Pre-Raphaelite exhibit with 32mm f/1.4 lens (PICS)

"Ophelia" 1851-52
John Everett Millais (1829-1896)

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My wife and I drove to our Capital City with two friends to see the famous Pre-Raphaelites "Love & Desire" exhibition at the National Art Gallery last week. If you live in Australia, the exhibit is in its last weeks but will continue to be on display for a short while longer - (until April 28, 2019). The last time I visited this gallery it was to see the Versailles exhibition and I found the 11-22mm lens far too slow/dark to work with when it came to some of the gently illuminated paintings. I had to resort to using a FF DSLR with a fast lens.  But this time I chose to bring only the EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens and left all my other gear, including DSLRs at home. I found that the EOS M6 with DPAF sensor worked superbly in the low light. Several other photographers were there with much larger lenses on their FF DSLRs and although photography was permitted (without a flash), there was definitely a few distasteful glances thrown in their direction when they crouched or stood in front of the paintings to photograph them.
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Taken handheld, with JPEG and no flash:  The ISO was set to 'Auto' and the shots mostly ranged from ISO 400 to ISO 1200 with a few showing up at 3200.
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"The Magic Circle" 1886
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

"Isabella and the pot of basil" 1867-68
William Holman Hunt (1821-1919)

"Astarte Syriaca" 1877
Dante Gabriel Rossettti (1828-1882)

"Broken vows" 1856
Phillip Hermogenes Calderon (1833-1898)

"Broken vows" 1856 (closeup) - not a crop

"Circe Invidiosa" 1892
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

"Why seek ye the living among the dead" c. 1875 or 1890
John Roddham Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908)

"Ecce Ancilla Domini!" (The Annunciation) 1849-50
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

"A dream of the past: Sir Islumbras at the ford" 1857
John Everett Millais (1829-1896)

I have no idea what this one was called but it appeared to be a tapestry.

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I was impressed with how crudely some of these paintings were executed.  I've always felt that to capture the greatest amount of detail with the least number of brushstrokes whilst producing something realistic was the mark of a true artist.  But it was also wonderful to observe these famous paintings in person and up close.  The hardest one to photograph was the one directly above ("A dream of the past: Sir Islumbras at the ford") because it had a lot of raised surfaces on the paint and they were all intensely glossy.
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But the images of "The Lady of Shalott" came out very well.  The only thing I needed to do was lift the shadows where the thick frame cast less light on the artwork for the tightly cropped picture I took.  My editing results were intentionally 'not perfect' but I can at least identify if someone uses the photograph, despite the number of copies floating around out there.

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"The Lady Of Shalott" 1888
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

"The Lady Of Shalott" 1888
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

"The Lady Of Shalott" 1888
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

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Unlike previous exhibitions, I noticed that all these "masterpieces" had protective anti-UV and Anti-Reflecting glass over them. I didn't see an exception to this and the lights in the building were often reflected in the glass. But I found that raising the camera slightly eliminated virtually all the reflections and with only a few exceptions I was able to photograph all my favorite paintings. Obviously I can't post them all here because there were so many but I really liked the results from the EF-M 32mm lens in this low light and would happily use the lens again for similar visits in the future.
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I knocked the lens against a concrete wall on the way in to the Gallery and the impact occurred on the front blade of the EW-60F lens hood I was using... I was surprised that there was absolutely no damage or scratches to the hood. I took around 700 pictures on the day and the battery still registered as "full" when I returned home.
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When I was leaving the Art Gallery I came across our friend Kate testing out her abdominal muscles by leaning over a pond backwards while trying to take a selfie for her Instagram page. She asked me if I wanted to try a shot with my camera in case her own didn't turn out. I've processed the image below, desaturated it slightly and merged several filtered effects to produce the final image. I kind of wished I'd leaned forward to capture some of her upper chest because the hard white edge of her dress doesn't give her body enough identifiable structure (for me anyway).
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32mm lens on the EOS M6 - Kate getting arty

32mm - 'classy' Guinness tap at the Pub

32mm - obligatory cat photograph - Quorra watching me.

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This is the first time I've taken this lens to an Art gallery and it certainly won't be the last.  I managed to achieve excellent results with it when I conducted early release tests in the Sydney Powerhouse (Science) Museum (with very dim lighting) late last year.  I'd say this would be one of the best lenses I've used for galleries and museums. Sadly it was raining all the way to the other state and back to my own city so I didn't capture too many shots in transit.
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Framing & Color Accuracy...
Something that I discovered after downloading the images I took was that some of the picture frames required some very minor distortion correction.  This was generally only needed for images taken from an angle to the paintings (usually because someone was standing in the way. A couple showed some light barrel distortion that was made more apparent by the picture frames and their alignment to the edge of the image frames that the camera took.  This is to be expected and was easily adjusted in Photoshop when it was noticed.  Overall, when facing the paintings pretty much straight on, I found the images were easy to capture without correction issues.  Color accuracy was good.  In fact, I found that many of the merchandise for sale in the gift store (postcards, bookmarks and books etc) were not a match to the colors visible in the paintings just a few feet away.  So the EOS M6 and the 32mm f/1.4 lens gave me some very accurate colors - which surprised me when I compared some of them to those in publications.

Another splendid post! Like many of your other posts, it has much to teach us.

Many thanks!

John TF wrote:

Another splendid post! Like many of your other posts, it has much to teach us.

It's still a learning experience for me... and always will be.  So any observations I've made are hopefully for the collective good of others.  I see a lot of people post questions about which lens to use and what lens they need to be able to travel with.  I had to think before deciding to leave my other lenses and cameras at home... because i wanted to take some photographs of these paintings.  But since the 32mm lens is still relatively new, I thought I should try to see what it might achieve. It helps to have some examples on hand and of course the Pre-Raphaelites are very famous works of art (even the not-so-good paintings) so it was nice to be able to photograph them with this lens.  Even if just to see how the lens performed in the challenging light.  The shot directly below was taken on my last visit to the same gallery and I struggled to capture much using the 11-22mm lens in the dim light (which you can see in the shot is really quite limited).  Shadow recovery with high contrast lenses with narrow apertures is often quite difficult and in the case of some of these indoor shots in low light, I didn't want a repeat from 2017 when I brought the 11-22mm lens with me and it failed to perform in the low lighting environment of the Art Gallery.  it's a great lens but even with Image Stabilization (which allowed me 1/30 sec exposures) I could not rescue some of the images taken with ISO 3200.  They were just too dark for that lens.  But that same lens later excelled when I was outdoors at dusk, taking wide shots of a NASA deep-space dish.   So each lens definitely has its use.
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M6 + 11-22mm lens - taken the last time I visited this gallery.

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M6 + 11-22mm lens back in 2017 - (same Gallery) A clear demonstration of how even ISO 3200 at 1/30 sec with f/4 (wide) was unable to achieve much in the way of useful images.  Note that this image has even been edited & corrected !

Same Art Gallery - King Louie's chair (from the Versailles Exhibit).  Taken with the EOS 6D + EF 85mm f/1.4L II USM lens, you can clearly see how dark the venue is here.

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What I like about using any camera in low available light is the way it performs and how reliable it is.  Out of all the pictures I took, only ONE was slightly blurred and that was one that was taken at 1/80 second... which ought to have been sharper... and the reason it blurred was because I was rushing to snap a shot before someone moved into my way and eclipsed the painting.  Fortunately I captured the image of that painting in a second shot. The photograph of our friend Kate (below) was the one that surprised me because I wasn't expecting to capture as much detail as I did.  I could (should!) have used different exposures or removed my CPL filter from the lens.  I guess this is what happens when you're just messing around with your camera without paying much attention to what you're supposed to be doing.
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M6 + 32mm lens - ISO 100 | f/5.6 | 1/800 sec } -0.33 ev.
The unfiltered JPEG (the one posted in the OP was edited).

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I haven't had a chance to use the EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens for any serious portrait work just yet... aside from snapshots.  And this picture of Kate (above) was no exception because I took it in passing... and was not set up (nor did I have any decent flash or lighting)... plus it was just starting to rain.  But I was very surprised to see how much detail was captured from this distance.  I'm not sure but I think my Polarizing filter was still on the lens because I'd used it earlier to photograph an outdoor sculpture just moments before.  I think Kate's pole-dancing classes helped her recline backwards just long enough over the pond.  But the images I took showed details like pores in the skin and individual hairs that caught me by surprised.  The other lenses I've used for this sort of thing seemed to smear those details in many instances.
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Detail captured at 100% - Sharpening is turned off & was not applied later in PP.

This is how she looked when I came across her.  Her boyfriend was just out of frame to the right taking a picture with her phone. 

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In retrospect, the strong contrast and saturated colors indicate that my Circular Polarizing filter was certainly on the lens. The overcast conditions are what made this an issue.  I'm certainly encouraged to consider using this lens again for similar photography.  As more people come to obtain this lens, I'll be curious to see what results they get with their own portrait shots.  There's a member here who posted some proper dedicate portraits with this lens just the other day and the results were very good.
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I think that the shutter speed was too high in my shot.  I almost certainly used M-Mode and the Manual setting is always going to be reliant of the correct settings by the user.  Alternatively it's possible that I used P-Mode because f/5.6 isn't on my list of typical aperture settings... I tend to gravitate towards f/7+ when aiming for sharp images.  Either way, I didn't have to do much to salvage the image beyond some cosmetic touch-ups to skin and raising the levels and mid-tones.
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Regards,
Marco Nero.

Seems as though your exhibition curator went to more trouble than those I've seen here in the UK - what a wide range of pre-Raphaelite art on show! Envious!

(I'm off to see the Don McCullin exhibition in a few minutes - it's at London's Tate Britain.)