  | ||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | |||||||
 | ||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
 | ||
| | |
Some general remarks about photography by Markus Ehrenfried
Always buy the best equipment you can afford Don't get me wrong, I don't say: "Sell your car and buy a Hasselblad or Leica!" ;-) Everyone has budget restrictions and the question is, how you spend that money. Will you try to get as many lenses as you can? This will almost always be a bad decision. Rather buy one really good lens instead of two or three mediocre lenses for the same money. If you end up with only two lenses instead of five, this is absolutely okay. It doesn't mean you should always buy the most expensive stuff on the market, but usually there indeed is a connection between quality and price. Some people will tell you that it is only 'the name', 'the brand' you pay for if you spend so much more on e.g. a good Zeiss lens instead of buying some other product. This might be true in some cases, but not in general. (The very same people will probably also tell you, the difference between your BMW and their Nissan is that you were just stupid enough to pay only for the little blue-and-white label on the hood... oh well, I guess I can live with this.) Even companies like Zeiss, Leica, Nikon and Canon produce lenses which are below their average and others which are outstanding. There are very good lenses by Sigma or Tamron and there are some bad Canon lenses on the market. Read reviews on the web to get an impression if users are satisfied with a certain lens or not. The point is: if you really want to have a certain lens, don't convince yourself too easily that some inferior product will also do for you, only because you cannot afford the thing you really would like to have right now. Better wait a bit or try to get it 2nd hand. At least I never got happy if I bought some substitute product and ended up in the long run buying the stuff I wanted to have from the very beginning (-- spending in total more money than if I would have bought it right away).
Do not use zoom lenses I'm aware that this is an extreme position. But let me explain why I decided not to use zoom lenses anymore. Zoom lenses have variable focal length e.g. from 28mm to 90mm. The opposite of a zoom lens is a prime lens: it has only one focal length, e.g. 28mm. The simplest lens you can build is no lens at all. It's just a small hole. Take a piece of black cardbord and prick a small hole with a needle into it. Put it between a light source (e.g. a window) and a white wall or a white piece of paper and you will see that you can find a position where an up-side-down picture of the light source is projected onto the white surface. You will get a much better picture, if you use a real lens like e.g. a magnifying glass. Those cheap disposable single-use, one-way cameras which you hand in for processing together with the film have optics like that. Now look at the lens of your camera: it consists of several lens elements, which are arranged in a complicated way. Why, if also one single lens works? Because it improves the quality of the projected picture. A single lens will not give you a perfect picture, the picture will have distortions and 'abarrations' which can be corrected by additional lenses. You have to find an arrangement of lenses which corrects for such optical imperfections in an optimal way. But you can only optimize it for one single focal length and for one single distance. So your lens will e.g. be optimized for a focal length of 50mm and objects which are at infinity. The further you go away from these settings, the less optimized your lens system will be. Now think about our zoom lens which covers a focal length range from 28 to 90 mm. It might be optimized at 50 mm focal length, therefore it will have it's best performance there. It can never be as good as e.g. three different lenses with only one focal length (prime lenses) of 28mm, 50mm and 90mm. So, why would anybody buy a zoom if you can get three specialized lenses which perform much better (and please don't be unfair and compare a 2000 EUR Canon L-series zoom to the cheapest prime lens you can find!)? Well, you have to carry around three lenses instead of only one and you have to change them every time you would like to take a picture with a different focal length. Yes, this sometimes can be inconvenient. Yes, it is slower. Yes, there are shots you will miss while changing lenses. Don't get me wrong. Modern zoom lenses are quite good compared to the zooms which were available 15 or 20 years ago. Many of the optical problems connected with a variable focal length can be handled by stopping down the lens to a smaller aperture. You will find that zooms are always slower (= have smaller maximum aperture) than comparable prime lenses. The larger the covered focal length range is, the more apparent quality compromises will become. Carl Zeiss builds a zoom lens for the Contax G system which covers 35-70mm and everybody who used it will probably agree, that it is not on par with the excellent prime lenses for the Contax G system. Tamron builds zooms which cover 28-300mm and Tokina offers a 24-200mm zoom lens. They must know a few optical laws Zeiss is not so familiar with. If you look up reviews on the web, you will find lot's of reviews which claim that Tamron and Tokina 'Super Zooms' are wonderful lenses which give outstanding results. You will also find many reviews which claim the same for Leica, Zeiss and Hasselblad lenses. Just be aware that those reviews are not written by the same persons. ;-) I mentioned above that even a prime lens can only be optimized for one distance. This becomes especially apparent if you focus on near objects like you do in macro photography. A lens optimized for objects at infinity will have a bad performance if focused on a flower only a few centimeters away. (Well, 'bad performance' is relative: Tamron dares to sell its 'Super Zooms' 28-200mm and 28-300mm with the designation 'Macro'!). All modern macro lenses (and now I mean real macro lenses, which are always prime lenses!) have therefore so-called 'floating elements'. These 'floating elements' are lenses or groups of lenses inside the optical system which move around relative to the other lenses depending on the distance you focus on. This technology allows the construction of lenses which are 'self-correcting' in a certain sense: the optical system changes it's correction when you focus on objects in different distances. Therefore, if you want to use fast optics with high resolution, good contrast and little distortions then you have to go for prime lenses. If your demands are lower, you might very well be happy with a zoom lens. But there is another point besides optical quality which I 'discovered' later, after forcing myself to use prime lenses: changing the focal length (which is what you do when you 'zoom') doesn't only make things larger or smaller in the viewfinder, it in addition changes the perspective by altering the viewing angle which is covered by the optical system. 