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OK, listen up.  The most important component of your camera is the lens.  If there is a place to spend the money, it's on the glass. I'd take a 5 year old 20D with a good lens over a top of the line 1Ds MkIII with a crappy lens any day of the week.  I can't tell you the number of people I see who have this all wrong. Last year at the Grand Canyon, I saw a girl with a high-end Gitzo tripod, 5D body, and some crappy consumer level zoom lens on the front.  Honestly, I almost pushed her over the edge.

There is a lot of talk about the mega-pixel race in digital cameras. I remember my first little 2MP digital Elph, and how I bought my father a little Kodak digital camera that I think put out only a 640x480 image and still cost $199.  We've gone from 4MP to 22MP in about 8 years, that's pretty nuts. The problem is that the number of pixels on the sensor is meaningless if the light that gets to the sensor is crap. And that means quality lenses, or in the cool photographer parlance "glass".

You can cut up the subject of lenses along many different lines, but I've chosen to start this discussion by dividing prime lenses from zooms.  For the uninitiated, a 'prime' lens is one with a fixed focal length, while a 'zoom' has a continuously variable focal length within a certain range.  So for example a prime might have a focal length of 50mm and a zoom 24mm to 70mm.

In the beginning, there were only primes.  Large format cameras only use fixed focal length lenses, as are most medium format lenses as well.  For decades, this extended into the 35mm world as well.  Through the rangefinder age (Leica, yum) and into the SLR revolution of the 70's.  While zooms had been invented and in use since the 1920's, it wasn't until their prices came down to earth and their performance improved that they invaded the photographic world.  I attribute that shift to the use of computers in their design. The Canon 24-70 f/2.8 zoom for example has 16 glass elements in 13 groups, which all have to remain in alignment and perform well from wide angle to portrait and macro to infinity. I'm not sure about you but designing something like that without a computer sounds near impossible (cut to me getting screaming emails from optical engineers). Prime lenses are much simpler. Even the high-end 50mm/1.2 only has 8 elements, and all things being equal, the fewer elements that bend my light it's way to the sensor, the better.

In the recent past and for most people in the world, zoom lenses have been their bread and butter. In fact, many SLR owners only have one lens, it's a zoom, and it stays on the body at all times. This is fine for the parent who bought a digital rebel with a kit lens to take pictures of their newborn and whatnot, but you're not getting the most out of that camera.

So people may talk about the latest 22MP Canon monster (which I'm totally salivating over) or the fabled 24MP Sony sensor that's in the wings.  However, all these sensors are going to show is the limitations of most of the lenses you put in front of them.  Now, I'm not one of those people who says that the 22MP sensor 'out-resolves' the available lenses.  It probably bests some of the lower-end and consumer glass, but it will certainly show weaknesses that got lost in the past.  Camera shake, inaccurate focusing, vignetting, and yes, at wide apertures, especially on zooms, they will not be sharp enough.

So what's the answer.  Well, first, better technique.  Second, Primes.

As a Canon user I've got all the good zooms.. 17-40L, 24-70L, 70-200L (and I had the 24-105L for a time).  But you know what?  I rarely use them anymore. What I do use are my primes. A 28mm, a 50mm, and a 100mm (the last occasionally). They're simpler, smaller, lighter, sharper, require less light,  are more contrasty, and by using them I've gotten much better at visualizing shots before I ever bring the camera to my eye.  Less versatile? Perhaps, but if you need to zoom, zoom with your feet.

If you only have zooms, do yourself a favor and go buy or borrow a decent prime lens.  Canon makes a 50mm 1.8 that's less than $100 and other companies have good deals as well so you've got no excuses.  If you own primes but have fallen into the habit of using your zooms all the time, take another look.  Your pictures will be sharper with more contrast, your viewfinder will be brighter, and you will be less likely to hurt your back from carrying it around.

More thoughts on "glass" to come...

So I'm in the mental market for a new camera.  That means that I don't have my credit card out, but I'm doing pros and cons in my head.  My scrappy 5D which has been my faithful companion for over two years is getting a bit long in the tooth.  I love that camera, it's like a good friend. Just think about all the photos I've shot with it, including at least 330 of the 365 Portraits last year. All the places it's been in Europe and across America and the people I've met with it, like my hero James Burke.  <sigh>

I added it up and estimated that I shot about 100,000 frames last year, plus what I shot before 365 and after, and that's on a camera who's shutter is rated for 100,000 cycles.  So I'm working on borrowed time here and I can't afford to have it break down on my on the job.

