the secret night life of mannequins.
In the book of essays, mostly done for "Lens Work" (a periodical about fine art photography) Jensen makes several points which closely align with what I've written here. When it comes to making good photographs we both believe that engaging with photography on a daily basis is important. Vital perhaps. The more you copy yourself the more you fine tune your own vision. And the more you practice the more fluid and competent you become. But what does that really mean? Do you really need to be out roaming around with your camera in hand every single day?
No. You just need to be engaged with your photography practice every single day. There are days when I take no photographs at all. But on those days I still carry a camera with me everywhere I go. Not only for "just in case images" but also because having it on my shoulder or in my hand normalizes having the camera always with me. It doesn't feel awkward of out of place. Always there for an unexpected gift from the muses or the gods of photography. In a way I stop thinking about it. In the same way that I don't dwell on which socks or which pants I'm wearing. As long as I am wearing pants....
Some days I don't go out walking with a camera but instead stay in the office post processing images I've shot the day before or the day before that. I don't subscribe to the practice of photographing for days and days until I fill up a memory card and then going through the images at a much later date; in a large batch. I want to make the post processing as tightly connected to the actual photography as possible so I have a keen memory of what the conditions were like when I was making the images. I want to remember how it felt to line up the composition. I want to remember what kinds of corrections I made to the camera's suggested exposure and color balance. The near contemporaneous feedback loop reinforces the learning; the distillation process. When too much time goes by your motivation for making the shots gets hazier; more opaque. You forget the choices you made and why you made them.
But on days when I am in the office, at my desk, looking at images, seeing just how far I can push the ISO on a ten year old digital camera before the files start to fall apart, I still have a camera on the desk in front of me --- or just by my side. Almost as if it's engaged in the process but mostly so I can reference in my mind how I was holding the camera while shooting and how I might improve my technique.
All of the images here are from and evening walk done two days ago. I'd just finished up a portrait session in the studio and said "goodbye" to the client. I noticed it was five o'clock and I wanted to go for a walk to make some evening/twilight shots with one of the Leica M (240) cameras. I'd read often lately about how "weak" that camera model is with high ISOs and dark environments. "Too noisy!" seemed to be the consensus. But I'm thickheaded and obdurate and I like to see things for myself. Everyone seems to have different tolerances for things like noise and, even more importantly, the post production environment has also changed radically. Noise reduction with A.I. is nearly unimaginably good. So I wanted to see for myself if ISO 3200 could look good. How about ISO 6400? And, like a tolerance for heat or loud noise, everyone's tolerance for visual noise artifacts and patterns in pictures is equally individual. I know how much I want to tolerate and I know it's different than even my peers whose judgements I respect.
I also want to know how the files look because I want to make sure that when I work for clients the camera and post production combined are adequate to satisfy even people who are more sensitive than I am about noise. It's part of the ongoing testing we should all do if our aim is to satisfy a paying client.
When I really want to see what a camera like the M Leica can do I pair it with a very high performance lens. Right now I'm testing the SL and SL2 noise performance in conjunction with Lightroom's "Denoise" control in the develop module. I'm using what I believe is my highest performance lens for that system (that I own....) and that's the new (to me) Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm lens. But on the M cameras the lens of choice for me is the Voigtlander 50mm APO Lanthar f2.0. So that's the lens I chose for this foray.
When I went out to walk and see what the M camera, lens and Lightroom can do I made judgements about the way I habitually work with this camera. Neither camera nor lens has image stabilization. So I normally shoot the camera with a 50mm lens at a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second or above. On this particular evening I was trying to stick to 1/250th of second for as long as I could, riding the ISO dial up as the light dropped. In this way I more or less eliminated the effects of camera shake in my post shooting evaluations of the resulting images. Too easy for the mind to conflate a technical shortcoming for a camera shortcoming so why not eliminate some variables.
Some people have trouble with rangefinder focusing. On this subject one thing I can say that might help is to make sure your rangefinder windows (two on the front) are very clean and don't "feature" fingerprints on the glass. Also make sure your viewfinder window on the rear of the camera is equally clean. Adding "organic soft focus filters" via finger prints or nose grease to the glass is a quick way to screw up your ability to find good focus. Clean is good.
I practiced rangefinder focusing with various Leica M film cameras for nearly a decade before switching to digital cameras. The techniques came back pretty quickly when I started shooting with the M cameras again. And sparkling, clean glass is a benefit I well remember from the film days.
What I found when I opened up all the files today is that I can still hand hold a camera from 1/60th of a second upward fairly steadily if it's got a 50mm lens (or wider) on the front. I learned that the Leica M sensor from 2012 has shadow noise once you crest 1600 on the ISO setting. But I also learned with this morning's experiments in post processing that Lightroom's Denoise has the superpower to clean up the noise without any deleterious effects on sharpness or detail. Score!!! That makes ten+ year old Leica rangefinder cameras still eminently usable right now, in 2024.
While shooting I appreciated that the optical viewfinder seems superior in low light to EVFs because it doesn't slow down (refresh rate with slower shutter speeds) or get noisy or jumpy. It's as bright and clear as your vision allows. I learned once again how much I like bright line finders that allow me to see what is coming into the frame but not quite there yet. I also like how the frame, with information outside the frame, helps me to fine tune composition.
There is a danger in reading information about cameras from people who very rarely actually practice it in real life, and with a collection of modern cameras. You end up getting mostly information the writer gleaned from whenever his formative years with a camera happened. If that was in the film days and the writer was mostly a 35mm film shooter you'll be getting information that's a bit stale and not as relevant to modern cameras and modern shooting techniques as you might want. We don't have to fill the frame to avoid cropping (a la the slide film days). With 50 or 60 megapixels, or even 24, you can certainly crop with near reckless abandon.
When I read something written about a camera I want to know if the writer is still an active photographer. Does he or she get out and use cameras on a regular basis? Every day? Every week? Once a month? What are his or her priorities. Are they tied to a "real" job or do they have time to experiment with their cameras at all hours of the day and in all kinds of weather? Have they shot ten thousand frames with the camera they are writing about or are they just giving you their impression after the first hundred or so frames?
So much of what we learned while shooting films is like ancient lore. Passed down from photo generation to photo generation and venerated by some even as it becomes increasingly obsolete. When I think about this I think about car tinkerers who've never learned how to work on fuel injection systems but who can talk to you about carburetors for hours and hours. Folks who imagine that purists only drive with manual transmissions. Computer veterans who wish we still used punch cards. Swimmers who think the waterline should hit you mid-forehead while swimming freestyle. Doctors who still think stomach ulcers are caused by stress and cured by bland diets.
When I write about cameras here it's because I've found out interesting things about them while using them nearly every day. Looking back at one week in 2023 I note that I shot 2,300 images with a Leica M in Montreal. Another 970 images during the same week with a Leica Q. You learn a great deal more when you use a camera for hours and hours a day, for days at a time. And you learn even more when you sit down and post process your take all the while experimenting with the new features and controls that your software programs deliver to you.
Brookes Jensen has some interesting ideas that stand the test of time. He believes in self assigning projects. He means that you might decide on a subject matter that you really love and you plan a project around that. He also believes in setting finite goals. He would suggest that you attempt (and succeed) in setting your project goal to make 100 portfolio prints of your chosen subject. Not work prints but finished prints you'd be proud to show off. He wrote about that over 20 years ago and I'd modernize it a bit by saying 100 perfect portfolio images that you could place in an online gallery and share with friends and colleagues.
Either way projects represent a big investment in time and a requirement to knuckle down and do the work. But at every step of the way he suggests you will learn new and valuable skills and new ways of looking at the work you want to make in the future. And that's very valuable.
