The Online Photographer

Wow, yesterday was a hard day. It's funny how much of life with a dog is based on mutual understandings—you don't realize how much until all your normal routines are interrupted. I'm sure things will get better as we ease into a routine, but we're in the adjustment phase now. Lulu was up all night on Thursday night, so I got no sleep either. Yesterday was one of the rare times I wished I had a laptop—I ended up sitting with her in the kitchen (where she's confined) most of the day, between trips outside and changing the ice packs. No computer for the dog nurse.

And of course there's no rest for the weary. The PA system at the high school down the street started blaring at 8 a.m. this morning—track meet—thanks for that—and an early bird neighbor decided that 8:45 was plenty late enough for anyone to sleep, so he might as well fire up his chainsaw.

I like my neighborhood, but the noise pollution can be surprisingly bad. A few weeks ago, someone decided that it was a good idea to gun his car down our street at one o'clock in the morning and sound a long blast on the horn. That happened three nights in a row. Just when I was beginning to reconsider my stance on automatic weaponry, it stopped. Knock wood.

A little logic
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I notice—and have noticed, consistently—that people seem to have a hard time understanding the logical distinctions between various statements about the importance of equipment. The exchange usually goes like this:

Me: Good equipment doesn't guarantee good results.

Typical responses: "I hate it when people say equipment doesn't matter." "Sometimes particular jobs require certain kinds of equipment." "Better equipment can improve your results in some cases."

The problem is that all three of those responses are, well, non-responsive. Equipment does matter, in all kinds of ways. And, yes, for various kinds of pictures you do need the correct equipment—sometimes because it's nice to have, sometimes because it's necessary. And, certainly, I've seen many cases over the years when otherwise good work was let down by poor equipment or technique. But that's not what I said. I said good equipment doesn't guarantee good results, and that statement is not logically inconsistent with any of the three classes of responses listed above.

Cravings
I sometimes wonder how many people have a favorite kind of equipment or a favorite material not in terms of what they like to use, but in terms of what they like to look at. Does that describe you?

I know people who love large format so much that they just aren't really moved by other kinds of photographs. I definitely know people who love and crave color in photographs.

I know people who say they love the look of Leica lenses, but I proved to myself long ago that I can fool those people. It's evil, I know, but if you show a Leicaphile a picture made with a fine lens of another marque and tell them it was shot with a Leica lens, more often than not they won't be able to tell the difference. Might as well keep 'em happy, then.

A Tri-X 400 picture. And it was taken with a Leica lens!!**

I will, obviously, look at anything. I'm equipment-agnostic and material-agnostic (and digital-vs.-analog agnostic, too). But if I search my brain, I think what I like best—the look I crave—is Tri-X 400*. (Maybe some evil person could fool me there, too.) I haven't shot any in years, but it's the look I crave. If I had to look at nothing but pictures made with Tri-X 400 for the rest of my life, I could live with that***.

Mike the Dog Nurse

*Tri-X 320 is a completely different film, and should have been given a different name.

**No it wasn't.

***I really need to get a new scanner so I can post some of my Tri-X work online. I am good and properly jinxed when it comes to flatbed scanners—starting in about 2001 I bought three, each of which cost more than the last, and each of which broke in short order. (If you look closely at the picture above, you can see the banding problem that was the downfall of scanner #1.) I then decided I really, really needed a dependable scanner even if I had to pay a lot for it, so I bought an Epson V-700. It lasted all of four months before it stopped working. It's still sitting here, mocking me. I know there are lucky people out there in the world who own scanners that actually work, but fate seems determined that I shall not be one of them.

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Featured Comment by Richard Howe: "I think you can make a stronger statement than 'good equipment doesn't guarantee good results,' namely: nothing guarantees good results. I've made lots of bad pictures with my Leica lenses (and a few good ones, I hope) and some good pictures with my (now antique) Olympus C2000 point & shoot (vintage 1999). The only thing that really seems to help is experience, plus something good to take a picture of, and a little luck too, of course. A friend of mine used to say to me (in another context), 'if you want a guarantee, buy a refrigerator.' I think that about sums it for me."

Featured Comment by Benjamin R. George: "I think the problem here is that making any statement about the relationship between equipment and results amounts to walking in on a very long (and, for the most part, very stupid) internet debate, and as soon as you enter the room, people will try to assign you to a side and then argue with you by arguing against that side's alleged platform.

"Everybody's read some hyperbolic claim about how equipment never matters. Everybody's read some other claim about how if you aren't willing to spend in excess of $5k you just aren't serious about photography. Anytime somebody says something about equipment mattering or not mattering, some portion of the audience will inevitably hear one of these extremes, even if the actual claim being made is a lot more subtle, and has no direct logical connection to either."

Featured Comment by Lynn: "The equipment between my ears produces my best photos, but I do admit it suffers from down time, inexplicable random errors, reliability issues, and can be easily distracted by dogs, children, and refrigerators. I find giving it regular exercise tends to produce better results. Oh, and it does tend to gravitate towards Tri-X and Kodachrome 25 looks, because those were the factory settings it grew up with."

Featured Comment by Paul Amyes: "For a while I taught photography. The thing that I hated was the whole issue of equipment. You had a class of 20 young people who wanted you to hand them a shopping list of exotica for their parents to buy them. They were visibly upset with the college requirement 'a 35mm SLR with with 50mm lens such as the Pentax K1000.' Honestly it was like being in front of a lynch mob baying for blood. They all felt that their creativity was being stiffled by the lack of equipment."

Featured Comment by John H. Maw: "I have found that new equipment often gets in the way of good shooting. It takes time for the equipment to become transparent to the process. In other words I work much better with stuff that I have had for some time and that I can use almost without thinking."

I had a chance to speak to Peter about his technique. Like many photographers he prefers not to talk about technique, because he doesn't consider it the point of photographs. However, he mentioned that as a point of preference and principle, he never uses flash—as a reporter he feels it's important to record the light that is there in the scene, not bring or create his own light. He did say that the night photographs in Tahrir Square were made possible by the Nikon D3 and that many were shot at ISO 6400, which ended up giving him shutter speeds between 1/30th and 1/60th, and that he shot mainly with the AF-Nikkor 24–70mm in the 24–28mm range. He told me he much prefers fast lenses and would have liked to have his favorite AF-Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.4 along, but his lens currently has a balky focus ring that might possibly have cost him some shots, so he left it at home. (I believe that lens has been discontinued and is no longer available new; perhaps some kindly Nikonian can fill us in on chapter and verse.)

He said several times that he was impressed and amazed by the "tremendous" performance of the Nikon D3 in low light.

Mike

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This is wonderful—after my recent post telling the story of the $5,500 Nikon lens hood, a thread on the subject started up on the Nikon Journal site (subheaded "The Nikon Historical Society Online"). And it turns out someone had saved a printout of the auction, which he then scanned and posted. So you can see the original auction at this link.

My memory wasn't too bad, all things considered—the final price was $5,555, the auction took place in March of 2000, and there are 10 of those hoods known to Nikon collectors (or at least there were at that time).

Mike
(Thanks to Fred Krughoff, Jarle Aasland, and especially "nsp9107")

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A reader named Tom tipped me off to the above auction, in which a seller called sk_photo is offering a Leitz Canada lens hood—described as "Leica/Leitz 12522H OLLUX lens hood for Leica 35mm/f1.4 [sic] 1st type lens"—for the rather princely sum of $698.25. (That's €513.42 or £440.88 if you don't feel like looking up the conversions yourself.)

Believe it or not, it's not the most expensive lens hood I've ever seen. Not by a long shot.

