The Quiet Picture

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!

I finally got a decent picture of Orion. An almost half moon is lighting up the foreground, but it should be looking even better on Monday or Tuesday when the moon is getting fuller. If only we get clear skies, that is – it was supposed to be sunny today but the clouds didn’t go away until at sunset. Anyway, I need the extra light so I can reduce the ISO. I don’t know what the noise reduction kept doing because it sure didn’t remove the noise in these ISO 250 images. Sometimes I do wish I had a high-end full frame camera… Or dare I hope for a revolutionary new noise reduction technique (that actually works) in Canon 60D?

This day was even worse than yesterday – just as foggy, but now we got rain as well. Lovely. So it was another long walk with the G10 and this time I experimented with the ISO values. And again I agree with what everyone says, the IQ is usable up to ISO 200 and anything above that should only be used in desperation. This image is taken with ISO 200, it was originally full colour but trust me, the difference to this b&w version was minimal; the days don’t get much more gray than today. So although I’m not a fan of b&w, I’m kinda happy with this one (and it will work better when I can properly process the RAW in LR… please Adobe, please!). Just had to crop all around to tighten up the composition and then to 2:3 dimensions. It may seem that I’m really attached to the 2:3 format but the thing is that my brain is so programmed for it that I have trouble seeing my compositions in 4:5. It will be useful to learn it though, just in case I ever want to move up to medium format!

My first day day out with the new Canon PowerShot G10! And what a lousy day it was. By that I mean the weather – I wasn’t missing the 40D in any case so having the new camera to test meant that at least I got something done and not just sit inside all day watching an Indiana Jones marathon (I got the 4-DVD box yesterday!).

The G10 is pretty much what I expected – I had seen enough test pictures before I got this camera to know what to expect, and my own pictures confirmed the impression so I got the camera I wanted. I tried a variety of techniques, handheld with IS, timer and a tripod, bracketing for an HDR, and also tested the lens adapter so I could mount a polariser filter and just to make it more fun, used the 3-stop built-in ND also.

So if IQ is not an issue, then I have to talk about the controls. It felt like I had to fiddle with the buttons and dials a lot more than I do with my 40D. Logically thinking, there isn’t anything more involved in taking the picture than with the dSLR so it must be quite simply that I’m not used to the controls yet. I know the 40D buttons with my eyes closed so hopefully I will learn to know the G10 equally well as I keep using it.

Which only leaves the software. The latest Lightroom version was released just before the G10 so I’m stuck with Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, which I hate with passion. Ok yes it’s probably because I’m not used to using the software… but seriously, even if I was familiar with it, I’d still hate it. Please Adobe, release a patch for LR – yesterday wouldn’t be too soon!

You’re not gonna believe this but… I just got myself a compact camera, Canon PowerShot G10 to be exact.

I have wanted a small portable camera for a long time now. The 40D is no lightweight, neither is the 24-105mm zoom lens. Put these together and you’re dealing with a big and heavy camera. There are also a lot of times a big camera is not practical to have and then there’s also my high threshold for taking a picture in the first place, I mean that every time I pick up the 40D I want to take a serious picture. For example, the hike we did in September. Sure I have some nice pictures from it, but I completely failed to capture feeling of the hike itself. What I mean is that there is a time and place for snapshots and the 40D is no snapshot camera to me, but the G10 however, you just dig it out from your pocket, switch on and snap. No threshold to get over!

I mentioned the Panasonic G1 a while back. I was hoping that it would be small enough to be that portable camera I wanted, but now I’ve seen it compared to other dSLRs and it’s actually not dramatically smaller. Not to forget that I would then be investing in a second system with lenses and accessories and all, so I decided against it.

So G10 it is. It’s been receiving rave reviews and it seems to be a professional photographer’s #1 choice in compact cameras.

Pros

• Nice zoom range 28-140mm (the 28mm wideangle actually beats the 38mm I get on my 40D+24-105mm zoom). Sure I’d like to have more at the long end, but 140mm works. Especially when I have 14.7MP to crop from.
• RAW
• Nice functions like live histogram and built-in 3-stop ND filter
• Conversion lens adapter with a 58mm filter thread so I can use my existing filters with a step-up ring (which I already happened to have)
• Other must-have features like bracketing and manual mode

Cons

• It’s a compact camera, what can I say. 14.7MP on a small sensor, that’s just insane. With today’s technology they should be able to create a kick-ass 5MP compact but unfortunately Joe Public can only appreciate the pixel count and not picture quality.

Also-rans

• Panasonic LX3. Panasonic had the good sense of jumping off the megapixel-wagon and created a nice 10MP camera instead. Unfortunately, it only barely beats the G10 in picture quality but what really put me off was the zoom range. Sure, 24mm wideangle is unique but 60mm at the long end…? It would never work for me.
• Nikon P6000. Just simply not as good as the G10.

First impressions

It’s heavy. I mean, I had read the specs so I knew how much it weighs, but it’s still much heavier than I thought. However, it’s easy to see where the weight comes from – the camera is solidly built and it feels like a real camera and not just some toy. Even the tripod socket is metal, and you don’t often get that with compacts. Secondly, there are a lot of buttons and controls, my 40D seems very simple in comparison. I might even have to read the manual!

The battery is still being charged but I will have to wait until the weekend to try it out in any case, so watch this space!

I did my homework and found out that many other people have discovered exactly the same problem I have with the shutter release button, and it looks like it’s not just the 40D but other models as well. Judging by what people have written, Canon denies that this is a construction issue and sure enough when I called the support “this is the first I’ve heard of it”. So I’m on my own to get it fixed unless the Canon service centre agrees with me that this is a factory fault and the 3-year extended warranty applies.

I did some testing tonight and found out that the problem largely depends on how I press the button, it’s a little bit loose so not all clicks are created equal. Most of the time it happens when I pause halfway to focus and meter, then when the button is pressed fully it blanks out. If I don’t stop in the middle, it’s normally ok. It also seems to be possible to press down the button in different ways, so if I put pressure on one side only it’s a dud, but if I keep my finger right in the middle of the button so it’s pressed straight down, it works. (Did that make any sense?)

Anyway, since I have to pay to get this fixed, I’ve decided to keep using it as it is now, the problem is intermittent and I have a semi-decent way of avoiding it. I don’t want to send it to service and pay for the postage and examination only to have it returned with nothing done because it was working fine when they tried it. So I will wait until it is really broken, the cost to fix it will be the same anyway.

I’ve had 6 Canon cameras in a row and this is the first one with problems. I guess my luck was bound to run out.

Grrr.

I have this recurring dream (or nightmare) that I’m looking at a photo opportunity of a lifetime and then when I press the shutter button, nothing happens. Well, unfortunately it looks like this nightmare is now becoming true – lately the shutter button is not responding as it should. Halfway it’s just fine, it focuses just as fast as it always did, but then when I press it fully to take the picture – nothing. Zip. Nada. This happens maybe 1 time out of 5 and it’s not related to the lens I use (I’ve tested with two Canon L-series lenses). No such problems when using a remote, so it’s only the camera shutter button that’s now starting to act up.

A real nuisance when I’m photographing moving subjects like the birds with the 300mm lens. Having to use the remote makes the process very un-intuitive because you have to keep your right hand on the handle anyway to move and balance the camera, and then the left hand is on the lens to steady the rig which is not very comfortable when you also have to operate the remote.

Definitely a bug, not a feature.

Let’s see… I bought my camera in September last year. They come with a 1-year warranty, right? Bummer.