Photographs, Photographers and Photography

How long will digital last?



I wonder whether digital 35mm cameras have come to a point where the rate of technological change is very much in the world of diminishing returns?

I got thirty years out of my Leica M3, bought in 1973, and it remains very capable today. The later Leica lenses are a bit better than their predecessors, but other than that the major advance was in film technology, not in cameras. The MP and M7 differ little, functionally, from the M3, which was first sold in 1953.

My medium format Rollei 3.5F lasted me ten years and I was always a happy camper with it. It's every bit as good today as when it was made in the early-1960s and likewise benefitted from huge improvements in film quality.

Modern digital cameras like the Canon EOS 350D and 5D, and their counterparts from the competition, leave little to be desired quality wise and, except in the case of the very best film technicians, improve on 35mm and medium format film quality. My 5D easily equals and generally surpasses medium format quality with far greater ease of use and light weight thrown in. Absent mechanical or electronic failure, with attendant obsolescence problems as regards spare parts, it's hard to see why it shouldn't still be producing great 18" x 24" prints a decade hence, and the improvements from its many replacements would, it seems to me, be marginal at best. Lenses? The 24-105mm is tack sharp at all apertures and focal lengths. What's to improve?

As I upgrade when a technological leap occurs, which is why I waited so long for a full frame sensor DSLR, I would guess that the 5D will be at home here for many years to come.

Still, I didn't see CDs and DVDs coming, nor the Internet, nor wide screen TVs, nor the iPod for that matter. So there's doubtless some new revolutionary imaging technology around the corner that will make the above so much bunk. Now that's an intriguing prospect.

Put them on a US postage stamp

If you want to mail friends and relatives with a legal stamp bearing the likeness of your nearest and dearest, go to Stamps.com, upload your favorite snap and send some money. Turnaround is about a week and the post offce accepts these. Here's our boy Winston:

It pays to stay current

Canon has released Firmware update 1.0.5 for the EOS 5D.

Here's mine loading and the result:




This fixes a problem with color pictures taken with the Standard Picture Style with +4 Color Density setting (the pictures would lose saturation on the sRGB setting and appear monochrome) and with the 85mm f/1.2L lens when used with the Canon 580EX flash where the shutter button would not work.

It's nice to stay current.

Which is what it's all about.

All that cataloging in Aperture did have a bright side, specifically an opportunity to reacquaint myself with many pictures from days past. So after all this talk of cameras and printers and software in recent columns, I thought it might be nice to share some pictures with you.

As is the case, I suspect, with many photographers, I have perfect recall of the equipment and film used to take these, even though the stored files are silent, as it's not something I routinely record. The digital age, of course, does this for you today.

So here goes - 16 snaps chosen at random and in no particular order.


Cruft's Dog Show, 1973.
Leica M3, 90mm Elmar, TriX.
This fine wolfhound wanted to see what was happening from under that Harris Tweed jacket.
 



South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1977.
A rugged, lonely place.
Nikon F, 28mm Vivitar, TriX.
 



Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1977.
A life begins, another draws to a close.
Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX.
 



World Trade Centers, 1982.
Pentax ME Super, 40mm Pentax SMC, Kodachrome 64.
 



London, 2000.
Cabs old and new.
Leica M6, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodachrome 64.
 



Tucson, Arizona.
A warm day!
Leica M6, 90mm Elmarit, Kodachrome 64.
 



Pebble Beach, California, 1987.
My wife calls this one 'The Pirate'.
Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R. Kodachrome 64.
 



Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1975.
What's not to like about Paris?
Leica M3, 90mm Elmar, Kodachrome X.
 



Rodeo Drive, California, 1989.
Someone parked this huge '60s wagon on this costliest of shopping destinations.
Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.
 



Bermuda, 1999.
Land of sublime architecture.
Leica M6, 90mm Elmarit, Kodachrome 64.
 



Somewhere in Arizona, 1988.
Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R, Kodachrome 64.
 



Hong Kong, 1995.
Statues ready for illicit export.
Rollei 35, 40mm Tessar, Kodachrome 64.
 



Pismo Beach, California, 2004.
A lazy, sunny afternoon by the Pacific.
Leica M2, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.
 



Union Square, San Francisco, 1999.
A child's wonder.
Leica M2, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.
 



Pasadena, California, 1988.
Gangster car.
Leica M3, 35mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.
 



Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1995.
Rocking horses at an antique dealer's.
Leica M2, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

Isn't the Internet wonderful?

Recent data on the locations of some of the visitors to this site - a truly global selection! Don't worry, I do not know your identity, only the location of the reader.



Let me see. The United Kindom where I grew up and learned that most civilized of games, cricket. When Hermann Hesse wrote of 'The Glass Bead Game' he must have been thinking about Lords.

Baden-Wurttemberg which my mother visited in 1938 and always spoke of fondly.

Poland of course - now how do I recover those 14,000 acres stolen from my family?

Holland and many pleasant memories of a wonderful country and its great people.

Russia, may she stay free and hew to true democracy.

Italy, the center of art, design, culture, fashion - always has been, always will be.

South Korea - may you become one again after the brutal regime up north collapses, as it must.

Lebanon - may you find peace and prosperity.

New Zealand - haven of beauty and fine people.

Mauritius - is there anywhere more beautiful?

Switzerland - thank you for my Patek Philippe, (yes, Patek, the salesman of the two, was a Pole) an analog dream in a digital world.

But above all, here is to all of you, for photography is tuly the universal language.

Output, back-up and conclusions

Output in Aperture means several things. These include:

Paper prints
Slideshows
Books
PDF files
Lower resolution files
Web pages

All are beautifully implemented and for anyone unfamiliar with iPhoto ’06, the book publishing option is simply a knockout. Aperture offers what iPhoto’06 has and more. Apple is capitalizing on much of the code developed for iPhoto in Aperture. I would guess future releases will offer additional functionality to distinguish the products and keep Aperture premium priced.

At the same time, printing is where I ran into the first performance issues. First you choose Print and a screen with all the usual options pops up. This takes some twenty seconds. That is simply too slow. This is what you get:



Then Printer Settings is clicked for the normal OS X printer choice display. This is nearly instantaneous:



Click Print Preview and it’s another 30 seconds – way too slow:



I suspect Aperture is generating a print file from the original master and is taking it’s time about it. The comparable timings in Photoshop CS2 are 1 second, 2 seconds and 8 seconds, respectively, so Apple needs to improve this dramatically.

On the other hand, you need not choose just one image for printing. Multiple choices are fine and, strangely, do not take a lot longer.

Alternatively, you can elect to print a contact sheet or a light table with as much or as little EXIF data displayed, and while the delays are the same as for a single print, the power to show previews in this way is tremendous:



Finally, with my Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 printer, I can get margins as small on 8” x 10” and 13” x 19” prints (meaning 5/8”) as I did with the Epson 1270 which preceded it, so my pre-cut mat boards work fine.

Slideshows are very easy to create and, of course, you can add music from your iTunes library and have Aperture automatically fit the slide show to the length of the piece of music – just like in iPhoto ‘06:



Books are simply the bees knees. Drag and drop, resize, spread across two pages, have faded pictures as backgrounds, add text, you name it. No advanced computer language degree needed. Aperture will even scale and align the pages for you, as instructed, and hardcover and softcover options are available. You can submit the book to Apple for production or generate a PDF version for your printer of choice. As an example, my first time with this feature it took me five minutes to generate a 10 page book with cover and title pages. I have printed books in iPhoto ’06 at Apple and can testify to the quality of the reproduction.

When it comes to outputting lower resolution files, such as JPGs for web display, Aperture is sadly lacking, as it does not permit the user to specify dots per inch in the final file. The result is that the output image quality is simply horrid. Apple is aware of this and evidently Version 1.1 fixes that shortcoming. I really need this as it’s a great way of creating files for display in my Photoblog and I really do not want to use Photoshop any more than I have to. Add the fact that PS CS2 consistently locks up on me when I use ‘Save for Web’, meaning that I have to run Photoshop CS, its predecessor, to do this. Two versions of Photoshop. What a pain!

Finally, web pages. These take more time to explain than to do. It’s a ‘select the images and click a button’, add title and page layout then click to generate files to upload to your ISP or to your .Mac account if you prefer. Most intriguingly, you can create Smart Web Galleries which automatically add content as you add images with the keywords specified in the ‘Smart’ set up. In each case, a click appends as much – or as little – data as you want to each picture.



I like the Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto ’06 for my Web site and will stick with that for the sake of consistency for now, but the Aperture alternative is fine for someone starting out with a new design. Big image sizes on the highest quality setting are 300-400kB in size with thumbnails 16-20kB each. Aperture includes six themes, each elegant, and you can bet there will be more to come. Large image sizing is up to you – just dial it in.

So now Aperture isn’t looking so expensive after all.

Work is needed to speed printing and improve the quality of small exported files, otherwise the interface is elegant and effective. Just try to do some of these things in Photoshop … and Apple denies it’s crafting a Photoshop Killer. Sure. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Finally, backing up. I have written before about my back-up approach. While Apple says you should run the Aperture Library on your internal hard disk (my disk is 160gB) for best speed, I prefer to have the Aperture Library, as it is called, reside on one of my two external 250gB LaCie Firewire drives, the other being used for back-up. I use SuperDuper! to back-up automatically at midnight, when I am well and truly in the land of nod, and the application does incremental back-ups, meaning that only new and changed files are backed up. While a cursory examination of the hard disk containing the Aperture Library suggests it’s one big file, this is not the case. Apple is simply hiding the details. Control-click on the Library and then Show Package Contents gets you this:



Do the same click routine on any of the ‘.approject’ files and you get the details – this example contains only two picture files:



One more click routine and the individual JPG files are clearly visible. This file structure makes it possible for SuperDuper! to make smart, incremental back-ups. You can also determine the Aperture overhead for these two files, whose aggregate size is 266mB. The additional Aperture files add a scant 0.8mB or 0.3%. Hardly anything to worry about. So if you read about file bloat with Aperture, you had better disregard anything else written by that person. Versioning will add a little more but the bottom line is that Aperture’s filing system is economical.

Aperture, however, comes with its own back-up functions, named the Vault, and frankly they are sadly lacking in design and execution. First, the user has to initiate back-up. Load Aperture and the opening screen will tell you how many items remain to be backed up to the vault. You then have to execute the Vault instructions to do the back-up. This is wrong. Back-ups should never be voluntary or depend on user action. They should be automated so they cannot be forgotten. Worse, while Aperture is doing its back-up, which does appear to be incremental, the application cannot be used. Further, it’s horrendously slow to a fast Firewire drive, almost unusable with a USB 1 drive. Finally, the color indicator which shows whether a new Vault back-up is needed is simply wrong. Do a back-up, exit and reboot and what do you get? An indicator which says you should do another back-up. Lastly, the Vault file is not bootable, unlike a clean back-up done with SuperDuper! You have to restore the vault using Aperture and I don’t want to think how long that takes.

In other words, I’m sticking with SuperDuper! and disregarding the miserable afterthought known as the Vault. Apple should make this fast, timed and automated. As it is, it’s near worthless. Just Say No to the Vault.

Aperture does not permit the splitting of a Library over multiple discs. However, go here and you can download a free script that will allow your Library to span multiple drives.

Some have objected to Aperture’s proprietary file structure which appears similar to that used by iPhoto. If you ever want to get to your original file you have to do quite a bit of drilling down using the Finder unlike in, say, Extensis Portfolio, where you can see the files easily. This is a poorly thought out objection. With digital camera files being identified with a meaningless number, how often is the user going to want to access these directly? A proper, daily, incremental back-up (I check the file sizes weekly to make sure those of the original and back-up are identical down to the last byte) is all you need.

In conclusion, then, Aperture is a landmark application. It completely integrates Import, Versioning, Retrieval, Cataloging, Image Processing and Output with a superb user interface using much of iPhoto’s design and adding additional functionality. Missing features include Curves and tools like the Lasso. Functions in need of improvement include set-up for printing, back-up (easily worked around), JPG small file output, RAW processing (the last two, fixed, we are promised, in the forthcoming Version 1.1). Lens aberration and distortion corrections along the lines of Adobe Camera Raw would be nice too. That’s not too many complaints for the very first version of this application which will simply change the way you process your pictures, be they scans from film or files from a digital camera. Speed, printing apart, on my less than stellar iMac G5 is fine with 2,000 files loaded aggregating 22.3gB, with many of these files being 250mB scans from 4” x 5” large format film.

