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TOP Down (Briefly)

TOP will be down for maintenance for a few days. However we will be back AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! As early as Saturday, but at least by Monday.

—Mike, TOP Chief Custodian and Facilities Maintenance Engineer

OT: The Art of Tea (for Two)...Pu Erhs

By Ctein

When I first wrote about the art of tea, I mentioned pu erhs, and several people asked me what they were.

It's no wonder. Pu erh teas have only been freely available in the U.S. for a score of years, and so are little-known and even less understood. Some of them have a unique flavor most commonly (and accurately) translated as "dirt," but describing all pu erhs that way would be no more accurate than describing all cheeses as being cheddary. The variety of flavors available in pu erhs makes them perhaps the most diverse of the groups of teas.

A new pu erh may be drinkable, but it is as likely to be bitter or astringent. Pu erh teas, though, are not merely dead dried leaves; they are chemically and biologically active. Pu erhs are supposed to age. Think cheeses and wines. The leaves continue to undergo oxidative and enzymatic changes, and they harbor microflora that further digest and ferment them. Pu erhs are eminently drinkable within a few years, but it can take anywhere from 10 years to 60 years for them to become truly brilliant. And, just as with cheeses and wines, many of them become totally forgettable.

Pu erhs come in four major types. Each type has its own broad flavor characteristics. Uncooked is traditional. The leaves are packed together, either loosely or compacted into bricks and bings (discs), where they start to age. Over the long run, uncooked pu erhs are more likely to produce the most spectacular teas.

Cooked pu erh is either gently heated or allowed to heat more from fermentation. This greatly accelerates the aging process producing a mature beverage much more quickly, but also denatures some of the chemical/biological components, so a cooked pu erh ages much less later. Like the uncooked versions, it can be aged as loose-leaf or compacted.

When it comes to brewing, pu erhs are practically bulletproof and thrive on vigorous brewing. They are one of the few teas where the universal recommendation is to start with boiling water. Brewing times range from 1 to 5 min., typically, but it's pretty much impossible to overbrew these teas. A half hour steep may produce a brew stronger than one would like (and so need a bit of dilution), but it will be flavorful, not bitter.

Pu erhs are designed for multiple infusions. I had one very nice pu erh that was only good for three brewings and I felt kind of, well, cheated. Another one was still doing well on the eighth pot. The flavor can change with each successive brew. A pu erh may be intensely dirty and smoky on the first pour and by the fifth be so grassy and fragrant that you'd think it was a floral tea. I can have one pu erh pot that I'm drinking from for the entire day, and it's like I'm drinking a whole bunch of different kinds of tea.

This unique characteristic, combined with the wide variety of flavors that pu erhs have to begin with, makes it pretty much impossible to characterize them as a group.

The ongoing aging process that makes pu erhs so fascinating is responsible for my comment last time that they are simultaneously some of the best bargains you can buy and an easy way to go bankrupt. For proper aging, the leaves are kept slightly warm (room temperature or a bit above), definitely dry, away from light, and open to air, because many of the reactions are aerobic ones. Paper's a common wrap. If you find a bing that is sealed in airtight plastic it's likely to be very cheap and of low quality.

Do not judge a bing by its cover. These are all very cheap pu erhs, colorful boxes notwithstanding. Entirely drinkable, entirely uninspiring. But with time, who knows?

Low grade but entirely drinkable bings in the 12 ounce range are available for prices between $5 and $15 in many Chinese markets. At that price, one can afford to experiment. Jon Singer picked up a very cheap bing in a market a dozen years back. Some of it was put aside and forgotten until about a year ago. When brewed up, it was so complicated and subtle that Jon and I couldn't describe it. We could pick out a slightly lemony flavor note, but it was like trying to pick one single instrument out of a large orchestra. It was as far from smoky and dirty as you could imagine.

Jon sent me a couple of these very cheap bings. They are drinkable, if uninspiring, and I've put one of them in the back of the cupboard to see what it is like in another decade or so. It'll probably be lousy, but what the heck, it was $6.

Three excellent and promising pu erhs. The two on the left came from Cha Guan and are no longer available, while the small bing on the right is one I just acquired from TeaSource.

Excellent bings and bricks go for $30–$60 when relatively young; my absolute favorite pu erh is a 500 gram brick that cost me $40 (that's enough for the better part of a year's worth of steady tea drinking). Daniel at Cha Guan (see my earlier tea post) was so proud of this find that he made it his shop's signature tea until it ran out. It's so smoky on the first pour it's like drinking a campfire, and it changes wonderfully with successive infusions. I was suffficiently impressed that I ordered a second brick and that is in the back of a cupboard. I'll see what happens to it in another decade. Truth is, I'm only a third of the way through the first brick after a year and a half.

Here's where financial madness can set in. You can acquire huge numbers of bings at individually reasonable prices. Before you know it, you have a substantial fortune tied up in dried camellia leaves (with the risk of finding down the line that you have the caffeinated equivalent of vinegar.) Happily, I do not have the collector allele in my genome. Still, one is tempted, especially when someone like Roy Fong comes back with a taster's set of eight bings, designed to appeal to a variety of palates and situations and which he has even greater hopes for when aged. A mere $350. I resisted. But I thought about it.

You don't want to know what will happen to the prices of some of these when they are fully aged, if they turn out to be as good as hoped. Really, you don't. Small amounts of the very best aged pu erhs sell for princely sums. I've never tried them; I never expect to. Fortunately, I am entirely happy with my modestly priced, delicious brews.

Ctein

Sometimes, Ctein's off-topic columns on TOP grow on you, and get better with age. If you don't like them now, set them aside for a little while. Who knows what might happen?

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Featured Comment by Mano: "Here in China (hello from China), puer tea is widely considered to be top dog, though a few years ago there was a scandal that this prized symbol of Chinese culture was actually being produced in Africa and sold in the country with fraudulent credentials. Back then you could spend the typical worker's entire year salary on a quarter kilo brick of the tea; after the African issues and other problems with hoarders and speculators the price of the tea dropped like a rock. Now anyone can get a decent aged tea for an affordable price, and it has become very common. In fact I may have a few bricks of it sitting in the back of some cupboard in my kitchen. People like to give it to each other as gifts, which get given again to other people because no one can drink all of it."

Featured Comment by Fabian: "I will check back in a decade or so, to see if I hate this article by then. Today, though, I found it to be a very interesting and inspiring read. 'Drinking a campfire' certainly sounds like something worth testing! Thanks, Ctein!"

Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "I never did get the 'tea' thing. My grandfather used to drink Lipton Tea. He'd plop the tea bag into a cup and add a couple of little saccharine tablets to it to sweeten it up. He was an odd man."

Featured Comment by Jerry Lewis-Evans: "Pu erh, or a phrase sounding phonetically similar, was a phrase that cropped up on various live Frank Zappa albums. It seemed to be one of those band 'in' jokes, but being from England I always took it to be a phrase that you would say while holding your nose to indicate an unpleasant smell! Maybe he was just indicating that it was time for a tea break!"

U.K. Deal on Lightroom 3

Adobe Lightroom 3 is being offered at at Amazon U.K. for 1/3 off the usual price for a limited time. The price of £95 has been extended, and is good through March 2nd.

At current rates of exchange, this just about matches exactly the current U.S. price. (Seems it usually goes at a premium in the U.K.)

Mike
(Thanks to Gavin McLelland)

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Improving Your Sensors

I went to have my vision tested yesterday, which for one reason and another ended up monopolizing most of the day. Some vocabulary for your edification, if for some reason you are as ignorant as I was yesterday:

Optician: Technican who makes (or sometimes just sells) lenses and eyeglasses.

Optometrist: Licensed medical professional trained to prescribe and fit lenses to improve vision and to diagnose and treat various eye diseases.

Ophthalmologist: Specialist in medical and surgical eye problems. Also, hardest medical specialty to remember how to correctly spell. (I vote we improve matters by getting rid of that first aitch. That first ell could go too. Opthamologist: There, isn't that better?)

I've actually known this in the past, but my ignorance on the matter seems to be self-renewing.

At any rate, I saw an optometrist yesterday. I have a problem in my right eye which so far no one has been able to diagnose; it's 20/60 and not particularly susceptible to correction. My left eye is age-appropriate, about 20/40 and very correctable. I'm learning how to use viewfinders left-eyed.

Unlike Clark Kent, glasses improve my super powers.

I got fitted for a pair of glasses specifically corrected for 22–24 inches, the distance my computer screen is from my eyes. I did this not for my eyes but for my neck, which has been hurting: the problem is that on sites where the text is not easily resized, I lean in and squint at the screen, hunching as I do so. I'm hoping my new glasses will relieve eyestrain at the computer and help me relax. They should also be good for looking at work in galleries and museums. (Maybe I'll get a pair of bifocals corrected for eight feet on top and two feet on the bottom and call them "museum glasses.")

I suppose everyone in the world but me takes perfect care of themselves, visiting their physician twice a year, their dentist three times, and their optometrist once. But just in case you haven't seen your optometrist in a few years, I urge you to make an appointment. Keep those sensors in good shape! And that prescription up to date.

Mike

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Open Mike: Coffee 'n' the Car

Coffee
I won't be writing a lot more on coffee, and there's a reason for that.

I've raised my game considerably when it comes to my morning cup: I'm now roasting all my own coffee; I got myself a good burr grinder (the #1 most important purchase if you want good coffee), and I've put together a small "personal library" about coffee and learned an awful lot about it. As with most subjects, it's much more extensive than meets the eye, and much more fascinating than you'd think, once you get into it.

Aye, but here's the rub: I can't be a coffee connoisseur. Why? A very good reason: I can't smell. (I was going to say "I don't smell good," but hey, I shower.) That is, I don't have a good sense of smell.

They say that dogs' sense of smell is ten to 100 times as good as ours, but that they can't taste very well at all. Food is all in the nose for them. It's long been known, anecdotally and scientifically, that for humans, too, the most exquisite and sophisticated appreciation of flavors is a confabulation of taste and smell. Well, I've become convinced that half of the appreciation of coffee, if not more, is in the nose as well. And I just have a very poor sense of smell.

That isn't just the way I was born: I had chronic sinus infections for years, acquired a dependency on nasal spray for a time, and finally had to have an operation on my sinuses in 1988. I've probably had 80 to 100 sinus infections in my life, and used to have to get my sinuses flushed regularly. (Stop me if this is too much information). I breathe clearly, now, finally, but can't smell worth a damn.

The bottom line with coffee is, I can't appreciate the nuances. I like the good stuff, and I can tell the difference between what I like and what I don't, but I'm convinced I'm not getting the whole picture. So I figure I'm just not suited to be a coffee connoisseur. That fits with what I've long known about myself: I like good coffee, but I don't really mind bad coffee all that much. It has to be really bad before I can't drink it.

However, I have discovered that roasting your own is very easy—almost too easy. The roaster I bought is easy to learn and simple to use, although it takes up a significant amount of room and you need a Shop-Vac to clean up with. It's only as big as a large toaster oven or small microwave, but it needs clear space around it when you use it. Cleanup takes 30 seconds if you do it slowly, so don't be put off by that. They say it can be expected to last for 2–3 years of regular use, but green coffee beans cost 1/2 to 2/3 what roasted coffee costs, so I figure, for me, the roaster will pay for itself 1 1/2 to 2 times over before it goes to the big roastery in the sky. If you drink a lot of coffee and have the space, the money savings alone could be reason enough to learn to roast.

And even I can smell the aroma of roasting coffee.

