Monthly Archives: September 2007

Marketing and choice

America’s strong suit.

As an American resident for some 55% of my life now, I’m permitted to make value judgments about what we do well and not so well. Note the ‘we’. I may still affect an English accent but 20 years of American citizenship and a disproportionate tax burden grudgingly paid over those years very much entitles me to say ‘we’.

So America does lots of things very poorly. Since 1955 our foreign policy has varied from criminally incompetent to disgraceful. It is nothing less than a history of failure. Our secret services probably couldn’t find bin Laden if he had a permanent suite in the Holiday Inn behind the White House, and we continue to think that waging hostile, aggressive foreign wars is the solution to what ails us. We guzzle oil like there’s no tomorrow – not surprising in the absence of an energy policy – and continue our migration to adoption of the worst of the nanny state policies of a dying Europe. Our fiscal and taxation policies make some sub-Saharan dictatorships look the model of common sense and our insane greed translates into bubbles of excess more or less twice each decade. We have a public schooling system that is a criminal conspiracy against our children and one of our main political parties derives its funding from shake down artists – trades unions and class action lawyers.

That’s some pretty bad stuff. But the other side of the coin continues to surprise and delight, for we do so many things right.

Whether by accident or design we are exceptionally welcoming to immigrants, despite all the hatred we engender abroad. We are, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the most generous and open-hearted nation the world has seen. We are, for the most part, supremely powerful and exceptionally benign in wielding that power. We are brilliant scientists and technologists and, most of all, we are the world’s business leaders. We grow more food than an we can consume. We are the leaders in all aspects of art and entertainment. Anyone can get an education for very little and anyone can get a job. We have the finest private schools the world has ever seen.

But, above all, we are a nation of hustlers, nowhere more evidently so than in our infinite skill at marketing. We can sell anyone anything. Whether it’s a fighter jet for the despot of the day in the Middle East or a newer, better car, boy, do we have a deal for you.

I am always reminded of our marketing prowess when I think about my mother, who passed away a few years ago. No way, she would tell you, was any marketer ever going to direct her thinking away from its independent path. But what did my sister and I find in her closet once she had passed away? Some dozen Coach bags and sufficient numbers of pairs of Evan Picone shoes to give even Imelda Marcos a little frisson. So, like the rest of us, the US marketing machine had got to the old girl.

In my fifty or so year life as a photographer I have always been fascinated by the externalities that affected my choice of equipment. Was I choosing based on need, economics or because the Coach-bag guys had got to me? I would like to tell you it was need, that money did not matter and that, like with my mum, no marketer was going to change my mind. Wrong on all three.

Let’s get specific. Of all the gear I have owned over the years which items mean the most to me? Worked best, ‘took’ the best snaps, gave me that warm glow that comes with seamless execution?

As I don’t want this journal entry to stretch to book length any more than you do, I narrowed it down to just five. Five pieces of photographic equipment that changed my direction and interests.

In chronological order, with my ownership period shown:

  • Leica M3 – 33 years
  • Epson 1270 printer – 6 years
  • Rollei 6003 – 7 years
  • Apple’s Mac – 8 years
  • Canon 5D – 2 years

Actually a very easy list to make, for each of these machines made a big change in how I work.

What made these special, and how did American marketing affect my choice?

The Leica M3 was the result of viral marketing as we would call it today. A relative had an M2 and once I handled it as a teenager, I had to have one. First there was the world’s best viewfinder. Second was the relative silence. But above all, it just felt right. And it so totally meshed with my interest in street photography that Leica’s marketing can rightfully be said to have been undertaken without pay by Cartier-Bresson, Brassai and Kertesz, because it was through their work I knew the rangefinder Leica. Leica’s marketing is, of course, some of the worst on earth. First, they made a device so good and so expensive that most of their market came from resales of used gear. When my last Leica finally saw the insides of the local UPS store last year I couldn’t help reflecting that after all those years of cameras and lenses from Wetzlar only once had I ever bought a new Leica product – the 90mm Apo-Summicron Asph, bought from England when the mighty dollar was …. well, mighty. Leica has got over its attention to detail and quality since those days so now everyone can own one. Which did nothing to improve Leica’s bottom line. Anyway, with that M3 the marketing feed was like that of a fellow painter recommending a brush. Word of mouth or eye, in this case.

By the time the Epson 1270 came around in the mid-90s, not only was I well and truly an American, but computer processing had sounded the death knell of traditional processing methods. And the dyes in Epson’s inks were so well made that great prints were limited solely by your ability to tune your hardware just so. The only reason this machine moved on was that I wanted to make larger prints, something the HP DJ90 readily offered in its 18” x 24” capacity, compared to the more limiting 13” x 19” of the Epson. Unusually for modern technology, the Espon truly is a Ten year digital device. Suddenly my default print size was no longer 8” x 10”. The marketing input here was simple. I used to subscribe to an advertising magazine for photo gear named Shutterbug. It had started as a classified ad rag and then tried to migrate up market with the inclusion of content. The fact that said content reflected some of the worst writing ever put out by flacks dependent on free gear (“Sure you can keep it, if you like it”) was lost on me. They said the Espon was great, I bought it and …. well, I bought it. I was lucky. Their lies were my truth. I lucked out – it really was that good.

In a roundabout way, the Epson reacquainted me with medium format photography. I had long owned a little used Rollei 3.5F TLR but never got on with the reversed waist level image. My brain had become lazy after all those years with Leica’s ne plus ultra viewfinders. But the Epson had opened my eyes to larger prints and, frankly, only rarely was the resolution/grain/whatever of my Leica snaps equal to the occasion. Epson had done Rollei’s marketing and the wonderfully ergonomically correct Rollei 6003 SLR, with a prism viewfinder, made for one very happy camper. Pretty much fully automated, the lenses beyond reproach, it made medium format as easy and as approachable as banging away with that Leica. Too bad it weighed about as much as a Mack truck. Not only was Rollei’s marketing nowhere to be seen – they don’t even bother advertising their medium format gear here – had they done so I would likely have avoided the product. Have you ever studied the sheer ineptitude of German marketing in the US? They just don’t get it. We don’t want things that last forever and get handed down to the next generation (only Patek Philippe gets that one right, and they are Swiss). We want the here and now.

Apple’s Mac was a no brainer and viral marketing was again at work. For the last five years of my life which saw me as other than my own boss, I ran an investment firm. We ran all our technology on Windows NT and had no fewer than six people (out of 50) running IT to make sure the daily failures by Windows would not show their ugly head in the front office. I was shooting the breeze with the head of IT one day and he mentioned he had just bought a roll sheet feeder to go with his Epson 1270. I chance to ask which computer he used at home and the surprise answer was “I use a Mac”. Now this is a fairly limp-wristed admission in the machismo world of Wall Street which regards Mac users to this day as a bunch of artsy-fartsy faggots. Now because my CTO was a very capable person, I paid attention. Add the fact that my home PC ran Windows 98 (want to know how to cure world air traffic problems? Run the Civil Aeronautics Board on Windows and, after the first two mid-air crashes, traffic will disappear) and crashed daily, you can imagine I was more than a bit receptive to some good marketing. Even if it was for a fag product. OS X had just arrived and the machines looked like nothing I had ever seen. I own my original G4 iMac with the screen on a stick to this day, even if it is relegated to back-up duty. The machine worked, it did not lock up, the awful Photoshop ran nicely on it (Aperture was not to become available until years later) and it looked great. As has every Mac since. And while I only work for one asshole now (me) I can still run Gates’s version of organized theft in Parallels, where Windows’s virusphilia is neatly contained in its own little incubated tent. I still need that for stock market applications – hardly Apple’s forte.

By the time I found out about the Canon 5D the Shutterbug subscription had been cancelled. Any number of web sites now published equipment tests and whenever you doubted the independence of the writers you could always jump over to comment boards. Even the smart marketers in camera-land couldn’t pollute all of those with purportedly independent emails extolling their products. Like any rigorous stock analyst I was approaching every piece of gear with the question “Where’s the money?” uppermost in my mind. So the decision to try a 5D was the result of word of mouth, too. People who used it loved it, I was getting increasingly irate with the amount of time wasted on the back-office functions related to film (all that non-creative processing and error correction) and people who splash out $3k on a camera body should, you would like to think, be pretty critical. After all, you could get a couple nice used film Leicas and a few of Wetzlar’s magical lenses for that kind of cash. The 5D made a huge difference to what I did photographically. The street stuff of Leica days-yore no longer interested me, the bulk and weight of medium format displeased me and I had grown to love the outdoors and the landscapes it offered. Plus I now hated, just hated, processing pictures. Just show me which button to press for a huge print, please. The 5D made all that possible – my migration to the front office of photography was complete.

And many thanks to all those anonymous, unpaid marketers who made it possible.

Pool

Or snooker to those of you in moister climes.

When I was a lad attending the School of Engineering at University College, London, it was a well worn saying that had it that a Third Class degree was the Gentleman’s Degree, suggesting, as it did, that the honored recipient had done just enough studying to pass, while devoting the bulk of his time to the role of Gentleman About Town.

One of the vices enjoyed by that urbane boulevardier was, of course, the civilized game of snooker. Change things around a bit, number the balls and you have pool on this side of the Atlantic. It’s as fine here as there.

And while Hollywood would have it that pool players generally hew to the personality of Bogart and the ambience of smoke filled, dank halls, the reality is that it has always, at its core, been a gentleman’s game. The Victorian connotations of the ladies retiring to wherever ladies retire while the men light up a stogie and pour another one (sort of like Alan Greenspan) remains accurate.

At least to this pool player. For while my degree most certainly was not Third Class – the poor kids of parents as foreign as a fruitcake have no time for the town – my affection for the pastime of knocking a few balls around on a piece of felted slate remains firm. And the communal facilities just happened to sport a snooker table.

Well, to cut to the chase and get the photographic content in, I finally acquired a pool table after three years of nosing about in CraigsList. Realize that the population density in central California is just a tad lower than in LA and San Francisco. So specialized toys like pool tables can take a while to find.


Brunswick Hawthorn in place. 5D, 20mm.

Mine is a Brunswick Hawthorn, beloved of presidents (Ol’ Abe, no less, was a customer) and rock stars, and numbers one Julian Lennon amongst its owners. Add new felt and cushions, a bit of surgical work on the lovely Art Deco brass corner pieces by yours truly (poor design ensured they were constantly falling off as you can see above) and more time than I care to relate on a ladder installing the lights, and my gross investment of $750 doesn’t seem so bad. Priced new pool tables lately? We are talking Italian slate here! We are knee deep in solid mahogany from back in the days when we knew how to handle those rain forests.

Well, after all the efforts of installing the slate, the felt, levelling, lighting, etc. it occurred to me that a good photograph for the wall of the home theater/pool room was called for. So, not 90 minutes ago I snapped this and hope that you enjoy it.


Warm overhead lights. Added some yellow to enhance the antique look in Aperture. 5D, 85mm, 3 seconds @ f/22.

Oh!, and by the way, the 18″ x 24″ print is coming off the Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 right now. If you would like a print, drop me a line. See what the 5D and a fabulous lens can really do.

Vince Laforet

A stunning image

Something special comes along now and then and this is an example:

Not only does this make you gasp for breath, it’s in the very finest tradition of Margaret Bourke-White, who just happened to have an office in the Chrysler Building.

Laforet does it in color. It’s better than hers. Hands down better.

More of Laforet’s stunning work can be found here.

The story of the above picture is here.

How much is too much?

The Nikon D3 is pushing the limits of complexity

I have never been a fan of some of the needless menu complexity of Canon’s 5D, my mainstay camera. So now that the estimable DP Review has started poking about the design of the full frame Nikon D3 I was eager to take a look how the designs compared.

First indications are not encouraging. The vast number of menu options is an order more complex than anything on the 5D and I have to wonder where all this is going. Worse, just like with the Canon, most choices have to be made after scrolling through options using the LCD screen on the back, rather than with knobs and dials on the body. Knobs and dials with fixed functions (shutter speed, say, or ISO sensitivity) are the preferred way to go. No hunt and peck. No squinting. It’s the sole superior feature remaining in film cameras. Any time a display provides for more than one variable, the user interface suffers.

So while I greatly appreciate that Nikon’s lens mount is backwards compatible with just about every Nikon F mount lens made, albeit with some compromise in automation with older lenses, I have to wonder just who needs all those hundreds of choices. Wouldn’t it be easier to relegate all of those to an application on your computer which would permit storage of the user’s selections when the camera is connected? Let’s face it, adjustment of variables is an 80/20 game – you want some almost all the time – focus, aperture, shutter speed, ISO – whereas most are accessed once in a blue moon.

Ways of Seeing

No, not the one by John Berger.

One of the books on art I enjoyed most was John Berger’s About Looking which went on to become ‘Ways of Seeing’ when the BBC filmed it. What was especially interesting about the piece is that it is cast in the author’s Marxist viewpoint of the world, where every object or possession is examined through the eyes of society rather than seen as the thing itself. That is no bad thing. After all, are we not told that small minds speak about people, middling minds talk about issues and great minds cast about for concepts? Berger is all about concepts.

The only snag with this thinking is that just because the author addresses concepts does not mean that his frame of reference is sane.

But, for much the same reason that I sometimes read the New York Times or watch Fox News – a recheck of reference points on the loonie left and the psychotic right – it is always an education to read the works of a Marxist as it serves to freshen one’s ideas about freedom, personal responsibility and the sanctity of the individual. So far, my belief in these attributes has only been strengthened by digesting the claptrap put out by these media.

Just think. In a perfect Marxist paradise there would be no music – you might, after all, enjoy it more than I, and we can’t have that. There would be no art – we all look alike and dress alike and live alike, do we not, comrade? And, worst of all, there would be no photography. That is the purest form of subversion. You want my likeness? The Ministry of Truth will not like this, you know.

Crazy? Ever seen any good snaps of Mao’s totalitarian China?

No. I didn’t think so.

No photography. Just think.

Horst and Hoyningen-Huene would never have made their homo erotic-tinged masterpieces. Mapplethorpe’s illustrated history of perversion would never have been seen. Newton’s jejeune dirty pictures would not have been published.

Hang on. Maybe Marxism would not be so bad for photography.

Just a minute, though.

That means we would have never been afforded the chance of seeing the guilty confections of Beaton. The just-so elegance of Cartier-Bresson. The soaring aristocracy of Blumenfeld. The gay abandon of Doisneau. The passion and sophistication of Parkinson. The guts of Bourke-White. The vision of Evans and Weston. The courage of Adams and McCullin and countless others. And, yes, even the second rate candy box tripe of Ansel Adams.

So maybe Marxism is not such a good thing.

I was reminded of all of this on reading in the Wall Street Journal (centrist mostly, loopy right on the OpEd pages) of the Met’s exhibition of no fewer than 228 pictures from its Dutch collection. Thank heavens for the robber barons. They provided labor for all and bequeathed great art collections to the Met. Works for me. And that got me thinking about the differences between religious art (meaning ‘Vatican-religious’) and secular art (being the Dutch and Belgian schools of the 17th century and their British and German forbears).

While painters of both schools were working on commission, the Vatican types enshrined their subjects, whether biblical or Papal, in halos and angels, the better to hide the foul stench underlying their accession to power. The Dutch chaps surrounded their clients with the attributes of wealth, perhaps never shown better than in Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (OK, so he was a German painting in England. The point is he adopted a secular rather than religious tone). And the stench? There is none. As my grandfather used to remind me, pecunia non olet. Money does not smell.


Holbein. The Ambassadors. 1533. The National Gallery.

The fine cloaks, the tools of navigation, attributes of wealth like the lute, are all seen large. These people are rich and successful. Of course, most photographers care not a whit for that. All they can fixate upon is the elongated skull in the foreground which, viewed obliquely from the lower left, shows itself in full splendor. You can interpret it as you like but I have long preferred to think of it as the ultimate statement in secular art. It is there because the clients wanted it there. It’s as spontaneous as, say, a White House speech or a politician at the site of an airplane disaster.

That’s not to say that the Vatican types didn’t try to subtly subvert the system. Take a look at Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ – the one in the National Gallery is the corker, not the one in Milan.


Caravaggio. The Supper at Emmaus. 1601. The National Gallery.

At first it is what you want to see. Christ surrounded by fawning apostles on his resurrection. I first saw it on the obligatory school outing, short trousers and all, when I was maybe 10 years old. And, like every misbehaving schoolboy, I stuck my nose in the canvas and all I could see was the imperfections. (OK, so my mother was Germanic and demanding. Leave it.) The tear in the sleeve. The worms in the fruit. The ravaged and bloated faces. Years later, the secularist in me acknowleges how smartly Caravagggio has hidden the stigmata, despite their being the object of focus for the two at the table. He isn’t buying it! In every possible way the painter is saying “Screw you and your religion” and I fell in love with him there and then. Even if my original admiration was for the worms. And even if I was having to go to mass three times a week.

Another guy who got it really right, meaning he got paid though his clients didn’t notice his work was no less subversive, was Mantegna. In his Death of St. Sebastian (I am reproducing it in a large size here as the detail in the painting merits it) you must agree at first glance that, surely, this is the proto-religious picture. The martyr is well and truly martyred, and true to form, is saving his dying gasp for the one true God, with that damnably condescending look of forgiveness for his killers. The only snag is that Mantegna, like some latter day cartoonist, has neatly insinuated two of the shooters at the lower right. And what do you think the one is saying to the other? “Nice shot, Ernie?” “Fancy a couple of quick ones at the pub?” “Did you catch the thing at the Coliseum last night?” It is a superbly crafted piece of subversive, secular propaganda.


Andrea Mantegna. The Death of St. Sebastian, 1480. The Louvre.

Now do you see why Sebastian’s expression gets my goat? Don’t you think a guy who just got one through the privates would at least admit to some pain? And the painter was Spanish. Can you say Spanish Inquisition? Catholicism’s version of modern Islam. Whoever painted this had real courage. Viva Mantegna!

So great painters were making ‘photographs’ 500 years ago. The Decisive Moment was there – it just took a while to place it on canvas. No 1/60th @ f/8. Their genius in reducing imagination to canvas gave us works like those above. Not being as good, we needed Kodak and a button to press. And by the time real photography came along the religious had disappeared. The world, as western hemisphere photographers know it, was secular. And hooray for that. May all our photographs be as subversive as those of Holbein, Caravaggio and Mantegna.