ANTONIO ESPEJO / THE POWER OF TELE LENSES 3

A PRACTICAL EXAMPLE OF DEPTH OF FIELD AND FOCAL LENGTH.

Following my search for spectacular Barcelona photos taken with tele lenses I remembered one image standing out. There was a picture shot by Antonio Espejo using a colossal tele.

CANON 1.200 mm COPYRIGHT ANTONIO ESPEJO

Espejo worked many years as El Pais staff photographer and, as Alguersuari, came from the Sports Photography field; because of this he was an expert in taking the maximum advantage from long distance lenses. Antonio was working in a book titled “Barcelona de bat a bat” for Lunwerg editors. Nikon and Canon professional’s services lend special equipment, during a limited period of time, to the photographers members of their professionals clubs. Espejo got a real “monster”: a Canon 1.200 mm. tele lens. In the image, taken from the steps below the MNAC (Catalonia’s Art Nacional Museum) you can see the Venetian Towers, the central monument and the Plaza hotel clock, all in Plaza España, and Joan Miró’s sculpture “La Dona i l’Ocell” (The Woman and the Bird). To all who know Barcelona , the image is surprising. All is together in the same plane. For those who don’t know Barcelona so well I looked for the distances in a city map. The Miró sculpture is…400 meters away from the Venetians Towers! But, due to tele lenses effect (the greatest the focal distance the greatest the effect) of flattening all the planes, the final result is simply amazing.

The tele lens used was of 1.200 mm. The so called “normal lenses” (similar to the human view) are the 50 mm, so in this case Espejo took the photo with a lens with a focal length that is twenty four times the 50 mm !I decided to take the same photograph using different lenses. I live very close to Plaza España so I took my tripod, my D80 Nikon and a bag full of lenses and climbed the steps that go from Plaza España to the MNAC. You have an exceptional Barcelona view from there that I have used in many occasions. And those are the results. I used three Nikon lenses: a 18-70 zoom, a 180 f:2,8 and a 300 f:4. In the captions I multiply the focal lengths by the 1,5 digital conversion factor to compare them with Antonio Espejo’s 1.200 mm lens.

NIKKOR 105 mm

NIKKOR 270 mm

NIKKOR 450 mm

CANNON 1.200 mm COPYRIGHT ANTONIO ESPEJO

TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Antonio Espejo needed to solve several technical problems to get his photo. A tele lens of such a long focal length needed to be shot using a high shutter speed or fixed to an extremely sturdy tripod. Espejo told me that he got a 15 kilos tripod from the Canon Professional Service. The second challenge was to get all the planes sharp, a greath DEPTH OF FIELD known as the distance between the farthest and closest sharp elements in the picture in relationship with the point we focus. Depth of field depends of three factors that can be controlled by a photographer who works in manual mode:
1) F-number. The smallest the f-number (less light entering through the lens) the longer will be the depth of field.
2) Lenses focal length. The longest the focal length the shorter will be the depth of field and vice-versa.
3) The distance. The distance between the camera and what we want to photograph. The longest the distance the longer will be the depth of field and vice-versa.
To get all the planes sharp in the image Espejo had two fixed variables, one positive and one negative. The positive one was that the distance of the subjects in the photo was very big. The first elements appearing, the Venetian Towers, were about 700 meters from the point the camera was, as I calculated on a Barcelona map. The negative and fixed variable was that the 1.200 mm focal length was very big.
Antonio could only play with the third variable left: the number f. Usually he should had used the smallest f-number and the correlative slow shutter speed allowing the right amount of light needed to get the right exposure. But there was a problem as Antonio told me:” I couldn’t use a slow shutter speed because, in spite of having the camera on the tripod, the focal length was so huge that the photo would be blurred, so I have to use a middle f-number and a pretty high shutter speed with Velvia 50 ASA slide film".
The photo was taken on a sunny day (a must to get this result) at 14h 8 minutes (Guess how I know that?).
The final result was fantastic. Chapeau Antonio!

JOSÉ MARÍA ALGUERSUARI / THE POWER OF TELE LENSES 2. .

BARCELONA, STARTLING IMAGES

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COLON MONUMENT AND TIBIDABO CHURCH. CANON TELE LENS 600 mm.

