hello from marstonfoto

In a way this is following on from my piece about film, sensors and RAW converters. I was going to say why I have limited the number of cameras with which I will shoot RAW (and probably will) but this is really about photographic snobbery. Photographic forums usually poll their members regularly to see how they use their equipment and the answers can be quite misleading. I’ve seen polls where the majority of members said they always used manual focus and manual exposure, always shot in RAW mode, never used noise control, always used some form of exposure compensation, used spot focus and spot metering and never anything more sophisticated, tara, tara. Well, I would imagine that a large number of these folk set the camera on Auto or P and use an 18-250 mm lens (but spelled lense). Not that this is a bad thing to do but there’s no point in being smart and dumb at the same time.

Photography has come a long way since I first had a camera when I was 8 years old. And that was in 1948. This was a very crude camera but I was delighted with it and thankfully no evidence of my work survives. The first SLR with a built-in coupled light meter came out in 1962 when I was using a manual rangefinder camera and guessing the exposure. My next camera was also totally manual and it wasn’t until 1970 that I used one with a coupled light meter. I didn’t own a camera with an autofocus lens until about 1994 and it was a revelation. Now that we have little marvels of the camera-makers art it seems damn silly not to use all the things that Canon, Nikon, Pentax etc have put into them.

But there’s a time for everything. It does no harm to shoot RAW every time if you also save a processed JPEG. This way you don’t have to process every shot with software. There are lots of occasions where spot focus is by far the best option and fewer but still many where spot metering could be required. Letting the camera choose its own white balance might be tricky sometimes but perhaps not as tricky as making a mistake yourself. Setting your own parameters for  jpeg processing is creative but sometimes it’s just best to choose a picture style or whatever your camera offers as an easy default. I do admit that I nearly always shoot in aperture-priority mode and that’s a hangover from all the mechanical cameras I’ve used but I’ve been known to leave a camera on P or even Auto (or worse – actually better probably – on the new Intelligent Auto setting). And I do use manual focusing but I usually let the camera have a go at auto focusing first. One thing I do nearly always do is if the camera offers it I set autofocus to an AF-hold button rather than the shutter button so that I deliberately focus where I want and meter with the shutter button. I do not think there is anything un-clever in letting the camera provide all the help you need. Nor do I object to using “scene modes” if the camera has them, which actually few of mine do.

Which really brings me to the “RAW or not” decision. I’ve recently downsized my gear a bit (by disposing of a Samsung GX10 system and putting one or two cameras into my camera collection rather than the everyday kit) and I now have a Canon DSLR system, a small digital Nikon system, micro fourthirds  and four compacts. To get the compacts out of the way, only one of them has a raw mode. That’s the Ricoh GX100 and I do shoot RAW with that some of the time as it is small enough to take anywhere and one never knows what one will encounter.

To read some reviews of cameras, especially the ones that go into deep technical detail, you would think that often all the software in them is wasted. I’ve very often seen as a conclusion to a lengthy review under the “con” points a remark that to get the best out of the camera you have to shoot RAW and manual everything. I wouldn’t give one of those house-room if I believed it but I do have at least one because the Ricoh GX100 was widely criticised by the technobabblers and the FujiFilm S5 Pro was roundly disparaged as well. I think that all my kit turns out a pretty decent jpeg, some better than others but all satisfactory.

I’m very proud of my Canon equipment, built up over some time and I think that the 5D Mk II is perfect for what I do with it and while I do shoot RAW + Fine jpeg I think that the jpeg files it produces are excellent; sometimes a tiny bit unsharp, occasionally a little too pink but that is the Canon look. I have all the lenses I need. As a backup I have a Canon 1000D, the cheapest entry-level body but it is very competent and I don’t bother with RAW files with it as I will use it mostly for candid shots and often with manual focus lenses.

I bought the FujiFilm S5 Pro on a whim because I had been having such fun with the S2 and wanted something that would meter with my manual Nikkor lenses and the very few AF lenses I had for the Nikon F mount. It produces wonderful jpegs “out of the box”. It is quite slow in use so it is an ideal landscape and portrait camera and if I’m honest I admit that I use it not very much but am not going to part with it. I’m quite happy to use nearly all default settings and have very seldom been disappointed with the results.

There then remain my four other cameras. I probably ought to feel guilty about them because I  bought them all fairly recently for quite a lot of  money though one camera body and some of the lenses were secondhand. One of them only shoots RAW because it is a film camera! It’s a Voigtländer Bessa 4A which takes Leica M mount lenses. It is very similar to a Leica M7 (but a quarter of the price) and very simple to use. It’s aperture-priority metered and the lenses are all prime and 15, 21, 25, 35, 50 and 75 mm.

The other three cameras are micro four thirds. Two are Panasonic – the G1 and the GF1 – and the third is the Olympus E-P1. Why should I need three of them? I don’t, I only need two but the G1 is a marvellous little camera with the best electronic viewfinder I have ever experienced and a large articulated monitor. It does its own thing, producing very satisfactory jpegs and using some excellent scene modes. I suppose that I use it as an oversized compact and it doesn’t seem to mind much getting wet.

The other two cameras are very similar on paper although they have entirely different characters. They are almost identical in size and use the same sensor. The Olympus one does not have a viewfinder other than its LCD and makes very good jpeg pictures and I let it get on with that. It also has an excellent high quality movie mode. While it came with its own zoom lens, I’m quite happy using the 15, 21 and 35 mm Voigtländer lenses with it where they are effectively double their focal length. With the two wider lenses I often preset the focus, using them in “snap” mode. The Panasonic one does have the optional electronic viewfinder and while it turns out good jpeg pictures I feel it does benefit from a  little work on RAW files so if the occasion demands it I will shoot RAW. Mostly though the work is to handle noise at the highest ISO settings and there has just been a firmware upgrade that claims to do this in-camera so that could save me some post-processing. Both of these cameras are really replacing compacts and it’s easy to use two of them at the same time.

What I set out to demonstrate is that with good equipment it’s not necessary to do all the work yourself! Coming from years of film work I like to produce as much of a finished work as I can in-camera and maybe there’s only a bit of cropping and minor fiddling to be done afterwards. I’m very comfortable with Lightroom (which also handles jpeg files) and I have almost given up using Photoshop CS in favour of its junior version Essentials. In fact I much prefer to use Paint Shop Pro Photo but I wonder for how long Corel are going to support it. Amazingly at my advanced age there are still people that will pay to have me take photographs and there, with my Canon kit, I do fall in behind the photo snobs and do a lot  manually but then I’m coming from an age when you had to do it that way and it’s second nature. Though for taking photos for pleasure I’m entirely in favour of letting the camera do the best it can.

I’ve been taking a lot of photographs in the last few weeks, many more than I usually do at this time of year but perhaps this has to do with the late autumn and, even in Derbyshire, some rather beguiling light. And I’ve been using all my DSLR equipment. Aside from two film cameras that I use much less often than digital equipment (and ignoring compact digital cameras) I have DSLRs with lens mounts of  Canon EF (5D Mk II), Nikon F ( FujiFilm S5 Pro) and Pentax K ( Samsung GX10).

Like most keen photographers, and particularly when I do paid work, I like to save the shots in RAW plus a jpeg. Now that storage media is so cheap, the jpeg is usually large in size and may be used as the final image. Although I think that sometimes the DPP software from Canon does a better job I use Lightroom to develop the RAW files. It’s too confusing to use more than one RAW converter.

Ignoring the fact that some lenses produce a slightly warm or slightly cool colour temperature compared to natural light, with film the choice of the emulsion and its characteristics is very important as that together with any filters used or specific types of processing will determine the final image. Most of us used to choose one film type for scene types and stick to it. For example a more saturated colour film for landscapes was often a good idea. For sports if black and white the most effective would be a high key contrasty emulsion. For portraits in colour a film producing more neutral tones would be attractive and for portraits in black and white a slow very fine grain film with mild contrast would be many people’s choice although David Bailey made wonderful use of punchy high-contrast stock. And depending on choice of film, if it were kept properly, used within temperature ranges and developed with a consistent developer for a particular film then no matter what camera was used, with the same scene, the same lens and the same exposure the results would be completely consistent.

A digital camera’s sensor just collects light in its pixels. The light does not have a colour but the sensor has (usually) a colour filter array that determines which colour is collected in that pixel. But each pixel must have three colours to determine the colour that will be used by the software so the other two colours of each pixel are estimated by reference to the colours of the adjacent pixels. The camera’s software thus creates its own estimate of the image as raw data. This raw data is then processed by reference to the parameters set in the  menu options (either the default parameters or the ones selected by the photographer) to produce the jpeg image and those parameters are stored with the RAW file but not used in it.

When the RAW file is displayed in the Raw converter there will be a partially “developed” image because the converter knows how to display each particular camera’s basic transforms. With most manufacturers’ the partially developed RAW images are lacking in brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness and the base light colour (the “white balance”) may be incorrect. It may also be necessary to do something about digital noise, darken or lighten the tones and improve clarity. Some of this work will need to be done to every file and some will be enhancement of the image. RAW converters will permit adjustments that can also be done with other software later. What is excellent about RAW converters is that they mostly do not alter the original file but store the user’s changes in a “developer” file so that it will always be possible to go back and re-develop the image from scratch. I prefer to do almost all necessary work in the RAW converter leaving only serious image manipulation for the photo editor.

It is easy to see that the RAW converter, together possibly with other image manipulation software, can produce the results of almost any film type and this gives digital photography its tremendous flexibility. But it is necessary to be not only very fluent with the use of the RAW converter and learn to use very small adjustments but also to realise that the starting point for different cameras and different sensors is not the same. It is not going to be easy if one has several cameras and shoots RAW with all of them easily to obtain the same results. At least I do find it difficult easily to reach my goal with several different types of RAW files. So after five years of using digital cameras I’ve decided to limit the number of cameras that I will customarily shoot RAW with. And in my next entry I’m going to say which and why.