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Squeaky-clean digital, no filmy residue
Friday, July 26, 2013
This blog has moved
Hi, there, and welcome to the archives of William Porter Photography's old blog. This old blog contains posts from the 2009-2010 time frame.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Don't say "Don't Say Cheese"
Seems another photographer—a woman in the UK—laid claim to this name a while ago, although she still hasn't done THING ONE with it.
Doesn't seem to be a single phrase in the English language that hasn't already been grabbed for use on the web.
Doesn't seem to be a single phrase in the English language that hasn't already been grabbed for use on the web.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Introducing an outstanding wedding photographer in Tampa Bay: Booray Perry!
I'm pretty active in several online communities of photographers, getting help from others from time to time, and offering help from my own experience whenever I am able. Sometimes I get to know other photographers pretty well from exchanges online and I do often look behind the "avatar" at people's work. There are more than a couple really good photographers out there.
Sometimes I even get a chance to talk personally with somebody whose work I like very much. That happened today with Tampa Bay wedding photographer Booray Perry. I won't say a thing about the wonderful name; you can find out for yourself on his website:
http://boorayperry.com/
Booray's a real live wire. He used to be a radio disk jockey here in the Dallas area and I can testify that his personality comes through loud and clear, not just over the phone but also in his photos and on his very entertaining blog. Today I found his post on the creative challenge of photographing the bride's shoes, which I both sympathized with and smiled at. Anyway, we had both been involved in a recent thread about wedding albums on photo.net, and we ended up chatting together about photography, business, and families. Like me, Booray thinks of himself as not just a wedding photographer but as a family photographer. I admire his work. If you are looking for a wedding photographer in Tampa Bay (or for that matter, someone to shoot your son's bar mitzvah, whatever), by all means browse the impressive online galleries over at his website.
Sometimes I even get a chance to talk personally with somebody whose work I like very much. That happened today with Tampa Bay wedding photographer Booray Perry. I won't say a thing about the wonderful name; you can find out for yourself on his website:
http://boorayperry.com/
Booray's a real live wire. He used to be a radio disk jockey here in the Dallas area and I can testify that his personality comes through loud and clear, not just over the phone but also in his photos and on his very entertaining blog. Today I found his post on the creative challenge of photographing the bride's shoes, which I both sympathized with and smiled at. Anyway, we had both been involved in a recent thread about wedding albums on photo.net, and we ended up chatting together about photography, business, and families. Like me, Booray thinks of himself as not just a wedding photographer but as a family photographer. I admire his work. If you are looking for a wedding photographer in Tampa Bay (or for that matter, someone to shoot your son's bar mitzvah, whatever), by all means browse the impressive online galleries over at his website.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Reading a photograph: Patricia Dalzell's "Benita at Home..."
Excellent post over at The Online Photographer. The subjects of the post are, first, a photo by Patricia Dalzell, and second, a reading of that photo by another photographer, Ken Tanaka. I disagree with Ken Tanaka's reading but am grateful to him for it; and I don't feel bound to accept or be too influenced by Patricia Dalzell's explanation of the photo's background, but I'm grateful for that, too. I won't reproduce the photo or the critique; you can and should bop over to TOP and see them both for yourself. It's worth the click.
What I want to do is say a few things about criticism and the meaning of art. This is a pool I used to wade in pretty frequently in my days as an academic.
A good critic in any art must be thoughtful but must first be observant, and to be truly observant, you must be disciplined, restrained, patient, humble. Or to put it differently, a good critic SHOULD be superficial, should be devoted to the surface, at least for a start. The problem with the way most folks look at photos (or poems, or movies, or whatever) is not that they are superficial, it's that they are dismissive, they're in a hurry. They FAIL to look even at the surface carefully. For most people, almost nothing is harder to see than what is right beneath their noses.
Thomas Aquinas, speaking in the Quodlibetales of the interpretation of scripture, said, Sensus spiritualis semper fundatur super litteralem, et procedit ex eo ("The spiritual meaning is always based on the literal meaning and proceeds from it"). In other words, look carefully at the literal level, the surface. Work hard to see the obvious and try to remain content with it as long as possible. Only then will you earn the right to step into the sanctum sanctorum of the deeper or less obvious meaning.
Ken Tanaka's reading, like a lot of readings done in the last, oh, half century or so, demonstrates a willingness to get to the sanctum sanctorum too quickly, too carelessly. It is, in short, an overreading. He says he's worried about the woman doing violence to him but in fact he does violence to her and to the photograph.
You can't ask too many questions about what's NOT in the photograph. Or rather, you can ask them, but it's not fair to expect those questions to be answered. You can't start trying to figure out where the woman's husband is, for example. I think it's silly to ask what the woman is holding in the hand that's in the pocket (a gun? a knife?). She has her hand in her pocket, that's all, and we have no reason nor any right to assume she's holding anything at all. Women get to put their hands in their pockets. Now, you are certainly allowed to notice the hand in the pocket. You can even sense that it's meaningful in some way—but you can't quite put your finger on what that way is. I would add, as a portrait photographer myself, that hands are a big problem in portrait sessions, especially in full-length shots like this one of Patricia Dalzell's. I've often heard it said that actors like to smoke when acting because it gives them something to do with their hands.
Sometimes the photo does reveal a lot about its context and then you may be obliged to take it into consideration. A photo of a political leader is almost inevitably political. Cartier-Bresson's famous photo of the woman who has been "outed" as a former concentration camp guard is also rich with meaningful context, which we know quite a bit about in part because Cartier-Bresson made a short documentary giving more of the incident for critics to chew on. My insistence on the importance of the surface is not meant to justify ignorance of WWII. We bring what we know to our experience of any work of art or craft. A photo of someone else's dead dog may be touching. A photo of our own dead dog may bring us to tears. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum, as much as the esthetes would like it to.
But an awful lot of art lives in a chamber which, if not a vacuum, at least has a pretty thin atmosphere. Patricia Dalzell says that she tries to make her photos "timeless", by which I take it she means first of all, "not easily dated." I strive for the same thing, so I can see a kindred spirit's work in this photograph. When was the photograph taken? Could have been almost any time in the twentieth century, I think. This is what I would call a private work. The subject is not a famous person and her story is not known. It's quite wrong to make up a story of our own and foist it on the photo, just because we feel the urge to do so.
If we can't ask what the woman ate for breakfast, where she's going after the photo session is finished, or whether her raised eyebrow is in fact a sign of latent anger or hostility, then what does the photo "mean"?
This is the central, perennial question of criticism in all the arts, and the best answer has never changed: the photo (or poem, or painting, or sonata) means what it says, just that and nothing else. It isn't a package that can be unwrapped to reveal the gift of meaning hidden inside. The package is the gift, the photo means what it is. No paraphrase or description can replace it.
Criticism isn't the record of art's meanings, not for a minute. Criticism is simply talk about art and it should always take us back to the work and help us see it (or hear it) more attentively. Moreover, all critics should realize that, while the work endures, all criticism is ephemeral. In the mid-twentieth century, we had a critical renaissance in which a lot of very smart people thought—and even dared to say aloud—that criticism had replaced art. Silly, silly, silly.
Anyway, a lot of criticism can be useful even when it's very wrong. Criticism that puts bad, inappropriate or distracting thoughts into your head that you have trouble removing, well, that's just bad. But some criticism is wrong but provocatively so. It provokes us to look harder at the work if only to see if the critic is right or wrong, or at some point perhaps in order to find evidence of the critic's wrongness. That's okay. Criticism is talk about art. And strong art can survive bad criticism. Shakespeare's plays have, and while of course it isn't a masterpiece in the league of King Lear, this portrait by Patricia Dalzell will survive a little misreading, too.
What I want to do is say a few things about criticism and the meaning of art. This is a pool I used to wade in pretty frequently in my days as an academic.
Superficiality is a virtue
A good critic in any art must be thoughtful but must first be observant, and to be truly observant, you must be disciplined, restrained, patient, humble. Or to put it differently, a good critic SHOULD be superficial, should be devoted to the surface, at least for a start. The problem with the way most folks look at photos (or poems, or movies, or whatever) is not that they are superficial, it's that they are dismissive, they're in a hurry. They FAIL to look even at the surface carefully. For most people, almost nothing is harder to see than what is right beneath their noses.
Thomas Aquinas, speaking in the Quodlibetales of the interpretation of scripture, said, Sensus spiritualis semper fundatur super litteralem, et procedit ex eo ("The spiritual meaning is always based on the literal meaning and proceeds from it"). In other words, look carefully at the literal level, the surface. Work hard to see the obvious and try to remain content with it as long as possible. Only then will you earn the right to step into the sanctum sanctorum of the deeper or less obvious meaning.
Ken Tanaka's reading, like a lot of readings done in the last, oh, half century or so, demonstrates a willingness to get to the sanctum sanctorum too quickly, too carelessly. It is, in short, an overreading. He says he's worried about the woman doing violence to him but in fact he does violence to her and to the photograph.
Don't expect too many answers
You can't ask too many questions about what's NOT in the photograph. Or rather, you can ask them, but it's not fair to expect those questions to be answered. You can't start trying to figure out where the woman's husband is, for example. I think it's silly to ask what the woman is holding in the hand that's in the pocket (a gun? a knife?). She has her hand in her pocket, that's all, and we have no reason nor any right to assume she's holding anything at all. Women get to put their hands in their pockets. Now, you are certainly allowed to notice the hand in the pocket. You can even sense that it's meaningful in some way—but you can't quite put your finger on what that way is. I would add, as a portrait photographer myself, that hands are a big problem in portrait sessions, especially in full-length shots like this one of Patricia Dalzell's. I've often heard it said that actors like to smoke when acting because it gives them something to do with their hands.
