Photoobsessioning
Jun. 16th, 2006 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
compilerbitchAs some of you may remember, my Fuji 6900 Zoom commenced pushing-up-daisy procedures recently, which prompted me to much belatedly think long and hard about my photographic intentions. As thinking about what was actually going on in my life (aargh) was a bit scary, I have probably spent a bit too much time pondering this kind of thing.
Oh, before I get into that, I just had a slight book frenzy in Foyles the other night, so I'm now the proud owner of The Portfolios of Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the man, the image and
the world: a retrospective. Oh, and I also splashed out on Ansel Adams's three classic textbooks, The Camera, The Negative and The Print. I can't recommend any of these books highly enough. Portfolios is eye candy of the highest imaginable order. Retrospective is a huge hand-to-hand combat weapon of an art book that contains most of the best photographs of people ever taken. It's interesting to juxtapose Adams and Cartier-Bresson, actually -- an Adams print is a technical tour-de-force, perfection in every grain of silver halide. Cartier-Bresson's photographs, in comparison, are frequently weirdly composed, out of focus or just plain wrong, but they contain more life than I've ever seen anyone else achieve. Recommended.
Anyway, on to musing about my own photography. I may go on a bit, so...
This all started by two things: receiving an inheritance recently that gives me the budget to by near enough any camera I might choose, and then thinking hard about what camera I might buy. My wish list, broadly speaking, was as follows:
o Must be digital, at least primarily. If the camera has interchangeable backs, then the ability to do film occasionally if the fancy takes me or just simply as a backup is fair enough, but I've done my darkroom days, and to be honest I prefer digital.
o Must be high resolution. I want to be able to produce large, fine prints with plenty of detail. For reference, think 6x6 with slowish film as a baseline, 5x4 film better still. 35mm film is not really sharp or smooth enough for what I have in mind.
o A user interface that is more knobs and dials than menus and button pushing.
o As I tend to go 90% for monochrome images, I want something that does monochrome well.
o Good portability and light weight would be nice. Pocket size would be better still.
o I want to be able to shoot good resolution near infrared images
After a bit of hair tearing, I realised that one camera wasn't really going to do all of this. I realised that what I actually need, most likely, are three separate cameras: a good fixed lens digital compact, a medium-format SLR with a digital back, and a 5x4 view camera with a scanning back. After some poking around, this is roughly what I've come up with:
Leica D-Lux 2
This thing really appeals to me. It's the result of a collaboration between Leica and Panasonic -- it's also sold in a near-identical version under the Panasonic Lumix brand. Decent lens, near-panoramic switchable aspect ratios (a bit like a baby X-Pan), 8 megapixel, small enough to go in my pocket, nice big screen, still does full manual if I want it. From what I've heard, the (Panasonic-designed) image stabilisation is awesome, and apparently you can get sharp results with 1/4 second exposures hand held. I'll check out relative prices, but if there's not much difference, I'll probably go for the Leica branded version because it will probably hold its value better, and Leica have a rep for supporting their products for a long time.
Megavision E-series Monochrome Back
This is the pricey bit:
*Deep breath*... This thing costs about $13k, just for the back, but with the current cost of second-hand Hasselblads the camera bit is almost free by comparison. The version I'm interested in is the 4k x 4k, 37mm square Kodak sensor based version, which yields 16 megapixels. It is available in both colour and monochrome versions, and I'm highly tempted to go for monochrome. I've never liked the results from Bayer pattern digital sensors when zoomed 1:1, and since the monochrome version has no antialiasing filter either, it should be as sharp as (at least) a 32 megapixel colour back, more likely 64 megapixel. My 'interesting' photos are more often monochrome anyway, and the very highest res colour backs (currently 39 megapixel) are too stupidly expensive to make any sense at all, and still probably not as sharp as a 16 megapixel mono back. I've had a chat to the blokey from Megavision, and he says that he can build me a back with no IR high pass filter (I'd need to use one on the lens instead), so by swapping that for a completely black IR low-pass filter, I'd be able to shoot IR without any difficulty at all. The computery looking thing on the back of the 'blad in the photo above is actually an OQO palmtop, which runs for-real Windows XP. If you lock up the mirror and keep the shutter open, it can act like the display on a digital compact for focussing and composition purposes, which again is fantastic for IR, because you can't see anything at all through the viewfinder in those cases.
I have a bit of indecision over which blad to go for. The back supports basically anything, so I'd have to choose between a 503CW:
and an H1:
The H1 is a lot more modern (obviously), in that it does most of the auto-wossname-everything stuff that a typical 35mm DSLR supports. The lenses are pricey and less available second-hand. I have a leaning toward the H1 from a common sense point of view, because it's a far more practical camera than the 503CW, but the 503 is so much like my greatly-missed old Bronica SQ that I find myself going 'awww' a lot. We shall see. If I can find an H1 second hand at a decent price, along with wide angle, standard and moderate telephoto primes, I'll probably go that route, but it looks a bit button pushy to me. I'll have to persuade someone to let me play with one, I think.
OK, this is the part where I go really insane. The Vague Plan is one of these:
Ebony SV45-U2
and one of these:
Better Light Scan Back
again, with some kind of wide angle, standard and telephoto primes, probably some nice sharp Rodenstocks or Schneiders. This latter category probably seems the most nuts. The Ebony looks old-fashioned, and it is. It's made of half a rain forest, a dead calf, and a bunch of titanium (yep, all that metalwork is titanium, not steel). Not exactly vegetarian, but it'll still be working in 50 years time. The Better Light is a scan back, which has a triple-row linear CCD that is swept across the back mechanically, rather like the mechanism of a flat bed scanner. It images at 6000 x 8000, 48 bits per pixel, and has no Bayer interpolation whatsoever, so this means 144 megapixels. Or, in real money, OMGWTFBBQ resolution, for pin sharp prints the size of, well, something really quite big. It does near IR as well, given an appropriate filter (you have to use an IR high pass on the lens by default if you don't want IR anyway). The Ebony has a full range of movements -- it's not quite up to monorail levels of bendyness, but I suspect that I'll mostly want to use this for landscapes, so lugging the Better Light control box, a not that tiny lead-acid battery and a laptop is bad enough, and a monorail just would make it a bit silly really. The Ebony actually folds up pretty small, and 'only' weighs a bit over 3kg.
OK, so what's missing from this list? Obviously enough, a 35mm DSLR. If I had to buy only one camera, it would probably be an EOS5D, which matches the 35mm film derived lenses of the EOS system pretty well. I can't help thinking that the EOS 1ds MkII is probably a waste of money, because hardly any of the EOS lenses can actually reach its native resolution. Far better to go for an EOS5D for half the price, because you'd be unlikely to notice any difference on prints of equivalent size. For take it anywhere purposes, the 5D is too big (for me anyway), I just wouldn't take it. I found my Fuji too big, and that's half the size. The above Leica is about my limit, and of all three rigs, is most likely to get the most hammer. I also suspect that it's probably actually not *that* far off the game in terms of image quality compared with the DSLRs either. For critical monochrome work, where the subject is moving or where handholding is necessary, the 'blad + Megavision rig is pretty much perfection, and 'blad Zeiss lenses take an awful lot of equalling. It's hard to imagine even the best possible 35mm rig getting close -- the 1ds II would be nowhere near due to its Bayer interpolation. Then, for *really* critical still life, architectural and landscape stuff, there's the Ebony + Betterlight rig, which would (of course) handle colour or monochrome perfectly fine. So, I see 35mm DSLRs as a compromise: the APS sensor versions are basically not really 35mm anyway, and are probably a bit too fine resolution for the current lenses, and the full frame alternatives are not really an ideal solution either. Better to go downmarket for the best that fixed-lens point and shoots have to offer, and upmarket.
What d'ya reckon? Am I crazy, or really crazy?
Oh, before I get into that, I just had a slight book frenzy in Foyles the other night, so I'm now the proud owner of The Portfolios of Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the man, the image and
the world: a retrospective. Oh, and I also splashed out on Ansel Adams's three classic textbooks, The Camera, The Negative and The Print. I can't recommend any of these books highly enough. Portfolios is eye candy of the highest imaginable order. Retrospective is a huge hand-to-hand combat weapon of an art book that contains most of the best photographs of people ever taken. It's interesting to juxtapose Adams and Cartier-Bresson, actually -- an Adams print is a technical tour-de-force, perfection in every grain of silver halide. Cartier-Bresson's photographs, in comparison, are frequently weirdly composed, out of focus or just plain wrong, but they contain more life than I've ever seen anyone else achieve. Recommended.
Anyway, on to musing about my own photography. I may go on a bit, so...
This all started by two things: receiving an inheritance recently that gives me the budget to by near enough any camera I might choose, and then thinking hard about what camera I might buy. My wish list, broadly speaking, was as follows:
o Must be digital, at least primarily. If the camera has interchangeable backs, then the ability to do film occasionally if the fancy takes me or just simply as a backup is fair enough, but I've done my darkroom days, and to be honest I prefer digital.
o Must be high resolution. I want to be able to produce large, fine prints with plenty of detail. For reference, think 6x6 with slowish film as a baseline, 5x4 film better still. 35mm film is not really sharp or smooth enough for what I have in mind.
o A user interface that is more knobs and dials than menus and button pushing.
o As I tend to go 90% for monochrome images, I want something that does monochrome well.
o Good portability and light weight would be nice. Pocket size would be better still.
o I want to be able to shoot good resolution near infrared images
After a bit of hair tearing, I realised that one camera wasn't really going to do all of this. I realised that what I actually need, most likely, are three separate cameras: a good fixed lens digital compact, a medium-format SLR with a digital back, and a 5x4 view camera with a scanning back. After some poking around, this is roughly what I've come up with:
Leica D-Lux 2
This thing really appeals to me. It's the result of a collaboration between Leica and Panasonic -- it's also sold in a near-identical version under the Panasonic Lumix brand. Decent lens, near-panoramic switchable aspect ratios (a bit like a baby X-Pan), 8 megapixel, small enough to go in my pocket, nice big screen, still does full manual if I want it. From what I've heard, the (Panasonic-designed) image stabilisation is awesome, and apparently you can get sharp results with 1/4 second exposures hand held. I'll check out relative prices, but if there's not much difference, I'll probably go for the Leica branded version because it will probably hold its value better, and Leica have a rep for supporting their products for a long time.
Megavision E-series Monochrome Back
This is the pricey bit:
*Deep breath*... This thing costs about $13k, just for the back, but with the current cost of second-hand Hasselblads the camera bit is almost free by comparison. The version I'm interested in is the 4k x 4k, 37mm square Kodak sensor based version, which yields 16 megapixels. It is available in both colour and monochrome versions, and I'm highly tempted to go for monochrome. I've never liked the results from Bayer pattern digital sensors when zoomed 1:1, and since the monochrome version has no antialiasing filter either, it should be as sharp as (at least) a 32 megapixel colour back, more likely 64 megapixel. My 'interesting' photos are more often monochrome anyway, and the very highest res colour backs (currently 39 megapixel) are too stupidly expensive to make any sense at all, and still probably not as sharp as a 16 megapixel mono back. I've had a chat to the blokey from Megavision, and he says that he can build me a back with no IR high pass filter (I'd need to use one on the lens instead), so by swapping that for a completely black IR low-pass filter, I'd be able to shoot IR without any difficulty at all. The computery looking thing on the back of the 'blad in the photo above is actually an OQO palmtop, which runs for-real Windows XP. If you lock up the mirror and keep the shutter open, it can act like the display on a digital compact for focussing and composition purposes, which again is fantastic for IR, because you can't see anything at all through the viewfinder in those cases.
I have a bit of indecision over which blad to go for. The back supports basically anything, so I'd have to choose between a 503CW:
and an H1:
The H1 is a lot more modern (obviously), in that it does most of the auto-wossname-everything stuff that a typical 35mm DSLR supports. The lenses are pricey and less available second-hand. I have a leaning toward the H1 from a common sense point of view, because it's a far more practical camera than the 503CW, but the 503 is so much like my greatly-missed old Bronica SQ that I find myself going 'awww' a lot. We shall see. If I can find an H1 second hand at a decent price, along with wide angle, standard and moderate telephoto primes, I'll probably go that route, but it looks a bit button pushy to me. I'll have to persuade someone to let me play with one, I think.
OK, this is the part where I go really insane. The Vague Plan is one of these:
Ebony SV45-U2
and one of these:
Better Light Scan Back
again, with some kind of wide angle, standard and telephoto primes, probably some nice sharp Rodenstocks or Schneiders. This latter category probably seems the most nuts. The Ebony looks old-fashioned, and it is. It's made of half a rain forest, a dead calf, and a bunch of titanium (yep, all that metalwork is titanium, not steel). Not exactly vegetarian, but it'll still be working in 50 years time. The Better Light is a scan back, which has a triple-row linear CCD that is swept across the back mechanically, rather like the mechanism of a flat bed scanner. It images at 6000 x 8000, 48 bits per pixel, and has no Bayer interpolation whatsoever, so this means 144 megapixels. Or, in real money, OMGWTFBBQ resolution, for pin sharp prints the size of, well, something really quite big. It does near IR as well, given an appropriate filter (you have to use an IR high pass on the lens by default if you don't want IR anyway). The Ebony has a full range of movements -- it's not quite up to monorail levels of bendyness, but I suspect that I'll mostly want to use this for landscapes, so lugging the Better Light control box, a not that tiny lead-acid battery and a laptop is bad enough, and a monorail just would make it a bit silly really. The Ebony actually folds up pretty small, and 'only' weighs a bit over 3kg.
OK, so what's missing from this list? Obviously enough, a 35mm DSLR. If I had to buy only one camera, it would probably be an EOS5D, which matches the 35mm film derived lenses of the EOS system pretty well. I can't help thinking that the EOS 1ds MkII is probably a waste of money, because hardly any of the EOS lenses can actually reach its native resolution. Far better to go for an EOS5D for half the price, because you'd be unlikely to notice any difference on prints of equivalent size. For take it anywhere purposes, the 5D is too big (for me anyway), I just wouldn't take it. I found my Fuji too big, and that's half the size. The above Leica is about my limit, and of all three rigs, is most likely to get the most hammer. I also suspect that it's probably actually not *that* far off the game in terms of image quality compared with the DSLRs either. For critical monochrome work, where the subject is moving or where handholding is necessary, the 'blad + Megavision rig is pretty much perfection, and 'blad Zeiss lenses take an awful lot of equalling. It's hard to imagine even the best possible 35mm rig getting close -- the 1ds II would be nowhere near due to its Bayer interpolation. Then, for *really* critical still life, architectural and landscape stuff, there's the Ebony + Betterlight rig, which would (of course) handle colour or monochrome perfectly fine. So, I see 35mm DSLRs as a compromise: the APS sensor versions are basically not really 35mm anyway, and are probably a bit too fine resolution for the current lenses, and the full frame alternatives are not really an ideal solution either. Better to go downmarket for the best that fixed-lens point and shoots have to offer, and upmarket.
What d'ya reckon? Am I crazy, or really crazy?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 07:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 07:41 am (UTC)droool! Nice toys.
Date: 2006-06-16 08:48 am (UTC)It would be interesting to see how the scanning back treats moving subjects. I was kicking around an idea just after Xmas to add a lens to a USB scanner and see what happens. I didn't get around to making a proper job of it, but I did get a couple of images of waving hands and the like. Having to lug around a scanner and laptop and power to take pictures kinda put me off the idea. I might try setting it up in the garden though.
This is one of the pictures I've bothered to upload:
Re: droool! Nice toys.
Date: 2006-06-16 03:50 pm (UTC)Re: droool! Nice toys.
Date: 2006-06-17 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 07:25 am (UTC)Of the two, for myself, I'd get the 1DsII now, but not because of minor differences in image quality. If I'm in Iceland and it starts raining hard, I don't want to have to choose between not shooting and the risk of having my camera fail catastrophically. I'm also a klutz, my old 1Ds mk. I took two embarassing falls and survived them with ease. Thank you, I'll take the tank, although, at this point, there'll probably be a new model of the tank series by Fall.
Reid Reviews I think has taken good long looks at the 5D and the 1Ds II, if you subscribe to that, I believe his 5D review has been posted publicly, but I'm forgetting where.
A pretty droolworthy list, indeed. I do color, and am glad for sone really long telephoto, which make some of your toys a bad choice for me, but I'm gonna have a good hot cup of envy even so. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 07:51 am (UTC)I'd be a bit more concerned about a 'blad H1 -- it's basically about as complex as a 35mm DSLR, and quite big (though to be honest probably not really much bigger than an EOS 1 series, just a different shape really. The 500 series is truly go-anywhere -- I mean, they used them on the surface of the moon, in vacuum!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 08:18 am (UTC)Assuming I do pull this all together at some point over the next few months, maybe you'd like to go and shoot some landscapes together? You'd be more than welcome to have a play with the weirder gear, and it might be fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 01:56 pm (UTC)Assuming I do pull this all together at some point over the next few months, maybe you'd like to go and shoot some landscapes together? You'd be more than welcome to have a play with the weirder gear, and it might be fun.
That'd be a blast. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 07:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 08:04 am (UTC)I also like working with equipment with quirks and limitations (which may be a bit surprising, given the extreme lengths I am prepared to go to for image quality, but I'll explain). My old Fuji was OK but a bit duff. Nevertheless, I got some good results from it by using its limitations and artefacts to my advantage -- the sensor was noisy, so I'd convert to B&W, do a bit of sharpening, and rack up the contrast to get something that looks like 35mm Tri-X pushed to 1600 ASA. The kit list above only really has one sensible camera in it: the Leica. Everything else has some weird limitation: the 'Blad/Megavision would be monochrome only, which most people would regard as a bit nuts, but for me, doing monochrome really well is very important to me. The combination will be guaranteed to be weird to work with, and will probably need some interesting compromises, but that tends (for me anyway) to push me to create something more interesting anyway. And the BetterLight + Ebony rig is the ultimate in weirdness: a full-on view camera, with a digital back that scans slowly across the image in somewhere between a few seconds and a few minutes. Moving images are generally thought to be a no-no, but *are* they? What would it be like, for example, to set up somewhere overlooking a busy street, and set up the camera to scan as slowly as possible? Non-moving things would look normal, but anything moving will be stretched or squashed. It won't look like a normal photograph, but it will definitely look interesting. It might look horrible, but there's definitely a chance that it won't! It's exactly that kind of, lets chuck a bunch of weird camera gear in the back of the car and go and point it all at interesting things and see what happens, experience that I'm trying to get at.
I don't see much point in trying to be yet-another person doing the same kinds of photograph as everyone else. I mean, yes, if I produce *one* print in my lifetime that's as good as an Ansel Adams, I'll be very happy indeed, but I'm not really interested in emulating people. I'd much rather do my own thing and see where it goes. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 08:16 am (UTC)There used to be a magazine, I forget which, that regularly published pictures done with a rotating panoramic (slit-scan) camera, of parties and the like. Sometimes you could see the same person twice, in different parts of the room :D
The infra-red stuff sounds pretty cool as well. Have you ever tried any Kirlian photography?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 08:23 am (UTC)I've not tried Kirlian photography. The high voltage RF always scared me off a bit, but I might have a go at it sometime. It certainly looks interesting. I do wonder if it would be possible to build an electrostatic scanner -- something like a long row of needles, maybe a few thousand of them, each fed to a very high impedance op amp. You could use this to scan the electrostatic field around an object in quite fine resolution. It would be interesting to see how the results compare to Kirlian photographs.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 12:25 pm (UTC)A comment on the B&W thing. I've been wondering if oen of the big DSLR manufacturers is going to get around to doing a B&W camera. I wouldn't quite be able to strech to one, but it would definitely be somethign of interest. I had a manual minolta set-up which I kept two bodies, and almost always one had colour and one B&W film in.
I'm defintiely looking forward to seeing what you can come up with with that lot.
For the MF set, what are the prices like for a 2nd hand 503? I'd have thought that even if you did go for the H1 then something more manual could be picked up quite easily.
But, more generally, wow!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 04:35 pm (UTC)I think if I could find an H1 at a reasonable price I might consider it, there's no doubt that it's a far better camera than the 503CW by any reasonable analysis. It would restrict my lens choice, and make for rather more costly lens purchases, but I'll probably only be buying 3 primes anyway. That's one nice thing about the combination of kit -- I don't need a zoom for the MF, because the Leica has one. I don't need colour for the MF because both the Leica and the Better Light do it. I don't need IR in the Leica because the other two do it. I don't need macro on the Leica or the MF, because the Ebony has a huge maximum extension anyway, and macro subjects tend to be static, so there's no problem using a Better Light. It's a bit like having one camera that does everything I want, except that it's three cameras, and two of them are weird. Or something!
It'll take me a while to pull all of this together. I suspect that I'll probably get the Leica first, followed by the Ebony and the Better Light (I'm talking to someone about buying his scan back at the moment actually), and then save up a bit and get the Megavision. Sounds like a plan to me, anyway...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 03:03 pm (UTC)In medium format, a lot of pros these days think very well of Rollei; they made the first medium-formats with electronic controls.
On the digital small-format side (interesting how the size of the cameras has not been changed by the use of digital sensors) you might want to look at the Olympus SLRs; I find their control software congenial. And don't forget to think about tripods. And lights, if you do studio work!
Me, I'm faunching after old Fuji panoramic medium-formats; I don't know if anyone actually makes panoramic digital cameras, and the results one gets from cheap stiching software are just not as good.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 04:15 pm (UTC)I've had some good panorama results by stitching my old Fuji's images together in Photoshop CS. My method is this:
0. (Before you start) Make sure you've rotated all of the originals first!
1. Use the autostitch feature. Watch it mess up. Then fiddle with the layout inside the stitch utility by hand. Finally, tell it to convert everything to a photoshop file, but keep each source image as separate layers. Turning on perspective correction generally works best.
2. Brightness/contrast match all of the source images one at a time until the hard joins are as difficult to see as possible. Normally this doesn't need colour correction, but occasionally it may need a tweak here and there.
3. Going over each join in turn, create a layer mask on the uppermost layer, select the layer mask and then manually paint in a join so that you can't see it at all. Generally this is easier than it sounds -- if the images join up OK, a bit of smooth feathering is generally enough, but hard edges have to be more carefully dealt with. It's easier to do than to describe, but I'd very much recommend using a graphics tablet if possible.
4. When everything looks as good as you can get it, flatten it to a single layer, crop off the ragged edges, then do any final finishing you might need. This is a good time to think about using clone stamp or other similar tools to fix anything you couldn't fix in stitching as-such.
5. Final dodging and burning, levels, curves, white balance, unsharp mask finishing as you would with any 'normal' image.
This all takes work, but I can generally manage to get images that don't look at all stitched. Some of my best examples make it impossible to tell, even though all the originals were shot hand-held.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-17 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-17 11:39 pm (UTC)