alan little’s weblog

parr(t) two

4th August 2008 permanent link

Going to photography exhibitions is expensive for me. Whenever I tell my wife I've been to a good one, she insists that I go again and take her with me this time. Which is actually wonderful. (I'm still jealous that she went to see an exhibition by the great Turkish photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan last year and I didn't. Admittedly she was in Istanbul on business at the time and I wasn't.) Yesterday we were at the Parrworld show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, second time for me.

Apart from paying admission twice, the other big financial hazard of photo exhibitions is museum bookshops. As Mike Johnston says, “If you're looking for good places to find excellent photo books, check your local art museum”. This time it was Edward Burtynsky's China that caught my eye in the Haus der Kunst bookshop. (Don't be misled by the cover photo, to my eye one of the weaker pictures in the book). Buying art books in museum bookshops is equivalent to buying CDs and teeshirts at concerts, except the good quality large format photography books are a lot more expensive.

Burtynsky was on my mind anyway, since I was trying a little while ago to convince Brian Micklethwait of his merits - with some success, it would seem.

Oddly, one picture that very much impressed me on my first visit to Parrworld – taken the P1 nightclub in the basement of the art gallery building – was gone this time, “at the request of the photographer” according to a little placard that was hanging in its place. I wonder what that was about.

we all love photography now

7th June 2008 permanent link

Martin Parr, whose exhibition at Munich’s Haus der Kunst I found interesting a couple of weeks ago, has a guest blogger spot on The Online Photographer recommending photography books.

I discovered whilst visiting Mr. Parr’s exhibition that the Haus der Kunst also has a very good bookshop. Harry Gruyaert’s Rivages is fantastic. Note To Self: casually mention this to Wife some time before Christmas. I also saw another marvelous photography book – with Martin Parr as one of the featured photographers – that I’m contemplating as an ideal Christmas present for somebody I know is one of my three regular blog readers, so I’m not going to name it now. And, come Christmas time, I will now have bitterly offended and alienated my other two regular readers. Life is hard.

buskers

22nd May 2008 permanent link

Genuinely good buskers are rare, and a great pleasure when you do find them. I found these guys today on my way from the U-Bahn to the art gallery. They were playing the Usual Suspects for classical busking - Eine kleine Nachtmusik, bits of the Four Seasons – and playing them well and with enthusiasm. I enjoyed them a lot.

And of course I had my new carry-around camera with me. This isn’t the world’s best or sharpest picture, sure – but I’m beginning to understand what people mean when they say the Olympus DSLRs produce subtly nice colours in their in-camera jpeg processing.

cruel and unusual

22nd May 2008 permanent link

The parrworld exhibition turned out to be thoroughly interesting and worthwhile. Martin Parr is a very talented photographer indeed, with a very cruel eye indeed. I personally can’t imagine being motivated to go out and produce art every day, driven by the loathing Martin Parr appears to feel for the people he takes pictures of.

(Top marks to Haus der Kunst, by the way, for having an exhibition in a major gallery, featuring a very good picture taken recently in the nightclub in the basement of the gallery building.)

The exhibition wasn’t just Martin Parr’s pictures: it also featured his large collection of mostly political kitsch art objects, and pictures by other photographers – presumably ones he likes, or who have influenced him, or whom has influenced. Or any combination thereof. One that particularly blew me away was an English suburban townscape by a guy named Mark Power who I had never heard of before, although googling briefly now, I discover he is in Magnum, much published and so on. The picture in question is the left hand one in the third group of three in this review of Mark Power’s book. It doesn’t look like much in a tiny thumbnail like this, but believe me it does in a big gallery print.

This is the photographic ability I really admire, far more than the ability to make spectacular pictures of spectacular things: the ability to make spectacular pictures of utterly mundane things.

freedom

22nd May 2008 permanent link

I just dropped my family at the airport for a ten day trip to visit relatives in Russia and, whilst of course i’m missing them terribly already (etc. etc.), I’m (also) contemplating what to do next with my new and precious freedom.

I have a couple of little projects planned for the house, but guess what: today is a public holiday in Bavaria. A quaint but irritating feature of German life is that everything is closed on Sundays and public holidays (with elaborate legal exceptions for, e.g., food shops in railway stations and – this is true – florists within a 500 metre radius of hospitals or cemeteries or on Mothers Day), so I can’t go out and buy the wood that I need for Project A.

I was also contemplating going into the office for a few hours. Sad, I know, but I do have a lot to get done at the moment and a bit of time without the phone ringing or people knocking on my door would be a bonus. Another quaint feature of German public holidays is my boss saying it would be fine for me to actually do some work today, but could the hours please appear somewhere else on my timesheet, because heaven forbid that the workers’ council should get wind of somebody who has a lot of work to do voluntarily showing up and doing it. If the Germans don’t start rethinking this kind of nonsense soon, the people who think there is no hope for the country will be right.

All these plans were in any case doomed when I drove past the Haus der Kunst on the way back from the airport and saw that it has an exhibition by Martin Parr. I don’t find Martin Parr’s work congenial – nor am I supposed to – but there’s no doubt that he’s a very talented photographer with a unique, if cynical, point of view. (At this point I am struggling and failing to come up with the right succinct English translation of the German word schief. Interesting.)

That, supplemented if necessary by the small but decent collection of Indian sculpture at the Ethnographic Museum just round the corner, followed perhaps by a spot of hanging out in coffee shops(*), should get me through the achingly lonely afternoon quite nicely.

(*) Lest I be misunderstood: unlike Dutch “coffee shops”, German coffee shops primarily sell coffee.

available darkness

19th May 2008 permanent link

Don’t use a flash out of respect for the natural lighting, even when there isn’t any.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

I like taking photographs in the dark. If I were really serious about it I would be saving up for the current high-ISO boss camera, the Nikon D3. From the reviews this sounds like the digital camera that finally overturns Kodak T-Max 3200 black & white film as the way to take photographs in the dark(*). The D3, however, is big, heavy and very expensive. I was interested to see if my new small, light, cheap Olympus carry-around camera would be at least adequate at night.

I would say it is, judging by the results of half an hour I spent standing at a busy crossroads in Pune one evening two weeks ago. The tiny little viewfinder is really dark at night, making composition tricky. The slow autofocus doesn’t help much either, and in theory the smaller Olympus sensor should be a stop or so less sensitive / noisier than a bigger one, other things being equal. But the results are, I would say, more than adequate. They’re sharp, with pleasing and accurate colour. They’re very noisy - not surprising considering I was desperately underexposing, in order to keep hand-holdable shutter speeds and avoid blowing the very contrasty highlights. But they clean up quite nicely with a bit of Noise Ninja in Photoshop, with a result that is probably slightly more grainy/noisy than I would have got with fast colour film, but with way better colour saturation and accuracy. I could never have done anything like this with a digicam. I don’t think I could have done all that much better with my D200, even allowing for brighter viewfinder, better autofocus and the fact that I have faster Nikon lenses.

(Always use flash outdoors in bright sunlight, by the way, unless you’re specifically aiming for a stark, high contrast black & white look. But do try to avoid it in all other circumstances.)

(*) “4–6 stops better than anything we had in the film days”, says Michael Reichmann.

digicam

17th May 2008 permanent link

My current main camera, a Nikon D200, is a spectacularly good camera and I’m very happy with it. I feel no pressing need for the slight improvements over it that the current second-from-top Nikon, the D300, offers; I will be sorely tempted by the nearly 25 migapixel, awesomely capable, huge and expensive D3X when it comes out later this year, but for the amount I’m shooting at the moment there’s no way I could even try to justify the expense.

I’m thinking in a different direction camera-wise at the moment. Both on my first business trip to Pune and meeting Michael Jennings and friends at a beer festival in Munich, it struck me what a cumbersome thing the D200 is to lug around when I’m not going somewhere primarily to take pictures. A big pro camera with big pro zoom lenses would be even heavier, and a lot of the time that simply isn’t what one needs. I’m thinking smaller.

But not too small. I find myself here on the verge of repeating what I wrote about small digicams two years ago:

I do have a little digicam, a Fuji F10 which I bought because it's supposed to be one of the faster-focusing and generally more responsive small cameras, and quite good for available light photography without flash. Supposedly. I still find it frustratingly slow in the kind of fairly low light indoor situations where I usually want to take snapshots. Its six megapixel picture quality makes reasonable small prints of my son for his grandmothers, but is nowhere near even a previous generation six megapixel SLR like a D70, let alone something more state of the art like the D200. The F10 is better than nothing, but if I were willing to lug my D200 around with me everywhere I would enjoy taking pictures a lot more, and get better pictures.

This is actually a big difference from the film days, and not one that is favourable to digital. A lot of small 35mm film cameras, including the little Yashicas and Olympuses I used to use, were (are) capable in the right circumstances of producing results every bit as good as professional SLRs. They had limitations – fixed lenses, slow autofocus and general lack of control – but the lenses were just as good as SLR lenses, and of course they used exactly the same sensors as their big brothers, in the form of bits of 35mm film. In most of the circumstances where you want to carry a small camera just in case, being theoretically capable of the same image quality as an SLR isn’t particularly relevant, but I did sometimes get some pretty decent pictures with film point’n’shoots.

The problem with small digicams isn’t lens quality. Plenty of them have good lenses. Small good lenses are easier and cheaper to make than big ones, and Fuji’s ability to make excellent lenses is beyond question. But the physics of small batteries and small sensors dictate that autofocus will always be slower, and pixel-for-pixel image quality will be worse. I personally have yet to take a good picture with a small digicam.

… none of which has changed, including – hey! – the exact same cameras that I still own and use (not much, in the case of the Fuji). And none of which means, as I also went on to say two years ago, that nobody can take great pictures with little digicams. Clearly lots of people can and do. But I don’t seem to be one of them.

So what to do? I want a camera that is significantly smaller and lighter than the D200, but a better digicam isn’t going to do the job. Olympus to the rescue, as it turns out, in the form of the (now) second-smallest DSLR in the world, the E410, on clearance sale at my local electronics superstore for €299 complete with a reputedly perfectly decent 14-42 (28-84 equivalent) kit zoom lens.

(Real Photographer Lawrence Ripsher talks more eloquently about the severe limitations of small digicams and reviews – and likes – the E410)

I find this amazing. Sure, the price I paid for the E410 is a stock clearance price because Olympus just started shipping a slightly improved and even (fractionally) smaller replacement model, the E420. Nevertheless: this is a ten megapixel DLSR for about a fifth of the price I paid for my D200 only a little over two years ago. The D200 is still a far more capable ten megapixel DSLR (I hope – if it turns out not to be it’ll find itself on ebay PDQ). The Olympus feels lightly built and delicate: I’ll have not be careful about throwing it casually in bags or coat pockets, or taking it out in less than perfect weather. Which is a serious limitation for a casual carry-everywhere camera, as is the fact that the slightly smaller sensor is generally reputed to have about a stop less low light usability. But if I seriously wanted an indestructible camera that can take pictures in total darkness [I do, I do] then I’d be back to thinking about the behemoth D3 that can shoot three stops faster than the Olympus, but weighs three times at more than ten times the price.

taking pictures of cameras: sad

Two weeks ago I was in India on business again, for the second time this year, and this time I only took the Olympus. First impressions: it’s a nice little camera. It's much less burdensome to carry around than the D200; it’s comfortable in a belt pouch, which the D200 very much isn’t. It has some drawbacks in comparison (as indeed it should at the price). Autofocus is slow and lacking in control. Highlights seem to blow out quite a bit more easily than the D200 – I haven’t done any like for like testing to confirm this, and shooting in the Indian midday sun is a challenge for any digital camera, but less dynamic range certainly would logically follow from the somewhat smaller sensor. Having to fiddle around on the screen to change shooting settings is slow and cumbersome compared to the dedicated buttons and switches that the bigger and heavier D200 has room for – although the Olympus menus are well organised which reduces the pain somewhat. The viewfinder is fine in daylight but terribly dark for night photography. But I like it. I didn’t buy it for “real” photography; I bought it as a super-digicam that is unobtrusive enough to carry around when I’m not primarily out to to take pictures, but capable enough that I can still take real pictures with it should the opportunity present itself. I think it will fill that niche pretty much perfectly.

mahatma gandhi road

9th May 2008 permanent link

People who were cremated and had their ashes scattered on the waters of a holy river clearly don’t “turn in their graves”, so: in an irony that doubtless has Mahatma Gandhi swirling in the Ganges, the main upmarket shopping street in many Indian cities is called “M G Road”.

M G Road in Pune, I only noticed last week on my third visit there, has modern glitzy shopfronts; but if you look above street level, many of those shopfronts are tacked on to ramshackle and charming Pune old town buildings.

two by two

20th April 2008 permanent link

Family trip to Munich zoo.

I suppose I could have claimed to have taken these in a park on the outskirts of Pune three weeks ago. Only people from Pune, and people who know that only South American monkeys have long prehensile tails, could have called my bluff. General knowledge from information placards at zoos is a wonderful thing – did you know polar bears are so well insulated that they are invisible to infrared sensors?

photography quotes

17th March 2008 permanent link

Cartier-Bresson got by with one lens … and Sebastiao Salgado uses three. You need more?
Mike Johnston

on the banks of the … gleissen

13th August 2007 permanent link

In a similar vein, my friend Andrew was chuffed when I said Henri Cartier-Bresson “wouldn't have been ashamed” of this:

© 2005 Andrew Haley

“No-one has ever said that to me before – and I suspect that no-one ever will again”

figures in the snow

13th August 2007 permanent link

Yesterday my wife and I took advantage of my mother-in-law’s visit for an art gallery visit sans child to the Alte Pinakothek. The Alte Pinakothek was the only one of Munich’s major galleries I hadn’t got round to so far; my wife had been before and came away unimpressed. It specialises in Renaissance and early modern European masters, and neither of us is much into saints, Madonnas or Flemish burghers. But I was sure there had to be something there worth looking at.

Sure enough there was, in the form of several marvellous pieces by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his confusingly-named but almost equally capable sons, Pieter Bruegel the Younger and Jan Bruegel the Elder.

Highlight of the day for me was my wife’s comment: “aren’t your pictures of kids sledging in the snow in Russia rather like Bruegel?” Well, would you care to guess how accidental that is, dear? Still it’s nice somebody noticed what I was trying, however feebly, to do.

cool camera

21st July 2007 permanent link

A Saturday Family Life Vignette.

I loaded up my Nikon FM2 with a roll of black & white film and took it for a walk round the zoo with my son today. I like to do this from time to time; there’s a lot to be said for autofocus and modern digital whizz-bangs, but there’s also a lot to be said for a camera where you press the button and it takes the picture immediately.

My son’s take on the matter:

Daddy, this camera is cool

Looks at back of camera. Works out that the little rectangular thingy where people too stupid to remember what film they were using used to put torn-off bits of film carton(*) isn’t a viewing screen.

But you can’t see the pictures can you?

No son.

Daddy, this camera is cool, but next time I want you to bring the other camera

Mister Diplomat.

(*) OK, ok, more likely pros who needed to know at a glance which was the one with the Kodachrome in and which was the one with the Tri-X.

war photographer

14th June 2007 permanent link

Yesterday I dropped Greatest Living War Photographer James Nachtwey’s name in a comment thread on Michael Jennings’ blog. This morning, surfing the online photographer [Greatest Living Photography Blog?] at breakfast, I noticed a link to a speech by Nachtwey accepting a journalism award.

James Nachtwey is a fantastic photographer, the only one whose work has ever caused me to have to walk out of an exhibition, sit down and cry. So this little coincidence seems like a good excuse to link to War Photographer, a very good documentary about his work that I went to see with my wife about a week before our son was born, my suggestion that there would be things in it that weren’t suitable viewing for a highly pregnant woman having been comprehensively ignored.

The Magnum Photo agency used to have very good online portfolios for their photographers, but have now shot themselves in the foot by hiding everything behind a subscription-only search wall.

acro yoga

1st May 2007 permanent link

I have some pictures from the Acro Yoga classes in Köln in April up on flickr.

I haven’t used flickr before. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of somebody else’s software automatically cropping my pictures to make thumbnails, messing with my colour balance etc. But a couple of people had asked about the pictures and were waiting for them, I haven’t touched my photo gallery pages for ages (should do something about that one day), and life is too short to edit HTML by hand. So I’ll see how it goes.

jealousy

12th April 2007 permanent link

I am jealous. My already outrageously well-travelled wife is on a business trip to Istanbul, where between meetings she managed to fit in a visit to Architectural Wonder Of The World the Hagia Sophia mosque / former cathedral, and (far more jealousy-inducing for me), an exhibition by brilliant Turkish photographer and film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

She’s bringing me back an exhibition catalogue and three of his DVDs, which we already tried to find on amazon.de and ebay.de but no go. Strange. Perhaps Germany’s large Turkish population wants a rose-tinted view of home and isn’t into gritty arthouse social realism.

I have Mike Johnston to thank for introducing me to Ceylan’s work.

I can’t be too jealous, though – this is just a quick dashed-off blog posting before I run out the door to catch a flight to Köln, where I will be hanging out with yoga babes at the Yoga Conference Germany 2007. Köln Cathedral ain’t the Hagia Sophia, nor am I aware of any current photo exhibitions there by artists as talented as Pieter Bruegel the Elder – but I’ll be disappointed if my yoga classes aren’t considerably more fun than Maria’s business meetings.

lessons in seeing

8th April 2007 permanent link

Bruce Robbins and Sharon Akler both, coincidentally, emailed me this week about my years-old review of Magnum Landscape – thus causing me to have another look at the book, which I hadn’t opened for a while. It's still my Desert Island Photography Book; thanks, Bruce and Sharon.

Bruce shakes his head over a reviewer on amazon.co.uk who thinks “very few of the images are truly outstanding”. S/he is is of course entitled to his/her opinion even though it is completely wrong.

I found the review after mine on amazon.com interesting, where the guy complains bitterly about the reproduction quality of the pictures in Landscape compared to Magnum Degrees. My thoughts about this:

• I’ve never seen a book reproduction that remotely compares to seeing a real print in an exhibition. Therefore I almost never buy exhibition catalogues (including Magnum Degrees) at the exhibition. If I buy them at all, I wait until several months afterwards when I can pick up remaindered copies much cheaper in art bookshops, after my memories of the glories of the exhibition prints have faded somewhat.
• Degrees is a big, expensive, glossy production; Landscape is a small, cheap, non-glossy production. Looking at some of the pictures that are in both side by side, I still find the reproductions in Landscape perfectly adequate. Matte looks different from gloss, it's not automatically worse.
• I didn’t find the repro quality of Degrees that great either, see above
• The actual point I want to make here: this is not landscape photography as we normally think of it. This is landscape photography of a kind that depends for its power on composition and conception, on seeing the non-obvious, not on mind-blowingly detailed and technically impressive huge prints of mind-blowingly tedious and clichéd subject matter.

Here’s your list of who’s in the book, Sharon:

Abbas · Eve Arnold · Micha Bar-Am · Bruno Barbey · Ian Berry · Werner Bischof · René Burri · Cornell Capa · Robert Capa · Henri Carier-Bresson · Bruce Davidson · Carl de Keyzer · Luc Delahaye · Raymond Depardon · Nikos Economopoulos · Elliott Erwitt · Martine Franck · Stuart Franklin · Leonard Freed · Paul Fusco · Jean Gaumy · Burt Glinn · Harry Gruyaert · Ernst Haaas · Erich Hartmann · David Alan Harvey · Thomas Höpker · David Hurn · Richard Kalvar · Josef Koudelka · Hiroji Kubota · Guy Le Querrec · Paul Lowe · Costa Manos · Peter Marlow · Steve McCurry · Susan Meiselas · Inge Morath · James Nachtwey · Martin Parr · Gilles Peress · Gueorgui Pinkhassov · Raghu Rai · Marc Riboud · Miguel Rio Branco · George Rodger · Ferdinando Scianna · Chris Steele-Perkins · Dennis Stock · Larry Towell · John Vink · Alex Webb · Patrick Zachmann

photography quotes

7th March 2007 permanent link

You mustn't want. You must be receptive.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, courtesy of Mike Johnston

a picture occasionally

19th October 2006 permanent link

Blogging remains, and will remain, sporadic as long as I remain without a laptop and the rest of my family continue have their own ideas about how I might like to spend my time at home.

