I live where I grew up, in Princeton, NJ. While the town has changed over time, as any place would over 46 years, it remains essentially the same. What has changed the most is the surrounding area.

Back in the day, as a kid, Princeton was surrounded by a belt of green 10-20 miles thick. Made up of farms and woods, it was a buffer that was as much psychic as it was physical. It kept the rest of the world at bay and it ensured a sense of small town life even though New York and Philadelphia were only 50 miles away.

Once, when probably 13 or 14, I went on a bike ride with a friend. We headed northeast along the canal and then at a certain point veered off. Up and out of the Millstone River basin, hours seemed to go by. Hot and thirsty, lost in every sense of the word, we were rewarded for our efforts when a Stewart’s Drive-in appeared off on its own, inhabiting a space carved out of a cornfield. Where was it? Where were we? We didn’t know and to a large extent it didn’t matter. It was summer, the days lasted forever, and it was hours until sunset. We had enough change for drinks, the owner pointed us back towards town, and after ten miles or so, biking through woods and farms, we were home.

Princeton is no longer isolated in that physical sense. The sod fields which lined Route 1 are gone, replaced by malls, shops, and hotels. There a long lines of traffic headed into town in the morning, out in the evening. Most of the rest of the land has been developed for housing or office parks. But traces of the buffer remain. To the east and the northeast of town, on the other side of the lake and the canal, there are still fields. Decent sized swaths of land, divided by long stretches of evergreens which rise three stories tall.

Plainsboro, NJ, February 16, 2010

Plainsboro, NJ, February 16, 2010

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Princeton, NJ, February 14, 2010

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Photographed this past fall, NYU Dental School’s new Oral and Urgent Care suite struck me in how much it reminded me of the house in North by Northwest.

Vandamm House, North by Northwest

The house in the movie, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, never existed in real life. The exteriors were painted mattes composited with live action foreground images.

NYU Dental School’s new suites:

Larger versions of the last two images are on my web site in the Architecture>Commercial gallery, here and here.

Well, the Jersey Shore must have been getting too much attention lately so the Pinelands decided to reclaim some for themselves. Dateline: Vineland, NJ, 1/21/10 – the police have arrested a man, the lessee-manager of a bowling alley, for contracting the torching of a rival alley a few miles away. The accused’s business has “Family Fun” in its name.  I guess we can add arson to the list of family activities.

I photographed the exterior of a Jersey bowling alley this summer for myself – a place I wanted to capture just in case I went by one day to find it gone for a new development. Here’s another view.

West Hunterdon Lanes, Frenchtown, NJ, July 11, 2009

I have posted reports on both of Canon’s new TS-E lenses (aka tilt/shift), the 17mm f/4L and the 24mm f/3.5L II, and I have been using them full on since receiving them earlier this year. They’re great optics. It’s clear how much of an improvement they are and how much they stand out the first time you use them.

Now, architectural photographer Rainer Viertlböck has posted two tests comparing them with his medium-format digital back, a 33mp Sinar e75, coupled with Rodenstock’s high-end view camera lenses; the 23HR, 28HR, and 35HR. Rainer used the Canon lenses on a Canon 5D Mark II.

Canon 17mm TS-E F/4L compared to Rodenstock 23HR + Sinar e75

Canon 24mm TS-E f/3.5L II compared to Rodenstock 28HR & 35HR + Sinar e75

Many are in agreement about how great these new Canon lenses are but I don’t know that anyone, myself included, expected them to compare so favorably against a medium-format digital back when used with view camera lenses. In the 17mm TS-E test, the Canon doesn’t have quite the detail or resolution of the medium-format kit but it comes awful close. This holds true even when the Canon files are res’d. up to match the Sinar e75 resolution.

In the 24mm TS-E II test, the Canon does a much better job than the Sinar/Rodenstock combo in controlling flare from tungsten light sources.

Every digital kit is a compromise of sorts. With a DSLR you have flexibility but loose in sharpness; with a medium-format digital back you gain in sharpness and resolution, but are more limited in workflow, operability, and the cost of entry is orders of magnitude higher.

It used to be that one of the main factors in digital architectural photography tipping the scales toward medium-format digital backs was the ability to use view camera lenses. This combo offered a photographer image quality which a DSLR with SLR style lenses could never attain. Well, never is broken and that compromise is looking less like a compromise and more like a choice based on style and needs.

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My Canon 17mm TS-E and 24mm TS-E II posts:

• Quick Look – Canon 17mm f/4L TS-E Lens
• Longer Look – Canon 17mm f/4L TS-E Lens
• Live View is My Friend (features the Canon 17mm TS-E lens)
• Canon’s TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II Lens
• What’s It Take to Fill a Space and Make It Your Own? (features the Canon 17mm TS-E lens)

This is the view from New York University’s newest dorm, Founders Hall. The only catch? You have to enroll and then get very lucky in the housing lottery.

A few images already appeared in the Live View blog post. Here are another few and the rest can be viewed in the Recent Work Gallery on my web site.

This past week I was finally able to get my hands on the new Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II lens. This lens is an update to Canon’s Mark I version which dates back to 1991. The earlier version, while never the sharpest lens in the bag, held up surprisingly well over the years. Where other lenses had to be shelved because the increased resolution of succeeding generations of dslr models rendered them problematic, the Mark I version of the TS-E 24mm with some extra Photoshop steps was still viable and a good counterbalance to shooting with fixed lenses and doing all of the perspective correction in Photoshop.

Canon TS-E 24mm II @ f/11

Compare the TS-E 24 II to the TS-E 24 in the upper right of the image above.

Compare the TS-E 24 II to the TS-E 24 in the lower left of the image above.

What does the new Canon TS-E 24 II bring to the table? It’s sharper, it’s optically true, and it exhibits no chromatic aberration. Using it will save a minimum of two steps in Photoshop post-production – it needs no correction for lens distortion nor does it need chromatic aberration correction. Eliminating those steps will save time and they’ll also save image quality as both steps tended to soften the image further.

Like the new TS-E 17mm, the TS-E 24mm II offers 12mm of shift. This is another improvement over the Mark I version of the lens which offered 11mm of shift but suffered image degradation if you shifted more than 7mm.

Canon TS-E 24mm II, 0mm Shift

Canon TS-E 24mm II, +12mm Shift

Most lenses on a 21mp’ish camera max out sharpness at f/11. Stop down more and diffraction sets in softening the image further. But when I tested the TS-E 17mm lens I found that if you wanted to hold sharpness on the outer edges when the lens is shifted you really needed to shoot at f/16. This was at the expense of softening some detail in the center of the frame but it was questionable how noticeable that would be. The TS-E 24mm II is similar but not as extreme.

Compare the TS-E 24mm II with a +12mm rise at f/11 and f/16 (image is the upper left corner of the photo above.) You can see that f/16 is holding the corner a bit better but this is a very small area of the frame, the difference is not huge, and some print tests are needed to confirm if f/16 over f/11 is warranted in this situation.

As mentioned above, the TS-E 24 II appears to be optically true, amazingly so, and in that sense similar to a good view camera lens. Here is a composite image made from three horizontal frames on the TS-E 24 II utilizing the full range of possible shifts (-12mm, 0mm, +12mm.)

Canon TS-E 24mm II: -12mm, 0, +12mm Combined

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An overcast day is not necessarily the best day to test a lens. Details can look soft and mushy and you can’t push the lens when it comes to checking for chromatic aberration or flare but it’s clear from the images what an improvement the new lens is.

Canon TS-E 24mm II

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All of the images above: Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University.

Canon TS-E 24mm II, Roberts Stadium, Princeton University

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Canon TS-E 24mm II, Roberts Stadium, Princeton University

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For more information:

The Digital Picture

DPReview

Canon

Northlight Images

Lobby View, New York, NY August 12, 2009, Canon 45mm TS-E f/4.5

I just had a quick week off but before that I spent six days on two architecture projects. The six days helped drive home what a great lens the new 17mm TS-E is and made me all the more eager to get my hands on the new 24mm TS-E II. But beyond that the spaces I photographed were ringing with my new mantra, Live View is my friend.

Live View is Canon’s implementation of the ability to see the image you are about to shoot live as a video feed on the camera’s screen, zoom in up to a 10x magnification, and check or set focus manually. Live View can be seen one of two ways: via the camera’s screen or if you are tethered either via the camera’s screen or via the computer screen.

Lobby View, 100% Crop of First Image Focused via Live View in Camera

When I first got my 1Ds Mark III’s I used Live View via my laptop’s screen as I tested some lenses. I found it cute but I did not see its usefulness. If anything there was a negative to it.  When operating Live View via the computer, I had a tendency to leave it on for minutes at a time which led to the camera’s imaging chip overheating creating stuck pixels in the image. So, I avoided Live View and continued to shoot as I have always done.

Fast forward a year and a half. I am testing the new 17mm TS-E lens and finding it very hard to focus manually. What to do? Out of desperation it crossed my mind to try Live View again. I had no laptop with me so I enabled it in the camera. Man, what a difference. Zooming in and setting focus. It’s all a piece of cake. On assignment in the following days I was able to put the focus exactly where I wanted every time. No more trial and error via the laptop to set focus. How did I work without this?

It’s clear that Live View can be helpful when shooting wider open, with less depth of field, but I wouldn’t discount the value of it when shooting architecture at f/11 or f/16. Depth of field is a tricky beast made trickier in the digital age. In the analog days most photographers tended to rely on the scales manufacturers provided on lens barrels or if shooting 4×5 they could simply pull a Polaroid to check focus. In both cases, images were never examined at 100% on large computer screens as they are today. If anything, the digital age has brought home the critical nature of focus with all lenses including wide angles, the fact that depth of field was always something of a false promise – it never guaranteed sharpness but only a range of acceptable sharpness around your point of focus, and that all lenses must be tested to not just find their sweet spots but to also find where diffraction sets in.

Community Garden, New York, NY August 14, 2009, Canon 17mm TS-E f/16, Focused via Live View in Camera

Another element in this, too, is newer lenses which don’t have set infinity points. Yeah, I’m shooting a building 50 yards away with a 17mm lens at f/16. I should be able to set the lens to infinity and not think twice about focus. Where’s infinity though? The answer is – it depends. With all lenses it depends upon the temperature, with tilt/shift lenses it depends upon if the tilt is being used, and with autofocus lenses having the lens focus beyond infinity can help the lens achieve accurate focus.

Once you get hooked on Live View it’s hard to work any other way especially if you are working locked down on a tripod and photographing stationary subjects. I recommend using it via the camera’s screen. You can still shoot tethered but Live View is easier and quicker when you are at your camera and all the controls are right at hand. This is also best option with Canon’s manual focus only tilt/shift lenses. In that case there is no advantage to enabling it in the computer. You have to be at the camera to move the focus regardless.

On a Canon 1Ds Mark III Live View is enabled in Set-up Menu 2, select Live View function settings. Once done pressing the Set Button on back of the camera puts you in Live View mode. It takes a second or so but once done the view through the lens appears on the camera’s back screen. You can then put the focus area anywhere within the frame via the Multi-Controller Switch and you can zoom in via the Magnify Button. To exit Live View press the Set Button again.

Community Garden, New York, NY, August 14, 2009, Canon 24mm TS-E f/8, Focused via Live View in Camera

The Live View function settings will also allow you to project a grid on top of the image and Custom Function 16, Live View exposure simulation, in the Custom Function IV menu, Operation/others, will alter the Live View screen image to reflect your exposure settings. I find the latter helpful when I use Live View.

I also find it helpful to use a loupe against the camera’s screen when working with Live View. Not to magnify the screen image further but to block out stray light. If you’ve been a photographer a while and have an old Schneider medium-format film loupe with a dark base or Toyo view camera focus loupe they will work fine. Otherwise, Hoodman’s HoodLoupe works very well.