Rainy Day. Scan Time.

 

Every time I go through my archives I wish for a medium format camera with a square, 6x6 cm sensor. And if that camera was very, very good I would pay what most people would consider an outrageous premium for it. At least as much as a new car would cost. There is something about NOT having to pre-visualize how a crop will actually look once you change it, slice it up and crop from some lesser format in post production. There is so much value to me in being able to SEE the final composition in the camera as you line up the shot. Sure. You can crop a square out of anything but it's not the same as experiencing it visually,  with the purity of instant satori. There just isn't. 

And here's my big problem with RAW files. You have to accept the full frame (uncropped) from the camera into your post processing program when you set a different format in a 3:2 camera. Even when shooting the review shows you the edges you didn't want to see in the first place. With Jpegs you get to define the format and work in it. But  then you miss out on the flexibility of the RAW file.

The medium format film cameras I owned spanned a lot of manufacturers product lines. There were many Hasselblads, the Bronica SQ line, the Mamiya 6 camera, and a slew of Rolleis; both twin lens and SLRs. Certainly there is enough of a market in a world with 8 billion people to be able to profitably sell a few thousand premium, big sensor, square format cameras every year. I'm tired of working within the false constraints of semiconductor driven size limitations. Yes, I know smaller sensors are less expensive to make but Rolls Royce is still making two or three hundred custom cars at $2 million and up every year. Aren't really, really wonderful cameras a lot more desirable? 

Ah well. Back to the scans. 

Currently reading a book called: "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin. 

It's an interesting way of looking at the life long creative process in all manner of avenues I've yet to explore. 

A new feature in PhotoShop. It's called Lens Blur. It seems to work....

I like to keep up with new features in PhotoShop. I wrote a while back about Adobe's introduction of DeNoise A.I. which cleans up noisy files without messing too much with the detail and overall look of files. The current limitation of DeNoise is that it only works with raw files. That's okay if you know that before starting a job on which you pretty much know that things are going to get noisy. 

Today I played around with a new feature called, Lens Blur. I was able to choose a Jpeg file this time and the feature worked well. It's just a grab shot of an advertising person on location, lost in thought. There was foreground stuff and background stuff and a nice looking subject to work with. I used the default lens blur setting but there is a slider that you can use to get more or less effect. This is at the halfway point on the slider. While the image might be improved if I spend some time with it and work on opening up shadows, etc. I was very impressed with how well the software detected the sharp intention in the front and then interpreted where the background blur was needed. The automation certainly saved a lot of selection time which might have been spent outlining the product boxes to the left as well as the bottles and stuff. 

This was a handheld shot, done with a Fuji GFX 50Sii and the "kit" lens; the 35-70mm f4.5-5.6. the image started life as a Jpeg and was shot at ISO 2000. I'll be using this feature a lot...

Why is Kirk posting so much? Hmmm. Well, we're having the house painted, inside and out. B. is out of town so I'm nominally in charge. Occasionally I have to spot check to make sure a custom paint color match actually matches. And I have no idea what the schedule for the painters will wind up being, day to day. So I meet them in the morning, go to swim practice, come back and check in, go out and find myself some tacos for breakfast, and coffee (since my kitchen is shrouded with layers of protective plastic sheeting...), come back and return calls, send bids, write a blog and then go out on a search for lunch. Today it was Whole Foods. Veggies. Some fish. Nice hot bar at the flagship store. Kind of a test kitchen for the far flung empire. Then I come back and check in with the painters. Admire the work. Ask a few obligatory questions and then head back into the office for more calls, returnable emails and, yes, more blogging. Stuff comes up. Now waiting for B.'s return from her adventure in San Antonio. Might have to book a hotel room tonight. The painting isn't over here for today and we're heading toward 6 pm. Pretty sure I don't want to sleep immersed in the paint fumes...

So, blogging. It's fun. It's easy. There's generally always something to discuss. Just thought I'd let you know.  

Vegetables and markets. So nice to have them...

I'm a bit jealous of people living in cities like Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In addition to several smaller, neighborhood markets they have food havens, amazing marketplaces, like the Jean-Tolon Market, the Atwater Market and the Maisonneuve Market. For photographers who love to make photographs of lush collections of fresh produce, artisanal pastries, cheeses, sauces and other tasty food, these markets are absolute treasures. On my visits to Montreal, mostly in the Fall season, I've spent full days hopping on the Metro to go from market to market to experience just how visually rich this food culture is. 

Austin has several "farmers" markets but they are a fraction of the size and have an even smaller subset of goods and produce to choose from. 

I have some clients who are decorating some dining and kitchen areas and they've asked me to put together a catalog of fresh food images from all over the place. Multiple mini-installations of images being something they are designing around. Over the years I've been involved in a lot of prepared food shoots but it's such a specialized niche in commercial photography now that I'm deferring to dedicated food pros when clients ask. But that doesn't mean for a moment that I'm not interested in making fun and interesting images of "unprepared" foods. Fresh fruits and veggies. Freshly caught fish. Artfully displayed tarts, cakes and pastries. 

In fact, now that we've replaced floor and are in the middle of an extensive interior and exterior painting project (no. I don't do house painting. Some things are best left to professionals...) B. and I are more and more focused on rehabbing the art around the house and in the studio. What used to be a collage of good, bad and mostly sentimental stuff is slowly surrendering to more tightly curated, and consistently framed and presented, work that we're doing ourselves. For ourselves. 

Our local agriculture isn't as diverse as areas of the midwest and northeast. I like to discover new markets in new places. Makes carrying those cameras around more worthwhile...   

The painting project is humorous. At least it is to me. The painters arrived yesterday morning and started wrapping everything in the interior of the house with sheets of plastic. From floor to ceiling in all the areas in which scrapping, sanding, caulking and painting will take place. The interior of my house is like a weird science fiction movie where the characters have to walk through semi-transparent, semi-opaque curtains of plastic to reach livable areas of the house. The living room, one of the bedrooms and one of the bathrooms are the safe zones. Areas previously painted and not on the docket for this go round. 

When I exited our bedroom and headed to the kitchen to brew the life-giving elixir we call, "Coffee" I had to part the plastic curtains at my bedroom door and walk down a long hallway, the floor and carpeting of which were also cosseted in impermeable wrappings. The kitchen and its appliances existed behind floor to ceiling wrappers as well. 

Our dining room table was moved into the "safe space" of the living room and I sat, wedged into a seat, staring at yet another floor-to-ceiling curtain of ephemeral material. Drinking yet another cup of perfect coffee and pre-visualizing this morning's swim. When I came home from my swim practice I watched our two painters wrap all the exterior trim in preparation for treating the exterior raw cedar with a preservation concoction. The application should take place all afternoon. I remember the same, basic experience from five or so years ago and plan to be somewhere else for the afternoon. I'm not at all acclimated to the fumes. 

The guys have switched to the exterior today because we have a window of good weather dry weather today and tomorrow and when the rain returns they hope to be back inside doing the pretty work. These guys are consummate professionals. They are very, very detail oriented and I guess that's why B. uses them for all our painting projects. She's out of town for two days so I'm marginally in charge of making sure everything goes well. I should sneak out and go to a movie instead....

Currently trying to find exemplary food markets/farmers markets in Texas. Let me know if you know of any and are generous enough to share your favorite spots. 

 I seem to be on a carrot jag today....

 

A Gratuitous Equipment Review. Totally Unscientific. Just Observational.

 

I started out my long connection to photography with a rangefinder camera. A Canon Canonet QL17iii. It was the long time historical precursor to digital cameras like the Leica Q and Q2. A smallish body, solidly built and fitted with a permanent, unchangeable lens. In the case of the Canon the lens was a just right focal length of 40mm. And, like the much later Leicas, the Canon lens featured an f1.7 aperture. 

At some point, a few years after my "initiation" into serious photography via both the Canonet, and time spent in a black and white darkroom, I moved on to other rangefinder cameras. Rangefinder cameras with the ability to change to different lenses. And eventually I entered the cult of Leica cameras via inexpensive, used screw mount (Barnack) and M series cameras and lenses. 

The first was a IIIf. Then an M3 with a 50mm Summicron. And after that a collection of lenses from 35mm to 90mm. Heady times. But cheap enough back then for even a student on a tight budget. My choice in college was between cameras and a car. I always chose the cameras. Having a car in Austin didn't help you shoot better in Mexico City, or somewhere else you reached by airplane (or bus). 

There are tradeoffs everywhere in photography gear. The original Leica M3 was blessed with a .91X viewfinder. Current M cameras have either .68X or .72X viewfinders. The vastly better magnification of the M3 finder made for easy use of 75mm and 90mm lenses and even made working with a 135mm lens somewhat practical. The higher magnification of the finder also increased focusing accuracy for every focal length. The tradeoff? The finder only showed bright frame lines for 50mm, 75mm, 90mm and 135mm lenses. Nothing for the wide angles. If you wanted to use 28mm and 35mm lenses with your M3 you'd need an external bright line finder sitting in the accessory shoe of your fine camera. 

The Leica M240 cameras (all variants) use a .68X viewfinder which is just barely wide enough to accommodate frame lines for a 28mm lens...if you can get your eye close enough. But what it "gains" at the wide end it throws away at the long end. I find the lower magnification finders unusable for 135mm focal lengths and barely adequate at 90mm. The image in the viewfinder is just so small. So, for me, the sweet spot, or point of less pain, when using lenses longer than 50mm is the 75mm focal length. The bright lines in the finder are easy to see and pretty easy to compose with while the rangefinder is still accurate enough to provide sharp focus even at close distances with the aperture at wide open. Of course, this is all dependent on your camera's rangefinder being accurately calibrated and using lenses that were manufactured with the right mechanical tolerances.... (caveat emptor!).

When I bought a 90mm lens for the system it was mostly as an "emergency" focal length for those times when I had convinced myself that I could do any sort of project with just my M series cameras and lenses ---and then got stuck needing something a bit longer than my normal range. But in my brain I presumed (and accurately so) that I'd get a lot more use out of an M mount 90mm lens adapted to an SL or SL2 than I would in getting daily use out of it on an M240. For some even more extra reach there is always the option of putting the 90mm lens on (via an adapter) one of the CL cameras and then taking advantage of a (cropped) 135mm equivalent. But from experience I knew that unless I was shooting film and using an M6 with a .85X finder (an option available back in the film days when Leica made three different finder magnification bodies for the M6 line....) or an M3 with its .91X finder, that I'd never be really happy with lenses longer than 75mm on a rangefinder camera. 

Once I'd acquired a second M240 body I presumed it was safe to start buying more lenses for the system. I already had the 28, 35, 40, and 50mm focal lengths in hand and I started looking around at the 75mm options for M. There are used 75mm f2.5 Summarit lenses from Leica but I reviewed the Summarit lineup when I was reviewing the M9 camera for a commercial website (back in the day) and I was never really blown away. Good lenses but a lesser build quality than other Leica optics and I never experienced the maximum optical performance that other Leica lenses can delivery.

I looked at the Leica APO Summicron, which I am certain is a great lens, but I didn't feel like dropping nearly five grand for what is, basically, a secondary system lens for me. Ditto the $14,000+ 75mm APO Noctilux f1.25 lens. I looked at the Voigtlander catalog and narrowed down my choice to that between the 75mm f1.5 (bigger and bulkier + pricier) and the much more recently introduced 75mm f1.9. Reading all the available reviews the consensus seemed to be that by the time you had each lens at f2.8 (which is where you'll probably spend your most time...) both lenses were nearly identical. Maybe even a slight nod to the f1.9 model. Which is much smaller, lighter and ... cheaper. I bought one. 

Judging the lens separately from the Leica M cameras by putting it on an SL2 I find that the lens is sharp enough at f1.9 to be quite usable for portrait work and most situations where center sharpness is key. That being said, everything gets better at f2.8 and by f4.0 the lens is as good as anything I currently use across the systems. Maybe the Sigma 70mm Macro Art lens is sharper. But if it is my eyes have a hard time seeing much difference at everyday f-stops.

As I expected, the 75mm focal length is harder for me to use on an M240 than is a 35mm or 50mm lens. My eyes are older, the frame lines are smaller, and judging the exact point on which the rangefinder is measuring takes perhaps more day to day practice than I have brought to the fore recently. 

There are no real downsides to the lens that I can see. There are plenty of charming attributes that I appreciate and became more aware of while photographing at the Eeyore's event yesterday. The lens is very small and light for its focal length and speed. The focus throw is fair short so I don't spend time cranking the focusing ring around and around (see the Milvus 50mm f1.4 lens --- it takes an afternoon to get from the closest focusing distance all the way around to infinity...).  And, as I can see from taking a bunch of photographs at f2.8, the lens provides very sharp images when used correctly. Focused close and using wider apertures you can get dreamy good background areas of near zero focus. It's pretty charming. 

My takeaway? If you have to use a focal length longer than 50mm with a .68X mag. viewfinder on a Leica M you should not waste your money on buying the finest or fastest. You'll likely be using whatever long lens you put on your M Leica in a more casual and considered way. And you have to admit to the physics limitations of  focusing triangulation with lower magnification baselines in current rangefinder cameras. While a great rangefinder systems beats the socks off most AF cameras in the 21mm to 50mm range the advantage of through the lens focusing and image magnification in the EVF quickly beat the coupled, mechanical rangefinder for focusing accuracy from 75mms on up. In fact, my favorite use of the 75mm and 90mm lenses from Voigtlander, both M mount products, is with them sitting on the front of an SL camera and me punching it to make sure I've nailed the focusing stuff down to the eyelashes. Or the pupils. 

With this considered I think of the 75mm VM f1.9 as a hybrid-capable lens. Happy on an M camera and even happier on an EVF mirrorless Leica. At around $600 it's a bargain. And, as it has no other features than good optics and a smooth focusing ring there is substantially less to go wrong with it. Here's some images from the lens that I took yesterday. I tried to find skyscrapers and mannequins but none were available at this location. I had to settle for images of real people. Quelle Horreur. C'est la vie.