Yearly Archives: 2006

Did he, or didn’t he?

Photographs, Photography

Decisive moments don’t last.

In London, on business back in 2000, I made a point of taking some time off and rambling around the charmed streets of Mayfair, where my hotel happened to be.

Something of a throwback as I had not seriously indulged in street photography since leaving New York in 1987, having left London – heaven for street snappers – ten years earlier.

On this trip I brought along the Leica M6 (a camera with a flawed rangefinder which flared out at the drop of a hat) and but two lenses – the 35mm Asph Summicron and the 90mm Elmarit-M. You could go around the world with little more and have just the right equipment for nearly all photographic opportunities. And this was before everyone passing through an airport was subjected to deadly levels of rays passing for security. Not so good for film stock either.

This decisive moment stuff is not as difficult as it seems, with a bit of practice. The secret is in anticipating the juxtaposition of subjects a few seconds before things come to pass. The result is unhurried and fairly predictable, though a stroke of luck never hurts.

For those who love London – and absent the weather what’s not to love? – these obviously wealthy women were making their way down Conduit Street from Berkeley Square. I always made a point on London trips of paying a visit to the Rolls Royce dealer in Mayfair, not as a prospective customer, but merely as one gawking at the latest and greatest in their showroom. That day it was a gorgeous yellow pre-war Rolls.

I spotted them some fifty yards away, allowing me time to mess with that awkward meter and pretending to gaze at the car in the showroom. As they passed me it was the work of a second to raise the camera to eye level and press the shutter. Only as I was doing so the street smart one of the two cast a backward glance of undiluted anger at me. On the one hand she was probably concerned that her privacy had been invaded. On the other, she couldn’t quite be sure whether her likeness had been captured or whether this was just one more tourist taking a picture of an exotic car. Adding to her confusion was the fact that I was wearing my ever present Harris Tweed cap, like a proper Englishman. You can see my reflection in the front side window of the car.


The Angry Woman. Rolls Royce dealer, Conduit Street, London, 2000. Leica M6, 35mm Summicron.

I delayed pressing the button for the merest moment as she looked back at me and the picture was in the bag. It says everything I like and dislike about the English dowager in one decisive moment and is a pleasant memory of a fine trip.

Cameras and loyalty

Cameras

Change or die.

I mentioned a while back that a friend had asked for help in selling a couple of film cameras on eBay. Now while eBay may be a conduit for some of the least honest people on earth – the sponsor smartly gets to act as innocent broker sloughing off responsibility for combating fraud on cheated buyers – it is nonetheless one of the more effective venues for getting rid of junk. Chances are good that someone out there wants it.

I admit I was a tad shocked at the dear relative’s lack of loyalty to these fine machines. But I know her to be a wise woman so I started reflecting on her decision.

The two cameras concerned were a mass produced and totally uninteresting (to collectors, at least) Canon Rebel and a much more collectible Kodak Medalist II which, owing to its strange appearance and bulk, makes the grade as an instant display piece. One immensely capable the other, well, just immense.

Arguably you would not want to use either to take pictures. The Rebel is surpassed handily by its digital descendants whereas the Medalist is really not competent in a world of 10 megapixel sensors and fabulous lenses, if you can even find film for it.

Knowing this I realized that my task would not be an easy one; however, as I am a big believer in the old saying that has it that you have to spend money to make money, I fitted the Rebel with two sets of new batteries (one for the data back, the other for the camera) and ran a roll of film through it, the better to show prospective buyers the quality this combination could produce. You can probably say with reasonable certainty that this will be the very last roll of film I will expose in my lifetime.

The Medalist could not be accorded like treatment as I could not find 620 format film in time, but it would appeal to a display collector, I reckoned, rather than someone looking for a daily user. All I did here was to clean it up and take a nice set of display pictures showing this magnificent piece from every conceivable angle.

To cut a long story short, both cameras sold, albeit neither attracted much interest. It’s the low selling price of the Rebel – $65 including new batteries, three rolls of film and a nice Canon carryall – that prompts this journal entry. Here, after all, was a camera that was selling a handful of years ago for what? $250? $300? The one I sold for my friend had probably seen a dozen or two rolls of film through it and was as close to mint as it gets. Like the proverbial Cadillac owned by the Little Old Lady from Pasadena of days past. In other words, thanks to digital, the Canon, a camera of great flexibility and yielding fine negatives, had depreciated some 80% in the blink of an eye.

It occurs to me that this sort of thing doubtless happened in previous generations where a technological breakthrough had obsoleted or bankrupted a predecessor technology.

