I can’t get any sharper, Cap’n, I’m giving you all she’s got…

I’m pretty sure my ongoing quest for sharp images has peaked out, at least with the equipment available to me.  It’s always been my challenge to push any tool I’ve got to limits beyond what I ever expect of it and then dial back to a working space, comfortable in the fact that there’s that extra bit available when needed.  It’s what I’ve been doing with lenses and cameras for a couple of years now and I’m ready to call it quits.

No, I’m not through seeking sharpness.   It’s just the next level requires a complete change of equipment or buying reconnaissance quality gear from the government, neither option I’m interested in pursuing.  Besides, I’ve pulled back from printing really large sizes and am perfecting my craft in the 11×14″ range for the near future.

What got me to this point?  I just purchased the rare and highly praised Olympus 35-80mm f/2.8 lens, a lens built for the OM line of film cameras.  The general consensus on all the research I’ve done is this is the best lens Olympus made for their film line.  I’ve only seen one for sale in the past five years and when another popped up on KEH.com in excellent condition I jumped on it.

I’ve only had a day or so to test it and under pretty miserable conditions of clouds and rain.  Still, I’m very impressed and expect great quality from this lens.  Here’s one comparison:

ISO 100, f/8, 1/20 sec. – 35-100mm f/2 Olympus digital lens

ISO 100, f/8, 1/20 sec. – 35-80mm f/2.8 Olympus film lens

Digital lens, same image as above, crop of 100% view

Film lens – same image as above, crop from 100% view

Both original images received slight sharpening via NIK Output Sharpener Pro.  No other adjustments were made to exposure.

If I stare at them long enough I swear the film lens is sharper than the digital lens but I could be imagining it.  They are both frighteningly sharp, giving a nice clearly defined aspect to the full scene.  They are very, very close, certainly close enough for me.  Not bad for a lens that’s got to be 20+ years old, predating the digital revolution.

Sharp eyes among you probably noticed my comparison lens, the 35-100 f/2, and are asking “why buy another lens covering similar focal length?”  Well, the digital Olympus lens weighs 4 pounds and is almost a foot long by itself, not counting the large hood that fits on it.  The film lens weighs 1.5 pounds and is less than 4 inches in length.  Yes, the digital lens gives me one more stop of light at f/2 vs. f/2.8 which may be important during early morning wildlife photography.  However, it’s a beast to walk around with and definitely is not subtle around other people.  The film lens gives me just about the full focal length range of the digital one, is lighter to carry and much less conspicuous.  I can see the film lens being my “walking around” lens and the digital one for outdoors.

Besides, the film lens will fit on my film camera (OM-1) to make a very nice little street photography kit.

So, that’s it.  I’m done.  If I can’t live the life of an outdoor photographer with two of the sharpest lenses ever manufactured then I guess it’s back to the view camera….

What’s the difference?

To a person trying to learn a bit about photography the amount of information you seemingly must know just to ask an intelligent question is overwhelming.  Cameras, lenses, gear, software, paper, ink, etc., etc. just rushes at you like water from a fire hose.  And the jargon – who makes up all these words and acronyms?  All I want is to make pictures – just show me which button to press.

[As an aside, ever notice when someone asks you to take their picture (usually a couple or family that wants everyone in the image) they always point out the shutter release button?  You know, just "push this button right here."  You'd think camera manufacturers would put the button in the same place, colored in read, with an arrow and writing saying something like "press here to take picture."]

Well, it is complicated.  It’s complicated because you have so many options to make the image you want.  Someone once said computers ought to be as easy to use as a toaster (really? have you seen toasters lately?).  Great idea, simplicity incarnate.  Of course all you get from them is toast.  Cameras and gear are that way.  If all you want is the standard vacation image then get a simple camera and push the button.  To really give yourself options to make the images you want, you’ve got to get into the complicated.

And it’s always been this way.  Do you know how many different films existed in the heyday of film photography?  It seemed every photographer had their favorite film, processed with their favorite chemicals, printed on their favorite paper, also processed in their favorite chemicals.  And you think Photoshop is hard to learn.  At least  you can see what you’re getting in Photoshop and you can work in the light.  For film the desired photo and the delivered photo were apart by hours, days, months (if you forgot and left your film stuck in the seat cushion of the car for awhile).

