Photographing the Faroe Islands

My wanderlust after a year and a half of no major trips was such that I had to go somewhere special. The Faroe Islands were high on my wishlist, so with my vaccination card snuggly in my passport holder I made my way there via Iceland in mid-June.

The question of what gear to bring wasn’t a tough one. The Faroes are all about big (really, really big) spaces. While birders would have good reason to haul telephoto lenses there, the rest of us can travel light with wide-angle glass. As with my last European trip, the Zeiss Batis 25mm f/2 was an easy choice for capturing the majestic landscapes. I used it to take the following shot just minutes after picking up a little Kia at the airport car rental.

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This remarkable view of the tiny village of Gásadalur was one of the things that drew me to the Faroes. That the geography of the island allows for an unobstructed sight of both the village and the waterfall makes it one of the great observation points on the planet. For this shot I had the Batis 25mm at f/11. Shutter 1/125 and ISO 100.

Two days later, I joined a local guide and did the hike to the Drangarnir sea stacks. While I’m an experienced hiker, I’m not accustomed to perilous heights and I found some the route a bit harrowing. This gave me the sense to put my camera back into my daypack and focus on keeping my feet on not tumbling into the fjord below. The payoff, along with surviving, was reaching this otherworldly view.

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The Batis 25mm really shines for shots like this. When editing this, I did not use the Adobe lens correction. While I sometimes like how Adobe will correct for the Batis’s minor lens vignetting, I usually prefer to leave images “uncorrected’ because the slight fisheye effect of the Batis can give a better sense of scale when it comes to landscapes. Vignetting can always be corrected separately when necessary. This shot was at f/14 to ensure every bit of the very long view was in focus. Shutter 1/125 and ISO 100.

The following, taken near the sea stacks but looking across the mouth of the fjord, is an even better example of all the sharp details the Batis can capture in one landscape photo. To understand the scale, please find my hiking guide within the lower right of the image!

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f/10, 1/160, ISO 100.

Vintage Fisheye Lenses

My vintage Asahi Takumar 17mm f/4 fisheye lens is one of my favorite staples. I often use it for concert photography:

The great Mock Identity playing Rhizome in DC.

November, 2018. This was the first ever public performance of the band that would be later named Coriky. This wasn’t the first time that Fugazi members Ian MacKaye and Joe Lally were photographed with a Takumar fisheye lens. Back in the day, that was one of the lenses of choice of punk/rop/rap photographer Glenn Friedman, who got his start shooting with Pentax film cameras.

Most of the best concert shots are taken within feet of the band. Here Lyris from T-Rextasy is leaning into me and I love the scale of the bit of her sneaker that is visible.

You may be wondering why I’d want to use an f/4 lens for concert photography when concerts tend to be so darned dark. With other focal lengths, there’s no way I would want an f/4. With a fisheye, I feel like I can get away with a noisier high-ISO photo. I’m trying to capture the overall energy of the moment and I’m not looking for the same type of optical quality that I would want from a 50mm. Fisheyes, or at the very least a very wide lens, are a must for me for concert shooting because I always try to get a shot or two of the band as a whole where all members are in frame.

But there are other quite useful applications for fisheyes! In September, I covered the opening of a new section of the Kennedy Center. I knew I would be shooting a lot of interiors and I knew some might be tight, so I brought the Takumar. While I was interested in using the fisheye’s wide angle to capture smaller interiors, I wasn’t interested in distracting readers with the fisheye look. There’s an easy fix for that when editing photos in Lightroom. You’ve probably used “Enable Profile Corrections” when Lightroom or Photoshop knows and recognizes the lens. In Lightroom, you can also manually select a lens profile and apply it to any photo. The Takumar 17mm isn’t in the Lightroom library, but that doesn’t matter. I simply sampled other lens profiles until I found one that was a good fit. An example of the results:

I pulled out the fisheye to fit the stairs and space into the frame, but a photo like this would seem quite out of place in a news story. So, run the the photo through some Lightroom correction profiles and…

Voila! People will know just what they’re looking at without being weirded out.

