens on the streets.


Selfie. The GX7/17mm Oly combination is almost impossibly responsive.


$5 pup. I snapped five in five seconds here – a buck a snap – and the fourth
caught the dog just so. The truly silent electronic shutter in the GX7 is a boon.


These charmers were getting a lot of attention.


Carving my pastrami at Lefty O’Doul’s.
The rye bread here is beyond fresh.
At f/1.8, ISO3200.


Dining al fresco on Maiden Lane. Quite lovely colors here.


Impossible not to make a donation when visited with warmth like this.
At f/2.5 and ISO400, this one made a gorgeous 18″ x 24″ print.


Uh huh.


Tattoo dude.


Looking up.


Toothless in San Francisco.


What happens when you listen to sell side stock tips.


Shoeshine man. The electronic shutter is inaudible at any subject distance.


Porsche girl.


Alone.


The sales pitch here was “Jesus is a Negro”.


Ritz Carlton guards making out like the CIA.


Beautiful color rendering. The GX7’s in-body OIS works well – this was at 1/20th.


The shallow depth of field at large apertures comes in handy.
The Oly lens has excellent resolution.


Some faces leave no time for composition. The last snap of this outing
and I was half dead from exhaustion, but could not pass this by.

Color rendering:

The color rendering is really pleasing in these images. Whether that’s due to the camera, the lens or both I have no idea, but the combination is right up there with Bogart and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, and JP Morgan and systemic corruption.

Aperture priority operation:

I used the ‘A’ exposure mode for all of these snaps, with the electronic (silent) shutter, meaning that the only thing I ever had to fiddle with was the control wheel to change apertures. Panny really needs to update its firmware to allow one stop intervals between clicks, here. Only gear fetishists need the default 1/3rd stop steps, which only serve to slow operation down.

Electronic shutter math:

One caution – as I always use the silent electronic shutter in the GX7 – doing so with fluorescent lighting as the sole light source is not a great idea. You will get stripes as the tubes flash on and off during the exposure, as here:


In the little boys’ room. f/1.8, ISO 3200. Spare GX7 battery
is in the coin pocket in my jeans. The excellent
slip proof Upstrap is on the camera.

Be sure to read the Comment below regarding the use of non-OEM batteries.

Assuming a 60Hz flash frequency (US mains) the five cycles seen here suggest that the electronic shutter takes 1/12th second (5/60) to traverse/scan the field of pixels, which is why you get noticeable distortion of moving images taken using this shutter. You can bet that the scan speed will increase in subsequent iterations of this design, making for less movement distortion.

For my preferred subject matter, movement distorion is not an issue. If it’s an issue for you, use the faster traversing mechanical shutter in the GX7, which is some ten times faster in this instance. Why anyone would need the primary benefit of the electronic shutter – silence – with a moving subject is beyond me, so I fail to see this as an issue.

What I write is genre specific:

In these articles it is not my goal to comment on anything other than taking street snaps and making nice, big, sharp prints from them. If movies, landscapes, birds, bugs or sports are your thing this is the worst place to look for guidance. If you want to learn about the mind numbing selection of exposure modes, issues like framing rates, white balance and sensor aberrations or how well this gear compares with dozens of competitors, there are any number of fellows with white lab coats and zero imagination out there whose site content you should be reading instead.

Controls and ergonomics:

The knurled ring surrounding the shutter button is programmed to change apertures, being faster in use than the rear control dial. Other than the shutter release, it’s the only control used in the field, along with the C1/C2/C3 top right dial settings which are programmed to ISO 400, 1200 and 3200, respectively. ISO 3200 is the maximum the electronic shutter works with, which is just fine at f/1.8 in poor light.

Panny has some silly statements in its instruction manual as to the largest prints which can be made at different ISOs – silly on the conservative side, that is. Anything up to ISO 3200 will, given a modicum of technical skill, yield prints of any size your heart desires. Panasonic has made steady progress from the sensor found in its groundbreaking G1 and is to be highly commended for its efforts.


Street snapper’s dream machine. Amateur looks, state-of-the-art responsiveness.

The nice chromed protective lens filter is a 46mm UV from B+W and is a recommended accessory given the relatively exposed front element which, like the rear element, is plane on the outside, being neither convex or concave.

Finally, note that I dispensed with the duct tape on the top plate holding the EVF in place, replacing it with some double-sided sticky tape below the eyepiece, where it’s invisible.

Conclusion:

For years I have dreamed of a small, fast, automated digital camera and fast prime wide angle lens to do what the Leica M did so well for me on the streets for over three decades. Small with instant response, silent, unobtrusive, sharp. And with autofocus, please! Let’s not forget in-body OIS. Don’t-care-if-it’s-stolen cheap would be nice, too.

In the Panasonic GX7 mated with the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 MFT lens, I rather fancy that my dreams have been granted, and for less money than a couple of hours on the local shrink’s couch for far greater benefit. The sheer ‘transparency’ of this combination, placing fewer obstacles between the eye, the brain and the recorded image than ever before, redefines the street snapping standard for this devotee of the genre.

Recommended without reservations for like minded photographers.