Category Archives: photography

Truth of the scene

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I’ve been watching some photography videos, and among other things some people seem to be praising the 50mm focal length endlessly; mostly for, supposedly, telling the truth about the situation before you, without either doing the wideangle distortion, or eliminating too much from the scene with telephoto isolation.

I’ve been thinking about that. Their assumption is that a photographer is supposed to show the scene as it is, to present reality without distorting it, to tell a story in ways that make you feel as if you’re a part of it.

That’s such fucking nonsense I don’t even know where to start. But first of all, 50mm doesn’t even feel like a focal length that does that. If anything, I would use an ultrawide to present the scene as I perceive it when I’m there, because I perceive so much with my peripheral vision that it’s almost exactly how I perceive a scene when I’m there, only without the geometric distortions. Something like this:

This is what it feels like to be there, on top of the island, and to look at the horizon. You see everything at once. What the 50mm approximates quite nicely is something else: the area of focused attention.

This is a 50mm frame; different island, different scene, different field of view. Does this look like something you actually see in front of you  when you’re there? Or does it look like something you’re looking at when you’re there? The latter, I’d say.

Or should we use another example?

This was also shot with a 50mm lens – same wide open aperture, even. Same evening. You think this is what my eyes saw? Or is it what I focused at and thought about?

Is photography about reporting accurately what was in front of me and telling a story about it, or is it about using bits and pieces of what’s in front of it to create a story about how I feel?

It depends on who you are as a photographer. If you’re a professional, it might be your job to tell other people’s stories, because that’s what you’re getting paid for. If you’re shooting weddings, you need to tell other people’s romantic stories for posterity, and you are merely a paid instrument that serves the purpose of achieving that. If you’re shooting a sports event for an agency, you need to report visually compelling moments from a game, create something that will draw attention to the article to be read. It’s your job to present it as visually interesting, but again, you’re telling other people’s stories, and you are as much an instrument in this as your camera. Basically, it’s paying audience first, motive second, and you and your equipment in service of that.

But I’m not a professional. Nobody is paying me to take pictures of what they want photographed. It’s all about what I want and why I want it. I might want to present the scene I experienced as accurately as possible. Or I might want to present something that drew my attention there, something most people would just walk by.

There’s absolutely nothing about the 50mm lens that I find more compelling, or more honest about presenting a scene than any other focal length. It’s basically a focal length that shows some things and omits others. This makes it no different from anything else, other than being more-less average. Want honest and complete impression of how it felt to be somewhere? Use a wide angle. Or use a telephoto, or use a normal lens, or use a macro. You think it’s not possible to use a macro or a telephoto lens to show what it’s like to be somewhere? I beg to disagree.

This is what it felt like to be there.

Also, this is what this scene felt like.

This, too, was what it felt to be there. The last one was taken with a 50mm lens. I find it no more or less honest than the second image, which was taken with an ultrawide, or the first one, taken with a 35-70mm zoom wide open on macro extenders. They all show some of my impressions, experiences and feelings. They also show something that’s in front of the lens, that may or may not be important.

There are all kinds of pretentious photographers – those with their Leicas and 50mm lenses trying to be HCB, or those with view cameras and f/64 ethos trying to be Ansel Adams, or hipsters shooting through a scratched filter on expired film, thinking that’s art. Whether something is art or not depends mostly on whether the thing you want to express is actually worth showing.

Let me show two scenes that would usually be taken with a 50mm lens, because it’s “honest”:

The first is taken with a 35mm, the second with a 135mm. Both faithfully capture a moment. In essence, if you’re going to do this kind of photography, you’re not bound to 50mm, because it’s not about the focal length or the aperture, it’s about the style and catching the moment. You don’t need a Leica and a 50mm Summicron to imitate HCB, you can be a fake person with any camera and lens. 🙂

Now that sounds like I’m pushing for authenticity, but that’s not really the case. I sometimes find it liberating to imitate someone who made something I liked, without trying to always do my specific thing, because sometimes I don’t actually know what I’m trying to do, and that’s fine. You can’t get new ideas if you always know what you’re doing and why; that’s how you produce more of the same stuff. Sometimes it’s actually fun to go somewhere and be a fake HCB or Ansel Adams. Make a postcard. Imitate something you liked. Get it out of your system. Shoot all the cliche frames first, flush them out, and then you’ll start noticing other things and having actual ideas. Using a 50mm and B&W to fake yourself out is just fine, because after you’re done taking all the fake shots that are in your head, you might actually get it out of your system enough to start doing something else. The way towards originality is often through copying all the stuff you found somewhere and liked. You might fail at copying them just right, but by being a poor copy of someone else you might actually start finding an improved version of yourself.

Intended purpose

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I recently took some very nice landscape photos with my new lens:

Before that, I used the same lens to take pictures of some night scenes in the town:

I also took pictures of some nature details with it:

The thing is, the lens I used is FE 135mm f/1.8 GM, a famous portrait lens from Sony. Interestingly, portraits are the only thing I haven’t used it for, so far. My wife did, however:

Wildlife in its natural environment

Using a portrait lens for shooting everything but portraits seems to defeat its purpose, which made me think. Sure, the 135mm GM is a fantastic portrait lens, but why? Because it has excellent bokeh and sharpness-to-softness rolloff, it is incredibly sharp from wide open, corner to corner, and is likely diffraction limited (meaning, it only gets worse as you stop it down). It also has an almost-macro minimum focusing distance. That, however, makes it excellent for details of landscape, and isolating nature details with narrow depth of field, due to its extreme aperture. Sure, there’s one new Sigma that’s even better, at f/1.4, but it’s so much bigger and heavier than the already very heavy Sony, that I decided I’m good at f/1.8, thank you very much.

The fact that a lens is great at something doesn’t mean it should be used for that purpose. Sure, it’s great for portraits. It’s also great at landscapes, at closeups, at nature details, at shooting butterflies against the light, at atmospheric urban scenes at low light, and astrophotography. Saying that it’s a portrait lens because it’s great at portraits is like saying one should become a porn star because they are good at having sex. Yeah, it sounds absurd, but that’s because it is.

There’s something that Catholics do that annoys me, and that’s belief that there’s a “natural way” things should be done, that’s ordained by God, and going against that is a sin. I think they particularly insist on that in matters concerning sex; basically, if you’re having sex for any reason that’s unrelated to reproduction, that’s against the natural order of things and is condemnable. They even had the audacity to cite animals as a good example of how humans should be – sex for reproduction only, pleasure only as a regrettable side effect of reproduction, and if you accidentally feel some form of sexual pleasure that’s unrelated to that, confession time for you, buddy.

At some point later in the process they seem to have figured out the concept of “mutual giving” between people that’s actually an important part of sex that has nothing to do with reproduction, and if you give them long enough, like a zillion years, they might actually catch on. The most ridiculous part of it is that they actually don’t know anything about nature, or how actual animals do sex. For instance, the Bonobo apes (a smaller species of chimpanzee) use sex as some form of ritual bonding and de-stressing; the dolphins practice sex in ways remarkably similar to humans, and so on. Basically, de-coupling sexual pleasure from its reproductive function seems to be a function of evolutionary advancement, similar to self-awareness and abstract thought. Thinking that sex should be used for reproduction only is like thinking that numbers shouldn’t be used as abstract entities, but only related to actual things that are numbered; basically, you can count sheep and trees because that’s how God intended it, but if you start playing with numbers as abstract entities unrelated to anything physical, you need to confess your sins against the Creator. 🙂

Does something have an obvious purpose it’s been designed for? Sure. A FE 85mm f/1.4 GM and FE 135mm f/1.8 GM are designed as portrait lenses. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a 14mm ultrawide as a portrait lens, or that you can’t use a 135mm for landscapes, to great effect. If you use things for what they are designed, in exactly the way they are meant to be used, it’s instinct and programming, not creativity and abstract thought. Sure, if you decouple mind from instinct and introduce creativity, there’s no end to which you can fuck up, and anyone who’s been on the Internet can attest to that. The Catholics use abundant examples of this as evidence that “God’s plan is not to be messed with”.

