Olympus in-Camera magic: the OM-D series,

(Warning! Contentious content)

Some people are used to give female names to their camera. I don't but if I had  to, i would give it Mélusine, the name of the Queen of Fairies, with the tail of a Siren, so well she supplements the needs of Imagination.

When the E-M5 appeared almost 3 yrs. ago, the mirrorless m4/3 format was still immature: slow AF, mediocre sensor, low sensitivity to light, restricted Dynamic Range. All it had was small size and better image quality than the so called Point & Shoot cameras.

Then suddenly all problems were solved, everything fell into place, and we had a jewel of a camera whose whole was more than the sum of its parts. When Steve Huff made one of his Strange comparisons against the Leica M9 he defied his audience to tell which shot was which.

The E-M3, a black beauty.

To me its is still a recent buy, but from the beginning it has somehow changed the way I shoot. By offering a tolerable EVF of some 1.4 Mpx and a small dSLR form factor it brought me back to my film times. But by giving me separate wheels for aperture and EV controls, plus a manifold of buttons to change the settings it has made for me even more useless Photoshop and PP. DPReview however was the first to notice that Olympus had made the miracle of making a Jpeg processor which had as good Dynamic Range as the best result you could get from RAW processing.

I know that many will cry foul. This is a contentious issue for people who consider Lightroom their holy grail. Much good might it do to them, I consider the time saved in avoiding PP precious for further shooting.

By seeing what the sensor sees I make corrections on the spot, and I am ready to shoot in a few seconds, even with the right Art Filter if I need a special atmosphere, for tone gradation there is even a separate button.

The OM-Ds have also a nice feature called Live Time. When shooting at extra low shutter times, the camera shows you an image emerging from the screen, so that you can stop the exposure any time, when you are satisfied with its brightness. Live Time makes it easy tomake such effects, like light-painting:

courtesy Steve Huff.

On the side of reactiveness,  not only the AF is lightning bast. The back screen, a great bright OLED  is touch sensitive, and has touch shutter: you select the area AF by touch, the camera does it and shoots instantly.

Priceless: when using it from the navel, people never notice you, especially if you have a wide angle pointed in a different direction, but they are still within the frame. OTH you can completely shut down the back screen, and use the EVF instead, as if it were an ordinary dSLR: great in bright Summer days, and great on batteries.

Now about the debate Jpeg vs. RAW. The difference is not in the recording format, but if and when you do a photographer's work. You are not collecting Kellog's Mickey Mouse piccies like kids after all, are you? One must be ready to catch reality, and if that reality is dead, because it is PAST, no exotic processing is going to save your skin.

Reality must be caught while it develops. That is the meaning of HCB apocryphal: 'I am a  hunter, not  a cook'.  We are not Digital cooks. If need be, one can convert an uncompressed  Jpeg into a Tiff, and work losslessly for minor corrections. Don't invent a fake world at the expense of a snap!

With the OM-D Olympus gave the possibility of preparing a perfect image BEFORE the shot, which a photographer should always attempt. Thinking that one will save the image later and correct it is just an illusion - treating photography as if it were  a painting, adding layer upon layer, an additive art, which it isn't. Better choose the right light on the scene, instead of brightening later on the computer. At the worst learn to use a speedlight - you are still using real light! Photography is about Light, not about layers of painting.

A proof? If you have a high number of keepers from the start you won't be interested in spending hours in the digital lab. You'll be more interested in spending that same time on the field in catching the visual opportunities. And this will result in a higher number of keepers.

Now what is a keeper and what is not a keeper? If you are on flickr, you know that others will rate your pics, and  that they almost never rate the camera, or the processing, but content, the decisive instant.

They will be indifferent if it is a Jpeg or a Tiff, and they will certainly not rate a RAW. They will rate if the picture is timely or not. The same will happen in contests.

All this wouldn't have happened if Olympus and Panasonic hadn't introduced the view from the sensor instead of the traditional dSLR view from the lens. EVF allows WYSIWYG and it is the whole difference: like going from a geocentric astronomy to heliocentric. You compose everything  on the LCD. Bye bye, Photoshop!

The E-M1 was the first to sport duplication of functions by WiFi on a  smartphone.

Now back to the Olympus cameras. Later models have refined the concept and added innovative features.

