Father Pitt’s Eccentric Photography – Old Pa Pitt’s few discoveries and many mistakes in photography

Moving Water

Fountain at Gateway Center. Notice the fascinating patterns in the falling water.

Old Pa Pitt would like to have a little electronic device, like a TV remote, that could turn off clichés. Just push the button, and the cliché disappears from our intellectual landscape. And the first photographic cliché he would turn off would be the moving-water cliché.

Try it yourself. Look up guides for beginning photographers who want to move on to the next level of manual control. When they come to the question of shutter speeds, what is the example they give to illustrate why you might want to control the shutter speed yourself? Four out of five of them tell you that you’ll want to do that to blur moving water.

Why? Why is moving water supposed to be blurred? Why should it look like strings of cotton candy? It’s unnatural. The only place that effect belongs is on inspirational posters with quotations from C-list poets.

But it has become a cliché. More than that: it’s a dogma. You have to blur moving water. It’s your duty as a responsible photographer to smooth out rapids and waterfalls into white streaks.

Why? You don’t see moving water that way when you look at it. You see an irregular surface, constantly changing, and the thing that is most characteristic is its chaotic irregularity. This characteristic is exactly what is removed by deliberately slowing the shutter speed to turn the water into a white streak.

But we can admit to ourselves that it produces some pictures that attract attention. At least they do the first five or six times you see the effect. After that you begin to get a bit tired of it, don’t you? By “tired” Father Pitt means that you simply don’t notice those pictures anymore. If you are forced to pay attention to them, you may tell the photographer that they are very nice, and the word you would use to describe them is restful. In fact they are a perfect cure for insomnia, especially if they are adorned with quotations from C-list poets.

So what should we substitute for this cliché? We can’t just take regular pictures of moving water, can we?

Well, yes we can. In fact, to counteract the cliché, it might be good to use the fastest shutter speed possible for moving water. You’ll capture drops suspended in the air, wavelets in the act of breaking, and other fascinating things that will actually give people something to look at, as opposed to a smooth and undifferentiated white streak.

In fact you’d probably get better results by leaving your camera on full auto mode and snapping your picture than by deliberately slowing down your shutter to achieve the effect that the textbook says you should use, the effect that will put every viewer to sleep.

Of course, the other great thing to do with moving water is to take movies. Water in motion is an endlessly fascinating subject for the kind of videos that most digital cameras or smartphones can do very well; and since most pictures are seen on screen these days anyway, there’s no reason they shouldn’t move.

But don’t slow down your shutter to blur moving water. If you feel tempted, try some other cliché, like extreme wide angles. Someday soon Father Pitt will tell you how much he hates those.

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December 22, 2024
The Picture Is the Thing

A natural-looking picture of some houses on Baywood Street in East Liberty. To make this picture, Father Pitt took three different exposures (with a little Kodak pocket Z1285 that will bracket exposures automatically), adjusted the perspective to look like nature, and fiddled with the colors to match the way he remembered the scene looking to his own biological eyes.

Father Pitt is a pictorialist. That does not mean that he expects to emulate the impressionistic style of the Pictorialists like Steichen in his early days, but that the picture, in his opinion, is the thing that matters, and not how the picture was obtained. A picture ought to be judged by how it looks, and not by some theory of what photography ought to be. If you produce a pin-sharp rendition of everything in front of your lens, good for you. If you produce blurry impressionistic shapes, good for you. The question is simply whether those shapes make a picture we want to look at, or whether those sharp details belong in the picture you’ve made.

For that reason old Pa Pitt has no objection in theory to any kind of processing you put your picture through to get the result you want. The Pictorialists of 1900 would rub and scrape and torture their prints to eliminate details they thought detracted from the effect they wanted. A modern photographer can do the same with the GIMP or Photoshop or Affinity Photo.

While you have only begun to think it, Father Pitt will hasten to add that much of what people do with image-editing software is in egregiously bad taste. Most of what most people do with anything is in egregiously bad taste, so we can’t expect them to be any more tasteful with powerful image-manipulation software in front of them. One thing that could be said in favor of the old print-torturing techniques of the Pictorialists was that they took a lot of effort, and therefore automatically excluded casual fiddling. By the time you had developed the technique and the patience to manipulate pictures that way, you might have absorbed some aesthetic sense, too. But not always: see the works of William Mortensen (you can find a selection on the Photography page of Dr. Boli’s Eclectic Library) for examples of laborious print-torturing in the service of sometimes appalling taste.

For his own pictures, Father Pitt thinks of the photograph as the raw material for a picture. Most of the time he is not attempting art: he is trying to illustrate what a thing actually looks like, and the way the camera sees must be adjusted to make it match the way human brains perceive. Thus the perspective of buildings is adjusted, the highlights are darkened and the shadows lightened, and the colors are adjusted to match what the human mind naturally does when it processes a scene.

This is not what photography ought to be like. It’s only what Father Pitt does to make the pictures that suit his purposes. Some photographers set a rule for themselves that the picture must go straight from the camera to publication, and if they get good pictures that way, then they’re doing it right. Father Pitt has little patience for abstract theories of what photography ought to be. He has more opinions than anybody needs. But if you can make a good picture by ignoring every one of them, then good for you. The picture is the thing.

December 21, 2024
Developing Black-and-White Film with a Monobath

Years ago, when old Pa Pitt was taking pictures mostly on film, he used to develop black-and-white film on the kitchen counter. It was not difficult. Instead of a darkroom, he had a changing bag, which is a portable darkness with holes for one’s wrists, and a daylight tank. Once the film is loaded into the tank inside the changing bag, everything else can be done in broad daylight.

There are several steps to traditional film developing. First pour in the developer and slosh it around in the prescribed way: this sloshing is called agitation, and there are important chemical reasons for it that would be boring to go into. Then pour out the developer and pour in a stop bath, which stops the development. Then comes the fixer, which makes the film lightproof, so that you can actually see the negatives without turning them all black. Then you rinse the film, and if everything went right you have pictures—negatives, that is, which can be scanned or printed to make pictures you can look at.

A monobath promises to simplify that process by bundling the developer and fixer into one solution. The idea is that the developer works fast enough to outrun the fixer; once the development is done, the fixer does its work, and once you’ve rinsed off the chemicals, you have developed and fixed negatives in one step.

Now that Father Pitt is picking up film cameras again, the economy and speed of developing the film himself are once again appealing to him. When he heard about the idea of a monobath, he decided to try it. It worked the first time, so here is a description of the experience for anyone who might be considering doing the same.

For his test roll, Father Pitt took an Argus A, a cheap and not very capable camera from the 1930s, to Clinton Cemetery. He was also taking digital pictures, so if the whole roll was wasted, the only loss would be the price of the film. It was Kentmere Pan 100, which is some of the cheapest black-and-white film you can get, and in spite of its cheapness Father Pitt has almost no complaints about its quality. The one small complaint is that this particular roll seems not to have been attached to the spindle in the cartridge. You should know that the film is at the end when you can’t turn the winding knob (or push the advance lever for you fancy types whose cameras are newer than ninety years old). This roll just wound all the way out; we knew it was done because the rewind knob stopped turning. Fortunately the roll was destined for the changing bag anyway, but it would have been very inconvenient if Father Pitt had been planning to take it to the lab.

For processing, Cinestill offers a “Df96 Mono Film Processing Kit” that includes much of what you need to get started: the chemical solution, a small daylight tank for one roll of 35mm film, and a funnel with mesh filter (that’s important, because you’ll reuse the chemistry multiple times). If you don’t have a darkroom, you’ll also need a changing bag, and you’ll definitely need an accurate thermometer. It also helps to have a small tub that you can fill with water to maintain the right temperature in the chemistry.

Temperature and agitation are everything in this process. It is more or less self-timing: at a certain temperature, with a certain amount of agitation, the developer will do its job in time before the fixer is finished. A shorter time would not produce the result you want, but a longer time doesn’t seem to make much difference.

Since the temperature is so important, Father Pitt filled a tub with water at just a degree above the proper temperature and set the bottle of solution in it for a while. When the thermometer showed that the solution was at the right temperature, he poured some of the bath water into the tank with the film and left it in there for a minute. Then he poured the solution into the tank, followed the agitation instructions, and waited till the time was up. After that, he poured the solution back into the bottle and rinsed the film according to the instructions. Then he took it out and hung it up to dry.

It was obvious from a glance that the film had developed, and when the film was thoroughly dry scanning the negatives showed that nothing had gone wrong with the development process. Some online sources say that monobath developing increases the grain, and that may be true; we can only say that the grain seemed to compare favorably with the grain in the same brand of film processed by a local lab.

Well, this seems like a good way to get film developed with minimal effort. In the whole process, the hardest part was getting the film on the plastic spiral reel in the changing bag, and Father Pitt will share one hint that seems to have made that part much easier. Cut off the corners of the end of the film that goes into the reel: those sharp corners want to catch on everything, and smoothing them out seemed to make the film slip into the reel much more easily.

For his next roll, Father Pitt will try the same process, but with a better camera.

Argus A with Kentmere Pan 100 film.

Update: Here is an example of a picture from a Kodak Pony 135 (which is a simple camera with a good lens) on Efke KB 25 film, developed in the same monobath chemistry:

Kodak Pony 135 with Efke KB 25 film.

October 30, 2024
Meet Frankencamera

If Victor Frankenstein had a camera, it would probably be put together like this. The camera is a Sony Alpha 3000. The lens is German and more than seventy years old (probably; old Pa Pitt is not sure about its date). It’s a Wirgin Telepar 105mm lens, which makes it the full-frame equivalent of 157½mm on the Sony with its APS-C sensor.

Wirgin Telepar lens mounted on a Sony Alpha 3000 camera

Father Pitt picked the Sony because its image quality was said to be excellent (and it is), but also because its E-mount, with inexpensive adapters, could accept a wide variety of ancient lenses that he happens to have sitting around. The Telepar is a 42mm screwmount lens, and the number of lenses made for that mount is staggering. Father Pitt has half a dozen of them from the days when he used a Praktiflex and a Zenit.

Now, what is the point of using a lens like this when there are modern lenses that are better and more adaptable? Well, for one thing, every lens sees the world differently. You won’t get the same picture from this lens and from a modern lens at the equivalent focal length. You might get a better picture from this lens. You might get a worse picture. But you’ll definitely get a different picture.

Second, attaching a manual lens to a modern camera wrests control of the camera from the electronics. The camera doesn’t know there’s a lens at all: it has to be told to fire the shutter whether it sees a lens or not. The photographer has to set the aperture on the lens itself, and he has to focus by hand and by eyeball (and with the assistance of focus peaking, which he does not disdain).

Third, a prime lens—one that has only one focal length—makes one think about composition differently. Old Pa Pitt makes full use of zoom lenses when he has them. But that laziness comes at the price of some second-rate compositions. When the only way to change the composition is with one’s legs, one puts more thought into the composition.

Father Pitt spent an hour in the Union Dale Cemetery with this camera and lens, and he was pleased with the results. Here are a few of them:

The Telepar will get more use. When it is not in use, it will continue to live in the tube in which it came to Father Pitt: a tube labeled “CLOSTRIDIUM HEMOLYTICUM BACTERIN… For Use by Qualified Veterinarians.” It fits the lens perfectly.

October 30, 2024
The Big Advantages of Little Sensors

A small sensor means a big lens range on Father Pitt’s Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Everyone knows that big sensors are better. All other things being equal (and all other things never are equal, but we’re doing our best to make a fair comparison), a larger sensor will create less noise and better pictures. It will also give the clever photographer more control over depth of field, so that the photographer can go to photography fora on the Internet and talk about bokeh with other people who appreciate a good bokeh and like to use the word bokeh in casual conversation.

Not many photographers talk about the advantages of little sensors, though, and since old Pa Pitt has a contrarian streak, he will step into the void.

Aside from the cost, there are three important advantages to small sensors.

The first is the size of the lenses. Father Pitt’s Fuji superzoom has a lens whose focal length would range from 24mm to 720mm—if it were on a full-frame camera. (“Full frame” in digital cameras means having a sensor the size of a negative or slide from a 35mm film camera.) Now, a 720mm lens on a full-frame camera would be awfully heavy. It would want its own seat on the streetcar. It would not slip neatly into Father Pitt’s little plaid camera bag with room for two other cameras.

Top of the Cathedral of Learning. It would take a whole lot of lens to stand on the ground and get this picture of the second-tallest Gothic building in the world on a full-frame sensor.

The second big advantage is depth of field. Photographers love to talk about bokeh, because knowing the word bokeh is one of the main things that set them apart as real photographers. It just means “blur” in Japanese, but “blur” doesn’t sound technical at all. And it is certainly true that how the out-of-focus parts of an image look is an important part of the aesthetic impression it makes, and good blur can be used to emphasize the things that are sharply in focus.

Look! Bokeh! The flower (Verbascum blattaria) is in focus; the background is blurred.

But deep focus is also valuable—having everything in focus throughout the image, even at widely disparate distances from the lens. Father Pitt will not go into the technical details of how sensor size and aperture interact to affect depth of field. The important thing for our discussion is that, whereas larger sensors allow more distinction in focus, smaller sensors have the opposite virtue: they allow more indiscriminate focus, making it easier to have everything in the image in focus at once. This can also be a desirable quality. In the history of art, as far as old Pa Pitt knows, it never occurred to a painter to blur the background to emphasize the foreground, until photographic images had made us aware of that possibility. We do not naturally perceive the world as partly focused and partly blurred. As soon as we think of an object in a scene, our eyes focus on that object. It takes an unnatural effort to focus on one object while being aware of the part of our vision that is out of focus. The popularity of the buzzword bokeh, Father Pitt thinks, has caused photographers to suppose that images are attractive only when they have proper blur. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, blur is a special effect to be used sparingly and with intent.

Arcade under the Bell Telephone Building along Strawberry Way. Old Pa Pitt likes this picture, and it depends for its effect on fairly sharp focus from front to back. The Fuji camera above took this picture, and the small sensor made it easy.

The third big advantage of small sensors is in macrophotography. It takes special lenses or extension tubes to focus very close with a full-frame sensor. Many relatively inexpensive digital cameras, though, can focus down to half an inch without breaking a sweat. Moreover, the depth-of-field advantage of a small sensor makes it possible to get a reasonable picture of a tiny object in reasonable focus. Photographers often resort to making “focus stacks” of thirty or more images to get one in-focus picture of a tiny thing, but in many cases the same effect could be yours just by using a much cheaper camera.

Spotted Henbit (Lamium maculatum). In this very close picture of a tiny flower, there is enough depth of field to keep the details of the whole flower and the adjacent leaves in acceptably sharp focus—which would be more difficult to achieve with a larger sensor. Photographed with the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

So is old Pa Pitt recommending that you dump your expensive SLR and pick up a cheap superzoom instead? No, but he is recommending that you pick up a superzoom in addition. A big sensor gives you a huge advantage in image quality, as well as the ability to play with bokeh until you’re absolutely sick of hearing the word bokeh. But there are many times when a small sensor is a big advantage. Having the right camera for those occasions will make it much easier to get the picture you want.

October 29, 2024
Why We Still Use the Cranky Old Kodak EasyShare Z981

The Kodak EasyShare Z981 was made toward the end of Kodak’s production of digital cameras (the Kodak cameras you can buy today are made by a different company that licenses the trademark), and it is one of the worst and one of the best superzooms Father Pitt has ever used. It’s poorly made, slow, and buggy, but old Pa Pitt keeps picking it up anyway.

Kodak tried to appeal to the enthusiast market with its high-end Z series, but compromises made this camera less appealing to photographers, while complexity made it less appealing to casual picture-takers.

The construction is appallingly cheap, and bits of plastic are likely to break—the battery-door hinge is broken on this one, for example, though to be fair battery doors are the most common physical point of failure in cameras that take AA batteries. A rubber band keeps the camera working.

If you save raw files, the camera is so slow that one reviewer suggested you put the kettle on between shots. (But, on the other hand, it does save raw files, so it earns points for that.)

At speeds of ISO 400 or above, the noise in raw files is pretty bad, and the in-camera JPEGs are smeary with noise reduction.

As with every Kodak Z-series camera Father Pitt has used, autofocus is fiddly, and in some modes simply doesn’t work at the long end of the zoom.

But at ISO 64, this camera produces gorgeous pictures. The Schneider lens deserves a much better camera behind it. There is very little distortion for such a long lens, although the wide-end barrel distortion is noticeable because the camera does no correction—it has to be corrected in software later. The camera itself allows a high degree of manual control over most things, and the electronic viewfinder is good enough to make manual focusing possible.

The pictures are the main reason old Pa Pitt keeps picking up this camera again. Under the right conditions, the pictures are clear and sharp. Father Pitt always saves the pictures in raw format, in spite of the wait between shots. Even at the base ISO of 64 they can use a little noise reduction, but they respond well to it.

The camera has plenty of quirks. Autofocus is, as we said, fiddly. Set on “Multi-Zone,” it often fails to focus at all at the far end of the zoom range. We have much better luck with it set to “Center-Zone.”

The auto ISO selection is not smart enough to account for the zoom lens, and the image stabilization is not impressive. Even in bright light, it’s a good idea to set the ISO to 200 or 400 for long-telephoto pictures. At 400 ISO, the noise will look dire in raw pictures, but it can be tamed in editing later. Father Pitt leaves the camera set to ISO 64 for most pictures and raises the ISO as needed.

The controls are not bad. A wheel on top of the camera changes the most frequently used settings. Menus are simple and fairly comprehensive. Dedicated buttons for flash mode, macro mode, and self-timer are on the top. The big useless “Share” button on the back can be ignored, since all the Kodak software it interacted with is long extinct. A switch on top activates the second shutter button, supposedly for portrait-format pictures; this is a useless extravagance on a camera otherwise made as cheaply as possible, and for some reason the switch deactivates the main shutter button, so you can use only one or the other. Fortunately the software is clever enough to tell you what’s wrong if you try to use the shutter button when it’s deactivated, but it could have been even cleverer and just realized that you probably want to take a picture.

The macro capability should be singled out for praise. The camera will focus at one centimeter, which is not uncommon in superzoom cameras but still very good. This camera, however, focuses at one centimeter with the zoom lens at the full-frame equivalent of 60 millimeters; most other superzooms that focus at one centimeter will do it only at the widest zoom setting. In effect, the Kodak focuses more than twice as close as most of the rest.

The worst thing about the camera is the build quality. It feels cheap, because it is cheap. In addition to the broken battery door, the little plastic loop that attaches the lens cap to its leash is broken. That is probably an improvement, since dangling lens caps are always in the way.

Old Pa Pitt will probably keep using this camera until it dies. It has produced enough good pictures that he feels as though he knows how to get what he wants out of it. But after it dies, he probably will not replace it. There is one big advantage to a camera one feels that way about: it can go anywhere, and one never worries about dropping it or losing it. For that reason alone, this camera gets a lot of use.

Some representative pictures from the Kodak EasyShare Z981:

The Yards at Three Crossings, Strip District.

Montour Trail, Moon Township.

Snow-on-the-Mountain (Euphorbia marginata).

Sixth Street Bridge.

October 20, 2024