Kong: Skull Island; what was that camera?

I spent a ridiculous amount of the running time of Kong: Skull Island wondering firstly what Brie Larson’s camera was, and then what kind of film she had loaded in it. Firstly, it’s some kind of Leica M4 with an attached meter in the hot shoe and an adapter on the viewfinder to correct the frame lines for - I think - a 35 mm lens. Which is all real stuff which people had to use in 1973 when we used celluloid film like barbarians and focused and exposed using our hands and brains like some kind of caveman. As to what film she was using; God only knows. Something which let her take pictures of the Aurora Skulliensis in the middle of the night without a tripod. That right there is almost more fantastical than a 150 foot high gorilla, because I’m like anyone else that way; I’ll believe any kind of nonsense when we’re talking about stuff I’ve never held in my hands, but once you get onto something I’ve tried and failed, I’ll be damned if I’ll believe that anyone else could ever have succeeded.

Kong is another one of those movies which wrote cheques with the trailer that it struggles to cash at full length. Kong fights helicopters! Looks great in the trailer, but it’s over in the movie in what feels like a heartbeat as Kong swats a dozen choppers out of the sky in the space of a few minutes. After that, it’s monsters slapping monsters, and humans getting in the way, and somehow it misses the sheer gut punch of Peter Jackon’s bloated but satisfying King Kong. I’m not quite sure why it doesn’t work as well. I suspect it’s partly that the original King Kong has a single straightforward plot which is all about the girl, where Kong:Skull Island is one of those things where a whole bunch of plots are put on the table, and then abandoned in favour of a literal “get to the choppah” story for a dwindling number of survivors.

Which is not to say it couldn’t have made all this sing. The cast is solid, with nothing as stupidly risky as putting Jack Black into a major role in a drama. John Goodman? Samuel L Jackson? Tom Hiddleston? These are guys who could probably get away with reading out the phone book. You don’t need MUCH script. You just needed a bit more than we get.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s a pretty good one. It’s just that the trailer made it look like it would somehow be even more. Just the notion of  King Kong crossed with  Apocalypse Now got me expecting some kind of magic that probably nothing could ever have delivered. When I merely got a solid adventure drama, I couldn’t help feeling a bit of disappointment. And the more I think about it, the more I think that the real disappointment is that Kong is interesting when he’s fighting against men and machines, and somehow less interesting when he’s wrestling with octopuses and creepy looking dinosaurs. Dozens of helicopters facing into catastrophe is an arresting image; CGI’d monsters fighting each other no longer has much novelty. So once Kong has Blackhawk Downed the whole air cav contingent, what seemed most fascinating about the movie was over and done with.

Tune in in two years time when Kong fights Godzilla. Or not, since both Godzilla and Kong have turned out to be things which were much more fun in my anticipation than they were on delivery.

iPhone 7 Plus and Bokeh

Bokeh. A week ago, you could have had a flu epidemic in most cities and stood a good chance than not one person sneezing would have known what the hell bokeh was. But Apple have come down from the mountain, in and among getting mixed up about the meaning of the word “courage”, and promised a phone camera which will deliver “bokeh”.

I have two things to say about that, and I don’t know which fist to punch the wall with first. 

Soddit. “Bokeh” first. Bokeh is the cool word for the way that the background blurs when you focus on a nearby subject with a long lens that’s been banged out to the maximum aperture. It used to be an inescapable nuisance of photography. The iron laws of optics mean that the closer you are to a subject, the less of it will be in focus. The bigger the negative, the worse the problem gets. Also, the more the lens magnifies the image, the worse the problem gets. It’s yet another of the annoying ways that cameras are just crap at a job which eyes do better.

Seriously, look up from the computer screen. Depending on your age, either everything was in focus immediately, or it was all in focus within a second or so. A camera can’t do that. Largely because a camera doesn’t have a brain behind it sorting everything out for you so that everything looks sharp and in focus at all times - in reality, about four per cent of what you’re seeing is a live feed of sharp imagery and the rest is your brain remembering what it looked like from a few seconds ago.

When there’s nothing you can do about a problem, you just have to make it into an opportunity, and so along comes bokeh. If the camera can’t keep everything in focus the same way an eye appears to, use the selective focus as a way to highlight the important part of the picture and blur out what doesn’t matter. The most common approach is in portraits; thirty years ago, if you got close enough to a person with a serious camera that their face filled the frame, everything behind them would be out of focus. Lemons, lemon soufflé.

And here we are in the wonderful 21st century. The average phone camera can get a crisp well exposed shot in the kind of light which would have needed professional lighting thirty years ago, and no-one even realises what an improvement that is. And the shot is pretty much just like the way the eye sees it, with everything in focus. Finally, cameras can take pictures which look like what we see and remember of the moment.

Somehow, this is terrible news. Because there’s no bokeh any more. The iron laws of optics again. Phone cameras use wide angle lenses and a negative the size of a match-head. Everything is in focus because it can’t not be. The wider the lens angle and the smaller the negative, the more of the picture is in focus. Serious arty photographers are crying into their beer. Or carrying around eight pounds of kit so that they can choose which bit of the picture is in focus and properly exposed.

Apple heard all this crying, and stepped forward with a new kind of camera in their phone. Which will give everyone the chance to look arty. 

Yeah, it won’t. The new lens is a 56mm equivalent. Bokeh doesn’t start to get usefully apparent until you’re at 85mm and longer. And that’s on old school 35mm film. On a tiny cameraphone image sensor, there’s going to be no bokeh effect of any kind. Apple have pretty much conceded this - their bokeh effect will not be available at first until they can improve the software. And at that point, it’s not a photographic breakthrough; it’s a goddam instagram filter. And we already had those. 

What Apple is offering you is a chance to mess up your pictures so that they will look different to the way that the world actually looks when you see it yourself. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d be pushing us to take advantage of a camera which actually sees the world properly.

New cameras

With much smuggling and other insidious plotting, I finally have the camera I was talking about last year. It has come all the way from America, but I am such an incredibly stupid person that it did not occur to me to buy any memory to put into it, so I have an extremely high quality paperweight for the present. This is mostly because I am away in Galway and didn't get a chance in the brief return to Dublin to go and buy camera memory or UV filters. Still, in principle I am now in a position to return to the photography of old.

It's not really that worth commenting on, except that nostalgia or something had me dig out one of my old 35mm photography books and I was looking through the darkroom techniques it was laying out. I never had the capacity to do dark room stuff in the days when I carried a real camera, and so I had never really got any experience to echo back against when I first saw what Photoshop filters would do. Solarisation and posterisation seemed well, just part of the general purpose wonderfulness of computing - sure, of course the programme can systematically change the hue values for each pixel to create that effect.

Well, it genuinely is that "simple" for Photoshop, but as I read through the accounts of darkroom technique it sank in on me how very far from simple it was to do it in the pre-digital age. Solarisation - which is pretty much a single menu choice in Photoshop - involved a lot of very tedious intermediate steps in a darkroom. The same is true of a lot of the other filters. And the masking techniques and contrast improvement stunts you can do in Photoshop also have their analogues in the real world, and very laborious they were too.

All of somewhat academic interest for me. I'm a bear of little brain and my interest in photo software reaches as far as, "can this clean up this image?" and "how does cropping work?" It's not that I'm some disciple of the purity of the original moment, more that I don't have enough imagination to reach beyond it. I either get it right when I catch the shot, or I try to retrieve what I thought I saw - I don't seem to have whatever it takes to look beyond that. Which is perhaps all to the good. In the end, it's not the camera, it's the eye. You have to see the composition and the moment which make the shot worthwhile. And you should know enough about the basic physics of what you're doing to use the controls properly, so as to tweak the light a little bit when the simple mindedness of the camera insists on shooting what's there instead of what you see. I tell myself that I've spent a ton of money in an effort to get a tool which will let me do that without getting in my way. Time will tell if I was fooling myself.

GZG walkers; painted

Two representative samples as completed. I decided that they had to be based on rigid bases because even after the limited handling involved in painting them, I could feel the legs working their way loose.

The camo pattern is loosely based on the 1980s MERDC patterns used by the US and still widely used in countries which were getting US military aid around that time; you can still see it on Korean and Greek and Turkish vehicles among others. The eight MERDC patterns were based on greens and browns. The prettiest of them was the almost never used woodland summer scheme which used dark green, light green and small highlights in black and sand. However, the only one which you ever really saw was the woodland temperate, which was half brown, half dark green with highlights in black and sand. In Greece, the sand was often replaced by light grey. I used the rough template, but replaced green with light grey, highlights being grey green and mid brown.

