hello from marstonfoto

So you have bought your new camera and would like to get some extras for it. Prepare to be shocked at the cost of your manufacturer’s own brand accessories. We all know about batteries where the manufacturer’s battery is £45 but a respectable copy is £12 but these are easy to find. But how about things like remote switches, flash triggers, flash diffusers, battery grips, mount adapters and so on?

Remote switches are either wired or wireless. There are infra-red switches but don’t get one. The wired ones from the manufacturers have fairly short cables, allow a half-press or full-press of the shutter button and can lock the shutter open. These can cost up to £55 but if you shop around you can find good copies for between £5 and £10 with up to 5 metres of cable. The wireless ones do the same thing but with a transmitter and receiver with a working distance of up to 50 metres. The receiver that plugs into the camera can be used as a wired release if required and the transmitter works  just as a wired release. Manufacturer’s branded ones can cost an unbelievable £100 but excellent generic ones can be obtained for £20 (with batteries).

The most recent digital SLRs that have built-in flash have flash transmitters to fire stand-alone compatible flashguns but if you are using studio flash you will need a wireless trigger with one or more receivers. A branded set of 1 transmitter and 1 receiver will cost you £190 but how about 1 transmitter and 3 receivers for £35? And for ordinary flashguns you can get standard plastic diffusers for less than a third of the cost of the branded ones.

I like battery grips for semi-pro equipment. These screw into the baseplate of the camera and provide for another battery and also give you a grip for holding the camera in portrait aspect, duplicating on the grip the controls that the thumb and forefinger use when the camera is held in landscape aspect. The extra weight provided by the battery grip makes the camera better balanced (at least, I think it does) and it makes taking portrait shots hassle-free. There’s no magic in these grips; they are made of polycarbonate with covering matching the camera and have electrical contacts. Yet the grip for the Canon 5D Mk II camera retails at £230 and the one for the Canon 7D retails at £190. Excellent copies can be bought for £72 and £80 respectively. I have one for my 5d Mk II (which actually cost only £57) and one for my FujiFilm S 5 Pro.

Finally, if you want to use lenses for a different camera mount on your camera you will need an adapter. The most popular cameras for using other lenses are Canon EOS, 4/3rds and micro 4/3rds. You are likely to be recommended Novoflex adapters. These are good quality and made in Germany but at between £105 to £149 are unnecessarily expensive. There’s nothing in an adapter of this type than machined brass and/or aluminium and they all exist to stand the lenses off the receiving mount so that they have the original distance from the mounting flange to the sensor (or rather film originally). For example, a Noveflex adapter to put a Leica M lens onto a micro 4/3rds camera is £129 but a good copy is only £40. The same prices apply to Leica screw lenses. For other lenses, such as Nikon, Pentax, Contax, Rollei, Leica R, M42, Praktica B and Adaptec it’s probably better to get an adapter for Canon Eos (typically £9) and then a single Canon EOS to micro 4/3rds adapter.

So, where do these cheaper products come from? Unsurprisingly mostly from China, but you don’t have to order from China as the products discussed (and more) are available in the UK and in nearly all cases postage is included in the price. Because it is so easy to set up this way, all the ones that I have discovered have eBay UK shops. The ones I have bought from are called PIXLAMB, photobits42, webshoptoU and YISHUMA gadget store.

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.

I think I came rather late to digital cameras. When clearing out a cupboard last week I found the first one I had. It is an Olympus Camedia C-2000, a plastic-bodied 2.1 megapixel camera from ten years ago and it is a good candidate for my camera collection. With a 3 x zoom (35-105 mm equivalent) f2.8 lens and an optical viewfinder as well as a small LCD it has an auto mode plus aperture-priority and shutter-priority modes. The storage medium is Smart Media and I found a few 8 Mb cards. It looks a bit battered but works perfectly and will produce nice 7 x 5 prints. I remember that I replaced it with a Minolta XT (3.1 megapixels and a nice slim body) but I gave that to my grandson otherwise that would also be in my collection. It was when Canon produced the 300D that I started to move to digital and the 300D was replaced with a 20D which was replaced by a 5D and I now have a 5D Mk II with some fine lenses for serious work.

