Subjects

I’ve shot hundreds of people in the past couple of years and I’ve learned many things. For example, that each subject is a new adventure and no two are truly alike. I’ve also learned that some subjects are ‘easier’ to shoot than others. This applies to some folks that are just genetically blessed to be photogenic of course, but I’m often suprised by some people who are handsome in life but hard to capture in 2D, it’s almost as if you can’t get the camera to wrap around them quite right. And of course the opposite sometimes occurs, where someone just looks super on film and completely different in real life. Those are physical factors and they’re important to be sure, especially for a photographer like me who wants to take pretty pictures.

But, and please excuse the flim-flam new agey jargon, the subject’s attitude and energy and engagement also play a huge and sometimes even more important role in success. I was shooting a subject on assignment about a month ago and my subject was a nice, very accomplished, very smart, good looking guy, who seemed almost scared to death about getting his portrait taken. And I tend to think of myself as a pretty easy going photographer who’s got some skill at making people feel at ease. I knew the guy was a Doctor Who fan like myself, and so started to talk about that.. but that got me nowhere. Maybe it was the assistant and art director and publicist who were there as well, and had I had him alone I would have been more able to really connect. I guess we’ll never know. I walked away from the shoot feeling slightly uneasy, but in the end I had a number of shots that I was pretty happy with. I keep telling myself that not every shoot is going to be perfect, so just do your job to the best of your ability.

As I think I’ve said before, I believe that portrait photography is a two-way street. I can’t take a truly great portrait of you unless you let me take it. This equation might not work out for a number of reasons. First, the subject might be scared. As a person with a completely irrational fear of my dentist, I can understand this emotion, but at least my camera doesn’t make that terrible high-pitched whizzing sound. Plus, as those who have met me can vouch for, I’m really not that scary. Secondly, the subject might be distracted. Life is complicated and they will probably have a lot of other stuff on their mind. I’ve found that these first two can usually be overcome if you have the time to wear subject’s defenses down. I’ve spent an hour or more shooting some people before I started getting the kinds of photographs that I wanted. Thirdly, the subject might just be an asshole. This happens sometimes, usually when they think they’re hot shit and hold you, your job, the situation, or worst of all, all three in contempt. I hope that eventually I’ll get to the point where I’m hot shit too and so can negate this one by just walking into the room, but in the meantime, you just have to grin an bear this one. Most strategies to fight it will make you look like an asshole too.

Sometimes though, when the moon is in the fifth house, and the earth’s magnetic field is just right, and you ate your Wheaties, you get a subject that honestly trusts you, and listens to your direction, and just makes it a terribly pleasant experience. This happened to me last Friday when I went up to Bronxville, NY to shoot a man for BusinessWeek. His wife let my assistant Meg and me in, showed us their home and let us setup so that by the time he came downstairs we were ready to go. I like to use available light as much as possible, for both simplicity sake and to keep the portraits from looking too contrived. So it was the sunlight coming through the windows and occasionally a speedlite bounced off the ceiling or through a diffuser or into an umbrella. He’s in the oil industry so I did a little research the night before and I asked questions whose answers I truly found fascinating. We moved around a couple of rooms and the front foyer and outside in less than an hour (I work fast). All the while he did precisely what I asked and let me do my job. I think he honestly trusted me and it was a really nice experience all the way around. We got to meet two terribly nice and fascinating people, and I’m very happy with the work we came away with. Sometimes you just get lucky; Hopefully the editor will feel the same way. When it gets published I’ll post a few of the outtakes.

It seems like an obvious statement, but the subject makes the portrait. I know some photographer who might disagree with me and think that they’re all powerful and can mold any situation to their whim, and still others who are so intent on their work that they never really engage the subject much at all. But in my experience, it’s during that give and take, that exchange between two people, that you get the best stuff. The truest Portrait, which to me is always the goal.

Black and White and Progress

Yesterday, my mother and sister and I went to the Met to see a new special photography exhibit that opened recently. It covers the years from 1840-1940 with a bit more on either side through the lens of about a dozen monster photographers. Early early Talbot prints, Atget, Evans, HCB, the heavies. As they are photographs from the older era they were universally monochrome. I’d say black and white but many of them were albumen prints that are better described as dark tan and white.