Sometimes the photo does reveal a lot about its context and then you may be obliged to take it into consideration. A photo of a political leader is almost inevitably political. Cartier-Bresson's famous photo of the woman who has been "outed" as a former concentration camp guard is also rich with meaningful context, which we know quite a bit about in part because Cartier-Bresson made a short documentary giving more of the incident for critics to chew on. My insistence on the importance of the surface is not meant to justify ignorance of WWII. We bring what we know to our experience of any work of art or craft. A photo of someone else's dead dog may be touching. A photo of our own dead dog may bring us to tears. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum, as much as the esthetes would like it to.
But an awful lot of art lives in a chamber which, if not a vacuum, at least has a pretty thin atmosphere. Patricia Dalzell says that she tries to make her photos "timeless", by which I take it she means first of all, "not easily dated." I strive for the same thing, so I can see a kindred spirit's work in this photograph. When was the photograph taken? Could have been almost any time in the twentieth century, I think. This is what I would call a private work. The subject is not a famous person and her story is not known. It's quite wrong to make up a story of our own and foist it on the photo, just because we feel the urge to do so.
What do photos mean?
If we can't ask what the woman ate for breakfast, where she's going after the photo session is finished, or whether her raised eyebrow is in fact a sign of latent anger or hostility, then what does the photo "mean"?
This is the central, perennial question of criticism in all the arts, and the best answer has never changed: the photo (or poem, or painting, or sonata) means what it says, just that and nothing else. It isn't a package that can be unwrapped to reveal the gift of meaning hidden inside. The package is the gift, the photo means what it is. No paraphrase or description can replace it.
Criticism isn't the record of art's meanings, not for a minute. Criticism is simply talk about art and it should always take us back to the work and help us see it (or hear it) more attentively. Moreover, all critics should realize that, while the work endures, all criticism is ephemeral. In the mid-twentieth century, we had a critical renaissance in which a lot of very smart people thought—and even dared to say aloud—that criticism had replaced art. Silly, silly, silly.
Anyway, a lot of criticism can be useful even when it's very wrong. Criticism that puts bad, inappropriate or distracting thoughts into your head that you have trouble removing, well, that's just bad. But some criticism is wrong but provocatively so. It provokes us to look harder at the work if only to see if the critic is right or wrong, or at some point perhaps in order to find evidence of the critic's wrongness. That's okay. Criticism is talk about art. And strong art can survive bad criticism. Shakespeare's plays have, and while of course it isn't a masterpiece in the league of King Lear, this portrait by Patricia Dalzell will survive a little misreading, too.
Traveling light: The post-mortem
Well, I'm back from my excellent vacation adventure, mostly but not exclusively in Yellowstone National Park. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post titled "Traveling Light," in which I revealed that I had—with some hesitancy—decided to leave my Pentax DSLR bodies and my excellent lenses at home, and instead to entrust my vacation photos completely to a couple of relatively inexpensive compact, fixed-lens cameras.
And that's what I did. My pro gear stayed home and the compact cameras traveled. Now that I've had a chance to review the photos, select my favorites and post them online, what do I think about this experiment? Was it a success or a failure?
I'm fairly satisfied with the pics I got with the FZ35, in most cases. This pic of a buffalo lying in the grass was taken in the middle of the FZ35's zoom range (around 200mm equivalent), which is usually a "sweet spot" for lenses:
There's a fair bit of detail here, acceptable noise (the shot was taken at ISO 80, the lowest setting), and good color. I'm confident it will print well.
This shot of the engineers building in Mammoth Hot Springs is slightly less satisfactory:
Fortunately I captured this as a raw file. The unprocessed original is somewhat "soft", but I think the final result turned out okay, after I boosted the blacks, the contrast and especially the "clarity" in Lightroom 3. Still, I can't shake the feeling that this shot would have been sharper if I'd taken it with my Pentax K20D and, oh, the Pentax 70mm prime.
The FZ35 shined when I was able to get fairly close to my subject, and when the light was good. We were not more than 25ft from these otters as they played near the banks of Trout Lake in Yellowstone:
I'm happy with that shot and don't think it would have been better if I'd had better equipment. There was a serious photographer there at the same time, shooting with a film SLR. Apparently he's quite devoted to the otters. I'd like to see some of his photos. But I'm happy enough with this.
The grizzly bears and wolves were far less cooperative than the otters. This shot of a mother grizzly with her three cubs was taken in the early morning, at Alum Creek in the Hayden Valley. I was using the FZ35 with the 1.7x teleconverter attached, and with the camera mounted on a tripod for additional stability. The FZ35's in-camera image stabilization is actually quite good, but when you are shooting at an effective focal length of over 800mm, well, image stabilization can only do so much.
This grizzly was probably a quarter mile away from us at the time. I tried to remember, when attaching the converter, to switch into the FZ35's shutter priority mode so I could keep the shutter speed over 1/500th sec. This wasn't quite as fast as the old rule of thumb requires (that would be 1/800th sec) but I let the camera's image stabilization do some work and I think the results were okay. At this distance, the limitations of the resolution of the lens become apparent. Teleconverters get you a longer reach but you pay for it in light lost (about a stop) and image clarity. But getting closer wasn't an option; we were restrained by the ranger, and if the ranger hadn't been there, I would have been restrained by my wife; and if my wife hadn't been there, I would have had to rely on my own disinclination to risk being mauled by a grizzly. So this is the shot I got.
Could I have gotten this shot with my DSLR gear? I doubt it but I'm not sure. If I shot with my K20D and the Tamron 70-300 ED Di Macro, and if I was using the Tamron 1.4x teleconverter as well, I'd have an effective focal length available of something over 600mm. Now the difference between 600mm and 800mm in this situation is less than you might think. It's possible that the DSLR's much better performance at higher ISOs would become a factor here. The shot above was taken at ISO 200, which on the FZ35 is a fairly noisy sensitivity level. If I had shot this at ISO 400 or even 800 on my K20D, I am pretty sure it would be less noisy and more fine detail would have been preserved. The field of view would have been narrower (that is, the bears would have seemed "smaller" in the frame) but the greater resolution of the DSLR might have permitted me to crop and get something close to what I got with the FZ35. I just don't know. What I am pretty sure of, however, is that what I could have gotten with my DSLR gear would not have been better.
(I hasten to emphasize that I'm comparing the FZ35's performance and capabilities with my personal DSLR lens options, not with what a pro photographer could do with a $6000 lens.)
The noisiness of the FZ35 at anything over ISO 100 became an even more serious problem when, on another day, we spent a long time one afternoon watching these bears chew on a bison carcass on the bank of Soda Butte Creek, in the Lamar Valley.
We were a fair bit closer to the bears this time—not more than a couple of hundred yards, I think, if that—but it was a drizzly overcast afternoon, in other words, the light sucked. In order to keep the shutter fast, I had no choice but to boost the ISO to 400, and that meant losing detail. The other problem here was that I wasn't using the tripod. Instead, for some reason, I grabbed the monopod instead.
But I think the images are quite satisfactory, as vacation photos. I got a gray wolf, too. She (the ranger told us it was a female) was hanging around in the neighborhood, probably hoping to get to the carcass if the bears abandoned it. Didn't happen.
I'm glad I had that reach.
The bottom line is that the FZ35 basically performed as well as I expected it to, which was pretty well. These photos aren't going to end up in National Geographic, but I'll be happy making prints of them for a vacation album.
I should add a note about the Panasonic 1.7x conversion lens. Dealing with it—putting it on and taking it off—involves a certain amount of hassle, akin to the hassle involved in changing lenses on a DSLR. Except that at no time do the camera's innards get exposed to the air and its hazards (dust, pollen, moisture, etc.).
I was a little vague even at the time about which of the falls this was. I think this is a shot of the Lower Falls, as seen from above.
I did the black and white conversion in Adobe Lightroom 3. But the raw file from the LX3 gave me everything I needed to work with to make a decent conversion. I used the LX3's 16:9 aspect ratio a lot, and usually cropped those photos to my personal favorite 2:1 aspect ratio for web display and printing.
I had a neutral density filter for the LX3 and tried it when shooting a couple of other falls. I didn't use it here because I did not want to blur the water. I really like the sharp definition in the water at the top of the falls.
This shot of my wife and daughter along the path down from Trout Lake is very different from the waterfall shot:
The LX3 gave me the wide-angle I needed here and the fast aperture; this shot was taken at f/2.4 and ISO 100. Color rendition is good and the shot is nicely detailed.
But my favorite use for the LX3 is landscapes. Here is one of my favorites:
These last two were taken not in Yellowstone but in Rocky Mountain National Park, where we camped for two nights on our way north from Dallas. This is the Moraine after a rain (and hail) storm.
The image's vibrance was goosed a little in Lightroom 3, but those colors are basically the colors that I saw.
The last picture is perhaps my favorite of the vacation and it illustrates the LX3's adaptability. I had to make a midnight run to the comfort station one night at Rocky. While I was out of the tent, I noticed that the Moraine—which our campground looked down upon from the north—was full of fog and the moon was shining above it. Everybody else in the campground was sound asleep, so as quietly as I could, I hauled the tripod out of the van, put the LX3 into manual mode, took a couple test exposures, and then captured this:
You can click that image for a larger version. Yes, it's a tad noisy, but hey, this is a six second exposure on a compact camera! I shot at ISO 400. In retrospect I wish I'd shot at ISO 200 and done a 12 second exposure. Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with this shot. The Moraine at Rocky Mountain National Park, like the Eiffel Tower and Mount Rushmore, has been photographed millions of times and most of the photos look like all the others. It's nice to have a chance to take a shot that looks a bit different.
