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 07:25 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. :)