Rome's Termini Station. Arrivals.

Camera: Mamiya 6 medium format, interchangeable lens rangefinder.

Lens: 75mm

Film: Kodak 400 CN (chromogenic black and white) ISO 400

Scanned from original print.

Hanging out at the Vatican, taking images of the non-tourists. The normal lens means you're close.

It was always interesting to shoot black and white film with a medium format rangefinder camera, out in the streets. Interesting because there was no way (other than the experience module in your brain and the depth of field scale on the lenses) to know how the image would look. The rangefinder window on the Mamiya 6 cameras showed an images that was as much in focus as your eyes could see. The center weighted meter got one onto the the target but you had to use your experience and observation skills to get exposure closer to the bullseye.

And if you got everything just right you still ended with a negative that had to be matched to graded papers and interpreted in just the right way to get the look that you had in your mind's eye in the first place. We digital users forget (or never experienced) the fact that the time elapsed from taking the photograph to actually seeing the first indications of what you actually got could be separated by days, weeks or even months. There was, for the most part, no immediate feedback loop to guide you in iterative steps to a better image --- in the moment.

It was a wet and rainy October day in Rome when I walked over from my hotel near the Via Veneto to the Vatican complex. It was the middle of the week and the kids were at school; their parents at work. When I got there the area in front of St. Peter's Cathedral was packed with senior citizens, gathered around their church banners, talking and debating. In my old pants and a vintage sport coat I mixed with the crowd and looked for images I wanted to take.

I pulled an old, incident light meter from my pocket and made a general reading for the area. The overcast light never changed. I ignored the camera meter and set my exposure controls based on the meter's indication. I kept the lens focused to around 10 feet which put me into a useful zone which could be quickly fine tuned when I put the camera up to my eye. I was working with a 75mm lens at f5.6 and there is surprisingly little depth of field there. The ISO of the film was the limit and really couldn't be changed half way through the roll without sacrificing what was already on the roll. You adapted by using a slower shutter speed and bracing yourself; paying attention to your handholding techniques. On sunny days, out in the streets, you could shoot at f8 or f11 and this allows you to pre-focus even a medium format camera and get good images. The benefit of pre-focusing is that when you see a scene you want to capture you need only lift the camera to compose and then shoot immediately. Most of use learned just about where twelve feet in front of the camera was, more or less. This yielded a photographer a certain invisibility that seems to have faded over the years.

I spent the better part of an afternoon wandering through an ever changing crowd just looking and absorbing the feeling and mood of the participants. Time well spent as I became, over time, a fixture to be overlooked. Perfect.

Too much color...

An artist at work on part of a wall that no one ever sees. 

Conceptual realism?

Selfies at the wall. Bringing portrait organization to visual chaos.

Photography of selfies in progress (and the above counts because of the included selfie stick) made with Nikon D810+24-120mm f4G lens. ISO 64. 

After nearly two months of constant rain and cloudy skies I am overdoing it with post processing in an ill advised attempt to make up for lost time with dramatic renditions of SKY!!!

I know I am overdoing it. I know I should lay off the "dramatic" filter and the "structure" filter in Snapseed but I've lived through so many gray skies that I just want to make up for lost time and create my own version of giant, Texas skies. I'll get over it. I swear! 

I am so confused. I must be doing something wrong. All the lenses I buy, which have reputations for softness, are far too sharp and detailed for my liking. Example: Nikon 24-120mm f4 G.

It was a holiday here in my country so I decided to do something different today and go for a walk in our ever growing downtown. Astute readers will remember that I bought a Nikon 24-120mm f4G lens about a week and a half ago. I almost didn't buy it because even though the long range of focal lengths and the relatively fast, constant aperture made it look great, on paper, I read many reviews which would have left a saner man running in the opposite direction from this product.

The two biggest knocks against this lens are that it is a crazy basket of distortions and that it's just not very sharp in the corners or at the longer focal lengths. Of course I have two replies. The first one is a quick acknowledgement of the fact that the lens has geometric distortions across the frame at different focal lengths. It's most pronounced at the widest setting. Most of the lenses people shoot with these days have the same kinds of distortions to some degree but the relevant thing is that the distortions can be automatically corrected by the camera, if you are shooting Jpegs. If you are shooting raw files the correction is one mouse click away in Lightroom or PhotoShop. Problem solved. Moving on.

The sharpness thing has me baffled and it may be that I'm just not keen enough to see it or smart enough to know what I should be looking for. I used the lens this afternoon to shoot lots of pretty pictures and I came back to the studio to fix them up and play with them on my computer. No matter what focal length I used to shoot the images they all looked sharp to me. And by "sharp" I mean they resolved lots of detail and that the transition between tones has high enough edge acutance to show off the detail in a convincing (and satisfying) way. I was using the Nikon D810 at ISO 64 and I don't think that's cheating. The camera can only pull as much detail out as the lens puts in. Right?

Stop reading lens reviews and test the lenses you are interested in for yourself. You might be surprised to find that most modern lenses are pretty good and that there's more to a lens than extreme corner sharpness. I hate corner sharpness. I put clear filters on my lenses and rub vaseline into the edges so it softens my corners up nicely. That way a file with too much sharp detail won't harm my eye with over sharpness.  (kidding. Just kidding).

But seriously, if you are a Nikon user, try whatever lens might suit you for yourself and ignore the internet experts. They are aiming for something different than you and I and it probably isn't the happiness of making nice photographs.

Happy Fourth. Independence can even extend to lens evaluations. Fun/Fireworks.

Too much fun playing with filters in SnapSeed......

Robin Wong (wonderful photo blogger!!!) reminded me of this piece I wrote five years ago. It may be the second best thing I've written about photos.

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/11/passion-is-in-risk.html

Would you please read it and tell me what you think?