More from Yosemite last weekend
Aug. 20th, 2006 01:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
compilerbitchIt's a strange thing, but even though I only managed to capture about 20 frames last weekend, I've probably had more good ones than I'd normally have ended up with had I shot a few hundred frames with a smaller format. Of course, it's probably partly just the fact that if you have to take best part of an hour over a shot, you tend to make more of an effort to get the details right, but it's probably also partly that the larger format and greater sharpness can be relatively forgiving. Some of these shots came from Saturday (the same series that I uploaded last week), and some were on Sunday. I'll say more behind the cut.
Falls, Yosemite (monochrome)
This image was from Saturday -- the falls (I don't know what they are called) are more or less opposite El Capitain. At this time of year, there isn't a lot of water, but they are still nevertheless photographable. This was taken with a 210mm Caltar, at about f22. I've also included a colour version below. The image was pretty sharp when viewed at 100%, but not quite pin sharp. I've since found out (thanks to some advice from the Better Light's inventor, Mike Colette) that I was probably hitting diffraction limits, and I'd probably get better sharpness at between f8 and f16, though focussing becomes a lot more critical, of course.
Meadow and Half Dome, Yosemite
This is actually one of my favourite images from the weekend, albeit not quite technically perfect. In this image, I did happen to use f16. It was also my first try-out of my Schneider 90mm Super Angulon (bought second-hand recently). The lens is a bit beaten up looking (it was cheap!), but in a recessed lens board it works perfectly with the Cambo, even with the compendium shade so I don't need to do anything complicated to attach filters to it. It's not that apparent at this size, but the grass in the foreground and the top of Half Dome is absolutely pin sharp, right down to the pixel level. However, the far side of the meadow is slightly out of focus. I was using a back tilt, just a few degrees was all it took, so I could get the meadow and the mountains in focus at the same time. This has the effect of tilting the plane of focus, but it's still a plane, and what I was photographing, er, wasn't flat. Overall, though, I love the look, so I'm regarding it as a success. It prints well at 11x8.5", but I think the softness at the back of the meadow probably makes this the limit, but that's OK.
Meadow, Yosemite
This is the same meadow, from the same vantage point, looking about 90 degrees to the right. This time, I used fractionally more tilt, so I got all of the meadow pin sharp, but the mountain looks a bit soft. This is fine at web resolution, but I didn't like the print. What really did work nicely, though, was cropping about half way up the trees and printing just the meadow as a slightly panoramic, quite large (17" x 11" I think) print. Again, the Super Angulon was staggeringly sharp, and even from a crop from about 25% of the original image, printed that size the image resolution was still beyond my own ability to see the limits on the print. There was quite a bit of wind, and the grass was blowing around quite strongly, but I actually really like the effect of the scanning artefacts -- it looks somewhat impressionistic in the way that the texture is warped near the camera. Again, not really a technically perfect image, but (at least the crop) is definitely a keeper.
Falls, Yosemite
This is the colour version of the falls shown in monochrome above. I'm personally not that keen on it -- I've always been a monochrome person in terms of my taste in photography. I do still shoot colour (might as well, with the Better Light), but I rarely find myself liking the results. Other people seem to, however, so here it is.
El Capitain and Half Dome in Infrared
This looks nice as a print, but gets a bit lost at this size. I need to shoot this scene again earlier in the day, I think -- I'm not keen on the way the shadow falls.
I processed some more of the IR images I captured at the weekend too. I'm not sure that this will turn into anything like a specialism for me, but some of the results certainly look quite interesting. This is a differently framed (different lens too, I think this is the 150mm Nikkor W) version of the falls, shot in IR. I'm still getting the hang of processing these IR images -- they tend to have very little contrast in their highlights and shadows, which makes getting a nicely balanced print very difficult, without ending up with a 'soot and whitewash' effect.
