first test of the rebel t2i. 60 fps conformed to 24, first grading attempt in color. Used a Hague stabilizer and 50mm f1.4 prime lens!

Every time I have a chance to shoot film, it makes me feel alive as a photographer again. This isn’t about the trend, pretentiousness or anything of the sort. It just feels real. It also usually edits better than digital, negative film has a wonderful ability to hold highlight details that digital cameras simply can’t capture.

The color images in this post are shot on a Mamiya 645AF w/ the stock AF 80mm f2.8 lens. The black and white images are shot on Neopan 400 with my new baby, a Canonet QL-17 G-III.

An Horse

An Horse

An Horse

Kelley James

Kelley James

I recently added a new camera to my gear case – Canon’s Canonet QL-17 G-III. Whew, that was a mouthful! The ridiculously long name aside, this camera from 1972 has the ability to create some stunning images in the right hands.

The Canonet QL-17 G-III is a wonderful miniature 35mm rangefinder. You don’t focus through the lens like an SLR, you look through the viewfinder on the top right and line up two images until they’ve merged. There are various Canonet cameras, mine has a 40mm f1.7 lens. It’s pocketable and fast! It’s been referred to as the poor man’s Leica, and I back that statement after using it some. It doesn’t match the build or optical quality of a Leica, but for the cost there’s not much that comes close. It’s surprisingly well-built, the camera feels wonderful to hold. It also one-ups most Leicas by having a leaf shutter rather than a focal plane shutter. This means full flash sync up to 1/500 of a second, even with a wireless system such as a Pocketwizard.

Fast flash sync is important to outdoor strobist photographers since you knock down ambient and freeze motion better at 1/500 than the 1/200th-1/320th of a second common in most current DSLRs. Indoors it doesn’t matter since the strobe’s flash duration is often even faster than that, 1/1000 of a second or shorter.

This camera has awakened the street photographer hidden inside of me that I didn’t know existed. There’s another advantage to the leaf shutter – It’s a mirrorless system. On a SLR, when you take a photograph you hear a big slap and THEN the photo is taken. That’s the mirror moving so that the sensor/film can be exposed. This causes vibration throughout the camera (read: blur) and is quite noisy. When I take a photograph with the Canonet, no one knows it happened! The leaf shutter is so quiet that it normally can’t be heard by anyone but the photographer. The 1/focal length rule for shutter speed also can be modified, I can easily handhold a sharp photograph at 1/8th of a second or longer with this camera. Of course, this doesn’t keep people or objects in the shot from moving, but it’s a great ability to have!

As with all that is great, there are issues that prevent perfection. While the Canonet can sync at 1/500 of a second with lights, that’s as fast as the leaf shutter will allow. A non-buld exposure of longer than 1/4th of a second can’t be made on the Canonet, either. You could have issues outdoors in sunlight if you’re shooting fast film, you can also forget shooting outdoor sunlight at a large aperture without the use of a ND filter. I find it difficult sometimes to focus using the rangefinder, the little yellow patch can be hard to line up sometimes. The rangefinder brightening trick can help with that, though. This camera also takes a now-illegal mercury battery, alkaline replacements have different voltages and cause issues with the meter exposing correctly. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it tried to overexposure by 1-1.5 stops.

A blog post of mine would not be complete without photographs, so enjoy! I’ve only put two rolls of film through the camera so far, but I plan on making extensive use of this camera in all of my future work. I’m looking forward to shooting it with color film and strobes on a sunny day!

An Horse - Canonet QL-17 G-III

An Horse - Canonet QL-17 G-III

Never Shout Never - Canonet QL-17 G-III

Canonet QL-17 G-III

Quick little update, did another shoot with The Boys of Summer on Monday during my visit to Ohio. Shot in the Temple Court area of Mansfield, one of the neatest areas to shoot I’ve come across over the years. When it comes to finding locations, the best ones are where you can get different looks in the same area. Free is always good, too.

both of these were lit with a single softbox and edited in both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I’ve been trending into simplicity with my work lately. I like the clean, simple look and that’s what I got with these. The first shot was shot with my Canon 50mm f1.4 lens and the second with the Canon 85mm f1.8. The 50 1.4 tends to have some issues on the left side when shot wide open, large amounts of  blue chromatic aberration in particular. When I can afford it, the 50L is definitely next on my list.

