The Quiet Picture

A couple of weeks ago Canon announced a whole pile of new products, including a Powershot G11 and S90. There was no SLR in the announcements but I guess they wanted to release it separately so people would pay more attention – so enter EOS 7D! It’s a follow-up to 50D (and here I was thinking it would be called 60D, duh) which means that it’s the camera that I would potentially upgrade to (my plan is to hop over every second release). So I pored over the specifications but the first thing I saw put me off immediately – 18 MP. 18?! For a sensor that is only marginally larger than on my 40D. Forget it. That’s almost as crazy as 15 MP on the G10, and Canon seems to have realised that and jumped off the megapixel race and reduced the pixel count to 10 MP in the G11. So one would hope that they would’ve been equally smart with the 7D, but apparently they plan to cater to an un-educated audience who think that more pixels is better.

So I’m disappointed to say the least. But as I continued reading the specs, I was kind of relieved to find nothing of any interest to me. HD Video is there, of course, but for the life of me I can’t think of any reason why I would want it. Just something extra I’ll be paying for, no thanks. It’s probably too much to hope for a non-video alternative in the future.

However, it’s not all that bleak. The new camera has weather sealing! Yes, after years of waiting, it’s finally there. But during all those years of waiting I’ve learned to photograph in inclement weather without weather sealing and I’ve never had a problem, so ironically, I don’t really need the sealing now.

And the best news of all – since the 7D is definitely not for me, I can save my money for something useful. Like a MacBook Pro!

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DP Review has a hands-on preview of 7D.

We’re finally there – we can take the photographer out of the equation. If the pictures are bad, you can genuinely blame the camera!

Time to concentrate on the main thing – flowers. Considering the slow progress of all flowers in Loos, I figured there was a risk that I wouldn’t find anything interesting (read: orchids) in the mountains. And I was right, the best I could find all day was some lapland marsh orchids which were in the first stages of opening. I also visited Torkilstöten, which is a reknowned floral hotspot, but summer is always late there. Today, the coltsfoot were blooming at their best… and the mountain avens were barely even budding. Plenty of snow, though.

The mosquitos are turning out to be a real nuisance. This is why I’d prefer cooler weather – it’s easy to wear protective clothing, but in this heat, it’s only a choice between bad or worse. Grin and bear. The option is to stay at home and do nothing.

The afternoon hike took me to a lake in Anådalen, on the map it seemed like the lake would be a nice foreground to some mountains. Alas, it wasn’t at all like I had imagined, but now I know. One to check off the list. I did find something else nice though, ironically, just a few hundred meters from the road…

During my late evening session, I suddenly came across a pair of cranes, walking around in a marsh. It would be just perfect as a foreground for the mountain, so I took out the camera… and found that it was stuck on aperture 16. No matter what I did, take out the battery, memory card and lens, it refused to budge. The wheel itself was ok, I was able to use it to change other settings. But not aperture. Dang! The cranes are getting further and further away while I’m trying to figure it out… then it hits me. In the previous session I had assigned the focus point selection to the wheel, because I couldn’t make the joystick select the middle point. And by doing this, I seemed to have disabled the wheel for aperture, a very useful function – not! – who on earth needs that? At this point, I finally realised what had happened. It must’ve started as an accident – the focus point selection custom function was reset so that I couldn’t use the joystick to select the point like I’m used to. But I couldn’t remember which option it was in the menu, so I had to do some testing, but the testing was spoiled by a brain fart. I had forgotten that in order to select the centre point, you just press the joystick. And because I had been in desperate need of the centre point, I had gone for the next best thing which was the wheel, without realising the consequences. By the time I had all of this sorted out, with correct exposure settings and focus point, the cranes had moved away almost too far but it was still worth trying. Click… and huh? I still had mirror lock-up on!!

What did I learn from this? That accidents and brain farts will happen!

First the G10 and now the 40D… my EOS 3 is not giving me any trouble, I’m loving film at the moment…

I’ve no special plans for this year’s vacation – just mountains. I started with a de-tour to Klövsjö, I wanted to check out the Fettjeåfallet waterfall. It was a sunny day so not really ideal for waterfalls, but at least I’d get to see the place. It’s a relatively short hike – about 2 km – but very rocky. But there’s also plenty to photograph along the way, and it’s this “along the way” that makes Fettjeåfallet one of the better waterfalls I’ve seen.

I had made the radical decision of taking the film camera (and the G10) on this excursion. The contrasty light in the forest is a nightmare for any camera so every time I wanted a picture I waited for a cloud to drift in. With the G10, I was able to use bracketing for HDR. And I must say I struggled a great deal with that. Every single time I’m on the field and need the bracketing function, I forget how to use it! And what kills me is that it’s not difficult, but I just can’t remember the combination of buttons to press. Because there’s that bracketing function, I can set it, I can even choose the interval… but the darn camera totally ignores my settings. So I’m missing some crucial last step in the process. Which leaves me doing manual bracketing, which takes too long, when the clouds are moving fast and thus changing the conditions of shadows and light in the composition. When I get home, I’ll have to check the manual and write down some notes and put them in the bag. I refuse to let a compact camera beat me.

But the film camera then. Not enough functions to get confused! The only custom function I need is the mirror lockup, but just in case, I carry the manual in the bag. You know, the good old days when you actually got a hardcopy of the manual. When I was walking back to the car, I was wondering why I’m not a least bit bothered about whether or not the slides will be any good. All too easy to botch the exposure in these conditions, and I didn’t even bracket. And I realised – the final picture is not that important! I’ve always said that the journey is more important than the goal, and it truly is. Good pictures are just a bonus. Sweet!

Compact cameras have quite awesome closest focusing distances. I mean, how many SLRs with macro lenses can brag with CFD of 1cm? So compact cameras must be really good at macro, right?

Pur-lease. Honestly, what’s the point of focusing at 1cm when you have to do it at wide angle? But I’m sure everyone who’s never shot macro with an SLR and a real macro lens are absolutely convinced that their compacts are far superior.

To be fair, the extreme focusing distance might be good for something. But to use a compact camera to create good macro pictures probably requires more from the photographer than using an SLR with a macro lens and I have to confess that I was lost with the G10 today. Try focusing to 1cm with a live toad – I didn’t.

I’ve just one thing to say – shallow DOF rules! I want my 40D back.

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The 40D is actually already on the way back to me. It’s just that UPS are not able to deliver it to me at home and I haven’t found out how to tell them that I’m at work during the day so they can divert the package to Ljusdal. Frustrating.

I was only supposed to write three posts about film, but that was before I actually got the camera. It feels like I’m more excited about my 2nd hand film camera than I was with my brand new 40D!  So I picked it up last night and the first impression when I was unpacking it was “wow it’s huge”. When I compared it to the 40D, it’s only marginally bigger but somehow it still seems larger than its dimensions indicate. Weird. The second reaction after unpacking the camera was “wow no display”. Just a tiny window to see the film roll, LOL.

Then after I had attached a lens and turned on the camera and pressed the shutter – oh wow. The Sound. When the 40D came out, a lot of people were complaining about the shutter sound. It was different than on the 20D, yes, but I got over it in about a day. But the EOS 3 is like beautiful music… I need to get it as an MP3. I’m telling ya, you want to take pictures with this camera just so you can hear the shutter!

What the Duck 648

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The lens I mounted on the camera was the Sigma 15mm fish-eye. I’ll add a fourth “wow” here – for the first time, I saw how wide 15mm really is. I could get the whole room in the frame… it’s a brand new photographic experience for me. I think I should try to learn to use wideangles this summer!

Great news from Olympus – now we can just hope that the other camera manufacturers are equally smart! 12 MP really is enough, what we need is to get more out of those pixels than more of them. Less noise and more dynamic range and I’ll be shopping for a new camera again!

Maybe so far I’ve made it sound like going back to film is all good, so I’ll talk about the caveats now. There are some things where digital beats film (and I don’t mean cost and instant feedback etc that I’ve already talked about), and some of these I will miss.

The possibility of changing ISO on the fly is one of the benefits of digital. I will be using Velvia 50 and 100, so whatever I do I have to do it with a slow speed film. I’ll be mostly using the film camera for landscape this summer, so it’s not a critical issue, but should I want to take the occasional macro I’ll run into trouble for sure, because most of my flower work seems to be done in low light. So if I want to do macro with film, I’ll have to find some subjects in brightly lit places. Or shoot petrified flowers.

I was a big fan of Velvia back when. Then around the time I switched to digital, Fuji changed the emulsions and even stopped manufacturing Velvia 50 for a while, but it seems to be back now. The strange thing is that I saw a chart about the grain size and according to Fuji, the ISO 100 emulsions have finer grain than the old 50! I’m gonna have to see it myself, so I will start with a couple of rolls of both.

Another digital benefit I will miss is white balance adjustment. Velvia is daylight balanced so it’ll work fine in sunlight, but when the clouds start coming in, my pictures will get the blues. The solution is obviously to use colour correction filters, but I have to confess that I was never really good with them. I owned an 81B which I never used and now I don’t even have that one. The biggest concession I made to colour correction was to get the Moose polariser which combines an 81A with the pol, so it will work with waterfall photography (which I prefer to do in overcast weather).

With that in mind, I am not completely liberated from post processing when I get the film scans back – one way or another I’ll have to fix the colours because I will not waste any more money on filters.

And the third benefit of digital that I will miss is graduated ND filters. Yes I know there are no grads in digital cameras, but I mean the ease of creating HDRs from multiple exposures. I can do that with film as well, but it quickly becomes a cost issue. Graduated filters is another thing I’ve always overlooked, so there are some type of pictures I never took with film because the latitude wasn’t there. But now I think I will try bracketing in moderation, if the subject is worth it. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an ND grad anyway – I could use it as a “slow-down tool” with digital as well.

And then finally – there is the issue of waiting. And waiting. And waiting, for the slides to come back from the lab!

Late winter is probably not an ideal time to get new gear, Velvia is wasted on snow and April in particular has never been a productive month for me. But the camera won’t suffer if it has to sit on my shelf for a few weeks and the Velvia rolls won’t grow old in the freezer. When the greens start sprouting up, I’ll be ready!

Recently I’ve been thinking about digital noise and wondering if it’s time for me to switch to full frame. But every digital camera has noise, the only difference is how the photographer sees it. My noise threshold is low, probably because the digital noise seems too patterned to me. Film grain on the other hand is random. If you claim that you prefer the noise to film grain, then I bet you’ve never seen a Velvia slide up close! Or then you just really like noise (or you’re really young and think that analogue cameras belong to a museum together with vinyl records). I remember when I switched to digital and was looking at the nearly noise-free ISO 100 images, the smoothness blew me away. Now I look at my old slides and see the grain in Velvia 50 and think that it’s beautiful! Grain is the nature of film, it’s part of its charm (your mileage may vary), but noise is just… well, noise.

Just to have an idea of the noise on a full frame camera, I tested a Canon 5D Mark II and to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. I was seeing a lot more noise than I had expected after reading all the positive reviews, so the 25K investment is not justified in any way, even if it looked like the noise was more random (thus more tolerable) than it is on my 40D. When it comes to full frame, I get to play with it on my cheap 2nd hand film camera anyway. Will be nice to see how my lenses perform, the 15mm fish-eye in particular should be interesting.

So with regard to getting back to film photography, there isn’t really any big reason to do it, it’s more of a feeling than a rational move. But here’s one thought: When I switched from film to digital, it quickly improved my photography thanks to the quick feedback. Now that I’ll start using film again, I’m actually half expecting it will make me a better photographer because it will slow me down!

I’m going to do something radical – go back to film!

Ok ok, not really going back but I will get a film camera again. I think I once mentioned half kidding that I want a medium format camera (2nd hand kits come cheap these days), but now I decided to settle with 35mm. The reason it’s happening now is that my 40D has to go to service and although I’ve played with the thought of relying on my G10 during that time, in the end I just couldn’t cope with the idea of living without an SLR. Besides, an analogue SLR is a whole lot more fun than a digital compact!

The running costs of shooting film will be high, because now I have to pay for each exposure. But then again this is a hobby – the most important part is that I enjoy it. The feeling of seeing the new slides on the light table is quite simply unbeatable, I’ve missed it from the very beginning when I switched to digital. You can think of it this way – with film you have to finish the picture before you press the shutter, so you better make sure you got everything right. With digital, you can snap and check the LCD, and try again… and then download the RAWs and start working on them. It kind of dilutes the sense of achievement even if the picture turns out to be great. I’m not very disciplined so if an easy road is offered to me (like checking the histogram instead of double checking exposure beforehand), I’ll take it. Slide film doesn’t offer any such shortcuts.

And let’s face it – digital captures may be cheap, but the digital cameras sure ain’t!

A 5D mkII costs about 25000 SEK and a used 5D (mk I) costs about 10000 SEK. I’m getting an EOS 3, which is roughly the film equivalent of a 5D (mk whatever). Back when it was still sold as new, it cost about 12-13K but I’m now getting it for about 10% of the original price. Before I switched to digital, I had an EOS 5 which was 3’s predecessor. The 5’s can still be found and they would be even cheaper than a 3, but I didn’t want the same camera I once sold myself and the price isn’t an issue in any case, not when people are just trying to get rid of their old kit.

Having said that, my decision has nothing to do with money (other than realising that it isn’t such a big investment at all). It’s just a desire to try something new – or old, as the case may be!