photos / thoughts / cameras / contemplation
Entering the cabin, patches of slow late sunlight catch my eye – lambent and leisurely.
Gentle at the edges, brushing over the lightly textured wall.
The hard angles of a cheap painting cast in soft shadow before the sun sets in deep yellow.
There’s nothing better than slow moving light that turns everything gold and warm, especially in small coastal towns where the rough sea meets rocky beaches. The regular opacarophile might love every sunset, but I fear that not every sunset is so easily framed as to be visually interesting. Maybe I’ve just seen too many sunsets? Maybe too much time spent looking through the viewfinder pondering settings turns the mind to a need to make every photo a winner? I suspect the latter is closer to the truth and is another story worth exploring.
Another sunset and another horizon. How to make this one something different? How to avoid the same bright sun and carefully placed horizon line composition?
I filled the frame with the orange glow of the sun just as that bright sphere dipped out of sight. The Finepix S200 EXR is an old camera and is quite soft at the long end, but who needs sharpness for the photo above? It’s all about the colour field and the deep orange glow. Underexposing by two-thirds of a stop deepened the colours. Everything is smeared to a sunset abstraction to fill the frame.
Minutes later, I caught a line of rough dark clouds marking the transition from golden hour to blue hour:
Sometimes, even on the sunniest day in a busy tourist town, you find an abandoned corner filled with dust and old newspapers yellowing at the edges. Once a licensed restaurant, the empty windows were of immediate interest and led to a hastening of my pace. I switched on the old Finepix camera and thought about initial settings and composition.
I like the way the sunlight illuminates key parts of the image and creates borders and frames: the white textured walls, the plank of timber, the blue wall, the papers stacked on a table, and a ceiling joist. Curious how this photo would look in a black and white conversion, I adjusted settings in Lightroom:
Light and shadow tell much of the black and white photo story. I always start with those foundations. The contrast here is bumped a little more, the sunlight spilling gently over timbers and walls is pushed, and the shadows are pulled down to create depth and mystery. The plank of wood resting on the crate becomes more of a focal point and draws the eye further into the dust and darkness of the rooms beyond.
The Nikon D50 appeals to me because it sits somewhere between the small Nikon D40 and the prosumer Nikon D70/D70s. With a plastic body that’s closer in style to 1990s Nikon film SLRs like the F65, it seems a world away from Nikon’s current black, sleek, industrial-feel mirrorless cameras and Z-mount lenses. The silver-bodied D50 I have may be technologically long in the tooth, but the 6.1 megapixel sensor still packs an imaging punch when used with careful intent.
The Nikkor 50mm 1.8 AF-D is one of my favourite lenses, and I can use it on the D50 because the body includes a screw-drive motor. Not only is the lens light and small, but the glass happens to be sharp and practically distortion-free. On the D50, it’s a perfect match, squeezing everything from the 6.1 megapixel CCD sensor. Even at base 200 ISO, the D50 is very quiet when it comes to digital noise.
This is the sort of camera and lens combination that invites contemplative photography at sunset on an overly warm eve. Old buildings, weathered window frames, and glowing reflections put me in mind to simply wander and open my eyes to vast possibility. Something about the terracotta on blue, framed by red brick, drew my imagination – ordinary, understated, usually unnoticed, and quiet.
Getting close to the yellow bars and setting the aperture to F4.5 allowed me to sufficiently blur them, communicate depth and dimensionality, and still maintain excellent sharpness in the peeling paint and the smiling figure – the subject of the photo.
The Nikon D50 fills an old DSLR usage gap for me – small and light enough to pack with another camera for the day; the ability to use AF-D lenses like the aforementioned Nikkor 50mm 1.8 due to the included screw-drive focus motor; and a top-plate LCD that communicates the most common camera settings at a glance.
If you hang around in online photography forums, especially where beginners flock, you’ll come across people proclaiming that the best and only way to really learn photography is to set the camera dial to Manual Mode and endure the suffering until it makes sense. I think this is one of the worst pieces of advice that anyone can give to a beginning photographer!
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Manual mode is bad or inferior. Of course it’s not. Some beginners might even learn well by pushing through the disappointment of fumbling with sweaty command dials whilst missing photographic opportunities. It’s just one way of learning, and everyone learns differently.
In fact, I heartily recommend Manual mode and night photography to any beginner who wants to learn all about the role of light in photography and how it can be controlled through shutter speed. What I object to is the stubborn declaration by some photographers that Manual mode is the Holy Grail and will enlighten even the most confused beginner. Let me tell you, setting that dial to M is more likely going to frustrate an eager beginner and turn them sour.