The Boys of Summer

The Boys of Summer

Advances in technology over the years has almost always been about convenience. Making it easier and faster to cook a meal, easier and quicker to go somewhere, things such as that. This is true in photography as well, especially with the digital revolution.

One thing that may never change though, thanks to the laws of physics and this world we live in, is that a zoom lens is a compromise. It is us giving in and asking something else to do the work our feet used to do while losing other things in the process. In many ways, this can be great. A traveling photographer documenting the events surrounding him will benefit from this. He can zoom in on a cow running amok in the streets of NYC and then zoom out to capture the entirety of the pandemonium.

But a photographer right beside him might get a much better photo of that cow, and here’s why. (A lot of this was written for the beginner to photography, if you’re aware of the terms you may want to skim some).

• Speed/Fast

when you hear that a lens is “fast,” what that means is that can open up the aperture quite a bit, letting in more light. Here is an example:

On the upper image, the lens has been opened wide, letting in more light. A larger opening in a pipe means more water can travel through, the same holds true for openings and light. This matters because the more light you let in, the faster of a shutter speed you can use. Mr. traveling zoom lens cameraman can’t open as large of a hole in his lens as the fellow beside him with the prime can, which means that his shutter speed will be slower (take longer to expose) and he will not be able to stop motion as nicely. (The more quickly you can expose a scene, the less movement you record, and the sharper the image *usually* is.)

The reason this matters in the prime vs. zoom argument is that because of the designs that zoom lenses have, a comparable prime lens will always be able to have a larger aperture opening. (Relatively anyway, it has to do with a relationship between the focal length and size of the opening that I won’t discuss now.) A $100 prime lens can shoot in conditions a $1,000 zoom lens can’t. If you’re shooting in low light situations, a prime lens will almost always give you more flexibility in what you can do and capture.

• Cost

As I said before, a $100 prime lens can usually beat a $1000 zoom lens. If you can live with the inconvenience of switching lenses when needing to cover a different focal length, a set of primes will give you advantages with nearly everything and save you money.

• Bokeh & Depth of Field

To put it simply, primes blur backgrounds beautifully. An essential part of portrait photography is deciding what will be in focus and what won’t be in focus. The more you can exaggerate the differences between the two, usually the better. This is something that happens usually when shooting  nearly wide open, f2.8 and below. (Smaller f-stop numbers mean a bigger hole. It’s confusing at first because it seems backward.)

This photo I took was shot with a Canon 50mm f1.4 lens @ f1.4 (1/500th sec and ISO 100) on a Canon 5D.

See how the background blends into this creamy, blurry goodness? This is a property of depth of field, in which a select plane of a photo is in focus and things closer and further from that plane become more and more blurred. When you open the aperture, make it large, that plane shrinks and becomes smaller. This means things that aren’t your subject become more and more blurred the larger you make the aperture opening. The lens designs of prime lenses allow for smoother background blurring, also referred to as bokeh. This photo, if shot at f4 at the same focal length, would lose some of the magical qualities that it has in its current form, as elements in the shot sharpen and become clearer.

A benefit of this narrow depth of field, other than the aesthetics of it, is isolating a subject. Blurring foreground and background elements in a photo forces the viewers eye to be drawn to the sharp, in focus areas of the shot.

• Sharpness

This is becoming more and more important as this mostly pointless megapixel war continues. You need a sharp lens to resolve well with those 24 megapixel sensors, or even more so with the 15 megapixel crop body sensors (pixels are packed even tighter together on a 50D compared to a 5D Mark II). A lot of things come together to determine resolving power of a lens. One I have noticed that effects things a lot is chromatic aberration. This is when you have color separation at areas of high contrast – you get a red line going one way and a blue line going another along the edge of a window, for example. Primes have simpler and superior optical designs, meaning less of this.

• Composition

I can go to any location, without my camera and lenses, and instantly know what each one will look like and how I would shoot someone there. I already know what the focal lengths 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm look like without having to have my gear. Shooting primes has allowed me to compose my shots better, zoom with my feet and get the distortion or lack thereof that I want in a shot by using the correct focal length for the situation. It might make more sense to back up and shoot with an 85mm lens over being close and shooting at 24mm, for example. I see a lot of people on flickr shooting snapshot portraits with wide focal lengths… it’s very rarely appealing, it rarely works. Not to say that it doesn’t or there’s times you shouldn’t, as it can be a useful effect.

To put it simply, a set of prime lenses will give you image quality that a zoom lens won’t, but it comes at the sacrifice of convenience. And yes, I’m one of those prime lens snobs the primes I currently own are the: Canon 24mm f2.8, Canon 35mm f2, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 85mm f1.8

I will likely update this over time, add things to it and tidy it up a bit, maybe post more comparison shots. Feel free to put your thoughts out there in comments below! Let me know if you agree, disagree, have any questions, feel I missed something, whatever.

There are changes I’m making this year in how I do my shoots, and one of them is prep work. How I prepare and what I do and plan to do will be much different.

For example, tomorrow I have a shoot with a band called Attack Attack. I figured out an idea a couple weeks back that I wanted to try, and I fine tuned it in my head until I knew what I wanted to do. Then I went to my studio and visualized the shot, I imagined how it would look like and how I’d light it. I researched online things I needed to obtain and purchase to pull this off correctly, and I ordered them. I then had to change my photo idea slightly to accommodate what I wanted to do. 

It’s going to be like a skydiving shot. Initially, I wanted a parachute in the shot. Six band members, one parachute, and a plane flying off in the distance. I then discovered it was going to be difficult to obtain a parachute at a decent cost, and one that was both small enough and not too small. A shot was then pointed out to me that a photographer had recently done with a band that was enough to want me to keep from doing the same idea. So I’ve now tweaked my shot enough to where it should stand out even to someone who has seen the other shot.

I needed a way to hold up a person in the air, so I bought a fall-arrest harness for that. Then, thanks to the help of fellow Five Giants Studio photographer Nick Brewer, I built something to hang that harness from. You can see it (and Nick) below, we just finished building that a few hours ago. I also bought a pretty decent fan from Lowe’s so that I can get wind going on the band members and at least have the illusion of wind blowing them around.

Tonight I am building the shot that I will place them into. What I need to do is find shots with similar lighting, the sun needs to be at similar angles for it to work. I am going to have the sky and some ground in the shot. Once I piece that together, I can know how I need to light the band. I will need one light to simulate the sun, which means I will leave the standard reflector on it. I might throw a 1/2 or 1/4 CTO gel on it as well to warm the color temp up a little bit. 

This is an example of some of the steps involved in preparing for a shoot. Not all my shoots are like this, but any that involve more complex ideas or building will usually need this and a decent amount of time. 

I will be posting a behind the scenes video from the shoot hopefully within a week, or whenever I get it and the shoot edited. In that video, I will cover more on lighting and possibly editing as well

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I needed a first post on this page. I decided I’d post a shot from a trip I made earlier this year, albeit after I ramble a little.

I will be using this blog for many things. I will talk about gear, I will talk about techniques (some, I’m not giving everything away!), how I do some things or thoughts and ideas about photography. I will occasionally talk about other photographers, things I am inspired by. I will sometimes talk about life and not even mention anything even distantly related to photography. I definitely plan on using this blog to post a lot of photos that are of a different style than what is typically in my portfolio.

Either way, you should use that “subscribe” link down on the bottom of the page and keep up to date with things I’m saying, because we all know how important my ramblings are

A month or two ago, I made a trip up to New England to do a few photo shoots. I did one in New Hampshire with a good group of guys in a band called Armor For The Broken, then I had to make the trek down to southern Massachusetts to shoot a band called The Miles Between. That trek involved me driving through Boston in the morning. I was doing what I often do when traveling, which is putting my 5D on aperture priority with my 24mm f2.8 lens and holding it at arms length while shooting some random shots. I came up upon the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge bridge and somehow was able to miraculously get two really good shots of it. I then managed to put a sneaky good lightroom edit on it that I liked, and I usually don’t like these weird edits, but I think it turned out good. If interested in buying this as a print or licensing usage, please get in touch with me. Anyway, here is that photo:

the Zakum Bridge in Boston