Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

So Andreas Feininger used a 40 inch telephoto lens with a 4 x 5 inch camera to do many of his famous shots of New York in the 40’s, 50’s.

Here’s a link to the poster I had on my wall for many years of Fifth Avenue Lunchtime.

So if you convert the lens to mm, you get 1016 mm.

Fifth Avenue does rise a bit from where he took this photo, but I think he had a platform to get higher.

My thinking was that a normal lens on a 4×5 camera is 150mm. So 1016 / 150 means this was roughly 7x normal.

So from that, if normal on a cropped sensor is about 40mm, then 7x 40mm = 280mm.

There are a number of ways to get to this number but they wind up about the same.

So the frame is going to be similar with a 280mm lens on a 40D, but will the “sense of compression” be the same?

I think it’s sort of the same question as what happens when you put a 20mm full-frame lens on a cropped sensor. Yes, you multiply it by 1.6 and get 32mm. But the relationship between foreground and background is still the same as with a 20mm lens on a full frame camera. It’s just cropped.

So, according to my theory, to get the same compression as Feininger got, you’d still need a 1000mm lens (more or less).

One of my blog readers is sure that I’m wrong about this. What do you think?

Hopefully I’m wrong.

The damned heat is keeping me from shooting. Hot weather is about the only thing that keeps me from getting out. I get lethargic. Plus, my A/C is not great, so I don’t feel like doing much of anything in the house. I guess it’s about 100 degrees in NY, and about 85 in my apartment. I’m going to spring for a new Air Conditioner this year… real soon. Don’t know if the cat just picks up on my mood, or whether he’s hot also, but he’s just been sleeping all day.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while you’ll see that every summer my shooting slows down. It seems to be the only season that I’ve not been able to capture. It’s frustrating because I’ve got a head full of ideas right now, but all I can do is lie around and watch repeats of police dramas. The heats supposed to drop tomorrow night. All I’ve done the last two days is keep a piece of paper by my bed and write down ideas for shots.

I did a bit of research into Feininger and his “Big Bertha” lens which he used with a 4×5 camera. I figured out to get the same compression I’d need about a 1000mm lens. Not something that is going to rest comfortably atop the street walker. He built a platform to raise his camera to do the Lunchtime Fifth Avenue shot. Not real practical for me. And those lenses aren’t cheap - not just to do one or two shots. I’ll stick with wide angles stuff for now which I like better anyway.

* * *

Dave -  I noticed your comments about Feininger’s Big Bertha lens.  He used a 40″ lens on a 4×5 Graflex body.  That’s only 8X (40/5=8), which is only about 178mm on a Canon 40D (22.2 x 8 = 178mm).

* * *

That’s true in terms of framing - but not in terms of telephoto compression.  If he used a 40 inch lens then the compression effect is still going to be 1016mm.  (Am I wrong!)  I’ve been wrong before you know.

Another way of looking at it is that when I put a 20mm lens on the 40D, the crop factor makes the frame smaller than on a full-frame, the DOF qualities of the lens are still a 20mm lens.  It’s just that you’re cropping out the edges.

“Dave - One thing I find fascinating about these new pictures is just how sharp they are from foreground to background.

Compare them with the image of the wheel on the header and the difference is striking. It’s as if depth of field doesn’t exist, at least at this magnification.

Is this due to post shot processing?” - Stephen

* * * *

Not due to post processing. Due to the angle of the shot and to some extent the DOF of the 20mm; and the distance to the nearest object. But the high angle changes the ratio of distance between the near and far objects. In other words, picture the camera at eye level. Think about the distance between the cabs in the foreground and the Apple store. Them imagine the camera up in the air 20 feet. All of a sudden you’ve added a substantial distance between the objects in the “foreground,” they’re now at the bottom of the frame, and in the distance, and both are well within the DOF of the 20mm and the same effect will work (to a lessening effect) as the lens gets longer.  In short - if you think about how DOF works - the closer the object, the narrower the DOF.   If the camera is a foot away from the subject at a given F-stop, you may find that focus is narrow.  The difference of a few inches at a given F-Stop will throw the subject out of focus.

Same subject, but now at 10 feet, and a few inches one way or the other won’t effect the focus.  So, I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well - but by raising the camera and increasing the distance between the near object, you can get it in focus as well as the furthest objects.  One thing I don’t know how to do is increase detail or modify focus in post-processing.

If you look at the photos of Andreas Feininger that were shot with a fairly long telephoto lens (Lunchtime Fifth Avenue) - you can see a similar effect since the camera is high enough so that he can mostly keep the foreground and background in focus. He had the added ability to do shifts since he was using a view camera; nevertheless, if you put a telephoto lens on a camera and shoot down fifth avenue at ground level, you’ll find it very difficult to get the foreground and background in focus. The higher you raise the camera, the easier it gets to have foreground / background in focus.

Suppose you want to stick your 40D camera - or any current Canon dSLR on a very high tripod and raise it up way over your head to do high-angle shots. (I’ve been fooling around with this). But you want to be able to see what your doing at the same time; or in a pinch, right after the shot is taken.

You get your remote control cable or wireless remote control, and then you’ve got two choices. You can run a USB line down to (what - I’m not sure); or better yet, run a video cable down to (what - again I’m not sure).

I have a lot of questions about the best way to do that in the field.

Example ideas:

- Buy some storage device that takes the USB input and transfer the last image immediately (say the Epson p-5000). Can you download the last image without having to put the camera into some special mode.

- But the better idea is (I guess) to put the camera into live mode (again I haven’t played with this yet) and run a video cable out of the camera and down to some portable device (call it x) that takes video in.

That’s about as far as my thinking goes, but I don’t know what the X Device for viewing would be.

So to sum up, I have put together a lightweight rig that can extend to about 15 - 18 feet high, and I’m able to trigger the camera, but I can’t see what I’ve got unless I lower the camera to look at playback. That’s not too good because I don’t have a way to raise the camera to the exact height and angle… I’m shooting blind.

A low-tech solution is to have a 6-foot or so ladder with me, but that’s too much to carry and attracts even more attention than I already do.

I’m sure that people who do studio work do this all the time. I don’t want to lug a laptop either. I just want a sort of video viewer with a small screen that weighs less than a pound or so…

What do you think - is there a simple way to do this?

* * *

UPDATE

I bought a SONY fx820 dvd player and video extension cord, plus large RCA to small mini-jack for under $200. This works great (at least in the house anyway). The DVD player fits in my camera bag; I believe the battery will last for six or so hours. The thing with DVDs is that they don’t all have video line-in, so you need to check that. Although this isn’t LIVE VIEWING, (although it could be if I set the camera to live view) the camera is set to show the image until the shutter is pressed, so that is fed to the DVD player and I can study the framing etc. All-in-all, pretty cool. Thanks everyone for your advice. And if I don’t use if for photography, I have a nice portable DVD player.

*** ANOTHER UPDATE ***

Just returned from my first use of the SONY DVD hooked up to the Video Output of the 40D. The pros: it is light enough to easily hold in my hand while I’m reviewing the last shot. It’s clear enough so that I can check framing and see most of what’s going on in the shot.

The cons: don’t expect VGA quality, or HD quality out of the video feed. It is fairly coarse. On the other hand, with the little focus checkboxes turned on in the parameter settings I can tell what it focused on.

The only thing so far that’s bugging me is that it starts up in widescreen mode and I have to set it to normal mode, otherwise the image is stretched badly. I want to see if I can figure out how to keep the thing in normal aspect mode. Otherwise - it’s a great deal. It fits in my small camera bag. And I was at least able to see what I had just shot and what the framing was; which is all I wanted.

Shot with the new contraption; 96th street by entrance to FDR. This and most of the shots from the high angle are with the 20mm prime lens. I have some ideas I want to try with a longer lens. The contraption itself is sort of interesting. I made it mostly from gizto carbon fiber parts. Legs are from gitzo tripod, the center pole is from a heavier Bogen tripod, one extra center pole is from a gizto (attached to the Bogen center pole) and on top of that sits a Gitzo monopod. Oh and at the top is a ball head. I would really like to have a geared center pole instead so I can make slight adjustments without having the camera position move from left to right; but this is about as far as I’ll go with it. What’s nice is that the thing can easily be used as a normal tripod. Without all the extensions going up, it’s about 4.5 feet high.

In general, since there is definitely sway at the top when it’s fully extended, I’m generally shooting at as high a speed as I can manage.

How stuff is attached. The c-clamp isn’t strictly necessary, it just gives a bit more security in case something snaps. So the top monopod is with two straight hinges (just to help keep the thing straight) with pipe (I don’t know what they’re called) attaching thingamjigs which have screws to tighten them (one at the top of the straight hinge, one at the bottom).

Pretty simple, though it took me a while to figure out the best way to keep the monopod straight. I could actually go higher than I’ve gone but I won’t be able to reach my cable release. I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile to spend the money on a remote release or not.

I began shooting at dusk… and then into the night.

So I’m on fifth, pointing the contraption across towards the Apple Store (pictures to follow I think) and bus runs by. Yes, I have a cop keeping an eye on me from the Plaza Hotel side. Is it still a hotel or is it condos. Whatever. I spent about an hour getting the hang of the thing and I think it will eventually prove useful. And as Craig noted: not a good idea to use it in the rain, esp. since it is a walking lightning rod though in this case it is not exactly the tallest structure around. Here what I liked was that you get the reflection behind me, but also can see through both bus windows.

I really hate attracting all this attention, but so be it. I try to remember how often I’ve felt foolish doing some sort of shooting only to find that it wasn’t foolish at all. This high-angle stuff came out of the montage experiments. I had been trying to figure out a better way to vertical montages when the idea of a sort of calibrated pole device hit me. Of course, I haven’t used it for a vertical montage yet and a lot of what I’ve done so far has been too planned for my own good.  In other words, I like to be surprised by something and not end up with what I pictured in my head.  (This is sort of anti-Ansel Adams pre-visualization but what can I say - I like to be as surprised as the viewer.)

Suppose you want to stick your 40D camera - or any current Canon dSLR on a very high tripod and raise it up way over your head to do high-angle shots. (I’ve been fooling around with this). But you want to be able to see what your doing at the same time; or in a pinch, right after the shot is taken.

You get your remote control cable or wireless remote control, and then you’ve got two choices. You can run a USB line down to (what - I’m not sure); or better yet, run a video cable down to (what - again I’m not sure).

I have a lot of questions about the best way to do that in the field.

Example ideas:

- Buy some storage device that takes the USB input and transfer the last image immediately (say the Epson p-5000). Can you download the last image without having to put the camera into some special mode.

- But the better idea is (I guess) to put the camera into live mode (again I haven’t played with this yet) and run a video cable out of the camera and down to some portable device (call it x) that takes video in.

That’s about as far as my thinking goes, but I don’t know what the X Device for viewing would be.

So to sum up, I have put together a lightweight rig that can extend to about 15 - 18 feet high, and I’m able to trigger the camera, but I can’t see what I’ve got unless I lower the camera to look at playback. That’s not too good because I don’t have a way to raise the camera to the exact height and angle… I’m shooting blind.

A low-tech solution is to have a 6-foot or so ladder with me, but that’s too much to carry and attracts even more attention than I already do.

I’m sure that people who do studio work do this all the time. I don’t want to lug a laptop either. I just want a sort of video viewer with a small screen that weighs less than a pound or so…

What do you think - is there a simple way to do this?

* * *

UPDATE

I bought a SONY fx820 dvd player and video extension cord, plus large RCA to small mini-jack for under $200. This works great (at least in the house anyway). The DVD player fits in my camera bag; I believe the battery will last for six or so hours. The thing with DVDs is that they don’t all have video line-in, so you need to check that. Although this isn’t LIVE VIEWING, (although it could be if I set the camera to live view) the camera is set to show the image until the shutter is pressed, so that is fed to the DVD player and I can study the framing etc. All-in-all, pretty cool. Thanks everyone for your advice. And if I don’t use if for photography, I have a nice portable DVD player.

*** ANOTHER UPDATE ***

Just returned from my first use of the SONY DVD hooked up to the Video Output of the 40D. The pros: it is light enough to easily hold in my hand while I’m reviewing the last shot. It’s clear enough so that I can check framing and see most of what’s going on in the shot.

The cons: don’t expect VGA quality, or HD quality out of the video feed. It is fairly coarse. On the other hand, with the little focus checkboxes turned on in the parameter settings I can tell what it focused on.

The only thing so far that’s bugging me is that it starts up in widescreen mode and I have to set it to normal mode, otherwise the image is stretched badly. I want to see if I can figure out how to keep the thing in normal aspect mode. Otherwise - it’s a great deal. It fits in my small camera bag. And I was at least able to see what I had just shot and what the framing was; which is all I wanted.

A couple of years ago.