I have a friend who got an English B.A. from a very prestigious school. He's a writer for a large corporation. He's always wanted to write a book. His whole sense of self as a writer revolves around the idea that he will one day write a book. He stops and starts on book projects but never completes them.
Finally, after I wrote five books in a row, over the course of two years, for Amherst Media, and then a 465 page novel, he asked me how. "How do you get through the process of writing a book?" It's all very simple. You get assigned or assign yourself to write a book. You make an outline. Then you work relentlessly on the damn book until you finish it. No excuses. Doesn't matter if it's great or not as long as you finish it. Once you finish it you can make it better. You can edit. You can hire an editor. You can revise to your heart's content. But to my mind it's the resolute act of just finishing one that makes everything work. Once you've done your first book the second is easier and the third is easier still. It's like a photo project. The big thing is to set a goal and follow through until you've completed the goal. 100 prints? Cool. And once you've gotten to those 100 great prints you can take a deep breath and see if there are better images out there that you can also include or swap in. But it's meeting the initial goal that's the most important step.
Brookes Jensen says that setting the goal and achieving it opens up so many more opportunities. And he's not talking about doing this for professionals. He's talking about hobbyists doing projects and setting goals. It gives your work the structure you might find most helpful.
For now my immediate goal is to explore the limits of my rangefinder cameras. My overriding goal is to shoot enough beautiful portraits to fill a book. And then to write the book. I think I can figure that out.
The M Leica is a fun camera. It's not the all purpose camera that most people might look for but as an alternative to a work camera it is a heck of a lot of fun.
Question? How do you write a blog everyday? Um. Sit down and write your blog... That was easy.
exactly as I saw the scene.
16 comments:
Beyond the technical skills and discipline required to write or photograph, a certain aptitude and drive is needed that seems more innate, or perhaps acquired over a lifetime. It is said that when asked how he produced so much outstanding music, Mozart replied, "The way cows produce milk." I don't think that is something one can learn.
Looking forward to the portraits book.
I think 100 prints worth showing might be a bit too ambitious for most, myself included. I've self-published two narrowily themed photography books, each with 20 prints and each book took two years to compile and complete. I heartily endorse the goal of getting to your print total goal within a certain time period and then swapping in and out into you are completely satisfied with your collection.
I find the process of curation as hard if not harder than acquiring the actual images. As a writer, you're probably familiar with the phrase "kill your darlings". It's so hard to exclude a favorite image even though in your heart you know it doesn't fit in the collection.
A whole bunch of stuff here that I agree with -- when people ask me about writing novels, I tell them that the critical thing is to finish them. I really believe if someone has a base level of ability, and can finish a novel, he/she will get published sooner or later. My first published novel was my third finished one.
I took pictures for publication (sporadically) for 30 years or so and I'm marginally competent with natural light. When I started taking photos with the first digital cameras (including a Kodak on a Nikon body, I think) I knew that I basically hated darkroom work, even though I had one. Digital got here, and I never looked back. In 2007 or so I was off to the Middle East as a photographer for an archaeological expedition, and a week before I left, I got my hands on what was literally the first Nikon D3 to arrive in the Twin Cities. The camera astonished me, and I still feel that astonishment, though it had nothing like the capabilities of our current cameras. Also, Lightroom is an act of genius, or probably several geniuses, IMHO.
I would add one thing to the idea of always having a camera handy and ready for opportunity. Sometimes, opportunity is very obvious, but a long way off. The movie star Shirley Maclaine (sp?) has a whitish house on a bluff here in Santa Fe, in the foothills of the Rockies. From one particular vantage point along the bluff, you can get a great (I think) Cezanne-like shot of the house with the moon coming up over the Rocky Mountains in the background; but it's a shot you can get only in a very few minutes of a full moon in a cloudless sky. It has to be early enough that the sun hasn't quite gotten below the horizon to the west, so it lights up the foreground and the house, with the moon coming up behind it. The moon is so bright even with sunlight on the mountainsides, if I ever do get the right shot, it's going to take some fancy footwork in Lightroom to get it exactly like I want it. I've blown two opportunities so far. Got the shot, but the light balance was off and not recoverable. For that shot, I don't need a camera by my side: I need to do a lot of advance figuring, and I'll need the camera preset, on a tripod, for five or six minutes.
nice pix Kirk
Your M240 shots confirm my decision to keep mine and not move to the latest model. The M240 is good enough. Very nice work Kirk.
My goal is 100 good working art prints per year. They go on my blog. At the end of the year, I edit these down to a portfolio of 25 prints. I call this the yearly Collection. This is the stuff that I submit to shows, hang on the walls, etc. Getting that 100 prints per year keeps me motivated.
Tolerance differences for artifacts and noise in imaging has long fascinated me. I came in during the film era. Chroma noise bothers me but luminance noise simply says “this is a photograph” to me. Particularly with black and white. That’s why I often shoot fearlessly up to ISO 3200 even with cameras that are a decade old. Sometimes higher than that. Many (but not all) people who started in the digital age freak out at the presence of any noise at all.
Meanwhile, on the subject of “Letting Go of the Camera,” I agree with almost everything you say, Kirk. But if I really want to live in the moment, I leave the camera home.
And, finally, I almost pulled the trigger on an M240 this week. But I passed, citing financial priorities. I’m likely to regret the decision.
On Digital noise - why not?
A few decades of shooting sports for publication in B&W. Grain was often part of the 'feel' of the image..., the Atmosphere - if you will.
Go back and look at the famous images of Y.A. Tittle battered and down on the gridiron. Look at all the great images where Grain helped the image. Then look at the antiseptic perfection of "clean, clean, clean' we see so much of today. Add in playing on carpet and you miss a lot.
Grain and noise where it is not wanted can be a problem. It is not the grain, but often the sensibilities of the photographer. Oftimes this grain helps so spend time working to get it and then compare.
Opening these in a new tab and then clicking on them to make them full size - the high ISO/technical aspects of the photos don't get in the way at all, and scrolling around them emphasizes your balancing of colors and the little details that make the pictures as a whole so enjoyable.
Really nice work.
On the down side, keep this up and we can expect the price of used 240s to accelerate in their appreciation, putting them that much more out of the reach of the rest of us, or at least me...
Really enjoyed the photos, lovely light. Thanks.
Now out putting mulch on the front flower beds. Don't want the rain that's coming to wash away the top soil....
Just a few blog notes: Time spent taking the photos: 2 hours. Time spent post processing the files: 1 hour. Word count of blog post: 2270. time spent writing and correct the mistakes in writing: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Time spent: 4:45.
Just sayin.
I gave up always having a camera on hand about 25yrs. ago. Now I only photograph with intent. But I think about photography constantly, and have realized just how much it has changed in those 25yrs. It has changed because, well, the world has changed. The greatness of Robert Frank's "The Americans" won't change but it doesn’t address the world as it is now.
Lensculture is evidence of the changes.
Bonjour Kirk, superbe article, texte, que je partage dans son entier et photos. J'ai toujours l'œil en bandoulière comme j'aime à dire et si je n'ai pas d'intention particulière à photographier, je ne résiste jamais à saisir les lumières naturelles qui traversent l'intérieur de ma maison et qui se posent sur le mobilier et les objets. Ma compagne me dit souvent :pourquoi tu photographies ça ? Réponse à la belle : je m'entraîne !
PS: je suis l'anonyme du commentaire précédent, oups !
Your photos bring back fond memories for me of walking the streets of Chicago at night, camera in hand. A friend and I would usually ride the L into the Loop just a little before dusk. The street lights coupled with the traffic, vehicle, and store lighting always made for a real challenge. I really need to get back downtown sometime and see how a modern sensor handles the many challenges of photographing at night.
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