Technical | >Re-PHOTO

Adobe Goofs

I’ve used Lightroom since it came out. I wasn’t pleased because Adobe bought out Pixmantec, developers of Rawshooter software, which I had been using, because it was better than the software they were developing. Of course I could continue using that – and I did for a while, but once I bought a new camera that wasn’t supported by Rawshooter I was forced to move to different software.

I might have chosen one of the alternative products – and I did try out several, including Bibble, Phase One and some others, but none appealed. And Adobe had provided a free copy of Lightroom 1 to us Rawshooter users. It wasn’t as good as Rawshooter for processing my RAW files but I decided to go with it.

And I’ve kept with it over the almost 10 years it has been going, first paying for the various major upgrades and then paying for a monthly subscription to both LR and Photoshop. Though I didn’t like the subscription idea it did give me access to the latest versions of the software and at a lower cost than buying the major updates.

Lightroom has improved fairly dramatically over the years – and every major upgrade and some of the incremental ones have added mostly useful new features. Whenever Creative Cloud told me at startup that a new version was available, I’ve always welcomed it and upgraded immediately. Except for the latest update. I’m still running LR 6.1.1 and have not upgraded to 2015.2/6.2.

Before I saw the button upgrade I’d see a post in my Facebook news feed about various problems people were having with the upgrade. Some of those were major bugs, with the software crashing and blue screening, and Adobe is putting out a bug fix*, though I’m waiting to hear whether this had been effective. But perhaps this is an update to miss.

Lightroom has always been very stable software on my current Windows 7 system, very rarely giving problems and working at a reasonable speed with some pretty large catalogues. At the moment I’ve no pressing reason to upgrade – and won’t until I hear that they have really solved the problem. Although making dehaze available as a local adjustment will be useful – currently I have my own ‘anti-flare’ preset which performs a similar function.

But a greater problem is that Adobe have massively changed the Import dialogue. Currently I use LR import to rename my files, add metadata from a preset file, add keywords, chose where to place the files on my system and make a backup on another drive.

Watching the Adobe tutorial I first found suggests you can’t do any of these things, but it isn’t actually as bad as it seems. Most of these things are still available. but harder to find and use. Most photographers will find that going into Preferences and turning off the ‘Show Add Photos screen‘ option will both greatly improve performance and give you an import screen that makes some sense. And the online Import help for 6.2 shows that most of the functionality is still there, if rather hidden and less transparent.

Laura Shoe’s Lightroom post on the redesigned import process is far, far better as a simple introduction to the changed dialogue, and helped to calm me down a little. Perhaps after all I might be able to live with it.

Adobe say the complexity of the import dialogue put some people off buying the software, but it’s power is what made many of us stick with it. I don’t have a problem with Adobe providing an ‘Input for Dummies‘ option, but not at the expense of making it harder for those of us who want to do more.

Their explanation of why they made the changes issued after the outcry really is frankly arrogant nonsense. We were not “universally unable to decipher the Import dialog without getting frustrated” though it did take a little work. Improvement without gelding would have been simple to acheive and universally welcomed. The changes have actually made it less transparent in various ways and it looks like they were a panic reaction to extreme pressure from marketing.

My reaction seems to be shared by many if not most other LR users. When I first read about the changes I went into panic mode, wondering which other software I could use in place of LR, but now I’m thinking I may be able to live with it.

I don’t just use LR when bringing my pictures from camera to computer. It’s far too slow for viewing and assessing images in the Import screen, and also too slow to import everything you take and then delete the no-hopers. For some time I’ve been using FastPictureViewer Pro to go through the images on my cards – in a USB 3 card reader. FPV lives up to its name for speed, and a single keystroke copies the images I need to keep to my ‘Input’ folder on an external hard drive for later ingestion by LR. FPV is great as a general file viewer and can also be used for renaming files and other things.

I’m still not sure if I can continue with my current workflow to get files into Lightroom and on disk, but if not FPV may be able to replace LR for parts of the workflow. Its rather a shame that we still have to rename files, as Nikon filenames only allow for 9999 images. It would be useful to be able to automatically add a yyyymmdd or other prefix to the file names in camera – the current 3 user specified letters isn’t enough. In some ways its good that Nikon has hardly changed the firmware through the whole series of six DSLRs I’ve owned, but there are some features like this that are long overdue for change now that far more memory is available.

* As often happens, I’d written this piece some time before it was scheduled to be posted to the blog. When I loaded Lightroom after saving it, the promised bug fix was available, though I’ll wait until I’m less busy (and other users have tested it) before I upgrade.

And Tom Hogarty and the Lightroom Management Team have issued an apology which you can read in full in Lightroom Journal. Here’s one section of it:

We made decisions on sensible defaults and placed many of the controls behind a settings panel. At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality. These changes were not communicated properly or openly before launch. Lightroom was created in 2006 via a 14 month public beta in a dialog with the photography community. In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team.

So far on person has commented on the apology, saying that the ability to eject a card after import is important to him and questioning how they decided this was a ‘very low usage feature’. The answer was somewhat surprising to me, “we have in-product analytics that measures feature usage and we also reference that against the quality of any one feature and the effort required to bring it up to our standards.” It does sound a little more like “We know best” than might be expected after the apology.

Camera Woes

Possibly the final image from my Nikon D800E – 25/07/2015 13:44:49

It was Saturday afternoon and I was in Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament photographing a woman speaking on a small platform in front of a small crowd. I’d taken a fairly wide view with the 16-35mm on the Nikon D700 and then raised the D800E and took a tigher image framing her speaking in front of the Houses of Parliament using the 18-105mm. Then I zoomed in and took a second frame, or tried to, wanting a tighter head shot, but it didn’t sound right. There was no clunk of the mirror. I tried again and it still wasn’t working. All I could get was a small bright area at the top of the frame.

I took off the lens and looked inside the camera. The lever at the side for the lens moved normally when I pressed the release, but the mirror didn’t budge at all, and looked slightly askew. Something was seriously wrong.

For the rest of the day I worked with a single camera, the D700, changing lenses rather more frequently than usual – and missing a few chances while doing so. Working with two cameras does really make a huge difference.

Back home I checked the camera again, and then began to think about what to do. Was this a sign it was time to switch to mirrorless? Unfortunately my recent experiences in using the Fuji X-T1 haven’t been entirely positive. Though the results are fine, it had let me down at critical points, simply refusing to turn on for a few vital seconds. And though the electronic viewfinder is good, even better than an optical viewfinder in dim light, in bright conditions it can’t compete. It lets you see the framing of the images, but not to really study the scene in the kind of detail provided with an optical viewfinder. The ability to zoom in on the focus area is great, but not much use when you need to work fast.

So I ruled out that possibility, except perhaps as a short-term measure while the D800E was in for repair. It seemed likely that it would require a major overhaul, and as well as the mirror there were a few other parts that needed replacement, but I could put up for a while with working with the D700 with the 18-105mm, 16mm fisheye and 70-300mm while using the Fuji with its impressive 10-24mm (15-36mm equiv.)

I bought the D800E as soon as it became available here in 2012, so it was now three years old, and the shutter according to the press release “has been tested to withstand approximately 200,000 cycles.” Three years later, mine was now a little over that, and I began to wonder if it would be worth repairing. What would the cost of repair be and how would that compare with the second-hand value of the camera?

I did a quick search on the web. One dealer was offering a D800 in almost new condition with a shutter count of only 12,000 for £1150. All those I could see on sale, even on Ebay claimed to be in at least excellent condition and hardly used, even at a little under a thousand.

I’d been intending to replace my D700 later this year. It has a shutter count of around 400,000 and a few minor issues and is clearly living on borrowed time. Some other photographers laugh at its cosmetic condition – loose rubber bits, embedded yellow paint and scratches, but it still delivers. It can’t last for ever and I’ve been expecting to have to give it a decent burial at any time for quite a while. Cameras aren’t made to last like they were, and photographers probably don’t want them too, as we are still in a time where technology is improving, if more slowly than in the previous decade.

I can’t remember (or be bothered to look back in my accounts) the exact cost of the D800E, but I think it was around £2,400. In those three years I’ve spent nothing on repairs on it and the cost for using it works out at just slightly over 1p per exposure, which doesn’t seem a huge amount to pay. I’ll get an estimate for repair sometime, but won’t be too upset if it turns out to be uneconomic.

Things have very much changed since the old days. The Leica M2 that I bought second-hand in 1977 – when it was around 20 years old – is still in silky-smooth working order, though a couple of repairs over the years have doubled the price I paid. It’s second-hand value now is about the total that I’ve paid, not as people often say a good investment, but still excellent value. Cameras then were equipment, but now they are largely consumables, replacing not just the camera but most of the costs that used to be born by film. And the film I used to use in that Leica (or rather a slightly improved version of it) now costs around 11p per exposure.

I’ve solved my immediate problems by buying a new Nikon D810. It cost a little more than those second-hand D800 bodies, but there are a few minor improvements that made me feel the extra was worthwhile. If I do get the D800E repaired I’ll have a camera in reserve for when the D700 gives out, and if not it may still be possible to use it with the mirror locked up for copy work in live view mode. But for the moment it’s a large, expensive and useless paperweight on my desk (useless because the desk is always so covered with junk there is no room for papers.)

