I took the FE 135mm f/1.8 and A7RV for a walk tonight. I thought, it there’s going to be any motives, they are going to require a long lens, and I was right. I didn’t want to take the 100-400mm, because it’s slow and I would have ran out of light much sooner.

The results were much better than I expected, because I didn’t really expect anything; the sun sets earlier now, and it was cloudy all day so I expected a grey mess, and instead I got very nice colours.

I was just thinking about something that changed in the way I take pictures.

At some point, I used to try to take pictures that would show the equipment in the most advantageous light. Partially it was because I was writing equipment reviews for a photography e-zine, but also because I subconsciously tried to avoid criticism of not being a good enough photographer to get the best out of the gear. I tried to make the pictures look as spectacular as possible, regardless of what I actually liked.

At some point, I stopped caring about that, because it made me feel stupid. Did I buy the camera to do the stuff I want to do, or did the camera buy me in order to show off its capabilities? Sure, I like making spectacular images occasionally. However, something I like making completely unspectacular images of nothing in particular because it reflects my mood, or captures some idea. However, I initially took pictures without any regard for the audience, then started taking pictures in order to prove something and impress the audience, and now I’m back at doing it for myself and not giving much thought to what anyone would say.

For instance, here are two versions of the same place, from different parts of the summer. The first is when the lavender was blooming and I was taking pictures of butterflies there with an ultra-wide lens, which is a weird thing to do, but I felt like doing it because I got bored of doing it the “right way”, with a telephoto.

The second picture is at the end of the summer. The lavender is gone, the butterflies are gone, and even the sun is gone at the end of the day, and there’s nothing there but stone walls, fence, dry grass, and emptiness. This emptiness is the subject matter of the picture – everything that was worth looking at is gone, and what remains is what caught my attention, and I photographed it in very dark black&white tonality to showcase the total, utter absence of anything meaningful.

How am I supposed to do that? By using all the colour the camera is capable of capturing? Despite the fact that there’s nothing of colour there? Am I to try to capture it in a dynamic way, making a composition that tries to engage the audience? Why? There’s nothing dynamic there. It’s exactly the static, empty remainder of a once colourful scenery that caught my eye. Photographing it in the most static way possible, that accentuates the stillness that remains when everything meaningful is gone, is the exact point of that picture. It’s not supposed to evoke colourful and dynamic sentiment, it’s supposed to evoke the emptiness one feels playing Witcher 3, visiting Kaer Mohren after the main mission is complete, and everything is as you left it, only without anything that used to give it meaning. The people are gone, the meaning is gone, but for some reason the lights are still on. You don’t photograph this with Velvia or EBX; you photograph it with the most depressing kind of Ilford B&W. It’s not supposed to showcase the gear. The gear is merely a shovel that moves the manure. It’s not the subject matter of the picture. In some pictures, the gear is the obvious part of the composition; the first thing people will ask is what gear that was taken with, because it looks spectacular. In some cases, however, the picture could be taken with anything, and the gear is supposed to be the last thing on your mind when you look at it.

It started raining here, finally. I was really worried about the vegetation at this point because everything was dying, not to mention the increasing fire hazard, with wildfires breaking out sporadically, and it was only a matter of time when everything would go up in flames.

Last evening we went out to take pictures, and the silky texture of the sky was nice, but the colours were very poor, so we processed the pictures in b&w, for the most part.

It’s Sveta Nedilja, of course. Some time ago they finished the road from Dubovica to Sveta Nedilja, which means it’s now easily within reach, but unfortunately the road no longer feels like wilderness. It’s as if the humans extended their civilization to that part now by building the road, and the feeling of the place has fundamentally changed, and not for the better. We tried walking on the paved road but soon gave up.

As you can see, I’ve been doing lots of black&white photography lately. I’ve also been doing lots of strong colour photography lately, as well. Sometimes it’s a matter of mood, and sometimes colour doesn’t actually do anything constructive, so I remove it. Sometimes, like last night, colour actually detracts from the image; it would merely draw attention to the fact that the colours don’t look “clean”. The silvery gray tones, however, were lovely.

I took the 85mm lens with me, and it was probably too tight for some of the motives. However, the ones that did work ended up being very nice compositions. 50 or even 35mm would probably work as well, or better, but that’s the thing about using primes: they force you to think about what you can do with what you have, not allowing you to just change focal length instantly if it doesn’t seem to work. Also, when they don’t work, they make you remember why.

The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art looks like a strange choice for this, since people think of it in terms of being a portrait lens, but to me, it’s mostly a lens that allows me to see in the dark while staying in the short telephoto range, and it also allows me to use depth of field to separate landscape into layers, rather than having everything sharp. In this case, however, I didn’t avail myself of this option, because the scene required everything to be sharp. I’m actually very satisfied with how the scene turned out, considering how unlucky we were with the colours. The bright part of the sunset throwing sparks turned out really well. Composing sun into a street lamp looks somewhat Instagramy, but I couldn’t resist. 🙂

I was going through some threads on the dpreview Canon R forum, since the new R8 II was announced and I wanted to see what people thought of it, and one thread in particular caught my eye. One guy literally asked what justification would one even have these days to shoot Canon.

How about, you want a 35mm camera system and you picked one of the two with the best lenses and cameras? I mean, what a stupid, arrogant question – asking people to justify their choices to you because you’re a fucking idiot who thinks people change the camera system every year based on the spec sheet of the current camera or whatever nonsense. This extremely annoyed me, and I’m in the Sony FE system myself. However, Biljana is in the Canon R system and so I know what it does. It’s absolutely excellent.

Canon R5, RF 70-200mm f/4L

So, why would you want to be in the Canon R system? Well, there’s a first-party adapter for the EF system, so all the legacy EF lenses will work great on the new cameras, and the EF system is so incredibly vast, and the lenses can be bought so cheaply used, it’s quite a gold mine of choices. Also, you can get excellent, cheap RF primes, such as the 16mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm, and the image quality from them is quite brilliant. If that’s not enough, you can get the L series primes and zooms, which are overpriced compared to Sony GM series, but they are top notch. Optically, they are perfect and I highly recommend them; I’ve seen what RF 24-105mm f/4L, RF 70-200mm f/4L, RF 135mm f/1.8L and RF 100mm f/2.8L macro do, and they are brilliant. So, you have excellent cheap options, excellent mid-range options and excellent high-end options. As far as bodies are concerned, there are plenty of entry-level options that can be bought cheaply used, such as RP or R8, and even R6 is reasonably priced. The higher-tier bodies are expensive, though, but they are excellent, and if you need them, they will do a great job. I’ve seen stellar work done with Canon entry-level stuff.

Canon RP, Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro

So, basically, you’d want to shoot Canon R because you’re an enthusiast photographer who likes great equipment, you know what you’re doing and you like getting top notch results. The same goes for Sony, for instance, since the two are very evenly matched. One is always going to be better at something and worse at something else. That’s a given. However, like in the film days when it was between Canon and Nikon, both were so good and so similar, that the choice was essentially made by getting one and just staying within the system and working with it. There were people who sold their entire system and bought the other one, and then returned the next year. We used to call them “idiots”, their pictures were usually shit and they always nitpicked about stupid shit no normal person cares about. Some things, apparently, don’t change.

One of the most absurd things I’ve heard in the context of photography recently is the fact that the most popular and effective way of scanning film is using a digital camera with a macro lens and a film holder. Essentially, instead of a linear CCD scanner they are now using a modern digital camera in order to produce a digital file from film, instead of just using the digital camera to take the picture in the first place.

However, you can’t argue with the results. My son uses this technique after attempting to resurrect some ancient Minolta SCSI scanner that produced inferior results. The “scans” produced with Sony A7RV are in fact among the best I’ve seen anywhere. Which, of course, leads to a conclusion that film is obviously a sub-set of a modern digital camera’s capability.

It’s not something that I didn’t know already, but it gives you an idea why I’m no longer tempted to play with film. Other than the nostalgic element of working with my old gear again, which is really minimal, film doesn’t actually do anything for me that I couldn’t get with my digital cameras.

Ilford Delta… sort of 🙂

Which brings us to an interesting point. I do, in fact, occasionally process my pictures in B&W, sepia or aiming for a certain look of a certain film process or a specific emulsion. That’s because those things were not merely technical limitations; sometimes they were actual artistic choices. Some things look better in black and white. Some things look better in bold, strong colours of Velvia or E100VS. Some things look better in a gentle pastel of Portra. The look of different film processes still has a place. However, since it’s all a subset of what a modern digital sensor can do, proven by the fact that the digital sensor is the best way to scan all kinds of film, it’s all a matter of a processing profile in Lightroom.

Only film can… oh.

I strongly dislike those garish, colour-faded or shifted profiles that are supposed to look like film; they look like film prints and negatives that have been left somewhere in a hot attic for 20 years, not like film as I remember it. They look like the end-result of decay of a technology that didn’t stand the test of time. I prefer to process things in ways that look like film when it’s fresh, crisp, with vivid and realistic colours, fresh from the lab and into the scanner.

Kodak EB2… not really 🙂

And the best thing about digital is that I no longer need either the lab or the scanner. I no longer need to fuss over availability or price of emulsions. I no longer have to fuss over freshness of the chemicals in a lab, or someone’s fingerprints on my slides, or dust and scratches. I’m getting a pristine, first-generation image, and then if I decide it would look better as Sensia, Velvia, T-Max or something from Ilford, it’s actually an artistic choice, not a technical necessity. However, the film isn’t dead; as long as we remember what it looked like.

Actually film; Sensia 100, MC 135mm f/2.8 Rokkor