The car
I'm frankly astonished by the Subaru-Toyota sports car that's just been introduced (and that I've been writing about). See if you follow: Subaru's version is called the BRZ, which, among other things, is Serbian for "quick"—or so I've heard; Toyota's version is called the FT-86, but will be sold as the Scion FR-S in North America, Scion being Toyota's budget brand targeted at young people. The two companies' cars are mechanically the same, but have different styling, tires, and options lists, and, more importantly, different suspension setups. Toyota did the styling and contributed some engine technology, but Subaru did the engineering and is building all of them.

Why astonished? Despite being talked about since almost forever, this thing comes completely out of left field. To begin with, it's small, and it's light, at least by today's standards—Ron Kiino in this month's Motor Trend calls it a "Miata coupe," and he's not far off, except that you can't get 200 hp and 150 pound-feet of torque from any known unblown Miata engine. And Mazda no longer sells a blown Miata. Yes, the Subaru-Toyota has a stick shift and the all-important rear-wheel drive, which are getting uncommon, and the engine's just a four-banger, albeit a boxer like in a Porsche. I love four-cylinder engines. Give me one any day, as long as the car it's in suits it.

All business: the BRZ from the helm. Photo courtesy Motor Trend.

Made by Subaru, you did get that? Subaru, which virtually forged its identity on full-time all-wheel-drive cars long before they were so common (remember when AWD vehicles were called "4x4s" and you had to switch manually into four wheel drive whenever you needed it?) And it significantly bucks some some very pervasive trends: the engine (at least for now, as introduced—the enthusiast base is already salivating for the inevitable STI version) is naturally aspirated, when everybody and his uncle is building turbos and putting them in everything (have you heard the one about the Turbo Chevy Sonic? It's true, and is reportedly a great improvement). It's dedicated to handling, in this day of horsepower über alles, when luxury carmakers will drop in engines that are too big even to the detriment of handling. (Mercedes AMG, I am talkin' 'bout you.)

No CVT, no turbo- or supercharger, no cylinder management, no AWD, no keep-up-with-the-Joneses horsepower for guys who are afraid their masculinity will be threatened if they don't cart around a whacking big thirsty engine they never need.

Yeah, it will have sat-nav available and a nanny or two. But it's not loaded down with a bunch of features. For the most part it's just basic, pure, old-fashioned sports car.

If you've been reading me on cameras for any length of time, you know what a breath of fresh air this is to me. I mean, BMW should really be ashamed of itself for not abandoning that old tagline "The ultimate driving machine." (Although it does seem to be gradually replacing it with "Sheer driving pleasure," which is more accurate.) Did you know that there's actually a BWM that has a cabin so well insulated from sound that buyers complain they can't hear the V8 well enough—so BMW actually pipes fake V8 engine noise into the passenger cabin through the stereo system when the car is switched to "sport mode"? I am not making this up. They're nice luxury cars, and I'm not slagging you if you own one, but, really, the days of the "ultimate driving machine" are completely over and gone even at BMW. Everything's market driven and the market is focused on "luxury" to a fault or "economy" in the breach.

And now here comes a pure driving machine, a Miata coupe with the engine Mazda won't give us. And it's been engineered from the ground up. All new. Any idea how uncommon that is, in this day and age? You can count the number of clean-slate cars on your fingers and toes, and if you lop off the one-percenter end of the market you won't need your toes.

It's like a camera coming along that had a 6-MP full-frame sensor, no viewing screen, no JPEG engine, buttons and knobs assignable by loading in third-party apps, and that had a viewfinder like an OM-4T*. And that was made of metal with leather gripping surfaces. The whole photography world would do double-takes. No, triple-takes. We'd all be shaking our heads and wondering, from what alternative universe did that thing come? 

That's the BRZ. I can't wait to drive it. This, you will probably hear about from me again.

Mike

"Open Mike" is your host going off-topic and astray. Sundays only.

P.S. Here's my coffee library:

Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival by Kenneth Davids. The basics of home roasting. Contains most of the information found in his more basic Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying.
Everything But Espresso: Professional Coffee Brewing Techniques by Scott Rao. The science behind brewing the perfect cup (essential). There's a companion volume for espresso if that's your interest.
The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer. (You might have to buy this one used!)
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast. The history of coffee from its mythological origin-story to the advent of Starbucks; some overlap with the title above, but a different focus.
Javatrekker: Dispatches From the World of Fair Trade Coffee by Dean Cycon. On-the-ground view of direct trade and fair trade. Entertaining. Coffee is the world's second most valuable legal commodity, after oil, so the economics of it are important.

There's also a lot of information on the web, of course, although a lot of it is pretty far-flung.

*Don't say B&W-only, Mike. Don't say it. Don't say anything about a square sensor. These things will just make people crazy. Do not make people crazy.

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Featured Comment by Karl: "To be honest, I'm not crazy about the body styling. After driving one it might well become beautiful, but as I see it now it looks a bit over- styled. The sculpture to it feels a little forced, a bit too much. The line is clean then broken. Just my opinion."

Mike replies: True, its looks are only so-so. But then, the major requirement in terms of appearance is to, let us say, keep the lack of appeal at bay, which they've more or less done. I mean, look at the parentage here: Subaru, whose WRX is one of the strangest of modern designs, to put it politely; and Toyota, whose previous sports car was the MR2. Considering that lineage, it's pretty amazing that the new baby isn't quite a bit...er, less attractive.

Featured Comment by Earl Dunbar: "Oh man, the new OM-D is going to be a sexy OM-4T with a big B&W sensor! Yaaaa hooo!!!"

Mike replies: I know nothing. Unfortunately, I mean that un-ironically.

Featured Comment by JH: "When I read that BMW was using this sound system to pipe in engine noise for the new M5, I collapsed in laughter. When I had a E46 M3 and was a BMW Club Instructor for track days, I cornered the M brand manager at a club gathering and gave him an earful about the car being so quiet. He calmly explained they could not make loud exhausts or engines because of the European laws regarding noise. So I suggested, jokingly, of course, the could at least put the noise through the sound system (which is networked with the engine management system). Oh my god, am I responsible for this travesty?"

Mike replies: Oh, so you're the guy!

Aspects of Aspect Ratios

"I never, ever crop...except when I want to."

