Many Unreasonable Apples

SFO

Another, more-recent Paul Graham lament about the lack of respect afforded "straight" photography. and a discussion(?) of the same essay/address, which oddly attributes a review of Jeff Wall photos to.. Jeff Wall? Misreading aside it has an interest list of conflicting viewpoints, like these:

• Conscientious: “hyperbolic, overblown, risible”
• la pura vida: OpEd: The Beautiful Burden
• Conscientious: “Continuing the debate about photography”
• Adam Bell: The Unreasonable Apple
• Touching Harms the Art by Luke Strosnider: Paul Graham – The Unreasonable Apple
• We can shoot too: “Quote of the Week – Paul Graham”

Now, this all got rolling back in February. How dare I blog about something so.... ancient?

I'm increasingly thinking that this is exactly what I should do -- like Garry Winogrand's delayed-processing piles of film canisters, which he left in storage deliberately so that he wouldn't mistake his immediate feelings about the experience of shooting for the experience of seeing the picture. So to, perhaps, it's better to give others the opportunity to shout each other down, mistaking contention for criticism. YMMV.

(And yes, I realize that pointing out a fight is not participating either -- I'll collect some opinions later, though frankly Graham seems to be just pointing himself. There is a problem. That recognition is easy. Solutions and sense about it is harder.)

Sit

Long Ride

Almost time to say goodbye to China, now that I'm back in Beijing. Also time to say goodbye to:

• My Canon 50mm f/1.4, which spontaneously has decided it doesn't want to focus on anything closer than 5 feet, even in manual (at least until I can send it off to Canon)
• My Panasonic LX1, which was pick-pocketed in Xi'an (along with most of my pix of the Xi'an city walls and street musicians)
• My HTC Excalibur smartphone, with all my notes and action items from the entire trip (pick-pocketed just tonight inside the Hyatt)
• My faith in Cisco VPN (pretty-well worthless on this trip)

So that's maybe $1000 in theft losses and a major dose of work frustration. Net balance for the trip then? Love it. Hassles and troubles like those just transform a vacation into an adventure, and the experiences I've had will last a lifetime, unlike any sort of electronic gizmo (and I have paper backups of my notes).

If I can just keep my laptop and 5D working for two more days....

(Followup: I remind myself, a bit, of my old second (third) cousin who raced motorcycles and cars and kept soldiering on through the many hospitalizations as just part of the passion....)

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Which doesn't begin to compare to what happened to Michael :(

Hi-Fi Lo-Fi

It's common to tell digital photographers: "don't trust the camera LCD as a preview."

Why the heck not? A lot of the time, I happen to like the picture I see on the LCD. So I made myself an Adobe Camera RAW preset that, as best as I could eyeball, would match the tonal range of the LCD on the LX1.

It was a somewhat subjective process, not entirely perfectly scientific, but simple enough. I shot some Kodak grayscale charts, played them back on the camera LCD while simultaneously loading them in Adode Camera Raw, adjusting the corresponding RAW/DNG conversion on my laptop under Photoshop CS3. I could see where the blacks petered-out, and the overall relationships in tones between neighboring patches. So patch 1 was full-on, the grays died out arounf patch 14, the values were a little boosted around patch 5, etc. It made the picture that I liked.

Once I'd made such a preset fro RAW files, I also made a corresponding adjustment curve that would alter camera JPGs to also more-or-less match the results I was getting from ACR. It's easy to make such a curve with a three-layer photoshop file (I like RAW but some situations — particularly very fast repeat shooting — still require JPEG for this little bufferless compact camera).

To make a curve that matches a JPEG to the ACR result: First, open the JPEG. Next, add a Curves layer and close the Curves dialog (we'll come back to it). Now, open the RAW file in another window, Select-all, and paste it on top of the JPEG (which will make a new layer). Set the blend mode of this new layer to "Difference."

Now all you need to do is open that curves layer again and adjust it until the visible differences between mictures are the absolute minimum. If the picture is black, then both the bottom (JPEG) and top (RAW) layers are a match.

The less-than-wonderful surprise I got was: the pictures don't align. At first I thought it was sharpening, but actually they just don't line up. They are two or three pixels misaligned, apparently at a 45-degree angle. In fact it's not even an integer number of pixels — the pic above (a 100% blowup of the previous blog entry) shows the closes I could get, and shifting it in the opposite direction simply moves the various contour-outlines from one side of the face to the other.

The second surprise was that, despite the fact that these curves reduce the tonal range (that is, they step on constrast), the RAW pic holds detail quite a bit better than the JPEG. I'd expected that since the JPEG had more range than my desired pic, I wouldn't make much difference. But it does. The higher fidelity of RAW still matters even on a low-fidelity images.

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As a minor aside, we noticed last night that the LX2 makes a guest appearance in Spiderman 3 — in a scene where a photographer loses his SLR, he wastes no time in dragging an LX2 out of his jacket pocket & just keeps on shooting.... (though I'd never recommend carrying the camera in your pocket with the lens and flash both already extended).

Sharp Distinctions

I'm something of a believer in half-baked photo tests. If test results aren't obvious except in highly-exacting circumstances, for equipment that's unlikely to be used in exacting circumstances, then: who needs them?

If results can be shown in ad hoc, half-baked test situations, then they're more worth examining. So here's a quick little comparison. I'm not looking at bokeh, or chromatic aberrations, or anything else. Just focus near the center.

I was concerned about some wobble in the focusing elements of my Canon 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens. I figured I should compare it to my corresponding rock-solid Contax-Zeiss 50, that I can mount to the 5D via a "Cantax" adapter. And since I was shooting at ISO 100 anyway, why not do a quick comparison against my compact LX1?

What you see above are pixel-to-pixel crops from the centers of three photos. The white-balance was set to "auto" for all, so the color shifts are not significant.

The results surprised me a bit. These shots are all made around ƒ/4, 1/250th of a second — handheld but leaning against a wall. I made several exposures & these are 'representative.'

The first surprise, to me, was how poorly the Zeiss lens did compared to the Canon. I had expected the opposite. While it's possible that my manual-focus skills aren't up to snuff when compared to the Canon AF (even with the special Canon 'S' manual-focus screen), I did check the entire frame, and found that there were indeed areas where the Zeiss focus was a bit better than here in the center, specifically in the corners. So either way, the Zeiss had less flatness, or maybe it was just less sharp at the center.

Or I can't focus. Either way, since in this case I only care about photographs that I myself will make, the net effect is the same: I get a sharper result with the Canon, at least for the 50mm. And that was a surprise (I'll have to test the 28mm lenses after the holiday).

I also found that the wobble seemed to have no effect on the effectiveness of the Canon lens (still disconcerting, and I may have to send it in. If I tilt the lens forward or back after locking focus, the elements move — and then I do shift focus. I can also feel a distinct "thunk" when the elements slide).

The third surprise was just how well the little compact PanaLeica held up. At ISO's above 100, or in terms of instant-on accessability, the big Canon dominates — but for good light, the LX1 (or LX2, which has the same Leica zoom lens) puts up a real competetive fight! Especially for a pocketable camera that costs one-fifth the Canon price (or even less: since the LX2 came out, I've seen real LX1 deals. I ran into one at Fry's last week, brand new for less than $300).

100%

I promise to try to make this the last "ain't full frame grand" post. This one is the 28mm ƒ/1.8 again, ISO 1600 and pushed a stop further in Adobe Camera RAW — 1/200 sec wide open.

100% crop below.

100mm f/2

On a whim I checked Craigslist to see what the Canon 100mm f/2 might be going for — to my surprise the least-expensive one in the entire Bay Area was on sale just a few blocks away.

Bigger = Gooder

I'm incredibly enthused after printing this at 12" × 18" and having each figure clearly resolved, even to the point of making out the webbing in the beach chair on the right.

(ISO 400, Canon 28mm ƒ/1.8 - 1/250 @ ƒ/7.1)

In-n-Out, US 280

Upstaging the Birthday Girl

rodeo

Aww Gee's

One glance at Craig's List and 20 minutes later I was in possesion of another G, from a fellow just a few blocks away and dirt-cheap. So now I've got a Canon G5 to replace the long-suffering, taped-together, and now deceased G1, and as a quiet digital companion to my Contax G2.

Dumb? Hmm, just last week I picked up an LX1 (aka Leica DLux2) for the wide lens and the 16:9 aspect ratio (looks cool displayed on the Sony PSP — a great way to carry a catolog of images, added to my other catalogs on the celphone and ipod)

I forgot to include my other G in this snap: the old Canonet G-III. Ah well.

First impressions of the G5 over the G1: manual use is incredibly improved, along with strobe handling. Sounds like it's time to revise some of the Botzilla Canon pages, now that the G5 has been out of production for months...

It's baa-a-ck

So Canon did it — put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall. The digital Cantax has returned, with a new (quieter?) shutter and a repaired lens release mechanism too.

They removed every inch of gaffer tape from the camera (I had peeled back a lot before sending it in, but they were far more thorough). Surprisingly, however, they left the Russian "brain-transplant" software in place...

Guess I'll add re-taping to my to-do list. I've come to realize I've got quite a stack of recently-purchased and never-read books, including the Parr Photobook: A History which had been backordered for so long. Martin Parr will be appearing here in San Francisco on the 24th — I'd better get to reading!

All this and Iron Python, MacWorld, and EI 2006 in the next couple of weeks too! Guess it was good that I got out a little over the break because it looks like I'll be working, studying, and staying focused for a bit.

Snapsmack

On Tuesday Canon told me they can fix (actually replace) my whacked shutter for marginally less than the cost of a new camera, so that's what we'll do. Not sure if it will return before the holidays... in the meantime I always have my celphone cam and the new old Elan 7E, which has been a real joy to use, alongside the Bronica. The Elan is quick, light, and impressively quiet. I really don't know why DSLRs are all much louder than Canon's film cameras.. makes no sense to me!

A new DSLR was a holiday possibility but I think I'd rather have a new set of dive lights and a wetsuit... instead of doing a lot of shooting I've spent the last couple of weekends (and this upcoming one) doing scuba. A little Nor-Cal hypothermia never hurt anyone, heh.

If the weather in Monterey permits, by the end of this weekend I'll have cranked my certification up another couple of levels to Advanced Open Water Diver, with an extra cert for Enriched Air Nitrox. Wet w00t!

Happy Thanksgiving and Buy Nothing Day to all.

99

The words you don't want to see if you own a Canon: "ERR 99"

My 300D blinked them this afternoon. The manual suggested removing and replacing the battery. Nope. "ERR 99" again. Switched CF cards. ERR 99. Eventually, I gently lifted the mirror to look at the shutter.

Wow. Ouch.

Two blades seem to have collided, rather than traveled past one another. One buckled, ripped in a way that I don't think you could do deliberately. The torn corner sticks a half-centimeter forward, straight out from the back of the body. This shutter has had it. Tomorrow I'll call Canon to inquire about a repair (most likely a complete shutter replacement, I'd guess), but I'm not particularly hopeful.

In a bit of pique I ran out and bought an old Elan 7E as a standin-in backup body that will still take my Canon lenses — as you might expect these days, it went dirt-cheap. Depending on the repairability of the 300D, I may be in the market for another DSLR or two :/

In the mean time, lots of fun stand-developing Tri-X and HP5. Stand-developed 35mm Tri-X @ ISO 2400 looks pretty darned good, for what it is.