Lock-down Learnings

Tim Tucker June 9, 2020

I came into 2020 wanting to migrate to Medium Format digital for most of my landscape work, and having just started to build up a system, was then almost immediately forced into lock-down like the rest of the world. So what happens when you plan to become more slow, methodical and deliberate in your landscape photography, but then are suddenly prevented from going outside for any recreational purpose at all, apart from exercise?

Learning & Development

One of the wonderful things about photography is there is always some new to learn or improve upon. Being in lockdown presents a massive opportunity to spend some time developing our knowledge and skills. It could be practical, like learning macro photography at home, or learning aspects of our favourite processing software that we have never tried or feel could be improved on. There are many resources online, from a variety of photographers and organisations who have reduced the cost or given away their online course and resources for free, at least temporarily.

I chose to watch some of my favourite photographers on YouTube, but also some online training for software and various webinars. I also took a paid academic course in Visual Literacy. That led me to read Secret Knowledge by David Hockney, a very interesting and thought-provoking book on the use of optics in the creation of paintings and drawings over the centuries.

My 1 week, 1 walk, 1 prime project

Restricted to one walk a day, which was of necessity walking the dog, I decided to use this as my daily photographic opportunity as well. To keep to the letter and the spirit of the law, as well as deal with the practicalities of having a dog in tow, I had to impose some further restrictions on my photography.

So, I came up with the idea that for each week I would take one prime lens on my lightest camera, no filter, no tripod, in fact nothing else other than a spare battery. I would be shooting handheld on-the-go and within ten minutes or so walk from home, early in the morning.

This was an almost complete reversal of how I saw my photographic approach going at the beginning of the year. After four weeks, just as the restrictions were about to be eased in my area, I realised I had learned a massive amount from this, and it’s probably something I am going to continue to do even after the restrictions are completely lifted. Carrying such light gear can be very liberating.

Kit evaluation & organisation

I had already sold a lot of gear to fund my move to medium format, but I took the time to take another look and pare-down or change-out further than I had before.

In particular, I realised that focal lengths in the ‘normal’ range I don’t really find that useful. I actually sold a lens as result of this process. Although it was a really good lens, I realised why I didn’t use it often and therefore I didn’t need to hang on to it.

I also spent some time organising my gear, so that I can now lay my hands on those stepping rings, tripod spares, filter adapter rings etc., that I would previously struggle to retrieve from various bags and cupboards. Now I have everything organised and labelled.

One minor but particularly beneficial thing was finding and using these labels to organise my 100mm square filters in two Mindshift pouches. Now I don’t have to go through the exercise of pulling out four grads in order to find the one that is actually needed!

Quick Edits

I also learned that just five minutes in Capture One working on an image could produce something significantly more satisfying than the out-of-camera jpegs. That’s not to say that there is anything wrong with those, just that a few quick edits, such as adding a subtle vignette, could really lift an image out of the ordinary. Thinking like this made me consider more the post-processing as I was taking the picture, for example it there was something distracting around the edge of the frame that I could not easily avoid or remove, like a blade of grass or a twig, I would consider whether I would clone this out later or simply mask it a little with a vignette. Although I shoot usually shoot RAW, in my normal way-of-working I typically don’t do ‘quick edits’ preferring to start with the image as ‘finished’ as possible in-camera and then refine it further in Capture One and Photoshop..

Other ISOs are available

Temporarily at least, I stopped being a base-ISO shooter. Of course, base-ISO is rarely an issue when shooting off a tripod, but handheld you have to raise the ISO to deal with camera shake, wind, gloomy woodlands or just dingy days.

Get on with it

Speed - as mentioned this was something I was doing whilst on a walk, so I felt that I could not spend too long composing/taking each image, so I was forcing myself to ‘see’ the image and execute it very quickly.

Intimate landscapes

I don’t live in a particular scenic area, although there is countryside all around, there are no sweeping vista or mountain ranges. But, over these few weeks I think I developed a bit of an eye for the ‘intimate’ landscape - a flower in a hedgerow, frosty leaves etc. I think taking a simpler approach, not being weighed down by equipment or expectations, helped me to see these things more clearly.

Rinse & Repeat

Of course often I often had the opportunity to repeat or try again with the same subject the next day. I also began to make a list of local subjects that are worth exploring further with a more deliberate approach, when I am able to. Some of these I know will be better at other times of the year, so I am effectively building a pipeline of ‘projects’ that I can tackle from home and when conditions are ideal.

Goodbye 'nifty-fifty'

Tim Tucker May 13, 2020

The ‘nifty-fifty’ - that ubiquitous ‘standard’ lens - comes from the days when 50mm became the ‘normal’ lens for 35mm film cameras. Normal meant equivalent to the diagonal of the film format so, strictly speaking it should not have been 50 at all, but more like 43mm. Almost all manufacturers though produced 50mm lenses and marketed them as ‘standard’ lenses, with only the occasional 45mm popping up,

50mm has a lot going for it. A simple optical formula and high sales volumes meant these were easy and cheap to produce and usually (but not always) achieved spectacular image quality and fast maximum apertures. This started in a time before zoom lenses that were both affordable and of decent quality existed, and hence the ‘nifty-fifty’s were knocked out in tremendous volume.

This meant, and sometimes still means, that very often the basic 50mm f/1.8 or f/2.0 was/is the cheapest lens in a manufacturers range, yet offers outstanding image quality. Today you can find ‘kit’ zoom lenses for less than the price of a 50mm, but there is no comparison in terms of quality or speed.

You can also find more exotic and expensive f/1.2 and f/1.4 versions, and over the years I have owned a few of these, including a Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AiS (gorgeous) and later a 58mm f/1.4G (expensive). But today, I don’t own one at all. Although I do have one zoom that covers that range, I find I am most often using that at 24 or 80mm for most of the work that I do.

So why is that? Well, the ‘standard’ focal length is said (arguably) to cover approximately the same field of view as human vision. In other words, when I take an image at this focal length, or thereabouts, the camera records the scene pretty much as a person would if they stood at that same point. Now, I think this works great for some types of imagery, for example street, reportage and documentary work. Here, the photographer is very often seeking to record a scene with people interacting, either with each other or objects such as tools or machinery. We actually want to put the viewer in the position to view the scene as they would as if they were physically there.

The narrative in these types of images comes from the subjects’ facial expressions and the objects around them. All this tells the story, by, for example, making us smile, frown or wonder what is happening, what just happened, or what happened next. It actually helps that we are literally recording a moment in time as a bystander might have witnessed it. Deviating away from that ‘normal’ view of the world can actually become a distraction.

But, for me, when I am shooting a landscape, I am not aiming just to record what is there, I am not trying to reproduce the scene. Instead, I aim to interpret the scene in my own way, and present it to the viewer based on what I feel at the time. So, I want to be able to create compositions that emphasise some elements and de-emphasise others, that demonstrate scale, that connect the foreground to the middle to the far, that add drama, or a sense of calm. I don’t necessarily, and only rarely, want to create a record of what anyone standing in that same spot would see.

So good-bye, nifty-fifty.

Perspective Explained

Tim Tucker May 10, 2020

Perspective and the effect focal length has on it is something many photographers don’t always seem to fully understand, at least in my experience. Often there is a belief that having a wide-ranging zoom gives you access to different perspectives, which, strictly speaking, is not the case.

Let’s start with this example of a situation we are probably all familiar with this, and is a common perspective 'problem', photographically speaking:

imagine you are trying to take a picture of a multi-story building across a city street. You probably use a wide angle lens (or the wide angle end of your zoom) and you tilt the camera upwards, to get the whole building in the composition.

In the resulting image, the building seems to lean away, because the top of the building is further away, and so appears smaller, relative to the bottom of the building which the camera is much closer to (sometimes called perspective distortion, but it's really just...well, perspective).

So lets suppose you decide to move to a more distant point-of-view. In order to keep the same or similar composition as before, you now switch to a telephoto lens. As you are now further away, the subject-to-camera distances to the top and the bottom of the building are more similar, and so the building does not appear to lean as much (or at all, if you are far enough away).

So what happens to the building now if we stay where we are, but refit our wide angle lens? Of course our composition is altered due to the increased field-of-view, and the building looks smaller in the frame. But the building still doesn't lean - because our point-of-view hasn't changed since the telephoto shot, even though we are now using the same lens as when we were close to it.

Changing lens has not altered the perspective - because we already fixed the perspective ‘distortion’ by moving further away. If we crop this image down to match the composition we took with our telephoto, both images will have identical composition and perspective, the latter being because we didn't change our point-of-view.

You can test this yourself by:

Take a picture with a wide angle lens.
Without changing position, change to a telephoto lens, or zoom in, and take another picture.
Now take the first picture and crop it to roughly match the composition in the second picture.

You will notice that the telephoto and cropped wide-angle images look the same. The relative sizes of elements of the scene and the relationships between them look exactly the same.

Below is a quick example I made using Artemis Directors Viewfinder on my phone. The first two are taken from the same spot, first simulating a wide angle lens and the second simulating a mild telephoto lens.

Wide Angle Crop

A crop from the wide angle image to approximately match the telehoto shot above - notice how the relative positions and sizes of all the elements in the scene are identical to the telephoto shot.

To summarise:

Camera position relative to the scene is the only factor that determines perspective (point-of-view) i.e. relative size and position of objects in the scene. It is also one element that determines our composition.
Lens focal length is another element that determines our composition (field-of-view) i.e. what is included/excluded from the scene, but does not alter perspective.

Point 2 is why I personally prefer primes to zooms for creative work. With zooms, you can get lazy, by standing in one spot and zooming in and out to alter the composition, but may not think as much about changing your perspective.

Disclaimer

Unless I explicit state otherwise, I do not receive any incentive or inducement from the vendor/distributor of any of the products mentioned.

However, some of the links provided may be affiliate links from which I may earn a small commission which helps me to run this website.

Why 'Medium Format' for landscapes?

Tim Tucker May 10, 2020

Over the years, in film I’ve have shot mainly in 35mm, but in the late 90’s, just prior to the onslaught of digital, I moved to medium format and then briefly to 5x4 film.

Almost 2 decades after switching to digital, and after a couple of years reflection, I realise now that my landscape photography, or at least my satisfaction with it, reached a height during those medium format years. Simply put, my ‘hit-rate’ (i.e. proportion of images I was happy with) has never been as high as it was from a roll of 120 film.

This is not based on the film format or quality, it’s about the whole end-to-end process. In fact, I am more than satisfied with the print quality I can achieve from my current digital cameras.

So what is it about my ‘medium format years’ that I value?

Is this image worth it?

The physical and financial effort of loading film into the camera, and the following processing effort and costs, mean that there was always a consideration of ‘is this shot worth it?’, and following on from that, ‘if it’s not, how can it be improved so it is worthwhile?’. That might mean shifting position a little, waiting for better light, moving on to another composition, or even coming back at another time.

Of course, in the digital world we have already invested in the equipment, and pressing the shutter one more time, or ten thousand times more, costs us nothing. Digital can make us lazy, if we let it.

Keep It Steady, Stupid

I would never, ever have considered not using a tripod when shooting MF or 5x4. Further more, that would be a pretty beefy tripod, to which would be attached a substantial head, and the camera operated via a cable release, with the mirror operated before the shutter.

Basically, to extract the maximum image quality from any imaging device, film or digital, you must ensure the camera cannot shift during the exposure. I learned this hard lesson when I started to shoot 36MP (Nikon D800) alongside 24MP (Nikon D3x). For some reason the D800 image quality did not seem up there with the D3x. Over time I learned that the D800 had a pretty clunky shutter (which Nikon vastly improved in the D810) and need to be locked down hard to get near the D3x for sharpness and detail. The D3x on the other hand, was more tolerant of ‘sloppy’ technique, possibly due to the extra mass of it’s large ‘professional’ body. I go into more detail in this post.

Get Ahead and Go Places

I mentioned heads above, and during those MF years I mostly used a geared head. When I moved to digital, this seemed like over-kill (and probably was for my first 6MP DSLR), so along came a succession of ball-heads.

Nothing wrong with a quality ball-head, but for landscapes a geared head just gives you that extra precision, slows you down and avoids the distraction of adjusting one way, over-shooting or the heading shifting as you lock it, and having to re-adjust. Basically, in this situation, you are now thinking about your equipment more than the image.

A geared head on the other hand, lets you make tiny incremental adjustments in one axis without upsetting the orientation in the other two axis. So now your attention is on the composition, not working around the limitations of your head.

I have more to say about heads here and here.

Slow is Smooth

If you hadn’t picked up on it yet, shooting ‘Medium Format’ for me is all about slowing down, and putting all your energy and effort into getting the most satisfying image. Part of this is your approach, but part of it is removing anything that doesn’t add to the creative process. That might mean practicing so that operating your equipment is second-nature, but it might also mean removing, replacing or upgrading items that get in your way or are distracting.

Basically I want my kit to just work, and not get in my way. I don’t want to step out of a creative ‘zen’ moment or ‘flow-state’ in order to think about what knob adjusts what, how to tighten that clamp or this adjuster.

That stands for tripods, heads, filters, even my camera bag, and of course cameras and lenses themselves.

Think of it like this: in elite sports even marginal gains can make the difference between winning and losing; a world record or also-ran. So, everything is analysed and refined to make those marginal gains.

That’s exactly what I am aiming for - removing all the ‘noise’ that intrudes on the creative process. Nirvana for me would be to setup my tripod, mount camera and lens without conscious thought whilst fully engaging on the scene in front of me.