The Online Photographer

The E-P1 to Scale

In the continuing absence of hands-on primary experience, maybe this will help with the E-P1 size debate. A regular reader who's become a friend of the site sent me this illustration he made. He took the images from various places on the web but they're presented scrupulously to scale. (Personally, I think each of us should just wait to judge until we see and hold the camera for ourselves. But we're here to please.)

Left to right, Canon G10 (1/1.7" small sensor), Olympus E-P1 (Micro 4/3), Canon 450D (APS-C), and Canon 5D Mark II (24x36mm or "full-frame"). Click on the image to see it a bit larger.

Mike

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Featured Comment by JK @ Studio Hatyai: "For close to a year, c. 1992, I carried a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder around Tokyo pretty much every day. It was a fairly big, clunky, noisy camera, but within a few months I stopped noticing those things, as you do with something you’re using all the time. The curious thing was, most of my subjects seemed to stop noticing it about then too. Somehow they were picking up on my casualness with the thing.

"Ever since then I’ve quit worrying about the exact size, color, shape etc. of a camera, at least in terms of its potential discretion. Much more than anything else, subjects respond to your ease with your gear, and your ease with them."

Mike replies: I had a weird experience once with that very camera that confirms part of what you're saying. I had one for a few days to try, and I felt very awkward and nervous pointing it at people. One time, believe it or not, I pointed it from my 4th-floor balcony at some nearby construction, at one guy working on a roof, and as I was looking through the camera the construction worker looked right up at me and glared. It seemed to me at the time like he had sensed himself being watched or spied on. It was uncanny, but I don't think it was a coincidence. Although it might have been, of course.

15,000,000 Nanoseconds of Fame

Not many people can say truthfully that they've been published in The New Yorker: I noticed that our own Geoff Wittig, who has written many book reviews for TOP, got a letter published in that magazine this week, in the context of his formal expertise (Geoff's an M.D. in real life). Nice going, Geoff!

Mike

Changing Scenery

By Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune

Mike
(Thanks to G.K. Froehlich)

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A veritable Smith & Wesson.

The Nature and Art of Workmanship

Writing about Steve McCurry's new book The Unguarded Moment the other day and thinking about how well it "goes with" his earlier book Looking East reminded me that for some while now I've been meaning to write a post about books in pairs. I have a quirky tendency to shelve books next to other books that I sense they fit with. Sontag sits next to Barthes, Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word is shelved next to John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Why? I guess sometimes the pairings are obvious; sometimes it's because the two books nurture or amplify each other, sometimes it's because I feel they balance each other out or contradict. I guess it has no real meaning...it's just a personal idiosyncrasy. I'm still not sure I'm ever going to inflict that particular essay on you.

But as I was thinking about it again I was poking around on Amazon seeing what's in print and what's not, and I came across David Pye's lovely little book The Nature and Art of Workmanship again. This rare little gem hasn't always been easy to get in the 41 years since it was published, so I thought I'd just throw out another recommendation for it for whatever it's worth. Pye was Professor of Furniture Design at The Royal College of Art in London from 1948 to 1974, and this book pertains mostly to furniture...on the surface. The book is really about the philosophy of craftsmanship, however. Read it with a flexible and open mind, and you can apply many of his ideas to many other fields, to many arts and most crafts. It can be easily seen as pertaining to the "crafting" of photographs (fine art prints, at the very least) and in some ways, I think, even cameras(!). I know that ever since I first read it I've found it helpful to think of his concepts of "the workmanship of risk" and "the workmanship of certainty" with regard to photographing—in a way it's what Garry Winogrand was talking about in that marvelous and thought-provoking little video we linked to a while back.

Right now, here, today, I'm not going to jump into the deep sea of talking about photography's relationship to craft, either historically or the way it's been changing again lately. It's a big subject. In any event, this is not a book that's directly about photography. But it's one of those rare books in which someone who's been thinking for a lifetime about a subject he knows deeply makes an attempt to share his hard-gained wisdom with others. In that way it's the opposite of much of the cookie-cutter, research-and-regurgitate, processed, pasteurized book product that passes for being publishable all too often these days. I certainly enjoyed it when I read it, and I treasure it on my shelves now, and I recommend it to you with feeling if it sounds like it might appeal.

Mike

ADDENDUM: Well for Pete's sake, I forgot the U.K. link. And Prof. Pye was a Londoner, too. Sorry.

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Featured Comment by Dale: "Just for perspective, I keep my copy of Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History next to my Gary Larson collection."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "Sontag next to Barthes, eh? Something tells me this is a charged statement.

"Might it be that when you see statements, for example, like this in Sontag's On Photography: 'For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common than [a frontal view]: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.'

"...and this from Barthes' 'Photography and Electoral Appeal' written decades earlier: 'A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common than [a frontal view], suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.'

"...placing one volume in close physical proximity to the other is your symbolic editorial correction for the fact that Sontag didn't have the courtesy of even crediting the original with a footnote in this and similar examples? Just wondering."

Mike replies: Ah, that ill-defined line between "influence" and plagiarism. (Which brings to mind the question, how does one reproduce a Sherrie Levine in a book?) Your comparison of these quotes raises one ugly specter: that I might have found Barthes so difficult merely because his language (in translation) is less clear....

Anyway, there's that, and that they seemed to have had such a mutual admiration society going, and that their writings and all the related fuss were roughly contemporaneous, and that the books are roughly the same size and thickness...regarding that last, I'm not proud—I didn't say this habit of mine strictly made any sense.

Featured Comment by Glenn Gordon: "Here's a bad PDF of a piece I wrote in 1996 for Woodwork magazine on David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship. It was good to see your mention of the book—it was seminal for many craftsman that I know.

Download "The Workmanship of Risk" by Glenn Gordon

"Speaking of pairing books, I’ve always shelved Pye's next to Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman (or at least I did until some unknown borrower failed to return the Yanagi; it’s one of those books I keep having to replace, lending it too often to people who disappear.)"

