DavidMillier

I can do benches!

Signed

The E10 was my first DSLR. Eventually sold it to a friend who dropped it and turned it into a ILC by smashing the lens off. It was a beautiful camera but suffered from terrible battery life. The accessory LiPo battery cost as much as the camera. I ended up carving a battery grip from wood to hold a model car nicad pack connected via the battery holder. A bit of a bodge but it did work.

I've got one of those too, and I don't like it either! Colour is too yellow in warm light for my taste and it exaggerates blues and totally desaturates greens. Good for B&W. But that's just my opinion, plenty of people still like the SD9. Mine keeps my SD14 company in the attic. My favourite Foveon was the DP2M but even that one wasn't good enough to persuade me to keep it. I've given up on Sigma.

I think a simplified rule of thumb is all you need to control perspective as a photographer:

"Select a focal length that magnifies the background to whatever size you need. Then move your feet towards or away from the foreground to get that the size you need"

So this debate is not about physics but about terminology. Fair enough,happy with that. I must say the rather than "perspective distortion" as the term to describe this, I would just stick with "perspective".

I'll investigate whether viewing distance makes any obvious difference to me. So far, I have looked through my Finn Hopson book "Fieldwork" at arms' length and again at nose to the page distance (of course everything is blurry) and I don't see anything obvious changing to the geometry, but I'll take your word for it and keep trying. Maybe it takes a while to build up awareness of what you are seeing.

I got to say, though, that even assuming you are 100% correct, it seems to me to be a storm in a teacup and have little practical relevance to the art of photography (at least compared to the effects from changing camera-to-subject differences). That kind of perspective change can be effectively used for compositional effect. Your concepts seem more like correcting geometric distortion from pointing the camera up or down slightly. Yes, to some people, achieving geometric straightness is important, but not to a lot of people. It's hardly something that would bother me for 1 second, to be frank, and I can't imagine any way that it can be used for composition. As someone else already said, viewing distance is not something the photographer has any control over.

Thanks for spending the time and effort to explain it, though.

Er, I can no longer see anything sharply that is closer than about 4 feet (120cm) away. I need longer arms these days. Reading glasses are my friend.

It's your last two sentences that confuse me. I don't use the word "perspective", "expansion" and "compression" to describe what you say. To me, you can only use those terms if something within the frame changes size relative to something else in the frame. If everything gets bigger or smaller, there's no compression going on.

From a photographic composition point of view, what we are trying to do is change the relative size of subject elements to create a certain look eg a gigantic dog sitting in front of a tiny house or a tiny dog dwarfed by a gigantic house

Ok... but this has little to do with addressing the common misapprehension repeated all over photography literature that compression effects are the result of using a telephoto lens rather than relative camera to subject distances...

I can't say that I have ever noticed any distortion from changing viewing distance. It must be a subtle effect. I will look for it now.

Telephoto compression

1. This time we complicate the situation slightly. We add a second man to the frame.

2. We repeat the exercise of shooting the ruler and both men standing side by side at 5m and we see the exact same result in an image: They all look the same size.

3. Then we wildly change things. This time we leave the ruler stuck in the ground at 5m but the first man stands 100m away and the second man stands 130m away. We then examine the print. What do we see?
   i) A large foreground ruler
   ii) Two tiny men in the background
   iii) This is the crucial thing: the two men look almost the same size despite being quite far apart! Why is this! The answer is because the 30m distance between them is relatively small compared to the 130m distance to the camera. There is a slight size difference between the two men, but we don't really notice it in the print, they look a similar size. Instant telephoto compression - except you don't need a tele lens to achieve it, it happens at all focal lenghths

The reason, I believe, that so many people attribute this effect to the tele lens rather than the relative distance between camera and the two men is because a tele lens allows you render things that are far away big enough in the frame so that you notice the apparent compression. The second reason is the reduced angle of view cuts out subjects at closer distances removing anything that distracts you from the visual illusion of "telephoto compression". But it's not focal length caused at all.

As to your story of this being something that is attributed to viewer distance from the print, I'm afraid I still don't understand this at all.

These discussions inevitably get wordy and hard to parse. I'm still not sure whether we are talking about the same thing. I've tried to dream up a scenario that explains what I mean by the word "perspective" (and how it works):

1. Imagine a tall man holding a 2m ruler standing in front of your camera (say 5m away). The man and the rule are the same height.

2. You take a picture with a standard lens. You examine the picture and conclude that the ruler is 2m tall and the man is 2m tall.

3. You increase your shooting distance to 10m, then 20m.

4. You examine the images and you note that as the shooting distance increases, both the man and the ruler diminish in size in the frame equally. At 20m they take up a lot less of the frame than at 5m but both are the same relative size as each other in all the shots.

The shrinking of the image size with distance is, I think, what most people think of as normal and what they mean by perspective: the further away something is, the smaller it looks.

1. Next, you repeat the whole exercise, except you shoot one sequence of shots with a mild tele lens and another with a mild wide angle.

2. You examine the resulting pictures and you notice the same pattern: the closer the shooting distance, the larger the figures in the image, the further the shooting distance, the smaller the figures. You also notice that the tele lens renders the figures larger at all shooting distances than the wide lens; but that in all shots the man and the ruler remain the same relative sizes. The man is still the same height as the ruler no matter what shooting distance is used and no matter what focal length is employed. Their absolute size varies with shooting distance and focal length but the relative height to the pair remains the same under all conditions.

3. Next we do something different: the man drives the ruler into the ground so it is self supporting. He then walks backwards so the ruler is fixed at 5m and he is at 10m. You examine the images. As you would expect, the man is rendered smaller than when he stands next to the ruler. This time the relative height of the man and ruler is different. This effect holds for all shooting differences and all focal lengths - even though the absolute height of both will vary as distance and focal length change, the fact that the man and the ruler no longer look the same size is the key factor.

This is what I mean by perspective in photography and why I say that shooting distance is the only factor that can make a change to the relative heights of the man and the ruler. I really struggle to imagine that viewing distance from the print can possibly influence the relative heights at all.

What's your opinion having done all these comparisons? I have a SD14 but I've never used a Quattro. I don't think a great deal of my SD14, because my unit suffers from yellow-green colour casts. You have to be so careful how you shoot and process it to avoid these, and I don't think it is worth the hassle. But it seems the performance of the SD14 is quite variable unit to unit.

Hi Tom

You've written quite extensively about this issue and I admit I still don't understand the significance of the point you are making. For me, the myth about perspective in practical photography is ensconced in the phrase "telephoto compression". You see this phrase everywhere - the implication being if you want to photograph something so the final image looks like a collage of overlapping layers with no depth between the layers, you use a tele lens because that is what causes that effect. Yet it is quite easy to demonstrate exactly the same "compression" effect with a wide lens if you crop a tiny section from the horizon and blow it up big. It is the camera to subject distance that creates the differences in foreground/background subject sizes that photographers like to play with rather than the lens focal length, yet the message you see everywhere is that it is focal length that creates the effects. Darwin Wiggett has a nice little easy to understand demo using video: petapixel.com/2016/06/09/use-zoom-lens-tell-story/ It shows very nicely how you use focal length to control the apparent size of the background and your feet to control the apparent size of the foreground (and thus the size relationship between foreground and background i.e. perspective).

It seems to me that you are suggesting you can achieve these affects simply by changing your viewing position relative to the print. It would be interesting if you could generate all these perspective effects (Big Nose Effect, Layered Collage Effect) just by changing the viewing distance from the print.

Is that what you are saying you can do, or am I simply misunderstanding the 10k words you must have written on the subject by now (more than possible!)?

Cheers

Dave

This is a good step forward. I'd prefer it if it didn't go full screen, though. On my 4k monitor it is extremely wide. It would be better as a centred block with generous white space on either side, more like the mobile device mock ups earlier in the thread.

It would be better if the top image was the same width as the content block as well. On my screen, the effect is a bit like a pyramid with the banner image the pointy bit on the broad shoulders of the section blocks.

My guess about all this market stuff is that the professional and enthusiast/artist/hobbyist market has always been a relatively small part of the overall camera market.

For example, way back in the film era what proportion of the camera using population were keen enough to join a camera club? Were there many Instamatic users in camera clubs? People like us were always a niche thing.

The 2000-2010 camera bubble was just that: new and interesting tech that was fashionable drew in millions of people to digital photography who were really Instamatic family snapshotters, not enthusiastic photographers who photographed landscape/street/portraits/abstracts/etc etc. Such people had always made up the majority of the photography market, and rightly so, for most people that is what photography is: the recording of personal moments. The people who took themselves seriously as image or art makers was and remains a tiny niche.

What we've seen in recent years is the introduction of better tech (smartphones) for pursuing personal family photography and the rise of social photography. Smartphones are good enough quality for those roles, always on you and live in a very convenient ecosystem traditional camera systems can't touch. The people who use them for these purposes don't mind the ergonomic inconveniences and certainly don't want to learn about ISO, f-stops and ICC profiles, why would they, they just want to take pictures. Smartphones are brilliant at what they do. We've also seen the rise of a more serious kind of image maker using those same phone cameras, as people have started to explore the capabilities and push boundaries.

But there is still a place for conventional cameras. For those who want cameras with excellent grips, viewfinders, speed, flexibility and the ability to control every aspect of image making, superb options exist. These people (people like us, presumably) always have made up a tiny minority of overall photographers and will continue to do so. However, the temporary bubble and market expansion it drove has left us with unbelievable choices of amazing gear, developed at breakneck pace.

Rather than bemoaning the collapse of the bubble and the rise of smartphones, we should be grateful for the decade of riding the wave of popularity that has left us with such fantastic cameras.

Nice for those working on Windows 😄

I have now calibrated/profiled my new monitor. Of course the spyder went and insisted I set brightness to 120cd :-(

The trouble I find with calibration and colour management in general, is that there is no feedback. I believe I have successfully calibrated my monitor but how do I know for sure? I have to take it on trust that it has worked. What the device should be able to do is compare before and after readings and confirm that the monitor is now calibrated and correct.

I have always found that unless my monitor is set very dim, the shadow regions of my prints are too dark. I have the brightness and contrast settings of my new monitor set at 20%. I've made no attempt to calibrate/profile it yet, but subjectively it feels about what I'm used to. My monitor is placed in front of a south facing window with the venetian blinds shut. Walls are painted white.

I'm not fond of the brightness of LCD monitors even for general use. Particularly the highlight areas. There is a lot of glare to my eyesight. Even though this 4k monitor is noticeably crisper, and even though I have everything lowered, I still find the "gentleness" of a reflected light print more pleasant.

It's been a while since I dug out the Spyder and I've forgotten how to do profiling under Linux. Thinking about it, I may have the profiled the last monitor under windows and imported the profile. Can't remember. Need to start reading up again.

I don't know the first thing about 8k monitors but that resolution would allow you to use a very large monitor which might be useful. You'd have to scale it massively though as text would be minuscule.

I got my 14n back in 2003 or 2004 and I still have it. It won't start up properly now, something goes wrong during boot up that makes it constantly cycle. I didn't wear it out, it went wrong all on its own while stored in a cupboard. I'd take it out once a year just to check it still worked and one day it went wrong. Very occasionally with a lot of persistence I can get it to take one shot.

I was shooting a 6MP D100 at that time and I think the jump to 14MP is the most significant image resolution leap I've experienced. However, the sensor is pretty poor. It is very noisy even at ISO80 and Kodak had to do a lot to make it produce acceptable images. It suffers horribly from colour aliasing and "Italian flag" patchy colour casts. The lens correction mechanism isn't any good and it only works well with a small number of lenses. Mine also suffered horribly from pink ghosting around highlights from reflections between the IR filter and back of the lens. IMO it was rushed to market, wasn't really of merchantable quality and was a bit of an embarrassment of a product. Still, in it's narrow operating window, with a fair wind and all that, I still made some very good largish prints (for the time) from it. I replaced it with a 5D classic which was a well sorted camera from the off and far superior in every way. I could still live with a 5D today, if I had to.

My camera now lives in my camera museum (ie the attic) along with a number of other relics of the early days of consumer digital.