With a street price of around $330 and the upgrade to Version 1.1. free, that’s an awful lot for your money. Of course you do need an Apple computer but then if you are serious about photography you already have one of those, no? And lest I forget, during this intensive workout of the product, Aperture did lock up on me once. But that was my fault. You see, I made the stupid error of loading Microsoft Word at the same time....

Image adjustments

Starting from the premise that there is no way on God’s earth that image ‘processing’ will ever be fun for this photographer, it sounds disingenuous to admit that manipulating photographs in Aperture is, well, almost a blast. That’s because the natural flow of steps taken to get a good display or print image has been designed properly from scratch. And it doesn’t hurt that the user interface is simply gorgeous to look at.

Here’s the screen right after importing six RAW files from the Compact Flash card. As you can see from the lower browser panel, the displayed image has been manipulated as the browser shows a second copy in the Stack. The master for ever remains untouched in Aperture. While the original imported RAW file takes up 35mB, the addition of adjustments, which automatically creates a copy of the original file, adds but 0.5mB to the file’s storage needs. That’s because the copy only records details of the adjustments, not a copy of the whole picture file.



Hitting the F key for full screen display and the H key to bring up the Inspector you get this:



Now you simply follow down the adjustments in the order the tools appear on the right and you are done. Details can be viewed at any point by activating the Loupe:



All adjustments can be toggled on or off, so that their effect can be seen easily.

Want an ‘actual pixels’ view? Just hit the Z key:



Full screen view with multiple images? Highlight the ones of choice and hit F:



And that’s about it for image adjustments. There's actually much more to these than meets the eye and you can go here for the sixty page version very well written by Kendall Gelner.

The very fact that it takes so few words to explain image adjustments tells you Apple got it right. There are some things that you cannot do in the present version. They include creation of layers, controls to permit adjustment of perspective, correction of vignetting and lens distortions. Most significantly, while Aperture permits Levels to be adjusted, there is currently no Curves tool. That’s a pity as I like to tweak the curve now and then to liven up a picture. For these adjustments it’s back to that old dog Photoshop, I’m afraid. Aperture makes this easy by allowing the set up of an external editor of choice, so one menu click opens the image in Photoshop which will save it, after manipulation, in the original Aperture directory whence it came. Layers are flattened in Version 1.0.1 of Aperture but Apple says Version 1.1 will preserve them.

In other words, if you prefer graphic arts to photography, well maybe you should stick with Photoshop. For me Photoshop is an addiction as easily shaken as film, now that better alternatives exist, and I’ll bet Apple will enrich the feature set as time goes by.

Next: Printing and Exporting

Image import and cataloging

Now you would think that the recent spate of bad weather would be excuse enough for deep feelings of self-pity and general ‘woe is me’ dark Slavic thoughts.

Not a bit of it. Having determined to integrate my photo management with photo processing, I set about attacking the transfer of some three thousand pictures from the Extensis Portfolio 7 database into Aperture and making some sort of sense of them. Not to mention a few thousand more images languishing in iPhoto ’06. These really need to be shown who the master is.

First I set about rating the images with one to five stars. Five being the real corkers, the jaw droppers. The ones you would show Cartier-Bresson if he was still around just to embarrass him. It’s a depressing fact to have to admit that only fifty six photographs made it to this exalted status, going to prove that if you can take one or two showstoppers annually, that’s good, I suppose.



Then it came to the nitty gritty. I thought long and hard about how best to do this, given that the selection of cataloging methods in Aperture is myriad. Let’s see, there are Projects, which contain master files and all variations thereon. OK, so my boy Winston is a Project in the best sense of the word. Just ask my wife. So Winnie gets his own ‘Project’. Next in the hierarchy are Folders. I take a ‘formal’ birthday picture of the boy each year so I created a folder named ‘Birthdays’. The Folder does not actually contain any photographs but it can contain Projects or ‘Albums’. I set about creating five Albums under the Birthday Folder, naming them ‘Birthday 0’ through ‘Birthday 4’ (Hey! Give me a break. I did once graduate as an engineer, after all) and proceeded to drag and drop the respective snaps from the Library, where all the Extensis database images have been stored, onto these Folders.

Now if I click on the Birthday Folder all I see is a label saying ‘Birthdays’. Click on any of the five albums in this Folder and the images appear.

I would like to group all the remaining snaps of Winston into chronological order, by year, but I cannot use the file dates as nearly all these pictures were taken on film, so the file date is nothing more than the date on which the original negative or slide was scanned, which is meaningless as often as not. So with the aid of my memory (not so great) and my wife’s (wonderful) Winston was eventually packaged neatly into years and thereupon further broken down into descriptive albums, as shown here:



Now I have the Winston Project assuming some semblance of order, with the lowest level – all those Albums – each containing a few dozen images at most.

So how does all this help find a picture? Well, you can just look through the albums and the chances are good that you will find the right thing fairly quickly. Within each album I have used Aperture’s Stacking capability, to group pictures into stacks, the most descriptive appearing first, meaning on top of the stack. Here are the stacks in the Album named Home Feb 2002 under the ‘2002’ Folder:



As you can see, the stacks, stacked in this picture, contain 5 and 21 pictures, respectively. Click on the number ‘5’ in the first stack and the display now shows:



In this case I am using Stack to denote what are referred to in popular vernacular as ‘shoots’ (ugh!), each being a separate studio session.

So Stacking can do an awful lot to reduce screen clutter and also permits manipulation of, say, the color or sharpness of all the images in the Stack simultaneously. Ideal for studio pictures where the lighting is constant.

Finally, to aid retrieval at the micro-management level, there are Keywords. These are the coup de grace of image retrieval but it’s very much a case of ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’. If you are not very studied in their use, they become worthless for retrieval and searching purposes. Aperture simplifies things by allowing you to establish as many Keyword groups as you like. For example, the ‘Wedding’ group might include specific topics like Preparations, Hair, Makeup, etc. The ‘People’ group might include Man, Woman, Boy, Girl, etc. In all cases the first eight keywords are numbered 1 through 8 and appear in a menu for ease of selection, either by typing their number or with a mouse click. Aperture allows the assignment of keywords to multiple images, which simplifies things. I tend to avoid the use of Keywords as it’s hard to come up with a short list of ones that are specific enough. Too general and they are as useless as if they are too specific. I used them in Extensis Portfolio 7 and in iPhoto ’05 (the predecessor to ’06). They were hard to use in Extensis and unstable in iPhoto ’05. Once bitten, twice shy.

So that’s about it for import and cataloging, a process which can take a lot of time but must be done right to be useful. If you are importing from iPhoto '05 or ’06, Aperture will retain folders, albums and keywords generated in that application, which can be a huge timesaver.

One quick word on import speeds. Now that I am brave enough to try RAW, I’m still holding off as Aperture v 1.0.1 has a known problem with the quality of its RAW processing. Apple has acknowledged its inferiority to Adobe Camera Raw and has apparently fixed this in the Aperture 1.1 release scheduled for the end of March 2006. Still, I thought I might give RAW import a shot to see how fast, or slow, it would be with the 13mB RAW files which my Canon EOS 5D generates. I use an inexpensive Microtech Firewire card reader with the iMac G5 as it’s so much easier to use than connecting the mini-USB cable to the camera. Well, import is nothing short of blisteringly fast. Six RAW files took a scant 18 seconds to pop up on the Aperture screen. Wow!

As regards size, the six files on the Compact Flash card, some 80mB in all, took up 207mB on the computer's hard disk, so the size inflation after RAW processing is some 2.6 times. Stated differently, a 250gB hard disk should store approximately 5,500 files when 75% full. Hopefully at least a few of these will earn five stars ....

As for all of Apple’s claims for increased speed in Version 1.1, I’m not holding my breath. Look, I like a good marketing spiel as much as the next man, but their claims of speed increases for their new Intel chipped machines verge on plain dishonesty, based on what I have read. And the current version of Aperture runs just fine on my less than supersonic iMac G5.

Next time – Image processing.

Finally - software for photographers

The problem with a monopoly is that lack of competition not only stultifies development, it also results in horrid products.

The best recent examples of this affecting photographers are Adobe and Microsoft.

Adobe makes Photoshop which has the worst user interface of any application since the first spreadsheets came out. In contrast to the lean and mean look of those products, Photoshop errs on the bloated end of the spectrum. The need for annual revenues, known euphemistically as ‘upgrades’ in the software racket, means more menus and more seemingly non-integrated afterthoughts are tacked on annually. So now in Photoshop CS2 you have Bridge, which is intended to help you manage your files, and Adobe Camera Raw which converts RAW files to a format PS can work with. Not to mention a host of 'plug-ins' which confer features Adobe forgot in the first place.

Microsoft makes products so virulently bad, so terminally unreliable, that it’s a continuing source of wonder to me that any demanding photographer would ever let Windows in his home. Once the class action extortionists, masquerading as lawyers, get through with Big Tobacco and McDonalds, they will surely latch on to Microsoft which has probably killed more people than those two industries combined. The killer will become renowned as BSLUD, or Blue Screen Lock Up Death. Symptoms include frothing at the mouth, smashed LCD screens and a keyboard imprint on the dead user’s forehead, marking where he hit when the old blood pump gave out.



The racing engine designer Keith Duckworth, one half of the team that created the great Cosworth DFV V8 of Formula One fame, once said “Some firms don’t even have designers, just ‘engineering and development’ to try and fix what should have been designed right in the first place". He must have been speaking of Adobe and Microsoft.

When the realization dawned that my new Canon EOS 5D offered a high quality, uncompromised image storage format known as RAW I balked for three reasons. One, JPG fine was so breathtakingly good, why use anything else? Two, having more than one version of every picture, which RAW dictates, posed troubling storage and filing questions. Three, no one had thought through how photographers really work with RAW so I have avoided the format until now. Meanwhile you have PS CS2 for ‘processing’ and something else – iPhoto, iView or Extensis – for cataloging and image retrieval. A clunky process at best and further complicated when you want to store variations of the original image.

Now I am becoming a RAW convert. What happened? Along came Apple with its driven leader, Steve Jobs, who never listened to what the world told him. They said Unix would never work for the consumer. He made OS X – the best desktop operating system. Period. They said no one would pay $400 for a sleek version of the Walkman. It’s called the iPod and everyone wants one. The Wall Street analysts, most of whom have never used an Apple computer, slammed him for opening street front stores. There are now hundreds and growing daily.

Jobs must have used the miserable products from Adobe because he charged his team to make an image processing, storage and retrieval product that worked like the photographer does. It wasn’t lost on him that the big fat calf known as Photoshop was ripe for slaying and that the result could only mean more money for the stockholders. That is always a good thing.

So Apple released Aperture on an unsuspecting world in January, 2006. I held off purchasing the application until some water had passed over the dam. Version 1.0 of anything seldom works. Chat boards disclosed that the product was slow on older processors like the G4 and prone to locking up. To Apple’s discredit, they never released a trial version, instead asking a high $499 for the retail application. They must have known that the Apple Faithful would do their development work for them – a leaf out of Microsoft’s book – and, sure enough, Version 1.0.1 was not far behind.



Reading and viewing the details of the product it seemed a compelling proposition, but I was greatly concerned with the speed issue. Having upgraded my excellent iMac G4 (the one with the beautifully thought out screen on a stalk) for an iMac G5 not six months ago (the one with the poorly thought out non-adjustable screen) only to see it obsoleted twice in six months with a faster version and then with the Intel version, I was not about to upgrade again. I had loaded up my 2 gHz iMac with the maximum memory of 2 gB and the contrast with the G4 was striking. Superior graphics processing and double the memory resulted in 250 mB 4” x 5” scans loading in Photoshop CS2 in ten seconds compared to sixty before. All other operations – sharpening, rotating, distortion correction and so on – were likewise speeded up by something approaching an order of magnitude. So I wasn’t about to go back to a world where I had to wait a minute for things to happen.

As part of my due diligence I posted a question on the Apple Discussion board at Apple.com asking about speed of operation on my machine. In contrast to most chat boards where puerile arguments debating the relative merits of Canon versus Nikon seem to be the order of the day, the Apple boards are pretty meaty affairs with much quality content. Well, the first few answers were from American public school graduates who naturally struggled with reading, proceeding to inform me that the thing just flew on their Quad-processor equipped, two Cinema Display, $2,000 video card, $10,000 G5 professional machines. Thanks a lot. I asked again and a graduate of one of the better private schools, where they still teach reading, writing and arithmetic rather than home economics and diversity values, responded that his iMac G5 had the same graphics card as mine, an ATI Radeon 9600, albeit with just 1gB of RAM compared to my 2gB. His timings confirmed that Aperture should run fine on my iMac so I bought a copy.

No, not for $499 + CA tax to the crooks up north who go by the misnomer of ‘government’. Two minutes of Googling disclosed a vendor out of state with hundreds of positive reviews and Aperture was in my hands for the grand sum of $330 two days later.

I spent the first couple of days watching the provided DVD video tuition disk while trying the illustrated actions on the images of Tibet in the sample pictures on the installation disc. These are mostly 3mB Nikon Jpg files and the product worked fast. Very satisfying, albeit with only a few dozen images. While I must confess to being sick and tired of pictures of Tibetan folk dancers by now, the video is far superior to the printed materials when it comes to learning the product. And there is a lot to learn. Not because Aperture is complex in the foul way that, say, Photoshop is, but simply because the designers (note that: ‘designers’ not ‘engineers’) started with a blank sheet of paper and answered the simple question “How does a Photographer work?” The beauty of the video is that it walks you through the normal flow of work involved – importing the picture, cataloging and storing, processing and publication, be it print, book, album or web, for all of these functions are included. Suddenly $540, or rather $330, doesn’t seem so bad.

Here are some of the things that strike you as being just right, very much in the “why did no one think of that before?” camp:

The Loupe – press a key and an old fashioned photographer’s loupe appears selectively magnifying that part of the image you drag it to. Genius.



The Inspector – hit the ‘I’ key and a property inspector pops up showing the steps you may want to take in processing your image, in the order required to preserve best quality. These include Red Eye correction, Spot & Patch, Straighten, Rotate, Crop, Exposure (includes Exposure, Saturation, Brightness Contrast, Tint), White Balance, Monochrome Mixer, Color Monochrome, Sepia Tone, Noise Reduction and Sharpen. Each can be toggled on and off so the changes are immediately visible. Brilliant!



The Full Screen view – hit the letter F on the keyboard and the image of choice pops up on an otherwise empty screen. Tools are available as you mouse to the top or base of the screen, making for an uncluttered working space. Extra brilliant!



Versioning – this is so clever I simply cannot see living without it. While Apple advertises Aperture as ‘Designed for Professional Photographers’ and pushes the processing of RAW files, the Versioning concept is applicable to all commonly used formats like TIFF, PSD and JPG. Whenever you make changes to the master file imported into Aperture, a copy is automatically made and changes applied to the clone. And do not think this means file bloat, for the copy is merely a small file storing details of adjustments applied to the master when displayed. Very economical. You can have any number of versions and display these individually or collapsed into a stack. This contrasts with iPhoto which does change the master. Aperture solves the problem of storing multiple versions of files in one master stroke. Very brilliant!



Cataloging and keywords – Here much is lifted from the very capable iPhoto with any combination of Star Rating, Project Name, Keywords (available in multiple ‘libraries’ of your design and choice), Date Searches, and so on. Projects can be stored in any number of hierarchical folders. Until now I have used Extensis Portfolio 7 for cataloging and retrieval, dropping images into Photoshop for manipulation and printing. No more. Aperture does it all, better. Exceedingly brilliant!



The Light Table – just like you used to work with slides on a light box. Hit a key and drag the images of choice to the Light Table panel. Each can be moved and sized at will. This is simply right. That’s how I think. Print as a contact sheet or export as a PDF to show others. Beyond brilliant!



By the way, I took the pictures shown above on my Leica M3 with a 90mm lens and studio flash. You do not have to be a digital user to benefit from this landmark product.

And no, you will not be getting any Microsoft messages like this one when you switch to Aperture:




More in Part II.

Where to find my ramblings on the 5D, in chronological order

Introduction - Film is Dead
Purchase - Putting my money ....
Part 1   - Pandora's Box
Part 2   - Some prints yield a fond goodbye to medium format
Part 3   - Quality is subjective
Part 4  - Messing about
Part 5   - Upstrap in Action
Part 6   - Fix that flap
Part 7  - Limekiln
Part 8  - On Speed
Part 9  - Wetzlar goes to Tokyo
Part 10 - Taking Rube Goldberg for a Spin
Part 11 - Hearst's Castle
Part 12 - Digital Dust
Part 13 - Excuse me while I examine my Portlait setting through the Glid
Part 14 - A Gorgeous Bit o' Bottle
Part 15 - After the Purge
Part 16 - A break in the storm
Part 17 - Breaking up
Part 18 - Canon's EOS Capture
Part 19 - Long thoughts

Book review



Harry Callahan (1912-1999) left a substantial body of work, yet I cannot help thinking he rues the fact that what he is remembered for most is the many pictures, frequently nudes, of his wife Eleanor.

And while he was an enthusiastic experimenter, be it with double exposures or light traces, these wonderful early pictures set a standard and style imitated, but seldom equaled, by many since.

It’s not that Eleanor is some sort of model ideal of a woman, whose modern image in men’s eyes dictates exaggerated breasts and miniscule hips. Quite the opposite. She is powerfully built, a woman of the mid-West, with solid bones and generous hips. A Real Woman. And does he do her justice. Whether it’s the powerful, face-on image showing a determined chin and direct gaze, or the many nude-in-landscape studies which define the genre, his photographs of his wife are never less than special and deservedly define his oeuvre.

The Chronology of his life in this book, published by Bulfinch, goes a long way to illustrating his restless mind and thirst for experiment. I quote:

1938 – Purchases first camera, a Rolleicord 120.

1941 – Begins to work with a 9 x 12 Linhof Technica (sic) camera.

1941 – Moved by the sharpness of Adams’ (sic) prints, trades enlarger for an 8 x 10 camera and begins to make contact prints.

1943 – Buys 35mm Contax single-lens reflex camera (sic – can’t they get anything right?) and begins two-year series of photographs of pedestrians.

The latter rival, by the way, anything done by Walker Evans in this genre, adopting a far grittier approach.

This is curiosity at its best and not mere fascination with equipment as Callahan takes lots and lots of pictures along the way.

He starts exhibiting in 1941 and thereafter it seems there is scarcely a month when a show or publication does not come to market.

Rightly so, for there is much to be learned from the mind of this true original, whether from the early monochrome or later color work.

Highly recommended.

Chorus of Light - Photographs from the Sir Elton John Collection - book review



Elton John (sorry, ‘Sir Elton’ just sounds too silly) has a lot of talent. He also has a lot of money which allows him to feed his manic collector’s streak. The collection on view here is of his photographs.

The only reason to buy this book is that it can be picked up for just a few dollars, having been remaindered no sooner than it was published. What you get is a 13” x 9.5” collection of some 150 photographs, nicely reproduced, representing many of the classic images of the twentieth century. Why anyone would want to pay huge sums of money for ‘original’ photographs – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one – beats me, but you get to peek, almost free, at a fine collection here.

The interview with John, who is predictably egotistical, is actually quite interesting.

If you like classic photography this is a cheap entrée.

Book review



It’s hard to know what to make of Walker Evans’s photography. On the one hand he is justly famous for his depression era photographs of American sharecroppers and the misery of their existence, photographic work commissioned by the Roosevelt administration. On the other hand, much of his work can be dismissed as a twentieth century variation on Atget’s nineteenth century pictures of a seemingly deserted Paris. In Atget’s case, the lack of people can be attributed to the slow films of the era, where a passer by would render a ghostly image, if he recorded one at all. By contrast, for Evans the stillness of the cities he photographed is solely due to careful planning and composition. And frankly, the architectural photographs are, for the most part, unexceptional and boring, despite having been set up with infinite attention to lighting and timing.

To make matters more difficult, this book comes from the ‘sell it by the pound’ philosophy of American biography, one of the saddest developments in modern writing. Weighing in at some six hundred and fifty pages, it closes in 1956 with the death of the author, James Mellow, who died in 1997. Evans died in 1975 aged 72, leaving the last eighteen years of his life sketched by Mellow in a few paragraphs. So even allowing for the fact that those years were not amongst the most productive in Evans's life, they would have conceivably added another 200 pages to an already ominously thick tome

These were some of the thoughts going through my head as I approached the daunting task of reading about one of America’s most respected photographers. It has to be said, then, that this biography is really quite gripping. Mellow writes beautiful, idiosyncratic English and displays a genuine love for his subject. His exhaustive research never makes the text lugubrious or boring. Best of all, the many reproductions of Evans’s work are interspersed with the text, thus placing them in context with the writing. It is well worth trading some loss in reproduced quality for this optimal presentation of the work.

Evans was a curious mixture. Well versed in literature and painting, he more or less stumbled on photography. Maybe his most telling comment about his contemporaries was to the effect that he denigrated the obsession with technique shared by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Strand “….none of whom I admire”, while admitting that technique interested him more than it did Cartier-Bresson “….though I admire his work very much.” A telling statement when you consider that Evans’s second exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1934 was with Manuel Alvarez Bravo and….Henri Cartier-Bresson. So one can read an element of envy into the comment on technique, and it brings one in a roundabout fashion to the realization that his best work by far was very much in the style of Cartier-Bresson.

Memorable photography is just that. Memorable. One remembers the pictures without having to look at them and those of Evans’s pictures I recall are all from the great street and subway images he took in the late-1920s and throughout the 1930s. The aggressive girl snapped on Fulton Street in 1929, the incongruously fur-attired black woman on 42nd Street in the same year and those incredible subway pictures taken in the late 1930s. Amazingly, Evans had challenged himself to take the subway pictures but then had to be pushed by mightily impressed friends to complete the project. He was nothing if not self-effacing. This seems very much a character trait – he was no self starter and needed the prodding of colleagues and business associates time and again to get on with the job. A self-starter would have left a broader body of work albeit maybe one of lower quality.

So Evans’s work can be enjoyed on many levels, from straight reportage and historical documentary to some of the finest street photography of his time. No prizes for guessing which impresses as great photography, though. Don’t be put off by the weightiness of this tome. It is an excellent study of a great photographer.

A very capable monochrome printer

In addition to doing a very poor job of emphasizing the DesignJet 90's self calibration capabilities, courtesy of the built in colorimeter, Hewlett Packard does an even worse job as regards explaining quality monochrome printing. You have to delve deep into their web site to find a document named 'ICC Profiles - for black and white images'. This leads you to downloading a file containing 8 Jpgs, each containing 7 copies of the same monochrome photograph with slight tint variations. You start by printing the Neutral profile Jpg on paper of your choice then select the picture with the most pleasing tint. Say it's the one captioned 'Magenta'. You then proceed to the Magenta profile and print that Jpg, electing the best. Then all you have to do is download the related ICC profile from the HP web site and drop it into the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles folder and choose that profile when printing in Photoshop.

It all takes less time to do than to describe and, once again, HP's instructions are outstanding. I did this using the three sheets of free HP Photo Matte paper provided with the printer, which is recommended for monochrome 'art' prints, whatever that means. As Himmler once remarked, "When I hear the word 'Art', I reach for my gun". Frankly I find the surface of this paper to be deader than yesterday's news but I suppose it's fine if you want to mount 4" x 6" prints in 30" x 40" mats, sign in 2B pencil and make sure you append a 1/10 designation. This confirms for the twit with a big checkbook that this is none other than a Limited Edition of ten, and the price, of course, is inversely proportional to the size of the photo.

Here's a snap of three of the profile pages and a 13" x 19" print made with the profile of choice on the DesignJet. This is an outstanding fine tuning capability, though I think I will stick with HP Photo Satin paper as I like a little life in my print surface.



In the original print a very full tonal scale is retained, though a glossier paper would improve on this further.

An 18" x 24" print emerges after a spot of calibration

I can think of several dozen things I would rather do than calibrate a photo printer. Like pulling weeds, bathing the dog, polishing shoes, changing the oil in the car, stripping old paint, and on and on.

However, it rained today so that ruled out the weeds and paint. The oil is fresh. Bertie the Border Terrier is clean and my shoes look fine. So the inevitable came to pass and I spent a big part of the day calibrating the HP Designjet 90 for optimal results. By that I mean that the screen and printed images must be as close as possible with regard to colors and tonal range.

I concentrated my efforts on HP Premium Plus Photo Satin paper, which I expect to use the most. On more critical examination, it has slightly less sheen than Epson Premium Luster and slightly finer stippling. Either way, both papers retain detail well without the specular reflection problems of glossy surfaces.

First I learned what I had done wrong to cause the paper jam yesterday. The HP’s paper source tray is large and must abut just so with the body of the printer for the paper feed to work properly. I really do not have enough room behind this monster to load paper from behind and in any case I like the idea of the paper being properly supported as it wends its way past the print heads. I fancy a touch of furniture polish on the sides of the source tray will do wonders to ease the stiction between the mating plastic surfaces which makes full insertion of the tray tricky. Epson has it all over the HP here, as the paper is simply dropped in the feed slot from above and things work fine.

