Third Eye: The camera sees more than the eye.

Photo rapidly turns from a profession into a common means of communication and becomes a new language of communication. Like any language, it has its own rules, its own grammar, which all those who don’t want to write exclusively in “Olbanian” should get acquainted with. More and more often I hear that the profession of a photographer is dying out, both in journalism and in general. And they are not the envious ones who talk but veteran bison, who have what to remember and with what to compare. Vladimir Arkhipov’s joke that a professional photographer is the one who shoots sausage was prophetic. Everything else now goes to keen amateurs and photo artists who make their money elsewhere. Professional photographers may well repeat the fate of, say, clerks: while there were two literate people in a parish, it fed them, and when they went to write everything, how could a clerk?

“The camera sees more than the eye.”.

Edward Weston

Lens-baby, like any picture-changing device in the frame, is an invaluable tool in the hands of a man of daring, and a multiplier of aversion to stamps that are too conspicuous on obvious receptions. It is interesting, in particular, because it allows you to manipulate and thereby influence the process of perception by the eye the visual information – above all, the selective sharpness within the frame. In addition, lens baby gives just a beautiful image, like many examples of simple optics, which in this day and age of computer-calculated lenses should be appreciated especially.

Photo by Nina Hay-Artyan

Or a closer example: a hundred years ago there were quite a few poets who lived on royalties and were familiar with pineapples and champagne. I wonder how much poets earn nowadays? And this is because photography is rapidly changing from a profession into a common means of communication, becoming a new language of communication. Like any language it has its own rules, its own grammar which everybody should get acquainted with if they don’t want to write in “Olbanian” only. One of the basic parts of photogrammatics is the science of optical image construction, or, more simply, how the lens works and what the result is.

Amateur photographers when choosing gear usually focus on the camera, and take the most standard, “kit” lens, almost by inertia at the “compact” stage, the pixels are considered most important . A capable camera is a good thing, but if they pay attention they soon understand why in professional circles cheap kit lenses are called plugs. After that you can say: there is no one. How much time he will spend leafing through Internet pages and studying various glassware, how much time he will save up currency for a new piece of clothing and prove its necessity to his wife – sapienti sat. The Knower Understands. Who was not, will be, who was, will not forget..

Meanwhile, this pursuit of a leader, this desire to buy the best is also a delusion. It’s enough to look at several pictures taken with a plastic Holga or a self-made monocle to see: there’s life everywhere, and penny glasses have their own language, sometimes very interesting. There’s a huge community of pinhole and ex-LOMO camera aficionados who take great shots with this nonsense. Buying the lens itself won’t guarantee anything, because you need to know how to use it: how it renders at different apertures, what the depth of field is and why it needs it, and how zooms behave when you change focal length zooming . Let’s try a little, on the top of it, without extra figures although optics is an exact science, and there are lots of figures in it to get to the bottom of it.

Constructing a photographic image with optics is a problem with many variables. Each plays its role and influences the others, creating a multilayered cross-interdependence. The most important – the format, the focal length, the chosen aperture, the lens optical properties. Whether or not the viewer can see all the subtleties in the frame depends on how the picture will be displayed. If it’s just a screensaver on your phone, you can hardly tell the difference between a compact and a medium format.

Photo by Igor Narizhnyy

Street scenes shot with a wide angle lens convey the mood of the environment to a greater degree than the “inner world” of a character. That is why the surrounding world in the frame is not subordinated to the hero of the picture, but on the contrary. In many cases it is closer to reality, but what difference does it make for photography?? It’s much more important that we can choose whether to emphasize the medium or its inhabitants. Canon EOS 5 film, Tamron 20-40/2.7-3.5, Kodak Ektachrome 100 S.

The format

Aspect ratio is, roughly speaking, the physical size of the sensor in millimeters, not pixels or, for film, the frame area. The bigger it is, the easier it is for the lens to build a finely detailed image in which every twig on the tree will be given a sufficient number of sensitive elements pixels or emulsion grains to reproduce an impressive gamut of half-tones and optically divide the frame into foreground, mid background and background. In the film era, one of the best pieces of advice to a photographer was this: “If you’re not happy with the quality of the image, don’t change brands – change the format” at that golden time medium format was still available to the common man . It was thought that starting from the medium format there is “air” in the frame. But old-school photographers, when everything was done properly and to the max, used to say: if you take your photography seriously you will sooner or later get under the rag, i.e. switch to larger format.

