Format Comparison Results

Last week my friend Dan came over with a couple of medium format cameras. (As a quick aside, Dan and I do a podcast called Circuitous Conversations with Bill & Dan if anyone is interested in that sort of thing) The idea was to take the same or very similar picture with a number of different cameras and formats in a controlled setting to see how much of a difference there actually is.  Now I’m sure a number of other people have done similar comparisons over the years, but often they’re of some building outside or a still-life of random objects on a table.  Pixel peeping porn for sure, but not really meaningful to me as a portrait photographer. To that end I asked my other friend Chris Keeting (yes, I only have two) to come and sit very still for a couple hours. Btw, Chris is @analognation on twitter is a painfully witty guy whom you should follow.

In the running were the following:

• a Canon 5D Mark II with a 50mm/1/2L prime at ISO 100
• a 1972 Hasselblad 500CM with 80mm lens loaded with Kodak Portra 160 film
• the same Haselblad 500CM with a Phase One P65 digital back at ISO 100
• a Phase One 645 body with 80mm lens and a different Phase One P65 back
• and for good measure, a Cambo 4×5 with 150mm lens loaded with Fuji 160S

The low-res results can be seen here: http://ontakingpictures.com/2011/02/format-comparison-teaser/

This is a surprisingly hard thing to do for a number of reasons.  First is having the subject in the same position, and Chris did a wonderful job in this role. Though even subtle changes in the way the light hits his fact can effect how you perceive the images. Film speed is also very difficult.  I wanted to get the light set and shoot them all with the same power of light at the same aperture.  However if you look at the list above you’ll see that the film cameras were using ISO 160 film. Now, that’s only about a half a stop, and C41 negative film is fine with a little bit of over-exposure. So I let it slide. Plus, I was going to try to work a little curves action to get them in the same ballpark anyway.

Matching
It was also really hard to get the white balance of the pictures similar. To get the two MF backs to visually match the Canon at 5600K, they were at 5180 and 5860 respectively.  I’m not sure if that’s a matter of terrible calibration at the factory or if that’s the way these things always act, but a 600k shift between samples, and neither was correct, is a alot.  Somehow I trust my Canon more than the $40,000 backs on this respect.  I also had to scan two different formulations of film and try to get them to match. Nulling out the orange cast of the film substrate in the process. Ideally what I should have done was to shoot a frame of a color chart which would give me a reference for everything plus neutral grays.  But alas I didn’t think of it and therefore had to do it by eye.

The other big problem is that I was shooting at the same aperture, f/8, on all formats so that I didn’t have to reset the light value with every switch. The problem here is that f/8 gives a very different depth of field depending on the size of the sensor or film. Especially on the 4×5 where f/8 is just one stop away from wide open.  In retrospect, I could have used a lightmeter to set the light lever for each camera while trying to compensate by stopping down the bigger cameras, but then you get into questions of diffraction effects of the lenses at that aperture and such. The practical upshot being that these are all different beasts and in some ways it’s like comparing apples and oranges. All those qualifiers out of the way, I do think I did a relatively good job of weighing and mediating all of the factors.

So what did I find out?
In the end, these are the points that I took away from looking at the resulting images.

First off, all of the cameras did a fine job taking the picture. All of them are professional quality. And if you’re only going to be looking at them on the web or your average magazine size print, there is no practical differences in my eyes.

You all know what 20MP full frame files look like, and I’m sure that many of you have shot film, so I don’t need to go into detail on those.  The 4×5 looked suitably great. However I’d much rather use slide film or b/w in large format for some reason.  In fact when it comes right down to it, I really only enjoyed shooting Polaroid 55 with it.  That leaves us with the two MF backs.

In the ‘pro’ side for the MF backs is the fact that there is a sick amount of information in the files.  I’d say they have more in common with a 4×5 frame of film than a 120 frame.  This also extrapolates down to smaller digital where I think my 5D2 gives me a file that’s almost as good as my Hasselblad using film. Definitely way more than my Leica can.  The question then becomes “Do I need that much information?” and that’s a good question.  Like I said, if you’re not printing big, then to my eyes there isn’t the need. Another thing is that because there is no AA filter in front of the sensor, you also get an incredibly sharp image as well. Like poke your eye out sharp and detailed. See below. MF RAW files are also 16bit (most modern SLRs are now 14bit) which means there’s more data in each color channel for you to work with.  This results in extreme plasticity in manipulating the RAW data. Over-exposure of 3 full stops can be pulled back; similar results in pulling up the shadows, which are less grainy and quantized as well. You can do with with Canon and Nikon files, but not 3 stops in the highlights. Maybe 1, or 1.5 stops tops. This can be a lifesaver in very specific situations.

The ‘con’ side to all the above ‘pro’s is that your technique must be flawless. They are precision instruments and EVERYTHING you do is magnified.  You get 3 times the data of my 5d, but camera shake and focus errors are magnified along with it. I found it very hard to focus accurately enough on both the Hasselblad (manual) and the Phase (auto/manual). The viewfinders, while huge compared to 35mm, are still no large or fine grained enough to match the sensor that’s ultimately catching the photons.

Speed is also a concern as these backs max out at about a frame a second. So if you’re used to snap snap snapping away at a clip, you’re in for a awakening. The autofocus is also slow and hard to control.  Really there’s only the center point, which is fine for me since that’s all I usually use anyway, but if you’re trying to focus on the eyeball you may get the eyebrow instead half the time. I guess the answer here is to stop down the lens so that more stuff is in focus, but deep focus portraits are often not what I’m looking to take. Honestly, minus the backs, medium format cameras feel like 15 year old consumer film slr bodies. They’re also big and heavy.  Not the kind of thing you’re going to want to be holding for hours.

Oh and I should mention computers for a second.  Remember that these files are 3 times the size of the Canon’s. Which means they’re 3 times bigger when you open them up in Photoshop, which means you need at least 3 times the RAM to manipulate them at the same clip.  I’ve got 12GB of RAM in my desktop and these images are HUGE. The picture of Chris that I posted the other day, with fairly light retouching and editing for me, came in at around 1.6GB as a PSD.  If I were using one of these cameras everyday, I’d upgrade my RAM to 24GB or more without flinching.  There were times when my desktop felt like a laptop while working on them, and I’ve got a very fast computer.

Finally there’s the question of cost.  The Phase One setup was about ten times the cost of the Canon setup. Like in all things it’s certainly not a linear progression.  The Phase is not 10 times better than the Canon.  Maybe twice as good or three times as good in image quality, but only if you assume that everything else is perfect. The light, focus, tripod, etc.  On top of the initial cost of the camera is the cost of the lenses which are often thousands of dollars each. More than the price of the Canon setup.  Look, I’ve got a $8000 stereo, so I know the law of diminishing returns, but even I’ve got my limits.

Would I want one? Sure. Do I need one? No.  And that’s actually a surprising result for me.  I thought the results would make me speechless with awe, but in the end I was just really impressed.  My next big gig where I’ve got a budget, I’ll certainly be renting one. A rig like that would have been great for some of my personal projects, but I can’t really complain as I’ve still got a setup that most people would kill for.

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

Format Comparison Teaser

Two of these images were shot on P65 medium format backs. One on a Canon 5d2. Another on a Hasselblad 500 with Kodak Portra 160 film and the last a frame of Fuji 160 pro in a large format 4×5.

I did a bit of minor color work to get them all in the same ballpark, and though the focal lengths and angles are not exact, AND the images I’m showing you are small, I still think it’s an interesting discussion. More detailed post or posts coming soon, but I thought I’d put this up as a teaser.  Let’s see if you can guess which are which in the comments.

UPDATE: I’ve written more about this format comparison over here.

Crop or No Crop

Some photographers never ever crop a frame.  They see the image as it was taken in the camera as a holy object which can’t be sullied by cropping. Others will do whatever they damn well please to the image.  I’m somewhere in the middle. Or rather it’s more of a split decision.

On film, I don’t crop. In fact I scan all the way past the edge of the frame so that the borders are in any prints. I started doing this because that’s what Cartier-Bresson did and I wanted to be like Henri. That way the film frame is somehow sacred.  I had a discussion with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders once and he’s firmly in the never crop camp.  That said, he’s almost always shooting film and he spends a crazy amount of time getting the images just right in the camera before he ever opens the shutter.  He’s got to. He’s shooting 8×10″ or even 11×14″ film which costs tens of dollars a frame. Measure twice, cut once.  For example, my whole series of images from Japan were shot on a Hasselblad and I made sure I kept the borders in. It’s more authentic that way.  What the camera saw is what I was looking at through the viewfinder. Very 1 to 1.

Now on the flip side is digital where sometimes I crop a lot. However most of the time I’m shooting with the cropping in mind, and I always crop to standard ratios.  For example I’ll often shoot 2×3 with the 5D and then crop it to 4×5 to make them look as if I could afford to shoot them on my 4×5 (grin). I’ll also sometimes crop square from the digital in order to match the view from my Hasselblad.  In fact, if I crop my 35mm lens square, I end up with a field of view that’s almost identical to the Hassy with a standard 80mm lens.  That’s why I bought the 35mm lens actually.  Cheesy but true.

There are plenty of other people who do fascinating stuff with odd crops and collages and I’m not saying anything against them. I’m a 63 year old photographer in the body of a 36 year old.  I like the way classic things look. I like to pay homage to the history of it all. For all of my back and forth on subjects like this, I do tend to have very ridged rules.  Things I will do and things that I won’t ever do.  It can be confusing at times, but then again, so can being alive. Deal with it.

Update: ONE MORE THING
I was just thinking about another time you may need to crop.  If you happen to drop your 50mm lens on the way through security and into a portrait shoot for TIME and have to shoot the whole thing with your 28mm prime because that’s the only lens you’ve got. Luckily the 5D2 has a lot of pixels. Enough to crop a fair bit and still be able to print full page.

Here’s the uncropped version. You can find the final version over in my portfolio.

Flash Consistency: You get what you pay for

Here are a couple shots from a shoot I did last week. They are sequential, one right after the other with identical settings across the board including when I converted the RAW files in Lightroom. They are very very similar and yet not identical. The one on the right is around a 1/4 stop more exposed.

This gets to the meat of the matter.  What caused this minor difference? The flash unit.  Now I’ve got a number of flashes at my place, but what happened to be on the stand when I was setting up was an Alien Bees B400.  Let me say right now that I would stand by the bang for the buck factor of Paul Buffs products until the end of time. I’ve got 2 Alien Bees and a big White Lightning and I’d be willing to bet that any similarly priced strobe would perform similarly or worse.  That said, you can see with your own eyes that you get what you pay for.

Now, a 1/4 stop or less isn’t the end of the world, especially if you’re shooting RAW.  Just trim them a bit in Lightroom right?  Well, yes for someone like me who really only works up a handful of shots from a shoot like this, but what about photographers who really need each shot to be identical?  Like product photographers or still life.  Places where you might be doing composites or have thousands of photos which are all going to be next to each other on some website or other.  Then the idea of trying to match them all by hand doesn’t look quite as quick.

And it’s not just exposure that can shift.  White balance of the light can shift drastically, especially when you change the power level of a flash.  Drop down to lower power because you’re going to shoot more wide-open to get a more shallow depth of field and all of a sudden their skin has a magenta cast. And matching skin color, especially when you don’t have anything neutral in the scene to compare, can be tricky to say the least.

So what can be done?  Well the sad but easy answer is to buy fancier strobes.  I’ve got a Profoto AcuteB I use on shoots away from the studio which is very consistent in my experience.  That said, it cost 6 times what the AB did. Really anal people can get the fast Broncolor and ProFoto digitally controlled packs which let you dial in power down to a 1/10th of a stop. That’s control.

Is all of this a deal breaker? Certainly not for me. But it does point to the fact that there ARE differences between levels of products.  Whether those differences are important to you is the question. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Tug of War

Lately I’ve been in a creative tug of war with myself. Pulling on one end of the rope is dynamic, illustrative, conceptual portraiture which people in advertising seem to like lately. Opposing lighting, posed, energetic. I’d put much of my own Drabbles project in this camp. On the other end is what I would consider a ‘true’ portrait. Simple, elegant, stripped down. Simple light, involved subject. Distilled. I’ve been doing both for a while and the disharmony is getting confusing.

Both have their place and their problems. Some would say that the modern stuff is overlit, overly dramatic, pandering to a society which wants everything delivered in small bite sized chunks ready for digestion. Processed and man-handled, often they end up being half photograph, half illustration by the time you get done with them. Even though I’ve created this kind of stuff, I try to back off a bit to give them at least the semblance of life.

Of course the more traditional stuff has the problem that not everyone makes an interesting simple portrait. It takes a certain kind of subject, in a certain mood, in a certain setting. We all see the classic portraits Irving Penn took, but we are only seeing the ones he liked. I’d be interested in the ones that weren’t so successful. In fact I’ve got a sign up next to my computer which says “No more boring pictures” then in tiny type beneath it, “Unless they are sublime”. And I think that’s it really. Simple can be, but doesn’t have to be boring. In some ways it’s much more difficult to take a good simple portrait than it is to setup 4 lights around a subject and sculpt the whole thing in Photoshop. And has the added benefit of not having to carry as much gear around.

All of the above doesn’t take into account the commercial potential of each. Arguably, the first is more commercial at the moment, the problem being that everyone’s shooting stuff like that so you can get lost in the noise. If it were up to me I’d probably shoot mostly the later. It definitely involves more interaction with the subject. More intimacy. More reward.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying here, but I wanted to get my thoughts down on paper as it’s been on my mind. Feel free to chime in with your own opinions below.

Photoshop CS5 from CS4

I just recently started using CS5 after having been a CS4 man since it was in beta.  Most of it is the same, so this won’t be a long post, but there are a few things which I thought some of you might find interesting.

First off a pet peeve from either version of PS.  What the hell is the point of the ‘pixel grid’?  At the point at which it shows up, you can plainly see the square block of the individual pixels. The extra grid lines only make it more obscured and harder to see. I don’t understand why the default is to have it turned on.  Ok, end rant.

Let me say that I didn’t switch from CS4 for any particular feature. Being a Windows user most of the time, I’ve had 64bit Photoshop for years now. In fact the main reason I switched wasn’t a feature of CS5 at all, but rather an annoying feature of Lightroom 3.  You see if you’re using LR3 with CS4, when you open an image in PS by using the “Edit in Photoshop” command, Lightroom renders out a PSD file (or TIFF I guess, but I use PSD) to the disk and then opens it up in Photoshop. This is all well and good except I often open a number of images to grab different pieces to use in a composite so I’m left with a bunch of big 16bit PSD files I’ve got to go find and delete when I’m done. This has to do with CS4 not supporting the latest version of Camera Raw.  I’d like to point out that I think this is pretty crappy of Adobe.  I can’t believe there is a good technical reason they couldn’t make the latest Camera Raw plugin work in the last version of PS, and having to spend hundreds of dollars on an upgrade just for that is annoying.  That said, CS5 fixes this issue for me and stuff opened in LR now just shows up as an unsaved new file in PS.

Now that I’m hear though, there are some new features.  The main one people point to is this content aware fill.  Overall I haven’t had the best luck with it. My results have not been nearly as super as the demos, and besides, most of the time I want a bit more control over what goes in the newly deleted space. For example, using it with the Spot Healing Brush, I found that the old Proximity Match setting works better at least half of the time.  There are certain situations where it’s like magic, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I certainly wouldn’t say it’s worth the upgrade.

I often use the Lens Correction plugin to add vignetting, and it’s no longer in the Distort menu but rather just near the top of the Filters menu along with Liquify and the rest.  It seems like it’s got the same auto controls that now exist in LR3, so not too much new there. Though I’d like to point out that if you fixed the distortion in LR and then open the image in PS and run Lens Correction, be careful because you could double correct and screw things up.  It’s not smart enough to know that you’ve fixed the problems already.

The only other thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes my preferences are spontaneously reset, including that damn Pixel Grid and it’s new devil child Scubby Zoom, which is just about the most annoying feature ever. You use the zoom tool (magnifying glass) and click and drag to zoom in and out.  For me it’s so fast and uncontrollable as to be useless. I always end up zoomed in so far I’ve got 3 pixels on my 30″ screen. Very disconcerting.

Overall I haven’t noticed any great performance or UI enhancements.  Let’s be honest, Photoshop is pretty mature at this point.  It’s like getting a new version of Word.  Most of us use about 10% of the app as it is. We really don’t need more.  Your milage may vary.

No Real Camera & The World of Harry Potter / Disney

Sorry for the dearth of posts the past few days.  I took a bit of a long weekend to Orlando and decided to not bring a camera.  Sometimes not bringing a camera is a good thing. Indeed I find that there are times when I have to do it for sanity reasons.  Plus it’s hard to go on rides with a big camera bag with you. Speaking of rides, this post is going to be not very photo related at all, but I wanted to give you my thoughts on what I had seen.

The World of Harry Potter
Very well done.  Not terribly big, but the buildings and the shop windows were about as good as they could be.  Coming around the corner into the Potter area takes your breathe away for half a second.  They got it right.  And it was an unseasonably cold 50 degrees and cloudy when we got there so the snow on the roofs almost fit.  The main ride through the castle on broomsticks was a decent example of the ‘put you on a motorized machine that’s synced to a movie’ type.  They get me a little queasy but I’m a wimp that way.  Butterbeer was tasty and reasonably priced at $3.25 a glass.  Cream soda and caramel is the best description I’ve got. I’m sure they’ll sell it in bottles soon enough.  We also went on the dragon roller coaster, which was pretty scary.  Spun around so tight and so fast that really you just watched the horizon spin around you with 3 Gs pushing down on your chest.

Disney
About my 5th trip to Disney World in my life and it’s still pretty fun.  Luckily my friend Chris works for ESPN and so got all 4 of us in with Park Hopper passes.  Sweet.  Needless to say, Chris ate and drank on our dime that day.  Loved me some Thunder Mountain Railroad. In fact we came back into the park after dinner to ride it again. The ‘Small World’ ride is downright trippy, I can’t believe they designed that for kids. We were the first people on the Haunted Mansion that day, we even had to knock on the door for them to know we were there.

Also went through Epcot and walked around the world.  Surprisingly accurate representations of England and France and Japan and the other places I’ve been in the world. A bit stereotyped perhaps, but better than nothing.  Quick tip, if you go on the Norway ride, run through the movie at the end without watching, you’ll be happy you did. And the sweet and sour chicken at the cafe near Soaring was super tasty.

The Hollywood park was also super cool in places.  Some of our group went on the ride where they drop you in old broken elevators. Not me.  That said, the backlot stuff with the optical illusions of extended city streets and fake subway entrances was pretty great.  As was watching little kids fight Darth Vader with a lightsaber.

One thing I will say is that people shouldn’t be allowed to bring cameras at all on these rides.  The guy in front of me on Pirates of the Caribbean spent the whole time snapping flash pictures above his head (none of which came out) with his screen on right in front of my face.  I’m a photographer and I know when you should and should not take pictures.  Enjoy the experience and stop ruining it for everyone else, idiot.

Other Stuff
We also drove out to the Space Center, but there were not bus tours that day, so the main reason to go (Seeing the restored Saturn V hanging from the ceiling) was not in the cards.  Something of a waste of 3 hours driving out there and back, but what are you gonna do.

Throw in bowling, eating at chain restaurants, watching HP 7 part 1 and you have yourself a packed 3 days.  I didn’t carry a real camera, so my 365.2011’s were all done with my crappy Droid camera. If I knew how many lockers and stuff were around, maybe I would have carried a Leica for fun, but still, light changes make digital much more versatile in those situations. But that’s ok, sometimes it’s the experience that counts. Hope you all can forgive my frivolity.  Now, back to work.

Meeting your Heroes

There’s an old adage that you should never meet your heroes. The idea is that they’ll never live up to your expectations and you’re sure to be disappointed, so you’re better off just sticking with your probably false yet positive conceptions.  In the past few years of taking pictures I’ve had the opportunity to meet and talk to some of my heroes and the results were decidedly mixed.  Some have been better than expected, and some a disappointment.  Spending 30 minutes chatting and shooting author and host of the old TV series Connections on BBC, James Burke for instance, was one of the top 10 experiences of my life.  It’s ok to laugh, I don’t care if you think I’m a nerd.

Well as you can probably gather by the previous post, yesterday I got to spend some time with legendary photographer Jay Maisel at his enormous 35,000 square foot studio building on the Bowery.  This is a guy who shot that out of focus picture of Marilyn, and the cover of Kind of Blue, and pretty much all the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit stuff from when I was a kid.  This guy has probably shot more Kodachrome in his life than all the pictures taken by everyone reading this combined.

All of those drawers are filled with tear sheets and unsigned prints for VIPs. Crazy. I couldn’t imagine keeping 15 copies of every magazine my work has been in.

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Print Portfolio Mania

Ideally, being a photographer should be about taking pictures.  Sadly however, an inordinate amount of time is spend getting people to ask you to take pictures.  Selling yourself through your portfolio of work.

Back in the day this was a matter of carrying a box of your prints around for people to look at. Then it became sending a box of prints. Then sending a book of prints. And then these books got prettier.  Much like that scene with the business card in American Psycho, the whole thing got out of control. The books then needed to individualized with fancy papers and bindings and boxes to hold the book when you were done. It’s all very baroque. And in my opinion, annoying as all getup.  Mostly because all of this frill and lace has absolutely nothing to do with the photographs inside the book. Don’t get me wrong, I think ‘presentable’ and ‘quality’ are delightful, but this stuff gets over the top.  People spend $1000 on their book. It’s all about the presentation and not the work. A state of affairs which really offends me.  As you may have figured out, I’m not a big fan of trends and fashion.

When I got into photography a few years ago I made myself a series of portfolios.  Nice letter sized prints.  Then someone told me that they images needed to be bigger, so I made an 11×14″ book, with most of the images centered on the page with borders. Then I was told that I should do more images full bleed out to the edges of the paper, so I did some of that. It wasn’t that the old fashion portfolios were really that terrible.  But printing your own prints for them was time consuming and expensive. So making changes and updating was a bit of a pain.  Plus I didn’t like the pictures were sitting inside of mylar pages so you were physically separated from the print.  The whole thing wasn’t ideal.

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Vignette? Sorry, I don’t speak French.

Vignetting refers to darkening of the image at the corner of your frame, usually when shooting a wide apertures. It’s an optical phenomenon that has to do with the way the lens is designed. Oh and it means ‘something small’ in French. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about it because it’s meaningless nowadays. End of essay.

Ah, if only that were true.  Well it is kinda. If you look up lens reviews on many sites they’ll show charts of the light falloff in different corners due to vignetting, and they’ll show how one less is better or worse than some other lens. If what you’re going for is perfect continuity of light across the frame (and agast! Who isn’t?), then hell you better make sure you’re lenses are of good quality.  And even those of good quality better be stopped down to prevent the evils of vignetting to bite you in the ass.

What a bunch of horse shit.  First off it’s rarely strong enough to even really notice, and you’ve been staring at photographs with lens vignetting your entire life so you’re used to it. Secondly there are a real reasons to stop down your lens, namely depth of field and corner sharpness because those are things you can’t improve once the picture has been taken. Vignetting is not on that list. Maybe, and I really mean maybe, back in the days of film there were times where vignetting was a problem for certain technical photographers. Mostly due to the fact that it’s a pain in the butt to compensate for in the darkroom.

Now however, we’ve got all kinds of things that fix vignetting automatically.  On my 5D Mark II, Canon has even added an in-camera feature that does it, with a fancy name and everything! “Lens Peripheral Illumination Correction” is what they call it. So turn it on, and voila! You’re all set, even when shooting jpegs. I’m sure there is a similar setting on other serious cameras. And if you’re a RAW shooter, every converter I know of can to this as part of lens correction. Lightroom 3 for instance has profiles for a ton of lenses and fixes vignetting while taking care of lens distortion and chromatic aberration to boot. It’s a good time to be a photographer.  You can buy crappy lenses with all kinds of problems and computers just fix them for you before you can say ‘poof’.
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