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SAGRADA FAMILIA CHURCH. CANON TELE LENS 600 mm.

I was looking for important images taken with tele lenses, far from the Sport and News category. Very quickly came to my mind Jay Maisel and his New York spectacular photos. Maisel is still taking photos there after 45 years. But I decided to try to find someone closer and to speak about José María Alguersuari. This Barcelona born photographer came from Sports Photography, and was one of the pioneers in using long focal length teles with large apertures. However, he changed Sport for a more generic kind of photo, and applied his knowledge of tele lenses to get very creative images with surprising views. The Colón statue, the Tibidabo and the Sagrada Familia churches were already photographed, for La Vanguardia Magazine, between the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. In these images the photographer uses with great skill the flattening effect of the tele lenses.

TORRE AGBAR. ZOOM CANON 35-350 ZOOM (CONVERSION FACTOR 1,6)

José María still works as you can see in this Torre Agbar picture taken just a year ago.

Alguersuari also writtes about PHOTOGRAPHY and has published two books in Spanish: "Álbum de fotografía práctica" and recently the amusing "Diarios de Fotografía...y alguna motocicleta". A book you can find in Kowasa, Barcelona.

THE XAVIER MISERACHS PHOTOGRAPHIC BIENNIAL AND “ON THE THRESHOLD OF CHANGE”.

The next Friday, September 26, at 19,30h in El Museu del Suro in Palafrugell, Girona, begins the V Biennial Xavier Miserachs that will be open till the 19 of October, an homage to the great photographer that spent his last years in this Costa Brava village. I have the great pleasure to participate in this Biennial with my exhibition “On the Threshold of Change” and with a little speech about Xavier Miserachs.

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ON THE THRESHOLD OF CHANGE” (Life in Spain during Transition)
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This exhibition is a photographic document about the life in Spain during the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. All started when in the year 2000, reviewing old photographs, I found one of the very fist pictures I took, in Bellvitge, still a teenager, using my father’s Contaflex. I realized that time had given this image an important added value that, perhaps, was not there in the moment I took the photo.

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BELLVITGE. L'HOSPITALET DE LLOBREGAT 1970

That was the starting point, together with the students fight in Franco’s last years that I photographed when I started to study Economics at Barcelona University, to go through all my stock. I ended up with a documentary photo collection that journalist Xavier Vinader named “On the Threshold of Change”.

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BARCELONA. FACULTAD DE ECONOMICAS 1971
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Carolina Martinez, who had worked in Magnum offices in Paris,comisariated an exhibition showed in Salamanca, San Sebastián and Istanbul accompanied by a Clemente Bernad text. Now it will be exhibited, by the first time, in Catalonia, thanks to the Xavier Miserachs Photographic Biennial and Silvia Omedes, Photo Social Vision president.

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BARCELONA. FUNERAL POR UN GUARDIA CIVIL 1976
SEVILLA. EL PALMAR DE TROYA 1977

EXTREMADURA. SINDROME DEL ACEITE DE COLZA. 1981

MADRID. ELECCIONES GENERALES 1982.

BIRDS OF PREY OVER BARCELONA

Well, exactly not over Barcelona but over Collserola massif, the green lung of the city. When autumn comes, migratory birds from North and Centre Europe fly to the South warmer areas to spend the winter. The Collserola massif is in the route known as EMIGRATION LITORAL ROUTE. Since 20 years, from Magarola’s peak, a privileged observatory, staff from Collserola Park follow and count the thousands birds of prey that pass during the months of September and October. Every morning, from September 13th till October 12th, the little observatory is open for all the visitors who want to enjoy the sight. It is important to bring binoculars and in the observatory will find park staff that will help us to identify the birds. All the information can be found in www.parccollserola.net





The Saturday 13th’s daybreak was beautiful and clear as a glass in Barcelona and I went to Magarola’s peak. I’m a birds of prey lover (see my Tunis photo) and is a fine way to spend a sunny morning. It is very difficult to get good photos of the birds, because although you can see them pretty well through the binoculars, they never get real close; you must know that from the observatory we can see till Barcelona’s harbour in one side and till Montserrat and Sant Llorenç de Munt at the other side. I was lucky. I saw plenty of honey buzzards, goshawks, kestrels and even a spectacular air battle between and marsh harrier and a sparrow hawk, much smaller, just over us. It looked like a Second World War fight between a fighter and a bomber.

CATALONIA'S MIGRATORY PATH

PICTURES FROM MY WINDOW. THE POWER OF TELE LENSES

This is the view from my window, a sunny September 7 Sunday, though the weather forecast announced rain. The picture is taken with a 20 mm wide-angle that with the 1,5 conversion factor of my digital Nikon would be like a 30 mm. I commented in another post that I see two of the Barcelona symbols from home, the Tibidabo and, in this case, Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia (in the red square).

This other photo, taken some years before from the same place, is the Sagrada Familia view photographed with a Nikon FM2 on a tripod, Fujichrome 100 ASA film, and a 300 mm tele lens plus a duplicator factor 2 that a borrow from my friend, EL PERIODICO photographer Pepe Encinas. Tele lenses are used to get a closer view (especially in Sports and Nature Photography), but they also have a very interesting side effect: they flatten the images getting all the planes together. In this picture we see that the temple is very close to the mountain behind, that however is outside Barcelona.

CURIOSITIES 2. MY NEIBORGH'S PICTURES.

Before Capa’s effect, during and after, I was surprised by the great amount of visitors, specially coming from South America (although many were from Spain as well) that rebounded. To rebound, in the bloggers language, means to arrive to a blog and for different reasons, the more common being that the contents were not the expected, leave it immediately. I wanted to guess the reasons so I followed their paths. All of them arrived through a search engine, Google most of the time, and all the keywords were related with “vecina” (neighbour). I made the list. The keywords were:

Fotos de mi vecina
Fotos vecina
Vecina fotos
Estas fotos de mi vecina
Vecina ventana
Fotos mi vecina
Miro a mi vecina por la ventana
Imágenes de mi vecina
Vecina imágenes
Mi vecina es
La foto de mi vecina
Mi vecina fotos

They were the 42, 5% of the entire keywords entries trough a search engine.

I carried on my investigation and wrote the magic words in Google “Fotos de mi vecina”. I found 320.000 entries, and mine “Paco Elvira: Fotos desde mi ventana. Mi vecina de Air France” was…the number 5 in Google first page!

But, of course, the other 4 before me gave me a clear idea of what was going on:

1) Unas fotos que le saqué a mi vecinita de al lado.
2) FOTOS-18 años mi vecina la más puta!!!
3) FOTOS- Las fotos de mi vecina desnuda.
4) Fotos de mi vecina en Blogalaxia.

GOOD GRIEF!

STOCK PHOTOS, CAPA AND THE COPYRIGHT

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Maria Rosa Vila, the DESCOBRIR CATALUNYA magazine picture editor. She was looking for Terrassa modernist buildings photos to publish in the August issue.

This fact made me think, once again, of the capital importance the stock has for a free lance photographer. When I started my career, an article written by Manuel Lopez,, the REVISTA FOTO director, got my attention. He said “The stock is the photographer’s retirement pension”. Since then, I kept, and organized, with great care all the pictures I was taking and nowadays my stock it’s a very important part of my annual photo sales. I manage my files myself and also I sell them through two stock agencies.

The photographer is the owner of his images and only sells the copyright of them each time they are published. In fact, the inventor of the images copyright was Robert Capa, one of the founders of MAGNUM, as I explain in an article published in EL PERIODICO, “Capa, el cierre del círculo”.

My good friend, the photographer Jeff Sedlik, former president of the Advertising Photographs of America, and now Plus Coalition president, say very clearly in his interview to Rangefinder Magazine . “The photographers retain copyright ownership and limit their customers’ right to reproduce their images”.
But now, dark clouds hang over this universal right. Powerful media groups intent, after publishing picture stories, to keep this copyright to be able to use photos and articles all the times they need in their different publications and platforms, without paying again for it

This happened recently, with RUTAS DEL MUNDO magazine, and affected a lot of photographers and journalists. This travel magazine belonging to HYMSA was absorbed by MC EDICIONES. This media group has about seventy different publications and all the professionals publishing in any of them have to sign a contract allowing MC EDICIONES to use their photos in any of his publications, in Spain or out of Spain, in different platforms, etc. (Follows the original contract in Spanish).

Importe de las creaciones referenciadas más abajo para su edición, distribución, reproducción, comunicación en versión digital, traducción, publicación y reedición, por sí o por terceros, en cualquier medio nacional o extranjero. Asumiendo cualquier tipo de responsabilidad incluida aquella por cesión de la propiedad intelectual de un tercero frente a su publicación por/en cualquiera de los medios mencionados anteriormente.
Las presentes condiciones serán tambien de aplicación a todas las creaciones entregadas con anterioridad a la fecha de suscripción del presente documento.

It’s fantastic! MC ediciones keeps the right to publish, all the times they want, in its magazines and digital platforms, pictures and articles although the prize paid for them falls below, or is barely, the Minimal Rate recommended by EL COL.LEGI DE PERIODISTES DE CATALUNYA and the UPIFC.

Robert Capa would roll over in his grave!

PICTURESROM MY WINDOW. MY AIR FRANCE NEIGHBOR.

NIKON F80. Nikkor 300 mm. f /4. FUJICHROME 100 ASA

This is a section I started with “Curiosity killed the cat” and I shall be posting new images regularly. The idea came to me ,long time ago, revising the W.Eugene Smith story “As From My Window I Sometimes Glance”, with photos taken from his New York Sixth Avenue loft.

I live in a flat with very good views over Barcelona's Gran Via. From there, tough a little far away, I can see two important Barcelona references: The Tibidabo and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia.
To make a living as a photographer means to travel a lot to the places you need to capture the images. Sometimes, only sometimes, I would like to take photographs from home, without moving. This section is a little piece of work based in this premises.

I’ll be mixing actual photos with others I took in the past like this one. It was a really huge Air France ad. Each time I looked through my window I faced the girl’s eyes looking to me over the Gran Via trees.

PICTURES FROM MY WINDOW. CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

Fortunately, not this time. Mi Persian cat, Canela, in one of her “safaris”.

MI SECOND AND THIRD BEST SELLING PHOTOS

Continuation of My best selling picture.

This story happened during the "good old days" of photography. (My daughter Andrea in the photo was about 5 years old, she is now seventeen). Today this would be unthinkable. I could have written an article wondering, what happened to the stock? Was it because of microstock agencies? But let's go with the story.

My second bestseller picture, also through AGE FOTOSTOCK, came from a non published photo taken for a newspaper Sunday issue.
It was at the beginning of the nineties. The journalist Albert Cañagueral and I (There were the good old times when photographer and journalist still travelled together) went to Venice to do a story of the city through a family that had been making gondolas during the last 300 years, from generation to generation. It’s basic to avoid too generic subjects and find an original point of view. Finally, the story was published in EL DOMINICAL DEL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA.



I wanted to take a good gondolier portrait, but light in the narrow channels is, usually, very poor due to the shadows of the buildings along them. So, in a clean, beautiful and sunny day, I rented a gondola for one hour, late in the afternoon (when the best light), asking the gondolier to go, back and forth, (away from the channels) from Piazza San Marco to San Giorgio Maggiore island. I paid about 50 € and it’s been one of the best investments of my life. My two Nikons were charged with Velvia 50 ASA slide film, one with a 28mm lens and the other with an 85 mm, and I kept shooting and shooting the gondolier during the entire trip.

None of the gondolier’s photos were published in El Dominical, but among the pictures AGE accepted later on ( they always edit pretty tight) there was a vertical shot, taken with the 28mm lens, that became ,through the following years, my second bestseller. It was even used in a pasta TV advertisement in Germany. AGE always asks the photographer to have a model release for the people appearing in the pictures, so they can commercialize them in any way: publicity, etc. That’s one of the reasons I have few people images in AGE FOTOSTOCK; I’m mainly a documentary photographer and can’t go on asking for model releases to everybody I photograph; it would be simply impossible. In this particular case I was lucky; the gondolier can’t be recognised because of the light.

Mi third bestseller? It’s a photo of my daughter Andrea. She was about 5 or 6 years old then.

She liked a lot to play with the telephone, simulating fiction calls. One day I found her phoning while sited in her toy car. She was so concentrated that I could set my Nikon with and 85 mm f/1.8 nikkor lens (one of my favourites for portraiture) on a tripod and even set a tungsten light bounced on an umbrella. Of course, no problem with the model release this time. AGE sells a lot of people pictures on daily life situations, but due to model releases, people attractiveness, locations etc, many times it does its own productions. Two colleagues and good friends of mine, Quim Roser and Kris Ubach, have started doing some stock shootings. The contract a few models, find a appropriate location, and, with a good lighting equipment plus an assistant, shoot thousand of photos in every of their 10 or more hours sessions.

Back to Andrea’s photo. The rhythm of sales was unstoppable; it would have beaten largely the dolphins and gondolier sales, but suddenly they started to decrease drastically till practically disappear. The reason? The telephone model she was holding had become completely old-fashioned

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF ONE ERA

Yesterday, organizing my stock photos (a subject I will write about in my next article) I found some images that made me think about. I took them in Tunisia, in March 2003, five years ago. I was there shooting a story for El Dominical del Periodico, together with a journalist. I remember a couple of photos: A head in the Bardo’s museum and a vessel in Cartago. There were some technical problems to be solved: poor light, color casts…

The head had two lights, fluorescent that looks green with daylight film, and tungsten that looks reddish. I set my Nikon on a GITZO tripod, and add a little touch of strobe, reducing the power in one stop, to correct the red cast.

The light on the vessel was better, but all from fluorescent lamps. Once again the Nikon on the tripod, but on the 50mm lens a placed a Kodak filter, 30 CC, magenta to correct the green cast. In both case, the journalist travelling with me, took a small digital camera from her handbag wile saying “I have no idea about how to take photographs” and pressed the shutter. Her camera, still of few megapixels, have an automatic program to take pictures inside museums. I have a look at her LCD screen. Her pictures could not to be published double spread but were technically faultless. The automatic white balance has corrected the color cast. The little strobe just the right amount of light and the sensitivity high enough to get a shutter speed to avoid blurred images. I realize it was the very end of an era.

Until this day, we professional photographers got many assignments, simply because the customer didn’t know how to solve technical problems. For instance, I used to shoot for a client who made special lights and lasers to use in discotheques, tried to make the photographs himself and failed. Photographers like Navia, National Geographic photographer Tino Soriano and myself were able to shot Velvia 50 ASA slide film with mechanical cameras as Leica and get sharp, saturated images, technically flawless, in spite of its conceptual value; thanks God there are more things than just technique in this world.

Some other photographers stood up in the sports field, such as Jose María Alguersuari or, from a younger generation, Albert Bertàn and Jordi Cotrina in the staff of EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA, for his ability to focus manually their 300 mm, or more, f:2,8 tele lenses. All they have a long and successful carrier, also in much wider fields, behind them. Jordi, for instance, is right now in China photographing the Olympic Games. However, their skill to focus manually these “monsters” is not required. We have autofocus instead. Only the price of these lenses separated, nowadays, professionals from simply amateurs.

The digital impact has been so big-it surprised the whole photo industry-that I confess my lack of future vision in my answers to the interview Nuria Aguade made me in October 2004, only four years ago, for “quesabesde”.

COOKS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD COMPETE TO PRACTISE IN EL BULLI

EL BULLI'S RESTAURANT KITCHEN

I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS, BUT YOU EAT IT

THE LITTLE BALLS ARE REALLY MADE OF MELON

THE KITCHEN AND SOME EL BULLI’S DISHES by PACO ELVIRA

CUSTO DALMAU FOR IBERIA EXCELENTE

CUSTO DALMAU PHOTOGRAPHED BY PACO ELVIRA FOR IBERIA EXCELENTE

A few months ago I photographed Custo Dalmau for Iberia Excelente magazine and just a few weeks ago the news of his private war against his competitor DESIGUAL appear in all the mass media.

COOKER CARME RUSCALLEDA FOR RONDA IBERIA

SESSION IN SANT POL’S BEACH WITH GEMA DARBO’S HELP

Also in July, I shot Carme Ruscalleda, the cooker with 3 Michelin stars for her restaurant Sant Pau in Sant Pol de Mar, for the August cover of Ronda Iberia magazine.