Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1

I've had a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 for nearly a week now, long enough to say something sensible about it. Been using it the way I planned – raw mode only, converting everything to black and white. For several years I've been on the lookout for a carry-everywhere P&S with reasonable image quality. In 1998 I bought a Ricoh GR1, which filled the bill; but it had a fixed focal length lens, and of course it wasn't digital. It's long gone now. Since then I've tried Canon's S50 and S80, Ricoh's Caplio and Fuji's E550. None of them seemed up to the mark for B&W.

The LX1 (sold by Leica as the Leica D-LUX 2) is eminently portable. Portable? It's minuscule, smaller than my S80 – I wouldn't be able to get a grip on anything tinier. As it is I can manage, but I'm careful to use the wrist strap. (The user's manual recommends a vertical grip in which the shutter's released by your thumb!)

A few other annoyances come to mind. The lens cap fits and grips nicely – it's spring-loaded – but it's a plain old detachable cap, as used by Nièpce and Fox Talbot. It could easily get lost. (It comes with a spider-web tether, but I wanted a camera, not a charm bracelet.) I guess the engineers wouldn't complicate their design with extra mechanicals: optics first. That's typical of Leica, whose name is on the lens.

It's worthy of the name. I don't know the details of the Vario-Elmarit, but somehow the lens looks realer than the usual run of P&S lenses. You can even see a minute six-bladed iris diaphragm inside. The lack of an integral lens cap adds to the impression of a scale-model pro lens. Images are excellent, without the blurred corners at 28mm (equivalent) that mar the S80. There's no danger of mistaking LX1 photos for Summicron work, but the little zoom's sharp and contrasty, and doesn't vignette enough to matter.

As I said, I shoot in raw mode only. That slows me down, since it takes the Lumix three or four seconds to write a raw image to a fast SD card. Together with the lack of a finder, this prevents speedy operation. I don't mind, since I didn't get the cam to photograph sports or children. In fact, I rather enjoy composing on the LCD, which I use the way I would a bright ground-glass focusing screen – a small one, so I have to wear reading glasses and hold the LX1 at arm's length like a book.

I leave the display set on black and white at the 16:9 aspect ratio. (Panasonic brags about its wide-screen format.) Raw mode ignores the B&W setting as well as the aspect ratio. You always get full color and full 16:9 sensor size. I don't mind cropping or converting to B&W in Photoshop.

PS and PS plugins are all the software I've used with the LX1. I haven't even looked at the disk that came in the box.

The camera got panned, in most reviews, for noisy capture. I bought mine after downloading sample photos and tweaking them in PS. That convinced me I can turn the noise to my advantage – time will tell. If you buy one of these cameras, be prepared for a lot of chroma noise. The anti-shake mechanism helps, especially if, like me, you shoot mainly static scenes. I can shoot ISO 80 where I'd expect to need 320, since slow shutter speeds are holdable. Alas, no stabilizer can cure motion on the part of the subject, so snapshots of kids and cats and such aren't in the cards.

Black-and-white hides much of the noise. I don't see how anyone could tolerate the camera for color, where the blotchiness is jarring, especially with dark subjects. And most especially with dark blues. ISO 400 is pretty hopeless even with postprocessing; it shows a kind of streaking in areas of flat color.

The controls are well thought out, with those most used tied to buttons and switches, not menus. (True, I have to use a fingernail to push the buttons). The camera has nearly every trick I need. Today, for example, I made a photo of a colleague in her dark, cluttered office, with one bright desk lamp for illumination. I spot-metered from the bright areas, then fine-tuned that with exposure compensation. (Yup, there's a live histogram.) Result was an exposure of 1/8 sec at ISO 80, which I was able to handhold with the help of IS. ("Image Stabilization," for those who don't know what the meaning of IS is.)

You can see my first week's results of shooting with the LX1 here.

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Afterthoughts in the wake of a weekend spent with the LX1 in Washington, DC.

• As with other LCD-only P&S cams, this one's nearly useless outdoors in bright sun. It does feature a one-button brightener for the LCD, but that doesn't help much. Point-and-shoot takes on a very literal meaning.
• The IS works well. Indoors I found myself generally leaving the camera set at f/2.8 and ISO 80, holding my breath and hoping for the best. And the best is often what I got.
• In photographing people or anything else animate, the slow (three-second) write-to-memory time is limiting. (I use RAW; JPG would be faster.)

In sum, a street camera it's not. But I knew that up front.

Inflationary Pressure

We've had some moderately large household expenses lately, and the market took a dive this week, so to console myself I plucked a hair from the dog and ordered a new carry-anywhere cam, a Panasonic LX-1. Why so, especially since the LX-1 (sold as the D-LUX 2 by Leica) has been generally dissed for having a sensor so noisy it makes ISO 400 "unusable"?

It's part of my ongoing quest for good digital B&W. There's noise and then there's noise. One man's noise is another man's music. Think how Tri-X pushed to 1000 would rank if you judged it with the noise meter commonly used in reviews of digicams. True, Tri-X isn't blotchy and uneven, as so many noisy digicams are. But I downloaded a couple of the LX-1, ISO 400 sample photos at dpreview.com, put them through a few hoops, and found the images admirably sharp and contrasty (that Leica lens). The noise can be managed, at least in black and white. The technique that currently pleases me most involves uprezzing by a linear factor of three, sharpening lightly, applying minimal "poster edges," then rezzing back to the original size. The result isn't Tri-X, it's true, but after all it would be infra dig to use digital capture as ersatz film.

I've had a number of walking-around cams since 1998. My first was the splendid Ricoh GR-1, which I'd still be using if I weren't trying to wean myself away from silver. Then came a Canon S50, terrific except for shutter lag – but that lag just about drove me crazy when I used the cam to photograph the anti-Bush march at the Republican convention two years back. I tried replacing it with a Ricoh Caplio (still under Ricoh's spell), but the Caplio was no GR-1 – images were inferior to the Canon's. Next came a Fuji E550, which was fiddly but excellent. I used it till last winter, when I tried replacing it with a Canon S80. The S80 is in many ways a marvel, but it has no RAW mode and the JPEG's are, I think, marred by too much noise reduction, which smears details and leaves lots of simple geometry in the borders of same-color areas.

For noiseless photography, with the slick, unctuous look I've come to expect from Canon, I have the 20D. What I want is not a little 20D but something different, something that gives me a result closer to the look I got with my Contax G and high-speed B&W film. (I'd pretty much settled on Neopan 400 pushed to 1600.) Whether the LX-1 fills the bill I can't say till I try it. If it does I'll sell the S80 and press on.

99% of Everything

Lord, it's beginning to looks as though I should retitle this blog "Letters to Neil." Oh well.

Did a Philippic on the sad fact that many very intelligent photographers work hard and buy expensive equipment and take courses and travel great distances to create turd-o'-misery photos. Followed it with this PS.

Indeed, this used to be a puzzle to me. I'd look at photos like the one I just sent and wonder where I went wrong and why I couldn't see the beauty the poor schlub took such pains to achieve. At some point in my life cynicism supervened. No doubt there are some things you love that I hate and vice-versa, and to each his own and all that, but let's face it: a huge percentage of everything is crap, and the crappiness of it is unrelated to the trouble the crapper took to produce it.

Last night I was looking through a book of Mapplethorpe's homoerotic S&M photos. Some are very striking, some are funny (like the guy dressed as a baby being submerged in a huge bowl of pabulum), but most are banal except for the seldom-seen subject matter: fisting, urolagnia, whatever. I recall that when a gallery owner was on trial for showing Mapplethorpe in Peoria or somewhere, and it became one of those celebrated Scopes-type trials, some art history lady defended the fisting pictures by talking about the "frontality" of the fister's arm, and the blah de blah of the picture plane, and fiddle de dee of the fistee. Pitiful to hear. It's a snapshot of fisting, BFD. R.M. got off on it.

Yet Mapplethorpe produced brilliant work, some of it homoerotic. Let's face it – you hafta take every piece, or not take it, on its own merit. If any.

And I don't mind at all if somebody takes time out for a couple of amusing or curious snapshots – my tolerance for boredom has become very great. So long as he or she or his or her advocate doesn't blab on about how even his farts smell like Shalimar. Brings to mind the couplet of Jonathan Swift about himself:

"True genuine dullness moved his pity
"Unless it offered to be witty."

Chem 101

Fiertel wrote: "Speaking of left hand/right hand stuff... What about why does the brain have its creative moods and days and other times, is good for nothing more than nose picking and shoe staring...like today...a shoe staring day for me, for sure. Cloudy day, windy and nasty...a perfect day for making art? Should be but when the weather is inclement, so am I."

Well, you know it's all chemicals, my man...we're just a bottle of chemicals. Sometimes one gets the upper hand, sometimes the other. Too many of this or that molecule and you're staring death and doom in the face; too many of the other and you'll cheerfully saw off your own leg. That's why certain chemicals are forbidden by an all-wise government. When my dying father passed through six weeks of torment and dementia that would be considered torture by any court of human rights, he could've been kept in a rosy cloud by a simple morphine drip. However, that was forbidden, since if God had wanted him to die a painless death then God would have killed him outright or tweaked his body chemistry in such a way that he died happy. But God had other plans, which are beyond our simple understanding, and it would be a Judeo-Christian sin to thwart those plans. As we know from the Torah, if you piss God off he's likely to send hurricanes and floods and pestilence your way, so the government in its aforementioned wisdom ruled that morphine could not be administered.

Outgassing

Comments on a book of mediocre photos.

Sheesh. I'm no Cartier-Bresson, yet I'm sure some of my stuff is way above this level. It's all chance, I guess.

I've thought about this a lot over the years. Consider. If you have a relatively small population, a certain percentage of the folks who do any given thing, any art or craft or discipline of any sort, will produce decent work and maybe, if the time and place and cultural currents are right, as in Periclean Athens or Shakespeare's London, even great work, stuff that really stands the test of time, whatever that is. If you read, as I once had to do, the work of the little fish of Shakespeare's day, folks like Beaumont and Fletcher and Kyd and Greene and Peele, well... It's interesting because it's quaint, but otherwise it's pretty sorry stuff. Likewise for many Old Masters of the time of Cimabue or Giotto. Admirable, no doubt, given their limited access to antique and foreign art, but, y'know... Most of us could do as well, and many of us could do much better than the Master of Podunk. If there'd been more people for art historians to write about, those guys wouldn't even be footnotes. But they lived in little places like Quattrocento Florence or Elizabethan London or the Athens of Socrates, where the population of practicing thinkers and doers was about the same as that of a few apartment buildings in New York.

Think of a shallow pool with a certain surface. If the pool is small, rising to that surface is easy. Now think of a pool with every dimension doubled. The surface is four times as big but the volume is eight times greater. And so forth. The world you and I inhabit is like a pool with millions of times the volume of Giotto's or Plato's, and a surface that's bigger but not enormously bigger – the volume increased by the third power, the surface only by the square. People can read just so many books or watch just so many movies or go to just so many photo expos. The competition for that surface, that interface to which artists and craftsmen and others who publish something aspire, becomes enormous. You can be top-notch and still fail to rise to the surface because it's so crowded. Or you can be banal and find yourself on top just because chance favored you.

OK, if I were a big success I might not see things that way. But I'm not and I do.

Negative Space

Fiertel and I had quite a go-round about drawing, and in particular about "negative space."

Spent some time last night reading the "negative space" chapter of Betty Whatsername's book about Drawing on the Right Side, and I think now I understand your point of view.

I wish art theorists had come up with some better term than "negative space," which suggests ideas from physics that don't correspond at all to what they mean, which is "ground," as in "figure and ground." That's something I've known about for fifty years or so, and which I think I understand.

The examples the lady shows are also revealing. I now understand why you're so militant about close cropping, often using the borders to cut into the subject, and why you favor long lenses. Wide-angle lenses are clearly unfriendly to "negative space" and to outlines in general. The figure and ground get confused – con-fused, melted together – in a third dimension. Earlier I too used only long lenses, usually 85 to 105 in 35mm. Now I'm learning, or trying to learn, how to master the con-fusion of dimensions possible with shorter focal lengths.

BTW, I wish Betty wouldn't go on at such length about the two sides of the brain. I'm starting to feel guilty about being right-handed and knowing more than a few dozen English words. She seems to imply that the ideal artist is Koko the Gorilla.

Also, the back of the book jacket features a pair of self-portraits done by one of her students, the first a cartoony childish one done before starting the course, the second a much more artful one done after two days of instruction. I much prefer the former.