—Frank DiPerna, about 1983

Sorry I didn't pull "featured comments" for Kirk yesterday. I was feeling unaccountably out of sorts, and probably would have mucked up the conversation.

I've never shot square, myself, and have always liked longer rectangles. Of course I've had to shoot with various square cameras over the years—my first camera-reviewing assignment, for the old Camera & Darkroom (R.I.P.), was surveying medium-format cameras, and when you review cameras you have to shoot with all kinds of things. My first review was of the then-new Mamiya 6, which shot square. I did mention in the comments that with the one square format camera I owned and shot with for any length of time, an Exakta 66 Model 2 with a waist-level finder, I cropped everything to a vertical. I didn't start out meaning to do it; it's just the way I saw everything. And then once I started, naturally I couldn't stop.

Mike shoots square. That was the Potomac estuary south of National Airport.

It was probably the only time in my life I consistently visualized a crop with every shot. Of course it all had to be the same crop; the work was exhibited around D.C. back in the day (it got nice reviews in the newspapers) which is why I still have some framed pieces floating around the house.

And this will make Kirk smile. The one summer that I did a lot of work with a 4x5 camera, I attached a section of a small, thin ruler to the inside of the camera back so that the camera created a more oblong rectangle—the same aspect ratio as 5x7. I didn't want to deal with the too-squareness of the 4x5 shape.

All my 4x5" negatives have a clear bar at the bottom where I modified the film holder to change the camera's aspect ratio. This is Polaroid Type 55
P/N film, from a project I did on a grant.

I've been shooting mostly with the GF1 lately, and am getting used to 4:3.

Of course, what Kirk is saying is, there was an aspect ratio that was right for him...so, by extension, there might be one for you, too; and, these days, some cameras let you choose. So you don't need to let yourself be bullied by the camera.

Mike

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Kirk's Take (Kirk Tuck #4)

They stole our choice of aspect ratios. Now we’re getting them back

By Kirk Tuck

When I started taking photographs, back in 1978, I picked up a 35mm camera because that's what matched my budget and, I thought, my needs. I spent some years trying desperately trying to confine my vision of what a scene or portrait should look like into a long and stringy frame that never quite worked. When I needed to shoot horizontally I always needed to slice off all the junk that showed up on the either side of the "good part" of the frame. When I shot vertically there was alway twenty five or thirty percent of the top or bottom of the frame that needed to be chiseled away to calm my eyes.

Gradually I became habituated to the long, skinny and mathematically clumsy frame and tried my best. I figured that having a photographic vision that was fluid and smooth and easy must be for people with some innate, natural talent. Like those lucky bastards who can just pick up a guitar and make wonderful music after a handful of lessons.

Then one day a friend who was also interested in photography showed me a camera he'd just picked up. It was a twin lens YashicaMat rollfilm camera that shot 12 square frames on each roll of 120 film. Square frames!

My friend couldn't warm up to the reversed image in the waist level finder and suggested that I give the camera a whirl. I reached down and pulled the finder apparatus into position, flipped up the little attached magnifier, looked through and focused. And, in an instant, something somewhat magical happened: Everywhere I pointed the camera a perfect composition sprang into being. I could point the camera at the intersection of a concrete curb and the asphalt of a street and, there it was, perfect composition.

And the joy I felt when I lined up my first informal portrait was wonderful. It eclipsed everything I'd done in photography to that point.

I felt like I couldn't afford the camera. I was still in school and working a part time job. But when I started down the stairs of my apartment, intent on returning the YashicaMat to my friend, I realized that I couldn’t afford not to buy it. The effect was that powerful.

When I decided to pursue the rigorous and noble undertaking of professional, commercial photography I went right out and bought a used Hasselblad 500 CM and 150mm Sonnar Lens. Every time I looked through the finder of that camera I knew the one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about would be framing. I had found my perfect aspect ratio.

And I found, when looking at the work of others—even masters—I have always had a prejudice for the calmness and formal structure of the square. I have friends who've used panoramic cameras and all the other formats. I've dabbled (mostly unsuccessfully) with 6x7 cm, 6x9 cm, 6x12 cm 6x4.5 cm, 4x5 inch, and 8x10 inch cameras and almost every time I find myself chaffing at the aesthetic discomfort of all that wasted space.

"No Problem." I thought. "I'm happy just shooting these marvelous, magical squares of color and black and white." And I did. Cartons and cartons of Fuji and Kodak films. Mostly Tri-X, but other flavors when the menu called for them.

And then one day it all collapsed.

We made the transition to digital. Clients loved it. You could shoot quick. You didn't need Polaroid. Etc., etc. We’ve heard it all a thousand times before. But the thing that really never got talked about was the most important thing we lost: aspect ratio choice.

If you bought a professional level digital camera you had no choice of aspect ratios. You got stuck with the nasty old 35mm, 3:2 ratio whether you liked it or not. And my battle with wasted and unusually configured space returned. And it was nasty. One maker of digital backs offered a square back but it was priced for people working for jumbo clients in world class markets. I was stuck with mainstream.

I'm sure there are those among us who can look at a 3:2 frame and immediately, and comfortably divine the "presence" of the square without assistance. Good for them. I'm not one of them. I like a little assistance from my camera in the form of clearly defined boundaries. Edges. Guide posts. When I look into the finder of my camera I want to see a square frame and I want everything not in the square frame to be excluded from view. And given the popularity of square frame cameras from the 1950s right up to the age of digital, I'm sure there are many who agree with me.

I suspect that rigorous boundaries are helpful because they eliminate one variable of choice and so let us concentrate on composition in a different way, regardless of which format you favor. Cropping after the fact is not the same.

One of the reasons I have been so passionately enamored of the mirrorless cameras is that removing the optical finder from the equation means camera makers can give us back our freedom of choice when it comes to the configuration of our framing via the electronic viewfinder. I bought the Olympus E-P2 with its electronic viewfinder largely because I can set the camera so that, when I bring the finder to my eye, I see a square image framed by black. And every EVF capable camera I can think of strikes the same blow for Freedom of Choice.

If you like wide, they give you 16:9. If you like that pedestrian and ubiquitous 35mm frame they're happy to give you the option to "3:2 it" all you want. And, true to most of the sensors in the mirrorless cameras I tend to use, they also offer the stodgy and boxy 4:3 ratio. You are free to use any of these "lesser" aspect ratios or join me in re-embracing the most intoxicating of formats, 1:1. It even sounds uniquely balanced. One-to-one.

Given the quality of camera files these days I've come to believe that flexibility in setting your preferred aspect ratio is one of the most important factors for overall photographic success and, that the move back to a gracious banquet of aspect ratios is a sign that we're moving past the gnawing hunger for more pixels and less noise into the more lofty sphere of actually thinking about the content and artful arrangement of our images instead of just their legibility.

If you are consistently uneasy composing images I would suggest that you and your present camera format may be at odds. If you have access to an electronic viewfinder camera with changeable aspect ratios you might want to take it out for spin and see what works for you. One size fits all is rarely a good plan in the mystical world of art. Or in the pragmatic world of photography. And if you really love the 3:2? Well aren't you just as happy as a pig at the trough?

SUPPORT ASPECT RATIO FREEDOM!

Kirk

Photographer, photo book author, and photography blogger Kirk Tuck's monthly column on TOP appears on the last Saturday of every month.

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Blue Marble 2012

NASA released this "blue marble" picture two days ago. It was taken by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP, named in honor of the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Granted, there's a fair amount of distortion in this—Mexico isn't actually as big as South America—but it's beautiful. There's a very large version available for download at the NPP page at nasa.gov.

Vern Suomi, considered the father of satellite meteorology, invented the device that for many years showed us those moving cloud- and weather-progression images on the evening news.

Mike
(Thanks to Doug Dolde)

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Featured Comment by Goff: "This is a worthy tribute to Vern Suomi, who was a good friend and colleague.

"In the early '70s he invented a method to measure the wind in the tropics from the difference in position of clouds in successive frames from a geostationary satellite (like this one which is named after him, but much less capable, 40 years ago).

"His technique was taken off the shelf when the alternative French method based on balloon drift failed spectacularly leaving a massive gap in the Global Weather Experiment. Suomi's method saved the day. It is still used routinely by weather forecasters. He would have loved this picture."

Michihiro Yamaki, 1933-2012

Michihiro Yamaki of Sigma being presented with the Golden Photokina pin by Oliver P. Kuhrt, Executive Vice President of Koelnmesse GmbH, on the opening day of the CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show in Yokohama, Japan, last February 9th (photo courtesy Sigma).

A pioneer of the photo industry has died. Mr. Michihiro Yamaki, founder of Sigma Corporation and its longtime Chairman and CEO, passed away on January 18th. Michihiro Yamaki began working in the optical industry while still a student, and started Sigma when he was just 28 years old.

The heart and soul of Sigma Corporation for many years, he was passionately interested in photography. In the last years of his life he was shown great appreciation throughout the industry, awarded Person of the Year from The PhotoImaging Manufacturers and Distributors Association, the Hall of Fame award from the United Nations, and, at the CP+ photographic show in Japan, the Golden Photokina Pin from Photokina—its highest honor.

Our respects and condolences to his family and all those who knew or worked with Mr. Yamaki.

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Kofron)

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Ben Syverson's Mattebox

I don't usually post much about apps, but rules are made to be broken. Ben Syverson (a TOP regular, if you'll excuse the brag) has created the killer iPhone camera app, called Mattebox. The camera interface is based on the Konica Hexar(!) (I organized a short-lived "Konica Hexar Club" on CompuServe when that camera came out).

Mattebox for iPhone from Ben Syverson on Vimeo.

$3.99 at the App Store. Mine's downloading now. And congratulations and good luck to Ben.

Mike
(Thanks to Charlie Didrickson)

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Featured Comment by Frank Petronio: "This is wonderful...makes me want to suck it up and get an iPhone. But the truly great purpose for this would be if someone could hack a professional DSLR and give us the option to install something with this quality of usability instead of the crappy interfaces that Canikony impose upon us. The first manufacturer that opens up their cameras to apps will crush the market—it's staring them in the face and they still can't see it."

Lens Test: Voigtländer Nokton 25mm ƒ/0.95 for Micro 4/3

By Ctein

John Camp loaned me this lens to play with because he thought it would amuse me. Indeed, it did. Understand that this is a $1,200 toy, a specialized bauble for them what demands fractional aperture numbers (although ƒ/0.95 is a bare 1/6th stop beyond ƒ/1, so for the rest of this article, I'm just gonna say ƒ/1). Idiosyncratic barely begins to describe this optic; I don't think I've ever encountered a lens with more character, and that's both good and bad.

The lens is compact and dense. Only about two and a half inches in diameter and length, it weighs almost a pound. The build impresses. Please understand that I am not especially sensitive to build quality, which means my threshold for caring is extremely high. I've handled and used my share of Leica equipment. I'd say it's nice. That's it. Meh, so sue me. This lens, though, it's like a work of art.

The 300-degree helical runs from infinity down to about 1:4—essentially macro on a sensor as small as 4/3 (and I will get back to that). It needs that wide swing; at ƒ/1, submillimeter movements produce observable changes in sharpness. But, oh, does it swing. The focusing action is not "smooth as silk"—silk has a perceivable friction. This is silk, slathered with fresh creamery butter, gliding on a bed of frozen, polished teflon. There is no sense of mechanical contact whatsoever, just a preternaturally smooth resistance that accommodates precise focusing movements.

The aperture ring is almost as remarkable. It feels like one barely has to nudge the ring when changing apertures, yet each half-stop detent locks so firmly into place you'll never feel there's a risk of accidentally moving the ring.

OK, enough hardware fetishism. Does this thing actually make decent photos? Well, umm, kinda, sorta depends.

