Fotografiska, New York

Some years ago, on a vacation in Stockholm, I persuaded my family to accompany me to Fotografiska a vast and excellent photography museum there. For something like a year leading up to its opening, I received regular teaser emails presaging the advent of their New York branch. When it finally arrived last year I was disappointed to learn how high ticket prices were and, in the midst of the pandemic mostly forgot about it. But my wife gave me a couple of tickets and a pandemic appointment for an hour last weekend and down we went. (Click any image above to see them all enlarged.)

I have ambivalent feelings about what we saw. There were 3 featured exhibits and a fourth one dedicated to the winners of the Photography 4 Humanity 2020 contest, photo-journalistic work dedicated to human rights issues. There was some excellent work here, in the traditional documentary photography school, some of it dramatically artistic as well.

Next came a powerful exhibit dedicated to death-row inmates who had been wrongfully accused and had been exonerated by DNA evidence, many after years of incarceration and some just hours or days before being scheduled to be executed. While it was a very powerful and moving exhibit, it was only marginally photographic. Each of the subjects was shown in their own floor-to-ceiling portrait, in a darkened alcove, with their voice describing some element of their experience. However, the portraits weren’t still photographs, they were video portraits of their faces.

Next was Naima Green’s Brief & Drenching. The first part was a series of portraits, seeking to explode traditional binary-gendered portrait styles. These were quite good, and certainly had their own style, although they remained, essentially portrait photographs. The rest of the exhibit was less photographic. there was an installation of objects, a video (snapshot of bloody pearls, evidently being pulled from a vagina, above, is from the video), framed collections of motion-blurred, deliberately “artless” Polaroids, and so on.

This was followed by the gorgeous photo-montages of Cooper and Gorfer’s Between These Folded Walls, Utopia, shown in 2 of the pictures above). These were beautiful, sensuous images. I’m not sure exactly how they were made, but certainly not through straight photographic processes.

Finally, there was Andres Serrano’s Infamous. Serrano, no stranger to controversy (think Piss Christ), collected a number of racist artifacts and then photographed them. Taken at face value, they’re a shocking evocation of the extreme racism that was quotidian in this country’s culture throughout its history, reminding us, in the current climate, how important it is to extirpate this scourge. While the photography is pretty straightforward, still-life product photography and the exhibit is powerful, it strikes me that it’s not so much a photography exhibit as a racist artifact exhibit with photography almost incidentally being the medium of display.

So, I came away from Fotografiska having seen some worthwhile, and even important, exhibits but not a lot of photography. Granted, photography is a broad term and all these works can certainly fit within a catholic definition of photography, but only to the extent that the term ceases to mean much more than ‘images created using technology, with content not necessarily concerned with the medium.’ To some extent I know as a white man of a certain age, I tend to think of photography in increasingly outmoded ways. OTOH, it almost feels as if the medium has been exhausted – all that’s left is tendrils of new forms growing out of the corpse of the now-dead photography I grew up with.

NEX-7: 6 month update from Michael Reichmann of the Luminous Landscape

Readers of my first impressions posts a couple of days ago will likely be interested in Michael Reichmann’s appraisal of his NEX-7 after 6 months of use. You can read it here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/nex_7_six_month_on.shtml.

Sony Nex-7: First Thoughts, continued

Part II

In Part I, I discussed the background of my Nex-7 purchase, the benefits of the camera to a street shooter, and what the camera feels like to hold and carry – all positive. Now, in part II I’ll discuss the downsides.

Battery life

To put it simply, the battery and battery life are terrible. Keep in mind that my shooting modes is this: during the working week the camera is on as I leave home, and stays on till I get to work (½ – ¾ of an hour later). During the day it’s mostly off unless I see something interesting out the window or go walkabout at lunchtime. It’s on again on the way home from work or if I’m travelling to meetings or taking an early evening walk. At the weekends the camera is on whenever I’m out and about which may be hours at a time. In the case of the Nikon D300 a single charged battery easily lasts a week, sometimes 2 or 3 weeks. Whenever I buy a digital camera I always buy a 2nd battery with it and I always carry that 2nd battery with me, charged. So I ordered the Sony with a 2nd genuine Sony battery. Because the camera’s entirely electronic (no optical viewfinder) I couldn’t really do anything with it till the first battery was charged. That took over 4 hours Thursday evening (so I stayed up past 1:00 a.m. just to turn it on). I then charged the 2nd battery while I slept. Friday and Saturday I had few opportunities to shoot with the camera but Sunday morning early we left on the train for Washington. Those of you who watch this site will know I love to photograph landscapes and suburban blight at speed with the shutter speed set high enough to stop background blur but leave some in the foreground. The Sony made this easy to do. In standard mode, when you turn on the camera, a quick press of the button in the center of the control wheel changes it to a shooting mode dial so it’s very easy and intuitive to get to shutter-priority mode and from there the top left dial lets you set the shutter speed you want. Simple and obvious. A real pleasure. So I took shots out the window on and off for the 3½ hours of the train trip. By the time we got there the battery was all but dead. We took a cab to the hotel, got refreshed and headed out down H street for a walk and to find lunch. I had plugged in the first battery in the hotel room and slipped in the 2nd. We walked along the Mall to the Washington Monument and on the the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Then we walked back to our hotel to prepare for dinner. The 2nd battery was dead. So, in the course of a single day I’d gone through 2 batteries. As I discuss some of the other issues with the camera below you’ll see the problem can be compounded. My plan is to buy a third battery and carry the charger with me.

