Blog Till It Hurts

And finally – all this blogging is tiring me – there's this note by Neil Himself anent the pictured fish: "I JUST WANT TO CROP THE HELL OUT OF THAT LOVELY FISH SO THAT I CAN REVEL IN ITS SMOKE AND SHEEN..."

There's some deep comment to be made about our differential approach to cropping, though I don't know offhand what comment that might be. I suspect it has something to do with your lifelong preference for things that are massive (or maybe I mean "massy") and have volume and heft, as opposed to my own tropism toward surfaces and space.

Another County Heard From

Viewer L.P. liked this photo but suggested the wall was wrong, and that the result could be "much better."

Thanks. L.P. – only the product matters, but the intention here was to put the scene in parenthesis, so to speak, between the left and right borders. An ironic tip of the hat to the Dutch masters, borrowing their light and perspective for a modern genre scene. (Oops, everything's post-modern now, I keep forgetting.)

Crop How Tight? And Why?

Posted this "suburban landscape" on photo.net. A.B. asked: "Would a closer crop give the pic a nicer look?"

Aristide: You raise a good point, the more so because a friend of mine whose photography I respect often suggests I need to crop tighter. My take on this is that until pretty recently I did photos strictly for the Web, where it's impossible to rely on small details that help a viewer "read" a print presented at, say, 12 x 18 inches and 240dpi. Now I'm working on the theory that the Web will soon support more throughput and therefore more visible detail, and tend to judge my own photos from large prints. (To me, 12 x 18 is large.)

This photo, for example, does need to be seen at a larger scale. It's important to take in the bleak wintry look – bare trees and bushes, passersby in heavy hats and parkas, low sun. Cropping to emphasize the single-point perspective might give it more impact, but would turn it into a cliché – or so I believe. Certainly the irony I prize would be lost.

Indelicate

Two letters to Arthur. He lent me the three huge volumes of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle."

Have been thinking, if that's the word I want, about the polar opposition of two things I love, and no, of course it's not that, we're all grown-ups here. I mean the arts and the sciences. Our pal Neal Stephenson, whose first volume I finished this morning with a sigh of relief and another of sorrow, because now I have only two more volumes to chew through, does a good job of showing (with caricatural excess, but n'importe) that in its infancy science was like stem cells, undifferentiated, so a savant would tackle astronomy today, dissection tomorrow, and semantics the day after. Everybody was a polymath, even if he couldn't do math at all.

But some were also poets, like Dryden, or well-placed bureaucrats, like Pepys. Wren was a great architect by any standard. It's true there's an ineluctable bimodality in human nature, but it's not absolutely given that science and art are opposites. One thinks of Leonardo and Michaelangelo and all those Italians stretching strings through pictures frames to learn perspective.

Still, art and science are opposites in some deep sense, though they may be the two sides of one coin. In particular, science is public. If an experiment can't be repeated, if the world at large can't view or taste or feel or smell the results, it's not science. Individual flashes of insight, as per LSD, don't make the nut. Whereas that's the very stuff of poetry and imagination. Nothing can be judged by an appeal to popular taste, which boils down to the lowest common denominator.

So I don't have a leg to stand on when I want to argue that (for want of better examples) some of my photos are better than good. For example, how about http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_january/060114153804_G, which to my way of thinking, or if that's not the word I want then my way of seeing, or being, is in some way almost perfect. Yet nobody else groks it that way. Furthermore...

Alas, at this point disgust overcame me. That usually happens when I think too long about esthetics.

---

Next morning.

In the bleak light of dawn – in fact, the bright light of a March morning with a high albedo, thanks to all the snow – I still think there's some depth in my maunderings. BS, maybe, but deep BS. The thing is, there's no metric for art. Science is based on metrics, which can be used to form and reject theories. Esthetics is the (doomed) attempt to find such metrics for the arts. If there are none, then one picture is as good as another, one poem no better than the next, and the only criterion for quality is popularity. Hemingway said those famous words to George Plimpton about the importance of having a case-hardened shit detector, but let's face it... Mark Twain thought his book about the Siamese twins was as good as "Huckleberry Finn." Hemingway himself let "Across the River and into the Trees" pass undected. And we all know about Shakespeare.

Maybe the only answer, if a writer or painter or whoever – a creative type who isn't on a salary – doesn't want to wake up glued in place like a fly on flypaper, is to forget about Art and grind out lots of stuff that seems OK to him, enjoying the process and trying to fob what comes out of him onto the public, swearing it's not shit. The lucky guys in my book are those whose art is dismissed as non-art by the arbiters who think they've found The Metrics. Cartoonists are a good example – maybe the best example going, since even moviemakers and photographers now routinely refer to their Art. (MGM's motto: "Ars gratia artis.") Nobody would promote Robert Crumb's stories as fine art, and if they did he'd just make fun of them.

Note to self: Hold that thought and follow that star. Remember what happened to your poetry.

Maxing out the Armamentarium

For several years now I've made most of my photos with an el-cheapo Tamron zoom lens. To use Tamron's own funny nomenclature, it's a Tamron SP AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di LD Aspherical [IF] Macro lens in Canon EOS mount. But my next paycheck is supposed to include my 2005 bonus, so I ordered a Canon "L" lens from B&H. I mean, you know! Everybody needs at least one "L" lens.

Or do they? Of course I ordered the lens in advance of the paycheck, and it arrived (good old B&H!) within 48 hours. Today, in fact. Here's this evening's note to Neil.

OK, here we go. The usual drill. Identical photos (of books and bookshelf) with two lenses, the Canon L and the Tamron. Raw files exactly as taken, no sharpening or levels or nothin'. Examining the results at 200%.

• 28mm f/4.0 -- The Canon is very slightly better in the corners. The Tamron is very slightly better at the center.
• 35mm f/4.0 -- The Tamron is much better in corners and center. In fact, the Canon looks OOF. May take this one over.
• 50mm f/4.0 -- The Canon is much better in corners and center. In fact, the Tamron looks OOF. WTF?
• 60mm f/4.0 -- The Tamron is much better in corners and center. The Canon looks OOF.
• 75mm f/4.0 -- The Canon is slightly better at the center, the Tamron much better at the edges.

OK, this can't be right. Something wrong with my test setup. I'm going to do everything over.

Later. Used more light and a more firmly braced tripod this time.

• 50mm f/4.0 -- The Tamron is better in the corners, much better in the center

Wait, wait, this is driving me nuts. Once more, slowly, deliberately.

• 28mm f/4.0 -- The Canon is very slightly better in the corners and in the center. It's almost a wash -- needs inspection at 300% to see any difference.
• 35mm f/4.0 -- I truly can't tell the difference.
• 50mm f/4.0 -- The Canon is very slightly better in the corners and definitely better in the center.
• 60mm f/4.0 -- Tamron slightly better in the corners, still better in the center.
• 75mm f/4.0 -- Can't tell the difference.
• 75mm f/8.0 -- Can't tell the difference.
• 60mm f/8.0 -- Tamron slightly better in the corners, centers identical.
• 50mm f/8.0 -- A wash; possibly a very slight advantage to the Tamron.
• 35mm f/8.0 -- Slight edge to the Tamron at both center and edge.
• 28mm f/8.0 -- A wash.

So where does this leave us?

I mean, what the fucking fuck?

Here we have two lenses. Street price of one is $400, the other $1200. The cheap one, let's be honest, outperforms the expensive one in the strictly optical, image-making department. The expensive one has the advantage of image stabilization. It's far superior mechanically, weighs twice as much, is smooth and slick. It gives a bit more wide angle (24mm vs 28mm) and a bit more telephoto (105mm vs 75mm). Then again, its max aperture is f/4; the cheap lens is f/2.8.

My conclusion is that the Tamron is one hell of a bargain so long as you're careful not to drop it or take it to Bosnia in the rain.

Of course pride of ownership is everything, so I'm going to put the Tamron up for sale on eBay and make the L-Canon my standard lens.

Not.

---

I agonized. Next day's mail:

Still rather perturbed about the lens, but my tests were careful ones. The Tamron's optically at least the equal of a lens costing three times as much. Go figure. Perhaps state of the art for the two lenses is the same, and Tamron economizes on materials, mechanicals and quality control. Tests I've read suggest there's a lot of variation among samples of the Tamron. And I'm sure it wouldn't stand up to as much use as the Canon. And sure, the Canon has image stabilization, and a 4.3x zoom range versus 2.7x, and may focus closer, and certainly focuses faster and more quietly, and focus is internal with no rotating ring, and it has a red ring around its rectum, 'cause it's a Canon "L" with mucho macho. Nevertheless it's an f/4 versus f/2.8, and costs $1300 rather than $400. Go figure.

---

Later in the day:

My conclusion is that there just isn't a zoom lens available for the Canon, at any price, that's better than the Tamron, in terms of image delivered. Bloody sheesh. I do miss my razor-cutting Zeiss lenses, really miss 'em. If God made anything sharper than that Makro-Planar, he kept it for himself.

The good news is that the Tamron is one super lens. And now I have $1,300. Maybe I should get one o' them new Minis.

---

Still later – the bulletins are getting closer together:

I've been thinking about this. Beyond a certain point, isn't it folly to worry about sharpness in the strict line-pairs-per-mm sense? It's the impression of sharpness, which has a lot to do with textures and contrast and relatively little to do with resolution, that's most important. The Impressionists made much hay out of that discovery. However, unlike those guys I'm trying to get my effects in black and white, where you can't use contrasting colors to give the illusion of sharpness. I do need a good lens.

---

Another day has passed, I'm home from work, and:

This evening I tried the L against some primes that I know to be very good, the 50/1.8 and the 85/1.8.

• At f/4 the L was considerably better than the 50/1.8 at the center and indistinguishable from it at the corners.
• At f/8 the L was still better than the 50/1.8 at the center and slightly better at the corners.
• At f/4 the L was about the same as the 85/1.8 at the center -- maybe just a shade better -- but not as good in the corners
• At f/8 the L was better than the 85/1.8 at the center and not quite as good in the corners

For the hell of it I then compared the L again with the Tamron, both at 50mm

• At f/4 the L was considerably better than the Tamron at both center and corners
• At f/8 the L was very slightly better than the Tamron in the center and still better in the corners

In other words, the L is remarkable for a zoom with such range. (The 85/1.8 is one of Canon's best primes.)

So why did the Tamron equal or beat it in earlier tests? Well, they were of flat walls. This one was of a 3-D situation, with various items at various distances. And it's clear the L and the Tamron focus at different points. The Tamron focuses a bit short. I don't know how that could've given it an advantage, but it's the only thing I can think of. So I'm now convinced the L is a stellar lens, better than most primes. And will keep it, forsooth.