I, however, submit portraits made with ultrawides and nature shots made with a portrait lens as evidence that God is not a limited idiot some seem to take him for.

Sin against the natural order: portrait with a 15mm fisheye

Every dog has emotions, breath and thoughts. However, humans decoupled those from their intended purpose and designed vipassana, pranayama and yoga. Super unnatural, as all things leading to transcendence necessarily need to be, because to act as a direct function of your design is to be an animal and a slave of Satan.

Nostalgia and wind

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Today I went out to take pictures against my better judgment, because the wind is so strong, it keeps moving the vegetation around and you basically can’t get anything still or in focus, especially if you’re doing closeups, as I was. However, I wanted to test something, so here we are.

I assembled a setup that’s closest to my (almost) first camera, the Minolta X-300 with the MD 35-70mm f/3.5 lens. Instead of the X-300 and Kodak gold 200 film that I commonly used, I used my old Sony A7II with an adapter, but other than the camera being 24MP full frame digital, the setup is functionally remarkably similar, giving me most of the feeling of working with film (manual focus and all that) while avoiding the hassle of having to develop and scan actual film.

The most remarkable thing about this experiment is that I expected to feel a sense of nostalgia, going back in time, using my old lens that I learned photography with and so on. There was none of that. The lens felt awkward, foreign, unintuitive to use because of the macro setting that basically moves the optics away from the film plane like a built-in extension tube when you run out of space on the focus ring to focus closer, and not having the autofocus was actually not that much of a problem because of the wind moving things, that made accurate focus impossible, so I just had to feel it.

Sure, it’s not actually my old lens; that one was lost while moving, in addition to previous situations that resulted in having to rebuild my Minolta system for scratch because I actually lost all of them; long story, but I decided I actually want to have them back, if only to compare with my modern lenses or if I happen to feel nostalgic about the film days. Fortunately, I got four lenses for the average of 50 EUR each, so it wasn’t an expensive indulgence, and there’s only so much you can learn by taking pictures of empty coffee cups, so I went out to see if such a setup would be worthwhile today.

It surprised me to find out how out of shape I am with the manual focus thing, and how absolutely zero nostalgia this triggered in me. It felt mostly awkward, with camera and lens not behaving the way I’m used to these days, and the results didn’t actually look like photos from my old ISO 200 negative days either. They looked like the stuff I took reasonably recently with the same camera and the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro lens, only less crisp, with worse bokeh and worse colours and the general look usually associated with old optics. Sure, if I wanted to make moody evocative photos on a gloomy day, that might be just what I want, but the nostalgia thing just didn’t happen with me, sorry. What’s surprising is that I ended up with over 15 winners, in that short walk, despite strong wind and the fact that I wasn’t familiar with the equipment, as strange as that sounds considering I used A7II since 2015 and the Minolta lens since 1984 to early 2000s. But that’s the truth – I haven’t actually used A7II with manual lenses for, well, ten years, and that’s a lot for muscle memory. That, however, is not really important, because it didn’t matter. What did matter is finding out that my style didn’t just magically revert into the early 2000s just because I returned to the lens I used then. In fact, nothing changed but the gear, and the gear was, well… worse. I mean, it’s not worse to the extent that I can’t make decent pictures with it, but I didn’t have any sort of epiphany about how great the old stuff was and how it can do everything the new stuff can. It’s just… meh. It’s worse, and not just worse than my best modern glass, it’s worse than my worst modern glass. I think the FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens that I replaced would perform better in every way, other than probably needing macro extenders for closeups. I mean, sure, the old lens creates a look that’s hard if not impossible to replicate with modern lenses, but if I react emotionally to something, it’s the crispness, clarity and smoothness of the modern lenses, where detail is perfectly sharp, and the rolloff is smooth as butter, the colours are clear and crisp, and there’s no stupid bullshit with white balance measuring greenish when the lens is open. I like that crisp, bright and clear look so much I basically bought every single modern lens that I found useful, regardless of them being expensive as all fuck, just because I feel so good about them. They are something I once would have dreamed about, if I knew it were possible.

In the days of early digital, I once said on a photography newsgroup that I would be satisfied with a Minolta MD digital body with a 35mm sensor, that I can mount my old lenses on, and just keep making pictures the way I’m used to. Now that I can try doing exactly that – with the only difference that the digital body isn’t an SLR that I expected, and it isn’t a MD specific body, but one that can adapt almost any glass to it, I can say with conviction that I was completely wrong. Those modern lenses… they are absolutely magical in their clarity, crispness and lack of all the stupid bullshit I once tolerated simply because I didn’t know better.

That’s an interesting thing about this life, as well. We got used to it, and we see death as something scary, because it means losing what we are used to, without first seeing where we are heading, and knowing if it’s better. Before I tried modern lenses and digital sensors, I’d actually fight to keep my old Minoltas and film, because it was all I knew, and I loved what it did for me, even if it frequently made me struggle and fail. But once I got used to the modern gear, it’s actually traumatic to revisit the old stuff, and I find the experience highly educational.

Similarly, when I have an experience of the “other side”, when the memory is fresh and immediate I could just shed the flesh without a single thought. As weeks pass, the memory fades, and I no longer feel that way; the physical experience, again, becomes all I am immediately familiar with, and I would instinctively try to protect it, and fear what comes next… if I don’t immediately experience it.  If you’re in a dungeon long enough, you’ll feel afraid of getting out. It’s something we all need to keep in mind. Lack of immediate familiarity with where you’re heading creates fear, and attachment to the known.

 

Misc thoughts

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Recently we bought a coffee machine, after postponing it for 7 years or so, and Biljana looked up all kinds of coffee, and of course she went down one of those rabbit holes on the Internet, with scientific research of health benefits of all kinds of coffee, and the only kind that had no demonstrable benefits, but increased probability of some nasty degenerative eye disease in old age, was instant coffee.

My comment: “And of course that’s what we’ve been drinking for the last 20 years.” 🙂

I guess the lesson is that sometimes you shouldn’t postpone buying the coffee machine.

On a different note, the iPhone 17 just came out and there’s all kinds of talk about how its camera is great. Yeah, like the last seven or so models of iPhone, which tempt you to not to carry your proper camera around because you always have the iPhone with you, and as a result, years later all your pictures are taken with the iPhone and they are all full of digital and optical artefacts and unprintable to anything comparable to what a real camera would do. Also, a current iPhone costs around 1500 EUR. Do you even realise what a great camera and lens combo you can get for this amount of money? That’s a Canon RP with a RF 35mm f/1.8 lens. And in two to four years, you’ll do that again, just flush 1500 EUR down the drain for no good reason. Smartphones are such an incredible waste of money, because they give you absolutely no added value over the older model. It’s like a subscription service to being an idiot. Unfortunately, you actually need to have one today. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a new one.

Today I finished installing the new glassy-looking OS on all my Apple devices. It’s not that I hate glassy look in general; Vista was actually quite nice and looked sophisticated. This, however, looks like something that was hastily patched up by people with no taste, and sometimes it actually reduces functionality. That’s the problem with “progress” for the sake of just fucking with things that work well so that you can tell people you did something new, because it’s expected that you do. How about designing a window manager that knows how to snap windows properly, or a file manager that isn’t dog shit? Something that would actually serve some useful purpose? No?

I heard some professional photographer talking how bokeh is bullshit invented by lens manufacturers so that people wouldn’t mind buying expensive lenses that create images that are mostly blurry. It just goes to show that being a professional just means that’s how you earn most of your money. It doesn’t mean that you know what you’re talking about, or that you’re good at what you do. You just know how to charge for it.

The blurry part cost a lot of money.

Sure, it makes sense to say that picture is about the sharp part. However, the not sharp part is the package that presents it. Flowers on a table in the restaurant aren’t the point of lunch, because you don’t eat them, but they are a nice thing to see.

There are several parameters that define usability of a lens, the way I see it. It’s how sharp can it get things that are in focus, how close it can focus, how much can you open the aperture to both gather light and vary the depth of field, what’s the focal length/range, does it introduce optical mess into the image (CA, flare etc.) and how convenient/practical is it to work with. The ability to blur out the background in ways that will look nice might not be important if you shoot only landscapes in ways that make everything sharp, or if you shoot portraits in a studio in front of a uniform background, then bokeh rendering doesn’t matter. If that’s all you do, great, you’ll save lots of money on lenses that are designed to render good bokeh. Good for you.

Another thing crossed my mind, regarding the last article. Someone is asking themselves why God allowed this trap to be created as a test for us, that it’s not right to subject us to such a traumatic and potentially fatal test. I’m rolling my eyes right now, because God didn’t ask us to do anything he, himself wasn’t willing to do, either male or female. Remember the guy called Jesus? Born into a carpenter’s family in a barn because they had no room in the taverns and his family wasn’t important. Taught things that irrevocably altered the Western civilization and got crucified for it, which is one of the nastiest ways to die. Then rose from the dead to show that death is not the end, and afterlife isn’t some vague shadow world.

Or Krishna and his girls? Oh, he had a super easy life, being born in a jail cell where his evil uncle imprisoned his parents because of a prophecy, and they smuggled him out and gave him to some peasants to raise, so he grew up as a shepherd instead of a prince. Also, everybody kept trying to kill him, and then his best friend and his family got exiled into the jungle, which ended up in a bloody mess. It’s all told like a nice story in the books, but think about how you’d have handled half of that stuff.

Not only was God here multiple times as male and female, but s/he also doesn’t actually pick fancy and rosy incarnations. Some are, just to show that s/he doesn’t get distracted by material wealth and power. Some are absolute shit, like that of Jesus, and still major world-altering scripture is written about how well he did. I won’t even get into the level of horror I had to deal with, or the stuff my girls had to deal with. That never stopped people from thinking we had it so easy compared to them, who had it so hard. God’s incarnations always look so easy and effortless – because God is so much more transcendental, holy and pure than you are. God doesn’t wallow in mud because there’s no mud in his path, but because he just doesn’t feel like wallowing in it. God doesn’t rise above temptation because s/he wasn’t subjected to it, but because s/he is holy. (I’m writing God as dual gender because it’s an equation with two solutions). You think you have it hard, but it’s not true. Satan used the absolutely worst, cruellest and filthiest tricks to deceive Divine incarnations. I think he was probably afraid he’d get killed immediately if he tried that shit on someone weaker, but he really took off his gloves with God, thinking God can take it. I don’t even wish to talk about that stuff, it’s that nasty. And yet, God did so well you think s/he had it easy. Sure s/he did; Sati for instance willingly entered a pyre and burned herself to death rather than listen to her sinful father slander Shiva. Biljana’s childhood was the siege of Vukovar, being shredded by tank grenade shrapnels, evacuated from the basement of the Vukovar hospital by the Serb war criminals who executed her uncle and imprisoned her father in a concentration camp, and she then had to live in exile, only to be told today how easy she’s having it, by some fucking asshole entangled in his self-inflicted worldly drama, who thinks he’s having it hard. Romana also spent her childhood in exile listening to spoiled teenage girls crying about their new shoes getting rained on while she was thinking whether her father, defending Usora in a ditch with a shotgun against Serbian tanks, will survive or get killed like the people in the neighbouring village did. Yeah, God had it so easy, you have it so hard, go cry me a river so that I can piss into the river of your tears, you treacherous bastards. You forget God when you’re doing well, and you forget God when you’re not doing well. Meanwhile, Rukmini and Jesus never forgot God, regardless of how they were doing, imprisoned or crucified or laughing, which is why people pray to them, and nobody gives a shit about you.