Knobs

The tri-navi system is really useful and works quite intuitively. The rear screen shows you what each knob is affecting at any given time. Other reviewers have pointed out that the initial settings are not ideal and should be reassigned. So far I haven’t gotten to that but I like the basic set-up. However all of these knobs are often accidentally shifted. In particular the right top knob, which controls exposure compensation is often shifted. I like to shoot Raw to the right at about ⅓ stop over the camera meter. But I constantly find the camera is as much as a full stop or two off that mark and has to be re-set. Similarly, the center control wheel on the back controls ISO in standard shooting mode. For walking around in the streets I usually leave it on Auto but several time I’ve found that it has crept up to as much as 800, seemingly by itself. I generally carry the camera in my right hand, down at my side with the shoulder strap wrapped around my hand. Perhaps it is brushing my leg – I’m not quite sure how the knobs are getting moved.

Video mode

I’m not terribly interested in video. It’s all I can do to learn how to make a good still image without figuring out how to make good moving ones. However, video is one of the strong points of the camera and I was happy to have it in case I ever do take it up. Unfortunately the dedicated video button, located on the top right rear corner of the camera seems to get pressed by accident quite frequently. On any given walk I will often find I’ve recorded 4 or 5 short videos of the ground without realizing it. To get rid of them I have to move into video review mode, choose delete, then confirm my deletion for each clip, then move back to still image review. On at least one occasion I went to take a picture and missed the moment because I didn’t realize the camera was already recording video. To make matters worse, video recording really drains the battery and you can actually feel parts of the camera warming up.

Eye Sensor

Cleverly, the camera switches from rear LCD to viewfinder mode when you put the camera up to your eye and back when you remove it. This is a feature I believe Minolta pioneered on the Dimage A1, my first serious digital camera, which I loved. However in the case of the Nex-7 it seems to be confused by being held at one’s side, flipping back and forth between LCD and EVF views and, thus, preventing the camera from entering sleep mode and further draining the battery.

Menu System

Other reviewers have commented on the confusing menu tree and it is worth mentioning. At the top level there are 6 choices: Shoot mode, Camera, Image Size, Brightness/Color, Playback and Setup. The only thing Shoot mode controls is the choice of exposure mode (aperture-priority, shutter-priority, manual program and scene pre-set modes which I never use). And these are all readily available without going in to the menus at all. Similarly, Image Size controls only the jpeg quality level (or Raw), the aspect ratio and the panoramic modes – so far I’ve set the camera to Raw and haven’t tried the others). Brightness/Color provides alternate ways to get to exposure compensation, ISO, white balance, metering mode and flash compensation, most of which are more easily available from knobs. It is in Camera, Playback and Setup where all the action is and these contain a bewildering array of items in no logical order I can figure out.

I mentioned in Part I how for subway shooting I have to individually set white balance, auto-focus assist and rear display on the Nikon. On the Nex-7, white balance is reasonably easy to get to (press the top panel “navigation button” twice, then use the left control dial to select white balance; turning off the auto-focus assist lamp is a little harder (press menu button, choose Set-up and then find AF Illuminator which can be 20 choices away or already available, depending on where you left it, and switch from auto to off); and I haven’t yet figured out how to keep the rear LCD screen off altogether.

The only way I’ve found to format a memory card is deep in the Setup menu. Perhaps there is some combination of buttons and knobs that will get to it faster but I haven’t found it and it’s not in the index of the unhelpful camera manual. This is somewhat similar to my Canon G9 but is a real pain when you’ve just removed the chip from you computer and want to go shooting.

