So here we are having fun on the end of Southwold Pier. In the end I packed very light. Two Leica bodies, an M4 and a M8, and two lens, an Elmar 24mm and a Summilux 50mm together with spare memory cards, two spare rolls of Kodak Tri-X and the iPad.
The above shot was taken with the M8 and the 24mm. All processed in Lightroom Mobile on the iPad. The colour looks a little odd as I used different contrast curves for the red and blue channel plus a little desaturation. An interesting look I hope you agree.
So far most of my photography today has been with the M4, the light was overcast and constant which made using an old camera without a built in meter very easy.
Grab any digital SLR, power it on and your instantly ready to shoot.
With mirrorless that is not always the case. Recently I saw an interesting video on Youtube looking at startup times for the Leica M 240 series.
Its often said format in camera, and the video demonstrated that a card formatted in camera compared to a memory card formatted on a computer made quite a difference to start up time. So first rule format in camera. If you have to format on the computer, download SD Formatter which will do it correctly.
Lincoln Cathedral – Leica M8, 24mm Elmar-M f/3.8
So above is the original image which I produced the two prints from.
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Its virtually impossible to see the differences of software correction at this size and even on the two prints it was hard to spot. The only difference immediately obvious is a slight composition change caused by the corrected verticals.
It’s in the corners that you can see the most difference. The noise and software correction has lowered the resolution making them look a touch softer.
I made two A4 prints and I invited a few people to choose which they preferred.
The score was four to one with one undecided. The majority all preferred the uncorrected print. For myself I also preferred the uncorrected print. This test is a little unfair as in reality I would usually post process an image in between these two extremes but it has given me much to think about.
I also recommend that you occasionally print some of your work. We get too fixated on our images on the screen, wanting noise free perfection and viewing the images at 100%, 200% or even 400%.
It’s often only when you get a print in your hand you realize how good your photograph really is.
With all the adjustments available to us in modern software I decided to do an experiment with the above photo.
First I did a very minimal development. No lens correction, no noise correction, some sharpening and a slight adjustment for blown highlights and deep shadow, hardly surprising with the high contrast subject matter.
Then a tweak of extra clarity (+15 from what ever I set for the screen), then off to soft proof and print.
The second version was much more aggressive, full lens and perspective correction, heavy noise reduction and then a little slight grain added to make the noise reduction look more natural. A touch more sharpening then off to soft proof, again extra clarity for the print.
I now had two prints but which was best. Well time to ask a few people what they thought.
I like cameras that produce real RAW files, just the data please – thats what I want from my camera. Admittedly its getting harder as more and more companies include adjustments into their RAW files.
My Leica M8 and the latest Leica M (Type 240) allow adjustments but when you import the images into a product like Adobe Lightroom all these types of adjustment like lens adjustment, noise adjustment etc are all optional and are off by default. This means you can customise as you want.
You may question why you may not want these adjustments, well any of these adjustments will reduce resolution and can cause smearing, especially at the edges.
With Leica M glass, you can get issues with the edges, these old designs work well with film but digital likes the light-rays appears perpendicular to the sensor. A little adjustment is sometimes necessary but its nice with the Leica M cameras to have the choice.
Interestingly testing has shown that the Leica SL does apply a little correction to M glass that cannot be turned off. This is a same as the design team for the Leica M have really shown how it should be done.
In case your interested the above image has all adjustments including noise switched off. It was taken with an old CCD Leica M8 at 640 ISO and a slow lens set to f/5.6 to give a bit of depth of field. This has resulted in a noisy image and one which resulted in a shutter speed of only 1/8 second.
Once of the joys of small mirrorless cameras is that with no large flapping mirrors you can shoot with quite slow shutter speeds, though 1/8 of a second and no image stabilisation is pushing it.
We used to have serial, parallel, and of course keyboard and then mouse ports. Lets not forget Video and of course SCSI for high bandwidth.
Since then computers have gradually improved with display port, HDMI, USB 1, 2, oh and firewire 1, and 2.
It seems a never-ending race. Different parties pushing different standards and every few years you have to buy new devices etc.
Apple for a long time have been at the forefront of this race. Firewire which they created with Sony never got widespread adoption but has been much better then USB 1 or 2, and lets not get started with the abomination that is the USB 3, its a horrid connector with decent bandwidth.
Thunderbolt which Apple developed and handed over to Intel to push is now leading the standard to unify all these different connectors. It can carry power, video, do USB 3 and backwards. It has the same connector as USB-C and so finally we may get one connector and cable that can do everything. The only problem is now waiting for the chipsets and computers to support all of this.
When they arrive its likely we will see more computers like the new Apple MacBook with the USB-C connect that we can use for anything we want. Roll on the future.
Tuesday saw me shoot a few on location corporate portraits.
I shot jpg & RAW (NEF) using a Nikon D800 with the jpg’s going to SD card the RAW to CF card.
While still on site I uploaded the jpg’s to my iPad Pro 9.7 and into Adobe Lightroom.
I then gave them a quick rating.
Once home, I imported the RAW’s into the Desktop version and had the import process drop them into a collection and sync with Creative Cloud. Once imported and backed up I left the desktop to render full sized images and went to bed.
While in bed I grabbed the iPad and sync’ed the ratings between the jpg’s and RAW files.
I then chose my selects and picks dropped then to separate collections and set the white balance on them all.
Tomorrow night I hit my desktop and edit my picks that will be sat there waiting for me.
Now if only Adobe would let me set meta data on the iPad.
Its been a little late arriving but the Apple iPad keyboard arrived today. Most of whats been posted about it is correct, there are better keyboards, but this one is slim and works with the new connector. iOS did introduce some additional features for keyboard support and sometimes a keyboard is very useful, a number of this weeks posts were written in the pub on the new iPad Pro with keyboard.
The biggest issue I have is navigation when your outside of the applications, while you can app switch with the traditional Cmd-Tab combination and go to your iOS home screen with Cmd-H it needs more commands to navigate and sometimes your are forced to use the touch screen.
It many ways its the reverse of the issue that the Microsoft Surface has, which for some things forces you back to a keyboard. Both devices have their pluses and both their negatives.
I’ll apologize now for the iPad posts this week but that’s all your likely to get.
I like drawing even though I am not a great drawer so it’s been fun trying out the pencil. It’s a very clever device and very much like using a real pencil, allowing you to hold it on the side and shade, and control the flow with how hard you press. The next step will be using it and the Adobe Apps to edit photographs.
The new iPad Pro 9.7 has arrived and I have to admit that I am enjoying it and do not regret it in the least.
I’m still working on my editing work flow and need a image resizing tool for posting but this post was all produced, including the image processing from my Nikon V1 on my new iPad.
My web content management software crashes and fails to handle large jpegs so while writing this post in the local pub, once I had edited the above image I had to downsize it. As I do not currently software to downsize images I cheated and used the pub’s wifi to email me a version of the image. The iPad’s mail client has the ability to resize when you send the image, so that’s how I resized it