I did not repeat the mistake of blackwashing the entire vehicle, instead opting for the fiddly, annoying and never particularly satisfactory technique of blacklining the panels. This looks quite garish in the photos above, but at arms length on a table it will be fine, particularly in the rather feeble lighting conditions prevailing on wargames tables. All successful figure painters wind up going one of two ways. Either their technique improves to the point where their figures look wonderfully lifelike and win prizes, or they realise that the figure only has to look convincing at three feet under a sixty watt bulb and their technique becomes all about getting roughly useful effects in the shortest possible time. I went down the second path years ago, and with every year that passes, I find new ways to avoid putting any more work into painting than is absolutely necessary for the objective in hand - which is generally to put a lot of figures on a table to a deadline.

Photos were taken in natural light around the middle of a very rainy day. On a bright day they could probably have been done hand held, but with the overcast conditions the meter was showing 1/15 of a second at f2.2, and it seemed safest to use the tripod and the remote release. Interestingly, the White Balance setting on the Sony for cloud gave the wrong colour balance; I got the most faithful results with the sunlight setting.

GZG walkers; preparation

The plan here is to paint a four colour arid landscape camouflage in light grey, light brown and small hints of mid brown and mid green. It remains to be seen whether I will be any more successful with that than with the gravs.

GZG make two different lines of walkers, eight legged and four legged. The four legged exists at the moment only as an armed scout type vehicle



This is the gun armed variant. There are two gun turrets available, one of which has a light cannon, and the other of which allows you to plug slightly bigger gun barrels into a roughly similar sized turret with a socket for rather science fictiony looking guns.



This is a missile armed variant, actually assembled from some of the spares provided when you order a platoon pack of anything.

Eight legged walkers can now be had either as tanks or APCs, though the APC seems strangely unconvincing to me - hard to get into, hard to get out of, not really high enough for troops to sit inside. I bought the tanks, which can have any of three guns plugged into the turret mantlet and a sensor mast stuck in a socket in the roof. As with the grav vehicles, I made up four, with three main gun turrets and one support turret which has a short gun and a missile pack. The main gun in the picture below doesn't show well; it actually consists of three parallel barrels held together at the muzzle end with a big clamp. I have no idea how I'm going to make that look reasonable. The sensor masts in these cases are the alternative spherical ones provided. One thing I'm really conscious of as the vehicles go together is that GZG have provided a lot of sockets in the turret roofs of their vehicles, and that there aren't really enough things to fill them plausibly. I may have to copy what they do with their own samples on their site and stick antennae into the remaining open holes, because they show up even after you've finished painting.

GZG grav armour; painted

These did not come out as I had hoped. The basic idea was to paint them in the current Swedish armour scheme, which is a splinter pattern in two shades of green and black. The first hiccup was when my preferred lighter green didn't have what it took to cover my mid green. So I wound up using a greyish green which gave the right amount of contrast but not quite the look I'd wanted. Then it turned out that it's actually quite hard to lay down a splinter pattern on such a busy and cluttered hull, so the patterns weren't quite as neat as I had hoped. However, the thing which just ruined it was the decision that I needed to emphasise the hull detailing by giving the vehicles an ink wash. This went on far too black and blotted out all the colours without really emphasising the detailing at all. And it couldn't readily be undone without starting the painting from scratch, which I wasn't in the mood for. So I retouched the lighter green and then dry brushed the vehicles heavily to reduce the excessive darkening caused by the ink wash.

That just left me wondering about the grav plates; after a lot of dithering I abandoned my initial idea of painting them blue with metallic blue highlights and settled for painting them silver with a green ink wash and dark bronze edging. The ink wash here worked out fine, settling well into the grooves and providing a useful streakiness on the raised areas.

Basing was done very simply; PVA glue brushed onto the base, then shake the base in beach sand. Let the glue dry and then recoat it with more glue to bind the sand and stop it shedding. A useful side effect of the second coat is that it darkens the sand and punches up the contrast between different grains. Dry brush with buff paint. Dab on yet more glue and then shake the base in micro foam flock.

I'm abashed about the ink wash outcome. I'd never had much luck with ink washes in the past, but then tried diluting the ink with Johnson's Kleer floor polish, which breaks up the surface tension and stops it from beading on the flat areas. It worked like a dream with 15mm infantry figures - the scale reference figures in the earlier shots were painted simply by washing them in one solid colour, inkwashing them heavily and then dry brushing them with the base colour again, giving an effecitve enough shaded effect for very little effort. The results are less inspiring when applied to big areas.

Photographing miniatures

Putting pictures on Blogger is annoyingly counter intuitive. Hats off to Google for coming up with something which is actually more frustrating to use than the picture layout tool in Word. So apologies for the messy layout in the last post, but it's not my fault. I need to think more about this. The next picture post will probably have less pictures.

There are whole web sites devoted to taking pictures of miniatures and I've got no intention of reinventing the wheel. I'm just going to note for the record how those shots were taken.

Sony DSC F828 on a tripod shooting into a cheap light box I bought on impulse a while ago. The box was lit from outside with two anglepoise lamps fitted with 75 W daylight bulbs; these are also the lights I use to paint under - in fact the set up was done on my painting table. The painting lights were Robert's idea, and a huge improvement on my efforts to get the light right using a single flash either on or off the camera. With the lights, I used manual exposure with the aperture set at 4.5 and a shutter speed of about three seconds; the times varied slightly depending on the shot, with most of the shots underexposed by about .7 of a stop to allow for the fact that I was shooting a fairly dark green and I didn't it to wash out.

I have complained in an earlier post about the limitations of the 828's viewfinder - it turns out that if you set the camera to manual and then work towards the correct exposure, the viewfinder will give a reasonably faithful approximation of the final shot based on the values that you dial in. Very useful because I was shooting a dark object against a light background and even with spot metering the camera's "correct" exposure was bringing the shot in too bright. I only wish it would do this when you're working on programme with a flash, but it's impressive to see, and it's a trick which SLRs can't do. The LCD preview has the other advantage that when you're working with this kind of job off a tripod, you can set up the shot without stooping awkwardly to see through the viewfinder. Overall, I may keep on using the Sony for this work even if I do buy a better camera.

Post processing was very limited; load the pictures into iPhoto, discard the useless shots (three-fifths of the shots on the card were useless shots from the early efforts to get the flash to do the work) and then crop the shots down. Once I had the crops done, I needed to correct a slight pink cast which I've noticed in most of my shots of figures. I can't decide whether it was because I got the white balance setting wrong or whether there's some quirk in the camera - I'm undecided because I've seen the pink cast in earlier shots which were done with dedicated flash where the white balance should have been perfect out of the box.

GZG SF armour; the grav vehicles

This is the GZG approach to a grav tank, at the early stage of painting. I've undercoated it black and primed it mid green - really cheap mid green, but the shade was the one that I wanted. I'm putting it up partly to show what the vehicle looks like and partly because I'm planning to show the process of painting the vehicle up.

The gun is one of three choices. The saucer shaped thing to the left of the vehicle commander is one of two choices for a sensor housing - the other one is a globe, which i used on the walker tanks.






This shows one of the alternative gun choices. In this case I also stuck a missile box on the mount for the sensor arm in the first example. I made one up in this mode and three with the big gun and the sensor disc. Stargrunt envisages no more than a pltoon of tanks a side so I was thinking in terms of a platoon of two to three gun tanks and one support tank with a short range heavy weapon and missiles for longer range interdiction. Or, being completely truthful, I was just making the most of the variations provided







This is the lighter grav vehicle with a turret mounted long gun. GGZ also make this with an unmanned turret which doesn't look as good. I wound up discarding a number of those turrets to the spares box.








The same light grav vehicle, this time with a support turret. The missile box in this case is cast into the turret. You get to decide which of two different gun barrel types to use; this picture shows the shorter one, and the one above shows the longer.













This shows the heavy with a couple of figures for scale purposes. The figures are old Traveller figures made in the 1980s which I only got round to undercoating and painting once I started buying these vehicles. Below, again for scale, is one of the light tanks with the same figures

smuggling

I have the camera set up right now in the hope of taking some pictures of all that GZG lead I was talking about earlier. I bought a cute little tabletop stand for the camera a while back but it's never really worked out for me; too hard to control the movement of the camera on the useless little head the stand's got. So I got out the tripod and looking across at it now I'm reminded of when I bought it, some twenty years ago. I was on a trip to London with AM, and bought the tripod because it was solid and the price was good, though higher than the limit for bringing things home. On the way back. the customs guys stopped us when we were coming back into the country. They saw the tripod and figured that there was bound to be all kinds of photographic goodies in our luggage. Much searching for contraband ensued.

Nothing to be found. All I had was an obviously well used SLR and nothing much else. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that what I was actually smuggling was the tripod.

Camera angst

For about ten years when I was in my twenties, I carried at least one camera every day, usually a Pentax MX SLR with a - to me - interesting backstory. Backstory aside, it was a simple camera with a fast prime lens and all manual controls. Even if the battery went flat it would go on taking pictures at whatever settings you'd dialled in. If you knew how to estimate an exposure, you didn't need the meter. And although I had, and have, the visual sensibility of a tree stump, I did have the ability to estimate exposure settings and the kind of rock steady wrists which let you work without a flash. The results were never great art, but I liked getting the shot in circumstances where most people would have had to use more camera and much more flash.

When I lived in Greece, I somehow stopped carrying a camera. It was too much trouble and over the space of a year or so what had been a hobby just passed out of my life.

For more than a decade, I dug out a camera for family events and pretty much didn't think of them apart from that. Then my sisters started having children and this seemed to respark the interest; I started carrying a camera when I would head over on a visit. I'd bought a digital camera by this stage, without ever getting much real use out of it. Canon Digital Ixus. It was a really well made camera, but it was never any real use to me. Like all modern compact cameras, it had a motorised lens which popped out when you switched on the camera. Makes for a nice compact package, but it means that it takes about ten or fifteen seconds for the camera to be ready to use, and so it wasn't much use when you caught a glimpse of something fleeting. And if you carried it ready against the chance of a shot, you hit the next bump, which was an autofocus mechanism that operated in geological time. Push the shutter button all the way through and wait for the camera to decide it was ready - frustrating, and when you're taking pictures of children, a guarantee of disappointment.

I traded up. I bought a Sony 828, the best thing I could afford at the time. Digital SLRS still cost ridiculous amounts of money in 2003. It's a very good camera. The lens is sharp and bright. The camera is ready to shoot as soon as you switch it on. The autofocus is fast and if you insist on taking the picture before the focus is ready, that's your decision. The on-camera flash is like any on-camera flash, pretty much useless. I bought a real flash to get around that, and when I have to use flash, I've got good results from it. There's just a couple of niggles. The viewfinder is terrible. In bright light it washes out. In dim light, it shows you what it thinks the picture will look like if you shoot without flash, which effectively means that it shows you a murky reddish blurred mess. There's probably an override for this, but I haven't found it yet. And it has that manual mode that so many manufacturers include on high end cameras - whizz a dial around for shutter speed, hold down a button and whizz the same dial for aperture. You can't independently control both at the same time, which is actually the key to doing manaul exposure properly.

The two things got more and more frustrating. I missed the bright clear view of an SLR viewfinder. The fact that I could use the LCD display on the 828 to set up shots unobtrusively or from better angles was great, but not enough of a compensation. And not being able to use manual control just annoyed me. So I began to think about SLRs again.

What I wanted was a Pentax. But Pentax weren't making a digital SLR. And I didn't like Canon - the control wheel's in the wrong place for my hand. And I couldn't afford anything serious from Nikon and I didn't see the less serious Nikon machines doing what I wanted. And so on.

This summer I started thinking seriously about it. I had the money to buy something useful, and the limitations of the Sony were starting to get to me. About the time that I was thinking seriously about the Nikon d70 (having weighed up and decided against the Pentax *ist series on the grounds that a) they couldn't be found in Ireland and b) the viewfinders were poor) Sony announced an SLR with chip based image stabilisation. Basically a re-engineered Minolta 5D, but interesting. i put the plans on hold till I could see one.

In the autumn, I finally got my hands on one. It was all right, but not quite right. Apart from anything else, the manual control had exactly the same weakness that the 828 had. And the lenses were going to be dear - if they could be found at all - and I'd need to buy a new flash (because Sony had unaccountably decided to stick with Minolta's completely non standard flash mount). Mmmm. There were rumours of a D80 from Nikon which would have the same resolution as the Sony Alpha and better build quality and imaging. i decided to wait to see one of those.

While I was waiting, Pentax finally announced a camera I could respect - the K10D. Chip based stabilisation. Proper manual controls. Good weather seals. I could use my old lenses with it - sort of. Same resolution as the Nikon d80 and the Sony Alpha. All in all, the camera I wanted, allegedly to be available in November.

And here it is, early December and there's no sign of one to be had. For the first time I can remember, it's not a matter of wanting something and knowing that if I waited the price would come down and I could get it for less. I'm sitting there with the money burning a hole in my pocket and there's no way to get the machine even if I paid top dollar. Signs on, the first sightings of either the K10D or the Samsung knock-off, the GX10 will be in January, when whoever is selling them will be having to price them to attract people away from discounted Nikon D80s and even more discounted Canon 400s - at which point I will have to buy a bargain whether I like it or not.

Of course, by the time I've waited that long, I may well have lost interest in the idea. But for the moment, it's something to brood on.