Still, 18” x 24” is a lot larger than 13” x 19” and cavalier handling of the paper will result in creases and malfunction. I found myself (literally) on the carpet more than once while loading the large size paper into the source tray, for lack of a large enough flat surface to place things on.

As regards color calibration, one thing I did not have to do is re-calibrate the screen with the Monaco colorimeter, as that profile was fresh. That still leaves a ton of variables and where the Epson preferred to deny Photoshop any color management, the HP’s instructions are quite the opposite and very detailed. There are so many steps it’s easy to miss something.

When I finally printed my first 18” x 24” it was like being back in the darkroom 35 years ago.

Breathtaking.

Simply breathtaking.

No question about it for this photographer. Nothing beats a Really Large Print.

Color matching is near perfect. I can do better but we are very much in the area of diminishing returns here. As for resolution, smoothness of tone, ease of creation of the original file, I challenge any medium format photographer to equal the output and sheer involving quality of the Canon EOS 5D’s full frame sensor. And I’m still only using JPG Fine here. RAW has yet to come.

I struggled a bit with nomenclature. It seems that 18” x 24” is called ‘Arch C’ in that moronic European size naming convention that printer manufacturers have adopted. For goodness sake, what the devil does Super B3, or JB5 or A2 mean to you? Now 12” x 15” or 16” x 20” we can all understand. Well, the engineers be damned. I scrawled ‘Arch C’ with one of those indelible pens beloved of graffiti artists all over the box of HP’s paper, the better to know what to dial in next time.

How much larger is 18” x 24” than 13” x 19”? See for yourself – the Leica is for scale (no, not for sale):



Yes, that’s our boy Winston on his fourth birthday. I learned from one of Canon’s tutorials on the web that setting the Threshold slider in Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask (what a stupid name for something that is intended to sharpen – engineers at it again) to 1 or 2, rather than zero, takes the bite out of facial pores and makes for a nicer look in portraits, so I dialed in 250/1/1 for this portrait. Despite being at 400 ISO and some two stops underexposed (ooops!) it’s near perfect as regards definition and tonal range once fixed in Photoshop.

There’s a lot of nonsense written about printers on the web. One ‘prominent’ site gave the HP a mediocre review, accusing the machine of color casts. Now I have no axe to grind for any particular manufacturer. I’m not paid by Hewlett Packard, or anyone else, and I do not get free printers and supplies to play with. I will use what works for me. But I cannot help suspecting that the boob writing this piece is fairly clueless about proper calibration of a printer which starts with the use of a colorimeter to profile the screen. He makes no mention of using one. The old rule applies. Garbage in, garbage out. I may denigrate technique as a means – nay, a hurdle – to an end, but you have to have it to get there consistently at a high level of quality

Want lousy prints from the HP? I have several I can offer you from today’s efforts. Want lousy prints from the Epson? Same answer. But want stunning, drop dead gorgeous framed pictures from either and you only have to calibrate things properly to be assured of the best results. The only way you will be able to tell the difference between Epson and HP prints is by the size. The market is simply too competitive for it to be otherwise.

Ink jet printers have not come very far in the last six years, based on my experience. Meaning the Epson 1270 was terrific back then and remains so today. Maybe inks are more permanent, maybe manufacturers’ paper profiles are better than before, but my standard for comparison is the old Epson 1270 and, believe me, that’s a very demanding benchmark indeed. I think I’m almost there in matching it with the HP Designjet 90. The only difference is that I can now go larger.

So if you want a good large format printer at some 60% of the price of the 17” Epson, you could do worse than the HP DesignJet 90. Or get the 130 model for a bit more if you need 24” wide. They do versions with a roll paper feed, and I avoided that like the plague. Ever tried to get roll paper to lie flat? They also do a version with a colorimeter for screen profiling, but as I already had one the base model printer worked for me.

'Expert' reviewers seem to overlook the fact that the HP DesignJet has a built in colorimeter to aid creation of a perfect paper profile for each of their papers. This does not obviate the need for a screen colorimeter like the Monaco to create a screen profile, but it ensures the paper's profile is accurately defined.

Here's how it works. You insert an 8.5" x 11" piece of HP paper of your choice and run the Calibrate Color utility. It prints a test pattern and then sucks the paper back in and, using the built in colorimeter, compares ideal against actual, adjusting the paper's profile as appropriate. That is very clever and HP does a lousy job of marketing a feature that no other consumer priced printer offers, as far as I know.

I have created three profiles thus - Satin, Gloss and Matte. Once done you throw away the pattern and get on with life. As with any paper, you have to remember to tell Photoshop which surface you are printing on but the rest is automatic.

By the way, the 18" x 24" print took 13 minutes to make and the HP Photo Satin paper is 76 lb. weight compared to 67 lbs. for Epson Premium Luster.

First serious prints and some myths debunked

Let's get the myths out of the way first. I had read somewhere on the World Wide (disinformation) Web that so much as a sneeze or a hint of moisture would make the inks on prints made with the HP DesignetJet printer run. I had the 8 1/2 " x 11" print from yesterday's evening trial run handy (it was made without any attempt to color balance nor did I use the right paper profile) so I let it dry for one hour and then took it to the Pindelski High Tech Test Lab, also known as the kitchen sink:



My dry elephant seals were now well and truly in their habitat as I soaked the lower half of the print with tap water for thirty seconds. That's a little more moisture than from a sneeze, I would think. Placing the half wet seals on the Pindelski High Tech Moisture Removal Center, aka the dish drying rack, I let the print air dry overnight and came back in the morning.



Guess what. No color changes or running ink to be seen. Just 'cause it's written don't mean it's so.

As it's raining today I decided to calibrate the printer and see what she could do on large prints. HP includes 3 sheets each of their Photo and Proofing Gloss, Photo Satin and Photo Matte with the printer in 13" x 19" size. Such generosity. I had also taken the precaution of buying 40 sheets of the HP Photo Satin in 18" x 24" to try the largest width the DesignJet 90 can handle. That's a lot larger than 13" x 19" - 75% larger.

It has been quite a while since I set up Photoshop to match the Epson 1270 and their Premium Luster paper to make things automatic, so I had quite forgotten how to get through all the arcane menus in Photoshop. Mercifully, HP provides a tutorial CD with the printer (what is happening at Hewlett Packard?), and this one actually loaded first time on the iMac G5, unlike the recalcitrant driver disk. The on-screen tutorial is really outstanding, narrated in clear, non-technical English. The thrust is simply one of "Select these options for the best print" without a lot of gobbledegook about gamuts, color spaces and all that garbage which has little interest to real life photographers who just want their print to come out like it looks on the screen.



I had earlier created a profile for the screen using the Monaco EZColor colorimeter thingy, so I left that alone as the monitor has not been on that long that color drift from age would be an issue.

Unlike the Epson 1270 which is silent when switched on and dormant, the DesignJet has a fan whirring away. Not really obtrusive but a wear part nonetheless, so I switched it off overnight. Warm up took just over a minute and I gave her a try with one of the free 13" x 19" sheets of HP Photo Satin whose sheen is identical, to my eye, to Epson Premium Luster though the weight of the paper seems quite a bit more. The back of the HP paper is rough rather than smooth, but I can't see that mattering either way.

I set up Photoshop as instructed on the CD video and saved the setting as 'HP Photo Satin'. I haven't tried the other papers but the HP Photo Matte looks interesting. It is dead matte, lighter in weight than either the Gloss or Satin and very much whiter viewed in daylight. HP recommends it for black and white printing which seems to make sense and indeed their web site has a ton of paper profiles together with very detailed instructions on how to get the best monochrome prints from the DesignJet. Nice to know but right now the focus is color, so that will have to wait.

Clearly, HP has done a great deal of work on color matching and paper profiles as you would expect from a company that has long had a leading position in large format printing in the graphics design and architectural work places.

The Epson 1270 is a very quiet printer. I always had to use it in non-bidirectional printing mode to avoid tracks on large prints, so that doubled printing time and, as I recall, a 13" x 19" would take some 28 minutes to make. The DesignJet is a different kettle of fish. It clanks, whirrs and grinds a lot when starting up and then gives a distinctive 'clack' with every pass of the print head on 13" and wider prints, although once running on smaller prints it's near silent. The table on which it sits has a space frame base construction - light but extremely strong - yet I could clearly see the table vibrate gently with each pass of the print head. To cut a long story short, the print emerged in 9 1/2 minutes and I let it dry an hour before comparing it to the screen in natural daylight. It was immediately clear that print quality was exceptional, indistinguishable from the Epson, and there was no sign of any ink tracks on the surface. The printed area had a 1/4" margin on the top, bottom and left side and a 7/16" margin on the right, making for a print size of 12 1/2" x 18 5/16", a tad larger than that from the Epson 1270.

One thing I do not like is that you have to adjust the input and output trays in disparate ways depending on the size of the paper, so I'm going to make a little guide for the commonly used sizes and paste it to the top of the printer. HP provides a good guide in their book, but it's more detailed than I need and involves too much hunting for the right settings.

After the print had dried for an hour I compared it with the image on the iMac's screen, which is some 14" wide and I must say it was very, very close. Greens in this landscape subject were a tad darker in the print but everything else was in order. The next test will be with a portrait, whose flesh tones should really provide for critical evaluation. That one will be 18" x 24".

The monster printer arrives

I dropped off the Epson 1270 printer at the UPS Store early in the afternoon not, it should be added, without a sigh. This great machine had served me well and many fine prints testify to its reliability and quality. I think my fine nephew will do great things with it. If nothing else, it will be a huge test of his technical skill - a 13" x 19" is not like making an 8" x 10". No sooner had I arrived home than Marty Paris, great acoustical guitarist that he is, arrived at the gate. "I have a big box for you" he intoned dramatically. Gulp! I had been without a printer for all of 45 minutes. Marty is our UPS man in his spare time and you could not meet a finer person.

Well, after Bert the Border Terrier had jumped in the UPS van for his cookie (Marty comes prepared) we struggled to get the 75 pound box on the dolly and lowered it gently to the ground. "Six years I got from the old printer, Marty". "Wow! Nothing lasts more than three years today. That's fantastic!" Nice to know the Epson has gone to a good home.

Bertie supervised while I struggled to unpack this bear. The fine people at B&H in New York had not chintzed on the packing, double boxing with more polystyrene peanuts than you really want to know about. By the time I got through the layers of tape, cardboard, polystyrene and plastic, the thing was almost manageable. The weight had halved. I had taken the precaution of clearing a space for it in the office - the old niche was too small - as well as running a long USB cable to feed it pictures. Enough time in the dark recesses of the wiring cabinet, replete with black beetles and cobwebs. There is a fortune waiting for the person who works out how to unwire home computers.

Now I must admit to some dismay on first extricating this monster from its cocoon. When I was an engineering student in London everyone knew that the finest laboratory instruments were made by Hewlett Packard. Later, on Wall Street, a like recognition played into the adoption of the HP12C as the calculator of choice. In neither case were clear instructions expected or available. You see, these devices were made by engineers for engineers, and no real engineer is going to read the instruction book. Heck, when Apollo was landing on the moon, did Buzz Aldrin check the book to determine why the panel was on the blink? Not a bit of it. A solid thump with a fist resolved the issue. It may have been "One small step for man" but a good bang ensured it was "A giant leap for humanity". Or something.

So the cause of my dismay was none other than some of the clearest instructions known to man, on huge paper that even I could read. I'm not sure whether this means you should buy HP stock or sell it....

Anyway, with psychological support from Bertram, I manhandled the thing onto that nice little oak toppped sofaback I had made many moons ago from some alder, which I ebonized, and some gorgeous stairing oak for the top. It wasn't conceived as a printer stand, but it does the job nicely.



HP does not supply a USB cable (how cheap is that?) but I was prepared, and my long cable was in place. The mechanical part of the installation was a breeze. You pop in six ink cartridges, followed by six print heads. Not for the colorblind, as several are like-sized, but easy to do.

Then came the software part. Now after my dismay at the clarity of the instructions, not to mention growing concern over the ease of the mechanical setup, I finally ran into a snag. And it was a big one. Try as it might, the drive mechanism in the iMac G5 refused to read the provided software CD. OK, I'm up to it, I can handle this, I'm not panicking. Dial up the HP web site, of course. Just download the driver. Not so easy, pal. The driver's there, but you cannot download it. Mail order only. Can you believe this? Is Carly Fiorina still in charge, dammit? I though they fired her with a $40mm handshake. OK, OK. I'll try HP Canada. No Designjet 90 in sight. Fine, how about England then. That bastion of civilization and decency must have the driver, no? No.

