Lens of the Year

Lenses

No contest.

It’s not so much ‘Lens of the Year’ as it is ‘Outfit of the Year’ and the choice will surprise none who have been visiting here recently.


Canon 5D, Canon 100mm EF Macro and Bower ring flash

While none of this gear is ‘new’ – the 100mm macro has been around for ages, the 5D is no spring chicken and ring flashes are as old as politicians’ lies – what is so very special about this outfit is how simple the technical side becomes. Back when, in the bad old film days, you used a lens head on a bellows, constantly messed with focus and depth of field, tried to remember the right exposure compensation when the bellows were racked out and then suffered agonies trying to light your subject. Then, when you snapped the picture, you realized that you had forgotten to stop the lens down and were five stops over-exposed.

But Canon obsoleted all of that with a few strokes of genius, doubtless available from other makers also. First, they made the lens fixed length. It does not change in size as you focus. Second, the focus range is continuous from infinity to life size on a full frame sensor body. Third, focus is automatic and blisteringly fast. And, finally, E-TTL makes sure that all those arcane calculations are a thing of the past, computing the optimal blend of natural and flash light on the fly. A nice 100mm length also allows the photographer to step back from the subject, leaving more working room, and throw in the Software of the Year and you have the most perfect macro kit yet.

Thanks to all this magic 100% of your attention can be devoted to the subject and the technology takes care of the back end. This compares well with the automatic gearbox in cars which leaves more brain cycles available for the job of driving rather than shifting gears. Sure, there are people who like to use a clutch. (None of them drive in Formula One, by the way). There are also people who will tell you that film beats digital and good sound ended with the LP era. Have pity on them, while they do their calculations and make incantations to the analog gods of yore. The world will always have its technophobes, most so over-invested in yesterday that they have to defend antiquity.

And it’s not like this wonder lens is wildly expensive, compared to the mess of adapters, bellows, racks etc. in olden days. The lens retails for under $500 and works every bit as well on Canon’s cropped sensor bodies as it does on full frame. The optical and mechanical quality is right up there with Canon’s exalted ‘L’ offerings – I know as I own some. In fact, there’s not a sharper lens in my kit. So add an inexpensive digital Rebel body, splash out another $150 on the ring flash (no need to get Canon’s costly version), and you have the best macro kit out there for under $1,000. What’s that, you say? You want the ability to switch off one side of the ring flash tube for better modeling effects like the Canon one does? Well, dear reader, I have two words for you. Black tape. You stick it over one half of the flash tube in the same way you stick it on your camera to obliterate all those gauche manufacturer’s markings. Now that’s what I call a bargain.


The good old days were …. really bad.

The Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro autofocus lens is the Lens of the Year.

Software of the Year

Macro, Software

A run away winner.

Until a fellow photographer pointed me to the inspired application known as Helicon Focus this award would easily have gone to Adobe’s Lightroom. Having switched from the slowness and bugginess of Aperture to the logical, modal work flow of Lightroom, I remain delighted with that application’s great user interface and with the fact that one application provides processing, digital file management, printing, web and book output, and it gets better with each new release. Best of all, except for some sluggishness in the adjustment brush in LR 2, which Adobe is working on, the application flies on just about any computer made in the past 5 years. Ever said that of Apple’s offerings? Best of all is the fact that LR has made visits to Photoshop increasingly rare and, hopefully in some future version, the horror that is Photoshop’s interface can be well and truly forgotten. Meaning that Adobe will add perspective correction to LR, the only significant feature missing for this photographer.

But my new found interest in macro and my ‘discovery’ of Helicon Focus (thanks to a fellow photographer) leave me in no doubt that is is far and away the most innovative and well engineered application I have learned in 2008. It simply opens up the world of close-focus and macro to heretofore impossible pictures. The fact that it’s been around for several years only speaks to the maker’s poor marketing – they should be telling the world about this brilliant piece of programming.

Here’s the sort of subject Helicon Focus excels at – I took several differently focused pictures and combined these into one sharp whole, using Helicon.


5D, 100mm Canon Macro, ring flash, 1/60, f/22, ISO 100, tripod. Composite of four pictures. Click the picture for the Helicon site.

The big print hanging at home is, simply stated, a show stopper. The starfish pops off the surface of what is a pretty low key print. Helicon Focus has taken close-ups out of the laboratory and made them accessible to all, whether your subject is seen through a microscope or a very long lens with limited depth of field, no matter the aperture. With the 100mm Canon Macro the whole process is a dream. Add a ring flash to provide some relief in the shadows and you have a very powerful tool set. Very well done Danylo and the whole team. I have read about like functionality in Photoshop CS4 and it’s so poorly implemented and so complex, I doubt anyone at Helicon is losing sleep, especially when you compare prices.

Helicon Focus is my pick for Software of the Year.

There’s a close runner up for the Software of the Year award and that is Bruji’s suite of database products.


Click the picture for Bruji’s web site

I use DVDpedia for movies and Bookpedia for my photography books – click in the right hand column and you will see the nice, clean web output these cataloging tools generate. These applications work well on the Mac but just sing on the iPhone; update something on the Mac and the iPhone will sync the changes when asked, if it is in wi-fi range of your Mac. It works perfectly every time and you can take your database of movies and books with you wherever you take your iPhone. Simple, superbly supported by an enthusiastic team and far better than the slow, clunky Delicious Library which I used earlier – an application that puts looks before speed. There’s something very warming about emailing for help and getting a quick, enthusiastic response from one of the Bruji developers. An experience you will never have with Adobe, Apple or Microsoft. Well done, Bruji!

Camera of the Year

Cameras

Still waiting.

Modern DSLRs are superbly competent, have great lens choices, come in a variety of sensor formats and enjoy minimal shutter and focus lag. They come from any number of manufacturers and share two bad features – they are bulky and noisy. The Mark II and Mark III variants do nothing to fix this and are very much in the land of diminishing returns, but it’s nice to see that Canon now has two full frame manufacturers to compete with – Nikon and Sony/Minolta. Best of all, by introducing the 5D Mark II, Canon has done a real number on the resale value of the Mark I and I expect you will be able to find lightly used Mark I bodies in 2009 for under $1,000.

Street and advanced casual snappers want something small, fast and quiet in their pocket when not hauling around the DSLR and they want a decent sized sensor, not one of those ridiculous fingernail sized things found in nearly every compact digital. They want instant on, couldn’t care less about the LCD screen, want an optical viewfinder and auto focus. They want a proper buffer so that snap-to-snap times are very short and they want a semi-wide angle non-zoom lens which suffices for most of the work the camera will be expected to do.

In other words, they want a digital Leica without the antiquated feature set, bulk, dated manual focusing and overpriced lenses of the Leica M8.

Well, we are not much closer to getting that in 2008 than we were in 2007.

Sure, the Sigma DP-1 is a compact with a large APS-C sensor capable of big, noise free enlargements. But everything else about it is wrong. The fixed focus length lens extends and retracts (why, for goodness sake?) making start-up times ridiculous and the whole thing sports what must be one of the worst user interfaces ever. The lens is also ridiculously slow for what you get.

The Panasonic G1 has some promise, dropping the SLR mirror, adding a competent electronic viewfinder for through-the-lens viewing, but pointlessly retaining the SLR form.

And that’s about it. The Panasonic LX-1, now in its third iteration, does some things right (so-so shutter lag, quiet, small, Leica optics) but has a lousy, small sensor and the lens extends and retracts. At least they now include an accessory shoe in the LX-3, meaning you no longer have to glue on your viewfinder the way I did.

Here’s what mystifies me. Given the sheer number of DSLR users, each wanting something small, simple and fast for fun use, why can none of the world’s camera makers get it right and put out a minimally featured digital point-and-shot with a fast 35mm f/2 non-retractable fixed focus lens, a big sensor and no shutter lag. How hard is that? They could sell these for $500 all day long.

So the Camera of the Year award goes to …. no one. The big manufacturers continue to refine their DSLRs to ridiculous extremes and continue to miss a vast, unserved sector – the very users of those DSLRs who no longer need to upgrade to 10 frames per second or 600mm f/2.8 lenses with IS.


The ideal digital snapper has to borrow the best features of these.

Take the lens and lack of shutter lag from the Leica, the electronic viewfinder and mirrorless/prismless design of the G1 and add the Sigma’s big sensor and you have a winner. Come to think of it, make two versions – one with a 35mm f/2 and the other with a 75mm f/2 lens. The size should be somewhere between the Leica M (too bulky) and the LX-1 (too small). Forget about Live View, face detection, wifi, interchangeable lenses, IS and all that other nonsense, sell them stripped and bare and photographers will make a line at your door.

The amazing technology price spiral

Photography

No bottom in sight.

Right before this year’s Superbowl, that annual orgy of advertising and steroid fueled ‘athletes’, I though it would be pretty smart to buy a nice big screen TV. I have no earthly intention of watching this ridiculous spectacle masquerading as sport, but a ‘Superbowl Special’ is a ‘Superbowl Special’. So I decided to fight my way through a parking lot of drivers with multiple tattoos and monster trucks, and spring for a big screen LCD TV.