My conclusion is that the experiment was generally a success.
One of my main motives for leaving the DSLR gear at home was that I didn't want to have to lug a variety of lenses around. That worked out well. Even though I was carrying two cameras with me in the car most of the time, both were small. And although I did have to fiddle with the FZ35's teleconversion lens occasionally, in general, I was able to grab a camera and go to shoot.
The other main goal was to take photos that were not worse than those I'd have taken with my DSLR kit. That's not a high standard, of course, but it was a realistic one. And I'd say that standard was fairly well met.
Our next family vacation takes us to another national park, Big Bend, in southwest Texas. I could change my mind in the next few months but right now I expect I'll be carrying the same two cameras I took with me to Yellowstone.
And that's what I did. My pro gear stayed home and the compact cameras traveled. Now that I've had a chance to review the photos, select my favorites and post them online, what do I think about this experiment? Was it a success or a failure?
Wildlife: Panasonic FZ35
We saw lots of wildlife on this trip, mostly in Yellowstone, but also in Custer State Park in South Dakota and elsewhere. We saw grizzly bears (but no black bears, I think), gray wolves, lots of bison, coyotes, elk, white-tailed deer, pronghorns, marmots, otters, not to mention lots of birds, including an osprey, a couple of bald eagles, a couple of sandhill cranes, what was probably a downy woodpecker, and a very colorful bird that we think was a western tanager. I'm justing rattling off the species I can remember easily.I'm fairly satisfied with the pics I got with the FZ35, in most cases. This pic of a buffalo lying in the grass was taken in the middle of the FZ35's zoom range (around 200mm equivalent), which is usually a "sweet spot" for lenses:
There's a fair bit of detail here, acceptable noise (the shot was taken at ISO 80, the lowest setting), and good color. I'm confident it will print well.
This shot of the engineers building in Mammoth Hot Springs is slightly less satisfactory:
Fortunately I captured this as a raw file. The unprocessed original is somewhat "soft", but I think the final result turned out okay, after I boosted the blacks, the contrast and especially the "clarity" in Lightroom 3. Still, I can't shake the feeling that this shot would have been sharper if I'd taken it with my Pentax K20D and, oh, the Pentax 70mm prime.
The FZ35 shined when I was able to get fairly close to my subject, and when the light was good. We were not more than 25ft from these otters as they played near the banks of Trout Lake in Yellowstone:
I'm happy with that shot and don't think it would have been better if I'd had better equipment. There was a serious photographer there at the same time, shooting with a film SLR. Apparently he's quite devoted to the otters. I'd like to see some of his photos. But I'm happy enough with this.
The grizzly bears and wolves were far less cooperative than the otters. This shot of a mother grizzly with her three cubs was taken in the early morning, at Alum Creek in the Hayden Valley. I was using the FZ35 with the 1.7x teleconverter attached, and with the camera mounted on a tripod for additional stability. The FZ35's in-camera image stabilization is actually quite good, but when you are shooting at an effective focal length of over 800mm, well, image stabilization can only do so much.
This grizzly was probably a quarter mile away from us at the time. I tried to remember, when attaching the converter, to switch into the FZ35's shutter priority mode so I could keep the shutter speed over 1/500th sec. This wasn't quite as fast as the old rule of thumb requires (that would be 1/800th sec) but I let the camera's image stabilization do some work and I think the results were okay. At this distance, the limitations of the resolution of the lens become apparent. Teleconverters get you a longer reach but you pay for it in light lost (about a stop) and image clarity. But getting closer wasn't an option; we were restrained by the ranger, and if the ranger hadn't been there, I would have been restrained by my wife; and if my wife hadn't been there, I would have had to rely on my own disinclination to risk being mauled by a grizzly. So this is the shot I got.
Could I have gotten this shot with my DSLR gear? I doubt it but I'm not sure. If I shot with my K20D and the Tamron 70-300 ED Di Macro, and if I was using the Tamron 1.4x teleconverter as well, I'd have an effective focal length available of something over 600mm. Now the difference between 600mm and 800mm in this situation is less than you might think. It's possible that the DSLR's much better performance at higher ISOs would become a factor here. The shot above was taken at ISO 200, which on the FZ35 is a fairly noisy sensitivity level. If I had shot this at ISO 400 or even 800 on my K20D, I am pretty sure it would be less noisy and more fine detail would have been preserved. The field of view would have been narrower (that is, the bears would have seemed "smaller" in the frame) but the greater resolution of the DSLR might have permitted me to crop and get something close to what I got with the FZ35. I just don't know. What I am pretty sure of, however, is that what I could have gotten with my DSLR gear would not have been better.
(I hasten to emphasize that I'm comparing the FZ35's performance and capabilities with my personal DSLR lens options, not with what a pro photographer could do with a $6000 lens.)
The noisiness of the FZ35 at anything over ISO 100 became an even more serious problem when, on another day, we spent a long time one afternoon watching these bears chew on a bison carcass on the bank of Soda Butte Creek, in the Lamar Valley.
We were a fair bit closer to the bears this time—not more than a couple of hundred yards, I think, if that—but it was a drizzly overcast afternoon, in other words, the light sucked. In order to keep the shutter fast, I had no choice but to boost the ISO to 400, and that meant losing detail. The other problem here was that I wasn't using the tripod. Instead, for some reason, I grabbed the monopod instead.
But I think the images are quite satisfactory, as vacation photos. I got a gray wolf, too. She (the ranger told us it was a female) was hanging around in the neighborhood, probably hoping to get to the carcass if the bears abandoned it. Didn't happen.
I'm glad I had that reach.
The bottom line is that the FZ35 basically performed as well as I expected it to, which was pretty well. These photos aren't going to end up in National Geographic, but I'll be happy making prints of them for a vacation album.
I should add a note about the Panasonic 1.7x conversion lens. Dealing with it—putting it on and taking it off—involves a certain amount of hassle, akin to the hassle involved in changing lenses on a DSLR. Except that at no time do the camera's innards get exposed to the air and its hazards (dust, pollen, moisture, etc.).
Landscapes and people: Panasonic LX3
Going into the vacation, I knew that, within its limited zoom range, the LX3 was a superior camera, indeed, within its limited zoom range and its even more limited range of satisfactory sensitivity (ISO 80-100), the LX3 is a very good camera, compared to just about anything. That Leica f/2.0-2.8 24-60mm (effective) lens is a real winner. And I understand that the LX3 has a slightly larger sensor than the FZ35. Anyway, from a technical perspective, the best shots I took on this vacation were taken with the LX3.I was a little vague even at the time about which of the falls this was. I think this is a shot of the Lower Falls, as seen from above.
I did the black and white conversion in Adobe Lightroom 3. But the raw file from the LX3 gave me everything I needed to work with to make a decent conversion. I used the LX3's 16:9 aspect ratio a lot, and usually cropped those photos to my personal favorite 2:1 aspect ratio for web display and printing.
I had a neutral density filter for the LX3 and tried it when shooting a couple of other falls. I didn't use it here because I did not want to blur the water. I really like the sharp definition in the water at the top of the falls.
This shot of my wife and daughter along the path down from Trout Lake is very different from the waterfall shot:
The LX3 gave me the wide-angle I needed here and the fast aperture; this shot was taken at f/2.4 and ISO 100. Color rendition is good and the shot is nicely detailed.
But my favorite use for the LX3 is landscapes. Here is one of my favorites:
These last two were taken not in Yellowstone but in Rocky Mountain National Park, where we camped for two nights on our way north from Dallas. This is the Moraine after a rain (and hail) storm.
The image's vibrance was goosed a little in Lightroom 3, but those colors are basically the colors that I saw.
The last picture is perhaps my favorite of the vacation and it illustrates the LX3's adaptability. I had to make a midnight run to the comfort station one night at Rocky. While I was out of the tent, I noticed that the Moraine—which our campground looked down upon from the north—was full of fog and the moon was shining above it. Everybody else in the campground was sound asleep, so as quietly as I could, I hauled the tripod out of the van, put the LX3 into manual mode, took a couple test exposures, and then captured this:
You can click that image for a larger version. Yes, it's a tad noisy, but hey, this is a six second exposure on a compact camera! I shot at ISO 400. In retrospect I wish I'd shot at ISO 200 and done a 12 second exposure. Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with this shot. The Moraine at Rocky Mountain National Park, like the Eiffel Tower and Mount Rushmore, has been photographed millions of times and most of the photos look like all the others. It's nice to have a chance to take a shot that looks a bit different.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that the experiment was generally a success.
One of my main motives for leaving the DSLR gear at home was that I didn't want to have to lug a variety of lenses around. That worked out well. Even though I was carrying two cameras with me in the car most of the time, both were small. And although I did have to fiddle with the FZ35's teleconversion lens occasionally, in general, I was able to grab a camera and go to shoot.
The other main goal was to take photos that were not worse than those I'd have taken with my DSLR kit. That's not a high standard, of course, but it was a realistic one. And I'd say that standard was fairly well met.
Our next family vacation takes us to another national park, Big Bend, in southwest Texas. I could change my mind in the next few months but right now I expect I'll be carrying the same two cameras I took with me to Yellowstone.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Don't Say Cheese
I'm experimenting with a number of changes here. I've fiddled with the look over the last couple of months. Blogger gives me more control than I'm taking advantage of, but I like to keep things clean, and I also want to keep things simple for myself.
And now I'm playing with a new name: "Don't say cheese." I don't tell my subjects to say cheese. I don't even ask them to smile. Instead, I try to get them to smile without being asked. It gives better results.
And I try not to take cheesy photos, which in itself makes me something of a stand-out in the wedding photography biz.
On the downside: If you didn't know that it was the title of a photography blog, would "Don't say cheese" make you think of photography? Maybe, but I doubt it. Without a context, it sounds more like advice you would give to someone who was taking a quiz about French food.
So enjoy the new name while it lasts. Maybe it will stick. Maybe it won't.
And now I'm playing with a new name: "Don't say cheese." I don't tell my subjects to say cheese. I don't even ask them to smile. Instead, I try to get them to smile without being asked. It gives better results.
And I try not to take cheesy photos, which in itself makes me something of a stand-out in the wedding photography biz.
On the downside: If you didn't know that it was the title of a photography blog, would "Don't say cheese" make you think of photography? Maybe, but I doubt it. Without a context, it sounds more like advice you would give to someone who was taking a quiz about French food.
So enjoy the new name while it lasts. Maybe it will stick. Maybe it won't.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
If you have the FZ35, do you really need a 1.7x teleconverter, too?
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the Panasonic FZ35 has a 18x zoom range that extends from 27mm to 486mm in conventional 35mm film or 36x24 digital ("full frame") terms. That's some serious zoom action.
So, if you can reach 486mm (effective) with the FZ35 on its own, do you really need the 1.7x teleconverter? After all, you can always just shoot at full zoom and crop, to make the subject appear bigger in the frame.
Well, the short answer is that the teleconverter is indeed useful.
Here is a photo of a car across the street. This was taken at full zoom extension (486mm equivalent) and cropped. What you are seeing here is actually a screen shot from Adobe Lightroom 3.
Now here is essentially the same shot, taken with the Panasonic DMW-LT55 1.7x teleconverter attached.
As you can see, the field of view is about the same in the two photos, that is, the car is about the same size in each photo. And the two images look just about identical in other ways, at least at this size. So are they in fact identical? Is the one taken without the teleconverter as good as the one take with the teleconverter?
No, it's not.
The one taken with the teleconverter actually has more pixels, more data. This means several good things. It will be possible to print the second shot somewhat larger than the first. The second shot will be more amenable to certain post-processing maneuvers, such as noise reduction and sharpening, because there is more data to work with.
Here's an enlargement of the license plate from the first shot (the one taken without the teleconverter). The enlargement ratio here is 3:1.
And here is an enlargement from the second photo (the one taken with the help of the teleconverter). The enlargement ratio here is only 2:1. In other words, I didn't have to work the pixels as hard this time to get the same size on screen.
The difference doesn't seem dramatic at first glance, but look again. Look at the Nissan badge above the plate, or the State of Texas symbol in the middle of the plate, or the word "MAXIMA" at the bottom. In the second image, everything is a little sharper, a little smoother and less pixelated.
*
Here they are again, a little smaller. I'm simulating the effect of printing here. You should be able to see that the second image is sharper and simply "better" than the first one. If you can't see the difference, well, you might be running into the limitations imposed by your computer's display.
*
The bottom line here is, the 1.7x teleconverter is actually useful. Say I have the good fortune not only to see a wolf in Yellowstone but actually to be able to set up my tripod and take a photo of one. From what I've read, it's almost certain that the wolf is going to be a long way in the distance. I can take the shot with or without the teleconverter. But if I use the teleconverter, I'll collect more data. The image of the wolf will be comprised of more pixels, which means the wolf will be higher resolution. And that's good.
A final point. There's a practical limit to the advantage of the teleconverter, and I'm working very close to that limit. The limit is set by two things: the quality (acuity or sharpness) of the lens; and the effective focal length at which you are working when the teleconverter is attached.
The quality of the lens that channels light to the camera's sensor determines how efficiently and effectively the available pixels are used. The number of pixels captured isn't the only thing that matters, in fact, it's not even the most important thing. A really good lens on a 10 megapixel camera will produce better photos than a mediocre lens on a 14 megapixel camera. Returning to the FZ35 and the teleconverter, the FZ35's built-in Leica lens is rather good, and the Panasonic teleconverter is not bad. But at full zoom extension, the FZ35 plus teleconverter seems to have reached its maximum resolving power, that is, more pixels in the sensor wouldn't matter because the lens is already starting to lose detail. A lens is an analog device, of course, it doesn't have pixels. But you can't just keep giving the lens more and more pixels and expect the lens to record finer and finer detail.
The other practical limit here is imposed by the focal length. With the 1.7x teleconverter attached, the FZ35, at full zoom extension, is shooting at a focal length equivalent to 826mm. Most serious photographers never own a lens with an effective focal length greater than 500mm, and many never even reach that. Now, when you are shooting at 500mm, 600mm, 800mm, even the tiniest vibration or instability in the camera can affect the sharpness of the image that is captured. The photos above were not taken with the camera on a tripod; I simply used a monopod. If I do use the teleconverter in Yellowstone, I will have the camera on a tripod, and I will use a 2 second shutter delay so I can get my hands off the camera before the picture is actually taken. At this extreme focal length, the merest touch can wreck a photo.
Nevertheless, while the teleconverter is pushing the FZ35 to its extreme limits, it's not exceeding those limits and if you really need extra telephoto reach, it's better to have the 1.7x lens than to do without and simply crop. Q.E.D.
So, if you can reach 486mm (effective) with the FZ35 on its own, do you really need the 1.7x teleconverter? After all, you can always just shoot at full zoom and crop, to make the subject appear bigger in the frame.
Well, the short answer is that the teleconverter is indeed useful.
Here is a photo of a car across the street. This was taken at full zoom extension (486mm equivalent) and cropped. What you are seeing here is actually a screen shot from Adobe Lightroom 3.
Now here is essentially the same shot, taken with the Panasonic DMW-LT55 1.7x teleconverter attached.
As you can see, the field of view is about the same in the two photos, that is, the car is about the same size in each photo. And the two images look just about identical in other ways, at least at this size. So are they in fact identical? Is the one taken without the teleconverter as good as the one take with the teleconverter?
No, it's not.
The one taken with the teleconverter actually has more pixels, more data. This means several good things. It will be possible to print the second shot somewhat larger than the first. The second shot will be more amenable to certain post-processing maneuvers, such as noise reduction and sharpening, because there is more data to work with.
Here's an enlargement of the license plate from the first shot (the one taken without the teleconverter). The enlargement ratio here is 3:1.
And here is an enlargement from the second photo (the one taken with the help of the teleconverter). The enlargement ratio here is only 2:1. In other words, I didn't have to work the pixels as hard this time to get the same size on screen.
The difference doesn't seem dramatic at first glance, but look again. Look at the Nissan badge above the plate, or the State of Texas symbol in the middle of the plate, or the word "MAXIMA" at the bottom. In the second image, everything is a little sharper, a little smoother and less pixelated.
*
Here they are again, a little smaller. I'm simulating the effect of printing here. You should be able to see that the second image is sharper and simply "better" than the first one. If you can't see the difference, well, you might be running into the limitations imposed by your computer's display.
The bottom line here is, the 1.7x teleconverter is actually useful. Say I have the good fortune not only to see a wolf in Yellowstone but actually to be able to set up my tripod and take a photo of one. From what I've read, it's almost certain that the wolf is going to be a long way in the distance. I can take the shot with or without the teleconverter. But if I use the teleconverter, I'll collect more data. The image of the wolf will be comprised of more pixels, which means the wolf will be higher resolution. And that's good.
A final point. There's a practical limit to the advantage of the teleconverter, and I'm working very close to that limit. The limit is set by two things: the quality (acuity or sharpness) of the lens; and the effective focal length at which you are working when the teleconverter is attached.
The quality of the lens that channels light to the camera's sensor determines how efficiently and effectively the available pixels are used. The number of pixels captured isn't the only thing that matters, in fact, it's not even the most important thing. A really good lens on a 10 megapixel camera will produce better photos than a mediocre lens on a 14 megapixel camera. Returning to the FZ35 and the teleconverter, the FZ35's built-in Leica lens is rather good, and the Panasonic teleconverter is not bad. But at full zoom extension, the FZ35 plus teleconverter seems to have reached its maximum resolving power, that is, more pixels in the sensor wouldn't matter because the lens is already starting to lose detail. A lens is an analog device, of course, it doesn't have pixels. But you can't just keep giving the lens more and more pixels and expect the lens to record finer and finer detail.
The other practical limit here is imposed by the focal length. With the 1.7x teleconverter attached, the FZ35, at full zoom extension, is shooting at a focal length equivalent to 826mm. Most serious photographers never own a lens with an effective focal length greater than 500mm, and many never even reach that. Now, when you are shooting at 500mm, 600mm, 800mm, even the tiniest vibration or instability in the camera can affect the sharpness of the image that is captured. The photos above were not taken with the camera on a tripod; I simply used a monopod. If I do use the teleconverter in Yellowstone, I will have the camera on a tripod, and I will use a 2 second shutter delay so I can get my hands off the camera before the picture is actually taken. At this extreme focal length, the merest touch can wreck a photo.
Nevertheless, while the teleconverter is pushing the FZ35 to its extreme limits, it's not exceeding those limits and if you really need extra telephoto reach, it's better to have the 1.7x lens than to do without and simply crop. Q.E.D.
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