Hi All,

As part of trying to run Restrained Elegance, I always like to keep reviewing our choice of equipment and technical kit. As part of that, every so often I try to do a review of what we’ve got, see what else is available, and whether we should be thinking about doing something differently. We always try to keep ahead of the curve, within the limitations of what’s affordable. I want to be wowed by the stuff we shoot, and that means being wowed by the girls, wowed by the bondage, wowed by the story, wowed by the look and feel and emotion… but it also means being wowed by the style and technical quality of what we produce. So we keep reviewing the technical kit to see if it is still the right tool for the job.

We already made a few decisions at the start of the year: backing down the number of shots we shoot in each set somewhat to concentrate more on getting 50 really GREAT shots rather than 80 or 90 good ones, for example. We’re going from shooting JPEG to shooting RAW, because the cost of all the disk storage to shoot everything for the site in RAW is no longer crippling the way it was a few years ago and because RAW does have the edge if you need to do any sort of colour correction or minor adjustments to the exposure in post production. I’ve moved from processing images on a PC to processing images on a Mac, because I discovered I really liked Aperture for processing and selecting RAW files (and various other reasons, the main one of which was Adobe issuing a totally broken new version of Premiere Pro for Windows, leading me to look at the Mac alternatives for the first time a while there, too).

Now it is the turn of the camera.

The Canon EOS 5D has been the workhorse camera for most of the photographers who shoot regularly for the site for the last three years. I usually burn out the shutter mechanisms of my cameras after around 100,000 shots, which is usually a couple of years of shooting, and I’ve had mine for three. So I wouldn’t be surprised if mine dies at some point this year, it is already overdue.

The question is: if and when it does finally give up the ghost, with what should I replace it?

As always, DP review is a great source of impartial information for 35mm/APS-C and compact digital cameras. The obvious choice would be a Canon EOS 5D mark II. (Well, duh). Higher resolution, although one has to wonder when the sensor is going to be too good for the resolution of the lenses on the front. The 5D was a fabulous camera, and the improvements made on the Mark II finally address some of the most serious issues, especially the god-awful problem of keeping the sensor clean. They have fitted a vibrating filter in front, which on the 40D that I have as a backup camera seems to work pretty well, keeping most of the shit off the sensor most of the time.

The Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III has some extra features, more robust build and better environmental seals but to all intents and purposes the business end of the image capture is the same as the 5D mark II, which makes a factor of three in price difference rather hard to justify.

The current cream of the crop over at Nikon is the D3X, which has somewhat higher resolution than the Canon equivalent. I’m sure it is a great camera and the Nikon lenses are good, but none of the test data I’ve seen really makes it look like it would be worth eBaying all my Canon glass and jumping ship (although I am not religiously attached to Canon, and may well go test a Nikon first). Similar comments apply to the newcomers like the Sony alpha, or the older but great high dynamic range Fujis. All have some areas where they excel, but on paper none of them look to have the killer edge over the Canon for shooting for the site.

No, the real question is whether to stick with full-frame 35mm or step up to medium format.

The last time I looked into this question was three years ago, when I went for the 5D. At the time, it was pretty much a no-brainer. Medium format digital meant shooting tethered to a computer and that would drive me mad. I remember what a liberation it was when I ditched flash sync cords for a cordless flash trigger and I really don’t want to go back to that. There were many other issues, with no real “system” for cameras or digital backs. Plus the backs were the price of a small house. We didn’t go there.

Now, though, the Hasselblad H3DII series of cameras has addressed all these usability issues and enable you to shoot medium format digital just like a slightly oversized 35 mm camera. The samples looked impressive, so I figured the only way to decide was to road test the beast. So yesterday I hired one and borrowed Ariel to shoot some sample shots in different lighting… and also to inaugurate shooting at our house, as there now is one room which is clear enough to actually shoot in! So we shot a bunch of test images in different lighting, one complete bondage set, and went for a walk around the woods near our house for some Sweden-style setting sun shots with a reflector (although sadly no assistant to hold said reflector).

To make it fair, we tried to shoot similar images in the same lighting using both the Hasselblad and my existing 5D. This is a little harsh on the Hassleblad as obviously I’d only just got my hands on it, whereas the 5D feels like it is grafted to my right eye after using it for three years. I did get a good hour hands-on demo from Hasselblad before taking the camera away to hire it so it wasn’t so bad.

All in all it was a very interesting and fun day doing something quite different for the site! Ariel thought it was interesting while she was tied up, but kinda lost interest once I started comparing minute differences in shots and RAW processing engines afterwards… 🙂 🙂 🙂

I’ve posted a few samples from the shoot on the members’ area. The complete photos from the bondage set will follow in due course. I thought people might be interested in the results, and also wanted some feedback and opinions on the shots.