This week, however, my wife’s ideas about how I might like to spend my time included taking a midweek break to go and enjoy glorious autumn weather in the mountains. Excellent idea. Here’s how the skyscape over the Grossvenediger in the Austrian Alps looked yesterday:

ted orland

3rd August 2006 permanent link

I've been an admirer of Ted Orland's book Art and Fear for years.

What I first discovered today, thanks to a link from Paul Butzi on The Online Photographer is that he is a damn fine photographer.

(Note To Self: in future, you might want to consider finding out whether somebody is actually a capable artist before spending years believing their advice about how to do art)

photo rules

27th June 2006 permanent link

Mike Johnston has a couple of very funny satirical pieces: internet-forum-style critiques of classic photographs by famous great photographers.

I think he thought he was making it up, until he found this real life example of some folks recommending that a picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson should be deleted from flickr.

Hmm. Perhaps the foks on flickr are taking the piss too. Even if they’re not, they’re entitled to their opinion. Not every photograph H C-B ever took is an immortal masterpiece, and anybody is entitled to their own opinion even about the ones that most people think are. No artist’s work is entitled to unthinking reverence from everybody. I personally happen to think the picture in question is pretty damn fine though.

Mike’s The Online Photographer is, incidentally, easily the best talking-about-photography blog on the web today.

a picture a week (8)

30th May 2006 permanent link

This one is a genuine film scan, shot in 2002 on traditional Fuji Reala on a retro-even-then Nikon FM2.

My first – and so far, only – visit to Venice was with Maria when she was pregnant with our first – and so far, only – child. Being an expectant father changes your perspectives. Venice is fascinating and amazingly beautiful, but it also occurred to me that it must be a lousy place to bring up kids. There are no trees or green spaces for them to play; you can’t let them run in the streets for fear they might fall in and drown. Venetians seem to be of the same opinion: the population of the city has halved in the last fifty years.

The few kids who are there are quite photogenic playing in the flooded squares at high tide, though.

a picture a “week” (7)

22nd May 2006 permanent link

Morning mist in the Cardamom Hills, Kerala, India, January 2000.

This one has been in my Indian landscapes gallery for ages, but Denys Bourque reminded me of it last week by asking if he could use it to illustrate a report he is producing on forest conservation work in the Indian hill regions. Glad to be able to support a good cause.

It isn’t a great picture. It was one of those ones where you think it might be when you press the button, but then you see the print a couple of weeks later and it isn’t. C’est la vie. (At least these days with digital you get the disappointment over with sooner) I’m still fond of it though. It brings back memories of my first trip to India. I was mainly there to study yoga with Lino Miele, but for a couple of days my friend Jeffrey and I rented motorbikes and headed for the hills. Those were the most memorable days of the trip for me: going to yoga class then sitting on the beach is all very well, but for me actually seeing a bit of India away from heavily westernised beach resorts was important too.

Seeing the shop print of this one was also a big step on my road to digital photography. The whole point of the composition, for what it’s worth, is the way the layers of mist are interleaved with the hills. In the print I got back from the lab everything beyond the mountain in the foreground was just blurry mist. I was sure that couldn’t be right, so I had a careful look at the negative and sure enough, the bands of mist and hills were there just as I wanted them to be. So I went out and bought a film scanner, and this picture was one of the first to appear on alanlittle.org a few months later.

(Whereas now, I haven’t shot a roll of film for over a year but I’m thinking seriously about going back to outsourced printing, because trying to get a decent colour match on inkjet printers I can afford is just such a time-consuming and endlessly frustrating bastard of a struggle. I simply can’t get my Epson R800 to come out with skin tones I’m happy with for people shots)

photography quotes

16th April 2006 permanent link

Photography is the power of observation, not the application of technology.
Ken Rockwell

a picture a week (6)

25th March 2006 permanent link

from a castle window

Photos of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria’s castle at Neuschwanstein are an appalling tourist cliché and could not therefore possibly qualify for A Photo A Week. Photos of the view from Neuschwanstein are ok though.

It’s astonishing what modern cameras and lenses are capable of. The tree in that picture is well over half a mile away. Here’s what it looks like in the full size image (unsharpened on the left, and on the right with Photoshop Smart Sharpening applied):

Those fence posts underneath the tree that you can barely see? At 100% you can clearly see the wire:

Holy Shit. That wire, remember, is well over half a mile away.

And this with the Nikon gear I can afford, which is very good but not quite the absolute best: a D200 with the 180mm f2.8 lens. A similar but truly state of the art setup – the D2X with the 200mm f2 – might produce just-about-perceptibly better results, but at over four times the price I’d be well into diminishing returns for the extra money.

a picture a week (5)

13th March 2006 permanent link

yoga class – learning to fall

Digital cameras – good digital SLRs at any rate – beat film hands down for taking pictures in the dark on any practical measure of resolution, tolerable grain/noise, ability to check that you’re getting exposure right in tricky lighting, etc., etc. They still don’t come close to fast black & white film – in this case Kodak TMax 3200 – for beauty.

a picture a week (4)

5th March 2006 permanent link

An Apologia: my Photo A Week project was supposed to be about digging worthwhile old pictures out of my my slide cupboard. Until such time as it eventually succeeds, my quest to take a great photograph in Munich’s Westpark is nobody’s problem but my own. And snow-covered trees are an appallingly tedious photographic cliché except in the hands of talented photographers (such as the cinematographer who shot the early scenes of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe – Donald McAlpine, says imdb)

Nevertheless: even in Munich, an hour’s drive from the Alps, the heaviest snowfall in a century doesn’t happen very often; and when it does, those slides don’t scan themselves while I’m out sledging with small children. It’s all a question of priorities

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Lantern Waste:

the state of the art

4th March 2006 permanent link

what if any are the advantages of the silver halide method of recording images compared to the digital alternative? … The massive change from classical silver halide photography to solid state imagery has been completed by now and the chemical recording of images will become a tiny niche, cared for by a handful of aficionados, as is the case with the vinyl LP record.

… says Leica expert Erwin Puts in an interesting essay that I recently dug out of my to_read list. In it he talks about Leica rangefinder cameras – his great love – their place in the history of photography (the golden age of photojournalism), and the particular style and aesthetic that was built upon their use. The same sort of stuff I talked about my comments on photojournalism in the Second World War, except much better informed and more thought through.

His key point is that different tools and materials encourage different aesthetics, make different things possible in art, and this will continue to be true in the digital photography era. Shooting black & white chemical film in mechanical cameras is an anachronism, no matter how beautifully made the cameras are. There are things you can do, looks you can achieve, with Leicas, available light and black & white film that you can’t with digital – but vice versa too.

I’ve only been taking pictures seriously for ten years and have never set foot in a darkroom. (Actually, a did have a nice little Ricoh rangefinder in my early 20s and enjoyed taking pictures with it, but it got hurt on a climbing trip and didn’t get round to replacing it until many years later. That was a phase of my life when I was lost and confused in many ways.) I’m not a hoary old film photography veteran. But I did learn photography with a 35mm film SLR – my Nikon FM2 which I will never part with even when I do get around to selling, scrapping or giving away all my other film cameras. And even though I shoot nearly all digital these days, I’m still very much an SLR-mindset shooter. Which perhaps makes me a dinosaur from a previous generation too.

I do have a little digicam, a Fuji F10 which I bought because it's supposed to be one of the faster-focusing and generally more responsive small cameras, and quite good for available light photography without flash. Supposedly. I still find it frustratingly slow in the kind of fairly low light indoor situations where I usually want to take snapshots. Its six megapixel picture quality makes reasonable small prints of my son for his grandmothers, but is nowhere near even a previous generation six megapixel SLR like a D70, let alone something more state of the art like the D200. The F10 is better than nothing, but if I were willing to lug my D200 around with me everywhere I would enjoy taking pictures a lot more, and get better pictures.

This is actually a big difference from the film days, and not one that is favourable to digital. A lot of small 35mm film cameras, including the little Yashicas and Olympuses I used to use, were (are) capable in the right circumstances of producing results every bit as good as professional SLRs. They had limitations – fixed lenses, slow autofocus and general lack of control – but the lenses were just as good as SLR lenses, and of course they used exactly the same sensors as their big brothers, in the form of bits of 35mm film. In most of the circumstances where you want to carry a small camera just in case, being theoretically capable of the same image quality as an SLR isn’t particularly relevant, but I did sometimes get some pretty decent pictures with film point’n’shoots.

The problem with small digicams isn’t lens quality. Plenty of them have good lenses. Small good lenses are easier and cheaper to make than big ones, and Fuji’s ability to make excellent lenses is beyond question. But the physics of small batteries and small sensors dictate that autofocus will always be slower, and pixel-for-pixel image quality will be worse. I personally have yet to take a good picture with a small digicam.

I’m not suggesting it can’t be done, though, and that’s the whole point. Just as with the switch from rangefinder to SLR photography that Erwin Puts writes about, there will be people who create marvellous pictures that take advantage of the strengths of small digital cameras, and that will have an aesthetic of their own that is different from the era of 35mm SLR photography. Alex Majoli, who won Photojournalist Of The Year 2004 using Olympus digicams, might be one of those people.

(There are other things too about the new digital world that aren’t improvements – everything has its trade-offs. We’re too dependent now on expensive, fragile, battery-hungry electronic gadgets compared to the days when all the storage and electricity you needed was a bag of film and a tiny little battery for the lightmeter that you had to remember to change every couple of years. But the places where those things are an advantage don’t feature prominently at the moment in my life as a responsible husband-and-father – the days of journeys by bus and motorbike around rural India, and week long hikes in the Arizona desert, are behind me for the time being. Pity. I can see the D200 making a lovely job of red dust-haze Deccan twilight.)

UPDATE: Steve Crandall has a friend who is a professional fashion and ad photographer, who says he is more creative and has more fun with his little pocket digicam. That I am not says more about my personal prejudices and limitations than those of digicams.

a picture a week (3)

28th February 2006 permanent link

Cityscape: Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, July 2000.

