Levelling the field

I find that cameras from different manufacturers make pictures which 'look' different. This is not too apparent if you present individual pictures as prints or on a screen, but when you put a collection together the appearances become obvious. Maybe I'm more sensitive to subtle differences than some. I stopped using 'off brand' lenses because they gave a different look to the camera manufacturer's lenses. Both colour and contrast are affected. So it is with camera sensors. Even if they are used in raw it can be more trouble than it's worth trying to match them up - and impossible for me.

This has been brought home to me once more after a visit to a poultry show. My first session saw a distinct difference between the shots made with a DSLR, which coped well with the fluorescent lighting, and the Fuji compact which fared less well. Second time out I'd replaced the Fuji with a Nikon compact and the files were a closer match. Last Sunday I had my Fuji mirrorless camera with me, which is supposedly taking over the world from DSLRs. It might be a great camera to use, and it performs well in the 'image quality' stakes, but... In the poultry shed there's a colour cast which is a real pain to correct (white balance adjustment doesn't seem to manage it) to anywhere near the Nikon files.

Before correction

After correction (as best as I could manage)

It's all fine and dandy having a small, quiet, unobtrusive camera that makes sharp and detailed pictures. If they turn out to have horrible colours (especially skin tones) there's not much point to the damned thing. The Fujis are now up for sale. A shame, because it really would be nice to cut things down to two lightweight bodies and a handful of lenses.

My plan to cut the weight down is to use single focal length lenses when I need to shoot in available light, and 'nasty' variable aperture zooms when I don't. Camera geeks sneer at these 'consumer' lenses because they aren't ultra-sharp - and because they are made from composite materials rather than metal. This obsession with ultimate image quality (which seems to be all about resolution and sharpness, and nothing to do with what the pictures look like) and build quality eludes me.

There is an easy way to get round these colour inconsistencies. Remove the colour! Although I prefer not to shoot in digital black and white making conversions from a mixture of digital formats can draw a set together with a consistent look. This being the strategy I have decided to adopt for the pictures I've been making in my friend's tackle shop. Not every shot that works in colour works in black and white though, so the edit of the set alters. This is how it stands so far:

View larger here.

While I enjoy making these documentary type pictures I'm not convinced they are as strong as some of my other stuff. I think this sort of photography requires more commitment than I can summon up to do it justice - and it shows.

---

Tom Wood says;

I think I understand why I like Tom Wood's approach to photography.

“The important thing is not to have an aim, I just go out the door and, whatever’s real, I try and deal with that.”
Source.

"When the stuff is too journalistic and documentary then it is journalism, if it is too conceptual and arty then that is another thing, but where the two meet - that is interesting."
Source.

None of which is as easy as it sounds...

The trade off or balance between art and documentary is ever present for me. I firmly believe that it is photography's ability to record, to make documents, that is it's greatest strength. Which is not to say that those documents can't go be something more.

I now regret that I didn't make an effort to document the demolition of the mill by the canal. When I moved to the village in the late 1960s and on until the eighties it was a major employer in the area - my mum worked there. It closed as a weaving mill in the nineties and became a factory shop. When I walked by it last week the last of it was gone. Soon it will be another housing estate. Maybe someone else has recorded its passing in full. The few pictures I have taken are gathered together here.

Once more I find myself struggling to come to terms with a 'small' camera. Daft as it sounds I prefer the results I get from my fishing compact to the mirrorless Fuji X-E2 I've been using for some time. Although I've finally managed to set it up so that I can use it more intuitively and quickly I still find a it frustrates. It's odd that little things you take for granted with a DSLR, in my case manually override the focus away from a focus point, can't be done with these 'lesser' cameras. It's handy if you are trying to shoot through a grill or branches at a subject in the background, and it's really useful when photographing people who are moving around faster than you can shift the focus point. Far better than letting the camera select where to focus too.

Mirrorless evangelists bang on about how much more accurate the focusing is with their cameras, and how superb the visual aids are for manually focussing. Yeah, but you can't have manual and auto focus at the same time. What's more the visual aids are only any use if you have time to use them. I also hate the way (at least on the Fuji) they only work in a zoomed in view of the centre of the frame. So you carefully frame, twist the focus ring and get a cropped and zoomed picture to look at - if the subject is off-centre you have to re-frame. By the time you have the subject in focus and zoomed out again you have to recompose. It's a faff. I don't care what anyone says, it's much easier (and quicker) to manually focus with the big, bright optical viewfinder of a DSLR.