Light falloff, wide open, is, as you'd expect, substantial. This is an ƒ/1 lens on-axis, but by the time you get to the near edge, exposure's more like ƒ/1.4. You'll be down 1 2/3 stops from center to corner. No shock, really; just be aware that underexposure when using this lens wide-open may prove hazardous. Falloff improves rapidly: at ƒ/2 brightness is quite uniform over the entire field, down less than 1/2 stop at the most extreme corners.

Figure 1. Central crops from 3kx4k-pixel photographs show that on-axis the Nokton cleans up very rapidly. Wide-open, even a few score pixels off-axis you start to see aberrations. (click to see at 100% scale)

Wide open, the lens is sharp-but-soft in the very center. Central image quality picks up very rapidly with smaller apertures; stopping down just to ƒ/1.2 makes a substantial difference (fig. 1). By the time you hit ƒ/2 the image quality on-axis is excellent and is as good as it gets—very impressive. Even normal lenses rarely peak out at just two stops below maximum aperture.

Off-axis? Whole 'nuther story. Wide open, you don't have to move more than a few millimeters from dead center to start seeing coma tails. That's observable even in the very small central sections shown in figure 1, which are cropped from 3kx4k-pixel images.

Figure 2. 80% out to corner, image quality is simply horrid wide open. At ƒ/5.6 it's decent, ƒ/8–ƒ/11 is optimal. (click to see at 100% scale)

The quality gets dramatically worse the further one moves off axis. Eighty percent of the way out (figure 2) it's horrendous. At ƒ/1 and ƒ/1.2 there's very little difference. It's so awful that if Coca-Cola made this lens, it would be giving "Coke bottle bottom lenses" a bad name.

Some reviewers describe this quality as being "dreamy" or "glowing." I'd say that's much the same way a realtor will describe a broom-closet-sized studio apartment as "cozy" or "intimate." Not me, sorry. Try "schmeary," as in what you'd see if you wiped off your fingers off on the lens after eating a nice bagel with plenty schmear.

Get beyond ƒ/1.2 and the image cleans up rapidly. The problem is the image quality has such a long way to go that you don't really clean up the 80% zone until you hit ƒ/5.6, and the extreme corners require ƒ/8–ƒ/11.

This is the upper left quadrant of an ƒ/1.6 photo at 50% scale (when you click on the image). That gives a fair impression, on screen, of what an 8x10 or 11x14 print would look like. Observe the fairly sharp boundary between good and poor image quality at about 75% of the way out from center.

The falloff in quality as you move off-axis is unusual. It's abrupt; there's a well-defined circle of decent image quality outside of which the quality plummets like Columbus sailing off the edge of the world, as fig. 3 illustrates. At ƒ/5.6, you've got 90% coverage with decent image quality. If you're inclined to a bit of cropping, you'd be set. ƒ/8 is probably your best choice for overall quality (figures 4 and 5), while ƒ/11 gives you uniformly sharp photos all the way to the corners.

Figure 4. A full frame, photographed at ƒ/8. Image quality's pretty uniform, except at the very most extreme corners.
100% center and corner snippets below.

Figure 5.

This lens lets you have it good or have it fast, but ya gotta choose one.

It'll also let you have it close. As I mentioned, it focuses down to about 1:4. With a sensor that measures only 13x17mm, that's a pretty tight closeup. Is it any good there? Well, it's better than I expected. There's a huge amount of barrel distortion (figure 6), no big surprise in a lens that isn't specifically corrected for extremely close work. But, it's nice clean barrel distortion that Photoshop can get rid of perfectly (figure 7). You'll need to stop down, of course, for anything resembling good quality corner-to-corner. At the macro end of things, I'd probably set it as ƒ/11 and forget it. Do that, though, and you'll be pleasantly surprised. Yeah, better at the center than the corners, but acceptable everywhere (figure 8).

Figure 6. ƒ/11 is the ideal "macro" aperture for this lens, which can focus down to about 1:4 magnification. This is a photograph of an iPad screen. The funny plaid pattern is an artifact of sampling this image down to fit in 800 pixels; it's not in the original photo.

Figure 7. The photo from Fig. 6 after barrel-distortion correction in Photoshop. Pay no attention to the plaid.

Figure 8. Center and corner portions of figure 7 at 100% scale.

If I were still doing lots of nightclub photography, I'd snap this lens up instanter. It's maximum-aperture flaws wouldn't be obvious in that kind of setting and stopped (way!) down it's a credible performer in normal situations.

Ctein

Ctein looks into interesting things on a weekly basis on TOP. His column usually appears on Wednesdays—this week the Laz. Ed. delayed it.

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Featured Comment by Noons: "Been using this baby on my E-PL1 since it came out. Rarely use any other fixed lens with this camera, with the possible exception of a very old Tamron Adaptall 28mm that is absolutely sublime on Micro 4/3 and a Canon FD 200mm ƒ/2.8 that has incredible bokeh. If I have to take interior portraits on available light, this ƒ/0.95 lens is the first grab. It is amazing for what it was designed for. And therein lies the rub: it is not a lens for landscape shots! [Just for the record, Ctein didn't say it was. He merely used a landscape shot to illustrate the qualities of the lens he was examining. It's just an illustration, not a recommendation of what you should shoot. —Ed.] Nor do I think anyone in their right mind would try such with a ƒ/0.95 aperture, whoever the maker might be! Thanks, Voigtländer, for putting out an affordable kick-ass-aperture normal lens."

Featured Comment by Min Wei: "Wow, my flickr view went out of the roof today because Mike Plews' comment mentioned my Canon 50mm ƒ/0.95 with Sony Nex-5N combo, ha ha. [Mike linked to a picture of Min's camera and lens yesterday. —Ed.] For me, the ƒ/0.95 is for night shots and bokeh shots. I mainly use my Canon 50mm ƒ/0.95 with my Canon 7 rangefinder. It allows me to shoot low ISO films in low light situations without pushing the films.