And why was it so complicated?  Well, as artists photographers had different views of the world and were able to present those for others to appreciate by using all those special tools.  Were they really different?  Let’s take a look.

Here’s a digital image processed through the NIK  Color Efex Pro tool to render images similar to different films.  Note – these are not images from these films but rather a digital approximation created using profiles the people at NIK developed by analyzing the actual films and incorporating their various attributes (sensitivity to different wavelengths, dynamic range, saturation, contrast, resolution, etc.) into the software.

Kodak Elite Chrome 100

Fuji 160S

Kodachrome 64

Original Digital image

Kodak Portra 160NC

Fuji Velvia 100

I used this image because of the limit color palette – little if any warm colors.  You can see the varying responsiveness to the blues and greens across the images, some subtle, some more obvious.  There are differences in contrast, particularly in the clouds.  Differences you probably wouldn’t notice if you looked at the images separately rather than side by side.  Nonetheless, there are real differences and photographers of that day usually picked a “look” and stuck with it, learned how to get the best performance from it and made that their signature.  A few of them even made the film itself famous (well, that and lots of marketing dollars from the manufacturers).

With digital we run the risk of all images looking the same unless radically post-processed intentionally.  Digital sensors are generally designed to render “flat” exposures and color saturation, leaving it up to the photographer to decide what the final image will look like.  But sometimes that just makes it harder.  At least with film you could pick one and get on with it.  Digital has so many options and such a learning curve that at times you wonder how you’d ever develop your look.  Sure, the software  usually has presets you can configure to run a set of steps with one click but then you have to remember what that preset is supposed to do!

Film, pick one and go.

Photography – more than a hobby, less than a compulsion…..maybe.

Strip color, make better image

With all the post-processing tools available now there’s a criticism I hear from photographers about people who change color images to B&W; “what’s the matter, couldn’t get the color right?”  Sometimes it’s a derisive comment, sometimes a search for information, but most of the time I feel it misses the point.  Images are made of compositions composed of what the photographer wants to show the viewer and sometimes it just looks better without the color.

Not that I’m intending to get snobbish about “art” and “black and white” and all that effort at segregating what’s of value from what’s common.  No, I use both color and B&W in my work, although I’m a novice when it comes to knowing which will work best!  The beauty of digital is we can tell quickly whether to pursue it or not; in the film days it required a different workflow to make a B&W image out of a color negative and when I say workflow I mean more than a few clicks of the mouse.  It took literally getting  your hands dirty while working in the dark.

I’ve been going through my Lightroom catalog to remind myself what’s in it and I found the following image.  It’s a scan of a Kodachrome slide image I made several years ago while driving along the coast of the Olympia peninsula of Washington.  I remember liking the shape and contrasts but also remember not being particularly thrilled how it turned out as the colors were dull and the image lacked some spark.  That was back when I thought a great image simply came out of the camera.  Now I know better.

I fortunately exposed the image fairly evenly (the sky was totally overcast so I knew it would be blow out but there were no details to preserve) so when I saw it I realized some post-processing would enable me to turn it into more of what I saw at the time.  And when I started working on it I knew it would be a B&W in the final product – the subtle colors of the rock and water just didn’t bring anything to the story of the image.

Looking at it now I really like how the even lighting of the overcast sky helped give me light all over the rock, including into the clefts and holes.  A more stark lighting, such as bright cloudless day, would have rendered this too harsh.  In this form it recalls the sense I had of the cloudy, cool Pacific coast, a place of not quite shadows and not quite sunlight, with a bit of salty tang in the damp air.

The moral, at least one, of the story is to not throw anything away (cheers from the pack rat demographic, groans from those more organized) because you may have a masterpiece just waiting for a little adjusting.

Landscapes at all levels

5×7″ Fuji Velvia slide

One of the iconic images of the western plains is this formation – Devil’s Tower.  I looked up some of Willliam Henry Jackson’s images of the monument and except for the trees nothing much has changed.  (Geologic time doesn’t lend itself to photographic motion unless you’re willing to leave your camera set up on a tripod for several thousand years and who’s going to change the battery?).  Call me traditionalist but I like discovering some of my images look very similar to the great photographers of the American west.  There’s a connection that spans the technology of photography to realize you have stood where these legends placed their tripods, looked over a scene they would find familiar, and made similar decisions as they about composition and exposure.  Using a camera similar to the one they used just reinforces the connection, especially when you’re under the dark cloth staring at the ground glass screen to focus and compose an upside-down image.

One tool I have that the 19th century photographers lacked is a way to portray the human element in the context of the landscape.  Long lenses were not readily available back then for a number of reasons – weight, sharpness, exposure times – so you rarely see telephoto images like we’re used to seeing.  Long lenses give me the ability to reach out to where people are in the landscape, to portray their interaction and scale as part of the grander scene.

These images were made with a digital camera, not a view camera.  Not only is it easier to move around and get the desired composition, but the range of lenses available brings a whole new dimension of possibilities.  The image on the right was made using a 600mm telephoto lens, something the 19th century photographers would have probably marveled at.   You have to wonder what they could have done with such tools.

Sort of like wondering what Einstein could have done with a personal computer….

Shape the image you want

One of the pleasures of large format photography is you have so much image to play with.  What I mean by that is you can crop to various compositions and still retain details in the image.  I use 4×5″ film which is scanned as big as I want depending on how much cropping I want to perform without losing much resolution.  If I expect to crop a lot I will scan to a greater number of pixels; crop just a little then scan to a more “normal” number of pixels.  I see no reason to scan every image to 150-200 megabytes if I plan to use the whole image.  Unless, of course, I want to print wall-sized images!

But why crop an image at all?  Aren’t you supposed to get the image you want in the camera in the first place?  Well, different compositions elicit different emotional responses.  Some open your mind to questions (what is that? what is the photographer saying?), some direct your eye to the subject readily, some are pleasing proportions of length and width – there are multiple reasons you might crop in order to deliver a certain response.  And different crops, as different compositions, tell different stories.  With digital cameras this seems like an easy issue to address – just make more images with different compositions.  But one camera and a couple of lenses may not offer sufficient flexibility for your desired image.  And with film you can’t just shoot a hundred variations on the scene (well, not economically at least).  For example, take this image:

This is a somewhat wide shot of a scene in a nearby park.  I liked the strong contrasts between the trees and snow, and the leading line of the snow-covered path pointing to the horizon.  It’s a general shot, nothing really stands out.  But it can be cropped in several ways.

Now there’s more emphasis on the path with the trees as framing elements.

This crop emphasizes the verticality of the trees and shows some of the details of the snow plastered on the side of trunks.

A little closer to the path than the original image, bringing the horizon closer.  Cropping down the top and bottom of the scene provides a wider perspective that focuses the eye along the trees.

Square is a pleasing crop (better when there is more subject than a white sky and white ground) and this one brings more emphasis on the path and reveals a possible subject farther away.

A closer crop makes the path more intimate and now the person walking their dog shows up on the trail as does the snow covered bench on the side.  Essentially this is what I would get by mounting a telephoto lens on the camera but all I had to do here is crop in tight on my already existing image – no lens changes required.

The digital camera companies seem intent on continuing their megapixel war of numbers.  For the vast majority of photographers a suitable file size was passed a couple of years ago but if you frequently find yourself in the position of cropping images a lot you might consider the higher number models.  Especially where there are no lenses that will deliver the composition you like.

Or you could step back and try large format photography!

Just a little panoramic

Been working with film lately so I looked back through my catalog to see what sort of images I’d made in the past with my genuine 35mm “full-frame” camera.  Looking over some images from Rocky Mountain National Park I realized three of them were apparently meant to be combined later into a panoramic but I’d forgotten to do it.  With digital you can just put a hand or finger in the scene at the beginning and end of the panoramic series to remind yourself but with film who wants to waste frames like that!  The images merged together pretty good (no tripod so lost some at the top and bottom due to misalignment) but the color balance was off slightly from image to image so I decided to turn the final panoramic into a black-and-white.  I think it works better that way.