That is why full frame DSLRs are so much admired – the Canon 5D, Nikon D3 and others, although not everyone will distinguish their pictures from cropped model “production” at once. That’s understandable: cameras give you possibilities, but how you use them is another question. Say, if you clamp the aperture down to 16 on a full frame camera it will be harder to recognize the full frame. Although, in general, conscious recognition is not necessary for making an impression – perception is largely subconscious and the viewer can not always explain what exactly attracted him to the picture. Leica fans like to repeat the following statistic: if you offer a person to choose between two images of the same subject shot with a Leica and any other camera, 80% will unconsciously choose the Leica image. We have to figure out if this is true or it’s just a matter of “Leukin’s loyalty”, but it’s a fact that the lens pattern is real and recognizable.

In short, the process of picture improvement, which began with the transition from the compact to a cropped photo camera, and then to a full-frame camera, does not stop here, but keeps improving by the same parameters further on, and in the transition to medium and large format more and more breathtaking detail, richer shades and semitones, finer texture of the image, which becomes multidimensional and three-dimensional, so that you want to touch it. At the same time you can play with the depth of field in a picturesque way: the waist-length shots shot on the large format are very famous ! portraits of Hollywood characters with their absolutely sharp eyes and blurred ears and the tip of their noses.

As for resolution, here’s a personal observation. Once for a big responsible job I had to decide what format to shoot the client said he believed only with his eyes and no one else . We had to take pictures of ancient engravings to make quality facsimiles. I shot them on Canon 5D that was almost a ceiling in resolution , medium format 6×7 cm slide and 4×5 inch sheet slide 10×12.5 cm , and the first thing I compared myself, using an old map of America measuring a meter and a half. So, in the digital photo the smallest letters on the map about three millimeters high were readable, but no more than that, and then only when zoomed in at 200-300% I then calculated that the letter had about 10 pixels in height . A medium format slide, when viewed under a microscope, showed that thin hairs spread out from the letters as if they had been absorbed in the ink by the old fiber paper, and a leaf slide made it possible to see that these hairs are blacker in the middle and lighter on the edges!

Another thing is that I had to use a 30x microscope to evaluate, because everything was more or less the same under a regular loupe. And on a print up to, say, 30×45 the difference is unlikely to be very noticeable, although film and digital behave differently when printed. I remember when full frame DSLRs came out, there were discussions in professional photo forums about getting better inkjet prints from them than from medium format film, and it was just a revolution in the minds of people. But this seems to happen because of the noticeable loss of quality in optical printing and their absence in digital.

The format effect is best seen on large prints. In Soviet times, it was believed that a linear zoom up to 7x gave you a good quality, but then it gets substandard of course, an important news report could be printed on a large poster with terrible grain and no sharpness . But if you have a trained eye, you can see the format even in a small picture – in micro-contrast and details you can’t hide the real quality ! . A few years ago, American publishers sounded the alarm: sales of glossy magazines began to fall harder than could be explained by the advent of the Internet. Investigation reveals that the reason is the mass shift of photographers to digital. More convenient and cheaper. But a medium format slide had such a margin of sharpness and color, it gave the subject such depth that one had an automatic feeling of luxury, luxury quality, which is what the gloss is based on. And a digital picture is just a picture: everything is distinguishable, but there is no luxury. The average reader is unlikely to have known about all these subtleties, but has stopped buying magazines.

Let’s say it again: the photographer is not only about luxury, remember Lomography and Holgu. Every format has its own specific possibilities, and every mother-photo is valuable. Michael Kenna was shooting medium format, Bresson worked with just a narrow “Leica”, Ansel Adams – 8×10 inches by the way, it’s 20×25 cm negative , and that? To describe the properties of the format in words is a thankless task like trying to depict Caruso singing. It’s better to look closely at the exhibition works and draw your own conclusions.

Photo by Nina Ai-Artian

Compact cameras look like frivolous toys in comparison with professional equipment, but there are situations when too thorough approach can blow out, so to speak, tremulous spark, and it is better to hurry up to shoot with everything you can get hold of. Besides, the “compact” image has its own aesthetics, partly due to the great depth of field. Canon Powershot G5,

f2.8, 1/8 c.

Focal length

Describing verbally the optical effect of different focal lengths is a little easier than the format, if only because it has already been done by many and repeatedly. In a nutshell: the bigger it is, the more compressed space is in the frame, and the picture is flatter at the same time, although it seems inconsistent at first glance, the near, middle and far are more separated, because of the shallow depth of field. In extreme cases super TV, short distance shots, open aperture the background is blurred beyond recognition, turning into a monolith, and the subject begins to live not in the real world, but in some conventional and not very related to it environment.

