johnrochaphoto.net

Papyrus

Over the last few posts, I’ve put up a few images which are mostly of macro subjects.

By macro I mean, close-ups which are life size or one-to-one at the film plane.

Now there’s a reason for this.

It’s because for sometime, I’ve been meaning to come back and have another look at the Canon 100 mm macro lens, which I bought some time ago.

It’s always, in my view, important to use new equipment when you first have it to get used to its basic features and then try it for sometime in the field.

It’s only after you’ve used it in real photo situations for a while that you understand exactly, what are the good bad strong or weak points for your own photography.

Now, this was also inspired by a comment I received from a photographer in the United States. This is what he wrote to me.

“Just read your review on the Canon 100mm Macro lens 2.8. I just got one and am learning. What is the switch for limit or full on the side for? I noticed over here in the U.S. there are a lot of magazines dealing with digital photography but a majority of them all come from the United Kingdom. Is there any reason that the U.K. appears to be such a contributor to the world of photography in the U.S.?”

Now, I actually live in Bulgaria, so I don’t really follow the UK photo press very well now and I certainly don’t know how it operates in the United States so maybe some readers of this blog could give their comments on this and give us both more information.

So really, I can only respond to Tony’s comments about the performance of the macro lens. I should say right now that I immediately responded to his comments with a brief reply and I also promised that I would give a longer reply here because I think the question of using a macro lens today is a matter of some interest to a lot of photographers.

So, just in case you’re reading this Tony. Hi!

One of the points I touched on before is that the reasons for using macro lenses have changed today.

Recently I visited Egypt and like most people I bought a bunch of souvenirs and when I brought some of them home I thought I would photograph some them.

Among these were some papyrus scrolls and immediately, almost without thinking I decided straightaway to pop them into my desktop scanner.

That shows one of the changes. As I pointed out before there was a time when I would have photographed the scrolls with quite a complicated light set up and making sure that the lens I used had corner to corner sharpness and a flat field.

That is using a lens designed to reproduce a completely flat object in such a way that everything is equally in focus all over the picture. Now today’s macro lenses are still, in most cases, more or less flat field lenses but the point I’m trying to make is that many many macro shots today perhaps most macro shots have a single point of focus or are not likely to be flat.

If you photograph an insect you want to concentrate on some particularly vital point, usually, the eyes, and everything else around it will go out of focus into a sort of blur so much more important is the way your lens deals with such things as depth of field (DOF), what sort of image is produced by the material that is out of focus.

So, when you take many macro shots, the point of focus is going to be very critical indeed.

And the main point perhaps is that whether you use a focus limiter or whether you try some other way of dealing with the focus spots that you might find in your viewfinder, in practice, the best thing to do is not to use the autofocus system at all.

This comes as quite a surprise to some people who believe that auto anything is always better.

But the fact is that almost all automatic systems are only better than humans in certain situations.

So for example, when you think of autofocus, photographers managed quite well in many cases before autofocus was invented.

This doesn’t mean that automatic systems are useless, simply that they need to be looked at carefully.

Before going further I thought it might be interesting to make a comparison with my old macro lens to see how things have changed.

When I first bought the Canon 100 mm macro lens I felt it was rather bulky, rather large, though not particularly heavy.

I thought it might be an interesting point, to compare it with my old macro lens, which is the now classic Tamron 90 mm lens.

Canon EF 100mm Macro Lens and Tamron 90mm Macro lens

It’s perhaps not directly comparable because the Tamron lens focuses only to half size without an adapter. I’ve photographed them together but appearances can be deceptive.

So I hope in the next post, to look again at the construction of the Canon 100mm millimetre macro lens, some of its particular points that I found out more about after using it for some time.

And then too, l’ll take another look at taking macro shots today

Talking extempore on the phone so to speak may not be the best way of giving thoughtful advice or being thoughtful at all so it occurred to me that I’d better think of what I was saying a little bit more reflectively.

At this time I thought of taking up the ideas I had about lenses. Now I suppose most photographers take an interest in lenses for granted but it seems to me that there are a number of things to think about.

First of all you can have the obvious point that it’s no use having a sophisticated or well built camera with a poor lens. Whether there are any poorly built cameras around now is a question.

At the simplest level you can think of camera lens combinations such as Zenith/Jupiter or Praktica/Pancolor which in my personal experience exemplify the excellent lens with less than excellent bodies.

On a deeper level perhaps it’s clear that you can have photographs without cameras and lenses at all. Without lenses there are pinhole cameras and without cameras or lenses there are traditional methods such as photograms which involve placing physical objects on light sensitive materials or modern technologies such as ray tracing.

Today it’s swung the other way a bit perhaps. And I’ve been motivated to look further at the advice I gave concerning kit lenses supplied with DSLRs, a few alternatives and even some historical perspectives perhaps to rethink how there are differences in practice today with digital imaging.

I thought to begin this it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane. Of course a lot of photographers that I know are out there were not even born in the times that I’m thinking about and even for me it’s half a lifetime away.

Nevertheless I hope you’ll bear with me as it should throw light on lenses.

I have in front of me as I blog a Spanish edition of the Focal Guide to lenses titled Los Objetivos – Una guia para aficionados. It’s written by Leonard Gaunt published in Barcelona and the year is 1978. The photos come from a number of different photographers such as Ed Buziak, Francisco Hidalgo, Raymond Lea, Michael Barrington Martin and Michael O’Cleary.

For copyright reasons I can only give illustrations with a couple of my own photos from this book which I think indicate some of my thoughts on lenses then and now pretty well.

The first picture is a picture of a fireman rescuing a little girl and is a copy of an old book illustration.

Fireman and Child

The second picture is of a mosaic taken from the city of Trier in Germany – then West Germany – which has many fine Roman remains.

mosaic

I think it’s worth pointing out the captions:

The picture of the fireman states that this would be a fine picture for a macro lens but is in fact taken with a standard lens.

The mosaic caption has a slightly different slant: It emphasizes the quality of modern optics pointing out that the picture was taken with a relatively cheap 29mm lens.

Now, how is this relevant to photo practice – or at least my photo practice – today?

There are a couple of points I think to talk about which might make more sense as we go along.

Both of these pictures are monochrome and are in some sense of flat objects. Both of these images benefit from overall sharpness. Clearly the mosaic is not completely flat but the book illustration is.

Now I’ll tell you straight away that in order to put the picture of the fireman and the little girl on this blog I didn’t look through my archive of negatives, or even my scans of negatives. I certainly didn’t take a roll of Kodak Technical Pan and a high contrast lith style developer and shoot the image again. I simply put the book into my flatbed scanner.

I think this illustrates one of the points. When I am asked to provide an image of a bookplate, a postcard a beer mat or a bus ticket and many other objects of this kind that I used to photograph and publish with many different editorial features I would simply replace them with a scanned image.

Is this photography at all? Was it ever?

To illustrate this with some more pictures.

Hospital Life Cover

The first is my cover spread from the now defunct Hospital Life. The editor, Deanna Wilson wrote this comment: “John Rocha describes the background to the 19th-century development of the Christmas card; he also took the exquisite photographs”.

The second is a link to a modern site from the National Council for the Preservation of Plants and gardens. (click here and choose Pictures Without Cameras from the Index)

Note these are called flower pictures but I think the point remains.

How does this tie up with actually taking photographs with cameras and lenses? I’ll try to look at that in my next post perhaps combining some points about lens choice with my views on the Raw Advantage