Camera Review – Jared Platt

March 4, 2015

Photographing with the Panasonic GH4

I had the opportunity to shoot a wedding in Ripe, England with the Panasonic GH4. This camera is a compact, light-weight camera with lenses so small you can fit them in the pocket of your jacket. I have always carried around a little Canon point and shoot that takes RAW images, but no point and shoot can match the experience of a SLR style, through the lens viewfinder experience. So the GH4 made for the perfect traveling companion. I kept it with me throughout the wedding, and as I traveled throughout the country before and after the job. While I shot, I has little experiments in mind, like latitude experiments and macro experiments, low light and motion experiments. I have posted the results here in the blog. The incredible thing about this little camera is that it also captures 4k video as well, but we will stick with the still photos for this post.

In this image of the pipe organ in St. John the Baptist church, where the couple was married, I was able to truly test the Panasonic GH4’s exposure latitude capabilities. The church was quite dark inside and yet, I was able to capture full detail inside and outside. I fully expected that I would not be able to maintain any detail in the exterior exposure, but I was pleasantly surprised by the latitude on this little camera.

The wedding couple took a walk along the southern coast of England before the wedding. Carrying a heavy SLR and its heavier lenses on a long walk is not all that much fun. In fact carting equipment around makes me wonder why I chose to be a photographer in the first place. But with a camera as small and light as the GH4 and its sharp little lenses that weigh almost nothing and fit almost anywhere, I was carrying three lenses and camera and I hardly knew I had anything with me. At times I had to double check to make sure I had a camera. Typically a light, compact camera means poor photos, but the GH4 breaks that rule.

It was a leisurely stroll and yes, we stopped to admire the flowers and I tested my need for macro! The GH4 was perfect, in fact, the digital view finder allowed me to see exactly what my depth of field looked like while taking the shot. That something that a traditional SLR won’t do for you.

The white cliffs made for a stunning coastline. Here again, I was battling a latitude challenge with the bright sun peeking through the clouds, but the GH4 held the detail in the brightest spots of the clouds and even in the shimmer on the water behind the couple walking near the cliff.

Silence at a wedding is golden, especially in an old stone church. The GH4 has a completely silent mode that makes me as a photographer invisible to everyone at the wedding and since my greatest wish is to be invisible at a wedding, this was a perfect camera for the job. While I was shooting the wedding with both my Canon and the GH4, I found myself choosing the GH4 for all of the close shots as I crept down the isle. They may have seen me there, but I can guarantee you, no one heard me.

Not only could the GH4 give me great back and white images from the church, but it provided excellent color in a dark church. Not only could the GH4 give me great back and white images from the church, but it provided excellent color in a dark church. Smaller chips often yield more noise, so I tested the GH4 for noise and found that the color noise was extremely low and the grain structure feels ver natural. I am a sucker for a beautiful grain structure. I know… its nerdy.

This little angel was my subject for a few days. The grooms niece and I chased each other around the grounds of the church for a little while as the bride and groom chatted with heir guests. The articulating screen on the camera allowed me to follow her around at a long angle and grab shots of her as we ran. Ordinarily, I would be taking shots like this completely blind, wasting 20 shots to get one that was in focus and composed correctly. But because I could see her in the articulating screen at all times and the GH4’s auto focus was tracking her face, I never missed a shot. It’s always nice to have a lot of images to choose from.

Like many churches in England, the cemetery surrounds the church, so when the little girls play on the church grounds, they play amid the tombstones of their ancestors. The groom’s Godfather rests in this cemetery. Was was fascinated by the casual and playful attitude of the children amongst the stones. They see them as just that, stones. I couldn’t present this image in color. It needed to be a black and white. It just deserved it. The GH4 makes exquisite black and white images from its RAW files.

After the wedding, I took a drive to Stratford Upon Avon to catch a little Shakespeare. Before the show, I took in the character of the old english buildings. It handled the latitude and the saturation issues on the chimneys very well.

After the show, I tested the higher ISO settings on the GH4 and at 3200 ISO, the camera produces a very nice grain structure with low color noise. I was completely happy with its extremely low light capabilities. I couldn’t have asked for a better image in that light.

My total experience with the Panasonic GH4 was wonderful. It’s small and lightweight body and lenses make it the perfect camera for hiking, and traveling. The quality is quite good and when compared to any small sensor camera, is absolutely fantastic. One could use the camera as their only camera and carry four times the lenses in half the space. Using it in conjunction with my smart phone was helpful as well. Rather than taking decent photos on my iPhone to post on social media, I was able to take superior images on the GH4 and send them to my phone for social media purposes.

The only draw back on the camera is the increase in depth of field due to the chip size and lens lengths. But that is a standard issue with micro four-thirds cameras. For those of us who like to live on the edge of focus, it feels like a limitation. But you get used to the feeling of having all your photos in focus and after a while, it stops feeling like a limitation and starts feeling like a blessing.

Panasonic is making exciting things for photo enthusiasts and pros alike. My good friend and photographer, Isaac Bailey, shoots with a Panasonic micro four-thirds camera and here’s what he has to say about it:

“I love my Panasonic mirrorless camera. It has opened a new realm of fun in personal photography for me. Using the control I get from my big DSLR with tiny size and weight, I can really go anywhere with this baby and make great shots” -Isaac Bailey Photographer Phoenix

Traveling with a camera is the only thing I know. I have never been able to go anywhere without needing a camera with me, but there is always a battle between high quality and compact size. The micro four-thirds market has opened up a new world of possibilities for compact PLUS quality and Panasonic is leading the charge. Heavy cameras may be a thing of the past in the not too distant future. Hurray for that!

March 22, 2010

Shhhh… Don’t Wake the Baby…

In case you didn’t know, we received a new baby into our family last week. She is a beautiful and healthy little girl. Both mother and daughter are doing well. We have been very blessed. She is already sleeping through most of the night and has been a joy to us. I am thrilled to have her join our little family.

Infant Portraits, Chandler Arizona

Infant birth documentary photographs at hospital in Scottsdale,

A little Tech Talk:

During an infant portrait, it is important to keep in mind that flashes and loud camera equipment can interfere with the portrait session itself. The equipment matters to the point that it does not interfere with the portrait session.

I shot all of these infant portraits with the Canon 1D Mark IV, a pro level camera, that offers an incredible 12800 ISO, which allows for very low light photography. This ability was absolutely invaluable as I photographed our new little baby. I hate using a flash during an infant portrait session and especially during the documentation process at the hospital. It is just a bad idea to use a flash. So shooting at a high ISO with a fast lens is the right way to photograph an infant.

In addition to the high ISO, one other invaluable option on the new Mark IV is the silent shutter mode. Those who shoot with smaller, consumer or pro-summer cameras will find that the sound of the shutter is not too loud to begin with, still perhaps enough to wake the baby, but not too abrasive. However, pro camera bodies have much more durable shutters and they make a lot more noise when they fire. This is not good for weddings or infant portraits. If you want the baby to continue sleeping, you can’t start snapping a loud shutter a few feet from her face. And even when she’s awake, that shutter can startle her. But the ever so quiet “silent” mode on the Mark IV work nicely. It softens the noise made by the shutter movement by slowing down the movement of the shutter and by separating out the two movements of the shutter. Pushing the shutter release button trips the shutter to expose the chip, but the shutter reset movement only occurs after you release the shutter release button. It is a fairly ingenious system and helps to mitigate the noise coming from the camera.

While the baby was sleeping, I put the camera in Silent mode and when I was ready for her to wake up, I took it out of Silent mode and sure enough, she started to stir as a result of the sharp noise from the shutter on the camera. So the noisy shutter turned out to be useful as well.

If you have shot with the 1D Mark III, you will have used this feature as well. They seem to have improved it in this model. It feels even quieter. Still not anything like a leica and the 50D and other pro-summer models are just as quiet in normal mode as the 1D M IV is in silent mode, but their shutters are not nearly as durable.

February 11, 2010

Rain and Gale Force Winds: A great day for a photo shoot.

It was a rainy day with strong winds all day and a bit cold for Phoenix, AZ in January, but we altered our planned photo shoot a little in the concept and went out shooting. Piano rock star, Kevin Burdick, was the subject. We decided to take the umbrellas, but when we got to our location, we had a break in the clouds, but not the wind. So we went with the umbrellas anyway. Kevin get very tired trying to hold the umbrellas up against the wind, it really was quite strong.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

The photos were shot with the Canon 1D Mark IV.

