Musings on Photography

Over on Luminous Landscape, Nick Devlin has written an in depth account of his trip to Japan with the G9, well worth reading if you’re considering buying one of these beasties. You will note that Devlin repeats much of what I have said (and others have said) about the G9 before.

The point I’d have people take away from Devlin’s excellent account is that what’s wonderful about the G9 is not that it produces images as noise free as the nearly noiseless EOS-5d (it doesn’t), nor the images are on a par with an EOS 1Ds mk III (they’re not), or even that the G9 is small and light enough to go with you everywhere (I’ve had a fair number of cameras that were smaller and lighter).

The point is more that the G9 is the first easily available camera that was, on all these scales, good enough. It is not the best in image quality - there are many cameras that beat the G9 on image quality. It’s not the best on noise - most DSLRs in the current crop beat it. It’s not the lightest camera nor the smallest. But on all of these scores, the G9 stacks up as ‘good enough to be used for serious work by serious workers’.

I think that’s where the puzzling over the G9 comes from in the reviews I’ve seen written by what I’ll call the ‘non-photographic’ reviewers. They look at the G9 and conclude that, when compared to the best cameras point by point the G9 is often bested by some other camera. What they’re missing is that we can’t take photographs with a camera that consists of Camera A’s noise free sensor, Camera B’s low light sensitivity, Camera C’s lens, and Camera D’s control layout. They’ve missed the fact that although DSLRs beat the G9 on noise and image quality, even a small DSLR won’t fit in your pants pocket. They’ve missed the fact that although there are other small cameras that fit in your pocket, they all have hard to use and frustrating controls.

We can only make photographs with a camera that actually exists, and which we can contrive to have with us when the need to make the photograph occurs. Every camera is a compromise, and the interesting thing about the G9 is not that it’s without compromise but that it’s a particularly interesting set of compromises - a set that never dips below the threshold where some particular aspect of the camera becomes a deal breaker.

The G9 has not replaced my EOS-5d - I still routinely grab the 5d when I’m heading out the door to make photographs. If I could have just one camera, it would be a low noise, high resolution DSLR like the 5d - in fact, for something like 18 months, the 5d was the only camera I used, and I didn’t feel much pinch.

Being a DSLR replacement is not where the G9 is interesting. The interesting thing about the G9 is that it’s let me extend my photography into a place that was hard to reach before - photographs of quotidian things and places where the photos were hard for me to get previously because the cameras that were convenient enough fell short in some other way. Because it’s on every level Good Enough, I now have the G9 with me and make those photos.

And, to put it in the words of Harry Callahan, that makes it just a bit easier for me to use photography as a tool ‘to regulate a pleasant form of living.’

The photo above was made with my Canon Powershot G9, at ISO 800. Noisy, it is.

This is a roughly 600 pixel crop, full size, from the lower right corner of the GMB ColorChecker. We can see the nasty noise.

This is the same crop, with Noise Ninja run over the image using the default settings, and using a profile I built for the G9. (Building a profile for Noise Ninja is easy and takes only about 15 minutes).

I won’t claim that Noise Ninja makes the noise problem on the G9 go away; it doesn’t. ISO 1600 is noisier than ISO 800, and it’s not even meaningful to compare the noise on the G9 to the noise on my EOS-5d.

But here’s the thing: I think there’s a terrible tendency to evaluate cameras as if they were to be our ONLY camera, and even worse, we tend to evaluate things by using a marketing matrix of features. I think that when we evaluate complicated things using marketing matrices, we often do ourselves a disservice, ESPECIALLY when we use the marketing matrix provided by SuperWonderDigitalCameraReview.com, or consumerreports.com.

The thing is, there’s no line in those matrices for things like “Sufficiently small enough that you’ll actually tuck it into a coat pocket when you take the dog for a walk”, “gives reasonable results in non-challenging conditions”, nor for “has control layout which doesn’t actually cause projectile vomiting on part of user”. And it turns out, those features are really important.

They’re more important, perhaps, than the noise level. Yes, I understand that freedom from noise is a good thing. But it’s not the ONLY thing.

The most important feature of a camera, ANY camera, is that the camera must actually be present when you want to make the photograph. The camera cannot be used to make the photograph before you if it is back at home, in a camera bag in the closet, because it is too damn heavy and bulky for you to carry around in your coat pocket and thus got left behind when you went out for dinner.

It does not matter if the camera at hand is noisy, in the very narrow sense that a photograph made with a noisy camera that you have with you is infinitely better than the photograph you would have made (but didn’t) with the noise-free camera that you left at home.

The G9 is not perfect. No camera is ever perfect. Sometimes we can gloss over some of the imperfections by using post-capture techniques and tools like Photoshop (to reduce the barrel distortion) and Noise Ninja (to reduce noise). It’s important, though, to understand that if we wait for the perfect camera before we start making photos, we’ll never start making photos. In some cases, the answer is to have one camera for one application, and another camera for another application.

Yesterday I happened to look at the stats page for this blog and was struck by the fact that, all of a sudden, the Canon PowerShot G9 is responsible for a large proportion of the search engine delivered hits on the blog. The level of those G9 related hits has been growing for some time, but it’s really taken off after this post titled PowerShot G9 Accessories.

The G9 is a funny camera. It’s gotten quite a few lukewarm reviews, like this one from MacWorld which says:

Canon’s G series has converted many a serious film shutterbug to digital photography. Launched in 2000 with the PowerShot G1, the sturdy G line helped establish digital photography as something more than a novelty. But judging from the latest entry, the Canon PowerShot G9, the line may have outlived its usefulness.

Make no mistake—this serious-looking black brick of a camera is capable of producing great images. But the G9 is out of sync with the marketplace, offering few compelling advantages, and some distinct disadvantages compared to cheaper point-and-shoots and comparably priced DSLRs.

[...] On the plus side, the odd little rotating ring on the G9’s main control button makes this one of the few point-and-shoots with a usable manual-focus option.

The G9 falls short in other areas, however. Most recent models similar to this one are superzoom cameras that cover a range from wide-angle to extreme telephoto. The G9’s lens starts out at a relatively modest 35mm and extends to 6x optical zoom, but a mere 4x digital zoom.

Too bad the author (David Becker) doesn’t seem to realize that, by using that ‘odd little rotating ring’ on the back, Canon produced a user interface that managed to meld the point and shoot line with Canon’s digital SLR line. To someone who’s been using a high end digital camera, that ‘odd little rotating ring’ makes the user interface instantly recognizable. I’m stunned to read a review of a camera that mentioned digital zoom except in the context of describing how easy or hard it is to turn the feature off, much less a review that seemed to think that 4x digital zoom is a disappointment.

Another strange passage from Becker’s review:

Add in some odd design and control choices—ISO settings are elevated to a separate rotating knob on the top of the camera, but you’ll need to dig through the menu to alter a basic function like image stabilization—and it’s tough to make a case for the G9’s $500 price tag. You can spend $150 less and get an equally capable point-and-shoot, such as the Samsung NV11 (). Or, you could spend $50 more for a DSLR with all of the above plus a significantly broader aperture range and versatility, which will allow the camera to grow with your skills.

Ok, I just have to disagree that having the ISO setting on a dial on the top of the camera but having to drill through a menu to turn image stabilization on and off is an odd design choice. And saying that you can spend $50 more and end up with a DSLR is sort of missing the point - it’s like saying “Why would you pay $5500 for a Leica M8 when you can buy a DLSR for one tenth the price?”

Ok, enough whining about this particular review, which I will admit is a cherry-picked example of WWW camera review badness. My larger point, here, both in mentioning the stream of G9 related search queries that land on this blog, and in mentioning the stream of bizarre reviews of the G9 is that the G9 is a nice little camera that is at risk of being Seriously Misunderstood.

The G9 is not a camera that appeals to photographers who are just starting out (although I’d claim it would serve handsomely in that role). Those photographers are more likely to buy low end DSLRs, just as Becker suggests. And it’s not a camera that appeals to the point and shoot purchaser, who no sooner would buy a camera because it records in RAW mode than they’d buy a camera that has no built-in flash.

The G9 is a camera that’s probably being bought by folks who already have DSLRs. They’re looking for something small, durable, and reasonably lightweight, with image quality high enough that they don’t look at every frame and wish they’d made it with a better camera. They want a fit-in-the-pocket camera that doesn’t disappoint with respect to image quality. Becker gets this part almost right, saying

The main market for this camera seems to be serious photographers who don’t want the clutter, expense, and weight of a DSLR. But with SLRs hitting price points of $500 and weighing less than a pound, those arguments don’t hold much water anymore. Instead, the G9 is likely to succeed mainly on looks—the styling invokes the classic rangefinder cameras of the pre-digital era—and brand loyalty.