I only got it last Wednesday and so far I’ve only taken it out on three days, but I’m getting to like it. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is in the noise from a redesigned mirror mechanism and damping. Possibly the sound isn’t much quieter, but it is at a lower pitch, less crisp and far less intrusive. I showed it to a couple of photographers this Saturday, holding the camera up a foot or so in front of me and pressing the shutter, somewhere in the middle of Parliament Square. With the noise of traffic going around the square it was hard to hear it.

Lightroom Dashboard

Here’s a nice idea that was on PetaPixel today, but…

Lightroom Dashboard is a web site that will give you an easy and graphic analysis of your Lightroom Catalog (OK, its a catalogue to me, but a catalog to LR.) It loads a web page that you drag your catalog file (or rather if you have any sense, a copy of it) onto and the web page then analyses your photographic habits. And as it says, it is “100% free, no software, no plugins, no uploads, all done within your browser.”

It doesn’t I think do anything that you can’t actually do in Lightroom itself, using the metadata filter in the Library view, and I think it will only do its magic on the catalogue as a whole.

You can see the kind of information it supplies in the demonstration on the web site.

Perhaps the most surprising statistic from the demonstration is that whoever produced the catalog took only 13,962 images in two years – about 19 a day – despite using 15 cameras to do so (and my calculator tells me that’s only on average 930 per camera.)

Unfortunately, a small note at the bottom of the application page reads: July 15th UPDATE – It appears as though large catalog files at 2GB and above are having problems loading. We’re looking into this issue and they are correct. Attempting to load the smallest catalog I could find – my current one I started on January 1 this year – immediately crashed my browser. The Library module at the top of the Catalog section tells me that it has only 52,235 pictures in it, pressing the \ key brings up the Library filter, and I can look at the figures, filtering by Text, Attribute or Metadata.

I’ve managed to produce these using only 5 cameras and 13 lenses, the most exotic of which was the 0.0mm f0.0 which apparently managed to take two perfectly decent images on my Nikon D700! Another oddity was the ‘Unknown’ lens which produced 90 pictures on the Fuji X-T1, while revealing its identity for another 230 as the XF 35mm f1.4.

Lightroom – with the help again of my calculator, reveals that I made 46% of those exposures with the D700 and 44% with the D800E, and a virtually equal number with the 16-35mm and 18-105mm – both at 41% of the frame count. My favourite lens is really still the 16mm fisheye, but there are far fewer situations where that is appropriate, and it accounted for only a little under 4% of exposures.

Lightroom Dashboard is a nice idea and great for the light user of cameras, and I hope it’s possible to fix the large files problem. It would have been good to see some nice graphs, pie charts etc, but the information is all there in Lightroom if you need it. And in Lightroom you get to see exactly which exposures you used that f0.0 lens for!

Lens TAAB

Those among you who like to use manual focus (or have no other choice) may well be users of Leica cameras and have lenses that incorporate a focus tab. On my first Leica, a second-hand M2, the only lens I had for the first year was a ‘collapsible’ 50mm f2.8 Elmar, an excellent lens that would largely disappear inside the body when twisted and pushed in, so the camera and lens would slip inside a largish pocket.

There was a small downside, in that it was possible to fail to get the lens completely pulled out and locked when you wanted to take a picture, resulting in a very out of focus image. Sometimes you only found out when – perhaps weeks later – the film was developed.

But another feature of that – and I think other old Leica lenses – was the focus tab, which stuck out from the lens. On that Elmar it was metal, and on its end was a small button which acted as a lock. To move the focus from the infinity position you had to press this in as you pushed the tab around. Being Leica designed and engineered it worked smoothly and ergonomically.

By the time I’d saved a month’s wages for my second lens, a Leica Canada 35mm f1.4 Summilux, the tab was plastic and there was no lock, though it had gained a better shape that fitted your finger. The great thing about both these tabs was that they removed the need to look at the camera when focussing. Cartier-Bresson style we learnt to adjust focus by the tab before raising the viewfinder to the eye to frame and expose.

Various people like me who miss the convenience of the tab have found ways to add them to other lenses. As well as focus by feel, they also give focus by finger tip; possible without but usually on lenses without a tab we use the less convenient finger and thumb to focus.

Some people have previously made various tab devices available for sale, and the Steer from Leica goodies is designed for “fast and big glass such as the Noctilux, the 75 Summilux and the 90 Summicron“.

But a new product (currently you can pre-order on the web site) from TAAB does look like a better solution. TAAB is a flexible neoprene ring that incorporates a tab and can be stretched over the focus ring to grip and provide a tab. Three sizes will fit most lenses. A recent design tweak has slimmed the rings down by 1mm, removed the logo and tapered the tab into a more ergonomic finger-fitting form compared to the prototypes shown in on-line images.

Mostly I’ve moved to using auto-focus, with Fuji-X or Nikon cameras and lenses. But perhaps I might get a TAAB to use on one of the Fuji lenses – perhaps the 18mm – to work with on the street, where manual focus is often the best way to go, as auto-focus too often finds the background rather than the subjects.

Thanks to PetaPixel for an article that let me know about TAAB.

Through a Glass

For some years in the 1980s and 1990s I worked on a project for which the great majority of images were taken through windows. Some of those images eventually made their way into an ‘artist’s book’ that I produced one year during during the Christmas break around 20 years ago, under the title Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

At the time I was working with colour negative film and having these trade processed with 6×4″ prints of every exposure, or occasionally when I was feeling rich, 7½x5″ (later I processed my own C41 and only contact printed films.) And these postcard-sized images were pasted onto sheets of 12×8¼ cotton rag with a ¾ folded at the gutter end to paste to the previous sheet, eventually with a little sewing and thick cardboard covers made into a 64 page hardback volume with a short text and 54 images. It still sits on my shelf.

I showed the work to a couple of publishers, both of whom expressed some interest, but eventually decided not to publish it, or at least not unless I could come up with at least half the cost either from my own resources or from a grant, and I lost interest. A few years later, in 2000, I put a very slightly different version of the work on the web, where it can still be seen: Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

Almost all the images were taken with a 35mm shift lens on an Olympus OM4 body, with a few using a 28mm; possibly some of the earlier work on the project was made with an OM2.

Of course some of the images I made depend for their success on the reflections, but there were many where the reflections made images impossible, or detracted from those I did make.

During the project I learnt quite a lot about reflections, starting with the fact that the polarising filter I always carried and which every magazine article and technical tome told you was essential seldom actually did what you wanted it to.

For many of the pictures I was able to work close to the window glass, and used a collapsible rubber lens hood costing a couple of quid (now from £1.12 post free on Ebay) pressed on to the glass surface to eliminate all reflections. Also essential was a cloth to clean the outside of the window through which to photograph.

Sometimes, the dust on a window – often on the inside where I couldn’t reach it – added to the image, as in this image of tables inside a café, taken a short distance from the glass with the lens well stopped down. I’m not sure now whether the scratch was on the glass or a later addition to the negative!

What led me to think again about these pictures was a post by Michael Zhang on PetaPixel, about research at MIT into the removal of reflections from images taken through glass. When working through glass, reflections normally are a double image, with a reflection from both the front and back surfaces of the glass, and by searching for parts of the image that are seen double the software is able to distinguish the reflections from the rest, and can then reduce or eliminate them. Perhaps before long we will see a ‘reflections’ filter in Photoshop.

Zhang also points out that there are products that are more elaborate (and more versatile, not to mention rather more expensive) than my cheap rubber lenshood for allowing you to work through glass – such as the Lenskirt. The price of around $50 puts me off, and it’s also considerably larger, though it will work with almost any lens. The days of lens systems like the Zuiko, where almost every lens I used had a 49mm or 52mm filter thread are unfortunately gone.

One of the other problems I faced was that window glass is often rather coloured, and although filtration when printing with colour neg might deal with this, when using a wide angle, rays from the edges of the subject travel obliquely through the glass with a longer path, sometimes leading to a noticeable colour shift. It’s a problem that would be much easier to solve working with digital images than in the darkroom, where I sometimes resorted to dodging and burning with different filtration. I worked on scans of some of the images and wrote about it in a post here in 2008, Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise revisited.

I hope to publish a revised version of Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise at a future date, in a new edit with some extra images and a few replacements. But finding the images and scanning the negatives will be a long job. Along the bottom edge of some of the prints in the book and on the web are details of the date and location where the images were taken, which makes finding things easier, but over the years many of the negatives that I printed from have been filed out of the date sequence I nominally used.

Continue reading Through a Glass

I’d love to love Fuji, but

Fuji X-T1, 18mm (27mm eq)

Around Easter I’ve taken some time off from my normal work and have spent a lot of time using the Fuji X-Pro1 and Fuji X-T1 cameras, mainly with the 10-24mm zoom on the XT1 and the 18-55mm zoom on the X-Pro1, but also working with my favourite 18mm and the 35mm Fuji lenses. At times I carried around some others, but didn’t find the need to use them.

It’s taking me a long time to get used to some of the idiosyncracies of the Fuji cameras, probably much longer than if I just used one of them. If I had to pick one it would be the X-T1, largely for its far superior electronic viewfinder. Though I do like the optical viewfinder of the X-Pro1, I’ve often found myself switching to the electronic alternative, as the zoom lens blocks a significant part of the optical view. It works rather better with the smaller 18mm and 35mm primes, where only a small part of the view is blocked.

If these – and others in this focal length range – would satisfy all my photographic needs, I’d prefer the X-Pro1, but I like to have both a wider and a narrower view. With the 18-55mm, by the time the long end is reached, the viewfinder image with the optical viewfinder is just too small for my liking, making the electronic view a preferable option, and with the fine 14mm f2.8 too much of the image is hidden where the lens obtrudes into the optical viewfinder.

The X-Pro1 is a fine but very limited tool which does appeal to me as it feels a simpler camera to operate than the X-T1, but for me the flexibility of the latter is vital. For so many lenses it works better. Even with that 18mm, seeing the bottom right corner in the viewfinder is much better. And now I’m used to it, and don’t waste time searching throught the menus for it, I very much like having a dial on the camera top putting ISO at my fingertips. Being able to walk from dark interior to bright sun without having to fiddle with menus is great.

I find switching from using a camera with a direct vision optical viewfinder to an electronic viewfinder can be confusing. Using mainly DSLRs and the X-T1 it’s just too easy to get into the habit of thinking if the image is sharp in the viewfinder it will be in focus on the sensor – and I have made many, many exposures that prove it just ain’t so. The occasional arty blur might be of interest, but to find you’ve taken 50 in error because you forgot to change back from manual focus can be annoying. With the 18-55mm at its wide end, depth of field may be your friend and cover your stupidity, but it doesn’t work at 55mm.

Of course it should be obvious that you are still on manual focus – no little green rectangle confirming focus – but in the heat of the moment it can be so easy to forget this. And if you are not photographing in the heat of the moment, perhaps you should ask yourself why you are bothering to take pictures at all.

I think now that I have finally figured out most of my problems with Fuji colour in Lightroom. I’ve been using the X-Pro1 on and off for a couple of years and have always been surprised at how many people enthuse over Fuji’s colour rendition. Even though I think I’ve now discovered how to deal with it, I still often prefer Nikon colour.

The best result I’ve got with Lightroom come from changing the ‘Camera Calibration‘ from the normal ‘Adobe Standard‘ to the Fuji ‘Camera Pro Neg Std‘. It seems to give better colour than the camera Provia/Standard that I normally use for in-camera jpegs and the viewfinder/screen image (it seems wrong to use a different setting for camera and Lightroom, though the camera setting doesn’t affect the RAW file, but working this way seems to give me a better match between what I see in camera and the developed files.)

Setting up a development preset that applies this and uses Auto-tone produces images that need little adjustment – similar in that respect to my Nikon files, while with Adobe Standard they were a problem to deal with. Though there still seems to be an undesirable propensity for pink in Fuji’s auto white balance to correct. Lightroom’s Auto-tone perhaps works even more reliably than with the Nikon files, though this may be a reflection on the less challenging situations I’ve used the Fujis in.

I have a small issue over file sizes. Fuji’s similar quality to Nikon comes from files with a roughly similar number of pixels, but while the RAW files from the D700 average out at around 11Mb, the Fuji RAW files are roughly two or three times that size. The 16GB cards I now mainly use in camera get filled up rather fast, particularly on the X-T1, and I’ll probably buy larger ones; transfer times to the computer and into Lightroom are noticeably longer, and my external storage is filling up at a faster rate. Nikon’s compression with no real life noticeable quality loss is very useful.

Fuji battery life is a problem, even using mostly the optical finder on the X-Pro1. Nikon batteries hardly ever need changing during a day’s work. I carry spare batteries, but hardly ever need to use them, and have to remember to swap them over occasionally or the spare loses its charge over months. Working with the two Fuji cameras, at the moment I have a total of five batteries. Just enough to see me through a day of fairly light work, but I really need at least one more. Expense isn’t a problem, with replacement batteries being fairly cheap, but it’s a nuisance having to carry and to change them.

Overall I’m feeling rather frustrated with the Fujis. With the Nikons I can turn them on when I get the cameras out of the bag, and turn them on when I pack up. Between those times – often hours apart – every time I put my camera to my eye and press the shutter release, the camera takes a picture, almost every time in focus and with hardly any perceptible hesitation.

With both Fujis, things are rather different. Unless you are going to be taking pictures every few seconds, it’s quicker to switch the camera off, then turn it on when you want to use it again, waiting the roughly two seconds start up time, otherwise you can be pushing the button and swearing for even longer until the camera wakes up.

Focus, even with the improvements from firmware updates, still takes a noticeable time, but its the time taken to persuade the camera into life that is for me the real killer.

For some photography with wide-angle lenses in fast-moving situations you can of course do what we always used to do, turn off autofocus and rely on depth of field, using ‘zone focussing’. Once it’s up and running the X-Pro1 with the 18mm does the Leica thing rather better than the Leica M8 I used to use, and about as well as the real thing.

X-Pro1: 18mm, 18-55mm (27mm eq)

I have had some issues with framing using the 18-55mm with the optical finder of the X-Pro1, though these may well be down to me rather than the system. Certainly I seem to chop off the tops of people’s heads rather more than when working with the similar frame inside the view with the 18-105mm DX on the D800. And using the Fuji combination yesterday, at times the bright line frame was fading away as I was working, which was not good news. I fear an expensive repair may soon be needed.

So, much though I like the Fuji cameras, and much though I prefer to take them with me when I go out for a long walk or some relaxed occasion, they won’t be replacing the Nikons for much of my more intensive work. Perhaps I might just try working with a hybrid kit, with the X-T1 and 10-24mm replacing my ageing D700 and the superb but heavyweight Nikon 16-35mm. Perhaps. I’ll certainly give it a try before getting around to buying a D750.

Fuji X-T1, 10-24mm at 15mm (22mm eq)

For some photographs, that couple of seconds wait isn’t a problem, nor the slight pause you get between the shutter press and exposure. Some people wouldn’t even notice it, but when you are used to a camera without appreciable delay it annoys. Catching the moment is often vital in photography; catching the moment a little after just won’t do.

While in this post I’ve concentrated on some of the negative aspects, particularly for certain types of work, there are also some very positive aspects of the Fuji. Working in quiet environments, the quiet (or truly silent in electronic mode on the XT1) shutter is a great advantage, both to me as a photographer and in preventing annoyance to those you are photographing, and fast lenses such as the 35mm f1.4 combined with good high ISO performance are great in low light on the X-T1. I’ve often found myself while working wishing I had this camera in my hands instead of a rather clunky Nikon with a slowish zoom. The 23mm f1.4 is more expensive, and I’ve not yet bought one, but I’m tempted by this and the weather resistant 18-135mm …

Continue reading I’d love to love Fuji, but

March 2015 complete

I fell asleep around midnight last night trying to finish putting my work from March on to My London Diary, waking with a start to find a black screen in front of me, and when I moved the mouse to rouse the monitor from its dreams, found myself facing a blank page where I’d almost completed the coding. In my daze it seemed something of a calamity.

Fortunately hitting Ctrl+Z to undo my last action – presumbably hitting the space bar with the page selected as I collapsed on the keys – restored my work, although had I been thinking clearly I would have realised that only the few keystrokes I had made since the last saved version would in any case have been lost. But it was certainly time to give up and go to bed. And finish the work the following morning, which I now have. I think there are 40 stories from March, though not all have a great deal of content, and a couple are just pictures from my occasional days off.

But I’m also aware of the many events I’ve been aware of but been unable to cover, invitations I’ve had to refuse because I have to be at another place. We are indeed living in interesting times, and it is something of a curse.

Mar 2015

Another Country Walk
Cross Bones Open Day
Murdoch on Trial – Guilty as charged

Jon Bigger Class War South Croydon
RMT protest Ticket Office Closures

Sweets Way at Annington Homes

Quiet Night at Poor Doors
Occupy Rupert Murdoch
Around Tower Bridge
Arrest Warrant for Rupert Murdoch
John Lewis customers support Living Wage

Stand Up to Racism Rally
Britain First Protests anti-Racist March
Stand Up to Racism March
Great British Tax Robbery
Bermondsey Walk

Poor Doors blocks Rich Door
Unite protest against Benefit Sanctions
Dolce & Gabbana Boycott
Debt Resistance UK #Blockupy solidarity
Free Shaker Aamer vigils continue
Savage cuts to Adult Education budget
Stratford to Hackney Wick
Class War go to Aylesbury Estate
Class War celebrate Election Launch
Class War Chingford Election Launch
Free the Hares boys protest at G4S

Poverty pay at the Royal College of Art
Save Our Lions – ban Canned Hunting
Let Ife Stay in the UK!
Police seize Class War banner
Viking longship invades Tate steps
Climate Change Rally

Time to Act on Climate Change
Poor Doors Zero Police
Aylesbury Estate Occupiers Move
Homeless Persons Matter
Mexican President told Stop the Killing
Shut Down Yarls Wood

Maximus – Same Circus, Different Clowns

As always there are many more pictures from most of these events on My London Diary if you follow the links, and in some cases some fairly lengthy stories.

Continue reading March 2015 complete

To the Tower!

I think the image above captures something of the atmosphere of the march by Class War from ‘Poor Doors’ at ‘One Commercial St’ in Aldgate to the building site at ‘One Tower Bridge’, which as its name suggests is next to London’s trademark structure. It was an interesting event in several ways, and you can read more about it and see more pictures at Poor Doors to Rich Gardens on My London Diary.

The Exif data also makes interesting reading, at least for photographers, and here is a summary, copied with minor editing from viewing a larger copy of the image in FastPictureViewer Pro:

1/60s, f/4.5, ISO 3,200, -2.3Ev
Mode: A, Meter: Matrix, Flash, Auto WB
Focal: 18mm, 19/02/2015 18:46:20, Adobe RGB (1998)
15.4MP (4,800×3,200) NIKON D800E, 18.0-105.0 mm f/3.5-5.6, (C)2015,Peter Marshall

You can see that I was working in aperture priority mode, which surprises me slightly, as more often at night with moving subjects like this I use shutter priority, setting a shutter speed that will let me control the blur from ambient light, or more often still, manual, so I can chose both aperture and shutter.

The DX lens at 18mm has a maximum aperture of f3.5, so I had chosen to stop down by almost a stop, probably to get a little more depth of field. My focus was on the central figure, perhaps around 2.5 metres away, which would render anything from around 1.5 to 8m sharp at f4.5, while at f3.5 this would only have been from 1.7 to around 5.5m. Or perhaps I just felt that most lenses do get noticeably better if stopped down one stop (or usually better still two.)

With the camera on A setting (aperture priority) the camera selects the shutter speed, and it seems to do so on the basis of the ISO and the +/- Ev setting when I test. So ISO3200 and -2.3EV should I think mean it was actually using ISO 640, but the actual results are very different from those at that setting. But I give up trying to work these things out, just set things up and alter the exposure compensation until things seem to work. At night you always need a stop or two compensation or the camera will make it look like daylight.

Of course using flash I could have stopped down more. The SB800 I was using is a reasonably powerful unit, and had I left the camera on P, Nikon would have had me using it at a rather ridiculous f10, and the picture would have been a dismal failure with little or nothing visible behind the front trio.

It’s also a picture that needed considerable post-processing. The figure at left was rather close to the flash and needed rather a lot of burning in. The other two close figures also needed some, and parts of the subject further away needed to little brightening. Almost all flash images need some help in this way to get closer to how the scene actually appeared.

Another problem in using any light source at night is colour temperature. Flash is daylight balanced, and the ambient light seldom if ever is. In some pictures the difference isn’t important, but in others it becomes very noticeable. Occasionally it’s an interesting effect, but more often a distraction – and one that can be overcome with a little post-processing.

Flash also produces an unnatural effect in this image with a number of translucent white spots of varied sizes – for example between the skull and the W on the banner at the right of the picture. These are reflections of the flash from out of focus rain drops. It isn’t really something that was a part of the scene, but an artifact of the way that the image was produced, and although the WPP or Reuters might not agree, I’d have no compunction about removing any of them if I felt they obtruded on the image that I saw when I made the exposure. But fortunately I don’t feel they do in this case, they are just one of the happy accidents of the medium that I embrace.

I chose the second image here partly because I thought it would be nice to have one of Tower Bridge.

It shows Class War blocking the bridge with flaming torches and with two banners including the ‘Political Leaders‘ which on a later occasion the police seized. Again, here’s the Exif data:

1/50s, f/4, ISO 3,200, -0.7Ev
Mode: M, Meter: Matrix, No Flash, Auto WB
Focal: 29mm, 19/02/2015 19:09:53, Adobe RGB (1998)
12.1MP (4,256×2,832) NIKON D700, 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0, (C)2014 Peter Marshall

The 16-35mm is pretty usable wide open, and there was no reason to stop down. Although this was taken without flash, I was using additional lighting, otherwise the banners and the faces in shadow were rather dim. Although I’m really a little out of range for the Neewer CN-216 with its 216 LEDs, it has done just enough.

It isn’t the sharpest image I’ve ever taken, but just sharp enough, with just slight problems caused by subject movement at 1/50s.

You can find the CN-216 (sold as Neewer, NanGuang and other brand names) on Ebay for £25-30 (or you can pay more) and it has a smaller and some larger brothers. I’ve tried a CN-160 which is nicely small (it fits in my jacket pockets) but the extra power of the larger CN-216 seems just worth having. The CN-304 probably gives a little more light still, which would be useful, but is significantly larger and heavier. (They also make yet larger and yet heavier versions branded EPHOTO which might be worth investigating for studio use.)

The CN-216 seems very useful used at ISO 3200 within 2-3 metres of your subject, and with the diffuser in place gives reasonably even lighting for a 35mm lens. Fall-off is noticeable with real wide-angles, but that isn’t always a bad thing, and like lens vignetting can usually be compensated for in post-processing if necessary.

Light output is controllable by a dial, which is also the on-off switch. I’d prefer it to have a separate on-off switch as, having to rotate it to full power for almost every use is annoying. The switch is also rather easily knocked on while in your camera bag and will then run down the 6 AA batteries – though supposedly they last for two hours. I now tape down the switch in transit, moving the tape to an adjacent part of the body while the unit is in use.

You can fit the unit into a hot shoe, or simply hand hold it, which gives more control over the lighting. The hot-shoe mount is a little flimsy and only allows up-down adjustment, but I find it handy to park the unit on top of the camera. The light comes with two filter sheets that slide over the top, one a clear diffuser to give 5600K daylight and the other amber giving 3200K. Probably the amber is more useful in terms of colour balance, but it does absorb a little light.

I’m unconvinced the diffusers give a greatly more even spread of light. The clear diffuser cuts down the light by around 2/3 stop and the amber by around another stop, so it might well be better to use the unit without either.

All of the pictures in Poor Doors to Rich Gardens were taken either with flash or with the CN-216, though in some the flaming torches were often themselves a significant light source. Getting detail in the flames and in the subject can also be rather tricky!
Continue reading To the Tower!

Feeling Blue

Anna Atkins was born 216 years ago on 16 March 1799 and the anniversary was celebrated by Google this year with a doodle. Her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843 is generally thought to be the first book to have been produced – if only in a very limited edition – with photographic images. These were ‘cyanotype impressions’, photograms of handwritten pages and of the algae specimens.

The cyanotype process had been invented by Sir John Herschel the previous year, and is a simple process to use for making prints, and is now often used in children’s workshops as well as for some more serious work. There were later adaptions and improvements to it (most recently by Mike Ware who thoroughly investigated the process and came up with a technically improved ‘New Cyanotype ‘.)

I’m not aware of any evidence that Atkins ever used a camera, though she has sometimes been cited as the first woman photographer. Certainly no camera produced images made by her have survived, nor are they any by another woman also awarded the title, Constance Talbot, the wife of the inventor of photogenic drawing and the calotype. Possibly one or other of them was the first woman to print a photograph.

I would describe the pages of ‘British Algae‘ as photograms rather than photographs, in a distinction I feel useful, though certainly not one that has always been present in photography. Until the 1930s it was common to use the term photogram interchangeably with photograph, and I have a number of copies of the annual publication ‘Photograms of the Year’, none of which contain what we would now call a photogram.

I have to admit that I’m not in general a great fan of cyanotypes, and have only kept a few of those that I have made. Several of them are from a session photographing a nude female artists model, something I’ve done very rarely, and were taken on 5×4″ during a workshop session where it was important to have a suitable subject on hand to produce images in a fairly limited time.

The problem I have with cyanotypes is that they are blue, and often not a very pleasant shade of blue – certainly one that does nothing for the model in this image.

It doesn’t really suit this street image either, but it illustrates one of the common problems of the traditional cyanotype – it is very easy to lose highlight detail. The problem here is partly that the negative was made for salted paper printing and has a very high contrast, too high for a good cyanotype print. Much better as a salt print.

It is possible to moderate the blue colour, and there are various ways to tone cyanotype images, though the results are not always permanent. In this case I started with a slightly weak salt print, and rather than throw it away (good quality watercolour paper costs as much as bromide paper) I overprinted it in register using cyanotype. The result was mildly interesting and I made a few more prints that way. Most but not all of the salt print disappears during the overprinting butas the image above shows, the blue is considerably altered.

And for the final image, I carefully avoided painting the cyanotype solution over the poster at right in the initial salt print.

But then I came to my senses and realised that I spending far too much time playing with chemicals and not spending enough of it on taking pictures. And a few years later I found that inkjet printing was a far more flexible way to produce images.

February Finished

Class War block Tower Bridge – and the banner than police threatened arrest over the following week

I had late night last night and finished uploading images and text to My London Diary for February 2015.

I’m still catching up after several weeks of computer problems, and my heart sank yesterday morning when my desktop seemed to be refusing to start up. The initial checks before Windows start to load normally only take a few seconds, but yesterday it was over 5 minutes. I went away, did something else and came back to find that eventually it loaded.

So I took a little look at the Windows log files etc, ran the troubleshooters and there wasn’t anything that told me I had a particular problem (or at least not anything I didn’t know about and have been living with for ages.) Later I found from Skype that my microphone wasn’t working and that told me I had no sound card. Well I knew that – its on the motherboard! But other than that everything seemed to be working OK. But I decided that while I had the computer on and working I’d get February completed in case it wouldn’t start up again – and around 15 hours later I had, although perhaps given more time I would have written more about some of the events.

I also did something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, and blew the dust out of the computer. My previous machine died after it had collected so much dust inside that one of the fans stopped working, and it overheated. I’ve been meaning to open the box and give this machine a spring clean ever since, and today’s problem prompted me to do so. It was pretty dusty.

Today, to my relief, the computer started up more or less normally. The microphone still wasn’t working, so I removed and replaced the USB wireless link for my microphone, then pressed the ID button to link it up, and that’s now fine too. But much as I like the advantages of digital photography and computer processing and the web, I still feel uneasy about having to rely so profoundly on sometimes temperamental systems that none of us truly understands.

Anyway, here is February: