Capital City Photog

Photography musings from Wellington, New Zealand

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Everybody Street

The last year has treated photography fans pretty well at the cinema - both Finding Vivian Meier and The Salt of the Earth were nominated for Oscars in the documentary category. I've purchased the former on blu ray, and will definitely buy the latter study of Sebastião Salgado when it is available. The fact that the Paramount Cinema is still screening The Salt of the Earth many weeks after its launch date shows that such films can have an attraction far beyond the photo geek. I've watched it three times already, so I definitely need to get my own copy, even if it's simply to save money on further viewings.

One film that hasn't received a wide general release is Everybody Street by Cheryl Dunn. Her documentary on some of New York's top street photographers is very inspiring. It was released in 2013, but it still appears to be doing the indie circuit well into mid-2015. I came across a reference to it while browsing the web, and I immediately grabbed a copy from Vimeo, from where it can be both downloaded and streamed.

Almost all of the subjects are great characters in their own right. I love Jill Freedman's ballsiness - and I'm sorry I can't think of a gender neutral term to describe a woman who is so fearless in a New York, in-your-face kind of way. Of course, I expect this kind of attitude from Bruce Gilden as he's famous for thrusting his camera in people's faces ... and using a flash to boot. I admire that in him, but it's not something that I'd want to emuate myself.

I feel a closer affinity to Bruce Davidson. He's not after the decisive moment, and sees his photography as a collabration between himself and his subjects. He's doesn't want to sneak his shots, because the results would be "too thin." He wants to capture timelessness, and not the ephemeral. I get annoyed when some street photogs demand that all shots must be candid to be authentic, and Davidson lays waste to such narrow definitions. Here is a Magnum photographer, whose membership was contemporaneous with Cartier-Bresson, but who followed his own creative path.

Which isn't to say that I don't like or even take candid shots myself. Street photography is my favourite genre, but it's certainly one of the most difficult forms out there. To capture a great street photograph takes great dedication and a lot of patience, and you can take hundreds of photos over many days before finding one that might offer a glimmer of interest. You also need a great eye, as a lot of street photographs from lesser mortals - myself included - aren't compelling. It's not enough to capture the image of a homeless person, an old face of character, or a sneaky shot of a pretty woman - these cliche photos litter Flickr.

The photographers in Everybody Street are out all day, every day. They're absolutely dedicated to their craft, and that goes a long way to explaining why they're so good. Those of us who are hobbyists will never have the time to build that kind of photographic muscle. They see opportunities quicker, and with a keener eye.

It seems a shame that this film isn't more widely known that it is. Cheryl Dunn should be sending an email with an attached poster to every camera club out there. I'm betting that would ensure way more viewers than the festival curcuit.

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Panasonic 100-300mm

When it comes to super telescopic lenses, there isn't much to choose from in the m43 world. Olympus has a 75-300mm, but the aperture of f/4.8-6.7 doesn’t excite me. Apparently they have a 300mm f/4 prime just around the corner, but since their bodies rather than their lenses are stabilised, they’re probably not a good match for my Panasonic cameras.

I finally sprung for the Panasonic 100-300mm F/4.0-5.6 after procrastinating. The reviews have said that it's simply ok ... they all mentioned it's a bit soft at the long end, and you need a tripod to have any hope of getting a sharp picture. Ideally, you pull back from the maximum focal length to around 280mm or so.

I took this hand-held photo in the early afternoon. I kept the ISO at 200 for as clean an image as possible, while the shutter speed was only 1/400s. Conventional wisdom says that the shutter speed of an unstabilised lens should be 1/600, where 600mm is the full frame equivalent of this 300mm focal length.

I think that the quality is simply ok. Perhaps a tripod or a faster shutter speed would have helped - certainly some of other shots showed a tiny bit of camera shake.

On the previous day I’d tried taking a photo of a large flock, hoping to fill the frame. Unfortunately, none of the photos turned out. The factors conspired against me - it was late afternoon, and the light was fading. I didn’t have a tripod and I had to really push the ISO to get a decent shutter speed so there’s way too much noise. It was also very windy, and it was almost impossible to keep the camera still while I was being buffeted about.

Because the depth of field from a telephoto is very shallow I should have shut down the aperture to f/8 or so to even begin getting focus across the frame, and I may need to go even smaller.

I went back again the following day with a tripod and at an earlier time with better light. Unfortunately, there were no birds congregating on the rocks so I simply grabbed the pair of gulls above. In bright light, if you hold your tongue, you can get some useable hand-held shots, but a tripod would be better for photos at the longer end. I’d love to know how slow I could get the shutter speed and still get a decent shot.

After playing with the lens for a few days, I guess the quality is fine for the price you pay. Even if you have the cash for a pro-level alternative, there isn’t really one on the market. My needs for a telephoto are pretty rare, so I wouldn’t go for it anyway.

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Graphic Art

When I was a child I was constantly drawing comic book heroes - either copying the masters or creating my own images from scratch. My favourite artist was Jack Kirby. He had a dynamism where characters seemed to leap from the page and he was less concerned with anatomically correct proportions than with compositions that imparted a sense of energy. He made great use of foreshortening to enhance the action-oriented elements. No hero or villain stood still.

I see a lot of these elements in Frank Miller's art in The Dark Knight Returns. But Miller also adds one other quality: shadow. Batman is the silhouette moving in Gotham's cityscape. Of course, this prefigures the character's reinvention in modern cinema, first seen in Burton's films but more fully realised in Nolan's.

Because Wellington can't be beaten on a good day, people were taking the opportunity yesterday to enjoy the warm sun and leap into the water down at the harbour. I tried taking photos from various angles, but in most cases, the background was too busy. Switching to a position where I faced away from the city so that the divers were backlit created my own Gotham skyline:

After a while, I decided that I also wanted a simple lit scene with Te Papa in the background:

I cropped the picture to a square in order to remove any distractions, only to discover that there was a bird just above the subject's head.

Some people might advocate cloning it out, but I just figure the sky is the bird's domain, and it earned the right to be there this time.

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Bring on the GH4

So I added a Panasonic GH4 to my arsenal, intending to use it exclusively for video. After all, I had a GX7 with in body stabilisation, so why would I need a bigger mirrorless for stills? And then I discovered that the GH4 can automatically detect eyes for focusing. Even though I appreciated the face detection of the GX7, when I needed the eyes to be tack sharp with a shallow DOF I had to resort to spot focus, which can be quite tricky when working with children and other fidgety subjects.

So I've been using the GH4 for photography more than I expected. It's a bit large for candid shots IMHO, but it hasn't stopped me from taking it to the mean streets of Wellington. I've also found that its tracking capabilities are better than I've been led to believe:

I don't claim to be an action expert, and I probably never tested the full capabilities of the Canon 7D's tracking, but my experiences with tracking with the GH4 seem to be on a par with those when using my DSLR.

What I do love about both of my mirrorless cameras is that they allow me to preview effects such as black and white in the viewfinder. I shoot raw, so I still have to do the conversion in post, but having an indicative image helps with getting the tone I'm after.

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Shallow DOF Headshots

I’ve had my Panasonic GX7 for about two and a half months now, and I still feel like I'm on the learning curve. When it comes to taking photos of people, I find that with my eye up to the viewfinder I can’t focus as fast as I can with my Canon 7D. And I’m talking about co-operative subjects who are keeping still while I select the focus point.

If I use pinpoint focus, the camera switches to 1:1 view in order to magnify the area I’m focusing on. This sometimes throws me, as I seem to lurch into a zoomed view, but the advantage is I can pick the point of interest with great accuracy. The 1-area focus mode doesn’t do this, and I worry - I suspect without reason - that a 1-area focus will never be as crisp as a pinpoint one. I really want the eyes to be tack sharp.

Finally, there’s face detection, where the camera determines that there's a person in the frame and sets the focus accordingly. But do I really want to leave focusing decisions to the camera? Especially if I am using my fastest lenses wide open? But if face detection works, it gives me the opportunity to take many more candid pics without faffing around and possibly missing shots. So I decided to test it.

Even my fastest lenses ain’t that fast. I have an Olympus 60mm f/2.8 macro lens, which is ideal for headshots. And I also have a Panasonic 20mm f/1.7, which isn’t suitable for close-ups at all. Nevertheless, I thought I’d give them both a go.

My testing was as far from a scientific proposition as one could get. My subject, an eight year old boy, would rather be doing fun stuff than boring camera tests with his dad. WIth a combination of bribes and threats, he does remarkably well, but I don’t often get an opportunity for repeats if I want to tweak things.

Likewise, I have to take my shots when time permits, rather than when lighting is ideal. But if the subject’s bedtime is way before the golden hour, I make do. So the methodology was simple: find some shade from the early afternoon sun and use as wide an aperture as possible. The results only show the unedited photos - meaning no exposure tweaking, and no sharpening.

The first picture using the 60mm was taken with the focus on the corner of the eye. I’d rather have focused on the pupil/iris, but it was so windy that I found it impossible to keep perfectly still, so the focus point kept moving. I’ve taken a screenshot from Aperture with the focus point viewer turned on. If I was allowed to edit this I would have upped the exposure. Or if I could have travelled back in time, I would have fetched a reflector. But my rule is to show the jpeg converted from the raw image straight out of the camera :

There’s sufficient separation from the background to suggest that the Olly 60mm Macro is perfectly fine for headshot portraits.

If you look at the 100% zoom, it seems that the eyes are reasonably sharp, even if the picture is a little too dark.

Next up is the face detection version. The subject’s a little closer, but that’s the price one pays if a squirmy subject can’t keep his mark. At the time the photo was taken, the face was framed by a square in the viewfinder. Looking at the focus point later on in Aperture, the bridge of the nose seems to be the area of interest:

Yet, the 100% zoom on the eyes seemed to be just as sharp:

In terms of the plane of focus, the nose of a child isn’t much closer to the camera than the eyes. It would be interesting to see how an adult would fare - particularly one with a well-endowed proboscis.

I’d love to able to try this with the Olympus 75mm f/1.8 ED or the Panasonic Nocticron 42.5 f/1.2. Would the wide open depth-of-field render the focusing ability of face detection useless?

The closest I could get to such a test is to use my Panasonic 20mm f/1.7. This is rather an academic exercise - the distortion at this focal length means that the lens would never be used for portraits:

At full size the picture looks fine, but what about when zoomed 100%?

At this aperture, focusing becomes an issue. The eye I selected is in focus, but the other eye is a bit soft. However, the head is titled slightly away from the camera, so the eyes aren't on the same plane. Again, when I started focusing, the boy's right eye was closer to the camera, but by the time I clicked the shutter, it was the left one.

So how does face detection fare? Again, the exact focus point misses the eye:

But the boy’s slightly further from the camera, which gives a slightly wider depth of field. Check out the 100% zoom:

Both eyes are pretty sharp. What’s not clear to me is whether this is solely due to the distance from the subject, the fact the face is square to the camera or Panasonic has some amazing technology for averaging the focus over the whole face. Clearly, further testing is required. Unfortunately, a carrot holds no attraction for the boy, and using a stick is against the law. I may just have to resort to begging and pleading.

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I've Gone Mirrorless

The popularity of the smartphone has added an injection of creativity into the world of photography. Some old hands decry its insidious democratising nature, as if the technology itself is undoing the good work of the professional photographer. There’s no doubting that more bad photos can be taken than ever before, but a perusal of social photography sites such as Flickr shows that there’s an abundance of work that illustrates a deep understanding of creative composition by phone photographers. They’re willing to work within the technical confines of their devices’ capabilties to create compelling pictures.

Nevertheless, I love taking photos with my DSLR, a Canon EOS 7D. It offers opportunities that my phone doesn’t - the ability to select lenses appropriate to the subject matter I’m interested in, or to manually control exposure, focal length and focus. But there are two factors that limit my enjoyment - the size and weight of the body and lenses.

I want to take more photos. I want to improve my technique and really develop my compositional muscle. But I have little free time, so it’s not practical to drag my kit around with me so that I can sneak away for a few minutes should the opportunity present itself.  

So I went mirrorless. It wasn’t my intention. I bought my son a wee Panasonic point and shoot so that he could join in the fun when I dragged him around taking photos with me. Then I had a play, and I was consumed by jealousy. You can control the aperture, shutter speed and ISO setting. It was a joy to use. It was then that I decided to go the small camera route. I looked at several options. The Olympus EM-5 has its attractions, but it wasn’t pleasant to hold. I don’t have large hands, and yet the grip was too small to be useable. The Fuji XT-1 is a well-reviewed camera, but I wasn’t ready to invest in an ecosystem that I may not want to stick with for the long haul. Sony’s cameras look to be specimens of fine engineering, but I’ve been burnt by Sony’s anti-competitive behaviour in the past.

In the end, I chose the Panasonic Lumix GX7, and it’s a decision that I don’t regret. It’s just so much fun to use, and it’s way smaller than my Canon. I went with this camera because:

It's small but the ergonomics are well thought out. Despite being the same size as the Olympus OM-D E-M5, the grip fits in my hand. And it has real buttons, so I'm not scrolling through endless menus to change my settings. 

It has a wide variety of lenses, plus it can also use Olympus glass. Since I have an interest in videography, I also have one eye on the Panasonic GH4 - which I may purchase in future if funds permit.The lenses would be reusable.

It has in-body stabilisation, so I don't always need to purchase more expensive stabilised lenses.

It has an electronic viewfinder. A regular screen isn't sufficient for my needs. I like the additional stability I can obtain from the extra point of contact of camera to eye. The viewfinder can tilt, which is a feature I didn't think I'd care about, but is one which I use all of the time.

The GX7 isn't perfect. I really miss the shallow depth of field I get with my Canon, and I can’t seem to focus as quickly or as precisely as I can with the 7D. But I’m sure a lot of this comes down to experience, and I’ll blog more about this in future posts.

I use and love both cameras. The 7D is a bit long in the tooth now, but it suits many of my needs. Canon has just announced the Mark II version. Its main attractions for me are better low light performance, the dual pixel focus technology, clean HDMI out and a headphone jack. I can’t afford it at present, but I can dream….