What Becker is missing is that the G9 seems to be a pleasant surprise - a combination of a small, light camera with a decent sensor (perhaps a bit noisy), a pretty good lens, and RAW capture. It’s a camera that appeals to the photographer who not only knows what shutter speed, aperture and ISO are but how they interact, and expect the user interface to allow easy changes to those critical settings even at the expense of hiding control of image stabilization in the menus.

Lately I’ve gotten several requests that I do some sort of serious comparison of image quality between my EOS-5d and the G9, all of them from photographers I know and whose work I hold in high regard. [I have just such a comparison planned, and it's waiting on delivery of the tripod plate for the G9, which got held up for a bit but should arrive shortly] I’d just point out that if the camera is getting the attention of these folks, it’s not the market mis-read that so many of the reviews that categorized the camera as ‘one of the few point and shoots with a usable manual’. It’s really more a nice, small digital camera with good image quality that happens to have a green ‘auto’ setting as well as the aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual settings. And I’d point out that I have people ask me my opinions about various camera models all the time, but the only other camera I’ve ever had anyone ask me to compare to a high end SLR in terms of image quality was the venerable classic, the Contax T3.

I’ve always liked Really Right Stuff products, starting way back when Brian Geyer ran the business. They’ve come up with some really innovative products over the years, and the product quality has always been first class.

So today, I got an email asking about about their ballheads, and to refresh my memory on one point I visited the RRS website.

While I was browsing, I noticed this clever product - a clamshell sort of case that dovetails with an Arca-Swiss style L-bracket to completely enclose your Canon PowerShot G7 or G9 camera.

Pretty slick. There’s more to it than just this - the case can double as a camera support. See the whole thing.

No, I haven’t held one in my hands (although I’m pretty tempted to order the combo, which costs $130.) But my prior experience with RRS products makes me pretty confident that they’ve done a really nice job.

Clever, huh?

[UPDATE: well, that didn't take long. I just ordered one. More on this item when it arrives!]

For years and years, I used a 4×5 camera almost exclusively. Now, a 4×5 image has an aspect ratio very close to 4:5 (it’s not quite exact because there’s a border around the 4×5 negative, and that changes it slightly). Now, it turns out that this makes it a good match to most common photo paper (such at 8×10). And somehow, in that ‘come to love the walls of our prison’ way, I got into this mindset that this 4:5 aspect ratio was, in fact, God’s Own Aspect Ratio. And, I’m ashamed to confess, I sometimes looked at the aspect ratio of a print for a clue to what format the photographer used. Snobbery, nothing more.

Then I bought the 5d, and started making prints from the exposures from that camera. And, of course, the EOS-5d has the usual full-frame 24mmx36mm thing going on - the aspect ratio is 2:3. At first, everything seemed wide, and it always felt like I had this extra space at the ends. It didn’t take long to adjust, though, perhaps because I’d been experimenting with a 1:2 aspect ratio with the 4×5, by cropping down the negative.

There probably isn’t one God’s True Aspect Ratio. The needs of the world’s photographers are many and diverse, and although one photographer will thrive with the 1:1 square aspect ratio of the old Hassy, another will thrive with the 6×17 panoramic ratio. That’s a good thing. We don’t have to all be the same.

And that’s why this is a petty complaint. In the relatively short time I’ve been using the EOS-5d, I’ve gotten really enchanted with the 2:3 ratio.

Naturally, my second favorite camera, the recently acquired Canon Powershot G9, has a 4:5 aspect ratio. It’s as if the Photo Gods have sent me a little camera that I like very much, but decided to tweak me just a bit.

On the bright side, this aspect ratio issue remains one of the few things about the camera that irks me. Yesterday I noticed that the camera has acquired several scratches (some in the paint, and one minor scritchy scratch in the corner of the display). This is actually good news - the camera has been riding around in the pocket of my coat, never far from hand. Some might call them scratches of use. I suppose that Fred Picker, bless his soul, would call them Noble Scars.

I’d just point out that if the most annoying day to day thing about the G9 is that I wish it had a 2:3 aspect ratio, then pocket sized compact digital cameras have come a mighty long way toward being real cameras instead of fancy electronic gizmos which can, in a pinch, be forced into making something which kind of resembles a photograph.

There are other problem with the G9, of course. Like every camera I’ve ever owned, I wish the lens was better - in particular I wish it had less distortion and nicer out of focus rendering. And I wish it didn’t suffer quite so much from noise at higher sensitivities. But the bottom line here is that although the G9 might make be inadequate in some ways, to me it feels like such a step up from all the other compact digital cameras I’ve owned that it’s a breath of fresh air.

Way back when I bought the Canon EOS-5d, I bought it as a ’scouting’ camera - what I wanted was a small, lightweight camera that I could carry around to various locations and make ‘visual notes’, so that I could be more productive with the big, heavy Linhof Technikardan 45s. But I bought the EOS-5d, and when I discovered what a great camera it is, and how good the results were, it transmogrified into my ‘main’ camera, and the 4×5 kit got ignominiously stuffed into the storage space under the studio stairs.

A similar thing seems to have happened with the little PowerShot G9. My relationship with this new camera arrival has been interesting to me - it was purchased, really, as a ‘vacation’ camera to take along on my trip to China. It served in that capacity very nicely. Based on my previous experience with cameras like this, I didn’t really expect it to ever get used for anything but a vacation camera, for tourist snaps.

But the big surprise is that I’ve found that the image quality is good enough that it’s turned into a ‘carry around in the coat pocket’ camera - one that I grab when I’m heading into town, or out on some errand. When I go for a walk, the little G9 gets tucked into the pocket and goes along. Sure, it could be a bit smaller. Sure, the photos could be less noisy. And it could weigh less, too - it weighs enough that I notice that it’s in my pocket.

But I’ve bought myriad little digital cameras specifically to fill the camera niche that the G9 is now filling - an Olympus C2000Z, way back when digital cameras were somewhat exotic. The C2000Z didn’t have very good image quality and I felt it was too bulky, and so was followed by a Minolta DImage X, a featherweight little camera that was incredibly small, incredibly light, but had the most flare prone optics ever assembled by man and had batteries that had to be charged every couple of exposures. And in turn, the inadequate Minolta was replaced by a barely remembered series of Canon Powershot A-series cameras, which were tantalizingly close to what I wanted but not quite there. And all the while, I kept remembering my beloved Contax T3 - a compact something more than point and shoot 35mm camera with a stellar lens, small enough to fit in pockets and light enough to take everywhere. Only the prospect of processing and scanning a continuous stream of TMY kept me from pressing the T3 back into service.

Rather to my surprise, the G9 seems to at last fit the bill. I wasn’t expecting it to - it’s not really smaller or lighter than the PowerShot A95 I have here on the work table. It’s not really all that light, truth be told. I’m not really sure what it is about the G9 that means it gets taken along so often, when the previous contenders didn’t. But in some difficult to understand and difficult to articulate way, it seems to have hit that sweet spot.

It might be that, for once, it’s a pocketable digital camera with controls that actually make sense - adjusting the aperture when in aperture priority mode, for instance, is done with a little control wheel on the back, just like with a ‘real’ camera. Press a button, and the same control wheel turns into the exposure compensation control. The autofocus system is not horribly bad, and now that I’ve got the two custom setting modes set to useful setups, I find that the camera is quickly turning into one of those “I don’t think about camera controls” cameras that seem to adjust themselves while you’re thinking.

There are flaws, yes. The viewfinder framing bears little resemblance to what the actual framing will be. The images are noisier than I’d like, and at high iso settings, Noise Ninja seems to turn the images into some sort of surreal plastic reminder of what the scene would have looked like if you’d been overdosed on recreational pharmaceuticals. The metering system seems to continually taunt me by picking an exposure that blows out highlights. But the thing records in raw mode, and the image stabilization seems to actually work. And that means that a lot of photographs are getting made that wouldn’t have gotten made before I bought the thing. Lots of photographic ideas are getting explored that until the arrival of the G9 got mental filed in the ‘Some day I should think some more about that’ part of my brain and thus lost forever.

And it turns out, it’s hard to argue with that. I’m left hoping that the G9 will continue to get put in the pocket when I head out the door, at least long enough to hold me over until its replacement appears on the market.

And if Canon are listening, I offer the following: More cameras like this one, please. A little smaller wouldn’t hurt. A little lighter would be nice. A little less image noise would make me happy. A move to the 2:3 aspect ratio would not break my heart. But on the whole, you seem to have hit it just about right, and you’d do well to keep moving in the same direction.

Chase Jarvis has an interesting post with pointers to info on packing photo gear for travel, all in video format.

Here’s my packing arrangement for my three week trip to China, as well as my recent trips to Arizona and Delaware:

Starting in the upper left and proceeding left:

• 250 GB Western Digital Passport external disk drive
• cable for above
• spare battery and charger for the Canon Powershot G9
• 3 Lexar 4GB SDHC cards in storage cases
• Lexar USB SDHC card reader
• Canon Powershot G9, with battery and one Lexar 4GB SDHC card inside
• Eagle Creek padded case, into which everything except the case fits.

Everything, including the camera, fits easily into the Eagle Creek case, which measures about 7.5″ x 5.5″ x 2″. The ruler is just for scale.

Not pictured is the Apple 15″ Macbook Pro and charger, which get packed separately. The laptop and the external hard disk (labeled ‘Travel’ above) never live in the same bag; the camera case (often without the camera inside) lives in my roller carryon, and the laptop lives in my Timbuk2 messenger bag. Both bags are carryons and never get checked as baggage.

So far, I’ve found this to be a pretty pleasant way to carry my extensive travel camera package. (hint: if you are suspecting that I really like the lightweight and compact G9 outfit, you are right. I like it a lot.)

Mike Johnston asks “If you could ask Santa (anyone in the photo industry) to make one special present (product) just for you, what would that be?” Here’s what I’d like - and I don’t think it would be hard for Canon to do it, either. In fact, I think they could do it and give it out free.
I’ve written before (here and here) about the stupidity of metering systems in digital cameras. A lot of the technical hurdles to implementing what I’d like (a metering system that automatically adjusts exposure according to the ‘expose right’ rule) have to do with cameras being SLRs with a mirror.

But with the wonderful little Canon G9, of course, there is no mirror. In fact, I can set the camera to display the histogram of the photo I’m about to take (we will here wave hands about and ignore the fact that the histogram is just an approximation of what the JPG would look like), so we know the G9 has the compute power needed to perform this simple adjustment.

So how about it, Canon? Will you revise the software in the stellar PowerShot G9 to include a metering mode which is “automatically adjust exposure according to the ‘expose right’ rule”? It would make this wonderful camera (I’m really falling in love with it) into a truly groundbreaking device, and set the entire industry on the right track.

Pretty please? It’s the only thing I want for Christmas.

Adobe have released an update for Camera Raw (now version 4.3) which, among other things, now is listed as supporting the Canon Powershot G9.

Word from my friend Bill Saltzstein is that the update substantially improves the handling of color balance. This does two things: a) it explains why I was always puzzling over color balance, and b) solves the problem at the same time it raises it in my mind.

I have not yet tried the update, but if it solves my perplexing color balance issues it will be a relief.

Just a few random thoughts to satisfy the curiosity of those who wondered what photo gear I dragged throughout China.

The camera equipment all fit into a very small (7″ x 5″ x1.5″) soft Eagle Creek packing thingie.

Inside were:

• Canon Powershot G9 with the shoulder strap taken off and a wrist strap added.
• 4 4GB Lexar Professional 133x SDHC cards
• one Lexar USB SDHC card reader
• two NB-2LH Canon brand lithium ion batteries for the G9
• the Canon charger for the batteries
• one 250GB Western Digital Passport external USB hard disk and USB cable

In addition to this bag of photo stuff, I also had an Apple 15″ Macbook Pro and one of those plug converters to allow me to plug my gear into the various strange outlets used in China.

My practice was that at the end of each day, I’d download everything off the SDHC cards onto the laptop, duplicate it all onto the external disk, and wipe the cards. Batteries got recharged each evening, when I remembered.

The laptop and the hard disk always lived in different bags, so that if I lost one, I still had a chance at having the photos taken so far.

This setup worked very well, I was very pleased.