At some point in the mid-'90s, when I was working for Photo Techniques, I somehow ran across an auction for an old Nikon lens hood. The hood was for an early 20mm lens for Nikon rangefinders. (Maybe it was 21mm—it might have been the one at this link [you'll have to scroll down to the "Nikkor-O 1:4 f=2.1cm," 1959–60], though I couldn't swear to it now.) When I first encountered the auction, it was at about the asking price of this Leitz hood—which seemed so utterly absurd to me at the time that I started watching the auction.

The price notched higher, and higher, and higher. I assumed two rich collectors were vying for the honors (actually it was three, in the early going—two later on). The price got to a dizzy $3500 or so, and then collapsed—one bidder for some reason retracted all his bids.

I assumed that was that. But no—gradually, the bidding recovered. The auction was set to end overnight, so when I arrived at work the next day (I didn't have internet access at home at the time) I hurriedly checked in. The lens hood—just a little ring of metal, you understand, and quite tiny and shallow, nothing special in and of itself—ended up selling in the neighborhood of $5,500!

I was intensely curious about this. I thought of a veteran Nikon collector I knew who I could call to find out more about the allure of the hood. But first I called the seller. He was a longtime "sole practitioner" gear merchant who was used to selling old stuff to the collector market, the kind of guy who used to advertise in Shutterbug. He hadn't known how to price the old lens hood—he'd never had one before—so he'd put something like a $295 start price on it just to take a stab at it, not knowing whether he could sell it for that. He told me that he and his wife had been so excited by the course of the auction that they'd stayed up all night watching it!

My Nikon collector friend solved the mystery. It turns out that there were only about 100 of those ultrawide lenses made, and they were prohibitively expensive. But, when the lens was new, the hood was an optional accessory—so presumably only a subset of the 100 lens purchasers also purchased the hood.

He told me how many of the hoods were known to exist, and of course I forget the number (I don't have a very good memory for numbers)—I think it was something like 10 or 13.

But the funny thing was that the purchaser had actually made a good investment. It turned out that the rare old ultrawide alone was worth about $5,000—but with an authentic hood it would be worth more like $15,000. So the buyer of the $5,500 lens hood had actually made a good deal, and gotten value out of the transaction!

At any rate, it's at least possible that this Leitz Canada hood at $700 isn't so expensive after all. Things are not always what they appear.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom)

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Another point about tripods—as with any sort of photographic equipment, it's wise to go for advice to someone whose needs and usages match your own, or match what you aspire to do. That's why it's so important for a reviewer to be clear about what kind of photographer he or she is—so you know what kinds of needs the equipment has to meet. If you're a "power user" of tripods, you'd be foolish to get your buying advice from me, because until now I've only been an occasional tripod user. (In "Tripod Technology," the history of my tripod use—my relationship with tripods, you might say—is set out explicitly in Part I, so any reader knows from the start where I'm coming from). But if you're also an occasional or casual user of tripods, like I am, it might be equally foolish to go for advice to someone to whom the tripod is an essential and central piece of equipment, such as a long-lens landscape shooter. That's how people end up with deluxe, $1,000+ carbon-fiber tripod and ballhead combos they never use.

The tripod advice you'll get from telephoto lens users is different than what you'll get from large-format aficionados (LF shooters tend to prefer 3-way heads to ballheads, for example); the needs of a backpacker might differ from the needs of someone who shoots out of the trunk of the car; the needs of a studio shooter are much different from someone who frequently travels by air. And so forth.

When she shot the pictures in the epochal book Immediate Family (surely one of the most important and popular American photo books of the 1990s—think of it as the "Jagged Little Pill" of art photography), Sally Mann lugged her 8x10 camera around on a Majestic tripod. Ever seen a Majestic? They're enormous. That was only possible because she made virtually all her pictures within a few hundred feet of her house or car.

No one knows your needs better than you. You also know your own shopping prejudices. Personally, I've always been comfortable spending more money on the equipment I use heavily and skimping on the equipment I use only occasionally; others might like to use cheap equipment but replace it frequently (David Hurn at one point owned six cheap Canon Rebels, and Erich Hartmann shot for a time with a Minolta CLE), or they might enjoy owning the best of everything, even the things they use rarely.

