The Online Photographer: Photo-tech

Photo-tech

Monday, 12 March 2012

The Sigma Bigprint Unofficial National Tour

So I mentioned in the previous post that Sigma digital camera devotees are a small but hardy band. Many of them hang out on the Dpreview Sigma Forum, withstanding a regular barrage of slings and arrows from trolls. And the members of the group (the sincere ones, not the trolls) are friendly and supportive of each other—some of them have even met up for photography outings and such.

Quick background, even though it's well known: Sigma has the exclusive rights to the Foveon sensor, which works like color film by layering the photodiodes one on top of another instead of placing them side-by-side as in a more conventional Bayer-type sensor. This allows each photosite to record RGB color information and gives Foveon sensors higher resolution than Bayer-array sensors. Unfortunately, this has led to a semipermanent dispute: Sigma likes to say that each photosite counts for three pixels, since it detects all three colors whereas a Bayer array only detects one; so it would call a sensor with five million photosites, for example, a "15 megapixel" camera. Competitors and their followers call foul on this, feeling that a photosite should equal a pixel, and claiming that a 5-MP Foveon sensor doesn't actually quite equal the resolution of a 15-MP Bayer-array sensor.

Arguments ensue.

The latest and greatest Foveon sensor debuted in the Sigma SD1 in 2010. It has a 3200x4800, 15.4-megapixel Foveon X3 sensor, which by Sigma's nomenclature means it's a 46-megapixel camera. (See preceeding paragraph.)

The Sigma Merrill Foveon X3 direct image sensor.

So anyway, let's let that sleeping dog lie where it lays, and move on. Recently, two denizens of the Dpreview Sigma Forum, Rick Decker and Kendall Helmstetter Gelner, had some 2.5x4-foot (30x48 in., ~76x121 cm) prints made from Sigma SD1 files, loaded them into a big cardboard box, and asked who would like to see them. The prints are currently on a circuit of the nation, wending their way from the home of one American Sigma Forumer to the next. (There might be a European tour as well, eventually.)

TOP reader and occasional contributor Jim Kofron was second or third on the list. Since he's in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not far from me, he kindly invited me down to have a look.

Jim Kofron holding one of the touring prints from the SD1.

We met in a deserted elementary school lunchroom; Jim's wife Jennifer is a drama teacher, and a play (which Jim photographed) had just ended. We spent a pleasant hour unrolling the prints and inspecting and discussing them.

The indiputable conclusion: SD1 files are a lot closer to the output of 46-MP Bayer-array sensors than to that of 15.4 MP ones. Foveon sensors have a particularly beautiful output; they have a sort of vividness and clarity that, when everything clicks, can be quite lovely. Some of the prints, even at that size, were really good—just as photographic prints, never mind the technical forensics.

Really big prints are a curious subgenre of photography, one that's been given undue prominence of late because of the conflation of size with status in the art world. Art photographers now almost have to print big. For normal photographers, huge prints are problematic. Most of us don't have places to store them (a dirty little secret of the gallery world: a lot of collectors don't have places to store huge prints either, and some photographers whose work was actually intended to be larger have had to provide 16x20s to galleries because that's the biggest size some collectors want to buy). There are a number of aesthetic considerations that apply as well; some pictures work well big, others really don't. Technically, the bigger the print, the smaller the technical flaw it will expose or exaggerate.

The one Jim's holding works well at the very large size. The eye is drawn past the foreground rooftops and spire and in to the docked sailboats, which are presented in rich, satisfying detail.

Of the twelve or so prints Jim showed me (sorry, I didn't count), a couple of the pictures didn't "work for me" at the size; one picture "fell apart" technically because it just didn't have enough detail where it needed it (detail was, in general, in no shortage in the prints as a whole); one was relatively poorly printed (these weren't fancy custom prints, according to Jim, but inexpensive fixed-price ones); and one showed a serious lens flaw—decentering—with admirable, almost textbook clarity.

My favorites were a western rock face with petroglyphs visible, with two tiny people climbing around on the rocks; the picture Jim's holding, and a similar one of European rooftops; and—the best argument for the Foveon sensor, I thought—a woman sitting in a garden. About that last one: I think it's just impossible to have a reasonable complaint with it. It looks great, even at what I consider an excessive size. As an enlargement it beats medium format film fairly handily, in my judgement, and I'd even say that I've seen plenty of prints from 4x5 that aren't as rich in either color or detail. I've never seen a print from the A900 quite that big, but it at least holds its own with the oversized A900 prints I have seen.

The prints look rich rather than hyper-resolved—there's plenty of detail—detail enough, certainly, even from eight inches with my reading glasses on—but the detail doesn't dominate. It integrates as a whole with the picture.

A slightly-bigger-than-lifesize portrait worked wonderfully, too.

With any camera, some pictures will print better big than others. But with the normal and ordinary caveat that the picture needs to be one that "works" big, I'd have no trouble at all, personally, making four-foot-wide prints from the Sigma Merrill sensor.

The Sigma SD1 Merrill is available as of this month—as mentioned in the previous post, for a much more real-world price than what it cost when it first came out. And what might be, to some, even better news: Sigma plans to put the same 15.4 X3 (15.4/46 MP) Sigma Merrill sensor in a version of both the DP1 an the DP2—to be called, naturally enough, the DP1 Merrill and DP2 Merrill. (At the link, scroll down.) (The difference between the two is the lenses—one has a 19mm [28mm-e] lens, the other is 30mm [45mm-e].)

Many thanks to Jim for sharing the touring prints with me, and to Rick and Kendall for their generosity to their fellow Sigmaphiles. It's always nice to encounter a bunch of photographers with such a sense of community.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Rick Decker: "Mike: Re the picture Jim is holding. You may not have realized that you can see the top of a cruise ship which is in the harbor and then behind it in the distance the houses you see are on the other side of the bay. Also, which you probably noticed, you can read the company name on the crane on the right side. And this from a zoom lens. Thanks for the review. And your three favorites match mine."

Featured Comment by David Paterson: "I owned a Sigma DP1 compact for a short time. There was lots wrong with it but the colour it produced was way the best I have ever seen from a digital camera. The green part of the spectrum—usually difficult—was particularly beautifully and richly reproduced. It had a 5-MP sensor which competed pretty equally, detail-wise, with my two other cameras at that time—Nikon D2X and D300 DSLRs, both 12 MP. If the Sigma SD1 Merrill could take Nikon lenses, I'd be very interested."

Mike replies: Okay, but beware of those write times. Note that the above is not a camera review—it's a print review. As I said in my shortest-ever camera review of the DP2, "Shooting raw with the DP2 is like walking holding hands with a three-year-old: it's just gonna slow you down." I'm told if you shoot Raw with the SD1, write times are very slow by today's standards.

Featured Comment by Jim Kofron: "Mike, I really enjoyed our session with these prints. I've been a Foveon/Sigma fan for a long time, but I was surprised how good many of these prints looked. European Sigma fans should know that Kendall and Rick have apparently sent a batch of the prints over to Amsterdam, so the European tour has commenced!"

Posted on Monday, 12 March 2012 at 10:44 PM in Cameras, new, Photo-tech, Photographic aesthetics | Permalink | Comments (33)

Friday, 09 March 2012

Ken Tanaka: Shooting JPEG Instead of Raw

Sony NEX-5N camera JPEG, 1.6 sec. @ ISO 800, –3/10 EV

By Ken Tanaka

A couple of months ago I suggested keeping an open mind toward using in-camera image processing, and a number of people asked me to expand on the subject. So I thought I'd just share the logic behind my suggestion and some notes on my own practices.

First things first: no, I am not advocating that anyone abandon using Raw* image files. They are undeniably essential for any application requiring extensive manipulation of the image, particularly significant enlargements. Further, Raw will be the most practical choice if you expect to apply extreme tonal variations on those images. If you need Raw, shoot Raw. Simple as that.

That said, however, the fact is that the majority of my own images remain rather close to their original capture state. I'll bet yours do, too. And with 10 MP being today's apparent minimum resolution for new cameras, I rarely need to even stretch a file any more. The native resolution is nearly always adequate for even larger prints.

So with 1+ terabyte of mostly Raw files hogging my disc space, I asked myself a few simple questions. Does an all-Raw image work flow make any sense? Should I be taking advantage of the substantial storage and processing economies of using pre-cooked camera JPEG files as my new "standard"? Shouldn’t I be taking advantage of the enormous strides that camera manufacturers have made in in-camera image processing? And the big question: Will anyone call me a sissy if I use in-camera JPEGs?!

Why shoot JPEG? Because that's where the money went!**
The major camera manufacturers invest substantial sums toward refining their image processing technologies***. It's what they're most proud of as the hearts of their cameras and a key part of their proprietary competitive weaponry. Processing systems such as Canon's DIGIC system, Nikon's EXPEED system, and Fujifim's EXR system integrate the operation of the camera with the lens and sensor in an attempt to optimize the recorded image.

Using only Raw files from your camera is analogous to buying an uncooked meal from a fine restaurant, preferring to season and cook it at home. This made perfect sense years ago when the chef was still in school. But today many in-camera chefs are James Beard Award candidates. It's definitely time for a re-think.

Back to the future!
So now that you're eager to use all the new technology in your camera, I'm going to suggest you shoot like it's 1980. Yup. Even the best camera JPEG is an 8-bit file which affords less adjustment leeway than a raw file. So the best general guidance I can offer when shooting JPEGs is to be careful with your exposures. We've all become sloppy as cameras have become more automated. Many of the camera processors realize this and have programs that automatically compensate for our carelessness. But the best strategy is to devote some "quality time" to become deeply, almost instinctively familiar with your camera's metering and processing responses. I guarantee that the investment will repay you with excellent dividends.

I'll have mine medium-rare, but hold the sauce, please
I approach in-camera processing to get the best of what it can provide. But usually nothing more. That is, I generally use the most neutral color profile and medium contrast and sharpness. This provides the camera's essential technical corrections and tonal adjustments but steers clear of the faux effects such as "Holga," "Antique," and "MFA Candidate." This produces a file with color and contrast tonality that's generally straight down the middle of the road and able to equally accommodate + or – bumps. It looks more lively than a purely linear Raw image but not vivid.

What about B&W conversions?
Black-and-white conversions are more technically and aesthetically complex than simply nudging chroma and luminance. Reducing relatively rich color data to a few shades of gray is tricky for anything fancier than simple desaturation. B&W conversions also tend to be wandering manual processes as you lurch through slider settings in search of perfection. Staying within a higher-bit color system offers you a wider aisle down which to lurch.

Conversions to B&W can strain the JPEG’s limitations, as shown in this conversion of a gradient portion of a scene.

For this reason I recommend taking either of two approaches. First, experiment to see if your camera's processor can produce a conversion that you like. You may discover that it can usually produce a good average head-start baseline.

Failing that, I recommend that you simply use Raw files for images destined for B&W conversion. This is especially true for scenes featuring color gradients and/or a densely varied palette of colors and tones. Why needlessly suffer?

Other notes
I've already made the point of taking care with your exposures when shooting JPEGs. To that end, if your camera's exposure compensation facility is not already second nature to you (wagging finger), invest the time to make it so. Exposure compensation may be among the least-used features on advanced cameras, even though it's incredibly valuable and powerful for providing the crucial nudging important for getting the best images straight from the camera (Raw or JPEG).

• The "expose-to-the-right" mantra is not always the best strategy for JPEGs. In my own experience, well-lit scenes with high-contrast ratios will, indeed, benefit from + exposure compensation. But predominantly dark scenes featuring bright points or pools, such as the top image, often benefit from – compensation. Again, forget dogma and experiment for yourself.

• Beware of resolution reductions that certain in-camera rendering modes may produce. For example, the Fujifilm X10's EXR mode devoted to minimizing low-light noise uses a pixel-binning**** technique which halves the camera's resolution. I'm not suggesting abstinence, just cognizance.

• Editing JPEG image files in Lightroom and Bridge is essentially identical to editing Raw files. (I use the Camera Raw editor in Bridge for making edits to JPEGs as well as Raw files.) In fact I expect that you'll rarely take note of the difference.

• Images processed from Raw files tend to have basically the same initial appearance, camera to camera, principally determined by your converter. But camera JPEGs show much more character of both the camera body body and the lens. Just an observation.

Photography has always been highly susceptible to dogmatic practices, fetishes, and gospels. "Only film...," "Only prime lenses...," "Only viewfinders...," "Only full-frame...," "Only Raw files...." The problem with dogmas is that although they're often founded in point-in-time best-practices they can become dated millstones in a field with such an inconstant technical environment as photography. That's exactly the case with the "Raw-only" dogma. If you use a late-model camera and have largely ignored its image processor, you owe it to yourself to explore it, even if you're a placard-waving "Raw-only club" member. You may find that you can better allocate your post-processing time or, better, spend more time just studying your images.

And nobody's going to call you a sissy or kick sand in your face at the beach if you start using in-camera JPEGs.

Ken

*[Just an editorial note...we can never decide whether to write it "raw" or "RAW" (it's not an acronym) so TOP's site style is simply to split the difference and write "Raw." This is on us, not Ken. "JPEG," however, is an acronym. —Mike the Ed.]

**Apologies to Willie Sutton for adapting his famous line.

***There are some exceptions. Within my own collection of cameras two, of the most expensive, the Leica M8.2 and M9, are ironically among them. The JPEG images from these cameras are downright primitive.

****Pixel-binning is a software/firmware algorithm to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of an image sensor by merging data from adjacent pixels. The compromise improves image quality but results in less image data.

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Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "AMEN! Three cheers and a tiger."

Featured Comment by Jim Allen: "Your analogy of buying a meal from a nice restaurant and taking it home to cook it yourself kind of struck me like a good solid smack. What a perfect description. I never thought to look at it that way, and have been pretty firmly in the 'just shoot Raw' camp. For a long time. Not a placard-waving demonstrator mind you, just always shot Raw by default, having read many recommendations to do so in the not too distant past. I've always set the point and shoot cameras I've owned to shoot 'fine' JPEGs without a second thought, and sometimes have been quite taken with the images thus produced. I've always assumed I needed to sit there in front of Lightroom as a kind of after shoot ritual with my DSLR work. Not always eager to give up the extra time required either. I feel a bit like an idiot for never even really trying out the JPEG capabilities of my Canon DSLRs. I think I've set them to take small JPEGs for Ebay once or twice, but that's it. HMMmmm. I think I'll try your advice and see what I see.

"Thanks for the article, it really was an intriguing read. Long have I wandered in the forest, and suddenly the trees come into focus."

Featured Comment by h.linton: "Interesting idea. I was actually thinking about this very thing this past week and after some thought realized that the only advantage (to my mind) would be the extra capacity on the CF card which is not an incentive to change. I get your logic though, but, in the digital world that I inhabit, it's the post-processing 'signature' that I create myself that I'm most interested in—not what some camera manufacturer might come up with."

Featured [partial] Comment by Zeeman: "There is another consideration though—one does not always know, at the time of image capture, how the image might eventually be used. It is no stretch to imagine that a photographer might take a photo, 'sleep on it,' and retrospectively decide that it looks better in black and white."

Featured Comment by marek: "The flip side is that a good Raw converter at home (perhaps from the very same camera company) is like having the 5-star Michelin chef living in at home listening to our every culinary desire?"

Featured Comment by John Krumm: "I shoot Raw, but when teaching middle school students (as I was this morning) we always have the DSLRs (Oly 520's) set to JPEG. The files look great in Aperture, and it's all so much easier to handle. There's an art to getting perfect jpegs, adjusting contrast as needed, watching specular highlights...it can help your Raw shooting in the end, since it forces you to think about the light more."

Featured Comment by Peter Silvia: "In keeping with this train of thought, Antonin Kratochvil is interviewed here and says that he shoots JPEG."

Featured Comment by K.H.: "Shooting JPEG is the equivalent of taking your colour film to the drug store for some body else to print it for you, shooting in Raw is like having your own darkroom, in my opinion."

Featured Comment by Murray Lord: "I liked what Gianni Galassi posted on his blog a while ago: 'I'm allergic to Raw formats and I expect a good camera to properly do its job, which is to take a photograph and properly process it into a usable file, instead of subcontracting this task to the photographer.'"

Featured [partial] Comment by Ed: "I compare .jpg to .mp3 files. They are great for listening to music in a bus, but not perfect for use on a 40,000 dollar sound system. Not perfect for editing either. But having said that, if you are happy with the end result there is no need to go elsewhere and indeed new in camera engines are improving."

Featured [partial] Comment by Roy: "Hmm. Shooting JPEG only is effectively to intentionally restrict your options. Given that shooting Raw and JPEG simultaneously is a cost free option—card space excepted—the argument is no argument at all."

Featured Comment by Nico Burns: "I still see very little disadvantage to shooting Raw+JPEG. I have a 16GB SD card, which allows me to take about [?] Raw+JPEG images before I run out of room. Hard drives are also fairly cheap. IMO having the Raw there just-in-case is definitely worth it those couple of times you need it."

Featured Comment by Jeffy: "JPEG makes me money."

Featured Comment by Jeff Johnston [no relation —MJ]: "Will anyone call me a sissy if I use in-camera JPEGs?! Yes."

Posted on Friday, 09 March 2012 at 03:39 PM in Ken Tanaka, Photo-tech, Shooting techniques | Permalink | Comments (75)

Wednesday, 07 March 2012

Nokia PureView

(Now there's a term that hadn't entered radar contact for me until a few weeks ago: "Nokia PureView.)

Hard on the heels of the news that the 41-megapixel Nokia 808 PureView isn't being offered here in the United States (the sensor will probably come here eventually in a phone running Windows mobile), there comes this fascinating article by Nokia's Damien Dinning. Really interesting what problem they were solving, and how they solved it. Newthink—I like it.

(As far as the guy hanging from the rock is concerned, though, human beings should stop doing that. I have to look away.)

Ctein is sending me the trial prints he made from the Nokia 808 sample files. I'll comment when they arrive.

Mike

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Featured Comment by beuler: "The size of each photo detector on the 808 (1.4 microns) is equal to that of the iPhone 4S. The iPhone has 8 million, the 808 has 41 million. Do you think this sensor is stunning? Consider the lens! Take a look at this interview about the lens on the front of that sensor. Mike, you should be all over this Zeiss interview."

Mike replies: I enjoyed it, yes.

Featured Comment by Speed: "So instead of buying a phone with a camera attached, we'll be buying a camera with a phone attached. As it should be."

Featured Comment by Jim: "Disruptive technology for sure. Technology eventually reduces everything to an appliance and sucks all the fun from things."

Featured Comment by Mike Anderson: "Like many Nikon fans are saying, 'can I get a D800 without the video?', I'm wondering, 'can I get one of these without the phone?'"

Posted on Wednesday, 07 March 2012 at 08:12 PM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (32)

Tuesday, 28 February 2012

It's the Future Calling

Every now and then I think I've landed in an alternate Universe—this time, because what I'm reading reminds me of one of those jokey posts from about 2004 where someone specifies "what I want" and exaggerates everything to a ludicrous degree.

You know, like "I want a camera that fits my hand but weighs 3 ounces, with a 17–800mm ƒ/1 lens...." That kind of thing.

Or it could have been, "I want a 41-megapixel cameraphone...."

Except that appears to be what all the tips stuffed into my inbox when I got home from the Auto Show last night were going on about. Improbable as it may sound, it appears that Nokia unveiled a forty-one-MP cameraphone at the opening day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain yesterday. Called the 808 PureView, it also has a sensor a little larger than a quarter the area of 4/3—some five times larger than the average small-sensor digicam according to dpreview. The camera's native mode will be pixel-binning, apparently. Here's the Nokia press release.

I had a conversation with a Harley dealer at the Auto Show yesterday, during which I admitted that I'm as much a 4-wheeler guy as Jeremy Clarkson (an episode of "Top Gear" highlighted Jeremy's ineptitude with, and contempt for, two-wheeled transportation). In a similar vein, I'm really just not a phone guy—I'm a camera guy. Still, surely, if the cameraphone and the digicam are going to meet each other on the sidewalk one day and pass each other while tipping their hats, then maybe yesterday was a big step towards that particular convergence.

(Unless I'm really in an alternate Universe. Could be; I mean, could a silent movie in black-and-white with a French star possibly win Best Picture in the real Universe? Sounds debatable on its face.)

Mike
(Thanks to numerous alternate-Universe tipsters)

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Featured Comment by Ctein: "I couldn't resist downloading and printing out the three photographs that Christian pointed us to. Printed them out as best-quality prints on 17x22" paper on my Epson 3880 printer. No image massaging except for about a half pixel radius Smart Sharpen, which I routinely do to all Bayer array camera photographs (it's amazing how much it perks up fine detail without introducing artifacts).

"The verdict?

"WOW!!!

"They're good. They're really good.

"For JPEG's, they're almost unbelievably good.

"No, it's not a replacement for RAW, it's not a replacement for an interchangeable lens camera, it's not a replacement for one of today's available-darkness wunderkind.

"But pretty much everything else? Oh yeah, this runs rings around them.

"(Assuming, of course, one actually wants a camera with a phone in it. Personally, last thing in the world I want. But you get the idea.)"

Posted on Tuesday, 28 February 2012 at 05:08 PM in Cameras, new, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (35)

Monday, 20 February 2012

Sony's 'Focus Peaking'

A TOP reader named Peter Erbak wrote from the Czech Republic yesterday to ask if we'd written anything on Sony's focus-peaking. I haven't—I haven't even seen it in action, thanks to the demise not long ago of the retailer in my area that carried Sony cameras.

I'm interested in hearing from people who've used focus-peaking with manual-focus lenses for "real work." If that describes you, what do you think?

Mike

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Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "It works, sorta. It's never spot on, the way you can get with enlarging the LCD 14x. If you are used to manual focus TLR cameras and use the 'too close, too far, split the difference' technique, it's pretty good, but not pixel-peeping good and make-24x36-inch-prints good."

Featured Comment by Michael Houghton: "It is really rather good, if you choose the right level of peaking (and colour) for the setting. It doesn't, of course, actually show focus—just contrast edges—and it works at the level of pixels you are looking at, not the full resolution, so it might peak with the whole shot in view but not at the pixel level, which can be confusing. Since the NEX displays the actual stopped-down image on the display, and then amplifies the image to get acceptable brightness, it does sometimes find transitory peaks due to sensor noise, and as a result it can be quicker to focus wide open then stop down.

"It takes a little practice to learn how to 'read' the peaks as they build up and drop away while you focus, but with a little learning effort you can get very fast rough focussing that you can quickly refine by zooming in. It will also peak in video mode and with autofocus lenses. It does prefer a contrasty lens, though, and tends to work much better a third of a stop down from open."

Featured Comment by Björn: "It's the best way that I have yet been able to focus with manual lenses on a digital camera. Its still not as good or fast as an old Canon AE-1 or even a good rangefinder. It tends to be very problematic in low light and low contrast situations, because the focus color doesn't show up because the camera obviously uses the edge of an object to determine focus and under those circumstances a precise edge is harder for the camera to see. Also when photographing people the focus color doesn't always show up in the eyes of people, more like around their ears, and if you use a large aperture you will miss focus on those occasions. You have to use the magnification function to be able to focus in those situations and that slows you down.

"The point of focus peaking is that its supposed to be a fast way to determine what is in focus, and when you have to use the magnification feature 50% of the time when shooting people that kind of uncertainty can be quite a pain. It works quite well in normal light and when your subject isn't moving too fast, but then again so does magnification focusing and good old zone focusing. All that said I do prefer it to other ways of focusing if you tweak it a little bit by shooting in Raw+JPG and setting the camera to a black and white preset so that the focus color shows up more distinctly on the screen."

Featured Comment by Bob Ware: "You must try it to believe it! I recently acquired a Sony NEX-5N and have adapters for both Nikon and Pentax lenses. Manual focus confirmation is assured by a shimmering outline around the subject. I find this much more informative than any other type of focusing confirmation system in other still cameras."

Featured Comment by Christer: "I have a Sony NEX-5N with the short kit zoom, and I also use the camera with some of my (current) Summicrons. Focus peak: you never had it so good! Especially if you wear glasses, like I do. I have variable focus (???) eyeglasses which can be a pain when used with some viewfinders. I sometimes manually fine adjust the focus when I use the NEX in AF mode. The image shown will then be enlarged five or 10 times so that focus can be really pinpointed. Of course you can select what area you wish to be enlarged so that you need not move the camera.

"For manual lenses, peaking is even better. You can use the peaking facility with maximum aperture to really nail down focus, and then shoot at whatever aperture you wish. Peaking is convenient, quick and cool."

Featured Comment by J Holmes: "Not really sure it is highly effective in stills (and especially in the case of wide apertures). I own a 5N and really am beginning to think Sony offered it up as a way to appease NEX shooters for a lack of native lenses. I have used it with legacy lenses as well as native and find it to be reasonably fast but not tremendously accurate."

Featured Comment by Doug: "Just like with using a rangefinder for the first time, one has to spend some time dialing in focus peaking and practicing with it. After using it on the Nex-5 and Nex-5N for eight months, I am very confident with it in most situations, and magnification is there for backup. You definitely can't pick it up and shoot with 100% confidence on the first day, but peaking works well with practice."

Featured Comment by JKP: "I really love focus peaking and focus confirmation in my A77. Really handy feature, also for macro photo, and I use it a lot. I have never been really into manual focus, now I would judge my manual focus to be 20–45 % of my shooting...not just because of the focus peaking, but also focus confirmation. But I mostly use it for video work, like follow focus. It is so easy to make controlled change of the focus plane during video shooting, somehow it takes my video work to the next level because of ease of use."

Featured Comment by Peter Foiles: "Using peaking properly is an acquired skill. If shooting a face at wide aperture for example you may initially think that having the face surrounded by peaking means it is in focus but what you will discover is that the ears are in focus and the eyes not. Once you experiment a bit and really understand exactly what it is doing then it works well.

"The combination of magnified view and peaking is as deadly accurate a focusing method as I have found in my 40+ years of photography, though it is a bit tedious."

Posted on Monday, 20 February 2012 at 01:31 PM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (46)

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Myths About Megapixels (...And, Does the D800 Have Too Many?)

By Ctein

The recent announcement of the 36-megapixel Nikon D800 has brought forth a certain number of predictable reactions, a few lauding it as the Second Coming and many more dismissing the utility of more megapixels.

Most such opinions are based on mythical (or at least mistaken) beliefs about what pixel counts really mean. Let's see how many of them I can shoot down in one column.

I've written on this subject many times before, so I'm not going to present detailed arguments. I am simply going to assert facts. To keep the number of comments I have to answer to a minimum, please remember to check to see if your doubts have already been addressed in the cited columns and my comments before you take issue with my myth-busting.

Myth #1

The sharpness of your photographs will increase in proportion to the number of pixels.

Reality: Well, technically, the square root of the number of pixels, but that's not really the issue. Quadrupling the number of pixels (doubling the resolution of the sensor) is no more guaranteed to double the sharpness of your photographs than doubling the sharpness of the film you were using did. Image sharpness is a convolution of multiple factors. Improving sensor resolution improves image sharpness, but it won't make a proportional difference unless it is by far the fuzziest link in the chain. For more on this, see my article "Diffraction In Perspective."

Myth #2

Getting more megapixels is just about making bigger prints.

Reality: For a minority, yes, but it's more commonly about making sharper prints at whatever size you're choosing to print. Good printers can render more than 500 PPI of fine detail and human eyes can perceive considerably more than that. Digital cameras are only about 50% efficient in terms of resolution (e.g., a 24-megapixel camera delivers about 12 megapixels of resolvable detail), so you don't have to be printing very large to see a perceivable difference from more megapixels. See "How Sharp Is Your Printer? How Sharp Are Your Eyes?"

Whether you care about that difference, of course, depends upon your needs. But the difference is there.

Myth #3

More megapixels inevitably means noisier photographs and/or poorer high ISO performance.

Reality: That would be true if the camera manufacturer took exactly the same chip technology and exactly the same support electronics and simply crammed more pixels into the same size chip. That never happens! Those pixel-count changes are always accompanied by other improvements in the chips and the support circuitry. If we had reached the physical limits of image quality, those improvements wouldn't be able to compensate for the additional pixels. We haven't; we're several stops away from that. New cameras frequently have higher pixel counts, lower noise, and better ISO performance, all at the same time. See "Photography at the Speed of Light" and "Something Old and Something New."

Myth #4

It's pointless to add more pixels because lenses aren't good enough.

Reality: I have no idea where this one came from, because it's contradicted by decades of lens and camera test data. I'm going to cut through the morass of minutia-based arguments about pixel dimensions, filter geometries, and Airy disks and lay it out in very simple terms. A 16-megapixel 35mm-sized Bayer array sensor is going to resolve around 50 line pairs per millimeter (lp/mm). A 36-megapixel sensor will resolve around 75 lp/mm. Even mediocre 35mm lenses will hit 75 lp/mm at some aperture over some portion of their field of view. This is true of both fixed focal length and zoom lenses.

Decent (not at all exceptional) 35mm-format lenses can hit 75 lp/mm at just about all apertures and will do so over most of the field of view for at least one aperture. They'll show peak resolutions more like twice that. Really good lenses (not necessarily expensive ones) will be able to exceed 75 line pair per millimeter without even trying hard over most/all of the field of view and will have peak resolutions three or more times that.

Furthermore, until the lens resolution drops to only half that of the sensor, improving sensor resolution will produce an observable improvement in image resolution.

See the previously cited diffraction column and "Why 80 Megapixels Just Won't Be Enough..."

Myth #5

This is just a useless horsepower race by manufacturers; people don't need all those megapixels.

Reality: Sure, it's a horsepower race, but saying nobody needs it would be like saying nobody needed 120 format over 35mm or sheet film formats over 120 roll film. Most people don't, to be sure. Even more won't be willing to pay the premium. Count me in that group; I may still very well lay out a grand for the 24-megapixel Sony NEX-7, but there's no way I'm laying out $3K for the boat anchor Nikon D800. But that's just me (and, similarly, your priorities are just you).

Let's also remember that not everybody likes to compose uncropped, full frame. Actually, most photographers don't (although many digital photographers have been forced into it). If 50% more pixels affords them the opportunity to do some reasonable cropping without unreasonable sacrifices in sharpness, they will be happy campers.

In other words, it's not about you. It's not even about me.

• • •

It's likely I have missed some myths, but I'm sure I've done enough busting to enrage some of the myth-perpetuators. Can't wait to see what shows up in my e-mail inbox.

Ctein

Physicist, astronomer, photographer and fine printer Ctein has written hundreds of articles for dozens of magazines about the science and technique of photography over four decades. It's no myth that his weekly TOP column appears on Wednesdays.

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Posted on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 at 12:09 PM in Ctein, Digital Techniques, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (65)

Saturday, 28 January 2012

Kirk's Take (Kirk Tuck #4)

They stole our choice of aspect ratios. Now we’re getting them back

By Kirk Tuck

When I started taking photographs, back in 1978, I picked up a 35mm camera because that's what matched my budget and, I thought, my needs. I spent some years trying desperately trying to confine my vision of what a scene or portrait should look like into a long and stringy frame that never quite worked. When I needed to shoot horizontally I always needed to slice off all the junk that showed up on the either side of the "good part" of the frame. When I shot vertically there was alway twenty five or thirty percent of the top or bottom of the frame that needed to be chiseled away to calm my eyes.

Gradually I became habituated to the long, skinny and mathematically clumsy frame and tried my best. I figured that having a photographic vision that was fluid and smooth and easy must be for people with some innate, natural talent. Like those lucky bastards who can just pick up a guitar and make wonderful music after a handful of lessons.

Then one day a friend who was also interested in photography showed me a camera he'd just picked up. It was a twin lens YashicaMat rollfilm camera that shot 12 square frames on each roll of 120 film. Square frames!

My friend couldn't warm up to the reversed image in the waist level finder and suggested that I give the camera a whirl. I reached down and pulled the finder apparatus into position, flipped up the little attached magnifier, looked through and focused. And, in an instant, something somewhat magical happened: Everywhere I pointed the camera a perfect composition sprang into being. I could point the camera at the intersection of a concrete curb and the asphalt of a street and, there it was, perfect composition.

And the joy I felt when I lined up my first informal portrait was wonderful. It eclipsed everything I'd done in photography to that point.

I felt like I couldn't afford the camera. I was still in school and working a part time job. But when I started down the stairs of my apartment, intent on returning the YashicaMat to my friend, I realized that I couldn’t afford not to buy it. The effect was that powerful.

When I decided to pursue the rigorous and noble undertaking of professional, commercial photography I went right out and bought a used Hasselblad 500 CM and 150mm Sonnar Lens. Every time I looked through the finder of that camera I knew the one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about would be framing. I had found my perfect aspect ratio.

And I found, when looking at the work of others—even masters—I have always had a prejudice for the calmness and formal structure of the square. I have friends who've used panoramic cameras and all the other formats. I've dabbled (mostly unsuccessfully) with 6x7 cm, 6x9 cm, 6x12 cm 6x4.5 cm, 4x5 inch, and 8x10 inch cameras and almost every time I find myself chaffing at the aesthetic discomfort of all that wasted space.

"No Problem." I thought. "I'm happy just shooting these marvelous, magical squares of color and black and white." And I did. Cartons and cartons of Fuji and Kodak films. Mostly Tri-X, but other flavors when the menu called for them.

And then one day it all collapsed.

We made the transition to digital. Clients loved it. You could shoot quick. You didn't need Polaroid. Etc., etc. We’ve heard it all a thousand times before. But the thing that really never got talked about was the most important thing we lost: aspect ratio choice.

If you bought a professional level digital camera you had no choice of aspect ratios. You got stuck with the nasty old 35mm, 3:2 ratio whether you liked it or not. And my battle with wasted and unusually configured space returned. And it was nasty. One maker of digital backs offered a square back but it was priced for people working for jumbo clients in world class markets. I was stuck with mainstream.

I'm sure there are those among us who can look at a 3:2 frame and immediately, and comfortably divine the "presence" of the square without assistance. Good for them. I'm not one of them. I like a little assistance from my camera in the form of clearly defined boundaries. Edges. Guide posts. When I look into the finder of my camera I want to see a square frame and I want everything not in the square frame to be excluded from view. And given the popularity of square frame cameras from the 1950s right up to the age of digital, I'm sure there are many who agree with me.

I suspect that rigorous boundaries are helpful because they eliminate one variable of choice and so let us concentrate on composition in a different way, regardless of which format you favor. Cropping after the fact is not the same.

One of the reasons I have been so passionately enamored of the mirrorless cameras is that removing the optical finder from the equation means camera makers can give us back our freedom of choice when it comes to the configuration of our framing via the electronic viewfinder. I bought the Olympus E-P2 with its electronic viewfinder largely because I can set the camera so that, when I bring the finder to my eye, I see a square image framed by black. And every EVF capable camera I can think of strikes the same blow for Freedom of Choice.

If you like wide, they give you 16:9. If you like that pedestrian and ubiquitous 35mm frame they're happy to give you the option to "3:2 it" all you want. And, true to most of the sensors in the mirrorless cameras I tend to use, they also offer the stodgy and boxy 4:3 ratio. You are free to use any of these "lesser" aspect ratios or join me in re-embracing the most intoxicating of formats, 1:1. It even sounds uniquely balanced. One-to-one.

Given the quality of camera files these days I've come to believe that flexibility in setting your preferred aspect ratio is one of the most important factors for overall photographic success and, that the move back to a gracious banquet of aspect ratios is a sign that we're moving past the gnawing hunger for more pixels and less noise into the more lofty sphere of actually thinking about the content and artful arrangement of our images instead of just their legibility.

If you are consistently uneasy composing images I would suggest that you and your present camera format may be at odds. If you have access to an electronic viewfinder camera with changeable aspect ratios you might want to take it out for spin and see what works for you. One size fits all is rarely a good plan in the mystical world of art. Or in the pragmatic world of photography. And if you really love the 3:2? Well aren't you just as happy as a pig at the trough?

SUPPORT ASPECT RATIO FREEDOM!

Kirk

Photographer, photo book author, and photography blogger Kirk Tuck's monthly column on TOP appears on the last Saturday of every month.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Saturday, 28 January 2012 at 09:35 AM in Kirk Tuck, Photo equipment, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (118)

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part II

You probably remember Part I, from a week ago Saturday. You might want to go back and re-read that before diving into this part. First, to reiterate: no B&W film photographer needs to practice sensitometry. It's absolutely not necessary for doing good work. This article does, however, contain information of real value for all APUG-type B&W photographers, so don't skip it if you're one of those—even if you have no intention whatsoever of buying a densitometer or practicing sensitometry.

As an aside, since a week ago Saturday I have acquired not one but two densitometers...

Continue reading "Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part II" »

Posted on Tuesday, 24 January 2012 at 11:27 AM in Film and Darkroom, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (34)

Saturday, 21 January 2012

Comment o' the Week: Good Ol' Days

From Dogman:

Among the wonderful memories of doing daily newspaper photography in the '70s & '80s was the hurried darkroom work. NOT!

You have never lived a full life until you have faced an 80-mile round trip night sports assignment to a barely lit high school football field where you were expected to obtain outstanding action photos in less than 20 minutes so you could meet an early deadline for the regional edition. Shoot your Tri-X at 1600 although the Luna Pro is showing that is almost two stops under, hit the country road and exceed the speed limit while trying to avoid the deer wandering around the route, get to the darkroom to constantly agitate the film for 3–4 minutes, give it a water soak for another few minutes, print it wet in an autofocus Leitz that's constantly shifting focus due to the wet negatives buckling, print a soft and crappy shot with equally crappy print quality on #5 Kodabromide or #6 Brovira (whichever is available) and give it to the sports desk dripping wet to barely make the deadline.

...and then go to your next assignment for the weekend edition society page.

Boy howdy! Those were the Good Ol' Days.

Great one.

I've long subscribed to Carl Weese's late '90s idea that B&W film photography was already perfect but that digital represented the real coming-of-age of color photography. Now I also like the idea that digital frees film photography...frees it from all its heretofore onerous practical and quotidian duties such as Dogman so vividly describes above. Now we can use B&W film only when we really want to.

It was Ron Wisner who said, also in the '90s, that B&W film photography would eventually join all the other obsoleted methods of graphical reproduction as a much smaller but greatly more prestigious fine-art printmaking medium. Nobody needs stone lithography, or woodcut, or copperplate etching any more for commercial image reproduction, but none of those things has gone away. (Just like view cameras or, say, platinum-palladium printing have not gone away.)

Could've been worse, Dogman. You could have had to use something like this.

Those media can move over now, and make room; there's a new one about to join their club. Digital does the utility work (and, I'd say, color, too, although some might still argue that) better. Optical/chemical monochrome film photography—highly evolved, completely mature, fully worked out, and beautiful in its own right—might finally get what its proponents have always sought...an elevation in its status as an art medium.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Walter Glover: "My sentiments entirely, as one who uses digital capture for the sake of commercial expediency and B&W sheet film for the soul and contentment of producing fine crafted work."

Posted on Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 02:27 PM in Film and Darkroom, Photo-tech, Visual Culture | Permalink | Comments (18)

Saturday, 14 January 2012

Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part I

Backing up a bit from yesterday, I acknowledge that a number of people were mystified as to, well, what the heck I was talking about. A densitometer, more specifically a transmission densitometer, is simply a device for measuring densities—usually, for our purposes, on negatives.

As you know even if you've never shot one in your life, a negative is a tonally reversed image; dark things in real life (called "shadows" through the photographic process even if they aren't literally shadows) expose the negative very little, resulting in clear (transparent) or close-to-clear areas on the film; bright things in life (called "highlights") result in heavily exposed areas of reduced silver metal in the negative—the dark parts.

A negative. Photo by John Loengard. Extra points if you
recognize whose negative it is.

A transmission densitometer merely measures how much density there is in any given area of a negative. It's just a measuring device, like a scale or a thermometer or a ruler.

Of course, the fun doesn't end there. Because anything you can measure, you can plot. (Mathy types rub hands together, twirl ends of mustachios.)

What sensitometrists do—well, the activity we're mainly concerned with here, anyway—is to expose a film to various measured amounts of light, develop the film in a particular manner (i.e., with the developer you're interested in, at a controlled time and temperature), read the density, and plot the amount of exposure against the density it creates on an X-Y graph.

If you do this a bunch of times for a bunch of different exposures (again, with the same film and development protocol) and plot all the points on your graph, you can then draw a line between all the points. Voilà—the film curve.

Courtesy nfsa.gov.au

The parts of the curve are labeled in this nice illustration I found (thanks, Australia!), so I won't belabor them further. Except to note that "base + fog density" (commonly written fb+f and pronounced "film base plus fog") is simply the "background density" of an unexposed but developed and fixed piece of film. You can see the fb+f at the edges of the negative in John Loengard's photo above.

The curve was first devised by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield, the fathers of sensitometry, in 1890, and was called the "H&D curve" in their honor for many years. Now it's more commonly known as a "characteristic curve" or "film curve." Sometimes you encounter the terms "D-LogE curve" or "Y'know, that charty thing for, like, the films or whatever" ('80s highschoolese*). All different names for the same thing.

Now, see that straight line section of the curve? How steep that is describes the contrast of the negative. Develop the test films for more time, the straight-line section gets steeper or more vertical. Develop for less time, and the slope gets milder. That's the origin of the term "Contrast Index" or CI, which was an method developed by C.E.K. Mees and Loyd [sic] Jones of Kodak Research Labs to describe contrast with a single number; there were even handy CI protractors for measuring the angles of curves. Mees and Jones, by the way, are responsible for our current system of B&W contrast management: developing to an average (or ballpark) CI and then fine-tuning contrast with paper grades. Different story for a different day.

More usual in more modern times has been to plot a "curve family"—several curves describing the same film in the same developer but developed for different amounts of time. Here's one of those, also clearly labeled if you'll look at it for five seconds. Note that as the development times go up, the curves get steeper.

Now, if you think about this, that represents an awful lot of test exposures if you're exposing one sheet (piece) of film at a time in, say, a 4x5-inch camera. So, naturally, a shortcut's been devised. What photographers do now to get this information relatively quickly is to use a pre-made piece of transparent material called a "step tablet" or "step wedge" that has a number of steps (usually 11 or 21) of known density already on it. One such is sold by Stouffer Industries. So what you do is expose your film to this step wedge, then read the densities on the film with...you got it, a densitometer.

A densitometer, as I mentioned yesterday, is very easy to use. You turn it on, put the film over the sensor, press the button or lower the sensor arm on to the film, and the reading comes up on the readout. That's all there is to it.

The other type of densitometer is a reflection densitometer, for reading densities on prints.

So what's sensitometry for?
Ctein said yesterday that he has a densitometer but has no use for it. That makes perfect sense to me, because he's mainly a color photographer. Consider this passage from Ansel Adams's fine book The Negative, in its various iterations over the years possibly the most inspirational technical book ever written (cited as such by literally generations of photographers):

Many consider my photographs to be in the "realistic" category. Actually, what reality they have is in their optical-image accuracy; their values are definitely "departures from reality." The viewer may accept them as realistic because the visual effect may be plausible, but if it were possible to make direct visual comparison with the subjects, the differences would be startling.

—Ansel Adams, The Negative, from the Introduction

A densitometer to my mind is really only useful in creative photography in helping to manage the "departures from reality" of the tones in black and white photographs. And, for the most part, they're used by people who can develop film one picture at a time, which means sheet film, which means large-format photographers, who use view cameras.

How any B&W photographer departs from the norm in terms of tonal values is an indivisible part of that photographer's style, from the high contrast of a Ralph Gibson to the low contrast of a Henry Wessel. It's one thing that makes B&W photography so different from color photography: every good black and white photograph is an interpretation.

Ralph Gibson, Priest Collar

Henry Wessel, Albuquerque, N.M.

Note that I've named two photographers who've probably never used a densitometer in their lives. That's entirely by design, because most photographers don't...and don't need to.

Yr. Hmbl Ed. hopes that all the above has been relatively pain-free. Even more fun stuff to come, so please stay tuned.

Mike

*Working with high school students can cause one to crave nouns.

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Featured Comment by Dennis Mook: "This brings back memories of the mid-1970s when I was learning the Zone System by reading books by Picker, White/Zakia & Lorenz, Adams, and others. I was a forensic photographer at the time and was fortunate to have all of the resources of the police department's darkroom at my disposal. I dutifully exposed many, many rolls of 35mm Tri-X (our standard crime scene film), Plus-X, and Panatomic-X as well as sheet after sheet of 4x5 Tri-X (my personal work) according to procedures laid out by my literary teachers. I then used a transmission densitometer to plot film base + fog and establish characteristic curves for these films with several developers. I found myself totally caught up in the technical side of photographic chemistry at the expense of getting out and making aesthically pleasing photographs! Did all this experimentation make me a better photographer? Maybe in some way as it allowed to understand the very simple 'expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights' axiom, albeit at the cost of a lot of time. I believe the one other thing it taught me was to be very disciplined in my approach to making my art which paid off in my photography as well as printmaking."

Posted on Saturday, 14 January 2012 at 02:39 PM in Film and Darkroom, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (36)

Friday, 13 January 2012

Up With Squares! More on Square Sensor Cameras

By Eduardo Cervantes

I was interested in Mike's article the other day called "Why Not Square Sensors?" I have advocated before for square sensors. In the case of a full-frame DSLR, an ideal square sensor would be 36x36 mm in size, but a proportional conversion could implemented in any digital camera known to man.

The reason for a square sensor is to go from vertical to horizontal at almost the speed of thought. It would allow the operator to hold the camera always in the same way, preserving the controls always in the same place and always keeping the flash over the center of the lens. No fancy, tiring and distracting elbow movement either. Superior to working with a vertical grip too, I believe.

This proposed system must be mirrorless. The main advantage is that the entire existing line of lenses in any camera system could be used without any restriction or limitation. Only three things are needed: A square shutter curtain to cover the entire square sensor in cameras with shutters, a square LCD and a square EVF. Perhaps, the complete shutter could be discharged with the use of an electronic shutter. They are already here.

The photographer could go from vertical to horizontal and to square at the soft inconspicuous touch of a dedicated button to obtain the desired framing in both the LCD or EVF. He or she could go from a 1:1 to a 2:3 aspect ratio and anything in between with the same camera. Whatever suits the subject better. One other huge bonus would be that when shooting Raw, the in-camera cropping would not be final. Re-framing and re-orienting the picture could be done during Raw developing always keeping the maximum sensor area in regard to the image circle.

The purpose of this arrangement is appointed for speed and comfort when shooting horizontals and verticals as well as for the optimization of the image circle in relation to subject kind and intention. It is not meant for the entire square sensor to be covered with the lens image. Suffice to say, the efective image would be kept within the projected circle of the lens.

For an existing lens system ready for a 24x36 sensor, these are the rounded figures:

2:3 aspect ratio: 24x36 = 864 square millimeters
3:4 aspect ratio: 25.5x34 = 867 sq. mm.
4:5 aspect ratio: 26.5x33 = 874 sq. mm.
1:1 aspect ratio: 30x30 = 900 sq. mm.

One more thing: There are some camera systems with a few perpective control lenses also known as shift lenses. As we all know, these lenses have bigger circles in order to be able to shift the lens without running out of image.

Nikon and Canon have some superb T/S glass in their lens lines. In the particular case of Canon, the new T/S-E II perspective control lenses have a usable circle of 67.2 mm. The circle needed to cover the entire 36x36mm sensor is 51mm. By using this kind of lenses with a square sensor we would effectively be converting a full-framer into a digital medium format camera and still have some millimeters left for shift.

Hasselblad's V camera first digital back had a 36x36 sensor. The image area of a 36x36 sensor is 1296 square millimeters in area, just a few millimeters shy of the Leica S2 with 1350 square millimeters in its 30x45 sensor.

The extra cost of the square sensor, especially as the cost of sensors continues to fall, would be within reason when taking into consideration all these benefits.

Eduardo

Mexican photographer (and TOP reader) Eduardo Cervantes studied photography in the United States and now owns and operates an all-digital professional studio in his native Merida, Yucatan.

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Featured Comment by Francisco Cubas: "A small world isn't? My first photography teacher was Edmundo Segura, in Villahermosa, and he used to talk about Eduardo Cervantes, who lived for some years in the city. He'll be glad to read this."

Posted on Friday, 13 January 2012 at 10:33 AM in Cameras, new, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (32)

Sunday, 08 January 2012

Why Not Square Sensors?

Old fashioned square-sensor camera. Taken with
old fashioned rectangular-sensor camera.

Somebody said the other day that there is "no reason" why the big pro cameras (D4, 1Dx) have to be so big. Actually there is at least one: pros like to have full dual handgrips for each orientation of the sensor rectangle, portrait and landscape, vertical and horizontal.

But if the market is trending away from mirrors and towards EVFs, why have a rectanglular sensor at all? Why not square sensors as the norm? Then give people their choice of rectangles in the camera settings. For one thing, you'd remove the need to hold the camera two different ways. And square sensors make the most sense in terms of lens coverage.

A mirror-box/prism assembly for a square format is more expensive than it is for a rectangular format, but if the viewfinder is going to be electronic anyway, there's no longer any reason except tradition to stick with a physical rectangle in the sensor.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Steve Braun: "I agree wholeheartedly! Square should be the standard for sensors and allows the most flexibility for the photographer and could lead to the shape of cameras changing to more like the medium format rangefinders of old than the 35mm SLRs that dominated for so long. So much nicer not to have to rotate the camera for verticals or add on an adapter to mount the camera vertically on a tripod as well."

Featured Comment by Ramón Acosta: "I would feel like I was wasting all those pixels I paid for. Once you decide on an orientation for the picture, if you use the traditional 35mm ratio you lose about 30% of the sensor area. Unless we get to a good resolution and price point, where those pixels don't really matter. Maybe at about 64 megapixels we end up with 42.8 MP after choosing an orientation. It may happen in the future when the megapixel war is in the distant past and the ISO battle has been won. (We have to remember that in the digital age, we seem to use dog years compared to traditional film years.)"

Featured Comment by Stephen Best: "Since change in sensor sizes/aspect ratios is likely to be slow, the real question is why not provide more display/capture options (1:1, 4:5, 6:7 etc) in cameras with EVFs? This also solves the problems with soft corners, and colour casts with less than optimal lenses. Let people make their own choices based an aesthetic and performance considerations.

"The NEX-7 does 3:2 and 16:9; why not 1:1? It's not as though there's a shortage of megapixels."

Featured Comment by Mike Peters: "As a person who shoots square, I would be thrilled to have such a camera available. I do have a GH2, which when I'm shooting for myself I set it to 1:1, and find it adequate. At 12 MP it is enough, and frankly rivals what I get from my Hasselblad in terms of apparent sharpness and beats it when it comes to grain, and no spotting!

"However, where it falls to pieces is in dynamic range and actual detail. Dynamic range will one day be a done deal, as will actual detail. But one thing that will not change though is the look of the image. A large piece of imaging real estate, as the 56mm square is, imparts a look to the image by the lenses used in front of it. And no matter how much trickery you write into the firmware, no other lenses look quite the same, they are just too damn short. So, unless sensors grow to fit a full frame Hassy, at at reasonable price, I'll just stick with film."

Posted on Sunday, 08 January 2012 at 02:27 PM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (78)

Monday, 02 January 2012

Sometimes the Latest IS the Greatest

By Roger Overall

Here's a question for you. If someone offered you a 6-MP DSLR for free, seven or eight years old but never been out of the box, would you accept it, and, importantly, would you use it? You know the high ISO performance isn’t going to be up to much. Start up will be lethargic. And you get more pixels in a decent smartphone these days.

Gear fear
Let's be honest. Most of us would feel more comfortable with something a bit more current. Digital cameras have a use-by date, or a user-bye-bye date. It's what camera manufacturers trade on. Their marketing departments have a genius for convincing photographers that their newest camera is so much better than their previous model. They operate some kind of reality distortion field. Suddenly, the camera that has served you perfectly well just doesn't seem up to the job. It's practically a miracle you managed to produce a useable file from it to begin with.

And guess what? Eighteen months hence, you'll find out that this new model is equally inadequate in the face of the latest and greatest release. And so on and so forth. It's a relentless acquisition cycle of barely adequate cameras that can only be redeemed by the feature set of the next model.

Several years ago, I decided enough was enough. I'm an intelligent guy—moderately so, anyway. At the end of 2005, I decided to invest in a Canon 1Ds Mark II—a camera that would last me for many years beyond the day that the final payment would leave my bank account. The specs were impressive and I knew it would deliver what I and my clients needed regardless of what subsequent models would bring. I applied devastating logic to the situation. If I was happy with the camera today, I would be happy with it tomorrow, and for many, many days into the future. Canon's marketing department be damned.

Happily married
The Canon 1DsII has almost 17 MP, housed in what feels like an indestructible shell of battlefield-grade armour. (That turned out not to be entirely true following a sharp interaction with a marble floor in 2010, which cracked the camera casing but left the stone floor undisturbed). It has 45 autofocus points, and its ISO 1600 files are very useable—a real boon for a documentary photographer often working in dull conditions.

Taken with my workhorse 1DsII. Plenty of light, no troubles locking on.

From the moment it arrived in my life, new camera releases left me cold. The 1DsII and I produced wonderful work together. Clients were satisfied. I was winning awards. We were happy. Even the acquisition of a back-up Canon 5D Mark II, with its even better high ISO performance and high-definition video, didn't diminish our bond. If anything, I felt even less inclined to worry about new camera releases. Together, the two cameras covered more bases than I needed covered. OK, neither could focus particularly well in murky light, or particularly fast in any kind of light, but that was a minor quibble. For three years, no new camera release, or rumoured release, could pique my interest.

The Lapland Shift
Lapland changed everything.

It wasn't intentional. I wasn't looking for my head to be turned. It was just one of those things.

A Dutch couple asked me to photograph their wedding in Lapland, in northern Finland, in November of last year. I knew from experience that at that latitude, daylight would be at a premium so late in the year, but I wasn’t unduly concerned. For most of the day, the light levels would be no worse than what I encounter on wedding assignments here in Ireland. I was more concerned about the cold, and how I would marshall my cameras to deal with the changes in temperature as they went from indoors to outdoors. Bringing a cold camera inside would cause condensation on the lens that would take a while to clear. I could hardly ask everyone to hold it for ten minutes while the lenses defogged—particularly during the ceremony.

My solution was to place one camera coupled with a wide-angle lens inside the ceremony venue early on the day of the wedding. It would be at temperature and ready to go when the ceremony started. I chose a wide-angle because the venue—a glass tipi—was a tight space.

That brought with it another problem. I'd only have a single camera to photograph all of the preparations with. There is a saying in professional photography: "If a job requires one camera, bring two." Redundancy is important when there's a pay cheque involved.

A friend offered me the use of his Canon 1D Mark III. A piece of equipment designed for press and sports photography. If my 1DsII is a bit of a Bentley (serene and measured), the 1DIII is more like a Ferrari. It goes. Boy...does it go.

You might remember that when it was launched, the 1DIII was derided for its autofocus performance. Under certain conditions, the camera simply couldn't produce a sharp picture. Eventually, Canon identified a fix to the sub-mirror assembly of the autofocus rig, though that didn't appease the camera's detractors. The reputation of the 1DIII never recovered.

Taken practically in the dark with the loaner 1DIII. This is a photograph that I would have struggled to get with the 1DsII or 5DII.

I do wonder why. It is a remarkable machine. In Lapland, it became my go-to camera ahead of my own 1DsII and the 5DII. Regardless of its reputation, its autofocus was doing things I'd never experienced before. It was locking on perfectly in virtually no light at all. And it was doing so on moving targets—during the dancing, for instance. This was autofocus by clairvoyance, or divine intervention, or something. Whatever the magic ingredient was, Canon hadn't included it in the 1DsII or the 5DII—both of which, in dim conditions, just throw up their hands and go into a sulk.

I was getting photographs with ease that I'd previously had great difficulty taking.

Moreover, the 1DIII was a good deal lighter than the 1DsII, due to improved battery design.

For the first time ever, the 1DsII looked less attractive to me.

The gap
Since Lapland, I’ve been working happily with my own cameras again—there's only so long you can hang on to a loaner before its owner really does want it back. The photographs are just as good as before. I shouldn't be surprised. After all, the overriding input device hasn't changed: the photographer. But still, now that I've had a taste of what current autofocus systems are capable of (and there have been further improvements since the 1DIII), the gear acquisition node in my brain is itching again: I want a new camera.

The camera I desire has the almost marble-proof ruggedness of a current 1 series EOS camera, the size of a 5DII and the autofocus performance of a current 1 series EOS camera (or Nikon equivalent). Dual card slots too. High-definition video is important to me as well. About 18 MP would be nice.

The problem is, nobody, as far as I can tell, makes this camera. Yet.

But I'm back monitoring the rumoured releases for 2012.

And despite my best efforts, I have to concede that the latest camera sometimes really is the greatest.

Roger

Roger Overall is a photographer based in Cork, Ireland. Here's his blog.

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Featured Comment by Gordon Cahill: "I admit it. I gave in to the lust. I succumbed. I'm weak. I love the new gear. It's fun. Even if I don't need it and I'm never going to use all of its capabilities, I'll want to see where it may take my photography. I'm honest enough to admit thee only reason I ever say I don't need a new camera (or that the one I have is 'perfect') is that I can't afford it."

Posted on Monday, 02 January 2012 at 06:39 PM in Cameras, new, Photo-tech, Roger Overall | Permalink | Comments (69)

Friday, 30 December 2011

2025

Zander at the restaurant last night with his new iPhone.

I'll be working today on selecting and "featuring" a few of the many, many comments now awaiting moderation for the previous post, so check back if you're interested in other TOP readers' recommendations of favorite iPhone apps. I must say it's interesting even if I don't envision myself becoming an enthusiastic iPhone photographer.

The curious thing about the iPhone that struck me this morning (as I was putting on my watch) is that it adds a further dimension to the trend or tendency among camera manufacturers in the digital era (as well as, really, the end of the film era). It's a trend I've been putting up a fight against every step of the way: the tendency to design devices to do everything. I've always advocated simplicty, directness, and dedicated functionality in cameras, simply because I've experienced, and been impressed by, the sense of "flow" that accompanies unconscious mastery of one's equipment and the concentration on the task of seeing photographically that it promotes. My biggest disappointment with the Fuji X-100, for instance, is that it does too much—it shouldn't have a flash, it shouldn't do video. Excessive functionality betrays the promise of simplicity that its retro physical design implies.

Imagine...it used to offend me that an electronical Nikon had 36 controls. Little did I know that those were the days, and that the control flexibility of cameras would increase tenfold if not a hundredfold from there. Our most feature-laden cameras today are now similar to computer programs such as Photoshop: they're so complex that no one person can reasonably master every single thing they can do, or every single way they can achieve every thing they can do. I continue to see this as a net loss. (Or rather, I continue to see the total absence of simple cameras on the market as a loss. I'm not against some cameras being feature-laden to an extreme; I'm just against all cameras having to be that way. Although the Olympus Pen Mini and the Leica S2 are both fairly simple in the way I appreciate, at opposite ends of the market.)

And you'll have to forgive some of the following, realizing that I'm not a techie. I don't like electronic devices and I don't use them because they're "neat" or fun. I am, rather, the kind of guy who has lived without a TV at times, and whose idea of a coffeemaker is a quart saucepan to boil water in and a filter holder. I've never had cable TV or owned a camcorder. Much of the "convergence" of modern devices is so old hat to some people that they will hardly be able to imagine anyone being impressed by it enough to even remark on it.

Still, what most strikes me about the iPhone is how many things it replaces. I mentioned that I thought about this when I was about to put on my watch this morning. The iPhone is a pocketwatch like my great-grandfather's—when I need to tell time I'll just take it out of my pocket and flip open its case. No more need to wear a watch (see, this is really so not new that just saying it might offend some people.) It replaces the personal music player, which I first encountered as the "Walkman," a portable tape player (I never owned one, but lots of people did). My son keeps all his music on an iPod Nano—or at least he did up until yesterday. I can't see him needing that any more. The iPhone includes, of course, a point-and-shoot camera, as we were discussing. It replaces the calendar on my wall. It replaces the weather broadcast on TV (which replaced the weather report in the newspaper, which replaced folk predictions of the weather based on observation and familiarity with local conditions). It can replace the morning paper, and even printed paper books if you don't mind reading on such a small screen. It replaces the maps in my glove compartment (again, I'm not a gadgety type of guy—my newest car is a 2007 model and I've never had a car with Sat Nav). In a sense it replaces the Post Office, since I can send short written messages to people on it. (Letter-writing must have become a literary form simply because, if you were going to going to go to all the trouble of delivering a letter-packet at great cost of time, effort, and expense in, say, the Colonial era, it must have seemed natural to put some effort into what was being delivered, and write at some length. It would hardly make sense to carefully carry a letter by overland coach and then seagoing sailing vessel if all it said was "what r u doing 2nite?")

(Incidentally, the march of technology overtakes us all: Zander, age 18, lived through the era when talking on cellphones was replaced by texting on cellphones. I remember when it happened: I stopped being able to eavesdrop on one end of his conversations with his friends when I was driving him places in the car. [This was a real loss for parents trying to keep in touch with their kids' lives, by the way.] He had to get unlimited texting on his iPhone yesterday, because, he assured me, 1000 texts a month was not nearly enough).

Curiously, I can see that for some people, it even replaces some of the functions of the home computer. That means I'm not only a Luddite, I have layers of Luddism...it makes me go "harumph" to think of doing photo-editing functions on the phone instead of properly, in ACR and Photoshop CS5.

Of course, the iPhone functions as a phone, too. (I almost forgot that.) I suppose you know people who have given up their land lines.

And all of the above only touches on all the things it can replace.

It still doesn't make coffee or feed the dog, but, as I've said before, the cellphone is, for me, the #1 indicator that the future is here. Dick Tracy was before my time—it started in 1931—but I do recall that when I was a kid, the convention of certain comic-book heroes wearing walkie-talkies on their wrists like wristwatches was a commonplace. That was no doubt deliciously futuristic to Chester Gould (1900–1985) and his readers. Little could they have imagined the smartphone circa 2012 and all the things it replaces. An actual iPhone simply wouldn't have worked as futurism in the 1960s when I was a kid: it would have been far too outlandish. No one would have believed it, even if someone could have imagined it. And that seems unlikely: I don't think anyone could have imagined an iPhone in 1990, if we're being honest. At least not in detail. Maybe not even 1999. Assuming continuing progress, it makes you curious about 2025, doesn't it?

Mike

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Featured Comment by Kalli: "We didn't get jetpacks or flying cars. We got something so much cooler and better: the iPhone."

Featured Comment by Ron Preedy: "I read somewhere that people are too optimistic about technological advances in the short term, 2–3 years. But they are too pessimistic (or not imaginative enough) about the long term ( >10 years). I like the simplicity of my X100: After I set it up I never go into the menus except for formatting the card, and simply ignore features I don't use. What I do use is all controlled by dials and switches, and there aren't many of those. But I'm a selective Luddite: I'm typing this on my Android smartphone :-) ."

Featured Comment by Seth Glassman: "One of the beauties of the iPhone design, and the genius of Jobs and Co., is that you can delve as deeply into the phone as you're comfortable without a million buttons reminding you what you don't know or care about. Use it for what's useful to you and ignore the rest. If the sheer number of apps is visually irritating, take them off. It's as simple or complex as you want it to be, and you don't need to feel guilty about what you could be doing if you cared...."

Featured Comment by Sandro Siragusa: "I for one enjoyed this guest-post from Grandpa Simpson."

Posted on Friday, 30 December 2011 at 03:19 PM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (67)

Monday, 26 December 2011

Is It Time to Move Back to the DIN Standard?

I just encountered a line at Rob Galbraith, in a news item about the upcoming-in-2012 Canon 1D X: "...a standard ISO range of 100–51,200 (which can be expanded to as high as 204,800...."

It made me realize that I habitually let go with a silent internal existential guffaw every time I read one of those outlandishly high ISO numbers.

It's not ridiculous to use, or learn, the meaning of ISO 400, 640, and 1000 and so on. You can memorize such numbers easily and learn to translate them into stops easily.

(Fairly easily, for the innumerate amongst us. Including moi.)

But who mentally works with fluency and fluidity with numbers like "51,200" and "204,800"?

The ISO standard actually consists of both the arithmetic and logarithmic numbers; that is, it's not "ISO 200," it's actually "ISO 200/24°." But when talking about it we ignore the 24 part (which came from the old DIN standard) and just use the 200 part (which came from the old ASA standard).

Seems to me the conceptual appeal of the old ASA scale is blasted to smithereens by the new, or recent, necessity of using such extended values. The jump from 51,200 to 204,800 (in our example) is also perceptually wopplejawed—it seems like a whole great whacking lot; it's actually only two stops.

Time to switch conventional usage from the now-standard arithmetic scale back to a logarithmic one?

Note here that there are no official ISO speeds over 10000. They're extrapolations that fall outside the official standard; so far they derive only from manufacturer specifications. Changes have to be made to the standard one way or the other to talk about speeds like the ones above.

Here's an example section of the old DIN scale and the ASA equivalents:

15 (25)

18 (50)

21 (100)

24 (200)

27 (400)

30 (800)

33 (1600)

36 (3200)

39 (6400)

The difference between 51,200 and 204,800 expressed in the DIN-derived part of a postulated ISO standard would be from 48 to 54. That seems more proportionate to me than using huge numbers in the tens and hundreds of thousands—especially since we're now just identifying film speeds and seldom if ever converting the numbers to stops in our heads anyway. Who needs to translate 80000 to 100000 in stops, these days?

Not a super-important point either way. But I'm just sayin'.

Mike

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Featured Comment by psu: "My vote would be to get rid of the ISO number altogether. The ISO/ASA ratings made sense for film where you want a single calibrated number to base your workflow around. Except that even in the film days it was at best a guideline, especially with black and white.

"In digital capture ISO is just a shorthand for setting the gain in the sensor and adjusting the internal image processing to compensate. This value is expressed in terms of the old ISO value, but it's not clear to me why. Generally I shoot in two modes: Either...

1. I want the camera to use the lowest setting it can to hold my desired aperture/shutter speed combination, or

2. I want the camera to use its base setting to get the highest possible image quality.

"It might be useful, in addition to mode (2) to have fixed "low, medium, and high" speed settings. But in general I don't see any reason for me to be hitting a button called ISO and twirling through 15 or 20 settings 1/3rd of a stop apart. The only time I ever set ISO manually now is either to obtain mode (2) above or to get a fixed ISO when I'm using flash because the Nikon auto-ISO system is too stupid to do the right thing with the flash.

"Since buying the D700 I never look at the ISO setting in the EXIF at all except to marvel at how good ISO 1600 looks."

Mike replies: That would make altogether too much sense. A future frontier in camera design will be (I hope) the intelligent simplification of camera design centering around, as my friend Nick puts is, functionality rather than features; Apple has been very good at this in the computer/music player/smartphone/personal notepad realm, but few cameramakers so far even bring it into their thinking. "Featurism" intrudes into, and interrupts, functionality to a significant degree with most current cameras, especially for people who aren't photographers or photography mavens—even cameras meant to be simple aren't. In fact it sometimes seems to me that recently, what a sophisticated knowledge of camera-tech is most good for is for designing the setup of a digital camera and creating standard procedures (some of which are workarounds) so that the device becomes effectively functional instead of just confusing and frustrating.

There's no reason at all for amateur cameras not to have a 1-2-3 scheme for setting sensitivity: 1 being the setting for optimal quality, 3 being the setting for acceptable quality in the lowest light, and 2 being the best balance between the two. The manual could tell you what the measured values of amplification are; the camera user doesn't absolutely need to know. Pro cameras could be a little more sophisticated than that, but, as you say, they could still be usefully a lot simpler than they are, and, as you say, referenced to signal amplification rather than to an analogy of inherent light sensitivity.

Featured Comment by Andreas Weber: "At least make it 'ISO 50000, 100000, 200000;' there's a reason why nobody talks about 1/128th or 1/256th sec., either! Please, in the name of all engineers...."

Featured Comment by Eduardo Cervantes: "The beauty of the American standard is that doubling the number doubles the sensitivity. That's why it remains relatively easy to apply even at such ridiculous ASA's. The European standard just adds three values for each doubling in sensitivity. I don't know if that is easier to apply when shooting.

"Many years ago, after my country's currency suffered numerous devaluations against others, buying a camera was in the millions. A meal in the thousands. Digital calculators were of no use anymore as they didn't have enough space in the display for so many digits. After things settled down, the government took three zeros out of the nominations and things went back to 'normal.' I wonder if the same thing could be apply to the American standard. Two zeros out; 100 ASA becomes 1 ASA. 6400 becomes 64. Lower than 1 ASA become fractions. The same for some others like 640. It becomes 6.4. Designers have done it in tachometers for years and it worked. Just commenting."

Mike replies: You're on to something. I'd say we could just jettison the intermediate stops, because, really, in the digital age, thirds of a stops are like Andreas Weber's 1/256th sec.—needlessly fine distinctions.

Why not just round the numbers like the shutter speeds are rounded, then use "k" once past 1000? So the progression would go 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 15k, 30k, 60k, 125k, 250k, 500k. That takes us all the way to ISO52428800. Seems high enough. And writing "51,200 and 204,800" becomes "500 and 2k." Much simpler.

Of course, we realize that the further our inventions get from standard practice, the less likely they are to ever be implemented.

Posted on Monday, 26 December 2011 at 12:27 PM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (57)

Friday, 21 October 2011

Lytro Launches

Talk about buzz. The biggest photo news on the planet at the moment is the announced launch of the Lytro "light field" camera for early 2012. Articles in the mainstream press are blooming like kudzu, and the Lytro website is being blasted with traffic.

We've covered* the plenoptic principle before. Essentially, it's a camera that you can focus in software after the fact, similar to the way you choose white balance in the raw converter after the fact when you shoot raw. The just-announced cameras have a unique and new user interface, which is probably best demonstrated rather than explained: this CNET video shows you how it works.

This technology will doubtless be beloved of the public, which never really understood focus to begin with and considers focusing a camera to be an impediment interrupting the picturetaking process. And so it might be, in a few years' time.

Photographers aren't necessarily the ones who are most excited about this development, but that may be because the inital examples we'll be looking at (the first versions will cost $499 and $399) will be roughly analogous to the third- and half-megapixel digicams of the mid to late '90s. It'll come along. If every smartphone doesn't have a plenoptic "light field" camera by 2016, I'll eat my hat. Ren Ng seems a similarly safe bet to become technology's latest wunderkind billionaire (although I don't know how much of the IP he actually owns or controls).

"Photographer"—how quaint
So (since I'm unable to resist a touch of commentary, even though it's not really appropriate for a news item) have you noticed that every innovation these days seems to be directed at making fewer demands on the photographer's decision-making? Adobe's Image Deblurring that we covered the other day promises that the photographer no longer has to hold the camera steady; light field photography means the photographer no longer has to choose the plane of focus before the moment of exposure. The "photograph" of the future will likely be a still frame grabbed from a video flow, refocused to taste, and displayed on an electronic screen. The activity we now think of as "photographing" might take place increasingly at a desk, at leisure, after the fact, rather than in the field.

The Lytro buzz does seem to indicate, though, that the next ten years could be just as interesting as the last ten years have been.

Mike

*The comments to that linked post seem particularly good.

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Featured Comment by Evan: "I struggle to see how these innovations are in any way a threat to 'traditional' photography.

"The box camera gave way to (easy to use) roll film, opening the door for amateurs to use cameras. Somehow, professional photographers struggled on. Instant film was introduced, destroying the creative process of the darkroom, yet somehow a few select artists forged ahead. Cheap 1-hour processing opened the floodgates to millions of people with crappy pocket cameras. Many of these cameras made basic decisions (like exposure) for you, undermining the creative process. Bravely, real photographers found ways to outcompete this new technology. Digicams and cell phones...Eh, you get the idea.

"If all 'good' photographers have is the ability to make focusing decisions in the moment, perhaps it's for the best that they become obsolete. Personally I like to believe there's a bit more than that. Real photographers have always been, and will always be, those who use whatever technology exists to its limits to say something new and important."

Featured Comment by Kalli: "So, what sort of a hat do you wear? Just out of curiosity…."

Featured Comment by Richard: "As a professional photographer I have to admit that this has worried me some. The profession is taking so many hits in so many fields. Weekend warriors with a DSLR and a couple hundred dollars worth of software, as well as journalism taken over by cell phones. This camera just makes it easier to take photos for any person. However will it be successful, actually I think not. In its present form it's an expensive gimmick. Yeah the technology will move into other things but here is the problem. Style. There is so much that goes into style, exposure, composition and yes focus but also the lens you use, and how that lens portrays the out-of-focus parts and the rendering of the image itself. At present the Lytro will not have a lot of those style abilities, it will have one style and that's it. I think it will be in cell phones and that's it. If there is one thing customers do recognize is style. So maybe I can still breath for a little longer, or at least till the 'Robot Photographer' comes out."

Featured Comment by Richard: "I think Plenoptic will be the new stereo photography—fascinating but useless. It is an interesting gimmick, but it makes life harder (post-processing) not easier for the average consumer so they won't want it. 'You push the button and we do the rest' is what most people want. I can see it as an app on an iPad for people's holiday snaps and most people will have it set for focus stacking so that everything is in focus, just like it would be with their iPhone camera."

Featured Comment by Dave Fultz: "It's the future...through a glass darkly. I'm delighted with the enclosure design, though, it's the first truly radical rethink of how an imaging device could look and work in years and years. I bet it works better than the naysayers think."

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "Whenever I see this phrase, 'light field camera,' I imagine a simple folding wooden 4x5" view camera weighing about three or four pounds."

Mike replies: I hear that. At least they don't call mirrorless cameras "view cameras"!

Featured Comment by Cary Siepp: "One of the more interesting aspects of this camera is that it is one of the first whose output is really only intended to exist in electronic form. Yes, you can pick a focus point in software and it will spit out a low-res JPEG for you if you want it, but the distinctive feature of this technology is that the image can be shared online and manipulated after the initial point of capture by anyone who views it. It's interactive photography, which is something genuinely new. Whether it will prove to be just an interesting technical proof of concept or a hit remains to be seen, but it's a fascinating development nonetheless. As others have mentioned and as was alluded to on the DPReview story on the Lytro, 3D imagery, especially video, seems like the most interesting potential practical application of this technology."

Posted on Friday, 21 October 2011 at 02:19 PM in News and Occasions, Photo equipment, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (72)

Thursday, 20 October 2011

Fight! Fight!

Hippolyte Bayard, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840

If I may be permitted for inserting my $0.02 about Ctein's column on Wednesday (and that's really all this is worth), I thought I might just provide a little helping of perspective. In the 1990s, I undertook a pretty broad survey of the hobbyist literature in photography going back to the 1800s. I still have a number of antique "how-to" manuals, articles, and references from that period of my career. And I thought I might say—if you're flexible-minded enough at parsing the following from an epistemological standpoint—that exposure is a problem that appears to be trivial on a superficial level but difficult, arcane, and involved on a fundamental level. Let me see if I can find another way of saying that: it's simple on the surface but gets deeper the deeper into it you go. It seems to respond with an appropriate level of complexity at whatever level you choose to engage with it.

It's also something photographers have always fought over. One of the low-level headaches I had editing Photo Techniques (at which my outgoing predecessor told me that the three things any reader needed to fully participate in the conversation were a view camera, a spotmeter, and a densitometer(!)) was what I referred to as "battling gurus." Various authorities had each devised their own methods for simplifying the deep matter of exposure into simpler methods and conceptual frameworks, and the problem was that these various "systems" either didn't conform easily to each other—in which case each expert tended to defend his own system and attack his competitors'—or else they did conform too closely, in which case various people might accuse each other of plagiarism, appropriation, or worse. Behind-the-scenes jealosies, resentments, and, sometimes, clashes between the various writers contributing editors, as well as experts outside the magazine's community, were forever furtively simmering beneath the surface. The editor (me) sometimes had to be referee. The worst case was when I received an ultimatum from one contributor who said that if I dared to publish so much as one more article from another contributor, who he felt was stealing his ideas, he would never write for us again.

Looking back over the literature, it appeared to me that such disputes go way back. I can't swear that I could document cases from the 1800s convincingly, but my impression was that, budgeting enough research time, one could probably find experts arguing over the most effective ways to understand and implement exposure in virtually every era in which amateurs have been involved in photography. And disputes over who came up with what go back to the very cradle: witness the contest between Daguerre in France and Talbot in England, and the symbolic suicide of Hippolyte Bayard (who had a good case, actually, if you look into it). The pictorialists argued over who invented and owned various alternative processes and styles and methods of manipulating prints; and many people appropriated the Zone System of Ansel Adams, reformulating it according to their own tastes referring various degrees of credit back to the master—who himself was helped in his formulation of the system by Fred Archer, whose name has by now settled beneath the waters, and by the redoubtable C.E.K. Mees of Eastman Kodak (Eastman bought Wrattan and Wainright in 1912 specifically to secure the services of Mees, who then set up and ran the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester) and his gifted assistant Loyd [sic] Jones.

One of the reasons I published my graveyard picture the other day was that it's almost an exercise in exposure. It consists of three separate camera exposures melded together to recreate what I saw at the scene. (Many of my pictures have a phototechnical or photohistorical subtext. It seems to be something I can't quite help.) I even once published my own "system" of exposure and development for black-and-white film, which I dubbed Johnston's Not Much of a System System.

Of course, some people aren't fighting at all. They're merely pinging off each other in various routes to expressing the facts most effectively.

At any rate, exposure is a wonderful puzzle, a sometimes frustrating control, and—let's be honest—something that nobody ever quite completely masters. I'm not saying that it constitutes a rewarding locus of study over time all by itself, but it's certainly an ongoing topic of learning, mastery, and, occasionally, debate...

...Same as it ever was.

Mike

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Posted on Thursday, 20 October 2011 at 10:01 AM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (28)

Tuesday, 18 October 2011

Photoshop Image Deblurring

I don't care for getting information from videos or presentations...the production culture seems alienating to me. In this one, for instance, I fail to see the need to have Dwight from "The Office" chirping along like a demented Ed McMahon—and what's the premise for that brief snippet of ancient Bachman Turner Overdrive? Were we supposed to reflect briefly back on blue-collar workers of the 1970s? But whatever: I think you'll agree that the substantial content of this makes it worth watching. You might want to hit full screen.

If you can't see the video here, here's a link to use.

Mike
(Thanks to Carsten Bockermann and others)

UPDATE: As several readers, including cfw and Christopher Lane, have pointed out, Adobe has admitted that one of the images used in this demo was faked. Dpreview has the details.

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Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "More technical details online (in written form :-) http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html and the paper that kicked this off seems to be this one at this year's SIGGRAPH http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yoavhacohen/nrdc/. From the abstract:

This paper presents a new efficient method for recovering reliable local sets of dense correspondences between two images with some shared content. Our method is designed for pairs of images depicting similar regions acquired by different cameras and lenses, under non-rigid transformations, under different lighting, and over different backgrounds.

"Note the 'correspondance between two images' bit. You need a matching image for this magic to work...but that might be a sharp but poorly composed one in a putative further product. Note also that this works not just for getting the PSF for deblurring but can also be applied to tone (color) correction and trasferring a known mask to a new image (the latter is less interesting for still photographers, I think). Currently it's research work. Not product work (AFAICT) though I'm sure Adobe are working on that. The paper is in light version (3MB) http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yoavhacohen/nrdc/nrdc.pdf or best quality (47MB!) version http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yoavhacohen/nrdc/nrdc_siggraph11.pdf."

Featured Comment by struan: "Twenty years ago I very nearly did my PhD with a group which developed one of the first fairly robust ways to deblur images in a reasonable time without having to handhold the algorithm—important, because it is easy to push the deconvolution to give the highly biased answer you first thought of. As it is, I became more of an experimentalist, but still did a lot of image processing.

"'Faked' is too harsh. Synthetic blur is a standard procedure when you are testing algorithms. It makes the test more controlled, and is really no different from using light from a collimated test target when testing lenses.

"An expert can get amazing results out of these sorts of algorithms. The problems come when real-world pictures meet anumerate users looking for a single button to push. If you have a blur shape (kernal) which is substantially smaller than the whole image and which, crucially, is constant across the whole frame, then even automated systems can do a good job. I used programs which could impressively deblur things like number plates on speeding cars in about fifteen minutes of chugging on an IBM AT.

"For photographic applications the biggest obstacle is that there can be multiple sources of blur, and that they vary across the image. Motion blur with long lenses isn't too bad, even with short depth of field. However, with wide angles the splodge that results from moving the camera is different for objects close to the corners than for those in the middle. You can start trying to construct different kernals for the different parts of the image, but then your kernal is roughly the same size as the sub-image which leads to all sorts of problems with artifacts, false positives and good old signal-to-noise.

"I can see a use for this counteracting the effect of tiny dim apertures at the long end of a handheld superzoom, but how many of those users buy Photoshop? The technology really needs to be built into the self-print stations they now have in photo shops, or the web-interface of an online printer."

Posted on Tuesday, 18 October 2011 at 04:08 PM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (30)

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Mike and Ctein Discuss B&W-Only Sensor Implementation (Digital B&W Part III)

Introduction: The foregoing discussion of a possible B&W-only camera in these environs (in this post and then this one) has deliberately ignored an issue that is nevertheless of some concern...namely, implementation. How good could a B&W-only sensor be? Would it have any appreciable advantages over conversions from a conventional color sensor?

My observation has been that one potential problem of calling for a niche device is that the first manifestation of the device type can be taken as the litmus test of the whole concept, when its acceptance or rejection by the market might in fact depend far more on the implementation of that idea in that specific device. One thing I took for granted in the foregoing posts on this topic is that I'm assuming that a B&W-only sensor would provide pleasing B&W output! But that's not necessarily a given—I could see a B&W-only camera coming along that I would hate simply because the output didn't look good. So how hard would it be to get good B&W out of a dedicated digital sensor? Since much of this is theoretical to me, and my comments mostly speculative, I thought I'd ask Ctein to join me in talking it over.

Ctein: Hi.

Mike: Ctein, there are a number of issues that we can discuss in turn. But to begin with, it's often been repeated on the web that there are probably some inherent advantages to be gained in discarding the color filters on the photosites and the anti-aliasing filters common to Bayer-array sensors. The assumptions are a) that a dedicated B&W-only sensor would be sharper than a Bayer sensor with the same number of pixels, and b) that it would have greater light sensitivity because those filters cut down the amount of light reaching the photosites. Yet the few direct experiments that are available on the web seem to conclude, generally, that while these effects are real, they're not as decisive as some might wish. What are your thoughts?

Continue reading "Mike and Ctein Discuss B&W-Only Sensor Implementation (Digital B&W Part III)" »

Posted on Thursday, 13 October 2011 at 10:12 AM in Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (94)

Monday, 10 October 2011

Temptations (Digital B&W Part II)

In some ways, Saturday's essay "Why Would a Digital Camera Have a B&W-only Sensor?" is one of the worst things I ever wrote. I struggle to try to express ideas clearly, but even as I was writing that one I already knew, in advance—before I had read one word of response—that too many people were going to miss the point. As I said to one commenter, the writer has to take some of the responsibility when readers don't understand. I work hard at trying to make myself understandable, I really do. But sometimes I fall down.

So I thought I'd pick myself up and try once more, from the top.

Try thinking about it in terms of temptations. What I'm saying is that if you're an upcoming digital photographer used to color who wants to really learn to see in black-and-white, color is like...heroin. No, that's too much; like candy—maybe sugar is a better analogy. Rats will prefer sugar-water to food literally until they starve.

Temptation makes you do things you shouldn't. I was in detox with a guy who escaped out a second-floor window in the middle of the night to go get himself some crack. Seriously, he hung out of the window and dropped to the ground and landed in some bushes. Color is not just a distraction, in this sense. It's a vice. A drug. Crack.

Oops, okay, er, sorry (hyperbole is such a temptation)—back to a milder metaphor: not like crack; like...catnip to cats. If color is there, you will gravitate to it. If you know the color file is in the camera, however deep it's buried, you'll see colors. Because we're weak, and color is seductive. (Or, as I once put it too sardonically, "when color became the way all cameras natively see, photographers went from photographing content and meaning to photographing reds and greens.")

And then you won't really learn how to see in B&W.

Or rather, some people won't. This clause is a problem in any web discussion. The Third Law of Writing on the Internet is, "No writer can ever qualify any point adequately."

Writer: X is only true for some people. It might not be true for you.
Person on the Internet: No, your argument is wrong, because X is not true for me.

As a commenter named Chris wrote late last night: "Having transitioned from being a mostly B&W film shooter to shooting digitally in almost all color, I am an example of your point; even setting the camera to process in B&W, I found I just couldn't give up the color subjects around me the way I can with B&W film; I know they'll be there, lurking in the raw file, and so I shoot those anyway, and lose the focus on B&W picture hunting."

As I keep saying, I'm only talking about a small group here, a minority. Some people are happy shooting color and don't want to master B&W. Some people never use crack and some people don't have a sweet tooth. You can include or exclude yourself as you wish. I'll concede that if people don't think they have any trouble with it, then I'm unlikely to convince them that they do. And some photographers, it must be acknowledged (though fewer than you might think, in my opinion), are true colorists. They respond to color; they work with color. Their work would be meaningless without color. Granted. We each define ourselves.

Rules to live by, except when you'd rather not
In many ways, most of my various recommendations about how to learn to be a better photographer could be seen to involve getting rid of "temptations." In quotes, yes—because of course it's not really a moral issue. Here are a few of the things I've advocated over the years for ambitious photographers:

• Settle on one axe. Why? Because then its interface will become second nature to you, and you'll learn intimately what it can and cannot do. You'll get comfortable with it. You'll get good with it. It'll become a friend. You'll know it inside and out. Buying cameras like toys and switching from one to the other all the time is a temptation. Succumbing to it prevents us from getting to know one camera well. (I should know.)

• Have a clear project with defined goals and ideas about the end result. Again, it reduces the temptation to become distracted. If you set out to document how people live in the suburbs, you then know enough not to waste your time with your macro lens in a flower patch you stumble across. If you're documenting the plant life of the Appalachian Trail, then maybe you know you need to document the prevalent flowers and you shouldn't waste your time with meaningless snaps of suburbs on the way to the trailhead. Focusing your intentions helps as much as focusing your camera. Otherwise it's just tourism.

• Settle on as few lenses as possible. Why? Because then you really learn each one. You learn the secrets of how the lens really sees. You learn, gradually, how to organize pictures most effectively with that lens. You'll learn to move, to place yourself, how to control perspective and geometry and backgrounds. And you learn to see how the lens will see even when you're not looking through the lens. To see what the camera will see without looking through the camera helps you see pictures.

• Never crop. Why in the world not? What harm could cropping do? Because imagining that they're going to crop everything later confuses people. Cropping is a crutch—you might have heard that said. If you point your camera at something in the heat of battle and think, "This composition doesn't look quite right, but I'll crop it later," you're fooling yourself. You simply can't see, instantaneously, in advance, whether it works as this or that crop or not; you can't try out all the possible crops in your mind. But if you're used to using the whole frame, then you know you have to get it in or out. You can recognize—visually, instantaneously—when you've gotten it right in the viewfinder. But if you crop all the time, you'll never learn.

Besides—I'm digressing now, a constant temptation to me as a writer—you can only crop one way: in to a smaller area of the frame. You can't crop outward, to things outside of the frame. Remember this snapshot from last weekend?

I didn't think consciously about getting the program and the "Premium Seating" sign and the tag around his neck into the frame. I just do it because I always do. What if I'd shot it this way...

Thinking, "Oh, well, it doesn't look quite right, but I'll crop it later"? Later, I'd think, hmm, mebbe I should have gotten his tag, and the sign, and the program, and his whole left forefinger into the shot. But you can't include more than you shot. Too late now.

Cropping is a temptation that makes you into a worse photographer if you depend on it regularly. Giving in to temptation is a weakness. Cropping is a weakness. Get it right in the viewfinder, each time; you'll find you start to miss fewer and fewer shots.

Of course, what I really subscribe to in practice is the way one of my teachers, Frank DiPerna, once (amusingly) put it: "I absolutely never crop under any circumstances, except when I want to." The same sentiment is probably true of all my other recommendations as well.

But can you see that what I'm talking about is all about training your eye and your mind more than anything?

Some can't help but see what the camera sees
So all I'm saying about a B&W sensor is not that I don't know all the workarounds; I do. I'm not saying that some people don't make successful B&W pictures with normal color digital cameras; some do. If you're convinced you "see" B&W whenever you want to, maybe you do. I'm not even saying that there are no advantages to shooting B&W with a color sensor; there are some.

Well-intended as all of those comments were.

I'm just saying it would be nice if the camera industry with its current choice of 497* different models could spare two or three that shoot monochrome-only, for those who want that. I mean, would it kill Canon or Nikon or Sony to come out with a monochrome variant of one of their popular entry- or mid-level DSLRs? That were really optimized for pictorial B&W output? Would it really cost that much? Is it really technically so difficult? Naturally it wouldn't sell as well as the color version, what with all those catnip-loving cats out there in the GP. My point is not that it would sell well, but that it might be latched on to by significant photographers to create significant photographic work. Surely that's worth something, even to a corporation.

We need some company that's really devoted to the art of photography. Heck, that could be its name—call it the "EOS Fine Art," say. Surely it would have some PR value? Give fifty of 'em away to the world's best B&W photographers.

Create a cult. (There I go again.)

Corporate dedication to the art of photography. If there were a given population of EOS Fine Art fanatics, would it be smaller or larger than the population of, say, large format aficionados? Of Lomographers? Of alt-processors? I'd bet more. Heck, I haven't bought a Canon new since G.H.W. Bush was President and the Orwellian war of the moment was the First Gulf War. If Canon came out with the EOS Fine Art, based on, say, the latest Rebel, I'd buy one tomorrow. (I'd have to, now that I've gone out on a limb like this.) So they'd have one new customer.

We might be a minority, but I'm not the only one who wants this. As reader Peter Klein wrote yesterday, "At a LHSA [Leica Historical Society of America] meeting a few years ago, Stefan Daniel [Division Manager, Product Management at Leica Camera AG] asked how many of us would buy a B&W-only digital M if Leica produced it. A significant number of us raised our hands."

But note also that I'm not writing about this because it's just something I want, necessarily. I'm saying it's something I think the photography community as a whole should have available to it, but doesn't. The photography culture. A small but possibly significant group of photographers would be better served if they could choose a camera or two** that are optimized for native B&W and that don't record catnip—er, color, I mean—at all. No distractions. No temptation. Just as an option for those who can't help seeing what the camera sees and those who prefer to have their tools fit their task. That's all.

Clearer this time? I hope so. I'm tryin' here.

Mike

*Made that number up. Does anyone know how many separate camera models there actually are on the world market?

**And thanks to those of you who recommended the Phase One Achromatic+, a scientific camera that records monochromatic luminances both inside and outside the visible spectrum, but you're going to have to buy a hell of a lot more stuff through my little Amazon links before I'd ever be able to afford that. I'm still aghast at myself for wantonly spending $2700 on the Sony A900, the most expensive camera I've ever bought in my life. I probably won't get over that for three years as it is (and it took me three years to work up the nerve to do it). It's in the living room right now hanging from a peg, glowing with heat generated by rapid depreciation; just looking at it I feel poorer with every minute that goes by.

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Featured Comment by Mark Hespenheide: "I'm not even a black-and-white photographer, never really have been, and I'd probably buy one if it were under $2000. Just to learn for a year, and push myself.

"And Mike—the best way not to feel guilty about that A900 is to get out there and use it. I honestly don't mean that sarcastically; I felt similarly when I bought my A850. It felt like a ludicrous amount of money. But I find that the best way not to obsess about gear or the cost of gear is to go out and photograph. When I'm out photographing, I'm not sucked in to reading forum posts and wondering if I should buy a 4x5" or a 645D...."

Featured Comment by beuler: "You can buy a pink Nikon, but not a B&W one. Who woulda thunk!"

Featured Comment by Richard: "I get what you're saying Mike. For what it's worth my Ricoh GRD 3 has one of those goofy grainy B&W art filters that renders remarkably like Neopan. It also has a setting to give you both the B&W plus color files. When I tried shooting that way it confused my senses badly enough I couldn't see in color or monochrome!"

Featured Comment by Jeffrey Goggin: "With regard to cropping, I find it interesting that I have no difficulty' seeing' in B&W despite the fact that I'm looking at a color image, yet when it comes to formats, I can't visualize anything but exactly what is presented to me by the camera. If Leica offered its digital M's with 4:3 format rangefinders, I would own one, but as it is, I can't bring myself to buy one with the 3:2 format even knowing that I can crop to my preferred 4:3 format during post-processing. It's funny how the mind works, eh?"

Featured Comment by Greg G: "There are no perfect analogies, but the brain knows what the brain knows. Put a 10-inch-wide beam on the ground and you walk it no problem, no matter how much you pretend (or discipline yourself) to believe it's actually 100 feet in the air. Put it 100 feet up and you walk differently. Put it 100 feet up but carry a balance pole, and you walk differently yet again. Put it 100 feet up with a net below and you walk differently still. Practice the 100 foot high walk enough (hopefully with both pole and net) and your brain will learn things about how your body works and about wind shifts that you'll never know staying on the ground.

"Now photography isn't life and death, but the brain still knows what it knows. If your camera only does B&W...."

Posted on Monday, 10 October 2011 at 12:59 PM in Photo-tech, Photographic aesthetics | Permalink | Comments (113)

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