jlw
Rangefinder camera pedant
Greetings! I'm writing this from Thedford, Nebraska, USA, population 237, county seat of Thomas County in the Sandhills region of north-central Nebraska.
I've come out for a week to shoot documentary photos of a summer dance camp that some friends of mine run at the state 4-H camp at the Nebraska National Forest, about 15 miles from here (by Sandhills standards, 15 miles away qualifies as "just down the block.") This is my first long away-from-home shoot with the R-D1, so I thought fellow RFFers might enjoy a "field report."
What I Took -- Since I planned to shoot both with the R-D 1 and the Bessa R3a I won in RFF's essay contest (once again, thank you all!) I took along a fairly wide and weird selection of lenses:
Since I also planned to shoot exclusively in raw format, I took along my Epson P-2000 photo viewer/storage gizmo. All that electronic stuff also meant taking extra batteries: three batteries for the R-D 1 and two for the P-2000. In turn, that meant taking the R-D 1's battery charger and the P-2000's charger/AC adapter. Both these chargers use the same type of AC cord, so I thought I could get by with just one cord; in retrospect, I wish I had brought two cords, but I'm living with it.
I also took along my iBook G3 laptop, but hoped not to need it for photo storage since I'd be dumping my two 512Mb memory cards onto the P-2000. Again, in retrospect, that turned out to be not quite the case.
What I'm Shooting -- The dance camp uses two temporary studios set up in the 4-H camp's main lodge. This building is finished in a rustic style, with walls of stained timber planking lined with windows, exposed beams overhead, and artificial lighting from small incandescent lights set in the beams.
This combination of bright outdoor light and dim tungsten light, backlighting through the windows combined with top lighting, and the dark background of the stained planks is enough to drive any camera's AE and auto white balance systems crazy. (It certainly did when I was trying to shoot in the same location last year with a Nikon D100!) But I figured out quickly that the things I was mainly interested in shooting -- the students and teachers -- were lit almost entirely by the overhead tungsten lights, and that this lighting was almost completely constant all over both studios!
By doing a little judicious "chimping" on the R-D 1's display, I found that at EI 1600, I could use a basic exposure of 1/125 @ f/2 for just about everything. Likewise with the white balance: I just set it to tungsten and left it. By choosing my angles carefully, I could pick spots where the window light created a nice cool "rim light" that helped offset the subjects from the timber-colored background. Interesting how a seemingly complex problem can have a simple solution when you rely on the human brain rather than a CPU!
Lens choices -- One side effect of this shooting environment was that I'm hardly using the 21mm at all -- it just picks up too much background clutter! I started out using the 35 for full-body shots, but now am gravitating toward the 40 -- that extra half-stop of maximum aperture lets me throw backgrounds out of focus just a bit more. No, there's no 40mm frameline on the R-D 1, but I seem to do OK by framing with the 35mm line and allowing a little "safety margin" inside it.
The real surprise has been the 100/2 Canon -- a lens I had brought along basically as an afterthought, but which has turned into by far my most-used optic. Since the backgrounds are so cluttered, I've been concentrating on shooting the faces of the participants, and it works superbly for this -- plenty of reach, very crisp, and terrific ability to blur out background distractions. Fairly long but not too heavy, it balances well on the R-D 1. Even the need to use an accessory finder (a 35-200mm Tewe zoom) hasn't been too much of a problem: basically I use the finder to position myself at the right distance for the type of shot I want (tight headshots, waist-up close-ups, etc.) and then concentrate on the camera's RF/VF for focusing and aiming.
Power management -- One thing I hate about digital photography is the way battery management dominates your spare time, and this trip has been no exception. As noted above, the reason is that I only brought the one AC cord for both battery chargers. I've found that a fairly heavy shooting day uses up about 1-1/2 batteries in the R-D 1 -- one runs down completely and I get the other down to 1/2 charge. The P-2000 will go all day on one battery. When I get back to the motel at night, I first plug in the P-2000 and let it recharge while I sleep, so it will be ready to go the next morning; when I leave the motel, I leave yesterday's "dead" battery on the charger, leave the half-charged battery in the camera, and carry the fully-charged battery in my case. This cycle repeats every day -- no problem UNLESS something gets out of sync. If, for example, I run down the second battery completely, I'm going to be hosed because there will be no way to recharge both the P-2000 and the camera batteries at the same time. Moral: Next time, I'm bringing both AC cords!!
