The Online Photographer

Today is the 75th Anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition in America. I thought this brief clip might be apropos....

________________________

Mike (Thanks to Mike O'D.)

Featured Comment by bobdales: "I want one for my RV so I don't have to put it in cruise control and then get up to pull a beer out of the fridge."

Under the "Barndance" picture, below, a commenter named James (very kindly) said, "It's a shame you don't have more of your black-and-white work online." And actually, there's a story behind that.

I used to print my pictures 6x9" on 8x10" paper. Although that seems paltry, they looked pretty good framed—here's an example:

(It was fashionable in museums for a while to frame horizontals in a vertical mat like that—I don't know if it still is. The picture is called "My grandmother's chair after her death." They don't make that molding any more—a pity; I liked it.) But people were always critical of my 8x10's. Big prints were more popular. I'd tell them I'm not trying to be popular; my personal work actually was personal, and if I never had shows anyway, what was the difference? But eventually the criticisms got to me. I bowed to fashion, and started printing on 11x14" paper. On most of my prints the image area is 7x10.5", which I figured was about as small as I could print on 11x14 without having it also fit on 8x10, but sometimes I printed really "big" and made 8x12's.

So here's the funny part. After making thousands of carefully crafted prints on 11x14" paper, for many years, digital came along. And all my prints were too big to fit on the bed of a standard flatbed scanner.

And that's why so little of my work is online. Doesn't fit on the scanner. I would have been a lot better off in the end if I'd just kept making 8x10's all along! 

That's what you get when you give in to fashion.

Anyway, I just have one little point to make today, and it's not even something I'm prepared to support. It's just that I've been saying for years that digital sucks at black-and-white, and everybody argues with me and then sends me bad black-and-white prints. Well, not all of them are bad. But a lot of them are. And a number of times I've put on my rusty armor, mounted my trusty steed Rocinante, and said there should be a digital camera with a black-and-white-only sensor.

Those trumpet blasts echo from the canyons. The world and I do not see eye-to-eye on this point.

So forthwith the perfervid peroration: In the past couple of days I've had my ol' inkjet printer fired up and cranking away. I can't really say about the Sony A900, because I shot so little with it—although I suspect it's also really good—but the Nikon D700 seems to be a really good camera for B&W. I mean really quite wonderful. I did Carl's "paper towel test," and whereas the Pentax K20D holds detail 2.7 stops above Zone V (not bad; about par for the course for APS-C sensors in my experience), the D700 holds detail 3.7 stops above Zone V! (Don't take my word for this; perform your own tests). And, impressively, that 3.7 stops above Zone V holds true for me with the D700 at ISO 200 and at ISO 3200. The difference in highlight detail is very noticeable. Using the "Exposure" and "Recovery" sliders in ACR, you can make files with surprisingly rich highlight detail, and they print wonderfully. No, I'm not prepared to share any B&W pictures yet; it's personal. But I'm impressed and gratified. I would say it's the first time I've gotten B&W quality out of a digital camera that doesn't make me mourn for Tri-X on Multicontrast Classic—tonally; grain and sharpness are much better with the digital prints. But that's been true before. It was the tonality that's been lacking, especially in the highlights. That's changed, finally, if my early trials with the D700 are a good indication. Overall the print quality I'm getting from the D700 seems to be very, very good.

...In colors, even, if one insists on that.

___________________

Mike

P.S. Man, I'm losin' it. Here's something else I meant to say: the D700's high-ISO performance goes double for B&W, because of course in B&W you don't see chroma noise in the shadows (or anywhere). So I'm making very pretty B&W prints from files shot at 1600 and 2500.

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Featured Comment by Ross Chambers: "Oh dear, I've been busy printing about 25 pictures 5x7" on 8x10" paper for a show! It all started when some were 5x7" negs and I could only contact print, so all the rest became the same size. I also will be matting 'landscape' in the same format as Mike's example. They look okay to me. Maybe someone who needs to fill a large wall will buy several! By the way, re size: There's a Gursky show in Melbourne, Australia at present. The Sydney Morning Herald was nasty enough to make an equation between admission fee and acreage."

By Thelma Gutierrez and Wayne Drash, CNN; Photo by Gregg Canes

Modesto, California—The photograph became an icon of the Great Depression: a migrant mother with her children burying their faces in her shoulder. Katherine McIntosh was four years old when the photo was snapped. She said it brought shame— and determination—to her family.

"I wanted to make sure I never lived like that again," says McIntosh, who turns 77 on Saturday. "We all worked hard and we all had good jobs and we all stayed with it. When we got a home, we stayed with it."

McIntosh is the girl to the left of her mother when you look at the photograph. The picture is best known as "Migrant Mother," a black-and-white photo taken in February or March 1936 by Dorothea Lange of Florence Owens Thompson, then 32, and her children..."

READ ON at cnn.com

________________________

Mike  (Thanks to numerous tipsters)

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One of Jim's workshop participants, shooting with a tripod, while Jim shot handheld.

By Jim Richardson

While most of the discussion concerning digital noise centers around the comparison of one camera with another, I end up feeling that, from an historical perspective, we're missing the boat. I too am one of those geezers who remembers the new wonders of Kodachrome 64. And under Rich Clarkson's tutelage I even remember the era of developing Ektachrome 64 as a negative so we could shoot color at the unheard of speed of 320 (in a desperate pinch).

In a more recent era, shooting for the yellow border magazine, ISO 100 became the norm. All higher speed films were reserved for truly desperate circumstances, and a picture shot on that film was going to have to be really special to overcome the lack of color and snap the editors expected to see.

Which brings me to my point. During that era we pretty much edited reality. We restricted the subjects of photographic inquiries to the brighter parts of world. Essentially we edited out dark parts of the world, such as nighttime. Often it didn't matter what the actual journalistic value of the subject was, if we couldn't make a good transparency of it we just didn't shoot it. It was a form of self-censorship and in many ways it presented a distorted view of reality to our readers.

Add to that limitation the problem of color balance under the myriad of odd light sources present in the real world. This narrowed our vision in two possible ways. Either we simply didn't shoot under such conditions, like under the pukey green fluorescent lighting in most offices. Or we went ahead and shot the pukey green and made an editorial statement out of it, using the ugly green to imply the ugly office conditions where minions toiled away their meaningless lives. (I know you could throw on the Tiffen FLD filter but did it ever look really good?) Either way, in the end we simply left huge parts of the world out of our examinations. The ability to adjust white balance in a digital camera is, for photojournalism, a minor revolution.

Now comes digital. And let me just say this: Hallelujah! Forgive me for not entering the debate over various cameras and their noise levels more earnestly. (Although I do like my D700.) The point is, all these cameras are wonderful! With any one of the current cameras we can bring huge swathes of the world into focus that were hitherto off limits. We are seeing great picture stories emerge from the darkness. This is a real revolution. Finally we can go where people really live and work and bring back images of impact and beauty.

All this actually matters, and not just to us photographers examining our pixels (and our navels.) It matters to the general public because it changes the visual stamp of our era. It changes what we think our world looks like. It changes which parts of it we're able to see and share worldwide. It is as if we just discovered another continent or got our first view of the dark side of the moon. It's not that photographers haven't done great night images before, such as the beauties that Brassai extracted from the Paris nights. It's that for every Brassai we now have millions of photographers who can look into the dark corners of our world (and of our souls.)

I'm sure we'll see higher ISOs in the future and I'm sure we'll see less noise and that the camera debates will go on long into the night (and that the DxO Labs of the world won't run out of work any time soon). But I think, historically, that when we've gotten to the point of debating whether images shot at ISO 3200 were perfect or merely remarkable we are, essentially, over the hump.

________________________

Jim

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Featured Comment by Paul De Zan: "Sanity! What a refreshing post. It's hard for me to understand how so many seem to be so jaded by what are, in fact, miracles. Glad I'm not alone."

Featured Comment by Bahi P: "The points you make apply all the more to those of us who are generally not at our best in the mornings. We get up late, stay up late and hang around with others who stay up late. Today, we finally get to document our own lives—at home, out with friends, out for an early walk around dusk :) —without strobes. It's seriously liberating. Soon, this freedom will be available to people using compacts, too. I still come across many commentators claiming to be baffled by the appeal of handheld photographs taken in low light. For them, a good photograph always has great sunlight in it and maybe a waterfall or some mountains and night photography is about tripods and flashguns. For the rest of us, our time has come."

I know I've been talking about the Panasonic G1 a lot lately, but I do find it a fascinating thing. Anyway, I think a lot of people are going to find themselves fascinated by this: it's a page from the November, 2008 issue of the Japanese camera magazine Nippon Camera showing adapters that let you use Leica M lenses (right—and, on the left, Canon FD) on the G1.

You can get them from CameraQuest, where they'll be arriving in late December. Cost, $175.

Sure looks like potential gearhead fun!

_______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Olivier Giroux)

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Featured Comment by Roger Suppona: "My G1 arrived last Saturday and my 4/3, Nikon, and M42 adapters arrived yesterday. Already I am liking the G1 a lot. I need to spend some more time with it but my Nikon days may be drawing to a close.

"To use other lenses you have to change a setting on the G1 to tell it that it's OK to work without a lens attached  before it'll do anything. After that it works like a charm. The display remains bright and viewable at small apertures and it's easy to focus. While playing with various lenses last night I thought it would be pretty cool to be able to use M-mount glass. Now it looks like I've something else to buy for the G1."

For my next comments about the Nikon D700, I'd like to ask you to undergo a mental exercise. What I'd like to do is separate the sensor from the camera, and look at them separately.

Some people are likely to have a little trouble with this idea, so let me talk about it a little. This is nothing new at all, but think of sensors as film. For the most part, sensors have replaced film convincingly, in some ways impressively. Sensors surpassed film for color purity pretty early on; for resolution, when they reached about 6 MP; they lagged behind in image size for a while, but when the 12–14 MP sensors came along they surpassed film (what I mean is, I can now make a print with a 14-MP sensor that is not just better but better and bigger than I could have made from a 35mm negative); and for high-ISO quality, digital surpassed film in 2004 or 2005—and has recently lapped it.

The only way that sensors have not yet surpassed film (neg films, anyway) is in dynamic range. They'll get there, I suppose. They just haven't yet.

It's been a Brave New World right along, with each new generation breaking new ground. And all along, of course, sensors have been radically more convenient than film—costing nothing on a shot-by-shot basis and able to be developed in a fraction of a second, if you use the in-camera JPEG converter, or merely very quickly and easily if you don't.

So I'm not complaining about sensors. But now consider the cameras—all the parts wrapped around the sensor—separately. Yes, of course the point of a digital camera is to contain a digital sensor, and there have been many "good cameras" before now in that sense. But consider the cameras experientially—what are the like to use? What are they like to carry and take pictures with? Cameras are particular sizes and shapes. They have certain power and support requirements, they are responsive or unresponsive in various ways, and they provide you with some method of pointing—some way of viewing the world and interacting with it. In respect to cameras—cameras as electro-mechanical devices, as objects, as hand tools, divorced from sensors and images—digital has been a pretty big disappointment, in many ways, up till very recently.

I've written elsewhere about the "whys" of that statement, so I won't go into it again here.

After my recent experience using the Sony A900 for a week I was left with a profound feeling that it was really the first really good camera I'd used in, say, ten years or so. It was the first digital camera I've tried that requires no excuses, makes no compromises as a camera just in order to be digital.

It's true that there were many capable digital cameras before it, but they all made concessions in order to be digital cameras. You remember all the particulars: they ran out of power quickly, they were too big and heavy, they had tiny little viewfinders, they slowed down if you shot too quickly, and so forth. The Sony A900 for me is a reasonable size and weight, it's ergonomic, it's got a splendid eyepiece and viewfinder, it's responsive and controllable. It is, in short, just as good as the film cameras we had at the end of the film era. Compared to, say, a Contax ST, I'd have bones to pick, but overall it wouldn't be found wanting.

It was the only camera, really, that I could say that about. Until now, that is—now there are two.

I have to excuse myself from the discussion of Nikon's D3 and things like Canon's 1Ds Mark III. I know they're good, they're just not my cup of tea, that's all. I'm an ex art student; you know, the type of ratty photographer who pokes around the edges of things taking pictures of things nobody else notices with crappy old forgotten secondhand cameras, slaving away in the darkroom to get the print just right, and never making a dime for any of it. Big he-man professional rigs used by guys who take pictures of movie stars are just not where I'm at. If I'm going to use a big camera, my minimum requirement would be that it should be made out of wood.

But the D700...well, it's the second really good camera I've used lately.

In 1999, Nikon introduced a film camera called the F100. It was an F-lite, what would now be called a "prosumer" camera, into which Nikon poured all of its experience and expertise as a cameramaker. F100s were so popular that they are still available on Ebay, in great condition, for greatly depressed prices.* Well, for all the great cameras Nikon's built in the digital era, none have come up to the standard of the F100. Just as cameras, I mean (have I said that enough?).

And at various points along the Great Digital Trail, periodically I have heard the same plaintive cry from out amongst ye pioneers: "Why can't they just make a digital camera as good as the F100?"

Well, now they have.** It took ten years, but digital cameras have caught up with film cameras as cameras.

As Steve Rosenblum pointed out the other day, nobody has yet made a digital camera that is as good as the Olympus OM-4T. They might eventually get there. They haven't yet.

But for the moment, the D700 is a wicked good axe. It feels right. It works good. It's a complete success not only for its sensor, but as a camera.

End of this particular point as far as the D700 goes; next up, some comments about the first really good digital cameras for black-and-white.

_____________________

Mike

*Note to impecunious but ambitious youngsters who can't afford the digital camera of their dreams: get yourself an F100 off Ebay, a 28/2.8 or 35/2 prime, and a brick or two of Tri-X to get started, and spend a thousand or 2,000 hours shooting with it. You'll be well on your way to mastery and a personal style.

**(And just as they did, the wave of the future hit shore: the first good camera without no flippin' mirror. But that's neither here nor there.)

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Featured Comment by Robin Harrison: "Interesting article, Mike. A few months ago I was in Japan around the time that 'holy trinity' of full-frame DSLRs were announced: the Nikon D700, the Canon 5D Mk. II, and the Sony A900. I spent too much time poring over Japanese photographic magazines trying to decipher the conclusions from their three-way tests (two of which were: A900 had the best dynamic range, the D700 had the best low-light performance). Somehow, foolishly, I made my conclusion. It had to be the Nikon. I'm sure it's just a numbers thing. We all go through it. With me, first it was long lenses (I had to get that Contax 300mm ƒ/4, then a Tamron 350mm), then short lenses (whoa...Voigtlander 21mm, then 15mm), then fast lenses (Leica 35mm ƒ/1.4, then a Canon 50mm ƒ/0.95); now it's maximum ISO sensitivity (what? ISO 25,000? SOLD!).

"So I walked through a Nikon-branded shop front in Tokyo, and came out with a...F100 and a 35 ƒ/2 lens.  Why? I decided it was the cheapest way of finding out what it would be like to shoot with a D700 over an extended period. I've been shooting nearly exclusively rangefinders the last few years, and I had no idea weather an AF SLR would be my cup of tea. It almost doesn't matter what film I put it, or what results I get. Compared to forking out blindly for one of these pricey (albeit great) cameras, the F100 is a cheap and fun exercise." 

Just a brief note to say thanks to all the people who have linked to their own pictures in the past few days. Some nice stuff has gone by, and it was good to see it. (I looked at everything.)

And speaking of pix, anyone get a nice shot of the cosmic smiley last night? The one at the left, by Bullit Marquez of the AP, is the one being passed around on Yahoo!.

It was cloudy here.

____________________

Mike

I find it kind of amusing how everybody tells me that IS won't stop subject motion...as though there were some kind of rule that you have to stop subject motion. This is only my favorite example that I happen to have scanned (I still haven't managed to get my scanner fixed), but I have dozens and dozens of pictures that are made better by subject motion.

They're just pictures. Some pictures work best one way, some pictures work best another way. There are no rules, there's just what works. What works according to you.

Another thing I like is how people always tell me to "just use a tripod." I sometimes wonder about that. Because for every situation I find myself in where I could use a tripod—even assuming I wanted to subject myself to the hassle of going to get the tripod and setting it up, which, usually, I don't—there are two or three situations in which a tripod would be useless. On board a boat? Leaning out a window? I seem to take pictures in lots of situations in which a tripod just isn't a practical option. The picture above is a good example of that, too—I had shimmied several feet out on to a wooden beam, and jammed the camera into the joint where two rafter beams met. Tripod? Not in that situation. Just had to use what was handy. This was taken with a Canon EOS RT and P3200 film rated at 1000, and even though it's been 16 years, I still remember the shutter speed—1/6th second.

______________________

Mike

P.S. For the record, and in the interest of fairness, I will admit that occasionally there is a situation where I didn't use a tripod, but should have. There are certainly plenty of situations when I could have used another stop and two-thirds, too.

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As a coda to the camera-carrying topic, this is my all-time favorite camera bag. It also militates against big, heavy cameras, since they won't fit. With the coming of mirrorless cameras like the Panasonic G1, it might be coming into fashion again.

Mine is positively ragged, worn to smithereens. It's going to be tough to toss.

_____________________

Mike

P.S. These have been around since before there were laptops!

Featured Comment by Tom: "I believe that bag was originally designed back in the '80s to hold one's petroglyph carving tools."

One of the things I've been pondering over the past few weeks is, which is preferable: high ISOs or IS? This issue seems to divide enthusiasts, and I myself have firmly taken sides—I love IS, as I've written ad nauseam. But why do I? Am I really justified? Of that, I'm not so sure. Does it suit my own particular way of working? Does it address shortcomings in my technique? (Or my liking for coffee?) Or do I just like the idea of it, somehow?

I want to caution you against putting too much stock in tonight's little trial, which I'm about to relate. There are far too many uncontrolled variables here to claim that this proves anything. In fact, I suspect it's pretty much impossible to level the playing field and make all these variables objectively fair. But I haven't tried very hard: I'm not even using lenses with roughly equivalent angles of view (although they're both the same focal length).

Here's the shot that started it all, which I admit I thought was enormously impressive when I took it. This is the Nikon D700 with the AF-Nikkor 35mm ƒ/2 at ISO 6400. All of the following are screen shots from ACR, and in each case I shot several shots and picked the best one.

If it looks like it was taken at night, that's because it was. This was a good three hours past sunset. The exposure ended up at 1/60th at ƒ/4.

Then I took the Pentax K20D and 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro and set the ISO at two stops slower, ISO 1600. I used the same aperture, but slowed down the shutter speed by two stops, to 1/15th, to compensate. But I turned SR on. (That's "shake reduction," what Pentax calls IS.)

You can see the angle of view is narrower due to the smaller format. Both shots were handheld.

Here are a few 100% comparisons: in all three cases, the D700 shot is on top and the Pentax detail is on the bottom. (Sorry if I didn't manage to grab exactly the same areas. In all three cases I tried to grab roughly the same pictorial area, not the same size sections.)

To me, it looks like the K20D at 1600 compares favorably to the D700 at 6400—it has better sharpness and more detail. This looks like a win for SR to me, for this kind of shot—a static scenic in extremely low light.

I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed that the Nikon didn't do better here. Here are a few things that could be going on: Maybe 6400 is past the sweet spot for the D700 (that is, maybe the D700 would beat the K20D by more than two stops if there were more light and I were using both at lower ISOs). Maybe the newer (c. 2007) Pentax lens is better than the older (c. 1987) Nikkor (I did give the Pentax DA Macro a rave review when I wrote about it). Maybe I'm better at hand-holding 1/15th with IS than I am at handholding even 1/60th without it (I think it's pretty obvious that this is true). Maybe noise reduction and sharpening would change the results or at least ameliorate the differences. Maybe I messed up the test in some other way I'm not aware of.

Here's what I'd do to make the trial a little more carefully: I'd use a 50mm Nikkor to make the angles of view more similar; I'd use a vintage 35mm on the Pentax to make the lens comparison more fair; I'd make duplicate shots on a tripod, focus bracketed, as controls; I'd photograph in a little better light to make the shutter speed of the Nikon 1/125th instead of 1/60th; and I'd use 3200 and 800 instead of 6400 and 1600.

More to follow (well, it's a blog—there's always more to follow). Stay tuned.

P.S. There's one criticism of this test you shouldn't make, and that would be to say that I could just use VR on the Nikon. Nope, because Nikon does not now and never will put VR in any of the lenses I want it in—not a chance. That's why I like IS built into the camera body, because it's usable with all lenses—including the ones I like. So the Nikon's only hope of competing is with higher ISOs alone.

Part II

Okay, here's another test, in which I tried to be more rigorous. For this one I used vintage, manual focus lenses on both cameras—a Nikkor 50mm ƒ/2 AI and an SMC Pentax-M 35mm ƒ2.8. The Nikkor was used one stop down and the Pentax lens wide open, which would give the optical advantage to the Nikon.
And in this case I compared the Nikon D700 at ISO 3200 and 1/125th with the Pentax K20D at ISO 800 and 1/30th, SR on. Both shots were corrected (well, sort of!) in raw but what you see here are screen shots from ACR. In each case I focus bracketed, and took seven shots and picked the best one.

Nikon:

Pentax:

Again the angles of view do not quite match, but they're closer.

100% comparisons, Nikon on top, Pentax below:

A much closer call this time. Having pored over both shots in various areas at various percentages, I'd again have to give the nod to the Pentax, but the Nikon is clearly holding its own. In this case, having shot the Nikon at 1/125th, there is no sharpness advantage to SR; noise and detail are ever-so-slightly worse in the Nikon image, and sharpness is better—the latter probably a consequence of the somewhat better lens stopped down one stop vs. the Pentax moderate WA used wide open.

From these trials I'd say that the Nikon almost but not quite maintains a two-stop advantage over the Pentax in terms of high-ISO performance—call it a stop and two-thirds to be on the safe side—as long as the ISO 6400 setting is not used. This accords just about perfectly with my sense yesterday that ISO 2500 would be a sensible setting on the D700, 2500 being a stop and two-thirds more than 800, which in turn is a very usable speed on the K20D.

______________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ry H.: "Well, either one of those photos viewed at that close crop appear more like oil paintings than photographs to me, which is probably a big reason why I try not to pixel peep too much.  That said, the Pentax K20D and that old M 35mm ƒ/2.8 lens seem to acquit themselves pretty well, especially considering that that particular lens is pretty pedestrian for a Pentax prime.

"On a different note, while I have seen a few examples of excellent shots which were only possible with a high ISO, I tend to believe that there's a reason photography is known as 'painting with light'— it doesn't work so well when the light is lacking. If people are using ISO 12500 and are getting good pictures of their children playing in a dark room, all the more power to them.  Myself, I'll wait until morning."