Why is the picture above in black and white? Just because I don't think the Fuji makes a good job of photographing people. Skin colours always look too pinky-red and its texture unnaturally smooth. The texture thing even comes across in monochrome conversions. The woman's bare arm at the left of the frame looks like a prosthetic! All a great shame because the camera is small, light and fun and discreet to use. Maybe I should sell a kidney and buy a Leica?

For outdoor shots without people, however, it does a decent job,although I'm not sure the colours are as 'rich' as I get from my Nikons (even the compact). I might persevere with it for my latest project-without-end. Recently I've taken to wandering round the bits of the village I've never had any reason to visit in all the years I've lived here. Which makes them visually surprising and interesting to me.

Sure enough I've got funny looks and been asked what I'm photographing and why. My answers almost always result in a bemused shaking of the head!

"Are you photographing that bench?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why not?"

Which is where I come back to searching for that intersection between documentary and art which Tom Wood mentions. It's all about trying to avoid the clichés used in photojournalism, and the pretentiousness of art photography. For me it's about the information in the pictures allied with formal arrangements. I'm also coming to favour making pictures which need time to understand rather than give everything at a glance. Pictures where small details matter. Which isn't easy...

---

Technical stuff

When it comes to computers I work on a 'need to know' basis. Which means I know how to switch them on and off and use the software I use. How they work or what the bits in the box are I neither know nor care. I am aware when they are full up though. Mine was pretty much full a year ago but by deleting all the absolutely rubbish photos I'd got stored on it I managed to keep it going. In one respect this was good in that it made me more discerning about my pictures. As the end approached it also made me more discerning about what I took photographs of - almost to the point of shooting like in the days of film!

Gratuitous picture to break page up.

Eventually the inevitable occurred and last week I had to either get a new PC or have a bigger hard drive installed. Either way I was going to have to save my Lightroom catalogue (among other things) and reinstall it on the new drive. Having opted for the cheaper alternative I now have my original machine running as it used to, albeit a little faster, but with loads of room for more rubbish photos! Getting Lightroom back and working proved surprisingly painless. With that done I thought that an upgrade to the latest version was in order. This was not done without trepidation when I bought the upgrade. The installation went smoothly and once more I had everything back as it should be and looking familiar. Naturally enough I was prompted to install another upgrade to deal with cameras released since Lightroom 5 had been launched - including my small 'fishing' camera meaning I no longer have to convert the raw files to DNGs before Lightroom will ingest them. This also was simple to do.

What I have found is that the upgrade was well worth it. Some sliders have disappeared, but more have replaced them. I have been most impressed by the defringing controls. Previously I struggled to remove fringing from shots taken with my little camera. It involved a lot of messing about, but one click pretty much deals with anything. If it doesn't shoving one slider across finishes the job. It's like magic!

There are other features I doubt I'll ever use, and some changes I still have to get my head round to use as intuitively as before but that'll come. None of this makes my pictures any better, they just look better processed...

Yesterday was wet, with the rain promised to clear in the afternoon. Which it did, providing that fleeting period when the skies are leaden in one direction and the sun bright in the other. Depending on wind strength this can last a while or be over in a few minutes. Having had white balance difficulties with the smaller camera earlier in the week I'd shifted the setting from auto to sunny. It didn't seem to make much difference and everything looked a bit blue. It took me a while to twig that this was a white balance issue for some reason, but once I did and I made a slight adjustment the grey skies lost the vivid dark blue and looked much more like they had in reality. D'oh.

The beach can usually be relied on for a lost ball or two. With the total number of balls photographed now over 250 I'm open to more experimentation. Using a small camera that can focus close gives opportunities DSLRs don't. After playing safe for a couple of shots I got in much tighter and cropped the ball in the foreground. It's a bit soft, but as a picture it's different to all the other ball pictures I've made.

I tried some other ideas on a bit of a ball I found later, but it didn't work out. It did give me something to try another time though. After four years of taking pictures of balls it's nice to know I haven't exhausted all the posibilities yet.

There is no great depth or meaning to these ball pictures (although I could invent some arty-farty BS I suppose!!), they're a way of keeping the creative juices flowing. Of making me think. Of finding ways to work with limited resources. A sort of visual and technical work out to try and keep in tune.

While I was wandering around ideas for the parking theme began to crystallise at last. Nothing to show yet. Although I think I now have an idea where to go with it. Maybe.

---

Looking for a certain ratio

Life is much simpler when there are no choices. Just when I'd decided that it was 3:2 for me I get sucked in by the variable aspect ratio options that non-DSLRs offer. Influenced by looking at panoramic pictures the other day and at square format shots in the Tim Hetherington documentary and a Fay Godwin book since then I set off for a wander round the wood with a camera set to shoot 16:9.

Bizarrely the first pictures I made in this format were in portrait orientation. It seemed to suit the tree trunks. I even cropped them narrower on the PC. I can imagine a series of such pictures. So having imagined it I'll abandon the idea before taking it further. Having had the idea is enough...

Then I used the non-DSLR low to the ground, using the rear screen for composing and the in built virtual horizon to level the camera. It's in situations like this that these smaller cameras are more functional than DSLRs. Sure saves neck ache. A flipout touch-screen for selecting the focus point would have been even better. Close up work with small cameras seems easy too.

I kept messing about at ground level in this letter-box format before switching to 1:1 for something I saw. Whether I gave up too easily or whether there wasn't a picture there in the first place I'm not sure. I do know that there are times when trying to find the picture becomes futile. When things click you work the scene for some time then everything gels. Other times you try all the angles and it just seems to get worse and worse.

I stuck with the square frame for a while. Trying hard not to always use it with a centrally located subject. It's a difficult ratio to work with. One that some people seem to be attuned to in the way that I feel at ease with 3:2 - which I have heard called too wide. For flat landscapes such as those which surround me the even wider 16:9 ratio seems to work quite well. It allows the elimination of too much empty sky and stresses the flatness while still allowing details to be seen.

 For all this experimentation the picture I like best from the short session was made in 3:2 ratio. A big limitation of small cameras which rely on electronic screens is their small batteries. Although it had read fully charged when I set out the damned thing died on me in no time. So it was a good job I'd slung a big heavy DSLR over the other shoulder. Even if it did have a 105mm lens on it.

Why do I like this picture best? It's got less to do with the aspect ratio than the content, which should always be the case. Too much time can be wasted playing around with technical aspects when it's subject matter that trumps them every time. There was an element of luck involved too. In fact I didn't notice the bee on the flower I'd focused on until I got the file on the computer. But it's the bee that makes the picture, although it's not its subject - which is the modern farmed landscape with it's monoculture practices, 'tramlines' and electricity pylons.

There was a video tutorial about composition posted on TalkPhotography the other day which almost got me annoyed. It was all sound advice for making pictures with immediate impact. Fine for journalistic or editorial use. get in close, fill the frame, isolate the subject and all that jazz. That'll make stunning pictures with a high 'wow factor' quotient all right. But that sort of picture is all too easily forgotten. I prefer to look at, and try to make (although they are far more difficult to make than punchy pictures), pictures which need time to come to terms with, which are sometimes visually complex, pictures in which the subject might not be what is in the picture but which the picture refers to or illustrates obliquely. Not that I succeed very often.

More pics.

---

Roll on winter

It must be my naturally miserable nature but I prefer winter time for wandering around the beach and seafront. You'd think that on a warm sunny afternoon with hundreds of people about there'd be lots going on that might make for interesting pictures. To my eyes, if nobody else's, the masses all seem to be doing nothing of interest. Eating, sleeping, wandering aimlessly. My hat's off to those photographers who do find pictures among the thronging hordes. I find people engaged in some activity make for far better picture opportunities. In winter people at the beach are generally there to do something - collect coal, ride horses, kitesurf - rather than idly 'enjoy' themselves.

Again I've been forsaking the viewfinder for the low-level benefits of the rear screen. When my knees worked properly I could have stayed partially squatted to get the camera level with the horse's head. Now I don't have to. Another so-sop picture but the colours work nicely and I don't care if the highlights are blown. It's almost level!

Another low level shot was taken when the shapes of the bowls and the plates attracted me. A bit of a nothing picture but when the girl came into the frame it sort of made a picture. One which I like because, although far less interesting, reminds me of this one.

The day's take away point is: Give up trying to take pictures of people enjoying the seaside in the sun and stick to making pictures of 'stuff' and empty spaces.

---