Another Stupid Thing I Did -- Normally, whenever I travel with a camera, I throw a little set of jeweler's screwdrivers in my shaving kit. This time, though, I forgot.
So naturally, after my first afternoon's shooting, I was sitting in the motel idly sighting the R-D 1 at a distant windmill, and got the idea that the RF wasn't lining up exactly at infinity. Even though the disparity was so tiny that I wasn't even sure it was real, I started obsessing about it -- worrying that all my first day's take would be out of focus. But since I hadn't loaded any raw-conversion software on my little iBook, there was no way to check!
The next morning, having checked the local hardware and auto supply stores with no success, I drove 65 miles to North Platte -- the closest town large enough to have a Radio Shack store -- and bought a set of jeweler's screwdrivers. I spent most of the remaining morning making tiny adjustments to the R-D 1's RF adjustment screws, but couldn't get consistent results -- sometimes the RF would seem fine, other times it would seem very slightly "off."
Finally I realized that the problem most likely was just that I wasn't centering my eye consistently behind the eyepiece, said the heck with it, and closed the camera back up. That evening I downloaded the tryout version of Photoshop CS2, which runs pretty slowly on a G3 iBook but at least lets me do a "rough draft" conversion on each day's take. Sharpness has been fine, so I concluded that I just spooked myself about the RF issue!
Sample pix -- I'll attach a few samples. They're downsampled from CS2 batch conversions in auto mode, so are NOT optimized for color balance, brightness, etc., but should give you an idea of the shooting environment I mentioned above. There's one wide shot to show the type of room and lighting; one 35mm Ultron shot; and the rest are 100mm f/2 Canon shots.
Hope you enjoyed this "field report"...
(Despite its tiny population, Thedford is the biggest town for miles around, boasting such amenities as a grocery store, two gas stations, a restaurant... and a motel with high-speed wireless Internet, which is why I'm able to post from here!)
I've come out for a week to shoot documentary photos of a summer dance camp that some friends of mine run at the state 4-H camp at the Nebraska National Forest, about 15 miles from here (by Sandhills standards, 15 miles away qualifies as "just down the block.") This is my first long away-from-home shoot with the R-D1, so I thought fellow RFFers might enjoy a "field report."
What I Took -- Since I planned to shoot both with the R-D 1 and the Bessa R3a I won in RFF's essay contest (once again, thank you all!) I took along a fairly wide and weird selection of lenses:
- 21mm f/2.8 Avenon
- 35mm f/1.7 Ultron
- 40mm f/1.4 Nokton
- 50mm f/1.4 Canon
- 100mm f/2 Canon
Since I also planned to shoot exclusively in raw format, I took along my Epson P-2000 photo viewer/storage gizmo. All that electronic stuff also meant taking extra batteries: three batteries for the R-D 1 and two for the P-2000. In turn, that meant taking the R-D 1's battery charger and the P-2000's charger/AC adapter. Both these chargers use the same type of AC cord, so I thought I could get by with just one cord; in retrospect, I wish I had brought two cords, but I'm living with it.
I also took along my iBook G3 laptop, but hoped not to need it for photo storage since I'd be dumping my two 512Mb memory cards onto the P-2000. Again, in retrospect, that turned out to be not quite the case.
What I'm Shooting -- The dance camp uses two temporary studios set up in the 4-H camp's main lodge. This building is finished in a rustic style, with walls of stained timber planking lined with windows, exposed beams overhead, and artificial lighting from small incandescent lights set in the beams.
This combination of bright outdoor light and dim tungsten light, backlighting through the windows combined with top lighting, and the dark background of the stained planks is enough to drive any camera's AE and auto white balance systems crazy. (It certainly did when I was trying to shoot in the same location last year with a Nikon D100!) But I figured out quickly that the things I was mainly interested in shooting -- the students and teachers -- were lit almost entirely by the overhead tungsten lights, and that this lighting was almost completely constant all over both studios!
By doing a little judicious "chimping" on the R-D 1's display, I found that at EI 1600, I could use a basic exposure of 1/125 @ f/2 for just about everything. Likewise with the white balance: I just set it to tungsten and left it. By choosing my angles carefully, I could pick spots where the window light created a nice cool "rim light" that helped offset the subjects from the timber-colored background. Interesting how a seemingly complex problem can have a simple solution when you rely on the human brain rather than a CPU!
Lens choices -- One side effect of this shooting environment was that I'm hardly using the 21mm at all -- it just picks up too much background clutter! I started out using the 35 for full-body shots, but now am gravitating toward the 40 -- that extra half-stop of maximum aperture lets me throw backgrounds out of focus just a bit more. No, there's no 40mm frameline on the R-D 1, but I seem to do OK by framing with the 35mm line and allowing a little "safety margin" inside it.
The real surprise has been the 100/2 Canon -- a lens I had brought along basically as an afterthought, but which has turned into by far my most-used optic. Since the backgrounds are so cluttered, I've been concentrating on shooting the faces of the participants, and it works superbly for this -- plenty of reach, very crisp, and terrific ability to blur out background distractions. Fairly long but not too heavy, it balances well on the R-D 1. Even the need to use an accessory finder (a 35-200mm Tewe zoom) hasn't been too much of a problem: basically I use the finder to position myself at the right distance for the type of shot I want (tight headshots, waist-up close-ups, etc.) and then concentrate on the camera's RF/VF for focusing and aiming.
Power management -- One thing I hate about digital photography is the way battery management dominates your spare time, and this trip has been no exception. As noted above, the reason is that I only brought the one AC cord for both battery chargers. I've found that a fairly heavy shooting day uses up about 1-1/2 batteries in the R-D 1 -- one runs down completely and I get the other down to 1/2 charge. The P-2000 will go all day on one battery. When I get back to the motel at night, I first plug in the P-2000 and let it recharge while I sleep, so it will be ready to go the next morning; when I leave the motel, I leave yesterday's "dead" battery on the charger, leave the half-charged battery in the camera, and carry the fully-charged battery in my case. This cycle repeats every day -- no problem UNLESS something gets out of sync. If, for example, I run down the second battery completely, I'm going to be hosed because there will be no way to recharge both the P-2000 and the camera batteries at the same time. Moral: Next time, I'm bringing both AC cords!!
Another Stupid Thing I Did -- Normally, whenever I travel with a camera, I throw a little set of jeweler's screwdrivers in my shaving kit. This time, though, I forgot.
So naturally, after my first afternoon's shooting, I was sitting in the motel idly sighting the R-D 1 at a distant windmill, and got the idea that the RF wasn't lining up exactly at infinity. Even though the disparity was so tiny that I wasn't even sure it was real, I started obsessing about it -- worrying that all my first day's take would be out of focus. But since I hadn't loaded any raw-conversion software on my little iBook, there was no way to check!
The next morning, having checked the local hardware and auto supply stores with no success, I drove 65 miles to North Platte -- the closest town large enough to have a Radio Shack store -- and bought a set of jeweler's screwdrivers. I spent most of the remaining morning making tiny adjustments to the R-D 1's RF adjustment screws, but couldn't get consistent results -- sometimes the RF would seem fine, other times it would seem very slightly "off."
Finally I realized that the problem most likely was just that I wasn't centering my eye consistently behind the eyepiece, said the heck with it, and closed the camera back up. That evening I downloaded the tryout version of Photoshop CS2, which runs pretty slowly on a G3 iBook but at least lets me do a "rough draft" conversion on each day's take. Sharpness has been fine, so I concluded that I just spooked myself about the RF issue!
Sample pix -- I'll attach a few samples. They're downsampled from CS2 batch conversions in auto mode, so are NOT optimized for color balance, brightness, etc., but should give you an idea of the shooting environment I mentioned above. There's one wide shot to show the type of room and lighting; one 35mm Ultron shot; and the rest are 100mm f/2 Canon shots.
Hope you enjoyed this "field report"...
Jim Watts
Still trying to See.
jlw,
Thanks for your well written report of this 'self imposed' assignment (no wonder you won the essay prize)! It's always interesting to read others working practices in situations like this, if only to help you avoid the pitfuls yourself.
I too have just returned from an extended trip away from home myself and had some of the same problems, which I might have avoided if I had read your piece first. I contemplated buying a P-2000 before I left, but decided I didn't want the extra weight and further charger to carry, so ended up buying a few more 1gig storage cards and then looking for local internet cafes where I could burn the cards to CD. This was a mistake and a tedious and time consuming exercise. I had thought that with the price of storage cards continuing to drop that at some point I would have enough even for an extended trip and I have not been impressed by the previous storage devices available. The P-2000 seems better so I think I will need to get one for future use.
Battery life was a real problem. We have had some discussion here in the past about batteries, but you seem to be doing much better than most. I have two batteries, Epson's 1500 Mah and a Generic 1350 Mah. I think about 200 shots is about the best I get from a battery even with minimal screen use (just the occasional check on the histogram in trickey light). I have power down set to 5 minutes, but do keep regularly taping the shutter button, to keep it live, if I'm shooting. How many shots are you getting per charge? I'm going to buy two more Generic 1450 Mah batteries. Four in total should hopefully see me through a day without charging.
I also 'Spooked' myself with the rangefinder using the 21mm Avenon. My rangefinder has been fine since new but when away I also thought I had a problem with the alignment at infinty with this lens. In the end I also concluded I wasn't centering my eye consistently behind the eyepiece and did it matter anyway as the amount it was out was more than covered by depth of field. I usually Zone focus this lens anyway. Just "On the Road" paranoia I guess.
Perhaps all this just another downside of digital, the need to be near a computer to confirm what your getting. I'm sure I didn't worry as much when I was shooting more on film and had to wait longer to process the results. Now you can confirm quickly you worry about more.
Your sample shots look pretty good to me even if not optimized. Thanks again for the report.
Cheers
Jim
Thanks for your well written report of this 'self imposed' assignment (no wonder you won the essay prize)! It's always interesting to read others working practices in situations like this, if only to help you avoid the pitfuls yourself.
I too have just returned from an extended trip away from home myself and had some of the same problems, which I might have avoided if I had read your piece first. I contemplated buying a P-2000 before I left, but decided I didn't want the extra weight and further charger to carry, so ended up buying a few more 1gig storage cards and then looking for local internet cafes where I could burn the cards to CD. This was a mistake and a tedious and time consuming exercise. I had thought that with the price of storage cards continuing to drop that at some point I would have enough even for an extended trip and I have not been impressed by the previous storage devices available. The P-2000 seems better so I think I will need to get one for future use.
Battery life was a real problem. We have had some discussion here in the past about batteries, but you seem to be doing much better than most. I have two batteries, Epson's 1500 Mah and a Generic 1350 Mah. I think about 200 shots is about the best I get from a battery even with minimal screen use (just the occasional check on the histogram in trickey light). I have power down set to 5 minutes, but do keep regularly taping the shutter button, to keep it live, if I'm shooting. How many shots are you getting per charge? I'm going to buy two more Generic 1450 Mah batteries. Four in total should hopefully see me through a day without charging.
I also 'Spooked' myself with the rangefinder using the 21mm Avenon. My rangefinder has been fine since new but when away I also thought I had a problem with the alignment at infinty with this lens. In the end I also concluded I wasn't centering my eye consistently behind the eyepiece and did it matter anyway as the amount it was out was more than covered by depth of field. I usually Zone focus this lens anyway. Just "On the Road" paranoia I guess.
Perhaps all this just another downside of digital, the need to be near a computer to confirm what your getting. I'm sure I didn't worry as much when I was shooting more on film and had to wait longer to process the results. Now you can confirm quickly you worry about more.
Your sample shots look pretty good to me even if not optimized. Thanks again for the report.
Cheers
Jim
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