What to do? Well, maybe it's just a quirk of the G5's drive, or of the HP drive that made the CD. So I pop the CD in the iBook and Hey Presto!, she fires right up. Advised by Bert, that fount of wisdom, I plugged in one of the Firewire external drives to the iBook and before you could say 'Woof!' the software was on the G5's hard drive. Minutes later the printer was installed. No lockups. The only Windows you will find in the old estate are in the walls.

That's not to say that HP doen't have some humorists at Software Central. Take a look at their wonderful proofreading of their software installation intructions:



The letter 'u' somehow dropped off the HP typewriter.

By this time the sun is setting, the evening libation beckons and I only have time for one quick print from the wretched Photoshop to see if the printer is speaking to the G5. So I load up a RAW image of the elephant seals just north of Hearst Castle on the magnificent Pacific coast and .... a jam. A piercing noise emanates from the beast and the yellow light blinks. Now in case you think HP is no longer dominated by engineers, just take a look at the control panel on this machine:



Now do you see why Aldrin resorted to brute force? Same guy designed the bloody buttons in the Lunar Module, for God's sake. To be honest I had loaded one sheet of Epson Premium Luster in the HP to try things out, so maybe this was some sort of corporate rivalry at work and HP had the thing jam by design anytime non-HP paper was inserted. So I pressed every button in sight, threatened Bert with physical violence, and slammed ten more sheet of Epson's finest on top of the one I had loaded.

And she printed just fine. 105 seconds for an 8" x 10" which is about four times faster than that great Epson 1270. Colors were right, density a tad pale, but this may well be the start of a beautiful friendship. Even if the birth was a Caesarean.

Book review



The old dictum has it that “If you having nothing good to say, say nothing”, so I will earnestly struggle to say something good about Garry Winogrand’s street photography. I purchased my copy of this book in June, 1992 and, amazingly it remains in print. I return to it earnestly every year or two trying to see what the famed critics who all gush over Winogrand’s work are going on about.

True, some of the early work here is not bad, capturing the feel of 1950s and ‘60s America. Where a set piece is involved, such as a night club or an event or a zoo, in other words somewhere where Winogrand could actually be bothered to make the slightest effort at framing the picture, then indeed there is some good photography. The many pictures from the night club El Morocco are exemplars of their kind and the zoo pictures are poignant and thoughtful.

But the overall feeling I always come away with from my repeated occasional marathons through this book, is that, well, the photographs are, for the most part, surpassingly ugly. In his gushing essay on the photographer’s work John Szarkowski nonetheless pulls no punches between the lines. Take a look at the contact sheet of Winogrand’s street shots in 1961 (vital, involved, he actually bothered to raise his camera to eye level in a few) with the one from 1982. Sorry, the latter is pure garbage. The other way in which Szarkowski takes a side swipe at Winogrand’s work is in reciting some mind numbing statistics about Winogrand’s prodigious use of film during his Los Angeles period, 1979-1981. In that time, Winogrand processed 8,522 rolls of 35mm film with another 5,000 or so rolls taken but not proofed. Half a million pictures in 2 years. That’s 20 rolls a day. Can you wonder his contact sheet from this period is rubbish? Judging from the 1982 contacts he just walked the streets frantically pressing the button all the time without looking for or at a subject. Well, I suppose Kodak loved him.

By all means get the book to see the work of an American icon. Just don’t expect too much.

200mm and 400mm are great focal lengths for landscapes

I have always enjoyed using a lens around 200mm for landscape photography. On the one hand, it's relatively easy to hold steady hand held or with the aid of a monopod. On the other, it affords the easy opportunity of focusing on the essentials, cutting clutter.

I often find that selecting an elevated viewpoint and then composing to cut out the sky works well. This approach heightens the sense of drama and 'stacking' inherent in a lens of this length, such as in this picture taken the other day of some local vines just before spring pruning:



Another example of an elevated viewpoint, looking down into the valley in afternoon light is this one:



And finally, a strongly receding subject like this is only made bolder by the long lens:



Go longer, meaning 400mm in my case, and things get shakier. Literally. There's more bulk to manhandle and more lens length for the wind to bear upon. It's not that my 400mm lens is bad - it is not - but I have very rarely managed sharp large prints from it using film as they were nearly always plagued by definition-robbing camera shake. 400mm is long! The new 'film speed' opportunities offered by the full frame sensor in the Canon EOS 5D, even at 1600 ISO it's near noise free, have literally brought my old Leitz 400mm f/6.8 Telyt back to life, once it was suitably adapted for use on the Canon body. This was taken at 1600 ISO and I think the shutter speed the camera selected was 1/1000th. Hand held with no support, the original is wonderfully detailed:



Now while there may be an 'auto everything' Canon 200mm L lens in my future, it's really a pleasure to see these old Leitz 200mm and 400mm warhorses getting a new lease of life.

Instant digital gratification?

I messed about some more with the software Canon provides with its 5D camera, Digital Photo Professional (DPP). You know the application with all those comedic spelling errors.

Well, I found more spelling errors, true, but I got to wondering about the little USB cable Canon provides with the camera that plugs into a receptacle under that silly flap on the side.

After installing DPP on my iBook, I plugged the camera in and switched the 'Communications' option on the Tools menu on the LCD from 'Print/PTP' (the default) to 'PC Connect'. That really should read 'iMac Connect' but I'll let it go. With the camera switched on, go to DPP->Tools->Start EOS Capture on the iBook and you are ready.

Take a snap in RAW format and, hey presto!, the picture appears on the iBook's screen. It works as well in Jpg mode. You see the snap on a full screen where you can actually gauge sharpness, focus, exposure and so on, as opposed to the small LCD screen on the back of the camera where you mostly see your nose in the reflection.

For a studio photographer, whether taking product pictures or using live models, this strikes me as the bee's knees in functionality. The pictures are automatically transferred from the camera's card to the computer while all this is going on. Thus a smart pro could have his studio assistant view the screen shots and provide instant feedback allowing corrections to be made. After all, said assistant no longer has anything else to do as he's not loading film any more. And you thought Polaroid invented instant gratification?



With the camera set to the lowest quality Jpg setting, a sharp picture pops on the screen in 3 seconds; with RAW it pops up blurred in 5 seconds and takes another 10 seconds to sharpen. There's quite a bit of processinbg going on in this case and, let's face it, my iBook's 1.42 gHz processor isn't the fastest on the planet. The timing with RAW + low quality Jpg is similar.

A separate panel on the iBook's screen also appears allowing you to set many of the cameras settings using the keyboard, such as aperture, shutter, ISO, image quality. Most intriguingly, you can also enable a timer automating shots with stated intervals. Maybe astronomers will like this sort of thing?

The cable provided is ridiculously short - some eighteen inches - as to be unusable, but that's nothing an extension cable cannot fix.

Postscript: I tried this set-up with a 15 foot long USB extension cable using my iMac G5 which has a 2 gHz Power PC processor, 2 gB of memory and very fast video processing. A sharp RAW image is displayed in 5 seconds, highest quality Jpg takes 3 seconds and lowest quality Jpg is around 1.5 seconds. These times suggest this would be an extremely capable studio installation as, by the time you have set the camera down to look at the monitor, the image will be there.

Blood and Champagne - book review



I recall approaching this book with the thought that Capa was not really a very good photographer. I came away thinking otherwise, realizing that what makes a war photograph 'good' is not beautiful composition or perfect lighting or wonderful technique. No, the act of being there and recording the moment is what makes a war photograph good and no one bested Capa at that.

This book does not include any of Capa's pictures, being an unauthorized biography. No problem. Just go to the Magnum Photos web site to see hundreds of examples of his work. Alex Kershaw does a fine job of writing a gripping narrative which at the same time is well researched. While the book could do with fewer asterisked footnotes, the quality of research is never in doubt and the writing never dry or academic.

Capa, the man, clearly suffered from what we would now call an addictive personality. His determination to be at the latest war front speaks to his addiction to adrenaline. In between, there was the incessant gambling, the boozing and the women. The gambling nearly bankrupted the agency he founded with Cartier-Bresson, Chim Seymour and George Rodger, Magnum Photos. The boozing was tediously incessant. The women ranged from Ingrid Bergman to Parisian streetwalkers.

Yet what a life the man lead. From the Spanish revolution, where he was in the thick of the action on the Republican side, to the D-Day landings on murderous Omaha Beach, to Viet Nam which took his life, he swallowed his fear and waded into the front lines of action. Kershaw forthrightly addresses the question of whether the famous picture of the Spanish Republican soldier at the moment of death was faked, coming away uncertain. I think it was, having seen some purported contacts of the film roll years ago in a reputable British photography magazine which showed the soldier 'dying' half a dozen times in succession, but it's hardly likely that Magnum, or whoever owns the negatives, is going to release them if that is the case. No matter. One or two fakes in a life as prolific as Capa's can be forgiven.

He also recounts at considerable length the D-Day story, where Capa went in with the first wave on June 6, 1944, carrying two Contax cameras and a Rolleiflex, taking but 79 pictures. Not surprising he took so few. Capa was a studied photographer who knew not to waste film and knew even better that the goriest images would never pass muster with the censor at Life, whose audience was Middle Americans who wanted their war sanitized. Kershaw relates how a darkroom technician fried the films when drying them, leaving but 11 frames useable, 9 of which were published. To Life's eternal discredit, the magazine blamed Capa in print, saying the majority of pictures were too blurred to reproduce.

Later, having taken the required five training jumps, Capa parachuted in, yes parachuted in, with the 17th Airborne over Wesel on the Dutch border, in March 1945. Stunning courage. He was armed with his cameras and a spare pair of underpants into which he admitted having to change upon landing!

That his life ended in 1954 at the age of 41 is hardly surprising. First, he was feeling pressure from up-and-comers David Douglas Duncan and Larry Burrows. That meant just one more war. Second, he was, as ever, broke and in need of money. Third, his unwavering dedication to being in the front lines meant that sooner or later the inevitable would happen. So Capa, his best work done, trod on that fatal land mine.

"It's not enough to have talent", Kershaw quotes Capa as saying, "You also have to be Hungarian".

This is a gripping story. The book is available from Amazon.

Shutters are all over the board

Over the years I have owned cameras from across the noise spectrum, by which I mean the noise the shutter makes when it’s tripped has varied from near silence to cacophonous. From a gentle whisper to a metalllic explosion.

For the most part, it’s fair to assume most photographers would agree that noise is not a good thing. Not only does it distract and cause vibration, there’s something just wrong about it. It’s in our genetic make-up. Why do you think the costliest real estate is invariably in the quietest locations, be it Fifth Avenue mansions with one foot thick stone walls or the sweeping estates of the Bel Air with the nearest neighbor hundreds of yards distant?

Silence, then, is a premium priced attribute, yet that fact seems to have escaped many camera manufacturers. Thinking back, the large Pentax 6x7 I owned years ago had the most wonderful lenses, yet the only truly sharp results I obtained from it were when it was used with a studio flash, with which it unfortunately synchronized at very low speeds. The problem was that tripping the shutter set off an explosion so loud, that people a hundred yards distant would duck for cover wondering which cowboy had come to down, guns blazing. So nice as that big negative was, and it fit 16” x 20” paper near perfectly, the camera had to go. The ten explosions a roll plus the onset of carpal tunnel from trying to hold this beast to eye level, not to mention hearing problems, were simply too much.

My large format gear is at the other end of the noise spectrum. In fact the lens shutters are so nearly totally silent, an illusion enhanced by the distance of the shutter from the operator and the huge space between lens and film which acts as a baffle, that sometimes I wish the shutters were a tad louder. Take the time I was photographing by a waterfall. Did that shutter trip or not? In other words, a crucial element essential in the design of all machines, feedback to the operator, is missing. It’s the same problem that makes using a silent keyboard so difficult.

Engineers will point out that noise is not just sound. Rather, it’s a collection of sounds of varying frequency, volume and duration all mixed together. So while I have no idea what the optimal mix is, I do know that higher frequencies are not a good thing as they tend to amplify the apparent noise too much. On the other hand, too much low frequency sound, is just as bad. As it takes far more energy to generate a loud low frequency sound than a loud one of high pitch - compare a cello or double bass to a violin - too much of the low stuff means something is moving hard and fast. Like a mirror thudding into a frame, protected only by a strip of neoprene. That spells vibration.

The second noisiest camera I ever owned was the Rollei 6003 medium format single lens reflex. What with the large instant return mirror, the electrical diaphragm and the motor yanking the film to the next frame, you could not be inconspicuous using one of these beasts. Rollei must have done something right with damping and vibration control, however, as even images at 1/15th or 1/8th second on a solid tripod showed no blurring from camera movement. And as a studio camera par excellence there’s an argument to be made in favor of noise as the subject knows that the picture has been taken. There’s that feedback thing again.

The Nikon F wasn’t bad. Like everything else about the camera, the noise was purposeful. No nonsense. ‘Built to last’ was the thought that came to mind when operating this brute of a camera. The Leicaflex SL that succeeded it in my tool kit gave the exact opposite impression. Tinny, limp-wristed, you always wondered how long things would last before the next trip to the repair shop. Quite a contrast to the magnificent solidity of the lenses.

The screw thread Leicas rangefinder were always far noisier than you expected. While their ‘clack’ was not that obtrusive, it hardly meshed with the Leica’s reputation as a stealth camera. The M3 and its successors were superior, though I always wished they were quieter, especially with that irritating shutter bounce on 1/15th and 1/30th, which every mechanical shutter M has had. The best in this regard was the M6 I used for several years which had a zinc top plate replacing the brass in the M2 and M3. Brass is ideal for chrome plating, but my M6 was black, so zinc was used as a cost saving. That camera had a beautiful shutter sound, sadly not matched by its build quality which was dramatically inferior to the M2 and M3. Plus the quick jam loading system was an absolute catastrophe - you had to crimp the film end to ensure it did not slip out of the stines meant to grasp it. So the M6 moved on, but not on account of its shutter sound. With any mechanical Leica M (I have not used the electronic M7) you get wonderful tactile feedback from the shutter release, to the extent that you know exactly how much pressure is needed to trip the shutter. Worth its weight in gold, whether on the street or in the studio.

The Canon EOS 5D is nothing to get excited about either way. The timbre of the noise is not objectionable, the volume is middle of the road, but you are going to be noticed when you press the button. For an electrical release, feedback is not bad. The first pressure to lock in focus and exposure is easily distinguished from the second which releases the shutter. There’s not that progressive feel of the Leica M’s shutter release, but it’s a worthy effort.

Setting aside the minority audience for large format cameras, the two quietest shutters I have used were from opposite camps. The one on the Rollei 3.5F was purely mechanical and wonderfully quiet. Feedback was not the greatest, not helped by the awkward location of the button, but it was a joy to use and hear.

The other was in the Mamiya 6, also a medium format camera. This one is purely electronic, the shutter release is actually an electrical switch, with all the challenges that poses for feedback design. Owing to an absence of a flapping mirror and the use of between the lens shutters, the camera was simply wonderfully quiet and what you did hear was just right.

Before closing, I have to say a word about the shutter in my Olympus 5050Z point and shoot. Near silent, Olympus felt obliged to add an option of an electronically generated shutter sound. This emanates from the camera’s speaker after the shutter is pressed. Unfortnately, it comes so late that it’s tomorrow by the time you hear it. Add the huge shutter lag and you have an example of how to get it dead wrong. Needless to add, the shutter release button has such poor resistance design that accidental exposures become the order of the day. At least you can switch off the electronic shutter noise.

So, camera designers, in my next camera I would like the sound of the Mamiya 6 with the tactile feedback of a Leica M2 or M3, with some of the overtones from the M6 for reassurance. The gun makers can use the Pentax 6x7 and Rollei 6003 as reference for their latest efforts. And the people at Olympus have some learning to do.

My M3 is what you hear when you tune in to this site, by the way.

A Day Off - book review



The charm of the pictures in this wonderful book, published in 1974, is in marked contrast to the sheer nastiness of much of Rober Frank's work in 'The Americans'.

Ray-Jones was an Englishman who studied in America and apprenticed with Avedon, amongst others, so he was culturally well balanced. This picture book is about the fabled British 'Day Off,' which as often as not saw the resolute vacationer at the seaside in a raincoat, earnestly hoping for that one ray of sun.

What so contrasts this book with 'The Americans' is that where Frank sees nastiness, greed and despair in Americans, Ray-Jones sees nothing but charm and a wonderful quirkiness in the British, all nicely garnished with a sprinkling of levity. A light touch. The view, if you like, of a fellow traveller rather than that of a xenophobic critic.

All social classes are pictured here, from the wonderfully aristocratic boys at Eton School, the couple on the cover relaxing between acts of a Mozart opera at Glyndebourne, cows and all, participants in innumerable summer carnivals with all their eccentricity on display or the seaside shots which absolutely make the book.

This volume of photographs seems to be out of print but most of the pictures here can be found in current offerings of Ray-Jones's work. So sad that he died at the age of thirty, in 1972.

Highly recommended. While the printing in my paperback edition is muddy and too contrasty, none of that detracts from the wonderful pictures.

35mm film just does not cut it for big prints.



I finally finished framing the last of the fifteen photographs for the walls of the home theater - a converted garage, I should add, lest you think I have hit the jackpot. A large room, some 700 square feet, it offers lots of wall space even after the big screen installation. All of these are 13” x 19” ink jet dye prints made on the fine Espon 1270, with the delays in framing resulting solely from the incompetence of the local art store (Michaels) which stated they could not get me more 22” or 28” frame pieces because it’s a popular size. No kidding. So I finally ordered the remaining ones from Documounts, an estimable business that wanted my money and charged half as much. They also provided all the mats and boards for the pictures and a local glazier cut the glass to fit. All told, a 22” x 28” mounted, matted and framed print, with a nice ebonized ash frame, ran some $60, or one third of the amount charged by the main street framing place.

So there I was last night wondering which movie to watch, while debating the day’s events with that vicious guard dog and breed standard, Bert the Border Terrier, seen above. The goal of the picture project, I reminded Bertram, was that all the snaps must have been taken within the last twelve months. No recycled inventory of past successes. Change or die. And, in the event, every last one of these snaps was taken within a few miles of our home in central coastal California. There are traditional landscapes, strange surreal beach scenes, and the occasional peeling old wall sign. Acting as tour guide for Bertie, whose attention was enhanced by the promise of a cookie, I recited the story of each for him.

By the by, I found myself thinking about the equipment used to take these pictures. First, the realization dawned that almost every last piece of ‘front end’ gear used has now been sold, given the compelling advantages of the full frame sensor in the digital Canon EOS 5D at these print sizes. Second, of the fifteen pictures, eight were taken on medium format, six on large format (4” x 5”) and just one on 35mm.

Now it wasn’t planned that way. What ended up on the walls had to have visual merit, but it also had to be critically sharp. The reason is that viewers do not respect the rule book that says you should step back when looking at a large photograph. Not a bit of it. The larger the picture, the closer they seem to want to get. Now each of these film originals had been accorded the highest quality processing. The negatives were correctly exposed, film was developed by a great pro lab in Santa Barbara (one of the few that does not play a game of soccer on the beach with your wet negatives) and the originals had been scanned on the highest quality dedicated scanners at 2400 dpi (large format) to 4000 dpi (medium format and 35mm). No grain or dirt reduction software was used to preserve definition. These technologies may be smart, but there’s a trade off. Post processing was done on my iMac G5 whose screen has been colorimetrically (or whatever you call it) balanced using a Monaco EZ Color Optix thingummyjig. You know, the puck you dangle on your screen to measure colors while mumbling incantations to various deities. Bottom line? Color on the screen matches color on the print.

The result is that you cannot tell the large format prints from the medium format ones, but you most certainly can tell the one done on 35mm. Not that there’s anything wrong with the definition in the latter. Using a well calibrated Leica M2 and a 35mm Asph Summicron, that original had, without a doubt, the benefit of the best performing camera/lens combination ever. The Summicron lens is simply breathtaking in its ability to resolve fine detail with great contrast. No, it’s the film that damns the print. You see, if you adopt the ‘stick your nose in the print’ viewing method, the 35mm original clearly shows the film beginning to break up at this print size. There is a hint of grain and, in landscape pictures with much fine filigree detail, that’s a no-no.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that for large prints, which are my goal, abandoning 35mm was the right thing to do. Up to 8” x 10”, decent technique and a top class scanner, meaning a dedicated film scanner not some cheesy flatbed, will get you fine prints from 35mm. Anything larger, forget it. Or, if you like the 35mm format with all its advantages of lens choices and compactness, well, Canon has a digital camera for you. By comparison with 35mm film, the full frame digital prints I have made recently are simply night and day when it comes to resolution and detail, and my technique remains unchanged.



The only way around this issue for ‘35mm film only’ photographers is to make sure you don’t show your work head to head with medium format or full frame digital. If you do, all your protestations about making great big prints from a small negative will be so much dross. If, on the other hand, your goal is display on a computer monitor, well, a Holga will do.

Speaking of which, if you like Holga-sized pictures, you can view the ones in my home theater here.

A man with an agenda - book review



When this book was originally published in France in 1958 (shock news), it would more appropriately have been titled 'The Ugly Americans', for Frank never misses an opportunity to show the very worst of America, whether making statements about race (the white man having his shoes polished by the black in a men's lavatory), toil (the workers slaving away in the mass production factory), crass commercialism (fully half of all the pictures here) or poverty (most of the rest). Nowehere is the nobility, generosity and selflessness of the great American spirit to be found.

So from that perspective, one might well regard The Americans as the ultimate hatchet job, where the victims praise the results which ridicule them.

Nonetheless, there is a lot to praise here. Yes, the photography is stark and the printing depressingly dark, at least in my paperback edition. However, Frank has an uncanny ability to spot the incongrous in daily life (who can forget his surreal picture of the boy with the Sousa horn?) and captures, again and again, that same Decisive Moment which so eluded Cartier-Bresson in his American pictures. And while it may be hard to set aside the prejudiced sociological criticism in this collection of pictures (the handful of images of affluent citizens clearly has an axe to grind), the result is a truly fine collection of what any picture book should be about. Great photographs.

Unsurprisingly, The Americans remains in print to this day. Every photographer's library should have a copy. Just take the left wing focus with a pinch of salt.

They will always be limited at the top.

Reading the other day that Konica/Minolta had given up making cameras I started getting worried that we are headed for a world with too few choices when it comes to manufacturers of photo gear. Competition improves the breed, after all. Then a few moments of reflection suggested that maybe there never has been more than a very small handful of choices when it comes to the best of the best. What the pros use.

At the start of the second World War, your choice was 35mm or medium format. Sure, large format has been around for a hundred or more years and soldiers on today, but it’s hardly a product with what you would call critical mass. In 35mm it was the world of the rangefinder - meaning Leica or Contax. The Contax had it all over the Leica, more sophisticated in every way, but damned by a fragile shutter mechanism. Leica countered with a great shutter and maybe the worst viewfinder/rangefinder yet invented. In medium format there was no choice. It was Rolleiflex or nothing. Now little about twin lens reflex design makes sense, but it worked, had great lenses and a negative big enough that even the average duffer could make a decent 8” x 10” print.

In film the choice was greater - Kodak, Agfa, Ilford, Perutz, Adox - all made great monochrome emulsions and Kodak, of course, was working on Kodachrome. Two violin players, the Leopolds - Mannes and Godowsky - were locked in a lab by the boys in Rochester and emerged a couple of years later with Kodachrome, rated at all of 12 ASA. Just in time for the film to be used by Nazi photographers to record Hitler as he set about destroying the great race whence these two geniuses of chemistry came. If the Leica was the greatest camera of the century, and it was, then Kodachrome owns a similar place in the world of film. Kodachrome was simply fabulous. Without it 35mm color photography would not have blossomed the way it did.

In the early fifties Leica finally made the single greatest 35mm camera of all time. The M3. Learning from the Zeiss Contax that integration of the viewfinder and rangefinder into one eyepiece might just be a good idea, and that making the thing bigger than a pinhole could be a selling feature, they added a wonderful, sharply delineated rangefinder rectangle and those projected, illuminated, nay, electric, field of view frames that left you in no doubt whatsoever as to what your lens was seeing. And you could use that viewfinder in almost non-existent light, focusing and framing with the utmost confidence, taking your picture with the near silent whisper of the Leica shutter. They didn’t stop there. They crafted what remains the greatest 35mm lens made. The 50mm Summicron which remains, to this day, the standard all Japanese manufacturers aspire to. This pairing was a high point in engineering aesthetics and optical design.

The M3 and its descendants lasted in the pro's gadget bag through the mid-sixties when machismo dictated long lenses and brutal looks. The former to avoid the bullets, the latter to state unequivocally that your camera could double as a weapon in time of need. The smart people at Pentax may have invented the instant return mirror, but the Nikon F was the camera of the Viet Nam generation. Its brute good looks, augmented by the equally masculine finish of the lenses, said you were the Real Thing. Pentax was not to be outdone, however. They started painting their cameras black and had the smarts to give a few to a London fashion photographer par excellence named David Bailey. In stark contrast to the stodgy, patrician, epicene Beaton, wedded to his Rolleiflexes and his Royal sitters, Bailey rocked. He was a real man. Pentax pushed it. They ran one of the greatest camera ads ever. It showed a beaten up black Spotmatic, brass wear spots everywhere, with just three words. “David Bailey’s Pentax”. Wow! Here was a guy slogging it out in the studios of London with all those dolly birds and clearly having every bit as tough a time of it as the fellows in Nam with their Nikon Fs. Years later, Bailey admitted he had taken sandpaper to his Spotmatics and rubbed the paint off at strategic locations. It got him a lot of dates. Not bad for a few bob and a couple of minutes of elbow grease, huh? So in the ‘60s your choice in 35mm was Nikon or Pentax.

David Hemmings played Bailey in Antonioni’s wonderful movie ‘Blow Up’, though his weapons of choice were a Nikon F and a Hasselblad. Change in the medium format world was slower than in the frenetic corner known as 35mm. At least you finally had a choice. It was no longer just a clunky twin lens reflex Rolleiflex. Why, the Hasselblad, scarcely more competent, said you had arrived. Because you could afford it. OK, so the viewfinder was lousy and the mirror did not return after you pressed the button, but good marketing saw to it that you did not notice.

Enter the seventies and eighties and Canon began to get noticed. They could not compete with Nikon or Pentax for charisma, those marques having earned their stripes in the hellish fields of Viet Nam and Carnaby Street. So they had to sell something else. And that something was technology, backed with abundant capital. Fast, small motors to move the film? Of course. Coreless linear motors to focus the lens? Naturally. Fast sensors to provide autofocus? Absoluement. Eye controlled focus? Well, we did it just to show that we could. Suddenly the competitors were rocked by this Japanese copier-making powerhouse with seemingly infinite resources, and they have been playing catch up ever since. But the old rule prevailed. In 35mm your choices were few at the top. Canon, Nikon, and maybe Pentax.

In medium format, the old guys were still at it. Rollei came out with a camera that four people bought, the SL66. Its huge mass and focal plane shutter which hated working with studio flash made sure that no one bought it. Zenza came out with something even worse, the Bronica, which jammed as soon as you looked at it. They had taken the worst of the Rollei and made it .... worse. Working photographers preferred proper flash synchronization and bought a Hasselblad. Rollei fixed that deficiency with their wonderful 6000 series of medium format SLRs, but it was too late. Traction had been ceded to Hasselblad. The Hasselblad may have been horribly unreliable but it was glamor personified. Plus it shared Rollei’s great German lens providers. An entry ticket to the world of Madison Avenue. So, like a Jaguar owner, you bought two hoping that one would survive while the other was in the shop.

Then in the ‘90s, digital arrived. No matter that the first efforts were comical in the extreme. Digital was Now and the old protagonists, Canon and Nikon, were at it again, followed by a somewhat breathless Pentax. The latter had one thing the two others could never understand. The word ‘elegance’ is part of Pentax’s genetic make up, a concept that never graced the worlds of Nikon and Canon. Olympus gave Pentax some competition when it came to chic design but let’s face it. What self respecting, red blooded American male was going to be seen with his wife’s camera? “David Bailey’s Olympus”? I don’t think so.

So, once again, choice was limited. Sure, you could have flirtations with minority brands like Minolta or Konica, but it was always rather comical to see the poor photographers using this gear. Like the people who were buying Saabs, hoping they would be sufficiently different that the downright horribleness of their choice would qualify them as eclectic, independent, thinkers. Wrong. They just didn’t get it.

Meanwhile, digital completely bypassed the medium format boys during this decade, and they will never recover the lead established by the big Japanese houses. When full frame digital beats medium format film, why would you blow $15k on a digital back for your Hassy when you could get a couple of Canon’s best bodies for the same coin and have something reliable to boot?

Leica? While issuing quarterly denials of impending bankruptcy their apparent goal is to sell only to Japanese collectors and tax exiles in Geneva. So you can’t have one. Settle for a Rolls or Bentley instead.

Film, meanwhile, had gone the way of Contax and Yashica and Konica and Minolta. The choices in color were now down to just two - Kodak and Fuji. The latter may have done a number on the former, taking away market share daily, but it’s all history now. Neither will be making color film by the end of the decade.

So there never have been that many choices at the top. Today it’s Canon or Nikon. Pentax for those willing to be different. And for medium format it’s Hasselblad digital, but who knows how long that will survive. And no one needs film.

The Epson 1270 printer

When it first appeared on the market six years ago, the Epson 1270 color dye ink jet printer was the first consumer priced printer which could make large – meaning 13” wide and up to 44” long – prints with high quality and repeatability. I bought mine new in March, 2000 for $539.05 and proceeded to produce hundreds of color and monochrome prints with it. First in 8” x 10”, later in 13” x 19” sizes, which makes for a nice 22” x 28” wall sized matted, framed result.

I’m not writing this because the Epson has given up the ghost. Far from it. The only reason that I know exactly when I bought it and how much I paid is that I just resurrected the original shipping box from the attic and found the sales invoice in there. You see, the Epson will soon be making its way east to my nephew whose current printer is limited to 8” x 10”, and he know and loves the quality this machine is capable of, reliably producing at 13” x 19” prints.

Ink remains easily available, even if all the colors are in one cartridge and the Epson’s software is about as good at predicting the ink levels as the Federal Reserve is at predicting inflation. Which is to say it gets it in the ball park but don’t stake your life (or next print) on it. Epson sold a lot of these wonderful printers and given the profit margins on ink sales you can bet fresh ink cartridges will be available for a long time.

Conservatively, I’m guessing that the 1270 has at least another four good years left in it, which makes for a ten year life in a digital age where products are seemingly obsolete days after hitting the market. Epson made the 1270 obsolete soon after I bought mine and eventually switched to pigment based inks with claims of great longevity. Didn’t worry me one bit. I have framed originals which are six years old and they look as fresh as the day they were made. I simply do not display them in full daylight eight hours a day.

One of the great appeals of the Epson 1270 was that its use of dye based inks, despite their reputation for fading, resulted in a color print quality very similar to that obtained with the old Cibachrome process. This was, for most, not something to be undertaken at home, as the temperature margins of the chemicals were narrow to put it mildly and their toxicity comparable to the effluent from Chernobyl. What Cibachrome gave you was a wonderful depth of color albeit at the expense of high contrast, so it matched up nicely with milder emulsions like Kodachrome II and, later, Kodachrome 25 and 64, provided your exposure was spot on. Paired with that old grain hound GAF/Ansco 500, Cibachrome was a dream. It was a strict teacher, but get the exposure right and the dynamic range was there for all to see.

The only reason the 1270 is moving on is that I find I want to make 16” x 20” and 18” x 24” prints more often, and if that does not sound like much of a change the latter size is almost twice the area of 13” x 19”. That’s a lot bigger when it comes to visual impact.

So B&H Photo has an order from me for a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 (they are backlogged, suggesting the secret is out) offering dye based inks which, miracle of miracles, are allegedly fade resistant. I toyed with the idea of the Design Jet 130 model which goes up to 24” wide, but concluded that prints that large were pretty much the exception rather than the rule for me, so common sense prevailed over machismo.

Truth be told, I am a tad apprehensive about the new printer. Not that installing the thing worries me – heck, with an Apple iMac it’s just one more ‘Plug and Play’ exercise. No, as a long time user of HP’s 12C calculator (a device now some 25 years old!) my wariness results from my all too great familiarity with HP’s instruction manuals. Hewlett Packard was always an engineer’s company, run by and for engineers, with the brief exception of a disastrous, mercifully brief, time under a chief executive who confused her posterior with her elbow daily, while spending far too much time on the former in the corporate jet. Now that the company has returned as an engineering powerhouse, I’m afraid that the same people who wrote the manual for my 12C calculator will have been involved in the book for the DesignJet. They or their kids.

On the other hand, like all good engineers, they probably believe that instructions are for losers, so the first thing I propose to do when the machine finally arrives is to pitch the instruction book. Worked with the HP 12C and Reverse Polish Notation was never an issue for this Pole. Any descendant of a proud nation that can charge Panzers on horseback needs no instruction book. And it doesn’t hurt that I have an honors degree in Engineering earned before the days of ‘open book’ exams.

Goodbye Epson. You delivered beyond any rational expectations.

A great photographer



If nothing else, the British Royal Family has been adept at two things – choosing its parents well and being fortunate in having a select group of society photographers over the years to preserve their likenesses.

They include Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson, Patrick Lichfield and Tony Snowdon.

Whatever one might think of his choice in mates, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who became Lord Snowdon upon his marriage to Princess Margaret, rates not just as a fine Royal Photographer but also as one of the great photographers of our time. This vastly talented individual skipped easily between the worlds of industrial design (his work changed the making of wheelchairs for the disabled), architecture (the aviary at London Zoo is his) and photography. While many credit him with the first use of coarse grain in fashion pictures, his real forte lies in gritty social documentary, such as the series on mental institutions, and in portraiture.

Sittings is a fine book, though long out of print. It is rare that the warmth and gentility of a photographer is so clearly reflected in his subjects’ faces, yet those attributes shine clearly here time and again. The portrait of Meryl Streep in the gnarled tree is a masterpiece, plain and simple. The darkness of Brideshead Revisited perfectly reflected in Jeremy Irons’s melancholic stare. And where many would have made cruel fun of him, Snowdon’s portrait of Prince Charles in his racing colors is a simple and subtle image of rank and privilege. Indeed, were it not for the trust that Snowdon clearly engenders in his subjects, pictures such as this would never have been taken. Just ask yourself if you were a member of that much maligned family, would you trust anyone to take your picture?

If there is one picture above all others that deserves singling out here it is the portrait of Lady Thatcher. As is common with most of the photographs in this slim book, the set is simple to the point of being barren, the better to emphasize that great leader’s magnificent resolve and determination. You don’t have to agree with her politics to admire Snowdon’s portrait which is apolitical in the best sense of the word.

Most of these images are to be found in a current book of Tony Snowdon’s work entitled ‘Photographs by Snowdon – A Retrospective’. Any photo portraitist seeking to learn from the very best should search out that volume.

More than just a rainbow

Name any of the world's great democracies and the chances are that you will find its happy residents indulging in the cocktail hour before dinner. America, Britain, France, German, Australia, Brazil - all favor this pastime which many regard, myself included, as the very touchstone of civilization.

Then look at those dour nations who struggle with the very idea of 'one man, one vote'; God forbid 'one woman, one vote' for many do not even allow women the freedom of the ballot box. The Saudis? They don't drink. The Russians? They do nothing but drink. The North Koreans? Please....

So after a day of truly wretched weather which saw thunder showers every few minutes interspersed with brief rays of sunshine, the thought of the daily libation was very much on my mind as I made my way to the freezer with its gin every bit as cold as the glass next to the bottle. Just before opening the refrigerator I glanced to my left and there it was. A superb rainbow gracing the old estate - clear sky to its left and threatening clouds on the right. Now you should know I'm pretty much blind without my glasses but that didn't stop me from rushing to the office to grab the 5D, nearly damaging myself on that insouciant boulevardier Bertie the Border Terrier en route, and exiting stage left at a rate of knots that would have given pause to the staunchest of Olympic competitors.

Forget the old wives' tale that landscapes are a stationary subject. Not a bit of it. Give the elements five seconds and, likely as not, the effect is gone. So throwing caution to the winds I banged off a couple of snaps even though what I saw through the viewfinder was mostly a ghastly blur, trusting to the gods and the Canon's automation to get things more or less right.

I rushed back in at scarcely lower a pace and placed the card in the reader. Locating my glasses gave confirmation that all was right with the technology from Canon HQ, but when I loaded the picture into Photoshop and snapped it up to 100% original size (that's some 30" x 45" on a print with the 5D's full frame sensor) it became clear that the otherwise denuded tree on the right was replete with more birds than you could shake a stick at. The small picture here scarcely does it justice but a few moments later as I sipped the soothing elixir, the magic lighting long gone, I could not but help reflect on this wonderful bit of serendipity. If you have a broadband connection, click here for a larger version.

Book review



Sorry, I just don't get it.

For some forty years I have been trying to like Strand's work without success. Frankly, based on the evidence of this Aperture book, his output reeks of stunning mediocrity and, if the prints in this volume are a guide, he was a wretched printer to boot. Ansel Adams, at least, knew how to print.

The sheer pretentiousness of the narrative here, where it is expected that the reader will nod in breathless agreement at the genius of the photographs, is best typified by the way Strand's street portraits are extolled for his use of a right angle lens to avoid detection. His well known 'Blind Woman' is singled out as a prime example of this approach. For heaven's sake, the woman is BLIND. Why the subterfuge? He could have stuck his plate camera in her face and the result would have been no better, nor the photographer any more detected by the subject.

As for the argument that has it that technical limitations of the time explain the poor quality of the prints (or is it because of one of those hallowed rare metal printing processes where the resulting grime is meant to be admired?) that also fails to pass muster. Julia Margaret Cameron, a technically challenged photographer if ever there was one, was turning out superior work some 50 years earlier.

Pseudo intellectualism at its worst. If you an uncritical admirer of the New York Times, buy this book. Otherwise save your $50.

Equipment then and now.

I took a few moments to take stock of how my equipment has changed over the past quarter as a result of the move to full frame digital.

Before:
3 Leicas (IIIG, M2, M3)
1 Leicaflex SL for long lenses
1 Bessa T for the 21mm Elmarit
21, 35, 50 (3), 90 (2) and 135mm Leica M lenses
200 and 400mm Leica Telyt lenses
Rollei 3.5F
Rollei 6003
40, 80, 150 and 350mm Rollei lenses
Rollei extension tubes
Mamiya 6MF when I didn’t want to drag the Rollei about
50, 75 and 150mm Mamiya lenses
Crown Graphic 4” x 5” with 90, 150 and 210mm lenses
Canon 4000 35mm scanner
Nikon 8000 medium format scanner
Epson 2450 large format scanner

After:
Canon EOS5D
24-105mm Canon lens
1 Leica M3
35, 50 and 90mm Leica M lenses
200 and 400mm Leica Telyt lenses adapted to the Canon
Crown Graphic 4” x 5” with 90, 150 and 210mm lenses
Epson 2450 large format scanner

Quite a reduction in clutter! The original goal, recall, was to get medium format quality without the bulk and complexity. The 5D came though with flying colors on that front, equalling or exceeding medium format quality at 30” print sizes, while making pictures possible that would never have been taken on film, thanks to Image Stabilization and grain free ISO 400 images.

Now I’m keeping the Leica M3. Not rational, I know, but it has been a dear friend for more than thirty years and we are not ready to part company. However, it seems appropriate to focus on the need for the 4” x 5” gear. If you can actually expose the film in this beast, large sharp prints are trivial, owing to the enormous size of the negative.

So I did my own little empirical comparison of pictures taken one week apart at Limekiln State Park with the Crown Graphic and with the Canon EOS 5D. This is about as unscientific as it gets and is based solely on my working method. I don’t think I need add what you can do with your lens test charts. We are talking real world results here.

So I compared 30” prints from both and, interestingly, there was little to choose. It seems easier to get a broad dynamic range from negative film than from digital, the latter needing more attention to exposure. Like using slide film. My large format Kodak VC160 negatives are scanned at 2400 dpi on a well tuned Epson 2450 flat bed scanner, using Silverfast Ai software. Doubtless drum scans would be even better but after waiting for two weeks for the film to be processed, I’m not about to wait two more for the scans.

For what are very similar scenes, the technical details could hardly be more different. Here's the 4” x 5” picture:



This was taken using a 210mm Rodenstock Sironar lens, probably 4-8 seconds at f/22. A massive Linhof tripod was used for stability. That lens is similar to a 75mm on 35mm. Setup time to take the picture was some five minutes. Processing was by Calypso Labs in California - an outfit that literally needs to clean up its act, judging from the amount of dust on the negative. The scan on the Epson took approximately 20 minutes. The file is 250 mB (!). Unsharp masking in Photoshop was 45/1/0 - in other words not a lot.

Now compare this with the Canon EOS 5D snap taken a week later.



Here I can disclose the technical details with certainty - they are part and parcel of the file. The shutter speed was 1/15th with the camera hand held on a monopod. ISO was set to 400 to allow a faster shutter speed. That’s a nice attribute of the Canon - ISO is used to control shutter speed. Up to ISO 800 grain is simply not an issue. The lens was fully opened at f/4 at a focal length of 40mm. Setup time was maybe 10 seconds. So the lighting was identical - 1/15 @ f/4 @ ISO 400 is nearly the same as 4 seconds @f/22 @ ISO 160. The original most certainly did not need any dust retouched, and I did not have to wait weeks for the negative to come back. The file size is 73 mB. USM in Photoshop was 250/3.2/0 - much more than with film and reflecting Canon’s own recommendation that the user starts at 300/0.3/0 to overcome the softening effect of the anti-aliasing filter in the camera.

So as a landscape camera the 5D excels. Meanwhile the Crown Graphic is on probation. There will be rare occasions where something larger than 30” x 40” may be called for (I cannot immediately recall ever having made a larger print) in which case a drum scan and a professional printing house would be called for with goodness knows how long a lead time. That is, of course, if color film in this size is still made when the need arises.

Snaps - book review. Simply the funniest photographer ever.



Elliott Erwitt takes funny pictures. You could just write that and know all you need to about this compilation of a lifetime's worth of humor.

For life without Erwitt would be a sadder place indeed - like going to New York and finding that Zabars is no more. Or passing through Los Angeles and discovering that the Atlas Sausage Shop is out of Kielbasa. Or visiting any Young's pub in England only to find the beer is now served cold.

No matter that most of Erwitt's pictures are posed. Unlike frauds like Capa's dying Spanish soldier (the contact sheet has him managing to die six times in quick succession) or Smith's Minamata child in her mother's arms (carefully posed with artificial light under the guise of street reportage), Erwitt makes no pretense about his light hearted work and just lets you enjoy it.

And it is much harder to be a great comedian than a great dramatist, whether your chosen outlet is acting or photogaphy.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it has too many pictures in it. You really must savor a few at a time to avoid overload. And, mercifully, the narrative is a scant four of the five hundred and forty three pages.

Buy the hard back version. You will wear out the paperback in no time.

This is the work of a great photographer.

Photographs - book review.



If your library of photography books is to contain only a handful of tomes, then someting showcasing Bill Brandt's work has to be on the short list.

Brandt may be one of the very few exceptions who proves that monochrome can be more powerful than color, for his is strictly a black and white vision of the world.

And what a vision it is. None of the work is derivative in any way, Frequently, the images are breathtakingly original. Whether it's his landscapes, or gritty scenes of coal miners or fabulous distorted nudes (sadly there are too few of these here), the viewer looks on in wonder at how one man could have done so much that was new. New and, let it be quickly added, horribly good.

Who can forget his portrait of a troubled Peter Sellers, taken between scenes for one of the Pink Panther comedies? Or his haunting image of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill. His picture of Sir Kenneth and Lady Clarke, the spouse looking up at her esteemed husband with awe and respect (both well deserved in Sir Kenneth's case), is charming for its lack of nastiness, which would have been an easy and cheap shot in the lovely home occupied by the couple.

His landscapes are no less moving. See the shot of Skye with the gull's nest in the foreground. An image that hints at the best the surrealists did. Then turn to 'The Man Who Found Himself Alone in London' taken in a 1947 smog, an affliction which London continued to suffer until the mid-1960s, when clear air laws finally allowed one to breathe easily. Timeless.

We are taught to adulate the landscapes of Ansel Adams which, by comparison, are little more than picture postcards, albeit ones snapped by a supremely competent darkroom technician.

Buy this, or any, book about Brandt and you will have one of the shining exemplars of the greatest photography of our time.

Just mind you don’t fall in the water.

Hearst Castle is the most popular tourist destination in central California so I took the precaution of booking a ticket in advance rather than be faced with a long wait for the tour bus which takes you some two thousand feet above sea level to Hearst’s opulent home. While I may have trashed Hearst for his part in dragging down the quality of journalism, a visit to his Castle on the central coast makes me feel a lot better about how he spent his money. As one of the tour guides pointed out, this magpie of a man expended some 78 of his 81 years collecting, starting with a trip to Europe aged three when he asked his mother why they couldn’t simply buy all the the things he liked. Got to like that!

While waiting for the bus - I chose Tour 2 which takes in the upper levels with all the living quarters, the kitchen and the two pools - I chanced on a fellow photographer using a pretty exotic looking Canon L lens finished in white enamel. Now I had seen these things at televised sports events but had never actually encountered someone actually using one, so my curiosity was piqued.

I confess to being in two minds about that red stripe that Canon places on its best glass. On the one hand it tells fellow photographers that you are serious (or maybe just seriously rich) about your images. On the other, it smacks vaguely of driving around in a Rolls Royce or Mercedes. Rather ostentatious and an invitation to thieves everywhere. Short of resorting to brush and paint, there’s really no simple way of blacking out the offending red stripe, unlike the ease with which electrician’s tape can be used to take out the obnoxious markings on the camera’s body.

Mick M. responded that the lens was a 70-200mm f/2.8 L zoom, and an impressive piece it is. Hard not to be noticed with all that white paint which, I suppose, must leave the nature photographer for ever seeking camouflage. Mick then opened his camera bag to disclose a veritable cornucopia of Canon L glass. Let’s see, there was a 24-70mm zoom, an 85mm f/1.2 portrait lens (yes, f/1.2!), an extender for the zoom and a strange looking duck with an enormous, bulbous front element. Proferring it, Mick explained this was a 14mm f/2.8 ultra wide angle. Not a fish eye. A genuine wide angle. This, I confess, had me greatly intrigued, and when Mick explained that his cameras were a 20D and 10D, the fact that these have small image sensors led me to pounce.

“Why not stick that wide on my 5D and see what 14mm really feels like?”. It was the only trump card I held, what with the one body and just the 24-105 L on it.

What ensued was that the loudest sound to be heard in Hearst Castle’s parking lot was that of jaws dropping. Mick’s, when he held the camera up to his eye, and mine shortly after. Now I had used a 21mm Asph Elmarit on my Leica for many years, to the extent that in some ways it had become my standard lens. Despite the cheesy, distorted, plastic viewfinder it came with, the lens itself was seemingly perfect in every way. Sharp at all apertures, compact and distortion free, it left nothing to be desired optically. Point it into the sun and flare was noticeable by its absence. The Leica 21mm has moved on once I concluded that 24mm at the short end of the Canon’s zoom range was fine for my purposes, but not without a twang or two on the heartstrings. We had become firm friends.

I can only guess that there is some sort of macho rivalry between lens makers - maybe I should refer to them as programmers - when it comes to making the widest lenses. I checked B&H and Leica has a 15mm for their reflex camera (costing about as much as a new car, needless to add), Nikon has a 14mm, and the various after-market manufacturers have 14s and 15s aplenty. Given that all of these run $1000 or more, they can hardly be mass market items and about the only use I can envisage on a daily basis is for unscrupulous realtors looking to make interiors larger. “Here is the bathroom” instantly become “Here is the palatial bathroom”.

Nonetheless, the impact of the lens in the viewfinder was overwhelming, and framing with it, walking towards a subject, gave this user a distinct feeling of unsteadiness owing to the width of the field of view, far in excess of what the human eye perceives. To cut a long story short, Mick very generously offered me the use of the 14mm and I reciprocated with the use of my 5D into which he needed only place one of his digital film cards to have a go. I got first go and on arriving at Hearst’s home in the sky one of the first sights was the outdoor pool. The weather was just so, a wisp of a cloud or two in the sky and a pleasant mild day in California. How do people in the mid-west get through the winter?

Having a fair amount of experience with ultra-wide lenses I knew enough to avoid the bane of all these optics which is boring, extraneous foreground. You really have to get in close, so I proceeded to attack the pool with aplomb, forced to sight through the finder, never having used something this wide before. I can ‘think’ 21mm, but 14mm is like a scene from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ by comparison. And vertigo was the order of the day as I teetered on the edge of Hearst’s ten foot deep outdoor pool! Now you absolutely have to use the hood with this lens, if for no other reason than there is no way to protect the cyclopean front element with a filter. It is simply too bulbous. And here’s a snap of the pool taken with Mick’s lens.



Though taken directly into the light, the lens seems flare free with just one small internal reflection visible in the picture. An extraordinary piece of design and execution. Will I be rushing out to buy one? No way. It’s the sort of thing I would use once a year and is inconsistent with my desire to minimize equipment, but thank you, Mick, for your generosity in allowing me to take a few pictures with this gorgeous bit o’ bottle.

If you would like to see a travelogue of a few more snaps from Hearst Castle, please click here.