Cameras, The Early years.

"My first camera was a Minolta SR-T101. It came with a 55mm lens, which has a narrower depth of focus and angle of view than the 35mm lenses that many of the other students at the San Francisco Art Institute were using. I couldn't afford a new lens, so I worked with this lens for about a year. It was a good learning experience. You can be sloppy with a wide-angle lens. The 55mm made me very aware of what I was putting in the frame. It was good discipline in learning how to see and compose. The 55mm had very little distortion. If I wanted a close-up picture I stepped up to the subject and if I wanted a wider shot I stepped back. After that first year, when I decided that I was serious about photography, I reluctantly sold the Minolta and got a Nikon F with a 35mm lens. The other students at the school were using a variety of cameras, but the most common were Nikons and Leicas."

Annie Leibovitz At Work, Random House 2008

I have often tried to recall what my first camera was. I think it was a Kodak Instamatic which took 126 cartridge films, and rotating flashcubes. I often looked at the ads in the magazines during the mid 70s in awe, at the latest Nikon Fs, and the magnificent Olympus OM1 cameras and could not understand how SLRs worked. I had no concept of the internal prisms that bend light, and the interchangeable lenses, the multi-patterned metering systems, depth of field previews etc. It was all technically impossible as far as I was concerned. I was happy with my little Instamatic.

My next camera was a Yashica MG1 which was a might good camera! It was a manual focus rangefinder, with metal construction and an electronic leaf shutter. I really loved the way it operated, and was a 'serious' after the plasticky Kodak. I realised that making good clear photographs involved more than just pressing the shutter. You had to focus and set the exposure at the same time. No more Cloudy of Sunny settings. Things were getting technical, like F-stops, with unimaginable numbers, F1.8, 5.6, 11, 16 etc...It made no sense at all, but it felt good. Distance marking on the lens barrel was easy to decipher, but F-Stops?!

Several years later, my father passed me a vintage 1960s Zeiss Ikonta, which had a folding bellows lens and a knurled knob for advancing 120 film. It was a beaut. Everything about it harks back to a time of elegance in design, form and function. Precision built.

It was useless. I could not make a decent photograph with it. In fact, I don't think I ever attempted. The viewfinder had fungus haze. The shutter was inaccurate. I still have it, the Ikonta. It sits longingly on a shelf as a showpiece of what it was once, a picture making machine. The shutter has now frozen due to years of inactivity. The knurled knob is stiff for lack of lubrication, and the rangefinder mechanism is all but jammed.

As far I I'm concerned, these were REAL cameras. The photographer had to work at camera handling, setting exposure and focus in the fly. None of those plastic electronic black boxes manufacturers churned out one a month under a different guise in the mid 80-to 90s. We are so spoilt today. Auto focus, auto exposure, face detection, smile detection, even pet detection!

Horrors!

A passion rekindled

(Click on the photographs to enlarge)

I recently 'acquired' a vintage 1971 film camera from eBay, an 35mm Olympus 35RD rangefinder and just had it back from Camera City repairs in Fitzrovia, just off Museum Street. It had taken them, actually, him, Pany, a stocky built, possibly Greek descent-of-a guy 3 weeks to clean and service the sticky shutter blades, and now it triggers smoothly with a purposeful 'click' you can barely hear. Just perfect for street photography.


I still have several rolls of expired (read 2007) colour and black&white film stored in my fridge sharing the same compartment with my acidophilus tablets, so I promptly loaded a roll of Fuji NPH400 and went out with no expectation whatsoever, except I had 36 shots to prove the worth of this little charming camera.



It was a Saturday and possibly the worst Saturday this year. The winds blew horizontal rain pellets across your face, and any umbrella opened was rendered useless within minutes. Still, the brave must shop, and we ended up at Primark in Oxford Street (which is another story) bargain hunting for Christmas goodies, (yes, we shop cheap). Incidentally, one can buy a full tuxedo suit for £14 and 6 pairs of socks for £2, trendy 'Che' T-shirts for £3.50. I kid you not. (Hah! Petaling Street, you've got a serious rival).


The focusing on the 35RD is accomplished with a 1/4 turn, short and smooth and the rangefinder patch is still bright and clear of fungus etc. What I find great about using this machine is the size and stealth ability, that is, I can be right up against people's faces and no one really notices me. Ah, it's just a toy camera, its an old silvery thingy, its retro. Most of all, its quiet. Much more quiet than the clunky M8 but not as low pitched as the M6, which I think is still the third king of stealth of all time. (The quietest and quickest camera I have used is the Konica Hexar 35, followed by the Digilux 2)



I am presently in KL and just managed to get the roll of film developed and scanned onto a CD. for £4.00. The scan was way too over saturated by the film quality came through as expected. I was astounded by the sharpness and clarity of the 40mm F1.7 lens! Exposure seemed to be accurate as well and the selective focusing technique produced great bokeh too. The shots reproduced here were grab shots, pre-focussed and random, to capture the shoppers with their umbrellas on Oxford Street, so there are lots of movement and fluidity in the photographs. Most were shot from the hip which is a technique I often use in street photography.






Since then I have loaded another roll of film to finish off, possibly today in KL. Hmm, perhaps this little film revival of mine may just last a little longer, a passion enkindled 30 years ago by the draw of the tiny Olympus Trip 35 my late father gave me.

Photographic Practice : The Print Principle

I have been lazy. I have not printed a decent image for over 18 months, yes, that's one and a half years (!) Don't get me wrong, I have taken lots of photographs in that period, but I admit, I have not properly printed a proof or exhibition print till today. What a revival feeling it brought!

3 years ago, I purchased a used Epson R1800 photo printer from Michael Freeman, and boy it was a brilliant machine, capable of printing 13" x 19" prints with archival colour inks. It sits sadly on one side of my study, untouched for that long, whilst I happily churned away with mediocre stuff on my HP all-in-one desktop printer, that's even got wireless connectivity.

This afternoon, for fear of clogged print heads damaging the Epson, I took myself to task of resurrecting 'the machine' and ran a sample A4 word document through it. It sort of made all the correct noises, beeping and clicking like a bleeding R2D2, and finally the paper was spewed out at the front...nothing...just very feint lines of blue, red and black spots..arrgh! Nevertheless, I persevered and ran two, no three cleaning cycles on it, before it produced a perfect test print. That took over 30 minutes.

I still have 3 boxes of A3 matt-heavyweight paper stacked under my desk, so I decided to make proof prints of some of my photographs from my current 'on-going' (yea, for 4 years) project titled LUMINA ( watch out for it, its a stunner, he says).



Well., the boy's pleased. I'm a happy bunny and all that.

Colours were slightly off, needs tweaking, but who cares, for now. I remembered Ralph Gibson saying in a workshop with him in 2002 that he often makes rough prints of his works and sticks them on his wall, and everyday, he would stare at them, until he gets bored, trying to understand each image, as he makes some more. Perhaps I'll make a point of doing just that. Images that dwell in hard drives and memory cards are next to useless. You make them and forget about them. I have tons of these, and only revert to good memory to pick them out, despite a fairly efficient filing system I have developed.

The other thing to note is this.

Camera manufacturers are constantly shoving up our noses with higher megapixel counts, 5 million, 7 million, 10 million, 13 million, 21 million, 24 million,..and, like suckers, we consumers only know one thing, the bigger, higher, more..the better and we are slurping these machines up like there's no tomorrow. Yes, big is good, for commercial photographers who print posters.

When was the last time you made a large print?

I mean, large, not 5" x 7" or 8" x 10". No, not A4 or A3 even. Earlier this year, I selected 4 of my black and white architectural studies taken in a French monastery last year to be enlarged to about 1 m x 1.5 m, something like 3 feet x 5 feet to grace a showroom wall in KL. The resolution was stunning at that size and the original files came from a 5-million pixel camera. At first, I had reservations about going that large but after some initial patch testing, I thought it would hold up, and it certainly did. I hope the ID guy was pleased.



A good 8 - 10 MP DSLR would be sufficient to produce a typical magazine spread ie. A3 size, and depending on the quality of lens resolution you have, you can go larger. I did say DSLR, and not compact digitals of equivalent MP count. These are just not in the same league due to technical constraints of sensors but I won't go into all that.

So, my take is this. If all you are ever going to do are 5"x 7"s and the occasional A4 or A3 prints, you could save a packet by looking out for older DSLRs, from 2 or 3 years ago, around 6 - 8 MPs, and smile!

Final Destination

Last week, there were several aptly scenarios for a 'Final Destination' headline, what with the Wimbledon Championships also, going on a stones throw away at SW19. Over the warm and sunny weekend, I found time away from sipping Pimms No.1 on my tiny balcony watching the river activities before me, to clear my second bathroom. You see, this 6' x 7' box conveniently called a bathroom, with no window had been my perfect 'darkroom' for many years, from 1999 to around 2006. Since I have practically 'gave up the Ghost' on using film, I decided to re-visit the shelf where one normally stacks half-emptied shampoos and conditioners, and bubble-bath (yes, I do have my fetish..) bottles, to clear out the 'other' inhabitants there : Agfa chemicals.

I primarily used Agfa Rodinol, Sistan and Agefix on Fujifilm Neopan 400s when I was that way inclined. It seems they are all pass their shelf lifes by now. How sad. I still have several boxes of Ilford 12 x 16 paper and some fantastic artpaper from Eastern Europe to which I have forgotten the name of for now. My Axomat enlarger and baseboard (again, Eastern European) still occupies space in my wardrobe, amidst the other rubbish I have gathered over the years.

(PS>Anyone wants a brilliant Meopta Axomat enlarger with a Nikkor lens, please email me!)

I do not actually miss hand-processing film and printing. The setting up and prep were a real pain. Also, the amount of fresh water used in the washing process was insane and unjustifiable in my mind. I used to fill up the bath tub with cold icy water and used that as a dunking bath for the prints straight from the fixer tray which sits on a large MDF board over the bath tub. And then there's the clearing up and washing afterwards. Of course, not breathing the chemical fumes also add years to one's lifespan, they say.

Now where's the Pimms...?

Meeting of GR-reat minds!

Last weekend, several brave souls from way and beyond ventured out into the freezing, damp and overcast weather of London to meet at The Bridge Lounge, a trendy pub restaurant overlooking Tower Bridge on Tooley Street (including me!). This was the 2nd (I missed the first one) meeting of the GR people : photo-enthusiast and users of the Ricoh GR/GX kind, a fringe and fetish-like group of compact camera users increasingly hard to find, these days..

The Culprit users!

Organised by Pavel Kudrys (Slovakian, founder of the Ricoh Forum) and Cristi, an avid Ricoh user and blogger at the Ricoh GR-Diary, this get-together was supposed to provide feedback to the Ricoh people of what actual users of their products think of their products, (albeit, a very small sample size, apparently the GR following is HUGE in Japan). Unfortunately the chaps from Ricoh Germany could not make it, but we had Frazer, the owner of Alpha Digital Services, the main distributor of Ricoh cameras in the UK joining us which was fantastic. For more from the day and forthcoming products, visit Cristi's blog.

The Culprit!

I blogged about the GRD 2 earlier here, here and here about what this little marvel can do. Although a small sensor camera, the handling is first rate and the performance from its fixed 28mm f2.8 (35mm equivalent) lens is superb for enlargements. It also shoots square 1:1 format in RAW, 4:3, and 3:2 aspects which is ideal for me. Best of all, its real slim and pocketable for everyday use. I never leave home without it!

GRD 2 : I can see clearly now

I received the GV2 external viewfinder yesterday in the post. I had expected it to turn up much later due to the shortage of accessories from Ricoh UK, however I got an email confirmation from the online retailer a couple of days ago, and things were looking up. So I was delighted when the postman delivered a small padded envelope to my door. Initial impressions are positive, the construction is metal, and similar to the GRD2 body material. It is small and is very compact, and shows a brightline frame corresponding to 28mm field of view (in 35mm jargon). There are 4 small markings within the 28mm brightline indicating a square 1:1 section to aid composition at that setting.

The great thing about the GV2 (unlike the GV1) is that the pop-up flash is still usable, with the flick of a switch on the left side.


Because of my shortsightedness, I prefer to use the external finder to compose my shots, traditionally, so that my eye does not need to change focus off the main scene to the LCD and back again, causing strain and missed opportunities. In addition, I can turn off the LCD display entirely, thus extending battery life.

GRD 2 : Testing, testing...

18 December 2007

Fairground attraction

I was out walking after a lunch meeting in the West End and came across this colourful carousel in Leicester Square. There is always a funfair in the square in December. It was very cold and so only a couple of horses were filled. I love to photograph fairgrounds, there are so many angles to look at and the hand painted rides are great. I decided to set the GRD2 on 1:1 view and too this shot above. Please click on the image to enlarge.I actually like the square format very much, reminding me of an old Rollei TLR I have on my shelf gathering dust. Some compositions feel 'at home' with this format and I will experiment more.

16 December 2007

(Click on each picture for a larger version)

A dry but very cold (3C) weekend brought me out to the streets of Central London to try out the capabilities of the Ricoh GRD 2, and also it was an excuse to do some Christmas browsing at the stores. I like the gifts they sell at Muji, especially the toys, they are simple and mainly made of wood, which beats the electronic offerings of so many other stores nowadays.

I am quite familiar with the 28mm experience especially in street shots and internal spaces. Focusing is adequate in good light, but I found it to be slightly slow in dark surroundings and outdoors in the night. I had the Focus Assist Light function turned off as I often found this feature to be more annoying than helpful.

Also walked past the Godiva chocolate shop window and had to photograph this enticing display..mmm those that know me know that I love chocolate!

The GRD 2 has a very close focus Macro mode, about 2 cm from the lens. Having downloaded the files on onto my iMac, I noticed that the colour accuracy was very good, much better than the Canon digicams I am used to. Perhaps I use the colourspace setting of Adobe RGB, which is native on my Photoshop application. Adobe RGB space has a wider colour gamut than sRGB space which the majority of digicams use. The other discovery is that the Auto White Balance is again more accurate that Canon digicams in daylight and tungsten environments.

For these outdoor photographs (above and below, and new banner) I was shooting handheld with -1.0EV at 200ISO on Aperture Priority at f3.5. This gave me speeds around 1/15s to 1/25s which I thought was sufficiently fast for steady shots. The above image was taken at Covent Garden Market. The Christmas decorations inside the market is like an ice palace with cool blue lights and icicle chandeliers hanging off the ceiling.

(Click on the each picture to see a larger version)

The photo above show Thomas Schütte's sculpture on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square and the Nordic spruce tree which is a gift from the Mayor of Oslo to the British every year for the last 61 years since 1947. It is over 20 metres tall. The gift of the tree by the Norwegians is in gratitude to the British support of Norway during WW2. Carolers sing under the tree every evening in December up to Christmas and it becomes a focal point for tourists during this time of the year. It was very cold this evening, inspite of this, a crowd of over 100 people turned up to greet and sing along with the assembled carolers. Shooting in RAW allows me to adjust the exposure and detail of the image and I applaud Ricoh for opting for the DNG standard of RAW files. This is a universal standard and can be opened in Photoshop without going through proprietory software.

...more later.