OM-1, Kodachrome 64, 35-75mm lens

I worked on the contrast edges a little to improve the dimensionality of the mountains and bring out some tree detail but that’s about all I did to it after the B&W conversion.  Slide film has a much narrower dynamic range than real B&W film so the clouds are blown out a bit but you can still see their wispy shape against the sky and that’s all I really wanted in this scene.  Pity the rocks in the foreground got cut off a bit, leaving you hanging in the middle – next time, a tripod and the pivot head I bought just for this type occasion.

This is the scene south of Trail Ridge Road, east of the high pass.  The road just opened on this day after an early snowfall (this was in October) and we were able to drive to the pass, stopping along the way to admire the view.  Higher up snow covered the rocks and western slopes and soon after we left the road was closed for the winter.  The National Park Service website says the road won’t open until May, 2013 so right now the only way to see this scene is by snowmobile or dog sled!

Long way around to get there

I admit to having a few cameras, probably more than I really need.  But as I learn more about my craft I’m discovering you get certain results when you use certain tools so I’m not giving up any tools just yet until I feel I’ve pushed myself to the limit in learning how to use them.  As one character in The Big Chill says, “it’s a juicy justification.”

The senior citizen in my gear kit, senior in the sense of having owned it the longest, is my Olympus OM-1.  I’ve looked at the brand’s newest offering attempt to bring back the tradition this camera started and it just doesn’t have the essence of the OM-1.  Something about the fit and finish, or the way all those buttons intrude on your grip, or the really tiny viewfinder – I don’t know, it just isn’t the same.  So, when I feel drawn to trying out the new Olympus model, I just pick up my OM-1 and get back to basics.

And I mean basics.  This is a manual camera (I threw the battery away years ago) – for film.  Manual focus, manual exposure, manual zoom (with the right lens) – did I mention you have to add your own film?  Not for the timid but then also satisfying to anyone challenged by doing is all yourself.

OM-1, Fuji Provia 100, 35-75mm lens

OM-1, Fuji Provia 100, 35-75mm lens

This post’s title comes from the round-about way these images arrived here.  Shot on color slide film, they were processed by traditional wet chemistry, scanned to digital format, loaded into Lightroom, converted to black-and-white using NIK Silver Efex Pro, exported as JPEGs and delivered to this site.  If I simply used my digital camera I could have cut out almost half those steps.  But the images wouldn’t look this way and I wouldn’t have had fun getting them to this site in the way I want them to look.

In addition to the craft of using a manual film camera, there is the craft of scanning film.  Scanners are notoriously temperamental, both in operation and results.  They each seem to have their own mind about color balance and sharpness.  Regardless of the software driver you use and the settings you put in place, you still have to adjust the image after it is digitized, not to mention cleaning it up to remove dust, scratches, etc.  But any translation process has these issues.  Talk to welders about metals, flux and rods, or carpenters about blades, woods and grain.  Part of the craftsman’s job is to know the tools and how to use them effectively when confronted with differing materials.

My aim is to connect with the forefathers of photography, not just via compositions or effects or attitude, but also by the actual technology.  Anyone holding up an image device, be it cellphone or DSLR, continues a tradition almost 200 years old – the continued interest in capturing a moment in time and taking what was into what will be.  Just as craftsmen today print their own books on paper made by hand with types carved one at a time, some photographers enjoy the hands-on adventure of shepherding what they see in front of them into a permanent image through tools the founders of photography would recognize.

Look where I’m pointing

Photographers, as most graphic artists, have many tools at their fingertips to guide viewers to specific aspects of an image.  For me one of the strongest is the crop, a decision on the dimensions and perspective an image will have in its final state.  Combined with design elements in the image itself, the crop can elicit an almost involuntary reaction in viewers.  They have to look where you direct, at least first, and linger where you want.  After the subject, the crop may be the most memorable aspect of a photograph.

Here are some examples of extreme crops made to complement the subject matter made to give you little license on where to look!

Mamiya 6, 50mm, f/11, 1/250 sec., Kodak TMax 400

Mamiya 6, 75mm, f/8, 1/125 sec., Kodak TMax 400

Mamiya 6, 75mm, f/16, 1/500 sec, Kodak TMax 400, Red 25 filter

Mamiya 6, 75mm, f/11, 1/125 sec., Kodak TMax 400

Film work

With spring and summer in place I’ve been spending much more time with large format slides and not really paying much attention to my medium format film camera.  I noticed the other day I’d accumulated four rolls of B&W print film in the ‘fridge so I decided to see what was on them.  Won’t be long before winter is back and color is gone; never too early to get feedback on how to improve B&W skills.

We’re lucky in Omaha to have a shop that processes medium and large format film (http://www.photographicsatthehotshops.com/).  Terry is a film and digital shooter himself who, in addition to running a darkroom for B&W, also scans negatives and makes prints using both wet chemistry as well as inkjet.  He’s got some very nice work hanging in his gallery and always is working on something interesting when I drop by.  He’s taught me some cool stuff about scanning that has taken much of the confusion out of my workflow so it’s always fun to stop in and chat for a bit.

Late last year he decided to sell his medium format film equipment and stick with large format and digital.  He handed me some film he had left over and urged me to use it up as he couldn’t.  One was a roll of Fuji Neopan, a film I was unfamiliar with.  I took it out for some landscape compositions back in the early spring just to see what came out.  I like my B&W film to give somewhat flat tones when properly exposed so I’m always looking around for options that do this best.

I really like this film, more so than Kodak TMax 100.  It’s not as contrasty so shooting in the afternoon doesn’t give the harsh shadows or bright spots I usually get with the TMax.  The dynamic range is what I expect from B&W film and it scans nicely on my Epson V700 with little exposure adjustment.  Dropping it into my NIK plug-ins I was able to develop the contrast I wanted and control the grain.  Here’s one of the better images off the roll.

It’s just a park scene but I like the way the film gave me lots of information to work with, both in details as well as exposure.  All I did in post-processing was to darken the sky a bit while holding the tree shadows constant, take out noise in the sky and do a little sharpening to make sure the tree limbs were distinct in the upper part of the image.  The dimensionality of the clouds came through nicely, from the near to far ones.  I’d been shooting with a red filter on the camera to enhance the clouds but I took it off for this image so I could still hand-hold (the red filter takes off 3 stops of light) with a small aperture for depth of field (I think this was f/16).

I’ll be getting more of this film in time for fall and winter – from these results I can see it becoming my go-to B&W film.  If anyone out there is using it as well I’d love to hear your comments on how to get the maximum performance.

Take time to stroll

Weather is the grand landscape on the Plains.  It fills the sky with clouds and softens the light with rain.  It moves the leaves around in the forest, dappling any scene with highlights and shadows.  It clears the sky so the sun can glare off the sidewalks and darken the ground under the smallest bush.  Weather here creates mountains in the sky that move to your desired location.

Planning good images is important, having a sense of where what type of light will be and when with respect to your subject.  But there’s a lot to be said for serendipity as well, exercised by the well calculated random walk with a single camera.  Pick the right kind of weather and you’ll find compositions everywhere – just take your time and pay attention.

I’m wondering how to combine the best of street and landscape photography, learning to see Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment in the natural world around.  Wildlife photographers recommend images where the animal is doing something, either natural for its species and habitat, or unexpected for the type of animal.  Like humans, decisive moments for animals brings the story into clarity with a single glance.  But what about landscapes?

Weather provides the decisive moments.  The mountain, lake, river, forest, etc. isn’t going anywhere or doing anything so light, that which makes each moment unique, has to come to it.  And the photographer has to see that unfolding in front of them and be ready.

Being ready and extensively planning may or may not be the same thing.  Being ready can simply mean carrying a camera on your strolls and using it when your eye catches something interesting.  The choice of where to stroll, the time of day, the time of year – these are ways to enhance being ready but not essential when your eyes are open and engaged with your brain.  It’s probably more important to actually stroll than to plan for any event that might happen along the way.

Society makes a lot of creativity, usually with a yardstick to measure who has and uses it and who doesn’t.  Yet people who study it continue to note that being prepared to catch the moment is essential to creativity, and not limited to a few individuals.  Our society is not conducive to taking time to be ready – we have too many items on our lists, each driving out precious time necessary for awareness.  The start of creativity is a conscious decision to start paying attention and making some sense out of what we perceive.  That sense may result in a photograph, a drawing, a song or a dance; regardless, it will be a personal reflection on what came about once we were ready.