I was taking a few pictures with the fisheye lens today; I didn’t use it in quite a while, and the release of the new Sony fisheye made me think about it.

It’s easy to overdo it, so I use it sparingly, but when I think about it, some of my favourites over the years were made with the fisheye, including two big prints in my home.

I was also thinking about other things I use sparingly or not at all, and I thought of a camera bag. I seem to have made a full circle: initially I had only one camera body and one lens, and the camera bag didn’t make much sense, so I didn’t have it. I would just carry the camera in my hand or around my neck. Then I got multiple lenses and started carrying them all in a camera bag until I got so sick of it, that now I returned to a simple camera with one lens setup. The camera bag is just so incredibly inconvenient, and I use it only for transporting gear to a different location securely.

We went for a late evening walk yesterday; I took the A7CR with the FE 50mm f/2.5 G with me, the light setup, just in case light happened, which didn’t look likely considering how late it was in the day. Well, ten points to Gryffindor for being prepared, I guess. 🙂

Today there’s lots of smoke in the air, because there’s a very nasty wildfire burning in Herzegovina and the wind is bringing it all the way here. This means the sunset will be spectacular today, but I might not go out and take pictures if the smoke is too much. We’ll see.

Edit:

Nothing too spectacular, I’m afraid, but still worth catching. The smoke was too low in the atmosphere to catch the glow.

I was just thinking about what kind of equipment I like.

After all, I had all kinds of cameras, lenses and other gear, and I do have my preferences. It’s just hard to put in a single statement, but if I had to, I’d say I love it when the gear isn’t fragile.

That doesn’t mean I bang my stuff up. In fact, I have a lens from 1984 that, according to my son, is in the best condition he ever saw for something anywhere near as old. By fragility, I don’t necessarily mean resistance to physical abuse, although I certainly prefer lenses and cameras not to damage easily with normal use. I mean the ability to use them within their full spectrum of nominal functionality with excellent results. This means that I can open the aperture and still get excellent sharpness and no stupid artefacts. It means being able to use the lens or camera in the rain, not because I would deliberately do so, but because I might get rained on by accident when I’m on a hike somewhere.

Guess how much water I had on both lens and camera here 🙂

It also means being able to shoot into the sun with the lens without flare ruining the shot. That’s what I mean by fragility, or lack thereof. A fragile lens will work great when everything is perfect, and fall apart when conditions are not ideal. I like working in non-ideal conditions; that’s usually where the best pictures are. If I have to baby the camera or the lens and use them only where they are comfortable, I will get rid of them in short order. Sometimes I will walk in strong sunlight and the camera will get very hot; or I will shoot in frosty conditions, or I’ll get caught by persistent rain. I’ll have sunlight that causes flare, chromatic aberrations and all kinds of nonsense in lesser optics. I’ll take pictures hand-held in deep dark, with stars visible in the sky. I want the equipment to follow me there and not crack under pressure. When I need to crank up the ISO, I want the image to still look great after I process it. When I need to open the aperture, I want the corners to still be sharp. If the lens is f/1.4, I want it to be great at f/1.4. I hate having to have mental markers, such as “don’t use this lens at these settings because it’s shit wide open and it’s shit at the longer end”. Thanks, but no thanks. A lens that has those caveats is fragile. A tripod or a tripod head that loses rigidity with my heaviest lens on my heaviest camera is fragile. A camera that can’t do really long exposures because the image falls apart from noise, or I can’t shoot in strong sunlight because it doesn’t have a viewfinder and I don’t see anything on the LCD in those conditions – thanks, but no thanks. If I want some function that I rarely use, I want the camera to have it, if it’s something reasonable like long exposure noise reduction (in other words, dark frame subtraction). Entry-level cameras are notorious for omitting such features, which is why I don’t like entry level cameras. It’s not snobbery; it’s the fact that some things will be omitted from those models because it’s expected that the expected user base won’t need them. It’s not that I think that those cameras can’t make great pictures.

Olympus E-PL1

I made great pictures with Olympus E-PL1, which is the entriest-level of all the entry-level plasticky thingies. That’s how I learned that I don’t like fragile cameras, because that one was fragile. I would need something, and it wouldn’t have it. I would use some function like ISO 1600, and it would fall apart. There was no viewfinder, and I challenge anyone to try taking pictures without one at noon on the southern side of Hvar in broad daylight. If you can’t compose the image because you see nothing on the screen, let alone focus precisely, then what is the point? Aim in the general direction of the island and hope it works? I swore I’ll never buy such a camera again, and I didn’t. It annoyed me so much that I almost gave up photography. That’s why I roll my eyes when people show that entry level cameras can make great photos. I know. Been there, done that. The problem is, they make great photos when all the stars align just right – you can see on the screen, you can use base ISO, there’s enough light but not too much, or you can use a tripod… how about making great photos when I want to make them, not when the camera is happy?

Hand-held at blue hour, wide open.

Fragility means a macro lens that’s soft and terrible when focused on infinity, and a landscape lens that has terrible minimum focusing distance, and it’s terrible at those conditions. It’s the opposite of robustness. Robustness doesn’t mean the lens will be able to do everything, but if it’s rated as f/4, you can shoot it at f/4 and get good results, not blurry mess. If it’s 24-105mm, you can shoot at both ends and get good results. I don’t expect it to be as good at closeup as a macro lens, but it needs to do well enough for me to pull off a shot in a pinch and not throw it away in frustration at home, when I see what it actually looks like.

Shot with what I had, wide open.

I expect a landscape lens to pull off a portrait when my wife steps into the frame. I know it won’t match the 85mm f/1.4, but it needs to do well enough. If it’s rated at a certain aperture and a certain focal length range, and if it focuses from 30cm to infinity, you can bet I will use it at all those extremes, and I expect it to do a good job. That’s the kind of lens I like.

Last night we went out for a walk and it was still so hot and humid that we ended up drenched in sweat even though we walked very slowly and took pictures. This summer is one of the worst I remember in the last decade, honestly; mostly because the heat was just relentless for such a long period of time. Also, the people are pests. We took pictures of a hedgehog who was minding its own business, and a pack of feral children crowded us while making such amounts of noise that the poor critter jumped from the meter high wall rather than to have anything to do with them. I hope they didn’t tear it apart and eat it raw after we left.

The only normal persons we encountered during that walk were that hedgehog and a few cats who were minding their own business and looked conscious. The humans looked like the night of the living dead.

Other than the zombies, we took some OK pictures; I took the 50mm f/1.2, Biljana took the 85mm f/1.8, and the motives were good for both. I wished I had the 135mm for the hedgehog, but it was such a rare encounter I couldn’t plan for it, and the 50mm was good for everything else. I processed some of them in b&w, and some in strong colour; both seems to work.

I love that big 50mm. It’s a heavy brick, but boy does it make great pictures in the dark.