Learning about the exposure triangle – how Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO interact to control light – is essential in the journey, but it’s not a mad race to the finish line. Rather than stopping stubbornly at M and staying there, set the camera to Aperture or Shutter Priority mode and take the gentler path. There’s no shame in using any of these modes. Set it to Auto or Program mode, even, and concentrate on developing the eye and the imagination and living in the moment. There’s NO rule that states a photographer must use Manual mode all the time, every time. Cameras are tools that provide options and we use the best tool for the job to produce a result.
Photography is about more than gear. It’s about more than the money you spend. It’s about more than how sharp a lens is or how proficient you are at reading a light meter – and lets face it, insecure ego-driven types who are stuck in M are likely still glued to their camera’s inbuilt light meter anyway – even old film professionals use a light meter as a starting point.
The truth is that lots of mediocre photographs are made in all camera modes. There are people obsessed with sharpness and eradicating all digital noise, but forget that an interesting composition is key. There are also people justifying the thousands spent on gear, hoping their next pro camera body purchase will make them a better photographer. Let me tell you something: if you make mediocre photos on a 16 megapixel camera, that 45 megapixel camera on the shop shelf isn’t going to suddenly make you better. Getting better is not just about becoming technically comfortable. It’s also about learning to see the world differently.
The Fuji Finepix S200EXR was released in 2009. It features:
In many ways, it feels modern, though the speed of processing is definitely of the 2009 variety. Still, I can save in both JPG and CCD-RAW, unlike previous Fujifilm bridge cameras.
The octagonal pixels that Fujifilm packed into these old sensors might seem odd by today’s standards, but the tech produces photos said to contain extra highlight information. It’s not terribly easy to verify this, as I’m still trying to work out the weird digital alchemy that results in:
It’s a lot to digest and also explains why some people describe this camera as a JPG machine ~ they clearly have better things to do with their time than mess with TIFF and RAF files. This makes it a complex camera on the inside. And as much as I like that the S200EXR offers classic Fujifilm JPG recipes – Provia, Astia, Velvia, and BW – the menu organisation also reflects the complexity of options available.
The seperate EXR option on the dial offers three special modes: 12 megapixel High Resolution photos that use all of the sensor pixels, 6 megapixel Dynamic Range photos that preserve more detail in shadows and highlights, and 6 megapixel images in the High ISO Low Noise mode. Weirdly, the regular PASM functions don’t offer any of the three EXR special modes and create regular 12 megapixel photos that use a different kind of dynamic range preservation technology.
I’ve found that importing the RAF files into Lightroom is the most convenient option in all cases. The imported 6 megapixel images from RAF files recorded in two of the EXR modes seem to be the darker of two exposures – or at least the darkest part of whatever data lives in the mystical RAF files. It seems likely that Lightroom is throwing away some of the data from the smaller octagonal pixels that preserve extra highlight information. A RAF file recorded in any of the PASM modes results in a 12 megapixel image, and Lightroom imports them just fine – this is my preference going forward.
It seems that the EXR line of cameras represented the pinnacle of Fujifilm’s longstanding SuperCCD sensor technology. Not too long after these premium bridge cameras and their strange alchemical sensors, the company moved to CMOS and their X-Trans technology. Despite the complexities of the camera, I find the images very pleasant.
In my last post, I wrote about experimenting with the Focus module in Exposure X7 to add slight blur and bloom. This goes some way towards reviving the look of old soft lenses that lack modern anti-glare coatings. It’s potentially a great fit for the low resolution results from toy cameras like the Camp Snap and others because it reduces the ugly haloes around edges that have been aggressively sharpened.
You can see in the photo of the Tree of Knowledge above that the Soften and Diffuse preset in the Focus module adds glow around the highlights, giving it an ethereal quality that contrasts well against the sharply angled boughs of the tree and the descending wooden timbers.
Here again, the highlights take on a nice soft glow. Everything seems ever so slightly blurred and the sharpened edges are softened considerably.
I think the glow effect in some of these photos is more pronounced because I’d used the Camp Snap with two filters attached: a Photape Warming filter, and a cheap diffusion filter that adds glow and softens highlights. I’ve since removed the filters and will experiment further.
You can see how the Camp Snap struggles to handle the strong red colour of the lantern. The result is a blown out mess where the details are lost.
The Camp Snap is great for scenes like this, where there are more mid-tones than bright highlights – sky, sea, and cloud in distinct layers. It’s the kind of seascape that I might have snapped with my old Kodak 110 format film camera as a teenager.
One of my biggest issues with the Camp Snap is the aggressive noise reduction and oversharpening. The latter results in ugly haloes that are especially visible in backlit scenes. Adding film grain to the image in Exposure X7 combats this to some extent, and also effectively breaks up oversmoothed areas, but it’s not an ideal solution. But I think I might just have found a better way.
The Focus section in Exposure X7 contains a useful preset called Soften – Diffuse Glow. This module mimics vintage lenses that are softish and bloom the highlights. I have now created a preset that adds blurring and blooming, slight vignetting, and fine film grain.
