Venice with a Fuji S5

Let's have a look at Venice, which I visited last year with a Fuji S5. Inevitably I end up with more photographs than I can use, so they sit on a hard drive gathering digital dust until I decide to dig them out.

My trip was mostly an excuse to carry around a big, heavy Mamiya twin-lens reflex with a 55mm f/5.4 lens - the widest for the Mamiya C-series TLR system - but I also took along my Fuji S5 and a fisheye lens because I love carrying things.

The Fuji S5 was launched in 2007. I've written about it before. Despite being twelve years old it still has very impressive dynamic range. Back in the 2000s the camera market only cared about megapixels, but in a move that was either very brave or completely misguided Fuji decided to prioritise vivid colours and dynamic range for their S3 and S5 SLRs.

They both used Fuji's clever SuperCCD SR sensor, which was designed to capture highlights without blowing them out. The image taken from the belltower above came out of the camera looking like this:

Which is more or less the correct exposure, although without digital burning it looks very bland. If the image had been shot with a compact camera the sky would be blown out irrevocably, and even with a digital SLR shooting a RAW file the sky would probably look something like the following if you had tried to burn the clouds:

The S3 and S5 on the other hand had a multilayered sensor, with two sets of photosites. There were six megapixels of full-sized photosites that captured the bulk of the image, plus six megapixels of tiny photosites studded in between the standard photosites that captured the same image underexposed by four stops. Photosites photosites photosites. There must have been a better way to write that sentence without using the word photosites so much.

The camera's internal software produced relatively muted results, and contemporary versions of Photoshop couldn't make use of the extra pixels, but nowadays the S3 and S5's RAW files are easy to work with using Adobe Camera Raw. A quick go with the graduated filter brings out lots of detail in the sky, and you can go mad with this, as if you were top Romantic painter John Martin and you wanted to scare people.

On a physical level the S3 was built around a Nikon F80 and had a slow data buffer that made it difficult to use for anything fast-moving, such as wedding photography; the S5 was essentially a Nikon D200 with Fuji electronics, but although it fixed the S3's problems it was too little, too late. Back then people wanted full-frame and sixteen megapixels, not APS-C and definitely not six megapixels.

Historically Fuji was out of step with the times, but only just. In 2007 Nikon launched the D3, which was a game-changer. Its emphasis on higher ISOs over megapixels caught the imagination of photographers, and almost overnight the competition seemed to give up on the megapixel wars and prioritise dynamic range instead. There were still high-resolution cameras, but they didn't have the same cachet. Fuji's digital SLRs had very good light sensitivity, although they weren't in the same league as the D3, and sadly there was never a full-frame SuperCCD SR sensor.

Modern digital SLRs approach the same dynamic range as the S3 and S5, but they tend to prioritise noise-free shadows, which is slightly more awkward to process with Photoshop. Processing S3 and S5 files is similar to burning black and white film, but lifting shadows is unintuitive.

The two cameras still have a cult following. The S3 is flimsier and slower, but uses standard AA batteries. The S5 is objectively superior - faster, more robust, and it will meter with manual focus lenses, whereas the S3 won't - but the batteries are long out of production. Frustratingly the S5 can't use D200 batteries, even though they're physically identical. Over time it will suffer the same fate as the Kodak DCS 14n / DCS Pro SLR, death-by-proprietary-battery, but for now it's still one of a kind albeit that there were two of them so it's one of two-of-a-kind the end.

Cordoba

Off to Cordoba, which is a short train ride from Seville. Like much of this part of Spain it resembles Morocco, but less hardcore. It's searingly, bakingly, shakingly hot in October, as if designed to weed out and evaporate any British people who visit the place, but I am made of sterner stuff, and furthermore I have a sun hat.

I laugh at the sun! Because I have a sun hat. The sun has made the planet Venus inhospitable to all known forms of life but it has no power over my head. The atmosphere of Venus is hot and full of carbon dioxide. Imagine you're trying to get to sleep, but it's cold, so you hide inside the blankets, but then you have to make an air channel, and then Soviet space probes invade your blanket. That's what Venus is like.

I have found that if I tip my sun hat at women and call them "m'lady" they enjoy that - they laugh and laugh, and laugh. I have some advice - instead of directly asking women if they have a boyfriend, ask them a question about their boyfriend. e.g. "You are very attractive, YOUR BOYFRIEND is a lucky man".

If it turns out that they don't have a boyfriend, follow them around until you become their boyfriend. It has not worked for me yet, but there are still some places where the local police do not recognise me.