I was in NY to attend a yoga workshop with Pattabhi Jois. Given his sometimes-somewhat fearsome reputation, I wanted to check him out before taking the plunge and going on a big trip to Mysore. His teaching tour in 2000 included New York, so it also seemed like a good chance to get acquainted with that wonderful, wonderful city.

The yoga classes were great. I was single at the time and didn’t know anybody in NY, so outside of class was a bit lonely at times until my friend Jeffrey showed up for the second week – but at least I had plenty of time for wandering about with a camera without having to worry about what anybody else would think. At the time I was only just starting to get to grips with digital imaging, struggling to learn how to scan film, how to drive Photoshop etc. I put some of my yoga class photos online (they were one of the first things on alanlittle.org) but it was an awful lot of work, and I never got round to doing anything with any of the non-yoga photos from the trip even though I was pretty pleased with some of them. Now I have a family, a more demanding job and much less free time than I had five years ago, but my photo-processing technique is also a lot slicker than it was (and I’m running Photoshop on a much faster computer). And it’s important to still make an effort to keep in touch with the creative process.

(about) a picture a week (2)

24th February 2006 permanent link

Southwold beach, 2nd January 2006. Conclusion reached by my son on his first-ever visit to the seaside: “wet, wet, wet and more wet”. Conclusion reached by me: low-angle winter sunlight on the English east coast can be astonishingly beautiful. I realise I am not the first person to have noticed this, although I may well have been one of the first to test the Nikon D200’s ability to capture it. Test passed with flying colours, I would say.

Another picture of the same scene, however, shows that you can’t get away with shooting straight into the low sun with a thirty year old cheap lens with no lens hood. Not even if that thirty year old cheap lens is the Nikon Series E 100mm, highly rated even by discerning lens connoissuers.

a picture a week (1)

12th February 2006 permanent link

This is the room in Mysore where Pattabhi Jois and BKS Iyengar – probably the most famous yoga teachers in the world today – studied in the 1930s as young men with their teacher, T. Krishnamacharya. Another highly respected senior yoga teacher, BNS Iyengar, also a former Krishnamacharya pupil, still has his yoga school in some upstairs rooms in the same building.

Russell has been visiting here lately.

a photo a week

6th February 2006 permanent link

If it’s worth taking time to look at other people’s photos, it’s worth making an effort to do something with my own too. Since I bought my Nikon D70 in the summer of 2004, my entire lifetime’s creative output up to that point, in the form of thousands of slides & negatives, has been locked in a cupboard while my film scanner sits next to my Mac gathering dust. Time to start doing something with them. So, New Year’s Resolution: from now on, A Photo A Week.

recharging

6th February 2006 permanent link

And then you go to the galleries and museums. You look at those fine books on photography and you see what the masters did long before you knew the difference between Tri-X and Ektachrome. Will you ever shoot a better picture than those Cartier-Bresson street scenes of the 1940s? Will you ever come near the intensity of a Gene Smith reportage? You discover that any imaginable situation has beeen photographed already - the moment of birth and the split second of death, desperation and joy, man on the moon and life in the womb.

Now they are working on computers that will store every photograph that exists in the world. You want a picture of spear-fishing in Surinam? Push the right buttons and you'll see it in milliseconds. The world on magnetic disks wll be right at our fingertips. Why bother to send a photographer all the way to South America? Why bother to go out into the heat and cold of the real world and take even more pictures, adding to the millions that exist already, stored away in the electronic maze? Will photography eventually make itself obsolete through overproduction?

… it takes a lot of courage (or arrogance) for any photographer to go out again and again taking even more pictures to add to the ever-growing abundance of photography

That prescient circa 1980 quote from Munich born, New York resident photojournalist Thomas Höpker has been at the top of my old writing-about-photography page for ages. But I wasn’t particularly familiar with Höpker’s work, so when I saw that the Munich City Museum is showing a fifty year retrospective I went to check it out.

Not the most amazing photo exhibition I’ve ever seen, but some pretty damn fine stuff. You can see a formal web portfolio of Höpker’s work at Magnum Photo, and an informal one at google image search.

One thing that strikes me about some of the older photos – blacks & white street photos of kids in Germany in the fifties and sixties – is “oh my god, that’s me”. My brother and sister and I were little kids on a cobbled street with terraced houses in the sixties – did we really look that old-fashioned? My home town hadn’t been heavily bombed in the war, unlike the ones photojournalists generally liked to take pictures of in those days; but my Dad remembered and could tell us exactly where each of the few bombs did fall (those having been the exciting bits of his childhood).

Once again I learn that there is a huge difference between seeing a real photographic print, big and properly lit, and seeing even a good reproduction in a book. The museum had the book of the show for sale, which even included some very impressive pictures that weren’t in the show, but the ones that were looked so flat and lifeless in a book compared to the “real thing” on the gallery wall that I didn’t bother. (As usual, there’s a good chance I probably will buy the book in a few months time when I see it somewhere remaindered, and my memories of what the “real thing” looked like have faded)

When you’re a parent of a small child you learn to be very assertive about needing and taking time for yourself. I was in town with my son, shopping for my wife’s birthday present, when I saw that this exhibition was on. Hmm. Good photo exhibition. I’m going. And although I would much prefer to go with my wife than alone, there’s no way I’m willing to try to look at something like that with a three year old in tow. My wife is away on business this week, so I decided I was entitled to a bit of preemptive battery charging before three days as a single dad and awarded myself Sunday morning off from husband-and-father duties.

Only a couple of hours though, so: into the museum. Straight to the photos, glancing neither to the left nor to the right at other exhibits. Look at photos. Museum coffee shop looks tempting afterwards, but if I do then I won’t have time for yoga practice before my friend’s birthday party in the afternoon. (Nearly all my [remaining] friends have small children too, so social events tend to start early) So no coffee: straight home, mat out, practice.

Arrived home to find the rest of my family limping around complaining about their bruised backs having had a huge sledge crash. Shit happens.

emergency camera

19th November 2005 permanent link

We just had our first snowfall of the year, and there are still a few autumn leaves on the trees. The result in our local park was extraordinarily beautiful when Jack & I went for a walk this morning.

Landscape photography doesn’t mix well with keeping an eye on an energetic toddler. I didn’t even think I had a camera with me. Then I remembered I did, but you’ll have to be content with my phone’s impressionistic effort:

photography quotes

22nd October 2005 permanent link

Needless technical perfection is a bad thing in creative art.
Ken Rockwell

Jein, as we like to say to such things in Bavaria. Yes, but … you need to be very sure that being technically immaculate is not relevant, or even directly contrary, to the artistic impression you are consciously working to produce. Or be producing things that are not “realistic” representations of reality, but doing so in a technically perfect manner – which I think is what Ken is actually trying to do. Both are different from just sloppiness or not knowing the difference between technically good and bad.

unrealistic?

16th October 2005 permanent link

You may be spending too much time in Photoshop if:

… you’re out for a bike ride with your family on a cool, clear Autumn morning and you see the outline of a tree against the sky, and you think “nah, that’s oversharpened. Doesn’t look realistic.”

noises off

10th October 2005 permanent link

Comments on other peoples’ blogs:

Steve Crandall has some figures on efficiencies of cycling versus other modes of transport that I think are overoptimistic. See my comment. Steve’s source, for example, has the statistic: “elite athletes produce 6 and sometimes 7 watts/kg for several hours”. In this Tour de France coach’s diary, I find that Lance Armstrong and other top ten Tour riders can sustain that output level for twenty minutes in short time trials. Over several hours on long road stages the power output is less than half that. I doubt the existence of athletes so elite they are twice as fit as Lance Armstrong.

Norm Geras, meanwhile, addresses the question of why it would be worth going to see an exhibition of photos by Diane Arbus if you’re already familiar with them, even already have a book with them in? Norm doesn’t have comments (shocking!) so I emailed him to point out that an actual photographic print is a very different thing from a reproduction in a book, even a good one. This is especially true of photos by technical virtuosi like Edward Weston or Ansel Adams, as I experienced when I went to the Ansel Adams centenary exhibition:

Seeing the actual prints also makes sense of some of what John Szarkowski has to say in the book that accompanies the exhibition. He says that during the later years of his life, Adams took fewer new pictures, or fewer that he liked, and concentrated instead on ’re-interpretations’ of earlier negatives. And Szarkowski feels that the later prints – intenser, more contrasty – are heavy-handed and melodramatic compared to the earlier prints. Having seen the prints he’s talking about, I agree. He shows two examples – one of aspens in New Mexico, a print circa 1960 and one from 1976; and another of Denali (Mt McKinley) – again, a print from the ’40s or ’50s and one from the ’70s. The earlier aspens print is gently, ethereally beautiful (melancholy, my girlfriend Maria says). The ’70s print also has a certain – different – beauty viewed close up, but from further away it just looks harsh. Same with the two Denalis. You can’t see this at all in the book (which I therefore didn’t buy). In the reproductions there, the ’70s prints look good, the earlier prints just look grey and flat and lifeless. You can’t see this sort of thing in a book, you have to be looking at a real print.

Even if (for some bizarre personal reason) you’re not fascinated with how the prints are produced from a technical perspective, the difference in how they look is still going to have some impact on how you experience them. It’s not as extreme as the shock I had seeing a real Van Gogh for the first time – prints in books give you no idea of the intense, heavy, three-dimensional brushwork – but it’s there. It’s there for more photojournalistic pictures too. I didn’t buy the book of the Magnum Photo fifitieth anniversary show at the show, because I was so disappointed by how the reproductions looked when I’d just seen the real thing. I bought it later when the book was cheaper and the memories had faded.

photography quotes

9th October 2005 permanent link

you have to die of something, and why not die getting a good photo

Asks Brian Micklethwait, who clearly has his priorities in life properly sorted out.

moma!

20th September 2005 permanent link

Five years ago, on my first visit to New York, I was absolutely floored by the Museum of Modern Art. Since then the museum has had a spell of exile in Queens while its midtown Manhattan site was completely rebuilt and greatly enlarged. Now it’s back. The old MoMA was a hard act to follow.

Things that struck me about the new one …

Edward Weston’s prints: not for their subject matter, which is irrelevant, but for their sheer technical beauty – lustrous depth, rich contrast, incredible sharpness. Can nobody print black & white photographs like that any more? Certainly nobody whose work is on show in MoMA at the moment can – Frank Gohlke’s prints, for example, are shockingly flat and muddy by comparison.

(Frank Gohlke might argue – certainly anybody could argue – that producing prints that are technically immaculate in that particular highly abstract Weston way is not the only legitimate artistic goal in photography. He/they would be right. It’s just difficult for me personally, having just been struck dumb by the sheer excellence of Weston’s prints to the point where my wife almost had to drag me from the room, to then go and look at technically inferior prints immediately afterwards, whatever the non-technical merits of the pictures might be)

Joel Sternfeld’s pictures of the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway on Manhattan’s west side.

I gather they have some stuff by painters and sculptors too, although remarkably little of it post-Jackson Pollock – i.e. in the last fifty years – seems to be interesting in any way.

The new building. Michael Blowhard points out that Terry Teachout is most unimpressed. I liked it, as a building, for two main reasons:

(1) I found the huge atrium very impressive.

(2) Windows. Michael, I know, and Terry, I assume, are long-time Manhattanites and might therefore be jaded and inclined to overlook the fact that Manhattan itself is the ultimate work of Modern Art. I, on only my second visit to the city, am not and find just walking around the place looking at it hugely exciting. The new MoMA has windows that offer some great views of the fantastic surroundings. I don’t remember windows or being able to see the surroundings anywhere in the old MoMA except the courtyard.

So I found the new building impressive as a building. But I liked the old MoMA too, I didn’t find this visit such a mind-blowing experience as my first one. That was my most awe-inspiring art gallery experience ever by far. Why not? This time I wasn’t seeing the amazing MoMA collection for the first time. Maybe this time they didn’t have the right things on display to push my buttons – there is nowhere near enough photography on show given the alleged vastness of the new display space; nor do they have the old hit-them-right-between-the-eyes-right-away “highlights of the collection” room right by the entrance. Pollock, Monet, van Gogh, Picasso … That was an excellent idea. And this time I was there on Labor Day so it was very busy.

Is the new building actually a better or worse place for viewing art than the old one? I certainly don’t dislike it the way Terry does, but I wouldn’t say it was obviously a huge improvement either.

“The Lenin's Tomb of Modern Art”, says Robert Locke. “Fill ’er up”, says Edward Winkleman.

one that got away

23rd August 2005 permanent link

But before I go, a cheeky re-post of an old piece from 2001 that I found whilst looking round the dusty attics of my pre-blog photography pages.

Imagine a photograph. A low hill in the New Mexico desert. Sagebrush under a black stormcloud sky. A red dirt road runs up diagonally leftward from the bottom right of the frame. At the top of the hill, a windmill glows against the black sky, pinpointed by the last gleam of the sun before the storm closes in.

I thought “wow, look at that” and didn’t stop. Two days before it had dumped a metre of snow in one night – Easter Sunday 1999, and the biggest snowfall of the year according to the locals I talked to. Driving my rented four wheel drive across the Jemez mountains west of Santa Fe the day after the blizzard was great fun – starting in the morning, with the whole day to get myself out, or hope for somebody to come by, if I got stuck. But this time it was five in the afternoon, I had thirty miles of dirt road to go before I got to the highway, then another fifty to the next small town and motel. I wanted to stop and get the camera out but I told myself not to take a stupid risk for the sake of a picture. By the time I reached what passes for civilization in northwestern New Mexico it had been snowing hard for ten miles.

Ansel would have screeched to a halt anyway, set up his tripod and eight by ten view camera in two minutes, and produced another Moonrise, Hernandez. And either got caught out in the blizzard or not, but not cared too much either way.

Some of the ones you don’t get stick in the mind’s eye the most. Besides, it probably looks better there than I could have managed on film.

commercial policy

20th July 2005 permanent link

It seems to be quite the thing lately for bloggers to complain about being “spammed” by marketing and PR people. I have mixed views on this.

I get a lot of requests for links from commercial yoga sites. These I generally ignore or politely decline – the latter if the people concerned have made the effort to write personally rather than just indiscriminately spamming me. I make exceptions for sites like Purple Valley Yoga, where they have yoga interests very close to my own and I know from other sources that they have a good reputation.

I would gladly prostitute myself for photographic toys, but sadly nobody has ever taken me up on my offer to do so.

And the other day I got a mail from Ross Stensrud of Fortuna Classical, whose company apparently makes an audiophile-grade hard disk jukebox that comes preloaded with classical music metadata. As Ross says, this is exactly what I described last year:

Somebody who is willing to spend … thousands of dollars for a … digital jukebox might well also want it to come with some decent metadata  (i.e. not the crap that is in CDDB) pre-loaded rather than having to key everything in themselves from scratch.

I’ve never used Fortuna’s products, and the only piece of audio gear I might personally be in the market for right now is an Airport Express. But since Ross has made the effort to search for websites that might be relevant to his products, actually read them (this is the crucial step, folks) and send individual emails, I wish him every success.

yoga workshop pictures

3rd July 2005 permanent link

Just returned from a great weekend in Berlin, attending a weekend course with David Williams. David is one of the most experienced western ashtanga vinyasa yoga practitioners who first learned the system in the mid ’70s. Interesting perspectives, quite significantly different from how a lot of people are approaching their yoga these days.

Notes to follow, meanwhile here are some pictures.

Many thanks to David, and to Henning of the Prenzlauer Berg Yoga Shala who organised the event.

This is one of the great beauties of digital photography. The event finished this morning, and the same day I have the pictures edited on the flight home and ready go to on the web. Try doing that with film. I used to be able to go the the lab to drop film off, go to the lab again to collect it, spend a whole evening scanning film (and did anybody, ever, not hate doing that?) and have the pictures up within a few days; but that was before I was a father. It would never happen now.

photojournalism in the desert

18th June 2005 permanent link

Having been impressed by Stephen Bungay’s book about the Battle of Britain last year, I’m currently reading his one on El Alamein. Which I’m not finding so impressive.

The photos are interesting though. They’re contemporary press photos, taken by not-now-famous photojournalists of the time. A lot of them are pretty good, but it struck me that they’re good in a way that’s very different from the better known black & white photojournalism style of the 50s and ’60s. Even in small book reproductions you can see that these are technically lovely black & white photographs. Razor sharp, beautifully subtle tones – especially considering the harsh desert sunlight they were shot in. The lighting is consistently high key – predominantly pale tones, contrast and areas of heavy shadow not used heavily as compositional features. But the compositions are stiff, formal, posed-looking. Often because they were posed: Bungay mentions that one picture, famous at the time, shows Australian infantry assaulting their own cookhouse for the camera.

Partly, perhaps, the 1940s guys, although competent, just weren’t as good as some of the great photojournalists of the post-war years. (Raymond Depardon, whose career began in the 1960s, is the great desert photographer). There’s more to it than that though. It’s about differences in both equipment and attitude, with the equipment making the attitude possible. 1940s press photographers were mostly still using large format cameras with 4x5 inch sheet film. Crown Graphics and the like (on the Allied side: the Germans might have already had somewhat smaller Rolleis). With a piece of film roughly ten times the size of a 35mm negative, these things then – and still to this day – produced images with resolution and tonality no 35mm camera (and only digital cameras costing tens of thousands today) could come close to. But they were big, clumsy, slow-handling beasts, difficult to use rapidly in fast-changing situations like battlefields.

High quality small cameras shooting 35mm movie film were first developed in the 1930s by Oscar Barnack of Leica, followed by the first Nikon SLRs in the ’60s. Leicas weren’t widely available outside Germany until after the war, but when they were they made a whole new approach possible. They couldn’t come close to the technical quality of black & white pictures from the old press cameras, but their lightness and speed of use made a much more “authentic”, genuinely close-to-the-action-style possible. This goes along with much more fluid, spontaneous-looking composition.

The most famous postwar photo agency, Magnum, was founded in 1948 by a small group of already well known photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson and American war photographer Robert Capa, whose photos of the Normandy landings in 1944 were one of the best known early example of the new style. The Magnum guys and others even took the technical limitations of what could be done then with tiny little black & white negatives and made them into a new and different photo-verité aesthetic: lots of heavy contrast to make strong compositional blocks, in place of smooth midtones and sharp detail. You couldn’t do those anyway with 35mm film, no matter how mechanically and optically wonderful your Leica was.

“Spontaneous-looking composition” doesn’t mean “pointing a camera at random and firing away”. The pictures of, to take two examples, Cartier-Bresson or the great contemporary war photographer James Nachtwey, are masterpieces of elegant composition. It’s just that they are such highly-practiced masters that they can do it quickly and almost unconsciously, watching for the moment in fast-moving situations. And maybe because they’ve trained themselves to do it instinctively, it isn't obvious what they’re doing. Not to me anyway. I’ve spent hours gazing at pictures by both of them, asking “How did he do that? Why does this have such a strong impact?” and not coming up with answers.

(The standard of photo reproduction in books, even in cheap paperbacks, seems to be higher than it was a few years ago - or maybe Mr Bungay’s publishers Aurum, who I haven’t otherwise heard of, are particularly good)

I’m writing this one the train, unfortunately, so I can’t look for online examples of the kinds of photograph I’m talking about. I might try to dig some up later.

tokina 12-24 first impressions

18th May 2005 permanent link

One of the things I have missed in the year I have had my D70 is the ability to take proper wide angle pictures. I don’t personally need or want ultra-ultra-wide: the 24mm is one of my favourite film lenses but composing effectively even with that is a challenge, and I’ve found I can’t really handle anything much wider. But still, 24 is 24 and the wide end of the 18-70 zoom that I got with the D70 (equivalent to about a 27mm perspective) just isn’t quite wide enough.

Paying over a thousand bucks for Nikon’s 12-24mm zoom isn’t an option for me at the moment, so I was very interested when Tokina came out with their 12-24. A lot of reviewers seem to think it is optically of similar quality to the Nikon at half the price; it seems to lack only things that, for me, are irrelevant in a wide angle lens anyway like fast internal autofocus.

They seem to be selling faster than Tokina can make them; my local shop let me had a play with a display/demo one today but said they couldn’t sell it to me and didn’t know how long it would take if I ordered one.

build quality & handling

I’m impressed. General feel is very solid. More neat & compact than I was expecting; very unobtrusive on a D70 body.

Zoom ring: I can’t compare to Nikon professional zooms as I’ve never used any. Way better than Nikon consumer zooms I have used (original 24-120, 18-70)

Manual focus ring: better than Nikon AF primes I use regularly (24, 50 1.8, 180)

AF performance: not relevant for the type of photography I do, especially for a wide angle.

test shots

Very unscientific quick’n’dirty test (standing in a shop with my 2 year old son and a borrowed camera & lens)

12, 18 & 24mm at f4 and f8, just handhelds pointed along the shop counter. And I didn’t have anything with me to compare it with – if/when I get one, I will do comparisons with the 18-70 at its wide end (should be no contest?) and the 24 prime (might be interesting).

Big methodological mistake: the area where I had most usable detail for comparison – lots of writing – was bottom right. But I quickly noticed that was close enough to the camera that differences in depth of field made any kind of assessment of comparative sharpness between f4 and f8 meaningless, even at 12mm. Note to self: use a flatter subject next time.

Methodological mistake #2: I was using the shop’s D70S. I forget to set it to raw: it was taking 3000 x 2000 jpegs with sharpness/contrast/saturation set to Normal.

Methodological mistake #3: I was shooting handheld indoors, and had to set the ISO to 400 to get a shutter speed I could handhold at f8. If there’s slightly more visible noise in the f8 shots, ignore it.

Methdological caveats aside, my general impression is: impressed again.

Corner pictures are actual pixels crops from untouched from-the-camera jpegs. I’m not going to waste time or bandwidth with centre crops: in-focus objects at the centre of the picture are sharp.

12mm

12mm f4

If I buy this lens, it won’t be primarily to use it at the very wide end. Nevertheless, here if anywhere is where I would expect to see obvious weaknesses.

Barrel distortion is clearly visible but not dreadful. Light falloff in the corners is visible at f4 if you look for it, but not blatantly obvious/objectionable to my eye.

Let's have a look in the top left hand corner:

12mm f4 corner	12mm f8 corner

What I see here: f4 is softer but not terrribly so. Chromatic aberration around the edges of the spotlight is visible in both pictures but more pronounced at f4.

There appears to be some blue colour shift in the f4 picture, but given that the pictures were taken under mixed artificial light with I-forgot-to-check-what light balance setting in the (not my) camera, I really wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions from this.

18mm

18mm f4

I did test shots at 18mm because it’s the middle of the zoom range; it’s also around (a bit longer than) where I would expect to be using the lens most, based on 24mm (=16mm) being my most-used wide angle with film.

Still some barrel distortion detectable by drawing straight lines on the image in Photoshop, but not at all obvious to my naked eye. Still a bit of light falloff at f4.

Corner view (actually top-just-a-bit-left-of-centre view, but this was the only place I had good in-focus detail right at the edge of the frame):

18mm f4 corner	18mm f8 corner

f8 is visibly but not massively sharper than f4. Chromatic aberration around the spotlight is very obvious at f4, only just visible at f8.

Again, ignore differences in exposure/colour balance – this was not a controlled-lighting test.

24mm

24mm f4

Oops. Moved the camera whilst switching settings between f4 and f8. The top left hand corner of the Sigma poster is right in the corner of the f8 shot and about a sixth of the way in in the f4 shot:

24mm f4 corner (ISO 200)	24mm f8 corner (ISO 400)

To my eye the f4 looks sharper. I think this is probably the noise difference between ISO 200 and ISO 400 compensating for any minimal difference in sharpness between f8 right-in-the-corner and f4 near-the-corner. There’s visible magenta chromatic aberration/fringing on the red lettering at f4 that’s barely there at f8.

moiré

All the pictures have moiré in the ceiling tiles that for some reason is more pronounced at f4 than at f8. I assume this is about the camera not the lens. The f4 pictures were shot at ISO 200 and the f8s at ISO 400: I wonder if the noise in the ISO 400 pictures is breaking up the moiré patterns to some extent?

going retro

17th May 2005 permanent link

I’ve been shooting nearly all digital since I got my lovely Nikon D70 last year, but a couple of things inspired me to dig a few rolls of black & white film out from the back of the fridge, and my old manual Nikon and 50mm lens from the back of the camera cupboard, and do some back-to-basics retro photography.

One was this excellent editorial from Lenswork magazine, 21 Ways to Improve Your Creativity: Letters to a Young Photographer [pdf], linked to by Evelyn Rodriguez. The other was a mail from Hugh Leighton McWilliams, who had come across an old blog entry where I was wondering whether I could do more to improve my photography by buying the D70, or just keeping the cameras I had and buying a big pile of black & white film.

On the whole the D70 was a good idea – if you actually want to do anything with your pictures, the whole digital workflow is so much easier than film that I have been taking more pictures, and enjoying my photography more, than I would otherwise. And more pictures ultimately == more good pictures. From 21 Ways:

1) Shoot more than you do; print more than you do; and be a ruthless editor. There is a great deal to be gained in sheer volume – not that volume itself is any virtue, but practice is.

I have noticed, though, that I don’t “see” in black & white as well with the D70 as I do with a camera loaded with real black & white film. It’s not just a matter of post-processing; the whole attitude and approach to composition needs to be different. I personally don’t often take colour pictures that work well converted to black & white after the fact in Photoshop.

Whether or not I actually get any decent pictures out of it, it’s been a very worthwhile exercise to spend a couple of days thinking carefully again about light, shade and composition in a different medium – pictures as things not pictures of things. The zoo this afternoon with convalescent Jack was fun: instead of just hauling my biggest telephoto lens around adding to the world’s already vast surplus of boring animal close-ups, I was actually looking for interesting pictures. It’s the looking that matters, not whether I actually got any this time.

lost & found

6th May 2005 permanent link

Wetterstein Alps, Austria

A couple of years ago I lost the negatives from a couple of rolls of film of hiking and climbing trips in the Alps. I was hopeful that they might turn up one day – I couldn’t see myself knowingly having thrown negatives out – and sure enough, last night I was looking for some other pictures and there they were in the wrong folder.

I quite like this one, of storm clouds building over the Wetterstein Alps on the Austrian-Bavarian border. It violates the “rules” of landscape photography that say “thou shalt use large (or at least medium) format slow film on a tripod”, having been shot handheld with fast film in a 35mm point & shoot. This is because, as the late Galen Rowell knew, the “rules” of landscape photography are trumped by the rule of mountaineering that says “thou shalt not carry heavy stuff that jeopardises thy chance of being off the mountain before those photogenic storm clouds get to where thou art”. Which I was.

finally, a real picture

2nd May 2005 permanent link

This, incidentally, is the picture I actually wanted to print when I began my Epson R800 black & white printing adventure:

Tungabadra River, Hampi

shades of grey

2nd May 2005 permanent link

I thought http://www.dantestella.com/technical/dynamic.html

Which turns out to be about 6 stops: 3½ under, 2½ over.

The mid grey bar with the red stripe shows a grey card at a standard exposure. The bars to the left and right show under- and overexposure in 1 stop increments. We go white - highlights completely burned out – somewhere between +2 and +3 stops.

If you compare the response curves of the D200 and the D70, you can see clearly that the D70 is flatter, less contrasty in the 2 to 3 stops underexposure range; but whether this is intentional or not, it then drops abruptly to the noise floor at -4. Look in comparison how the D200 has a little more midrange contrast, then tails off in a perfectly smooth s-curve to black at 5 stops under. Beautiful.

The D70 is getting noisy at -3, and has basically disintegrated into noise at -4. The D200 is tightly contolled, almost completely noise-free, right down to black at RGB 2,2,2.

Custom white balance is even more accurate than the D70 – red values are slightly high on the D70 shots; the D200 ones are absolutely neutral.

The D200 is in most ways my dream camera: superb handling and build quality, excellent colour rendering, more than enough resolution for anything I’m likely to want to do for the foreseeable future. (Serious landscape photography and small children don’t combine well). But dynamic range continues to be the big achilles heel of digital sensors compared to (some) film.

I don’t know enough about the physics of digital sensors to know if this is actually a Hard Problem that isn’t going to get much better because we're already up against a physical limit (which seems from what I read to be pretty much the case with pixel pixel size and resolution); or if it’s just that nobody has paid enough attention to it yet. I know Fuji and Kodak have tried to address it, with very limited success.

Fuji’s S3 – successor to their S2 that was much loved by portrait and studio photographers a couple of years ago (I was seriously considering buying one, but then Nikon came up with the D70) – uses a sensor with large and small pixels. The large ones give you low light sensitivity; if there’s too much light and they’re blown out you can then try to get a reading from the less sensitive small ones. Or something like that. Interesting idea: from the reviews I read, such as this one b Thom Hogan, it doesn’t seem to have worked very well. Apparently in the right circumstances, if you’re really careful, you can maybe squeeze out an extra half a stop compared to a good conventional sensor. To make a compelling difference it would have had to be two stops easily.

Then there is, or was, Kodak. Kodak’s recently discontinued digital SLRs had a reputation for being deeply flawed and difficult to use, but capable of wonderful results in the hands of the few who made the effort to learn how to use them effectively. One of those eccentric few, and generally one of the web’s most interesting offbeat photography writers, is Dante Stella. In his fascinating comparison of the kodak with Nikon’s current über-camera, the D2X, he says Kodak, although they use a normal sensor, have software that is highly optimised for squeezing as much dynamic range as possible out of the signal coming from that sensor. The result, he says, is that shooting the Kodak is like shooting negative film whereas the D2X’s response is more like slide film: punchier straight-out-of-the-camera images, but less forgiving.

I also used to shoot a lot of colour negative film, particularly Fuji’s lovely Reala, on the basis that that too has tremendous exposure latitude and can shoot more or less anything without losing highlight or shadows. This didn’t actually turn out particularly well - the resulting low contrast negative captured vast amounts of raw information, but turned out to be an absolute bastard to process digitally to get decent colour balance and contrast. I’m not the only person that has been down this particular road either.

more pictures of greycards

2nd May 2005 permanent link

Whilst spending an entertaining and educating morning measuring prints of greycards, I realise that this would also be a good time to measure the dynamic range of the D70’s sensor.

Which turns out to be about 6 stops: 3½ under, 2½ over.

The mid grey bar with the red stripe shows a grey card at a standard exposure. The bars to the left and right show under- and overexposure in 1 stop increments. We go white - highlights completely burned out – somewhere between +2 and +3 stops.

On the underexposure side there’s still a clear discernible difference between -3 and -4; there’s still a slight measurable difference between -4 and -6 but I can barely see it, and I‘m sure it’s nearly all noise by then anyway. I assume you could keep underexposing more or less indefinitely without getting to RGB 0,0,0 – difficult under normal conditions to prevent any light whatsoever from reaching the sensor – but beyond a certain point you’re just taking pictures of the sensor’s background noise.

Greater underexposure latitude is presumably why current imaging software, such as Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight adjustment, can do such a remarkably good job of salvaging recognisable (if noisy) detail from what appear to be the deepest shadows; whereas white is white – once a pixel is reading off the scale that’s it, game over.

Coming soon: a return from camera/printer geekery to actual photographs somebody might actually want to look at. But (some level of) one is part of being able to produce the other.

r800 black & white notes iii

2nd May 2005 permanent link

print your own greycard?

Having read various discussion forums in which people complain about their Epson R800s producing coloured black & white prints, and then apparently push buttons in Photoshop and Epson’s printer driver more or less at random until the results start to look more pleasing, I decided instead on the radical approach of actually doing some measurements to work out what is wrong and what to do about it.

Here's how to use a Nikon D70 (or any other good digital camera) as a poor man’s colorimeter:

You take a photographer’s standard grey card, meter and set manual white balance on the card, and take a picture of it. You load the raw file into Photoshop, adjusting nothing in the raw file converter, and voila, you have a grey picture with RGB values around 110,110,110 – the light level inevitably varies across the surface of the card but it’s is pretty much perfectly neutral, with the R, G and B values never varying by more than a point or two.

photographer’s standard greycard

(People refer to standard grey cards as “18% reflectance”, but this doesn’t seem to correspond in any way to what Photoshop regards as “black minus eighteen percent”, or 82% greyscale. Nor is it 50%. Photoshop calls RGB 110,110,110 “64% grey”. I am so glad I don’t actually need to understand this stuff)

Then you print the print the picture of the grey card exactly as you were previously printing your black & white pictures. In my case, that was as an RGB file, with the appropriate Epson paper profile, perceptual rendering intent and black point compensation selected in Photoshop, and colour adjustment turned off in the printer driver. This gives excellent results for colour pictures, but black and white comes out looking green to my eye.

You lay the print on the grey card, reset the manual white balance in case the ambient light has changed, take a photograph showing half the real grey card and half the print, load that into Photoshop and compare the two sides.

greycard (right) compared to unadjusted glossy print

You immediately discover two things: it’s difficult to use this approach with glossy prints because what you photograph is as much reflections on the surface as what’s actually on the print. (It might be better to use a flatbed scanner for this exercise if you have one instead of a camera. Or perhaps not – I hope a $1,000 D70 has better metering and white balance than a $50 scanner).

But also: even with a glossy print, you quickly learn that what your eye was seeing as a “green” print is actually yellow – or in RGB terms, lacking blue. The density of the print – i.e. how dark a shade of grey it is – is pretty close to the real grey card, but B is around 12 points below R and G. You can see this clearly on the histogram too: everything is nicely bunched together as it should be for an all-one-shade-of-grey image, except that spike of too-low blue on the left.

The first correction I try is a Yellow -5 colour adjustment in the printer driver. This produces a picture that is pretty neutral, but far too light. Look at the two nicely neutral, but too far apart, spikes on the histogram.

greycard (right) compared to glossy print with Yellow-5 colour adjustment

Switching to matte paper for the time being because it’s going to be easier to get accurate comparisons, you find that an unadjusted print still looks-green-but-is-really-yellow, but slightly less so than it was on glossy paper: B is 7 or 8 points down instead of 12.

I try levels tweaks in Photoshop. The first thing I try is simply Blue +5. This looks pretty good to the naked eye, but when measured is still a bit too light (10 to 15 points) and a bit too red (R 5 points or so higher than G and B).

greycard (right) compared to matte print with blue+5 levels adjustment

At this point I perhaps go slightly off track (again). This print looks good to the eye but still doesn’t measure all that well, so I go off trying further multidimensional levels tweaks, taking the overall tone down a bit, blue up a bit, red down a bit etc. The “best” one I come up with – i.e. the one that measures closest to the actual greycard, is this: RGB midtone down 8 points, blue +6, red -3, green +2. It’s still not perfect, but it’s getting very close (look at the lovely tight histogram):

greycard (right) compared to matte print with complex levels adjustment

There are still two problems: it’s still just fractionally too red and too light – doubtless fixable by further tweaking. But further tweaking may not be worthwhile because … it doesn’t actually look any better than the first, simple levels tweak.

Lessons learned: a methodical scientific approach pays off. Finding out exactly what was wrong was quick, and I was immediately able to try out adjustments that made big steps in the right direction. But also: what measures best may not be what looks best to the eye. My first simple tweak on matte paper (Photoshop levels Blue+5) doesn’t quite match the greycard perfectly when measured, but to the naked eye it looks at least as good as, if not slightly better than, the fancier attempts I made afterwards. Don’t forget that the objective is to find out what produces an aesthetically pleasing print; measurement is a tool to get yourself pointed in the right direction, not an end in itself.

NOTE: I should mention - ignore the slightly lighter bands in the middle of all the comparison prints. These are just the out of focus edges of the prints laid on the grey card. It’s the left hand side (print) versus the right hand side (greycard) that we’re interesting in comparing. At some point if I have time I shall re-photoshop the images and cut the middle bits out.

r800 black & white notes ii

28th April 2005 permanent link

In the first episode, Alan set out to get better black & white prints from his Epson R800, but got sidetracked into the surprisingly intricate intricacies of producing greyscale test charts in Photoshop.

Now, he googles “Epson R800 black & white” (always do this first folks) and quickly finds the photo.net black & white printing discussion, where it becomes apparent that lots of people have this problem and some of them have suggestions about ways to improve it. Others say the improved results, whilst not perfect, are about as good as you can realistically expect from a printer that uses coloured inks. I shall try out some of the suggestions.

(Some of the people on photo.net think the 2100 was better for black & white because it had a grey ink cartridge. I did get very neutral black & whites from my 2100, but only with expensive third party RIP software, never with Epson’s own drivers)

Imaging Resource, on the other hand, thinks the R800 is better than the HP7960 for black & white. Oh well. If the various fixes suggested by the folks on photo.net don’t do it for me, the HPs are cheap enough to buy one, try it, and unload it on ebay if it isn’t an improvement.

UPDATE: there is also a yahoo discussion group rejoicing in the wonderful name of “DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint”. In it a guy called Daniel Ridings recommends a method, but when I try it I find I don't like it – too blue.

In the yahoo group I also find a link to inkjetart.com’s review of the R1800 (bigger version of the R800) where they say:

Inkset neutrality for black and white printing: We interviewed several Epson employees about this issue, and they indicated that because the R1800 inkset does not have the light black ink (like the 2200, 4000, 7600 and 9600), it will not produce as neutral black and white prints as does the 2200, especially with matte and fine art papers.

r800 black & white notes

28th April 2005 permanent link

I’m (still) very happy with the colour glossies I get from my Epson R800. Our wedding photographer, who shot digital, gave us conventional photo prints from the digital files, and jpegs on a CD. The Epson prints I'm getting from the jpegs are, to my eye, clearly better than the conventional photo prints.

Black & white is a different story, as it still almost always seems to be with inkjets. Other people seem to be happy with theirs, but mine seem to be coming out slightly green and a bit lacking in punch/contrast. So far this has been on my “look at one day when I get round to it” list; unfortunately it has suddenly become more urgent because the pictures Maria chose as housewarming presents for two friends of ours (who I hope won’t read this before their housewarming party on Sunday) are black & white.

So, now it’s time for me to get serious about working out whether there is in fact anything wrong with the prints the Epson is producing – and if so, what to do about it.

These, then, are working notes from a project in which Alan finds himself learning more than he ever wanted to about colour theory, printer calibration and how to use a Nikon D70 as a crude colorimeter.

Step One - print some test charts

I thought I would just run up some test files in Photoshop with bands of 100% 90%, 80% etc, grey(*), print them and see what they look like.

First discovery: RGB-to-greyscale conversion in Photoshop isn’t linear. RGB 127,127,127 gives you 57% black, not 50%. Much experimentation later, here’s the curve:

Second discovery, made whilst messing about with the first discovery: my monitor – a Formac Gallery LCD profiled with an OptiCal Spyder – isn’t half bad. In a dark room I can see 1% greyscale steps almost right out to both ends of the scale.

Third discovery: the eye – my eye, anyway – seems to be more sensitive to subtle differences in light shades than dark.

Dark grey from black: depends on the level of room lighting. In a dark room I can just about discern 98% grey (RGB 10,10,10) from black. In daylight I can’t unless I look from an angle, not directly onto the monitor. Straight on even 96% (RGB 20,20,20) is difficult.

Light grey from white. I can discern 1% grey (RGB 254,254,254) from white in a dark room but not in daylight. 2% grey (RGB 251,251,251) is easy even in daylight.

Here are some examples. The black rectangle on the left has 98% and 96% grey rectangles in it; the white one on the right has areas of 1%, 2% and 4% grey. I can make these out in a browser on my laptop; your mileage may vary.

Next Step: print out my DIY greyscale test charts and compare them to a standard photographer’s greycard.

Possible outcomes: I can see three possible outcomes to this whole project. (1) I discover that the printer is actually fine, and I just need to up the contrast a bit in my pictures before I print them. (2) The printer needs calibrating, and I eventually work out how to do it (or pay somebody else to do it) … or (3) I decide it’s just not worth the time and energy and buy a cheap Hewlett packard black & white printer instead (having first convinced Maria that it’s cost-justified and that I can find space on the printer shelf for it)

(*) I apologise to any American readers who might find my spelling of “grey” a constant irritation whilst reading this.

epson r800 notes

8th April 2005 permanent link

J Greely noticed that his Epson 6x4 photo printer wasn’t printing the whole of his 6x4 photos, and eventually managed to get a response from Epson support saying that this is an intentional feature: the print driver enlarges the picture slightly to avoid borders appearing if the paper alignment isn’t 100% accurate.

I noticed the same thing printing 6x4s with my R800 but hadn’t got round to investigating it further. (Non-borderless “centred” prints aren’t, quite, either. Presumably also paper misalignment). After my initial reaction – “print my whole picture, dammit!” – I have to concede that Epson do have a point.

Epson probably think – and they’re probably right – that most people printing 6x4s don’t compose their pictures carefully and won’t notice or care that the whole thing isn’t being printed. And for my purposes:

• for things where a 6x4 print is the final output (pictures of Jack for grandparents, mostly) exact composition isn’t that critical
• if I’m doing colour proofs for things I eventually want to print bigger, guess what – exact composition isn’t that critical for them either

And in any case …

• conventional minilab prints do the same thing, at least as badly, and probably for the same reason of paper misalignment
• I imagine it’s probably very hard to get 100% borderless prints exactly right printing by hand with an enlarger, too. (I’m guessing. I’ve never done conventional darkroom printing)

UPDATE: I tried sizing at 6x4 then printing at 95% for a picture that did have a crucial detail right at the bottom of the frame. I got nearly but not quite the whole bottom of the frame, with a very narrow but easily visible (about half a millimetre) right border. Getting paper alignment accurate to within a millimetre clearly isn’t doable yet on a printer at this price.

what the f*ck?

5th April 2005 permanent link

Adobe have announced Photoshop CS2 (what would, I assume, have been Photoshop 9 if they had stayed with their previous version numbering). I use Photoshop CS and it is a marvellous piece of software.

But.

The announced price for the upgrade is $149 (US). Everybody in the photographic world knows this, and Adobe surely know that everybody knows this. And yet today, Adobe send me an email offering me the German language version (which I don’t use, and they presumably know I don’t use it because they know what version I have registered) for a bargain 288.84 Euros, or $370.16. They must be fucking insane.

This is even more blatant than the previous Euro-ripoff pricing of Photoshop CS.

I answered the mail asking what on earth they think they are playing at. I don’t expect a reply.

UPDATE 28th April: John Gruber on Adobe the once-great creative software company. And no reply to my email from Adobe Deutschland yet.

UPDATE 30th May: not only no reply to my mail, but today Adobe Deutschland had the nerve to spam me again with their “only” two and a half times the US price offer. Bastards.

been & gone

1st March 2005 permanent link

I was in the camera shop today. (Hey, I didn’t go out with the intention of going to the camera shop. I mean, Jack gave the keyboard a cup of tea, and after three days drying out it still hadn’t recovered, so I had to go to the Apple shop. And the Apple shop is just across the road from the camera shop, and there’s no harm in just having a little look? Right?)

Anyway.

I was in the camera shop today, and they said their first shipments of Nikon’s new flagship the D2X – which I can’t even think about affording at the moment, maybe in a year or two – and the Tokina 12-24mm zoom lens – which I am seriously interested in, the 18-70mm on the D70 just isn’t quite wide enough – have already been and gone.

practice, practice, practice

2nd February 2005 permanent link

Photos taken on my New Year’s visit to Maria’s family in Russia: about 500. Pictures deemed (mostly by Maria) worthy of putting on a CD for Maria’s brother in law: about 50. Deemed worthy by me of putting on a web page for my parents: 25, most of which are there for the subject matter and only a couple of which I think are worth anything qua photographs.

And one that is on my to-be-looked-at pile as possibly a quite interesting landscape photograph, taken whilst walking on the frozen River Volga on New Year’s Day(*).

(*) Things I Never Thought I Would Say.

And, incidentally, of the two or three decent pictures out of 500 from this trip, pictures taken with the lovely-on-the-D70-as-a-mild-telephoto 50mm f1.8: all of them.

a walk in the park

16th January 2005 permanent link

Sunday Photography Vignette: I just got home from a Sunday afternoon family walk in the park, with a 512 MB flash card crammed to bursting with 90 pictures. This is exactly the reason why I got my Nikon D70 – I would never have taken three rolls of film with me just for a Sunday afternoon family walk (I’m sure some people would, and good luck to them, but I’m talking about me here) and, other things being equal, the more pictures you take the better your pictures will become. Taking pictures is far more important than having any amount of expensive exotic lenses. Practice, practice, practice.

There is a great, classic photo to be taken in Munich’s Westpark (just as there is everywhere). This isn’t it, but I might take it one day if I practice enough.

your camera does not matter

16th January 2005 permanent link

Instapundit introduces us to South Knox Bubba, who introduces us to the bizarre concept of a “basic DLSLR kit”’ costing a shade under ten thousand dollars.

Folks, try not to worry too much if you don’t have a ten grand starter budget. You can win photojournalist of the year with a $500 digicam. Alternatively, Ken Rockwell has some sensible advice about starter lenses for DSLR photography. Dante Stella also has strong views on what lenses most photographers need/can use effectively (although I disagree with him about 180mm telephotos)

Let’s take a look at Bubba’s ideas anyway. I have no interest in Nikon-vs-Canon religous wars. (I personally shoot Nikon. I’ve been very happy with the Nikon cameras and lenses I’ve used; I’m sure Canon make very good cameras and lenses too)

Canon kit:

20D Body: $1400
24-70mm F2.8: $1095
70-200mm F2.8 IS: $1600
400mm F4 DO IS: $5300
100mm F2.8 Macro: $450

Total: $9845

Nikon Kit:

D70 Body: $900
17-55mm DX F2.8 $1350
70-200mm F2.8 VR: $1600
200-400mm F4 VR: $5300
105mm F2.8 Macro: $580

Total: $9730

In the Canon kit he hasn't got a wide angle lens (24mm isn't wide on a 20D) – he realises this. But if you’re actually interested in taking pictures rather than dick-waving, a wide angle lens costing a few hundred bucks is going to be useful far more of the time than a 400mm, $5,000 mega-wonder-telephoto.

He hasn't got a really good portrait lens in either kit. The macro lenses could serve in a pinch, but on these cameras they’re really too long, and at f2.8 they’re not really fast enough for available light indoors either. For both Canon and Nikon a 50mm f1.8 costs a hundred bucks or so and makes a lovely indoor portrait lens on a small-sensor DSLR.

No batteries, no flash cards, no flash. With either of these cameras I would want at least two batteries and three or four one gigabyte cards. If I were laying out this kind of cash I’d want a proper flash gun too. The built-in flash on the D70 is ok for daylight fill flash, but for non-available light indoor photography (an abomination, but necessary sometimes) you really need more power and the ability to do bounced and/or diffused indirect light. Plus you’re quickly going to find you want powerful flash and a beamer a lot of the time with your $5k giant telephoto lens.

I really question the usefulness of those $5k giant telephotos. If I were a professional sports or wildlife photographer, or rich (“professional sports or wildlife photographer” and “rich” being pretty much mutually exclusive), I would buy the Nikkor 200-400mm tomorrow. But I’m not, and while I’m sure a lens like that would be great fun to play with I don’t think it would actually help to improve my photography.

Bubba specifically says he’s looked at the specs of high end pro SLRs and decided he doesn’t need them. Fair enough. If I had that kind of money to spend, I’d sooner spend half of it on a Nikon D2x (due out in February) or a used Canon 1Ds (seem to be going for around $4k on ebay) than on some esoteric wonder lens.

Here’s what I’d do with ten thousand dollars to spend on a Nikon DSLR kit, following Bubba’s rule of buying new from B&H:

D2x body:	$4995	Due out in February, this seems to be the expected price
50mm f1.8:	$100	budget portrait lens. Alternatively the 105mm f2 ($920) or the 85mm f1.4 ($1000) – both reputedly absolutely lovely lenses, but a bit long for portrait use on a small frame DSLR.
70-200mm F2.8 VR:	$1600	I already have the lovely 180mm f2.8. If I were buying again, I’d get the zoom for more versatility
17-55mm DX F2.8:	$1350	I really want something a little bit wider than the 18-70 that comes with the D70. This or the 12-24 ($940)
SB800 flash with SC29 cable:	$395
300mm f4:	$1100	The teleconverter, the 300 f4 and the 80-400 are all good options costing well under $5k if I decide I really need something longer than the 70-200 (already equivalent to a 300mm f.28 in 35mm). I’d try the teleconverter first.
80-400mm VR:	$1430
TC17e teleconverter:	$420

Total: $8860

I don’t know the Canon range so well so I won’t comment in detail. I’d go for a used 1Ds for around $4k, swapping that for the 400mm telephoto. On this body 24mm is wide enough, but I’d definitely want the 24mm Tilt-Shift ($1000) for landscape photography. If I still had any money left over I’d get the 100-400 IS zoom ($1410).

And what would I get on an absolutely unlimited budget? There’s definitely Leica M7 in there somewhere, plus a Phase One P25 and something Zeiss-y to stick on the front of it. I could make Bubba’s $10k look like small change.

Update: reading further, I see that Bubba is into bird photography. In which case yes, he does need those big long lenses. I retract the bit about “dick waving”. (I was wondering if he might be into sports, in which case neither the D70 nor the 20D is fast enough for serious use). He says he’s quite happy with 6 or 8 megapixels resolution, and “To me, the lenses are the biggest investment. New bodies will come along all the time.” Which is true. For me, resolution, low light ability and a fast(er) camera are the things worth spending money on for the sort of photography I find interesting; Bubba has clearly thought his priorities through and decided that for him telephoto reach is very important. Fair enough.

photography quotes

13th January 2005 permanent link

the most rewarding part of photography is the picture-taking, rather than the end results. … loads of dusty photo albums – or from now on chunks of memory on my hard drive – are a small price to pay for the chance to really look at the world now and then.
Mick Hartley

Hallelujah, brother!

jack in russia

8th January 2005 permanent link

Pictures of my son Jack visiting his grandma in Russia. Intended mainly for his other grandparents, but anybody else who feels like it is welcome to have a look too.