Now on to some tips and tricks:

First, the sun is off to the right of the photo and slightly behind Kevin. Which means that if we took the photo without additional lights, he would be too dark. Remember, we are competing with some bright clouds in the background, so we have to control the ambient exposure to match. We could use a big reflector, or we could use a flash. It was just Kevin and myself, no assistant, so we chose a flash unit. A Canon 580EX II is mounted on a pole about 12 feet off to my right to avoid the on camera flash flattening effect. Because it is off camera, I had to connect it via wireless slave. I am using the pocket wizard TT1 and TT5 system. This allows the camera to communicate with the flash via radio signal, but unlike typical radio slave systems, that only transmit the fire signal, the TT1 / TT5 system allows the camera to communicate metering solutions etc to the flash for TTL auto exposures. The TT1/TT5 system also allows me to sync my flash at incredibly high shutter speeds via radio slave, and in order to get the ambient exposure right with the correct depth of field, I need to expose the image at f 5.0 at between 1/1600 and 1/2000 of a second. A typical flash slave system will only allow syncing with a flash at 1/250 of a second. So the Pocket Wizard TT1 / TT5 system is critical to the success of this photograph. When I need the light, but also need the shutter speed, I don’t have to compromise.

The flash is set to provide a bust of light which is about one and a half stops lower than the brightness of the sun. This allows the sun to remain the dominant light source. You can see that the sun is still creating its signature crest of light on the far right side of Kevin’s face, but it is not blown out. The near side of his face, though lit well, is still the shadow side. This combination of lights provides a good contour to his face. I am getting a studio lit look out on location with three lights.

“Three lights,” you ask, “but you have just mentioned the two?”

Light One: The sun. This is the strongest light on the set. It is the light coming from the side and slightly behind, giving me that crest of light on his face and hands, and acting as a hair light. It is also providing the nice bright crests on the clouds and the mountains.

Light Two: The Canon Flash. This is a direct light on Kevin’s face which is filling in the shadow not to match, but fall short of the power of the sun (light one). This gives us a great vivid exposure on Kevin’s face, without flattening the contours of the face because it is not on camera, but off camera and coming at the subject from the same side of the frame as the sun, so direction of the shadows still make sense.

Light Three: God’s Soft Box, the Northern Sky. The northern sky (because in North America, the sun is always in the southern sky) is a giant soft reflector of the sun’s light. That bounced light from the northern sky is filling in all the deep shadows on my subject and on the mountains and the clouds. Without the reflection of the norther sky, the shadows in the photo would be very dark. Now, I cannot position God’s soft box on a moment by moment basis, it is in a fixed position, but there are some things I can do. I can choose the time of day to shoot, so that either the northwest or the northeast sky is my active soft box and I can position my subject such that he faces the northern sky, and I can choose the proper location for shooting the photograph so that my subject can face away from the sun, toward the northern sky.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

I always know where the sun is and is going to be. My iPhone, though not a good phone, has a great sun position app which tells me the exact position of the sun at any hour of any day well into the future. So, when I scout a location, I know where the sun will be a 3 PM on Jan 12, 2030 and can plan my photo shoot accordingly. I need to know this, because I want to get the best shot with the least amount of equipment possible.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

The green toned photo above is what happens when the sun changes brightness on you in the middle of the shoot. The original shot is a bit off in exposure, but with some fancy photoshop work using two different develops of the same RAW file, I was able to pull of a very cool shot and and control exactly how dark I wanted the background and the subject. I love the drama of the image.

Note: Although the rest of these photographs have undergone a major amount of burning and dodging they have not been “retouched much at all. I am not all that interested in major retouching, but burning and dodging, which I did very skillfully in the darkroom, is still a very key part of the beauty of my images. Although now, I have such precise control offer my burns that almost anything is possible. I often will slim down a subject or remove a belly with only burning and dodging. I will post my article on Burning and Dodging here on the blog in the near future. It ran in Professional Photographer Magazine in January 2010. If you have a copy, take a look.

_______

This next set of photos, we moved the position of the light from my right side to my left. Some people on my facebook posts have said it looks almost like he is being photographed against a backdrop, because he is popping out of the photo so much. This is what happens when you move your second light to a less natural position. Instead of the light coming from the same side as the sun’s light, it is coming from the other side, which subtly sets Kevin at odds with the shadows in the background. Ergo, he jumps out of the photo because he is no longer blending in to the light. Your mind sees him as different than the photo, even if your consciousness can not figure out why. Study the photo carefully and see the shadows on Kevin, then the shadows on the mountains and clouds.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

Anytime you want something to pop out of your photo, you have to make it different than everything else in the photo. Most of the time, people use a bight color to do this. More subtle is using a different texture of perhaps a different pattern, etc. Notice, he is also wearing a tomato shirt. That helps him stand out in every photo. But the lighting is the real key to creating that extreme difference that is still subtle enough to make one question their perception.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

Now for the rest of the photo shoot. When he is far away from the camera we obviously can’t light him with a flash, so a little dodging in the post production fixes the shadow of the face. Fortunately, distant shots like these don’t require as much lighting, because they are more about composition. Besides, we still have our two lights working for us: light one and three.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

Before we went out for our location shoot, we also did a few shots in the studio. Kevin is great for expression. I posted a set of these expressions in a previous post, but here are a few larger shots I loved from the session.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

You may be wondering what I did to the photos here. What photoshop action did I use? The coloring effect is done completely in Adobe Lightroom with the click of a button. It is one of many presets I have created for toning my images. This one reminds me of an old 1970s photograph of my mom and dad in horn rimed glasses and a few of the kids up in the mountains. The color is faded and the paper is yellowed and some of the silvers are oxidizing. It is a nice effect, but who wants to wait 30 years for that. Anyway, most people make these color presets with the color balance changes, but that sometimes messes up the photo itself. Making presets correctly is important. I am finishing up a second set of presets, which will be available for purchase by WPPI 2010 in Las Vegas (where I will be teaching a master class on Lightroom and if you are coming, I will teach you how to make this preset). The first set of presets is called the Essential Lightroom Preset Collection, which is a set of work-flow centered presets to get you through the editing process quickly. This new set is called the Top Secret Collection, which is a set of effect presets to compliment the Essential Collection. This effect in particular is mostly based in the split toning panel of the develop section in Lightroom. There are some other settings in Saturation, Vibrance and Clarity etc that help to make it look just right, but the bulk of the effect is there in the split toning.

By the way, if you are going to be at WPPI and want to take my master class, but can’t get in because it is full, email [email protected] and ask to be placed on the waiting list. If there are enough people on the waiting list, they will open another class. And more importantly, they will book me in a platform class next year, which they should have done this year. So if you are going to WPPI, email and ask to be placed on the waiting list.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

And finally, a nice black and white at 1600 ISO. This Canon 1D Mark IV is incredible in the higher ISOs. I can’t say enough good things about that ISO. I turned off the flash slaves and simply used the modeling lights, raised the ISO with impunity and shot. With this camera, I will never fear the ISO. Never.

Portrait of Kevin Burdick by Jared Platt

February 3, 2010

Guess that ISO – a lesson in film and digital grain structure

(First Published on the Pictage Blog, Thursday, Feb 11, 2010.)

So I have a little game I first played with Elizabeth Pratt from Canon. The game is called “Guess that ISO”. We are going to play it here today. for those of you who are not professional photographers, ISO is the sensitivity rating of the film or chip in the camera. Lower ISOs are best in bright lighting conditions and higher ISOs allow for proper exposure in low light situations.

Here is the image we are going to work with. It was shot with a Canon 1D Mark IV. This is the final image with various adjustments and increased noise reduction etc. I just wanted you to get a feel for the image we are working with.

Child-Portrait-Feet-1

The Fine Print:

The zoomed in detail images below have only one adjustment applied. I have to be upfront here, I am not going to show you the original image with no noise reduction because that is not practical, no image is used without a default noise reduction. So, what I am showing you below is the image with absolute “normal” noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom. I have the NR set at 25, witch is the default for Lightroom for basically every camera on the market.

With the fine print out of the way, let’s play.

GUESS THAT ISO…

Look at the grain structure and noise levels and tell me what ISO did I use?

low-noise-markiv

Now for a little lesson on color noise and grain.

In the beginning, was film. Film is made up of millions and millions of floating silver halides (little flex of “want-to-be silvers). These silver halides float in a gelatin emulsion (like jello but harder – made mostly of cow hooves etc…). So, no film image is ever a continuous tone. Even the best film image has a grain structure to it. The image is made up of tiny little randomized dots that, when seen from a distance create the illusion of an image. George Seurat made paintings in this manner, which is known as pointillism. His paintings were constructed from random specks of paint placed in proximity to each other. Colors were mixed, not by blending pigment, rather, several dots of yellow and blue were mixed by the eye to create the illusion of green. As the dots got closer together, the tones became more dense and vice versa as they grew further apart. The further back you stand from a Seurat painting the better and more continuous the tones and colors in the painting appear. If you have ever seen a color newspaper or magazine up close, you have seen a very large and pattern based version of pointillism. Photographic grain (color and black and white) exhibits with the same principles.

Film’s inherent grain structure was a necessary part of the photographic image making from the the 19th through the 20th centuries. We accepted it and grew to love it, because it was the only option available. Slower films, which required brighter light, had less grain and more continuous tones; faster films, which could be shot in lower light situations had more grain and created a more pointillistic effect. We came to see grain as part of the art form. Larger, more prominent grain structures felt gritty and press like. They insinuated “documentary” and “reality”, while tighter, smother grain structures presented a cleaner, cleaner view of the world, so we saw them as more controlled. Landscape photographers and commercial photographers shot this way, so naturally the images were typically more perfect and therefore a little less believable than the gritty “documentary” style images with all that grain.

Originally, photographic emulsions were mixed in only one variety: the grainy, gritty kind. But, with the advancement of the science and the introduction of finer grain structures and faster emulsions, photographers began choosing film speeds, not just to deal with different lighting conditions, but also to create a different mood or feeling in their images. Selecting a 1600 ISO press film for a commercial fashion shoot was a choice specifically made by the photographer to suggest reality, documentary or art! Films were chosen based on their color bias and for their grain structures. Some photographers loved large grain, others loved fine grain. But grain was always a part of the photographic life and we all accepted its existence and learned to manipulate it to our advantage.

With the advent of digital photography as a viable photographic medium, photographers no longer had to accept grain. Unlike film, digital captures are made up of a grid of pixels, and those pixels are so close together that from one point of color or tone to the next there are no gaps. This means it is a truly continuous tone. Digital presented us with a grain-less option that was so clean and so flawless that the visual language began to change. Photographers expected more out or their image making tools and started seeing grain as a flaw in the image as opposed to a beautiful part of it and, to some degree, some clients have rejected that gain as well. Seurat would be agog at our negative reaction to grain in a continuous tone digital age. He went through great pains to create paintings completely out of this grain-like effect and here we come in 1010 thinking that grain is an eye sore? Strange indeed.
While it is great to know that I have the option for grain-less images, the fact still exists, that grain has a purpose in image making and when used well, enhances the photograph. But, one thing digital has not done well, in the past, is grain.

Our love affair with the cleanliness of the digital capture, only lasted in the lower ISOs of the camera. Digital cameras had a problem of color and luminance noise in the higher ISOs. I remember shooting with a Nikon D1x and then a Canon 10D. Both cameras were absolutely worthless at 800 ISO. Even if you could stand the blocky and offensive grain structure, the color noise was so atrocious, you could only keep the file if you were willing to turn it to black and white. Even just 3 years ago, when comparing film to digital, one would have to admit that while the digital capture did a better job at creating a continuous tone in the lower ISOs, films were far superior to digital in the higher ISOs with its beautiful grain structures. If a digital photographer wanted beautiful grain, he would have to shoot his image in a lower ISO and then digitally manipulate the image and render the gain into the image. This is no longer the case…

Recently, camera technology and image software technology together have reduced the color noise and randomized the grain structure in the higher ISOs to the point that a side by side film and digital grain comparison at 800, 1600, 3200 ISO will leave film in the dust for continuous tone and fine grain structure. Our little guess the ISO game proves this point. In a dimly lit room, the Canon 1D Mark IV can record details, brighter than the eye can see them, at a 100th of a second and yet the grain structure is tight and beautiful. It seems that with each new generation of cameras, film looses another unique feature. Beautiful grain in the higher ISOs is the just the latest.

I have never bought into the notion that grain is a negative thing. When I shot film, I loved the grain of 400 TMAX. I loved shooting with Fuji 1600 or Ilford 3200. Now, digital has matched the beauty of those grain structures without any heroic manipulations in photoshop. Say it with me again and again, “grain is beautiful!” And now, in digital we have every option before us: heavy grain, light grain or absolutely no grain. And we don’t even have to change film!

Thanks Canon!

And the ISO is…

So now, are you ready to know the ISO? 12,800 ISO. I am still astounded. The Mark IV, together with Adobe Lightroom’s standard noise reduction creates a beautiful, tight grain structure with no offending color noise whatsoever. You can not beat that. It this point, every ISO from 50-12,800 is usable in digital without a second thought.

low-noise-12800iso-markiv

PS. Don’t get on me about Nikon v Canon, or Film v Digital. I’m not judging you if you shoot Nikon or Film. I used to shoot Nikon film cameras. To date, my favorite body I have ever shot with is a the Nikon F5. Film still has its place and still beats the pants off digital when there is no electrical outlets to charge your camera or when it comes to latitude of capture. I’m just talking about where we’ve been and how far we’ve come with respect to grain in photography. Think about it. We’ve come a long way.

Jared Platt

Platt Photography

This article was first published on the Pictage Blog on .