I had recently acquired an AppleTV and simply could not make out movie synopses on the old 168 lb. cathode ray tube Sony, so I trotted off to WalMart and blew $900 on a 42″ Vizio. I had been watching the price trends in flat panel TVs and my guess was that prices had pretty much bottomed. As for the brand, I knew that Sony/Samsung made the LCD panel (as they do all these large panels) so had little concern over longevity and quality control. Made in South Korea is a hell of a lot more reassuring than Made in Detroit. Another $30 saw a pair of half decent bookshelf speakers from Radio Shack plugged into my old amplifier, and took care of the truly awful sound produced by the native hardware in the TV.

So I was feeling pretty smart.

Well, I just checked the prices around that annual spell of Genuine American Idiocy known as Black Friday – the biggest retail sale day of the year, coming right after Thanksgiving – and felt pretty foolish. The same TV was now selling for $600 (I think of it as the ‘Subprime Special’) and if you felt spendy, another $100 got you one with a plasma screen rather than an LCD one. Throw in a massive recession and maybe these things will get cheaper yet.

Price trend for a typical Panasonic 42″ LCD TV over
the past nine months. High, median, low.

And we all know the story about CD and DVD players. As an avid classical music fan, I simply had to have a CD player and spent no less than $1,000 on my Hitachi 1000 in 1983. It works to this day and something far better/faster/etc. can be had for …. $50 or less.

Hard disk drives are the worst offenders. My 60gB which came with the MacBook was replaced with a 160, then a 250 and now a 500gB version. Prices? How about $100, $100 and $80, respectively? And that’s all within 18 months. And for mass storage, you can now get 2 terabytes in a properly fan cooled enclosure for under $400. I know as I have 8 terabytes’ worth!

As for flash memory and RAM, who on earth would want to be in those businesses? Every time I use my crappy old Olympus C5050 for a snap for this site, I am reminded that the 256 megabyte CF card it uses ran me over $130, 7 years ago. By contrast, the 2 gB CF card in my 5D now retails for under $25.

Then, take the Canon 5D. An outrageous $3,000 for the body when announced 3 years ago. Now its better/faster/etc. replacement, the 5D Mark II, is expected to retail for $2,600. Meanwhile, lightly used 5Ds sell for $1,300 and falling. I would have bought a used one when acquiring mine a couple of years ago but they were nowhere to be found.

Could I have waited another year for the TV or two years for the camera? Maybe and no. While the TV was a luxury, this avid photographer, well and truly sick of the process/scan/retouch cycle dictated by film, found there was no alternative to the 5D. It’s not that I care for Canon. Frankly, brand means little to me. But I do care for full frame sensors and half decent lenses at reasonable prices. Plus, realizing that used prices of even the best film cameras would come crashing down – because of cameras like the 5D – I decided then and there to unload all that Leica and Rollei gear, making my net investment in my 5D + 7 Canon lenses about as close to zero as you can get. Actually, I made money on the deal. Why anyone would buy near-obsolete film gear beats me, but I trust it made some loony collector happy somewhere.

Frankly, I simply cannot see improving on the quality of the 18″ x 24″ prints from my 5D originals, but two years hence when the 5D Mark II is selling for $1,000 on the lightly used market, thanks to the better/faster/etc. 5D Mark III, I may just snap one up. Anyway, I’ll need another body while Mark I is at Canon to have all the garbage removed from the finder system, thanks to Canon’s non-existent dust sealing in that model. If they will even deign to accept it for overhaul, that is.


Recent 5D selling prices.

Natural Redhead

Photographs

Pure serendipity.

I wa staying downtown San Francisco at the St. Francis at the turn of the millennium, and when I leaned out of the hotel window, this is what I saw:

Natural Redhead. Christmas, 1999, San Francisco. Leica M6, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64

The original slide was digitized on a Nikon 2000 film scanner and is otherwise unprocessed.

I have been lucky to own many Leitz 50mm Summicron lenses, as befits the greatest optic of the past century. These included a collapsible screw mount one (very early) which I used on a IIIG ‘Barnack’ body. For my M2, M3 and M6 I variously owned single and dual range versions of the fixed mount 7 element design in that gorgeous chrome that only Leica could do in the 1950s. Then there was the six element variant – the one without the infinity catch and the last with a removable head which you could use on your enlarger. I did. And finally the magnificent first version of the Summicron-R for the Leicaflex, which I used on my SL and R4. That one combined Nikon vibrance with Leica subtlety in your color snaps.

All were dear friends, participants and collaborators and if I admit to a favorite – a cruel task indeed, as to elect one for the top rung is to relegate all the others – it would be the six element on my M2 or M6. Many knocked it, and the satin black finish was so …. ugh!, but I liked the high contrast compared to the earlier versions and the low weight. In some respects, its images felt more Nikon than Leica. You know. Where you elect punchiness and contrast over detail.

It’s a trade off I was willing to make at that time of my life – a long time, come to think of it, as that Summicron was a colleague for nigh on twenty years. Do you think you will be able to say that in twenty years regarding your latest purchase?