But before the 300D came along I was already toying with the idea of a digital camera capable of making large quality prints. My local friendly independent photographic dealer sold me on the idea of a Minolta Dimage 7 Hi. It must have been about 7 years ago. This “bridge” camera with a fixed 28-200 mm Minolta lens with a 5 megapixel sensor cost the best part of £1,000 and my business dutifully parted with the cash. I took it to Prague in December 2002 (together with the little Olympus) and it was more than a disappointment. It was a disaster. I had read the manual, taken a lot of test shots and was going to give it a real workout. I think it must have been the most user-unfriendly gadget ever made. Because the LCD was so tiny and the typeface miniscule most of the settings were achieved by pressing buttons that had a rotary selector switch. You had to move the rotary selector to the parameter to change and hold the button down while using a wheel by the shutter button to change the parameters. There were three of these selectors in strange places on the left of the camera. The  electronic viewfinder was dim and despite having a diopter adjustment was not sharp. In nearly every case the camera’s metering system was beaten by the Prague light. It came closer to being right with the spot meter. Focus was hitty-missy but again the spot variety was the best option. It’s cold in Prague in December and batteries don’t  function too well but they lasted hardly long enough to get more than a couple of dozen (poor) shots. The Olympus was a star by comparison. So after another try over Christmas with slightly more success the 7 Hi went to live in a cupboard alongside an old Polaroid and one of the first-generation digital video cameras. Three years later I lent it to my stepson to take on a trip to Antarctica (he’s a travel agent and has a wonderful photographic eye) and it beat him too. Now it is sitting on my collection’s shelves as an example of a poor effort.

To put a digital camera into a collection (by default or by buying it specially) it ought to have a special quality (which both of the foregoing have and for very different reasons!). I don’t count the Canon DSLRs although I think the original 5D would have qualified had I not sold it to buy the Mk II. The next possibility was a Panasonic FZ-50 that had everything going for it except for much too much noise at high ISO levels but I also sold that for a good price after using it for 18 months.

The first deliberately purchased digital SLR for my collection was an Olympus E-330. This is a FourThirds camera introduced in 2006 and the first DSLR ever to offer Live View. The E-330 has a distinctive design. Instead of the standard prism, that creates the “hump” it has a finder light path that runs sideways which gives it an elegant shape. The very clear and bright LCD is articulated in the vertical plane which allows for low and high shots as well as providing a really good “waist-level finder” that is as good for candid shots as it is for portraiture. The 7.5 megapixel sensor produces good prints with the trademark “Olympus colour” and the two “kit” lenses are good. The implementation of Live View was excellent since it permitted the phase-detection auto-focus of the earlier Olympus DSLRs while also providing the contrast-detection auto-focus that is a feature of compact cameras. The E-330 shows Olympus in full creative mode.

Almost simultaneously I had the opportunity of acquiring a FujiFilm S2 Pro from a wedding photographer who was upgrading to a Nikon D3. The S2 is built from a Nikon D80 body using the wonderful Fuji 6/12 megapixel sensor and was introduced in 2002 at which time it was something of a revolutionary concept. This particular camera has a battery grip and the camera thus can run off a total of 8 lithium AA cells, certainly enough for a whole day’s wedding shooting. The S2 is not an amateur’s camera. It is deliberately aimed at the professional who needs to get high-quality shots with excellent pictorial quality and in particular the best skin-tones in the business from a fairly simple camera over a lengthy period using Nikon lenses. As such it deserves a place in any collection, particularly as its successor the S3 did not bring any startling improvement. The S5 Pro (there was no S4) is quite a different camera being based on the Nikon D200 and represents a standard of pictorial quality that in my opinion has yet to  be bettered by any digital camera. My own S5, currently used as a back-up camera to the Canon 5D II, will no doubt join its predecessor on the collection shelves in a few years time.

In 2007 I bought a Pentax K100D Super. This is a 6 megapixel entry-level DSLR that runs off 4 AA cells, has a sensor with a sensitivity range of 200-3200 ISO, in-body shake-reduction system and a dust-removal system in a metal body. No Live View, just a camera designed for taking pictures in the traditional manner. You could think of it as a modern-day Spotmatic or K1000. Pentaxes are unique amongst digital SLRs in that they support every lens that any Pentax camera could use right back to the first one in 1957. The screw lenses need an adapter, cheaply available. Manual lenses with the “auto” aperture setting will meter in aperture-priority mode but the magic of this camera is that even the oldest lenses will meter in manual mode; you set the aperture and press the AEL button and the camera sets the shutter speed. And for all lenses, even manual-focus ones, the camera will beep when the lens is focused. So you can see that the reason it is in my collection is that it can use so many of the collected lenses.

When I began this blog I did a piece on compact cameras, four of them which I still own but I think that fairly soon two of them will join the others above in my collection. I think the case for one of them to be there is pretty strong. The Fujifilm F31 fd is a really good low light point and shoot. The sensor was overtaken in the market by the rush for more and more megapixels (but you really don’t need more than 6 for a p&s) so it was the last of its kind. The other one is the Canon Powershot A590 IS which I think will be the last of its kind as well.

