CKrueger wrote:
here is no correct workflow. I want to work a scene and produce a finished photo on the spot. You want a lump of clay to mold at your computer.
I pondered this “lump of clay” remark, and ended up unsure of your implication.
On one hand, while it isn’t as insulting as another forum members “throwing shit against the wall” analogy in another thread, it could be taken negatively — as in “you just have a lump of clay, not a photograph.”
On the other hand, a lump of clay is what many sculptures begin with, and the whole process of creating their art is about shaping that basic starting material into a something of value. That perspective on the relationship between shutter clicking and work in post echoes Ansel Adams’ famous comment about the negative being the score and the print being the performance – something that sees “lumps of clay” in a different light.
Jack Flesher wrote:
Well then maybe it’s time you consider it for cropping to your desired vision? Easier than lamenting about a manufacturer not giving you the exact option you want.
I use white balance while shooting to get a better idea what the photo will look like even if I do adjust it. I use the B&W lever on my Zf because it makes it easier to see how different tones will look, even if I play with the color channels later.
Crop in-camera helps with visualization, and it lets me shoot a much higher percentage of my photos SOOC, which lets me spend more time shooting and less time processing.
If Fuji is happy to have an X100V have a “digital zoom” dial that gives a “70mm” 6mpix image, they shouldn’t have a problem letting an XT5 shoot a 20mpix 65:24 image. It’s not like the RAWs are being affected, anyway.
Fuji has spoken to this in the 26mpix days and said “we’ll look into it when resolution increases.” At this point it’s market segmentation, ala General Motors, IMHO.
gdanmitchell wrote:
On the other hand, a lump of clay is what many sculptures begin with, and the whole process of creating their art is about shaping that basic starting material into a something of value. That perspective on the relationship between shutter clicking and work in post echoes Ansel Adams’ famous comment about the negative being the score and the print being the performance – something that sees “lumps of clay” in a different light.
Exactly that. If you’re shooting a “RAW capture” of a scene with the intent to turn it into your photographic vision afterwards, your RAW file is a ‘lump of clay’ that you’re molding into your finished product.
If you’re shooting SOOC, you’re spending that time up-front. Challenging or impossible in some cases (candid portraits or macro stacking), but not so difficult in most cases (ref: all SOOC photography in history, such as PJ photography where editing is expressly forbidden).
Both processes get to a photograph—they both make art. They just take slightly different paths.
Already there. My kit right now is a GFX50R with some old Rokkors, a 32-64 and EF 70-200/4. It’s great, but big and heavy, and GFX is awful for telephoto selection. I just picked up an S9 with an 18-40 and 28-200. It’s TINY, and it does the job, but I’m in the “learning to love” phase right now as I learn how Panasonic does things. Their ergonomics are a bit odd—Sony-like, if you will.
Your point about masochism is interesting.
You find fiddling with the camera while shooting to be painful, and would prefer to use more powerful tools later when there’s no time pressure to get the shot.
I find fiddling with Lightroom to be painful, and would prefer to make my photos SOOC and avoid the computer altogether.
Lol, just chuckling at the idea of us'oldies' holding you down and 'forcing our opinion' on you!
Of course we progress by the older, more experienced and thus wiser passing on the benefit of their reasoning to the youngsters. If they were more respectful of it humans might have progressed further than we have.
Walie wrote:
100% with you, no reason Fuji can't add the crop in with a firmware update.
Also, it takes no time at all for the usual oldie blowhards to barge in and force their opinion on everyone else.
I agree with you on the topic. But isn't the entire point of a forum to have people with a variety of experiences to provide their opinion on a topic? A thread doesn't need to end with mutual agreement all around. Or are you whipper snappers to sensitive to hear an opposing opinion?
I don't use in-camera cropping modes, but a 65x24 "x-pan style" crop could be kind of a fun tool to play with. It should be doable in 40 megapixels -- the resulting image would be, what, about 22 megapixels? That's more than enough resolution for almost anyone, notwithstanding the multitude of excellent upscaling software available today. I've been playing around with Topaz AI and it's quite impressive as far as noise reduction/sharpening/enlargement is concerned, perfect for that once-in-a-decade time when you're going to make a 50 inch long print for your wall
mdude85 wrote:
I don't use in-camera cropping modes, but a 65x24 "x-pan style" crop could be kind of a fun tool to play with. It should be doable in 40 megapixels -- the resulting image would be, what, about 22 megapixels? That's more than enough resolution for almost anyone, notwithstanding the multitude of excellent upscaling software available today.
Since I can make a fine 20” x 30” print from a Fujifilm x-trans original, this would still make a fine 16:9 print that is 30” wide. That’s bigger than most people will even make. Heck, you can even push farther than that in most cases.
- - -
SGinNorcal wrote:
… isn't the entire point of a forum to have people with a variety of experiences to provide their opinion on a topic?
Ya think?
Anyone who thinks a post is wrong is free to offer a persuasive counter-argument. (Hint: Bleating insults won’t persuade anyone.)
No one is “forcing” anyone to read posts that might offend their gentle sensibilities. Heck, there’s even a “hide me” link that a protect the tender feelings of young blowhards from posts by the scary oldie blowhards!
80” wide in my LR, 45” in dining, 60” in guest bed…
mdude85 wrote:
I don't use in-camera cropping modes, but a 65x24 "x-pan style" crop could be kind of a fun tool to play with. It should be doable in 40 megapixels -- the resulting image would be, what, about 22 megapixels? That's more than enough resolution for almost anyone, notwithstanding the multitude of excellent upscaling software available today. I've been playing around with Topaz AI and it's quite impressive as far as noise reduction/sharpening/enlargement is concerned, perfect for that once-in-a-decade time when you're going to make a 50 inch long print for your wall
Clearly there are two distinct working styles as re formats; get it in-camera vs deal with it in post.
To my thinking, the "get it in cam" crowd is paralleling a film work ethos. Back then we did that since it was what our medium was limited to for any non-custom wet lab output. If I wanted a square crop off my 645 negative, I had to order it to the size I wanted and trim it later, or have a custom lab print it out appropriately for me. I did not have my own wet darkroom. Contrary to this was original 6x6 format, which was designed to be cropped in post to 8x10 for traditional album purposes. There were both landscape and portrait sets of grid hash-marks on the focus screens for virtually every waist-level camera including Hasselblad, to make this easily accomplished since you could not turn the camera sideways easily. Plus the users of those cams generally did do their own wet darkroom work, where now crops regularly occurred, primarily because they didn't have zoom lenses
Nowadays with digital--and again to my thinking--it seems a less viable workflow. I find it ridiculously easy to use Fuji's 4x6 finder grid-lines to compose a normal 2:3 rectangle, a 3:1 full-width pano or a full height square of the same basic scene on the fly, especially so when a zoom is on the camera. Heck, I occasionally even visualize a 4:5 frame simply by lopping off one of the lines at the sides, top or bottom depending on how my cam is oriented at capture. Granted, this does require that I run the specific image through at least a simple editing program to get that crop after the fact. But for me, that's WAY less work than trying to throw a lever for every different format I want to capture in cam, especially considering I can literally compose all of the above in rapid succession without ever taking my eye from the finder.
Jack Flesher wrote:
Clearly there are two distinct working styles as re formats; get it in-camera vs deal with it in post.
To my thinking, the "get it in cam" crowd is paralleling a film work ethos. Back then we did that since it was what our medium was limited to for any non-custom wet lab output. If I wanted a square crop off my 645 negative, I had to order it to the size I wanted and trim it later, or have a custom lab print it out appropriately for me. I did not have my own wet darkroom. Contrary to this was original 6x6 format, which was designed to be cropped in post to 8x10 for traditional album purposes. There were both landscape and portrait sets of grid hash-marks on the focus screens for virtually every waist-level camera including Hasselblad, to make this easily accomplished since you could not turn the camera sideways easily. Plus the users of those cams generally did do their own wet darkroom work, where now crops regularly occurred, primarily because they didn't have zoom lenses
Nowadays with digital--and again to my thinking--it seems a less viable workflow. I find it ridiculously easy to use Fuji's 4x6 finder grid-lines to compose a normal 2:3 rectangle, a 3:1 full-width pano or a full height square of the same basic scene on the fly, especially so when a zoom is on the camera. Heck, I occasionally even visualize a 4:5 frame simply by lopping off one of the lines at the sides, top or bottom depending on how my cam is oriented at capture. Granted, this does require that I run the specific image through at least a simple editing program to get that crop after the fact. But for me, that's WAY less work than trying to throw a lever for every different format I want to capture in cam, especially considering I can literally compose all of the above in rapid succession without ever taking my eye from the finder.
That’s more or less my take, too. Back in the film days we did tend to be more fixed in our thinking about finalizing the crop in camera, especially those of us who shot a lot of 35mm slide stock. (We also had to rely more on things like GND filters, color correction filters, fill light, and such.)
Digital has freed us from that. (Though don’t forget that a lot of cropping did go on in the film era, too. Hunt up some marked p contact sheets by film-era photographers sometime and you’ll see that they did not eschew cropping.)
One friend who got his start in the world of Ansel Adams near the end of Ansel’s life was a longtime LF (4x5) film photographer. He eventually moved entirely to a digital workflow. These days he will talk about _intentionally_ including a bit more in the frame than he thinks he’ll need, and definitely more than he might have included when shooting 4x5, since that gives him a bit more flexibility in post to refine the composition.
Like you, I find it pretty easy to pre-visualize a range of potential aspect ratios in the viewfinder of my digital camera. (My default is 4:3, I also like 16:9, and I occasionally use 3:2 or 1:1.) And if I “shoot large” just a bit, I have really good control over the final composition in post.
One more thing. Sometimes it seems like there’s a bit of pseudo-macho posturing about not cropping after the exposure, as if there is some shame in cropping. ;-)
Jack Flesher wrote:
Clearly there are two distinct working styles as re formats; get it in-camera vs deal with it in post.
To my thinking, the "get it in cam" crowd is paralleling a film work ethos. Back then we did that since it was what our medium was limited to for any non-custom wet lab output. If I wanted a square crop off my 645 negative, I had to order it to the size I wanted and trim it later, or have a custom lab print it out appropriately for me. I did not have my own wet darkroom. Contrary to this was original 6x6 format, which was designed to be cropped in post to 8x10 for traditional album purposes. There were both landscape and portrait sets of grid hash-marks on the focus screens for virtually every waist-level camera including Hasselblad, to make this easily accomplished since you could not turn the camera sideways easily. Plus the users of those cams generally did do their own wet darkroom work, where now crops regularly occurred, primarily because they didn't have zoom lenses
Nowadays with digital--and again to my thinking--it seems a less viable workflow. I find it ridiculously easy to use Fuji's 4x6 finder grid-lines to compose a normal 2:3 rectangle, a 3:1 full-width pano or a full height square of the same basic scene on the fly, especially so when a zoom is on the camera. Heck, I occasionally even visualize a 4:5 frame simply by lopping off one of the lines at the sides, top or bottom depending on how my cam is oriented at capture. Granted, this does require that I run the specific image through at least a simple editing program to get that crop after the fact. But for me, that's WAY less work than trying to throw a lever for every different format I want to capture in cam, especially considering I can literally compose all of the above in rapid succession without ever taking my eye from the finder.
I do respect YMMV... ...Show more →
Film methodology varied, if you shot transparency film everything regarding exposure etc had to be done in camera, using neg you had more freedom. Although nothing like the possibilities that modern digital post processing allows. Ironically cropping had to be done afterwards whichever you used, and I had a selection of foil masks I could overlay on a 35mm transparency.
Obviously a negative is no use straight out of camera, and frankly if you want the very best IQ neither is a digital file, expose so you don't lose highlight detail and the SOOC image will look dark but shadows can be lightened wonderfully in post processing, giving more detail in the image as a whole. That's practical knowledge of how to get the best out of your recording media. IMHO that should be the predominate thought in all use of process to record image, not convenience or 'plilospphy'.
Edit: of course X pan was the film format you DID choose crop before exposure, no point in using it if you didn't want panorama. But it's advantage was that it gave you the quality gains for such things of large format without the disadvantages of cumbersome 5x4 cameras. I don't see the parallel with a small light camera like Xt series, the gfx fits the mould much better if you really want to limit yourself.
gyoung143 wrote:
Obviously a negative is no use straight out of camera, and frankly if you want the very best IQ neither is a digital file, expose so you don't lose highlight detail and the SOOC image will look dark but shadows can be lightened wonderfully in post processing, giving more detail in the image as a whole. That's practical knowledge of how to get the best out of your recording media. IMHO that should be the predominate thought in all use of process to record image, not convenience or 'plilospphy'.
Quite right. If anyone thinks that “straight out of camera” has a precedent in film photography, that’s only the case if a) they limit their thinking to slide film (and eschewed the use of filters) or b) regarded default drug store processing as SOOC.
In the film era photographers who wanted the best results thought more about what image information was in the negative and could be used in darkroom post. The most careful did all kinds of stuff to optimize the capture for post processing: modifying exposure based on scene dynamic range and what tones were predominant in the scene, pre-exposing film, using filters, and more. (For a remarkable example, find an online copy of the contact print of Ansel Adam’s’ original negative for “Moonrise, Hernandez.” I think you might see one on this page if you scroll down to the images section.)
Those shooting negative film had one other potential advantage over today’s digital capture. At the bright end of the luminosity spectrum, film’s performance “rolled off,” thus diminishing the likelihood of blown highlights. You could use a “hotter” exposure without risking the highlights or other bright areas as much. Digital doesn’t handle highlights the same way and, as we all know, digital reaches and blows right past its limit for recording highlights quite abruptly. So in many cases the “right”exposure is to “underexpose” from the SOOC perspective. The fact that digital cameras have such wide dynamic range (wider than can be directly reproduced on screens or print) makes protecting the highlights the focus, even if that makes the SOOC image look dark — because the higher DR of today’s cameras lets us recover that shadow detail with excellent quality.
I think there are two thoughts behind the SOOC approach.
One is that it is just easier than dealing with post processing. I get it, not everyone likes to post-process (even using the automatic default settings that often work pretty well), and they’ll settle for a less that optimum technical result that they still like a lot.
Another is an incorrect notion that today we’re taking shortcuts and in the old days “real photographers got it right in camera.” That’s a bit of a perversion of what “getting it right in camera” actually meant. In the hands of excellent photographers it did not mean “no post processing.” It meant capturing the best image data for making the best final output print.
gdanmitchell wrote:
One more thing. Sometimes it seems like there’s a bit of pseudo-macho posturing about not cropping after the exposure, as if there is some shame in cropping. ;-)
Nah, no more than there’s a “better specs are better art” aspect to putting yourself through a hell of giant files, ETTR, obnoxious color spaces, and focus stacking to squeeze every last lp/mm and bit of dynamic range from a RAW file.
To my part, I’ve spent years staring at files in Lightroom pulling sliders back and forth, and I find it unfulfilling. I am happiest when I’m shooting. My goal is to maximize time shooting, and minimize time processing. Getting it right in-camera supports this goal.
I’m just fortunate to be shooting in a time where this workflow is possible while producing pleasing photos. I can certainly extract more with PP work, but why bother if it’s not necessary?
Does anyone truly enjoy PP work? Or do people just enjoy the results?
CKrueger wrote:
I can certainly extract more with PP work, but why bother if it’s not necessary?
Does anyone truly enjoy PP work? Or do people just enjoy the results?
Each to his or her own, but I do it because I believe that the final result is more powerful and expressive.
Many things in photography are not objectively “enjoyable”their own. on I don’t “enjoy” carrying a big tripod and a pack full of lenses. I don’t enjoy getting up three hours before dawn. I don’t enjoy days when I search for images don’t find a great one.
But that’s part of the work, in my view. And in the end, the rewards are worth it.
CKrueger wrote:
Nah, no more than there’s a “better specs are better art” aspect to putting yourself through a hell of giant files, ETTR, obnoxious color spaces, and focus stacking to squeeze every last lp/mm and bit of dynamic range from a RAW file.
To my part, I’ve spent years staring at files in Lightroom pulling sliders back and forth, and I find it unfulfilling. I am happiest when I’m shooting. My goal is to maximize time shooting, and minimize time processing. Getting it right in-camera supports this goal.
I’m just fortunate to be shooting in a time where this workflow is possible while producing pleasing photos. I can certainly extract more with PP work, but why bother if it’s not necessary?
Does anyone truly enjoy PP work? Or do people just enjoy the results?...Show more →
I for one not only enjoy raw processing, but I look forward to it! Seeing the images I visualized when I pressed the shutter all in order and any one I click on pops up big and bright in the center of my monitor, and then with just a few drags here and pushes there it pops and comes into an almost more pure and satisfying life than when I captured it. And the second benefit is getting to relive that trip or excursion all over again, whether I took it 2 hours ago, 10 days ago or a couple years ago. Oh, and a third thing: raw processors continually improve and gain features that can breathe new and even different life into images since I last processed them, all while reliving the experience yet again.
But that’s me.
A lot of my art, and joy from photography, happens at the computer.
CKrueger wrote:
Nah, no more than there’s a “better specs are better art” aspect to putting yourself through a hell of giant files, ETTR, obnoxious color spaces, and focus stacking to squeeze every last lp/mm and bit of dynamic range from a RAW file.
To my part, I’ve spent years staring at files in Lightroom pulling sliders back and forth, and I find it unfulfilling. I am happiest when I’m shooting. My goal is to maximize time shooting, and minimize time processing. Getting it right in-camera supports this goal.
I’m just fortunate to be shooting in a time where this workflow is possible while producing pleasing photos. I can certainly extract more with PP work, but why bother if it’s not necessary?
Does anyone truly enjoy PP work? Or do people just enjoy the results?...Show more →
For me it's part of the desire ti get the best I can out of every shot, if I look at an image on my monitor, or on a decent size print and there is something that could be improved I am less pleased with it. If it's 'artistic' it will have to wait fir next time, if it's technical then I won't rest till I've sorted it if I am able to, or I have failed to do my best.
Professionally clients expected it, and for my own work I liked to use 35mm and enjoyed the challenge of getting the best out of that, indistinguishable if possible from larger formats , which took careful choice of materials and attention to detail in processing.
I sit with Lightroom in front of me and marvel at what I can do with the 'raw' material so easily with those sliders. I took to it early on with scanned slides and Photoshop, for prints initially then to do slide shows as soon as we had HD tv. Decades of putting up with what we got out of camera with film, even with the very limited work you could do with negatives if you printed them yourself, a very time consuming process in colour.
So yes I enjoy it, but done quickly with the basic controls, no fiddling for hours with layers etc etc. If you don't grasp that opportunity you are losing one of the major advantages of digital workflow, and not doing you or your work justice. And while you are outwith the camera you could spend the same time taking more great photos, or exploring the visual aspects of the subject instead of fiddling with menus and function buttons. Back to basics, manual control of shutter and aperture, and focus too if its relevant, you can have auto iso as it doesn't affect IQ much unless you get to silly figures, with modern sensors anything from base to 640 iso will be indistinguishable. You don't need to take the camera away from your eye to change these important parameters, concentrate on the picture in the viewfinder.
If you're practiced, doing in depth post processing can be relatively fast. My images that have taken the most post probably took 30 minutes total, a small price to pay for huge improvements. The slowest part is always removing kruft from the scene, which is admittedly faster now with generative AI.