It’s not exactly technically complex architectural photography, but it’s an easy way to add flexibility for what types of shot a vintage lens produces. The point is that an old fisheye can give you the perfect aesthetic for things like a band shot, but they can also easily be used to produce more standard looking shots. That’s why I so often keep one in my bag!

An Inexpensive Workaround for a Broken Sony a9 Diopter

I have been shooting on the same Sony a9 for nearly 2 years now. For most of that time, it’s been an indestructible workhorse performing through many bumps and rainfalls over tens of thousands of photos. Then, however, a few weeks ago I dropped it on a kitchen floor. The result was a blurry viewfinder. The diopter adjuster, also known as that little knob on the viewfinder that focuses the viewfinder to the specific needs of your eyeball, was of no use.

I unscrewed and removed the diopter dial off to make sure it was actually turning the inner mechanism. It was. I considered taking the viewfinder apart, but getting into the viewfinder on a9s and later models of the a7 requires an involved teardown of the camera body. I have enough experience with my own mechanical limitations to know there was a chance that me trying the teardown could lead to a repaired viewfinder… and a much greater chance that it would lead to me crying into a giant pile of loose screws and disconnected circuit boards, cables, and capacitors.

I considered sending the camera off somewhere for repair. The drawback with that is that most any competent a9 mechanical repair will run at least $400. There was also the strong possibility that the camera would need a new viewfinder unit, which pops up prices fast given how advanced the Sony electronic viewfinder is. It didn’t make sense to drop all that money on a 2-year-old camera when $500+ could go so far picking up a new a9 or the new a7r4 with its ginormous sensor.

So for a while I started relying more on the camera’s rear monitor. I used more native E-Mount lenses that allowed for autofocus. I turned on focus peaking for when I was using vintage manual lenses. I was still more or less just as adept and proficient a photographer this way, but photography became far less pleasurable for me. I felt disconnected from my camera and my subjects. I realized how much of the rush of shooting depended on being completely lost in the viewfinder, seeing only what was in frame.

After a little research, I found a very roundabout (some might say ridiculous) workaround to have a viewfinder again. I attached a $55 Movo monitor magnifier:

My Sony a9 equipped with Movo monitor magnifier. The lens is my trusty ole Helios 44-2.

This universal adapter turns your camera’s back LCD monitor into bigass viewfinder. It’s not the sturdiest piece of equipment, and the optics are simply cheap plastic, but it’s got a diopter, the plastic keeps it lightweight, and it serves its purpose. I can now look into a viewfinder and get lost in the image.

The biggest drawback is obvious: My once wonderfully compact a9 is now waaay longer. I guess it could be good for impressing people who will assume that bigger is better, but I don’t like having a more conspicuous and unwieldy camera. It also makes the Sony’s main menu and c3 buttons tougher, though not impossible, to operate. But for me these are small prices to pay for having a real viewfinder again. I feel like I have my camera back!

The Great Bokeh Controversy of 2019

Bokeh is the Japanese word for “blur” and it’s the word photographers around the world use to describe out-of-focus fields and elements within photos. As I’ve written about in past years, I enjoy combining street photography, abstract photography, and bokeh photography to create impressionistic photos like this:

I took this the other night and shared it on 500px, Instagram, and the other usual places. When I added it on Flickr, I included it in a number of groups including Bokeh Photography, which is Flickr’s largest bokeh group in terms of membership (EDIT: This was wrong, both “bokeh” and “Bokeh: Smooth and Silky” are larger). I had been a member of that group for many years, often adding similar photos. Unbeknownst to me, the group founder had quit Flickr, and the group has fallen into new management. When I submitted the photo above, it was rejected and the group’s acting admin commented on it, “That is not bokeh, it's merely a defocused lens.”

Certainly one of the weirder comments I’ve ever had on a photo. I replied explaining to him what bokeh is (I didn’t realize he was with the bokeh group), and that while bokeh photos with focused subjects are nice, a photo that is entirely bokeh is still, well, bokeh. This led to a rather absurd debate and if you have a high tolerance for long-winded blowhards, you can read the whole thing in the comments of the photo on Flickr.

But the tl;dr version: This fellow only considers it bokeh if it’s a standard portrait-style photo where a flower or bird or model is in focus with creamy bokeh elsewhere in the frame. He doesn’t recognize bokeh light points as being bokeh. I enjoy those well enough, and as I pointed out, of course I know how to take photos in such a standard style:

I don’t take photos like that much these days unless it’s for a job, because I don’t find them particularly challenging or satisfying. This fellow seemed offended by this, and was determined to convince me that my abstract street photos were in fact easier to take. If there’s anyone out there who agrees with that, then I’ll say to you what i said to him: Go out and try it. If you think it’s easy to create a compelling photo out of a completely unfocused frame, then I encourage you to take a few minutes to prove it. I look forward to seeing your results in Flickr’s other bokeh groups.

Switzerland, Italy, and Morocco with the Zeiss Batis 25mm f/2.0

Often with wide-angle lenses you have to live with either a slow aperture speed or excessive bulkiness. Example: the Zeiss Distagon 35mm f/1.4 is fast and produces beautiful results, but it's brick-heavy and as long as many 100+mm lenses. Smaller wide-angle lenses usually range from f/2.8 to f/4 if you aren't paying the big bucks for something like a Leica Summicron lens.

The Zeiss Batis 25mm f/2.0 attempts to find a middleground. It's reasonably fast, and while it's far from small for a 25mm, it's fairly lightweight and the length isn't too out of control. It is a fat lens, and would probably be a bit much for the smaller Sony E-Mount cameras.

As for results, it combines excellent optical performance with minimal distortion to produce high-quality, straightforward results. This makes it a good travel photography lens for me. I don't look for personality traits such as bokeh quality as much in wide-angle lenses as I do in 50+mm lenses. With something like the following shot, taken at Lake Lugano in Switzerland, the priority is catching a big field of view with maximum clarity.

The Batis 25mm at f/10, 1/160th shutter, and ISO 200.

Cramped spaces can also call for wider angle shooting. I turned to the Batis when walking the narrow streets and alleys of the old Medina of Rabat, Morocco.

f/6.3, 1/400th shutter, and ISO 400. Lots of contrast added in the edit, with some added vignetting as well.

When in manual focus mode, this lens has a readout on top of it that displays focus distance, as well as depth-of-field (circle of confusion) range:

At f/2.8. The readout is also available in feet, but years of vintage Soviet lenses have taught this American to think in meters.

It can also be set to always on or off. I've seen reviews call this feature a gimmick, with photographers saying they don't see the point. I couldn't disagree more - this readout is wonderful feature, and I hope to see it on more lenses in the future. I often rely on zone focusing for things like street photography and concert photography. When I'm walking through a city trying to quickly capture slice-of-life moments, I prefer older lenses that have markings showing focus distance and aperture so I can know at a glance if the focus will be right. This readout brings that feature back with a new level of accuracy.

If you're someone who uses autofocus a lot, this feature won't be of much use to you. But I would also suggest you turn your autofocus off - I consider autofocus much more a pointless gimmick than this readout!

Getting back to lens performance, I'm also happy with how it does in low light, as seen here crossing the Arno River in Florence, Italy:

f/2.5, shutter 1/50th, and ISO 2000. Florence is often drizzly in January, but as film noir cinematographers discovered long ago, that's great for shooting streets and sidewalks at night.

I don't chase after sharpness performance as much as many photographers, but I was happy to have the Batis's sharpness when I came across this tree on the shore of Lake Como in northern Italy:

Do you see the silhouetted witch? f/5.0, 1/200th shutter, ISO 100.

Moroccan flag street art in Casablanca. f./4.0, shutter 1/640th, ISO 100.

One of the many picturesque streets near Lake Como, Italy. f/4.0, shutter 1/60th, ISO 100.