I remember when I first read the all-too-common advice that tripods were essential for photographic quality. I lugged a big tripod around for weeks, dutifully setting it up even in broad daylight. Sure, some of my shots were a little sharper; I remember marveling over the clarity of each brick in a distant building. But then I started noticing the situations in which my best shots were taken: from a speedboat; leaning out over the ocean from a jetty; from a crowded sidewalk (in tourist areas in Washington, D.C., where I used to live, tripods are illegal on sidewalks because they impede foot traffic); from a fire escape; over the dinner table. Many if not most of my favorite kinds of pictures are taken in places where tripods would be impractical, even absurd. Technically it's possible to imagine some of those pictures being taken with a tripod, but the time and fuss required to set up the tripod would have missed or completely destroyed the spontaneity of the moments the pictures capture.

On the other hand, I also have a tendency to be less than adequately careful in situations where tripods would be helpful. I've never been much good at shooting architecture or interiors, for instance, and I'm not very demanding when trying still lifes. Those cases call for deliberation and fastidiousness, and I tend to get bored before I've gotten the shot. My shots of architecture, consequently, are taken like street shots, and they're not very good. It's just not my thing, is all.

If you took my ten all-time favorite photography books, there's probably not a single shot taken from a tripod in, say, eight of them. Tripods aren't necessary...for me, or for the kind of photography I most like.

Obviously, the opposite is true for others.

Just be sure to match your advisors to the advice you need, is all. Too much of a mismatch, either way, can be costly—either in money, or in "the wrong kind" of image quality, or in missed or blown opportunities.

Mike

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Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "Very very good advice! I've had some experiences (not in photography) of getting 'too-good' tools for my level of skill; it's expensive and frustrating. The 'expert' tool is sometimes completely useless without expert-level skills. And other times, you just don't need that much ruggedness or whatever.

"My tripods haven't made it into the closet in years. One of them lives mostly in the living room (so I can walk past it on the way out the door with the camera), and the others live in a bin I bought for the purpose next to the pile of camera bags in the bedroom. There's a total piece of junk that is probably the second tripod I ever owned (and which I really should throw out), and a Slik U212 that's the third (still sort of useful), and the monster, a Bogen 3051, which I can't seem to carry up the stairs :-) .

"A few years ago I decided it was time for a tripod upgrade. I was doing more landscape, and also shooting at zoos, and needed the support for HDR sequences, long exposures for water, and so forth. My old tripod was the Bogen 3021 legs with the cheap Bogen ball head (maybe something-168 in Manfrotto speak?). I realized that the ball head didn't lock too well, and shooting vertical was a pain. So I ended up upgrading the head and the quick-release system (including an L-bracket on the camera), and not the legs. And in fact I've used the tripod a lot more since then. Which is just as well, given what it all cost (RRS RH40, clamp for it, another clamp for the monopod, L-bracket, replacement foot for the 70-200, and a few miscellaneous things; OUCH!)."

Carbon fiber Gitzo GT1531 Mountaineer

-

I've been doing some research on tripod heads recently, which caused me to remember that I never did finish up writing my tripod non-review. (As I explained in Part II, it's a trial, not a test.)

You'll recall that the first two parts of this article were sort of stumblebum. I committed several errors as I traipsed along. For one thing, in Part I I first said my Old Faithful Gitzo had steel legs—but Bryan Geyer, founder (but no longer owner) of the tripod specialists Really Right Stuff, informed me I was wrong about that. They're aluminum (translation into English: aluminium). Then I speculated that Gitzo carbon fiber tripods might be made in China. Wrong there too.

But those weren't even my biggest boo-boos. Because I jumped to the wrong conclusion in Part II, too.

You'll recall that when we last left our hapless hero, i.e. moi, in Part II, he was promising to compare the two carbon-fiber tripods on hand: the expensive, Italian-made (ahem) Gitzo 1531 ($600), and the sensible camera store brand, the no doubt Chinese-made(?) $240 ProMaster T325P. But he (oh, all right—I) jumped the gun and stated, "If it were my money, especially given my only occasional use of tripods, I'd have no trouble picking the ProMaster; it doesn't really have anything to apologize for...given its cost."

Turns out, that was a statement of prejudice. Pre-existing bias. Given my parsimonious nature and immunity to tripod gear-lust, I went into the comparison expecting to be perfectly satisfied by the cheaper ProMaster. I expected I'd have no trouble resisting the blandishments of the fru-fru, fashionable, très cher Gitzo.

Wrong once again, carbon-fiber breath.

Test fail
I first tried to do a few tests for stability. Given that I don't have any heavy cameras or long lenses, these tests were something less than conclusive.

And here I must delve into a digression, which I hereby indent in order to enable you to skip over it with ease if you're so inclined:

Camera stability is a continuum. Robert Frank had a trick whereby he set the timer on his Leica and tossed the camera up in the air, such that it took a picture at the apex of the toss (Ralph Gibson says he witnessed this). That's one example of an unstable support. We've all taken pictures from unstable platforms like moving cars, or vibrating ones like airplanes. Good camera-holding technique results in a more stable platform than poor camera-holding technique. Excessive caffeine intake is a destabilizer if the camera support is you.

Personally, I've long been a low-light shooter, so I've made a sort of fetish over the years of finding camera supports adventitiously—"camera supports" I've used to good effect have included public trash receptacles, mantlepieces, and the rafters of an old barn. I know every trick in the book when it comes to finding camera support out in the wild. One good one is simply to press the camera up against something, anything—even something as simple as a wall. I've even used, as a "bipod," the back of a child with her arms braced on her knees (thanks Mari!). It worked.

Tripods offer a higher level of supportiveness and motionlessness, of course. But they're a continuum too, or a continuation of the continuum. A poor tripod is often enough—and a good one sometimes isn't. Surveyors, I'm told, use devices that measure ground vibration. Ever set up a tripod on a heavily traveled bridge? The bridge moves, doesn't it? The best tripod won't help if whatever it's sitting on is moving. Well, it might help, but it won't entirely eliminate all camera motion.

The upshot is, where camera support is concerned, there's no such thing as perfect. There's bad, better, and good enough. Often, any tripod is good enough, and just as often the best tripod isn't perfect. "Tripods is not a game of perfect," to steal the great title of a golf book.

Digression over.

Anyway, suffice to say I couldn't gather any meaningful data on which of the four tripods (the two carbon fiber ones, plus my Gitzo Studex, plus my aluminum Bogen/Manfrotto) worked best to steady a camera. Even with my biggest camera (which is not big) and my longest lens (which is not long) they all worked fine.

Just setting them all up and shaking and twisting them by hand, it was clear that the two (bigger, heavier) aluminum tripods were stiffer and sturdier than the two (smaller, lighter) carbon fiber tripods, but not by all that much, and besides, the comparison wasn't fair—Gitzo does make a larger 35xx series of carbon fiber tripods (like this one), and those would make a more equitable comparison with the beefier Studex.

Plus, the CF tripods are more tippy. That's a function of their lightness. If you have a lot of weight to perch on top of one, I'd be a little leery of them. They might get top-heavy and be just a little too easy to topple. Remember, light weight is a good thing in a tripod when you're transporting it, not when it's set up and being used. In the latter situation, heavier is still better. That's why people hang stuff from their set-up tripods, which in turn is why both these CF models have a retracting hook on the bottom of their center columns.

The real conclusion
But here's the upshot, and the point of this post. After I used both tripods for several weeks, the Gitzo just plain won me over. The ProMaster, although it is fine for the money, is just a tripod—vaguely annoying and much better than nothing if you happen to need a tripod.

But the more I used the Gitzo, the more I came to downright admire it. It's almost—dare I say such a preposterous thing?—pleasurable to set up and knock down. Never thought I'd say such a thing. It really is. I love the little "Pop!" the leg-locks make when you unlock them. They work so well you almost want to set the thing up and knock it down again even when you don't really have to. (Maybe I'm going too far, now.) It's never hard on your hands. It's easy to use, fast, feather-light to carry, and works a treat.

I did buy the ProMaster—for the test. But if I were a tripod guy, I would save up for the Gitzo. It's plain better. And not only better, but really good. Expensive, yes, but worth what it costs, which goes a long way toward lessening the pain of purchase. I ended up loving it, and felt pangs of regret when I had to send it back to B&H.

Were money no object for a tripod, my choice for any size DSLR and most film cameras would be the in-betweener size Gitzo Mountaineer GT-2531 (3 lbs.)—the price is currently the same as the price of the smaller 1531 legs pictured at the top of the post, the ones I had on loan to test. Or I'd go for the big GT-3531 (4.7 lbs.). I'm told that if you travel on the airlines, the four-section GT-2541 or GT-3541 variants of these two legsets meet carry-on regulations (but please check that yourself—don't take my word for it. I didn't confirm).

I'm still rather fond of my big ol' battered Gitzo Studex (pics in Part I), which has been through thick and thin with me. I still use it by default when a tripod is needed. But tripods really have come a long way since my Studex was the latest thing. From now on, having completed my actual trial, my stock recommendation when it comes to tripods goes to the carbon fiber Gitzo Mountaineers.

As they say in the foothills of the Dolomites*, bravo.

Mike
(Thanks to Paul De Zan for the aerial photos link)

*Where Gitzos are now made, that is.

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Question from Rick in CO: "By the way, our old aluminum Gitzos were made in France—guess they were recently bought out by Manfrotto?

Mike replies: Manfrotto was founded by an Italian photojournalist named Lino Manfrotto, who marketed his first tripod in 1972. In 1989 the company was purchased by the Vitec Group, a British company based in Kingston upon Thames, near London. Manfrotto used to be known as "Bogen" in the United States because the products were distributed by Bogen Photo Corp., founded by Lester Bogen. Lester Bogen died in 1988 and Vitec Group bought out Bogen Photo in 1993 and changed the name of the tripods in the U.S. to Manfrotto, in accordance with what they were already called in the rest of the world.

Lester Bogen was famous for an ad which showed him sitting on top of one tripod and holding several more (right).

Gitzo was founded as a photographic products company in 1917 in France by Arsène Gitzhoven. Many old view camera lenses had Gitzo shutters (the Gitzo website says that at its peak, the pre-War Gitzo company produced 750 shutters a day). The company closed during the occupation of France in WWII, and in the decades after the war was taken over by Yvonne Gitzhoven Plieger, Arsène's daughter, and her husband, who were responsible for the firm's concentration on the tripod business.

Vitec Group, which by then already owned Manfrotto, purchased Gitzo in 1992 and transitioned the manufacturing to Italy during the period 2001–5.

Vitec Group chooses to run Manfrotto and Gitzo as two separate entities so each manintains its own brand identity.

More than you wanted to know...?

Featured Comment by Gavin: "As well as being the home of Vitec, Kingston upon Thames's other photographic claim to fame is that it is the birth place of Eadweard Muybridge. His family ran a barge business on the banks of the river. He donated a large collection of his prints to the town museum on his death. They have just set up a special exhibition space for this collection. I hate using tripods."

Gordon Lewis's snarky guide to camera brands is so far the most popular post in the history of his young Shutterfinger blog. So what if you just have a mirrorless digital camera and don't currently even own a DSLR? And own seven (count 'em) film cameras but aren't even shooting film? On second thought, maybe I'd better not ask.

Mike

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