I was just talking to the AI about the photographic requirements for Plitvička Jezera, and it made me laugh when it offered suggestions about cameras and lenses. Sure, I guess that’s what it found on the Internet – people asking what camera is the best, what lens is the best. I find it completely ridiculous.

You see, the camera/lens requirements there are so minimal, that as long as you have a camera with 4/3 sensor or bigger, with 12MP or more, and a standard kit zoom, you’ll do great. Sony R-1 did great when I used it there. Canon 5d and Olympus E-PL1 were also great. Olympus E-1 with 5MP had resolution that wouldn’t survive proper magnification, but with good technique, 12MP or more will give you a sharp B2 sized print. That’s 70 centimetres in width. If you want bigger magnifications, 24MP Sony A7II will give you sharp B1 print size. Everything higher than that is overkill. As far as lenses are concerned, 28-70mm is fine, 24-105mm is slightly better. Aperture doesn’t matter; f/4 is great. What matters is resistance to flare, and sharpness at f/8-f/11, because that’s where you’re going to be most of the time, or even at f/16. Yes, diffraction is slightly bad, but insufficient depth of field is much worse. You can correct for diffraction with unsharp masking. You can’t correct for insufficient depth of field, and then your ability to magnify the picture will suffer more than it would with 5MP resolution of Olympus E-1. Proper technique, meaning hyperfocal distance calculation, stopping down to f/16 or even more when necessary, tripod stability, ND filter so that you can blur the water; that’s what will actually give you sharp, good pictures. You can’t buy your way out of this one, because photographic technique is everything, and any semi-decent used camera will do. Biljana used the Canon RP with RF 24-105mm f/4 L lens there and the technical quality of her shots was absolutely top notch. What you actually need, and I mean need, not want, is a light, sturdy tripod. Not some big monstrosity; a traveller-type light carbon or aluminium tripod with a good ball head with Arca Swiss mounting plate, and you need the Arca Swiss L-bracket for your camera. When we took just the ordinary small mounting plates, they rotated on the camera body during exposure and caused issues. You need the L-bracket, or at least pinky grip with the Arca Swiss rail. Modern image stabilization that can work on a tripod is a big asset. You can survive without it, but it will enable you in getting the shots that would otherwise be lost to boardwalk vibration.

The biggest problems there are tourists – in a sense that they shake the boardwalk making it impossible to do long exposure shots. The solution to this is to get started as early in the morning as possible, before the hordes are finished with their breakfast. Get to the boats early, before they are working, and you’ll be rewarded with the ducks and cormorants messing around at the dawn, still at peace because the humans didn’t yet arrive to disturb them. When the entire continental China and most of Japan and India are in the park, the animals will hide, and honestly, I will follow along because at that point nothing is fun anymore.

Also, what’s important is the light. Once the light is lost in the canyon, the white balance will go deep blue, which means you lost most of the frequencies of light. Not great. Also, when the sun is too bright, you will have hot spots across the picture; also not good. Ideally, you would want fog in the autumn morning, and the sun catching on the mist.

However, for the most part, if you’re trying to get blurred water, cloudy weather is better than sunlight.

Circular polarizer is good to have, but a ND filter is essential. I usually prefer ND64, but it might be too strong for low light situations; ND32 or even ND16 might be more practical. With ND64 it’s easy to get seconds of exposure, but that will give you water that turned into mist. What you might want is texture in the water that indicates motion; not too much, but not completely blurred either. I got good results at 1/6s to 1/2s. Even shorter exposures like 1/25s can look good in some situations, but longer than half a second rarely does. Sure, if you want it dreamy, go ahead. I prefer it peaceful but alive.

The majority of good shots there, however, might not even require a tripod. Birds messing around on the lake require 1/500s or shorter. Lots of motives are just common forest/lake stuff, no need for blurring anything.

Lens flare, when it’s sunny, can be a pain there. It’s good to have a lens that’s resistant to it, which I usually don’t, so I lost multiple shots to flare. It’s a thing. Camera resolution and lens sharpness are non-issues there, but lens flare is a problem. Also, around noon or later, when the sun is too strong for photography, all the tourists are there, acting like they’re on Instagram and not in nature, and they disturb the peace of the place to the point where we pack our stuff and go have coffee and cheese cake, and then return to the hotel, shower and inspect our photos until dinner. The last time we were there, I caught an excellent shot of the snow caps in sunset light with a telephoto lens, so things like that might be worth looking into.

I always think I’ll set up the tripod with a wideangle and try to get a Milky Way shot, but it’s not happening. Too many street lights, too many trees obstructing the view. Not worth it. Instead, we go to bed early, wake up early in the morning, and that’s where the best light is.