The Kodak sign has become a legacy symbol, akin to the floppy disk icon

In the limited time I had in Cordoba I made a beeline for the main event, which is the Mezquita. It's a fascinating building. A former mosque with a cathedral built in the middle of it. One moment you're walking through a forest of pillars, the next moment you're confronted with a cathedral.

The effect is striking. I'm not sure it works. The cathedral is very tall but not very large, and when I was there the whole place was packed with tourists, including me, although of course I am a traveller, because I rough it, e.g. I wash my socks in the hotel sink. I am better than the other people. On a scale of ten, I am seven or eight out of ten - they are three, or fewer.

As in the previous post I used a Fuji S5 and a Peleng fisheye lens and some software. The lighting conditions made me wish that Fuji had persisted with the S5's SuperCCD SR sensor. Even at ISO 1600 the camera can retain highlights like nobody's business, but it gets very noisy. Alas the S5 was the end of the line. It has aged well, resolution notwithstanding.

I'm in two minds as to whether a tripod makes a person a tourist or a traveller or even a documentarian. On the one hand a tripod is genuinely useful, on the other hand it smacks of trying too hard. It's the kind of thing a landscape photographer might carry around, and no-one wants to be a landscape photographer. They're nerds.

Furthermore the combination of rigidity and mass required by a decent tripod makes it difficult to transport a tripod abroad, and of course most places frown on tripods. I remember trying to set one up in the toilet of a Burger King on the Edgware Road, and despite the fact that there were no signs forbidding tripods the security guard insisted that I leave. This was when I still had trouble with the old drink. We're friends now.

But if God had intended for mankind to remain sober, why did he make the world so bad?

This is snek. He's just outside Seville's Santa Justa train station and has presumably been around since 2010. I wonder what graffiti artists think about council-endorsed graffiti. The council tends to pick the most skilful artists, and their work persists for several years - but graffiti is a transient art form, and without constant regeneration and replacement it loses its power to shock, it becomes part of the furniture, unnoticed, anonymous.

Metropol Parasol, Seville

Off to Seville, to have a look at the Metropol Parasol. It's a gigantic mushroom / alien skeleton that puts me in mind of one of the early levels of Thief: The Dark Project, although I'm sure if you try and shoot passers-by with water-filled arrows the police will arrest you.

I took along my Fuji S5 and the Peleng fisheye lens I wrote about in a previous post. With a resolution of only six megapixels the S5 is behind the curve, but its dynamic range is still very impressive.

The parasol is a legacy of Spain's boom years. Building began in the mid-2000s but didn't finish until 2011. It's made out of wood, but it had to be reinforced, and the project eventually came in late and over budget. Up-close it looks a bit shoddy and I wonder how long it will last. The walkways that run along the top are held on with little screws and the whole thing needs a clean.

The entrance is downstairs, and although there was a plan to have a little shopping mall underneath the structure the owners must have been unable to sell the units, so there's only a souvenir shop and some vending machines. If the whole things catches fire the only thing that remains will be a set of pedestals.

But I'm being mean. It's a striking presence. For €3 you can take an elevator to the top floor, where you get a complimentary drink. I chose a wine cooler. The lower area is basically a child's playground, so the ambiance is nice. As I sat drinking my wine cooler and listening to the sound of children laughing at someone else for a change I thought of a better world.

A walkway runs along the top of the structure. It's hard not to imagine that you are walking on top of a cloud, and as I gazed down at the people down below whilst drunk on the complimentary drink - remember that complimentary means free, complementary means that you are pretending to be nice to someone - which was a wine cooler, I imagined that I was one of the Greek Gods of Mount Olympus. Wearing a toga and sandals.

Did you know that Mount Olympus is a real place? Did the Ancient Greeks notice that there were no Gods living on top of it? Perhaps they chose not to look too hard. Did you know that McDonald's in Spain serves beer? It's true, I have seen it.

The parasol also acts as a sun shade. Even in October Seville is dry, dusty, and really hot. It put me in mind of the old Spaghetti Westerns, although they were filmed in south-east Spain, not Seville (the landscape of Seville is too flat). The locals have adapted to the sun, firstly by being thin and lovely and secondly by building the city so as to block out the sun, viz:

Which made me wonder. Imagine if they build a giant sunshade on top of Seville - and then people started living on the sunshade. They would have to build a second sunshade on top of that. The result would be something akin to Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, but without the robots. I didn't see any robots in Seville.

As a British person - I am a British person - Seville is odd. It is the anti-Britain, with constant heat and the locals are thin. Beer is incredibly cheap but if there is a massive alcohol problem, I didn't see it. The air of constant violence that characterises Britain is absent. Seville is full of sad, pathetic losers who have reasonable conversations in bars and clubs really late at night - wasting their lives - when they should be fighting or sitting at home watching television instead.

Spain is where British footballers and pensioners go to live, but not Seville; it's too hot and nowhere near the beach. I have a Brit-dar but it rarely went off, instead the city seems to be very popular with Chinese tourists, who are a great unknown. British people have a peculiar relationship with themselves. They go abroad to get away from Britain, but choose to visit places that have large populations of British people, who they secretly despise. I have a nagging feeling that the Europeans think that we are the freaks, which is of course not true.

Sirmione

Ages ago I had a look at the Peleng 8mm fisheye lens, which comes from Belarus. On a full-frame camera the results are extraordinary, especially if you run the images through software; they become very wide and very tall. On an APS-C camera however the Peleng's effect is more modest, although still striking.

Just for fun I carted one off to Sirmione at the southern end of Lake Garda. The lens was stuck on the front of a Fuji S5, with the results run through Photoshop to stretch them out. The results look a bit like Google Street View, but there are no streets.

There was a fad for former Eastern Bloc cameras and lenses at the end of the last century. The Peleng was one of the odder choices, along with the medium format Arsat lens and the half-frame Agat camera. 8mm fisheye lenses project a fully circular image on a full-frame camera, which is an effect that grows old very quickly. It's a lot of money to spend on something you might only use once or twice. Circular fisheyes make a bit more sense on an APS-C camera, and for that reason Samyang of Korea makes a modern, APS-C only 8mm fisheye.

The Fuji S5's extended dynamic range lends itself to fisheye imagery - it's impossible to use graduated darkening filters with a fisheye lens, so unless you want the sky to be blown-out you have to bracket and layer, which is a lot of fuss, or expose for the sky and bring up the shadows with Photoshop, which tends to introduce a lot of noise.

Why only a few images? As an experiment I'm blogging this while on holiday with an ancient ThinkPad X61, instead of waiting to get home. A laptop has a lot more storage space than a tablet and a much nicer keyboard. Twenty years ago I would be hailed as a pioneering digital nomad, but a lot has changed in twenty years and nowadays even plebs have mobile phones and the internet etc. The novelty has gone.

What about Sirmione? The last time I was here there wasn't as much water, viz the images in this post. I could walk all around it. This year they've added more water, so I had to cut short my circumnavigation. I had an ice cream instead and read some of Robert Massie's Dreadnought whilst drinking. Massie's book is well-written but has masses of padding. It's great to have lots of context, but the chapters about Otto von Bismarck and Friedrich von Holstein are simply overlong - and even though Germany's most infamous warship was named after him, Bismarck himself couldn't give two hoots for Germany's navy, he was an army man.

Compare those chapters with for example the coverage of Lord Charles Beresford, who tussled with Jackie Fisher and was a leading man of the day but is nowadays forgotten. Beresford had no real influence on the course of Britain's Dreadnought programme and so the chapters devoted to him are padding as well, but they're shorter and feel much less stodgy. Furthermore the old-fashioned, militarily conservative Beresford's failure to knock out Fisher - a mere Sir - suggests that the Navy had, in the run-up to the Great War, finally succeeded in having itself managed along rational, scientific lines rather than the whims of a few powerful men. This might explain why the "lions led by donkeys" charge levelled at the army was never directed at the Royal Navy. Warships float on science and are made out of money, which is more precious than anything. Unlike human lives they are too expensive to entrust to whims.

Sirmione seems to be popular with disabled people, which makes sense because it's mostly flat. It would however be difficult to visit by train, as the nearby train station at Desenzano is an uphill walk. Another thing that is awkward is the structure of this post, which begins by talking about fisheye lenses and then turns into a mixture of travel advice, book review, and military philosophy, before ending with a curious paragraph about Sirmione's disabled facilities, followed by a wistful reminiscence of the late Elisabeth Brooks in The Howling - she was pretty - which I haven't written yet (come back later)

This pier was packed with gorgeous Italian women wearing very revealing swimwear (not pictured).

It is now 2025. Sometimes I go back to old blog posts and proof-read them. I'm still pondering Elisabeth Brooks, but the gag up the page above the changing water level struck me. Back in 2016 the humour came from the fact that, obviously, the tide had changed. The authorities hadn't put more water into the lake, it's just that the tide had changed. That's why the water level was different.

And then it struck me. Lakes don't have tides. At least, not Italian lakes. They aren't open to the sea. And yet the water level had definitely changed. How come? Well, it seems that Lake Garda is subject to droughts and snow run-off just like any other body of water, and 2016 had presumably been fairly wet. In fact there was torrential rain a couple of months after I visited Sirmione. So, you learn something every day.

Tokina 100-300mm f/4 AT-X

We call it flooding; the river calls it freedom. Seventy-five percent of the Earth's surface is covered in water, and from outer space the planet appears blue because the greens and yellows and browns of the land are overwhelmed by the blue of the sea. On an objective level Earth is a water planet with some landmasses. The affairs of man are inconsequential compared to the affairs of fish, because it is their world, not ours. The ocean itself is alive, and has a mind. It is engaged in a constant struggle to obliterate the land. Torrential rains and flooding are the ocean's attacks against soil and rock.

Little does the ocean know that it is doomed. When the sun burns out it will expand, and all the Earth's water will evaporate into space. The dominant substance of the universe is not water, or earth, it is instead hydrogen, the most common element. Hydrogen powers the sun. One day the ocean will learn to split itself into oxygen and hydrogen, and perhaps then it will make peace with the land.

If I was a multimillionaire I would consider opening a fish bar. It would be called Nautical but Nietzsche, and I would only welcome patrons who had rejected conventional morality. Just outside the door would be a doll of a priest that guests would be encouraged to beat with a plastic haddock. The only bands I would book would be Ska bands. There is no meaning in this world, and we are free, and so are fish.

That is why it would be a fish bar and not for example a barbershop or a book store. Today we're going to have a look at the Tokina 100-300mm f/4 AT-X. It's an old manual focus push-pull zoom lens from the 1980s. I decided to try it out at the Yeovilton air show, thus all the images of aeroplanes and stuff in this post.

I put it on the front of a Fuji S5, an ancient six-megapixel SLR with a clever HDR sensor. The S5 is an eccentric choice for an airshow, especially so in 2016. The resolution doesn't lend itself to cropping, and the camera's eight-frame, 1.4fps "burst mode" isn't very good. But the sensor does well with clouds, and I don't have any other Nikon bodies, and why not? Human history is full of wise men who were overruled and ignored by irrational egomaniacs who wanted a golden bicycle, and I intend to make history and have a golden bicycle.

The Sea Vixen had a two-man crew. The pilot sat in the cockpit, the radar man sat undermeath the bulge on the left, where he was safe from seagulls.

Show here on a Pen F, with the Nikon-Pen F adapter from the previous post. I toyed with the idea of taking this to Yeovilton, but the Pen F's vertical framing would be awkward. Also, JCII sticker, aw yiss.

The red ring is a bit embarrassing. Tokina was probably copying the red ring of Canon's FD-era zoom lenses. It was a contemporary of the Canon FD 100-300mm f/5.6L, and perhaps it was designed to one-up that lens - the 100-300mm f/4 is a stop faster. It's about the size of a modern 70-200mm f/4L but has a built-in tripod mount...

...which is adjustable but not removable. It's in the right place balance-wise, although it's much too small to use as a handhold. The push-pull action is awkward because infinity focus isn't quite at the infinity mark, and it suffers from zoom creep. Otherwise it feels very tough. The lens has an internal zoom mechanism, and although mine must be thirty years old it has only a tiny amount of dust. The rear element is fixed in place and perhaps the zoom control filters out dust. Irritatingly the front part rotates when you focus. It takes 77mm filters.

The lens came with a hood that mostly filtered out flare, but not in this case.

What's the performance like? In my experience of old telephoto zooms the best of them were surprisingly sharp, but the colours were washed-out and the last 100mm or so was often very poor. The 100-300mm f/4 is surprisingly good in those two respects. Wide open at 300mm f/4 it's entirely usable. The colours have nothing wrong with them and vignetting is mild. For the following images I stuck it on a full-frame Canon 5D Mk II with an adapter.

The full frame at 300mm f/4, focusing on the gutter, because that is where my mind spends so much of its time. There's a bit of pincushion distortion, but not much, and with a textured backdrop the vignetting is basically undetectable.

Central sharpness is fine - not bitingly sharp, but good enough for 300mm f/4. Highlight edges have purple fringing. At the top the image with no processing, at the bottom some added unsharp mask. Stopping down to f/8 doesn't improve the image to a noticeable degree.

Towards the edge of the frame there's obvious CA and an overall soft glow.

The same image, but with CA correction and sharpening. There's still a soft glow, but at reasonable enlargement sizes you can't tell.

Bear in mind these are 100% crops from a massive 21mp image. For all practical purposes the Tokina 100-300mm f/4 is usable at 300mm f/4. I briefly tested it at 100mm and it was razor-sharp; I'm not going to fill this post with endless shots at different apertures and focal lengths, just trust me that 300mm f/4 is the worst. Bokeh at the minimum focus distance of 2m is a smooth paste. The lens appears to be parfocal, e.g. if you focus at 100mm and then zoom in, it stays in focus. I say "appears to be", because it's difficult to zoom the lens in and out without changing focus slightly.

Does it make sense nowadays? Under optimal conditions the lens performs very well, but life has surface noise. A lens is just one part of a photographic system, which encompasses not only the technology but also the human factor. Throughout my life I have used photography as a means of artistic expression; in the case of artistic photography the human factor is by far the most important element. I have a strong heart, robust guts, muscled legs, firm buttocks, a keen eye, steady hands, and a mind that is complex, well-fed, and endlessly questioning. I stand on the brink of infinity, gazing at the clouds below.

Conventional airshow photography, at least on a deliberate level, is all about the photographic system, the combination of lens, camera body, location and timing, of which the lens is just one component. It is also an accidental illustration of transience, futility, and the cold hard grip of the iron laws of thermodynamics, but the same is true of all human endeavour. Car shows, fireworks displays, marriages, they are all doomed to decay. The aeroplanes degrade every time they are flown, and even with meticulous care the metal can only take so much abuse before it fails. Perhaps the machines can be rebuilt, but at some point they become new machines. Each year a generation of photographers visit the show, generating a flood of images that delight the eye for a day and are then forgotten. The state of photographic technology marches on; the slides that wowed Mr and Mrs 1983 are nowadays cute novelties; stills photography itself is a throwback in an age of high-speed 4K footage captured with drones and GoPro remotes. As the saying goes, this year's top fighter prototype is tomorrow's chip paper.

At 300mm the 100-300mm's image quality is fine, but as part of a photographic system it doesn't really work for airshows. It's not long enough, and manually focusing a push-pull zoom while tracking a plane through the sky is difficult. At f/4 it's a stop faster than the typical modern 75-300mm f/4-5.6 plastic zoom at the long end, but even cheap plastic zooms tend to have motion-aware image stabilisation, and furthermore the optical deficiencies of modern zoom lenses are generally easy to correct in Photoshop whereas motion blur is a killer.

The Textron Scorpion is a light attack aircraft that resembles the old Dornier Alpha Jet. It is still under development and might have missed the boat - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down - but nonetheless it has attracted several sales leads.

As a tribute to naval aviation the poor chaps in the back saluted the crowd.

There was a demonstration of an AH-64 blowing things up. After fifteen years of LiveLeak videos it's hard not to think of thermal images of people blown into bloody chunks.

By all accounts the 200-400mm f/4 TC is a superb lens, although I'm not convinced that it's the best choice for airshows, especially not on a full-frame body. On the positive side it has excellent autofocus and image stabilisation, the problem is range. The nature of airshow manoeuvres is such that when the aircraft are closest to the stands, they're turning away, so you need to capture them on the far end of their loops. A 600mm f/4, a 300mm f/2.8 with a 2x converter, or a 400mm f/2.8 with a 2x converter mounted on a 7D all have superior range.

The counter-argument is that you lose the ability to photograph planes that get too close - but they never get too close!

And that was Yeovilton. Last year I took along an infrared camera and photographed the last Vulcan; it no longer flies, so the roster this year was relatively mundane. The Royal International Air Tattoo will have an F-35, which has just flown across the Atlantic. This of course means that we can fly it back across the Atlantic and bomb New York if we want - stealthily. With precision munitions and the F-35, the UK now has the ability to kill any individual walking around in the open in New York and nobody need ever know.

Random observations: it was sunny, and then it rained, and despite getting damp the 100-300mm f/4 didn't break. I know very little about the lens, or for that matter Tokina. Judging by the adverts in Popular Photo it was launched after 1982 and replaced before 1992 by an autofocus version, which was in turn replaced by a second version that is now discontinued. Tokina no longer sells a telephoto zoom. The company still exists but gives the impression it is on its last legs.

Whilst taking pictures I was surrounded by people with weather-sealed lenses, using weather-sealed camera bodies; the moment it started to rain they rushed to put their lenses away and get under cover. There's an old saying that two is company, three is a crowd, but in reality three is a trio, and after the introduction of the Public Order Act of 1986 - which abolished the crime of unlawful assembly - a crowd (at least in the context of riots) is a gathering of twelve or more people. Three people is not a crowd. This has nothing to do with air shows or photography, I just wanted to get it off my chest. The rooster was mundane.