A Lens to Love

[aymoon]

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Lars, it's inspirational to see you sticking to jpegs. This is something I'd like to do, and have done so with black and white, but colour worries me. I don't trust the auto-wb settings on any camera, and have tried working with standard tungsten and daylight settings, but then to get the exact look I want, I'd have to revert to using colour compensating filters etc. (back to my cine days). I don't want to carry around 20 filters with me as would be available if I was on a movie shoot.

 

Just wondering how you deal with colour. Do you stick to tungsten and daylight to reflect your film experience, or do you venture into the other settings eg. fluorescent, cloudy, or god forbid, 'auto'???

 

I would love to know as, whilst I enjoy using Capture One et al, I still want to get it right in-camera.

[wattsy]

WB aside, I rather prefer the colour that you get with the M9 JPEGs compared with what you get with a 'default' RAW conversion. It was the same with the M8 but the JPEGs from that camera were poor in all other respects. The M9 JPEGs are significantly better (and I am not averse to using one in preference to the RAW) but they still lack the finest detail that you get by converting the DNG.

[ishkra]

Here's a confession: I do not shoot RAW. Why bother when I can get quality like this without the bother?

 

Bother ....post processing is just funny and creative time to spend at home when it's cold outside

[archi4]

Lars,

I can very well understand your viewpoint concerning jpegs, in all the years I shot Kodachrome (from the early 50's) I couldn't get behind a Mac and if I messed up it was just too bad and the slide went into the bin. Just try saving a bad slide on Cibachrome!

However, I have tried shooting RAW+jpeg with my M9 and I find the skin tones from the embedded profile in the jpegs much too magenta in a side by side comparison, no adjustments to either. This is especially apparent in Lightroom 3. Of course it is a matter of taste and for everything except skin tones not of consequence.

maurice

[lars_bergquist]

Dealing with colour: As long as illumination is continuous-spectrum type (a.k.a. black-body radiation) I use an appropriate pre-set, or set Kelvins manually. AWB handles mixed light with predominant halogen pretty well (see my previous shots from the Stockholm Photo Fair). In really hairy situations, I set WB manually with the aid of an Expodisc. I should add that I have had a really instructive relationship with a Minolta Color Meter II.

 

There is one thing I must emphasise: Colour is subjective. Colours have no objective existence: They are qualia that our own nervous system arbitrarily attaches to various light wavelengths and wavelength mixes. Is my "red" the same as your "red"? Nobody knows.

 

In any case, you cannot specify colour without specifying the illumination. Our sense of sight exhibits a feature called "colour constancy", meaning that even in firelight, we subconsciously assign the "colour" (actually, colour mix) "white" to objects we assume are white, like a sheet of paper. But actually, we perceive that firelight is red, tungsten yellow, and noon light bluish, and the perception colours (!) our mood. I have a background in publishing and printing. We used to calibrate colours under a standard 5500K light source -- this was before electronic calibration. But having everything look like it had been shot on 5500K daylight film in 5500K light, would be utterly boring.

 

What we have to do is to compensate funny lighting to an extent about equal to what our own visual colour constancy does. But obsessive colour compensating becomes no less obsessive because we have applications like LR or PS that permit us to indulge our obsession. "Perfect colour" is an abomination in practice, resting on a misunderstanding of theory. And please, skin tones do vary quite widely even in "white" (dirty pink) people. Oh well, it must be one of these Kodachrome things ...

 

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One more thing: I am NOT interested in detail no-one can see unless he scrutinises a one meter print with a magnifier. This is not how sane people look at prints; I have been into that matter before in this forum. "The one who prints the most ultrafine detail before he dies, wins" -- no Sir, that's not what photography is about. Not in my book!

 

I have said it before: "Sharpness is the fetish of boring photographers". And I might add that "totally standardised colour is the fetish of insufferably boring photographers". I prefer to go out and take some pictures. Like those two ladies at the fireplace. I knew that AWB would make that firelight look like firelight. Well, it did.

 

The obstreperous old fart from the Kodachrome Age

[jamesk8752]

Lars, your post above on dealing with color hits the nail right on the head IMO. Obsessing over any of the many technical minutae to the detriment of realizing the intent of the image is foolishness of the first water. Thanks for expressing this so clearly!

 

Regards, Jim