"And of course the bokeh! I just love it! Here is one shot I took with an ISO 64 film at night at ƒ/0.95. Here is the one taken with the Sony Nex-3:

Photo by Min Wei

"And about using the Voigtländer lens for landscape shots. I say why not. Yes, ƒ/0.95 is the key point of this lens. It's good for low light shooting and bokeh shots. At same time, many people will attach this lens to their Micro 4/3 camera and keep it on most of the time. The performance at other aperture other than at ƒ/0.95 is definitely worth checking! And, there is at least one use for shooting landscape at infinity, wide open—shooting landscape scenes with stars and the Milky Way at night! How cool is that! Just my two cents."

Awwww...

Doppelgang, 2001–2012

There are few things in life better than a good dog. Years ago, my mother decided to try a small dog in her small Georgetown home, so she went to a breeder and got a miniature long-haired silver-dapple Dachshund with one blue eye she named Wolfgang. Maybe ten pounds soaking wet, Wolfgang was an outsized character, a little Napoleon, brash and full of himself, never afraid to challenge dogs four times, or even eight times, his size. By the time Wolfie got old—spirit undimmed—my mother had gotten remarried, and my stepfather also had grown very fond of Wolfie. So they went back to the same breeder and got a puppy who turned out to be Wolfie's great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew—also a miniature long-haired silver-dapple Dachshund with, yep, one blue eye. Although his temperament was completely different, he looked just like Wolfgang. So of course they named him Doppelgang.

(The joke, if you're not familiar with the word, is that doppelgänger—which I think means "double walker" in German—means a double, lookalike, counterpart, or alter ego—in literature, sometimes of a ghostly nature and occasionally sinister, although that last doesn't pertain here.)

Alas, today will be Doppie's last day on Earth. Wolfgang died with his boots on, so to speak, in a spectacularly catastrophic car accident that miraculously spared his owners and the younger dog; Doppie, in keeping with his milder nature, will go to sleep for the last time today at the vet's. He has been ill for some time.

I once said the only thing wrong with dogs is that they don't live long enough; my mother's cousin Ham Schirmer answered, "That's just god's way of making sure you get to know more than one."

My sympathetic condolences to Jane and John, and everyone else who knew their dear little Dopp, who really was very sweet. He gets blessed on his journey with that highest of compliments: "good dog."

Mike

P.S. If you've never seen the Nova show "Dogs Decoded," I highly recommend it—I've seen it twice now and found it completely fascinating. It's available for streaming on Netflix and from iTunes as well. Plus, they rerun it on Public Television now and then, so you could just keep a lookout.

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Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part II

You probably remember Part I, from a week ago Saturday. You might want to go back and re-read that before diving into this part. First, to reiterate: no B&W film photographer needs to practice sensitometry. It's absolutely not necessary for doing good work. This article does, however, contain information of real value for all APUG-type B&W photographers, so don't skip it if you're one of those—even if you have no intention whatsoever of buying a densitometer or practicing sensitometry.

As an aside, since a week ago Saturday I have acquired not one but two densitometers...

Big Prints From 4/3-Format Sensors

How Big Can You Go?

Carl Weese, Trees in fog, Woodbury, CT, 2012 (Lumix G3, 45–200mm)

By Carl Weese

There's a certain kind of landscape I've done, just once in a while, but for a long time, going all the way back to the 1960s when I did them with Kodachrome II loaded into a Pentax H3v with a 105mm Takumar. These landscapes are unlike my usual practice of working close to subjects using short lenses. They're made from moderate or long distance with moderate or really long telephoto lenses.

Shingletown, PA, 2007 (Pentax K10D with 70mm Limited)

This fall I got around to buying a lens for my Micro 4/3 cameras that would be suitable for this kind of picture—a Lumix 45–200mm. Many of the pictures in the Winter Light Series that I've recently been posting at my Working Pictures Blog were done with this lens using the Lumix G3.

These landscapes can be a bit abstract, more about light and atmosphere than detail, but a certain level of resolution has to be there or I'm not happy with prints from them.

Foggy Morning, Woodbury, CT, 2012 (Lumix G3, 45–200mm)

Obviously a picture like "Foggy Morning" makes very little demand for resolution.

Willow, Woodbury, CT, 2012 (Lumix G3, 45–200mm)

A picture like "Willow" does make enormous demands on resolution, and doesn't work for me unless, no matter how big the print is, examining it at reading distance reveals a wealth of detail with convincing description of the subject matter. A print that looks OK at "normal viewing distance" but falls apart if you move closer to view it at reading distance doesn't cut it. Why entice me to come closer only to disappoint?

Large prints, 20 inches or more wide (I'm not talking about the monster mural-size prints that are popular in the photo art world today), seem to present these pictures, this particular aesthetic, really well. So that brings up the issue of enlargement, both traditional and digital. I began serious digital capture work around 2006, using an Olympus E-1. I was astonished at the quality of 5x7-ish uninterpolated prints, which looked like slight enlargements from medium format film, even though the 4/3 sensor’s physical size was about a quarter that of 35mm film.

However, I noticed I couldn't make them a lot larger than that. I found that I totally disagreed with the common wisdom that digital captures could be up-interpolated by a factor of two with no loss of quality. Nonsense! To my eye a print from a 2X upres file looked like hell.

Understand, most of my serious work is in large* and ultra-large format**, so I'm used to making contact prints from very large film negatives, or modest digital enlargements from those same negatives—so admittedly my standards are a little lofty. For digital files, 1.5X usually worked OK, 1.75X maybe, sometimes—but 2X, never. I can make much bigger prints now, but it's not because enlarging digitally has gotten any better; it's just because I've got more pixels to work with. The physical size of the Micro 4/3 sensor in my Lumix cameras of course is exactly the same as the old 4/3 E-1.

I was astonished again a year and a half or so ago when I saw the quality of the 20-inch wide prints I could make from Panasonic Lumix GF1 captures. But then, the uninterpolated GF1 file, at the native 300 ppi resolution for my HP Z3200 printer, is 13.333 inches. So that 20-inch print is almost exactly the same 1.5X up-res that I found was generally of good quality from the old 5-MP E-1. It's just a whole lot bigger.

When I began to do some of these distant-twigs-and-branches pictures with the new lens, the results were frequently disappointing. Some were fine, but many just weren't sharp enough. The pictures looked fine for online use or even for an 11x14-ish print, but completely fell apart with the very minor up-interpolation of the 16MP file to 20.5 inches, although my usual quick tests of the new lens showed its (computer-enhanced) optical quality to be excellent, at least at short to middle zoom settings, after which an annoying amount of vignette sets in. Amazingly good in fact, considering the $255 price tag. So I wanted to look into this and see what was going on. Obviously distant branches are an extreme problem, but there are similar issues in my more usual short lens pictures like, say, the detail and texture of a brick wall in one of my urban landscapes. If the bricks turned to mush in a print I'd find that just as unacceptable as what the distant branches were looking like. In fact, I gave up on a fairly pricey wide angle lens because I couldn't stand the never-really-sharp corners.

So late last week I had chores to do at a place where there are plenty of test subjects for this problem. My earlier experiments were done at reasonable shutter speeds, hand-held, with the default ON setting of the in-lens stabilization. This time I put the camera on a tripod and turned off the stabilization (Panasonic—and everyone else who offers some form of anti-shake--instructs us to turn it off when using a tripod). Bingo! As soon as I looked at the captures on screen, I could see they were crisper. On critical examination at 100% view, there was a surprising amount of variation, but the general level was a big improvement, and a lot more of them than before were just plain sharp!

Crows, Roxbury, CT, 2012

This detail is a 100% crop (after you click on it to see the full size upload) showing that even all the way up in pixel peeping territory, there is good definition in the tree branches and surprisingly nice tonal variation in the deep black values of the crow sitting in the tree. It isn't necessary (or really possible) for a 100% view to look "perfect," but with some practice you can learn to judge how much definition is enough to make a convincing print, and how little definition means the print will fall short.

The variation, I think, is from focus. With shallow depth of field (even at 4/3 sensor size) a thicket of sticks or branches gives a difficult focus target, whether you use the AF or go manual—where in the depth of the thicket will you focus? Probably, most of the time, the front, but that's not so easy to find either by the eye or the AF. I chose a nice looking picture and used the up-interpolation function in ACR to make a file that will print 20.5-inches wide at 300 ppi, then sliced out a 7x20.5-inch strip through a critical area and sent it to the printer. The result is really solid. It's just as good as the enlargements from my short lens street shooting. Which is to say, better, at 20.5 inches, than my 1980s 15-inch square darkroom RA enlargements from Hasselblad negatives.

What may be going on here is primarily mechanical, not digital. After all, this is a very high degree of enlargement of the optical image projected by the lens. I never enlarged my 35mm negatives beyond 12x18" image area in the darkroom, and these 20-inch prints are from an optical image on the sensor that's about a quarter the size of 35mm film.

The 'Higher Expectations' factor
There is an ancient photographic rule of thumb that, with practice, you should get good results hand-holding the camera at a shutter speed that is roughly the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens in use. So, 1/60th for a 50mm, 1/30th for a 35mm, 1/250th for a 200mm, and so on. This is specific to 35mm classic format. A larger hand-held camera would allow slower speeds for enlargements to a given print size, which was convenient since their lenses were usually slower. It's pretty commonly understood that for sub-35mm sensor sizes this rule has to be modified by the "crop factor" of the sensor size. In fact I've noticed that manufacturers incorporate this into the software. With several different cameras I've found that if you set aperture priority or full program mode along with auto ISO, as the light gets dimmer the camera will stop lowering the shutter speed and begin raising ISO right about the point of "reciprocal of shutter speed multiplied by crop factor." The reason this is needed is that the optical image projected by the lens is subjected to more enlargement with a smaller sensor to reach a given print size, and so any degradation due to camera shake will also be magnified by that factor. But that's not enough, because the quality of digital sensors has made us greedy.

I'm thinking that the old rule of thumb needs to be multiplied not only by the crop factor, but also by a "higher expectations factor" for the bigger prints that can be made. I suspect that the old "reciprocal of the shutter speed" rule was envisioned for prints on 8x10" or 11x14" paper. So it wouldn't even apply to 12x18-inch enlargements from Leica negatives, and, come to think of it, it didn’t.

This means that even if you use a full frame DSLR, unless you are only posting online and have no interest in making prints—big prints—the old rule of thumb needs to be modified. I'd estimate by a factor of two, because I think current digital sensors can deliver good results at twice the magnification of the optical image that you could do with film. So the quality of the lens, and the steadiness of the camera, have to conform to a doubled, or more, standard of quality.

The good news here is that even difficult, detailed subjects shot with longer lenses can yield really good prints at 20 inches or more from 4/3 or Micro 4/3 sensors. The caveat is that there is no margin of error. The mechanical stuff has to be right on the money: perfect critical focus, complete suppression of camera shake. The optical quality of the lens, whether digitally enhanced or not, has to be up for the degree of enlargement. There's nothing like a tripod for holding the camera steady. Still, it's nice to be able to respond quickly with a hand-held camera, so I'm planning some tests at longer focal lengths and higher shutter speeds, with and without stabilization. If I get any interesting results, I'll report them.

Carl

*4x5-inch to 8x10-inch view cameras

**View cameras larger than 8x10

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Featured Comment by Bill Pierce: "Boy, do I think you are dead on. Most digital photographers routinely look at screen magnifications of sections of their photographs that have no parallel to what we did in the film world. And after a while, we realize we are looking at a lot of camera shake. It's gotten to the point where I'll use a larger than optimum aperture or higher ISO before I'll drop that shutter speed. And in lower light, a tripod. I feel pretty silly with a little tiny camera on a big tripod, but it works. I think you just wrote the most important 'tech column' on the web in quite a while."