technical

Fuji X100 for landscape photography

I have recently purchased the fabulous Fuji X100 and now use it as a lightweight landscape kit. More soon.

Nikon and Zeiss

For the curious the system I mainly use is a Nikon film and digital setup. Since December 2007 I switched to the new Nikon D3 and several months afterwards added a D700. I still use 35mm film an awful lot and have an array of bodies including an F6, an F5, an F3, an FE2, an FA and an FM3a which see a lot of use.

One significant change I have made over the last year is moving off the various Nikon pro zooms I used to favour (i.e the 14-24mm, 17-35mm, 24-70mm and 80-200mm f2.8s) and now only use primes and specifically the ZF range by Zeiss as they are superior to the Nikon offerings - prime or zoom - in most ways.

The lenses I regularly use are:

Carl Zeiss 21mm f/2.8 Distagon ZF
Carl Zeiss 25mm f/2.8 Distagon ZF
Carl Zeiss 28mm f/2 Distagon ZF
Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2 Distagon ZF
Carl Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 Planar ZF
Carl Zeiss 100mm f/2 Makro-Planar ZF

I usually only carry three of them at one time and vary the focal lengths depending on what I want to photograph. If I am going to be in narrow valleys I would have something like the 21mm, 28mm & and 50mm with me whereas for more open landscapes I might carry the 25mm, 35mm and the 100mm to pick out far off detail. Often enough though going out with just one prime - the 35mm - is what I really enjoy.

Rather more occasionally the fabulous 24mm f/3.5D ED PC-E Nikkor makes it into my bag.

I perch this lot on top of a Gitzo 3540XLS carbon tripod with the impressive Kirk BH-1 ball head.

Over the years I have owned several Hasselblad and Pentax medium format systems - and many of the photograps on this site were shot using them - but am not nearly so active in using medium format as I once was. I have moved away from the fallacy that being able to print as large as possible is desirable as in fact the best way to enjoy a photograph is to actually hold a print in your hands and this rather limits the size to nothing bigger than about A3 and preferably even smaller than that.

What I have discovered over the last couple of years after much toil is that, contrary to popularly accepted wisdom, the performance of modern 35mm slide film is actually superior to a camera such as the D700 and D3 in terms of the detail it can capture and so I find myself using, and buying, 35mm film cameras more than ever. The big caveat to this statement is that it requires a very good scanner, I use a Coolscan 9000ED along with its glass holder for any slides that are not perfectly flat, and a lot of patience. The final requirement to get the turbo boost out of your scan is the correct use of Smart Sharpen in Photoshop. No other sharpening procedure/software I have used - and I have a few - seems to do anywhere near as good a job. USM, what I used to use in my naivety, is hopeless and is a recipe for poor results. Provided your workflow is immaculate, and now mine is pretty good, your old beat up Nikon FM with a good prime and a roll of Provia 100F will outperform the current top end 12 megapixel DSLRs in terms of resolution.

Of course with DSLRs like the D3 you are free to use high ISOs that film can't begin to match and the dynamic range of RAW files is wider too. The workflow is also easier of course but somehow rather less satisfying. In the end I split my photography between digital and film relatively evenly depending on the volume of shooting I expect to do. Scanning 2000 images is not a task to take lightly believe me.

In terms of film I was an avid user of Agfa APX 100 black and white negative film until its demise and have now transferred my affections to Ilford Pan-F and FP4 as well as XP2 Super from time to time. I remain a fan of Fuji Velvia 50 and I am happy to see it back in the shops although recently I have begun using Provia 100F much more as I don't always want extremely saturated images.

The value of Live View

When I first heard of Live View my initial thought was "So what?". How misguided I was.

One of the early lessons more attentive photographers learn is that autofocus is far from infallible even when you would imagine it has no excuse to go wrong. Well, it frequently does. Often the margin of error is small and is lost to a landscape photographer as routinely you are focusing at - or close to - infinity and you are using an aperture of f8 or f11. However, as soon as you start employing selective depth of field at subjects that are relatively close by any focusing errors - even very slight ones - are image destroyers.

This has been particularly brought home to me in the last year as I have turned almost exclusively to the use of manual focus prime lenses - the superlative Carl Zeiss ZF range. They are fantastically high quality both mechanically and optically but their extraordinary performance is easily nullified by small focusing errors and so the scales have fallen from my eyes in terms of the value of Live View on my D3 and now my D700. Unless I am shooting at infinity and well stopped down I now make it a matter of policy to check focus in Live View. The end result is that the technical quality of some of my photography has taken one upward step.

Importantly Nikon's implementation of Live View does exactly what you would need it to do - it stops down the lens to the requested aperture thus you instantly eliminate any focus shift which you would sometimes get from focusing on a wide-open lens which is subsequently stopped down during the exposure. I imagine that Canon and other manufacturers implementation works similarly but I do not know for sure.

The use of Live View is the 21st century analogue to the use of a loupe on the ground glass of a large format camera and I now wouldn't be prepared to do without it for the kind of photography I pursue.

As an aside, the Leica M9 which has only just come out at the time of writing (December 2009) would be an ideal camera for me because of its small size and high quality lenses had it had Live View implemented. You could dispense with those silly external viewfinders you are forced to use for wide angle lenses and you could actually focus telephoto lenses with complete accuracy. Without it the M9, which is otherwise very appealing apart from the price, is being forced to work with one hand tied behind its back if you want to focus it in an exacting way.

In short I would strongly recommend to anyone reading this to use Live View whenever appropriate to the composition you are working on (i.e. wider apertures at shorter distances) as you will often find it will help make the shot.

Some observations on image quality

Most people who look at a carefully made print of a high quality photograph, whether it be inkjet or from a traditional wet darkroom, are often amazed at the quality obtained. Details are sharp, the colours are saturated and the image can even seem three dimensional. Inevitably the first question asked is: "What camera do you use?".

In many ways it's the wrong question or, rather, it's asked for the wrong reason. One's choice of equipment is probably the least important variable in the image taking process - but it is certainly not unimportant either. Almost any camera body built in the last thirty years or more (and which allows user override on any automation it may have) will produce first class results when used knowledgeably. However, if the lens you use is a cheap, plastic zoom more often than not the final image quality will suffer a bit (and sometimes a lot!). Similarly if you fail to use a tripod you will erode the picture quality further unless it's bright enough to use a very fast shutter speed. Your choice of lens aperture can also have a significant effect on the final image as you often have to balance your need, as a landscape photographer, for extensive depth of field with the degradation in image quality due to diffraction. Last but not least is the image size itself. Generally speaking the larger the negative/file size the better the quality of the final print and for this reason I still use medium format film when I can which, when well scanned, can produce results that outstrip any current DSLR. All that the latest cameras - digital or film - bring you is added convenience but not always added quality. That said I am certainly not alone in wanting to own the latest camera or lens but I am conscious of the fact that it is often enough a want rather than a need.

The real determinants of successful landscape photography lie elsewhere than the camera or lens. Chief amongst them is being in the right place at the right time. You need to plan where you are going to be and at what time to catch the right light falling on your chosen subject. This will have you up and about whilst the rest of the world is still fast asleep and have you lingering around well after everybody else has had their dinner. Next after being in the right place at the right time is having the ability to see what will make an eye-catching photograph - your compositional skills. Yet further down the list is having the appropriate technical skills to cope with the scene that is unfolding before you and in last place is the actual equipment you have chosen to use both for image capture as well as processing and printing. Although I ascribe differing importance to these various elements of the photographic process, they nevertheless all form part of a chain. No single element can fall significantly beneath another, in terms of quality, for that image to be compromised.

In short, much of the work and thought involved in making a high quality image occurs before you even take the camera out of its bag. Once you have chosen your location well, arrived at it in good time for the best light to emerge and visualised what kind of shot you want then the remaining steps from image capture to making a final print are usually straightforward and, with experience, automatic.