Newer Tech Notes (last update: 6/21/2004)

Non-Tech Notes

Links

Photo Home


  • The Canon PowerShot S50 is a sweet thing. If you stick with ISO 50, and don't enlarge the full frame beyond 8 x 10", it's perfectly acceptable for the kind of work I do away from the studio – casual portraits and even landscapes. The lens is surprisingly good if you stay below f/8, where diffraction lowers contrast and sharpness. Generally I leave it at f/5.6. The small sensor and short focal length add up to plenty of DOF, so wide apertures aren't especially problematic.

    It's one of those cute cameras, like the Ricoh GR1, that can give you results nobody could tell from images delivered by a much larger, much more expensive camera. Naturally it has its limits – don't we all? It's a point-and-shoot, out of place on a tripod or in a studio, yet the optical viewfinder's only good for approximate aiming, and the LCD's hopeless in bright light. There's some fringing, and plenty of noise at higher ISO's. (The stupidly named NeatImage software helps with noise, but it's slow to use.) The leather holster came unstitched and nearly lost me the camera. A surgeon friend restitched the strap, so I still carry the cam everywhere and use it more than anything else in my kit. You'll find plenty of S50 shots in my gallery. There's also a good appreciation of this model at luminous-landscape.com.

  • In September I bought a Canon 10D. I knew what to expect and haven't had any surprises. The D30 was excellent and the 10D's better. It's become my usual tripod camera, pressed into service for flower photography, still life and macros, studio work of any sort. Over Christmas I even toted it into the North Carolina mountains for some hand-held photos of falling water at speeds of 1/4000 sec, something I couldn't have managed with film – the 10D's high ISO speeds are damn near noiseless.

    So far I have no complaints at all about the 10D. I've begun wearing glasses while making photos, since both the 10D and the S50 give me a full view of the finder with glasses on, and I need to be able to see their LCD's and controls. (Got tired of whipping my reading specs on and off. Now I have multifocal lenses.) There's nothing I can tell you about the camera that hasn't been reported on the review sites. It feels good in the hands, works well with all my lenses except (occasionally, inexplicably) the non-USM Canon 50/1.8 "Mark I" (old metal-barrel model), and so far simply hasn't missed a beat. It's annoying that it takes so long to write RAW images to the CF card; if you make a rapid sequence of, say, nine shots (which is all the buffer will hold), be ready to wait a minute before you get back into the groove.

  • 2/6/2004. Over the last few weeks I've spent a good deal of time on frozen lakes in Harriman Park. (You can see the results in my gallery for January.) Among other things I discovered that the 10D's shutter won't work if the camera chills down to, say, twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It takes a while for this to happen, of course. It may be that the shutter's the first thing to stop working when the battery output goes down, though I wasn't getting the low-battery telltale. The S50 also stops working after a while, the symptom in its case being a washed-out image – I suppose the shutter/iris is sticking open.

    The Contax G2's cold-weather symptoms are subtler: it loses autofocus. That's right – it just won't get an AF lock on anything smoother than tree bark, and of course when it can't focus it won't make an exposure. Most frustrating. I wound up in manual-focus mode, focusing by scale the way I did with my Tower camera from Sears, Roebuck in 1956. I don't think this is a battery problem, either; I replaced the batteries with a fresh, warm pair and that didn't bring back autofocus. It occurs to me now that I noticed the same failure last June in New Brunswick, where it was chilly but above freezing. At the time I thought the fine rain was guilty, but now I'm not so sure.

    Checking the Web, I turned up a note by another G2 owner who complained of exactly the same problem.

    Why am I using the G2 at all now that I've gone digital? Well, I suppose I'm trying to find some excuse for keeping the Contax kit, which is cute and fun to use (when it works). I have the vague idea of recycling it as my B&W camera, since the word is that digital doesn't (yet) do B&W quite as well as film. That may be a lie, but it encourages me to use the G2. It's also the only way I have to get true wide angle shots. I've even considered buying a copy of the Contax Biogon 21/2.8.

    Which leads to the question: What film? I've been re-evaluating B&W – tried so far Agfa 100, Ilford Delta 100, FP4, TMX, TMY and of course Tri-X. Results not in yet.

  • 2/8/2004. Results are in, or at least one result: Fuji Neopan 400 in Tmax gives me the blacks and whites I want. This photo is what decided me:

    For the last two weeks I've used the Contax G2 almost exclusively – quite a chore, and not cheap either, since I'd given away my aging film and had to replace the darkroom chemistry. Were the results convincing? No. My only reason for keeping the Contax kit is that I already have it, and that I've got a sentimental attachment to it. Of course it can make good photos, but the hours, money and effort involved are many times what I'd spend on digital. The money and effort I can afford, but every day I have fewer hours ahead of me.

    I'm keeping the G2, but probably won't use it for much except studio portraits and, if I ever get a model, nudes.

  • 3/3/2004. Another month of G2 follies, and not only have I bought the Biogon 21, I'm high bidder for a second G2 body on eBay.

    Let me take the lazy man's way out and tell the story in excerpts from my letters to Neil Fiertel, dear old friend and complicit photographer. Important: I had no idea anybody but Neil would ever read what I wrote. We're a couple of vulgarians. Beware.

    • 2/9/04. After two weeks doing nothing but the G2, when I went back to the 10D yesterday I was astonished all over again at how easy it is to get a good image and at how good the images are. I did a still life of a shell that has a liquid look I wouldn't know how to get with film. I don't doubt it's possible, maybe with large format, but not something I'd hope for from 35mm. Let's face it: the 35 was at its best as a handheld PJ camera, a la Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank or Gene Smith. A studio camera it's not. Yet it was being pressed into service for that kind of thing. OTOH, a digicam with a full-size 35mm sensor really is a studio camera and can deliver images of the sort you'd hope for from a Hasselblad. Even the 10D has that quality, though you can't enlarge as much.

    • 2/9/04 (later that night). Sigh. The 10D is every bit as good as the G2 for black and white, only getting to the final result takes about 1/1000th as much time and effort. This is the green channel from a shot I made tonight.

    • 2/12/04. I don't enjoy developing film any more, though there's still some pleasure in seeing the result when you hang it up to dry – some atavistic thing. Probably left over from our days as cavemen and tree dwellers.

      B&W film seems to have peaked out with the T-grain emulsions. Some still don't like them and insist it peaked with Tri-X and Pan F. On the Web I find many folks who still mix their own pyrogallol and Harvey's 777 and other developers that worked well for Edward Weston and Gene Smith. And let's face it, some of those guys made wonderful pix. But I'm sure they also lost a lot because of poor consistency in their developing. In fact, Messrs Smith and Weston weren't known for their beautiful negatives; quite the contrary. Ansel Adams tried to put the thing on a sound basis, but you had to pay lots of attention to the tech. Cartier-Bresson and Mapplethorpe left the lab work to others who really knew how to do it.

      Let's face it: 35mm can no longer compete with high-end digital. For the moment, unless you can afford a digital back and put up with tethering it to a laptop, medium format film still has an edge, and nothing can come close to large format. But unless you're making huge prints (or need camera movements) there's little call for large format.

      Enlarged to 7 x 10.3", that latest self-portrait I did looks as good to me as the same size enlargement from a Hassy or Rollei.

    • 2/15/04. The combination of Zeiss 45/2.0 and Neopan 400 (T-grain) film is very good - covers the scale from black to white with lots of nice tones in between. Ridiculously sharp too. Something I read on the Web suggested that the Zeiss lenses are at their best when they're wide open, or nearly so; so I did a bunch of photos of Chris in colorfully embroidered (but dark) clothing, in full sunlight, with lens at f/4. Results seem technically remarkable to me.

    • 2/15/04 (later). Thinking over your comments, I guess I'd say that I'm reacting against the rather simplistic high contrast and saturation of typical "Hancock" shots. One of the reasons for going back to B&W and 35mm (apart from the teen-age fun of it all) was to get the long slope of gradations available that way. (Common wisdom is that digital has range similar to slide film, plenty of snap but less subtlety than B&W film.)

      Maybe this B&W of Chris is a better example of the nice results I've been getting with the Contax and Neopan 400.

    • 2/15/04 (still later). Just for the hell of it I made two A3 (12 x 18") B&W prints, one from the photo of Chris (G2, Neopan 400) and one from the 10D self-portrait with the drink in hand. I had to res up the 10D pic, and of course the 35mm scan at the same dpi (240 is what I use) would've been considerably over 12 x 18. To make a long story short, both are very sharp and detailed, no problem counting the threads in the clothing and so forth, yet to my eye the 10D image gives the *impression* of greater clarity and sharpness because it's noiseless. In light areas of the 35mm shot you can, inevitably, see the grain - ISO 400, after all. Very likely if I'd used an ISO 100 film like TMX the grain would be invisible. The 10D photo looks like something shot with a Hasselblad on TMX. Anyway, nobody in his right mind would critize either one as being unsharp.

      Both are the kind of results we could only dream of when we were kids.

    • 2/16/04. After all my fiddlin' comparisons of various films and sensors and such, I'm still quite happy with the look of the 10D's images. It really is one of those paradigm shifts. Photos from different periods have a look that's at least partly the result of the technology then prevalent - the Daguerrotype, the wet plate, the early Leica/Contax 35's, the 60's SLR's with Tri-X, etc. There's a clear difference between the hard and sharp but somehow gritty 35mm images of the 90's and the new slick, suave, smooth digital images you get from cams like the D60 or the 10D.

    • 2/18/04. Out of curiosity mostly I shot a roll of TMX and developed it in Diafine. Results are amazing - it really looks like something from the 50's. Big grain and blocked highlights.

    • 2/19/04. Anyway, the Diafine experience was disappointing, to say the least, as was the Acufine/Tri-X trial. So far only Neopan 400 in TMax seems to suit the G2. Sad.

      Let's face it. No film/developer combo suitable for handheld photography (Leica, Contax rangefinder) is going to beat, or even match, the 10D shooting at the same ISO and selected for the green channel (most of the noise being in the blue channel). However, the 10D isn't a Leica/Contax-type camera suitable for unposed pictures of people. So far nobody, including Leica, makes a digital with the streetwise qualities of an M6 or a G2. (For example, the cute li'l S50 has too much shutter/focus lag.) The Leica/Panasonic announced for sale in a month or two may be made along those lines, but it's hampered by having a smallish sensor with only 5mp.

    • 2/19/04 (later). OK, it's hopeless. I don't know and can't imagine any combination of 35mm film and super-snazzoo developer that would equal the B&W I can get easily and routinely from my 10D. Sad, but there it is.

      Here for example is a snapshot I did this evening, characteristically of myself because nobody else is around except Chris, who's watching British comedies on TV. It has exactly the smooth, slick, sharp, luminous quality I've tried so hard, and generally failed, to get with film.

      Here's a portion of the 100% image so you can see that the detail really is there. Oh yeah, forgot to say: it's made at ISO 400. Think Tri-X.

      Out of curiosity, and to be a completist, I made a similar photo using the S50 @ ISO 100. It's OK but much inferior to the 10D shot. Lacks that super snap, that slick-dick What Rose oiliness. Also it's a bit noisy. Film could certainly equal or even beat the S50.

    • 2/21/02. After doing my Saturday chores I got the idea of making some photos of the American suburban landscape. We live on the brink of the country still, equal parts Squaresville and Hicksville. I did a couple of shots using the 10D and others using the Contax with Ilford Delta 100, widely touted as the finest-grained, sharpest film since Kingdom Come. And yes, it does make very good pictures, but no, it doesn't beat out the 10D. Sigh. Will attach samples. True, the 35mm image scanned at 4000dpi is larger than the 10D's (assuming both are at 100%). But it can't compare to the 10D for smooth, silky edges and detail.

    • http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_February/546_19 -- G2, "Support Our Troops," Suffern, NY (I'm fond of this one) http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_February/040221153408bw – 10D, another "Support Our Troops" http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_February/546_34 -- G2, ditto

    • 2/22/04. Neil wrote:

      I realise that digital cameras will replace most uses for film but metal plate photo litho replaced the use of limestone for most uses. They are replacements only in the sense that most people are using the latter over the former...and now photolitho is going the way of the DoDo also... It is about convenience and style and sometimes but rarely about inherent quality. I find for example all the detailed images that you have sent that were digital lacking in a certain kind of modular detail which could be called grain in film...there is a certain building block that is not there. That does not make it inferior nor superior to film...different certainly...different in so many aspects that why are we making comparisons any longer. Just take the film camera as an entirely different image making machine and the digital camera with all of its certain advantages...and disadvantages ...for that which it does best. I would not dump my film cameras since the results that I get with them are different from digital and thus have a place in the toolkit just as one kind of paint or brush is different from and needed in place of another. I remember this painter who used to pull out the old cloud brush when he was doing a demo for his students. He kept it just for this purpse because it did what he wanted it to. Sure he could have used another and maybe it would have been equal to the task but it was easier to use the right tool for the right job. If making super blowups that are grainless is what you need then of course, use the 10D. If it is an expressive gritty image with the kind of modular crystalline qualities of film that you want...go for it.

      Curiously, when I would see studio camera prints in the old days...sharp and grainless as they were to everyone else, I found them unsharp due to the loss of grit that to my eyes told me that all was well in the world of that image. The smooth and slide-y creamy and velveteen look that they inevitably have, turns me off. Those great big mountain scenes by A. Adams do Nada for me precisely because they lack the character of the medium...for me at least. I am as yet unsure if the digital medium will suit my needs unless I were to corrupt them by adding grain a la Photoshop filters which does it to a certain extent but not with the kind of subtle variation that comes free with film. All in all it is a tossup.

      You have always had a hard-on for grainless and sharp and I for the somewhat grungier look that I head towards. It is style and content and not so much technique. I would not be satisfied with the 10D as it loses sharpness long before film loses its qualities and for large prints such as are my goal, it would simply not do the job. I noted on going back to DPreview, that their tests clearly showed the Sony [828] as substantially more detailed [than the Canon 10D]...and grainier due to noise which bothers many people it seems. Now that is a personal issue that each one must deal with. I would like to have control over how much noise is in an image and that is when software will have to suffice. I would rue the day, though, when only digital images are available and no one would even know about signal to noise being an issue or that film grain was even something that one knew intimately.

      Just think, no choice of film stock...no choice of image except through some kind of software modality? It does not sound flexible at all...limiting for the artists out there.

      When Litho became so tech, the litho quarries in Germany shut down for some 30-40 years...a long time anyway. Stones were recycled and when too thin they were laminated to cheaper stone so that artists could carry on. The quarries are open again and there is a demand for their stones as litho is not the same as its modern substitutes in any way shape or form. It is different that is all.


      Hancock replies:

      Very good points indeed. Every case is different. The replacement of old fuddy-duddy tempera on board with oil on canvas (cutting-edge, hi-tech in 1500) had much to do with convenience (the goo stays wet for days, and you can roll the damned thing up when it's finished) but also with the craving for a fleshier look. Clearly (as one can tell from the paintings of our friend Wyeth) it's not a question of one being simply better than the other.

      Likewise, color film seemed so obviously superior to B&W - adding a whole new dimension, etc, and being the holy grail of photo tech for a hundred years - that B&W all but disappeared, and is just now rebounding, because in fact it does have its own esthetic, just as chamber music does.

      But in the case of, say, digital versus analog computers, the difference is so big and the advantages of digital so obvious that analog computing simply vanished long ago (except for some dedicated specialized units). Also the biological approach to mental illness, where you give the sufferer a pill instead of 20 years on the couch, has driven the Freudians into the realm of tea leaves and astrology - their technique doesn't work, the other does, end of story.

      Digital versus film lies somewhere between the obviously-better and the different-results extremes, I'd say. There's a different look, certainly, and again it's the holy grail: no grain, and in a couple of years images as sharp and detailed as any lens can handle.

      It's tempting to think that film is the way to go for the effects you describe. However, once you've digitized something you can do what you want with it. Like those techniques for making a recording sound as though it's being performed in a given concert hall. I would expect that the Tri-X look, or whatever, will soon be reproducible via software. Naturally you have to have a *very* detailed image to begin with, and I don't think we're there quite yet.

      You're right about our different approach to images. I've always been a fan of folks like Vermeer and Wyeth, possibly because color isn't the big draw for me (obviously) and because I always had supernaturally sharp eyes and could see sharpness where you saw the famous nada.

      The thing is, I picked Contax/Zeiss exactly because I wanted that slick look, or as much of it as possible. Leica has always been about the kind of sharpness you describe, while Zeiss traditionally tried to get the grainless, nerveless look. I really don't crave the grittiness you mention. Even with B&W I go for stuff like Neopan 400 rather than Tri-X, the latter looking like gravel to me.

    • 2/23/04. Oh man, I always feel awful after spending real money. But the last month of B&W testing (plus your recent comments) decided me, so quick before I could stop myself, on the spur of the moment, having checked keh.com's list of newly arrived used equipment, I bought a copy of the Zeiss Biogon 21/2.8, which is supposed to be as good as anything except Leica's aspheric 21mm.

    • 2/24/04. Whilst awaiting delivery of this jewel I'm preparing for it by trying to think what on earth I can take 21mm photos of. Came home early today (more on that later) and spent the afternoon driving around the suburbs looking for photo ops. Found plenty, but in places where I could never make a photo -- can't stop the car in the middle of the highway, after all. And would probably be arrested, and my Contax confiscated, if I took photos of the gigantic BLESS OUR TROOPS flag in front of the police station. Whadda you, some kinda Arab? (Remember we live in an area where there are special kosher ambulances with all their labels in Hebrew, etc.)

      So I wound up as usual in the woods, totally unprepared, wearing running shoes yet, and damn near broke the camera and my neck sliding down a snowy cliff ('cause it's snowing) into a freezing river. Saved my nuts by grabbing the rough bark of a friendly tree. I like trees.

      I think (we shall see) that I have the true clue on B&W film/developer now. There's lots of mystification and obfuscation, but to me it seems pretty simple. Different combinations of film and developer and time and exposure give you different looks-and-feels. Find a look-and-feel you like and go for it. And that's what I've done. I'm tired of experimenting.

    • 2/24/04 (later). Whew. Bit of a chore, shooting and developing and scanning and Photoshopping B&W film. But one makes these sacrifices.

      The best of the photos I made today must be the dog run, 450.15. Deeply felt if nothing else.

      These aren't easy photos, I know. Ugly in (I hope) the same way lots of North European woodcuts circa 1500 are ugly. Different from my too-gorgeous color fotos of flowers and beheaded bunnies. More honest in a way. Staring into an asshole. The asshole stares back.

      Remember I'm trying to do without obvious composition, and in these recent fotos I'm also doing without color. Tour de force if it works. If not, not.

    • 2/25/04. It's not attracting lots of profound comments. Sum total so far: two, both from folks who probably think Picasso needed glasses:

      "Good overall effort, however the image lacks a strong focal point! The contrast, light and details are good."

      "Uninteresting, to much open space. I would like to see it cropped leaving out the about a third of the lawn in the foreground. Also a filter to bring out the sky and trees in the background."

      Needless to say, "Support Our Troops" was dismissed as having no "center of interest," also "too cluttered." Surprised they didn't criticize the drab colors.

      On the other hand, everybody's ecstatic about pretty flowers in a vase.

      Sometimes I wish there were places to post photos where comments are forbidden. Still, those I get are helpful in a meta-sense. They help me gauge the placement of my stuff in the universe of common perceptions, if you take my meaning. Also these folks are trying to be helpful, assuming I'm a kid who doesn't know you need a center of interest or that a good photo must tell a story. In most cases they'd be right, and since I don't have a rep on these websites they don't see any reason to look harder.

    • 2/25/04 (later). Unfortunately not enuf time to say everything I thought of while showering and driving to work. However, the basics. Your suggestion about the difference between film and digital, and about your and my esthetic, led or anyway contributed to photos like "Support Our Troops" (which indeed doesn't show up well on the Web, but in a print you can read the sign) or "Dog Run." I can't bring myself to use the graininess you mentioned. But I can, I think, get the grittiness you like. It's a sort of meta-grit, though. I mean, grittiness has to do with breaking up solids into patterns of grit, or in adding odd specks of adventitious matter to the image. I'm doing, or trying to do, the same thing via composition -- using large areas of pattern (as in the dog run) or including lots of clutter. The lack of a COI could also be seen as part of this nouveau grit.

      Also I like grits with eggs. But smooth, buttered grits.

    • 2/25/04 (still later). Yup. Personally I was delighted with "Dog Run" and just printed it at 12 x 18". So bleak, so misty, so empty, so Beckett. Here's a slightly warmer evocation of the place and time, taken a few minutes later facing in the other direction: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_February/551_35.

      Lots of excitement tomorrow: my new used lens is scheduled to arrive. It's a 21mm Zeiss Biogon. When Zeiss came out with their original 21mm Biogon (in the late 40's) it was the widest wide angle lens made for a 35mm camera. They made a version of it for the Hasselblad Superwide.

      'Course I've never once used anything shorter than 28mm, so may strike out with this one. As you know, Saint Cartier-Bresson didn't use very short or very long lenses either. In fact, some people who had converse with him will tell you he swore he never used anything but a 50mm lens, and a Leica, and black and white, and full frame. Others (who seem to have done more research) claim he did on occasion use a 35mm sort-of-wide-angle, and in the 30's preferred the Zeiss 50/1.5 lens, and that the famous photo of the Cardinal in Paris was made with a non-Leica, and that the ultra-famous "Behind the Gare St-Lazar" is *not* full frame, and that once, on commission, he did a color cover for "Paris-Match." These exchanges quickly evolve into pissing contests. As for Henri, if he remembers the details, he ain't saying.

    • 2/26/04. (Lunchtime.) Chris says my new/old lens has arrived. Will check it out this evening, though I can't do much really until the weekend. I think I have ten days to decide whether to keep it. keh.com is pretty respectable that way, and the 21's sell quickly.

      Hope it's OK and that I can warm up to it. As I've said, I have mixed feelings about keeping one foot in the past, though no doubt what you say about appropriate technique is true. In any case, for the moment, and for the foreseeable future, there are *no* digital equivalents to cameras like the G2 or the Leica M's. Those photojournalism DSLR's are the nearest digital comes at the moment, but they're big and heavy and expensive.

      Funny. I remember our 50's discussions about SLR vs rangefinder and so forth, and your first SLR, an Asahi Pentax circa 1962, sans prism. You didn't like the photos of Bob Schwalberg, and I recall your exact words: "He likes his negatives so thin you can't see 'em."

      Ah well. I guess Bob's dead now, like everybody else.

    • 2/26/04 (later). Well, the 21mm arrived today from keh.com. As far as I can see it'snever been used - was delivered in original box with original papers except for the guarantee. Like my other Zeiss G-lenses, it's a jewel, clad in titanium and made, seemingly, by nanomachines incapable of the least flaw. All I have to do now is find the time to use it. Oh, needless to say, the viewfinder (of course it has a special finder) sucks optically, with major barrel distortion and no diopter control and no bright line. Alas, the G2's downfall has always been its finders; Leica has great viewfinders, as well they should considering their prices.

      But Les, wouldn't you really rather have a Leica M7 with their own 21/2.8, 28/2.8, 50/2.0 and 90/2.8? Well, yes, maybe I would; however, that outfit, which exactly matches my G2 kit, would cost me (at B&H) $9,200. The Contax/Zeiss stuff, all new, currently comes in at $3,500, which indeed is about what I paid. Is the red dot worth nearly three times as much -- the price of a good used car?

      No.

      BTW, as usual the keh.com guys delivered on time, and the product is as advertised, if not better. I recommend them. www.keh.com.

    • 2/27/04. What's the straight dope on looseness in a lens barrel? I've had lenses, generally used, with some play discernable. For example, with Chris's Pentax macro, which works very well indeed, if you grasp the glans of the barrel, where you would screw in a filter (though most people prefer doing it in bed), the barrel's not perfectly tight, so that if you try to rotate it clockwise then counterclockwise you can feel a bit of play. I've usually put this down to drying out of a lubricant or wear in some set screw, and figure it's harmless, since the lens doesn't actually move in and out, which would affect focus, or side to side off-axis.

      I ask because that's the only thing I can find that qualifies the used 21mm as used. There's a barely perceptible amount of play in the barrel.

    • 3/1/04. After much reflection and testing I guess I'm reconciled to the 21mm, which turned in a decent performance at the museum even though I used it wide open for each and every shot. No noticeable vignetting, and corners are acceptably sharp. I should've had faster film, but whoknew? Anyway that was an extreme test.

      No doubt after a few years I'll stop worrying about the loose lens barrel.

      The frequent inability of the G2 to focus is another annoyance. The camera's notorious for that. Your G5 (or for that matter Chris's G2) has far more reliable autofocus. I guess it could be that I just got a lemon, or that a repairman could fix it. But fuckit. I can always focus by scale, a great leap forward for technology that lands me where I was in 1956 with my first 35mm camera from Sears, Roebuck. Maybe as film cameras head for the toilet I can pick up an extra body or two cheap, and get one that focuses better. It wouldn't be a bad idea to dedicate one such body to the 21mm.

      Remember that I never used such a short lens before this. I was pleased to see that I could take photos which don't show the oddities that shout "superwide" -- elliptical circles, stretched perspective in the corners. The photos of the whale room are quite impressive, really, not esthetically but in the sense that they show most of that very large interior without the central hot spot or weird proportions I usually associate with w.a. Instead the lens does what I hoped it would: opens up the space, separating out details like the little people, the big whale, the various stairs and windows and spotlights.

      And of course you're right about flare -- apparently the T-coating really works. Even shooting into spotlights or for that matter into the sun, I haven't seen any flare. The instructions that come with the lens say you should *not* use a lens hood, and Contax doesn't make one for this lens.

    • 3/1/04 (later). What's annoying about the G2 is that it's strictly autofocus, like the GR1. Canon (at least with the USM lenses) allows for manual focus with no changes in settings at all, just twist the magic ring and you're there. Also the Canon lenses stay where they were last focused, while the G2 maddeningly goes back to infinity focus after every shot (unless you hold that button down).

      Of course if a camera depends entirely on autofocus, the autofocus has to work. I'm halfway to concluding that my personal G2's AF is out of whack somehow. The fact that cold weather (even above freezing) makes AF difficult or impossible is suggestive. And many G2 owners swear to God that they never have any trouble at all, which sure'n hell isn't my case.

    • 3/2/04. Aye, you have a lot to answer for. By telling me that film has a dirty, funky quality with its own charm, you set me off on a quest that's kept me busy for a month of Sundays, seeking The Look that would give me an alternative to the sleek look of digital, which I thought suited me perfectly. And so it does, but one should always be noodling around looking for something new.

      Anyway, the alternative look I'm finding is one epitomized in my mind by some of Diane Arbus' B&W's, like the one of the completely tattooed man. It combines high, count-the-threads resolution with an overall low-key, toned effect. I think I got it in last month's shots of Chris wearing Chinese-y clothes from Chico's. And again in a couple of the AMNH photos I did on Saturday with the Zeiss 21. It's tricky, because the dark B&W tones can easily turn to mud; you have to include enough sharply rendered detail to prevent the mud from happening. Luckily I have the Zeiss glass and T-grain film. As you pointed out, what's wanted is the texture grain can give.

      This grail is so holy to me now that I've put in a bid for a second G2 body on eBay.

    • 3/2/04 (later). Why? Because I think my photos were getting too gorgeous and losing their irony.

    • 3/5/04. Rereading, this morning, your and my words re the difference (and nondifference) between digital and film helped settle the matter for me. Digital is noiseless and can be used wherever I want the look of a Hasselblad or 4x5 -- studio and landscape sort of thing. Film has a furry, gritty quality -- pointless to use low-speed film, which one does in a (futile) effort to get the (effortless) smoothness of digital on film. How very retro. While (the right choice of) high-speed B&W film produces a kind of burnished-brass look, a sort of black glow that pleases me inordinately.

    • 3/5/04. Neil's response:

      I fully agree...film is tough and gritty...a kind of Bogart-ean cigarette stuck to lip, sooty lung phlegmy kind of grittiness. A sort of loser private eye image of the world looking out of a dirty back window into the lovelessness of an inner city without empathy but with nonetheless a kind of solidity like cast pewter...that is film and most especially the high speed versions. Yes, quite correct, one must eschew slow speed films unless one is shooting with a camera designed really for tripod – i.e. large format - as a 35 is essentially a camera of the heart...one shoots from instinct and not from intellect with that machine...or should and thus the imagery ought, by nature, to be shorn of pretense and designer formalism but should rather be more like a machine gun shooting from the hip with hot steel flying more or less in the same direction but scattered by adrenaline, sweat and the excitement of the moment.

      Such can surely be the role of the digital camera that takes up the size and handiness of the 35mm. With its slowish image taking regimen, this might take a few years, but it is upon us almost as I write...soon, very soon, we shall have it all.

      Ga-roan. Soon, very soon, we shall be dead, or unable to read without a magnifying glass, much less work in Photoshop. The tragedy of our generation. We wait a lifetime for the old whore to part her legs, and when she does we're too old to get it up.

  • 3/12/04. So much for my correspondence on that topic. A few more words and I'll give it a rest. Put some of the Contax G2 film-test photos online with these notes:

    I did a series of test shots comparing G2/Zeiss photos with 10D/Canon pictures of the same subject. The digital images are "better" in the sense that they're free of grain and other visual noise. However, the analog image is made up of disparate components (irregular grain) that break smooth lines (on a small scale, of course). The digital photo is like something downsampled from a 4x5 or 8x10, with the smooth transitions and slick look of large format. By comparison, the analog image is dirty, funky, anfractuous, irregular, nookshotten, fuzzy and warm, I dunno - but different. Does that make it better? Certainly not. But it does have its own look, just as 35mm has a look different from medium format.

    Not to be coy about it, if I could have only one camera I'd certainly pick the 10D. Digital images can, at least in principle, be turned into something with the qualities of analog. The opposite isn't true.

    However, I already have a G2 kit of which I'm irrationally fond, and there's a certain retro charm in rangefinders and wet processing, which I've been doing since the 1950's while patiently waiting for digital to arrive. Furthermore, for the time being there's nothing digital that has the virtues of a G2 (or a Leica M). In particular, nothing now on sale will do serious wide-angle work - except the Canon and Kodak full-frame DSLR's, neither of which I can afford to buy.

    An interesting sidelight is the digital rangefinder soon on offer from Epson/Cosina. (See www.dpreview.com.) But it has an APS-sized sensor with no special tweaks to enable short-focus without bad vignetting.

    Ten years from now things will be very different, but I'll also be ten years older, if indeed I'm still alive. And there's always something better around the corner. Alas, even early adopters have to live within their means.

    Thanks to all for intelligent comments. One in particular deserves a good answer: "My guess, and you may have been hinting at it when saying digital was like a downsampled analog, is that film actually does capture more data yet it doesn't look at clean exactly because it kept all the detail while digital may keep more of the stronger details while dismissing some smaller details, thus a cleaner look."

    Think of music. When far-eastern musicians first heard European "classical" music in the 19th century, they often complained that it was "full of holes." They created their own music on the assumption that there would be a drone note, a bass line or some such "texture" (sorry for all the quotation marks) laid under the melody, the way a painter might start with scumbling or underpainting. Likewise, Europeans accustomed to the music of Brahms and Beethoven were surprised by the compositions of Stravinsky or (an extreme case) von Webern, since the new music no longer used the repeated figures and bass lines that served Wagner or R. Strauss as a kind of laugh track.

    OK, I'm biased, sue me. My point is that most of the "information" in a negative is in fact redundant, background noise which doesn't contribute to the image's information content but does add a texture, a glow, a patina, a "look." If you downsample a big negative, that background noise is minimized, lost in the translation to a lower res. If you do digital, assuming fairly large pixels that don't need much signal boost, it isn't there to begin with. That's what gives (good) digital images their slick, unctuous quality. It's a wonderful trick, like putting a Deardorff in a matchbox, and I'm grateful. However, the film look has its own charm, which I'm trying to turn to my own purposes.

  • 3/30/04. I think I've got it now. I know how to evoke three different looks using B&W film, B&W digital and digital in full color. Examples:

    B&W film: B&W digital: Digital color:


  • 6/21/04. Last month the G2 and Sonnar 90/2.8 spent a few weeks in the Contax shop; the camera was focusing a bit closer than it should've. Contax did a good job, repairing and adjusting both camera and lens (under warranty) in pretty short order.

    This year I've used the G2 a lot. I enjoy shooting with it – it's solid, feels good in the hands, I can carry the camera and three lenses in a bag smaller than a lunchbox, and the images I get are excellent. But it has two drawbacks, one just annoying, the other a show-stopper that limits the kit's usefulness:

    • Annoying: The finder is miserably dim and small.

    • Abysmal: Autofocus is unreliable, especially with the 90mm lens.

    The problem with the G2's autofocus is that if you can't focus the camera the shutter won't release, and the only focus available is autofocus. The "manual focus" mode uses autofocus to set the "manual" focus point – there's no such thing as moving the lens till two images join in the finder. That does help, since you can prefocus to a particular distance by try-and-try-again trial-and-error. But it helps less than I'd like, since the lens still indexes to infinity between shots, which makes it almost impossible to catch a fleeting pose or look. Compare this with the autofocus of any Canon SLR, where manual focus really is manual, where focus is reliable and quick and (with USM lenses) silent, and where the lens damn well stays at its current focus point between exposures.

    The G2 has the drawbacks of autofocus without its benefits. If its AF worked reliably the story would be different; alas, it doesn't, especially with the Sonnar 90/2.8. Ironically, till Contax overhauled my lens and camera I was willing to believe I simply had a lemon. But while the G2/90mm combo does focus accurately now, it has no more luck achieving focus than it did before. Infurating when you frame a promising shot and press the shutter release and nothing happens.

    Result: When I set out to use film I now tend to take along the Canon EOS 7, though I know the lenses can't hold a candle to Contax/Zeiss, and I have nothing shorter than 28mm. The SLR's bigger, but it's also quieter and has a decent finder. Odd to think an SLR does a better job handheld than an all-auto rangefinder, but that's the case. Oh well. It's the lenses, stupid.


 

New Tech Notes (last update: 9/7/2003)

Non-Tech Notes

Links

Photo Home


  • I'm moving to digital. I've known for a long time (and I mean since the 60's, not the 90's) that photography will eventually go digital; nothing else makes sense. But new tech's expensive and buggy, and I'm old enough to want tools, not toys. So I waited.

    But... Last winter, looking at tech details posted with photos in online galleries and forums, and reading reviews of new cameras at two excellent websites, dpreview.com and luminous-landscape.com, I felt I could finally afford to try a DSLR. So I bought, on eBay, from a nice guy in Montreal, a Canon D30. While waiting for it to arrive I ordered a few lenses – the Sigma EX Macro 50/2.8 and a used "Mark I" Canon 50/1.8.

    I took to the D30 right away. Here's a photo from my first session with the camera. I decided to stick with Canon, just as I've stuck with Contax/Zeiss till now, and bought two more lenses, Canon's 28/1.8 USM and 85/1.8 USM. They're both excellent, but I find I use the macro far more often than anything else. Results are fine. The Sigma build quality's poor, but Canon doesn't offer an equivalent lens.

    As soon as I took delivery of the D30, Canon announced the 10D at a price not far above what I'd paid. That didn't distress me, though, since I seldom make prints larger than 8 x 10, and the D30's native image size is 6 x 9 at 240ppi. Of course I'd rather have the newer camera, but the lenses are fungible, and I know I'll move up from the D30 fairly soon.

  • At the end of March I bought another digital camera, a Canon G2 for my wife. (eBay again.) This is literally the first photo I made with it.

  • Two weeks back I bought another P&S digicam for myself, one I can easily tote around, a Canon S50. It has its limitations – you can read all about them at dpreview.com – but if you have enough light for ISO 50, results are excellent. Again, here's one of my first photos.

  • Digital suits me very well, which is good, since as I said it's the coming thing. Its noiseless, silky, unctuous look is exactly what I want most of the time. More on this later; tonight I want to add a word about what I judge to be the future of the DSLR.

    I'd intended to move from the D30 to a 10D early next year. Now I wonder. The more I think about current DSLR's the less satisfied I am with them, at least with DSLR's that mimic 35mm SLR's. Two problems stand out:

    1) They perpetuate the stupid 2/3 aspect ratio, which has crippled small-format photography since the beginning. I don't know why Oscar Barnack chose that ratio, but it was a mistake. It forces makers to build a lens that covers the long dimension, which means big lenses, especially zooms, and big compromises in optical design. Yet few subjects apart from landscapes and langourous ladies fit well into 2/3, and it's hard to use vertically. 3/4 is a far better ratio, and that's become the standard for cheap digicams. That's what I'd prefer.

    2) Loss of resolution. Except for the expensive 1Ds (and the failed Kodak and Contax), DSLR's have sensors of roughly APS size. Yet you're obliged to use standard lenses with 24 x 36mm coverage. As a result you're effectively reducing every lens's definition by 3/5. And of course you also have trouble getting wide angle.

    Some new lenses are being designed for the smaller format, but it'll take a long time for Canon or Nikon to duplicate their 35mm offerings in miniature. Meanwhile of course there are no third-party offerings, no second-hand market, etc.


 

Old Tech Notes (last update: 1/3/2003)

Non-Tech Notes

Links

Photo Home


  • I’m fond of Contax/Zeiss. Their cameras are well designed and well made – Kyocera’s kept up the tradition. Their lenses are superb and generally cost less than top-end Canon or Nikon glass.

  • At this writing the camera I use most is a Contax 167MT, discontinued a few years ago. It’s a manual-focus SLR; for ten or twelve years it was Contax’s entry-level body. If I’d had the money I would’ve bought an RX or even an RTSIII. For my purposes the 167 is a studio camera; I always use it on a tripod.

  • I’ve had several Zeiss SLR lenses, including the excellent Distagon 28/2.8 and the less excellent Distagon 35/2.8. Seldom used either of those and eventually traded them in. I rely most on the superb AE Makro-Planar 60/2.8, the larger and heavier of the two Zeiss 60/2.8 macros. It focuses down to 1:1. Its mechanicals can’t be faulted and optically it may be the best normal macro ever made. For anything photographed at more than arm’s length there’s the 50/1.7 Planar, one of the world’s true bargains – Summicron quality at less than $200. My only long SLR lens is the discontinued Sonnar 100/3.5, sharp enough to shave with.