Dreams, Reveries, Mysteries, Memories: 'Emmet Gowin: Photographs'

Here's a deep treasure fished out of photography's recent past, rescued and revived by Steidl and the Pace McGill Gallery (where there was a show of the work this past spring). Emmet Gowin: Photographs is another of my long-time favorite photobooks, available once again, after many years, in a lovely new reprint. A straightlaced young man from a strict upbringing married into a more freewheeling, open, and expressive family and made art of the collision, with the fully open eyes of one who belongs but sees everything as if it were new (and astonishing). A book made out of the energy of young love and new freedom, and ambition.

In retrospect this is something of a period piece. The sparse highlights pulled up out of the inky blacks is a printing style that now looks very '70s. Gowin includes Sommeresque landscapes, extreme wide angles, the dense, textured, flat-field arrays that would preoccupy his later work, and a Callahan-like extended portrait of his wife Edith. But it's the snapshot-made-art quality of his new family's faces, bodies, activities, environs, and lives that are the core of the book. Lives and deaths, I should say.

Some of the pictures were made with a medium-format lens mounted on a view camera, making the pictures circular, with the areas outside the image circle carefully burned to gray or black by the photographer (who had the reputation of being a virtuoso printer). The effect is like a keyhole, or like a peephole in a door, although we're looking in, not out. It enhances the feeling that we're seeing something private and essential.

I knew this book very well as a student, and in the mid '80s I got to meet Edith Gowin. I told friends at the time that it was like meeting Lincoln, another famous subject of many photographs. To me she had a legendary quality. She spoke, however, in a high-pitched voice with more than a trace of a mountain twang, her words full of warmth and generosity. (Lincoln, too, is described by contemporaries as having a peculiar-sounding, high-pitched voice.) Not at all like the imposing, vivid, and somewhat dark figure, half wild lover, half earth mother, that inhabits the book.

Emmet Gowin: Photographs contains one of my all-time favorite pictures, too, called Nancy, a picture that could neither be simpler nor more rare. (Reproduced in this article from a while back.)

I'll probably have to get the new edition, which is very faithful to the old one but better made (and hardcover). Even though I must say I don't like the new cover. The edition I have, in paperback, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. It cost me $4.47, which means I bought it used. I got it perhaps four or five years after it came out. One of the essential books in my library. I look at it every year. A book that's grown with me, like a much-loved piece of music.

Mike

(Here's the U.K. link.)

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Taking Pen in Hand

A couple of readers sent me this link, to a young woman in England with a German (or Dutch?) accent handling the Olympus E-P1. Sometimes seeing someone handle a camera can give you a better idea of what it really looks like.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Sailer and Hugh Crawford)

(P.S. Somewhat annoyingly, I can no longer post YouTube videos directly here, because the minimum size of the videos now exceeds the width of my column. You know what they say: oh well. I wonder what would happen if I reset the size constraints manually....)

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Featured Comment by Maarten B.: "German accent, definitely. The name is German too. For a Dutchman like me it is very easy to hear."

Featured Comment by Clayton Lofgren: "Another one with funny accent."

Workingman's Leica

 
The Hartmann Leica, $1475

After I published the post called "The Leica as Teacher" on May 28th, followed by "Why It Has To Be a Leica" the next day, a number of people contacted me to say that they'd been inspired to try the "one Leica, one lens, one year" experiment that I was suggesting. (Good going and good luck to one and all, by the way!)

My old friend Nick Hartmann did that very experiment—one lens, one Leica—but he did it for almost a decade. He contacted me last week wanting to know how he might de-accession his old trusty Leica and 50mm Summicron while at the same time helping it to get into the hands of someone who might want to use it for its intended purpose.

So: one Leica, one lens for Sale. Cosmetically it's what would be called a "good user"—it has a few scars, and some scratches on the baseplate. Probably the worst thing appearance-wise is that Nick blacked out the engraved camera name and the "red dot" with a sharpie, and, when that didn't quite work, covered them with black electrician's tape. He's removed the tape, but the engraving and the red dot don't look so hot.

However, it's been treated well and scrupulously maintained since new. Nick bought it in September of 1996 and used it "almost daily" until April of 2005. During that time he logged 500 rolls of film (you can see some of his work online), which means the camera has seen about 20,000 shutter actuations. The M6 shutter will go to about 100,000 shots before needing service, and has been known to last for as many as 400,000. So there's a lot of life left in this one.

The lens is also somewhat "experienced," but the rear element has been protected by being on the camera since new, and the front element has always had a protective filter on it.

Mike and Zander at the Cozy Corner, Oak Park, by Nick Hartmann

Nick shot one of the best photo archives I have—for years when we'd see one another I'd drag Zander along to whatever restaurant we met at, and Nick would take pictures of us, then send prints to me. I have them all in an archival box, and the set as a whole is a lovely record of me and my son over the years of my adventure in single parenthood. Most of those pictures, of course, were shot with this very camera and lens.

Anyway, if you're one of those who are thinking of trying the "Leica year" experiment, here's a camera you can use. Nick would like to get $1475 for the camera and lens, which seems a fair going price. He'll stand behind the sale, as will I: in June, a year from now, if you'd like to re-sell the Hartmann Leica again (assuming of course you haven't done anything grievous to it in the meantime), I'll advertise it again here on TOP and you can pass it along to someone else who wants to try it.

Anyway, if you're interested, leave a comment to that effect and I'll pass your email address along to Nick. (In order, if there is more than one.)

Mike

BONUS: In the spirit of passing useful things along, the buyer of the Leica can also do a favor for another (perhaps young, perhaps impecunious) photographer he or she knows: Nick will send a "good user" Canon EOS Rebel XT DSLR and an EF 50mm ƒ/1.8II lens to a photographer of your choice, for free. Just let him know the name and address of the person you want the DSLR to go to when you make the arrangements for the M6.

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UPDATE: About ten people have expressed interest now, in the comments and via email (it's about 6 p.m. here in the Midwest). Nick won't be in his office until Monday morning, but he'll get in touch with people then, in order. If it doesn't go to #1, then it will go to #2, and so on...in any event I think we can safely say it's sold now. Thanks to everybody who expressed interested, and if you just missed it, sorry about that.

Wanted To Trade

I hope Ken doesn't mind us pointing this out, but it is pretty funny....

Mike
(Thanks to Michael Nesbitt)

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Featured Comment by Stephen Gillette: "A cautionary tale for all of us husbands to ponder. The '92 Subaru Justy comment really scares me. I think my wife would aim higher, but then again...."

UPDATE: The link is gone now. It was trivial—a Craig's List ad ostensibly by a woman from North York, near Toronto, wanting to trade in her "slightly defective" husband because he is obsessed with reading Ken Rockwell's website and wastes money buying all the latest cameras. One of the things she listed that she would take in trade for him was a '92 Subaru Justy. —Ed.

'Call Bruce McBroom'

Cartoonist Curtis Tucker with an early romantic interest, some time in the '70s

Photographer Bruce McBroom tells Alex Altman the story of shooting the last of the great pinup girls...

"...It was just Farrah and myself. It was before the days where you had to have stylists and hair and makeup and background art directors and assistants. It was just me and Farrah and my Nikon, at the home she shared with Lee Majors, a house on Mulholland Drive overlooking Hollywood, with a beautiful view...."

Mike
(Thanks to Ken Tanaka and Curtis D. Tucker)

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ADDENDUM: Another example of one of the fundamental mysteries of still photography...how one shot can work so well and another, similiar shot doesn't. Although obviously an homage to the Farrah poster, this promo picture of another '70s pinup girl, Loni Anderson of "WKRP in Cincinnati," falls flat. (Although perhaps that isn't quite the right phrase....)  —Mike

 

News Blips

Michele McNally, Picture Editor for The New York Times, is answering questions, through tomorrow. Some good answers already.

Phase One has purchased Leaf. (Warning: PDF link). As Our Humble Correspondent, the Curator and Chief Featherduster at the Northeast Kingdom Field Camera Repository and Odd Format Graveyard puts it, "not something that's going to affect the average TOP reader. But in the small puddle of the MF digital market, it's an enormous splash."

Will there be a professional version of the Olympus EP-1? The BJoP's interview with Mr. Akira Watanabe.

Michael G. Dougan, Tambay (the Watchman)

This is the first picture I've personally seen from the new Fujifilm GF670 / Bessa 667. Brief review and more pictures by Michael Dougan at Japan Exposures.

Mike
(Thanks to Charles F. Heuer, Oren, Eolake, and Dirk)

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Kodachrome Flat, Grosvenor Arch, and a Great New Book

In the announcement of the demise of Kodachrome the other day, reader Luc Novovitch asked about Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah. Our old friend Dan Westergren, Senior Photo Editor at National Geographic Traveler, has written a nice blog piece about the history of the name. The area, which encompasses the famous Grosvenor Arch pictured at right, was discovered, photographically at least, by an expedition led by National Geographic writer Jack Breed in 1949, who originally dubbed it "Kodachrome Flat" because it was so spectacularly photogenic. There's an ironic twist to this Grosvenor Arch picture, though! Nature photographers especially might be interested in checking out the link.

Meanwhile, Steve McCurry, whom Kodak has selected for the honor of shooting the ceremonial last roll of Kodachrome film later this year, has a new book out, and it's a beaut. Called The Unguarded Moment, it's a major retrospective of McCurry's best and favorite work shot over three decades. As you might expect, it includes pictures from all over the world, mostly Asia and the subcontinent. (Here's the U.K. link to the book.)

McCurry is an elite travel/location photographer at the very top of his game. Fortunately for us his work is thoroughly represented and readily experienced in books. The Unguarded Moment, which might be his masterpiece, consists of horizontal pictures set vertically on the page, so the book is in effect bound at the top rather than the side, like Stuart Klipper's The Antarctic. It features the same oversized format as Looking East, McCurry's book of portraits and one of our favorites from 2006. In fact the new book makes a perfect matched set with Looking East, "landscape format" pictures to the earlier book's "portrait format" ones but bound so they can stand side-by-side together on a shelf. It has the same lush, gorgeous, deep-hued reproduction quality that suits the pictures so beautifully (looking at reproduction like this is almost a sensual experience). It's a very fine set of pictures—street and slice-of-life scenes spiced here and there with the direct, soulful portaits that have long been McCurry's signature. Highly recommendable to anyone who likes exotic locations, masterful candid street photography, or just superbly reproduced color photography in general. If you don't want to buy it, see if your library has it. Just a very satisfying and enjoyable book, another standout from this photographer.

To wander back on topic, Steve McCurry estimates that he's shot some 800,000 pictures on Kodachrome, including his most famous one.

Mike

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Weddings with a Telephoto

By Jeff Ascough

I'd never seen Jeff Ascough's wedding photography blog before. It's worthwhile—well-written and thoughtful, and Jeff obviously knows what he's doing. Here's a nice piece about shooting weddings with a telephoto lens. You might not agree with it, or all of it (I hope I don't just post links to things I agree with...), but it highlights the fact that a lot about shooting technique has nothing to do with the photo-technical aspect:

Being unobtrusive is largely about behaviour, rather than dressing in black and trying to blend into the shadows.

What people do find uncomfortable, is the idea that they are being 'spied on.' Standing away from a group of people at a drinks reception, and pointing a large telephoto at them is far more suspicious in terms of behaviour, than being in and around them taking pictures. Guests can't see the photographer's face, and non-verbal communication is missing. This can lead to a degree of discomfort and a change in behaviour patterns, which I believe leads to poorer pictures.

If I were a wedding photographer I think I'd bookmark that blog. Sometimes I think that the highest compliment I can pay another photographer is to say he's a good shooter. (Or she.) And good wedding photographers are good shooters, for sure.

Mike
(Thanks to Geoff McCann)

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Featured Comment by hlinton: "I'm kind of on the fence about this. Having shot events and weddings (and other assignments) all over the world I don't think one can limit themselves to just this or that approach. At times it works but as times change so do the processes. I use three zooms ranging from 16 to 200mm. Can't go anywhere without them. I was beginning to think that I never shoot anything wider than 28mm only to discover while shooting a party recently that I would have been in big trouble without the wider zoom. By the end of the night everything was shot on a 70–200. I really think it comes down to personalities. Jeff attracts the type of client that he shoots best allowing him to utilize his skills in a way that's appropriate for him. That's not to say that I don't agree with him. I just think that we all get to where we're going in our own way and his way may be (and most likely is) different than your way."

Depth of Field Hell—The Sequel

By Ctein

I don't know why this myth about the depth of field being utterly independent of focal length (for constant magnification) keeps on going, because it's easy to prove that it's wrong and sometimes it really matters that it's wrong.

Nonetheless, it is a myth and it is wrong.

Here's the real skinny. At close working distances, depth of field is nearly independent of focal length. In fact here's a handy approximate equation for depth of field that depends solely on circle of confusion (c), aperture (f), and on-film (or sensor) magnification (M):

DoF (on either side of the subject) = c*f*(M+1)/(M*M)

As you decrease the magnification, lens focal length starts to become more important. As you get close to the hyperfocal distance, to maintain comparable total depth of field, the magnification becomes inversely proportional to the focal length of the lens rather than being independent of it!

A good rule of thumb is that for just about any photography you do indoors, depth of field isn't going to be affected by focal length, just on-film magnification. But as you start photographic more distant subjects, the effect of focal length increases and eventually becomes as important as aperture.

At intermediate distances, the total depth of field (in front of and behind the subject combined) decreases as the focal length of the lens increases, for the same on-film magnification (and same aperture and circle of confusion). The distribution also changes. The shorter focal length lens will always have less depth of field in front of the subject than the longer focal length lens, but it will have more depth of field behind the subject than the longer focal length lens. In other words, for the shorter lens the depth of field is not only greater but more asymmetric.

These comparison photos illustrate how changing the focal length of the lens can change depth of field even when the on-film magnification stays the same. The photograph in the upper left was made with a 25mm lens and the one in the upper right with a 300mm lens. The lower photographs are enlargements of the ones directly above them.

I moved the camera to keep the on-film magnification 0.02X, but the distance between the targets didn't change and both photographs were made at ƒ/11. The front target is equally sharp in both photographs, but the far target is much blurrier in the 300mm photograph than in the 25mm photograph.

This graph shows how depth of field changes with on-film magnification for the 25mm and 300mm lenses. At closer distances (greater magnifications) focal length has minimal effect on depth of field; it becomes increasingly important as the distance increases. Notice that the total depth of field is always greater for the shorter lens, but the shorter lens has less depth of field in front of the subject and more depth of field behind it than the longer lens does.

Assuming you don't want to take my word for any of this, you can prove it yourself any one of several ways:

1. Mathematically—if depth of field really depends upon magnification and not lens focal length, you should be able to recast the depth of field equations using magnification as one of the variables so that focal length drops out entirely. Give it a try! Good luck!

2. Numerically—set up a spreadsheet with the depth of field equations that computes depth of field in front of and behind the subject as a function of on-film magnification (for a given f-stop and circle of confusion, of course). Try it out on a bunch of cases.

3. Pragmatically—pull out some of your lenses that still have depth of field markings on them. Compare the depth of field of markings between, oh say, your 50mm lens and a 300mm lens at distances that would correspond to the same on-film magnification (about six times further for the 300mm lens).

4. Logically—consider two extremes. First hyperfocal distance. Go to your textbook and pull out the standard equation for hyperfocal distance. Figure out what on-film magnification it corresponds to. You'll see that the magnification varies inversely with the focal length of the lens. No, that's not an artifact of having the far distance go to infinity. You could pick a far depth of field that was huge but finite, like say, 1 km, and plug that into the full depth of field equations and you'd get the same result as close as matters.

5. Reductio ad absurdum—consider the depth of field in front of the subject for any particular lens and situation you choose. It'll be some finite number. Now imagine swapping that lens for a lens of shorter focal length; to keep the on-film magnification the same (which, according to myth, will keep the depth of field the same) you will have to move proportionately closer to the subject. Keep making the lens shorter and shorter. At some point the total distance from the shorter lens to the subject is going to be less than the near-side depth of field you calculated for the longer lens.

Ctein

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'People Are Reasonable—Even Jewel Thieves'

Photo: Boogie Woogie Flu

This is pretty cool. Ted at Boogie Woogie Flu found this old record at an antiques store in Phoenicia, New York, and posted some of the cuts as MP3's.

I've never heard Weegee speak before. "...One of those accents you don't hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side," Ted writes, "and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee's voice after Weegee visited Kubrick's set one day."

Don't miss it.

And don't forget: "You can't be a Nice Nellie and do photography."  —Weegee

Mike
(Thanks to Kevin B.)

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UPDATE: Joe Riefer tells me that the Getty Museum had some some audio clips of Weegee speaking in its 2006 exhibit. Unfortunately they're RealPlayer files, so I can't listen to them, but maybe you can.

Thanks to an exchange between Steve Gasbarre and Michael Gilday on Photo.net, pointed out in the comments by yemado, I've learned that the person behind this record was none other than Lou Stettner. The record catalogue number is Candid CA1001, dated 1958, put out by Candid Recordings, and there was a review of it in the June 22, 1958 issue of The New York Times.

Featured Comment by Rod Graham: "I guess like a lot of others, I've had a passing 'familiarity' with Weegee and his photojournalism. But this recording is beyond a famous photographer talking about photography: This is a man talking from his heart, plain and simple words, freely sharing his art and craft and views on a profession that obviously meant everything to him. You don't have to be interested in photography at all to be taken with this piece of oral history and the simple integrity of the telling."

Kodachrome Ends 74-Year Run

By Ernst Haas

Eastman Kodak announced this morning that it will cease the manufacture of Kodachrome this year.

Celebrated in song (literally!) and story, Kodachrome is the oldest film in production and the longest-lived film product in the entire history of photography. Developed by Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes (known as "God and Man" within Kodak) in 1935, Kodachrome had exceptionally low contrast (a good thing in a transparency film) and an inimitably rich, beautiful color palette. For decades it was by far the best color material extant. Among other things, for many years around mid-century it relegated families to long sessions in darkened rooms with a slide projector and a screen, the best way people had of showing each other their vacation and birthday party pictures. Many leading photographers even today, including Sam Abell, William Albert Allard, and Steve McCurry, did much of their important early work on Kodachrome.

However, it is inherently slow and very difficult to manufacture, and devilishly intricate to process. Only one lab in the world is currently processing it—Dwayne's in Kansas, USA. The best article about Kodachrome was published in Popular Photography and reprinted in the book The Best of Popular Photography. (I should be able to provide issue and page number, but I can't seem to put my hands on it.) Many film users—including avowed Kodachrome fans—have moved away from it in recent years. It currently accounts for less than 1% of Kodak's shrinking film sales.

It might have been '97 or '98 that I first wrote about the coming demise of Kodachrome, in the pages of Photo Techniques, at the time Kodak suspended in-house processing services. If memory serves, however, Kodak promised back then to continue manufacturing the film for at least ten more years. It kept that promise.

God and Man, inventors of Kodachrome. I own a large dye transfer print of this picture, but I've never been sure who was who. I think Godowsky is at the piano. (Thanks to Helen Bach.)

This end was inevitable, but it was certainly a fine long run! Not for nothing is the press around the world this morning calling Kodachrome "one of the iconic products of the 20th century."

Bravo to God, Man, Kodachrome, Kodak, and "those nice, bright colors." R.I.P.

Mike

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Depth-of-Field Hell

I might have lost my cool a bit in the the "P.S." to the "What's a 'Fast Lens'?" post below. I apologize for that.

My problem is that I've been sensitized. I was the editor of a technical photography magazine for six years. Depth-of-field (DoF) is a subject that is deeply beloved of wannabe photo-tech writers, and few things could create instantaneous dismay deep in my editor's heart like opening a submission and finding yet another beautifully prepared, extensive, arcane article on DoF. DoF is perhaps the ultimate hell of photo-tech—graspable enough so many people think they can understand it (or think they should!), complex enough so that very few really can. Whenever the subject really gets going, great reams of material are spewed forth "explaining" it, always—always—strewn with considerable content that happens not to be true. Assuming any given reader engages with said great mass of verbal matter, he comes out the other side usually no more enlightened, and possibly considerably more confused. Finally, add to those conditions the simple fact that a technical understanding of DoF is not required for the successful practice of photography, and you begin to appreciate the extent of my exasperation with the subject.

(By the way, the other day I finally figured out why "grammar police" types can seem to be so fussy and cross. It's because they keep correcting the World, and the World keeps making the same mistakes anyway. If you tell your child three times to hang up the wet towel in the bathroom and he doesn't, you're not that irritated. When you've told him 700 times and you still come into the bathroom and find the damp towel in a moldy pile on the counter, you might well be incensed. So do you see my point? No matter how many times I remind people that "loose" is the opposite of "tight" and "lose" is the opposite of "win," people are still going to misspell it—because it's different people all the time, and there are an inexhaustible supply of them. It's like having 40,000 children, each one of whom needs to be trained to hang up the towel. The first three people I correct, I'm perfectly calm. By the 700th, I'm about to "loose" my mind. Anyway, you see the problem: educate one photographer about DoF, or ten, or a hundred—at however great a cost of time and effort—and you still have numberless millions to go. It's Sisyphean.)

In any event, I've just added more material to the end of the original post. Ctein chimed in. It's now longer. And hopefully a bit more clear. But it's beginning to flirt with becoming yet another of those great masses of verbal matter on DoF with which the literature of photography, and now the internet, is littered.

End-around
Anyway, I figured I might try to do a quick, painless end-around on the subject, and try to tell you what actually matters about DoF. I'm going to ignore the technical explanation: because That Way Lie Dragons; Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter there; etc. I'm doing that on purpose, so please don't write to fill me in.

1. By far—by far—the most important factor in how much DoF you'll get is your distance setting. The farther the distance between the lens and whatever it's focused on, the more you'll get in the DoF.

2. Next most important: the focal length of the lens relative to the size of the film/sensor. Again, on principle, let's forget all the tech-talk about what's "really" going on and the scientific explanations and all that. All you need to remember is that the longer the lens, the less apparent DoF there will be in your shots. And, big jumps matter, little ones not so much; there's not that much difference between an 85mm and a 100mm, or between a 24mm and a 20mm. Very roughly speaking, when there's a 2x or 1/2x difference in focal length, you're going to have noticeably different DoF characteristics to learn.

3. Last: aperture setting. When I was teaching, all my kids had to memorize the following phrase: "The higher the number the smaller the hole the greater the depth of field." Can you see differences? Of course. But again, it takes relatively bigger jumps to really matter all that much. The other two factors matter more.

Quick'n'dirty
Photography is a visual medium, so let's take a look at a couple of examples of point 1, above. I'm saying that your distance setting is the biggest determinant of DoF. Take a look at these two shots:

28mm lens on 24x36mm, ƒ/5.6

Same camera, same lens, same focus distance setting, ƒ/2.8

In both of the above examples, I've focused on the tree trunk in the middle of the frame. I was standing about thirty feet away from it. There are some differences in the two pictures, mainly because most lenses are at their crappiest wide open and this lens is a fairly crappy little lens, so the lower picture looks a little worse. And the much closer branch-tips in the upper right are a little crisper in the ƒ/5.6 shot. But when your distance setting is 30 feet with a 28mm lens, the aperture isn't going to have very much effect on apparent DoF. No matter what the maximum aperture of the lens, you're going to have a hard time getting anything out of focus with this focal length lens at this distance setting.

Now look at the same two-aperture difference at a much closer distance setting, wider aperture first this time:

ƒ/2.8

 
ƒ/5.6

In this case, you can actually see a little difference in the blur, because you actually have some blur. In both of these, the focus was placed on the flower in the middle of the foreground, at the bottom of the frame. (I should have been a little more careful with exposure and framing. Sorry. Then again, if I made everything perfect, I'd never get anything done.) Now, obviously, there's some difference here. There should be: the aperture has been stopped down two stops. The flower is indeed a bit more "isolated" in the top, wide-open shot, and the blurry parts are indeed a bit blurrier. But just look back and forth between the house details at the top of the frame. There's some difference, all right....but it's not that much difference.

So in the top pair, you'd have a hard time opening up the aperture enough to introduce any blur; in the bottom shot, you'd have a hard time stopping down enough to eliminate all the blur. The point is that the top shot is pretty much going to have no blur, and the bottom shot is going to have some blur, with this camera and lens. And that's because of focus distance, mainly.

In any case, where DoF is concerned, don't sweat the small changes too much—whether this or that sensor is slightly larger or slightly smaller, whether this or that lens is ƒ/1.7 or ƒ/2.4, whether you're focused at 10 feet or 12 feet. When learning to manage sharpness and blur, it's the big swings that make more noticeable differences.

Hope this helps. But if it's just more verbiage added on to the great whacking pile of internet blather about DoF for you, well...at least you've got my sympathies!

Mike

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If you need it, you need it.

Featured Comment by FS: "I am surprised that nobody has referred so far to this little gem: The Ins and Outs of Focus by H. M. Merklinger (Warning: PDF download):

http://www.trenholm.org/hmmerk/TIAOOFe.pdf

"This is about infinity focus versus using DOF scales. The idea ist to focus on infinity, and then stop down so that the actual opening of the aperture is about the same size as the smallest object to b resolved."

Mike replies: I was looking all over for a current source for Harold's book yesterday, and was stymied. I had no idea the entire book was a free PDF download. Thanks!

Harold's methods are a bit quirky, but his two books are a fine brief introduction to the understanding of focus and DoF.

Random Excellence: Damion Berger

Damion Berger [untitled]

This isn't the easiest picture in the world to visually parse. If you're lucky, when you first looked at this you didn't get it right away, and then you did. Made you smile, I bet. I'll give you a hint: it's a perfectly straight photograph, as far as I know. (I hope it is. We should ask Damion.)

It's from the series "In the Deep End." I've known there was a great series of photographs in this subject for literally twenty-five years; I always knew it. (I could never be the one to shoot it, though. Or try. Ever heard that old dictum that a man can drown in a teacup of water? Well, I am that man.) Every now and then I'd see a hint of it, one shot here or there showing just how rich a subject it could be. There was a fine book out a long time ago from Aperture called Swimmers (actually, it was Aperture no. 111, June 1988) that showed a lot of the composite parts, but of course lacking one unifying sensibility. Anyway, Damion Berger's "In the Deep End" is the first time I've ever seen anybody actually pull it off. Great set. Don't miss the slideshow—this is work that really coheres as a set, and each of these pictures is better in the context of all the others.

Some of the work is on view all summer long at Bonnie Benrubi Gallery, in the "Hot Fun in the Summertime" show. The gallery is at 41 East 57th Street, 13th Floor, New York, New York 10022, phone 212/888-6007.

Mike

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UPDATE: I heard from Damion, who tells me that all the pictures in the "Deep End" portfolio are indeed "straight."

Glub, glub, glub

Three Cheers for Olympus

I don't usually like to proclaim opinions about things before I know quite what I'm talking about. Not because my opinion is so valuable, but because it isn't.

However, I feel a somewhat closer connection to the new E-P1 than I do to most cameras because of the fact that I've been periodically calling for just such a camera (a large-sensor compact) for the past four years or so. Lots of people have been asking me, "Is the E-P1 the DMD?" I hope this justifies sharing my initial reactions even if it might not add much of substance to the discussion...on account of I don't actually know anything firsthand about the E-P1.

Seldom have new cameras been so anticipated as the E-P1. (The last time expectations rose to such a fever pitch was for the Canon 5D Mark II.) Ever since Micro 4/3 was announced and Olympus let it be known that it would venture an entry into the category, and later when the early mock-up above was shown under glass, many photographers have been waiting for the details.

Personally, I'm well pleased by what we've learned so far of the E-P1. It's basically just what I expected—and more, too.

Not interested
I should mention that there's a lot about the camera that doesn't interest me. I don't think I'm interested in video, and I don't think I'm interested in having a dictaphone in my camera. So I'm not initially moved by the "electronic Swiss Army knife" aspect of the E-P1. I know this is part of the point of it, part of the design brief, part of the marketing schema. But the reason I like cameras is because I like pictures. I don't go moping around wishing that a camera would just do something else in order to make it more interesting. I like pictures. I like cameras. I'd be likely to use the E-P1 just as a camera.

I'm also not interested in any of the whole happy muck-pile of JPEG processing features—art filters and scene modes and suchlike gabble. That's all fine for those who want all that. Not for me. I'd shoot raw and out.

I'm also not interested in the zoom lens. Wouldn't buy it, and if it didn't exist my opinion of the camera wouldn't be changed. Your mileage etc.

Pig in mud
Here are some of the things I'm happy about, on the face of things:

• The lens focal length. Three huge cheers for Olympus. I've opined (cavilled?) at length elsewhere about the growing scarcity of plain old 35mm-equivalent primes on many digital cameras. Thirty-five millimeter is the de facto normal lens focal length on a Leica rangefinder (the 50mm Summicron holds the position honorarily, but for many years, more people bought Leica 35mms than 50mms), and for better or worse it's just my "home" angle of view. I see like it does. To me something in the 35mm–40mm range is the first most-needed lens, no matter what else is available. I'm thus very happy that the first prime for the E-P1 is a ~35mm-e.
• Body-integral stabilization. As longtime readers know, I love this feature...when it's well implemented. It sure worked great on my old K-M 7D. I don't know, maybe I just drink too much coffee. I loved it for low-light shooting; it really helps. Olympus reportedly implements this feature well. I have high hopes.
• The lens speed. ƒ/2.8 is not super fast, but it's fine for a camera with a sensor that's good up to ISO 800 and that has IS (see the post about this below, second one down). Plus, on cameras where you don't have to look through the lens to see the subject, widest-aperture speed isn't as important. On a camera like this, I'd rather have an ƒ/2.8 the size of this one than an ƒ/2 that's twice as big.
• Two viewfinders! Kewl. Very considerate of Olympus to provide a matching OVF for the 17mm. I'll admit that right now I can't quite see how I'd focus and shoot with this camera, but I'm provisionally willing to wait and see until I can try it for myself. I'm a clever guy (well, with cameras, at least), so I'm betting I can figure out a method that I'd get comfortable with that would allow me to actually take pictures with the E-P1. This baseless conviction subject to cruel real-world smackdown at a later date of course.
• Right-sizing. Everybody will have different opinions about the size of the E-P1. Too big? Too small? Just right? Hello, Goldilocks? Personally, I'm happy that Olympus made an obvious attempt to choose a "just-right" size. You or I might not agree with the designers' choice. (Or, we might.) But I give them credit for making an attempt at finding just the right size.*
• Premium quality. Nice that they decided not to go the el-cheapo price-leading cost-accounting shopper-checklist cut-the-corners route. The EP-1 appears to have some fine-object quality. I approve; I like cameras that are beautiful. If I want cheap I'll buy cheap; in this case I'd rather have pretty.
• Design. Okay, maybe the whole Pen thing is a tad breathless, a shade precious; whatever. I don't think I've ever seen a Maitani Pen and I don't feel the whole nostalgic vibe in this case. But I like the fact that Olympus took so much care in crafting an object of beauty and desire, making a camera that has style and grace.**
• Strap lugs. Yeah, they cost more. But I like plain old strap lugs. Had to smile when I saw 'em.

Withholding judgment
Lots of things about the E-P1 remain to be seen. That's always the case with a new introduction. Are we going to like or hate the viewing screen, or not care? Is the camera responsive enough? How's the lens, really? What do we really think about the image files, after we've shot with the li'l bugger for a few months and learned how to eke the quality we want out of it? Lots still left to suss, after the sun sets on this day.

But for now, I'm psyched. Do the kids still say that? We used to say that when I was a kid.

Mike

*P.S. I could not care less if it fits into a pocket. Absolutely not a criterion. Never carried a camera in my pocket, don't wish to start.

** Also, I do like it when companies respect their history and take continuity into account. It's part of identity, and making products with strong, coherent identities makes for strong companies, if you ask me. Olympus is thinking of its own history, of what sets it apart and makes it unique and thus, what it can offer to us that differentiates it from everybody else. That quality is not the strongest quality among the many strengths of Japanese corporations in general. I admire the people at Olympus for thinking that way.

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My trusty camera bag, had it since '82, still looks new

Featured Comment by Dwig: "Excellent points. Particularly that about the 'normal' prime lens.

"Personally, I prefer to keep the term 'normal' sacred, holding to the classic definition of a lens with a focal length equal to the diagonal measure of the image. That equates to 42mm for 35mm full frame if you file the negative carrier out to show the edges. It's only 40mm otherwise. If you shoot slides, it's more like 37mm or 38mm and if you judge from a machine printed borderless 4x6 or 8x10 it's more like 38mm for color negs and 35mm for slides. Bingo, your preference for 35–40mm-e lenses makes perfect 'normal' sense. Even Nikon's new 35mm ƒ/1.8 DX lens is overly long to be a 'normal' in my view; they need a 24-28mm offering. [Oren and I agree —Ed.]

"'Standard' should, in my opinion be reserved for historical discussions involving the old film convention of selling a 50mm lens as the basic starter lens. Today, 'kit' or 'kit lens' has really replaced the term."

Ahmadinejad Sucks at Photoshop

This is all over the web, but that's no excuse not to include it here...the original, as far as I can tell, came from kheirkhah.ir, which in turn apparently took it from a Farsi-language newspaper.

Can bad Photoshop be a sign of moral turpitude? Ahmadinejad was apparently "chosen" to win the "democratic" election by the Ayatollah who functions as the "Supreme Ruler" of Iran—whose minions, in this case, are not above not-so-subtly enhancing the approved selection's crowd support. Worse, reports are filtering out of Iran that this "Supreme Ruler"—who is, remember, a religious leader—is considering the use of massive violence to put down the street protests.

That has to be the most disgusting thing I've heard in a long time—and it's had lots of competition.

Various and sundry American Christian leaders periodically disgrace themselves with hypocrisy and bad behavior (a spectacle I confess I find intermittently entertaining, in the aggregate although certainly not in all particulars), but at least they're not in any position to order the wholesale slaughter of their own flocks.

For a bracingly balancing view of Iran and its people, I recommend Rick Steves' "Iran: Yesterday and Today." It's not the whole story either (being sanitized and Iranian-government-approved, as Rick explains)—it's just a side we see less often.

Mike
(Thanks to numerous tipsters)

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Got a top DSLR? You need this...

What's a 'Fast Lens'?

There's been some talk about whether this or that lens is "fast" or not since the DP1 came out sporting an ƒ/4 fixed lens. How "fast" is the Olympus E-P1 lens, really?

The concept of "lens speed" (referring to maximum aperture) has been variable over the years. Without launching into a history lesson, it's all been relative—Tessar-type designs are limited to fairly small apertures, for example, and first reaching ƒ/2.8 with a Tessar-type was an achievement. Generally speaking, though, lens speed was a prestige camera feature in the middle third of the 20th century, more or less, and cameramakers competed to see which could out-do the next. The market rewarded this tendency until ƒ/1.4 became common in normal lenses (the further from "normal" a focal-length is, generally, the harder it becomes to make the lens a fast one). Several cameramakers reached further than that, most notably with Walter Mandler's famous Leitz Noctilux, and several makers, Canon in particular, reached ƒ/1.4 with some fairly wide lenses for 35mm. The other famous fast lens early on was the 85mm ƒ/1.4 Zeiss Planar, which has long and interesting history that continues right down to the present day, in a fine lens released very recently. But the market as a whole didn't much care—ƒ/1.4 at the normal focal length turned out to be the point of sufficiency for most photographers where lens speed was concerned. Options that do better than that have sporadically been available, but have never achieved much in the way of popularity.

Of course, film speed has to be factored into that. During the only two stretches of time that I used Leica rangefinders—the first time for a period of about two years in '91–'93, the second time for something closer to a single year around '96 or thereabouts—I used Summicrons. (Leica, unique among cameramakers, names its lenses according to the lenses' maximum aperture; all the "Summicrons" are ƒ/2 lenses.) I was shooting Tri-X, rating it at E.I. 200. Also—somewhat oddly in retrospect—I never used either of those Summicrons at ƒ/2! The first main lens I used was a fourth-version (now called the "pre-ASPH") 35mm Summicron (which I once rather infamously dubbed "the King of Bokeh"), and the second time I used a custom-coated collapsible 7-element 50mm Summicron from the early 1950s. Neither lens was much good wide open, so I avoided the open aperture (and, for the most part, one stop down as well, if I could).

One might well ask, why use a Summicron if you're not going to use the lens wide open? It's a good question, especially since, on a Leica, you don't need to use the lens to see in the viewfinder. That, of course, was the other driver of lens speed: SLRs caught fire in the market starting in the 1960s, and, when you look through an SLR, you're looking through the lens you have mounted on the camera, generally at its wide-open aperture. The slower the lens, the dimmer the view. And why is that important? For focusing, of course. Photographers who have come of age since 1985 or so are probably aware that everybody used to focus manually, but only if you experienced being dependent on it can you really appreciate how important it was to have a good, snappy groundglass and a crisply fast lens to see through. On SLRs, you might never shoot at ƒ/1.4 with an ƒ/1.4 lens, but that maximum aperture was still very important nonetheless.

Zander at age 1, a much-loved family snap taken with a very fine fast lens, the OM Zuiko 100mm ƒ/2, wide open (can you see the telltale of slight spherical aberration?). This was a true candid; my uncle had just plopped his own hat on Z, and Zander responded by looking up at him and smiling. I got off one shot before my uncle took his hat back.

The increasing popularity of zoom lenses in the 1980s and '90s changed the equation again. Very broadly speaking, zooms are two stops slower than equivalent primes; if a premium normal prime lens is ƒ/1.4, a premium normal zoom is ƒ/2.8; cheaper, smaller lenses in each case might be one or two stops slower than that. This was really only practicable because of the parallel advent of autofocus. Slow zooms, especially mated to cheap finders, would have been very difficult to focus manually.

Nowadays, of course, another factor has once again changed the meaning of lens speed is the high-ISO capability of digital cameras. I distinctly remember the brief juncture at the beginning of the 2000s when digital image quality became good enough to tempt serious photographers, but the "speed" (we call it ISO, even though it strictly isn't) of sensors didn't yet match that of film. That changed quickly. Image quality still declines with increasing ISOs, but the general consensus is that every sensor/firmware package has a fairly well defined limit of "usable" image quality—and, with larger sensors, the number is usually amazingly high when you compare it to similar limits applied to film. My personal standard is that if a DSLR has good quality at ISO 800 and usable quality at ISO 1600, I'm happy. My current DSLR does considerably better even than that.

Image stabilization yields yet another twist to the story. IS is a "tripod replacement," not a "film-speed replacement," and that does have implications for how it's useful and how it's used. Even so, one or two stops' worth of further flexibility in low light or with long teles is often quite valuable.

The long and the short of it is this: in 1992 I was shooting with an M6 and Tri-X rated at E.I. 200, using an ƒ/2 lens that had poor image quality wide open, meaning that I avoided shooting wide open. The new Olympus E-P1 that we've been discussing for several days here has an ƒ/2.8 normal lens. But it probably also has "good as Tri-X" image quality at ISOs up to 800 or so, and its built-in image stabilization probably yields one or two stops' worth of shutter speed into "tripod territory." Let's say for the sake of argument that the newer lens design is also acceptable in terms of image quality wide open (even though that still remains to be seen). What that means is that, even according to these fairly conservative calculations, that I gain two stops in exposure index ("film speed") (ISO 200 to 800) and up to two stops in shutter speed (thanks to IS) using the two lenses at the same effective widest aperture (ƒ/2.8). And you're not dependent on the lens for the brightness of a TTL (through-the-lens) optical viewfinding image.

Or, put it this way: given the presence of all these conditions, ƒ/2.8 is the new ƒ/2.

You can say "more speed is never bad," but in practice, the market will eventually decide on a point of sufficiency, just like it does with all technical parameters in which various makers compete to satisfy real demand. The "point of sufficiency" is where most people decline to pay for further improvement (or buy it only for status). We might already have reached that point with megapixels and sensor speed, with 24 and usable 6400 respectively in the most advanced devices. (Only time will tell. The manufacturers will overshoot the point of sufficiency, but as they do, fewer people will pay for the increased performance.) However, for a small personal snapshot camera designed to be handy and portable—given that it has a large sensor with good high-ISO performance and IS—an ƒ/2.8 lens seems fast to me.

Mike

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P.S. Comment: "But I'm not so concerned about exposure, I'm concerned about achieving limited depth of field to isolate subjects."

Not picking on the person who wrote these particular words (or any individual who might have written similar words) personally...but this is total internet hooey. It's something the "thousand monkeys in a room" on the internet have convinced themselves is an issue. It isn't. Or it shouldn't be, to any pictorial photographer shooting pictorial subjects.

In this particular case: a) you don't use a 35mm-e on anything to "isolate subjects"; and b) the difference between ƒ/2 and ƒ/2.8 for "isolating subjects" is very slight, marginal at best; and c) isolating subjects has much more to do with how you use the lens than with a one-stop difference in aperture on that lens. Finally, d) most people who consider themselves "concerned" with "isolating subjects" just as often don't have enough depth of field as too much. I see the evidence all the time, in pictures, all over the place, everywhere. Here's just one (a sample from the E-P1 and 17mm lens). Just one of millions...do you see that this photograph doesn't have enough depth of field for the subject? (The only reason I can pick on this picture is that it's a sample of the new lens wide open, and is not presented as something that's aesthetically intentional. I try not to pick on actual pictorial pictures by actual amateur photographers who might be hurt or offended by having themselves used as an example of what not to do.) O, if I could but count the number of out-of-focus dog's noses I've seen because the earnest but hapless photographer was trying to blur the background....

The problem in photography from 1840 until about 2005 with rare exceptions (fashion photographers and their once-fashionable 300mm ƒ/2.8s come to mind) was to get enough depth of field. The problem was almost never too much. And then came the theoreticians of the shared armchair and their picayune calculations of sensor size and diffraction and all else that's much talked of in numberless fora but wrong....

Best advice: unless you're doing technical work, and have extremely strict conditions and/or requirements to deal with, and you thoroughly understand the issues from a practical as well as a (real) technical standpoint, then ignore everything you come across on this subject. Most of what's out there is 99.75% complete chrome-plated bulldung. (And as you can see, the persistence of the error—and the knowledge that it's never, ever going to go away—makes Mike a mite testy.)  —Mike

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