One Grain Amongst the Storm

Yesternight, I was caught red-handed drooling at the Nikon photographic lens section of B&H Photo Video online store by the Moral Police, a.k.a., the wife. A chill befell freezing everything alive wherein the unasked questions hung in the mid air betwixt her eyeballs and mine:

Why must I be a photographer, if it doesn’t earn me a dime?

Can the family withstand yet another financial typhoon?

And the most incriminating:  If I can’t be a good photographer with the lenses I own, what is the guarantee that the fifth or the sixth piece of glass will make me a better photographer?

Hard pressed to produce anything meaningful, my vocal chords sputtered like a carburetor dying in the middle of a submerged street. I was reminded of Fra Lippo Lippi, the Victorian monk and painter, immortalized in Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologue, who was caught wandering by the night guards at ‘an alley’s end where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar’ in a rather colourful section of the city at midnight. Caught in an apocalyptic moment in his life, Lippi burst forth against the hypocrisy of religious leaders who ordained that indulgence in human form and flesh was sinful, both in life and art. He forcefully argued how the cloistered life of celibacy imposed upon him was unnatural and against human elements, and how, he was actually being truthful to youth, life and nature.

Similarly, will the earth shatter if I falter at seductive displays of voluptuous glass and spend a lecherous moment or two at pages of such intent? More so, for a toothless tiger like me whose credit card limits can barely scrape the bottoms of a single pro-class Nikkor! Whether I’ll ever be able to lay my hands on the triumvirate of 12-24 f/2.8, 24-70 f/2.8 and 70-200 f/2.8 VR, and whether my pictures will hang in galleries of highest class across the continents, should not be a puzzle requiring the prowess of an IBM Deep Blue, but aspiring for the image quality easily achieved by the top class photographic lenses makes me work all the more harder with my paltry set of kit lenses and primes.

Thus, being the owner of kit-class lenses (and balls), I quickly hit the ctrl-alt-delete

combination and slipped in the permafrost of my bed, hoping to wander across the tabooed catalogues in eons of future, and quietly resolving to be a real photographer, someday.

“Flaming (also known as bashing) is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users”

-Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

Recently, one of the myriads of non-descript crevices I keep drifting in on the net, ‘officially’ charged me with ‘flaming’ for a rather mundane discussion on competing models of Nikon and Canon cameras. Funnily though, the Original Poster of the thread was rather thankful to me about the suggestions I’d made. I was amused and perturbed at the same time as I’ve been a netizen since the text-only days of the Internet and I take pride in my netiquette. All along, I have carefully chosen my words, syntax and ideas, and thought twice before hitting the Post button. I am sure most folks will be hard put to recollect a single instance where I may have rubbed a co-participant the wrong way, leave alone ‘flaming’.

Now, those who know me well will tell you how impassioned I may get while defending my beliefs.  One of my seasoned friends and a senior tirelessly exhorts me against the hamartia. However, even he would admit that it takes some knocking to get me worked up and start spewing flames on the adversary. The source of consternation in the aforesaid incident, therefore, was neither the absurdity of the charge leveled against me, nor the absence or presence of worth in the models of certain brand, but the unwritten ‘rules of the forum’ which implied that the participants, lowly beings that they were, dare not raise an eyebrow to the cloths of the Emperor, a.k.a. the Administrator. And since the Emperor chanced to be the owner of certain brand of photographic equipment, anyone found even breathing against it would be charged with Capital Crime!

Since the summons had arrived in a private message, and it was condescendingly pointed out to me too, I offered that the proceedings be held in open court, in full public view of the participants of the forum. The appeal vanished as soon as it was posted, quite like my earlier ‘flaming’ expressions. Frustrated, I posted a ‘Goodbye’ message for the benefit of the odd sympathiser, who I believed had a right to the knowledge of my impending future disappearance. This also vanished as if charmed!

Well, the moral of the story is that while in the dingier sections of the fishmarket, you not only have to love the Administrator’s Dog, but the entire present, past and the future clan of the Dog! Fortunately,  few keystrokes away from the vain fiefdoms, I can surrender myself to the grace of communities like Photo.net. And although I have no plans of embracing silence anytime soon, words from an old poem by T. S. Eliot well up in my mind from nowhere:

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

Death

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

Death

Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning

Death

Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog

By this grace dissolved in place…. 

Not many moons ago, Ole Jørgen Liodden was an ace Canon photographer. Armed with his ‘tank’, a.k.a the EOS-1Ds Mark III, he scoured the Arctic permafrost for sparring polar bears. Quest for frolicking king penguins had him lying on his belly on icy South Georgia seashores. Lodged knee-deep in unforgiving snow, he stretched the autofocus limits of many a Canon, shooting sea gulls, hawk owls and hunting eagles. He returned again and again with stunning images of wildlife that stunned the folks and the professionals alike.

Suddenly though, the old companionship crumbled like a sheet of ice into bottomless pits. OJL sold his ‘tank’, 5D Mark II, recently acquired 7D along with the assortment ‘L’ lenses, in favour of the duo of Nikon D3S and D3X, paired with gold-rimmed Nikkors. The latter was admittedly a ‘gift’ from ‘the Dark Side’. But the Nikon apparatus overwhelmed him by its extremely fast and precise autofocus and superior picture quality that he could achieve in a single day. The decision to adopt Nikon for his future photographic journey was easy to take.

The community is choked with contrasting emotions of the two camps. For those on Canon’s side, the treachery couldn’t have been blacker and the venom spouted is suitably worded. The former Canon ambassador became a Nikon whore overnight. There are, of course, insinuations of a banal deal. Canon was incensed enough to expunge all references to the fallen photographer from its Canon Professional Network pages.

For those of Nikon it was a natural thing to do. The good photographer needed to equip himself with a superior imaging system like D3S/X to realise his full potentials.

Regardless of what OJL has to offer, the net is rife with speculation about his extreme step. He was apparently miffed by being bypassed for the field tests of Canon 1D Mark IV. Eventually he would receive a beta body for a brief period with a sealed memory card chamber, with no permissions to download the images or the video for viewing in full, leaving him unsure of the final picture quality. Canon appears to have become touchy about their products getting negative publicity while still in throes of birth, more so after the 1Ds Mark III faltered in the autofocus department. However, Canon’s strategy seems questionable since the early products are put in the hands of no mean photographers. As the high-caliber reviewers stumble upon the glitches instinctively, it would be ideal not to have them handcuffed for the welfare of all, and that includes the end-users.

OJL’s switch to Nikon should also be viewed in the light of his conviction that a photographer should never be fettered to equipment and technology. Prior to the switch and before Canon erased all signs of him from their CPN websites, there were hints of a photographer larger than the brand itself, on the page titled, ‘What’s in your kitbag?: Ole Jørgen Liodden’:

“To only think about equipment and technology is not the right track to go down….If you want to build up a name for yourself, you have to take pictures that you want, not like other photographers or how your customers want you to take them. Take your pictures from your inner visions, with your own angles and your own touch.”

Towards the end of March, of what is known as ‘the annual financial closing’, the accidental banker in me braces for the approaching storm with clinched fists and gritted teeth. It’s payback time for the mounds of litter left around by the careful staff all along the year, ‘willful default’ of the considerate borrowers, neglect of the prescient depositors, hieroglyphics of multi-layered taxes imposed by the State and the Cardinal Sin of unachieved targets. The twister eventually dumps me barely breathing in the middle of megatons of printouts which must be arranged in precise sets bound for differing destinations. And just as I seem to be regaining control of my limbs, the Statutory Auditors descend like bolts of lightning.

For the past two years or so I have been more of a taxidermist than a photographer. Every now and then I have unpacked the bags, extracted the bodies and lenses from their respective shells, brushed off the dust, recharged the batteries, put in fresh sacs of silica gels and repacked and returned the stuff to the cupboard. I have doggedly though stuck to photography forums and have made insignificant noises now and then about the odd photograph uploaded or a new DSLR launched. But come March, eyeballs start threatening to detach themselves from the gray goo behind and vanish into thin vapour. Sleeping like a log seems to be the inevitable call of nature rather than sleepy logins into forums.

I get overwhelmed by anxious mails and queries of the photographic community unexposed to the vagaries of financial closings. I am equally touched by the emotions of those speculating whether I toppled off a cliff trying to capture a perfect sunset and have become feast unto the eagles, or my foot lost hold of an aging parapet and the fall blew my head into an unrecognizable mess forcing the police to donate the body to the local medical college for a small fee. It’s a routine, I assure all of them, and I’ll soon venture into wilderness with a camera slung around my neck, leaving the sordid world of figures behind. And I’ll be back on the forums soon discussing why the mesmerizing pair of green eyes of the Afghan Girl is more haunting than the quizzical stare of Monalisa; and how the Monk who sold his Nikon to buy Canon gear will return one day inconsolable in his repentance!

They say they understand but they know well enough that the question of livelihood has probably swallowed the passion of a photographer for good.

Getting married? Be sure the photographer you choose is able to tell her F-stops from tripods! Especially, be wary of morons prowling around with slow Canons! For the life of you, DO NOT miss the following video:

Actually, I owe the title to Scott Kelby rather than the ongoing Nikon Marketing teaser where something ‘Nikon’ is claiming to be Sexy, Hollywood and Marco Polo, all rolled into one, with Innovation thrown somewhere in between. I could have waited for a couple of days for the mystery to reveal itself with the countdown cards, each with a companion trait, but I figured it is unlikely to make any difference to my final thoughts on the subject. And the credit to Scott Kelby? Well, I’ve stolen this trick of attracting readers with ‘fake titles’ from his famous book ‘Digital Photography’!

Don’t go away just yet. It is not really that bad. I will take a plunge right into the middle of Nikon, Sex, Hollywood, Marco Polo and all.

The Nippon Kogaku K. K. started operations as early as 1917. And while they have not been quite the originator or the innovator the way Leica or Pentax have been, they have perfected and produced some of the finest cameras and lenses the world has ever seen. They started out making lenses for Leica and Contax and ventured into manufacturing their own ‘Rangefinders’ and small cameras. The ‘F’, launched in 1959, is famed to have triggered a revolution in single lens reflex cameras. indeed, the successive ‘F’ series have gained cult status among professional photographers and photojournalists the world over, thanks to their ruggedness and system compatibility. Their mettle has been tested from the Antarctic to the Sahara, and even in the extremities of space, as exemplified by the numerous voyages aboard NASA spacecrafts. Even after the world went digital, Nikons have retained their class and fan following. The D2XS, and recently the D3S, were chosen by NASA for photographic documentation of their unearthly ventures. Going by their feats, I wouldn’t have been shocked if Nikon cameras had gone ahead and claimed, “I am Neil Armstrong”, instead. But to have made it a bit innovative, or rather sexed it up a bit with a Holywood twist to it, what about:

My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the Cameras….

As it turns out though, photographic excellence may not coexist with financial excellence. The fate of legends like Kodak and Pentax are rather sordid sagas of competition, marketing and psychological warfare. In the duopolistic scramble between Nikon and Canon today, Nikon cannot afford to lull themselves into complacency of success they are having with their DSLR cameras. They are frantically trying to gain a foothold in the curiously lost battle of compact cameras where Canon have been ruling, thanks to a slew of series and models which are good at what they do and are considered ‘sexy’ too, courtesy catchy shapes and colours. In fact, one of Canon’s famous series is even named ‘SX’, only a vowel short of the magic word! Big deal. Nikon now seem to have decided being rather direct about the sex part of the whole stinking thing. And within the sexy frame you have flashes of facts, fables and fictions a la Marco Polo. Very, very romantic!

