Kia ora tatou:
I know I bang on about this, but the fact is:
I am analpedantic about image quality.
Once again I have been reminded that quality matters.
Every time I make an image that blows my trumpet, I want to make it BIG, or rather to make it BIG if I should choose to so so at some time in the future. In fact my explorations of picture space over the last ten years or so  have been to do with the structuring and arrangement of dense amounts of information. A major picture-making issue for me has been a concern with finding the order in complex picture structures, in defining the balance point between not enough and too much information.

It still is.
I blame my dear friend Mark Soltero. He has been exhorting me to make my work big. A0+. At least. This may be because his paintings are themselves big works (2-4m sq), but I don’t think so. Because of him I have another picture-making issue, which runs alongside but is attached to this; near and far. A few years ago the pair of us went to view a retrospective by New Zealand realist painter, Grahame Sydney. Grahame’s works are themselves big, but so is his subject matter. I had always viewed them from a distance, and for the first time I was able to get up close and observe every brush stroke, fine, perfect, exquisite. I could immerse my self in a micro-view then step back a few metres and take in the whole. I was entranced. I still am. And I wanted to be able to do the same. At the time I was working in film, and the only answer was 8 x 10. But it has always seeemed to me that large format photography can easily become stilted and lose its spontaneity (or at least that has beem my experience of it, working with 4 x 5). So I never went there.

Then I moved to digital, and the possibility was there. recently, frustrated by the substandard work of the labs available to me, I took on a 24″ printer, had it installed and calibrated and went to work. and the holes in my technique became immediately apparent. You see, here is the thing. At A5, or A4 or even A3, subtle deficiencies in shooting technique are not apparent. At A2 and larger they become rather glaring. A subtle amount of camera shake becomes obvious. A less than stellar lens makes its deficiencies known/seen. and it simply will not do. I have been told that a viewer will never see it. Perhaps. But I will. And that matters to me.

What make  matters worse is the increasing pixel count in our sensors. The bigger the sensor, the less room for error. Images that looked fine on my 1Ds Mk II now look …wobbly when shot on my 1Ds Mk III. It is a hard taskmaster, which is driving me to do it better. Not a bad thing, really. Perhaps our frustrations are really challenges and opportunities putting their hands up. so once again I am working my technique harder, going through it bit by bit, looking critically at ways in which I can sharpen up (literally and metaphorically).

Allow me to share what I have learned.

Firstly longer lenses are unforgiving. My EF 100-400/4.5-5.6 is good at up to 200.  At 400 it will not let me away with anything. The slightest tremor and it is all over, Rover.

1. So I now use a remote release, and mirror up. The 1Ds III allows me to set it so the mirror stays up for successive exposures. I fire the first one to get the mirror up and eliminate mirror slap. I wll throw the file away later. Then I fire a second and third to reduce the vibration and get one which is pin-sharp at 100%. I look for the small details in the file ( grass, branches etc).
2. I have been using heavier and heavier tripods. I hate working on a tripod.  I would much rather shoot hand-held and spontaneously. But I use them. Lately all my landscape work has been done using a Manfrotto 058B Triaut and a Manfrotto 229 Head ( combined weight 8.1 kg. My back hates me).
3. I am also using Moose Peterson’s long lens technique. It makes sense to me. Looking through the viewfinder as  I trigger, I have noticed with long lenses (> 300mm) that I was still getting a subtle shake. Hence moving to this technique. Whatever I can do to dampen that is important.
4. If I do handhold, I use the 1/focal length rule, but triple it. That is, If I am using a 50mm focal length, I treat 1/250 as the minimum. Preferably faster.
5. I avoid apertures higher than f/11. On FF sensors like the 1DS Mk III, diffraction sets in earlier. f8 is better.

As I review this piece, it obviously makes me appear pedantic. And your point?

What I have learned is that you never master anything.

You only refine.

Thank goodness.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Thinking about Photography and Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.