17 July 2011
Adox and more
23/07/11 16:20
Adox MCP310 and Gossen Digisky
Two different products, but both aimed at the small band of photographers who are dedicated to the artisan goals of the craft. The Adox paper is a modern version, made in Berlin, of the classical AGFA paper and is based on the same emulsion formula. It produces beautiful rich blacks with deep texture and subtle grey shades. One may object that with high-quality inkjet equipment the same result can be produced. This type of discussion is interesting to keep things in perspective, but the relevance may be questioned. If a car has a top-speed of 130 miles/h it hardly makes sense to note that there are other cars that can also achieve this speed. There are many more factors involved, some technical, some emotional. It is always a pleasant and even gratifying moment to see the image emerge from nowhere in the developer solution and grow to rich blacks and excellent whites, based on a well-exposed negative, taken with a Leica M camera. It is the whole chain that has to be considered and not one small step.
Pictures of a different character are possible when the film is the Spur DSX film developed with the Spur Modular UR-new version. You do not have to choose big enlargements to see the unsurpassed smoothness of the tones. Even a 10x enlargement (producing a 24x36cm print (but often cropped to 24x30cm) ) has that very peculiar combination of high definition of details, extremely smooth tonal scale and solid three-dimensional depth that can be captured with Leica lenses. I have now a two-track policy, having in my bag an MP and an M9-P and a new Gossen Digisky. This model was introduced at the last Photokina 2010 and is one of the smallest and most powerful exposure meters money can buy. It is the size of a contemporary smart-phone and can be handled with one hand. I will not elaborate here (the Gossen site has all detail) and a test will be published shortly. The possibility of incident light metering and contrast measurement at the same time delivers a much better exposure than the part-selective reflective metering of the M-cameras. I would not rely on the histogram function of the M9 to check the correctness of exposure. The Digisky does a better job. The whole idea is of course to spend as little time as possible with post-processing and to employ the Ansel Adams approach of visualizing the result before exposure.
Electronic music
There are many similarities between electronic music and digital imagery. Electronic music became of age around 1960 and digital photography had to wait till 1990 for the take-off. The history of electronic music might show the roadmap that digital photography could follow.
The first electronic compositions incorporated many characteristics of the classical and conventional instrumental music. Quite logical, because that was the sound most musicians were familiar with. You can compare this with digital photographers taking pictures in the analog frame of mind.
At first electronic soundtracks were combined with live music produced on acoustic instruments. Later the music becomes totally digital and new musical forms emerge ending with the now popular laptop-music on stage.
The synthesizer, the computer, the laptop are stages in the technological evolution of the medium, but the main question is whether the music has become more beautiful or even better. The conclusion might be that the technological advancements do not in themselves guarantee that the art of music does deliver quality.
The same can be said of photography. The stage has not yet reached that modern artists have constructed a new paradigm for visual arts, and are still tied to the classical view of what an image should be. Remember that the canon of the photographic image has been cemented by at most 200 classical photographers and that the new generation has not yet shown its creative and technical potential. You might wish to read the recent Arnold Crane interview in the ZEIT-Online for more reflections about this topic.
Lucian Freud
The death of Lucian Freud, the master of realistic painting, brings home the notion that painting can be more truthful and realistic than photography. Freud had superb mastery of the painting of human skin and his models had to pose for months to explore their skin and personality underneath. His portraits are of the same intensity and quality such that David Hockney (who gave up photography as irrelevant for the arts) remarked that t was a preposterous idea to assume that photography could replace the painted portrait.
Lens tests
Cameras and lenses are designed to produce optimum results, but manufacturing tolerances may degrade the final result. At least as important are the tolerances that creep in during the process of making the pictures, in particular the focus error. Below you see a series of MTF graphs (SX 50mm ASPH FLE): the middle row shows the performance when the optimum position (assuming zero tolerance) has been set wide open and stopped down to f/4. These diagrams are comparable to the official MTF graphs. The top and bottom rows shows the same apertures but with a defocus of -0.03mm and +0.03mm. Note the different shapes of the graphs. Now it is hardly possible without sophisticated equipment to notice these small differences of 0.03mm. But the interpretation of the final results may change dramatically. In a recent test by the ColorFoto magazine, some high speed Zeiss lenses were rated as not good (read my lips: bad!), but the result might be influenced by these small focus errors. The possibility of this error is not included in the test protocol.
If one reads raving or negative reports about the same lens, one needs to reflect on these sources of error and this makes most reports at least incomplete and at most inconclusive.
The solution? My solution is to bracket focus at 1 mm intervals over a focus range of 20mm. This procedure assures that the best focus can be found, but it also increases the amount of images/negatives to analyze with a factor 20! If you test one lens at 4 apertures (1.4; 2.8; 5.6 and 11) at three distances (1m; 3m and 10 meters) you have 12 images which is acceptable, but with focus bracketing you get 240 images to analyze!
The diagrams below are measurements based on the +/- 0.03mm difference. We may count ourselves lucky that Leica uses manufacturing tolerances well below these numbers and so real live results are in fact close to the middle row, unless your focus is way off.
Two different products, but both aimed at the small band of photographers who are dedicated to the artisan goals of the craft. The Adox paper is a modern version, made in Berlin, of the classical AGFA paper and is based on the same emulsion formula. It produces beautiful rich blacks with deep texture and subtle grey shades. One may object that with high-quality inkjet equipment the same result can be produced. This type of discussion is interesting to keep things in perspective, but the relevance may be questioned. If a car has a top-speed of 130 miles/h it hardly makes sense to note that there are other cars that can also achieve this speed. There are many more factors involved, some technical, some emotional. It is always a pleasant and even gratifying moment to see the image emerge from nowhere in the developer solution and grow to rich blacks and excellent whites, based on a well-exposed negative, taken with a Leica M camera. It is the whole chain that has to be considered and not one small step.
Pictures of a different character are possible when the film is the Spur DSX film developed with the Spur Modular UR-new version. You do not have to choose big enlargements to see the unsurpassed smoothness of the tones. Even a 10x enlargement (producing a 24x36cm print (but often cropped to 24x30cm) ) has that very peculiar combination of high definition of details, extremely smooth tonal scale and solid three-dimensional depth that can be captured with Leica lenses. I have now a two-track policy, having in my bag an MP and an M9-P and a new Gossen Digisky. This model was introduced at the last Photokina 2010 and is one of the smallest and most powerful exposure meters money can buy. It is the size of a contemporary smart-phone and can be handled with one hand. I will not elaborate here (the Gossen site has all detail) and a test will be published shortly. The possibility of incident light metering and contrast measurement at the same time delivers a much better exposure than the part-selective reflective metering of the M-cameras. I would not rely on the histogram function of the M9 to check the correctness of exposure. The Digisky does a better job. The whole idea is of course to spend as little time as possible with post-processing and to employ the Ansel Adams approach of visualizing the result before exposure.
Electronic music
There are many similarities between electronic music and digital imagery. Electronic music became of age around 1960 and digital photography had to wait till 1990 for the take-off. The history of electronic music might show the roadmap that digital photography could follow.
The first electronic compositions incorporated many characteristics of the classical and conventional instrumental music. Quite logical, because that was the sound most musicians were familiar with. You can compare this with digital photographers taking pictures in the analog frame of mind.
At first electronic soundtracks were combined with live music produced on acoustic instruments. Later the music becomes totally digital and new musical forms emerge ending with the now popular laptop-music on stage.
The synthesizer, the computer, the laptop are stages in the technological evolution of the medium, but the main question is whether the music has become more beautiful or even better. The conclusion might be that the technological advancements do not in themselves guarantee that the art of music does deliver quality.
The same can be said of photography. The stage has not yet reached that modern artists have constructed a new paradigm for visual arts, and are still tied to the classical view of what an image should be. Remember that the canon of the photographic image has been cemented by at most 200 classical photographers and that the new generation has not yet shown its creative and technical potential. You might wish to read the recent Arnold Crane interview in the ZEIT-Online for more reflections about this topic.
Lucian Freud
The death of Lucian Freud, the master of realistic painting, brings home the notion that painting can be more truthful and realistic than photography. Freud had superb mastery of the painting of human skin and his models had to pose for months to explore their skin and personality underneath. His portraits are of the same intensity and quality such that David Hockney (who gave up photography as irrelevant for the arts) remarked that t was a preposterous idea to assume that photography could replace the painted portrait.
Lens tests
Cameras and lenses are designed to produce optimum results, but manufacturing tolerances may degrade the final result. At least as important are the tolerances that creep in during the process of making the pictures, in particular the focus error. Below you see a series of MTF graphs (SX 50mm ASPH FLE): the middle row shows the performance when the optimum position (assuming zero tolerance) has been set wide open and stopped down to f/4. These diagrams are comparable to the official MTF graphs. The top and bottom rows shows the same apertures but with a defocus of -0.03mm and +0.03mm. Note the different shapes of the graphs. Now it is hardly possible without sophisticated equipment to notice these small differences of 0.03mm. But the interpretation of the final results may change dramatically. In a recent test by the ColorFoto magazine, some high speed Zeiss lenses were rated as not good (read my lips: bad!), but the result might be influenced by these small focus errors. The possibility of this error is not included in the test protocol.
If one reads raving or negative reports about the same lens, one needs to reflect on these sources of error and this makes most reports at least incomplete and at most inconclusive.
The solution? My solution is to bracket focus at 1 mm intervals over a focus range of 20mm. This procedure assures that the best focus can be found, but it also increases the amount of images/negatives to analyze with a factor 20! If you test one lens at 4 apertures (1.4; 2.8; 5.6 and 11) at three distances (1m; 3m and 10 meters) you have 12 images which is acceptable, but with focus bracketing you get 240 images to analyze!
The diagrams below are measurements based on the +/- 0.03mm difference. We may count ourselves lucky that Leica uses manufacturing tolerances well below these numbers and so real live results are in fact close to the middle row, unless your focus is way off.