Spouse out of town. Dinner dishes washed up. No desire to spin my wheels streaming anything. What to do? Oh, yeah, grab a camera and a lens and go out for a night time walk and see how different everything looks after dark. But which camera? Which lens? Which shoes?
The shoes were easy. It's been warm here this week so, of course, Birkenstock sandals. As far as cameras go I've been bumping into my little Sigma fp all week long so I took it as a sign that I should show that six year old studio veteran some attention. Seemed natural to pair it with the 45mm lens since it originally came bundled with one. I made sure the battery was charged and a memory card was inserted. Switched the camera to shoot black and white Jpegs and headed out the door.
While an fp without an EVF, or the jumbo sized hood for the rear LCD, is never my first choice for shooting in bright daylight at night it's a totally different thing. The LCD is easy to see when everything but your subject is plunged into darkness... I like the monochrome settings on the fp after I've added a couple notches of contrast to the mix. I've got the camera set up to go to sleep pretty quickly and it's kind of annoying to have to wake it up but that goes a long way toward providing more battery life. Which can be a weakness with this camera since it's doing a lot of processing with a mini-sized battery. Add in an "always on" screen if that's your preference and you'll need to pocket a couple batteries to get through a shooting day.
The Sigma fp and the 45mm were an antidote for my recent foray into the Leica "nose bleed" region of SL APO lenses. When I bought the Sigma and its lens the purchase price was under $2K. And over the years I've often been impressed by Sigma's color artistry. (As opposed to the idea of "color science").
The fp is an odd-to-handle camera for those raised on the usual SLR, DSLR and mirrorless cameras from other makers. It's a small brick with a few controls on it and no frills. No EVF ( you can add one...). No In-body-image-stabilization. No ergonomic grip for your right hand (you can add one). No comfy curves for happy handling. It's just a brick with a lens on the front and a (non-flippable) screen on the back. But it's the perfect camera for the photographer who keeps whining about "wanting more friction in the process..."
And, that would be me.
The camera has a great imaging sensor that's 24 megapixels. It's got a generous range of color modes and a few techie touches such as ISOs down to 6 (six) (you'll want to use a tripod for those lower ISOs). Another feature that went missing is a mechanical shutter. You get an electronic shutter. You learn to live with it or you move on to another camera. I've learned to live with it since I am not a sports photographer. You won't see me at the F1 track sucking down Champagne and trying to decipher some arcane Sony menu so I can shoot at one hundred frames per second... But lacking so much equals so much less to break, wear out, fail.
No mechanical shutter = far, far fewer moving parts. No floppy screen delivers self-explanatory robustness. No IBIS means no sissy photographers will own the camera... only those with arms of iron and wills of steel (dreadful hyperbole). Actually, I'd love it if this camera had IBIS...
And so, quite obviously, this is not the camera for everyone. But I had fun with it and that counts for something. It was a nice break from perfection. And a nod towards classical minimalism. Which is refreshing. Especially on a warm (but not too hot) evening when one just wants to ramble around and look in the windows of closed shops and restaurants and maybe photograph a few neon signs.
The hardest part for me last night was resisting the urge to bring the camera up to my eye to focus or compose. I had to resort to dirty baby diaper hold (which has been subsequently renamed as: cellphone dysmorphia paralysis, a condition in which any photo subject causes you to have tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex arms with which to hold your picture taking apparatus at kinda, but not quite arm's length). I'm embarrassed to hold a camera in this fashion and embarrassed to compose on a rear screen with the camera held at arm's length but I'm working on it with a team of photographic psychologists, one of whom suggested sticking a two foot dowel out of the back of the camera to keep my face at the right distance. One poke in the eye is enough to convince that's a bad idea. Another suggested that the traditional grip, camera-to-face, had its birth during Freud's career, positing that those eye-to-machine photographers were suffering from the fear of loss of intimacy with the camera. And the camera being a substitute for a human partner. Alternately the result of unresolved Oedipal issues.
But resisting the urge to commit face-to-camera contact I finally got used to using the camera in this primitive mode and soldiered on into the night.
While it might be more exciting to write that I was in constant danger during my after sunset walk, that predators lurked around every corner, that the risk of theft or even armed robbery was enormous, the truth is that the walk was mundane, adrenaline and cortisol free, and actually quite comfortable. I am of the age now at which younger woman smile at me in passing almost with a small dose of pity. Young men nod and are well behaved when I walk by. Older couples seem delighted to see another of their cadre out enjoying the moment --- while I'm pursuing a hobby that most have just assumed has passed its expiration date. So, happily ignored or treated with gentle greetings. And if I had been robbed at gunpoint what would the perpetrators have gained? A six year old, well used and not very popular camera, and a couple replaceable credit cards. A lot of stress over not a lot...
I have an embarrassing little thing to confess. I do a better job fine-tuning unhurried compositions when I can see the image on a two dimensional screen. A flat screen. As opposed to putting my eye up to a finder tunnel. Even a very well made finder tunnel. It's probably mental muscle memory of the decade or so in which I used a Hasselblad with a waist level finder and....a flat focusing screen; no pentaprism. Or the decade before that when I did my composing on the upside down and reversed focusing screen of a 4x5 inch view camera.
Look at the file firmly holding on to the highlights on the polished,
white surfaces of the shop mannequins. A nice test of highlight
resilience. And with nice tones.
I've written above about the faults and weirdness of using a brick of a camera without aids to better photography but now I should talk a bit about why I continue to like the camera and why I use it every time it surfaces from under a pile of paperwork or old swim towels. Or why it sometimes spends weeks at a time in the backseat of the car, also covered with old hats and books I meant to read at the coffee shops.
I love it because the Sigma fp, with the 45mm f2.8 Sigma lens, is so small and easy to carry around with a rope style strap. It's because the sensor was near the first of a current generation of BSI, full frame sensors that can deliver relatively clean and noise free files at ISOs we only used to dream about. Some of the images included in this particular blog post were done at ISOs as high as 32,000 and even though they started life as Jpegs and were NOT subjected to A.I. noise reduction schemes, I can barely tell them apart from the ISO 1600 or even 800 photos.
The files are not only clean but endowed with great dynamic range in that even Jpeg files, when shot at their highest quality, have highlights that don't burn out and shadows that beg to be opened a bit in post; and without penalty. Work with the raw files and the camera's imaging chain is incredibly competitive with anything currently on the market. And, to be honest, I prefer the Sigma fp color renditions to those from my herd of Leica cameras. I'm never sure which ones are more accurate but I'm certain about which I find more pleasing.
I'm sure the young couples walking along the sidewalk and eating bespoke ice creams from various posh vendors thought me odd as they passed me by while I was carefully making photographs of mannequins in my favorite windows. Thought me odd for using an actual camera instead of my phone. Thought it odd that an old man would be interested in female fashion. And found it exceedingly odd that I was able to resist the strong lure of freshly made ice cream, in all of its varieties. But they passed by and seemed, as a group, to be enjoying an uncrowded and comfortable visit to the area.
Much has been written about the 45mm f2.8 Contemporary lens from Sigma. Some laud its "character" which is code for: this lens is blistered with anomalies. Others, who perhaps waved the lens next to a camera for a moment before writing about it, have bought into a fable that the lens is "soft", "unsharp" or soft focus-y when used at its maximum aperture. But they are mostly wrong. Yes, the lens has its own look but it's not about lack of sharpness or contrast. One can see this in the texture of the clothes on the mannequin just above, or in the sharp edges of the in-focus ceiling fan in the shot just below.
The lens is sharp even wide open as long as you aren't trying to trick it into becoming a macro lens. It's a lens that's designed, I think, to be used from about four of five feet to infinity for good sharpness. And, surprise!!! but most lenses without floating optical elements are only optimized to be at their best at one focused distance. Generally about 50X their focal length --- but in the end the actual, optimum distance is decided by the lens designer. If you want a lens that's sharp everywhere, at every focused distance, you'll want something like the Leica SL APO primes which have floating elements to compensate for every change in distance. But be ready to pay for them even if, for most images, it's hard to see the differences between them and fine lenses like the Sigma. I know. I own and use both...
I think I was drawn to this combination last night because I had been reviewing a post about my maiden voyage, as a young photographer, to Europe, and I liked the black and white images I took then. There was both a softness and a sharp focus to the images and even when I missed the "ultimate" point of sharp focus I liked the feel and the tonality of the files. Much the same way I like those from the fp.
One of the big "knocks" on the fp is the lack of IBIS. I know, I know, once you've had it you never want to do without. But what I found is that by setting the Auto-ISO to about 1/125th of a second or, even more conservatively, 1/250th of a second as the slowest shutter speed, the need for IBIS vanishes with normal focal length lenses. Even more so with wide angles. Sure, the camera might need to venture up to 1/32000 ISO to nail the exposure but the camera can do that and any imperfections seem to add to my appreciation of the final image.
IBIS really comes into its own when shooting things that don't move while using longer lenses. Introduce subject movement and faster shutter speeds take precedence as the primary means of making sharp photographs. I hedged my bets last night and used 1/125th of a second because there was little to nothing at stake. And because I've done this stuff before and could predict a lot of how things would turn out. Would I like it if the fp had IBIS? yes, but then it would be different; it might need to be bigger, heavier, or slower to use. I bought the camera knowing it didn't have IBIS and just as I thought six years ago, knowledge is as helpful as a feature.
I only paid to park for an hour and a half and when I looked at my watch I found my time on the street was almost at an end. I kept looking as I walked back up the street I'd come down. I don't know why I thought the street would be different in appearance from the opposite direction but it was. And that felt nice.
When I got home I looked at the images on the rear screen of the camera and I was pleased. The images had the feel I was looking for. A continuity with images I'd made almost fifty years ago with Tri-X film and a rudimentary camera (which I don't really need to remind anyone but that old Canonet (film camera) lacked IBIS and fast ISOs and all the rest of the photo-crutches and we were still able to come away with images that have grown in nostalgic value over these long years). Having a current camera that focuses itself is about as much automation as I wanted last night.
After I reviewed the images while sitting on the couch I called my spouse to check in with her. She was visiting relatives and all was well. After the call I raided the refrigerator and freed up the remaining chocolate mint ice cream from the freezer. It was delicious. A nice capper to a day and an evening well spent.
The boot shine station at Tecovas Boots.
shot of a Daft Punk (band) poster through a shop window.
An early face plant at something silly I said some 50 years ago.
A nice way to sum up a group of images about....nothing.
What an adorable, little watch.
Health note: I'll be on and off and online the next few days. I go in for a laser procedure to zap a recalcitrant kidney stone that has evaded capture and theatens to attack, in the future, when I least expect it. I hope to be fine and dandy in a couple of days but I'm an eternal pessimist where my own health is concerned. I'll be totally under for the procedure which should last for 45 minutes to an hour. We've stocked the kitchen and pantry with good stuff to eat and also fun stuff to eat (see: Chocolate Mint Ice Cream --- just above).
Oh the joy of aging "gracefully." Honestly? All these little health "events" suck. I'd gladly trade a Leica camera body just to get out of the surgery. But...no takers from the medical community. I guess I'll just have to put on a brave face and try not to faint... Best, KT
