Monthly Archives: December 2009

A revolutionary decade

The 2000s will forever be the decade film died.

There’s a strong case to be made that photography experienced only one game changing technology in the 112 years leading to the end of the millennium, and that technology was the invention of roll film.

While dry plates were already in use when George Eastman introduced roll film in 1888, the change was revolutionary, taking the making of pictures – heretofore the province of an affluent few – from ‘artists’ and placing the enabling technology in the hands of everyman.

The first Kodak – 1888

I would go further and add that Kodak’s invention of Kodachrome – which did for color what the Brownie had done for monochrome – was a technological sea change of almost equal significance. Color was now available to anyone at modest cost with consistently assured results, thanks to Kodak’s outstanding quality control.

Kodachrome

Some might even argue that the invention of small cameras was as big a technological leap, one made possible by the existence of roll film. The Leica may not have been the first camera to bring high capacity exposure capability to photographers, but it brought an engineering standard that gave much the same guarantee of results as did Kodak’s roll films.

Thereafter much of what changed was simply variations on a theme. Rangefinders came and went. The pentaprism and flapping mirror (both on their last legs) – a mechanism surely invented by Rube Goldberg – prevailed for much of the last four decades of the twentieth century, but what lay underneath was still the same old roll film camera. There was still the agonizing wait while Rochester processed your Kodachrome, although always cured by the exciting arrival of the mail with that small yellow box of slides. I doubt that postmen have ever been as popular since.

There was, of course, one other technological breakthrough of enormous magnitude, but ultimately of little significance, and it too was the brainchild of one man. Edwin Land gave the affluent consumer instant results, first in black and white, later in color in the guise of Polaroid film. The process was rendered obsolete by the one hour lab which could deliver 36 beautifully printed snaps in one hour or less, making the extremely high cost of Polaroid film a thing of the past. Americans may be impatient, but they also know the value of a buck, and at a buck a shot compared to a buck for ten, the math did not solve for Polaroid.

But the first decade of the new millennium, which ends today, saw the first really significant change in mass market photographic technology since 1888, so you could argue that roll film is amongst the longest lived modern technologies known to man. Daguerrotypes, wax cylinders, shellac discs, vinyl LPs, CDs, DVDs, Cathode Ray Tubes, carburetors, propellers, drum brakes, magnetic tape, typewriters, recording tape, cassettes for film, movies and sound – all are dead or dying and none lasted more than a few decades.

That revolutionary change, of course, was the introduction of mass market digital technology and while I do not recall ever complaining that 36 exposures on a roll were too few, now a thousand or more on a postage stamp-sized memory card is viewed as the norm. And if that’s not enough, movie capability is taken for granted. In the short space of a decade, digital technology has largely equalled or exceeded anything available to its predecessors in quality, flexibility, size, price, speed, you name it.

Canon’s first DSLR – the D30 of 2000

You can read all about the first Canon-branded ‘serious’ DSLR at DPReview which recommended it highly in August, 2000. Today even the cheapest point and shoot exceeds the D30’s specs at a fraction of the cost.

I, for one, embrace digital with open arms. Its democratizing features – everyone can press the button if few can actually take a good photograph – means there is much more noise in imagery today than ever, but for photographers seeking ever less interference between vision and result it would be quixotic to deny the superiority of digital over film in every respect. None of that denies that there remain a few superb craftsmen getting the very last iota of quality from traditional wet darkroom processes, but that’s largely a decision based in the love of process rather than in the love of results. There are still folks who use hand tools for woodwork and bamboo split cane rods for angling. For them it’s the tool not just the result.

What is startling is the rate of change. In a very short time the digital camera has gone from expensive plaything with poor image quality to dominating every image making sector from point-and-shoot to professional gear for billboard-sized images. Three things make it possible – the first two are the development of sensors and the invention of low energy display panels – plasma, LCD, whatever. Curiously, the latter have thrown photographers back to the very early days of the creative process where the image was viewed at some distance – albeit under a dark cloth – on a screen during the composition stage. But more importantly, those screens in large sizes – as big as your wallet permits – have obsoleted the wall print. While consumer ink jet printers are at a level of perfection seemingly hard to improve, they are about as obsolete as roll film. Who needs a printer when the TV screen beckons as the display medium of choice? Why spend huge sums on matting and framing when a $5 connecting cable works just as well? Sure, I’m a huge fan of big prints, but the cost makes little sense for most applications.

The third enabling technology is, of course, the personal computer and that too is reaching a development plateau. Prices are leveling off at a point so low it seems ridiculous. Reliability has never been better so that now one of the greatest challenges facing any hardware manufacturer must surely be the lengthening replacement cycle. Why get a new box when the old one works just fine? The operating systems and application software for home computing are now so cheap, reliable and capable that it seems hard to imagine revolutionary changes which will make photographers want to throw everything out and start again. While we will see more data storage move to the ‘cloud’, remote from the hardware, the core technologies are well developed, cheap and in place.

The computer for the rest of us – it just worked.

But then no one saw digital coming, certainly not Kodak or Fuji, both of whom have been broken by the change. So it’s foolish to say that things are as good as they can get and doubtless there is some new technology around the corner waiting to create the next seismic change. I just can’t see what it is. Within ten years upper end camera hardware will have shaken the silly prism and flapping mirror as surely as CDs shook off the stylus, but that’s evolutionary, not revolutionary. The sensors in the best gear are at a point where it’s pointless to demand more, and while things may get faster and quieter and maybe even cheaper, it’s hard to see what the next revolution will bring. I think it may take a while.

I believe that the next ten years will be the Decade of Broadband. Increasing bandwidth demand for delivery of content – movies, data, commerce of all sorts, art books (finally!), online storage – will see a dramatic increase in bandwidth to the business and home, while competition will see to it that prices continue to fall. AT&T got most of it right in its prescient 1993 advertisements titled “You Will” with a voiceover by Tom Selleck (remember him? Also obsolete). The only thing missing from making all of the telephone company’s ideas really practical is an absence of bandwidth and speed in our transmission systems. It will just take time and money – no technological breakthroughs are needed, just shovels to make trenches for all that optical fibre.

Meanwhile, thanks to the technological revolution of the first decade of this new millennium, there has simply never been a better time to be a photographer.

On a personal note, had you told me on January 1, 2000 that my Leica M2, Leica M3 and Rolleiflex 3.5F would all be disposed of and that I would be using two cameras from a home electronics manufacturer (the Panasonic G1 and LX1) for daily snaps and a Canon 5D for ‘medium format’ quality …. well, I would have pointed you to the local loony bin after suggesting you first sober up. Change or die.

Posts of the Year

This has been a productive year for writing about Photographs, Photographers and Photography and I had a blast doing it. I hope you have been stimulated, inspired and, yes, angered from time to time. Without emotion there is no progress.

So, without further ado, here are my favorite posts of the year, in no particular order:

I am delighted to report that the revenue I have derived from this journal in 2009 was identical to that for 2008 and prior, meaning zero. I can assure you that will continue in 2010.

Happy New Year and thanks for dropping by.

Onward and upward:

Norman Parkinson: Sisters under the Skin

Another Parkinson for the library.

If I make mention of Norman Parkinson yet again it’s for the simple reason that a friend gave me her copy of Parkinson’s first book, Sisters under the Skin, for Christmas.

The sensationalist cover notwithstanding, the contents show Parkinson at his very best. Simply stated, Norman Parkinson is the Renoir of the camera and, mercifully, there is no recourse to black and white for its own sake. I increasingly think of black and white as an excuse sought out by photographers who are struggling with mediocre color material. When Parkinson uses monochrome it’s because it’s the right thing to do.

You see women in all their glory and infinite variety here. Iman with an impossibly long neck, a slutty/sultry Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor – never more beautiful, an equally lovely Lesley-Anne Down rendered in pastel tones, and a simply charming portrait of the Queen Mother, warm and tender. There’s Twiggy at the height of her fame, Princess Anne very much in charge of her (charging) steed, and that fabulous Van Dongen out-of-focus book cover you will see if you click the link above, from Parkinson’s book ‘Portraits in Fashion’.

This book is enhanced with short stories for most of the pictures, my favorite being the Marisa Berenson one where some crass git remarks “Goodness, your backside is collapsing like Mahtma Gandhi’s dhoti” to which the superb Marisa replies “Who’s she?”.

Wenda Rogerson (Mrs. Norman Parkinson) makes a spectacular appearance in perhaps the warmest photograph in a book suffused with warmth – you can also see her by clicking the link at the start of this piece and, yes, she hangs on my wall to this day. My, even Barbara Cartland looks half human in Parkinson’s hands, layers of make up or not. The only question which constantly comes to mind is how could an Englishman be, well, so Italian?

Very worthwhile searching out on the used market as it’s no longer available new.

Funky shutters

A neat G1 shutter experience

I confess that when I first saw this image, taken just before Christmas, I almost erased it. It’s another focusing on the theme of lone individuals in the big city – what I call my ‘Edward Hopper series’ after the great American painter.

The key element is the figure and is lost in gloom. But right before I hit the ‘Delete’ key I noticed something strange. The ‘up’ escalator is blurred whereas the ‘down’ one is sharp as can be. That’s an interesting little mystery, and it suddenly struck me that despite all it’s electronic magic, the Panasonic G1 which I used to snap this still uses a conventional focal plane shutter, with vertically traveling blinds. While it happens to default to an open state, thus permitting the sensor to receive and transmit the image to the electronic viewfinder (the camera has no prism or mirror) it’s conceptually identical to those used in some cameras a hundred years ago.

So I decided to manipulate the image and started messing with selective-this and slider-that in Lightroom, ending up with this:

Escalators and lone figure. G1, kit lens at 28mm, f/5.6, 1/30, ISO 320.

The camera’s shutter was moving with the down escalator and in the opposite direction to the up escalator, which accounts for the differential sharpness of the two.

Here’s a detail screenshot:

Perhaps the most famous example of funkiness from focal plane shutters is this picture by Jacques Henri Lartigue, where the wheel’s seeming elongation is the result of …. you guessed it, a vertically traveling focal plane shutter, the effect further magnified by the photographer’s panning with the motion:

Early focal plane shutter distortion. Taken in 1913.

Modern focal plane shutters travel too fast for this sort of extreme distortion which is a shame!

There really is little new under the sun, but the strange effect in my picture and a bit of manipulation make for an interesting snap. It seems that the 1/30th second used (excuse me, the 1/30th second the camera’s electronics chose, as I invariably use aperture priority exposure automation) was perfectly in sync with the speed of the down escalator.

Falling lives

Shorter and shorter.

I used my Leica M3 for some 35 years. It had everything I needed in a street snapper, being small, quiet, sharp and fast. Add a lens or two and you had enough to travel the world. I mostly used it with the 35mm Summaron with those ghastly viewfinder ‘spectacles’.

My M3

My Rollei 3.5F made it through 10 years. Truth be told, I seldom did it justice, never getting comfortable with the reversed waist level image (you were always looking up at people’s chins) but the large negative was nice and the camera even quieter than the Leica.

My Rollei 3.5F

It’s successor was possibly the most accomplished medium format film camera ever, the Rollei 6003 Pro. The designers obviously took pictures and the choice of shutter or aperture priority automation was better executed than anything before or since. The lenses were to die for and the controls near perfect. Too bad it weighed several tons. Five years.

My Rollei 6003 Pro

One other attempt at medium format came and went in a year. The Pentax 6×7 was so loud that there was basically no environment in which I cared to use it.

It made the sound of a gun when the button was pressed

By contrast, the diminutive Pentax ME Super with its sweet 40mm Pancake lens was a dream and served me well on the streets of a tough New York during most of the decade of the 1980s when I lived there. It started as a ‘steal me, I don’t care’ substitute for the Leica and ended up my daily snapper. I left it behind in New York when I moved to Los Angeles. Street snappers were safe there as no one walked.

ME Super with pancake in place – as good as 35mm SLRs got

But my all time favorite of the film years was my Leica M2, which I bought in very sad shape in 1993. I got a dozen very hard years out of it and it always made me regret having bought the M3 back in 1971 when I really should have got the M2. The 35/50/90mm viewfinder was just what the doctor ordered and no bespectacled bulky 35mm lenses were needed, just the wonderful 35mm and 90mm Asph Summicrons. Parting with that one really hurt when I sold it.

My Leica M2 with the 35mm Asph Summicron

My general drift here, however, is that there are no more 5, 10 or 15 year cameras. The rate of change in technology is so startlingly high right now that if you were to tell me that I would be using my Panasonic G1 as my “go to” tool of choice five years hence I would laugh myself silly.

No sooner do I write that, though, than I am given pause by the superb Canon 5D. I see no earthly reason to upgrade to the Mark II as the images seem every bit as perfect as anything from medium format film and maybe it will just enjoy a double digit anniversary here. Provided it doesn’t blow and die for lack of digispares. I have recycled a couple of the poorer lenses made by Canon for this body but the rest soldier on as sharp as the day I bought them and newer arrivals preserve backward compatibility so far.

Life’s too short for brand loyalty. I wonder what the Panasonic G2 will bring? Or the Samsung XYZ3? If it works for me you will find it around my neck or, more likely, in my pocket.

“Rich sod” I hear you thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth. My M3, bought in 1971, was the results of My years in retail. The Rollei 3.5F was a real beater which cost very little. Now, film Leicas and Rolleis are super collectible, of course. Pretty much everything else was from trading gear, and I never bought new until digital came along. The reasons are simple. ‘Used’ and ‘digital’ equals ‘obsolete’, as in parts are not available no matter how competent the camera, and repairing them makes little economic sense. Further, digital gear is so much cheaper than the machines of old that it has become very affordable. That $650 G1 would have cost some $100 in 1971 currency when I got that Leica M3. It never ceases to amuse me that the proceeds of my M2, M3 and a small handful of lenses paid for everything I use today. Like with investing, timing the exit right makes a big difference. And loyalty is for dog lovers.