Insane lenses, cameras which bleed awesomeness and cost as much as the National Debt

I thought since it has been a while and then some, since I have written anything about photography, I should be back. There have been elections back home and people dying just south of the border. With any such event or conflict come the reporters. Some call them the vultures of war. But it is true that in many cases they do a job that is difficult, under the most extreme conditions. And many of them never make it back. So, what about the tools they use?

Lets start off with the age old Leica rangefinder series. This has been the darling of serious (read well funded) news agencies in the early postwar years. Built like a phookin' tank, the M series brought a revolution to the 35 mm wurlde. The M pedigree continues in the sleek M8.2. Ragefinders are different from SLRs in that there is no mirror. Focussing is achieved by optimizing path length through a beam splitter. In practice, you turn a knob until two images coincide. There are fewer moving parts and hence rangefinders are quiter and more compact than SLRs. But SLRs are more versatille. Here, read this comparison.

Leica also had an SLR lineup, (which they developed with Minolta, the company that gave the wurlde the first SLR with an integrated autofocus and lens drive) the R series. But being Leica, they decided that they were too awesome for autofocus, which everyone and his grandmother has had for about 25 years. Then, they went in for a collaboration of sorts with Olympus, Panasonic and Sigma in the Four-thirds system. Except, they built one DSLR and essentially went to sleep. Oh, and they did promise a 14-150 mm ultrazoom which is not very easy to find.

Now, it seems, after much soul searching, Leica has come up with a new SLR series, the flagship being the S2. This promises to be close to medium format quality. Which will give the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III (yeah, a mouthful) quite a headache, and maybe Mamiya heartburn for its ZD medium format cameras. Medium format means larger film size, or larger sensors and is only for you if you have lots of cash to drop, maybe work for a fashion magazine or a high end porn studio and are as serious about resolution as an erection problem.

Now a leetil aside on Leica being all icky with the Four-thirds gang. Come on, Olympus is the only plucky guy putting out great cameras out there with this standard. I use an E-500 myself, which is simply lovely. They have a pro grade E3, a semipro E-30 and many, many prosumer models. Much better bang for the buck than any APS model SLR. And they have such wonderful lenses!

But lets step aside from this discussion of camera bodies and talk about a couple of lenses which have caught my attenshun. I have mentioned the Leica ultrazoom already. You would use the ultrazoom for daily "street" photography. This would be a walkabout lens with a zoom range of 10-12x. Nikons 18-200 mm antivibration lens is a runaway success. Ken Rockwell loves it. You probably will as well. This is awesome for news photography. Canon had no equivalent for a long time. But that is about to change. With this lens and an EOS 50D, I imagine you could goo up against a D300 and win, especially in static frames. But the ultrazoom lens market will have changed forever with the introduction of Tamron's 18-270 mm. This is available in EOS and Nikon mounts (typical!) and goes for less than 590$ on Amazon (not a plug). In your face Nikon/Canon! Bear in mind that point and shoots these days have 22x zoom and sell for half that of an SLR body. A good photographer with a decent P&S can get better results than a newbie with a pricey DSLR.

But more on lenses. The brightest Canon EOS lens is the 50 mm f1.2. Pricey and awesome. Nikon's brightest is a f1.4. Still awesome. Leica has an f 0.95 Noctilux lens for its M series. Yeah, breathe in and out slowly while your heart rate comes back to something decent. You can probably shoot handheld in candlelight with that piece of glass. Which means, its time to wrap up with the story of one of the fastest lenses ever made used by Stanley Kubrick.

Saraswati Pujo pictures are here

See this link..

Also, I decided to include these two pictures, which I have also loaded on Flickr, along with their captions...


I was indulging in some stage photography at the Mitali Saraswati Pujo cultural programme last weekend. During the Sarod recital, this leetil kid who was fast asleep in his pram woke up and decided to go take a walk. He strolled up to the stage and then stood enthralled by the music. I saw a wonderful photo moment here. Before his grandma could wise up to the fact that he was off and put him in the pram again, I had to take a picture. So I folded up the tripod and sat down on the ground so that I was actually below the kid's eye level. I opened the tripod at minimum extension and waited for my moment. The problem was that he was so close to the stage that I knew it would be impossible to frame him and the performers at the same time, atleast not with the lens I had. So I crossed my fingers and waited. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes (which feels like much longer with the eye on the viewfinder) he turned slightly. Then I waited a wee bit longer until he turned around completely and took this shot.

More pictures.

This is one of my favourites.. taken last week. The thing with candid shots is that you have to be a. prepared, b. have the undefinable thing called 'instinct for art' to know what is a great picture moment and what is ordinary and c. have the right equipment. I have long believed that a suitable long lens is what is needed to get the perfect shot. The problem is that long lenses tend to be somewhat dim/slow and do not give the crispness that a 40-150 lens tends to deliver. Also handheld shots with the lens fully racked out can be quite troublesome. That is why people spend so much on fast tripods like Bogen-/Manfrotto kits. I have a cheap Sunpak pan head which is neat for stationary objects but simply unsuitable for moving objects. Then again, shooting at night presents its own problems. Tricky light conditions and moving objects combine to make photographing them really difficult. The only solution is to jack up the ISO to something like 1000. I don't trust the sensor above that.. way too much noise. A really fast lens makes all the difference at that point. Antivibration, either built into the lens or the sensor is mostly useless at night. But f2.0 or wider would be very welcome.

As it turns out recently, I got to look at the Nikon 18-200 mm antivibration lens. There is nothing like it to compare on the market... I would like to see Olympus give us something like that. The problem is that Olympus makes good, but very expensive glass. But who knows, maybe I will get myself the next professional body from Olympus in two years time... and if that has built in antivibration for the sensor and a flip back display (with live-view) then that will be perfect. But expensive.

4/3rds sensors and signal/noise.

S/N or signal to noise ratio is something that spectroscopists of all brands dream about maximising. There is a small slogan on our lab whiteboard:

Sensitivity x Resolution x Convenience = Constant.

This sums up the picture very succinctly. Right now, I was busy reading a pep-me-up article about the 4/3rds system. Why did I need the pep-me-up? Because of the disgusting unwillingness of third-party companies to provide cheap tele lenses for the 4/3 mount. Undoubtedly, Nikon and Canon make brilliant cameras, but I have used an E-500 for the better part of ten months now, and I am delighted with its performance. I would not exchange it for anything short of, say a D200. But there is a lot of crap information floating around which needs to be taken with a massive truckload of salt.

1. Sensor Area:
The dimensions of different sensors are given below in mm:
Point & Shoot 2/3 = 6.6 x 8.8 Area(sq. mm) = 58.8
4/3 = 13.0 x 17.3 Area(sq. mm) = 224.9
Sigma/Foveon = 13.8 x 20.7 Area(sq. mm) = 285.66 % of 4/3 sensor area = 127
Canon APS-C (almost equivalent to Nikon APS-C) = 14.8 x 22.2 Area(sq. mm) = 328.56 % of 4/3 sensor area = 146
Full Frame = 24 x 36 Area(sq. mm) = 864 % of 4/3 sensor area = 384

Barring gigantic leaps in semiconductor technology (which I do not rule out), the trend should be towards improving the performance of existing signal processing algorithms and optics, as we seem to be stuck with small sensors for now.

Street Photography.

Question: What is street photography?
Ans: Simply put, it is taking pictures of people going about their daily business "in the street", sometimes without letting them know.
Question: Is it ethical?
Expanded question: Is it proper to take pictures of people without asking for their permission in the first place?
Ans: Ok, people, this is a personal opinion. Here goes: I believe that as long as your intentions are good, it is fine. Let me explain: by good intentions I mean that you are not trying to violate someone's privacy for profit, you are not stalking someone, you do not plan to take embarrassing or revealing pictures.
Why? Simply because an 'aware' subject is no longer a natural subject.
Discussion: of course, it is very difficult to draw a line between art and something of a more salacious nature, but I am putting some value on the personal morals of the photography.
Profit: something that I leave open to discussion. I am not a professional, so this is not an issue that I have had to deal with, but it is pretty much an open question... do you share profit, if any with the (unknowing) subjects. A rather knotty problem.
I leave this post with a couple of street pictures. Comments welcome. Also check the wikepedia entry here.