Category Archives: photography

What worked

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The lessons from the Plitvička Jezera national park were interesting. We both took super excessive amounts of gear with us, and ended up using only the standard zooms, the 24-105mm f/4. I did use the 100-400mm telephoto for the first half an hour and I took two good pictures with it, one of which was at 100mm. The ultrawide zoom never left the bag. The fast primes never left the bag, and I was at f/8 for most of the hand-held shots, and f/11-f/16 for the tripod shots.

I initially thought that my thick Amazon polarising filter was vignetting at 24mm, but it turned out that it’s the lens problem when the geometry corrections were disabled in Lightroom, and I had them disabled by default. Weird, but better than having to manually fix the problem, I guess. Also, I guess I don’t have to replace the filter.

Both cameras did great. One would think that Biljana’s Canon RP would do worse than my Sony A7RV, but the image quality between them was indistinguishable. I guess if she wanted to print bigger than one meter in width she would encounter some issues, but other than that, she got excellent colours, resolution and general image look. Also, her camera is significantly lighter than mine, which helps a lot when you’re out taking pictures and hiking for hours on end. My Sony has advantages if you really have to rescue detail from the shadows and highlights, or if you are trying to take pictures of birds and the AI AF manages to lock on, but for the kind of shots we were getting, they were interchangeable. The RP has the sensor from the EOS 6d mk II, which was widely used as a wedding and nature photography camera and the images it produces are excellent, with great resolution and dynamic range, and very low noise. Since Biljana learned her craft on the original 5d, the RP is just improvements across the board. It doesn’t have IBIS, but the RF 24-105mm f/4L IS is stabilised optically so that was no issue either.

The only piece of equipment that gave us trouble was the camera mounting plate, which was small, almost square, with insufficient grip to the body, which made it rotate on the camera in vertical orientation, so we could either miss vertical shots altogether or try to support the camera’s weight during exposure so it wouldn’t rotate, which usually produced less than ideal results. I ordered L-brackets for both our cameras as soon as we returned home. That’s an interesting reality check – people would think about cameras, lens sharpness and even filter quality, but the only actual piece of gear that ruined our shots was the mounting plate.

We did both encounter flare and ghosting issues with our lenses, but considering how we shot in strong sunlight with sun basically in or around the frame for the first day, I think the lenses did fine.

My M4 Macbook Air was cooking itself and throttling in the hotel room while importing hundreds of 61MP shots, but in the end it did everything I asked it to do, with speed only being limited during the import phase. When I was actually editing, it was as fast as my Studio at home. I had issues with the Thunderbolt 4 cable disconnecting the storage drive a few times when I was working from the bed, and I’m not sure whether that was the cable, the drive or the Mac’s fault, but it was annoying. It was fine once I found a steady position that won’t strain the connectors. The NVME storage drive was of course very fast and worked great.

So, if all I needed was basically a 24-105mm f/4 lens and a normal camera, why do I have all that other stuff? Well, that’s because in other circumstances, like for instance yesterday, all I needed was the FE 135mm f/1.8 GM lens:

Some other day, all I will need will be the 35mm prime. Or a 90mm macro. Or a 100-400mm telephoto. Or an ultrawide. You get the picture. I have a lens not because I need every single one of them for every single occasion, but because I sometimes really really need it to do something, and that’s where I prefer to have it rather than say “damn, I wish…”. 🙂 There’s a reason why I internally call a standard zoom “a Plitvice lens”. It’s because my experience over the years showed that it’s what you need there, and you hardly need anything else. I just wish I didn’t carry all the rest of the stuff in my backpack like a pack mule the first day, “just in case”. 🙂

Luck

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You can have equipment, you can have skill, but in order for it all to come together, you sometimes need a dumbass bird to knock itself out cold at your glass door, and then pose for you half conscious. 🙂

Also, sometimes having your subject shit itself in front of the camera actually makes things better:

You just can’t make this up. 🙂

Dissatisfaction

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I’ve been thinking about something recently, how “better” isn’t really a simple metric; as mathematicians would say, it isn’t a scalar, where 5 is bigger than 2. For instance, I have a 50mm f/1.8 lens that I like a lot because it’s small and light and it’s something I can take for a walk when I have no expectations to get usable pictures, but it still has good minimum focusing distance, excellent sharpness and so on. It has issues – focusing motor is loud and slow, and it has lots of chromatic aberrations wide open on contrasty areas. Also, it doesn’t have a MF/AF switch to turn AF off quickly when it starts struggling. So, I thought about upgrading it, getting a better 50mm lens.

