Resurrecting a 5D (or two)

Posted on April 27, 2012 by

(Or why your Canon DSLR might malfunction)

THE DAY Canon’s 5D MkIII camera body was announced my 5D MkII went haywire. prompting me to quip that Canon must have a built-in self-destruct mechanism, to make 5D users part with their cash for new models.

The coincidence seemed all the more peculiar because my 5D MkI had started acting up around the same time that the Mk II came out, making the decision to part with $2,600 for the MkII body easier to make than it otherwise would have been,

To my surprise, it turned out that the “self-destruct” idea was not quite as wide of the mark as I originally thought.

Tucked away at the bottom of the flash connector and USB port compartment is a little drawer, held in place by a tiny screw, that contains the innocently named “date-time (back up) battery”. The camera manual breezily declares “If you turn on the camera and the date/time is reset, replace the battery…”

What the manual does not say is that if the date/time continues to display normally but the camera drains batteries within a handful of shots, or refuses to recognise lenses, or won’t connect properly with a PC to upload images… then it might just be that the hidden, forgotten battery has reached the end of its life.

The inadequate instructions in the manual can prove very expensive. I spend around $100 on new batteries for the 5D MkI, all of which appeared to be defective, before concluding that the camera itself must be faulty, Then, because the charges levied by the local agent are outrageous and the cost of a repair might be excessive for a four-year-old camera, I bought a new MkII – and for the next several years the MkI sat idle as I was unaware that a little $3 battery and two minutes with a tiny screwdriver was all that was needed to put it back into service.

Of course, the batteries I bought years ago no longer hold their full charge and need replacing (another $20) but at least they don’t die completely after a handful of shots.

I’m grateful to Susan on the Shutterstock forums for pointing this solution out to me and I’m posting it here to help others who may find their Canon cameras start behaving oddly.

Both my 5Ds now have new date-time batteries (the MkII takes a CR1616, the original 5D takes a CR2016) and are behaving themselves again, and should do for another four or five years.

Posted in Cameras, Canon 5D, Canon 5D MkII, Digital Cameras, Equipment, Photography, Repair | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chicken, broccoli and penne in Parmesan sauce

Posted on April 22, 2012 by

LAST YEAR I started a food blog which was intended as a cross-referral promotion, directing people to photos I have for sale and directing them from the photos on those sites to the recipes I had used to make them. I thought it might be handy if people wanted to publish a recipe column. It didn’t work out because the agents handling my photos wouldn’t allow me to link back to an external site.

Rather than waste the effort that went into that blog before I learned the idea wasn’t going to work, here is the first recipe … and you can still buy the photos and use the text if you want to…

Chicken, broccoli and penne in Parmesan sauce

This is a quick and delicious way to put together a healthy meal.

Ingredients:
250g chicken breast
200g dried penne rigate tubular pasta
Small head of broccoli split into florets
Chopped parsley

For the sauce:
25g butter or about three tablespoons of olive oil
1 heaped tablespoon of flour
300ml milk

Clove of garlic (crushed)

half a cup of grated parmesan.

Salt and pepper

Grill the chicken pieces on an oiled hotplate until cooked through and golden.

Boil the pasta in salted water until just soft.

Steam the broccoli florets in a covered dish in a microwave until dark green but still crisp.

Melt the butter (or heat the oil) in a thick bottomed pan, add the flour and stir for a minute, then turn down the heat, mix in the well crushed garlic and gradually pour in the milk stirring constantly to make a smooth sauce. Throw in the parmesan cheese and salt and pepper to taste. Finely chopped onion could be softened in the sauce before adding the flour and, of course, the garlic is optional.

Slice the chicken breasts into bite-size slices and mix most of the chicken, broccoli and pasta into the sauce, ensuring it is well coated. Decant into a serving bowl or put on plates and add the remaining broccoli, chicken and pasta over the top to give is a nice appearance and finish with the chopped parsley.

Photographs of this dish are for sale here:

http://www.dreamstime.com/-rimage21640969-resi554

www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup_edit.php?id=18101186/?ref=PaulCowan

http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?gallery_id=262#id=86901832

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Fabulous food

Posted on April 22, 2012 by

PHOTOGRAPHING FOOD has its perks and its pitfalls. The latter mainly involve the message from the bathroom scales; the former include the chance to discover new dishes and even entire new cuisines.

I have no doubt that having someone else prepare and style the food is the most efficient way of making food photos but – with rare exceptions – I’ve always made everything I photograph. And that has the benefit of developing my cooking skills and that , every now and then, I stumble on  on something stunning.

That happened today, with a recipe for lasagne verde – a pasta dish made with green spinach lasagne. I was hampered by a lack of white wine and played around with one or two other ingredients, such as Chinese five spice, and the result has proved such a hit that I thought I would preserve the recipe for posterity and share it with the world. So here goes:

Paul’s lasagne verde

500g fresh minced beef
One large white onion
Two medium carrots (one chopped to small cubes, one grated)
Two sticks fresh celery finely chopped (these will add a little crunch to the final dish, so don’t leave them too big)
Two Maggi (or other commercial) beef stock cubes
500ml homemade passata (boiled down chopped tomatoes and garlic with the seeds and skins sieved out), commercial passata is available or tins of tomatoes could be used.
2 tablespoons tomato paste
Half a teaspoon oven-baked garlic paste
A very small pinch Chinese five spice
A heaped teaspoon of dried marjoram.
Olive oil
A pack of fast-cooking green lasagne sheets
A generous half cup of freshly grated mature cheddar and parmesan.

Put a good splash of olive oil in a saucepan, chop the onion well and cook slowly, covered until it is mushy, remove cover, add the carrots, celery and garlic, mix well and allow to simmer down uncovered over a low heat. When the carrot cubes are soft, remove from the pan. Add a little more oil, the beef, the crumbled stock cubes and the tomato paste and cook until the meat is done, then add the passata, five spice and cooked vegetables.

Sauce:
120g unsalted butter
110g plain (all purpose) flour
1.25l milk
Salt and pepper

Warm the milk. Melt the butter in a pan, when it is hot add the flour, whisking to make a roux. Add the milk gradually and the salt and pepper as desired, whisking continuously until you have a smooth sauce that is just simmering. Don’t let it burn.
Grease a baking dish, add some of the meat sauce a layer of lasagne a layer of bechamel sauce and a layer of meat sauce and repeat until the ingredients are used, finishing with a layer of bechamel that fully covers the pasta. Sprinkle on the cheese and bake for about 35 min at 180C in the middle of the oven until golden.

My lasagne photos can be bought here:

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-20016967-lasagne-verde-vertical.php

or here

http://www.dreamstime.com/modify.php?imageid=24435133

or here

http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?gallery_id=262#id=100844638

(not all images are available at the same sites)

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Commando delivers the goods

Posted on April 15, 2012 by

MY ENSIGN Commando continues to surprise with the quality it delivers. Here is a crop from a photo I took as the light was fading, so I had to shoot with the aperture wide open at f3.5 and focus as carefully as I could with the rangefinder.

Image

Taken from just below the house number in this shot:

Image

Not only is the image extraordinarily sharp when sized to 16MP (which is what the crop was taken from – equivalent to a 5ft x 5ft print), the Ensar lens shows no sign of chromatic aberration.

 

Posted in Cameras, Ensar 75/3.5, Ensign Commando, Equipment, Film cameras, Folding cameras, Photography | Leave a comment

Six weeks with only film

Posted on April 13, 2012 by

The main shopping area of Rethymnon, Crete, shot 0n expired Fuji Pro 400H with an 80mm single-coated Tessar and a Pentacon Six, March 2012

IT WASN’T MEANT to happen. I hadn’t planned on six weeks of travel equipped only with aged film cameras. But when my Canon 5D MkII died just hours before I was due to board a flight to Athens I was left with no alternative.

So, making a virtue of necessity, I decided to turn the trip into a project: attempting to shoot stock-quality images exclusively on film. Things were made slightly more challenging by the fact that I had already decided that the photographic objective of the trip would be to start building up a collection of Cretan flower images.

For the task, my arsenal consisted of one Pentacon Six with 50mm, 80mm and 120mm lenses (only the 50mm is multicoated) and extension tubes, and a Mamiya C220 with 105 and 180mm lenses. In practice, the C220 was no use for flower macros as I was hand-holding so parallax made focusing impossible.

There are estimated to be more than 1,700 species of flowering plants on the largest of the Greek islands, including some that are found nowhere else. In March, April and May the island is like a garden.

So, how did the project go? Well, this selection of shots tells part of the story (no unauthorised use, please):

On the whole, the experiment worked well. With four or five inches of extension tubes it was easy to compensate for the loss of light being about one stop, so by using 400ASA film I was able to get away with 1/250s at around f/11 or f/16.

An advantage of using film is that it holds details in the highlights very well, much better than digital, and as flowers are generally much brighter than foliage. The uncoated (or single-coated) 80mm Tessar also has quite low contrast which helps significantly with sunlit flowers. It is also responsible for the decidedly retro feel to the picture of the city of Rethymnon at the top of this post. The 120mm Biometar was sharper than the 1950s Tessar and would probably have been the better lens for the project – but unfortunately I slipped in a puddle of slime and broke it on the first day’s shooting.

Knowing there were only a dozen shots per roll – and there was no quick way of getting more 120 film once it was gone – made me quite careful about how I used them. In all, I shot only about 400 frames; I suppose I would have had thousands with digital.

There was a lot of down-side, of course, compared with shooting on a DSLR. First of all, getting medium format film processed is problematic. I found a shop that would still do it but I felt the quality was unsatisfactory, so my last 20 rolls are still waiting to go to a specialist lab which will ensure they are done well.

Scanning and cleaning the images I have got is not only a very slow process on an Epson V500, it tests my scanning skills to the limit and I cannot be sure I’m getting the best results from that.

Grain is an issue with ISO 400 film. It is possible to fill most of a 6×6 frame with a 1cm long vetch flower but at ISO400 that will probably only translate into the equivalent of a 25MB (8MP) file at the sort of level of perfection many agencies demand today. Shooting with ISO 100 film would have meant opening up the aperture to around f/8 or f/5.6 in order to keep the shutter speed fast enough to avoid shake.

Overall, the equipment proved to be well able to meet the challenge of shooting some pretty extreme macros, despite its age. A finer-grained film would have been better and I am waiting to see how four rolls of Provia 400 slide film turn out.

Posted in Cameras, Colour film, Equipment, film camera, Film cameras, Film SLRs, Lenses, Macro, Medium Format, Pentacon Six, Photographic techniques, Photography, Tessar 80/2.8 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A postcard camera

Posted on February 11, 2012 by

I TOOK my Zeiss Ikon 6×4.5 for an outing the other day, just to see what it could do. The light was flat and a bit dim, which isn’t ideal, and either my exposure or the processing was a bit off but at its best the old folder managed to produce images that would be very acceptable as postcards or even up prints of up to 10×8.

Here is one example, shot with the Schneider Xenar (Tessar clone) almost wide open and, for comparison, a similar shot with a Canon 5D MkII and 70-200 f/2.8L beneath.

There’s no doubt that the Canon has greatly superior image quality but the Super-Ikonta shows the advantage of the larger format negative. The 70mm shot with the Canon is in the short telephoto range, while the 75mm lens on the Ikonta is standard for the format.

I don’t know offhand which has rendered the comparative colours of the wood better but its clear that their response in that part of the spectrum is rather different (the film was Fuji Reala).

The sharpness and lack of vignetting of the Xenar used almost wide open is notable – and it’s nice to see that the rangefinder (which I had to adjust when I got the camera) is accurate.

In view of the poor quality of the negatives (which were carefully metered) I have checked the shutter speeds again and the readings show that my exposures should have been accurate to within 1/2 stop, so I suspect the corner shop’s processing is partly to blame.

Measured shutter speeds:
1s = 0.94s
1/2s = 1/16
1/5s = 1/48
1/10s = 1/12s
1/25s = 1/25s
1/50s = 1/53s
1/100s = 1/88
1/250s = 1/164s
1/500 = 1/300s

Posted in Canon 70-200 f2.8L, film camera, Film cameras, Folding cameras, Lenses, Schneidar Xenar 75/3.5 (Tessar), Super-Ikonta A | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Ensign Selfix 220

Posted on January 27, 2012 by

BRITAIN’s camera manufacturing industry has been all but dead for almost half a century, yet in its heyday it was inventive and often took a different path from its Continental rivals.

The leading British brand in the mid-20th Century was undoubtedly Ensign, which produced an extensive range of medium format cameras from 1930 up to the end of the 50s, when their failure to embrace 35mm photography ensured their downfall.

Their inventions included the camera that jabbed your finger if you tried to take a second exposure on the same frame (now, why did nobody else think of that?).

One particularly interesting model, in view of the features it incorporates, is the pre-War Ensign 220. I haven’t been able to discover its launch year, but it was featured in an advert in 1939 (here) and I have seen one referred to as being from 1937. The prices, ranging from £3/15/0 to £10/17/6d depending on the lens and shutter, show that even a basic model was a luxury item. The mid-range £4/10/0 model, which probably corresponds to mine, is equivalent to £623 at today’s prices, or almost exactly $1,000.

This camera is rather odd in having a dial-set five-speed American-made Ilex General shutter, a design that was overtaken in the mid-20s with the invention of the rim-set design shown in the company’s advert. I can only guess that the war left Ensign without the superior German-made shutters so they obtained a supply from the US. The shutter still works, which apparently is unusual for the Ilex General.

The built-in features are more impressive. The camera features internal flaps that nestle in the film chambers for shooting in 6×6 format (12 frames per roll of 120 film) but are flipped over to cover the side of the film gate for shooting in 6×4.5 format, which allows 16 frames to be shot per roll. The flaps are a better solution to the problem than Zeiss Ikon’s removable removable masks, which have mostly got lost over the years and are inconvenient to carry.

One 6x4.5 flap can be seen under the winding knob on the left, the other is half-closed beneath the viewfinder on the right

One 6x4.5 flap can be seen under the winding knob on the left, the other is half-closed beneath the viewfinder on the right

Almost all dual-format folders feature two red windows so that users can read the numbers on the back of the film, which are spaced differently at different heights on the backing paper … but not the 220. It has only a single window, unusually placed off to one side that is only meant to be opened when the film is initially wound on. The rest of the time the user relies on a small dial on top of the camera which is geared to the wind-on knob. As you wind the film the dial rotates and you stop winding when the next number reaches the register mark.

And this is where it gets really cunning: not only is the spacing between frame numbers on the dial varied to take account of the roll getting thicker as more film is wound onto it, the disc itself is double-sided, with 1-12 on one side for 6×6 and 1-16 on the other for 6×4.5.

Top view with the frame counting dial and pin removed. The other side of it is numbered 1 to 16.

The viewfinder is also adaptable to either the 6×6 or the 6×4.5. The top of it pulls off and is narrower at one end than the other. For 6×4.5 shooting it is mounted with the narrow slot at the front, for 6×6 it is turned around.

The focus method also differs from most folding cameras. Instead of turning the front cell to move it in and out, the entire camera bed slides backwards and forwards driven by this lever, with a distance scale marked on it. To shut the camera, the bed must be fully retracted, which means having the focus set to infinity. The lever has a depth of field scale marked on it.

All in all, the Ensign 220 is a well thought-out design with many novel features.

Like the Zeiss Ikon folders, it advertises the manufacturers’ own brand of film, available in orthochromatic (blue sensitive) and panchromatic as well as “ultrachrome” which was apparently an orthochromatic slide film. Houghton, which became Ensign, had been making films since the first decade of the 20th Century.

ADDENDUM: I’ve just checked the shutter speeds, which are nominally 1/5s, 1/10s, 1/25s, 1/50s and 1/100s as well at T and B.
The 1/5s setting runs at about 1/16s. All other settings (except T and B which are correct) run at 1/50s.

(All photos in this article were shot on a Pentacon Six with a 120mm Biometer using extension tubes.)

Posted in Ensign Selfix 220, film camera, Film cameras, Folding cameras, Fomapan 100 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment