Backing away from the extremes I find that most of the cameras I own are quite able to make better photos than I imagined.
I think most of us are a bit guilty of buying a camera, a car, a music player and pushing it to its limits (to see what it will do!!!) in part to justify the idea that we purchased a really fine object. Primal justification.
Most Porsche crashes, statistically (Data from DFR - USA, subsidiary of Data Free Research Universal) happen in the first month of ownership when drivers who are new to rear wheel drive sports cars over-reach then over-brake and lose control at high speeds). This is just an example... If you are a Porsche driver who has never lost rear wheel traction on a tight curve we are very proud of you but don't really need to supply the blow by blow account...we already believe you.
When it comes specifically to cameras the attribute that's been the underlying feature of hottest desire for the last twenty years has been a camera's ISO performance. Specifically, how does your new camera perform when the light's gone low and you've decided you have an absolute need to test out the high ISO settings with the hope that you'll be happily stunned by the low noise in the resulting files.
Thousands of users were more than willing to downsize their file resolution a few years back by buying a Sony A7S camera model instead of one of Sony's much higher resolution models. The reason was to get the camera which, at the time, had the lowest possible noise at higher ISOs. Even resorting to the downsizing from 24 or more megapixels to a "meager" 12 megapixels. And I get it. Some people want to photography without any auxiliary lighting wherever and whenever they desire. It's fun.
The interesting thing to me is that not all light is... interesting. Flat, or overly contrasty, low light rarely makes a subject more interesting. In many cases the high ISO performance is also combined with high apertures (f1.0, f1.4 etc.) so the "drama" in the resulting photos is all about the very shallow depth of field more than anything else. But that's a whole different topic.
For the last three or four years I've been experimenting in my paid and unpaid work with the use of LED lights of all kinds, pressed into use to make portraits. It's so fun to shoot in a "what you see is what you're going to get" modality that we sometimes forget that, for pure image quality, there are other options.
While a few months ago I felt no constraints in the shooting of portraits with continuous light at ISO 800 or even ISO 1600, confident that either faith or very good post processing noise reduction would make the files just as good as the stuff I used to shoot at ISO 100 or 200 with earlier generation cameras. Now, I've had a mild change of direction. A reversion to antiquities, in a way. I have rediscovered flash.
Kind of a silly statement to make as I've had decades of experience with using electronic flash, but there it is.
I started retesting flash in preparation for several big event jobs this Spring. The kind that are held in big ballrooms with low lighting and subjects that move around on their own accord. Unpredictably. I knew that regardless of what brand of camera I might use virtuous high ISO performance wasn't a guarantee of nice light or good files. Or good color. In the testing process I set up flashes in the studio to make sure they would interface well with the Leica cameras I'd be using. What I discovered, at least in my small space and with big umbrella modifiers, is that the flashes could provide me with enough power to slide back a decade or so and use ISOs like 100, 200 and 400, at apertures like f5.6, without breaking a metaphoric sweat.
And, as I walked around outside in bright daylight with cameras set at ISO 50 or ISO 100 I started to wonder if I'd inadvertently gone too far in the wrong direction; trying to press LED lighting and constant lighting into all my projects instead of weighing subject matter, intent and the end results of each situation.
And, probably, I have erred a bit. Ah well. To be human...
I photograph portraits of doctors and physicians assistants for a giant radiology practice. When I look back at the work I've done for them I find that it started back in the film days. Early digital portraits were done with cameras as far back as an Olympus e-10, a Kodak DCS 760, and others. And back then it was pretty crucial to use as low an ISO as possible for the sake of lower noise and wider dynamic range. After having done well over 300 portraits over the years for the practice I can look across the range of examples to see where I could have done better or where I was happily surprised at how good some of the oldest files looked.
All of this coincided with a recent decision to make the portraits I'm still taking for clients with flash instead of the continuous lights I have been using.
Let me explain.
I was setting up a portrait shoot after my "event flash testing marathon" and decided to use flash for the studio session. Used two Godox AD200 Pro lights mounted together on a Godox AD-B2 adapter that combines the flash power of the two battery units into two bare bulb tubes and also provides a fairly bright modeling light. I use a small reflector on the light and I cover the reflector with a white diffusion material to spread out the resulting light so it works well in conjunction with a very large, white umbrella. The umbrella is also fitted with a white diffusion material so that the light path goes from the flash tubes, through the on reflector diffusion, into the umbrella where it bounces back and through the umbrella mounted diffusion material and then on to the subject. Used this way the light is very soft while still being directional. The degree of lighting "drama" is then dependent on how much fill light you add to the shadow side of the portrait subject.
The one thing to be aware of is how much all the diffusion diminishes the power of the lights. Fortunately the combined flash power of the two units in the AD-B2 is around 400 watt seconds. But even at 1/4 power I can still photograph subjects at ISO 100-200 and with apertures such as f5.6 to f8.0 (depending on how close I use the lights to the subject).
With the power readily available I fell quickly into the routine of maximizing image quality by using the lowest ISO setting. Since I was also overpowering ambient light, sunlight coming indirectly through windows, etc. I found I was getting better overall color accuracy in the files. There is only one source to balance to. The lower ISOs are giving me more dynamic range, fewer burned out highlights and an overall more robust and flexible final raw image file. Which just makes sense.
And that brings me back to the title of the post. It's the idea that if you aren't chasing the extreme edges of possible performance but instead stay in the sweet spot of your camera's abilities and its sensor's best use parameters, you can make your photographic images better and your post production routine easier while at the same time getting very sellable images to boot.
I guess it's nice to know that your camera can see in the dark but as a working photographer we've generally been working in the middle range of our camera's efforts. And now closer and closer to the optimum range. It's the same with lens performance. For a long time we've been chasing faster and faster lenses and paying a price penalty for our tunnel vision. It's nice to find that almost every lens I own can be "state of the art" if I use it at f5.6 instead of wide open. It's easier to hit sharp focus as well.
A Porsche 911 GTS can go 150+ miles per hour but you'll get the longest life out of the car and the best gas mileage at much lower speed. And you'll be safer to boot. By the same token you could use any 24 megapixel camera from the last 10 to 15 years at its lowest ISO and couple it with a well made lens used at f5.6 and you'll be able to generate very competitive photographic files. You pay more for the newer cameras with more ISO performance but if it's just nice images you really want you can do that with a lot of cameras. Even old film cameras. Funny how all that works.
My current studio and location flash set up includes three: of the Godox AD200 Pro flashes with various heads, including my favorite round ones which also contain their own modeling lights, and two of the Godox V1 lights which use the same modifier and front of flash accessories. I have Godox flash triggers for the Leicas, the Fuji camera and even another trigger for the Panasonic S5 that's lurking over on the "film scanning station." All the triggers work well. All the flashes are great and have a lot of battery stamina. And, in the age of battery powered flash lighting my preference for big and small umbrellas is front and center.
There are other flashes in the studio and all have the ability to manually set power levels while all having "slave" modes that offer triggering when the radio triggered flashes go off. Wow....I never thought about it but my flash system is scalable. That's so tech-y.
Some of this was driven by my desire to use my Leica SL cameras more often in the studio. They are great cameras but the older sensor in that camera comes with some ISO compromises compared to the newer sensors in the Lumix S5ii and the Leica SL2-S. But those compromises only become apparent at the ISO goes ever northward. By combining the SL cameras with flash power we're right back to being completely competitive with just about any camera ---- based on the way I use them.
We had hard rain in the middle of the night. Thunder and lightning this morning put the kibosh on swimming today. We need the rain. We've got a lake we need to refill. We can swim tomorrow.
Projects upcoming: website photos for a law practice, advertising photos for an oral surgery practice, headshots composited with backgrounds for a large insurance company, a continuous stream of medical professional portraits for a radiology practice. It's shaping up to be a busy June. I may not be so out of touch about commercial photography as some might think... A blessing and a curse. Client demand is making for a halting retirement. Altering the glide path.
No. I have not purchased a Porsche.
