There’s a joke I like to make:

“The reason I buy an expensive cameras, lenses, filters, tripods, and other gear is simple: so that when I’m out in the field and fail to capture a compelling image, I can lay the blame solely where it belongs… on mother nature!”

I have a shorter version that goes like this:

“Cameras suck!”

They’re both true.

I have a Canon 5D Mark II camera. I’ve owned this camera (or rather a version of it – I now have two) since December 2008. It’s by far the best camera I have ever owned. It’s arguably the best camera for landscape photography that Canon makes.

It’s also not good enough.

I use four criteria when evaluating any camera:

1. Physical design, durability, and reliability
2. Usability
3. Quality
4. Features

The first two categories are annoyances. They don’t prevent images from being captured, they just make the process more tedious. The last two categories do make images (of acceptable quality) impossible to capture, place limits on photographer creativity, and also happen to affect every single camera on Earth. As such they’re a larger topic and I’ll cover them in a separate post.

I started off whining about my beloved Canon 5D Mark II so let me start doing that again. Note that the reference for all of these complaints is natural landscape photography, which for me means natural light, on a tripod, using manual focus (so I will completely ignore any issues with external flashes, image stabilization, or autofocus).

Physical design, durability, and reliability

The Canon 5D Mark II is not (nor does it claim to be) a weather-sealed camera. It suffers from large temperature variances (which cause condensation to form inside the camera) and external moisture (from rain, snow, or waterfall spray). Both these sources of moisture break the electronics of the camera, sometimes permanently.

Temperature variances can be accommodated by placing a ziplocked bag around the camera (and lenses) so that they adjust to the ambient air temperature without condensation. Rain and spray can be mitigated as well (using plastic bags, rain covers, and other inconveniences), but this threat cannot be eliminated completely unless you choose to never photograph in the rain, snow, or near waterfalls.

This camera demands to be babied. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I shoot in heavy rain and waterfall spray all the time. I’ve had my camera go out of commission several times due to external moisture issues, this is even after covering it up when I wasn’t shooting. A camera body shouldn’t need to be as large and heavy as a 1D in order to be weather sealed. Given the number of professionals that shoot with this body the lack of weather sealing is a real issue. I know I treat my gear harder than just about everyone, but that’s because I’m more worried about capturing a compelling image than hoping my camera can survive a little temporary spray from a waterfall.

To be fair, I have used the camera in temperatures ranging from -15F to 122F and it had no problems performing in those extreme temperatures. But add a little water to the mix and watch out.

Usability

There is no shortage of usability issues with this camera, most of which could be fixed with software updates. Here are some that come to mind.

• Exposure bracketing. Currently you can bracket three exposures. 99% of the time that’s one exposure more than I need to capture sufficient dynamic range. This means that I either take a third wasteful exposure or that I use manual and adjust the shutter speed between each paired set of exposures. Dumb! Just let me bracket two exposures (better yet, let me bracket an arbitrary number of exposures). Also we should be able to bracket an arbitrary distance between exposures, not just up to two stops.
• Exposure compensation. Currently you can set the exposure compensation to +/- 2 stops (the Canon 1D series supports +/- 3 stops). There are times when I want to use exposure compensation more than two stops, so why not allow it? Why have a fixed number line at all? As I scroll to the left of -2, -3 should show up, as I keep scrolling, -4 should show up (and likewise when compensating in the opposite direction). Exposure arithmetic is fun, but not that fun.
• I realize that some people like that fat dial for switching between Av, Tv, M, and Bulb exposure modes. But it is extremely rare that I iterate between exposure modes on the same shoot (one of the main reasons I do this is when going from M to Bulb, and that’s because of another usability stupidity I’ll describe next). I do often switch from horizontal to vertical orientation, doing this will often cause the dial to flip from Av to Tv. It would be good if there was a custom function to disable this dial and set in the camera. I would actually be fine if the dial was gone altogether, but I’m likely in the minority.
• Limiting in camera exposures to 30 seconds. This really doesn’t make sense. I would like to be able to exposures of any length in the camera without requiring an intervalometer. Other intervalometer features should be supported in camera as well (including delays between the first exposure, delays between each exposure, duration of each exposure, and number of exposures). For any exposure that needs to be over 30 seconds, I’m again forced to do exposure arithmetic and need an intervalometer or remote switch.
• I should be able to use the LCD screen (and related functions) when the camera is in the middle of an exposure (this is most often needed when shooting a long series of exposures at night, it would be good to check that, say, the lens hasn’t fogged up or something else stupid has happened when you’re devoting 2 hours to a shot).
• Disable mirror lockup automatically when the camera is in the Bulb exposure mode, or at least have a custom function to enable that behavior. There’s nothing quite as awesome as waiting 4 minutes for an exposure to finish when you realize all you did was flip the mirror.
• The exposure mode should be viewable in the viewfinder, as should the focal length and focus distance.

Those are all things that annoy me about my specific camera, they’re all fairly minor and they’re all within the realms of current technology to fix (and could all be addressed with the Canon 5D Mark III).

There are other feature and quality issues that affect every camera, many of which aren’t going to be addressed within the next 15 years let alone the next camera release, and I’ll get to those in a future post.

Within photography circles there is a lot of talk about previsualization – the idea of forming a concept of an image before you even step into the field. Previsualization is almost universally lauded as a technique that you can use to improve your photography. Previsualization can involve all aspects of the finalized image, including concrete elements like composition, subject matter, light, and color to more subjective elements such as mood, drama, and atmosphere.

For natural landscape photography, previsualization isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Previsualization, alone, can actually make your photographs worse.

Photographing nature is a double-edged sword. You are at the mercy of forces which are largely unpredictable. With scouting, increased knowledge of your subject, knowledge of seasonal and current weather patterns, and experience you can increase predictability but only to a degree. Nature will often not behave as you would like, but it can also present you with amazing opportunities that you did not anticipate.

If you have a previsualized image in mind, you need to be able to abandon it with extreme prejudice if the conditions are not right. You should never settle for a subpar previsualized image when there is a good non previsualized image just around the corner. Flexibility and the ability to adapt are skills that are just as useful as any amount of previsualization.

This is not to say that previsualization is a bad technique. In fact I always start off with previsualization.

When I previsualize an image, I’m mostly concerned with subject matter and light. Usually I don’t worry about compositions, I can find those when I’m in the field. I have a long and growing list of images I’d like to try, some of them work in overcast light, some with no cloud cover, some with backlit or frontlit clouds, some with fog, some with the moon as a subject, some with the moon as the primary light source, some at night with no moon (moving stars, static stars), some with long shutter speeds, and some with narrow depth of field. The previsualized images vary in their degree of specificity, some are highly specific and may take years to fulfill (star trails over Upper Yosemite falls with a moonbow), and some are more general (mountain reflection with alpenglow and wildflowers along the shoreline).

Having a long and growing list of previsualized images, many of which work for different lighting conditions, is good way to mitigate risk if the light turns out differently than you anticipate. There are times however when nothing that you previsualized will work. Your anticipated subject may be in front of you but the epic light is ninety degrees away.

At this point you can either settle for a crappy version of your previsualized image or start looking for something else. That something else may have the same subject, but with a different mood or light, or may involve a completely different subject altogether.

There is risk involved with abandoning your previsualized image. You may very well end up with a mediocre image (or no image at all). Often the risk will pay off and you will come back with something that’s much better than your previsualized image. In some instances, your new non previsualized image may not be any good, but may give you ideas for a future image that would work with slightly modified conditions (many of the images in my previsualization list are actually the result of non-previsualized images that didn’t work out).

You are allowed to take credit for non previsualized images. Just because the seeds to germinate an image were sown by forces outside of your control and not your brain months before you pressed the shutter doesn’t invalidate the result. Some images are best created from the bottom up (by adapting to available conditions) rather than top down in your head.

The goal should always be to create great images. How you get there may be interesting but is ultimately irrelevant. The image will stand on its own or it won’t. By limiting the paths you take to creating a great image, you’re also limiting the number of great images that you take.

OK, that’s not true.

HDR doesn’t suck, tone-mapping sucks!

OK, that’s not exactly true either. Tone-mapping usually sucks. It’s rarely true that a technique always sucks outright. There’s a time and a place for everything, just like bagpipes have their place in music, tone-mapping has its place in realistic natural landscape photography. A very very small place.

HDR is a general concept: a means of achieving a greater dynamic range in your image than what your camera sensor can capture with a single exposure. Tone-mapping is one way to achieve this. Manual exposure blending is another. Today HDR and tone-mapping have become synonymous, but HDR can be accomplished with a wide variety of techniques. Tone-mapping just happens to be the worst one.

There are times when tone-mapping makes sense such as for surrealistic or pseudo-realistic landscapes, architecture/interior shots, or any shot where the traditional tone-mapping defects (halos, ghosting, softness, over-saturation) are actually desired. Those are typically not attributes one wants for realistic natural landscapes. My issue with tone-mapping for realistic natural landscapes isn’t just with the current implementations (e.g., Photomatix), which will likely improve over time and get rid of those defects, it’s the concept itself.

With tone-mapping you’re taking multiple pixel values and averaging them. This is almost never what you want. Taking an example with two exposures, you usually want pixel values from one or the other, not an average. What that average ends up being is dependent on whether you’re using a local or global-contrast tone-mapping algorithm, and whatever knobs and levers your tone-mapping program provides, but ultimately you’re deferring that choice to the algorithm. The only place it sometimes makes sense to have an average is where the two exposures meet.

Worse yet are those who do this when the dynamic range fits entirely within a single exposure. They become so used to cranking images through the tone-mapping grinder that they don’t realize when it’s time to turn off the machine. If your post-processing technique has no variance and could be replaced with an automated script, it either means all of your photos are the same or you’re not playing enough of a role in deciding how they should look after they come out of the camera. Neither is very artistic, is it? Instead of spending 5 minutes waiting for that HDR merge to finish, spend 5 minutes thinking exactly how you want each part of the final image to look and learn how to get it there.

Now some can use tone-mapping in a subtle way such that it’s hard to tell they used it at all. This is fine – and better than the way most people use it – but what’s the point? You can almost always achieve the same effects without tone-mapping and take less time to get there.

All of this is why I prefer to manually blend exposures. Well, I actually prefer not to have to blend exposures (and usually I don’t have to). In the cases when I do need to blend exposures, the overwhelming majority of the time I can get all the dynamic range I need with just two exposures. Using manual selections allows me to decide what exposure is used on each area of the image. It’s also no more difficult (after a time) and in fact can be done faster than tone-mapping which often takes forever even on a fast computer. Exposure blending can also be used for more than increasing dynamic range too (for instance, increasing depth of field by blending exposures with different focus points; blending two exposures with different ISOs, one to stop motion, the other to reduce noise; blending the same composition taken at two points in time, and many other ways).

So I prefer HDR if done by manual exposure blending, and almost never if done by tone-mapping. The tone-mapping algorithms will get better (and will likely use a combination of heuristics and pixel-choosing rather than pixel-averaging and fix the obvious defects of current implementations), but I haven’t seen anything yet that produces better results than manual exposure blends. I used to use Photomatix and tone-mapping, but found I could achieve better results without it, and haven’t used it in the last few years at all.

And while we’re on the subject, the notion that there has to be “detail” everywhere in a photo, and that all shadows are evil, needs to go away. It’s OK if part of the image falls off the left of the histogram, and, I know it’s heresy, but it’s also OK if some of the channels are blown out to the right of the histogram too, depending on the situation.

It’s also OK to use tone-mapping for natural realistic landscapes. Sometimes. But make sure you’re doing it for conscious artistic reasons and not just out of habit.