No, you’re not having it hard, God is having it hard having to listen to your crap.

Wrong equipment

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I was thinking about the four thirds system I was using for a few years, between 35mm film and 35mm digital. Was it a mistake?

I don’t think so. Olympus E1 with the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens was the best camera/lens combo I could’ve bought in 2004, especially since it was discounted. At full price, it would’ve been too expensive, but for what I paid for it, 1000€, it was a good deal. Compared to the 6-8MP Canons and Nikons at the time, it had similarly limited resolution – yes, percentage-wise the difference between 5 and 8 sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t; whatever you couldn’t do with one, you couldn’t to with the other, either. So, as a singular camera-lens entity, it was great and it served me well in the transition from film to digital. Essentially, I used it for the same kind of photography I did on film, just with less money spent on film, development and scanning.

The problem with four thirds wasn’t that it didn’t make good pictures, or that I was unhappy with the camera and the lens. The problem was that I wanted to replace 35mm film with 35mm digital because that was the look that I wanted, and four thirds wasn’t 35mm. Also, the upgrade path was either very expensive, to the point where getting everything I wanted would cost as much as a 35mm system or more, and so when the 35mm Canon 5d became available, I did the math and decided that I might as well buy the stuff that I actually wanted in the first place, and I could get both resolution, dynamic range, and the reduced depth of field that I wanted, all at the same time.

So, the reason why I used the four thirds gear was the same as the reason why Canon and Nikon users used their APS-C cameras at the time. It’s not that they wanted APS-C, it was that 35mm was beyond reach so they used what they could get for reasonable money. I’m sure some stayed with APS-C even when 35mm became ubiquitous, but I’m also sure that most upgraded to 35mm. It was just a normal thing in that phase of development of digital technology, where not all was there yet. This is why I don’t consider it a mistake; driving a 1980s car in 1980s wasn’t a mistake, it was just what everybody had back then. Yeah, a 1980s car didn’t have airbags, wasn’t anywhere near as safe as today’s cars, and didn’t have equipment that’s anywhere near today’s standards, but nobody says buying an Audi 80 in the 1980s was a mistake. It was a very good car by the standards of the era, but technology progressed significantly since. If I had to go back in time and pick a camera to buy, I’d buy that same Olympus set in a heartbeat. What I would likely not do, however, is buy my first digital camera, the Fuji S602. Sure, it was a learning experience about digital, but it was a completely wrong camera for me and didn’t fit my style, requirements or criteria at all. For something as expensive as it was, I would have been better off buying more film gear immediately, rather than later, but then again, if I didn’t get burned on early digital, would I be able to tell what the problems were? I don’t think so. I think everybody needed to get burned somewhere in order to know what’s not good for them, what needs to improve and so on. Still, I have one good photo with that early digital camera:

In fact, I had a film camera with a 50mm f/1.4 lens with me when I took it, and tried to take it with film gear, as well, and the depth of field was so much of an issue that the photos weren’t anywhere near this good. So, a camera that sucked for me in most ways turned out to be just right for taking this picture. If it helped me do that, and if it helped me learn about what the limitations of small sensor digital were, and helped me figure out what I wanted, was it really a mistake?

That’s why I say mistakes are a part of the learning process, and I’m not worried about them. Mistakes are a problem if you fail to learn, and fail to move on. They are a problem if you get stuck in them. A correct path is sometimes navigation between wrong choices, between not enough and too much, between what you know for sure you don’t want, and what you think you want until you try it and see it’s an overkill. It’s not just a photography thing, it’s a life thing.