Sony A7, or the Lego FF System

When the Sony A7 was introduced it made the effect of a bomb, in sites such as DPR. The dream of all the Planet's geeks had been fulfilled: to fit a 24x 36 sensor in the body of a compact

I was myself surprised and alarmed: had I invested in a system like m4/3 which had no future?

The price of the bodies between $ 1500 and 2000 was indeed very close to the E-M1, $ 1300, while resolution on paper was twice as much.

A massive sales factor is that while the Sony A7 had almost no native lenses (5 to be honest) it could take with adapters the whole Sony Alpha range, the E NEX range, and hear, hear, all the FF legacy beauties of the past, with adapters soon to be made by the Chinese. At their native focal range.

So , if you are familiar with mirrorless cameras, Sony aspired to become a universal digital back, because its short distance to flange allowed them to accommodate any FF35 lens, with no need  to correct the crop factor which other mirrorless systems have (as high as 2x, in the case of m4/3) with a focal reducer.

And although native FE lenses made by Zeiss are mostly expensive, in the specific case of the Zeiss 35mm FE, price and size € 600 are comparable with the Olympus 17mm while resolution allowed is almost the double.

So this is the equation: a win-win. Or is it? Karel Van Wolferen, an outstanding photog. who is testing legacy beauties on the A7r reports that when he went at Yodobashi, the main Tokyo shop, there was no crowds to tear an A7 from his hands.

From early tests it had indeed emerged what was the curse of 35FF mirrorless: most legacy lenses below 35mm, are unusable because of the aberrations due to both the short distance to flange, and big size of the sensor. 

It is not difficult to understand that once you substitute the flat plane of film with 3D electronic wells the extreme angles of light rays hitting them don't fill them and reach their bottom.

 It's a geometric problem, which affects the edges of the frame, with sometime heavy effects:  light falloff, and colour shift at the edges. Leica and Voigtlanders like the 15mm and 12mm became unusable. Some 21mm SLR lenses keep up the fight, but they are rare and in between.

At any rate you can't buy or adapt anything, with eyes closed. That is exactly what Karel Van Wolferen keeps on testing: each and every lens, on a case by case basis, bless him. Indeed early tests show, that below 35mm, very few lenses can be saved. You also need some very precise adapters.

Note meanwhile that the Sony A7 is the first digital FF to have the same size of the Leica M. No mean achievement!

Leica however introduced microlenses on the edges of the sensor to offset the slanted rays of light. It works quite well with Leica lenses, remarkably with Wide Angles. For Sony however the problem is to offset quite a number of unpredictable lenses of all kinds. Hence the approach case by case of Van Wolferen.

By comparison there is no such problem at the edges on m4/3 and APS sensors with short register, because they cut off the bad edges. So the problem becomes: is there a true advantage in adopting FF35 as a general format? Or is it better suited only for very specific genres, like Portrait and Landscape?

For Landscape there is a solution of course, but it is an expensive one. Native Lenses, like the v. expensive Zeiss FE 55mm Touit series, that will set you back by $ 1500. That of course gave me pause for thinking, and that explains the prudence of Japanese customers.

Main features of the different models

All the three A models are issued with the same frame, not taller or wider than a Leica M. The ambition is clearly to be a modern replacement at half the price, although the dSLR shape gives also the hint that this could be a replacement for cropped mirrorless, which have the same shape and slightly smaller size.

Sony has also reused sensors, probably  in order to keep prices down, but they are still the best in the industry anyway. You can find the A7 sensors in the Sony A99 and the A37.

The bodies have the same Tri-Nav wheels of the NEX 7, in addition to the Mode dial. One for EV compensation while the front and rear dials adjust shutter speed and aperture, and you can swap functions between dials.

Luckily they have adopted the menu system of Sony dSLR (A37), instead of the mind-boggling one the NEX. The A7 have their fair share of buttons, with two function ones, and others that are reconfigurable, so the camera can be set to a photographer's needs.

Imaging Resource did a thorough comparison with the  best models of the industry and there is no doubt that Sony's sensors at the top of the resolved detail. Check here the A7 and here the A7r for comparisons with other top cameras.

To summarize: the Sony have more or the same resolution of a Nikon D800 top of line in half the size!

So there is some substance to the claim the A7 to be the New Leica. Same size, best resolution and top German lenses - Zeiss 35/2.8 goes 1320 lines full open!  according to Roger Cicala. of Lensrentals.

Where the Sony A seems to be still lacking, but that could change, is in the AF speed. Only the A has CDAF+PDAF, and thus good tracking, while the Ar has only CDAF and thus is slower than its sibling. 

According to Lensrentals the A7r resolution with the 35/2.8 Zeiss is the top of the industry. 

Cicala however tested it also with adapted Canon lenses and the Sony A7r beats the Canon 5d bodies when mounting their own Canon lenses!

This might be explained by the lack of AA filter, and the rumored offset microlenses in the A7r, as well as the gapless array of its new sensors.

OTH the Sony Ar doesn't have the front curtain electronic shutter of the A, which allows to attenuate the loud plonk of the shutter., and its alleged shutter shock. 

Flash synchro in the A is 1/160 instead than 1/125 in the A7r, and drive mode is faster, about 5 fps instead of 4 fps in the Ar. 

RAW recording times are allegedly slow, and both cameras take their time to wake up.
Another CON for both cameras is the lack of IBIS - in camera stabilization.

My temporary conclusion: to reach full resolution you must be a better photographer than with my Olympus OM-D because of the unwanted blur and loss of resolution that will happen far easier with a larger sensor than with smaller, cropped sensors. 

Simply because a bigger resolution requires a steadier hand, or a tripod, while there is no general stabilization to lean on. 

DOF  also is less forgiving in 24x36. In a portrait if you focus on the eyes, the tip of the nose might be OOF .

courtesy Meicw, flickr

Consider also that the Olympus OM-D have almost twice the operational performance of the Sony. The Jpeg engine of the OM-D is also so good that it's difficult to tell the 16 Mpx resolution  apart from the A's 24 Mpx. You can detect a difference only in the Ar, which at 36Mpx, has more than twice as many pixels as the OM-D.

So is it worth it? If you work with Stock Agencies exacting at least 20 Mpx for landscapes, certainly. For Journalism and Fashion, which rely on content, or even Marriage, I am unconvinced. An OM-D or a Fuji X with their great per pixel resolution might be enough, and operate faster. Stock wise, you can always uprez your pictures.

There's however a question looming. Have the cropped mirrorless reached limits to growth with the 16 Mpx Sony sensor?

Did Sony change format because it  saw that it couldn't break the 16 Mpx limit on a small sensor, without getting less resolution, like it actually happened  with the NEX 7?

So will in the future the difference in resolution between cropped and FF formats tend to accentuate?  That's the investment decision to consider. Which lenses to get should be the main consideration: cropped or FF35? You can't duplicate the investment, with the current prices!

Courtesy Sushicam, flickr. A7.

There is also the A7s, which has chosen a third way. To downgrade to 12 Mpx in order to achieve and even better Dynamic Range, and the extraordinary sensitivity of 504,000 ISO. Technical data being still missing I might review it in a further post.

Finally a last consideration. By the various reviews, especially the one at Imaging-Resource, there is no way that the A7s are going to compete with top dSLR, the latter being too fast in operational speed. So Sports might be a forbidden territory.

However if you check the Imaging-Resources comparison, the Sony sensors are the highest resolving of all, so here is the paradox. A camera for enthusiasts that beats in resolution the Canons and Nikons top of the line, while not being bigger than an Olympus, or a Fuji.

Quite a few things to ponder, before pulling out the wallet. Consider also that coming models and updates will fix the teething problems.

The areas that might be improved by firmware or in future models are AF and operational speed. Getting IBIS (perhaps from Olympus), getting more native lenses ( a lot are coming!) and fixing that loud shutter that introduces vibration, unwanted attention and possibly shutter shock.

So what to do?  Because of its modular nature and very recent introduction the whole system deserves to wait and see how it evolves. 

A7, Flickr.

What I personally find very attractive is the Zeiss 35/2.8 and its splendid performance, at just EU 600.  So I might wait to see If the kit comes down in price and buy adapters for my Zeiss Jena 50, and Jupiter 85/2, and perhaps add an adapted UWA from Samyang. Far from expensive.

Start a new system? Too old for that. For operational speed and Street I'd keep my E-M5.

Other solution might be to wait for Photokina and see if and how Fuji and Olympus go FF.

Check also the review at DPreview. They gave the A7r and the A7 Gold and Silver award respectively, but they also spoke out the Cons.

So could  this be a Leica M substitute of a kind? There are some bugs in the design to fix. AF will certainly evolve for the better, like it did in the Fuji X-T1, the Olympus E-M1, and the Panny GX-7.

However, because of the lesser Mpx to process, smaller sensors like m4/3 will probably always be faster, and better with tele lenses because of the 1,5 or 2x crop factor, so your choice. IBIS with teles also gives a considerable advantage: it's like having an invisible steadycam.

For more deliberate tasks like Portrait and Landscape however the Sony A7 might well become the new Industry standard in mirrorless. It's the equivalent of what in film was called the Medium Format. A very portable Medium Format, indeed.

'Nadja', a follow up.

* Warning: Intellectual stuff! - jump altogether if you are not into psychology and deconstruction.

My friend Daniel Jouanisson, videographer, sent me this photo update on the squares of Paris in 'Nadja'. Judge yourself how little they have changed in almost one century!

Hotel des Grands Hommes

How important were those squares for the  the story of Nadja? Here is another interpretation by Critic David Bate, from Westminster University in 'Photography and Surrealism' .

Deconstruction technique is interesting here because it allows to get to the bottom of the most indifferent image, and extract its true meanings. Remember: no photograph is innocent!

You can always connect it to a context, to a choice and a photographer's point of view. Here we are told about Nadja's madness, so pychanalysis is suitable, and it might even explain the hidden meaning of those sad squares that populate the book.

In his book, Bate relates Surrealism and Sexuality, giving an explanation to the Enigmatic.

Some images draw us, even if we don't know why. Interpretation can provide the explanation. Finding the culprit is like finding a serial killer by Forensic Science. 

Out of necessity the language is specialized. My comments will try to clarify.

David Bate: "The photographs in 'Nadja' echo this structure of loss through their emptiness. As the reader views the photographs in relation to the text, the pictures are dis turbingly empty, 'lacking' in actual events. Looking into these photographic spaces where any decisive momenthas 'disappeared', we wonder what is the other there. 

Just as Nadja loses her image of identification, so the 

reader of Nadja is deprived of a reflected identification 

in the photographs. Most of the photographs, even the 

portraits, have a mute and mournful look, there is a 

'dinginess' in these pictures, rarely noted by commenta- 

tors as such, through which their 'mood' of emptiness 

invades the book. 

Expecting to find photographs of the events in their captions, the reader finds them lacking and it is in this way that an enigma emerges".

In the book the onset of the Enigma is also marked by the impromptu appearance of a fortune teller:

When Nadja told Breton she saw herself as Helene, Breton was reminded that a clairvoyant had predicted days before their meeting that he would get involved with a Helene. Another unlikely coincidence!

Breton and Nadja are approaching the Unconscious zone, which is timeless. They can meet, but they can also differ, having different unconscious goals.

David Bate: "Towards the end of Nadja, Breton says that he wanted some of the photographic images of the places and people to be taken 'at the special angle from which I 

myself had looked at them'. This proved impossible; 

the places 'resisted' this and thus, for Breton, 'as I see 

it, with some exceptions the illustrated parts of Nadja 

are inadequate'

"Breton mythologizes these places, as having some- 

thing in them which resists representation. This only 

makes those places gain in enigma. There is little or no 

attempt to show things as literally from Breton's point- 

of-view in the photographs. In the photograph of Place 

Dauphine, the view is outside, looking in. One would 

have to be a disembodied voyeur to be able to 'see' what 

cannot be seen in these photographs. Whatever Breton 

says himself in the book, the photographs make crucial 

contributions and their presence gives a distinct feeling 

to the book. Can it be that this is what Breton meant 

when he described the photograph as 'permeated with 

an emotive value'?"

                    The uncanny Place Dauphine, where Breton and Nadja were to have dinner.

What is not said is that most of those somber Paris' squares in fact have been the theatre of acts of blood. In Place Dauphine was executed Jaques de Molay, the Master of the Knights Templar. Nadja perceives it and exclaims: "Et les Morts, les morts!" - she can feel the dead, she registers them. She predicts a black window turning red, and a few instants later a window lights up showing bloody red curtains! 

Another of those squares they meet at is where Marie Antoinette was beheaded. Those are not innocent places. They carry the mark of the public execution of a paternal figure.

"'Sadness', says Julia Kristeva,'is the fundamental mood 

of depression.' Certainly the photographs in Nadja are 

not joyous, they resonate with solitude. The ghosts of 

'whom I haunt' appear through their absence; as in the 

solitude of the child at the primal scene, with the parents 

'away' enjoying themselves. In this paradoxical signifying 

structure the signs are empty but never 'empty', they 

still signify. The enigmatic message of emptiness draws 

us back to those feelings and affects in the story of 

Nadja, where madness and sanity are combined in 

the mood of melancholy sadness. This mood is based 

on an identification with the lost object, where the 

depressing and depressed feelings hide an aggression 

against that object." [The Father Figure, she identifies Breton with]

"Nadja is a story in which Breton nevertheless undoes 

himself a little. He is clearly haunted by Nadja's 'madness' 

and the experience of their encounter — even if, as a 

trained psychiatric nurse, he can still say: 'You are not 

an enigma for me.'

"Meanwhile, the eyes of Nadja,repeated insistently
 in Man Ray's montage of them in Nadja,
 place Breton and the reader under her surveillance 
(an image added by the author in 1964)."

"The book ends famously with the seemingly im- 

promptu and rushed conclusion: 'Beauty will be CON- 

VULSIVE or will not be.'The 'beauty' here for Breton is 

the hysteric in convulsion, but in the end, Breton remains 

on this side of the symbolic order, he is the neurotic 

witness to his own unconscious conflicts, while Nadja 

is given to signify the unconscious and can no longer 

bear witness to her own thoughts. 

"Nadja transgresses the symbolic order and pays the price of incarceration. As Simone de Beauvoir wryly notes: 'She is so wonderfully liberated from regard for appearances that she scorns reason and the laws: she winds up in an asylum.'"

"The paths of the sexual question 'Who am I?' are 

different for the man and the woman in 'Nadja'. The 

different trajectories relate to the different relations to a 

paternal image. If beauty is hysteria, it is in the opening 

up of an identification with the other. In patriarchal 

law, as Lacan points out, the question of 'woman' is of 

an 'identification with the paternal object' through the 

Oedipus complex. It is surely this relation that Breton 

explores in Nadja and is perhaps why the photographs he 

chooses are so emptied of such potential identifications, 

except one photograph: of himself. "

To Nadja the acts of blood make the squares terrifying, the very image of parricide, while for Breton,  they are just depressing, reminding him of his literary forebears. 

"The 'whom do I haunt?' posed by Breton at the beginning of the book is revealed as Breton's melancholic 

trawl of the patchwork of paternal literary figures 

(Rousseau, Nerval, Baudelaire etc.) emerging in Nadja

as the 'primordial' signifiers that make up his Paris.  

Breton buries himself in relations to these signifiers as 

he delves into a bit of Nadja's psychosis. His fleeting 

interest in Nadja is as link to that lost literary history"

(From 'Photography and Surrealism' - David Bate)

See how the same image can bring about different responses? A realist interpretation would never have explained them. Surrealism brings to the images the powerful contribution of the unconscious. Internal feeling is as real as the material reality out there.
'Nadja' is very important for the History of Photography, because it introduces the concept of shifting signifiers - there's not a one-to-one correspondance with what the image apparently depicts.
Realism, the earlier paradigm of photography, is therefore inadequate.

Although Breton died in 1966, Surrealism continued to exercise its influence up to the 1970s, notably in the work of women photographers, such as Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman - who mentions explicitly 'Nadja' among her  influences. 
 With her performances and body art photographs Francesca Woodman  showed  how women can reappropriate their own bodies, by turning upside down the male imaginary.

                                             *

And now, just to lighten up, another photo from my friend Jouanisson on American Realism:

No Photo is innocent! We will soon discuss what happened to photography at the era of the internet globalization. When everything went to the dogs with a surfeit of special effects, allowed by the advent of digital. And when millions of digital images pushed aside what had been the little world of the paper image.
Stay tuned!

The severe beauty of Rome

As a Medieval and Ancient town Rome rests on a paradox: it is both a walled town and a garden town, among the greenest in Europe.

By the times of Augustus it had already reached one million people, being the largest of Antiquity.  200 yrs later, in 270 c.e. when Aurelianus began to encircle it with its second and last line of walls, its population was already dwindling.

When the walls were breached by the barbarians, and the empire was finished, in 450 c.e. the countryside set in and the villas of the aristocracy reclaimed the deserted spots. The first Church was built on the farm of the wife of Constantine.

By year 1000 c.e.. the population had been reduced by hunger and the plague, to 40.000 - less than the number of public statues the City had under Augustus. They all but disappeared by the time the Byzantines left town in yr. 1000.

It is only by the birth of Italy in 1861 that the city recovered. Today within its walls, still live 800.000 only a quarter of Rome's population, about the same of Augustus' times.

As a child I was lucky to live by Porta Aureliana, the most impressive post of the Northern Side, which must have fought against the Goths and the Huns. Right behind it are the noble Borghese Gardens whose gallery hosts so many classical statues and paintings.

They were none of my concerns as a kid, since I played indians and cowboys with my cousins in the vast parks of Villa Borghese.

One classical statue in the open however struck my attention, and its inscription I learned to translate as soon as I learned English:

From Childe Harold pilgrimage:

     Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul! 

     The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, 

     Lone mother of dead empires! and control 

     In their shut breasts their petty misery. 

     What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see 

     The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way 

     O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye! 

     Whose agonies are evils of day -- 

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.    (Byron)

City of the soul, indeed. And ' Lone mother of dead empires!' Those sentences were going to mark me for life, in my assessment of such a unique city, and they still haunt me:

Was it also a parallel? Could Byron have forecast the fall of the British Empire - I wondered, as he was running to help the Greek independence against the Turks? 

Is it the unavoidable destiny of all empires to crumble? The British Empire took 500 yrs. to build, and only 50 to disappear utterly. Rome took much longer and transmogrified in a Spiritual  Empire. There is room to ponder, sitting on a broken column like Byron did.

So  in my middle age, I wondered a few years ago what equivalent I could provide visually of the broken might of my mother-city, and found no better than to dedicate one full Summer to the Walls of Rome.

Please consider that the original perimeter, 19 km long,  took all the male population of Rome to build it under Aurelianus' edict in only 4 years, so great was the hurry to stop at its doors the coming Goths and Vandals from the North . It is still a huge monument, particularly by the Southern side, which includes the Cestia pyramid, and other mighty stone edifices.

Next the Pyramid, leaning against the inner side of the walls, are the two English cemeteries, to which I feel connected, because in one of them are buried both Keats and my father, the Acattolici one, and Gramsci, the frail founder of the Italian Communist Party, remebered by Pasolini 

That Summer however it was the mighty Porta S. Sebastiano and adjoining walls who took my photographic attention. With its twin towers it is also a beautiful sample of late Roman military architecture, which is sadly made ugly by street signs, so I had to learn to clone them away, one by one.

Over its terraces was an exhibition of a Chinese artist, made of stone animals - a rabbit to point to an ancient Year of the Rabbit, when Rome was still young. It was there to celebrate the link between the two oldest empires of the planet, The Chinese and the Roman ones, connected by a trade route known as the Silk Road.

Despite all the work I have only a few keepers of these huge walls. You'll need a Wide Angle and a bubble level or equivalent. If you don't have a tilt shift lens your perspectives are going to be distorted. You'll also have dynamic range problems, the exposure difference between lights and shadows being huge, especially in the Summer. So you might have to try HDR or a ND filter.

Meanwhile the cemeteries kept drawing me. In Keat's one it seemed as if I could hear again the Ode to a Nightingale:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, 

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, 

But on the viewless wings of Poesy, 

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: 

Already with thee! tender is the night, 

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, 

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; 

But here there is no light, 

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.   (Keats)

There lies the tomb 'whose name was writ in water'

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! 

No hungry generations tread thee down; 

The voice I hear this passing night was heard 

In ancient days by emperor and clown   (Keats)

Not half a kilometer away it a military cemetery, the Commonwealth's one. Against one of the walls, facing the strict line of white tombs, is a moving inscription by a delegation of Englishmen, reminding that the Roman wall is of the same nature of the one which protected civilization in the Scottish north, the Adrian's Wall.

A strange short circuit of the imagination, but very true. In the Commonwealth Cemetery however are buried the crews of the bombers of Montecassino, some Jews, some Indian, people from Leeds and Birmingham, New Zealand. There might be also some American Crews, but mostly the latter  are buried near Anzio.

So because of the dead, that is one of the most international corners of the old city! A City of the Dead. Byron writes:

     The Niobe of nations! there she stands, 

     Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; 

     An empty urn within her wither'd hands, 

     Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago; 

     The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now; 

     The very sepulchres lie tenantless 

     Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow, 

     Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? 

Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress.  (Byron)

Those Byron's verses remind me that behind the welcoming smile of its parks and vales, the beauty of Rome is severe.

Some evidence of severity is given even today by the remnants of the House of Vestals, at the Forum. This was the oldest institution of the city.

Those girls were chosen among the noblest families of Rome to keep the Sacred Fire. If ever caught in intercourse they were immediately executed. The period of chastity lasted either 20 years, or for life, as for the Chief Vestal. To all effects, they were nuns.

They were second only to the Pontifex, the highest magistrate in Republican Rome, whose title is still carried today by the Pope. Pontifex means builder of bridges, a title that meant reconciling the savage tribes that camped on the separate river's argins, like the Etruscan and the Sannites, by building a bridge. To unite v. different tribes is still what basically the Pope does today. Religio means binding people together.

The Romans could also be pitiless with those who rebelled to Imperium. I caught recently some pictures of the inner side of the Arch of Titus, where a bas relief narrates the plunder of the Temple of Jerusalem, showing legionnaires carrying in triumph the Menorah, the seven arms sacred chandelier, which was buried under the Coliseum.

The Temple was utterly destroyed at the end of the long and bloody Jewish wars, in 70 and  135 CE, and the inhabitants carried as slaves to Rome. It was the end of Judea for 2000 years. But only 200 years later the barbarians were at the doors of Rome, at the Aurelianus' walls. And the citizens of Rome were to experiment the same cycle of plunder, rape and assassinations the Jews had gone through. It's what the Greeks called Ananke, and Dante the law of Contrappasso, the retribution of destiny.

Now just a bit of photographic advice. If you do want to do your own bit of Architecture and Landscape - and it is almost impossible not to do so in such a photogenic place, and you'd bring only one lens, make it a Wide Angle Zoom. The city Center is mostly  Middle Ages narrow streets whose alleys open up suddenly on huge monuments, like the Pantheon, the Forum, the Coliseum, or St. Peter. 

With a normal lens you'll never have the troom to even catch a significant part of what you shoot. Keep the normal lens for portraits of your loved ones, of for doing a bit of street shooting instead.

You can buy the 4/3 9-18 here at Amazon, or its sibling the m4/3 one.

 Rome has colored walls, most in terracotta red, which make wonderful backgrounds to passers by. Ordinary life happens in the open and people gang up easily in the summer in its convivial squares, so a theater like atmosphere develops naturally. You'll have tons of photo-opportunities, when the heat of the day relents. And tons of extraordinary dishes to try in the open air tables of trattorie. This is what you will have at the Ghetto, deep fried: