Camera and lens reviewers

YouTube Influencers

YouTube influencers are an interesting bunch. Their primary motive is to make money. The more they are watched, the more advertisement money they make.

The first problem with influencers is, they are not independent. They have symbiotic relationship with camera manufacturers. Manufacturers lend cameras to influencers, as new models emerge. Often influencers censor themselves, and avoid criticising in fear of manufacturers dropping them from their list. Due to conflict of interest, their reviews are not reliable. Typically they praise products of certain manufacturers, while smearing the others.

The second problem is, influencers focus on numbers. Most of them just dump the fact sheet from manufacturers’ website without providing useful insight for users. User experience, ergonomics, haptics, build quality, reliability, and durability are often not covered sufficiently. When they provide sample pictures, they are either substandard or heavily photoshopped images. Most often they fail to demonstrate out of the box camera capabilities.

The third problem is, influencers skew their preferences towards hypes which has no meaning for serious photographers, such as video AF, face recognition, and so on.

Reputable websites

DPReview is a long standing camera and gear review portal with well managed reviews, posts and forums. DPReview has strong Photography focus and it is less prone to hypes.

ApoTelyt.com is another website designed to show detailed side by side comparisons. One thing I like about them is their ability to show proportional pictures of cameras, so that users perceive their relative sizes.

Tape recorders

This reviewer type loves to show off their presumed knowledge, by constantly talking about specifications, and using photography jargon to decorate their talk. 90% of their talk can be read from manufacturers’ data sheet.

Bokeh worshippers 

Fast lenses are great. But Bokeh worshippers simply cannot get over excessive bokeh talk. Every lens has strengths as well as weaknesses. Bokeh worshippers don’t talk about astigmatism, diffraction, chromatic aberration, OIS or lack of them.

Leica bashers 

Leica bashers try to prove Leica cameras and lenses are not worth the high price tag. They make shifty comparisons with other manufacturers’ data and cherry pick to prove their point. They typically ignore ergonomics, build quality and hidden strengths of Leica gear, such as Leica look.

Leica ministers

Leica ministers are just the opposite. They preach Leica technical specifications like a parrot and refuse to leave slightest room for criticism. Some of them may go as far as photoshopping the sample pictures to prove their point. Their symbiotic relationship with Leica is so very obvious. The irony is Leica equipment does not need propaganda.

Lost Dreams

A small shopping centre in Parramatta. Battered and bruised, we cannot imagine its past. Perhaps it has been ugly all along. A shankie town equivalent of equally disturbing modern mega malls. Polluted with dirt, rust and obsolete billboards with frozen smiles, it manifests decay of American dream copied in Downunder. 

The side wall of Roxy Theatre Parramatta. Rusted and forgotten. Gone with the days of glamour of 1930's. 

The opening on 6 February 1930 was "an event of considerable social importance" with "a packed audience and an interested crowd of several thousands in the street opposite the brilliantly-illuminated entrance".The theatre was "praised as a symbol of local progress" and the evening features 'greetings to the people of Parramatta "voiced" from the screen by several Paramount film stars. - Wikipedia

The Parramatta Council has been frantically approving new developments while demolishing past, chose to make an exception and kept a historical "real estate" building. Nothing can better represent their unashamed pillaging of heritage buildings. The only building that is worth to keep has to manifest what they do as a monument to their greed. How ironic is that.

An odd extension near the end of Victoria Road, Parramatta. In this soulless and depressing picture, colours had no success of cheering it up. I like it as a document of surreal ugliness, and ugliness only humans capable of making. 

An old fashion caravan

Sometimes it is the surprising simplicity of custom-made objects attracts us.

A hot, bone dry day.
Like wooden toys from sixties.
In this case it was this caravan.
Neat and bold.
Stark white and red.
Lines, as if cut out from cardboard.
Who would make such a thing?
It is all there, loud and clear, but mystery is unsolved.

Dealing with geometric distortion

I admire Mark Power’s photography. He uses a large format camera to capture human-less urban landscapes where still subjects; buildings, industrial sites, houses, trees appear perfectly perpendicular, and the ground occupies less than 20% of height. With a large format camera, pictures turn up how we see them in real life, with minimal distortion.

It is important to understand that not all distortions should be or can be eliminated. Vanishing lines originating from perspective vision give us a useful sense of depth.

However wide angle cameras exaggerates perspective distortion when vertical axis is even slightly tilted. This typically happens when you tilt the camera along its horizontal axis in order to include the top of a building or reduce the ground.

In this article I will explain an editing method to get around geometric distortion inherent in full frame cameras with wide angle lenses.

For the record I use DxO PhotoLab raw image editing tool, but I am sure there are similar tools available for Lightroom users.

I use the geometric correction feature to fix distortion. After the correction the image frame will look like a Trapezoid. The correction algorithm rotates the image in the opposite direction, straightening the distorted image at the expense of losing some real estate from the bottom of it.

This is fine as I sometimes need to shift the crop rectangle vertically upwards anyway, to cut off much of the ground.

The image size reduction occurs during correction is affordable. In this example my original image resolution went down from 24MP to 21MP since the corrected image is slightly smaller. The resultant image was still quite large and as sharp as the original one.

Note, the images on this post are not full resolution.

I have two additional tips regarding geometric correction:

• When you use the correction reference guides, do not make them perfectly aligned with the edges that you want to straighten. Allow a marginal perspective distortion offset. Otherwise you may end up with an isometric image with no perspective depth, which will look odd.  
• Apply correction first before applying any other processing, such as presets, brightness, contrast and shade filters. It is best to apply the correction algorithm on a raw image straight from the camera to eliminate the possibility of aliasing. 

Photography, a personal manifesto

A good picture should immerse the viewer into the frame with a unique story.

In photography I don’t think about depicting stories. For me life just goes on, so should photography.

My objective is capturing existence in an evocative language. In this language subconscious cues are intermingled with reality. My subjects need to animate themselves with genuine expressions of existence. In this world “fake” should not be present, if so it should be ridiculed or alienated.

The rock

Dreamy retro

Ghost Palm

Lightcatcher

If I need to single out one thing that surpasses everything else in Photography that would be light.

With light we cast memories.  Often we remember scenes from our distant past, because they have dreamy quality about them.  We remember them because of the way how light created those images.

Welcome to Noir era

I have been shooting colored pictures in 28 mm for a while now. 

Starting today I decided to embark a new venture. The era of Noir begins.

I'll be sharing more pictures of this sort in the coming days.

Problem: 28mm focal length

This has been very limiting in my street photography for quite some time. 

There are three problems with wide angle:

• Too much detail around my subjects.
• Geometric distortion around the edges.
• Need to get super close to subjects (1-2m).

Solution: 50 mm crop mode

50 mm digital crop immediately fixed these issues without drawbacks. With 50 mm crop I can achieve excellent print quality at 300 dpi with size 11.2" x 7.47" (28.5 cm x 19 cm) a near A4 size or at 200 dpi with size 16.8" x 11.2 " (42.7 cm x 28.5 cm) a near A3 size.

With 50 mm my effective distance for being close to my subjects increased to 2-4 meters. Geometric distortion simply disappeared too.

Problem: Color RAW

Shooting in color and capturing images in RAW format have these disadvantages:

• Big file sizes
• Slow transfer times
• Time consuming post-processing, editing and exporting to JPEG
• Complicated archiving (DNG and exported JPEGs)

Solution:  Black and white JPEG

Shooting in Black and White with JPEG output eliminated all of the above. Removing post processing from the equation forced me to focus on getting the picture right as I shoot it. Black and White allowed me to focus on light, composition and framing without complexity of getting the colors and white balance right.

Problem: View finder

Behavior of public changed against photographers in the past decade. In digital post-Instagram era there are just too many photographers using either phone cameras or digital cameras.

I also noticed taking pictures with phone cameras are perceived "normal"  but if you point your digital camera to people's face while your eye is in the viewfinder, you get a more frowned look. 

Solution: Touch AF + Release

This mode allows the photographer to disguise more effectively. You look like adjusting your mirrorless camera so you won't attract too much attention while touching your LCD screen at the back. In my camera a simple index finger touch triggers a super-fast AF and untouch releases the shutter, just like a mobile phone. 

Alternatively if you have time you can use the viewfinder and manual focus to take well-crafted pictures without changing any setting.  Both modes are inter-switchable with zero effort.

Leading lines - Bradfield Hwy

Leica Q-P, ISO 100, f/11.0, 1/640s, -1.0 EV, 28mm

note: the original picture is un-cropped and unedited. This one has half the resolution. 

Postmortem (why this picture worked for me)

• The main leading line, highway starts with a strong cue, the yellow car.
• Then the road takes our eyes to an easy ride in the city direction.
• The road, the landscape and the sky are in equal footing. All three have different and equally likeable elements. 
• It is important that the road's centre nearly starts off from the lower left corner which was crucial to this picture's success. Should it were slightly higher or lower it wouldn't be so successful.
• There are no ugly elements like trucks or too many grey cars piled up. 
• There are no distractions like a nearby wall or a light pole.
• Vehicle density is just right. It is not congested traffic.
• Clouds have perspective, they diminish towards horizon. You don't have this effect very often. Incidentally they make another interesting layer cutting through the sky extending the leading lines on the ground with a white plane in the sky.
• It has exceptionally well balanced dynamic range (wide range of tones), it is neither too dark nor too bright, as its histogram shows:
  
  
                           
  

  

Natural light

Instagram gave way to a culture of artificial light and artificial color. Popular opinion skews to everything bright. Pictures are bastardised, heavily edited with brighter colors and shadow effects. They become cartoonish representations of nature. They don't look real, they lack originality. They are boring. They are awful.

I do however love original light. Ultimately what I want in my pictures is they must look real. 

Take above picture for instance. Straight from the lens. The scene looked exactly like this when I shot it. The colors were like that. The light was like that. My signature is hardly a signature, I like capturing what I see, not necessarily what other people like to see. 

All I had to decide was whether the timing was right for the best light and whether it was worthy to take it. I felt the urge to take it because this particular scene and time of the day reminded me 19th century impressionist paintings. Dim yellow lights and silhouettes strolling in a premonade have Parisian character. There is drama. There is melancholia. There is heavy hearted Art in it. It is real and it has feelings. Therefore it is worthy to take and worthy to look at. 

Post Anzac Day

Leica Q-P Checklist

In the bag

• Blower
• Spare fully charged battery
• Clean soft cloth
• Lenspen + soft brush
• Zeiss lens wipes

Checklist:

• Camera is clean dust specks removed with blower.
• Lens is clean with no visible dust specks or stains.
• Leather cover is attached and locked.
• All photos are deleted.
• Focus mode is set to single-focus.
• Focus rectangle is in the middle.
• Display settings are set to EVF Extended.
• Exposure compensation is set to 0.0.
• Shutter speed is set to A.
• Macro is OFF.
• Focus ring is locked.
• Aperture is locked at A.
• In Live View make sure level gauge, histogram, overexposure blinker and all meters are visible. Press OK button to change the view mode.

Anzac Day - 2019

Soldiers are humans, they are real. 

They fight on fake identities, be it religion or nation. 

That is the tragedy of war, a real human killing another real human. 

When looked at this way, war becomes utterly absurd. 

As they were dying I don't think they wanted to be remembered as soldiers who sacrificed their lives for us to have peace. 

That would be no more than our delusional thinking to comfort ourselves. 

No, that is not what they were thinking when choking on blood. 

They would want us to remember they died needlessly. 

They would want us to value peace and understand the true meaning of it.           

Opera House in Autumn

For me a good picture is like a poem, it must invoke emotions otherwise not accessible via reality.

Sardines

Near the Luna Park

Framing - an analysis

This picture has 3 repoussoir objects, the church on the left the apartments on the right, and the wall at the bottom. Hence these foreground objects draw viewers gaze into the middle section with diminishing depth towards the horizon.

There is a subtle difference between the two. The picture on the right was taken from a vantage point more on the left, hence the church occupies a much bigger area. Despite this seemingly minor difference, the picture on the left draws our gaze directly in the centre of middle section, hence with no trouble our gaze reaches the horizon.

The picture on the right however is harder to look at, instead of gently steering our gaze towards the horizon, this picture makes us stuck on the left, somehow our gaze doesn't want to steer away towards the centre of middle section. This is because we pushed the repoussoir on the left (the church) too much to the right, as a result, it pushes the middle section further right, taking it away from our attention span.  It is harder (with an effort) to let our gaze driven to the horizon in the picture on the right. 

Tip: In order to see this effect with your own eyes, just click one of the pictures to enlarge, then quickly flip them by rapidly pressing the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard.

Hidden forever

A picture often matters, not because it is extraordinary and complex, but because it is deceptively ordinary and simple. I often see beauty in ordinary things. Those I need to capture are the ones I want to keep to myself, the ones others should not see the way I see them, as if I want to lock them in a world they remain hidden forever, yet they are there if you really want to see them.

Emotions

For me a good picture is the one that come about effortlessly as it evokes emotions engraved deep inside my psyche. It is not about rules or how I want people perceive my pictures. It is all about me, how I want to remember my emotions.

You cannot take good pictures for the sake of taking good pictures. Good pictures require you to surrender, they are images of a different reality agonisingly more beautiful than your world, they won't let you in, unless you leave your pride and worldly intentions at the door.

st leonards at dawn

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

Gay Pride - Mardi Gras Sydney 2019

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

Wedding break

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

People