The Zen of Manual Camera Photography

Last weekend I managed to get out with the new camera and take some pictures. It was quite a different experience from taking pictures with the SLR, I must say. The first and most obvious difference came when I was just learning how to use the new camera. The two-step operation of the shutter (first cock it with a lever on the left, then fire it with a lever on the right) took some getting used to. I searched all around the camera for a dial with which to set the ISO speed of my film, until I realized that since the camera didn't have a meter, there was no need for the camera to care what the film speed was! More intuitive was the way focus is dialed in on the camera, very smooth and nice, with much more precision and repeatability than on my SLR.

The second difference was trying to compose the shot using the waist-level finder. I had heard some people complaining online about how difficult it was to do this, but until I tried I didn't realize how disorienting it can be! It's not simply that everything's backwards, it's that if you want to center something that's on the left of the viewfinder, you have to move right! Even tougher is attempting to level the picture, because again if the right side of the image is too high in the viewfinder, you have to lower the right side of the camera. Surprisingly though, after about my third roll of film I started to get the hang of it. I'm thinking that a few more sessions with the camera and it should start to become second nature to me.

The biggest different, though, was how different the entire experience of the picture-taking session was for me. People have said that they like to use rangefinders because they feel like their part of the action, they're right inside what they are photographing, when they use a rangefinder, whereas with an SLR, they feel like they are an outsider looking in. I think I know what they are talking about, because I felt the same way when I started taking pictures. Because I didn't have the camera up to my face all the time, I felt free to look around and soak in the landscape before me, instead of hiding behind the camera the whole time. I really felt more connected and more relaxed about taking pictures. Less like a scientist documenting what I was seeing, and more like a part of the scenery. It really felt good.

The other thing that contributed to this feeling was the all-natural meter that I had, mainly my own eyes. Before I took any pictures I learned the Sunny-16 rule, and memorized parts of the EV scale. Using that, I sized up each shot based on what its EV value was, and used the Sunny-16 rule to translate that into an f-stop and shutter speed. It was amazing how much simpler taking photographs became when I didn't have to rely on a machine to tell me what the settings should be and I just used my own judgment. I felt it really helped me relax and look at the scene before me, instead of trying to point a device somewhere to get a meter reading and wondering if the meter had gotten fooled.

So overall I'm pretty happy with this new approach to taking photographs. It's almost a zen-like experience now, I feel so much more connected to everything. It's very cool. Can't wait to drive up and down the coast on the weekends and take some more pictures!

Just bought a Mamiya C220

So, I haven't been feeling so great recently, and one of my biggest flaws is that I tend to try and compensate for that by buying things. Call it some sort of retail therapy. I know it doesn't really help, but ultimately I do it anyway.

This time around I decided to invest in a medium format camera. The main reason I did this was because for portraiture work. I managed to take a very nice-looking photograph of a friend, and I found myself wishing that I had a bigger piece of film to look at. I've been growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that I need to scan in my film to digital before I can really get a good look at it. Putting an 8x loupe over a 35mm frame is OK, but not really comfortable, and you can't really get a great feeling for holding a picture in your hand when it's that small.

Plus, medium format offers greater resolution and the ability to make bigger prints. I've been scanning in my 35mm film at 4000dpi with a Nikon Coolscan V-ED scanner, and it seems like at that resolution (6,000 x 4,000, or 24megapixels!) the film itself has become the limiting factor.

Finally, on my trip to Greece and Italy, I felt as though people would get more self-conscious when they saw that I had my big camera pointed at them. It was much more difficult to get a nice candid photo of friends and family.

All of these things led me to start researching alternative format cameras. Ideally I would shoot a giant piece of film, like a view camera, but large format cameras are simply too big and complicated to shoot candid people photos with. They're really intended for studio work or landscape photography. That left only medium format. Most of the SLR choices were very expensive (not even going to discuss the cost of a Hasselblad system, but even the Mamiya 645 series was pretty expensive).

Then I discovered Twin Lens Reflex camera systems, and I knew I had found what I wanted. These are relatively small cameras, so they are easy to carry around discreetly, and the fact that they are mostly waist-level viewfinders enables you to take pictures on the sly much more easily. You can even turn your body to the side as if you're not looking at your subject and just turn the camera lens towards them to take their picture! Plus on eBay the prices were quite reasonable.

Originally I was looking at RolleiFlex cameras, because of the quality of the camera and lenses, but the auction prices for any that were known to be in good working condition seemed to approach $200 with regularity, and I was a little bit concerned about paying that much for a very old camera with an unknown history. Plus the fact that it was a fixed lens design with no possibility of switching the lens was not very appealing to me.

Then I found the Mamiya C220 and C330 cameras. They have interchangeable lenses! Plus the cost of the camera with an 80mm lens was only marginally higher than the RolleiFlexes. I found a dealer who seemed reputable on eBay, and I ended up buying a C220 with the 80mm lens, plus a wider 65mm lens and a telephoto 135mm lens. The package will hopefully arrive by Friday, so I will have something to play with. I'll let you know how it goes! :-)

Lessons learned from Greece/Italy

So I've finally finished scanning in all my photos, and now I'm in the final stages of editing them and getting ready to upload them to Yahoo! photos for others to see. I'd say I learned a lot about taking photos from this trip, mostly because of the fact that over 70% of the photos ended up being quite terrible (as usual). Figuring out why is always the learning experience when taking photos. Here's a few things I learned on this trip:

1. On touristy trips like this, people are much more interesting than empty landscapes. The pictures are much more interesting to look at if you have people you know in them, interesting both for others and for myself. This seems self-evident, but I normally don't take pictures of people. It's something I need to work on since I have very little experience with it.
2. Focus, focus, focus! Too often, I had the focus set wrong. I would think that infinity was good enough, or I would trust the camera to just get it right, and it would get it wrong. Especially when you throw people into it. Something placed ten feet away from the camera with f/8 at 40mm is unfortunately not within the depth of field if the focus is set to inifinity. You don't really care when that something is a plant or chair, because it's "close enough". But when it's a person, it's glaringly obvious when they're even just a little bit out of focus. Aside from people though, there were a few times when I had a statue or some other inanimate object as the focal point of the photo, and I just didn't check the focus closely enough, so the photo was ruined. Unlike almost any other technical problem, you can't fix focus problems in post.
   
3. Use the AE and AF lock buttons when shooting people. People don't like to stand around, so you have to work very quickly. If people are in the photo, you can't make them stand around holding their pose while you figure out the right exposure, so you have to do all of that beforehand, and then ask them to pose. This is where the AE lock and AF lock buttons come in handy. I never use them when shooting landscapes because I have time to set everything manually, but when people are involved, there isn't time to take meter reads and adjust the focus ring manually. These buttons are invaluable for those situations.
4. While landscapes are predictable, living mobile things (people, animals, etc) are not. So while with careful setup you can take just one shot of a landscape and have it be exactly what you want to capture, with people and animals you always have to hedge your bets and take a bunch of shots, hoping you get the perfect shot somewhere in there. I got lucky with one picture of a friend that turned out really really nice, but that was pure luck. Many more pictures of family and friends and even animals ended up being wasted because I only took one or two shots and didn't capture quite the perfect expression or action. This is where digital really helps, and I'm strongly considering getting the Canon 5D, I just can't afford it anytime soon! This is also where using a rangefinder instead of an SLR might be beneficial, so I'm considering that as well. Man, this hobby is getting expensive!
5. The 24-105mm f/4 lens is really the correct lens to bring on a tourist trip. The point of being on a tourist trip is to spend time with the group you're with. If you lag behind to take pictures, they get tired of waiting and simply go ahead. While I did take a few days off to just go photograph on my own, in general I preferred spending time with the group than being by myself. Probably the slowest thing about taking the photographs was switching lenses. I brought my standard landscape lenses, meaning the 17-40mm and 70-200mm zooms, which are perfect for landscapes, but really not good for walking around and taking tourist-type photographs. Too often I found myself needing to switch lenses, and on more than one occasion I chose to give up the photo and stick with my group than take the time to swap lenses and get the shot I wanted. And rarely did I end up needing the super-wide or super-telephoto focal lengths on those zooms, a 24-105mm range would have been perfect. That lens is also very discreet, unlike the huge grey 70-200mm lens that I didn't feel comfortable walking around with around my neck. I could have reduced my weight and sped up my shots if I had had the 24-105mm. The IS would have come in handy several times as well. Yet more money to be spent!
6. On overcast days, overexpose!! I had a ton of photographs come out way too dark, and in almost every case it was because the sky was overcast and there just wasn't much contrast. The camera essentially sees a gray card in front of it, and so it pulls everything down to 18%, and it looks ugly. This is something that I'm still trying to understand completely, and I probably need more formal training on it, because I have a tough time figuring out when the camera is underexposing and when it's not on cloudy days. Clearly I'm missing a key piece of information about how the meter works.
   
