Melbourne Cup 2024

Yesterday was a Melbourne Cup day all around Australia. I hit the Sydney metropolitan area with the following goals in mind:

• Use 50 mm focal length
• Get closer to subjects as much as possible
• Aim good framing and minimal cropping

On the upside the carnival atmosphere in the city relaxed everyone. Women, with dazzling outfits, wanted to be seen. Weather gods were in favour too, with an overcast but a bright day. These conditions helped me to achieve my goals. 17 photographs turned out to be OK with minimal cropping and touch ups out of 141 shots over 4 hours, 11,000 paces.

I used my Leica CL crop sensor camera camera with Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens mounted on it yielding 53mm effective focal length. I used zone focusing with aperture set to 7.1 and the focus zone set between 2 and 7.5 meters. I set minimum shutter speed to 1/250s. 

There were some setbacks however:

😱 Leica CL does not have IBIS, therefore camera shake is an issue in low speeds. It turned out however even 1/250s shutter speed wasn't enough to compensate for hand and foot gestures turning up blurred. Going forward next time I'll use 1/500s.

😱 Some of the images gave me more blurred outcome on the mid-back side of the focal zone. I can't figure out why. Potential reasons are given in the Appendix.

Appendix

I set the aperture to f/7.1 (mid point between f/5/6 and 8.0.) I set the zone focus between 2-7 meters. My minimum shutter speed is set to 1/250s. Despite that my subjects between 3-7 meters aren't sharp enough, why?

Chat GPT answer:

Your setup seems solid for zone focusing, but a few factors could be affecting sharpness at that distance:

1. Depth of Field (DOF) Limitations: At f/7.1, even with zone focusing, the depth of field might not be as wide as expected, especially with an APS-C sensor. On a full-frame 35mm lens, f/7.1 offers decent DOF, but with the crop factor, you may lose some perceived sharpness. A smaller aperture like f/8 or f/11 could help.

2. Focus Calibration: Zone focusing relies on accurate distance markings, but if there's a slight miscalibration in your lens or sensor alignment, even slight deviations can make a difference in sharpness for subjects at 3-7 meters. Test the lens focus with manual adjustment to see if it consistently matches your zone marks.

3. Subject Movement: Although 1/250s is generally fine for most stationary subjects, any slight subject movement within your zone focus range could lead to soft images. For moving subjects, you might want a faster shutter speed, like 1/500s.

4. Sensor and Lens Resolution Limit: The Leica CL’s APS-C sensor and the 35mm Summicron lens might be reaching their resolution limits when combined, especially at f/7.1. Testing at f/5.6 and ensuring proper focusing alignment might help optimize sharpness. 

If none of these tweaks yield improvement, adjusting focus slightly or revisiting hyperfocal settings could help achieve the desired clarity.

Lunch Break

In autumn, office workers are having a lunch break in the Sydney CBD. I like the yellow colour palette, giant Corinthian columns. I can see the play, to other eyes it may look like a banal reality.

Next time you see cockatoos in a cloudy day

On a wire next to each other

Casually accompanied by one another

Pay attention to their communion

Being themselves for a short while

Feeling the warmth of strangers

Shoulder to shoulder

Strangers no more

The Lantern Man

It was a mid afternoon in the northern part of the city where the sun escapes through gaps between long shades of buildings pouring its light on odd corners. 

This man, an ordinary office worker, with a plastic bag carrying his late lunch suddenly moved to a sunny spot just for few seconds. It appeared as if his ordinary plastic bag was a lantern of some sort absorbing and reflecting a pack of light. I wouldn’t call him a messiah but suddenly he no longer appeared as ordinary.

Do not afraid of capturing images of ordinary scenes. In fact good photography most often than not is about creating extraordinary out of ordinary.

Street Photography

 What is Street Photography? 

Street photography, a genre of photography that records everyday life in a public place. The very publicness of the setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge. - Google -

This is a pretty accurate description. Yet street photographers can stretch these boundaries a bit.

For me a picture taken on a public setting does not have to have people in it but it must have a meaningful story to tell from photographer’s point of view.

Take this picture as an example. 

On the surface it is an ordinary picture. In the background a liner docked in the Sydney Harbour, and in the front the roof of the oldest cottage the colonists built two centuries ago.

There is a deeper story than what it tells me. The humans are not visible but trapped in their little compartments in the liner. Just like the tiles on the roof their collective story is what unifies them. They may have individual stories and lives. But from this distance they lost their individuality. Their story is about a journey, today made under favourable circumstances, but two hundred odd years ago as convicts transported inhumanly under the deck of a ship.

From distant climes, o'er wide-spread seas, we come, 
Though not with much éclat or beat of drum,
True patriots all: for, be it understood:
We left our country for our country's good.

George Barrington - an Irish pickpocket, a First Fleet convict.

Instagram and all that jazz

I had been on Instagram. After a while, it just lost its vibe and I quit.

When I first joined Instagram my primary goal was to follow photographers that I admired. Primarily I wanted to learn from their wisdom. 

I was very picky with my followers (they were mostly people whom I knew.) I have never been interested in receiving “likes” from strangers for my photos. I was not interested in seeking public approval, nor I wanted to build a fan base. 

Instagram failed to address my expectations. 

• Most of the time I did not receive posts from the photographers I followed, and on my trail it increasingly showed posts irrelevant to my interests.
• Instagram favoured popular, hyper-edited and tasteless images that lack meaningful stories. 
• With the emergence of AI tools I realised Instagram could use my photographs to train LLMs (AI Large Language Models.) 

I was wasting time on Instagram with zero returns.

I quit Instagram at the time reels were not that popular. Later on TikTok pushed YouTube and Instagram to build their own reel-culture. 

Over time Instagram became the worst platform for sharing photography.