A bit of photojournalism with my R-D 1

[jlw]

Some of you might recall the dance-rehearsal pictures I included in my posting about my experiences with the 1.3x eyepiece magnifier I got from Megaperls... well, I actually found something productive to do with them!

The choreographer whose rehearsals I was photographing asked me the other day if I'd like to do a little display of the pictures to put in the lobby at her concert, which is coming up Wednesday. Naturally I said yes!

I selected some of the pictures, wrote a brief explanatory text to go with them, and used Adobe Indesign to lay them out in a two-page, traditional-magazine-style "photo essay." Then I printed out these pages at 18x24-inch size on an HP DesignJet wide-format printer. I plan to display them simply by hanging them on the wall behind the ticket table -- kind of a sneaky way to get a photo essay "published" without the inconvenience of having to find a publisher!

Even though none of the pictures was particularly stellar by itself, I was pleased with the way they all worked together. I thought some of you other photojournalism fans might enjoy seeing them, so I've attached a couple of thumbnail JPEGs of the layouts, and a PDF of the complete essay in case you want to see it in detail.

Hey, you know what? The glory days of the big picture magazines may be long-gone, but RF cameras -- including digital ones -- still work great for this kind of "picture-magazine-style" essay!

 

[aad]

Neat stuff! If the day of the picture mags is gone, the world is truly the poorer.

 

[Honus]

Jim - Very nicely done, both the photography and the layout. I particularly like the 'film-like' quality of the RD-1 b/w images. What lens and iso did you use?

- Robert

 

[Dougg]

Very nice to take advantage of the offer to get some "exposure" on your fine efforts!

 

[jlw]

Jim - Very nicely done, both the photography and the layout. I particularly like the 'film-like' quality of the RD-1 b/w images. What lens and iso did you use?

Thanks, I liked that quality too. I shot all the pictures in raw mode at EI 1600. I did the initial raw-file conversion, cropping and toning in Adobe Lightroom; I also used its vignetting-correction feature "backward" (adding vignetting instead of reducing it) to darken the corners of some of the images a bit, to help direct attention toward the center. (Back when I did wet-darkroom printing, I almost always burned in the corners of my prints a bit for the same reason.)

I applied a bit of sharpening to most of the images using Lightroom's "Detail" slider; applied to raw images, it seemed to do a good job of enhancing the image texture in a way that looks similar to film grain, rather than getting the comic-book effect that you get if you overdo conventional unsharp masking.

When I went to make the picture essay layout, though, I exported the images I planned to use into Adobe Photoshop format. By the time I enlarged some of them to the sizes I wanted in the layout, they had lost a bit of the sharpened effect I had added in Lightroom; fortunately, using Photoshop's "Smart sharpen" filter at a fairly low setting seemed to bring it back.


About lenses: I made most of the pictures in the essay with a 28/1.9 C-V Ultron, a 50/1.5 C-V Nokton, and a 100/2 Canon. (I also shot a few pictures I liked with a 21mm, but none of them made it into the essay -- the figures were so small in them that they wouldn't have had any impact in a multi-picture layout. This is one of the ways that selecting photos for an essay is different from selecting photos for individual prints.)

Using the 100 on the R-D 1 is rather dicey: the lens demands very accurate focusing (the Megaperls eyepiece magnifier helps a lot) and framing is a bit random. With this lens I usually use a 135mm Komura brightline auxiliary viewfinder; it must have been designed with VERY tight framing, because its angle of view is actually a pretty good match for the 100mm lens -- even though it should be too wide given the R-D 1's 1.53x "crop factor." The real problem is not frame size, but aiming: as is often the case using a very long lens on a rangefinder camera, it's hard to make sure that the viewfinder and the lens point exactly the same direction, and with such a narrow angle of view, it doesn't take much of a mismatch to cause problems!

I knew this going in, and was aware that using the 100 would be risky; in fact, the vast majority of the pictures I took with it were unusable. However, the ones that DID work out (such as the ones of the female dancer sitting on the floor, and the man with his hands on the woman's shoulders) were good enough that I felt they were worth the risk!

This plays into my philosophical idea that sometimes photography is a tradeoff -- you have to choose whether you're willing to give up the near-certainty of getting a lot of merely "OK" pictures in order to have a small chance of making a few really good pictures.

If you're a professional, who has to "deliver the goods" in order to get paid, you can't afford this tradeoff -- you have to play the odds and take the high-percentage shots. As an amateur/independent, though, I have the luxury of being able to choose sometimes to take the risk of getting NO pictures in hopes of getting one or two GOOD pictures. Every time I use the 100 on the R-D 1, I take that risk!

 

[rvaubel]

Framing Error with Telephoto

Framing Error with Telephoto

Of course thats why SLR's are better for telephoto. After all your 100mm is equiv to 150mm which would have been beyond the max in the days of film. Still because of the "instant replay" aspect of digital capture, I think a lot of use have been pushing the limits more agrressively than before. I, like you, don't like to use accessarey viewfinders, instead using the focus patch as a guide. This actually works pretty well except for the fact that the patch moves in the frame . The M8 won't do that and should be a lot better guide.
Between focus and framing error, I'm still getting about 30% success with my 85mm @ f5.6 or so and this is with people on the street type of stuff. I'm getting the VC 75mm f2.5 lens which I think will be a good tele match as the 50mm framelines will probably be very usefull as an approximation.
One thing that I have learned about telephoto with a rangefinder is post processing cropping is almost a necessity, philosophical arguments notwithstanding.

Rex

 

[pfogle]

jlw - that's a lovely layout you've done - I really like the way the photos work together - they do get stronger in context. I think you've used the potential in the nice geometric shapes (reflections, etc) really well. It does look like one of those Life essays, dammit!