The expensive E-M1 introduced PDAF in addition to CDAF (Phase AF + Contrast AF). This allowed to use over 30 High Quality lenses of the earlier 4/3 system and use them at their native speed, which had been impossible with the E-M5. 

  It added also HDR in camera and Time Lapse Movies. A Color Director - I could also see its uses, next to Tone Control. Again something you don't need Lightroom for anymore

Introduced later this year, like in the E-M1, the economy E-M10 added Wi-Fi, which allows to download, or better upload piccies to your favorite social sites on the fly.

The E-M10 sports a new pancake zoom kit lens

Thus you can see a new concept emerging in photography: not  a work of art or better an overprocessed monster, slowly cooked in PS, but image as instant communication, to be corrected later in Instagram or Snapseed if need be, if you want to add to the fun. Otherwise just plain, stark photography, directly uploaded on line. Communication first, musings later.

Besides WiFi also allows to literally to drive the OM-D on a tripod from the phone: again WYS in the phone is IWYG from the camera. Isn't it neat? You can 'touch' the camera from the phone!

Another feature all those fairy cameras have is strong IBIS, meaning that you have rock steady AF, a thing that only steadycams could provide in the past, with a heavy expense and with a cumbersome equipment. Now it works with a slight buzz, as if by magic. Or the whirr of invisible gyroscopes. In fact Olympus made the sensor levitate!

 That means shooting with a 3-4 stop advantage in low light. You can also shoot movies, which are absolutely steady, including the image of the viewfinder.

This combination of features has resulted in an industry standard that other brands have trouble to follow.  This disruptive  technology has created a cognitive gap with other users, that is why I have trouble explaining why I am not interested in Photoshopping anymore and I have switched instead to  the 'Slow Photography' paradigm.

When I tell DPR forum users the above they can get very angry, but that's the mere truth: disruptive technology can change radically one's habits, and sometimes for the best.

I have been accused of using Olympus' Art filters in place of PS, in a crude way. But the truth is that I like them crude, exactly like B&W is a strong transformation of colour. I like them not for realism, but from distancing from the real in a critical way. For instance to show how hard underprivileged environments can be. I am not into the beautification of marriage photogs. or other commercial shooters.

A tip about the lenses

Strong IBIS and good sensors have much reduced the need of fast lenses - this is another contentious argument. Be against or for, my pleasure. But I will give my opinion:

People have forgotten than in film times there were plenty of 2.8 and even 3.5 great primes optimised for resolution and small size. Last century. Leica 3.5 lenses were not rare, and so Zeisses and other wonders: the best pancakes ever made for rangefinders.

Lenses below 2.0 were rare, big and mostly used for Portrait or Fashion. Now in the consumerist age everybody seems to have learned the worst from Marriage photogs. , but the truth is that fast and sharp exclude often each other. 

Example: the PanaLeica 25mm has half the resolution at 1.4 it has at 2.8, Lensrentals discovered.

So people get lenses that are fast and sharp, but only at smaller apertures, and pay big bucks for the privilege, LOL.

Zeiss knows since it just provided the Sony A7 with a 35/2.8 for small  size and sharpness.

But what do people know? In fact with short distance to flange it is v. risky to make fast lenses, especially in wides, for resolution drops at the edges since they are not telecentric.

Better have a moderate aperture and exploit the sensitivity of the sensor, exactly like Sigma is doing with its Art DN Series, if one wants sharp across the frame. These lenses are resolution champions  for Micro 4/3 and they cost 1/3 than those of other makers. Just check them at Lensrentals.

The Sigma Art Series for m4/3 system, all f/2.8

BTW sharp and high resolution are not the same. Sharp is subjective while resolution is measurable.

Most of my lenses are 2.8, and believe me I don't feel limited at all. In low light Auto ISO can to to 3.200 or even 6400 and IBIS allows me to shoot at 1/10 s perfectly stable at 2.8. What else do I need? That is candlelight.

People object: but you don't get nice bokeh. I reply get close to your subject and you'll have all the bokeh you need at 2.8. 

Besides I, consider bokeh  a dirty trick issued from the beautification drive of Marriage photogs.  - a drive towards fake photography as fake as it might be. Women without pimples or freckles.

Again this has nothing to do with Slow Photography, which is rather on the side of f/64 and the Stieglitz camp. Again YMMV, as they say. But a Camera is first and foremost a perspective machine. Why waste your DOF by blurring everything?

Feel that I have been unfair or unjust towards PP? Feel free to comment. If we are many we might even try to make a poll.

My Black Queen, with gaffer's tape over the Logos.

The Automatic Clairvoyant

The Automatic Seer, by amalric.

Nadja, or the Surrealist City.

When Andre' Breton starts to write his illustrated short novel 'Nadja'  in 1928 Paris still looks very much like Eugène Atget had documented it: quite drab and deserted, very far from the dizzy atmosphere of Tolouse Lautrec, and the pageant of the Crazy Horse, and the Belle Epoque.

 WWI and its millions deaths had transformed and emptied the suburbs and the neighborhoods of the poor. Among the opening pictures in Nadja is that of a statue, a military called Eugène Dolet, of which Breton says that it both attracted and repelled him. 

To the reader the authoritarian statue  seems very much in contrast with the poetical style of writing, except that perhaps it establishes some ominous expectation which is in contrast with it.

Breton uses a symbolist style of the earlier generation of poets, Mallarme' and Rimbaud, but the photos are  describing an ordinary stroll in Paris, and the reader/onlooker expects something to develop out of the contrast. The next photo is 'Bois & Charbons' the picture of a ordinary shop of wood and coal, but with a cavernous aspect, as if an ogre dwelt there.

Breton is establishing a net of personal meaningful places that defines both a theatre set for the novel, and an interior landscape where an action is going to take place.
At first it will be the meeting with an actress friend who relates a lurid, Grand-Guignol show Les Detraquées, (The Cranks) based on serial assassinations in a college of young girls, made by the head mistress, with the complicity of her lesbian friend. Again the reader is shown the picture of a real scene.

Here again photography is used to confer reality to what might otherwise seems a series of fantasies. But in so doing the text  establishes the city as a country of imagination, where one can expect both crime and love. 

The surrealist group headed by Breton was soon to use the camera as a mechanical artifact to play with chance and evoke the unconscious. Man Ray used cut ups and 'rayographs'  made directly on sensitive paper in the  darkroom. William Burroughs and Brian Gysin later invented the Dream Machine projecting  hypnotic rays of light. The Camera Obscura saw its uses expanded . Here, however, it is used used in a simple mimetic way, but in an enigmatic way, in relation to the text.

Back to the novel, Breton progresses to a fleamarket where he finds a strange phallus-like white sculpture with coloured lines, which he later understands to be a three dimensional statistic of a city. It's a typical 'objet trouvé',  whose meaning has been displaced by the mind in a perverted way - he says. It is the birth of Détournement, symbolic displacement, which will have a central role in Surrealism, when becoming deliberate.

In fact the poet is establishing his own inner theatre where  a momentous happening is going to take place. In the street he crosses and stops  an attractive blonde with an unfinished make up, and a poor dress, who expresses herself by riddles: Nadja "whose name in Russian means hope, but it only the beginning of it" she says.

By coincidence Breton just a moment earlier was thinking of the Russian revolution, but also noting that ordinary work, that of the people leaving the offices, had very little to do with imagination. 

Nadja, who is looking for work,  nevertheless appears as a  messenger, the Angel of Revolution, coming to drab Paris, as if she had wanted to meet in person the poet, instead of being stopped by him.

It is as if there was a collapse of the inner expectation and outside reality,  between the subjective and the objective, which is brought about by desire.

Of Nadja however we will know little of her external appearance.  Instead we get some riddles  and some extraordinary drawings that she gives to Breton. 

They are the  the  token of her visions, like a flower  with a double set of petal-eyes, a symbol of inner beauty and  Love. "la fleur des amants". 

 Nadja is  a seismograph, telling Breton  she sees him as being drawn to a Bright Star, which is like 'the heart of a flower without a heart'. Breton is very moved.

Later  we learn that Breton, who at the time was married  had at the same time an affair with the actress Blanche Derval who had played in the Grand Guignol piece mentioned earlier in the novel. 

Of her we have a portrait,  which acts like a more material incarnation of Nadja. It is as if a photo, an objective correlative, wouldn't be able to catch Nadja's otherworldly nature. So the  portrait of Blanche must act as a displacement of Nadja. Breton compares the makeup of the two women, mentioning that one is too light for theatre and the other too heavy for the street -  and so makes an equivalence.

Nadja instead is only evoked by her  her 'regard de fougère' her 'fern look' while she meets the author in  ominous places, like the Sphinx Hotel, or the square of the Mazda Light billboard. 

She draws the author as a fierce cat with flaming hair and folded eagle wings along the sides, and herself as Melusine, a water nymph, whose lower body is made by a fish tail. It is clearly a figure of the Unconscious, but also of European legends. Melusine predicts the future and is a fairy queen of the inner world.

We are given  some other drawings of Nadja, : Le bouclier d'Achille, le Reve du chat, le Salut du Diable.
The drawing here at the top of the post, will be used as a cover for the book - it is the portrait of a  a fortune teller, a seer who is perhaps Nadja herself.

 Indeed she is able to interpret correctly some of the most complex paintings by De Chirico or Max Ernst, which hang at Andre's home.

 The drawings of Nadja operate on a different level from realistic photographs. They are 'apparitions', dream-like material of the Unconscious. Photography however documents them as real as the Paris' statues.

Some, like Le Reve du Chat,  a fugitive cat with the tail held by the wick of an invisible oil lamp (The Lamp of Wisdom?) , are cut ups of ordinary appearances  united in a paradoxical way, which suggests a further meaning. Cut ups  were to become typical of Surrealist art, as in Man Ray or Max Ernst.

Ordinary life reclaims  its rights, however.  The way Breton and Nadja separate each other only after a few days of acquaintance is an object of comment by  Katharine Conley's The Automatic Woman. Not only was Breton married, but he also ignored that Nadja was mad. Suddenly we are reminded of the stark facts of life.

Nadja was to return to the province she came from, Lille, presumably to solve her money problems, but was instead hospitalized.. When Breton discovered it he simply mentions that the hospital  probably did her more evil than good, by making a prisoner of her.

She had made him a seer and confirmed him to be an artist with a higher destiny, (The Bright Star)  but he never took the trouble to go and visit  her, preferring to make her the central character of a novel which was an immediate success - Conley comments sardonically. 

In an amazing displacement  of desire, Breton  shows instead of Nadja a portrait of actress Blanche Derval, who differently from Nadja, was resisting  his desire. The reader will never know what the real Nadja looked like.

Curiously Blanche in the Detraquées  abducted  an innocent schoolgirl. But it is as if Breton who performed an Identity Theft by substituting portraits.

Now, what is my relationship to surrealism? Although I am rather Post-avantgarde, and therefore eclectic, Surrealism is part of my culture, especially in the sense of Psychogeography: I am driven both by uncanny and the Sublime, but also the very simple, and the unexplainable.

I met some of the last surrealists, like Arturo Schwarz, the critic and collector of Marcel Duchamp -  I invited to Rome William Burroughs and Bryan Gysin, the writer and artist friends, who invented the Dream Machine. I missed by a hair Francesca Woodman, the photographer, who had sent me an illustrated postcard of her. They all switched a trigger, by alerting me to the imagination gap in Realism, which is the current ideology in photography. Any image is more than what it purports to be.

There is a photograph in 'Nadja' of which I have by coincidence a precise equivalent: Breton says:  'Devant nous fuse un jet d'eau, dont elle parait suivre la courbe'. 'Before us springs a water jet, whose curve she seems to follow'

                    

 What is the attraction they have in common? To me they are both mimetic and enigmatic, although they lack the optical tricks of later Surrealist imagery.

The conclusion of the book is Breton's famous sentence, which seems a sad epitaph to Nadja's madness: 'La beauté' sera convulsive ou ne sera pas' 'Beauty will be convulsive, or will not be at all'.

Strangely the closing photo of  the novel is that of Becque, another authoritarian military bust in a square of Paris,  like the one in the beginning of the book. It is as if the drab postwar reality had reasserted  its role, by closing the doors of Imagination. Hence beauty must be convulsive, to shake off  the smothering  of Repression.

That was a lesson learned by the time of the revolution of May '68, when the walls of hospices crumbled down, and imagination was again 'au pouvoir'.
Sexual liberation met social criticism, as it had done first in the Surrealist Movement.

It took more to liberate women, however.  That is why it will be interesting to dedicate another post in the future to Francesca Woodman, the 'Rimbaud of Photography', who used her own body to create surrealist photography in the 1970s.

Notes

 According to the legend Melusine can't be watched  in her private rooms possibly because of her animal  fish tail.  Her noble husband who peeps at her while she begets her three daughters. will be punished by them, and be prevented to reign.

I recently learned with surprise that Melusine was the begetter of the House of Lusignan, kings of Portugal, and of the two kings of Jerusalem, Amalric I and II, of whom I carry the name by mere chance. The  nick had attracted me, for no other reason that it was neither English, nor Latin.
  So it is again a strange coincidence that I was to cross the path of Melusine, such a strong protectress of imagination.
A Melusine  was also Queen of Cyprus, which she defended successfully against  the hordes of Saladdin's sons in the 1400s. She was reputed as a beautiful, cultivated woman.

In the end, despite the efforts at occultation of Breton, a family portrait of Nadja (Leona Delcourt) has finally been unearthed in 2009 by her biographer, HESTER ALBACH.

Here she is:

She was indeed a sweet child, with 'un regard de fougère' - and yet a 'force multiplier' for the Surrealist Movement.The finding of her portrait settles the debt of the first visual novel of Modernism.

The two girlfriends

Leica or Leica-like?

There is a new kid in town, and it is a Panasonic Leica lens, also known as the Leica 15/1.7 Summilux for the m4/3 mirrorless format, so a 30mm eq.

It will be the ideal companion of the GM1, that we reviewed lately, since it is a v. small lens. Although not a pancake it will be sold in kit soon with the GM1, said Panasonic.

At the moment there are no photo samples, but if we go by the resolution chart and compare it to the best, it will be outstanding:

It has excellent resolution to the very edges, contrast, and good bokeh.

It has also an aperture ring which is useful for reaching good DOF in the Street. It also has good metal construction, which should confer sturdiness, and neat aperture clcks.

Yes, but Purists will object,  still this is not a true Leica, since it is not made by Leica of Solms for the Full Frame 35mm Leica M. 

True. However on April 24th Leica will launch a new line of ILS. The Leica T  typ 701 will be a mirrorless camera made by Panasonic with 16 Mpx and an APS-C sensor, like other cameras on the market. However it will have a $ 3000 price tag., body only, two or three times as much as the best mirrorless. That's Leica quality, assuredly. 

Keep in mind that an M typ 240 model runs in the $ 6800 without a lens! 

Now Leica introduced the mirrorless small sensored Vario last year for $ 2500, but it was a fixed lens camera. Now it's taking a bolder step: mirrorless, small sensor and interchangeable lenses. Why?

IMHO the M models are too expensive and Leica has a much smaller market it deserves.

When Leica crossed the Atlantic to Canada in the 1950s a Leica M3 cost only $ 447, which corrected for inflation would be now $ 3630, according to Ken Rockwell.

Unfortunately it is nowhere near the price of the new M typ 240 which is $ 6800, body only.  Leica prices have spiraled out of control, because collectors are ready to pay them. 

However for photographers it's a different game. Sensors' technology today lasts only three years, so in theory Leica cameras, howsoever beautifully they are made, start to lag behind very quickly, no matter how tank-built they are.

So Leica's reasoning must have been: Let's make a Joint Venture with a mirrorless leader, let's cut prices and expand the market.

Good move, although I prefer to stay with my own Japanese version of a mirroless Leica small sensor, the Olympus E-M5, which is 3 times less expensive, and yet, according to Steve Huff, has the same resolution of an M type.

Being a m4/3, it can still mount a Leica 15/1.7 Summilux which costs $ 599, instead of the 3000 of a Solms' Leica lens. So Leica or Leica like? Today the Leica name is declined in various ways.

I forecast that performance of the new Leica T will be about the same of a m4/3, or a bit better, since Panasonic which builds it for Leica, has no better sensor or technology than Olympus.

Having an APS-C format it will have a larger sensor in the horizontal than m4/3, and therefore a small advantage. Also, build will be exceedingly good and Leica will make primes in Germany for it, while Pansonic will make the zooms in Japan. How's that for a marriage?

Great lenses are even more important on small sensors, so German Leica has another chance to excel, even with a small sensor.

I am sure the Leica T will look and feel gorgeous, and the joint venture is intriguing. So stay in touch for the Leica introduction on April 24th 2014.
Here is the first real image, courtesy Leica rumors: