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We are constantly bombarded with discussions on the relative merits of film versus digital and vice versa. This debate has been ongoing since the arrival of the Sony Mavica (guess when and then look at the bottom of the page*), replete with 700Kb floppy discs. At the time the Mavica was used for those jobs it was good at and it still lives on today – a surveyor arrived at McNamee mansions last year and used one during his survey for our solar heating, to record the inside of our loft space.
Since those days the digital camera has gradually made inroads into the scene, taking more and more sophisticated roles along the way. It started with surveyors (typified by the Nikon Coolpix 950) but has now progressed through small product shots, to A4 pages, to front covers of flashy magazines and double page spread of high-quality, lifestyle magazines. One of the last outposts for 5x4 film has been the technical camera for use in architectural photography. This too has started to yield to the onslaught and we spoke to specialist Paul McMullin about this recent (and ongoing) transfer to a fully digital workflow.
Things came to head during Paul’s recent shoot for The Architectural Review. Initially they had insisted on the use of 5x4, their editorial policy demands that the building are plumb and true, with no converging verticals. The availability of a true wide-angle shift lens had frustrated Paul’s use of his Nikon D2x but, in the background, things have also been getting progressively worse for film. At one time you could have E6 processed in many places, even our local hospital trust offered the service to local photographers. This gradually diminished, starting with E6 lines running only on selected days of the week, then being decommissioned and congregated only in the larger city centres. Eventually Liverpool lost all E6 lines and Paul was having to travel to Manchester, or courier his work there, for processing. Then the last outpost in Manchester closed (and by coincidence the E6 line came back to Liverpool). While all this was going on, magazines such as BJP were filing reports almost weekly on the labs going out of business or retracting services.
The crunch came when Paul had paid out almost £500 on film and processing. Atlthough the 5x4 was up to the usual high standards of this format The Architectural Review selected just one and for the remainder purely digital. The £500 did not even take into account the time and energy spent travelling with films or the considerable time it takes to prepare a high-quality scan on his Imacon. We hear so much about the time photographers spend on their digital workflow, forgetting that to prepare a 5x4 scan takes lots of care and quite a lot of painstaking dust removal as post-scanning work.
The Nikon D3 arrived in a timely manner and one was ordered within hours of testing the Professional Imagemaker review model (see article in the last issue). Paul’s three-lease cycle was due up on his D2x and so it was time to make a decision. After testing the Hasselblad 39Mp camera, Paul decided that the Hasselblad investment was not justified by the improvement from the additional pixels; the costs did not stack up. It was time to make a clean sweep and here is the matrix of equipment changes.
The Walker Titan 5x4 along with 65mm, 90mm,150mm and 180mm Schneiders was sold back to camera maker, Mike Walker. The popularity of 5x4 is still strong enough for Mike to have a waiting list, so the refurbished camera will be moved on to a new home. The Fuji 6x17 GX Panoramic camera was sold to a landscape photographer. The Imacon Scanner is retained. The Hasselblad 503 and SWC bodies are to be sold complete with 38mm, 50mm, 80mm and 150mm lenses and three backs.
The incoming kit includes the new Nikon D3, along with a selection of enses, a VR 303 Panoramic Head, a GPS camera system and a Lowepro Roller 2 to wheel it all about. The 'balance sheet' is shown in the table opposite. The icing on the cake was the arrival of the 24mm shift lens.
The switch-over has thus cost in the region of £1,200. Part of the decision making process was the realisation that waiting longer would have allowed the resale value of the film cameras to drop still further as the market becomes bloated with defunct equipment.
PC-E NIKKOR 24mm f/3.5D ED
For the architectural specialist two recent developments have brought the possibilities of digital capture with ‘35mm’ size of DSLRs into the frame. First is the fullsize chip of the new D3 which gives the photographer their true wideangle lenses back and secondly the arrival of Perspective Control Nikkors at 24mm and 85mm focal length.
Paul McMullin received one of the first 24mm lenses to come into the UK and kindly collaborated in the testing. The 24mm lens has an angle of view of 84°, rising to 101° when fully shifted. The shift is available at ±11.5mm and the tilt ranges ±8.5°. The lens contains 13 elements in 10 groups. It has three ED elements, three aspheric and one with the new Nano Crystal Coat. As we will describe later, this is a potent mix of glass!
For our younger readers who may be unfamiliar with rising front cameras, here is how it works. In order to keep verticals in the scene vertical in the image, the back of the camera has to be perfectly upright. This often chops off the top of the scene. Without a shift lens the photographer has to move further away, sacrificing image scale and detail, or use a shorter focal length lens which again sacrifices scale and image detail. Shifting the lens upwards brings the top of the scene back into view and keeps everything plumb, ie nonconverging verticals. This is illustrated in the picture sequence.
Tilting on the other hand, changes where the depth of field lies in accordance with the Scheimflug Principle. We will spare you the physics – suffice to say that if you are photographing a landscape and need more near depth of field to cover the rocks at your feet, you tilt the lens down and the job is done! The same principle applies if you have a product at an oblique angle to the camera and wish to get both the front and the back into focus – except that here you tilt in the horizontal plane; again it is easier to look at the pictures than try to understand the words!
To test the lens we used the PC24mm with and without shift to demonstrate the effect. We also tested it against an older 24mm f2 Nikkor and finally we corrected the perspective in Photoshop and compared the result. We then shot using tilt in both the vertically downwards position and sideways against a wall. The PC lens just won in all aspects in terms of sharpness and colour fringing. The striking thing when using the lens for the first time is just how little shift and tilt are needed to perfect images, the values in the specification seem, at a casual glance, to be quite small, but they do exert a large influence on the picture geometry!
Overall then this lens is a little beauty which is going to make huge inroads into the architectural photographer’s armoury. Paul is already imagining that this lens is going to stay on his D3 for most of its working life!
ABOVE RIGHT: Initial lens test shots (not for client use!), the interior of the new School of Tropical Medicine for the University of Liverpool. Note the correction of the verticals by the use of lens shift.
ABOVE: Photoshop has been used to corrrect the perspective of the image. Despite the rather heavy amount of distortion of the image (as shown on the right) the detail has survived quite well. The shift lens, however, just makes a slightly better job.
ABOVE: Each pair of pictures shows the disposition of the camera on the right and the resulting image on the left. Below the top image is another composite which shows the effect of tilt in the horizontal plane (termed 'swing'). Note how the sharpness of the stonework is improved in the right hand picture by the application of maximum swing.
Photo Quote: Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. - Henri Cartier-Bresson