Old man Gutenberg and his press did a number on all those Benedictine monks who had the market in illustrated manuscripts well and truly cornered. Being a pretty smart lot, however, (and I admit to bias here, having been educated by them), they went where the money is. Meaning booze. Benedictine Dom Perignon invented the cork stopper, making transportable champagne a reality and the now unemployed Benedictine artists transitioned to making Benedictine liquer, making many happy and themselves rich. Nice transition. And say what you may about religion, there’s a lot right with a bunch of chaps that knows a good liquer or glass of champagne.


That was then, this is now. An illustrated Benedictine manuscript fragment

In medicine the local barber gave way to penicillin, the surgeon and his anesthetics. The latter, in turn, is fighting a losing battle against smart pharmaceutical chemists who are rapidly obsoleting the scalpel with their targeted drugs. Amen for that.

The Ford Model T did a number on the horse and buggy business. You now enjoy a horse as a recreational avocation, flaunting the key rule of not owning something that eats as you sleep.

The light bulb did it to candles. The latter now serve as a backstop when lightning hits the local generator and provide continuing work for the local fire brigade and insurance adjuster.

Newsprint is where film was a few years ago. Meaning scared and about to die. The computer with a properly targeted news reader application will allow a user to digest hundreds of stories daily where in the past he might read that many on a topic of choice in a week.


Hundreds of stories at a glance. The NetNewsWire news reader on an iMac.

The main street movie house is in the early throes of death, replaced by the DVD which, in turn, will soon yield to downloadable movies. No need to leave the armored compound you call home.

The iPod killed the CD.

Those are some of the big wrecking technological changes that immediately come to mind. Back to the topic of photography.

Digital changed photography more than any technological change since Kodak’s ‘You press the button, we do the rest’. Actually, that was not so much a technological change – after all Kodak was selling cameras pre-loaded with roll film which technology had been around for a time – as it was a brilliant marketing change. Place the customer first (something Kodak has long since forgotten) and the world will beat a path to your door. In like manner, the iPod made better that which already existed, made it easy to use and made it sexy. The photographer uses the latter as a temporary storage device for his digital pictures which are overflowing the storage card in the camera on that extended trip. When he’s not listening to his tunes or watching movies on the same device, that is. So now Apple has changed that old Kodak dictum and it reads “Your press the button, you do the rest”.

And with this change in photographic technology I believe a new behavioral set of circumstances has come to pass. Namely, that brand loyalty is, for the most part, a thing of the past.

In the old days a serious photographer was a Leica man or a Zeiss man or a Rolleiflex man (sadly, few women were allowed into the club). Later he became a Nikon or Minolta or Pentax or Canon man. Or woman. He swore by Kodak or Agfa or Ilford film. For his dad, it had been GM or Ford. They had not let him down in the past and were not about to do so now, having grown with him.

Look at the exquisite care Leitz, for one, took with transitioning its many happy users from the anachronistic screw mounting of lenses on bodies with simply awful viewfinders and ergonomics to match, to the fast and infinitely more capable bayonet mount and magnificent finder of the Leica M. Though the first bayonet Leica, the M3, came out in 1954, Leitz was releasing the latest in its line of screw bodied cameras as late as 1957, finally discontinuing it in 1960. Forward lens compatibility was also assured – what better way to preserve the value of that investment? – so the M body was one millimeter thinner, allowing a screw to bayonet adapter to be fitted while preserving infinity focus. And gradually those old pipe smoking fuddy duddies at the camera club came to realize that maybe a lever film advance and the world’s best integrated view/rangefinder weren’t such bad things after all.

Their modern descendants are the same folks who deny the reality that film is in its last innings. But Leica, in its clever marketing, had managed to preserve a past generation of users, making them upgrade, and attracted a whole new generation who saw the M for the superbly capable instrument that it was. Brand loyalty, in other words, was well used. Whether they get away with it again with the ridiculously overpriced and soon-to-be-obsolete Leica M8 remains to be seen. They had better watch out – those M bayonet patents are long expired.

Now fast forward to 2006. At the beginning of the year I was a Leica M loyalist of some 35 years standing. Newer Ms had come along – truth be told none were as well made as the M2 and M3 I had been using for all that time – but there was no reason for ‘upgrading’, if an upgrade it really was. I tried an M6 and found the rangefinder worthless pointed into the sun. Those on the M2 and M3 worked fine. That’s what happens when accountants take over from engineers. The lenses got better and better, true, so I upgraded those, but when something better came along it would clearly not be from the house of Leitz, or Leica as it had become. It happened to be from Canon in the guise of a (barely) affordable full frame sensor in the EOS 5D DSLR which instantly obsoleted all my medium format gear. I couldn’t sell the latter fast enough before it became worthless. Bye bye, Rollei.

And had you told me that I would make my daily user a camera which was made by a consumer appliance maker – the Panasonic LX1 – and that this would replace none other than the vaunted Leicas, well, I would probably have had serious doubts about your sanity. And that was just a few months ago. Panasonic had made a better mousetrap, Canon had made the best, near grain-free sensor in the business and brand loyalty simply made no sense. So when my friend wisely wrote to me, in response to my email agonizing about selling the Leicas, with just three words, I knew there was more than a grain of truth in what she wrote.

“Ain’t Change Wonderful?”

Let’s extrapolate that thinking for a moment. The other day I watched a brief Sony promotional video on YouTube where a charming Sony technologist was extolling the virtues of the new Sony Alpha A100. I have spoken highly of this camera, based on its paper specifications, in the past, not least because it is a rebadged Minolta with Sony’s capital and genius behind it. What do you think the smart Japanese engineer said on that video? Why, he took a leaf straight out of Leica’s book. “Just think”, he said, “there are six million Minolta lenses out there that will fit our camera”. Respect the past while selling the future. It was not lost on me, either, that each of those six million lenses had just got two new leases on life, courtesy of a digital sensor and a vibration reduction mechanism built into the body of the camera.

So one day soon someone comes along with a sensor as fine grained as Canon’s in a much smaller package (it does not have to be full frame if the quality is there). The camera has vibration reduction built into the body, not the lens. The viewfinder has focus confirmation for manual focus lenses just like some Pentax DSLRs. Now my tired eyes can see when things are sharp as the little light comes on. And the mount will respect the legacy of the past by being Nikon or Canon or Minolta or Pentax, or even Leica M. For all those tens of millions of lenses out there. And maybe that brilliant manufacturer somehow obsoletes the flapping mirror and pentaprism with a crisp, straight through electronic viewfinder with no ghosting and high contrast. So much cheaper and more reliable than all those mechanical parts.

And what do you think I will do? Why, dump the Canon and move on, of course.

As they say on Wall Street, “If you want loyalty, get a dog”. And I already have one of those.


Bert the Border Terrier. Loyalty personified, unless a cookie is involved, that is.

Margaret Bourke-White – early work

Book reviews, Photographers

A great woman photographer in a man’s world.

She was beautiful, well educated and had a strong sense of design. That Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) photographed the first cover of Fortune magazine in 1930 is well known. It is no less surprising a fact today, when one considers the extent to which men dominated journalistic photography at the time. Indeed, just three years earlier, Bourke-White had to lobby for weeks to be allowed into the Otis Steel Mill in Cleveland, for her gender was a ‘do not enter’ sign writ loud and clear in a man’s world. Fitting, then, that the resulting pictures, taken in 1927, made her famous.

This book chronicles her Machine Age photographs, taken through 1936, before she grew into a great humanist photographer, one adopting the candid style that the Leica had made possible. You will not find Leica pictures here. No, large format was the order of the day and Bourke-White embraced it enthusiastically, reveling in the fine level of detail the medium afforded.

Perusing my collection of photography books the other day I realized with some dismay that there was not a single one dedicated to the photography of Margaret Bourke-White. That omission was quickly corrected. This volume, published by Rizzoli in 2005, remains available from Amazon. You will not find a photography book with better quality reproductions, the pictures being printed with great tonal range and depth.

Bourke-White was not loved by the dominant working class male photographers of the day, a fact well illustrated in the excellent text by Stephen Bennett Phillips, which is quite devoid, mercifully, of dry academic drivel, and a fascinating read. As Phillips points out, where a Walker Evans would record his subjects in dry, unemotional, square on detail, Bourke-White could never resist the soaring diagonals which render her photography of man made objects so exciting. Further, she committed the cardinal sin of working for Big Business, becoming one of the highest paid women of the day, rather than choosing to starve nobly in some unheated garret. In these, her early works, people are mere design elements in pictures which glorify machines. Only later would her style change and adapt, and people would become the subject.

This book is not for everyone. Certainly it will stir the socialist souls of those convinced that industry exists to dehumanize and control. But for those who see the Machine Age, that time during which America simultaneously became the most powerful and most generous nation that the world has ever seen, as a true reading of America’s greatness, will revel in the magnificent photographs on display here.

Five stars

Photographs, Photography

About those ‘best’ pictures.

One thing both Aperture and iPhoto encourage the user to do is to rate images with up to five stars. What constitutes a one, two, three, four or five star image is left up to you, of course, but the system adds a useful learning process to the cataloging experience.