That’s where we encounter a problem, you see, because optically speaking nothing is that much better. If a lens is ergonomically better, it’s also bigger and heavier, not to say much more expensive, and that removes most of the reasons why I like a 50mm. So, I could get a 50mm lens that’s slightly faster, has better focusing and more mechanical switches and controls on the lens itself, but is half a kilo heavier and costs a really significant chunk of money, and let’s say I bought it. Would I carry that to a walk when I want to carry the lightest possible camera? No, of course; I’d still take the 50mm f/1.8, because it’s light and small, it’s sharp enough, versatile enough, and looks unassuming. I can get a 50mm f/2.5 G, or a similar thing from Sigma, which has better controls and it’s still small and light, but I’m actually losing aperture and therefore photographic versatility. So, basically, something that’s technically not the best lens is actually exceedingly hard to upgrade, because gains and losses don’t come in simple packages; essentially, “better” is not a simple scalar.

This creates a silly situation where my cheapest lens is apparently here to stay because it almost perfectly fits the role I have for it. It needs to be cheap, light, small and good. It’s not something I use for stuff where I need absolute image quality; I just need it to be very good, and still small enough that I still decide to take it when I go out and there doesn’t seem to be much to take pictures of. It also needs to be versatile because I have no plan and no idea what I’ll see, if anything. I want something that’s better than the iPhone, and not much more hassle to carry around. I could get some small compact camera, which is another thing to charge batteries for and with different menus I have to learn, or I could just take my old Sony, which is as small and light as a micro four thirds camera, and put the light 50mm lens on it. The image quality of that setup is honestly stellar. Versatility, with its close focusing distance and aperture, is also pretty amazing. It’s just that it focuses like shit and has no AF/MF switch on the lens, and has strong CA when I shoot into the light, which I tend to do. Slightly annoying, as flaws go, but they are soon forgotten when I open the images in Lightroom.

I already had situations where something like that would annoy me, and then I would “upgrade” to something that solved one problem by introducing five bigger ones; for instance, I upgraded the old 13” Macbook Air to a 15” Macbook Pro somewhere in 2015/2016. It was faster, had more power and memory, had much better screen, but it was bigger and heavier, and actually less usable for writing than the old Air. I actually had to get a second ultralight laptop for that, the Asus Zenbook, because the “better” machine was so much “better” that it was less functional for the main task I actually used it for. I also “upgraded” from a Mondeo to a huge Audi A6 estate once; bigger is better, right, and also the kids were small so I wanted a bigger car to carry their stuff. I got rid of that car as soon as it was practical and got something smaller and more suitable. Also, a bigger house is better until it’s so big it becomes a hassle to maintain and you actually spend time looking for family members around the place because you don’t know where they are.

If your shoes are too small, bigger is better, until they become too big, which is when bigger is worse. When you drive a car that’s a bit too small, bigger is better until you feel like you’re driving a bus.

Recently Biljana and I were buying new laptops; she got a 16” Macbook Pro, and I thought about just getting one of those for myself, and then I remembered how that ended the last time I “upgraded”, and said “fuck no”. What I got for myself is the 15” Macbook Air; I just loaded it with enough RAM and that was it. Why did I get a “worse” computer for myself? I actually didn’t, I got a better computer for what I need it for, and I got her the better computer for what she needs it for. It’s like multiplying two matrices, one of requirements and one of actual hardware specs; what you use it for, how you use it, what matters, and then multiply this with actual hardware properties of mass, size and performance.

It’s not just about equipment. Most things in life require balance, where you think you need more of something until you see what it actually means. All those ideologies that feed on resentment are a good example. Communism wanted “more equality”, and produced universal misery. Feminism wanted power for women, and broke civilization to the point where it would now be easier to burn it all down than to fix it. Inclusivity sounds great until you understand that it destroys criteria.

You see flaws and you think something has to change. Then you change it and see it’s actually worse.

Satan seems to have started this resentment thing first – oh, it’s not right that some souls are so incredibly large while the others like himself are pipsqueaks. Something should be done to make everybody equal. So he made a world that limits everybody to the same playing ground, and that obviously worked great for eliminating inequality. Oh wait…

The answer to his “Some souls are so much larger than everybody else” should have been “Good; that means we have someone to admire and strive towards.”

Women’s answer to “We live in a patriarchy” should have been “Great, we love powerful men.”

The problem with resentment is that it’s a problem that presents itself as a solution. It’s not. You can point at a laptop and say “oh, it’s so small”, as if that’s a problem, and the right answer is “of course it’s small, that’s the point”. The answer to arguments that try to foment dissatisfaction is to think whether something is actually problem, or a set of features you actually prefer. Everything comes with drawbacks. You think you could always use a few inches more of penis size, but your wife might say “please no”. She might think she could do with bigger boobs, until they start jiggling around while she’s running or exercising, at which point she’ll start complaining about that. We seem to be incredibly sensitive to dissatisfaction and inclined to think change must be an improvement, but in reality, it seems that the only thing we actually need to change in most cases is perspective.

Truth of the scene

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I’ve been watching some photography videos, and among other things some people seem to be praising the 50mm focal length endlessly; mostly for, supposedly, telling the truth about the situation before you, without either doing the wideangle distortion, or eliminating too much from the scene with telephoto isolation.

I’ve been thinking about that. Their assumption is that a photographer is supposed to show the scene as it is, to present reality without distorting it, to tell a story in ways that make you feel as if you’re a part of it.

That’s such fucking nonsense I don’t even know where to start. But first of all, 50mm doesn’t even feel like a focal length that does that. If anything, I would use an ultrawide to present the scene as I perceive it when I’m there, because I perceive so much with my peripheral vision that it’s almost exactly how I perceive a scene when I’m there, only without the geometric distortions. Something like this:

This is what it feels like to be there, on top of the island, and to look at the horizon. You see everything at once. What the 50mm approximates quite nicely is something else: the area of focused attention.

This is a 50mm frame; different island, different scene, different field of view. Does this look like something you actually see in front of you  when you’re there? Or does it look like something you’re looking at when you’re there? The latter, I’d say.

Or should we use another example?

This was also shot with a 50mm lens – same wide open aperture, even. Same evening. You think this is what my eyes saw? Or is it what I focused at and thought about?

Is photography about reporting accurately what was in front of me and telling a story about it, or is it about using bits and pieces of what’s in front of it to create a story about how I feel?

It depends on who you are as a photographer. If you’re a professional, it might be your job to tell other people’s stories, because that’s what you’re getting paid for. If you’re shooting weddings, you need to tell other people’s romantic stories for posterity, and you are merely a paid instrument that serves the purpose of achieving that. If you’re shooting a sports event for an agency, you need to report visually compelling moments from a game, create something that will draw attention to the article to be read. It’s your job to present it as visually interesting, but again, you’re telling other people’s stories, and you are as much an instrument in this as your camera. Basically, it’s paying audience first, motive second, and you and your equipment in service of that.

But I’m not a professional. Nobody is paying me to take pictures of what they want photographed. It’s all about what I want and why I want it. I might want to present the scene I experienced as accurately as possible. Or I might want to present something that drew my attention there, something most people would just walk by.

There’s absolutely nothing about the 50mm lens that I find more compelling, or more honest about presenting a scene than any other focal length. It’s basically a focal length that shows some things and omits others. This makes it no different from anything else, other than being more-less average. Want honest and complete impression of how it felt to be somewhere? Use a wide angle. Or use a telephoto, or use a normal lens, or use a macro. You think it’s not possible to use a macro or a telephoto lens to show what it’s like to be somewhere? I beg to disagree.

This is what it felt like to be there.

Also, this is what this scene felt like.

This, too, was what it felt to be there. The last one was taken with a 50mm lens. I find it no more or less honest than the second image, which was taken with an ultrawide, or the first one, taken with a 35-70mm zoom wide open on macro extenders. They all show some of my impressions, experiences and feelings. They also show something that’s in front of the lens, that may or may not be important.

There are all kinds of pretentious photographers – those with their Leicas and 50mm lenses trying to be HCB, or those with view cameras and f/64 ethos trying to be Ansel Adams, or hipsters shooting through a scratched filter on expired film, thinking that’s art. Whether something is art or not depends mostly on whether the thing you want to express is actually worth showing.

Let me show two scenes that would usually be taken with a 50mm lens, because it’s “honest”:

The first is taken with a 35mm, the second with a 135mm. Both faithfully capture a moment. In essence, if you’re going to do this kind of photography, you’re not bound to 50mm, because it’s not about the focal length or the aperture, it’s about the style and catching the moment. You don’t need a Leica and a 50mm Summicron to imitate HCB, you can be a fake person with any camera and lens. 🙂

Now that sounds like I’m pushing for authenticity, but that’s not really the case. I sometimes find it liberating to imitate someone who made something I liked, without trying to always do my specific thing, because sometimes I don’t actually know what I’m trying to do, and that’s fine. You can’t get new ideas if you always know what you’re doing and why; that’s how you produce more of the same stuff. Sometimes it’s actually fun to go somewhere and be a fake HCB or Ansel Adams. Make a postcard. Imitate something you liked. Get it out of your system. Shoot all the cliche frames first, flush them out, and then you’ll start noticing other things and having actual ideas. Using a 50mm and B&W to fake yourself out is just fine, because after you’re done taking all the fake shots that are in your head, you might actually get it out of your system enough to start doing something else. The way towards originality is often through copying all the stuff you found somewhere and liked. You might fail at copying them just right, but by being a poor copy of someone else you might actually start finding an improved version of yourself.