Alas, if only the photographic equipment makers focused on producing cameras that remained sizable in the hands of photographers rather than chipmunks! If only the cameras just took great pictures instead of trying to churn out Holywood flicks, cutting out cheap audio albums, being internet browsers, turning into GPS navigators and mobile phone devices! If only, the cameras were left alone being cameras rather than being converted into skimpy, touchy, feely, sexy ipods with all modes merged into a single Sex-Priority mode that would auto-sense the sex of a subject and shoot even before you switched it on! Trust the Marketing gurus to induce you into asking just the same.

Never have the DSLR-bashers had it so good. Finally, there is the ultimate in point-and-shoot with sensors nearly as large as those in four-thirds DSLR cameras. And there is an electronic viewfinder to scan the world in ‘realtime’. Really high-tech. Why, you can change the lenses too! It is called EVIL, or the Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens camera. At the time of writing this the Olympus E-P1, a.k.a. the “PEN”, and the Panasonic GF1 are already hogging the eyeballs in the Internet space, if not the real world markets. Samsung too seems to have thrown the hat in the ring with the NX-10.

The whopping contraction in size has been acquired by hacking off the mirror mechanism altogether. In a typical SLR body, the light beams are reflected towards a pentaprism/pentamirror which in turn directs them through the viewfinder. Before you have the feeling that this is an elegy on the bygone mirror and prism, I would like to point out that many pros are given to use “mirror up” in their DSLR’s before tripping the shutter for avoiding vibrations caused by the snapping movement of the mirror. Thus, mirrors do have a negative side effect. Is this a reason to rejoice, then?

Not really. Although reluctantly, I am willing to let go the pristine real-life view of the subjects before I take the image in favour of the real-time electronic view, if it offers better and sharper pictures. Theoretically, it does. But it also seriously reduces the size of the camera. The problem is, they have bloated the sensor (for the standards of a compact camera)! And bigger sensors need bigger lenses! A typical zoom lens has several groups of glass elements inside them. Precision mechanisms and long barrels are required to move these elements to change the focal length. What is the point if I still have to snap a converter and use huge professional lenses to dwarfish bodies. How do they remain petite anymore? If the industry has to mint an entire series of miniaturised lenses for the EVIL format, what is the point in having a large sensor?

The evolution from Film to Digital SLRs has been a gradual one. The likes of Nikon started with the DX format (1.5X crop factor to 35mm) when they launched the D1 in 1999 and it was not till 2007 when they came up with D3, their first FX (full format 35mm) DSLR. It should not take one long to realize that the professionals looking for higher quality look up to full format cameras rather than the cropped DX version.

Yes, small is beautiful. But excuse me, it somehow appears to be a case of ‘Honey I shrunk the DSLR’! Just as everything in life, you set the limit somewhere. Can you really enjoy a HD movie on the small screen of your mobile phone? How effective are the mega dollar thrillers like the Star War series, the Jurassic Park saga or recently, the Avtar, on your home television panels?

I am not seeking to establish that the new EVIL format will fail. Far from it, we should witness the established players like Nikon and Canon flooding the market with their models sooner than later. The technology, however, is poised to replace the point-and-shoot, or more specifically, the advanced compact cameras –or “bridge cameras”, if you have it that way — rather than the DSLRs. Incidentally, the existing entry level DSLRs have already been shrunk to manageable sizes for those who hate the bulk of the bigger brethren of the race. You only have to try holding a Nikon D3000 or a Canon 1000D in you hands to realize this. Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop the www.wired.com from coming up with “5 reasons to ditch your Digital SLR” :

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/five-reasons-you-should-ditch-your-dslr/

Its an amazing piece of yellow journalism, indeed.

I caused some heartburn when I wrote ‘Go, get a DSLR‘ and I’m still busy wiping foreign froth off my face! A couple of connoisseurs who couldn’t bring themselves to descend low enough to put in a comment on this blog, called me long distance to tell me how very backward looking I was. DSLRs will be passé in a year or two, I was told, and I probably was not ready to acknowledge the advancements in technology. Was I an ostritch or something? See, what happened to all those doggedly sticking to film photography!

Sure enough. Unfortunately and fortunately, the goo doesn’t stick to the face of someone who drools at the scent of a new gadget! I, who have kept the date with Intel, chipset to chipset and with the nth upgrade to my console am none the God! Bricks to polyphonic mobiles, Razrs to Iphones, I’ve had them all: my battered bank account would bear testimony to that. Suddenly now I am the retro fool who wants to screech his gramophones and rewind his ISO 100 film.

Surprisingly, the very fact that I advocate Digital rather than Film SLRs is conveniently lost on my detractors. Why, if I am the rabid purist, did I not stick to Film SLRs? Come on, I will make it simple and tell you that! In case of Digital vs Film, two overpowering facts in favour of digital photography sealed the fate of the latter. One is the power of ‘instant review’. The second is, of course, the power of ‘delete’ and shoot ‘anew’ without any jolt to your wallet. I can throw in the power of increased dynamic range and ISO sensitivity also for good measure but this will sooner turn out to be a never ending slugfest of film vs. Digital. This has been made possible because of the innovative use of digital sensors in place of disposable films. Apart from this, nothing else has changed for the equipment otherwise refered to as “Single Lens Reflex” cameras. The same however does not hold true for the case of DSLR vs point-and-shoot cameras. With more compact camera models than there are stars in the Galaxy, none of them has been able to match the might of life-sized sensors and appendable lenses of a DSLR. My point is, I am not blind to new developments in technology but the broth has to settle before I start sipping it off my daily cup.

But this may change and how! The world is waiting with baited breath the advent of the Apple Tablet, “a cross between an iPhone and a laptop” with a 10 inch high resolution screen. Now, this is getting interesting! What if the huge facia could act as a lens with integrated glass elements and aperture, feeding an enormous sensor behind! That would certainly beat the Hasselblads, or wait, the resolutions of even View Cameras! And when that happens, I will be there indeed, in the overnight queue to grab my piece of the Tablet that will put the Nikon D3s and Canon 1Ds of this world to shame. Meanwhile, go get a Tablet that is a phone, a media player, a personal computer and an image snapping device all magically rolled into one!

Everyone has legs, everyone walks. Do some people walk better than others? You bet! Hundreds of languages would bear testimony to the thousands of rhymes alluded to mesmerizing walks of the damsels, ladies, princesses, queens…. I hope I don’t get sued by some overzealous feminists. I’ll throw in the gaits of heroes, warriors and princes for good measure….

Talking of walking, it occurs to me that some people can walk faster, as does, Usain Bolt. Excuse me, you say, isn’t Bolt a sprinter? I’d insist however that Bolt’s kind of moving his body at those amazing speeds is a kind of walking. Further, some people have mastered stunning arts, all thanks to their legs. Gymnasts, ballet dancers, ski-dancers, karate kids and kick-boxers are all a visual feast to watch (except probably the last two types who are best enjoyed from a respectable distance).

Why am I going mad with this legs thing? You see, folks, I am trying to pull an analogy. All I want to do is to juxtapose the legs with cameras that most everyone has in their hands most of their waking times these days. Yes, I am talking of those tiny holes in most mobile phones. Many of those mocams, to coin a word, are being put to service profusely. You see the point? Just as the accident of your having legs doesn’t make you a great walker (forgive me if you regularly kill dozens with that feat -pun intended), your ownership of a mocam doesn’t make you an Ansel Adams. The reason I am mad with this mocamtography thing (sorry for coining again) is that I stumbled upon this wannabe-learn-photography thing on the web address of a respectable institution where the writer had meticulously put images shot off a mocam, a point-and-shoot and a DSLR, neatly in a row, and argued that there really wasn’t any difference among the shots of these three at a smaller scale and you need to buy an SLR camera only if you intended to send your images to the National Geographic or something like that, which you obviously don’t.

He could not have been more wrong.

If you harbour even the faintest desire of learning photography, go get a DSLR. Hold it, you think, they don’t come cheap! But friends, just as money doesn’t grow on trees, photography doesn’t grow on mocams! Whoever said there are free lunches in the world?

Photography is capturing of Light in a controlled manner onto a photosensitive material such as a film or a censor as the digital SLR’s have. The light is controlled by two critical mechanisms called the shutter and the aperture. The shutter is like a curtain that has the censor covered and opens for a short determined period to allow the light to hit the censor. The amount of time may vary from an hour to 10,000th of a second or could be more either way. The aperture consists of a number of blades arranged to form circular openings of variable shape. The hole as it changes its size varies the quantity of light entering and hitting the censor in a given period. Because of the behaviour of light as perceived by various tenets of Physics, the size of opening of the aperture has significant impact on the depth of focus that an image would have. There is a third equally important element called ISO Sensitivity of the film/censor and together the three have the final say on how a photograph is going to look. However, since the advent of digital photography, the ISO Sensitivity of a censor can be changed on the fly, and we need to be less and less worried about it as compared to the olden days when one had to rush to a dark room, carefully take out the film and pop in a roll having a different ISO sensitivity. However, clean noise free images at high ISOs (think 6400 where 100 is normal) are the reason why those BIG DSLR’s with BIG Dollar price tags exist, apart form many other matters that you would eventually discover.

Following is a brief list of why absolutely you must have an SLR or a DSLR if you are serious about your photography. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the cameras simply as SLR and Consumer Cameras, with mocams only being a severely low rung adaptation of the latter.

1. Consumer cameras are Auto-everything. If this sounds great then they were invented just for folks like you! Go ahead and enjoy them. However, if you want to take control of your composition, think of an SLR which will normally allow you to take charge of the exposure, metering, shutter speed, aperture, ISO sensitivity and even the flash. In short, you have to decide whether you instruct the camera most of the time or the camera instructs you all the time!

2. Human eye is a highly complex organ which can dynamically focus at near or far objects in a twinkle, in different lighting situations. Cameras, although an imitation, are not that lucky. The act of focusing in a camera is achieved by the lens attached or fixed to it. Till date, no company has invented a lens which will work perfectly in every situation. SLR cameras, or Single Lens Reflex Cameras, being cameras with detachable lens system allow for switching the lens to your heart’s content, limited probably only by the size of your wallet. I have, of course, established and reputed companies like Nikon and Canon on my mind when I say that. Talking of lenses, SLR lenses also have provision for attaching critical filters like a polarizer.

3. With an SLR camera you are actually seeing the world through the lens and there is absolutely no shutter lag when you pull the trigger. On the contrary, the consumer cameras send a tiny replay of the scene on their LCD screens and have various degrees of shutter lags, depending upon their cost. The latter also have an annoying tendency of freezing for several seconds while they are struggling to save the file.

4. Thanks to the marketing blizzards, most consumer cameras are bursting with mega pixels today. However, their censor sizes unfortunately remain minuscule. This brings in serious picture quality issues like noise, over-processing and unreal colours.

5. Most consumer cameras have their apertures starting at F8 or more. It is the impact of the severe crop factor of their censors. You can forget about seriously isolating your subjects. Thus even if some models allow for manual control, the impact of aperture related controls over the image remains pathetic at best.

6. Due to the minuscule scale mechanisms of consumer cameras, low shutter speeds are required to compensate for the inherent small aperture openings in low lights. It makes shooting even simple objects difficult unless you use the on-camera flash, which may result in really flat and unsavoury images.

So, invoking my analogy again, if you would rather use your legs to just keep moving yourself around in an unconcerned way, you would be doing something very natural. However, if you want to accomplish better than that and thus be remembered, learn interesting uses. Lift yourself above ordinary pointing your mobile camera and shooting your subjects dead!

(Post moved from my other blog)