The first thing that I learned is that the Hasselblad is very well designed and laid out. It was no harder to shoot with than the Canon. The only thing I found I was missing was RGB histograms, which seems like an odd omission. Setting a custom white balance was a bit of a palaver the first time, but once I’d set it to a user button it was super easy. The viewfinder is nice and big and bright, but the difference between an f/2.8 prime lens on the Hasselblad and a f/1.4 prime lens on the Canon meant that it wasn’t as much of an improvement as one might have imagined. The biggest usability kudos went to the Hasselblad, for the ease with which one can clean its sensor. But the self clean on the 5D mark II should counteract that a bit.

Processing the images it was clear that the 31 megapixel Hasselblad really was capturing three times the detail of the 13 megapixel 5D. Its results were clean, crisp and sparkly. The real revelation, though, was just how well the Canon stood up to the comparison. Have a look at the full-sized images from the Canon and you’ll see that the amount of detail in there is damned impressive from a camera-lens combo costing a sixth of the Hasselblad’s… and a three year old camera, at that.

One could definitely see the effects of the low-pass filter in front of the sensor on the Canon- the detail is significantly less distinct fresh out of the RAW file. But apply just a touch of sharpening and it is right back up there. The Hasselblad doesn’t have an anti-alias filter, so detail comes out of the camera very crisp. The downside is that some areas of textiles show Moire patterns which have to be removed in software. So… swings and roundabouts, really. The Canon really isn’t as sharp, but it’ll never have the Moire problems either.

Probably more surprising was that the vaunted quality of the Hasselblad lenses really doesn’t shine through compared with a humble Canon 50 mm f/1.4 prime lens (costing a few hundred pounds as opposed to a few thousand). It isn’t even a L-series lens. I was expecting to see chromatic aberration or fringing or soft edges on the Canon. I don’t normally have time to really study each image we shoot for the site in great detail, and I took it as read that if I looked really closely I’d see the imperfections. I’m sure the lens tests are right and that those aberrations are there and would bother us if (say) we always shot with the lens at f/1.4 or always had fine detail right to the edge of the frame. But shooting “typical” RE shots where you care about the girl and the bondage rather than the background, I couldn’t point to a single image where I felt the shortcomings of the lens were compromising the quality. Even on the outdoor shots at f/2.8 the lens was performing just fine.

I must admit parenthetically here that I was spurred on by a forum post a month or two ago complaining about the lack of sharpness of RE pictures. Sharpness is an odd thing- you can make a picture look so sharp the edges would cut you, just by turning up the unsharp masking step during image preparation. But if the images end up with a black-and-white halo around every edge, the result looks unnatural to me. I like crispness and definition rather than just “sharpness”. It is hard to explain the difference, and I’ve always thought it was largely a matter of personal taste.

There’s also the issue of depth-of-field, which is definitely a matter of personal taste. If you want to see everything in the scene in focus, you can always set your apeture to f/16 or f/22 and away you go. But that means putting as much “weight” to random bits of background wallpaper as to the important stuff like the ropes and the girl’s eyes. Shooting at f/1.4 would be the opposite extreme of only a tiny bit of the model in focus, thus concentrating all your attention on (say) her eyes. This is very much a personal artistic decision to made on each set we shoot. It is also constrained by the conditions: you can’t shoot outside at sunset into the light with no flash at 1/400th of a second and f/22 and ISO 100- it would just look black. So you either need a long shutter speed, risking camera shake, or a wider aperture, giving less depth of field, or a higher ISO, giving more noise. Or you add flash, and change the way the shot looks completely. Personally I like the bit of the scene that’s supposed to be in sharp focus to be REALLY sharp, crisp and detailed, but I don’t mind having a shallow depth of field if it makes the shot more beautiful. Conversely, in a lot of studio shots I do like to have the whole of the model in sharp focus (but I probably don’t want the background to be as sharp and compete with her). Anyway, I digress. The shots from both cameras in usual conditions and shooting carefully are sharp.

On to other considerations.

We were surprised at how dodgy, yellow and purple tinted the skin colours were on the Hasselblad looking at the RAW files in Aperture. It seemed to be very hard to get a good white balance (even from a proper grey card) and small differences in skin tone where Ariel’s hands were tied seemed to a over-exaggerated. I was really surprised. I preferred the colour rendition of the Hasselblad in the outdoors shots but preferred the skin tones of the Canon indoors, especially under flash.

This morning I reprocessed a bunch of shots using Phocus, Hasselblad’s own RAW converter, and that does seem to have done a substantially better job. Which is annoying, because the interface and workflow in Phocus isn’t as slick as Aperture, and Phocus doesn’t have the healing/repair tool (Aperture’s repair tool is FANTASTIC).

Working backwards I managed to improve the Aperture results a bit, but it still doesn’t do the job as well as Phocus. Why Hasselblad have to write their own instead of writing proper plugins for Focus, Lightroom and Photoshop I don’t know. Having to use two programs to process stuff is a bit of a workflow issue- having happily claimed that disk space is now cheap, it isn’t so cheap that I want to have multiple copies of each 50 MB image file hanging around. It could probably be done if the results justified it, as at least the Phocus step could be automatic once you’ve got the right parameters for a set.

All of this chin-stroking and staring at massive RAW files is great, but the bottom line is that you guys’n’girls don’t see the images as they come out of the camera, and most of you aren’t viewing them on a huge high-def-video-editing-capable monitor, either. As the recent forum survey shows, most people have screen resolutions around about the 1280 pixels mark. If one resamples the images down to this size, is there any perceptible difference between the Canon ones and the Hasselblad? Do we prefer one to the other? Everyone always blithely says that by the time you get down to web size none of this matters, but in the past I have found this to be an over-simplification.

If this were really true then the images I shot seven years ago on my first digital SLR (a 3.1 megapixel D30) should be indistinguishable from the ones shot on the 5D, and I do not think that is true. I think the oversampling does give you more headroom, better noise performance once you downsample, and more facility to “hint” at the presence of detail. To date, every time we’ve stepped up the resolution I feel there has been a subtle but definite improvement in the overall quality of the results. Bearing in mind that the lenses have been the same for most of that time, that seems like it has been the sensor which is the limiting factor.

But I am really hard pushed to spot any differences between the Canon and the Hasselblad on the 1280 pixel versions. Ariel couldn’t tell which was which, and I only can really because of the different aspect ratio.

Top one is Canon (aspect ratio) 3:2 and the bottom is Hasselblad with a squarer 4:3 sensor. There are differences, certainly, but they are as much down to choice I made when deciding exactly how much to sharpen each image and exactly where to set the contrast, tone curve, and white balance settings when processing the RAW files in two different programs. I could probably make them look even more similar if I tried. I wasn’t trying to, I was just trying to produce a pleasing image the way I would for the website normally. You can definitely see more detail in Ariel’s cardigan on the Hasselblad image, but I’d be hard pushed to claim that I couldn’t sharpen the Canon image a little more to bring that out.

Again top one Canon, bottom one Hasselblad.

I think I mildly prefer the Hasselblad images, but it is really hard to be objective. I don’t know that I could pick them out if I hadn’t taken them. I definitely prefer the Phocus-processed Hasselblad versions to the Aperture processed ones, though, especially on the skin tones.

Any techies or photographers out there care to comment, or throw in their experiences?

At the moment it is looking hard to justify investing in medium format kit costing five times as much as the existing stuff when the differences in the end product as used on the site currently are so subtle (verging on non-existant). Given that I can’t see much evidence that we’ve hit the limit of the lens performance on the Canons yet, the step up to 21 megapixels for a 5D mark II as a straight replacement for the 5D if and when its shutter mechanism burns out is looking hard to resist.

There is the argument that future proofing what we do suggests working with the best we can right now- indeed, part of my reason for wanting to switch to processing RAW files and working in a non-destructive editor like Aperture is to allow for the possibility of reprocessing sets with much higher output resolutions in the future, when screens may be bigger, hard disks on the server less expensive, and internet connections much faster. And if I want to produce a book of RE photos at a later date, I might be very thankful for the investment now. (I do curse my short sightedness in not shooting in RAW from the start, for this very reason). If every set we shoot is supposed to be an occasion, doesn’t it make sense to record that occasion in the best resolution we currently can afford? So if we all end up with HD-capable monitors in two years’ time we could reprocess everything with a few mouse clicks. We may not be able to see the difference in the processed versions at the resolution we use today, but maybe we’ll be glad of all those extra pixels in the future.

If I were producing billboards or A3 double page spreads in Vogue showcasing the textures of different fabrics, I’d buy the Hasselblad right now. If someone offered me a job to shoot for a magazine or an advert right now, I’d hire one for the day. I’m struggling to see the business case for it for the stuff we actually shoot and the way most of you actually get to see the images right now, but maybe the future-proofing argument is the strongest one.

Any thoughts?

Cheers, Hywel.