Hearst’s Castle

Canon 5D

The only good thing to come out of yellow journalism

If the state of American journalism was headed solidly downwards in the 1930s, publisher William Randolph Hearst made sure that the pace to the bottom of the cess pit was accelerated. His populist, sensationalist brand of reporting bequeathed to the modern consumer prime time television news that focuses exclusively on the latest murder/rape/divorce, or the tribulations of some famous sports figure who has taken one steroid too many. Bread and circuses.

However, you can glean more useful information from one page of any American newspaper than from one hour of the so called prime time ‘news’ on television. Unless, that is, you read the New York Times or Washington Post, whose reporting sources tend to be Hollywood stars, supremely qualified to report on geopolitics and the fiscal state of the nation.

Thank you, Mr. Hearst.

However, Hearst’s millions did leave us with one fine attraction, namely Hearst Castle on Highway One in central California, some 20 miles from my home. Taken as a whole it’s something of an abomination, the ultimate in ‘check book collecting’, but digested in smaller pieces each of the many rooms packed with antiquities is a fine thing to behold. The Castle was Hearst’s lifetime hobby, and his architect Julia Morgan was adding to it throughout his life. Hearst would buy a medieval ceiling on one of his European jaunts (he probably wanted to read the British press to see what was really going on), bring it home and tell Morgan to build a room around it. Now that’s thinking big!

Driving by the other day on the way to see the elephant seal pups a few miles north on the beach, I took a picture from Highway One with the castle rising magnificently in the distance on top of the hill some mile and a half away. I had despaired of ever getting this right on film, as the long lens required only emphasized the atmospheric haze, but as I had my 400mm Leitz Telyt with me I gave it a shot anyway. I finally get to try RAW, I thought.

So I set the EOS 5D on RAW, the film speed at ISO 400 and the f/8 setting on the lens yielded a 1/500th second shutter speed. The result, after dropping the snap into Adobe’s Photoshop CS2, which automatically opens Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), was disappointing. The haze had washed out the picture, and the Telyt lens, I know, does not lack for contrast.

However, a few tweaks of the sliders in ACR made things look better so I saved the file in PSD format and added the usual unsharp masking and a small tweak to the levels control and look what emerged:

Now I must confess that, so far, I have not found the Canon EOS 5D’s Fine JPG images lacking in any way. The quality is outstanding, large prints a breeze and whatever JPG processing the camera does appears unobtrusive. Digital artifacts are invisible. Best of all, the file size is relatively small – some 4 mB or so. By contrast the 5D’s RAW file is 14 mB and the processed PSD version balloons to a ridiculous 73 mB. Now that is large. So RAW appears to have a place for challenging subjects that need a lot of manipulation, but the extra processing time is not justified, for this user, on the average photograph. JPG Fine quality equals or exceeds anything from medium format and processing is fast and easy.

Still, it’s nice to know RAW is available in the overall tool kit. Now I want to retake this picture early in the morning with the castle rising from the mist as California’s sun gradually makes it visible.

Brassai

Book reviews, Photographers

The Monograph – book review.

Paris de Nuit, a collection of Brassai’s pictures published in 1933, remains one of those books of photographs that are essential to understanding the street photography school of the early twentieth century. There is none of the acidity of Cartier-Bresson or the remoteness of Kertesz. Rather, there is a feeling that the photographer is one with his subjects in a city he loves dearly.

This tome, The Monograph, published in 2000 by Bulfinch, has much content from that classic, all of it reproduced in deep toned, juicy monochrome. While technique is never an issue with Brassai, always being superb, the large scale of this book only emphasizes just how good he was, considering the great limitations of the equipment of his day. This is 1933, for goodness sake, and no, there were no 5 frames-per-second digital cameras with shake reducing lenses available.

Something new for me, gleaned from this book, is how many of Brassai’s pictures were crops of a larger negative. Sometimes one negative would result in two or three separate images. Shocking? Absolutely. Justifiable? Totally. If it’s good, what do you care whether the whole frame was printed (what a silly pretentious idea) or not?

And if you thought the perversions of San Francisco, or earlier, New York and London, were in some way original, you need only check this book to learn that there is nothing new under the sun.

Degas was a fine photographer given the limitations of the medium in his time. His paintings speak loudly of the photographic world to come. Many images here conjure up memories of Degas’s L’Absinthe and the lives of the down-and-outs of cafe society. Had Edgar Degas lived another thirty years, these are the pictures he would have taken. Brassai realized that vision. See it in this fine book.

Taking Rube Goldberg for a spin

Canon 5D

That’s Heath Robinson to British readers

Having written about the complexities of getting my old Leitz 200mm f/4 Telyt to work on the Canon EOS 5D, I took the Rube Goldberg collection of lens, adapters and digital body combination for a spin yesterday, in that wonderful afternoon light you get right before a storm. Ergonomically the outfit handles unbelievably well and, mercifully, there is no wobble despite all those adapter rings.

I had the 5D set on ‘Av’, meaning I set the aperture (the lens is manual so you have no choice in the matter) and the camera sets the shutter speed. Anyway, at ISO 200 and f/5.6 the camera said 1/750 so I pressed the button. Here is the result:

I checked the screen preview on the 5D’s LCD and it looked two stops overexposed, so I took another at f/11. Now this did not smell right. Years with manual cameras have done a decent job of calibrating the exposure meter in my brain, and f/5.6 looked about right to me.

Getting home I dropped the snaps in iPhoto and, sure enough, the original at f/5.6 was right, the other two stops underexposed. What gives? Well, I had cranked up the brightness of the Canon’s screen to maximum in a vain attempt to make the thing visible in daylight. As a result, everything looks over exposed. So I have now reset the screen to the factory default.

The picture above is about half the original, yet is wonderfully well defined on a 13x enlargement. So those magicians at Leitz Wetzlar had it all right some forty years ago when this lens was first sold. A 40 year old lens on a 4 week old camera…. OK, so it’s not auto-anything, but I mostly use long lenses on landscapes, which tend to be fairly stationary beasts. I’ll leave sports photography to those far more expert than I will ever be. Or want to be, in that genre.

As for that LCD screen, I have adopted a one hundred year old technology to solve the problem. Diving into my 4″x5″Crown Graphic kit, I borrow the well worn black T shirt which I use to see the focusing screen on that behemoth and stick it over my head and the camera. This actually makes the LCD screen visible. Some things never change.

On the way home I spotted this gaggle of $1mm homes perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Anywhere else these would be slum dwellings but here in California these are considered luxury weekend getaways. Right dead on the San Andreas fault.

Whatever you think of the architecture, you may agree that this old lens still does the job.

Here’s the center section at a 30x magnification ratio:

Worlds in a Small Room

Book reviews, Photographers

Some of Irving Penn’s finest work.

Irving Penn is not just a great fashion photographer. Give him some spare time and off he goes on some personal project or other, frequently to the remotest places on earth, or the strangest. Like San Francisco.

This fine paperback shows pictures taken in his portable studio across the world, always by northern light. Published in 1974, it goes much further than August Sander’s cold, soulless work. Penn is vitally involved with, and sensitive to, his subjects, be they the mud people of New Guinea or Crete’s wizened old women.

If there are favorites then one has to be the group shot of Hell’s Angels with their women and machines, their leader looking like nothing so much as a Greek god. Then there are the Moroccan women so shrouded that only an eye protrudes.

I have been coming back to this book for some thirty years now and it never ceases to stimulate the senses and please the eye.

Steam, Steel and Stars

Book reviews, Photographers

O. Winston Link’s masterpiece.


Click the picture for Amazon US. I get no payment if you do so.

Of all the books of railroad pictures you need know of only one. This one. Indeed, whenever photographs of breathtaking beauty are sought out, many in this book will be on the list of finalists regardless of subject.

Every picture in this book, all taken in the dying years of steam on the Norfolk and Western Railway of Virginia, is taken at night using flashbulbs, sometimes dozens at a time, using Link’s specially made apparatus.

Link shows that, to do something well, you have to be totally involved in, and in love with, your subject matter.

The composition, the insights into the last years of Norman Rockwell’s America, and the sheer love lavished on the work makes this book one of the very best picture books ever published, right up there with Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’, though the subject matter could hardly be more different.

You don’t care about steam trains? No matter. If you care about drop dead, fabulous photography, you should have this book on your shelf.