An issue of terminology.

Here’s a fun fact- Canon’s name is derived from the Buddhist figure Kwannon, a thousand armed lady of mercy, and the original prototypes were called Kwanon Cameras. They changed the name to Canon soon afterwards, and probably tossed out the mercy alongside it, because Canons are not exactly known for their ergonomics.

A while ago after years of shooting Canon equipment, I sold everything I had and went Nikon. Canon, why you insist on making bodies that are so eyeglass-wearer unfriendly I’ll never know. Recently though I thought a compact p&s body would be nice for portability’s sake though and great for Cherise to carry around, and I guess ol’ lady mercy decided she wouldn’t lose me so easily.

The Canon S90 is small- pocket size even, as long as you aren’t carrying much else in said pocket. They’ve also taken a brilliant engineering decision, and gone conservative with the megapixels (around 10), which leads to some solid low light performance for a point and shoot.

Darn clean at 800 ISO. Exterminates the competition. Sharp macro mode too.

What’s really cool about this camera though is a slight (very slight) analog touch- it has a rotating dial around the lens with different functions depending on the mode you’re using- in Aperture priority mode the dial sets the aperture just like on an old manual film camera, which is pretty awesome.

The lens is crazy sharp for a point and shoot as well, especially shooting in my preferred style- close and wide. Speaking of which, I can’t say what the maximum zoom is on this camera, because I keep it pretty much stuck on 28mm, the widest setting. This is also where you get the f2.0 aperture, making low light shooting great. That’s even better than the G series Canons, and has the same sensor to boot.

Good for the foodies. Valhalla Table fries.

Oh, and it does video too. Not HD, but reasonably nice VGA, and it’s a ton of fun. It’s convinced me that my next DSLR definitely needs to have video to play around with. This is perhaps not the S90’s video at its best, but it’s kind of hilarious. Cherise gives God of War a try for the first time- hardest difficulty. I think she did all right. This camera is awfully good at grabbing tidbits like this.

Bottle caps from high grade glass bottled Mexican Coke

There’s more of that posed versus candid again.  I shot these outside of Tere’s on Melrose at this semi-hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called Tere’s.  It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but the food is delicious.  Egg fried, queso fresco stuffed chile relleno burrito with rice, beans, sour cream and guac?  Yes please.  And check out the size of those cokes.  This isn’t the American HFCS containing coke either.  This is the lovely sugar-rich south of the border cousin, the Mexican Coke.  Sure, you can pick them up at Costco in So Cal, but this one is like twice the size!

As for the photos themselves, they were shot in the shade.  Harsh light is rarely photograph friendly, and this goes double for black and white.  You want to get nice tonality and gradations to capture the spectrum of greys between black and white.  This can be done if you find a good shady spot.  You’ll get much softer lighting, and a much more pleasing result to look at.  With a strobe you can try to fill in detail in harsh light by firing a low powered flash, but natural light is such a great thing.

Late afternoon, down on Melrose.  I love the dynamic here.  It’s just a mannequin in the window, but with Cherise chilling below it, it gains sudden life.  They look like a couple of hoodlums too cool for where they are, but holding onto the spot anyway, a pair you don’t want to fuck with, casually looking off in different directions like they own the place.  This is why I like shooting people.  Alone, the mannequin might have been a kind of interesting if rather stiff shot, but get the right person in there and you gain a whole new energy.

That made in U.S.A. sign is pretty sweet too.

I’m finding myself shooting a lot of verticals with the 50mm.  It lends itself so well to portraits that it kind of comes naturally with that lens.  I’ve got to work on including more horizontals in the mix though.

Beguiling boots

The horizontals also enlarge way better on this site.

Diafine, though, is weird.  It’s a two part solution that is ISO insensitive, temperature insensitive, and apparently lasts forever.  You can theoretically develop a roll of 100 speed film and a roll of 1600 speed film in the same tank, and not have to worry about different development times.  This is amazing.

Diafine plus Fuji Acros film is a particularly nice combination.  I’ll have a few more scans soon, but here’s one.

It gets a nice warm tone also that’s usually lacking in digital b&w, unless the shooter consciously adds it in via toning in photoshop.  I’ll be shooting more of this for sure.

Rooftop shenanigans

We roasted on the way over.  (90 degrees.  Car has no air conditioning.  $1000 to fix.  No thank you sir.)  Once we got there, I found myself surrounded by scantily clad women.  The hottest thing of all though was- you guessed it- the dynamic range I was able to get out of my Nikon.

You can see here that I shot right into the sun, but was still able to get a nice amount of detail in the shadows.  Shooting RAW allows you to pull off shots like this- details in shadows and extremely bright areas can by pulled out in areas usually inaccessible if you’re shooting plain old jpegs.  It takes more processing time, but is worth the extra effort.

That said, I didn’t let digital have all the fun.

Love and peace

Up on the roof

I shot this on the Leica MP rangefinder with a 50mm Summilux ASPH lens, the most brilliantly over-engineered 50mm lens around.  50mm is typically a standard focal length, and is an excellent focal length to learn on.  Henri Cartier-Bresson shot on 50mm almost exclusively.  Keeping all this in mind, I can’t figure out why it’s one of the most glossed over focal lengths around.  Canon, Nikon, Sigma, etc.- none of these companies make a completely solid 50mm 1.4 lens.  Leica’s is great, but it costs an arm and a leg, and I was lucky to find an extremely well priced used one.

For a couple of years, all I had was a Canon AE-1 and 50mm 1.8.  If you’ve got a new SLR/DSLR, I strongly recommend picking up a 50mm equivalent.  If you’re lucky enough to have a full frame camera, a 50mm will do.  More likely than not, you’ve got a crop factor to deal with, in which case a 35mm lens usually does the trick.

By the way, the film I had in the Leica was Fuji Astia slide film.  Incredible stuff.  Not to say the digital didn’t perform admirably.

Nice makeup

Nice hair

I’m not particularly a fan of artificial lighting, so everything was was shot with available light.  At the beginning of the day, the daylight was quite harsh, and shooting indoors with window light or shooting in the shade was in order.  (It was too bloody hot outside anyway.)

In times like these, shots of people waiting around make for comically absurd photojournalism shots.

It's like a Fellini film

The waiting wound up being worth it.  The pay off is the toward the end of the day, when the light got golden and beautiful.

Parasol day dreaming

Posed-

Annnnnd candid-

The only real trick to candid photos is time and familiarity.  Once you’ve stuck around long enough and taken enough photos, people get tired of posing.  I’m not really a fan of ’stolen’ shots, and hate to shoot without people’s permission- it’s far too nerve-wracking to get good shots, and you wind up relying more on luck.  Patience is the only requirement.  This works too when you’re in unfamiliar situations, surrounded by people you don’t know.  If they start to accept that you’re there and just part of the background, you’ll be able to get candid shots.

In any case, I think the young lady here is going to kill me.