Walking the Plank: Balancing on the Head of a Pin I have a friend who is a shaman—a shamanic healer. She believes that the right moment for something to happen is the first moment it does happen. It is an interesting thought for me as I journey forward this year in transitioning from film to digital capture with the Nikon D3x. I have had a painful month of moving my efforts forward with the new camera system. Sure, the “first kiss” from my D3x was sweet, which I reported in last month’s column, but it left me longing for another. What I got for my second imaging effort was “burnt lips.” I am bewildered by my colleagues’ comments throughout the years, voiced in their own articles, on how successful they have been in photographing with their digital cameras. From what they have reported, one would seem to be a fool not to rush forward with extreme haste toward the benefits of digital cameras. It is not that I doubt their sincerity, but rather that my experiences are at odds with their own. Why is it that I find my own efforts, with a state-of-the-art digital camera here in 2009, as difficult as balancing on the head of a pin? Perhaps the differences are best explained by what each of us is trying to achieve in our own photography. Perhaps what works “simply” for one photographer may be the subject of a nightmare for another. For me, fine art photography is about expressing a feeling in my final print, which is a reflection of how I felt at the time the photograph was taken. That is the intent of my work: creating a sense of feeling about a subject in my final photograph based on my experiences in the field. I rarely find that the camera and lens have captured an image with the same passion that I had when I viewed the scene at the time the photograph was In order to accomplish my work, I need to be able to transform the raw image into something new, something that reflects my inner vision. For me, I do not accept “what you see is what you get” photography, but rather strive to make the final photograph sing to its viewers by the long path of exacting postproduction. The computer is the tool of choice in the modern digital photographic era. While it is a very powerful method of image processing and transformation, it often falls short in its ability to “repair” damaged images. Math, software, and computers are not a “Band-Aid” for an ailing image. This is an important concept to understand: image processing should not be used to heal an ailing image, but The down side of my work is that “contortionist image processing” has its limits. Any flaw in the original raw image will be exacerbated to the point wherein it is overt to the viewer. And this is where I think I differ from my colleagues on the subject of digital cameras. I don’t think they routinely push their images to extremes; and therefore, artifacts that are objectionable to me are only minor nuisances to them. The image below, “Backseat Betty Revisited,” is my second major effort in fine art image-making from the Nikon D3x. It was photographed with the Zeiss ZF 2/35 lens I spoke of in a previous column. While the final image is pleasing to me, the process of getting it to its endpoint was not. It took more than sixty hours of postproduction effort, and three complete restarts of the image-making process from the Camera RAW file in order to finish the photograph. By the end, I did not know if I could endure another moment of chiseling the image out of its flawed origins. I had to fight for the image to survive, and it exhausted me.
For whatever reason, the RAW image file had considerable chromatic aberration (CA) damage throughout its structure. Chromatic aberration in the RAW image is a nightmare for my work as it has a tremendous effect on the overall resolution of the final photograph. It is a quick downward spiral by the effect of CA in reducing the image resolution and making the detail look lost in a sea of disturbing artifacts. While it is assumed within the industry that math and computers can remove chromatic aberration from images and do so without damaging the image in any Beyond the CA issues in “Backseat Betty Revisited,” I also felt that the bokeh of the Zeiss ZF 2/35 lens looked oddly “angry” at full resolution, but still pleasing at 50% resolution. It is unclear if these issues were caused by a bad copy of the lens or are inherent in its performance. My guess is that the lens is optimized for peak sharpness (which it certainly is), but it does so at the cost of over-correction of lens aberrations, resulting in a bit of a disturbance in the bokeh at maximum resolution. I think few people would find this technical issue a handicap for their work; but in addition to the CA, it contributed to a melee within the fine detail of my RAW image structure for this particular image. It should be noted that I continue to have faith in the extraordinary image quality of the Zeiss ZF lens series. This just may not be the lens for me. Both the chromatic aberration and the angry nature of the bokeh at micro-sized viewing were exacerbated to an extreme in my use of an experimental RAW converter. The software simply made a bad problem worse. I would never have guessed how critical the choice of RAW converters would be toward the microstructure of the image. I am still evaluating different RAW converters and their effect on the microstructure. I will report back when I have found a clear winner. As I mentioned, I am skeptical as to how software can be used to resolve chromatic aberration from lens issues without damaging the microstructure. I
am not referring to methods that provide simple, slider-based image realignment between color planes, but rather algorithm-based transformations that look at As for the source of the problems with my lens, I am unable to make a conclusion at this time. It is quite possible that I received a bad copy of the lens. It is equally possible that the design of this particular lens may have “issues” that occur under certain shooting conditions. Certainly, all wide-angle lenses, be they from Zeiss or any one else, will exhibit chromatic aberration away from the lens center—and as per above, CA is a difficult issue to resolve. The only way for me to figure out what is best for my work is to try other lens combinations with the D3x and see what I can do to resolve the impact of chromatic aberration for my image-making. There is hope, but tradeoffs may need to be made in order to accommodate the best path forward. For my work, this may be the first possible moment that digital capture could accommodate my artistic needs, but it still remains an incredible challenge. My own energies are completely absorbed in trying to settle down the new tools and to make them useful, and to do so without panic. It is already a given that my work as a fine-arts photographer has changed radically from my past works. It would be foolish of me to ignore the strengths of the new tools, instead demanding that they fulfill how I previously made my photographs. It would not work. But at the same time, the new tools are forcing me down certain paths based on my ability to make the technologies work for my art. “Courage” is in re-inventing oneself now and again to meet up with the changes that press our work into a new realm. No one said it would be easy. Pete Myers Archives (click) --------------- |
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