With wide-angle lenses, on the contrary, space becomes tangible and elastic, the close-ups literally stick out of the frame the difference in the size of the near and far details creates the effect of looking at close up, at point-blank range, and enhances the effect of presence. It is not without reason that photojournalism has recently made extensive use of wide-angle lenses, remember Sergei Maksimishin’s work.

Super wide angles, somewhere between 12 and 17 mm in the full frame, reproduce perspective in such a way that you get a feeling of space distortion and special energetics because of the too wide transmission of the foreground. This can and should be used for artistic effects.

This makes it clear why many genre photographers starting with Bresson himself preferred medium focal lengths, in particular, as they brought minimal subjective coloring to the frame. “The Polentinik does not isolate the subject from its environment like a TV set and does not strain its spatial energy like a wide-angle camera remember Bresson: “Shooting with a wide-angle camera is like shouting” . The stock lens optically conveys objectivity with it we parse the subtle connections of the elements of the frame without being distracted by visual side effects.

Another thing is that in skillful hands, first of all by playing with the near and medium frame, “polentin” can imitate the effect of both a moderate wide-angle and a short portrait. Examples can be seen in many classic shots.

Photo by Alexey Lokhov

Even at small format sizes the format camera frame is recognizable by its volume, palpable texture, contrasty description of the smallest details. Besides, a great advantage of a format camera is its ability to move – to tilt, twist and shift the lens and film in relation to each other. It may not be too striking, but it makes a big difference in the frame. They can be used not only to change the geometry of the frame within a wide range, but also to position the boundary of the DOF wherever the photographer needs it, and not necessarily parallel to the film plane. 9×12 cm camera, 210 mm lens.

Aperture

Many people think of aperture only as a purely technical element that regulates exposure. It’s not like that. So it does adjust the exposure, but it also determines the lens pattern, the actual resolution, the plasticity of the image and, finally, the depth of field.

In the days of film it was considered that aperture opening was not the best in terms of optical detail, but the aperture opening at 3 on the average different lenses have different features steps of maximum aperture was optimal in terms of sharpness and detail. And at about 16 diffraction starts to show itself – a very unpleasant phenomenon when light rays pass through a small hole and get divergent from one another, resulting in lower resolution and contrast the image looks like it is covered by a blurred film .

To be clear: a fully open aperture was and is, nevertheless, very much in demand and fast lenses are still desired, but for other purposes: achieving shallow depth of field and background blur, accurate and fast focusing, etc. d. We are now talking about the optical pattern of the lens the depth of field is a separate story, about it below.

Those who want to see with their own eyes the effect of the diaphragm can make a simple test: take a picture of some textured scene with fine details at all possible apertures. Recommended to minimize other factors with a tripod. In the case of zooms, by the way, it’s very interesting to repeat this test at multiple focal lengths. You can bet that at a fully open aperture the image will be floppy and the sharpness won’t be perfect, especially at the edges of the frame. By shutting down the diaphragm just by half a step you will see the considerable improvement of the image: the details become sharper and more lush, the texture becomes more palpable because of the increase of micro-contrast. The obvious progress will continue until about f8-11, after which the micro contrast will start to drop and fine details will get washed out, and not at the edges of the frame, but evenly over the whole field. This is absolutely typical. Of course the image of a cheap “whale” lens and a professional lens with many zeros in price will be different at fully open aperture and all the rest, but the algorithm of changes is the same: first the picture is a bit “wacky”, then rich and voluminous, then dry and gray.

It should be mentioned that in the digital epoch objective research is sometimes hampered by tacit image processing directly in the camera, and that is especially true for JPEG pictures. For instance, looking at different lenses of the Olympus SLR lineup will show that they produce almost identical image which shouldn’t be the case. There is one of two things: either the company has made phenomenal progress in unifying its optics or, more likely, the camera quietly brings the picture to the finish.

Another – and most important – caveat to the aperture work has to do with the unprecedented variety of digital formats in film – in the sense of sensor size. The thing is that the diffraction depends on the format: the bigger the size of a sensor or a frame, the later it reveals itself at the aperture. If for a frame of 24×36 mm the threshold value will be f13 remember that diffraction does not collapse at once but increases gradually , you can usually shoot at medium format up to f16 without any problem, and f22 is a perfectly “good” aperture for a sheet camera. Respectively, for a cropped sensor even after F11 one should keep in mind this danger and not to clamp the aperture unnecessarily. Since the sensor in a compact camera is many times smaller at best it is 5 x 7 mm and more often 4 x 6 mm , diffraction occurs almost at once there, almost from f5.6. No wonder that test shooting often shows: compacts are better to shoot with the aperture fully open or only slightly closed.

Photo by Nina Ai-Artian

A monocular is one of those lenses that communicate much more about the photographer’s mood or general outlook than they do about the outside world or the specific piece of it that makes up the subject of the shot. So the revolt of reality amateur photographers that happened a hundred years ago was predestined and inevitable. And thank goodness for that! The whole resulting world photo is much more interesting than the “monocular” part of it. Narrow-film camera, scan from a negative.

Depth of field

Like aperture, it is wrong to consider depth of field as a purely technical parameter. It’s a creative tool of its own, separating the world you want to tell about in the picture from everything else that gets relegated to the background or environment. The depth of field gets smaller as the aperture gets wider, the focal length of the lens gets longer and the subject gets closer to the camera. Even with the diaphragm fully open the depth of field DOF can be very large if you focus on infinity a tree twenty meters away and the North Star will be sharp , but it will shrink to a few millimeters if you focus on the near limit of focusing. These are all commonplace truths, but there are a few points of interest not everyone remembers.

For example, the aperture increases the DOF to infinity twice as much as to the camera, so if you have to precisely place the border of sharpness, you should aim not at the middle of the subject, but at the border of the first third of it, as seen from the camera. Or else: the depth of field decreases, as was said, when you mount a longer focal length lens, but only if you don’t get off the ground and the lens accordingly “accommodates” a smaller portion of the subject. But if you need to take a picture of a fixed piece of space, e.g. a window opening, the depth of field will be the same with any lens at the same aperture. It sounds unusual, but just imagine: if you shoot a window opening with a 20 mm wide angle you have to stand at the window sill, and if you use a 200 mm TV set you have to go ten meters away. One compensates for the other.

Depth of field depends on format, and it is already more interesting. The bigger the format, the less the Depth of field. That’s why the depth of field of the cropped DSLR is one step larger than that of a full frame SLR, for the same scene since their sensor area is less than half of the full frame , and the 4/3 system has even larger DOF sensor area is about 2/3 of a cropped frame, or 1/4 of a full frame . With compacts, the DOF is really enormous, which is exemplified by the following example. As it is known, at the beginning of the last century, when progressive photographers were fighting Pictorialism, the “Group f64” which included Ansel Adams, was founded in San Francisco.

The name of the group was a play on the working aperture, with which they shot their subjects mostly magnificent landscapes , and the meaning of its use was to provide maximum image sharpness in all depth, in contrast to the dreamy blur of Pictorialists. An aperture of F64 sounds pretty cool, most of today’s popular lenses just don’t have one. But let’s count. Adams usually shot with an 8×10 inch format camera though many others as well . A moderate wide angle for this format, roughly equivalent to a 35mm lens for a 35mm format, would be 240mm. Focusing, let’s say, at a distance of 5 meters and setting aperture f64, we get the depth of field from about 2 meters to infinity. This on the one hand. On the other hand, take for example the once very popular Fujifilm f30, a compact camera with a 1/1.6 inch sensor, not the worst size in its class this size is still in fashion among luxury compacts .

So, to achieve the same depth of field at the same 5 m and at equivalent focal length 8 mm , you need not to aperture the lens at all: at maximum F2.8 it will also cover sharpness from 2 m up to infinity! For compacts with a smaller sensor, and there are a lot of them, the DOF is even bigger. For reference, a full-frame DSLR with a 35mm lens will give the same DOF at f11 calculate the depth of field for a variety of lens combinations, formats, etc. d. You can find it on the web according to charts, which are easy to find on the web .

Photo by Igor Narizhnyy

In my opinion one of the greatest achievements in photography lately is equipping it with stabilizers. They allow you to shoot handheld at almost any time of the day or night, and it’s a great help if you want to capture something whimsical and fairy-tale like in the mood. Canon 5 D, 24-105/4 L at 24 mm, ISO 3200, f4.5, 1/4 c.

Lens quality

The only way to talk about lens quality as an issue is in purely technical reproduction, where the more details you get, the better. But when it comes to making an artistic image, by and large, there is no such thing as good or bad – it all depends on the task at hand. A reporter goes out on assignment with lenses all over, because he knows by experience: they might not let him go behind the cordon, it might be too crowded, or there might be nothing visually interesting, and he’ll have to get out of it by means of optical effects.

His task is to bring the footage to the editorial office. An artist’s job is different: to express their sense of the world or a small part of it. In this case it is enough to find yourself one or two lenses which, as one of my colleagues put it, “work with your head in unison”, and then settle down and get down to work. The same Bresson shot almost everything in a row with a single “half-pint”, only very occasionally switching to a moderate wide-angle 35mm. Bernard Faucon, a virtuoso of Happening photography, when he decided to take up photography, bought a Hasselblad with one lens and never changed it.

If a lens has some feature unique to it, it can atone for the lower resolution and inconvenient handling, because an unusual image is an important creative tool. More and more open-minded youngsters are discovering the image quality of the old American optics, and not because it is better which is by no means a fact , but because it is different. Let the “Jupiter” has lower sharpness than other “whale”, but it draws blurred background as no one else can! Even in the 19th century quite sharp lenses were made for those standards and formats , and yet the Heliard lens, released in 1902, made a splash all over the world precisely because of its slightly lower sharpness and a particular plasticity.

But it’s all a search for a personal style, and good luck to those who look for it. The optical quality of lenses undoubtedly exists and lends itself not only to subjective, but also to quite scientific evaluation. But we must remember that photography, in a sense, is arranged according to the principle of a chain: its overall strength is determined by the weakest link. If you take a solid full frame DSLR, but set the sensitivity to maximum, the results will be worse than a 4/3 camera in good light. The same thing will happen if you shake your hand or shoot with cheap unsharp optics then again, in artistic photography you can deliberately go for all that . Consequently, in order to get the most suitable image it makes sense to look for the weakest link in your system in order to provide a breakthrough in quality with minimal investment. Experience shows that optics rarely leave the top of the list of upgrade contenders.

A colleague of mine, who finally bought a professional 24-70/2.8 zoom, expressed his impressions in brief: “Almost like a medium format” understandably, compared to what he had . Indeed, improvements in the most important parameters of an image contrast and resolution can equally be seen when we change for the better, both in terms of format, optics, and sensitivity. And vice versa: a concession in just one parameter brings the entire system down one notch. Meticulous Americans back in the days of film calculated that if you squeeze the maximum out of the equipment technical, then shooting medium format with ISO 400 film gives a print similar in quality to a narrow frame with ISO 100 although, of course, reading such calculations, we must remember that the resolution alone the final print is far from exhausting the important characteristics of the image .

But there is one parameter, which depends only on the lens: color rendering. It depends on both the optical scheme and the quality of the illumination. A “color” lens is usually easy to recognize by its price – they do not come cheap. For example, it is often said about the famous L-series in Canon’s optical lineup that it is valued not so much for its sharpness as for its color.

Over the last century and a half probably thousands of lens types have been developed. Find yourself a good helper or two and have a great shoot!!

Photo by Nina Hay-Artyan

The Chinese plastic and at the same time iconic Holga, an heir to the once famous Diana, brings to mind Alexei Parshchikov’s essay on photography. It describes a camera as a miniature theater, where the action is staged in its own way. Peculiar lenses, laminating, exposure limitations – everything is working in order to set up a special world inside Holga, which irreversibly though recognizably remakes everything that falls into the lens for itself. There is a telling story connected with “Diana”: a famous American photographer, tired of his students’ lamentation about amateur class of their equipment which supposedly did not let their talent unfold, forbade them to use anything except “Diana”. According to him, not even a month passed before the pupils finally began to understand what photography is. “Holga, double exposure.

Photo by Igor Narizhny

This not too serious shot illustrates, first, the mood that grips a traveler after a few days in Eastern Europe and, second, the way a 12mm super wide-angle camera looks at the world at full frame and its fine art capabilities. You have to keep the horizon roughly in the center of the frame to keep the walls from tumbling backwards. Canon 5 D, Sigma 12-24/4-5.6 at 12 mm, ISO 500, f7.1, 1/25 c.

Photo by Igor Narizhnyy

This recognizable New York house is not the product of digital manipulation. In fact, it’s practically a direct scan of a medium format slide. The peculiarity of the image can be explained by the shooting with a 45/3.5 shifter lens, based on the old domestic Mir-26, and the cross-process, here a slide developed in accordance with the recipe for negative film. Shift lenses, compensating the convergence of verticals, give a kind of dignity and even grandeur to the building. The red coloring comes from adjusting the curves in the scan. Pentax 645, Hartblei 45/3.5 shift lens, Kodak Ektachrome 100 S.