You’ll be crouching and kneeling a lot, because that’s how you get good perspective. Removing your backpack beforehand might not be an option, so don’t overburden yourself with lenses you’re not going to use. Also, changing lenses with all that mist and spray in the air is a terrible idea, because that stuff will require a wet cleaning of the sensor. Whenever I took more than one lens around the lakes, I regretted it.

So, that’s my take on it. I mean, sure, you can geek out over lenses and cameras all you want if it makes you happy, but out there the tripod mounting plate and filters will matter far more.

I took the tiny FE 50mm f/2.5 G to a walk this evening, and I have to admit, I love the combination of small size, excellent mechanical quality and stellar optics. I thought the f/2.5 aperture would be insufficient for what I normally use a lens of this type for, but it turned out not to be an issue. It’s crisp, with modern image aesthetics and incredibly high resolution for something so small.

Assimilated

Nothingness

Fire of gold

Parched land

I listened to something on YouTube; comments about someone highly praising a lens he barely uses, and then people are asking why did he buy it in the first place. Well, not so fast. You don’t have to use a lens daily to have a need of it, or to appreciate it, or for it to earn a place in your toolkit. I have a huge list of my favourite photos that were made with lenses I rarely use. However, when I use them, the results usually tend to be my best work. If something is your favourite dish, it doesn’t mean you have to eat it every day. Frequency of use isn’t really tightly correlated with need. I need a lens if it enables me to make a particular type of photography. If that’s something I do once every five years, that’s quite a good reason for me to own such a lens. A fisheye is a good example. Do I need it? Absolutely. Some of my best work is with a fisheye. However, it’s a dozen photos over two decades.

Decomposing

Frequency of use means nothing to me. Quality of work, in those cases when use happens, means everything. The fact that a lens gathers dust for years on my shelf doesn’t mean anything to me. I need it there, when the right situation arises. A frequently used lens is merely a lens I take for a walk, and I will produce most of worthless and generic pictures with it. That also doesn’t mean that the lens is not good; it just means that I use it when probability of success is negligible. Either I don’t feel like taking pictures, or I think there are no motives, no light, but I still take the camera, just in case. However, a “just in case” lens will occasionally also take my best pictures, when I’m wrong, and I do find something worth photographing.

Film point-and-shoot

Phone

Because “case” occasionally happens when you don’t expect anything.

But where to draw the line? When is something rarely used because it’s useless? Well, that happens. I had lenses that turned out to overlap so much with other lenses, that I gave up on them and sold them. There are cameras and camera systems that I find good and useful, but something else was better. I don’t actually have to own everything I ever used to make a favourite picture. I had multiple standard zooms. They were all good. However, I only need one, and they all overlap in functionality and the results they produce. I already wrote that I have sentimentality for the pictures, not the equipment, and this sentimentality usually makes me like a lens type, rather than tying itself to a specific lens. Sometimes, sentimentality is tied to the specific time of day, with the light of specific colour, or the time of year when I felt something and captured it with photography. I don’t care that I no longer own a Minolta or an Olympus that captured it, if I have a Canon or a Sony with similar capabilities. Somehow, the sentimentality transcends specific hardware and translates across platforms. I’m weird that way. 🙂

We saw the fire on Brač on the horizon so we went as close as we could to get a better view. It’s pretty bad, and apparently on inaccessible terrain so the firemen can’t do anything about it. Also, strong Bura wind is spreading it like crazy.

From Kabal peninsula, Hvar

From Stari Grad ferry port, Hvar

We got a warning when we got close.

I love it when equipment just works. I took the camera and the 85mm f/1.4 Sigma out at midnight in the middle of nowhere and total darkness, focused at the wildfire and got excellent shots at ISO 12800 f/1.4 1/50s. I was thinking, what would be a professional lens choice for this? Probably a 70-200mm f/2.8. It’s like two stops slower than what I took. Sure, you’d have more flexibility in framing, but two stops slower means 1/15s hand-held, which means smoke not being well defined, flames not being sharp, and so on. I saw the pictures in the news today, I thought, why are they all darker, fuzzier and more red? And then it was, oh, they were exposed shorter because that’s the best they could hand-hold.

I was taking a few pictures with the fisheye lens today; I didn’t use it in quite a while, and the release of the new Sony fisheye made me think about it.

It’s easy to overdo it, so I use it sparingly, but when I think about it, some of my favourites over the years were made with the fisheye, including two big prints in my home.

I was also thinking about other things I use sparingly or not at all, and I thought of a camera bag. I seem to have made a full circle: initially I had only one camera body and one lens, and the camera bag didn’t make much sense, so I didn’t have it. I would just carry the camera in my hand or around my neck. Then I got multiple lenses and started carrying them all in a camera bag until I got so sick of it, that now I returned to a simple camera with one lens setup. The camera bag is just so incredibly inconvenient, and I use it only for transporting gear to a different location securely.