The Slowest Light In The World

We are told that light goes at 299,792,458 metres per second. That may be so when there is company present but I can assure you that when you are using a pinhole camera the stuff travels considerably slower. While you might get your ordinary photography with a digital camera in half a second the pinhole camera will require most of the day.

The reason for this is simple: the digital camera opens up to a maximum aperture of f:1.8 and uses an ISO of 6400 - the pinhole camera opens up to f: 248 and uses an ISO of 100. If you opt for the paper negative you have an ISO of 0.6 and if you put a yellow filter in front of the thing you have an ISO of peanut butter. As far as making pictures, choose smooth or crunchy...

Okay, this is not as bad as it seems. The Ilford Obscura camera will not take racing-car pictures at Wanneroo while the cars are circling the track, but it will take pictures of them while they are in the pits. And with a bit of management the pit pictures will be free of human interference. The camera system will also be suited for landscape shots on cloudless days, dreamy sea pictures, and interior views...as long as you can stay inside for an hour.

The calcu-later* kit that comes in the pack enables you to see what the equivalent shoot time will be for the Obscura compared to the results from a standard light meter. Those people who do not have an old hand-held meter can always use the screen readout from their digital camera to tell them what the standard exposure for a scene is - and then you can dial it onto the converter. But be aware that the converter dials are not corrected for reciprocity failure.

This is a phenomenon that occurs when you are using really long exposures - the recording medium gets less sensitive the longer the time is extended. A rough rule of thumb for the really long ones will be to double what the calcu-later says. Most pinhole shots benefit from longer exposure.

Of course the whole business happens on a tripod. In the case of the Obscura, though, as it has a flat bottom, it can be placed on any solid surface for the duration of that exposure. You set it, open the shutter, and read a book until the time comes to close it. In case of a dull day, I recommend you start on " War and Peace " and go on to reading a comic if you finish before the camera is ready.

You might laugh at this ( and you might laugh now, thank you...) but even with f:16 lenses and 400 ISO films in medium format cameras I remember leaving shutters open for 20 minutes to record projected images on a screen in a darkened studio. Literally set and forget.

A question from the readers; " What exposure times do you use  if you are using studio flash? ". I don't know, but as I have a studio flash outfit and tabletop models that will not move, I intend to find out. The trick will be to use multiple pops of the strobe system to lay more and more light onto the emulsion. I intend to use a digital setup to tell me what would be successful with a standard lens and then convert it with the calcu-later. I'll bet that will also need double the number of pops...

* Pun, John, pun...

Bonk, Bonk, Bonk. Is This Thing Turned On?

How many items do you carry in your photographic kit that don't need electricity? Not many, I suspect. Even the lens cleaning cloths these days seem to have a battery door somewhere...

One that you can rely upon without power is the grey card. Also known as the gray card in rural Missississippi. It is the photographic studio equivalent of a Powdermilk Biscuit - always there in the cupboard and good for any number of things.

The schools all teach about grey/gray* cards when they talk photography. In some cases I suspect their lecture material was last revised about the time that Ansel Adams invented the 2-zone system...he expanded his practise later...and they make great theatre out of using the things to assess exposure. Some modern students can be brought to understand this and come cannot, but it is still good to see old rituals being enacted.

The standard 18% reflectance grey/gray card was used first with hand-held meters - indeed it may have been seen with extinction meters in the Jurassic period. It allowed the user to have a standard surface colour and contrast to measure to ensure that exposure fell somewhere in the middle of the sensitive range of the plates or films in use at the time. It worked, and let the user make one good guess regardless of whether the scene to be photographed was in contrasty sunlight or flat dark shade. The photographer could then override that advice by merely setting the aperture or shutter speed differently.

This was in the days before camera companies packed the central processing chip with 20,000 images that could be referenced in an instant to give a perfect exposure. You got one bite at the cherry and, often as not, your teeth hit the stone inside. This was in days when you paid for the film, developing, and printing, and did it with your own money. You wanted to get the exposure right the first time.

Your scene might have been all over the place as far as lights and darks went and measuring any small portion could have thrown out the whole shebang. The 18% reflectance was what your meter was set for so it was what you measured. Some of us measured them at home before we went out and cello-taped the controls down on the cameras but that didn't work all that well...

Well... you can do the same thing now with the cards. Use them as exposure guides or use them as white balance guides. You can shoot a custom WB into one and save yourself a lifetime of slider hockey on the computer when you get home. You can take a clear picture of it, compare it to the computer screen and later to the print and see exactly whether you've got the balance right. Like the multicoloured X-Rite calibration colour checker cards, 30 seconds spent shooting this simple little plastic panel will save you 30 minutes in the computer room.

That's good value for money and time. Grey, gray, or grau - they make sense.

* Not to be confused with a noted Melbourne television personality who did crow imitations.

Dumbing Up On Sunday Afternoon

Have you ever been bewildered by photography? I'm going to make a candid confession - I have -  many times. The first encounter with a camera that required me to set the focus, aperture, and shutter speed and then advance the film and count how many shots I'd taken was a daunting one. It was at high school and there were girls watching and I was terrified of appearing to be an amateur fool.

I've conquered that fear now and have become a professional one. People consult me for fool lessons. I could fool for Australia in several fields...and I have also conquered the fear of complex cameras. I readily whiz dials, push buttons, poke screens, and pinch and swipe with the best of them. At any one time I have 18 different criteria set on my cameras  - they function like Norden bomb sights.

But just now and then I succumb to an attack of the dumbs and want to do the least amount of thinking and controlling that I can. A Sunday trip to a car musem with the Fujifilm X-T10 gave me a chance to try out a new level of non-control. I switched on the AUTO lever.

This is a lever set under the shutter speed dial to allow the camera to take over nearly all its own functions and decisions. You cannot tell it to do much of anything in the way of ISO, shutter, or aperture and it will only agree to give you JOPEG images. But it shuffles through an amazing variety of pre-set program decisions to give a good result with no more than pointing and shooting.

The excuse Fujifilm gives for this is the idea that you hand the camera to spouses, children, or lesser mortals when you want a picture of yourself in front of the scenery. As you are not there to be fabulously technical, the lesser mortals have just one button - it is presumably all they can cope with. A very condescending lever...

Well I descended all afternoon and I am delighted with the results. I did put up the on-board flash of the X-T10 to fill some of the shadows, and I did make use of the fold-out LCD screen at the back for waist-level and floor-level shots but pretty near all the rest was just between the X-T10 body and the 27mm f:2.8 pancake lens. The percentage of keepers and usable illustration shots was over 90, and the only real danger for me was having no lenshood on the little lens.

It was good enough to encourage me to dumb it for more of the Camera Electronic equipment reportage events I do. Speed, discretion, and handiness are of prime importance for these things since any delay means that the snacks are gone before you can get to them. And I suspect that there will be a number of other cameras out there in the mirror-less or compact range that also have hidden control positions on their mode dials that allow them to run on autopilot very well.

Let " George " do it.

Don't Swat the Spyder - He's Your Best Studio Friend

Your normal reaction to a large Spyder may be to reach for a swim fin or flame thrower, but we would like to break you of the habit. Not only will you be a better friend of the environment, but you'll get better pictures as well. Miss Muffett - invite the Spyder Cube to sit down beside you.

The grey card is one of the most useful of devices to judge accurate exposure with. No matter how much confidence we have in the software of our camera, there are times when it can be fooled and we need to be able to correct its errors. If we use a grey card we can find the 18% reflectance point that gives our meter the best chance of an even exposure.

If we also have access to a pure black tone and a pure white tone in our image we can tell our computer exactly how far to go for the image that it alters.

Finally, for the ultimate of contrast control, we look for the ultimate specular highlight and absolute shadow. But frequently in the subjects that we encounter none of these attributes are to be found. We find ourselves basing our decisions in the studio, field, and computer room on uncertain things and sometimes can never seem to get a pure photo, no matter what slider we shift.

Enter the Spyder Cube. It has 6 working faces as well as a specular highlight collector and and a absolute shadow point . You can dangle it near to your main subject or screw it onto a tripod so that your camera sees it in the same light. One or tow test shots to the grey and you've got the basic exposure, and when you get the test shots back onto your computer screen you will have the whole range of tones there to adjust to; specular, white, 18% grey, black, and absolute black.

Here's the key to what you see:

A. As bright as it will ever get. Pure white from the strobe tube.

B. The 18% grey.

C. The white that you have to deal with in the lighting situation you are in.

D. The black you have to deal with with the lighting as it is.

E. As black as you can ever get it.

If you follow the entire sequence through to your printer - and then make sure that you examine the output from the printer in a strong, even light - you can produce full tones without skewing the contrast one way or the other. Some workers will go further and specify colour temperatures for viewing and time to let any drying effects of the ink settle down, but in general you can make a much more accurate assessment that you could back in the days of a wet silver print. Dry-down seemed to rob us of so much brilliance then unless we took extraordinary measures with ferrotype tins and glazing solutions.

The Spyder Cube is small enough to pack for the field and fast enough to deploy in any studio shoot - and cheap as chips compared to frustration time spent whacking sliders back and forth!

" Go Out And Go Mad "

That's a famous phrase from a former CE employee - uttered when the deal had been done and the customer was going out of the shop with the precious new camera held gingerly in both hands. It was an injunction to go have fun - to explore - to shoot a thousand shots and discover what the equipment was capable of.

Occasionally you would discover that the equipment could go mad by itself.

Case in point is the adventure at the Hyde Park Community fair on Labour Day. I attended and had a good time. I scored an old-fashioned* lemonade from the Girl Guides,  avoided the attention of the worst of the political pressure groups, and photographed the veteran and vintage cars.

Hyde Park is a full-sun and dappled shade venue and you need a fill flash and your tongue stuck in the corner of your mouth sometimes to get acceptable exposure. In some cases you get science and in some you get art. In the case of the FIAT sports car I seem to have gotten a little of both, mixed with madness.

The car is a simple red colour - well it would be, being an Italian sports car. I mean, let's be realistic about these hings. And an Italian motoring enthusiast restored it and displayed it. Red.

There it is front and back, and the rather simple interior as well. Sweet little thing. Good lines  and a tiny little motor. I always try to give my car blog readers a look at the engine bay as well as the outside.

But look at what the Fujifilm X-T10 does when there is massive overexposure of red. The camera was operating on Programmed mode at the time and there was a spritz of .5 flash from the EF42...but look at what has become of the external red paint colour. Yellow!

My theory is the sensor just spat the dummy with the over exposure. I am not sure if it would do the same with any other colour, but that will be the subject of a separate series of experiments. I'd call it funky but I'm afraid of inadvertent typographical errors...

* I was a bit disappointed that they used the phrase "Old-Fashioned" as it suggested something with whisky. It turned out to be lemonade...

To check out the Fujifilm X-T10, flash and lenses feel free to come in store and have a play. Or order several on line. They come in silver and black.