Even though the Camp Snap is a toy camera, it features good sharpness and resolution when compared to other toy cameras like the Kodak Charmera, the G6 Thumb Camera, and the Chuzhao. More importantly, Camp Snap photos don’t seem to feature obvious interpolation artifacts because I don’t think it’s resizing images beyond the native resolution of the sensor. Both the G6 and the Chuzhao feature these unattractive digital artifacts.
Tonight I went back and edited a bunch of Camp Snap photos. The Focus module seems to effectively soften the hard edges and sharpening haloes. I’ll be playing with this a lot more.
The Nikon D200 and the Kodak Charmera – two very different cameras on the surface. The D200 is built like a magnesium-alloy tank and the Kodak Charmera is a tiny plastic toy. There’s no comparison when talking about image quality, of course, yet I continue to return to the fact that we can freeze time through the use of these devices, whatever their technical limitations.
The act of making a photo has become so culturally habitual – so intertwined with commerce and self-promotion – that the initial magic has long since been lost. We’re a long way from the very first photo made ~ “View from the window at Le Gras”.
It’s strange to think the toy Kodak’s 1.6 megapixels features vastly more resolution than the very first photo made using a camera obscura over an 8 hour exposure time. Marked in technological milestones, human lives seem small. Our lives seem smaller still when we pick up to examine even the dullest stone that lies at the foot of a worn hill that was once a mountain.
In colour, the photo above is washed out and the highlights burned beyond editing. In black and white, the photo becomes a small study in shape, direction, pattern, and shadow, with a high-key aesthetic. It was a single moment seized as we ordered food.
We chanced upon a burned out ruin. I walked around fallen red brick and charred wall cladding, immersing myself in light and shadow.
I couldn’t forget the Nikon D200 in my camera bag. It pulled on my left shoulder as it reminded me that it’s services were available – every bit the prosumer DSLR of 2005 and seemingly so distant from that first photograph in the early 19th century.
One might wonder if there exists a linear technological line between cave art on rough walls and the recording of the world to modern digital storage media? It’s hard to imagine a world without the technology to record ourselves and the world, yet we’ve always sought a type of crude immortality through the things we leave behind – whether recorded on cave walls 60 thousand years ago or posted online. We try to leave a mark before we leave.
Rarely do I have the opportunity to get so close to a ruin like this. Walking over the rubble, the soles of my sneakers adjusting to the sharp edges and angles of detritus, I reflected on the passage of time.
When wading into the plastic-strewn waters of toy cameras and weirdly branded scameras, you’d be foolish to expect image quality. I certainly don’t! What I’m looking for in cheap cameras like this is fun factor. The Kodak Charmera works not because it makes high quality images, but because it’s small, pocketable, easy to use, and fun. At the very least, the Charmera makes consistently dodgy photos, so I know what to expect.
The Chuzhao is a tiny plastic TLR-inspired digital toy camera. It has no menu system, a nice colour screen shaded by a flimsy plastic hood, and a bunch of awkwardly placed buttons that seem to operate according to cryptic laws – hold down one button to access the photo album then twist the tiny silver crank on the side of the camera to select a photo, then press another button to delete. Like I said, it’s cryptic. It’s a good thing the basic operation of the camera is easy enough.
My first impression is that the Chuzhao TLR-inspired camera can make surprisingly detailed photos in good light. In low light, it’s an impressionist painter’s worst nightmare – more oversmoothing than exists in half a dozen Kodak Charmeras combined. They’re not even worth salvaging in the best photo editing programs. I don’t believe all the AI in the world could save the worst of these photos without significant insertion of generated content. But as you can see in both the photos above and below, the detail possible can be surprisingly good for such a toy.
I need to make an admission: all of these photos have been ever so slightly edited. As with my Charmera pictures, I’ve added film grain to break up the oversmoothing, reduced the Clarity to make it look less sharp, and added some extra warmth.
The Chuzhao camera is a strange device. It’s not as unobtrusive as the Kodak Charmera because it’s not really small enough to fit into a pocket comfortably without it feeling like you’ve stuck too many Mars Bars in there. And because it features the classic TLR top-down view, it takes time to compose pictures and isn’t going to be your friend when you want to use it in other positions and angles. I can quickly grab a photo with the Charmera, but the Chuzhao demands more attention, making it not quite as fun or as convenient.
I do think there’s something positive to be said for using the Chuzhao in good light in the included black and white filter mode (mine is actually sepia tinted, so I just desaturated it during editing). And the inclusion of auto-focus (yes, auto-focus in a toy camera) means that it’s capable of close-focussing and blurring backgrounds. That in itself is pretty cool. Being fixed focus only, the Charmera can’t do that. Neither can the Camp Snap.
The Chuzhao is worth a look if you buy it cheaply. It’s available on a wide range of sites and I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a number of those listed are just copies of copies with different innards – so you take your chances with something like this.