The Online Photographer

The Luminous Landscape Videos

Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape interviewing Ctein in 2004

Well this is a nice surprise. Josh Reichmann, son of our late friend Michael of The Luminous Landscape, has given us permission to make available the two videos of MR's visit to Ctein's San Francisco area darkroom fifteen years ago. This is especially generous of him as L-L is now behind a paywall.

Here's the interview. The part about dye transfer begins about 23:50 of the 32-minute video if you want to skip right to it.

The second one is really the priceless one—it's the only video we know of that shows a dye transfer print actually being made. The first fifteen minutes are somewhat simulated (you can't film in total darkness), but the later part is real-time documentary, showing Ctein making an actual matrix and a print, from start to finish. You really should watch this—it's quite fascinating even if you never set foot in a darkroom or never will again. And it's now a valuable historical record, at least in photo-tech history. Finally, it certainly shows you how involved a process it was to make the rare print or prints you've bought in our sale!

Speaking of which, there are now less than two days left. The basic information is here and you can browse the available images here.

Many and most sincere thanks to Josh. I found it emotional to see and hear his father again—I knew MR for many years. It's the first time I've rewatched one of his videos since his passing. He was a pioneer of photography online and is greatly missed in our little corner of the universe.

Enjoy!

Mike
(Thanks to JR)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Sid: "Fascinating, even spellbinding, videos!"

Rob de Loe: "Best quotation from the second video: 'now we know why not that many people do this anymore.' Yeesh. What an incredible amount of work to make one print. I had no idea. Thanks for posting this Mike."

Mike replies: Incredible, isn't it? Now you can see why I think dye transfer is one of the most amazing processes in photography's history. But unlike some things that are purely difficult, there was a reason for going through all that work: the results were inimitable, especially as regards maximum black and color purity.

However, my second most favorite color process is pigment inkjet. A well-made pigment inkjet print can be really beautiful. It is a wonderful medium too.

...And not quite as difficult, either.  :-)  But one of the salient comments Ctein made in the video is when he talked about the prejudice people have that inkjet printing is just "pressing a button and letting the computer do it." He's right that that's the same prejudice that people leveled against photography itself in the beginning. Inkjet printing is a skill too, and takes knowledge as well as judgement.

As an aside, note also in the videos that Ctein doesn't use junk words and fillers when he speaks. You won't hear him say "um" and "ahh" very often, if at all. And he doesn't use filler phrases like "you know" (unless he really means it) or "know what I'm saying" or "like" or "stuff like that"...or stuff like that. Sometimes he will pause and actually sigh, but he's silent—he doesn't fill his silences with junk. Very unusual manner of speaking these days. No wonder he dictates instead of typing.

Kenneth G James: "Wow! Watched the videos, they are great! Thanks Mike, Thanks Josh."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I actually have a DVD of that second video (from a former LuLa subscription purchase) that I keep near my desk as a greatest-hits reference. I’ve not only watched several times myself but I’ve played it for others. Several years ago I even played it for a lunchtime group of photo curators and conservation interns at a major museum. It’s a wonderfully educational video, a genuine classic."

Mike replies: Genuine classic...I thought the very same thing, Ken, rewatching it last night.

[A different] Mike: "As amazing as the process is to watch—and it really is—it's even wilder to think about how the idea came to be in the first place. Wow."

MHMG: "Some fifteen years later, I listen with interest to Ctein's comments and concerns about print permanence in the first video. Ctein is entirely spot on with some of his concerns about accelerated aging test methods as it was practiced at the time. We have now learned something about modern inkjet prints that weren't predicted by those accelerated aging methods practiced at that time. A new understanding of inkjet print longevity has indeed been determined both by refinements in accelerated test methods and actual observations in real world anecdotal reports at this point in time now that inkjet printing is a much more mature print process. I take comfort that both 'real world' anecdotal evidence of aging issues with modern media and more recent accelerated testing protocols with improved methodologies for these media are now leading to a better understanding of print permanence. The role of optical brighteners and titanium dioxide whitening pigments in modern media, for example, play a more significant role than we knew at the time Michael Reichmann interviewed Ctein in the these videos. Progress is progress!"

David Lee: "Thanks for the videos Mike. I watched the printing process three times already and shared it twice."

Eamon Hickey: "An incredible treat to watch these videos, especially the printing demo. Thanks to all who thought to make it and now made it available for us to see. In addition to being a master printer, Ctein is a master explainer, a skill that is probably as rare and valuable (in the benefit-to-the-rest-of-us sense) as his darkroom skills. A real pleasure to hear and see him describe his work."

Zowie! New Edmund Optics Knowledge Center

Seldom does something really significant pop up in an incoming mass email, but...wow!

This morning I got an email from Edmund Optics of Barrington, New Jersey, that simply reads:

Master all things optics and imaging using the new Edmund Optics^® Knowledge Center! This page allows you to easily and seamlessly explore our extensive technical library of application notes, videos, technical tools, and more. Resources can be sorted by 90 different topics to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Holy Cow! Turns out the EO Knowledge Center is loaded with tutorials about all sorts of topics relating to optics. It's still in beta, so they're looking for feedback. Well, my initial feedback is that I think I'm going to have fun at that library. (Oh, and can they pretty please do one on why "equivalent aperture" is not even a real thing? Thenk-yew.)

Anyway, what a great idea and what a nice service. See for yourself: here's the link to the new EO Knowledge Center.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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'Visible Identifiability' and 'Decoder Availability'

The Babylonian Plimpton 322 clay tablet, with
numbers written in cuneiform script, circa 1800 BC

Still on the subject of data storage....

Maris Rusis wrote an insightful comment yesterday: "It is not enough that data can be stored in an eternally stable form. The data reader, its software, and its power supply needs to be eternally stable and available as well. Who today maintains a reader for old style floppy discs or computer punch cards? Mike, perhaps nothing is truly archived unless it is directly human-eye readable like your negative and contact print files."

Those are two separate issues, it seems to me. "The data reader, its software, and its power supply needs to be eternally stable and available as well" might be called something like decoder availability. This is why I thought it was silly human folly to include the "golden records" aboard the Voyager space probes in 1977. The "message in a bottle" quality of the Voyagers themselves isn't ridiculous, because it's a gesture and a symbol (Voyager 1 is presently the manmade object farthest from Earth), but records are a data carrier that need a pretty preposterous Rube Goldberg contraption to play; expecting an alien civilization to be able to recognize the disks as data carriers and be able to reverse engineer a record player adds several factorials to the already almost infinitesimally minute chance that a thinking being will one day detect and intersect with Voyager.

...Unless you posit that there is another civilization out there in the Universe that not only harbors sentient hominids, but also sentient hominid audiophiles who happen to have Fozgometers. (And if you don't know what a Fozgometer is, you haven't been reading TOP long enough.)

Anyway, I've learned that the data encrypted on fused silica glass is recoverable (albeit sub-optimally) with an ordinary optical microscope. Of course it still needs to be decoded.

Everyone also seemed to think that the "glass could break." Fused silica is pure SiO₂. We're more familiar with borosilicate glass, which is common in household objects. Borosilicate glass is only about 80% pure, but you might be familiar with its physical toughness—I know it can withstand a drop to the floor (my floor is 3/4-inch cherry wood). I have a borosilicate drinking straw, and dropped it from a height of six feet on to a rock, and it did shatter. The most interesting thing I found in a short skate around the Web was this:

The theoretical tensile strength of silica glass is greater than 1 million psi. Unfortunately, the strength observed in practice is always far below this value. The reason is that the practical strength of glass is extrinsically determined rather than being solely a result of chemistry and atomic structure as is an intrinsic property like density. It is the surface quality in combination with design considerations and chemical effects of the atmosphere (water vapor in particular) that ultimately control the strength and reliability of a finished piece of quartz glass. Because of stress concentration on surface flaws, failure most always occurs in tension rather than compression.

In other words: "reliablility depends on...chance."

Fused silica is also vulnerable to an acid or two, but I can't re-find the exact names.

The other issue with the Project Silica panes is that they don't possess Visible Identifiability. "Identifiability" is a term I fished (half tongue-in-cheek) from statistics. Here it means the thing satisfies the "what the hell is this?" interrogation on the part of those who come to it cold. One of the big plusses of storing photographs as positive images on pieces of paper or negative images on transparent cellulose acetate or polyester is that when they are encountered by that all-important personage known as "Any Idiot," assuming some unspecified threshhold IQ on the part of said personage, he or she can deduce from inspection what it is. This is important. When someone in the future comes cold to that little 75mm square of glass pictured in the illustration yesterday, it's not going to be immediately apparent that it is in fact the timeless 1978 cultural treasure Superman starring Christopher Reeve.

The key to both these issues is probably the selfsame "adoption and acceptance" we were talking about yesterday. The greater the extent to which Project Silica 'panes' (do they call them panes, or what?) become the standard for permanent WORA cloud storage for any length of time, the more and more likely it is that "the data reader, its software, and its power supply" will continue to be available past the viability window of the technology; and if its use becomes sufficiently widespread, it's also likely that some people will continue to be able to recognize what it is, in the same way that there are still people around who can identify "old style floppy discs or computer punch cards," medieval scrolls penned in Latin, and Babylonian clay tablets.

The Fozgometer will doubtless be a great insoluble puzzle for future archaeologists. But it's pretty amazing, really, that we have Babylonian clay tablets that we know refer to the passage of Haley's Comet (then not yet thus named) in 164 BC and 87 BC. That's successful long-term storage.

Mike
(Thanks to Maris)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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James Weekes: "I read a piece, years ago, that I wish I could find. It told of a man who went and lived with one of those isolated tribes in S. America. He stayed for quite a while and took a lot of pictures (on film). He returned home and had enlargements made of his favorites. Some of people, some of animals and the surrounding landscapes. He returned to the village and showed the people the prints. They had no idea what they were. They could not 'see' a face or an animal, just color on paper. It was because they had art, no drawing, therefore no visual literacy. So, even if we send prints, and the next intelligent life finds them, they might not recognize them for what they are."

Mike replies: I wasn't actually suggesting we need to make photographs visibly identifiable for the sake of aliens, but regarding your point, I'll just say that it took my older dog three years before she could detect dogs on the television. But as soon as she learned the trick, she started barking at the ones she saw. Soon she got so good at recognizing them that sometimes she would bark at a dog on the TV that I hadn't noticed yet, which caused me to start looking for—and often, to my amusement, find—the dog on the screen, and once she even barked at a cartoon dog. So I'm betting the Yanomami could be taught to decode photographs, and I'll venture to guess it wouldn't take as long as three years. Also regarding your point, how could anyone know that aliens would be able to see? Perhaps they evolved on a planet that was perpetually shrouded in dust, and it was of no use to them to sense particular wavelengths of radiation. Perhaps they evolved enormous ears, the better to hear things happening in the dust-fog. And for that matter, why would we suppose they'd have to have ears either? How could we even suppose that they share the same basic DNA code we share with animals, which prescribes a thorax, appendages, a control center, and a variety of sensory mechanisms? It's been argued that many human creations, from automobiles to a Civil War army, unconsciously mimic that basic structure (automobiles have two eyes, four paws, a heart, even an anus...). Naturally we like to assume that alien beings would need to follow the same blueprint, but it's only human nature to presume so.

Martin D: "Interesting issues raised in your last few posts, Mike. How can we make our photographs survive the passage of time? How easy will it be for our unknown future friends to 'read' our photo archives?

"There is something magical about the self-explanatory and self-archiving nature of analogue photography. I am delighted to have moved to digital, but I miss the 'naturalness' of the silver medium.

"A silver print need not be decoded: the archival medium already is the final output. And if processed well, the silver print will store well without the need for us to continually reformat it along the way. With digital we don't need to worry about mold attacks and such like—hooray!—but it requires continual renewal of both the physical medium and the coding/decoding technology. This is perfectly OK, of course—we can live with it—but it breaks the spell. We can manage this process, but the very fact that we need to manage the process makes the process distinctly anti-Tao. The Tao version of photographic storage would make us produce our best pictures in some physical medium that self-perpetuates and self-repairs and that can be picked up by anybody, at any time in the future, when it will explain itself to that future viewer in a language that that viewer can understand.

"Nothing beats B&W transparency film in that regard. Agfa Scala 120, in 6x9cm format from my Fuji GW690: for me that was the absolute dream of photographic output. So beautiful on the lightbox, and so self-explanatory. If an alien visitor in the year 2232 finds the box with my Agfa Scala portrait of my father, they will require no help to decode it. They will understand that it is a photograph, they will understand what a photograph is and why humans took photographs, and they will see that my father was a good and kind man. Now, let's hope that at some point we can find a similar archival Tao in digital."

Mike replies: It's curious, but once one accepts as a value the idea that pictures should last, we then immediately confront the opposite problem, which is: for how long, and for whom? I'm privileged to have seen the world's oldest surviving photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras," at the National Gallery show "On The Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography" in 1989 (the book is one of the better visual tours of that period, and is still in print), and it's now 193 years old. Conveniently, that's about the presumed lifespan of today's inkjet prints made with the better materials. So that's sort of my own standard—that is, my idea of what picture life expectancy (LE) constitutes. It conforms pretty well with your selection of the year 2232 in your post.

Probably the biggest problem in this regard is that only a tiny minority of photographic pictures can or will be produced with LE in mind...and the problem then becomes which ones to choose for that honor. The sad truth is that a.) no one has much of an idea which pictures the future will value, and b.) insofar as we think about it at all, we seem to be remarkably bad at guessing. For the most part, photographers seem to assume that one day they themselves will be celebrated at heroes of the visual imagination, and that therefore whatever they produced will be valued for the simple reason that they produced it. This seems, shall we say, optimistic. It's essentially just an expressing of the ego, however touching that might be. But even photographers who use posterity's potential interest as an organizing principle for their work—those broadly known as documentary photographers—don't actually know what the future will need. Maybe they'll spend their time documenting great public works or city scenes, whereas the future will be surfeited with such scenes and actually need something else, something nobody now even thinks to make pictures of. An analogy for that can be found in the fact that for many eras of history, only the activities and concerns of the ruling classes and aristocracies were deemed worthy of attention and preservation, whereas historians today are relatively starved for information about the working classes and underclasses such as slaves. The point is that we as photographers are very bad at certain things, and among the things we are worst at are editing and selecting—in many ways, but especially those ways that put the interest of posterity uppermost in mind.

John Nollendorfs: "Real photographers make prints!"

Mike replies: I feel ya, my brother, but, to take your statement seriously, isn't that really just another accident of history, like the statement "real photographs are black-and-white"? We were forced to make prints for decades because the most efficient and convenient —and hence most widespread—medium happened to be a double-negative process. Without prints we couldn't look at what we had photographed. But there's nothing inherent in today's digital imaging that favors or prioritizes prints. Actually somewhat the opposite, because the print-form now inhibits sharing rather than promoting it, as it used to do; using a print as the container for the image restricts access to those in its physical presence, which is like parking it in an out-of-the-way place where very few people will ever be able to discover it and experience it.

And since we're blue-skying about aliens and such-like here, how about this for a fanciful premise: maybe in 50 years people will simply assume that it's the nature of images to be ephemeral. They're made in their numberless billions to be shared in the present or for some limited time, and it's their nature to be obliterated after some shortish interval, for instance when the person whose phone it's on gets a new phone or when the online photo-sharing service that is "storing" the image on its servers goes belly-up and vaporizes all its holdings. At that time, maybe there will arise a small fringe movement of contrarian craftspeople who militate for putting images in a fixed form meant to last for 200 years, and all the crusty beardy photo-dawgs of that future era—today's twentysomethings—will be saying things like "real images are meant to be temporary!"

I'm just sayin'.  :-)

Mike Chisholm: "Re 'Haley's Comet'...you (or your secret, semi-literate amanuensis) are doing it again. Just stop it. Hell hath no fuming like a pedant provoked."

Mike replies: Well, I don't know what the woman's name was! I'm no astrologer. Was it "Hailey"?  :-D

Coming Revolutions in Storage and Memory

We were talking about SD cards yesterday, and whether 95 MB/s (megabytes per second) is enough download speed or whether you need to pay the premium for 300 MB/s cards. Yes, of course, some people do need the latter—pros, videographers, heavy shooters, anyone on a deadline, etc.

As far as storage and memory are concerned, though, you need to know about two things, both of which were mentioned in the Comments. The first is called CFexpress, a possible new standard in portable removable media that's a big leap from what we've had up till now. The other is some even more exciting news in archive storage, an issue which has been a real headache in digital (and for certain analog media, such as the originals of movies) for decades now. It's called Project Silica, and it's just in the proof-of-concept stage now. But the concept is fascinating indeed. As are the concepts behind the concept.

CFexpress
Think your measly 300 MB/s SD card is the sh*ts? Well, yes, it is, but maybe not for long. CFexpress cards use Sony's XQD form factor and will be back-compatible with XQD devices, and can potentially deliver four lanes of 1GB throughput per lane. Upcoming examples of the Type B version of the 38.5×29.8×3.8mm cards can hold half a terabyte of data with read speeds up to 1,750 MB/s and write speeds of 1,000 MB/s, and the potential is for even more than that.

This is better tech. But as Kishore Sawh writes on SLRGear, "we’ve seen 'better' tech come and go in various fields before simply because they weren’t broadly adopted, and this was a concern for photographers and manufacturers. Make no mistake, adoption rates and market share can make or break a 'superior product.'" Truer words were never spoken. But that, in case you were wondering, is why the Nikon Z6 and Z7 and other Nikons use XQD cards—Nikon has already announced upcoming firmware updates to enable the Z6, Z7, D5, D850 and D500 cameras to use CFexpress Type B. Nikon is only waiting for the cards to become available before releasing the firmware that will enable them. (I don't know how many other current, or imminent, pro cameras use or will use XQD, but I'm guessing there are and will be more.)

Photo courtesy Lexar

A Lexar CFexpress card fits in the XQD slot of the Nikon Z7

More generally, it remains to be seen if CFexpress will be the storage media of the future, because it depends on adoption and acceptance. For now, though, I can't see how companies making cameras for professionals could fail to keep up with each other and transition to CFexpress—it's just so much mo' bettah. In the more distant future, it's certainly possible that cameras will involve a paradigm shift away from traditional handheld interchangable-lens standalone cameras—already, many amateur cameras are index-card-sized, quarter-inch-thick wafers (that is, smartphones) that can send their pictures wirelessly to the cloud for storage. Who knows if professional digital imaging will go that way too, or some other way? But assuming there remains a need for portable removable storage and a need for improvement in that area, CFexpress may be on the cusp of creating a decisive leap in the existing state of the art.

Microsoft Azure's Project Silica

Photo courtesy Microsoft

And speaking of the cloud, check this out. What you're looking at here are, on the left, the four reels of the 1978 movie Superman on celluloid, and, on the right, the same movie encoded on a palm-sized piece of hard silica glass. It's a technology developed by a sprawling Microsoft division known as Project Red Dog (2008) > Windows Azure (2010) > Microsoft Azure (2014). It's called "Project Silica." The successful transfer in the picture above is the proof of concept.

It's astonishing. Microsoft says "the hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats." Awesome/brilliant as all that is, it's not even the new technology's neatest trick. An absolutely huge problem in data storage, and one that looms even larger for the future, is that vast amounts of labor—and hence, expense—are needed to keep ahead of entropy, a.k.a. decay. In this case, for instance, "Warner Bros. proactively migrates content every three years to stay ahead of degradation issues." Just imagine having to do all that work just to keep Superman in shape! Then multiply it over all the movies Warner Bros. has ever made, then to all the movies anyone else has ever made, then to all the other kinds of information humanity thinks is as deathless and eternal and essential to culture as Superman....

Anyway, what's sorely needed is storage media that is "write once, read always" (WORA), so when you put something away you don't have to tend to it. Ant Rowstron, partner deputy lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the United Kingdom, says, "one big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation. We really want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it."

'Zackly. Here's a picture of my former WORA technology:

I haven't touched it in better than 20 years and all the image information is right there  awaiting potential excavation. This method isn't practical any more—once it reaches this stage it's stable, but it takes too much work and cost to get to this stage.

The piece of glass in the picture above contains 75.6 gigabytes of data plus error redundancy codes. How much work will it take to get that information to that stage? For the piece of glass pictured, probably a whole lot. I presume the eventual answer to that question is that the answer will evolve. Project Silica isn't currently intended for home storage or computing (or for your Lightroom catalog)—it's for the cloud. But if it turns out to be practical—and see those comments above about adoption and acceptance—it could eliminate the eternal headache of "write once, then back up over and over and over again at regular intervals until you run out of money or until some idiot drops the ball, at which point everything goes to hell pretty damned quickly," i.e., the current state of digital archiving.

If you want to know how it's done, you'll have to read Microsoft's article, released just a few days ago, because it's over my head. (I'm guessing you already know whether you want to read it!)

Mike
(Big thanks to Speed)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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What Is Bokeh? And the Dog's Nose

[Ed. Note: This started out, this morning, as the republication of the article "What Is Bokeh?" from 2009. However, I ended up revising it extensively. This version is based on several of my earlier articles about the subject.]

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There are three common types of blur in photographs. Two are caused by movement. Moving the camera while the exposure is made, either deliberately or accidentally, is called "camera shake."

Example 1 by Tone

Example 2 Ray Graham

Blur because the subject moved while the exposure was being made is called "subject motion."

Example 1 by Aaron Reed

Example 2 by PhotoJunket

Example 3 by Roberto Rodriguez Adam

When the above two kinds of blur are deliberately combined, usually by trying to follow a moving subject with the camera during the exposure, it's called "panning."

Example of panning by Wanda Scott

The third common kind of blur is when parts or all of a picture are "out of focus" (o-o-f) or not within the depth of field (d-o-f). This is usually called "focus blur."

Example 1 by Zoran Rodic

Example 2 by Patrick Marioné

Example 3 by Reinhard Gruber

(Example 3 under "subject motion" is also an example out-of-d.o.f. blur or bokeh.)

Putting the plane of best focus in the wrong place is called "misfocus." (A fourth kind is software-generated blur such as the "Portrait" setting on my iPhone, but that's beyond the scope of this post.)

Example of misfocus by Meestro

As an aside, note that all three of these types of blur are common causes of less than perfect clarity when they are present in small amounts below the threshhold of conscious recognition. We became much more aware of this when digital came along and we could pixel-peep our files at any magnification. Even now, though, very small amounts of motion blur, camera shake, and misfocus are very common in pictures people assume are "fine." And, indeed, in some cases they don't ruin the picture. People actually have a pretty good ability to look at the image subject when the image isn't perfect.

"Bokeh" simply refers to out-of-focus blur or the parts of a photograph that are out of the depth-of-field, and, especially, the subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus blur. It derives from the Japanese word that more or less means "fuzzy," which also sometimes has the sense of "fuzzy in the head," i.e., confused. That works nicely.

Highlights
Bokeh includes, but is not limited to, consideration of out-of-focus specular highlights. Out-of-focus specular highlights (here's an example) are simply where aperture shape will show up most easily in pictures (i.e., spots of bright sky in out-of-focus foliage, for example). The reason the Internet thinks "bokeh" only refers to highlights, and that the shape of the aperture blades are the defining feature, is because that's the most obvious effect.

Section of search results page for "bokeh" on Flickr. The Internet thinks bokeh only means out-of-focus light sources and specular highlights, which is wrong.

The only lens I ever got rid of because of its specular highlight bokeh was a Zeiss 100mm ƒ/3.5 for the Hasselblad. (An extremely sharp lens.) It had five aperture blades, and small, bright out-of-focus spots were perfect pentagons. Specular highlights tend to pick up the shape of the aperture (here's an example—the shape of the out-of-focus highlights are the shape made by the aperture blades). Lenses with rounder aperture shapes avoid rendering specular out-of-dof highlights that way, but rounded aperture blades merely help a little in certain situations—they don't create good bokeh all by themselves. It's much more complicated than that.

A tip, though: if your lens's aperture has a distinct geometric shape that you see in specular o-o-f highlights, remember that it's probably still perfectly circular wide open, so you can sometimes avoid the aperture-shaped "blobs" that way.

The three original articles about bokeh were published in the March/April 1997 issue of Photo Techniques magazine, which I edited at the time. Carl Weese was the one who introduced me to the idea. Oren Grad, who speaks Japanese, clarified the terminology. The articles were written by John Kennerdell, Oren, and Harold Merklinger. Harold's article is online at The Luminous Landscape. Oren and John still write on occasion for The Online Photographer.

The only reason I added the "h" to the end of the Japanese word in the magazine was that English speakers persistently mispronounced "boke," which at one time (but no longer!) was the more common romanization of the Japanese katakana characters. It's properly pronounced in two syllables, "bo" as in "bone" and "ke" as in "Kenneth" with equal stress on each syllable. "Bokeh" simply renders that a little more accurately. At least adding the "h" stopped all the "toke" and "bloke" jokes.

The word or spelling have nothing to do with the word "bouquet," from the French, and is not even pronounced the same (bo-keh versus boo-KAY).

The other nice unintended consequence of the alternative spelling was that it made the term easily searchable on the Internet. In the weeks following the publication of the issue, I was able to watch as the number of LexisNexis search engine hits (1997 was pre-Google) for "bokeh" went from none, to 15, to 90, to 450, to 8,000 and so on. (A Google search just now yielded 70 million results.) It was as if I had tagged a word the better to track it, like a naturalist might put a transmitter collar on a wolf. We literally watched it spread.

Some photographers apparently object to the word. It's been called "pretentious." It's not, any more than the terms "sharpness" or "saturated" are pretentious. It's simply a descriptive word for a property some photographs exhibit and some do not. It's shorter than saying "the way the lens renders out-of-focus blur (or out-of-d.o.f. blur)," which is the equivalent in English. That's all.

In this picture, everything but the screen is out-of-focus blur.

There's also no "good" or "bad" bokeh, at least not per se. As my father likes to say, "If it works, you're right, if it doesn't work, you're wrong." Same for bokeh: if you like it, then it's good. If you don't like it, then it's not so good. That goes for the presence of blur, as well as for its specific properties. Some people just don't like blur in pictures at all. And some pictures have none.

There's some agreement as to what's good and what's bad, but it's very rough. For instance, people seem to dislike "ni-sen" (Japanese for "double-line") bokeh—here's an example—but the late Phil Davis (author of Beyond the Zone System, a book every large-format black-and-white photographer should own) showed me a picture he liked taken with a very odd, very old camera that featured a church steeple way in the distance. The lens had rendered it as two very blurry church steeples, quite widely separated. I've still never seen more egregious ni-sen. Phil liked the effect enough that he framed the picture and hung it on his wall. (See above, under "if you like it....")

It's true that I got very obsessive about it for a long time (which I don't recommend), but my own opinion is simply that the blur should be unobtrusive, and not detract from or call attention away from the in-focus areas of a picture, unless you mean it to.

"Selective focus," another term causing confusion, just means the tactic on the part of the photographer of choosing which part of a picture is in focus and which part isn't—hopefully, photographers know enough to control which is which. (Some photographers don't, sadly. I see a lot of close-up portraits of dogs where the eyes are in focus and the end of the nose isn't, which bugs me like a bad tpyo.) The opposite of selective focus is sometimes called "pan-focus," which just means that everything is sharp from front to back. The term pan-focus has nothing to do with panning, which is a different technique altogether. I know, photographic terminology is a mess and getting worse. Don't blame me.

The King is dead
Then there's the issue of the applied connoisseurship of lens bokeh—specific aesthetic effects, or the adjective preceding the word. The Japanese term for the character of the bokeh (according to Oren) is boke-aji, which translates roughly to "flavor of blur." Typical "flavors" might be harsh, jarring, smooth, fuzzy, gentle, tizzy, confused, soft, etc. Just ordinary descriptive words.

In the early 2000s I created a .PDF download ranking some specific lenses for boke-aji. It's of limited usefulness these days, because all of the rankings are for old film-camera lenses, but here it is if you're curious. Remember, though, the ratings are just my own opinion. There are no agreed-upon standards.

There's also no perfect lens for bokeh. Please don't ask me how I know; I mentioned obsession, and it's very painful to suffer from such a blatant mental infirmity. Well, okay, the correct word is embarrassing, not painful. An acquaintance from Minneapolis once sent me a picture postcard that had an out-of-focus brick wall in the background. I looked at the picture first, and my eyes went right to the brick wall, because such regular but contrasty subjects are good at revealing shortcomings in the blur behavior of a lens. Then I flipped over the card to find that Gary had written, "As Mike's eyes go straight to the brick wall...."

He got me.

And as for "the King of Bokeh," which is what I unfortunately dubbed the Leica Summicron 35mm ƒ/2 version "IV" in a caption in the original articles: well, it's not. It's just not. I had no idea that reputation could adhere so firmly and so persistently to that lens even now, more than 20 years later, due to such an offhand comment! Here's what I should have said, if I could have explained myself better: that lens has nice, tight, coherent background bokeh when you shoot it stopped down and focused on middle distances, say, five feet and farther. "Nice, tight, [and] coherent" is merely the kind of bokeh I happen to like in B&W; and I always stopped that lens down at least one stop and usually two or three—honestly, I don't think I ever shot with it wide open in all the years I owned it; and "focused on middle distances" is how I usually shoot. So I'm sorry; I shouldn't have generalized. Troublemaker, I am.

'All generalizations are wrong'
As a general rule, I've found that bokeh gets progressively more problematic:

• the larger the aperture (meaning, the more aberrations come into play)
• the closer the focus
• the more distant the background from the plane of focus
• the more complex and/or contrasty the background

What these rules of thumb predict, quite naturally, is that you’ll have an easier time avoiding distracting bokeh with most lenses if you stop down a bit, keep the focus at moderate distances, and avoid contrasty backgrounds. With any lens, we discover our own limits for what we’ll tolerate, and then either shoot within those limits or deal with the consequences. The above rules of thumb also predict that “worst case” bokeh is easy to provoke: it’s when you use the lens’s widest aperture, focus as close as the lens can, and include deep background with complex subject matter or harsh contrast.

Front and rear bokeh (meaning in front of, or behind, the plane of best focus) might also differ.

The important thing to realize here is that there's no such thing as "the" bokeh of a lens! As the above indicates, the same lens can render blur differently depending on how a picture was taken and on what it shows; the bokeh can even be quite different in different areas of the same picture.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that if the bokeh is generally better, the in-focus image is generally a little softer and gentler, and not so "hard sharp" or "wire-sharp" as virtually all modern lenses have become. This is just a very rough equivalence and not a hard-and-fast rule. I might have said in 1997 that this was true of Bronica and Minolta film-cameras lenses generally, except I would never have dared to suggest that any brand of lens was less than super-sharp; that would have been the mafioso's kiss. Also, bokeh looks better in B&W.

No one lensmaker makes all its lenses with the same bokeh characteristics, so none can be said to be "best," and, really, no one lens can be better than any other at rendering bokeh because it's a matter of taste! I've seen statements like "this lens has beautiful bokeh" made about bokeh I personally think is atrocious. That doesn't mean they're wrong and I'm right, though. It just means my taste differs from theirs.

In general, digital lenses do better with bokeh than film lenses did. Probably because, post-1997, it started being talked about more and more (you know, from zero hits to 70 million hits), and lens manufacturers haven't got their heads in the sand. I've even seen the word used in lens advertisements. Lots of post-1997 lenses have really nice bokeh. I love the PanaLeica 45mm Macro, for example. (No, not a King. It's not even the Marquis of Bokeh. It just has pretty bokeh that I love. You can see an example in this post.)

One last curmudgeonly grouse on this subject: sometimes I think I helped create a monster. Please, Internet: bokeh isn't necessarily a desirable property all the time, and more of it isn't automatically better! Many beginners and a few ignoramuses on the Internet seem to assert that the greater an area of a picture is out of the depth of field, the better a picture it is. That's nonsense. I've even heard people say that since they paid extra for a fast lens, they're going to shoot it wide open all the time! How wrongheaded can you get? It's like saying a B&W print is better the more black it has in it. (They paid for that silver!) Photographers always try to get the placement of focus right and the depth-of-field right, and that doesn't mean more or less of one or the other—it means the picture should have what it needs according to your best judgement. Photography isn't about all-purpose rules applied rigidly to all circumstances. Get the dog's nose in the depth-of-field, please!*

Learning how your lens renders blur is no different from learning its other characteristics, such as whether it's unsharp at certain apertures or whether it smears the corners or whatever. Some people like that kind of thing, some people don't. It's all good. Want my advice? Don't obsess about it. (I know whereof I speak.) If you want to learn about it so you can attempt to apply it or control it, fine; if you don't, and prefer just to take pictures and let the chips (both the sharp and the blurry chips!) fall where they may, that's fine too. We're all just having fun here, after all.

I'm off till Sunday. Have a nice weekend! Get out and take some nice blurry pictures why don't you....  :-)

Mike

*I love that picture. Love that expression. The joke is, when you want to get the dog's nose in the d-o-f, one way is to photograph a dog with a shorter nose!

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JH: "Re 'All generalizations are wrong': I use this all the time in the form of 'All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false.' It's a paraphrase of the philosophy of Kurt Gödel who proved mathematically that some things could not be proven, so he switched to philosophy."

Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, c. 1933

JG: "I frequently photograph my dog, a white standard poodle, using my Sony RX1, which has a 35mm ƒ/2 lens that renders photos in such a gorgeous way that I happily live with its many quirks and marginal reliability. Her nose is so long (approx. 6"!) that even with the lens stopped down to ƒ/8, it's impossible to get both it and her eyes in focus if I photograph her face straight on. At typical portrait distances, it's even difficult to get her nose and eyes in focus with her head turned 45 degrees, so photographing her well is more of a technical challenge than many people might realize."

marcin wuu: "There's a great read about bokeh and depth of field on Zeiss's website. Easy to understand yet scientifically sound, the best kind of article you can imagine. Funny thing about what's good and what isn't in the context of animal photography—as a cat person and shallow d-o-f fanatic, I suffer greatly because it's so much harder to put cat's nose out of focus with modern tiny sensor cameras—a cat's muzzle is way shorter than a dog's."

Mike replies: An excellent paper...I assume, as much of it is well beyond my own expertise! I particularly liked the sentence, on page 26, "The most important and clearest attribute of blurring is simply the amount of it." True dat.

The paper is a bit ironic for me however. In 1997 I had access to Zeiss's spokesperson. I can't come up with his name just now (my aging brain!) but he was quite an enthusiast (a resolution fanatic) and very intelligent, and perhaps a bit imperious as well. When I asked about Zeiss's position on the issue of "bokeh" (explaining what it meant), he reported back that he had inquired of Zeiss's lens designers but was met with perplexity. Apparently no one then at Zeiss had the habit of considering how the out-of-focus areas were visually rendered in pictures. I was told some version of the same thing we heard all over: you are supposed to look at the stuff that's in focus, not the stuff that's out of focus. Which is fair enough.

By the way, since then, I think Zeiss is one of the companies that has used the word "bokeh" in its advertising, if I'm not mistaken.

Relevant to what I said about small amounts of blurring degrading quality, I had been puzzled by an illustration photo in a then-recent Contax brochure that purported to show the resolution of one of Zeiss's best lenses for that system, but that, to my eye, was clearly slightly degraded by motion blur (and I was seeing just the printed brochure, not the original slide or print). The spokesman knew nothing about it and said that Zeiss had nothing at all to do with Contax's brochure pictures, which was doubtless true. I was curious, however, and at the time I had a practice of occasionally trying hard to get to the bottom of a random selected mystery—a good habit for a journalist, I've always thought—and I chased down the story about that particular factoid. At Photo East the next year I found the guy who knew the story. It turned out that the picture had been taken by one of the PR people tasked with writing the brochure, someone who wasn't even really a photographer. It was these sorts of facts that I learned to keep to myself, though, because in our industry it wasn't very difficult to get blackballed if you embarrassed somebody. I was already on the "outs" with Contax at the time, so I kept my mouth shut about that little point. I hope now that Contax is long out of the camera business, and the camera that brochure was concerned with is selling for peanuts on eBay, I won't get in trouble for saying this! (The Zeiss lens that made the picture is excellent; I actually still have one.)

Speaking of keeping one's mouth shut, my friend Jerry K. (who provided the picture of the soccer ball in the fishing net the other day) told me a joke yesterday. Seems an older gentleman had just passed his 60th anniversary, and was asked what the secret to a long marriage was. He said, "I've learned two things. To do what I'm told and to keep my mouth shut."

The interviewer said, "Oh, really? What if you wanted to tell her something nice, for example, that her figure looks particularly nice in a particular dress?"

The old man considers this thoughtfully for a few beats, and then says, "I wouldn't risk it."

John Krill: "Speaking of the dog's nose this photo was taken in Vietnam. The dog got so close that its nose was out of focus. Sadly the dog was killed by a land mine but his handler survived.

"Follow this link to see the photo and the story."

Edge Sharpness: A Solved Problem?

According to a spate of recent news articles, two Mexican physicists have cracked a problem that stumped Isaac Newton and Diocles, the ancient Greek mathematician who first recognized what is now known as spherical aberration. Two doctoral students at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey, Rafael G. González-Acuña and Héctor A. Chaparro-Romo, have published a "mind-melting equation" that allegedly solves what is known as the Wasserman-Wolf problem, formulated in 1949, regarding spherical aberration in lenses. The paper, published in the journal Applied Optics (Vol. 57, Issue 31, pp. 9341–9345 [2018]), is titled "General formula for bi-aspheric singlet lens design free of spherical aberration." Supposedly, when lensmakers of all kinds begin using it, spherical aberration will become much simpler to correct and variations in edge-to-edge sharpness in lenses will become a thing of the past.

Sounds good. On the other hand, the story also kinda resembles those "viral" news stories that get going from time to time that the news media just loves to repeat...you know, like redheads are going to go extinct, or alien spaceships resemble flying saucers, or you should drink eight glasses of water a day (a myth that originated in an unresearched article in a women's magazine many years ago and took on a life of its own). What those stories have in common is that there is no scientific basis for any of them, and yet the public, for some reason, just loves them and can't get enough. I'll just note that no journalist has the expertise to check out or evaluate this story.

...Certainly including me. Here; here's the equation. Why don't you check it out and tell me if it'll work? That's farther above my head than a star that's too far away to see with an Orion StarBlast.

González-Acuña (right) was awarded The 2019 Optical Design and Engineering Scholarship from the International Society for Optics and Photonics.

As we speak, huge amounts of research are going into technologies that might be applicable to smartphone camera lenses. That much, at least, is certain.

Mike
(Thanks to Dr. Charlie and several other readers)

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GKFroehlich: "I've worked in the area of electromagnetic propagation for most of the last 45 years—six in graduate school, and 39 on the job. The work involves understanding, characterizing, and describing—mathematically—how electromagnetic waves are affected by the materials they interact with, as the waves travel from one point to another. For example, visible light (which occupies only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum) might interact with a subject by reflecting off of it, and then by passing through the various glass elements of a lens, before it is 'detected' by an appropriate sensor (e.g., film, our retina, or the sensor in you Fuji). Similarly, a short pulse of microwave energy might interact with a subject by reflecting off of it, and then by passing through the turbulent atmosphere, followed by passage through some kind of antenna, before it is detected by the receiver. The mathematics used to characterize and describe this journey, and the waves' interactions with whatever they encounter, can appear pretty formidable to those not familiar with it. But in fact, the math required to merely characterize and describe is reasonably straightforward.

"Where it starts to become very difficult is when—instead of merely describing the effects of a given path through a given set of materials—you have a very particular outcome in mind, and you wish to discover what materials, geometries, and other properties will provide that outcome. That is a design problem, and those are in general much more difficult problems to formulate and to solve. They are also the most common types of problems encountered. After all, it's usually easy enough to evaluate how an existing system performs; it's a whole different ball game to specify desired performance, and then to find the system that will deliver that performance! And this, of course, is exactly the problem that lens designers, radar designers, and the like must deal with every day.

"In the early days of my career, we had to solve these problems mathematically, and the holy grail was always to find a solution in closed form. That means the desired result could be expressed as an equation—preferably one that could actually be computed when numerical values were substituted for all the symbols. Whenever a closed-form solution eluded us, we would then have to begin making simplifying assumptions and approximations, and applying our experience, to arrive at our best-guess result.

"As computers became more ubiquitous, and much faster, and as memory became less and less expensive, it became feasible to attack these problems iteratively—that is, to make an informed guess, evaluate it (i.e., try it on for size), refine the guess, evaluate this new guess, refine it some more, evaluate it again, and so on—until a satisfactory or acceptable solution was finally obtained. This approach is now widespread and well understood, and it's usually the default method for attacking some of the more difficult design problems in electromagnetic propagation, including lens design.

"Lens designers have long understood that aspherization could be used to minimize spherical aberration, that bending could be used to minimize coma, that proper placement of the field stop could minimize astigmatism, and so on. And for years they have quite effectively applied 'brute force' iterative optimization, with some remarkable results. The contribution of González-Acuña and Chaparro-Romo is to find this particular solution directly in closed form. It is a remarkable achievement in its own right, and should not be minimized. But whether it proves more computationally efficient than current iterative approaches remains to be seen. And one last observation: It appears that their solution is applicable only at a single wavelength, or at least over a very narrow band of wavelengths. If so, practical applicability might still be a long way off."

David Evans: "Diocles proved that replacing a spherical mirror with a paraboloid could eliminate spherical aberration. As far as I know he was interested in burning mirrors and did not consider lenses. He couldn't have got far with lens theory since the law of refraction was not known in his time. The math is way over my head too, but it appears to apply to a single-element lens for which chromatic aberration will still be a problem. I don't know how it applies to complex lenses."

Ernie Van Veen: "I entered the equation into my son's scientific calculator and it seems to work, although, no matter what values are given to the variables, the answer always appears to be 42."

Tim Bradshaw: "I've looked through the paper and it looks at fine to me: I'd have to learn more optical terminology, and sit down with pen, paper and algebra system to actually follow the derivation, but it's immediately clear this isn't cranky in any way, so it's probably correct.

"I think that getting a closed-form solution for this is a remarkable achievement, but how much relevance it has for practical camera lens design, if any, is not clear. This is for two reasons.

• One of the assumptions they make is that the refractive index of the lens material is constant. This is probably a good assumption in the sense that the refractive index should be the same throughout the body of the lens, but it's horribly wrong in that it will vary with the frequency of the light: with colour in other words, unless the material of the lens has no dispersion. Well, of course, real materials do have dispersion which is why no-one uses singlet lenses, and this solution does not clearly help there.
• Computers exist. If you want to design a lens you can either seek a closed-form solution like this, or you can attack the problem numerically using a computer to iteratively find a good solution. Attacking it numerically is repugnant to people like me who like to do our maths with pen and paper, but if what you want is a good lens, especially a good zoom lens (there's a reason that there were essentially no zoom lenses before computer lens design became possible) then attacking it numerically is the way to go. So this solution is practically interesting for camera lenses if it makes the numerical simulation of lenses easier: if it doesn't, well, it's not.

"None of this is meant to detract from this result: I have a background in mathematical physics and I'm very interested in closed-form solutions. But I suspect it has limited, and perhaps no, relevance for camera lens design. I think it may very well be important in some other areas though: in particular if you are interested in light only at a single frequency then this may well be very interesting. An example of that is lasers and laser optical systems are used quite pervasively, for instance in the fibre-optics which will now send this comment from my computer to yours. There are probably more lenses for laser-based systems than there are for cameras."

Of Old Days and New Ways

Well, we certainly have gotten a lot of comments over the past couple of days. All the comments sent me scurrying back to eBay to revisit film camera faves from days gone by, a bad habit I long ago left behind but that feels awkwardly familiar even now. 

It sure is fun to revisit the idea of old film cameras. I miss the sense of control I had using them, and the feeling of a direct connection with the world that an optical/chemical method of recording the lens image imparted. I feel neither with digital imaging. DI just doesn't have the essential magic of film photography—that sense, when you look at an original print, that you are seeing a shadow of the real world. I don't feel that with digital and never have.

However, it's mainly the idea of old film cameras that I like. In fact, I've been lucky—almost incredibly lucky—in that various advancements in photography have come along just as I needed them. Autofocus (AF) came along just as I was starting to have trouble focusing. Digital's short feedback loop came along just as I was getting frustrated with the ongoing complexities of visualizing ("previsualizing," in Minor White's redundant, yet somehow still superior, word for it). Digital came along just as I was getting burned out on all that work I used to have to do. High ISOs became a reality just as I was getting really interested in low-light photography. Image stabilization (IS) came to the rescue just as I was starting to have trouble holding cameras steady.

It's almost like whatever I've needed immediately gets invented. 

The journey not the destination
Each step along the way has come with a sense of liberation and fun. Just to name a few...my first AF camera was a Nikon N8008, and boy did I have fun with things like no-look shooting with one hand, knowing the camera would set its own focus. Whee! I "borrowed" my doctor brother's early Nikon Coolpix (950, I think it was) and shot all afternoon with it. Fabulous fun. Loved that thing. The first camera I owned that had IS—the Konica-Minolta 7D—was a revelation. And although it's controversial at the moment to admit, the most fun I've had in the past three (five?!?) years has been shooting grab shots with phones. It's as close as I've ever come to the imaginary visual notepad I always wanted. I always imagine it's the same feeling of freedom, liberation, and playfulness that Oskar Barnack must have felt when he was out roaming the streets of Wetzlar with his Ur-Leica. You're set free.

I will never regret having mastered film photography, or having learned to see in B&W, or having trained myself to guess exposures without a light meter, and I will always remember the darkroom with great fondness. "Rolling my own" film from bulk rolls onto cassettes and developing film by hand were merely chores, but I loved everything about printing under enlargers and I enjoyed working in—and being in—darkrooms. Using Leica rangefinders for four years or so really did teach me a lot about shooting skills. I'm grateful and glad for everything I went through earlier in my life in photography. Wouldn't trade any of it. And if I ever retire—okay, retire rich enough to have someone else develop my film and make my proof sheets—it'll be B&W film till the end for me.

More work for less return
But the fact is, I need the cameras we have today. Astonishing though this fact may be to me, I am no longer young (just because you can see it coming doesn't mean it isn't still a surprise). I need autofocus. I appreciate today's sophisticated autoexposure, coupled with what I can correct using my favorite program, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). And I am reassured by IS. Having instant visual feedback and the ability to check results on the fly has made me a better photographer. High ISOs that can reach into the darkness, coupled with shadow recovery in ACR, has expanded the kind of subject matter I can consider—I've always loved low light and near-dark. And being liberated from a set per-exposure cost has made it easier, more comfortable, and more fun to simply play. Even though I never minded, the journey from viewfinder to finished print in 1980–2000 involved an awful lot of scut work. There was powerful austere beauty in the "purist" version of the way things used to be, but there seems no way around this conclusion: I used to have to work harder to get worse results. Or fewer good results.

I'm probably going to love well-made 35mm B&W prints best until the day I die—it was the chosen technique of my younger days and I seem to have been imprinted—but when it comes to color, finely-judged inkjet prints are prettier than any color printing method from the film days in my opinion. I find it curious that inkjet prints still have low status value. But then, humans are weird.

Don't get me wrong—I still have deficits as a photographer. And I suffer from some of the usual grumpiness, ennui, and disaffection that stereotypically goes along with my age and stage in life. I am an "adept" (noun form) when it comes to finding things to complain about.  :-)

But: much as I enjoy daydreaming about going back to the past, for me, and for who I am now, things are better today.

All that jazz
Now then, that's done. What to do now? ...I guess I'll put a vinyl record on the turntable and go listen to some '50s jazz!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Mark Barton: "Very, very long time reader—first time commenter…. Speaking of eBay and film cameras, I was recently very surprised when I decided to sell a bunch of the gear that I’d 'accidentally' accumulated over the last 15 years. The surprise was that I ended up with an extra 20–30% above the original purchase price for each and every item! I’d always half justified buying stuff on the basis that I could sell it again without loss, but never expected to make a profit!

"And to bring things back to the post, I’m currently listening to Dave Brubeck at this moment on the speakers bought with the proceeds from the camera sales!"

Pierre Charbonneau: "The beauty of analog photography is hard to define for me. For some inexplicable reasons, I prefer my inkjet prints from well-scanned negatives. During five years, I was enamored of the Leica Monochrom. Quite a superb camera capable of splendid technical results. Sharpness and possibility of dodging or burning were fantastic. But since few years, there is a somewhat softer, a delicate highlight, and a unique and real grain, not fake, that pushes me to shoot 400 ISO film. The 13x18-inch prints are a fine reward for compensating the cost of film, and the time spent on processing and scanning. I guess there is something more organic to film photography. If the word does make any sense here."

Ernie Van Veen: "Interestingly, that is almost exactly the opposite of my emotional experience with photography. For the first 35 years of my photo-snappin' I was frustrated and mentally blocked by film and all of its 'magical' complexities. These were chores that I could (will) never 'get my head around.' In spite of the enthusiastic mentoring efforts of a couple of very talented photographer friends, film opened no doors for me; instead it always stood in my way.

"It was the purchase of my first DSLR in 2011 that set me free. That's when I felt that sense of control and that feeling of direct connection to the world that you feel with film. I have always been a technical, rather than artistic, person. But film has always left me bamboozled. A bit like prestidigitation; you can show me again and again but I will always see only the 'magic' and not the technique. Computers, however—these I understand. That's probably why I was a programmer and systems analyst for 30 years. I happily shoot in manual mode and I understand the usage of the camera and lenses, but I love the menus, I love the screens, I love Lightroom and Photoshop and I love inkjet printers (not the cost of ink). Without digital I would have given up photography years ago."

Gary Nylander: "For many years I split my time between using digital and film. When I was working as a newspaper photographer I used digital exclusively since 2001. I never wanted to go back to using film for newspaper work; with digital I could get time-sensitive pictures to my editor a lot faster, with no colour chemistry to mix up, which was a bonus.

"On my days off and holidays, I opted to use film cameras, mostly a 4x5 view camera. It was a lot bulkier and heavier than the digital cameras that I was using for work, but I liked the alternative way of seeing, I felt I was really on holidays when using my view camera, it was a much slower pace to use in comparison to the fast-paced work I was doing using digital cameras on a daily basis for the newspaper. But alas all good things come to an end and the photography department at the paper I was working at went the way of the dodo bird and so did my job. Now that I am investing in my own digital equipment, newer and much better than what I was using at the paper with their 15-year-old cameras. I have now found that my new-fangled digital camera has met and exceeded in some cases the quality I was getting from my scanned 4x5 view camera negatives. That I find amazing."

