So, why do I keep a Canon EOS 5Dmk2 around if I think the Nikon V1 is so hot?

Mostly because it can do this at 6400 ISO with an 85mm Zeiss 1.4 lens, wide open.  That's why.

Oh, and it can do this too.  Under the nastiest, lowest mixed florescent and tungsten household lighting you can imagine.  I can't quite do this with a V1 and though I don't do this kind of stuff that often I do like to be able to pull it off when I have too......

Rosie and the Ramblers were in the studio today, cutting a new album.  Rosie asked me to drop by and take some images for their website and promo.  She likes "real life."  So I came equipped with some fast glass and a Canon 5D2 as well as a Nikon V1.  I looked at the difference between the Nikon at 3200 and the Canon at 6400 and I put the Nikon away and shot "digital old school."

I'll keep the old stuff around for a while longer.  Is it just me or does that Zeiss 85 look good to you too?

I'm in San Antonio for the next two days shooting a hospital.  I'll be back in Austin Friday night getting ready to do my 10:15 am demo at the Austin Photo Expo Saturday morning.  I'll be the guy trying to juggle two cups of coffee.....

I don't know Bokeh from Boca Raton but I like the way the CZ works on the 5D2

My dad on the evening of his 60th wedding anniversary.  We all celebrated at their favorite restaurant down in San Antonio.  I brought along a camera.  He's still pretty spry in his mid-80's. His doctor advises no more cage fights or extreme combat sports.......

The long suffering spouse, Belinda, stands still for a quick dissection of the ZE's out of focus character, nearly wide open.

This is a short post.  That's because there's very little philosophy to impart/discuss, no in-depth tests with DXO software and old Air Force optical charts.  I don't know how to measure chromatic aberrations and I could care less about corner sharpness in a high speed 50mm lens (that's why we have three or four macro lenses sitting around.....) but I wanted to report how I feel about the 50mm Carl Zeiss ZE f1.4 lens that I've been shooting since late last Summer.  In as few words as possible:  I like it.

Here's how I like it:  On the front of a Canon 5Dmk2,  shot between f2.5 and f4,  in low daylight.  It's not a "show off" lens.  It doesn't scream, "Look how brutally sharp I can be!!!!"  It doesn't throw oversaturated color in your face.  It's well behaved and it hits a beautiful balance between the impression of sharpness and high detail.  It's a graceful lens for shooting faces.

I think I've read just about every mainstream review of high speed 50mm lenses currently on the market. The testers test everything the same way.  They want the same sharpness in the extreme corners that they get in the center.  They want MTF curves that kiss the top of the graph at every aperture and (if zoomy) at every focal length.  They don't seem to understand that all lens design is fraught with compromise.

I want to know what a lens is supposed to do and whether or not it does that thing well.  If you read the works of Erwin Puts, an expert on Leica lenses and lens design, you will learn many things and one of them is that optical designers work to optimize the inner 2/3rds of the lens coverage based on the idea that the photojournalist who originally needed fast lenses was most likely trying to capture a subject or subjects in the middle of the frame and that the edges didn't matter.  You'll also find that it's possible to optimize a lens for high contrast and apparent acuity or high resolution but not both, simultaneously.  Good designers strive for a balance between the two.  Color rendering is at least as important as sharpness and contrast and, finally, all of these factors are inter-related, like the sides of a triangle.

I have no way of knowing what was in the minds of the designers at Carl Zeiss when they came up with the final design of the 50mm ZE but I know that their final product gives me a look that is more realistic than photographic.  Perhaps they've made the conscious design to tame hard edged acuity in favor of detail and wider tonal range.  At least that's how it seems to me.

The nice thing for photographers is that we have so many choices available to us.  I've compared files with the Sigma 50mm 1.4 and it'a clear that it is optimized to have high acuity and high contrast.  That could be very appealing to a "Jpeg Only" shooter who doesn't want to spend a lot of time messing around in PhotoShop.  The cool thing is that if you have a 50mm that's optimized for higher resolution and slightly lower contrast you can control additive contrast in raw post production and augment the good qualities of your lens without the attendant compromises.

Think of it this way,  a lens that is optimized for high contrast and high impression of edge acuity will look fabulous in the same way that highly saturated, highly sharpened images first look on the screen.  But you'll notice that they produce less real resolution and detail and the higher rendering contrast comes at the expense of wider tonal range.  You can buy a lens with a different combination of attributes and then add saturation and edge sharpness in post to emulate the best aspects of the "flashy" lens and the "tamer" lens.

It's all academic to me.  I judge a lens after I've shot with it for a while and pulled out some images that I really like.  So far the 50 CZ ZE is a mixed bag for me.  I like the focal length on the cropped Canon format but I think I like the performance of the lens on the full frame camera better.  What I especially like is the opposite of what most reviewers say.  I like the way it renders out of focus backgrounds better than my 50mm Canon 1.8 or the 1.4.  The lens whose characteristic is closest to the performance of the Zeiss lens is a much overlooked optic from Canon, the 50mm 2.5 macro.  At 2.5 to f4 it looks nearly the same.  When I grab a lens now it's generally a toss up between the Zeiss and the Canon macro.  People trash talk it's loud autofocus motor but it can be manually focused just like the Zeiss with the same silent profile.

Would I buy the Zeiss lens again with all the knowledge I've accrued concerning the four different 50mm's I've played with?  Probably so since I like the way it renders color.  If I were on a budget I'd just settle for the 50mm 2.5 macro and I'd be pretty happy.

What about the 50mm 1.1.2 Canon L series lens?  It's way too big.  It's way too expensive.  And I'll probably figure out some way to rationalize its purchase and then regret my purchase and sell it at a loss in the not too distant future.  Oh the horror of being a mindless consumer and still having the self knowledge of my foibles.........

My continuing love affair.......with the Canon 7D. Enhanced by the 60mm efs and a few LED lights

I'm taking a risk today.  I'm posting from my laptop and the screen isn't nearly as well calibrated as the monitor in my office.  I'll assume this looks like my model, Selena, and that the flesh tones are somewhere in the ballpark.  Apologies if it's bright purple.....

I don't have a scientific method of measuring the different ways in which various cameras handle color, I just know what colors I like to see and always how I like the contrast of the files rendered.  Now I'll head into heretical territory.  I recently did a big job for an ad agency.  24 portraits in two days.  On site.  I used two cameras.  My main camera was a Canon 5Dmk2 with a 100mm f2 lens tacked onto the front.  The other camera was my old Kodak DSLR/n with an even older Nikon 135mm f2.8 on the business end.  The exercise went like this:  Shoot the bulk of the frames with the Canon camera and, when I felt like I had what I wanted, pull up the Kodak and shoot an additional ten frames.  All the frames were shot under the same lights,  Profoto monolights in the 600 w/s and 300 w/s varieties.  I used a gray Lastolite target and did a custom white balance for each of the cameras.  I shot both of them in RAW.  I processed both sets of files in Lightroom 3.0

And what to my wondering eyes did appear?  Softer, smoother, more accurate tonalities and colors out of the Kodak camera.  Much easier to post process into pleasing files.  And whether it was a different "shoulder/toe" curve parameter or just more dynamic range, the Kodak beat the snot out of the Canon 5d2 in terms of holding juicy detail in slight overexposures.  Now, if I really dig in and spend the time I can get the two cameras to look a lot a like but when I show the files as 12 by 18 inch prints my art director friends choose the Kodak prints every time.  Every time.  The Kodak came onto the market in 2004.  In camera years that's like a decade ago.  The Canon is barely 18 months old.  Amazing.

In it's defense the Canon 5d2 has great detail and for most things, very decent color.  But it was enough to shake my nascent confidence in Canon's supposed supremacy as a portrait camera.  So I was expecting the 7D from Canon to be no great shakes.  But I was wrong.  When I go thru the same process and do the same white balances with the 7D it creates files that, while not quite as detailed as the 5d2, are much more pleasing in the eyes of this portrait photographer.  And I'm still trying to figure out why that is.  It's a newer sensor but not by much.  They have the same Digic 4 processors.  And the lenses are the same.  But I guess it's one of those things I'll never have a solid metric for because I'm pretty sure the guys at Canon don't want to get into a dissing war between their various cameras.

Suffice it to say that I started shooting with the 7D more and more.  That moved me to buy an interesting lens, against my better judgement.  It's the 60mm macro, EFS.  EFS means that it only covers the optical circle of the Canon cropped frame cameras.  Won't even fit on the front of a 5D2.  But it just seemed like the perfect portrait focal length for the 7D and other cropped sensor cameras.  It's nice and small and fits on the body well.  Not too front heavy.  And it opens up to 2.8.  Here's a photo sample from last week:

It's shot at 3.2 and some slow shutter speed but it looks good and handles well.  The combination works for a lot of the faster, candid portraits I sometimes do and it doubles as a macro rig when I need to get close.  The other two shots in this blog were done with the 70-200mm f2 (non-IS) which I mentioned recently.  It's an incredibly good lens and, if someone handed me $2400 and asked me to buy myself another long zoom I'd pass right by the new 2.8 type two, snap up another $600 f4 and stick the rest into something else.

In a previous review I wrote at length about the handling of the 7D and the responsiveness of the auto focus but my recent romance with LED panels has caused me to think more about the color handling characteristics of various camera models instead of the more common threads of discussion which tend to center around resolution and dynamic range.  I've found that both the 7D and the new 60D are much better in AWB than any other Canon camera I've had the chance to handle.  Much better.  And when I'm in the studio shooting under the non-continuous spectrum of my wacky LED lights I find that the cameras, when left to their own devices, hit the proper white balance right off the mark, unlike the 5d2.  If you throw the Kodak I mentioned into the ring you'd have the opposite of the AWB Bell Curve.  In the absence of a custom white balance shooting with the Kodak is like shooting thru a kaleidoscope.


So I did a little reading to see what I could find out.  Here's the factoid that I'm hanging on to:  Both the 7D and the 60D make use of Canon's Intelligent Focus Color Luminosity metering system.  It's part of the autofocus system but it uses color sensors to more effectively understand what's in the  frame.  It's only a suspicion on my part but I believe that this new measurement tool is also somehow tied into the overall camera white balance tools and this gives the newer cameras an edge over the other cameras in the system that don't share this technology.


Let's talk about flash for a moment.  I know a lot of wedding photographers swear by their 5dmk2's and I can understand why.  It's a good camera with a sensor that's capable of capturing a lot of detail.  But when it comes to flash and autofocus in dimly lit venues I can't see why these photographers don't rush to pull the 7D out of their bags.  The flash performance is a full generation ahead of the 5d2.  The autofocus lock on is two generations better and probably on par with the system in the 1Dmk4.  The flash makes use of the same IFCL metering system that I talked about above and in combination with the flash exposure lock button flash becomes as easy as shooting Nikon.


I put the camera and 580 ex2 flash thru their paces in the dimly lit ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel last thurs. night.  Legendary attorney, Joe Jamail, took the podium in a crowded ballroom to give a speech about UT's president, Dr. Bill Powers.  Before he launched into his speech he squinted at the spotllights illuminating the small stage and asked, "Can you turn those darned things down?"  They did.  And it dropped the overall illumination a lot.  Even though Mr. Jamail was in a dark suit and the stage was backed with black curtains the camera/flash combination did a great job nailing the exposure using the FEL spot pre-metering and locking in the settings.  I try to take only a few flash shots because, no matter how discreet you try to be, it still gets annoying.  I switch over to a preset custom banks which changes my settings to 2800 K color temperature, ISO 3200, spot metering and "Camera Neutral" color setting.  And I will say that, with a little noise reduction edged in, the camera performs quite well at what would have been extreme nose bleed territory for a cropped frame camera only a year ago.......


So where does this new found appreciation put me in terms of grabbing cameras for assignment?  Well, if resolution, sharpness and final reproduction size are all critical my choice will be the 5D2, hands down.  If I have to get the tiniest slice of focus and put everything else out of focus I'll also grab for the same camera.  But if I can shoot under 1600 ISO, need fast AF, need good out of camera color balance and good white balance, and if handling is critical it's the 7D all the way.  With my 20,  my new 35 f2 and the 60mm macro EFS I've got a nice, small and light "classic" photojournalist's set up that doesn't break the bank.  Throw in a couple of wide ranging zooms like the 15-85 and the 70-200 f4 and a 60D as a back up body and I have system I'd feel comfortable with on a very large portion of my jobs.


Thank the photo dieties,  they all take the same batteries.  Just a few random observations from a week of daily shooting....

Lit with a single LED panel blasted (ha, ha) through a Chimera diffusion scrim.

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

The Canon 60D revisited. Funny what a lens will do.....

 I liked the 60D the minute I picked it up and (with a few caveats) I've liked it more and more as I've used it.  But it wasn't until I capriciously stuck the Carl Zeiss 50mm 1.4 ZE lens on the front of it that it became my favorite camera to take out shooting.  It's more responsive and feels about one and half generations better than a Canon 5Dmk2.  It's at least as good a camera for most non-ultra-sport shooting as the Canon 7D.  And I like the way it feels in my hands.

I originally bought the 50 Zeiss to use on the 5D2.  I thought it would create very cool looking images with impressive DOF effects and it did that just fine.  But what it didn't do well was manually focus.  And when I used the focus indicator or the focus indicator+obnoxious beep I found that the combination missed the point of sharp focus, no matter how I had the camera set.  The 7D was a bit more accurate but even with the micro adjust feature of both the more expensive cameras I was never quite sure I'd get what I wanted in sharp focus.  Which led me to believe that the mis-focus anomaly must either be non-linear or intermittent.

On a whim I put the lens onto the 60D and set the menu items for "stupid operator in need of much help" or SOINOMH mode.  That means, center focus point, beeping confirmation and steady green light indicator hand holding.  I proceeded to shoot and the oddest thing happened:  Every time the camera told me I was in focus I really was in focus.  I was soon able to lose one set of training wheels.  The beep.

Although I leave the beep on if I'm around a bunch of really pretentious gear nerds because it seems to drive them crazy and, as they flinch and clutch at their 1DS mk3's, I have a moment of selfish entertainment......)

A benefit of this newly realized focusing capability is the new knowledge that the Zeiss lens is sharper wide open than I originally thought and the saturation and color rendering is pretty darn good.  This leads me to leave that lens on that body all of the time.  This combo gives me a solid platform, great images, smaller form factor and the satisfaction of having a tool combination that's working at optimum efficiency.  If you don't shoot sports and you don't need the full frame chops of the 5Dv2 this is really a wonderful little camera with good high ISO performance into the bargain.  I grab it first when I leave the house or studio.  When I'm being reckless this is the combo I keep in the car.

But I'm not writing this with the intention of slagging the 5 or the 7.  It's just that this whole circus of lens  madness and focus brought me to realize that there may be an optimum lens and camera combination for each body.  I spent a while looking through images I've taken and I think it really breaks down like this:

1.  The 60D and the Carl Zeiss 50mm is my favorite combination for casual portraits and walking around  just making photographic trouble.  I like shooting with the rig between f2.2 and f3.5.  I like what it does to the backgrounds when I get in close.  Works for me.

2.  The 7D is the perfect match for the 15-85 and that combination is rarely rent asunder.  For some reason I feel like they ultimately compliment each other.  I love the wide angle end and I find more and more that it's a lens that was made for wide open shooting.  The 7D sensor and AF seem to wring out every scintilla of performance from the optics and vice versa.  If it's commercial and I've got to get the shot this is the camera I'll grab.  Doubly so if it involves "smart flash" or HS flash.  Really.  Almost as good as the Nikons........sniff......(meaning as good with flash as the Nikons are.  Not anything else.)

3.  The crazy anomaly.  The 5D2 has the best overall image quality of the three and not just by a whisper.  But it seems harder to extract that extra five to ten percent of quality for me.  Sometimes, when all the stars line up I get incredible stuff.  And for high ISO I am consistently impressed and amazed.  But it can be a goofy camera to work with.  The body doesn't really feel as solid as the other two.   And instead of one there are two lenses that I think are synergistic with it.  One is the 85mm 1.8 which seems to ride on the body about 60% of the time.  The other is the 70-200 f4 which comes out of the case when we do traditional portraits, lit with softboxes and perfectly metered.  Every frame is sharp from f4 on down and it has no weird CA's or soft spots.  I thought I'd love the Canon 5D2 with the 50mm focal length but that's been a non-starter for me.  I love using it on a tripod and with the mirror locked up.  That's "sharp mode" and it really reaches down and pulls out great performances when used that way.

If I had to choose one of the three to go and shoot personal work with?  It'd be the 60D.  More to come.

I was thinking about this whole subject as I was "nerding" around in the studio getting used to my new LED light fixation.  I decided to do a photograph with which to illustrate this blog and I wanted to see how the new lights would do on a product shot.  I wanted to see what, if any, the advantages of using LED's over florescent or hot lights would be.

Right off the bat I found that I could use the lights closer than I every have before.  That means even a small panel with some diffusion on it yields the same soft light as other fixtures in bigger fixtures used further away.  I could also use fixtures right next to my camera without worrying about being blinded by the flash or heating up the camera.  In the same situation the florescents would probably have held their own.  But compared to tungsten and flash the whole setup, visualization process and shooting was easier, more comfortable and more straightforward.

I even included a set up shot.....just for fun.

not shown is one more light to the far left of the scene which is providing additional illumination on the background to keep it even.


The lights are the ePhotoinc LED 500's I've mentioned before.  I took a chance and it turned out well.  So far I've done a handful of assignments and my only real issue is that getting perfect white balance has to be more intentional at the front end of the process now.  Also, the lights can cause polyester fabrics to go a bit purple.  I'll experiment with some UV filtration when I get back by gear.   For everything else?  Charming.  And cool.