I had brought my Leica and a roll of 400CN with me which allowed me to both see this work and then get inspired to shoot as we walked around for the rest of the day. I went home, getting the film processed on the way (3 cheers for Connie), and scanned the ones. The photo in the last post is from that roll, as well as a good 6 others which I decided to scan and print. That’s a pretty good take for me from a single roll, the scanning takes a long time to do and clean up, so I’m picky when I’m editing.

The prints were looking so nice on the satin paper I use that I got on a little black and white Leica printing spree and went and printed about 20 images that I’ve shot since the beginning of the year. About 6×9″ on letter size paper. One after another as they popped out of the printer I held them under the light and got a little giddy.

Now, I’m not going to say that b/w is for everything or that you can’t shoot good b/w on a digital camera, especially with monochrome color channel adjustments in software like Lightroom. But for some reason I didn’t feel like I could have produced quite the same images with my digital camera. I’ve tried too, and some of them came out really nice, but none of them felt as objective somehow. Maybe it was the leica glass, and perhaps it was the borders I leave on the images when I scan (That’s my own little rule with the Leica, ‘No Cropping’ and borders to prove it.. I want to be like HCB).

No matter the reason, there is something ‘better’ and more interesting about the film b/w than digital to me, and I don’t feel the same way about color. The dynamic range feels wider (certainly the case with true b/w film), and the midtones have more character. If I had shot the above photo with my 5D, that skylight would have been completely blown out.  And blown out in that digital way.  If I have one big gripe with my digital gear, it’s the complete lack of grace when blowing out highlights. I know all about digital theory, and all 1’s means 100% and there ain’t nothin’ above 100%.  But they need to expand the dynamic range of the sensors so that they can use software to give a much smoother curve to the ends of the spectrum.

Or maybe it’s the silver nitrate (thought I was shooting C41 film and printing to inkjet, it’s DNA is still in the blood)  And that’s when the only analog part of my process is the film after that it’s digital all the way.  It’s as if the process has been so refined over the past 100+ years that there is no way to improve it very much. Maybe I’m talking a lot of shit.

How I Print

First I talked about how I scan, so I thought I’d write a bit on how I print. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m increasingly thinking of a print as the final product of the photographs I take regardless of whether they were shot on film or captured by a piece of silicon. I remember telling my late father to buy an Epson Stylus 670 printer back in 2000 because of how good it’s photo output was. Now I wasn’t really into photography at the time, so we were printing pictures from our little 1 or 2 MP digital cameras on plain paper. He particularly liked impressing guest by taking a picture and then going and printing it out while they watched.

They were simple times to be sure, but there were problems. The print quality was only ok, the inks were dye-based which means that if you’ve left any of these photos out in the sun, they’re probably barely legible now. It was fun, but certainly not the equal of lab prints from a decent film camera. Oh how times have changed.

As with everything in the digital world, things have changed for the better at an increasingly steady pace. The big change was probably Epson’s with the introduction of the first reasonable pigment ink printer that a photographer could afford, the Stylus Photo 2000 in 2002. It had 6 inks, pretty good output quality and perhaps most importantly for us, finally gave us archival prints at home. The early pigment inks though, couldn’t compete with the vibrancy of the colors coming out of dye printers of the same vintage, so there was still work to be done.

Most people would concede that there is now a decent parity of image resolution and color quality between pigment and dye. Many people, the more forward thinking of us would also concede that inkjet prints now equal the wet lab prints of all but perhaps the most master printers of black and white.

I’d like to say before I get into the products I use that I have absolutely no connection with any of these companies, and can only speak to my own experiences. Your mileage may vary.

For a few years I used a Canon i9900 13″ printer. It’s output was pretty good, especially once I had custom profiles made by a guy I met at a party. I especially loved Ilford Smooth Pearl paper which to me felt like a real photograph. However I was concerned with the price of ink, so eventually I started using bulk ink refills by Media Street, which worked suprisingly well. All in all a good experience, but when I started getting serious about photography in the past couple of years I knew that I had to get a pigment printer so that I could sell my prints with the knowledge that they’d be around in 50 years, so I started shopping.

The obvious choice was the latest Epson 13″ at the time which was the 2200 I think. However I have a couple problems with it, first I have read many a horror story about clogged nozzles if you don’t use the printer for a time, which is a problem that I’ve hated since the dawn of the inkjet age. I’m not always printing every day, so this was pretty big. The other was that it only took one black cartridge at a time, either matte or photo black. You can switch them out, but you loose a decent about of ink on each swap, and as someone who likes to print on both coated and matte papers, this a deal breaker.

Just when I was getting frustrated, HP announced their competitor, the B9180. It had both matte and photo black inks installed at all times, larger capacity cartridges to keep ink costs lower, and a self cleaning system which kept nozzles from getting clogged. And best of all, it cost less. I waiting for a couple of favorable reviews and jumped in. It wasn’t a perfect journey, the first printer I had delivered wouldn’t complete its self-calibration (more on this in a second), so after an hour on the phone with a very helpful tech, they sent me another one which is working well to this day.

The B9180 has a pretty neat self-calibration feature which prints a test pattern and then takes readings to make sure everything is within spec, it’s pretty cool. It’s also built like a tank, and I have to say that I’ve had no nozzle clogs at all since I’ve owned it. Not that there aren’t a few annoyances. When you use the single sheet paper feeder (which I do whenever I’m printing photos) and have the paper butt up against the side guide rail, it doesn’t line up with the guide line on the tray. That is, the print is skewed, until I started to make sure that it was correct by the guide line and to hell with the side. The other issues I have are with the driver, which is really annoying.

You see, as many of you may know, I’m a windows guy. I’m not into the mac cult. And as such I use a program called Qimage to do my printing. And let me just say that I really love Qimage. If you’re a windows user (I think it works in Parallels on a mac too) and print photographs, you owe yourself to try it out. Qimage takes a lot of the question marks and grey areas from the process of printing. It helps you lay out your images, it resamples them to the correct resolution for the print size, and makes profiles much easier to use.

And here’s where the HP drivers come in. When I used Qimage with my old Canon, the output would be exactly like the layout on the screen. With the HP, it’s exactly like the layout on the screen sometimes. Other times it’s nothing like it. For example a while back I was printing two 8×10’s side by side on an 11×17 slice of paper. For some reason the HP driver thought that I wanted both of them to take up the whole page instead. However when I cut the paper in half to make two 8.5×11 sheets and printed an 8×10 on each, it worked fine. I questioned the author of Qimage, Mike Chaney, on this and he told me that it’s a function of the drivers and that the best he can do it send the correct layout to the printer, how the driver interprets the instructions is out of this control. And this guy knows more about printing and drivers and profiles than I will ever know so I trust him on that one.

As for paper, I’ve come to really love the people at Red River Paper. The quality is as good as I’ve seen, they’re fast to ship, and they’re relatively cheap. In particular I’m a user of their Polar Matte and Arctic Polar Satin papers, they’re super with the B9180. I absolutely LOVE the Polar Satin, I won’t print with anything else at the moment, black and white prints on it are amazing, ink dark blacks and absolutely neutral. Oh and by the way, the Ilford Smooth Pearl I used to love on the Canon doesn’t work well at all on the HP. I’m not sure why, because it’s supposed to work well with the Epson pigment inks, but I get pooled ink and a mottled photos on the HP. I gave the rest of my stock away last week.

As for custom profiles, with the HP I don’t use them. I set the driver to the closest built in paper type and let the printer do it’s thing. I let the printer/driver manage the color, and it does a great job. I get output that’s as close to my calibrated Eizo screen as I can imagine, very easily. Interestingly enough I’ve tried to print both within Photoshop and Lightroom with similar “Let the printer control the colors” settings, and get terrible output. Somewhere, something is still doing profile conversions in there, but I don’t know what or where. Printing from Photoshop is like a black art to me, it amazes me that people can make it work.

What I’ve been print mostly lately are 8×12 prints on 11×14 paper. This leaves a nice artsy polished print with enough white space around it. I also printed the full set of 13 portraits of the Red Horse Cafe series on 13×19 Polar Satin and they look great, though I imagine that the dark nature of the images probably chugged a bunch of ink, but it has to be cheaper, certainly more convient, and you have much more control over the output than sending them out to be done.

If anyone has any questions.. I’d be happy to answer them.

Cafe Walls

Just a quick update on ‘Hanging Prints on a Budget’.  Yesterday I hung the whole series of 12 portraits of the staff of the Red Horse Cafe on my block.  It was a fun series to shoot casually over the course of a few weeks and now everyone can see the whole set.

…and the best part is that so far, none of them have fallen down, yet…

Here’s one side of the room:

Hanging Prints on a Budget

You might have noticed that over the past few months I’ve been shooting a series of portraits of everyone who works at the Red Horse Cafe. It’s a nice little coffee and treat lounge on the ground floor of my building in Park Slope. This all started when I was jazzed to shoot one night and so took a portrait of a guy named Derek who was on his break. This led to another and then another, and in the end I shot all 12 of them plus group portraits of the whole clan.

Well they’ve asked me to show the series on their walls next month, which I’m more than happy to do. I’ve printed a set of 13×19 prints on Red River Polar Satin paper (super stuff in my opinion) which came out great, but I was having a hard time coming up with a good way to display them. I can afford to spend $40 a pop on decent frames to hang in a cafe for a month. That’s $500, and that ain’t gonna happen. I also didn’t want to permanently spray mount them to foam core either, as ink and paper aren’t cheap when you’re printing large dark images.

So I came up with a scheme last night, went and bought supplies today, and it actually worked, so I thought I’d share in case anyone else had a similar problem.

Materials: Black foamcore, 1″ wide black masking tape, large clear picture corners, 3M removable double-sided tape, and no.4 bulldog clips.

Step one: Cut the foamcore to size. I bought 32×40″ sheets, so I cut them in half to 32×20″. And then into 2 14×20″ sheets with a 4″ slice left over. This gives me a 1/2 inch border around the edge of the print.

Step two: Cut strips of the masking tape and tape along the edges of the foamcore to give them a nice clean edge that won’t split apart from minor wear and tear. I left about 1/2″ in the front and wrapped the rest over the edge and onto the back of the sheet.

Step three: Use the double-sided tape to fix the centered print in the middle along the top edge and in the center of the print. This double sided tape goes on the back of the print, of course. This should keep the print from sliding out of the picture corners.

Step four: Attach picture corners to all for corners of the print. So in the end the print is sticking to the board on the four corners and in the top and center with the tape on the back.

Step five: This part was my sister’s slick idea, how to hang… Take a big bulldog clip to the top of the board and hang by the whole on the clip. It’s a little funky and a little industrial, I think it looks cool. You may disagree.
All told, I think it comes to about $3 a print. Perfect, and looks good. They’re going up at the end of the week so we’ll see how they look on the wall soon enough. Thoughts welcome.

Organized? HA!

Computers make things pretty easy for the most part.  As long as you take a moment to actually rename your photos from ‘img1052.cr2’ to ‘TomMcCarthy_24.cr2’ then you’re well along the way to being able to find that image at a later date. I also have a hierarchy of folders on my hard drive that keeps things in order even if my LightRoom database gets gassed.  So to find Tom McCarthy from May 22nd of last year, I’d go into Portraits > Tom McCarthy > 070522 and there they would be.  Easy peezy…

Hell, if you’re one of those crazy (pronounced ‘[eyn-l]’) people who actually tags their photos with keywords, well then you’re in even better shape.  The point being that most of us have more digital files than prints and negs but the computer does a lot of the legwork for us. But how about the physical stuff?  The prints and developed negatives?  How to keep track of them?

I was in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders studio a few weeks ago and he asked me how I keep things straight and I said Lightroom, etc and then he said, “…no, your prints and film”.  The only answer I had is that I really don’t keep them straight.  He then took me down and showed me his cataloging system which involves lots of 11×14 and 8×10 print boxes full of polaroid prints and large format film.  He’s got a coding system starting with letters that correspond to what type of material is in the box, and then a catalog number.  All in order on the shelves and shelves that are his life’s work.  It was very cool.  But how to find what you’re looking for in those boxes?

In the old days, I guess the answer would be some sort of card catalog like back in your elementary school library, or in my case, like in my father’s record stores.  But today we have a better option, which is what Timothy uses, a database.

So, in keeping with trying to create a stable foundation to build my body of work on, I’m thinking of starting a database to keep try of my prints and negatives.  I’ve only got a few boxes of each, so it’ll probably be a weekends worth of work for me and an unlucky friend, but I think it’s got to be done.

I’m a windows guy, so I tend to lean toward Access as the database.  I could also use FileMaker Pro, which is what TGS uses, and is cross-platform, but being a computer geek I remember when Filemaker was a punchline in jokes that my sister and I used to about people in her museum industry.

Anyway, I’ve come up with a first draft of the database record schema. That’s fancy database talk for what information I’m going to keep about each print. And here it is:

Index number
Subject
Date
Type – film/digital
Camera
Paper Type
Paper size
Print size
color/bw
Printer
Location

I also did some google searches for anyone who’s already got a template set up for such a purpose, but typing in photography database template in google gives you a bunch of scrapbooking crap that’s exactly NOT what I’m looking for.  I need something that’ll scale.

So..  if anyone has gone through this process and has any advice on the
matter, please speak up and speak loudly.   Opinions on my schema and
what I’m invariably missing from it are also welcome. Thanks, and I’ll keep you abreast of the progress.

Glass (Part Two)

First off, thanks for the interest in these essays. I think your comments and discussion really make this whole thing more interesting, so keep them coming.

Just to clear up a few thoughts based on comments of the first section of this essay.  I don’t believe that prime lenses are the end all be all for all photographers. I fully understand those who like the versatility of zooms for reportage, or travel,  or sports, or event photography.  Mostly I was talking to those people who have only ever shot with a zoom, and usually a mediocre consumer level one with a 3.5 maximum aperture at that.  Neither prime nor zoom is necessarily the only knife in the drawer, but drawers are big, and there is certainly room for both.

And Scott is right, there are downsides to switching lenses.  More dust in the body, missing the crucial moment, etc.  But to my mind, what’s the point of having an SLR if you’re only ever going to use one lens with it?

As for bang for your buck.  On the Canon side you can get the 28/1.8, 50/1.4, and 85/1.8 for much less than the cost of a single 24-70/2.8 zoom. To my eye, you don’t need L level primes to compete with L level zooms.   When I first got my 24-70 a couple years ago, I thought of it as a bunch of really great f/2.8 primes, but haven’t found that to be true.  A decent prime stopped down to 2.8 is going to be sharper, certainly at the edges, than a zoom wide open.

——–

OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way.  Some new thoughts.

I’ve got a confession to make.  I’m a pixel peeper.  The subject and the composition of the shot are all very important, and while I rarely enlarge bigger than 11×14, I want to be able to if I choose. I’m not sure if it’s my equipment failing or if my eye is getting better, but lately I’ve been a bit disappointed with my lenses. I tend to work in low light and like short depth of field so I’m hooked on wide apertures. Stopping down to improve things really isn’t an option.  And while if my focus is right on and the subject tends toward the center of the lens, I can get the sharpness I want, I can’t alway guarantee those things.

When I shoot with my large format, or the 80mm on my Hasselblad, or the 50mm on my Leica, there is definitely a difference in the look of lenses. I’m certainly a pragmatist and a cynic, so I’m not one for mythology or nostalgia, but I’ve got to say that there is a difference to the look of photographs from those cameras.  For the large and medium format, some people say the difference is that the image is not reduced as much to fit on the film. The less manipulation the lens has to do, the more true the light is on the other side.  And that might be true, but it doesn’t explain the 35mm Leica with a lens from 1955 mind you..  Theoretically, modern lenses should be better than old ones.  Computer designed, new aspherical lens elements, modern and more effective coatings to reduce glare and increase contrast.  But to me it seems that the pudding doesn’t always bare out this proof.

Since I only use a handful of lenses, I figured I’d look into upgrade options.  The 28mm I use is the best Canon makes in that focal length.  If they made a f/1.4 L like they do at 24mm and 35mm I’d be all over it like Hillary Clinton on a superdelegate, but they don’t so I think I’m stuck there. That leaves the 50mm which I tend to use a lot.  My 1.4 is a great lens, but is there better?  Canon makes a 1.2L but I’ve heard mixed things about it.  And for 6 times the cost of the 1.4, I’d need some serious kudos from other users before I took the plunge.

But if I like the old lenses so much, why don’t I go that route?  Well that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking.  I would certainly give up auto-focus and auto exposure control for image quality.  For the work I’d want these lenses for, that’s a no brainer.  Plus manual focus and exposure is what separates the men from the men who use the green box mode.

Zeiss, the nearly mythical German company who make the lenses for the older Hasselblad and Contax cameras, have come out with modern SLR lenses in the past couple of years.  For the Nikon and Pentax mounts natively, but with a quality adapter they’ll work on an EOS mount too.  And there area a lot of people on the forums of DP review and Fred Miranda’s site, who swear by this route.  Saying how much better these Zeiss wide-angle primes are than what I’m using now.  Many of them also talk about how the old Zeiss lenses for a Contax SLR are also great for this purpose because you can get them for a song on the used market.  T* coating magic and all that implies for only a couple hundred bucks. Good thing my economic stimulus check should be here tomorrow.

The thing is, there are also people who have tried this route and say the people praising it are disillusioned and that the differences are not that apparent, and the usability costs great. I really wish there was an option that was very obviously the right way to go.

I used to be in the audio recording world.  And while I was at school, other kids and I would be ogling over some piece of gear or another and I remember one of my teachers saying, “gear is gear”.  A couple years out I realized that he is right.  Not that there aren’t differences, but given a decent Canon setup and a decent Nikon setup..  it’s the same ‘stuff’. Just a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver.   For a while I was a gear hound in the photo world too.  But in the past couple of years now, it’s been about the images above all else. I don’t want to worry about my tools, I want to buy the best ones for what I use them for and then get on with taking pictures. Confident in the knowledge that any deficiencies in the photographs I’m taking are my own fault, and not the result of me now having the new 2008 Widget XLS.

So are there advantages to classic designs?  Or is it all in our heads?

What Is The Final Product?

Back in the days of film, there was a physical object, the film itself. And whether it was a positive slide and thus the end of the line, or a negative which could lead to prints, there was a tangible ‘thing’ that you could point to and say, “That is my photograph”. In the days of digital, we seem to have lost that. Yes we have been the beneficiary of all of digitals advances, such as exact backup copies, cost per shot, maleability in post-production, etc. But I’ve got 46585 pictures in my Lightroom database. Looking at each one for 5 seconds, it would take you over 60 hours to look at them all. Now, how many of them exist as more than magnetic polarity on a couple of hard disks? How many of them do I have prints of?

Lately I’ve been reading books and news stories about ICP finding boxes of Capa’s negatives, or about photographers in the 1920’s purchasing prints from their old timers like Atget. Back then the print was the final product, a final work of art. Variations inherent in the analog photographic process guaranteed a uniqueness to each print. I realize that we’re in a new age, and some could argue we’re in it’s infancy, but I think the subject of what is a photograph, bears some thought. I could sit here and print just one copy of one of my photographs and sell it. A unique work of art. But what if I went and printed 5 of them? Or 50, or 5000, or the extreme case I guess would be that that portrait in Time? Time has a circulation of almost 4 million. Why are each of those photographs worth less than if I had only printed one copy? Isn’t art about getting an emotional response from the viewer? It’s a portrait about communicating the subject to the viewer? Why does there being other pieces of art like it detract from someone’s experience of the work. I guess that’s a big question of Warhol and the people at Christie’s, but I still think it’s an interesting question.

Anyway, lately I’ve had a bit of a conservative streak in me. I want there to be a final product to my work, so finished photographs have started to get printed. Usually 8×12 or so on 11×14 paper. Then they get put in sheet protectors and into print boxes. I don’t know why but it makes me feel better that there is a physical final product at the end of the creative line. Something to show for my work. I guess I’ve just moved the analog further down the line, but it’s still there.

I also notice things, often things I want to change, in printed photographs that I don’t on screen. And I’ve got a good screen and an excellent screen to printer workflow so the two are very close to one another visually. Somehow it’s just different on paper. Some people say the difference is in that light is reflected off of the print, versus being backlit, and that are brains are just more used to processing that sort of visual information. Maybe. That would explain why people print out emails to read them, but I guess it doesn’t explain why chromes look so good through a loupe on a light table. So it becomes an iterative process of print, edit, print. Not the best on ink usage, but it seems to lead to a more satisfying final image.

So prints have become current answer to this question of a final photograph in the digital age. But I’m more than willing to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject, so please, comment away.

Glass (Part One)

OK, listen up.  The most important component of your camera is the lens.  If there is a place to spend the money, it’s on the glass. I’d take a 5 year old 20D with a good lens over a top of the line 1Ds MkIII with a crappy lens any day of the week.  I can’t tell you the number of people I see who have this all wrong. Last year at the Grand Canyon, I saw a girl with a high-end Gitzo tripod, 5D body, and some crappy consumer level zoom lens on the front.  Honestly, I almost pushed her over the edge.

There is a lot of talk about the mega-pixel race in digital cameras. I remember my first little 2MP digital Elph, and how I bought my father a little Kodak digital camera that I think put out only a 640×480 image and still cost $199.  We’ve gone from 4MP to 22MP in about 8 years, that’s pretty nuts. The problem is that the number of pixels on the sensor is meaningless if the light that gets to the sensor is crap. And that means quality lenses, or in the cool photographer parlance “glass”.

You can cut up the subject of lenses along many different lines, but I’ve chosen to start this discussion by dividing prime lenses from zooms.  For the uninitiated, a ‘prime’ lens is one with a fixed focal length, while a ‘zoom’ has a continuously variable focal length within a certain range.  So for example a prime might have a focal length of 50mm and a zoom 24mm to 70mm.

In the beginning, there were only primes.  Large format cameras only use fixed focal length lenses, as are most medium format lenses as well.  For decades, this extended into the 35mm world as well.  Through the rangefinder age (Leica, yum) and into the SLR revolution of the 70’s.  While zooms had been invented and in use since the 1920’s, it wasn’t until their prices came down to earth and their performance improved that they invaded the photographic world.  I attribute that shift to the use of computers in their design. The Canon 24-70 f/2.8 zoom for example has 16 glass elements in 13 groups, which all have to remain in alignment and perform well from wide angle to portrait and macro to infinity. I’m not sure about you but designing something like that without a computer sounds near impossible (cut to me getting screaming emails from optical engineers). Prime lenses are much simpler. Even the high-end 50mm/1.2 only has 8 elements, and all things being equal, the fewer elements that bend my light it’s way to the sensor, the better.

In the recent past and for most people in the world, zoom lenses have been their bread and butter. In fact, many SLR owners only have one lens, it’s a zoom, and it stays on the body at all times. This is fine for the parent who bought a digital rebel with a kit lens to take pictures of their newborn and whatnot, but you’re not getting the most out of that camera.

So people may talk about the latest 22MP Canon monster (which I’m totally salivating over) or the fabled 24MP Sony sensor that’s in the wings.  However, all these sensors are going to show is the limitations of most of the lenses you put in front of them.  Now, I’m not one of those people who says that the 22MP sensor ‘out-resolves’ the available lenses.  It probably bests some of the lower-end and consumer glass, but it will certainly show weaknesses that got lost in the past.  Camera shake, inaccurate focusing, vignetting, and yes, at wide apertures, especially on zooms, they will not be sharp enough.

So what’s the answer.  Well, first, better technique.  Second, Primes.

As a Canon user I’ve got all the good zooms.. 17-40L, 24-70L, 70-200L (and I had the 24-105L for a time).  But you know what?  I rarely use them anymore. What I do use are my primes. A 28mm, a 50mm, and a 100mm (the last occasionally). They’re simpler, smaller, lighter, sharper, require less light,  are more contrasty, and by using them I’ve gotten much better at visualizing shots before I ever bring the camera to my eye.  Less versatile? Perhaps, but if you need to zoom, zoom with your feet.

If you only have zooms, do yourself a favor and go buy or borrow a decent prime lens.  Canon makes a 50mm 1.8 that’s less than $100 and other companies have good deals as well so you’ve got no excuses.  If you own primes but have fallen into the habit of using your zooms all the time, take another look.  Your pictures will be sharper with more contrast, your viewfinder will be brighter, and you will be less likely to hurt your back from carrying it around.

More thoughts on “glass” to come…

Choices, Choices, and more Choices.

So I’m in the mental market for a new camera.  That means that I don’t have my credit card out, but I’m doing pros and cons in my head.  My scrappy 5D which has been my faithful companion for over two years is getting a bit long in the tooth.  I love that camera, it’s like a good friend. Just think about all the photos I’ve shot with it, including at least 330 of the 365 Portraits last year. All the places it’s been in Europe and across America and the people I’ve met with it, like my hero James Burke.  <sigh>

I added it up and estimated that I shot about 100,000 frames last year, plus what I shot before 365 and after, and that’s on a camera who’s shutter is rated for 100,000 cycles.  So I’m working on borrowed time here and I can’t afford to have it break down on my on the job.

So, basically it comes down to 3.5 options.  Buy a 1Ds Mark III ($8K), switch to a Nikon D3 ($5k) to get the supposedly great high iso performance, or wait for Canon to release their new 5D ($3-4k).

First the Canon/Nikon question.  I’ve used Canon since my first SLR, in fact it was an Elan7 film body.  And I’ve got a half dozen Canon lenses in my kit, so I lean towards sticking with Canon.  But that’s not my only problem with switching to the D3.

First off it’s 12MP so, I’d pay $5k to get no upgrade in resolution, which seems a bit silly.  I never shoot continuous so more frames per second are of no use.  I’d like the high iso capability but I’m not sure it’s worth switching just for that.  Plus there is the lenses.

I’ve found myself using 2 primes lenses for a lot of my work.  A 50mm and a 28mm.  And the 28mm is the problem.  Nikon doesn’t sell a good one anymore.  They did, about 5 years ago, but for some reason they took it off the market.  It was fast too f/1.4, and from all accounts had exceptional image quality.  It’s so good in fact that used ones on Ebay go for $4000.  I wonder why they stopped selling it, but that’s another question for another day.  Anyway, I’m not going to spend four grand on a used prime lens on top of the five grand for the camera. And then still be at 12MP, that’s just silly.  If I was a Nikon user, it’s a no brainer, the D3 is the first camera they’ve put out that really competes. It’s a winner.

Ok, so that leaves us back in the Canon court. And I’ve been waiting for the new 5D successor (probably called the 5D Mark II) for a long time now.  Rumors say it’ll be 16MP, better high iso performance (which is already pretty good on the 5D), 14bit Raw files, and maybe even weather sealed.  Nearly perfect for my needs. But how long can I wait?  I need a backup body and my current 5D would be great for that role.

Plus there are a few things that I’d love to have the 1Ds for.  First off it’s 21 megapixels, which is just crazy stupid.  Enough to crop half the image away and still have a 10MP photo.  It’s also, however enough pixels that focus and lens quality become CRITICAL to getting high quality photographs. Not to mention the fact that it’s built like a brick; as one review said ‘if you need a camera that you can drive nails with, this is it’.  However, the big thing that draws me even more than the resolution is the viewfinder.  It’s huge and bright and it shows 100% of the image you’re going to take.  Something I’ve gotten addicted to on my Leica (even seeing beyond the framelines on the rangefinder).

The other half option is to just buy a cheap or even used Rebel XTi for $400 or so and use that as a backup on the off chance my 5D fails.  And then just wait and see how good the new 5D Mark II body is.

So many choices, so little time.  It may sound like I’ve just got a camera fetish and that I’m a gear whore.  But I don’t think anybody can claim that I don’t use my cameras.  I really am looking for the tool that’ll be in my hands for the next couple years of my life.  It’s a big decision and a lot of money, and I thought that putting it on paper might help clear away the cobwebs in my head. If anyone’s got anything to add to the conversation, comment away.