Michael Perini: "A near-perfect summary of the way I feel. We didn't notice the work because we were just doing what was required. Sometimes I think a film background is required to fully appreciate the wonders that are possible with digital. I have all my film gear, and keep telling myself that I'll make 8x10 contact prints again...but I think I'm lying. I hope I'm not...but I think I am. Thanks."

Prejudice, Guilt, and Shame

I've made a decision: I'm no longer going to be prejudiced about smartphone cameras. Ten years ago, when Janis Krums took a cellphone picture of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, we still had reason to be amazed that a non-photographer could take a news picture with a phone and it could be, like, meaningful. It seemed like a brave new world then. No longer. Now, smartphone cameras are just another kind of camera. Like any other kind of consumer camera from the Kodak Brownie to the point-and-shoot to the digicam, they can be used for any kind of photography up to and including expressive artwork. Any kind of contempt for their "unseriousness" is hidebound and old fashioned, merely the residue of older attitudes clinging to the present.

For example, I was doing my daily battle with the goldenrod in my "wildflower garden" (inherited with the house) a few days ago, pulling it out by hand, when I uncovered yet another poor plant that had been engulfed and smothered by the rapacious weed. It had large buds at the top so I suspected it was not a weed itself. The next day, returning to yank still more goldenrod from the ground (I have a feeling I will never win), a single day in the sunlight had encouraged the recently liberated be-budded plant to do this:

Blooming while the blooming was good! You could almost feel its gratitude at being freed from the clutches of the rampaging goldenrod. So I ran to the house, got out the full-frame camera and the 85mm lens, and took this. Do you like it?

Just kidding. This is an iPhone picture, in portrait mode.

Does it make any difference? It's just a picture, and it's just for here. I'm not going to print it. Anyway, I think scorning pictures made with phones is an outmoded behavior now, and so is feigning amazement that good pictures can actually be taken with phones. They're just another kind of camera, among all the other kinds of cameras. You might scorn them if you are disposed to scorn other consumer cameras—few photographers ever respected the Kodak Instamatic or Disk cameras, for instance—but don't forget that there have been people who have done interesting work with toy cameras and things like pinhole cameras made from shoe boxes.

Toy camera?!

I suppose it's sort of old-fashioned that I even bother mentioning this, at this late date. The whole rest of the world has already accepted that smartphone cameras are just cameras...it's only crusty old photo-dawgs like moi who have been holdouts. But really, I don't want to be the kind of person who holds other peoples' choices against them, like the crusty old pros in the 1930s and '40s who scorned the tiny 35mm cameras made by Leitz as "toys." Some pretty decent work was done with those, too.

Nothing but colors
I ate some ice cream on Friday, for the first time in this calendar year. I had a kiddie portion. I didn't enjoy it. I felt a bit sick afterwards, half because of the massive dosing of sucrose and cancer-promoting casein, and half out of guilt for betraying my fealty to WFPB. This is an iPhone snap a picture of the ice cream shop in Naples (New York, not Italy, don't get excited):

I'm so ashamed.

Not a great picture, and I'm not proud of it, but it illustrates a point I want to make. I admit I've had various bigotries about materials and methods over the years. For instance, back in the old days when black and white were the colors of photography, I could never seem to bring myself to make serious prints on RC paper. I had used some of the very earliest ones, and they tended to discolor and acquire craquelure, so I never quite trusted them and I could never take them seriously. RC was for work prints, fiber-base for final prints. Which is ironic, because some of my fiber-base prints made on expensive fine-art papers thirty years ago are showing a touch of age, looking a tad dingy (probably because of aging or fading brighteners), whereas prints made on Ilford RC papers still look very good. Some of them look like the day they were made. The RC papers seem to have lasted better than some of the fiber-base papers. If I were going to print traditional B&W today, I'd use Ilford RC papers. Well, except for the fact that museums and galleries are prejudiced against them too. Or are they, still? They used to be.

But I'll tell you one thing I can't get over—taking pictures like the one of the ice cream shop that just depend on pretty colors. I'm not talking about all color photography, just photographs that are entirely "of" bright colors. Whenever I take a photograph that's "just" of color, it's like I get hit by this paintball pellet of guilt and shame. This is just me—I know there are superb photographers known for doing just that their whole careers—but something about it just seems illegitimate to me, and it makes me feel guilty when I catch myself doing it. I find it very hard to concentrate on shooting carefully when the only thing that draws me to a subject is just a bunch of strong happy colors. Something in my brain screams at me for it and makes me feel bad. Bright colors? It seems to say. Is that all photography is?!?

Maybe I need to work on that. Or maybe I'm just not good at that type of color photography. It's all right not to be good at things.

Again, this is just me and my own brain, my own...feelings. For my own work only. Nothing against anyone who pursues colors as a subject, so please don't think I'm insulting you, or anyone. As with many things in photography, I try to separate the way I feel about things for my own work and my openness to the same things in the work of others.

I mostly succeed. Heck, sometimes I even take flower pictures now. That's a change!  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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John Camp: "I do disdain cell phone cameras when used to make art photos, but I use mine all the time to make notes, record prices, take quick candids, etc. The only time they're removed from my phone is when I discard them or message them to someone, who most often won't remove them from her phone except to discard them.

"You're not far from Manhattan. Go to the Guggenheim, take a look at the huge Robert Mapplethorpe photos on display right now, and tell me how you'd make those prints after shooting the same subject with a iPhone.

"My daughter has access to a very fine, beautifully printed Mapplethorpe retrospective book; she says seeing the Mapplethorpes at the Guggenheim was, for her, a totally different experience. (And it is.)

"I don't run your blog, but it seems to me that you can either have a camera blog, in which all cameras are more-or-less equal, simply because they're all cameras, and that would be a fine thing to do; or you can have a photography blog in which all photos distinctly are not equal. Of the not-equal photos, the iPhone shots are the least equal."

JimH: "Congratulations, Mike.You have crossed the threshold from cause to effect, camera to image. It's easy to focus on what makes the image but that's understandable when we're dealing with an art that uses such seductive tools. I wonder if artists experienced angst over brushes or sculptors over chisels like photographers do over cameras today.

"I recently had to take closeups of some tech products for an online newsletter we produce and I was not pleased with the shots with my Pen F. I tried my iPhone 8 and got much better results. That was it—the whole lot of Olympus gear went on eBay and was sold (got a nice price too!) Why should I leave it sitting here unused? I had only taken about a hundred photos with it in a year.

"Thom Hogan rails at the camera manufacturers about ignoring connectivity and ergonomics and I agree. Using an iPhone is intuitive, simple and covers 90+% of what I ever did with a complicated 'camera.'

"And remember when it comes to art, there are Lomo, Holga, and pinhole groups doing great art. I even had Holga lenses for the Olympuses.

"Your comment about the purists scorning Leica 35mm users at first made me chuckle. My high school art teacher who got me interested in photography (and cars) gave me this drawing more than 50 years ago. Seems appropriate."

photoDes: "Like others who have commented, I just can't manipulate my phone well enough to enjoy photography. It seems to fight me when I'm trying to compose and then push the 'button.' I never seem to catch the picture I want. The photos I've taken are impressive enough but the handling is the worst of all my cameras (various types). I could comment on the lousy sound quality of the phone service too, but I won't."

Tom Burke: "Thank you! I too have been enjoying my iPhone camera. In fact I think that some of my favourite pictures of the last couple of years or so have been taken with it. In view of which, it’s interesting to note that in his 'One device...' anouncement, Steve Jobs did not include a camera as one of the three devices. The three were: a wide screen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and an Internet communicator. Yes there was a camera included as well, but Jobs didn’t think it was worth saying much about it. But the smartphone camera has disrupted an entire industry."

Henning Wulff: "I think my 'moment' regarding phone photographs was when I saw this print offer. This has now proudly hung matted and framed pretty much as you suggested in our house for the past six years. Definitely money well spent; the joy in viewing it is ongoing."

Mike replies: A beautiful thing, isn't it? I still love that.

Paul Van: "As a bit of a gear-hound, one of the things that has appealed to me about photography is the seemingly endless paths you can take. Cell phone photography is just another path, currently well-traveled with occasional footprints leading off the path. While I may be of an age or temperament that is not interested in going down that path (or at least not far), I can appreciate those who want to explore it."

Darrell Marquette: "Yes. They are another kind of camera which I use along with my digital and film cameras. I just love photography no matter what makes the photo."

How Many Pixels Does a Good Man Need?

We were all conditioned to want more pixels for a good decade or more of our lives, and for a time it worked. At some point, however, the allure faded for me.

I liked my 6-MP APS-C DSLR (a Konica-Minolta 7D). That was a special camera, made by a remarkable team of experienced engineers and a company with a vast wealth of knowledge. The files are still beautiful, and I have prints from them (made by Paul Butzi) that are in the 16x20-inch ballpark that continue to look fine to me (although people in the know—like Oren—would see the telltales of uprezzing). And of course Ctein offered a demonstration "big print" in 2012 to show the kind of resolution a good printer could get out of a 12-MP Micro 4/3 sensor. That print continues to look fine to me too.

Puzzlers, taken with the 6-MP K-M 7D in 2005. Photo by MJ.

I sometimes idly wonder what a six-megapixel APS-C sensor made using today's technologies would look like. I just checked (using B&H's search panel headed "Still Image Resolution") and, apart from some inexpensive novelty-type products such as Canon's IVY CLIQ, which is described as a "Hybrid Digital Camera/ZINK Printer," 10 megapixels is apparently about the lowest number of pixels you can buy now in a serious camera.

Do you remember Tommy Brown? You can see the size of his prints from the first picture at that link. Some of his prints were made with his current camera, a Sony that has 42MP. But some of the prints were made from 12-MP files. You could tell the difference if you looked, but all the prints looked fine and nothing called attention to itself with insufficient quality (except the prints made from 35mm B&W film, which were enlarged too much. Film can't keep up with digital). All the 12-MP prints were from older cameras, too, so presumably other things were different aside from just the number of pixels.

Naturally, we all have different standards and preferences, and I know the standards and preferences of many other people will differ from my own. I'm sure there are people out there who would really like to investigate the new GFX 100. And there might even be a few people who would like more pixels than that. We all have different points of sufficiency. (a term I wrote about here. The footnotes of that 2009 post are interesting given recent developments, aren't they? That was before the Leica 50mm Apo-Summicron-M came out. But what I reported in the footnote was something I was told by a Leica rep.)

Ctein wrote a column about the number of pixels we might theoretically need before we reach a point where we can't discern any more improvement. You can get a lot just from the title if you don't want to go read it: it was called "Why 80 Megapixels Just Won't Be Enough..."

Where I fall
This surprises me, but it's been nine years since I personally concluded, while trying out a Pentax K-5 that was introduced in September 2010, that I had discovered where the point of sufficiency was for me when it came to pixels. The K-5 seemed to have enough. After that (although I'm still occasionally susceptible to insecurity), my desire for more began to subside. The K-5 was a 16-MP camera. It's been almost ten years and I haven't appreciably changed my mind since then, surprisingly. I've owned several 24-MP cameras and one with 36 MP, and I've used a variety of others with higher-than-16-MP resolution. But I've never been really convinced it's anything I really personally need. Sixteen is sort of my baseline number now, and has been for quite a long time. I was surprised to find out just how long a time.

Beautiful 19th-century "survivor" in Saylesville,
Wisconsin. Taken with a Pentax K-5.

Again, that's just my idiosyncratic personal judgement—I understand you might feel differently, and if you do I won't argue with you for a second. We all have those different standards and preferences I mentioned. Everybody gets to say for themselves. There's no right or wrong answer. There's nothing at all wrong about wanting or needing 24 or 36 or 37 or 42 or 50 or 100 MP...or more. Well, maybe there's one thing that could be wrong with it—that would be if someone is merely reacting uncritically to marketing assumptions, and not actually deciding for themselves using their own eyes and their own visual taste.

But no one around here would do that.  :-)

Mike

P.S. I never could post-process that Saylesville Hall image. I tried it again and I still can't do it. Good thing for me it's not that great a picture.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Carlos Quijana: "Agree. I was happy with my Nikon D100 (6 MP) and then with the D700 (12 MP). 16 MP is fine. More pixels haven't improved my photos, I have to say."

Martin D: "Your 16MB sound right for me too, especially since my final prints are fairly small and in B&W. Noise characteristics to me are much more important than absolute resolution."

Clay Olmstead: "If you're like me, and almost all of your pictures are seen on digital screens, the answer is purely mathematical: HDTV is 1920 x 1080 pixels; to avoid sampling error, you need to get above the Nyquist limit, so you want to have at least two times that many pixels in each direction; call that 2.5 just to have some margin of error. That makes a sensor that's 4800 x 2700, or 12.96 MP. Any more than that is just for cropping."

Paul Judice: "I've worked in retouching for fashion brands since photographers shot film. My world was very concerned about the new digital cameras having enough resolution to make a store window display image, since those can be six or seven feet in height. For years I did a lot of test strips at final size to assess the damage, but since the 20 megapixel barrier was cracked, I've rarely heard any concerns."

Dogman: "I like to relate how I decided digital photography could replace film photography for me. It was a photo I made in 2008 with an 8MP Canon DSLR that I cropped in half and printed (the best half) 8x11.5 inches. It looked really good framed and hanging on the wall. Later I printed it 13x19 inches and it still looks good on the wall. Today I'm using 16MP and 24MP cameras and I'm totally happy with the results."

Thom Hogan: "Back in 2005 I wrote on my website that 24 MP was about where the crop sensor pixel push would end. That was based upon a whole bunch of calculations and assumptions (e.g. diffraction, and how print technologies might make low-level acuity pass through to visibility).

"In essence, I was trying to do the sort of calculation that the audio market had done (e.g. 'how much can we actually hear?'). In retrospect and practice, I'd say the mark really was more around 20MP. Both 16 MP and 24 MP crop sensor are basically the one standard of deviation mark on either side, so I'm fine with anyone picking one of those.

"With full frame (and certainly medium format), things change a little bit. You either gain cropping flexibility or maximum print size capability from those formats at the same pixel densities (basically where we are with the Z7 with 45MP). Most people really don't need either of those, frankly.

"That said, I've long cautioned about what's going to happen with 'prints': they'll go digital. And they'll be on 8K or higher flat screens. 8K is 7680x4320, or 33MP. It's that 'or higher' part that will start to dictate just how good today's images look 50 years from now."

Ger Lawlor: "Lens first, processing second and sensor third—matching the lens with the sensor is critical.

"Just for fun, I recently repaired my Sony NEX-C3 (new screen for a few dollars). Using the same lenses it is definitely sharper per pixel than my A6000. At the other end of the spectrum, a client commissioned a 25-foot by 8-foot photograph last week and I also supplied four other images almost as large for a commercial job recently. (Showroom fit-outs.) Canon 5D MkIV, 85mm ƒ/1.8 at ƒ/8, ISO 100 bolted down, and an unsharpened stitch of 12 images processed very carefully is giving excellent results at 2–3 foot viewing distance. But it is also astonishing how well a 24-MP image upscales if done right. The biggest issue when doing crazy upscaling is sharpening artifacts, lens issues, and noise. Naturally, at this scale it often isn't any more than 96dpi native, but still, not bad."

Alex Buisse: "It is far from the norm, but I have had a few clients request I do not shoot for them with my Nikon D4, as 16 MP was simply not high enough resolution for their needs, and the 36 MP of the D810 was the absolute minimum they would consider. For my personal shooting, though, I feel that 24 MP is more than enough for most uses."

Mike replies: I heard the same thing about the original Canon EOS 1D (4 MP). A few clients were balking at the low resolution. You might recall that for a while Canon intended to split between "fast" (responsive) but low-resolution cameras, and slower but high-resolution cameras. The original 1D was complemented by the 1Ds in 2002, which had 11 MP and was the equivalent then of the GFX 100 now...bleeding edge! The 1D Mark II (2004) doubled the 1D's pixel count.

Then again, back in the '80s I remember a pro telling me that he had to shoot 8x10 film for high-end watch catalogs even though the shots were going to be reproduced no more than three inches wide, and most considerably smaller than that. He tried to sell the client on medium format for efficiency's sake but they wouldn't go for it. They wanted "the best" and were willing to pay for it.

Open Mike: Fun, the Final Frontier

["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP, expressing Yr. Hmbl. Editor's own idiosyncratic opinions exclusively. Readers are neither required nor expected to agree! Visitors are encouraged not to take umbrage! Open Mike appears on Wednesdays on TOP.]

-

For the last 20 years we've been amusing ourselves by demanding better and better digital cameras. And we got everything we ever asked for and more. Cameras now have everything. Absolutely everything. Except one thing.

There's just one single, solitary feature still missing.

See if you remember any of this. Twenty years ago*, we really wanted digital to be just as good as film—not almost as good as, but just as good as. It seemed like a tall order...for a time. First we wanted more pixels, because there just wasn't enough resolution—the first digital camera I used had 640,000 pixels; at the time, the "megapixel" era—exotic term—was still in the future. We needed more accurate colors, because reds were too saturated. We needed better uprezzing programs, so we could make normal 11x14-sized prints. Pro cameras cost $25,000 and amateur digicams had teeny tiny little-fingernail-sized sensors, so we wanted the good cameras to be affordable and the tiny-sensor cameras to have larger sensors. For a little while, digital only looked good at low ISOs, and we realized that high-speed films could be shot at higher ISOs than digital, and we wanted digital to match or exceed that. That period didn't last terribly long. Image sharpening was so important, Bruce Fraser wrote an indispensable book about it. We needed bigger buffers so we could shoot at the camera's higher frame rate for more than just a few shots. We needed cheaper and more capacious cards. I was a cheapskate and waited, so the first one-gigabyte CF card I bought cost $150...used. There were all sorts of proprietary recording media—remember SmartMedia cards? Memory Sticks? We needed better "throughput," so the camera didn't need to "think" for so long when you turned it off, and so you didn't risk losing shots because you turned it off too soon. For that matter, we wanted faster turn-on times. Then we realized that even though autofocus was getting pretty fast, that was only in good light—we needed better autofocus in low light. Ditto the ability to measure exposure—it worked fine in good light but not so much in poor light. That needed to get better. "Shadow noise" was the big issue for a while—there was a lot of it, and it was ugly. Noise reduction was key for software. Of course we wanted the cameras to be affordable. We also wanted cameras that were smaller than the huge early pro cameras. We needed lenses that were "optimized for digital" and didn't result in that alarming purple fringing on objects against bright backgrounds (eventually called CA, even though sometimes it wasn't CA).

As things got better and better, our attention turned into sort of a "mop up operation." Any remaining quirks and shortcomings? Oh yeah, dynamic range (maiden name: exposure range), the ability to capture a high SBR (subject brightness range) in one shot. And, cautiously, the cameramakers along the way added features we never had before. Image stabilization, first in the lenses then in the camera bodies. Focus tracking. Camcorders were popular, so they began putting video capability in still cameras, which is so common now that everybody who wants a stills camera is forced to buy a video camera too. Focus stacking. Electronic shutter, which is silent. Face recognition and eye AF. There are a lot more, but I can't list them all because...well, I didn't care about many of them.

So what's still missing?

Only one wee little thing: they're no fun. They have everything you could possibly want, except that.

Fun is the missing "feature."

Take a recent new camera for example. (I won't name it, because it's just an one example among many, not deserving of being singled out for censure.) I'd love to love the camera, and maybe I might, but the table of contents in the manual is longer than I would want a whole manual to be. (Eleven pages.)

How long is the manual itself? 519 pages.

That's too long to read before the camera itself is completely outdated and consigned to the dustbin of history.

For me, using cameras like that is like being forced to take a test in a subject you don't enjoy.

For a hard-assed prof who won't grade on the curve.

Fun is subjective. But all my life, it's been fun to take pictures. I used to say I could have fun taking pictures with anything. My 9-year-old cousin got a Kodak disk camera for Christmas and I, ah, accidentally used up all her film before Christmas dinner. How could I do such an inconsiderate thing? Because I was having fun. (I bought new disks for her.) I photographed with a Canon Xapshot once (an early still video camera) and a 120 Agfa folder from the 1930s (my mother was born in the '30s) because they were both fun. I used a $10 Diana (now called Holga) and an 8x10 Deardorff. I had fun with cameras I bought at flea markets and cameras I bought new for thousands of dollars, cameras I borrowed and cameras I inherited. Two of the most fun cameras I ever used were the Nikon Coolpix 950 (1999, didn't own one) and the Sony F-707 (2001, owned it). I bought a Crown Graphic and took it all apart and put it back together and even that was fun.

Now? Not so much. I don't think it's just me. 

What's fun? Well, fun is whatever you think it is. And yeah, some of my cameras are still fun. Some of the ones I used to think were fun would not be fun now. But today's cameras are increasingly un-fun, seemingly by design. As if by intention. Let's put it this way: fun is the one thing the camera manufacturers aren't even thinking about. It never enters their heads.

Fun needs to be the final frontier if you ask me. The cameramakers can inject new life into their offerings and save their own butts if they'd only exempt us from the exam. Not with all their cameras. Just some of them. I'm not all that sure they even know what fun is any more!

Mike

*I recently realized that the first time I used a digital camera was more than 20 years ago. Wipe the film days off the chalkboard altogether—I'm now a grizzly old graybeard in digital. There are grown adults heavily into photography today who weren't alive when I first used a digital camera. Yikes!

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Rip Smith: "What makes a camera fun to use? What’s missing?"

Mike replies: Simplicity, directness, responsiveness, and the possibility of complete mastery and control, of its use becoming second nature with practice. And a great viewfinder.  :-)

The best film cameras were the simplest: Rollei TLR, Leica M6, Pentax Spotmatic, field view cameras, etc. No manufacturer ever, to my knowledge, has even attempted to make a digital camera that is radically simple—as simple as possible, but no simpler—yet also excellent in terms of quality, ergonomics, and responsiveness. Instead they give us great garbage heaps of configurability and call that "control," which it is not.

...It's human nature, though, I suppose, and unavoidable. It certainly is the fashion and the custom. But the manufacturers are painting themselves into a corner: they are trapped into an arms race of runaway featuritis, which in practice creates increasing amounts of frustration and dissatisfaction (i.e., no fun), and it's beginning to turn off even the mavens. I believe it started to turn off typical consumers quite some time ago now.

Jared Sebby: "I came into photography through a love of industrial design and architecture. The best products in both of those fields are often the simplest: people loved Dieter Rams' Braun products because they were clean, simple, easy to use. They loved modernism in its day for many of the same reasons—function was considered more important than form, and so form was plain, but functional.

"Photography doesn't really have that kind of pervasive design ethos now—Leica, leaning into their Bauhaus-adjacent heritage, delivers it in spades, but other manufacturers seem too afraid to take the same steps, too afraid of losing one tool on the Swiss army knife they produce to imagine digital cameras without all the fancy gadgets. They don't want to alienate one subset of photographers, so they make cameras for everyone and it's a perfect fit for almost nobody.

"I'm reminded of camera reviews by Andrew Kim, a product designer who formerly ran minimallyminimal and now works for Apple after stints at Microsoft and Tesla, who prioritized the feel of a camera and its simplicity over what it could do. His concept camera had a dual-action exposure dial and shutter button, a screen, and nothing else. My ideal camera, the millennial that I am, is a slab of aluminum with a shutter button, combined speed and ISO dial, interchangeable lenses, and an electronic viewfinder. Even better if it doesn't have menus and can only shoot Raw."

Michael Fewster: "Along the same lines, I have recently been involved in discussions about suitable cameras for beginners. In my humble opinion a beginner needs to get their head around ISO, shutter speed and f-stop and the relationship between those controls and the changes they make to an image. I would be looking for a camera with dedicated f-stop control, preferably on the lens barrel, a dedicated ISO control and a dedicated shutter speed control. Those basics are the things that give control and fun. I'd also recommend buying a secondhand camera while learning and then maybe move on to something more sophisticated once the user knew what they wanted in a camera and how to program those controls where they wanted them for their purposes, if that is the way they then wanted to go. What camera would you and other readers recommend for those starting on the photo journey? It seems to me to be a similar question to Mike's request for fun."

Jnny: "Phone cameras are still fun."

John Reynolds: "Re 'No manufacturer ever, to my knowledge, has even attempted to make a digital camera that is radically simple—as simple as possible, but no simpler—and also excellent in terms of quality, ergonomics, and responsiveness.' I have a Leica M Edition 60, it's all the above, and yes, it's fun!"

Pierre Charbonneau: "So true. I use for work the essential pro DSLRs. They are very potent for sure. No doubt on reliability either. I never use one of them on a day off. Instead, the analog Leica MP, a old Chinese Seagull Twin lens, or a Fuji X100 comes to the journey. This last one is not the simplest to set up, offering so may options. But when this has been resumed, the actual shooting is most entertaining. Clear finder, focus quick and close, files are malleable and robust, and the camera is light and pretty. These three cameras make the bill as fun cameras for me. And what I look for as an amateur is having fun!"

Chris: "I found fun when I moved to a Fuji X-E3 with 27mm ƒ/2.8, set to Velvia for in-camera JPEG."

Bill Allen: "This. In the words of Rob Pike, 'Less is exponentially more.'"

Mark Hobson (partial comment): "a few weeks ago, as I was sitting in the first class lounge in Union Station (Chicago)—at the mid-point of our three-city/three-train/3,000 mile trip—I overheard a conversation wherein a woman was asking for help with her new camera, a mid-level Nikon DSLR. She was desperate, inasmuch as she was on special trip for which she had purchased the camera, and as yet had been unable to make a picture. Literally, unable to make a single picture.

"I stepped up and offered to help. You might think, after nearly two decades of digital camera(s) usage [also, Mark is an accomplished professional—you met him in the post "Elephant Tongue and Hypnotized Chickens" —Ed.], it would not be a herculean/rocket science task to get her started. While I was eventually able to get her reasonably set up, there was not a single camera function for which access was intuitive. What a bad joke the whole experience was, both for her and me.

"After getting her functional (in a very rudimentary/basic fashion), off she went, reasonably happy, only to return five minutes later with another it-won't-work issue. Utterly shameful and ridiculous on the part of camera makers who have created this mess."

Mike replies: Great story. Reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about Dylan Thomas. He had a shack on the wild, rocky Atlantic coast of Wales where he would write his poetry, sometimes allegedly writing only two lines in an entire day (possibly because another task that occupied him was his ferocious drinking). The story goes that an illiterate old woman lived nearby, and he would take his day's work and read it to her. If she didn't understand it, he would tear it up and start over.

Might not have been literally true, but it might as well be.

I wonder what it would be like if camera manufacturers began to compete with each other to see how simple and intuitive they could make their products? One test might be how long it would take for the "woman on the train" to get up and running and have an easier time with her nice camera.

And before the mavens worry, I'm not suggesting all cameras should be simple and intuitive. But some of them might reasonably be. (Some of them other than hyper-expensive Leicas.)

The Proper Attitude Toward Tech (Frank's Lesson)

Michael Kenna, Stone Pine Tunnel, Pento, Abruzzo, Italy, 2016,
silver gelatin print, 8 × 7 inches

I learned this from Frank DiPerna, one of my teachers at the Corcoran. I must have been having difficulty with something one day, and with a wave of his hand and in a dismissive tone of voice he said, "Just master it. Just learn whatever you need to know to do your work. Don't worry about anything else. Just master what you need."

Or maybe he said, "...don't worry about the rest of that crap." (I'm paraphrasing here.)

I still think it's a good attitude to have. Pros need to master a whole lot, because the essence of professionalism is problem-solving—you have to confront the client's problem and solve it (under the gun, too), and that requires having a lot of arrows in your quiver. But it makes you a jack of all trades and it doesn't let you go very deep. On the other hand, look at an art photographer—someone like, I don't know, Michael Kenna, or the late Henry Wessel Jr. Michael Kenna basically shoots B&W film in a Hasselblad on a tripod and has been working that way for decades. He has a very stable signature look. He's no doubt a deep master of his camera, materials, and techniques. But I'll bet he doesn't think much about how to test chroma noise or corner resolution. Henry Wessel worked as hard as any photographer out there, but he shot with the same Leica and lens for much of his life, made the same size prints. Ask him to explain the layer mask in Photoshop and I'll bet he would have looked at you blankly. He wasn't an explorer of techniques. He was an explorer of the found visual world. His mastery was profound. It just had little to do with technique, is all.

Henry Wessel Jr., Nevada, 1986,
gelatin silver print, 12 1/16 x 17 7/8 inches

And even pros just master what they need. I've told this story before, but I once worked for an old studio pro who was asked by a friend to explain a little amateur hot-shoe on-camera flash. The old pro replied he had no idea how it worked, and added that he didn't even own one. His friend was incredulous that he could be a top pro and be so ignorant of such a basic piece of equipment. My then-boss didn't bother to explain that he had a hundred thousand dollars' worth of studio lighting and light-shaping equipment back at his studio, and that he could light a swimming pool from a scaffold. Bare-bones lighting to him was one pack and three heads!

Find your way of working; figure out what you need to know; and work as hard as you must to master it. Unless you want to, you don't need to take it any further.

Mike

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(Not) everything must fade away

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hugh crawford: "A professional is measured by their worst work and an artist is measured by their best work."

Mike replies: Thanks for that Hugh. I knew we could depend on you to add something trenchant here.  :-)

Paul: "Good outstanding photography is all about finding a 'voice,' authorship. In theory once you discover it, everything else becomes surplus."

Mike replies: I always liked the story about Nick Nixon. Evidently he started out his career determined to continually switch techniques and working methods, changing every year. He did that for a few years and then alighted on shooting very loose and close-in with an 8x10 camera and wide-angle lenses, in black and white. He's now been shooting that way for decades, and he's a master at it—I've shot with an 8x10 just enough to be totally amazed as to how he does it. As far as I can see, some of his pictures should be technically impossible.

Rob De Loe: "My favourite example of this way of thinking is Jane Bown, who from what I've read was not at all interested in the 'tech.' She kept it very simple equipment-wise, left film processing to the technicians at the paper, and focused on making fantastic portraits."

GH: "I used to be an assistant for a somewhat well known art photographer who used big, complicated sets, and I was both surprised and impressed by how relatively limited her tech knowledge was. Having spent so many years getting into the tech minutiae of photography myself, that was an eye opening experience for the better, and I've tried to keep that in mind for all of my artistic pursuits. It's the vision that's important. You can always hire someone to do the technical stuff."

marko: "Bare bones lighting! That's hilarious. Back in the day I used to strobe light sports arenas for Sports Illustrated. Four to six Speedotron 2400's and our totally mobile set was a Norman 200b with mini soft box. I also had little idea how on camera flash worked. That made me laugh, thanks."

Peter Wright: "This reminds me of a conversation I had not so long ago with Freeman Paterson, who has built a career as a distinguished art photographer that spanned many decades shooting only 35mm slide film. (I was already an avid reader of his books forty years ago.) When the subject somehow turned to flash, Freeman said he couldn't offer anything as he didn't own a flash gun, (or any other lighting equipment). His entire kit seemed to consist of some cheap zoom lenses, some primes, and a couple of old SLRs—you could probably pick up the lot for about $500. He has someone else do minor Photoshop tweaking and final printing, so I'm pretty sure he could not tell you what a layer mask was either. This seems almost a truism; all the really great photographers I admire (and even the ones I don't especially admire) seem to severely restrict themselves in terms of equipment, subject matter, and media, either for a lifetime or at least many years at a time. Obviously, they have found the tools that allow them expression, and don't need to go any further technically. So if we want to move beyond 'GAS addicted tinkerer,' then it seems we need to decide what moves us (or pays the bills, of course) and the things we need to master will become much reduced, as well as obvious."

Paul Richardson: "A great point, and a relevant reminder for me. I tend to go off on tangents in terms of picking up editing techniques, and it occurred to me just earlier today that I simply don’t need to know a lot of that stuff. This after wasting two hours on trying to pick up a masking method I was unfamiliar with. It suddenly occurred to me that I know enough to deal with simple masks, and really, what more do I need? A kick in the pants, maybe."

Steve Renwick: "Sage advice, but it's important to remember that it's best applied to art photography. Even if you're not a professional, there will be topics you need to know even if they don't serve your art. For instance, at a family event, one almost has a responsibility as the 'photographer in the family' to bring along a digital camera and record the event. Even if operating said camera is much more annoying than operating a Hasselblad (he wrote bitterly whilst in the midst of a family vacation)."

Smartphone Sunday

The two side-by-side camera modules in the Apple iPhone 7+

It's smartphone Sunday, apparently.

I finally downloaded a raw app (one of many) for my phone—Halide Camera. It lets the iPhone 7+ shoot in raw as the default, and improves the camera controls. It's allegedly an "expensive" app, but at $5.99 it's one of the cheapest camera accessories I've bought in years (he said ruefully).

I shot this quick torture test on the iPhone with the Halide app and the result was pretty good. I was easily able to adjust the exposure for the highlights. The shadow recovery wasn't what it would be with a Fuji GFX, of course, but it was adequate, just—by balancing the shadow, highlight and exposure sliders in Photoshop and then applying some judicious noise reduction I was able to get this acceptable result. It's not up to the standard of Micro 4/3 but it's certainly better than the OOP (out-of-phone!) JPEG.

The problem here was highlighted by Marco in a comment the other day. "Maybe I am digressing," Marco wrote, "but this point comes to me often when reading posts like this. How do you decide that you are going out to take snapshots (phone) or something more serious (camera)?"

That's been a big issue for me my whole life. No matter what my "current practice" might be, I'm always afraid of having the wrong thing with me when I stumble across something I really want to make a picture of.

Back when I "saw" in B&W, just having color film in the camera was a big liability—because I'd see a picture I wanted my "real" film for, and I was blocked. My camera bags always contained a few half-shot rolls of color film, because I'd encounter something I wanted to shoot with Tri-X and I'd hurry and get the dang color film out of the camera so I could load some of my "real" film. It was frustrating.

Because when I'm out with a camera I'm not just seeing. I'm seeing like the camera sees. Where "camera" means my preferred technique of the moment. Other cameras look different, and aren't always acceptable as a substitute.

So of course a big problem arises, as Marco says, when you're out and about and you only have your phone with you and you want your camera but it's not with you. Because you never know when you're going to see a picture.

And sure enough, I have maybe two dozen pictures I've taken with my phone which I dearly wish I had taken with my camera. In certain cases it's okay, I can live with it. But in about half a dozen cases it's just a loss. I got something good, something precious, but on the wrong camera. Too bad.

So maybe having the raw app on the phone is a capitulation of sorts—it's an acknowledgement that I actually photograph with an iPhone and not a dedicated camera* some of the time. Now, when that happens, I'll be able to shoot raw and stand a better chance of getting a decent file out of the thing.

(Wish I had taken those six precious pictures with the Halide app? I guess.)

Mike
(Lead photo by Kārlis Dambrāns from Latvia)

*By the way, how long before "camera" means "camera phone" in the culture, and we need a separate term for what we now call cameras? That day is coming, I'll bet. I already find myself using the term "dedicated camera" to say what "camera" used to mean. In the early days of digital we always had to distinguish "digital" cameras from cameras. Now it's the other way around—"cameras" are digital and we have to specify "film camera" when we mean one that shoots film. Ah, the warp and woof of terminology through time!

P.S. Today's the big day I migrate to my new computer. I spent half the day yesterday preparing. Wish me luck, although I hope I won't need it.

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Want to help TOP?

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Ned Bunnell: "Mike, I’ve been testing quite a few Halide images which I’ve printed at 8x10 and the results are actually pretty nice...especially the B&W’s. I’m also doing a lot more processing on my iPhone. You should try using Darkroom to convert your Halide images. It does a nice job."

Just Because Russell A. Kirsch Has Forgotten Who He Is, Doesn't Mean We Have To

Scanned photo of his young son Walden by Russell A. Kirsch,
considered by common consent the first digitally scanned image

Decline and death are an indivisible part of living. We're like flowers, which unfurl from a seed, grow, thrive, and bloom—then drop their petals, wither, perish and become one again with the soil in which they grew. In a way, finding it sad is...I don't know, indulgent? Some word like that. It's really only...natural. (The cycle of birth and death grows more profound to us as we age.)

This short article at Oregon Live about Russell A. Kirsch strikes me as sad even though maybe it's not. It's a brief glimpse into his life now, near the end of his decline.

Kirsch was one of the digital pioneers. He was the leader of the team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that developed the first digital scanner in 1957. I've been reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now recently, and finding it very thought-provoking (that term isn't just book-blurb boilerplate; it means what it says, i.e. a book that often sends you off on trails of thought of your own), and I can't help but view Russell Kirsch through the prism of the values the book defends.

Kirsch's has been a useful life, and by several accounts a happy one. His wife is still taking care of him. For the time it takes you to scan this one article, I thought you might want to acquaint with him, if you never have previously.

I look forward to the time when a standard scholarly work about the digital pioneers will illumine all of their biographies, after the fashion of Vasari, Plutarch, or Johnson. (Or Harold C. Schonberg, whose Lives of the Great Composers I enjoyed.) Hope I'm around to read it.

Mike
(Thanks to JG)

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Jim Fix: "Thank you for that article. I met Russell at the start of my computer science teaching gig at Reed in Portland, must've been 2001 or so, probably before his condition had really taken root. I worked semi-regularly at the bakery they mention in that article, Ken's. One day there I was grading papers with 'automata diagrams' on them. There was this dapper, smiling fellow across the table from me, and he struck up a conversation about those diagrams. He was full of energy and curiosity, and natural charm, and he slowly revealed to me the details of his pioneering work, including the scanner prototype he had built, and the National Standards computer he had helped invent. Quite a resumé.

"He apparently was quite fond of images and art, definitely influenced by the life he had with his art historian wife. If I remember correctly, in retirement he was collaborating with her on ways that technology could be meaningfully used to analyze and preserve works of art, especially if it allowed others to share in his wonder about the artistic impulse. I think they had just returned from a visit to a major cave painting site in France, and he was full of ideas about that.

"I was grateful for the conversation, and my own luck, and was happy to learn that he had taken on teaching the same kind of automata material to his group of retired friends, ones that wanted to stay fascinated and engaged with the world around them, even the digital one. Despite his stature, his generosity during our chat left me feeling validated, and with an extra energy that I carried back to my own work.

"Funny how a shared love of a good cup of coffee and a Ken's 'morning bun' can lead to all sorts of other connection. You never know who your neighbor is and what they've been part of, and it's often good to put in a little work to find out.

"I am sorry to learn about his condition and its effect on his loving family. I got to witness a man who seemed filled to the brim with riches."

Mike replies: What a great memory. Thanks for sharing it, Jim.

Schoolteacherish Mike

Sometimes I feel like referring articles is a bit schoolteacherish, like I'm passing out assignments. That is, of course, not my role, as I'm talking to friends here—my equals and betters.

But really, sometimes articles come along that ya just have to read. One such is "In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?" by Joshua Rothman, in The New Yorker. Pretty much a must-read for photography polymaths like you. (It annoys me that The New Yorker has evidently adopted another QUIRK—awkward "shouting" capital letters intended—to go along with its longstanding brain-dead practice of putting book titles in quotation marks instead of italicizing them like everyone else in the literate world. (Editor Remnick should have left the quaint old original typeface alone and changed that instead.) But at least that one is excused by being a "tradition," going all the way back to Ross or wherever it goes back to. The publication's newest QUIRK, with no tradition whatsoever, is to assign different titles to the same article depending on whether it's online or in the paper magazine—which is confusing and irritating. Anyway, in the printed magazine the same article is titled "Afterimage," in the Nov. 12th, 2018 issue.*)

Years ago I tried to assert that digital imaging should not be called "photography," that the word photography described what we now clumsily know as analog or optical/chemical photography (I usually dislike back-formations), and that the new medium was sufficiently different that we should know it by a different name. I thought "digital imaging" or D.I. served just fine, since that had currency at the time.

I've never changed that opinion, but I learned to back off on it, because people didn't like it—in the early days of digital, any comparison of film vs. digital quickly devolved into a status dispute, and people on Team Digital were immediately and automatically prickly about imagined slights to their standing. They wanted the main word applied to their chosen tech. So "digital photography" it was. As Mad magazine used to say, Yecch.

This article—whatever you want to call it, "Afterimage" or "In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?", really gets at what I was talking about back then. We're on different territory now. It's just that it looked like the same territory at first. It isn't. The changes are far more profound than just the means by which we fix a lens image to make a still picture. Really, D.I. is closer to figurative painting than it is to photography. Sez me.

At the very least, there's a short list of people I think everyone interested in our subject ought to know, and Hany Farid is on the list. If you don't know the name yet, the article will be an overdue introduction.

...Reports due Tuesday. Just kidding!

Mike

*I know, I'm getting to be a grumpy old man. (My friend Dan's joke—he's 65: "Every morning I wake up grumpy. I should just let her sleep.")

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Rob de Loe: "Superb find Mike. Thank you for sharing. The implications for society are stark and clear in this piece (and they're not good—we have a lot of things to figure out).

"What the article doesn't get to is the implications for 'photography' as an art form. On that front, I'm actually not too worried. Would you expect a painting to be a faithful representation of the real world as seen by the painter? Of course not. That's where photography as an art form is going (if it's not there already). Once people are comfortable with the idea that you can't believe anything you see in a still photo, we can all focus on whether or not the picture gets us to think, engages our emotions, makes us feel something, etc. (which is kind of the point for me). Of course where the wheels will come off the bus is situations where the photographer as artist claims that the picture is a faithful representation of the world, but in reality it isn't. We're there already as everyone hopefully knows based on recent famous 'gotcha' incidents. This will only get worse. Hopefully software will help us sort this out (but as the article points out, that's not guaranteed either)."

robert e: "I agree that different titles for web and print is both annoying and complicating, but I think I understand the reasoning, or at least the motivations to do so. While 'Afterimage' is a perfectly appropriate title in the context of an issue of The New Yorker magazine, it's not very effective in the context-stripping environment of web reading, where attention-deficient people like me peruse long lists of article titles, often from different sources, and often not bothering to click up even the descriptive blurb. On the other hand, 'In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?', while both attention-getting and descriptive, would clash with both the style and layout of the print mag, and not contribute anything to the way most people read it. (Might work as a subtitle.)

"Sure, many people probably do read the web mag as they would the print mag, but the idea, of course, is to try to leverage the openness and reach of the web to expand the steady, paying readership."

rodfrank: "I read an article a couple of years ago about Dr. Farid and his software that that will detect an altered photograph. At that time he extended an offer to analyze a couple of photos. My class at the local university sent two photos. One was unaltered and the other had very little alteration that we thought was well hidden. About a week later we received an email telling us not only which photo was altered but exactly where the alteration was done.We were impressed to say the least."

Another Modern Digital Internet Falseism

I read it on the Internet again: "It's no use using older lenses on digital cameras. With today's best digital sensors, you must use the very best, very latest lenses."

I must? Why?

This is another IF (Internet Falseism, a "falseism" being a truism that isn't true). You have doubtless read it a hundred times in one form or another.

What if you want to use a soft-focus lens on a digital sensor? Will the sky fall? The world explode? Will you be arrested?

Must be true, though, because I've read it on the Internet so many times.

Actually, you can use any lens you want to on a digital sensor, no matter what its potential resolution. If it's a good sensor, it will merely capture whatever the look and properties of the lens happen to be.

Optimizers do it best
The only reason to use a high-resolution lens on a high-resolution sensor is if you want a high-resolution picture. But if you have an interchangeable-lens camera, you can switch that high-res lens for a low-res lens and back again, and no hostages are taken and no one gets hurt. You remain free to roam about on your own recognizance and the sky stays where it belongs.

It's a lot of fun to use old lenses on new sensors.

If you "optimize" your camera for high resolution, all you have is a camera that takes pictures with good resolution. You still have the exact same problem every other photographer has with every other camera: what to do with it. How to put it to good use. How to make the dumb equipment make a smart picture. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or for ninety-nine out of a hundred photographers, incrementally better resolution makes zero difference in the aesthetic and expressive success of any particular picture.

And if you "optimize" your camera for high resolution, all you have is a camera that takes pictures with resolution that is good for this point in history and with today's particular technology. In olden days, John B. Williams wrote a book called Image Clarity that was all about his investigations into how to optimize photography for high resolution. He covered everything. Of course, none of it is relevant to digital photographers today because the technology has changed (and film photographers certainly aren't using film in order to achieve optimal image resolution). That's what will happen to your attempts to "optimize" resolution now, too. Only faster.

Flatware applications
Besides, very generally speaking, optimizing for resolution, these days, is akin to saying Warren Buffett needs more money. I see more pictures spoiled by too much resolution as I see spoiled by too little (just as I see more pictures spoiled by too much out-of-focus blur as I see spoiled by too little).

If it's what you want to do—optimize resolution, starting with the best sensors and the ideal lenses for them, a sturdy tripod, and some way to show your results meaningfully—well all right then. By all means go ahead. It's one thing you can do. It's one look. It's one kind of photograph to take.

And, of course, there might be a few specialty applications which require extreme resolution. A Zeiss spokesman, at a presentation in the '90s, used this example: what if you see a person holding up a table utensil several hundred yards away, and you want to know whether it's a fork or a spoon? ...And you have time to set up your surveyor's tripod, which he recommended and used? John Williams used a slightly more plausible example: what if you're doing surveillance photography and you want to be able to read a license plate from a long distance away? But he had to add as a caveat: ...and you can't switch to a longer telephoto lens? Or words to that effect. Well. There are some pictures that might work better with higher resolution than you can get normally. A few.

I'd own both. Old, bad lenses and new, super-sharp, hyper-clinical ones. One for fun. The other for fun.

Nowadays, we might add a third imperative: what if you want to win arguments on Internet forums about the superiority of your gear choices by showing little snippets of pictures at 100%?

Well now, that's important, as we all know. Just as important as showing whether it's a fork or a spoon, or for reading license plates when you left your 600mm at home even though you're doing surveillance.

...But mine are better!
I hate to break it to the Internet, but there's actually no law that says you get extra life points for a tiny bit more resolution in all your photographs. You get no credit for it. Most pictures will not be better for it. Most people will not care. Even the ones who do care won't care for very long.

Use any lens you want to on your digital camera. You stand just as good a chance of making a good picture with the most highly corrected lens it's possible to buy today as you do with an ancient screw-mount lens with low contrast and poor edge definition. It's just that the artistic problem will be different, that's all.

Mike

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James Weekes: "Hear, hear. Some of my favorite pictures of the last few years are taken with my Holga lens on a Micro 4/3 body. I love the color, and am surprised by the resolution, which is better than my old Holga cameras with TX.

"The biggest advance in my world has been the 20-megapixel sensor on my Lumixes. The color is just lovely and the resolution is really adequate."

Andrew Lamb: "A few years ago, I did some stills on a film set where the DOP was John Mathieson (Gladiator, Logan, X-Men: First Class, etc). He was using a state-of-the-art Red camera but the lens was a Cooke zoom from the early '70s. I asked his assistant about this combination and was told that using an older lens was to stop the image from looking too clinical. Anything goes."

Phil Stiles: "I've played a lot with vintage glass on modern sensors. I would add that the modern sensor can reveal that those old lenses are better than one remembers. My 105mm ƒ/2.5 AIS Nikkor produces great images on my Sony A7rIII. After comparing a Contax C/Y 85mm ƒ/2.8 with a Batis 85mm ƒ/1.8, I sold the Batis. Focus peaking and magnification have changed the ways we can use vintage glass. Since we're viewing on the web, you probably can't point to a shot 'spoiled by too much resolution,' although my guess would be that it's a portrait where the camera sees so much more than the eye that the hyper-realism becomes surrealism."

Huw Morgan: "I have a crazy-sharp 85mm portrait lens that causes me nothing but grief. Every subject looks at the pictures and freaks out over wrinkles and skin flaws that seem to leap out of the screen. I need to apply copious amounts of Photoshop 'wrinkle cream' to make clients happy, eating into my time and profit. I'm looking for an 85mm slightly blurry lens. Anyone have any suggestions?"

Mark Roberts: "Anyone interested in photography would do well to see the movie "Mr. Turner" (about the painter J.M.W. Turner). Director Mike Leigh had hoped to shoot on film to get the look he wanted but didn't have the budget necessary. So he shot digital but used the oldest, least-corrected lenses he could scrounge up. Can't argue with the results." Rob L.: "There's one little bit of 'maybe' here, though—I've had several older lenses that did weird things on digital bodies—reflections off the back elements, or the way they light hit the sensor—so it's worth testing things a bit. But as I age, it's AF, not optical purity, that's driving me to current glass. :-) "

Jim: "In my work (fiber optics) I've been exposed to a lot of recent systems for surveillance and the technology is getting spooky. Only part is due to camera resolution; the rest is digital post-processing. I've seen fisheye cameras over traffic intersections that can read every license plate and are starting to use facial recognition. Did you read about how the British identified the Russians accused of poisoning in the UK—they found many images of the guys and could easily track their movement. Drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and a camera will read your license plate and send you a bill for the toll. I parked in a parking garage recently and the ticket was printed with my license plate ID and used it to help locate my parked car.

"Of course this processing is not intended to create attractive images. But if you want that, you can find lots of software that will manipulate images to make them look 'better,' whatever that means to you. Did you see the New York Times Magazine portfolio a couple of weeks ago with the weird images manipulated by Cindy Sherman?

"The point is that we are reaching a point near where PCs were 20 years ago, where advances are becoming less hardware and more software."

James M: "Just what I need to help me relax about my gear. Can you please post this article once a month, so that the effect doesn't wear off?"

scott kirkpatrick: "'Falseism?' Better is the expression that physicist Wolfgang Pauli made famous: 'Not even false!'" [Link —Ed.]

George Feucht: "Absolutely true about the demand for vintage less-than-perfect lenses for cinematography. Here's a great example. This is the Cooke company re-manufacturing their old, flawed classic lens set due to the demand of the original sets from the '60s/'70s. Things just look too hyper-clean when you use perfect optic on a perfect sensor. Modern, sharp lenses look great on film. As for our new, perfect cinema sensors, they look best with flawed lenses."

The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36

A hundred and five years ago, in 1913, an asthmatic photographer who worked as an engineer for the Leitz optical factory in Wetzlar, Germany, seeking a less burdensome camera to carry, invented a handy little camera that was about as small as he could make it. It used 35mm movie film, so-called because its overall width, including the sprocket-holed edges, is 35mm. The film had the sprocket holes along both edges for registration in movie cameras and projectors, and, because it traveled a vertical path in both, each discrete image was 18x24mm, a 3:4 ratio. Barnack, who fitted his creation with a 42.5mm lens*, was constrained to use the same image area width of 24mm—but, because he used the film traveling horizontally in his camera, he was able to double the other dimension, resulting in the comparatively lavish larger image area of 24x36mm, a 2:3 ratio.

The first commercial Leica was produced eleven years later, in 1924, and for a number of years, "135" or "35mm," as it was called, was also known as "miniature" format. Most professionals and serious amateurs, who scorned it, at least used what we now call medium-format film, mostly 120 and 620, paper-backed film rolled around an open spool, and they often used sheet film. I worked for an older photographer in Maryland many years ago whose own older mentor had photographed assignments using a 4x5-inch Speed Graphic, sometimes taking only six sheets of film with him to cover an event. The skill of knowing which six exposures to make, and of making every shot tell, was considered an essential part of being a professional. With 35mm cassettes, not only could you load up your camera with up to 36 exposures at once, but you could also take along an extra cassette or two. Profligate and unnecessary!

During what later came to be known as the Korean War, a photographer named David Douglas Duncan discovered some remarkable screwmount lenses made in Japan by a lens manufacturing company called Nippon Kogaku, or Japan Optical. News of these lenses, which were impressively sharper (and cheaper) than German lenses, spread like wildfire among the war photographers in Korea and from there to the consumer culture in the West, and it put Nippon Kogaku—officially known since 1988 as Nikon—on the map.

As photographers became adept at composing within the overly long rectangle of 2:3, they used certain tricks, such as using a strong central vertical to break the space into two halves. Photo by Marc Riboud.

The 24x36mm image size, which by the 1950s was becoming accepted as a standard, was also widely known as a rather awkward rectangle. It suited landscape photos, but little else—it looked too tall in verticals, and made composition difficult, especially for photographers used to the square shape common in 120 cameras. Photographers learned various tricks to compensate—for example, using a strong center vertical element to break the shape up into two halves. But many people, especially committed amateurs, remained uncomfortable with the shape of the rectangle (called the "aspect ratio").

Nikon's first rangefinder camera, first called "The Nikon" then called the Nikon 1, of 1948 (now highly collectible with less than a thousand originally produced), had attempted to "correct" the shape by making cameras that made 24x32mm negatives and transparencies. It was a prettier shape—3:4 again—but it wasn't exported, and was quickly replaced, because slide mounts had already been standardized for 24x36.

Score one for 24x36mm.

The next possibility for moving away from the standard size happened in the 1960s, when "half frame" cameras enjoyed a brief vogue. Fitting twice as many exposures on a standard-length cassette of film, it appealed to pennypinchers. It was also the first time (to my knowledge anyway) that the word "frame," implying that there was a whole frame to be divided into half, was implicitly applied to the standard 35mm size.

Over the years that followed there were many attempts made by both camera and film manufacturers to leave 135 cassettes with 24x36mm image area behind—mainly led by Kodak as the leader of the consumer film industry. These included the highly successful 126 cassette for Instamatics (the result of research that revealed that the biggest problem consumers had with 35mm was loading and unloading their cameras properly—it was also, in my view, the product that convinced Kodak it could dictate the market, a big factor in the company's eventual almost-demise). It was introduced in 1963. The miniaturized version of 126, 110, came along in 1972; then the ill-fated Disc Film of 1982; and finally the grand finale, the big multi-company consortium push to APS in 1996. But every attempt to "smallen" 35mm failed. Mom and Dad Consumer were well satisfied for years with their point-and-shoots, 35mm color negative film, one-hour photo kiosks, and double 3R or 4R prints. Didn't need no steenking Discs, that's for sure.

In my view, the big problem with all these attempts to move away from 135 was that they only offered consumer products as alternatives—that is, they went downmarket from 35mm. When APS was in development, I was surveyed for my opinion and made the case to Kodak that if it wanted to establish the new film as a standard, it would also have to provide professionals and serious amateurs with an alternative that was better than 35mm—that is, balance the downmarket APS with an upmarket alternative that was better than 35mm. Rollfilm, which dated from way back in 1899, was kludgy and inconvenient and was initially designed for indoor studio use—handling it in bright sunlight could result in light leaks, although precision manufacture in later years minimized that problem. It was still far from ideal. A variety of experts proposed cassette-loaded, horizontally-traveling film closer in size to 645, with fewer "sprocket" holes (used for registration only) along only one side. But it never came to pass.

APS ended up doomed by two things: first, it solved producers' problems mainly, and didn't offer consumers enough advantages over 35mm—or rather, its advantages weren't intuitively obvious to consumers in 1996—and second, of course, digital was on the horizon by then.

When digital began to be viable in the late 1990s, I assumed, along with many others, that we had finally met the thing that was going to end the reign of 35mm film. Which of course it did...

...But what it didn't do, obviously, was end the reign of 24x36mm as the standard size of recording substrate! Larger "chips" (sensors) were difficult and expensive to manufacture at first, and most early consumer digital cameras had smaller sensors. For more serious cameras, APS Type C sensors were initially the norm. These made more sense than 24x36mm for many reasons—cost, but also better depth-of-field (D-o-F) characteristics and the fact that smaller lenses were required to cover the format.

There was also a "focal-length multiplying effect," whereby lenses of shorter focal length could show the same field of view (FOV) of longer lenses for 35mm. When Four-Thirds came along in 2006 (or so—I don't remember the date, and the Internet is surprisingly deficient in answering the question "when was Four-Thirds introduced?"), the focal-length multiplier of 2X indicated to me that it would be hugely popular. Although I didn't use long lenses myself, I had been professionally involved with "Ad-Ams" (Kodak's term for advanced amateurs) for many years, and I was aware how seriously many photographers coveted longer and longer lenses. I assumed photographers would flock to Four Thirds and never look back, glorying in that focal-length multiplier and the newfound accessibility of long-lens angles of view.

But it turned out that the reason Ad-Ams loved big teles was for prestige, not picturetaking. They were big, expensive, and impressive, and that's why people coveted them so much. When "bridge cameras," with their absurdly long telephoto reach, removed the high status from extremely narrow angles of view, it turned out most people didn't care all that much about telephoto reach after all.

I also assumed that people would like smaller sensors because they made it easier to get better (more!) D-o-F. All through the history of photography photographers had worked to get more "pan sharpness," that is, everything in the image in focus from front to back; the manifestos of the then-radical Group ƒ/64 in the early 1930s called for sharpness from foreground to background, for example. For the first time, that got stood on its head from the early- to mid-2000s when digital cameras with 135-sized sensors started to become accessible to well-heeled amateurs and hobbyists. Cameras with 24x36mm sensors gave noticeably less D-o-F than images from smaller sensors, and this emerged as a virtue, not a liability. Of course, it didn't help that the U.S. magazine Photo Techniques had, in 1997, published a series of articles introducing to photographers in the West the idea that out-of-focus blur (something the magazine termed "bokeh," the first time that spelling had been used, significant in that it allowed the spread of the concept to be tracked) had aesthetic properties that could function indivisibly in certain pictures. Outrage and ridicule was widespread at first. But that was before people started looking around for reasons to prefer the larger sensors that they actually wanted.

Bias lurking
The very terminology became biased. Lens focal lengths, to cope with the hodgepodge of different sensor sizes, were already being given in "35mm equivalents," to the extent that many digicam lenses were marked in equivalent focal lengths—the focal lengths in 35mm terms the FOV of which they mimicked—rather than their actual, real focal lengths. Photographers might have no idea what the FOV of a 4.3mm lens on a 1/2.3" sensor might be, but they understood the FOV of a 24mm lens on 24x36mm, so the description "24mm equivalent" was descriptive for that 4.3mm lens. "Focal length multiplier," which described an advantage, was replaced with "crop factor," which implies an adulteration from completeness—to have a crop factor, you have to be "cropping"—cutting down or limiting or curtailing—something. What? Why, 24x36mm, of course. Then, when the simple concept of "35mm size" was replaced by the brainless moniker "full frame" (brainless because all deliberate standard formats are full frame—is a 4x5-inch contact print from a negative made with a 4x5-inch camera not the full frame?), it was an unmistakable signal that bias was afoot and roving the landscape. If 24x36mm is "full" sized, then it implicitly stands to reason just from the terminology that anything bigger is too much and anything smaller falls short. Support was again gathering for the substrate size that refused to die!

Of course, this mainly had to do with the leading cameramakers' investment in SLR technology for the format—and, for consumers/photographers, two things. The first was the familiarity they had with the FOV of long-familiar 35mm lens focal lengths.  Cameras that used 24x36mm sensors returned photographers' favorite lenses to the FOVs they were already long comfortable with. And, of course, the second was prestige. Status is a very strong motivator in the photography hobby. "Full-frame" sensor cameras were bigger and more expensive, their "image quality" at least detectably ahead of that of smaller sensors. Full-frame, as it was now called, picked up in DSLR sales to dedicated photographers of all stripes, and (even though Nikon tried hard to resist) after a while it became comfortably ensconced.

For some time it looked very much like the amateur alternative, the newer mirrorless types of cameras, would be where "FF" would not gain a foothold. Micro 4/3 was announced to great fanfare and continuing popularity (eventually killing off regular 4/3), and most other camermakers' mirrorless products were APS-C or smaller for a while. But that was not to last. When Sony began its "throwing spaghetti at the wall" marketing strategy, trying this, that, and the other thing, what was the stickiest and stuck? Full-frame mirrorless ILCs. The A7 and its proliferating heirs became one of the most successful among Sony's more serious photographic offerings.

The September Revolution
Now, with the "September Revolution" of 2018 in the history books, it's official: full-frame mirrorless (FFM as I call it—not sure if anyone else does) has been anointed with great portent and fanfare as the wave of the (near) future for mirrorless. The so-called "Bigs," Canon and Nikon, never before serious about mirrorless in any significant way (probably hoping to choke the upstart with lack of oxygen), both announced FFM systems. Panasonic, probably chafing even more at longtime rival Sony's successes, did them one better and formed a Micro-4/3-like consortium with Leica and Sigma. Finally, as if to put a ! on the proceedings, Zeiss (Zeiss?!) released a quirky, newthink fixed-lens FFM—24x36mm sensor, check—and put a coda on this remarkable month. As in the famous story of the size of the Space Shuttle Booster being based on the width of two Roman warhorses' asses, "specifications live forever."

Of course it remains to be seen if the market for mirrorless will sustain all those newcomers, and which of the new systems might thrive and which wither. But the biggest winner is a foregone conclusion: it's Oskar Barnack's 24x36 standard for substrate size. It's now far removed from antediluvian adapted movie film with unnecessary vestigial sprocket holes along both edges. But it's still that ancient, awkward 2:3 rectangle. The fateful doubling of the 3:4 movie film ratio that old Oskar (d. 1936) settled on (who knows how) way back in 1913 is alive and well—and stronger than ever.

Mike

[This article, excerpted from the first draft ms. of my future book for my Patreon subscribers, is copyrighted. You can link to it but please do not post it on forums or republish it anywhere. —MJ.]

ADDENDUM, Tuesday afternoon: I guess I have to point this out: this is not an article arguing against the 2:3 ratio. I thought it went without saying that lots of photographers prefer 2:3 and lots of great photographers in history have shot in 2:3.

Isn't that a given to anyone who knows anything about photography?

It's just that a significantly large minority of photographers (now, as well as in history) don't care for it, is all. I've personally shot 2:3 ratio cameras for most of my life. But don't take that as an endorsement. It's just a choice. You can like any aspect ratio you want to and it's okay by me.

*The Ur-Leica, now very likely the world's most valuable camera (although that proposition has not been tested—it's a treasured artifact owned by Leica Camera AG) indeed has a 42.5mm lens, not 50mm, according to Malcolm Taylor, the British Leica technician who was entrusted by Leica to clean and service it. This seems to be contradicted by Oskar Barnack himself in his own statements, but Malcolm Taylor has confirmed it in several interviews, including this one, in which he says, "The first stage of work on the Ur Leica was to look on the lens which to my surprise, and that of Dr Wangorsch [at that time the curator of the Leica Museum in Wetzlar —Ed.], was a 42.5mm, ƒ/4.5. It was a wide field Summar (a 6-element variant of the original Zeiss Planar) that had been designed by Carl Metz. The wide field nature of this lens may explain why later photographers have been unable to recreate the exact perspective of Barnack’s original Wetzlar photographs, [because they were] assuming the Ur Leica had a 50mm lens."

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Hans Muus (partial comment): "Great article; look forward to your book! I seem to have read a couple of times, in a now distant past, that Barnack's invention was initially intended as a light metering instrument for movie-making: using the same film and processing as used for the movie proper and developing the test exposures quickly on the set."

Mike replies: I've heard that too, and I don't quite buy it, and I'll tell you why. The reason is, why would he double the frame size if it were merely for testing? Setting it up as what we now know as "half frame"—images the same size as the movie negative, 18x24mm—would have allowed more test exposures and fewer films to develop per test, and been the same resolution as the movie. The idea that the Ur-Leica was intended as a test device sounds like a "back-formation" to me—an idea someone came up with later to justify the little camera as being acceptably serious and purposeful. Of course I'm just guessing.

Jakub: "Nice article and bodes well for your book. Like many others (I'm sure) I caught your little joke about Photo Techniques not helping. From Wikipedia:

The English spelling bokeh was popularized in 1997 in Photo Techniques magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the March/April 1997 issue; he altered the spelling to suggest the correct pronunciation to English speakers, saying "it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable."

Mike replies: The common pronunciation today is "BO-kuh," not "bo-keh" as described above. But as we learned with "Nikon" recently, whatever conventional pronunciation develops culturally becomes proper, so I'm cool with it.

It's worth remembering that the concept—that the out-of-focus areas in a photograph sometime contribute to the aesthetic whole—was received with a good deal of indignation and hostility at first. I got long handwritten letters admonishing me to pay attention to the sharp parts and not look at what you're not supposed to look at!

Gordon Lewis: "What you implied but not say explicitly is that the persistence of 24x36 in the digital world was motivated as much or more by legacy film lenses. Pros did not want to have to buy a whole new set of lenses for 'cropped' formats and didn't like having their expensive wide-angle zooms transformed into normal range zooms. Manufacturers, in turn, did not want to have to build out two competing lens lines. What I find ironic is that so many photographers will bitch and moan about a lack of 'innovation,' but when it's actually introduced (mirrorless m43, for example) they will fiercely stick to their tried-and-true 24x36 DSLRs."

Paul Christensen: "What a great photo by Marc Riboud! For those interested and in the neighborhood, there will be a retrospective of his work at the Suermondt Ludwig Museum in Aachen which opens this Friday. More information (unfortunately only in German) here."

Jim Richardson: "In many ways owning a FF camera performs the same function as knowing the secret handshake of an exclusive club: it lets you into the brotherhood."

Ed Bacher: "Great post. And... you made the top 10 in Hacker News today. I can send you a screenshot in case the page has changed."

Apple iPhone XS and XS Max: The Camera Is the News

News from smartphoneland: John Gruber at Daring Fireball has an excellent article about the camera in the new iPhone XS. First, he quotes Apple Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller emphasizing that Apple is the leading camera company in the world. Later he makes the point that most people do not upgrade their phones every year, then defends his comparing of the XS to last year's X by saying: "for the people who own an iPhone X who are considering an upgrade to the XS, to my mind, the camera system is the one and only reason to do it."

The XS has a new wide-field lens and a larger sensor for the wide lens (there are two cameras and two sensors—the longer lens's sensor isn't changed). The wide lens is actually longer in focal length: 4.25mm vs. 4mm in the older phones. The sensor, however, is ~30% larger, meaning that the wide lens changes from 28mm-e FOV to a wider 26mm-e FOV despite the lens being longer.

But it's the "vastly improved" Neural Engine that's the big change, according to Daring Fireball. The Neural Engine, you recall, was the big news in the iPhone X, the part of the processor that performs AI. The original A11 Bionic had two cores and was capable of 600 billion operations per second; the A12 Bionic ups that to 8 cores and 5 trillion operations per second, and makes possible the always-on "Smart HDR" that John's examples demonstrate so spectacularly. 

The XS Max is approximately the same overall size as the 7 Plus and 8 Plus, but the display is much larger because it covers the entire face of the phone.

He concludes: "My takeaway is that the Neural Engine really is a big deal for photography and video. Supposedly, it’s just as big a deal for AR [augmented reality], but the camera has been my obsessive focus this past week. For users, it’s a big deal because it has a dramatic, practical, real-time effect on the quality of the photos and videos they can shoot. None of this happens in post; all of it is visible live, as you shoot."

Since blown highlights are my bête noire with small sensors, Smart HDR sounds promising to me. Check out the article.

Compute the blur
The other big feature of the XS and XS Max is adjustable bokeh...in Portrait Mode, using the "Depth Slider," you can choose the degree of background defocus you want after the fact. (Here's a brief video from Apple Informed if you want a visual demonstration.) Early tests are showing that the feature allows more control than a fast lens on a large sensor. Because it's done in software, it's easier to keep all of the main object in focus and change the degree of apparent defocus on the background only, avoiding the foreground blur that so often disfigures narrow focus as captured on large sensors. For example, a dog's face photographed with a FF camera and fast lens, as you've seen many times, will often leave the dog's nose out of focus if you want maximum background blur. With the iPhone XS, you can dial up the apparent defocus in the background without putting the dog's nose out of focus too.