  • Shortly after 9/11 I felt moved to make more spontaneous and less self-congratulatory photos, so I bought a G2, the rangefinder Contax designed to compete with the Leica M series. (Practical considerations apart, I’m tickled to get back into the swing of the Contax/Leica rivalry that made 35mm photography so innovative in the 30’s and 50’s.) It’s a sweet little camera with three sweet lenses for normal use, the traditional triad: 28/45/90. I have all three: the Biogon 28/2.8, the Planar 45/2.0, the Sonnar 90/2.8. Just saying those names is like chewing a Mars bar.

  • Speaking of sweet little cameras, in ’98 I bought a Ricoh GR1, a point-and-shoot with a single-focal-length 28/2.8 as sharp and clear as most famous-name 28’s. Results were good enough to make me want more serious equipment; that's when I moved along to Contax/Zeiss.

  • The GR1’s tiny and eminently portable, but I hesitate to carry it everywhere because it’d be hard to replace if it's lost or stolen. (For reasons that pass understanding, Ricoh no longer exports it to the USA.) I’ve taken to pocketing a cheap Olympus Stylus point-and-shoot (35/3.5 or 35/2.8, clamshell build) loaded with high-speed film. They have a reputation for sharpness and ease of use that’s rather inflated – or maybe I’ve been spoiled by the GR1. But any camera’s better than none. (Or is it?)

  • On occasion I still use a Rollei 3.5f left over from the old days – that is, from the 70’s. There’s nothing wrong with it now that I've replaced the dim old focusing screen, but processing and scanning are problematic. Medium-format scanners, or individual scans to Kodak Pro PhotoCD’s, are too rich for my blood. (My new screen is excellent. It’s made by Bill Maxwell of Maxwell Precision Optics, Decatur, Georgia, USA, 404-244-0095.)

  • From the time I got back into photography, early in 1998, till 9/11, I shot only chromes, almost always Fuji Sensia 100. I had them developed by Kodak or Fuji without mounting. Before the summer of 2000 I sent the best shots off to Kodak to be scanned to PhotoCD’s; then I bought a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 and began doing my own high-res scanning. My reason for preferring transparencies was simple: I wanted to be able to read the results on a light table. Again, 9/11 gave me a swift kick in the head that changed my mind for me. When I got the G2 I fed it Kodak B&W film, which I developed myself. I colored the images in Photoshop. (I sincerely believe those photos are the best I’ve ever made.) Then I moved to color negative film: color because, well, I wanted color, and negative film mainly because I wanted higher speed for handheld photography and ISO 400 chromes tend to be harsh and grainy. These days I’m using mostly Fuji Superia from Wal-Mart, developed by the kids at the local Walgreen’s. Sometimes the processing’s good, sometimes bad, but I haven’t had better results from any lab I’ve tried, including Kodak’s. Evaluating color negatives isn’t as hard as I’d feared, and since I have my own scanner I can always see how a negative looks in a thumbnail.

    Those Pro PhotoCD’s (for the Rollei) are expensive, so I got an Epson 2450 flatbed scanner that’s supposed to give decent results with medium format. It doesn’t, mainly because the light source is diffused not collimated; but the scans it makes are OK for Web publication.

  • It’s an article of faith with me that photographs are meant for endless reproduction. Photographers willing to destroy their negatives or otherwise consecrate their work to the custody of a few collectors rub me the wrong way – with a rake. The Web and its successors are the right vehicle for publishing photos. Just now we’re limited by bandwidth and display technology, but it won’t be long before every wall becomes a video screen. Unfortunately, for the nonce the only way to see and exhibit photos in high resolution is to print them somehow. To that end I bought an Epson 2000P inkjet printer, which gets the job done fairly well.

  • Typically I spend an hour or two in a photo session, burning a few rolls of film to get a series of shots that may yield two or three worth posting to the Web. Then come five or six hours of Photoshop work. The result – that is, what I consider the final product – is a TIFF image suitable for printing on 11x19" stock. Each TIFF is also squeezed into a 72dpi JPEG for Web viewing.

  • So why not go digital and eliminate the middleman? If I live long enough I certainly will. Twenty years from now film will be a curiosity, at least in small-format photography. For the moment, though, very few digital cameras offer the features we’re accustomed to in 35mm SLR’s, and none can match film’s endless storage capacity or speed of operation. The best digital products are still pricey, too – the pick of the litter right now is the new Contax @ $6,500. And they’re cumbersome. There’s nothing at any price that can compete with the Contax G2.

  • Here are some sample photos (click on thumbnails):

    • GR1 with on-camera flash, Kodak TMZ (XTOL)

    • GR1, Fuji Superia 400

    • Olympus Stylus Epic with on-camera flash, Fuji Superia 800

    • Olympus Stylus Epic, Tri-X (D76 1:1)

    • Contax G2, Zeiss Planar 45/2.0, Kodak Max 400 45/2.0, Kodak TMZ (TMAX)

    • Contax G2, Zeiss Sonnar 90/2.8, Kodak T400CN

    • Contax G2, Zeiss Biogon 28/2.8, monolight, TMX (TMAX)

    • Contax 167MT, Zeiss AE Makro-Planar 60/2.8, Velvia

    • Contax 167MT, Zeiss AE Makro-Planar 60/2.8, TMX (TMAX), monolights

    • Rolleiflex 3.5f, Kodak Portra BW 400, monolight, Photoshop

    • Rolleiflex 3.5f, TMX (TMAX)


 

Copyright © 2002 Leslie Hancock