So, basically it comes down to 3.5 options.  Buy a 1Ds Mark III ($8K), switch to a Nikon D3 ($5k) to get the supposedly great high iso performance, or wait for Canon to release their new 5D ($3-4k).

First the Canon/Nikon question.  I've used Canon since my first SLR, in fact it was an Elan7 film body.  And I've got a half dozen Canon lenses in my kit, so I lean towards sticking with Canon.  But that's not my only problem with switching to the D3.

First off it's 12MP so, I'd pay $5k to get no upgrade in resolution, which seems a bit silly.  I never shoot continuous so more frames per second are of no use.  I'd like the high iso capability but I'm not sure it's worth switching just for that.  Plus there is the lenses.

I've found myself using 2 primes lenses for a lot of my work.  A 50mm and a 28mm.  And the 28mm is the problem.  Nikon doesn't sell a good one anymore.  They did, about 5 years ago, but for some reason they took it off the market.  It was fast too f/1.4, and from all accounts had exceptional image quality.  It's so good in fact that used ones on Ebay go for $4000.  I wonder why they stopped selling it, but that's another question for another day.  Anyway, I'm not going to spend four grand on a used prime lens on top of the five grand for the camera. And then still be at 12MP, that's just silly.  If I was a Nikon user, it's a no brainer, the D3 is the first camera they've put out that really competes. It's a winner.

Ok, so that leaves us back in the Canon court. And I've been waiting for the new 5D successor (probably called the 5D Mark II) for a long time now.  Rumors say it'll be 16MP, better high iso performance (which is already pretty good on the 5D), 14bit Raw files, and maybe even weather sealed.  Nearly perfect for my needs. But how long can I wait?  I need a backup body and my current 5D would be great for that role.

Plus there are a few things that I'd love to have the 1Ds for.  First off it's 21 megapixels, which is just crazy stupid.  Enough to crop half the image away and still have a 10MP photo.  It's also, however enough pixels that focus and lens quality become CRITICAL to getting high quality photographs. Not to mention the fact that it's built like a brick; as one review said 'if you need a camera that you can drive nails with, this is it'.  However, the big thing that draws me even more than the resolution is the viewfinder.  It's huge and bright and it shows 100% of the image you're going to take.  Something I've gotten addicted to on my Leica (even seeing beyond the framelines on the rangefinder).

The other half option is to just buy a cheap or even used Rebel XTi for $400 or so and use that as a backup on the off chance my 5D fails.  And then just wait and see how good the new 5D Mark II body is.

So many choices, so little time.  It may sound like I've just got a camera fetish and that I'm a gear whore.  But I don't think anybody can claim that I don't use my cameras.  I really am looking for the tool that'll be in my hands for the next couple years of my life.  It's a big decision and a lot of money, and I thought that putting it on paper might help clear away the cobwebs in my head. If anyone's got anything to add to the conversation, comment away.

So as everyone in the photo world knows, Polaroid announced a month or two ago that they're going to stop production of all instant films.  Some people say that it's lack of market, but I think it's more that the conglomerate that bought Polaroid a few years ago doesn't want to deal with a small ancient business like that.  I'm still hopeful that Fuji or someone will step up and start making more.

I've talked to a number of people, photographers and muggles who are upset about it.  I was at Calumet a few weeks ago and I saw some girl buying a stack of film packs for her 600 (that's the consumer square, "shake it like a polaroid picture" ones.  Which you're not supposed to actually shake, by the way.)  I figured she was an artist, instead it turns out that she was having a party. <blank stare>.  My friend Carole was telling me last week how they use polaroids in the puppet world to record sets and puppets for continuity.  To make sure they know what hair they used on the green one for that episode last year.  Going to CVS to get prints done from her digcam is not good enough. She's looking into portable printers. And of course there are photographers. I was reading a blog by Emily Shur lamenting the loss.  And she shoots 4x5 all the time. Life's going to get annoying for her.

I've got about a half box of Type 55 and a half box of Type 79 left, but a couple weeks ago I ordered 3 boxes of 55 from ecamerafilms which is where I've gotten all my stuff in the past.  The price had gone up from $70/box to $99/box, but I figured that it was a one time last minute splurge.  A couple days later it hadn't shipped and I got an email saying they were out of stock and couldn't get more.  So I tried another place, same thing.  And then another, same thing.

Boxes of 55 are going for about $150 on ebay right now. That's about $8 a sheet.  Too rich for my blood.  So I guess what I have left is the end for me. And it's sad, because that's mostly what I used my 4x5 for.  I'll get less use once I've got to start going into manhattan and waiting 6 hours to get a photo developed.

I was chatting with a big-time large format photographer last week and he was saying that he just spent $3000 on 8x10 Polaroid stock.  That's about 10 boxes at today's prices, and there are 15 in a box. So he just spent three grand to take 150 pictures. Again, too rich for my blood.

Luckily for me, film is a luxury. It's what I shoot when I want to do something for fun, for me, to experiment, or to slow down. For me, it's a sad inconvience, for people like my large format friend or Emily Shur, it's a fundamental problem.

So, a toast to Polaroid.  Oh and the glasses were not shot on Polaroid, I just thought they were pretty touch to the post.

I wanted to update you all on what worked and what didn't during last Friday's shoot outside at 1 in the afternoon. To review, I suggested 3 ways to deal with the sun: #1 Get out of it,  #2 Overpower it, or #3 Diffuse it. Let's see how they did...

#1 Get out of it
This ended up being the big winner. I ended up using a big tent like canopy to block the direct light.  With so much light coming in from behind him on the edge of the shadow, I ended up with a nice backlit blown out which wrapped the light around his head.  And then later in the shoot we were working in the shadow of a building against a very nicely colored brick wall.  Shooting RAW made the kind of pictures I wanted possible, because there was enough latitude to save both the shadows and the highlights in post.

#2 Overpower it
Hmm.. not so much.  My Canon 550EX Speedlight at full power and a few feet away couldn't overcome the big hot light in the sky, which was 93 million miles away.  Maybe if it was bare bulbed it would have worked, but not with any sort of diffusion.  And a bare strobe was not the look I was going for.  I'm sure if I had a more powerful light this would have worked better. Perhaps one of those Quantum systems, or certainly a studio strobe with battery pack, but we didn't have time for that kind of thing.

#3 Diffuse it
This one worked some of the time.  However in the middle of the day with the sun coming almost straight down on the subject, it's hard to get the diffuser in position and keep the assistant out of the shot.  Also, the sun was so bright that while testing, I found that I had to stack two diffusers on top of each other to get the light as soft as I wanted.  So this one worked, but was not the most convenient.

In the end, trying to modify the terrible light was more trouble than it's worth, especially when you have the option of just getting out of it in the first place. 

I'm of the belief that photographs have a natural print size. Some photos are meant to be 4x6 and look silly blown up, and some don't feel like they can breathe unless they're 20x30". Sometimes a little print just doesn't cut it.

When I print in the studio I use an HP B9180, which I like a lot, but I'll write about that some other time. The problem is that the maximum print width is 13". With a 13x19" print being about the maximum you're going to get out of it. If I want to go bigger, I send them out.

A quick aside to those who don't think there pictures will look good at 20x30" because it won't be 300dpi like you're supposed to have... Don't worry, if it's a sharp photo with good color, it'll look great. Modern cameras, especially in the 10-12MP range up-res quite nicely. Plus you're not looking at a poster with a loupe anyway, you're standing a couple feet away usually.

Hell, billboards are only 10-20dpi. So taking the long dimension of my 5D 4368px/10dpi/12inchesperfoot = a perfectly nice looking 36FT billboard.

I've done up to 24x36" from a 5D file taken handheld with a 24-105L zoom lens and they look great.

www.elcocolor.com/poster_special.htm

Ok, I'm probably going to start a flame war here, but can a fan of Fuji film (I'm talking C41 color here, not the instant stuff) explain to me why it's good?

I remember a few years ago I shot a few rolls of NPH on the recommendation of a photo finishing place.  She had said she had a customer who swore by NPH.  Shooting it and getting it developed within hours (apparently that was the trick).

Well in the intervening few years, as I've gotten more into photography, I've become a fan of the Kodak Portra films.  On both 35mm and 120, I shoot usually the 160NC, 400NC, or 800 and I've found it to be very consistent, fine grained, pushable, etc.   Maybe I've become spoiled.

A few weeks ago I was at Calumet (it was a Sat, so I couldn't go to any of the usual photo stores in NYC) and they were sold out of the 400NC I was looking for.  So I asked about the Fuji Pro 400H, and the guy behind the counter said, it was OK, but most people preferred the Kodak.  Since they didn't have what I wanted but I needed some film, I said, "Ok, give me a couple rolls and I'll try it out".

Now, this isn't an ad for Kodak or anything, but I've shot both of the rolls in my Leica and I've got to tell you, I'm very underwhelmed.  The colors are washed out, the contrast is "eh", and it's really grainy.  Well lit stuff shot at f/11 and 1/250 look soft and with grain that looks as if the film has been pushed a stop or two.  Look at the photo of the lamp in the next post down.  Look at the amount of grain near the lightbulb.  And this was a well exposed, correctly scanned picture shot in the middle of the day.

When it comes to chrome, I've been shooting Kodak lately too, I like the 100G stock, especially in my hasselblad when I travel. I have however had good experiences with Provia (and occasionally Velvia when I'm feeling saucy) on medium format, and Provia on the 4x5 comes out gorgeous.

So I feel like I'm missing something with their normal color film.  Let me know if I'm wrong or I got a bad batch, but from what I've seen both literally and figuratively, I don't get it.

For those who don't know, RAW is a file format where your camera takes all the information that the sensor captures and writes it to the flash card without turning it into an image.  This allows you to have much more control over turning that data into an pretty picture, in your computer when you get home, instead of having you're camera just turn it into a jpeg. I shoot RAW almost exclusively.  As my 'look' is largely created in post processing, having the extra information that a raw file contains (12 or 14 bits per channel instead of 8) gives me much more headroom for manipulation.  It's also saved my ass more than a few times due to mistakes in exposure and white balance.

Canon and Nikon cameras save raw files in their proprietary .CR2 and .NEF formats, respectfully. While Lightroom and Photoshop and Aperture and all the rest of the aftermarket raw converters can currently open these formats perfectly well (sometimes you've got to wait a month or so for them to add support for new cameras).  Will that be true in 10 years?  If Canon goes and changes their format, is Adobe going to continue to support RAW files from the original Digital Rebel from 2004?  And wouldn't it be better to have them in some publically documented format that a number of different companies support?

Well, DNG is an open raw file format that Adobe has come up with.  DNG, as in Digital NeGative. A handful of cameras use it as their default RAW format, such as the sexy Leica M8.

Some people think Adobe's DNG format is the answer.  There are free converters available that will turn your .CR2 or .NEF files into .DNG files.  With a few practical upshots that I've found. For one, Lightroom no longer has to keep metadata in additional .xmp 'sidecar' files.  So my hard drive has less crap all over the place.  One file per image instead of two.  And secondly, Adobe has included lossless compression of the raw data so it takes up less space on your hard drive without losing any data.

Anyway, I took the plunge this week and had Lightroom convert all 26,000 or so CR2 files in to the DNG format. In the process I gained back 100GB of drive space, I assume, due to the lossless compression.

Some people claim that upon conversion, you're losing additional undocumented metadata that the camera added to the images.  I'd really like to know what kind of data they're talking about because I haven't noticed anything missing. As long as it keeps the date, iso, exposure settings, and copyright, I'm not sure what else I could really need.  Either way it's too late for me, I've jumped in with both feet.

So, if you've got any thoughts, comment, questions, or rants on the subject, we're all ears.

Feel free to tell me that I'm crazy and a fool if you like.  I'm used to it.  ;-)

As a short addendum to yesterdays hard drive rant I wanted to talk a tiny bit about offsite backup.  RAID 1, and physical prints, and the original negatives are all well and good until your house or, in my case, apartment burns down.  I'd rather not lose everything I've ever shot, so I've been looking for off site backup solutions.

Of course, I'm not going to backup 500GB of data over the net, but I can save full resolution jpegs of my final work as a last-ditch lifeboat.  So when I'm done working on an image, I've started saving these jpegs into a folder called 'Ark', as in Noah's.  Then it's just a matter of where to put them.

I could just buy more space on my webserver and ftp them up there, but that seemed clunky.

For a while during the 365 portraits project I was using Mozy to back-up final jpegs just in case.  You install this little app that runs in the background and keeps an eye on certain folders you designate, uploading any changes to the mozy servers.  This system is great and at $5 a month for unlimited space, seemed pretty good.  But I decided to do a little more research...

And I found an app called Jungle Disk, which is a front-end for Amazon's S3 (simple storage service).  Now, S3 is really designed for developers and such, but Jungle Disk makes it easy and it works just like Mozy does. 

So why is it better?  Cost and Longevity.  First, you pay for each GB of storage and transfer, but the costs are so low.. 15 cents a GB/mo that unless you're putting TONS of stuff up there, it'll be cheaper than Mozy.  I've transfered a few GB up there already and so far my bill is 38 cents.

And I'm sure the Mozy people are secure and what-have-you, but I'd bet on Amazon being around in 10 years more than them..  but maybe that's my own bias.  According to what I've read, Amazon keeps redundant copies at multiple data centers, and jungle disk encrypts the data between you and the server, so it's secure.  Oh, and they're both cross platform, so the can be used on both Mac and Windows.

I've only been using it for a couple of days, but it looks pretty good so far.

When you see old time photographers studios, they're usually floor to ceiling in storage boxes.  Print storage boxes and negative storage boxes up the wazoo.  In many ways, the digital photography revolution has helped in this manner.. at least as far as the negatives go.  We can now store a hundred thousand 'digital negatives' in the same space that a paperback book used to take up.

However, with great power comes great responsibility.  With digital you tend to take and keep more images, so the 100,000 that may have represented a photographers career a generation ago might now be one year's catch for some people.  In fact, I did some calculations and figured out that I shot about 100,000 frames over the course of my 365 portraits project last year.

When I started last year I had four 500GB drives in my desktop computer, setup as two RAID 1 arrays so I didn't have to constantly worry about a drive failing. For those of you who are unaware of what I'm talking about, RAID stands for 'Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks'.  And while there are several different, what are called, RAID levels, the one I'm talking about here means that the computer reads and writes the same information to two physical hard drives all the time.  So if one of them goes kapootsky, you've still got all your stuff on the other. Redundancy is good.

So there I was with a Terabyte of redundant storage.  Just as an aside, what's really crazy is that 5 years ago if I had told you I had a terabyte of storage you probably would have laughed me out of the room, but I digress. However toward the middle of November, I noticed that I was running low on space and something had to be done, and being low on cash-on-hand it had to be done reasonably cheaply.  I decided that as an interim temporary solution, I would buy a couple of 1TB drives and replace two of the 500's, there by giving my self a total of 1.5TB of space to work with. And that worked until recently where I started getting to about 200GB free, which sounds like a lot, but is a brick wall I'm driving towards pretty quickly.

As my career and jobs and projects progress, I'm trying to figure out the best way to store my work and I've got lots of options and none of them are ideal.

Here are my requirements:

1. It's got to be able to store a lot of stuff.  I think 2-3GB would probably keep me alive for a while.
2. It's got to be fast.  Fast enough that I can work off them with 500+MB Photoshop docs. and not have to take a coffee break when I hit 'Save'
   
3. It's got to be expandable, as I don't want to go through this again in a year.
4. It''s got to be redundant. So RAID 1 or perhaps 5.
   
5. I'd really like to stay platform agnostic. My desktop machine is a Vista64 box but my laptop is a macbook pro.  So I'd like to try to not use any sort of software RAID if possible.

Ok, now that we've got that out of the way, let's look at some of the solutions that I have considered.

• External HD's - your average USB2 or firewire drives are not going to work.  They're not the fastest things in the world and most of them don't do RAID, and the ones that do max out at a couple of 1TB drives, which is where I am right now.  Plus I don't want a stack of ugly mismatched drives sitting on my desk.
• NAS boxes, or Network Attached Storage - Basically a server that you plug into your network that all your computers can talk to.  The best of these, like the Infrant ones, MIGHT be an option, but I'm very suspect about their real world throughput, even with gigabit LAN.  I've got two gigabit network cards in my machine so I COULD dedicate one to just this, which might help, but still, I'm suspect.  If anyone out there wants to try to talk me into or out of this solution please comment and share your experience.
• Upgrade the Internal Drives - I could also just upgrade the other two drives in my machine to 1TB, and move all of the extra crap like movies and music over to an external drive where they're out of the way. But I feel like this is going to max out at some point too.  And I've have nowhere to go until they start making drives bigger than 1TB.
• External Sata Enclosure - The most promising solution I've found so far.  Basically a box that sits outside your computer containing hard drives and a power supply, that talks to your computer on a eSata connection.  eSata is just the external version of how internal hard drives connect to your motherboard, so it's just as fast.  The problems are price, they tend to be expensive, and most of them use your operating system to do the raid stuff, which is not ideal if I ever wanted to stick with one platform or the other. 
  

There is a company called Sonnet that makes these external enclosures and eSata cards to go with them.  They seem high-end, selling to video people and such, and have gotten very good reviews, but I can't seem to take the plunge yet.

 If any of you out there have anything constructive to say on the subject, I'd love to hear from you.  There doesn't seem to be too much consolidated information about this issue, which I'd imagine a lot of people are dealing with. In my search, the only site I found that was really useful was Brian Smith down in Miami on his Brian Smith Photo Gear blog http://briansmithphotogear.blogspot.com/. He's the guy who turned me onto the Sonnet stuff.

So, this is a call for opinions and comments.  Let's see what we can come up with.  Thanks.

I'm a firm believer in confidence.  Not being cocky and annoying, but rather an understanding that you can handle the situation and the things that come up, because usually you can. Let's be honest, unless it's a skill that you need intense training for, the average person could probably figure most things out.  I remember a few years ago my father talked my friend Mark and me through replacing the dishwasher in my parents kitchen.  My father was sick at the time so he directed from a chair across the room, but the point of the story is that it wasn't nearly as complex as I would have thought.

Since the end of 365 Portraits about two and a half months ago, I've been shooting less than I had been.  I'm probably still shooting a lot compared to most people, but still less than I was.  This makes sense, since I've released myself from the insanity of finding a new subject each day. I've been shooting for clients and doing my own projects which you end up seeing here on OTP, but at the same time I can't help but feel like I was losing my edge.  You know, that 'thing' you get when you're really in the flow and in practice.  I was shooting so much last year that shooting felt more natural than not shooting, and so when I walked into new situations I had the confidence that I could get what I wanted out of that day's subject, no problem.

As anyone who spent any time with me last week would tell you, I was pretty antsy and nervous leading up to Friday.  You see, I had what to me was a pretty big shoot for a magazine cover last Friday, and lately I haven't been all that excited with the quality of my work. I felt like I was getting predictable and boring and repetitive and all the other adjectives that an artist never wants applied to them.  I was seriously worried that I had lost 'my touch' as it were and that I would fall flat on my face in front of a photo editor, makeup people, hair people, wardrobe people, the subject's publicist, my assistant, etc.

However, once I got there and started shooting (After the subject was 45 minutes late and then another hour waiting for the style people to do their thing) all of that melted away and I realized how much of a rush I get taking portraits, especially when I get in my "ooo, that's it!" giddy mode. I love the flow of the moment and the transitive nature of the whole situation.  I love the fact that I have the subjects complete attention and hopefully their trust.  I just love shooting portraits.  And by the end of the session I had both won over the subject (who I think was a little cranky when she walked in the door) and also won back my own confidence.

I guess this is all to say that I've got to figure out a way to overcome my own fears, or at least find a way to keep them in check.  Like in sports they say that if you think you're going to lose, you probably will. That if you think you're going to screw up, you're more likely to.  It's all about have the right mindset.  I've got to think that I'm going to make art every single time I pick up a camera. 

Tonight I edited down the 400+ shots to my 20 or so selects.  I then opened up my favorites and played around with some post-processing.  And you know what?  They're not bad.  In fact, they're pretty good. I'm very proud of a number of them.  Maybe at some point I'll have the right to show them do you, but for the moment you'll have to trust me. <grin>

So for now I'm pretty confident, and say "Bring it on!" to any challenge.  I guess we'll just have to see how long it lasts.