As my use of Aperture is recent (as is the application) and I use it to store ‘photographs’ rather than ‘family snaps’ (iPhoto is ideal for those) I get to rate all the images in the Aperture database at one time, suggesting that I am at least applying like standards of evaluation. Over time this process may be worth less, for what seems great today may not pass muster tomorrow as taste and standards change. However, at this one point in time it seems to me the star ratings may be reasonably meaningful.

So what is a ‘Five Star’ image? For me that’s easy. It’s the one where my instinctive reaction is, simply, ‘Wow!’. I want to show that one to everybody, mount it, matt it, frame it. Rightly or wrongly, I expect you to like it. I will to come back to it time and again.

I have been taking ‘serious’ pictures since 1971, when I was twenty and for the first thirty years my ‘serious camera’ was a rangefinder Leica, so you will understand the preponderance of Leica and monochrome pictures in my Five Star list.

My Aperture library holds 2,748 pictures.

Of these but 64, or some 2%, get Five Stars.

18 of these are monochrome, all film.

5 are digital. (Three on the 5D, two on the LX-1, which tells you something about that little point-and-shoot)

44 are on 35mm film.

11 are on medium format.

4 are on large format.

39, no less, were taken on a Leica.

4 were with 20-28mm (or equivalent) lenses.

51 were with 35 or 50mm lenses, about evenly split.

6 were with 90mm lenses.

3 were with 200mm or longer.

So the most common thread is a 35 or 50mm lens on the Leica using TriX – hardly surprising for one who grew up as a street photographer. Now I no longer use film and my only Leica connection is the Leica lens on my Panasonic LX1, and a fine lens it is, invariably used at its widest 28mm setting in widescreen format.


A Five Star image.
Lonely – a tribute to Edward Hopper. Leica M2, 90mm Apo Summicon-M Asph, Kodak Gold 100.
The last day of the millenium. December 31, 1999, San Francisco

What is intriguing about the above small data set is that 5 out of the 64, or nearly 8%, were taken on digital, a medium I started using seriously with the purchase of the Canon 5D in February of this year, barely 8 months ago. Now when I converted the picture library to Aperture there were some 2,000 film pictures, at which point new additions were digital, so the ‘Five Star’ rate for film pictures is 3% (59/2000) whereas that for the digital additions is 0.5% (5/748). So that’s a high number of digital Five Stars added in an eight month period (over 35 years that extrapolates to 263 Five Star pictures!) but a low rate of Five Star digital snaps, barely 0.5%.

Which sort of points to where I had already arrived intuitively before running these numbers – digital, because of its accessibility and speedy production time, encourages you to take more pictures but there’s a lot of dross burying the jewels. But I think it’s a fair trade off. I would rather increase my output of Five Star pictures, even if the trade off is more mediocre ones.

Richard Gere – Photographer

Book reviews, Photographers

A moving book of pictures chronicles Tibet.


Pilgrim. Photographs by Richard Gere

I have long enjoyed Richard Gere as a film actor, not least for his light touch and excellent timing. For whatever reason, he seems to have fallen out of favor with US audiences, yet finds himself more popular than ever in Japan, where his movies are invariably huge box office hits.

But I’m not writing about Gere the actor here. Rather, this piece is about Gere the photographer, a man who has been a long time devotee of Tibetan Buddhism and documents his faith here. His love for the country and its gentle, cruelly oppressed people, shows well in this large book. Gere spared no expense in production, for the book is beautifully clothbound with the sixty-four pictures reproduced in warm monochrome tones on Mohawk Superfine acid free paper (I quote from the Appendix). Suffice it to say that the look and feel of the whole project is of something of the finest quality.

Gere’s photography is noteworthy. He does not hesitate to publish pictures which are blurred because of camera shake, where the effect justifies it (indeed, the cover picture is blurred) nor to use slow shutter speeds to blur moving people in otherwise sharp surroundings. This is no mere affectation for leafing through this book shows that the effect is used well and never detracts from the emotion of the pictures.

And emotional they are, none finer than that of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on page 63 or the simply gorgeous, there’s no other word for it, picture of the hands and prayer beads on page 48.

It doesn’t hurt to read that Gere donated all his profits to Tibetan charities.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with a book like this is the celebrity status of the photographer, but this is miles away from another tome of lousy snaps by yet another underemployed spouse franchising her marriage to a rock star. Gere, clearly, is not only the real thing in his beliefs, the photography is simply beautiful to behold and very moving.

The book appears to be out of print; my used copy came from Powell’s Books for the not inconsiderable sum of $35. Money well spent.