Preliminary conclusions

I am still enjoying the camera overall. It’s light and easy to carry. It feels comfortable and natural to shoot with and is quite responsive. It’s far less intimidating for street shooting than a big DSLR. But the items listed above are real annoyances. My next steps to overcoming them are:

buy a third battery to carry with me
modify how I hold the camera so as to:
1. avoid accidentally moving knobs and settings (in the last 2 days I’ve managed to keep the ISO where I want it)
2. not go into video mode unintentionally
3. allow the camera to go to sleep and save the battery
delve deeper into the manual to see if I can customize things around the menu system

I’ll try to make one more follow-up report on my success with these things. I think the Nex-system is excellent for my type of street shooting. It combines high image quality in a small light package with a wide range of features and manual controls. Most of the issues I’ve described seem as if they could be improved through firmware upgrades and learning the camera better (and carrying 2 spare batteries). At this point I would recommend the camera to anyone who shoots in a similar mode to what I’ve described here.

Sony Nex-7: First Thoughts

Part I

I’ve had the Nex 7 for about a week now. Ordered in December of last year, it finally arrived late last week, just in time for a few days in Washington DC (I’ll be posting pictures from that trip over the coming weeks). Unfortunately, it arrived with only the kit lens (18 -55mm) but at least I could get to work with it. Before we begin, a little background.

Background

I’ve been a lifelong Minolta shooter. I started with a Minolta srT101 when I was 13 and have since then shot with the XE-7, a couple of xd-11s, the Dimage A1 and the Konica Minolta 7D. And I have to say I loved each of those cameras. When the 7D began to get a little long in the tooth and started getting balky a new generation of sensors had just arrived and I had to choose among the new Sony (Minolta-based) Alpha 700, Canon 40D and Nikon D300. But when I held the Alpha 700 in my hand it had a totally different layout from my beloved 7D. And I was seduced by the idea of owning a “professional” camera. I sold all my Minolta equipment, bought a Nikon D300 and became a Nikon shooter. The camera is heavy-duty and takes fantastic quality photos. However it’s incredibly heavy – I think about a pound more than the 7D with a medium zoom – so heavy, in fact, that I developed painful tennis elbow from carrying it around and had to adapt my whole shooting style to left-handed camera carrying. Carrying it in my Tenba messenger bag with a 2nd lens, a flash and a few other odds and ends was killing my back and shoulders and putting my chiropractor’s daughter though college. Also, it’s way too “pro” for my taste. Features that I could find intuitively on my 7D were buried deep in menus on the D300. When I shoot in the subways I change my white balance to fluorescent, turn off the auto-focus assist lamp and the rear LCD display. Amazingly, for all its customization capability, it doesn’t seem possible to assign that set of features to a custom setting. I must make all 3 adjustments individually each time I descend and undo them each when I emerge.

This set the stage for my delight at the early reports on the new generation of mirrorless cameras, particularly the Nex-7. Among the features that attracted me:

Small lightweight camera and lenses
Very high image quality and 24 MP in an APS-C sized sensor
Good build quality, if not quite as weatherized and rugged as my D300
Full range of serious photography settings and manual controls
A usable viewfinder built in (there were raves for the OLED EVF)
Tiltable rear screen
The “tri-navi” system sounded like it would accommodate my customization preferences through physical knobs, which the 7D excelled at
While there were few E lenses available yet, the initial ones sounded to be adequate and many, many lenses were available with adapters with focus peaking promising to make manual focus feasible

Camera Feel

The camera feels very comfortable in the hand. Solid, but light. I wouldn’t even mind if it was a tad bigger – my right pinky curls in below the camera instead of on it – not a problem, but I don’t think I’ve ever shot with a serious camera so small before, including the 2nd hand Voigtländer Vito C I started with when I was 12. Lenses feel pretty good and don’t feel as unbalanced in the hand relative to the small camera as they look. Also, one of my real peeves with my last several lenses is the way the rubber zoom and focus rings loosen up over time and won’t stay put. The Sony E55-210 and E18-55 are wide, hard-ridged and both feel like they’re there to stay (time will tell). The camera is quite fast and responsive if not quite as fast as my D300. But I haven’t had any missed shots because the camera wasn’t ready. The layout of the buttons and knobs is good and they fall comfortably under ones fingers (although see a problem with this in Part II). By and large, I found I could start shooting immediately without reading the manual. It feels good to shoot with the camera, natural and comfortable.

I’ve now processed my first batch of a couple of hundred images in Lightroom and the file quality is superb, especially at lower ISOs. It’s a little unexpected to shoot with a camera as small as this, that feels like a digicam with an electronic viewfinder and get such big, luscious files to work with.

However, all is not perfect. In Part II I’ll discuss some of the annoyances I’ve run into in my first week of shooting.

Tag: review