7. Don't use Sensia 100 on overcast days! Man, this film looks bad when there's little contrast. Just flat and ugly. Of course, it's really just Astia, so it's low-contrast by design. On sunny days it's quite good. But overcast it just doesn't do much. Provia 100F is a much better choice in those situations. Actually, the dollar per roll I save using Sensia instead of Provia is probably not worth it. I think I'll just stick with Provia full-time, since it handles all situations pretty well. Although I feel like I should give Velvia another shot. Oh yeah, Kodak Elite Chrome 100 is just gross, I will never shoot it again.
8. My bag situation is all wrong. After buying four new bags for all different kinds of situations back in February, I'm finding that probably none of them were right. That's pretty annoying. Probably the closest thing to being perfect is the Crumpler seven million dollar bag I have (which I didn't bring on this trip!) It enables me to carry all my gear, but more importantly, stow the entire camera without taking the lens off, regardless of which lens I have on the body, very quickly and pull it out very quickly. This would have saved me a lot of time. The only question is whether or not it would have been comfortable to carry around for eight or nine hours. I'll have to find that out. In the meantime, I have to look for new camera bags. *sigh*
   

Crazy Tourist Photographers

I just recently got back from a trip to Italy and Greece. I brought a relatively small setup with me to go shooting photos with: my EOS-1v, the 17-40mm f/4, the 50mm f/1.8 II, and the 70-200mm f/4. Plus about 30 rolls of slide film. Walking around though, I saw some truly crazy things that other tourists were doing with their cameras. There was the usual "tourists who don't turn off their flash when trying to shoot a picture of a building across the Great Canal thereby ruining the shot by just getting a picture of illuminated nearby water" thing.

The crazier thing was how many people were doing this while using $1500 digital SLR's. I swear, these things have just become status symbols. People buy them because they're "cool" and it makes them look "sexy", even though they have no clue what they're doing and, worse, don't really care to get a clue. It's the Mercedes of the photography world. I find that pretty despicable. When I decided to start out with photography, I bought a simple entry-level camera that cost me about $250 with lens. Only when I finally figured out how to operate the thing did I bother with upgrading to nicer bodies or lenses. I wasn't worried about how "cool" I would look if I bought the fanciest equipment first.

The worst of this was seeing people taking silly pictures with the most ridiculous gear you can imagine. I saw a 60 year old who was carrying a full EOS-3 with power booster and a 420EX flash attached, in broad daylight, while lounging at the pool. Do you really need those 7 pictures/sec capability while sunbathing?? I never once saw him actually try to take any pictures with this camera setup, either. Clearly this guy was carrying this gear around just to show off.

But the tourists who take the cake in this category has to be the two guys who were walking around Venice with their girlfriends/wives/whatever, carrying not just EOS 5D cameras, but also 70-200 f/2.8 IS lenses, with lens hoods attached, on a cloudy overcast day! They were using these things like point-and-shoot lenses, just walking around, snapping a shot, and then moving on. No tripods, of course, and certainly no more than five seconds to evaluate a shot and take it. They could have been such pro's that that's all the time they needed, of course, but somehow I got the impression that they were just showing off their fancy gear. Worst of all, they were making their wives carry all their photo bags and gear! Like little sherpas.

I did at least see two serious photographers while on the trip. One had a Leica M7 who was waiting patiently for tourists to clear so that he could take a picture of a homeless lady begging for change. Another had a tripod out during the magic hour and was very carefully and patiently setting himself up to take pictures of the gondolas. So it wasn't all just ridiculousness.

But probably the most annoying thing of all was the three or four times that I would take the time to find an interesting shot, compose it, get all my settings right, take it, then turn around and see some tourist there behind me duplicating my shot! Find your own damn pictures to take, people!! ;-)