Cool stuff.

The Android world of course has a number of smartphones that vie with Apple's photography capabilities; competing equivalents of Apple's Neural Engine are beginning to make their way into competitors' products even now. I'm only writing about Apple because that's what I use. A smartphone is now definitely part of my photography kit, although I use it more for visual note-taking than anything else. I get a lot of pleasure out of it. I'll see if I can post a few examples of what I mean by "visual note-taking" someday soon.

Mike
(Thanks to a number of readers)

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HR: "People who say the phone cameras are getting so good that it can replace a regular camera indicates to me that the kinds of photos they take are vastly different than what I take. Being limited to the very awkward, fiddly ergonomics of a phone with its very slow camera usage, inability to make quick decisive photos at an exact instant in time, being limited to just a wide angle lens (or maybe two in some recent very expensive phones), having only a screen to use even when it is not good in sun and at night the light from it illuminating you and making it obvious to everyone you are taking a photo, the tiny sensor that doesn't work well in low light, etc. makes it a no-go as a main camera for me. It is also hard for me to imagine wildlife photographers, sports photographers, BIF photographers, etc. thinking that a phone, no matter how good the IQ gets to be even close to a substitute for a camera with good ergonomics, fast, decisive operation, interchangeable lenses of many types, and so on.

Mike replies: While I don't know of any photographers who use a phone as a main camera, several extensive and very good photojournalists projects have been done using much earlier cellphones and smartphones. Several advertising campaigns have been shot with phones. Doug DeMuro's YouTube channel is shot mostly with an iPhone. The list goes on. Obviously they're not the tool for every job, and obviously they're not the tool for any job for certain photographers, but they're cameras, and virtually all cameras can be used for good work in the right hands.

John: "Impressive, but I’ve never experienced one iota of fun taking a picture of something with my iPhones. And fun is what it’s all about for me."

Steve W: "As Ken Tanaka has alluded to, this is the future of photography for most people. When they add a third lens/sensor/camera in the 85mm-e to 100mm-e range...what more would most people really need?"

Jack: "Thanks for the link to the article. The photo in the article that compares backlit shots with the two phones was quite a difference. Wow."

c.d.embrey: "For me the decisive moment is when my client's check clears. There are very few paying jobs that I couldn't shoot with Apple's iPhone XS. Anything from products to portraits to panoramas...."

J. K. Lux: "Mike's article (and John Gruber's) is about the technology of photography, not about what's better or worse than anything else (phone vs. 'pro' camera, Apple vs. Android, etc.). The phone companies are coming up with interesting solutions to some enormous constraints (like the size of the phone) in pursuit of better cameras (in pursuit of bigger market share). Just because I love shooting with my X-T2 and all its physical dials doesn't mean I'm not interested in how a tech company is dealing with dynamic range or focus bracketing in ways that are different than the major camera brands, or solutions to fitting a better lens into a smaller package—solutions which very likely will have an impact on dedicated cameras as well."

Mike replies: Thanks for rising to my defense. I was just about to remind people that I'm not personally responsible for cameras being included in smartphones!   :-)  

Are Modern Lenses At Their Best Wide Open?

Hank wrote: "I wonder now about the idea that lenses are best stopped down two stops from wide open. That certainly is true of lenses from the film era, but I can’t help but feel that today’s (better) lens designs are made for wide open use. It’s possible this was done to appease the bokeh-fanatics, but on some systems, such as Micro 4/3, it would seem to be a requirement, no?"

Mike replies: A lens is said to be "diffraction limited" at the widest stop at which diffraction has the largest negative effect on image quality, the point at which stopping down further only increases diffraction* rather than further minimizing aberrations. That aperture is also known as the optimum aperture. A "diffraction limited lens" is diffraction limited at its widest stop. These are rare.

As an illustration, take a look at Imaging-Resource's lens test of the Nikon 24mm ƒ/1.4G. At the link, go to "Lab Test Results" in the upper right hand side of the page. Then click on "Nikon D3x." That means you're looking at their test results for the lens on a full-frame camera. Now, run the aperture slider up and down the range. The lower and flatter the colored part of the 3-D performance map, the less blur. As you go up and down the aperture range, you can see the performance gets better as it is stopped down, until ƒ/4—that's where aberrations are minimized. After that, the graph of performance begins to rise again—that's diffraction kicking in. So according to this test this lens's optimum aperture is ƒ/4, three stops down from wide open.

You'll also note that the results for ƒ/4, ƒ/5.6, and ƒ/8 are quite close to each other, which is why photographers talk about "the middle apertures" as offering best optical performance.

Note also that the middle part of the field is still pretty good with this lens even wide open. Looking at only the middle of the field is what leads some photographers to think that some of their lenses are just as good wide open as stopped down.

You're right, however, Hank, that modern lenses—especially slightly longer ones, especially ones for smaller formats—do suffer from fewer aberrations at wider apertures, and can be very good wide open. Let's turn to the Imaging-Resource test for the recent Fuji XF 50mm ƒ/2. As you run up and down the aperture range for that lens, you can see that its performance is admirably consistent from edge to edge  and through the aperture range (the graph stays pretty flat and doesn't move up and down very much throughout the range). However, even with that lens, you can clearly see that performance improves as you stop down...even if only a little. That lens, too, is diffraction limited at ƒ/5.6—three stops down, same as the Nikkor above.

You'll find that most lenses are technically at their best 2–3 stops down. Even if their performance is very consistent and the differences are slight. You can see the same thing if you have a complete family of MTF tests, for every aperture.

However, there's a bigger difference for photographers, in that some lenses are so consistent that for practical purposes the technical "sweet spot" doesn't really matter. The difference in the Fuji lens's performance at different apertures is minimal enough that you'd be likely to have trouble seeing it with general shooting, especially handheld.

You can easily use such test information when shooting. For example, with the Nikkor 24mm ƒ/1.4G on FF, I'd shoot at ƒ/1.4 and ƒ/2 only if I knew that center sharpness was all I needed. If I needed the whole frame to be critically sharp, I'd know to stop down to the middle apertures. With the Fuji 50mm ƒ/2, on the other hand, I doubt I'd avoid any of the apertures for reasons of optical performance—they're essentially all "middle apertures" in the sense that all apertures would be decently sharp for ordinary pictorial subjects. Except for perhaps those few pictures in which resolution might be critical. In practice, with that lens, you can't see the tiny measured differences between ƒ/4 and ƒ/5.6, for instance, and I wouldn't hesitate to shoot with it at ƒ/16 based on I-R's test info. (But of course the final test is our own results according to our own eyes.)

As to whether you need to stop down for best sharpness, it's seldom a bad idea, but then again with some lenses it's not particularly necessary. The best advice is simply to learn your lenses—check the tests, look at your own pictures, figure out what you might need to do and when, and then apply that knowledge as best you can! (Sometimes in the heat of the moment these things aren't that easy to remember. Having fewer lenses and keeping them longer helps your familiarity with them.)

As an aside, a quick visit to Imaging-Resource's test graph for the Panasonic 12–35mm ƒ/2.8II will show you why I like it.

Mike

*"Diffraction" in lenses refers to the way that rays of light spread out as they pass physical obstacles—in the case of a lens, the edges of the aperture blades. As the aperture gets smaller, the relative percentage of these diffused light rays relative to the area of the total light passing through the glass of the lens goes up. It's also why a pinhole image is always soft—the diffused rays comprise such a large percentage of the light rays coming through the hole. Very small apertures will always show the effects of diffraction. Large apertures actually have more diffraction, but the diffused light is such a small percentage of the overall light coming through the lens that it's not significant.

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Hank: "Thanks Mike!"

Mike replies: Yer welcome.

David A Edelstein: "It's been a while since I've looked at any of those sharpness tests—mostly I shoot with what I shoot with and I don't care about what tests say. However, looking at the tests for the Zeiss 50mm ƒ/1.4 shows exactly why I love that lens: it's very, very weird wide open, gets 'normally unsharp' stopped down to ƒ/2, and then pretty damn sharp at ƒ/2.8 and smaller. Each of those give me specific visual styles I can use for different ideas."

Mike replies: A man after my own heart. Exactly so, and just what I'm talking about—if you know your lenses you can make use of everything they offer, not just their optimal sharpness. It can both help you avoid mistakes and also use their weaknesses to pictorial advantage. A great many art photographers liked less-than-optimal lenses for specific visual properties.

SteveW: "The Nikkor 58mm ƒ/1.4G does not score well with the test chart scores online, and is a controversial lens in that regard: not sharp enough to justify the expense is the primary argument. However, the 58mm is pretty much the reason I stick with Nikon and not try a smaller sensor system.

"The 58mm has interesting characteristics. From ƒ/1.4–4 it is one kind of lens, especially in the ƒ/1.4–ƒ/2.8 range. From ƒ/5.6 and smaller it behaves more like a normal 50mm. To be sure, the 58mm has a wild blur chart on the Imaging-Resource test page: it's my most challenging and fun lens to use, and it won't win any sharpness awards to be sure. That said, I'd probably have switched to Fuji or Micro 4/3 if not for this lens.

"I imagine a lot of folks who read Mike's blog will have similar stories of lenses they are fond of for reasons other than sharpness. In this sense I like Mike's idea of the 'nested' two lens kit. A standard zoom that is nice and sharp and 'normal,' and then a favored prime within the range that does unique things, even if only a really wide aperture or a micro or tilt-shift or whatever strikes one's fancy."

That Addictive Little Sensor

Detail. It just has a "painterly" look somehow.

A while back (April 2017) I wrote of my budding infatuation for the Sony IMX 269. The huh?

That's the 20.4 MP Micro 4/3 sensor so far found in only in five six cameras: the discontinued Panasonic GX8 (in which it debuted), as well as the Panasonic G9 and GX9, and the Olympus E-M1 Mark II and Pen-F.

(Let me know if I'm overlooked any.) [UPDATE: Forgot the GH5! —Ed.]

Entire frame. Note that the blogging platform we use softens images somewhat.

I don't know what it is about this sensor, but it's addictive. Does it somehow mimic film (if it can be said to, it would have to be some sort of "super" film), and I subliminally recognize and respond to that? I don't think so, but I don't know. I do like the "grain" of the way it renders at higher ISOs.

Apropos of the "Best Comment Ever" post, I once heard something that has stuck in my mind: that the craft we put in to our pictures mostly serves to make craft invisible to people who look at our pictures—and that the geeky gear enthusiasms we gush about and fight over, on the other hand, are something photographers indulge in for their own pleasure. (Such things "nourish our enthusiasm," was the way Ansel Adams rather gingerly put it.)

If you like full frame, for example, I wouldn't argue with that for a millisecond. I get it. I've owned FF cameras and I recently caught up with the state of the art compliments of B&H Photo, which sent me a Sony A7III (currently back-ordered) to try out. Lovely camera, beautiful files. Honestly, if that's what "sends" you, I have zero objections. Not veiled, not backhanded. No argument from me whatsoever.

GX8s with Pana/Leica 45mm Macro (left)
and 12–35mm ƒ/2.8 zoom (right)

But I love the way the 20-MP Micro 4/3 sensor renders. My current GX8 might be the only digital camera that's ever given me that "indulging myself in geekery" feeling...that sense that I'm photographing things to enjoy how pretty the camera is going to make them look. It has a look of edge sharpness, a distinctive crispness.

Scrumptious. Lovely. I really like the "look."

D'ye ken?
Do you shoot with one of the five six cameras? If you do, let me know if you know what I'm going on about. I'd be interested to know if I'm not crazy. (Actually I'd also be interested to know if I am crazy.)

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Paul Richardson: "I have the Pen-F, and no, you’re not crazy. Or we both are, as I know exactly what you mean. I’ve gone back to certain images I’ve taken with the Pen-F, and I’m baffled by the look of them—in a good way. Painterly is an apt word to describe it, but it’s something more, which I can’t quite put my finger on. And that’s with the 'cheap' 14–42mm lens."

Tom Hassler: "Well Mike, I can't speak to the state of your sanity, but I will second your opinion of this sensor. It does have a lovely, long-scale look that really benefits the format. I'm currently shooting an Olympus E-M1 Mark II and it rarely disappoints. Sony is on a tear lately with state-of-the-art sensors in several formats...."

Cecelia: "Based on my experiences with multiple Micro 4/3 cameras and my current OM-D E-M1, I completely agree with you. It is much better than the 16-MP and 12-MP Micro 4/3 sensors I have used. Lower noise at low ISO and more pleasing noise at higher ISO. The dynamic range and colors are generous. I also like the Nikon 24-MP full frame sensors—they are even nicer, but come with the good and bad of full frame."

Omer: "Yep, I see that in the pics from my GX9, though I thought it was a Panasonic thing."

Matt: "I shoot with two of those cameras. The E-M1 Mark II, which I bought the day it came out, and the GX8, which I just bought used last month. While I'm a sucker for larger formats (which I have indulged to the extreme with an old 8x10 view camera), there is definitely something to be said for the 20MP Micro 4/3 sensor. I find that I'm really enjoying using it at ISOs that really are 'too high for it' (6400 and even 12800). For the right subject the desaturated colours and visible noise/grain of 6400/12800 add something to the image. This is in stark contrast to every other digital camera I've had where strong noise was something I could never come to terms with in my images."

John Camp: "I have two GX8's, and if it weren't for GAS, I could happily shoot with them forever. In lots of ways, they're perfect cameras—they're small but not too small, as are the lenses; the sensors are large enough to capture all the quality I need; they have IBIS; and I do like the files. I shoot with a D800E as well, and it's hard to explain the difference in 'look,' but it's there. I think of the GX8 files as looking 'dusty,' but that sounds bad, and it's not bad. It's more that the pixels seem to contain more than one color, though that can't be true. Another thing. I know that you (Mike) are a wide shooter, but the Olympus 75mm ƒ/1.8 is something else. I've not seen the new Z lenses, obviously, but I really think I've never had a lens as good as the 75mm. And I've had a bunch of Summiluxes."

Dennis Mook: "As a Fujifilm X-T2 and Olympus E-M1 Mark II user and really loving the Fujifilm colors, I created a series of presets in Lightroom mimicking the Fujifilm film simulations so I could apply them to the Olympus raw files. As good as they look in the X-T2 images, they seem to look better applied to the Olympus files. They seem to have a different, even more film-like quality."

Forever-Old APS-C

Ah, the furor.

From all appearances, you'd think the full-frame (FF, 24x36mm) sensor size is the banner of the future.

Ah, the hubbub.

Personally I think that's "wishful marketing"—more like what the cameramakers hope will happen.

Actually, I think it's likely that the standard for "really good" performance will get smaller and smaller. As it has been doing.

I know I'm getting to be a cranky cantankerous contrarian, but...I still like forever-old APS-C as the sweet spot. Unless you need three-foot wide prints. Is this anti-social? Am I being a wet blanket? Am I hanging back at the fringes of the party instead of joining in? Well then, sue me.

No, don't sue me. You know what I mean.

Mike

ADDENDUM: The above is stated within the context of my overarching guiding principle, which is that everyone's photography belongs to them and, as long as it's not hurting anybody, they should do whatever they please. I have nothing against anyone shooting any camera they like! So don't think I have any axe to grind except my own. If it helps you do the work that pleases you, whatever floats your boat is A-OK with me....

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dennis: "Unfortunately, the same camera makers hoping that FF is the future have a lot to say about it. If Canon, Nikon and Sony sell 80 or 90% of all ILCs and all three of them choose to neglect APS-C and put most of their efforts into FF, consumers see where the buzz is and start to worry about long-term support for APS-C. Nikon DSLR users long ago gave up on ever seeing wide primes or an updated ƒ/2.8 midrange zoom with VR (though the 16–80mm ƒ/2.8–4 probably took a lot of people by surprise). Sony's APS-C lineup remains the same messy hodgepodge of good, bad, pricey and third party that it was when they shifted all their resources to FF. Now Nikon and Canon have new FF mirrorless and Nikon hasn't said a word about APS-C (Canon threw EOS-M users a bone with a new prime). And while you're right in that cameras that can produce 'really good' images get smaller and smaller (cameras that use Sony's 1" sensor are great, other than the lack of easy shallow DOF) the standard itself seems to be getting arbitrarily higher. Meanwhile, people carry bigger and bigger phones and drive bigger and bigger cars, perpetually illustrating that 'good enough' isn't good enough!"

Brian Stewart: "I made the jump from APS-C to FF at a time when the modest improvement in low-light performance made a real difference to what was possible for a lot of my shooting at the time. It also gave more options for wide-angle lenses, but at the cost of losing the crop factor at the long end, and of having to use larger and more expensive FF lenses.

"Nowadays, while FF is still going to give you better low-light performance, what I can achieve with APS-C is more than acceptable. There are good APS-C wide angle lens options, especially from Fuji. I've reverted back to APS-C. I'm not interested in FF because I can't see the attraction. Unlike some, I don't feel the need for maximum pixels and ultimate image quality. They don't mean I capture more compelling images, and I don't believe I can see the difference in my prints. YMMV."