Falls in Infrared
Anyway, that's it for tonight. I'm probably not going to go out with the camera this weekend (too much to do housework and unpacking wise, sadly, and I really need a bit of rest, I think). In other news, my medium format rig (I know I've not talked about this much recently, but it's still ongoing) is getting closer to completion, so it's possible that my next trip might well be with that instead. I have settled on a Bronica ETRS with an AE-II metering prism (that gives it aperture priority auto exposure if I choose to use it), 40mm, 75mm, 100mm macro and 150mm primes (the older, metal barrelled ones), with a motor drive (I don't need it to wind film, but it does cock the shutter and mirror). I have ordered a Megavision E-series 16 megapixel (4096 square from a 37x37mm chip, 50% bigger than full frame 35mm) monochrome back, (and an OQO palmtop tablet PC, which they prefer as a portable platform) which should be ready to pick up week after next. I already have the camera and lenses (though I'm waiting for a replacement for the focussing screen, which was a bit banged up on the second-hand body I have), so I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on the back. This is a bit of a dream camera for me, actually -- I've always liked Bronicas, having had an SQ for a few years. Their lenses are top notch, and their electronically timed shutters are a considerable improvement on the Hasselblad 500 series, which often don't match exposure settings accurately from lens to lens. It's all relatively cheap on the 2nd hand market currently. The Megavision backs are a neat design -- they are designed to run tethered to a PC, so there is no messing about with microdrives or huge SD cards, they just dump images directly to your hard disc over firewire. Normally this would make them a pain to use in the field, but they sorted it very cleverly, by building the back so that you can clip an OQO palmtop PC directly to the back, resulting in a rig that is just as portable (but with a way better display) than you'd get from their (rather more expensive) competitors like Leaf and Imacon. Going for monochrome is a bit of a leap, I'll admit -- currently, they are the only people who will build monochrome backs, but apparently they sell quite a few of them for industrial and medical imaging purposes, so it's not that unusual for them. The big advantage, of course, is no Bayer-pattern filtering, meaning no RGGB filters and no optical low pass filter, so sharpness is at least twice as good as an equivalent colour sensor, possibly more. The avoidance of filter factors means that light sensitivity is improved, so you get substantially less noise for any given ASA rating. They also have a binning mode which lets you drop the resolution, but treat square blocks of pixels as one huge pixel, giving huge light sensitivity -- apparently, it should be possibly to go up to about 10000 ASA. I'm guessing that I should get about the same resolution as a 39 mexapixel colour sensor, assuming no radical settings used for conversion to B&W, but rather better results than taking a single channel. I should get much better low light/long exposure performance too. Expect to see more here as it happens.
Oh, one other thing -- on a tipoff from Richard Chang at Megavision, I got myself a Giottos carbon fibre tripod to replace the huge and heavy thing I bought cheap with the Cambo. Wow. Very, very impressed. It packs away really small, weighs very little (most of the weight is in the hardware, the legs weigh next to nothing), and is incredibly stable and solid. With everything locked down, it feels bolted to the ground. I've never used anything made of carbon fibre before now -- it's a strange experience. Where aluminium is a bit boingy and flexy, carbon fibre just isn't. It just does not flex. In other respects, the tripod is very well designed, with a trick centre column that can be mounted upside down or horizontally as well as conventionally. It came with a head that's a bit underspecified for the Cambo, but that is a perfect match for the Bronica. This is going to be a big improvement, I think. Whilst I'm happy to handhold the Bronica (I couldn't afford a tripod in my younger days, so I got good at handholding as a consequence!), I'd rather use a tripod so as to get the best possible sharpness. With film, a tiny bit of shake induced blur won't show, but I suspect that the Megavision will be less forgiving than FP4.
Falls, Yosemite (monochrome)
This image was from Saturday -- the falls (I don't know what they are called) are more or less opposite El Capitain. At this time of year, there isn't a lot of water, but they are still nevertheless photographable. This was taken with a 210mm Caltar, at about f22. I've also included a colour version below. The image was pretty sharp when viewed at 100%, but not quite pin sharp. I've since found out (thanks to some advice from the Better Light's inventor, Mike Colette) that I was probably hitting diffraction limits, and I'd probably get better sharpness at between f8 and f16, though focussing becomes a lot more critical, of course.
Meadow and Half Dome, Yosemite
This is actually one of my favourite images from the weekend, albeit not quite technically perfect. In this image, I did happen to use f16. It was also my first try-out of my Schneider 90mm Super Angulon (bought second-hand recently). The lens is a bit beaten up looking (it was cheap!), but in a recessed lens board it works perfectly with the Cambo, even with the compendium shade so I don't need to do anything complicated to attach filters to it. It's not that apparent at this size, but the grass in the foreground and the top of Half Dome is absolutely pin sharp, right down to the pixel level. However, the far side of the meadow is slightly out of focus. I was using a back tilt, just a few degrees was all it took, so I could get the meadow and the mountains in focus at the same time. This has the effect of tilting the plane of focus, but it's still a plane, and what I was photographing, er, wasn't flat. Overall, though, I love the look, so I'm regarding it as a success. It prints well at 11x8.5", but I think the softness at the back of the meadow probably makes this the limit, but that's OK.
Meadow, Yosemite
This is the same meadow, from the same vantage point, looking about 90 degrees to the right. This time, I used fractionally more tilt, so I got all of the meadow pin sharp, but the mountain looks a bit soft. This is fine at web resolution, but I didn't like the print. What really did work nicely, though, was cropping about half way up the trees and printing just the meadow as a slightly panoramic, quite large (17" x 11" I think) print. Again, the Super Angulon was staggeringly sharp, and even from a crop from about 25% of the original image, printed that size the image resolution was still beyond my own ability to see the limits on the print. There was quite a bit of wind, and the grass was blowing around quite strongly, but I actually really like the effect of the scanning artefacts -- it looks somewhat impressionistic in the way that the texture is warped near the camera. Again, not really a technically perfect image, but (at least the crop) is definitely a keeper.
Falls, Yosemite
This is the colour version of the falls shown in monochrome above. I'm personally not that keen on it -- I've always been a monochrome person in terms of my taste in photography. I do still shoot colour (might as well, with the Better Light), but I rarely find myself liking the results. Other people seem to, however, so here it is.
El Capitain and Half Dome in Infrared
This looks nice as a print, but gets a bit lost at this size. I need to shoot this scene again earlier in the day, I think -- I'm not keen on the way the shadow falls.
I processed some more of the IR images I captured at the weekend too. I'm not sure that this will turn into anything like a specialism for me, but some of the results certainly look quite interesting. This is a differently framed (different lens too, I think this is the 150mm Nikkor W) version of the falls, shot in IR. I'm still getting the hang of processing these IR images -- they tend to have very little contrast in their highlights and shadows, which makes getting a nicely balanced print very difficult, without ending up with a 'soot and whitewash' effect.
Falls in Infrared
Anyway, that's it for tonight. I'm probably not going to go out with the camera this weekend (too much to do housework and unpacking wise, sadly, and I really need a bit of rest, I think). In other news, my medium format rig (I know I've not talked about this much recently, but it's still ongoing) is getting closer to completion, so it's possible that my next trip might well be with that instead. I have settled on a Bronica ETRS with an AE-II metering prism (that gives it aperture priority auto exposure if I choose to use it), 40mm, 75mm, 100mm macro and 150mm primes (the older, metal barrelled ones), with a motor drive (I don't need it to wind film, but it does cock the shutter and mirror). I have ordered a Megavision E-series 16 megapixel (4096 square from a 37x37mm chip, 50% bigger than full frame 35mm) monochrome back, (and an OQO palmtop tablet PC, which they prefer as a portable platform) which should be ready to pick up week after next. I already have the camera and lenses (though I'm waiting for a replacement for the focussing screen, which was a bit banged up on the second-hand body I have), so I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on the back. This is a bit of a dream camera for me, actually -- I've always liked Bronicas, having had an SQ for a few years. Their lenses are top notch, and their electronically timed shutters are a considerable improvement on the Hasselblad 500 series, which often don't match exposure settings accurately from lens to lens. It's all relatively cheap on the 2nd hand market currently. The Megavision backs are a neat design -- they are designed to run tethered to a PC, so there is no messing about with microdrives or huge SD cards, they just dump images directly to your hard disc over firewire. Normally this would make them a pain to use in the field, but they sorted it very cleverly, by building the back so that you can clip an OQO palmtop PC directly to the back, resulting in a rig that is just as portable (but with a way better display) than you'd get from their (rather more expensive) competitors like Leaf and Imacon. Going for monochrome is a bit of a leap, I'll admit -- currently, they are the only people who will build monochrome backs, but apparently they sell quite a few of them for industrial and medical imaging purposes, so it's not that unusual for them. The big advantage, of course, is no Bayer-pattern filtering, meaning no RGGB filters and no optical low pass filter, so sharpness is at least twice as good as an equivalent colour sensor, possibly more. The avoidance of filter factors means that light sensitivity is improved, so you get substantially less noise for any given ASA rating. They also have a binning mode which lets you drop the resolution, but treat square blocks of pixels as one huge pixel, giving huge light sensitivity -- apparently, it should be possibly to go up to about 10000 ASA. I'm guessing that I should get about the same resolution as a 39 mexapixel colour sensor, assuming no radical settings used for conversion to B&W, but rather better results than taking a single channel. I should get much better low light/long exposure performance too. Expect to see more here as it happens.
Oh, one other thing -- on a tipoff from Richard Chang at Megavision, I got myself a Giottos carbon fibre tripod to replace the huge and heavy thing I bought cheap with the Cambo. Wow. Very, very impressed. It packs away really small, weighs very little (most of the weight is in the hardware, the legs weigh next to nothing), and is incredibly stable and solid. With everything locked down, it feels bolted to the ground. I've never used anything made of carbon fibre before now -- it's a strange experience. Where aluminium is a bit boingy and flexy, carbon fibre just isn't. It just does not flex. In other respects, the tripod is very well designed, with a trick centre column that can be mounted upside down or horizontally as well as conventionally. It came with a head that's a bit underspecified for the Cambo, but that is a perfect match for the Bronica. This is going to be a big improvement, I think. Whilst I'm happy to handhold the Bronica (I couldn't afford a tripod in my younger days, so I got good at handholding as a consequence!), I'd rather use a tripod so as to get the best possible sharpness. With film, a tiny bit of shake induced blur won't show, but I suspect that the Megavision will be less forgiving than FP4.
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Date: 2006-08-20 10:11 am (UTC)Anyway, *applause*
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Date: 2006-08-20 05:06 pm (UTC)