'Perspective' means how the size of objects change if they move towards you or away from you. It's about the proportions between objects near and far objects. This depends on the angle of view covered by your lens. If we look around, we simply estimate the distance to things which surround us by looking at how large or how small they appear. Our eyes cover a viewing angle of approx. 50°. Some cars have a little sticker on the rearview mirror which warns you that objects you see are actually closer than they appear in the mirror. How can that be? These mirrors are not flat, they are slightly curved like a cylindric surface which makes them cover a larger angle of view than a flat mirror would. If you now look at such a mirror and estimate the distance to the car on the lane next to you by looking how large it appears in the rearview mirror, you might experience a bad surprise if you change lanes because you think there is still enough space. We are used to the proportion-distance-relation produced by the 50° angle optics right and left above of our nose and if we are confronted with a different angle of view we are deceived. In photography it is exactly the same: a wide angle lens (which coveres a larger angle than ~50°) will exaggerate perspective by displaying distant objects smaller than we see them with our eyes; on a picture it will look as if there is more space between them as in reality actually is. A telephoto lens (a 'small angle lens', which covers angles smaller than ~50°) will do the opposite: it will 'compress' perspective, things will look like moved closer to each other. A lens with an opening angle compareable to our eyes is called a 'normal' lens as things will appear in 'natural' perspective, like we see them with our unarmed eyes. In small format photography (24x36mm) a normal lens with an ~50° angle has a focal length of about 45 to 50mm. Lenses with shorter focal length are wide angle lenses: a 28mm lens e.g. has a wider angle of view of about 75°. Lenses with longer focal length are 'small angle' or telephoto lenses: with an 90mm lens you cover for example an angle of only 27°. The shorter or longer the lenses are, the more pronounced also the effect of exagerrated or compressed perspective willl become. (I should perhaps remark that the angle of view depends on the film format. This is quite simple and obvious. Imagine, you just would cut out a tiny portion of your 24x36mm negative and take this as your film format. This would turn your 50mm normal lens into a strong telephoto lens. Actually this is an effect known from almost all digital SLRs: their CCDs (the light sensitive chips) are smaller than the classic 24x36mm negative size which makes a photo taken with a normal lens look like a photo taken with a telephoto lens in the 24x36mm format. It's just simple geometry. If e.g. a digital SLR 'extends' the focal length by a factor of 1.6 (because the CCD is by that factor smaller than a small format negative) a picture taken with a 50mm lens will look like a picture taken 50mm x 1.6 = 80mm lens (if we neglect depth of field effects for the moment). If you go to medium format like 6 x 6 cm the effect works in the opposite direction: an 80mm lens in medium format photography covers about the same angle as a 50mm lens in small format.) The photo below might serve as an example for the effect a wide angle lens can produce: the proportions between the Rolls-Royce and the Mini Cooper are a gross exaggeration. In reality it didn't look that extreme! Note also how stretched the trunk of the red car appears compared to its hood. (Sorry for the poor image quality, a small digital camera was the only thing I had with me on that day.)
If you use only zoom lenses, you will perhaps never develop a feeling for perspective. At least I never did. Most people turn the zoom ring only to make things larger and smaller and are totaly unaware that this also modifies the perspective. There are two ways of making things larger: 1) change the focal length, 2) get closer. If you choose the second option, you have to walk towards the object but you will keep the same perspective. If you just turn the zoom ring you will probably not even know what the focal length is when you release the shutter (unless you take the camera down and look at the little numbers engraved on the zoom ring). On the other hand: if you use prime lenses, you force yourself to a certain perspective and you will always be aware which perspective you apply to a scene as you have to deliberately change the lens if you want to change the perspective. The intentional and conscious use of perspective can tremendously improve your photos! (Of course I'm aware that there are many experienced photographers who know very well about how perspective works and use it deliberately and selective also with zoom lenses. My comments above are primarily an observation about my own habits, which are typical for someone who grew up with zoom lenses: all the time too lazy to walk around a bit and often using the zooms at their very limits (e.g. at 28mm and 90mm on my 28-90mm zoom lens), totaly ignoring that there is something in between. I perhaps never took a picture in 'normal' perspective at 50mm with my zoom lens! And it is probably unnecessary to mention that zooms usually perform especially bad at the limits of their range as they are optimized somewhere 'in the middle'.)
Take notes At least for me it is very useful to take always notes, so I can remember which lens I used, which filter, if I used an exposure correction, to which value I set the film speed, little things like that. It isn't very helpful to try something with different aperture and shutter speed settings and then being unable to identify which picture was which when I get the processed film back from the lab one week later.
Find a lab which delivers high quality and reproduceable results Most pictures are ruined in the lab. If you use decent equipment and good films and take care about exposure and focus, you should get (at least technically) good results! If the colours look strange and the contrast is odd it usually was not your fault but the lab screwed up. (This is normally only an issue if you order prints, slide films are much more consistent.) So, if you get bad prints which look too light or too grey or whatever: don't accept them. No way! They can do better! You pay for it and you want to have good results. Bug them. Get onto their nerves. Don't make it too easy for them. Ask them to phone their lab. Send the prints back to the lab and ask them to explain to you what went wrong. If they tell you that this is the best possible quality, go to another shop and order just a few prints from the very same negatives. Or even better: order some single prints from the same negatives at their lab again (these prints then usually will be better, because not the whole roll of film is printed automatically, but somebody has to take the negative into his hands and put it somewhere into the printer and look at it). Show them the difference. Ask them why they are unable to produce prints like that in the first place. THEY WILL HATE YOU FOR THAT! There are labs where you get on one day excellent prints and the next day the quality might be below average. The setting of their printers and the ingredients of their chemical soup seems to change on a daily basis. Try to find a lab which deliveres good and reproducable quality! And make life hard for them! It makes absolutely no sense to spend a lot of money on good equipment and then being satisfied with mediocre results! The whole point of photography is to get in the end good pictures and you cannot accept that your photos will be ruined during the last step! (BTW: Better labs are usually also a bit more expensive. There are some new digital printing techniques which produce outstanding quality!) If you've finally managed to find a good lab, stay with them. Don't change again just because you see somewhere a special offer.
Never be satisfied with the first picture Decide if you would like to photograph something at all. If not, don't take a picture. This sounds stupid because it is so obvious, doesn't it? At least for me it was important to learn which pictures are not worth taking. Perhaps you know this situation, too: you are at a great place and expect the pictures you take there to be just as great. Once you get them back from the lab you feel very disappointed as they are boring and 'flat' despite they basically show what you wanted to photograph. But they somehow don't 'work'. I therefore try the following: before I press the shutter all the way down I try to forget what I saw with my eyes and look only at the part of the scene which is actually visible in the viewfinder. Is this really the picture I would like to have? Surprisingly often it isn't. But perhaps it is, if I just go a few steps to the left side and take something else into the frame... Another thing you might want to try is the following: whenever you took a picture, get a few steps closer to your subject and take a second picture. My mistake is often that I don't get close enough to things. Decide afterwards which picture you like better; I found that I often liked the second one better than the one I took in the first place. Or, more general, make it just a habit to change something, like e.g. take exactly the same picture again, only with a larger or smaller aperture. I found that it always makes sense to have 'series' of pictures and often just one of them is much better than the others. (Professional photographers work exactly that way: they shoot lots of film. They never take only one single picture of something, often not only one single roll of film. I read in an old National Geographic issue, that they choose the perhaps ten or fifteen pictures which they actually publish in an article out of thousands and sometimes tenthousands of images!) Taking good pictures apparently often means: finding a way to eliminate bad pictures.
If you like a picture, try to find out, why you like it! If you browse through pictures (your own ones or those of other people) you sometimes stumble over a picture which you find magnificent. But what makes this picture being a great picture? I found that often it is very difficult to define, why some pictures 'work' and others just don't. Try to find it out. Is it the light? The composition? The perspective? I think one can learn a lot by looking at the pictures on photo.net and similar websites where people upload their best pictures and discuss about them. If you take a series of photos of basically the same motive, you might often find that one or two of them just stand out and are clearly 'better' then the other ones. Try to understand what is missing on those other shots!
| ||
| | |
 | ||||
 | ||||
| | | | |
| ||
 | ||
| | |
| | |