The Grocery Store Tea Bag

Of course you know the popular axiom - “it’s not the camera that takes the picture, it’s the photographer.” And I certainly have no intention of arguing with it. But here’s what I’ll ask you… What is the difference between an ordinary morning and a morning with a little cup of hot, fragrant coffee? Why have the new shoes been standing in the hallway forever while you still wear the old ones? Why climb to the ninth floor on foot if there’s an elevator? And how much tea do you have to drink to learn to tell the taste of Assam from a grocery store tea bag?

Of course, all these questions are rhetorical. Meaning, they don’t expect an answer. But let’s suppose we live in a world where there is no coffee in the morning, where every day you have to put on new shoes that haven’t been broken in, and the elevator simply hasn’t been invented yet (though they’re building nine-story buildings anyway). How about a world where the only tea that exists is the grocery store tea bag?

Shoo, nostalgia, shoo!

No, today we won’t be remembering the past. We’ll talk about the present. About a photographer’s everyday routine and how it sometimes matters that this routine isn’t spoiled by small annoyances and inconveniences. Of course it’s the photographer who takes the picture. The only question is - does he get any satisfaction out of the process?

Yes, whether a photographer manages to shoot a masterpiece doesn’t depend on the camera. All that depends on the camera is how convenient and comfortable making that masterpiece will be. But let’s leave the camera aside. I brought it up only as an example. What I’m going to talk about is various photographic accessories that have almost no effect on the final result, that is, on the photograph. Their absence won’t stop you from shooting your masterpiece. Their presence won’t make you a great master or a guru. Useless little things. Almost. Why almost? Because a photographer’s mood often depends on these accessories. And everything else often depends on the mood. Even the meaning of life. Such a simple little connection.

Glass, Tin, and Wood

One of the most controversial instruments in a photographer’s arsenal is the filter. The most ordinary filter. Why controversial? - you’ll ask. Because very often it gets used for the wrong thing. The most widespread of filters is the so-called “protective” one. By its purpose it’s meant to protect the lens from dirt and damage. But most of the time it protects your camera from good pictures. Usually a photographer wants to improve the quality of the image he gets and buys expensive lenses. Such lenses give better resolution and less distortion. But how do you leave such an expensive thing unprotected? No problem - we’ll put on a “protective” filter. This one will do just fine. And it’s cheap - about five bucks.

But look at the math you get - a quality lens with a cheap “protective” filter will give you the quality of… the “protective” filter. Was it worth spending on the expensive lens?

And what about protection? I don’t know… The choice here comes down to this - either you shoot with the lens or you take care of it. Of course, anything can happen. A friend of mine, for example, had a lens fall out of his bag. But the lens had a protective filter on it. The filter - shattered, the lens - intact. You’d think, here’s one more clear proof of how useful “protective” filters are.

That’s for you to decide now. I never use “protective” filters. No piece of glass, however good it is, will improve the quality of your lens. And if you dig into the physics a little, you’ll understand that it can only make it worse. By how much? That depends on the quality of the “protective” filter. So choose for yourself. There are only three options. More quality and more risk - then shoot without a filter. Less quality and less risk - put the filter on. Less quality and more risk - then the camera in your cell phone will suit you perfectly, the one somebody may simply steal from you one day.

But if you can’t imagine life without “protective” filters - then at least try not to skimp on them. As a reference point, a quality filter will cost two hundred dollars and up.

As for other filters, there are only two of them in my backpack. That’s the minimum set I need for digital photography. Shooting film, I’d carry a lot of other filters with me. But “digital” simplified my choice. Most of the effects you get from using filters can be reproduced on a computer. What’s more, those effects can be applied locally (that is, not to the whole image), corrected and even undone. If the filter was used during the shoot, “undoing” its effect is already pretty hard. That’s exactly why only two filters are left in my arsenal - a polarizing one and a neutral density one.

The way a polarizing filter works, as the name suggests, is based on the wave nature of light. Polarizing filters, or just a “pola” for short, only let through light polarized in one plane. Light is usually polarized by reflection and scattering. The most common source of light polarized by scattering is the blue sky. That’s exactly why, shooting with a “pola”, you can darken the sky without affecting the other parts of the frame. There’s one more use for polarizing filters. Light reflected off the shiny surface of dielectrics (various liquids, glass, lacquered surfaces, plastic and so on) is linearly polarized. So shooting such objects with a polarizing filter, you can significantly reduce reflections and sometimes even remove them completely. Just a few typical examples - shooting a reflection in a pond, a painting behind glass, a person in eyeglasses or a store window.

Polarizing filters come in different kinds. First of all it’s worth paying attention to what they’re made of. The reasoning here is the same as with choosing a “protective” filter. It’s going to be glass, which at best will degrade the quality of your shot only slightly. It’s just that, unlike the “protective” filter, with a “pola” you can get an effect that’s almost unachievable on a computer. So I carry this filter with me. Actually mine isn’t a plain “pola” (my filter is called a Warming Polarizer). It’s combined with a “warming” filter that makes the photograph warmer (and what else could a filter with a name like that make it?). I shoot a lot of landscapes and that combination is entirely justified there. A polarizing filter has one more use - a “nontraditional” one. Since part of the light is held back by this filter, the exposure changes when you use it. That’s not a problem, because modern SLRs measure the light through the lens and so take the reduced light into account. But sometimes that’s exactly what I use the “pola” for - to cut the light. It’s especially needed when shooting running water, when a long exposure blurs the surface of the water. And to lengthen the exposure you need to cut the light. Feel it? Math again, curse the thing. My mother told me: “Learn your multiplication tables!”

But back to photography. Usually a polarizer cuts the exposure by a factor of one and a half to two. On a bright sunny day, or to reach an exposure of several tens of seconds, that isn’t enough. And this is where my second filter comes to the rescue - the neutral density one. This filter’s function is fairly simple - to cut the light and at the same time not introduce distortions into the color characteristics of the frame you’re shooting. Which is why it’s called “neutral density”. Photographers usually carry several such filters of different densities, marked in F-stops (that is, in the amount by which the light is changed). But my “neutral” filter isn’t quite ordinary either - it’s variable density (it’s called Vario-ND). That is, all the same thing, but instead of several filters of different densities - I have one. You turn the ring and the density changes across a range from two to eight F-stops. Convenient? That’s what I decided too. Although during the trip to Australia I shot with it very rarely, even though the shooting mostly happened along the coast, where there was water in abundance. Why rarely? Because somebody was always asking me for it. So on the next trip I’ll take two “neutral” filters with me - one for myself and one for “the other guy”. These filters are made by the American company Singh-Ray. It’s a small company and it sells its products only over the internet. So you won’t find such filters in stores. But if you have trouble ordering online, then I’d recommend looking at the B+W filters from the German company Schneider-Kreuznach. This company makes very good lenses, so they make very good, high-quality filters too. True, you won’t find a variable density “neutral” filter there - but is it my fault your internet bill hasn’t been paid?

Wallet, Wallet… What Wallet?

These days the answer is a little box with a hard drive and a card reader. Plenty of companies make them now. And the more of them there are, the… no, you didn’t guess… the worse. This is more from the theory of large numbers. What’s worse? Everything. When the choice is big - choosing is hard. Bad. Many models - which means there are ones that suit photographers, and ones that don’t. Bad again.

So you need to figure out what you want from your portable storage. I use mine only for backup. That is, one copy of the frames I’ve shot I keep on the laptop (which I carry with me), and a second copy on the photo storage. Digital isn’t film (what an apt statement). And anything can happen to your shots - the drive in the laptop can die, the storage can fail, or you yourself can accidentally format the card before you’ve saved the frames onto some device (in practice that happens far more often than equipment failures). That’s exactly why I duplicate all the data. And until I’ve checked that I have two copies - I don’t format the cards. In most cases it’s a waste of time and disk space. But the normal distribution (this is again from the theory of large numbers) doesn’t interest us. What interests us is the anomaly. That is, the thing that happens very rarely but doesn’t hurt any less for it.

I hope I’ve convinced you how important backup is. Or at least planted some doubts.

What does good portable storage have to have? First, you’ll need quite a lot of space on the hard drive. Today the size of a RAW file runs around 10 MB, so with regular shooting (200-300 frames is still relatively little, considering the ease with which those frames get made on digital) you can fill a 20 GB drive in a week. So I’d recommend looking at boxes with no less than 40 GB, and better 80 GB right away, given that the size of the drive has little effect on the price of the thing itself. Then it matters to make sure which cards it can read. And whether it supports the type you use. And how many different types of memory card it supports. It’s not a given that you won’t be using a different type of card in the near future. And the last mandatory parameter - battery capacity. For these boxes that value is measured in the number of 1GB cards the device can copy to its internal drive without recharging. Imagine you’re driving across the desert. Magnificent dunes, photogenic camels, insane sunsets and knockout sunrises. The frames fly off at the speed of a samum (that’s a kind of wind). Only there are no palm trees with power outlets along the way. Not even in the oases. Water there is, electricity none. So what do you do? Refuse the camel another photo session? That’s inhumane toward the animal. Greenpeace wouldn’t understand. This is where it comes to the rescue. But only the one that can copy more than a dozen memory cards without recharging.

Mine is an Epson P-4000. The main virtue of this one is that without recharging it can copy sixteen one-gigabyte cards. A fairly impressive figure. Besides that, it can read data from two types of card (CF and SD) and lets you listen to music on the road and even watch video. And although it has a huge, bright screen (four inches on the diagonal) - I didn’t choose it for watching movies on the plane. I need it for the desert. Or for the deep taiga. Around Baikal, for instance. Where there still aren’t any outlets. Where there’s nothing but primordial beauty. And what’s surprising - I’ve noticed that the beauty of a place is inversely proportional to the number of electrical outlets in that territory. Such is the math. And on that simple electro-photographic law I’ll end my account. To pick it up again in the next issue. Because a grocery store tea bag can be brewed again and again. Tested by more than one generation.