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere that I have a collection of manual cameras. Over the years it has grown and it now contains quite a large amount of cameras from the mid 1950s to the 1980s. All these are of the “amateur” or “enthusiast” variety with perhaps a small number of “pro” examples. At present there are 104 SLR cameras and 4 TLRs with 225 lenses, 63 assorted fixed-lens cameras, 8 interchangeable lens rangefinders and a few miniature cameras plus conversion lenses, adapters, flashguns and odd items.  I have used many of them in the past but honestly do not have much desire to use any of the 35 mm ones on a regular basis except perhaps one of the Nikons, maybe the Leica R3 or the Olympus  OM 2n and possibly the Nicca 3-F that is the oldest in the collection. On the other hand I do use many of the lenses with my Canon 5D Mk II for which I have adapters for 8 of the lens mounts. I also have a Canon EOS to micro 4/3rds adapter so that what I can use on the Canon I can use on my Olympus E-P1 or Panasonic G1.

But I do miss film. Until about 1980 I processed all my black-and-white work and while I’m not going to go back to darkroom printing I can certainly process monochrome film to negative and scan it. I don’t really want to use a mechanical SLR because my digital SLRs are so much more advanced. What I need is a take-everywhere film camera to complement my digital cameras. Thinking about  this it seemed obvious to me that I should be using a modern 35 mm interchangeable-lens rangefinder. After a lot of looking, I was lucky enough to find this.

It’s a  Voigtlander Bessa R4A, the actual one I bought, with  my Nikkor H-C 5 cm f2 lens which was on my Nicca 3-F when I bought it mounted on it. This is a wonderful lens, quite the equal of the Leica Summicron of the day and mine has survived without a blemish since 1953. This camera was made in 2008 and I bought it used but mint from Aperture Photographic close to the British Museum in London. Aperture is a great place. It’s part cafe, part shop. The coffee is excellent and you can be sure that there’s no rubbish in the camera department. Prices are on the high side of average but you get what you pay for.

Voigtlander is the oldest name in photography and nowadays it’s just that – a name. It is licensed to Cosina Co. Ltd of Japan who have been producing cameras under the Voigtlander name and the Bessa range since 1999. Cosina is a very interesting company. Started in 1959 it is still a family business in optical manufacture. It has made cameras and lenses for many of the major brands as well as its own and today makes its own Voigtlander cameras plus Zeiss Ikon and the Epson RD-1 and makes lenses for Carl Zeiss. The lenses it  makes under the Voigtlander name are for its Bessa cameras and the Leica cameras and for Nikon and Pentax. The best  way to discover Cosina is to visit Cameraquest’s site.

The Bessa R4A is a rangefinder 35mm camera of about the same size, weight and conformation as the Leica M7 and uses the same Leica M lens mount. Because it is metal it is reassuringly solid. It features an eletronically-controlled shutter with speeds of 1 second to 1/2000th and is an aperture-preferred automatic camera using a centre weighted exposure system. It may also be used in full manual mode. Designed to be used with wide-angle lenses, the rangefinder has framelines for 21, 25, 28, 35 and 50 mm focal  lengths although of course any focal length lens can be used. The large and bright viewfinder is a pleasure to use and the rangefinder is quick and easy. The Bessa range includes two other models that are available in either mechanical or electronic shutter mode and each has a different viewfinder magnification and different built-in framelines. The R2 model is the most “Leica like” as it has framelines for 35, 50, 75 , 90 mm with a 0.7 finder magnification. The R3 has a life size finder and framelines similar to the R2 except that there is a 40mm replacing the 35 mm. I chose the R4 because of the very nice wide angle finder and the wide angle frameline choice. Although I could have afforded one, I didn’t consider the Leica M7 because my budget would be for that and only one lens and I wanted a good lens collection.

Voigtlander lenses for the Leica M mount are not expensive but they are very good quality. For example versus the new Leica Summarit f2.5 range of 35, 50, 75, and 90 mm the Voigtlander equivalent lenses are on average only 36% of the Leica price. Right now I have 21, 25, 35 and 75 mm, the 25 and 75 bought used with the camera and the 21 and 35 bought new from the UK importer. My cost is just about the same as a secondhand Leica M7 body only. The single lens I would have wanted with the M7 and could (only just) afford is the 35 mm Summicron (f2) at £1,915. But I’m not going to spend that much.

With the lenses I have (including my old Nikkor 50 mm f2) a very good wide to short tele film camera system and one I have confidence in. I did not consider buying a 28 mm lens as it is a length I hardly ever use (even in a zoom range) with my full-frame digital camera for which I have 24 and 35 mm prime lenses. Actually to put that into context I don’t consider my Canon f2.8 wide primes to be as good as the Voigtlander lenses, certainly not wide open. If I do buy more Voigtlander lenses then this will be for another purpose.

The reason for this piece, which I’ve filed under “ramblings” as well as articles is to remind visitors that a Voigtlander system makes a very satisfactory return to film. My current cost is slightly under £1,500. To see all details if you are in the US contact Cameraquest as above and if in the UK go to Robert White’s site

Of course I do have another route back to film and that is Medium Format via my Mamiya TLRs  so the developing tank I bought is one that will take 120 as well as 135 film. Another story I hope.