A few weeks back, a reader wrote to Mike comparing the sharpness of prints made with his 6-MP and 12-MP digital cameras. He put in some effort to compare apples and apples. Both cameras had the same format, and he used the same high quality prime lens on both cameras at the same ISO and aperture. He worked on a tripod, photographing the same target at the same distance under the same conditions, and he printed out the photos using the same workflow in several different sizes. He saw little difference in sharpness between the two cameras. Apparently, up to fairly large print sizes, it didn't matter whether he used a 6- or a 12-megapixel camera.

The reader had made an error. He'd stopped down the lens all the way to ƒ/11. That meant his likely blur circle was larger than the pixel size on either camera. I guesstimated that the most resolution difference between the two cameras he could hope to see was 10–15%, so small as to be nearly undetectable in real photographs.

A good equipment test is really a well-designed scientific experiment that measures the variables on which you want to collect high-quality data. Few people have the knowledge or skills to design such experiments. There's a reason people go to expensive schools for many years to learn how to do this. The majority of tests that I read about online are done incorrectly. When they produce unexpected results, as they did in the case of this reader, the first thing to investigate is the testing procedure.

I've written many columns and comments about print sharpness and what people can and can't see. There have been many comments from readers who couldn't verify my assertions, making comparison prints on their inkjet printers. The readers neglected to determine whether their printers were even capable of reproducing such fine detail before making the comparison prints; they weren't. Like Mike's correspondent, their experiments were too crude to measure what they were looking for.

That's why I was so happy with this column back in January: "How Sharp Is Your Printer; How Much Can You See?" It's not easy to come up with a robust test that a non-expert user could run that tells them something useful and meaningful about what kind of fine detail they're getting and seeing.

There's another way tests go wrong. Mike has described to me how tests of total harmonic distortion failed to tell us how audio equipment would sound, because it really matters to the human ear which harmonics get distorted. Once you know that, you can design an appropriate test, but the most competently-executed THD test won't tell you what you want to know.

I just ran into this with my Olympus Pen E-P1 (which I am very a very happy with, don't get me wrong.) Published tests report a pleasantly low level of noise with this camera. DxOMark is still my favorite for quantitative information, and they have comparison data for my old Fuji S100fs and the Olympus. My field tests pretty much agree—with a glaring exception. No one's noise tests distinguish between visually-random noise and noise that appears as a regular pattern. By the time electronic noise gets massaged into a photograph random electronic variations can turn into a very non-random artifacts.

I photographed a moonbow on New Year's Eve, handheld with the EP-1 (God, but I love an ƒ/1.7 lens and image stabilization!) The top image was taken at ISO 800, the lower one at ISO 1600. In these comparison illustrations I've cranked the chroma all the way up to "11" to make the noise readily visible; it's nowhere as obvious in the original photographs.

-

ISO 800

ISO 1600 (click on either image to see it larger)

The increase in truly random noise between ISO 800 and 1600 wouldn't make the higher-speed photograph unusable, especially if I ran it through good noise reduction software. The color banding that you can see in the ISO 1600 shot does. That's a manifestation of noise that isn't reported in the published tests, and it's a real killer. At ISO 800, the nonrandom noise isn't a showstopper. At ISO 1600, it is unacceptably distracting to the viewer in the correctly-printed photograph, and it's not something I can filter with software.

Now, keep in mind that this is the kind of subject which is most likely to bring out such noise—broad uniform areas of low saturation in the dark part of the tonal scale. A more variegated scene would disguise this noise. What it means, though, is that I can't really count on this camera for quality results above ISO 800. That's about a half a stop faster than quality results out of the Fuji S100. The thing is, based on the simple noise data, I should get nearly two stops more usable speed out of the Olympics. Clearly, not gonna happen. That's a disappointment, and it's a failure of the testing protocols. The data being reported is technically, but not visually, accurate.

Tests. They don't always tell you what you need to know.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

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Panasonic has announced the Lumix G2 and G10 cameras in the Micro 4/3 standard. The G2, which is a refresh of the popular G1 / GH1 and will presumably eventually replace them, has a touch-activated viewing screen, and the G10 is a stripper model with fewer features (mainly, it lacks the articulated screen) and a lower price. (It also offers name confusion with Canon's product, but that sort of thing appears to be popular in the camera market.)

The press release is here.*

Mike

*TOP reader Lynn B. points out that the press release doesn't mean "pallet" of options, unless you have to lift them with a forklift. Ah, Spell Checker.

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I'm a little surprised that National Geographic's "Top 10 Photos of 2009" have come under such fire in our comments. Although to be honest, my first reaction, like that of several readers, was that the set was a little bland. (Actually, that's not quite accurate—my first reaction was "I could have found better ones." That was my arrogant inner editor speaking.)

It quickly occurred to me, however, that if you know in advance that you're going to do a television show about the 10 pictures you chose, that would influence your choices. You'd pick pictures that have interesting back-stories, wouldn't you? So I'm reserving judgment about the choices until I see the show, which airs here a couple of hours from now.

There are, of course, all sorts of reasons for making specific picks when you pick a list of anything. One of the major early projects I did on this blog was a top ten photographs list. When I did my own list, I was trying to cover most of the major genres of photography—portraits, pinups, landscapes, photojournalism, scientific photography, and so on. So naturally that "program" affected my choices. I was also picking pictures that "stood for" the best of each genre—when I picked a portrait, for instance, I picked an Alexander Gardner portrait of Abraham Lincoln, because it would be well-known to most American readers and because Lincoln was the first politician to realize the political advantages of using the then-new medium of photography to help craft a cult of personality. So I wasn't just saying "this is a great portrait," I was saying, "this is a famous and significant portrait, one that can 'stand in' for all portraits." The needs of the program I'd committed to came before other considerations; if I were just picking my own favorite portrait, it probably wouldn't have been that one.

Personal best
But that got me to thinking. How hard would it be to pick your own ten favorite pictures?

What each of us likes and doesn't like has a lot to do with our personal interests and tastes, of course. It also might have something to do with the kinds of pictures we take—we might tend to like photographers who do the same sort of thing we ourselves do, only better. Landscape photographers admire landscape photographers, and so forth. Color photographers like color photographs.

Our technical choices might have a lot to do with what we admire. I have a friend who's a great devotee of large format; he'd probably pick ten pictures that included mostly large format pictures. Maybe all ten would be. Personally, I realized about twelve years ago or so that most of the pictures that move me the most are naturalistic black-and-white photographs of "found" or encountered scenes, mostly with people in them; I dislike set-up shots and generic scenics. I have a weakness for pictures taken around water.

Our ten might include subjects we're interested in. A sports fan might pick sports photographs, a military enthusiast might pick great war photographs, a guy who's crazy about cars might pick some great car photographs.

Other people might go for variety, and pick "one of each" of many types of photography they like.

Connotation certainly plays a part. I've done a lot of hiking and photographing in the upper Midwest, and I find I tend to respond better to pictures of that general area than to landscapes of the Rocky Mountains or the desert Southwest, for instance. Even though the latter are usually more spectacular.

I know a guy who loves photographs of New York, and another who has a great passion for architectural photography.

John Szarkowski, the great curator and critic, reportedly had a weakness for pictures of apples. He was an apple grower and a great aficionado of apples, and it was known in certain circles that if you were dropping off a portfolio for review at the Museum of Modern Art during his long tenure there, it wasn't a bad idea to include an apple picture or two.

Depending on the ground rules, you might pick some of your own pictures, too. Or pictures that have personal meaning for you. For many people, photographs by others have a hard time competing with photographs of the things and people they love. 

A favorite of yours might be a "breakthrough" picture that was important to you in your own artistic growth. Ansel Adams had a lifelong affection for "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome," which was the first picture he used a red filter on and the key precursor, for him, of the heroic style of western landscape that he later developed into his mature style. He always honored that photograph's significance in his own artistic development.

Apropos my own ten best list that I mentioned earlier, it might be wise to separate our critical judgment from that which we love and respond to personally. There are plenty of photographs I would defend to the end as being indisputably great that I don't personally have much feeling for. (That old "head vs. heart" dichotomy.)

Or maybe not
I'm guessing this might not be an instructive exercise to actually do. That is, it might be pretty pointless to  make the hard choices and come up with ten specific photographs. After all, looking at photographs is an appetite and a pastime—it depends in part on a constant stream of new encounters, an ongoing adventure of new discovery. But it could be enlightening to at least think about it. It could tell you important things about who you are, where you stand. Maybe even things you don't consciously realize about yourself.

Could you at least think of three or four things that would have to be on your list, for instance?

I can think of a few that would be on mine.

Mike

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Tomorrow, in many markets in the United States—and later in the week in other markets—Public Broadcasting will air "National Geographic Magazine's Top 10 Photos of the Year." You can see JPEGs of the ten pictures here.

Here are some excerpts from the official write-up:

In 2009, National Geographic’s photographers took more than one million images from which only 1,000 could be published in the magazine. From 1,000, these 10 were singled out for lasting significance.

National Geographic magazine's Top 10 Photos of the Year presents a countdown to the magazine’s best image from 2009, chosen by National Geographic magazine editor in chief Chris Johns from his list of the 10 best photographs published in the magazine last year. The photos cover a broad range of subject matter, from unexplored caves and endangered freshwater dolphins to the global food crisis and vanishing cultures.

[...]

The top 10 images were taken by:

Kevin Schafer, who struggled with the murky, tannic waters of the Amazon River for his first National Geographic magazine assignment.

Fritz Hoffman, who dangled from a cable over the raging Nu River in China as villagers crossed on a zip line to take animals to market on the other side.

Amy Toensing, who, documenting the drought in Southwestern Australia, describes how her picture came together almost by accident as she followed a family through the parched landscape of what had once been a thriving farm.

Stephen Alvarez, who explains how he illuminates pitch-black underground caves to expose them in a way that has truly never been seen before.

Martin Schoeller, who typically shoots portraits of celebrities like Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie, photographed the Hadza, a vanishing culture in Tanzania. He shipped a complete studio to the African bush with lights and generators to capture this series of intimate, searing portraits.

Randy Olson, who used a computer to control an underwater camera trained on a grizzly bear in Kamchatka, Russia.

John Stanmeyer, who usually covers wars, international conflict and social injustice, traveled to nine countries for a story about the global food crisis.

James Nachtwey, who has a similar beat to Stanmeyer’s, spent several months in Indonesia covering the many faces of Islam in a nation that is home to more Muslims than anywhere else in the world.

Len Jenshel and Diane Cook, a husband-and-wife photographer team, battled time and weather to make a photograph of a rooftop garden on Chicago’s City Hall.

Michael “Nick” Nichols, National Geographic magazine’s editor at large, was ranked No. 1 of the top 10 with his photograph of a giant redwood tree. He talks vividly on camera about how it took nearly a year to complete the photograph and how it almost drove him to the brink. Using gyroscopes, dollies and computers, Nichols and his team made a seamless top-to-bottom photograph of a 300-foot redwood tree, the first in history.

Sounds interesting—I'm going to try to catch it. If you've never seen Nick Nichols' redwood picture from the October, 2009 issue...well, you still won't, because even the fold-out in the magazine was but a small representation, and a JPEG or a TV image are going to be even more inadequate. But it's a remarkable project and one that I imagine is going to be well worth hearing about.

Check your local listings for scheduling in your area.

Mike
(Thanks to Dan Carnagey)

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As far as I can tell, some guy in Georgia is putting Micro 4/3 mounting plates on a Chinese Senko CCTV lens and adding some engraving and a cool (but possibly reflective?) day-glo lime green retaining ring. And why not? Sounds like you could have fun with that. Not sure if all this is a fair appraisal or not (they haven't answered my email). Anyway, officially, it's the Noctor HyperPrime 50mm ƒ/0.95 for $750, shipping in...April. Not April 1st. April...well, 15th. Ah, let's just say "spring."

Mike
(Thanks to Iñaki)

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[Editor's note: I haven't been able to procure usable JPEGs of sample pictures from Photography Unplugged to use with this article. To give you an idea what the pictures in the book look like, there is a small selection of nine examples on the main page at www.harald-mante.de.]

By Jim Hughes

A while back, Mike asked people to talk about their favorite lenses. I was busy on a project at the time, so stayed silent. But I did think about it. And in the middle of the night I came up with an answer that surprised even me: over the course of many decades of photographing—generally carrying a camera wherever I go, not because I need to make a living or burnish a reputation but because I still love what it feels like to take pictures—my favorite lens turns out not to be a lens at all. The "optic" I feel most comfortable seeing my world through is actually a film. Kodachrome, to be precise.

Okay, if pressed, I could name a glass lens or three. At the top of my list would be the 50mm ƒ/2 Schneider Xenon fixed to my eminently pocketable Retina IIa folder. This 60-year old lens is really sharp yet still manages to render Kodachrome’s abundant tonalities with a soft brush. Then there’s my reliable "modern" antique, the minuscule 35mm ƒ/2 Canon that I regularly mount on my indestructible Canon 7s rangefinder (both circa 1968). Shooting color—all I do now—the Canon produces rich and deep transparencies that somehow possess the enduring look of old-time black and white. In fact, most of my compact Canon RF lenses perform similarly. Must have been a design philosophy back then. Many of today's lenses seem oddly cold and calculating by comparison.

Jim Hughes with his Retina IIa. Note the Leitz 1:1 bright frame finder. Blackberry photo by Peter Smith.

Brings to mind Ralph Gibson's comments the other day regarding books (which I agree with, no surprise). I've known Ralph since he arrived in my office at Camera 35 with a box full of prints under his arm and a plan to self-publish them in a book. He wanted a portfolio in the magazine to help make it happen, and I was more than happy to oblige (as I was later, with Larry Clark's Tulsa, at Ralph's suggestion). Ralph is, by the way, one of the smartest, most articulate photographers I've had the pleasure to work with. Even then, he thought of the photo book as a distinct art form; books offered the ability to pair images on facing pages, he said, expanding and deepening their meaning, which can't be done as effectively in exhibits (or today, on the web). "A less ephemeral experience," I think his words were regarding photographs in books.

I also agree with Ralph's comparison of digital versus film. When I did the Ernst Haas in Black and White book, the publisher, Bulfinch, wanted the reproductions be be made from digital tri-tone scans, the newest and "best" process in 1992 (these days, we would be talking Quad-tones, or maybe Octo-tones!). I wanted the reproductions to be made in old fashioned offset-lithography duo-tone, with the plates made from film produced optically in one of those giant room-sized repro cameras on tracks. I thought the look of the latter would be a better match for Ernst's B&W photographs, most of which were made in the '40s, '50s and '60s with Rolleis and Leicas. So the publisher—reluctantly and at no little expense—did a test, running both the old and new technologies on a sampling of prints. When we spread out the press proofs for comparison, the decision was clear: the digital scans seemed to cause ink to float more on the surface of the paper; done that way, Ernst’s images had less depth and were overly-sharp at the edges of things, imparting a harsh tonality he never envisioned. I wanted the ink to be absorbed by the paper more. The differences were subtle, but real. Low-tech won, expensive and labor-intensive though the production may have been. (Of course, this may go a long way toward explaining why the book has never been reissued, turning it into a hard-to-find collector’s item.)

Given digital's relatively rapid ascendancy, it can come as no surprise that today, virtually all books—pictures, words, whatever—are made using new technologies whose rough edges presumably have been mostly smoothed out since 1992. Scanning and the ability to create digital files can rightly be thought of as having brought about the democratization of publishing, a good thing if ever there was one.

And as Ralph noted in his email to TOP, "the book will surely prevail." Consider the volume currently in my hands. Photography Unplugged (2009: Rocky Nook, Santa Barbara, CA—here's the U.K. link), is its title—not a little ironic in the digital era. This handsome production, a 200-page, 50-year retrospective of German travel photographer and university professor Harald Mante, is a paean to Kodachrome, his film of choice for both personal and professional work. "Paean"—the word itself is ironic, considering that this first commercially viable color film was primarily developed by Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, an unlikely pair of classical musicians and amateur photographers, in the mid-1930s.

The two Leopolds—"Man and God," as they were called at Kodak—figured out how to incorporate RGB dye couplers into the processing chemicals, rather than the film itself as with the now far-simpler to process E-6 films, using a very complex infusion method that soon utilized an equally complex selective reexposure on what was essentially black-and-white film stock. From its beginning, Kodachrome has required very sophisticated processing at full-fledged labs. But the end result was spectacular: since the color was not built into the film but added later, actually displacing silver, emulsion layers could be significantly thinner, allowing for reduced light dispersion and superior sharpness. According to my 1939 edition of Color in Photography, by Ivan Dmitri, Kodachrome was manufactured in its early years with an ASA speed of 8. Not that long ago it was available in E.I.s of 25, 64 and 200. The slower versions offered a grain structure so fine as to be virtually invisible.

1932 Lincoln Cabriolet, Rockport, Me. Camera: Kodak Retina IIa. Film: Kodachrome 64. © 2001 by Jim Hughes.

Little wonder magazines such as National Geographic and Holiday for many years mandated its use by its photographers. Little wonder photographers such as Sam Abell, Costa Manos, Douglas Faulkner, Jay Maisel, Ernst Haas—not to mention Harald Mante, and yours truly—gravitated to it. But Kodachrome’s complexity was its undoing. Where once there were labs throughout the world working around the clock, slowly but surely the equipment wore out. In the face of a waning markets and disappearing profits, production lines were not rebuilt or replaced. Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, stands alone today as the processor of last resort. And when Kodak announced last year it was ceasing production of K-64, the venerable film’s last surviving embodiment, Dwayne's, with more than a little regret, said it would shut down its K-14 processing line at the end of this year.

I had never heard of Harald Mante, or seen any examples of his impressive body of work, until Mike, knowing my connection to Kodachrome, had Mante’s book sent to me. It was a revelation (and a little like looking in a mirror, despite some clear differences in the ways we see). His editor and publisher (and clearly old friend and admirer), Gerhard Rossbach, wrote in his forward: "The idea for this book developed during numerous conversations with Harald Mante about the need to set a counterpoint to the increasing 'homophony' that modern, digital photographic processes produce. Here, we want to show you Harald Mante's work in its purest form, without the aid of computers or Photoshop. In other words: what you see here is Harald Mante unplugged, with each original, unprocessed image showing the moment exactly as Harald Mante saw it through the viewfinder of his camera."

In a brief statement, "Goodbye Kodachrome," Mante himself says, "Kodachrome was the first slide film I ever used, and [has] remained my staple for decades." His book, he notes, is "...a perfect way for me to say 'Goodbye' and 'Thank You' to this famous film!"

1956 Red Chevrolet Convertible, Rockport, Me. Camera: Kodak Retina IIa. Film: Kodachrome 64. © 2006 by Jim Hughes.

I have just loaded my final roll into the Retina, appropriate since it was probably the Kodak camera line that benefitted most over the years from Kodachrome's original popularity. While I shoot, I will also be trying to figure out how I will ever match Kodachrome's qualities: that deep, liquid color, those cool, muted shadows, that wonderful sharpness, the absolute clarity, the three-dimensional look and feel I've learned to see and capture. For me, rating K-64 at 100 and exposing for the highlights has become second nature. Like Harald, for 50 years I have visualized my pictures in Kodachrome color. Now I’ll have to learn new ways to see.

Jim

Both Kodachrome illustrations are from Jim Hughes' American Classics Series.

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Jesse Speer, Winter Gateway

I got some sixty submissions today when I asked for help in changing our header. To those who made submissions that weren't selected, thanks very much for your kindness! Sixty alternatives proved an embarrassment of riches—virtually all of them were better than I could have done, and thus would have served the purpose. There were some very interesting interpretations and variations.

The one I chose is by TOP reader Jesse Speer, a nature photographer and graphic designer from Bozeman, Montana, USA, who photographs mostly in the Rocky Mountains. His website is extensive, and gives you a good idea what he's all about. Lots more pictures as good as the one above.

Jesse tells me he's been reading TOP since 2007.

For the record, I guess I should apologize for the "contest" casting of the original post. I should have just made it a straightforward appeal for help. Several readers objected to the "for spec" call for work. No offense—I just thought it would be more fun letting someone else do it than doing it myself again. I did try, initially, to work with a graphics firm here in Wisconsin, but basically my budget is just too small. What I paid Jesse is about all I comfortably could have paid, so this wasn't an attempt to get work for free or "on the cheap."

Anyway, thanks again for all the good submissions—I literally could have used any of them, and about ten were really excellent. And thanks again to Jesse, who says he's going to use the money to help pay for a new GF1 kit. Good man!

Mike

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