Hot Mess Shoot – Behind the Scenes

Ever try to wrangle 7 pretty young actresses in black dresses?  It’s not as easy as you would think, and I’m sure you weren’t thinking it was going to be easy. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about an upcoming shoot to take the promo shot for season 3 of a web series series run by my friend Amy Kersten which is due out in January. Well, here are the results of that shoot. My friend Claude was nice enough to do some BTS filming so you could get an idea of the scene. Be sure to play it at 720p to see some detail.

For those interested in the technical aspects, I shot with my 5D2 tethered to Lightroom on my new 13″ Air (which worked great by the way, far better than my old unibody Macbook) with a 50mm lens. In the end, I changed the lighting setup I was considering in pre-production and swapped out the ring light for a beauty dish up front.  A softbox up a bit on each side were used to get some separation from the background.

This might be a good time to mention something about white, black, and grey seamless paper backgrounds.  Under the right conditions any one of these could show up on camera as white, black, grey. It’s all a matter of distance. Distances between the subject and the background and the lights.  In my particular situation I would have liked to have more distance between the group of girls and the background, but the laws of physics and the long dimension of my space thwarted my efforts. So in the end what I got was less of a black background than I had intended, which is some ways was a blessing in disguise because it made it easier to cut them out of the background when I decided to do a composite.  More on that in a bit.

So I was all set up when they arrived. The best girl ever brought some wine and cheese to feed and relax them while they got ready.  All told, that part of the evening was a fine flurry of people. As a general rule I prefer one-on-one shoots, no let me rephrase that. Shoots with one person are a completely different animal than shoots with a number of people.  The latter is more an exercise in shepherding than interaction. Or at least it can feel that way, so I had brought along a couple of people to assist me in the endeavor.  Once we figured out the best way to group the girls so that we could see all their faces, Cisco spun them up in caution tape and we were ready to get started.

I shot about 150 pictures in total.  Not many at all compared to some shoots like this, but ultimately we were looking for one main shot, so as long as I had the raw material to work with, I was good to go.

When we were all through I sent Amy about 50 pictures to look through.  The final shot choice was pretty painless, she chose one shot of all 7 and wanted two specific faces replaced from a couple of consecutive shots. Easy stuff because the shots were almost identical anyway. With that bit of trickery done I started on the post production.  When we began I had vague ideas of just having them look like they were caught in a police searchlight on a black background. Thus shooting them on black paper as opposed to something on white or similar light color like we used for last year’s pin-up shots. So here is what I started with:

First step was to clean-up any rogue hairs and odd dress straps and misguided makeup. Then I went in and darkened the background a bit to make them pop and used some masked curve adjustment layers to add local contrast.

Not bad, in fact it’s just fine, but it didn’t get me excited. I wouldn’t put this version up as the main image in my portfolio. Too dark, too unfinished. I had to do better. So then I was thinking, ‘what if they were out late one night, had a few too many and were discovered like that in an alley or on the street?’ So I went out and took some images to use as a plate background.  There is an empty store a couple blocks away that looked perfect for this concept, so I came home with this:

Yes, it was shot in the daytime, but it was hazy that day so the sun wasn’t harsh coming straight down. In fact there are some advantages, because at night you’ve got the scene lit by a number of different street and store lights, all at different color temperatures with lots of spectrum peaks. Not what you want if you’re looking for a plate that you can mold into your vision. Darkening is easy, and if you do it right you don’t notice that it wasn’t shot at night anyhow. Hollywood does this all the time by the way, when they shoot night scenes in the daytime with the exposure way stopped down. Once you get the background in the ballpark, the next stop is to drop the girls in from the original picture and do a really rough mask just to see if the overall perspective and sizes are right. I took care in shooting the door a bit wider (35mm lens) than the girls themselves, so that the field of view would be bigger and everything would match up more easily. Because I filled the frame i both shots to give me as many pixels as possible, I had to grow the background a bit to make the ladies fit into the background properly. Alternatively, I could have made the girls smaller, but why throw out pixels from the most important part of the shot? The background being a little soft only makes them stand out anyway. In the end the full size image is 4500px square, which is way bigger than it’ll ever be used.

The next step is the tedious part: masking. Ugh.  I’ve tried every plugin and technique I can find to do this kind of work. Some of them look like magic in the demos, but at 100% I always find myself going in and working over the final line with a paintbrush anyway, so now I just mask the whole thing manually. In a situation like this where it’s not obvious where a black dress ends and the black paper begins, it’s massively time consuming and headache inducing. But that’s how you make sure it’s done right I guess. There is an advantage to of the kind of work I do, my final product is usually an image or a few images, not 300 like an event photographer would have to churn out. So I take my time until it looks perfect (or at least perfect to me).

With them all masked out like this, you can see that while they’re in the right position and the right size, they feel like they’re floating in the scene, but you still need more layers. That’s because there is nothing connecting them to the background, depth is needed, and shadows are the answer.  The first and in my opinion the most important shadows are the smaller sharper ones right where their shoes meet the sidewalk. Adding these alone adds a layer of realism.

Next of course, are the shadows the girls are casting on the background. The main key light up front is going to darken the area right behind the girls.  I usually start with a copy of the layer with the girls, move it behind and then fill them with black.  Blur and distort it to taste. Then maybe go in with a very soft and light brush to add a little extra shadow where needed.

I got to this point and started to think that maybe I was finished, or very close to it. Then I realized it needed more electricity. For example, where were the side lights coming from? I might as well make them volumetrically visible in the upper corners, and perhaps a lens flare or two to blend it all together. So after a couple hours of shooting and many hours of editing, here’s the final result.

Why Street Photography Isn’t for Me

Some photographers just love going out on the street with their camera. Living in the world, shooting the world, going on photowalks with other photographers where they all walk around together and shoot the world. In the process of shooting every day so far this year there have been days where I didn’t have a shoot, or an idea, or I had a shoot for a client but couldn’t use the pictures for my blog etc. Days where I had to go out for a walk with the camera slung by my side. I’ve come to realize that I don’t really like doing it very much.

Granted, there are a smattering of random street pictures from the first half of the year which I’m really happy with, but most of them were pure happenstance. Literally something I tripped over, or a split second where I saw something and was able to get my camera up in time. I understand that this is the point and that some people feed off of that idea that they may come home empty-handed or perhaps having bagged the proverbial big whale. But that excitement stresses me out. It removes all sense of control from me. I understand that I have to notice whatever I’m going shoot and be good enough technically to get the shot, but still it feels more like gamble than a skill. I want something more deliberate. I’m most definitely not a hunter, especially with portraits.

There have been plenty of times in my life where I’ve walked up to someone cold and asked if I can take their portrait. Not a lot, but I’ve shot so many people that even though the ratio is low the number is high. And I’m a friendly guy so they tend to say yes, but if you’re in this situation the person is usually going to give you a minute or two. Which is fine for a couple of snaps, but no time to really dig deeper and get something special. I want it to be a partnership not a competition. Which is another thing, I don’t like taking people’s pictures without their permission. I try to be non-confrontational and I’m not a voyeur. I’ve done it a handful of times but I always felt like I was doing something wrong while doing it. Even with the tilted shot of an old man from a couple of days ago that a lot of people seemed to like as an example, that was taken from the hip because I didn’t want the guy to yell at me for taking it.

I had a chat with my friend Jeffrey over at Faded & Blurred the other day and I was talking about this subject and he mentioned a quote, I think he said it was Avedon. Something like, “I don’t want to wait for things to happen, I want to make them happen” Which gets somewhere closer to how I feel.

Also, from a technical perspective, I don’t think that dSLRs are good street cameras. Too big overall, too noticeable. I’ll put my hat in with the people that say this is where a rangefinder really shines. Smaller, less obvious, quieter shutter. Overall far more discrete. The iPhone4 actually does a decent job for photos of still objects in good light, I’ve found myself using that more than I thought I would, and with good results.

So, is there photographic gold in them there streets? Yes there surely is and I’m sure there will be times when I go for a walk with my camera with me. But most of the time I’m going to leave it to other photographers to find. You can’t do everything well, sometimes you’ve got to pick your battles. I’m sure there are plenty of landscape photographers out there who would think of nothing to sit and wait for 2 hours for the light to change in their favor, but who would go into a cold sweat with the very thought of spending 2 hours taking portraits one-on-one with another human being. And I’m glad they’re out there, because when it comes to landscapes if the light’s not right when I get out of the car I just shrug and drive to the park lodge to buy the postcard.

Mindset

The human mind is a funny thing, especially so in those of us who, shall we say, don’t always see the glass as half full. There is a rhythm to the swings as well. Sometimes I think that I can take over the world while other times I quite honestly can’t get out of bed for fear of failing even at being awake. There’s an irony in the fact that when I was a kid I liked going on the swings during recess, but as an adult my mental swings are my nemesis. The funny thing is that this cycle of how I see myself is largely independent from the perception of me by the world at large. As far as most of you are concerned you generally either like my work or don’t.  I highly doubt that my fan base swings from tens of thousands of people down to zero in keeping with my mental state.

And of course I’m not the first person to have this problem. History is littered with stories of people like me, especially artists it seems. Or maybe it’s just the depressed artists that get the column inches.  To the end of coping with what I’ve come to see as an immutable part of my life I’ve read and I’ve talked and I’ve tried to figure it all out, or at least make some rational observations which I could remind myself of when I’m down to try to wrench myself out of it, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve encumbered myself with personal projects and daily tasks in order to keep my mind busy thinking about anything but itself. Lately I’ve been going to the gym almost daily as well. I’m certainly an idle hands kind of person. Those kinds of things help a little bit. They at least soften the valleys, but sometimes I feel like they may often soften the peaks as well. That’s the problem, the up times are highly addictive. When you’re at baseline or flying in manic-ville the depression almost seems like a worthwhile trade. Days of despair for moments of enlightenment. However I often wonder if the inspiration is all that inspired at all.  They feel that way of course, but so does the brilliance of people on a good acid trip.  Only when they come down do they realize the true mediocrity of their ideas.

I’ve also tried to predict the swings but it’s proved closer to trying to prognosticate the stock market.  But just like the stock market, rationality often has little to do with it. People, in this case me, get spooked. Or they get scared, or they get inspired, or they get frustrated by those things out of their control and a shift starts.  Like a change in the wind or like an avalanche or a stampede of bulls, there’s a certain inevitability to it all. As if I don’t have a choice; as if I’m just along for the ride.

Don’t know where I’m going with this or the point that I’m trying to make. Just thought it could be useful to put fingers to keyboard in yet another attempt to figure it out. As if it’s just that I haven’t figured out the puzzle yet.  Maybe the trick is to surrender to it instead of fighting it. You know, something like ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love the depression’. Somehow I don’t think it’s in me though. The fight is one of the only constants in my life and I can’t just let it win.

Macbook Air 13″ (2011) First Thoughts

My 2008 unibody aluminum Macbook, yes that one that they only made for about 5 months, was getting a little long in the tooth. So I gave my partner Heather my unibody as a replacement for her black Macbook and started looking at the upgrade options.

First off, I’d like to point out that at no point is my laptop my main machine. I’ve got a very powerful Hackintosh with 24GB of ram and 9TB of drives with which I do serious work. My laptop is usually just sitting next to me with my email up, or for skyping with the family, or reading the news on the bed. Occasionally however, I travel with it and use it to backup my cards and do some basic Lightroom adjustments and minor Photoshop before posting an image or two online.

An iPad was ruled out immediately. I had bought and sold one a few months ago when the iPad 2 was released. I was largely unimpressed. I like having a keyboard and create more than I consume, so I needed to move further up the chain. I knew I wanted something light, and I don’t need the juice in a Macbook Pro. Again, this isn’t my main machine. This left me to consider the new Airs.

With the i5 processors and 128GB SSD for a reasonable price, I was mostly sold from the start. The main question was deciding between 11″ and 13″. I love the idea of the 11″. Little tiny thing not much bigger than an iPad that you can run actually software on. However, in the end I went with 13″ for a couple of reasons. First, when working with pictures, the extra pixels make a difference. Especially the 144 extra vertical pixels, especially in Lightroom where the filmstrip takes up vertical space along the bottom. Secondly, the 11″ stock configuration has a slightly slower CPU, 1.6GHz vs 1.7GHz, which may not sound like much, but modern Intel chips do this neat trick where they overclock themselves when not using all the cores. The 1.6 chip overclocks to 2.3GHz where the 1.7 overclocks to 2.7GHz, and that extra 400MHz can make a difference when you’re rendering a couple hundred RAW previews which generally happens on a single thread.

So I stopped by the Apple store down on 14th street, and picked myself up the bottom of the rung 13″ with 4GB of Ram and 128GB SSD with my ASMP Apple discount. Came to about $1325 after tax.  Just for a minute consider the amount of computing power in a chasis less than 3 pounds which costs so little.  That’s about half what a decently set up original IBM PC would have cost, and that’s not even taking inflation into account.  Moore’s law is your friend.

I brought it home and then agonized with myself for a couple hours over whether I should even open the box. $1300 is not a lot for what you get, but it’s certainly not pocket change. And how often do I NEED a laptop anyway? Shouldn’t I just save the money and take it back? I constantly get buyer’s remorse after large purchases. It’s like my father is constantly behind my shoulder making me feel guilty.  Well, I won’t build the suspense any longer, I opened the damn box up and here are a few of my thoughts based upon less than a day of use.

First off it’s fast. Like really fast.  But this is to be expected, it’s got a fast SSD in it. My first in a laptop.  So not only is everything nearly instantaneous, even the boot time isn’t more than a few seconds really, but it’s also almost completely silent.  The only thing I’ve found to get the fans going so far is skype video, but that’s to be expected.  I would say that if you weren’t doing serious photo or video work and instead using the computer for what other people use their computers for,( i.e. web, email, facebook, calendar, music) that this would make a fine primary machine as long as you can live within 128GB of drive space. You would probably want to get an extra external drive.  That said, it would probably be the fastest feeling computer most people have ever used. It’s that zippy.

Let’s talk about the screen. It’s got a nice resolution for the size (1440×900) and it’s plenty bright, but it’s still a TN panel, so there is still some color shift in both the vertical and horizontal axis. And I suspect the color depth is 6 bits per channel at best. There’s some serious dithering going on in the radial gradients on the login page. It’s better than my last Macbook though, and considering the size of the machine it’s in I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It wouldn’t work as your primary monitor, however, and sadly, Apple’s stock profiles suck. Whatever white point they use is way off from the 6500k that I work in.  Also as it turns out, the software that is used with my i1 Display 2 colorimeter is PowerPC based. So without Rosetta in this new OS, I’m up the creek on pulling this screen into shape.   So I’ll have to find a way around that profiling issue before giving this the seal of approval from a color point of view.

Battery life is impressive so far, I’ve not used it past 70% or so, but it looks like it’s between 5-6 hours of my normal use.  When I was on Skype earlier it quickly dropped the estimated time down from 6 hours to 2 hours. So be warned that it’s not limitless.  I have still not tried pulling some RAW images in to see how they’re handled.  On my old machine, loading in 150 images from my 5D2 and letting it build previews would quickly leave me with half my battery in only 15 minutes.  Hopefully this will be a bit better.

It’s obviously a light laptop, though somehow it doesn’t feel as light as it is to me sometimes. Pick up my old one in one hand, and the new one in the other and there’s difference, but it’s not the night and day difference that the thickness of the machines would imply. Maybe that’s just more of my lust for the 11″ which is another half pound lighter still. Also I’ve found when sitting on the couch typing, like I am right now, it’s almost too light in the base. Not quite enough to counterweight the screen to keep it stable under your hands.  I’m certainly not asking for it to be heavier, but it’s an interesting unintended consequence.

Overall,  so far, so good.  It’s fast, light, relatively small and does everything it’s supposed to do well. I’ll give it 100 RAW files to chew through tomorrow and get back to you on how it acts as a travel photo machine. My guess is that within the limitations of the screen and battery, it’ll do just fine. By far the nicest laptop I’ve owned when you average everything out. But then as technology improves, that’s exactly how it should be. Better, faster, cheaper.  Keep it up, guys.

UPDATE:
Ok, so I’ve imported 206 21MP RAW files into Lightroom 3 and rendered standard previews. The battery went from 48% to 42% in the 12 minutes or so it took, and the laptop fans didn’t sound like they were trying to take off for Madrid. All a huge improvement on my old unibody Macbook. Part of this is due to the more efficient/lower voltage CPU I’m sure, but I’ll give some credit to the SSD as well. No spinning means faster disk access and less juice used.

Now if I can just figure out a way to profile this screen without buying a new puck and we’ll be in business.

Self Promotion Voodoo

Let’s face it. We’d all love to have the problem of having too many ideal, high-paying clients.  However most of us don’t. Most of us have to toil away week after week trying to get people to notice us. I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago and he said he was amazed that people weren’t knocking down my door. I assured him that it just doesn’t happen.  I love when I see old timer photographrs speak and they always have a story that’s a variation on “I got off the bus from Kansas with the clothes on my back and a showbox full of pictures. So I walked right into LIFE magazines offices and the head of the photo dept gave me an assignment on the spot.  Of course I had to borrow his camera to do it!”  However in today’s climate, being good isn’t enough.  You have to be good AND get people to notice you. Just try to walk into Conde Nast with a shoebox full of your pictures and see how far you get.

I’m admittedly terrible at this, well at least in some ways.  I got the web 2.0 side of things down. I’ve got a blog and twitter and facebook and all that.  And I try to constantly give my followers content which I hope they find interesting and share with their friends who in turn share it with theirs.  I’m also fine with the personal interaction.  I adore meeting new people and can talk to just about anybody.

With this in mind it may surprise you, but I don’t like self-promotion. I love lecturing about my work in front of a couple hundred people, telling the stories behind the pictures and how I ended up with a particular shot. But cold calling one person is enough to give me the sweats. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think a big part if it is a fear of being one of those people who get people to notice them and yet they’re not good enough to back it up with their work.  Even though I’m not that guy, my fear of being that guy or even being perceived as that guy is paralysing to me. Some people are shameless about this stuff and will hand a postcard to every person they meet. I’m not that guy, I find it obnoxious and I’m constantly trying to find the middle ground on getting noticed and remaining human. The funny thing is that though I find it arrogant for someone to constantly sell themselves and expect people to care, however my friend Beth pointed out that it’s just as arrogant to expect people to know who you are without telling them.

So you’ve got to get your name out there. Where do you start?

Some people send emails out to try to get people over to their site.  This is good because it’s cheap and relatively painless, except for the fact that you can easily slip into the spammer category. You buy addresses of people in the advertising, magazine, and graphic deisgn industries by subscribing to a service that keeps track of them, and except for the fact that it costs around $1000 per year, you’d think that this was ideal.  However in my experience, most if not a great majority of the people on the list have asked NOT to receive emails.  I can understand this from the point of view that they’re busy people who are trying to get work done without their inbox filled with links to 50 photographers sites. And even the ones who do accept emails, your ‘click through rate’ is usually in the area of 1%. So if not email, then how?

The old school version of email was postcards and mailers. My good friend Randy talked me into sending out postcards lately. Not too many, two targeted sets of 60 cards alternating every couple of weeks. So one person will get a card per month from me. It’s about building a brand awareness for me.  That they see new work and my logo. Hopefully they’ll think, “This guy is legit, we should call him”.  And cards are different from looking at a website because they’re a physical object which can be held and pinned to the wall. Humans are tactile by nature. The problem with cards is that they’re not cheap.  About $1 a pop to print at Moo (higher quality and lower count runs) as well as the 29 cent stamps and the labels to be printed. So that’s a couple hundred bucks a month, so call it $2400 a year. Plus the $1000 to buy the addresses in the first place. Not pocket change. However, here too there is a campaign of designers who hate cards. There are sites showing piles of them in the corners of creative’s offices, and even the other day I got an email about a site called First-Stop which will post your work, as long as you promise to stop sending out cards because of the environmental waste involved. You can’t win.  Some people like cards, some people like emails, some people like both, some people like neither.  No approach is right.

Over the past few decades, getting your stuff in the numerous semi-annual books was the way to go. You give them thousands of dollars for a page or two in a 2 inch thick glossy magazine the size of the old Sears catalog. The idea was that buyers would flip through that to browse photographers for a particular job. If you’re not in the book, you don’t exist. But with a number of books going in and out of fashion with people, who knows where your money is best spent. Plus it always felt like something more for fashion photographers anyway. Too glitzy, too much glamour. Not to mention too expensive.

And of course I know you all have your own portfolio website, mine is at http://www.billwadman.com for example. However how many other sites is your work on? Behance, The Creative Finder, FoundFolios, LeBook,  Taproll, Workbook, One Eyeland, even Flickr.  And those are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.  Most are free with paid premium upgrades. You know, paid features like “showing up in search results”. Thanks, that’s great.  But each of these is hundreds if not thousands of dollars to join, with no analytics or idea of how many influential people they have looking in the first place.  Great, I just spend $300 to get my site looked at by two creatives in India and one in Poland. That’s just super, and a fantastic use of my limited promotional funds. And how are you supposed to keep your portfolio up to date on 15 different sites anyway?  I thought that was the whole point of having your own site in the first place.

So if everyone you ask has a different opinion on what recipe of these options is your best bet, then personally I think you’ve got to go with your gut.  Sad, but true.  Personally I can’t afford to spend $10,000 a year on promotion, so pages in those books and premiere memberships to those sites are outside my budget.  But then I think, well maybe if I splurged on getting highlighted on FoundFolios, I’d get enough work that the return on investment would be positive.  However, it’s all a gamble right?  I might just end up with a couple of grand on my Amex card.

For Sale: Canon 5D

It’s with great trepidation and sadness that I offer my original Canon 5D for sale. This camera is my favorite that I’ve ever owned and it pains me to part with it. But since it sees so little use sitting in my equipment closet, I feel like it would find a better home with someone who was using for the purpose for which it was intended, taking pictures.

For those of you who might be fans of my work, this is the camera that took almost all of the 365 Portraits project. As well as the majority of my editorial work through most of 2008. If you’ve been a cropped sensor shooter up til now, moving to a full-frame sensor will be a treat. More control over depth-of-field, better low-light performance, actual wide-angle lenses, etc.

It’s certainly in used condition, but in that good way that feels like it was part of something great. Otherwise it’s in fine working order. It comes with the original box, the Canon battery charger, an aftermarket travel charger, and three batteries. The markings are covered with gaffer’s tape, but those come off cleanly, showing off all the free advertising Canon could fit.

I’m looking to get $1000 USD for it, plus shipping if it’s international.
Feel free to email me any inquires or questions to bill at billwadman dot com or @billwadman on twitter.

The Candid Frame – I’m this week’s guest!

Last week I was lucky enough to be the guest on Ibarionex Perello’s fantastic photo podcast called The Candid Frame.

We talk about the need for personal projects, the story behind my 365Portraits.com project, as well as how I approach taking portraits and working with the subject to get them to be a partner in the process. It was great fun to record and Ibarionex is a real gentleman. So go listen to my episode and while you’re there, subscribe to the whole series. It’s that good.

Spread the word and enjoy.

The Candid Frame

Link to iTunes page

 

Priorities & Trade-offs

I’ve been thinking about our most recent Circuitous Conversations podcast where Dan and I give advice on what dSLR to buy. A question that the both of us get more often than we can count. I think that the conclusion that we came to was that you really can’t go wrong with any of them anymore, even the least expensive model on each of the Nikon/Canon line.

That said, I realized that we overlooked an important facet of that discussion, which is priorities.  What’s most important to you? While all of these cameras can capture a good picture, some do certain things better than others. For example, my priority is image quality when there’s light around. To that end I use a Canon 5D Mark II. It’s got a full frame sensor, 21 megapixels, and has very low noise within any reasonable range, and is reasonably small & light. While I don’t agree with Dan that Nikon’s UI is substantially better than Canon’s (I think they both have their strengths and it comes down to what you’re used to), even if I did like Nikon’s UI better, I would probably still use a 5DII because image quality is my priority and 12MP full frame cameras can’t compete (btw, I know about the 24MP monster but it’s big, heavy and really expensive which is why I switched from the 1Ds3 to the 5D2 in the first place). I’m willing to give up something in order to get what I want.

Similarly if I were into taking pictures of birds, I’d probably go with a cropped sensor in my camera. That way you get about 50% more distance on your lenses and a bit more depth of field to boot.  Or another, I never put my camera on continuous shutter. In fact, I rarely if ever take more than a picture or two a second. But if I were shooting sports, I’d need one of those hummingbird fast 10 FPS speed demons. The need for speed would trump the fact that it gave less detailed pictures.

Any camera body on the market now will do almost all these things well. They’ll have plenty of pixels, enough FPS for most, be decent in low light, etc.  But if you’ve got a specific need, and it’s that important to you, that priority could easily dictate what camera you should buy.  Just something to keep in mind.

Glacier Point: Picture behind the picture

This morning, we found this picture on Heather’s old iPhone.  Taken as I was perched precariously on the edge of a 3000 foot cliff  (not really, there was a big ledge in front of me) and just moments after I took the picture below (the clouds had slammed into the face of half dome and moved downward by then).

And this is the picture I was taking:  (click to enlarge)

A Canon 5D Mark II with a 50mm/1.4 prime lens.  No tripod, no medium format, no film holders, no fancy anything. About 2.5 pounds of gear. When we got home I had it printed at 30×48″ and it looks amazing even from a few inches away.  Modern technology is awesome.

By the way, if any of you want to buy a print. Send me an email (bill at billwadman.com), I know the photographer so I can get you a deal. Any size, but it’s definitely made to be seen big.

Manual Focus Mess

Up until recently, if you were a photographer your first camera was probably manual focus. If fact is was probably manual everything.  Something like a Pentax K1000 that I started with. People still love cameras like this.  Friends of mine shoot with old manual Nikon F’s and I myself use a Leica M, Hasselblad V, and 4×5 from time to time.  It’s fun to slow down and take your time.

Before the mid 70’s auto-focus didn’t exist. You didn’t have a choice.  For many photographers the answer was just to have a lot of light and stop down the lens a bit and guestimate the focus or use a hyperfocal distance to get enough of the scene to be sharp. That’s what Cartier-Bresson did.  He’s stop down to f/8 or f/11, set focus to hyperfocal and just snap away.

My problem with manual focus now has a number of prongs. First is the more of a cultural one which is that times have changed and shoots move quickly, and when shooting people I often don’t have the luxury to spend a second or two focusing manually.  It’s time consuming and the camera usually does it better than I ever could. People expect you to shoot fast nowadays.

The second reason I don’t use manual focus much on digital is that I can’t do it well enough.  The more information your sensor captures, the more precise you focus has to be. It shows all of your flaws. Focus you may have gotten away with on 35mm film is going to be very soft in a 25MP digital file at 100% on a computer screen.  That problem is even worse when you’re talking about medium format as I found when Dan and I did our format comparison a few months ago with a couple of 60MP P65+ backs. The only way to really tell what was in focus was to shoot tethered and zoom in. And there’s no way I could reliably do that manually, despite the fact that AF on those MF bodies kinda suck.

And the viewfinders in these cameras still don’t feel as big and nice as the ones in my old film cameras. I just can’t tell critical focus in there.  My father’s old Canon AE1 had a split prism in the focusing screen.  Why did they stop including those?  They were great. You could tell if something was in focus by lining up two images like in a rangefinder. It was great.  I know there are companies which sell split prisms for the 5D, I just can justify spending the hundreds of dollars they cost.  When I got this camera I replaced the screen with Canon’s matte option which makes focus more obvious at the expense of a bit of light. Since I shoot with fast primes most of the time I’m willing to make that trade-off. That said, I still don’t trust my eyes. I don’t know if it’s that I’m getting old or what, but I can’t look through the viewfinder and focus on a persons eye from 8 feet away and trust that it’ll be sharp at f/1.8.

The reason I started thinking about this in the first place is that Zeiss recently released a 35/1.4 for the Canon EF mount.  I love the look of Zeiss lenses and their T* coating.  Better than Canon L glass? Eh, different.  Is that difference in my head?  Maybe. Do they feel glassy smooth to focus? Oh my god yes.  I tried out their 50mm a couple years ago and the problem I had is the one I’m discussing here. I just couldn’t reliably focus accurately enough to make it worth it.  The best Bokeh in the world ain’t worth a damn if the part of the image you want in focus isn’t in focus.

Am I the only one who has this problem?