Vintage versus Modern: Battle of the 50's

Since my last post was about comparing two 85mm lenses I think it's only fair to go on to compare a couple of 50mm (ish) lenses as well.

The contestants are:

the fairly new Nikkor AF-S 50mm 1.8G

and a couple of seasoned veterans:

M42 Fujinon 55 mm
M42 Volna 9 58mm
M42 Helios44-2

from left to right: Nikkor 1.8G, Fujinon 1.8, Helios 44-2 and Volna 9

The M42 lenses were used with a M42 to Nikon adapter with an infinity correction lens. I will make a separate post comparing lenses with and without this adapter to pentax and nikon bodies to see how much influence the lens has. My gut feeling, having seen those lenses on the pentax system which does not require a correction lens, is that it actually does not have much of an impact on image quality. But we will see that in a more controlled experiment soon.

So here we go, the shots of the test scene. All were shot with flash and a Nikon D610 on a tripod at 1/160 and ISO100.

Performance when shot wide open (scaled down to 25% of the original size):

(click to enlarge)

Here clearly the Nikkor lens has the lead in terms of sharpness. Helios and Volna don't offer f1.8 and therefore are shown at their respective widest aperture.

performance at 2.8 (widest common denominator)

(click to enlarge)

Here Nikkor and Fujunon lenses show pretty good performance (Nikkor still in the lead in my eye) while Volna and Helios do not come close in sharpness.

performance at 8.0

(click to enlarge)

Here now the Volna shows why it's called a macro lens. The performance at f8 is very good and close to the Nikkor lens. The Fujinon gets a close third place while the Helios still has a rather soft rendition of the scene. For better comparison see the 100% crops below at 1.8, 2.0, 2.8, 4.0 and 8.0.

100% crops close up

(click for full size)

My overall impression is that at f8.0 the nikkor lens and the volna 9 are very similar in sharpness, meaning they are both very sharp and show excellent detail. The nikkor is more contrasty than the volna 9 while the volna, since it's a macro lens, has a very short minimal focusing distance allowing you to get very close to your subject. All in all the Nikkor beats the other lenses pretty good unless you are in for some vintage soft focus effect which is very extreme with the helios 44-2, and present on the Volna and Fujinon lens on wider apertures. The Fujinon overall is a pretty good lens not far behind the Nikkor at apertures above f2.8.

Vintage versus modern: 85mm lenses

I thought it would be fun to compare a modern portrait lens I recently obtained to an older one that was my prized posession until now.

The two contestants are:

M42 smc Takumar 85mm 1.8 (built in 1972) - manual focus

and the new

Nikkor AF-S 85mm 1.8G (built from 2012 on) - autofocus

My test setup:

I shot this scene on a tripod with manual focus on the eyes (in liveview) of mr. frankenstein's monster here with a flash, trying to keep total exposure approximately the same. I went through aperture 1.8, 2.0, 2.8, 4 and 8.

I should not that the Takumar behaved as if it was slightly longer than 85 so I had to move the trippod about a cm back to get the same framing. All images were shot with a Nikon D610 and 1/160 of a second at ISO 100.

100% crops on the face:

The result came out as quite interesting.

These lenses have very different characteristics. The Nikon is clearly sharper at 1.8 and 2.0 while, to my eyes, it seems the takumar may have a slight advantage at f4 and f8. They seem to be tied at 2.8. This has to take into account as well that I have to use an adapter for the M42 Takumar lens which includes a lens for infinity focus. I would argue that this is a good sign that the lens inside the adapter (amazon) does not mess things up too much and, if anything, points towards this 1970's lens being even better than shown here with a camera that accepts it without infinity focus adapter.

There is some green fringing going on in the Nikon 85 while the Takumar shows no signs of chromatic aberration across the board.

Now the sharpness at f1.8 and f2.0 one can see as a letdown on the side of the Takumar or a feature. It certainly has a special-soft-focus quality to it so you might actually like that look on portraits.

Keep in mind that these are 100% crops from a 24MP sensor. On images in more typical resolution the soft focus effect actually translates in smooth transitions and a dreamy overall look.

See here for the scenes at 1.8

All in all I think the more modern 85/1.8 certainly has an edge at low apertures if your aim is a very neutral rendition of your subject. If you are in for some vintagy charm you should however consider trying out the Takumar.

smc Takumar 85mm @ f2.8

In the next article I will have a look at some lenses in the 50mm range including the Nikkor 1.8G, Helios 44-2, Funijon 55 1.8 and the Volnar-9

Have a happy and inspired new year everyone!

Leaves are falling.. (Part 2)

Finally here is the second part of my short look at how the image was made.

This is the image after I photoshopped the leaves in that I had shot separately. It's basically all using a photo of leaves and then adding a layer mask to fit it into the image. Sometimes also adding a curves layer to darken or brighten parts of the leaves helps to make it look realistic

Here I added a blurry background which I tried to match to the colors going on in the image with the model already. The color matching can be done in several ways. What I like to do is open up channels and then start with, say, green. This now displays a monochrome image where ONLY green color is shown. With this selected I add a curves layer to the image background (and only the background) and start tweaking the green curve. I look at the image and adjust the background until the image looks like the background fits in. Once this is done, do the same for red and blue. It takes some time but usually gives nice results.

Here I added some atmosphere by painting some smoke into the background and the foreground. You can do the same by photographing some smoke and blending it in. I tried to make some smoke using a mixture of glycerol and water (in a mix of about 1+6 or so) and putting it into a humidifier. This actually gives nice smoke but I probably need to find a more powerful humidifier given that the smoke just pours out of it more or less and I'd rather have it emmited a bit.

Now I added some color grading using a curves adjustment layer in order to make the shadows a bit colder and add a bit more punch. The curves adjustments are shown here:

Final touches. Here I decided to tone down the image a bit to not make it too saturated. In the end I actually made it a bit brighter again (see final image in the last post)

So I hope you found this in any way useful. Given that this year is approaching it's end I wish you a happy new year 2015- don't get too wasted on new year!

Leaves are falling.. (Part 1)

Some days ago I had arranged a photoshoot with a model online and over coffee we had gone through a list of things we could try to shoot. On the day of the shoot I was passing a playground in the morning that was surrounded by a lot of trees and suddenly the idea came to my head to create an image where the model's hair had been replaced by leaves and she was holding an hourglass representing the passing of time.

Photos like this, of course, have probably done before - but sometimes it's just fun to give something your own spin and try it out. Admit it, you have shot water droplets before too haven't you? Or that portrait of an old man in black and white? I know I have.. ;)

So as I was passing the playground I just grabbed a handful of leaves and put them in a plastic bag I had brought along.

At home I washed the leaves just to make sure there were no crawly things hiding in there that could make the model uneasy.

Since covering the whole head in leaves is a bit of work (and we were limited by the amount of hairpins) I decided to just put some leaves where her hair meets her face (the temples, the side of her head) and we took a picture like that. (One light source - it was an umbrella up top and my Yognuo 560 II)

After this shoot with the model I then set up a styrofoam head (that I had adjusted to exactly her height) and pinned lots of leaves all over it. I then took a picture with exactly the same settings as in the shot with the model and replaced the styrofoam head with her head in the final image.
This way we saved a lot of model-time and a lot of hairpins!

I will go into the post-processing that went into this shot in a second post.

Fate II deconstructed (tutorial)

This is a deconstruction for one of the recent images I have worked on called "Fate II". The basic idea was to have something remincescent of the greek fates that, according to mythology, were responsible for weaving the thread of every man and woman's life.

This is the image:

Some parts of this shoot were planned and some were improvised. I knew I wanted to have a mysterious, etherial look and that the model would be wearing a red veil of sorts that would be see through. I also wanted her to hold an hourglass because this fit well with the symbology of the initial topic.

I bought the hourglass on ebay (10€) and got some red organza curtains from a local shop (mömax, about 6€).

I went for a mysterious atmosphere and therefore wanted to have some smoke in the image. One good way to make your own smoke is by adding some glycerol to water (I added about 1 part to 8 parts water) and make that mixture evaporate. The easyest way to achieve that was by mis-using my humidifier for this purpose.

The lighting had to be dramatic and spooky so I decided to have one speedlight mounted right above my model shooting through a white umbrella (about 10€ on amazon) mounted on a lightstand (dynasun) connected to a weighted arm, holding the umbrella (wallimex).

The other speedlight below the model was first wrapped with some paper to prevent light spilling out too much and to only light up the background behind the hourglass and the model's chin.
This speedlight was put inside of the curtain.

Both were triggered by the on-camera flash from my Nikon D610 set to the lowest flash power (Slave mode 1 for the Yoguno's. Both were set to 1/16 power).

This is the photo that we got. Notice that there was too little smoke in the background. I later went back and just shot some smoke on black background to later composite into the image. The model came up with this really great looking pose. Getting the curtain to fall in a way that looks nice was some work. We used some clamps to give it a bit of shape. The rest of the steps were done in Photoshop.

Next the main character was separated from the background. This was done by adding a layer mask and painting with black on that layermask where the background was. To be faster you can also use the magic wand tool first to select the black background and then do a second pass with the paintbrush to remove all the background. I knew up front that I wanted to replace the background with something else so this step, although somewhat cumbersome, was necessary.

Next I made a new layer behind my character and filled it with a desaturated and dark color, creating a new background.

Leaving a solid color would have been possible but I wanted to give the scene a little bit more of a setting so I chose an image that I had shot on a photowalk the day before and put it between the character layer and the background layer at low opacity. I placed it such that the arc would form a "halo" around her head, leading the eye to look down.

Now I lightened up the face and the hourglass by using a curves adjustment layer (click for an explanation) and the paintbrush.

I added smoke by taking a couple of different smoke images and carefully overlaying them over my character. I used the "Blend If" function to only blend the bright parts and leave the dark ones out. You can use layer modes like "Lighten" for a similar effect.

Last but no least: color. I chose a color that was opposite (click for a color wheel) of my light red (green) using a curves layer and colored that background and some areas around the hourglass with that color to bring out a stronger contrast between the character and the background. Eventually I shifted the whole picture from red-green more towards magenta-cyan using a hue-saturation layer. I did this because I found the green looked a bit too harsh while the blue had a bit more of a natural/pleasing look.

I hope you found this little rundown useful. If you would like to see future posts like this or things were unclear, please make sure to drop me a comment.

All the best and have fun!
Mark

Long time no see

Oh my.. it's been forever. I had a long break from blogging now.

I spent the last months on various RL issues, finishing science projects and making some major life decisions. Since most of those have been done, it's time to get writing again.

I have updated my website and got a new domain (http://mu-photography.com), I much prefer the new layout to the old one. I will keep it rather minimalist and simple.

Other than the website relaunch I have been working a lot on getting a nice portfolio together including several fine-art images. Some of which are shown here:

A lot of images, especially collaborations with models, are coming up.
I will also post quite a couple of how-to's in case you are interested in a behind-the-scenes look for some of these images.

Take care and happy shooting,

Mark

concert photography

i brought the camera along for a rock concert yesterday and learned a couple of lessons
(also thanks to matthias hombauer, an established concert photographer who gave me some tips afterwards)

1) pick a lens that has a decently wide aperture. i had an 18-135mm f5.6 with me and that was not so great. next time i will try a 50mm 1.4 - although that one is quite heavy.

2) shoot in manual. my camera likes to make rather "creative" choices under the lighting conditions of a stage so i set it to manual and went this way. my settings for the pictures below were f5.6, 1/60 iso 6400.

i'd prefer to shoot at a smaller iso setting due to excessive noise but in the end.. well, you learn. here are some pictures from that shoot: