Yearly Archives: 2006

Robert Gambee – Downtown Manhattan

Architecture, Book reviews

A standout from the crowd of Manhattan picture books.

Wall Street Christmas by Robert Gambee was published in 1990, some three years after I had taken Horace Greeley’s advice and moved west to Los Angeles. It is a wonderful piece with superb photography and text by Gambee – a monumental task. The book has over 270 pages and probably as many pictures.

While no longer in print you can pick up a good used copy for a few dollars from Amazon or other booksellers, and I recommend it unreservedly is you like superb architecture and photography.

I was reminded of the book when cataloging some pictures the other day and coming across a batch from my Wall Street days. Gambee records not only the exteriors but also the plush executive suites where the rich were made to feel better about parting with their money, for they could see so much of it hanging on the walls. My favorite recollection of the time is attending meetings in the board room of J. P. Morgan at 23 Wall Street where, for some inexplicable reason, I was always seated directly opposite the huge oil of J. Pierpont Morgan himself, dark glowering gaze and all. I have absolutely no recollection of the content of the meetings but the portrait will go with me to my grave! I recall traipsing down the corridor of this fine space – the building deliberately built to just a handful of stories to emphasize the wealth of the institution – and suddenly the industrial carpet changed to plush pile as you approached the hallowed ‘executive’ area.

There are the obligatory pictures of the World Trade Centers, of course, as it was impossible not to notice them. They only looked good at night when all those office lights made the facades look like some digital modern art piece. I had a client in one on the 95th floor and you had to take two elevators to get there. Each building was so large it had its own zip code for mail. Having dined a few times in the surprisingly good Windows on the World restaurant at the very top on the 110th floor, I recall on one windy winter’s day when the short elevator trip to the top was interrupted by the failsafes which would refuse to allow the elevator to move if the building and its shaft were twisting too much …. these buildings were tall!

Gambee’s pictures are far superior to anything I ever did in New York, but just for fun, here are a couple of my images.

Old and new, downtown Manhattan. Pentax ME Super, 200mm Takumar. Kodachrome 64

World Trade Centers. Pentax ME Super, 40mm ‘pancake’ Takumar. Kodachrome 64

A fine book, whether your interest is in architecture or just a vouyeuristic one wishing to glimpse the corridors of American financial power.

Simple lines and colors

Panasonic, Photographs

Sometimes a simple abstraction strikes you, and you press the button.

Simple colors. Simple lines. An air of mystery. What is around that corner?

Lines and colors. Panasonic Lumic LX1, ISO100.

With the small Lumix LX1 and its superb Leica lens, there really is no excuse. Nowadays I always carry a camera, in contrast to those occasions where even the compact Leica M3 and its small 35mm lens were too much to lug around. The only thing to remember is a spare battery.

Kodachrome

Book reviews, Photography

Everything looks worse in black and white

Smirking with ridiculously self-satisfied glee at a joke he has just told to the wife of one of his flunkies, Hitler reaches for the cookie bowl. His pasty faced complexion contrasts strangely with the tanned, Aryan health evidenced on the woman’s beaming face, her gingham dress replete with red and white stripes.

Turn the page and there’s a post-Bitzkrieg Warsaw in September, 1939, its ancient buildings just so much rubble, with a proud, well fed line of Wehrmacht soldiers guarding their spoils, grey helmets shining in the sun, the sky a pure azure, doubtless wondering about that evening’s forthcoming excesses at the cost of their Polish captives.

One more page and Rotterdam is in ruins, one hour after the German bombardment, the sky a threatening dark indigo this time.

One more page and it’s the turn of the French, surrounded by German troops, brown shirts everywhere.

Yet another page and there’s a rotund, self-satisfied German actress in Hitler’s Chancellery, massive gold necklace and ruby red lips glistening just so in the Berlin of 1940. Enjoy it while you can, baby.

The sheer depressing nature of these pictures, blow after blow after blow, each speaking to the Master Race’s self-pronounced superiority, has a strange way of jolting the viewer into reality. Suddenly you are wide-eyed with amazement when you realize all these pictures, by unnamed photographers, were taken on Kodachrome.

Many, many years later Paul Simon was to crystallize the essence of this very American invention in the lyrics of his song. He was doubtless writing about the demise of TriX:

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of edu—cation
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they’d never match
my sweet imagination
everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Leave your boy so far from home
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

And if you want to catch the spirit of the piece, go no further than the lovely Coneheads on DVD, to see what I mean.

The Leica may have been the greatest machine invented for photography, and its gritty, grainy black and white film stock enshrined an era seen through the eyes of street photographers everywhere. But the snaps were not color. And pragmatic Americans, ever looking for the latest gadget, the true reality, wanted color. So Kodak gave them Kodachrome.

The single greatest photographic invention since the Leica.

The book is ‘Kodachrome, 1939-1959, The American Invention of our World’, and you can get it for chump change from Amazon.

Yalta, 1945. Stalin decides the future of Western Europe while WSC and FDR look on. Click the picture.

It is, perhaps, unfair to refer to this as Kodak’s invention, though Kodak deserves credit for letting two professional musicians, one a pianist, the other a violinist, take up laboratory space in upstate New York in 1930. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. just happened to be keen amateur photographers and geniuses at chemistry. Clearly, God did not allocate talent equally. After thirteen years of research, Kodak announced Kodachrome on April 12, 1935 as the first continuous tone color film. Imagine a thirteen year development cycle for anything today.

That early emulsion faded badly but by 1938 the Leopolds (‘Man’ and ‘God’ as they were known in Rochester) got it right and the Kodachrome you can still – if only just – buy today is little changed. Best of all, unlike any other color film ever made, processed and properly stored it is virtually fade proof. History may not record how Mannes and Godowsky felt about their emulsion being used to photograph the creator of the Final Solution, but the oh! so satisfying picture of German prisoners of war in a prison cage on Normandy beach (page 44) doubtless warmed the cockles of their hearts, especially as it was taken on the emulsion they created.

Kodachrome in 1938 was some 12 ASA in speed. Later, as Kodachrome II it became 25 ASA, where it stayed until being discontinued, now as Kodachrome 25 (I suppose that sounded faster) a couple of years ago. Meanwhile Kodak had also added Kodachrome X (later Kodachrome 64) and Kodachrome 200. For years, such was the repute of this emulsion, National Geographic would only accept Kodachrome slides for reproduction in its pages.

Jane Russell frolicked in the hay for all to admire for a poster for her film ‘The Outlaw’ in 1944. Howard Hughes, who bankrolled the movie, famously remarked “There are just two reasons to go and see her”, summarizing succinctly what every American male was thinking. Americans were happy in 1944, if not gay, and Kodachrome captured Jane’s …. womanhood just so. No one organized a protest, men continued to eat red meat and smoke Marlboros, and women had 2.4 children and craved a starter home in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. Political correctness, refuge of cowards and lawyers, had yet to raise its ugly head. Marlene Dietrich looked ravishing in Kodachrome and jewels in 1948 (it’s OK, she was on our side) and General Douglas MacArthur could look macho in his jeep in 1950. Doubtless the vain General liked what Kodachrome did for him, even if Harry Truman later fired him for insubordination. Too bad we don’t do that with the generals today.

So a vital part of the chronology of American life, of what it meant to be American, is recorded for all time on fade free Kodachrome, in true colors that tell how it was.

There’s Elizabeth Taylor, ravishing in a white dress. The young JFK with Jacqueline Bouvier, film stars both, enjoying a game of tennis. Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson helping destroy one of the last great bastions of White American bigotry, baseball. Marilyn entertaining the troops, her generous lines lovingly rendered. Hitchcock looking like … well, like Hitchcock, ruddy pink face and cigar. Kodachromes all. The El still ran in New York and Kodachrome proves it. Gamine Audrey Hepburn and blowsy Jayne Mansfield showed their true colors. Tarty Shirley MacLaine juxtaposed with a sneering Elvis. Zapruder used Kodachrome in his 8mm movie camera to record JFK’s murder in Dallas. Tricky Dick tried to look like presidential material next to Ike. Not very successfully, let it be said. Even Kodachrome could not hide the fact that his sly smile might just be something to worry about. And even the great Walker Evans got in on the act with a storefront snap in Kodachrome, though in this instance it’s only fair to add that he should have stuck to black and white.

I used Kodachrome exclusively during the period 1977 through 1990. The absence of grain, the consistency of processing by Kodak, the tonal range and color accuracy, all were simply wonderful. Eventually color negative films would rival, maybe surpass, these qualities, and once you could scan the originals and save them to properly backed-up hard disks, fading ceased to be an issue. For in much the same way as I used TriX during the years 1971-1977, Kodak showed what world class products were all about.

You can still get Kodachrome. K25 is no more and Kodak doesn’t want you to know about the alternative as evidenced by a search on their web site:

But go the the B&H web site and Kodachrome 64 can still be had in 35mm cassettes, in 64 and 200 ASA speeds. Only one lab remains in America that can perform the wildly complex processing of this emulsion, and the lovely 120 film size disappeared years ago, as I found to my cost. Unearthing two rolls from the dark recesses of the film shelf in the fridge the other day, it transpired that no one, not even Kodak UK, processed this size any more. Oh! well, I had to throw them out. Just think, through the late 1950s you could get Kodachrome in sizes up to 8″ x 10″. Imagine that. Today it’s 35mm or nothing.

And the inventors? Kodak’s historians have wiped them from the memory banks. Search on Mannes or Godwosky and you get nothing. Shameful.


Matanuska Valley, Alaska, 1978. Leica M3, 50mm Summicron. Kodachrome II.
Taken by this newly affluent immigrant shortly after arriving in America.
At last I could afford not just color film, but Kodachrome, no less.

So if you still use film but have never used Kodachrome, please rush and get one of the remaining rolls now. Your scanner’s dust removal software will not work (silver is required in the emulsion for that and Kodachrome has none), it’s not especially fast by today’s standards, but do you really want to go to your grave and say “I never used Kodachrome?”. No, I didn’t think so.


Lake Elizabeth, California, 1990. Leicaflex SL, 180mm Apo-Telyt-R. Kodachrome 64. One of my
last Kodachrome pictures. After that, scanners became affordable and Kodak color negative film,
impermanent as it may be, provided a far faster processing turnaround.

It’s the software, stupid

Software

Software can yield far greater improvements than optics.

You might fairly accuse me of worshipping at the altar of the gods in Wetzlar when it comes to optics. For the last 75 years of the twentieth century, Leitz Wetzlar, as it was most of that time, created two great cameras – the screw thread Leica and the M3 and its variants – and dozens of the best lenses known to photographers. And while I may have moved away from Leica rangefinder cameras in the absence of a digital option, I have had the rare pleasure of using many of Wetzlar’s lenses on my rangefinder and reflex Leicas.

My first Leica lens was the 50mm Elmar. It’s sole limitation was the boob behind it pressing the button on the M3. Twist the mount counter-clockwise and the lens neatly collapsed into the camera body, passing for what was compact back in 1971 when I got mine. August 2, 1971 to be exact. The 90mm Elmar and a superb 35mm Summaron followed. In each case these were the ‘beginner’s’ option (meaning cheap, by Leitz standards), and only years of hard work later did a Summicron grace the M3. That was the incomparable 50mm Dual Range, the brass mount having last seen duty as the main engine bearing in a Panzer tank. And I’m afraid that mention of any of the dozen others that came and went would be a tedious exercise in the overuse of superlatives. For the M these included the 21mm Asph Elmarit, the 35mm Asph Summicron, later and mercifully lighter versions of the 50mm Summicron, a 90mm Elmarit, Tele-Elmarit, Elmar-C and Asph Apo-Summicron, a 135mm Hektor, Elmar and Apo-Telyt, 200mm, 280mm and 400mm Telyts, and on and on. Each magical in its own way.

Map reader. 1973. Leica M3, 50mm Elmar, TriX/D76.

For the most part, these lenses were designed the old fashioned way. Hard graft with calculators and logarithmic tables, long hours melting ever more exotic glasses, interspersed with occasional bouts of sheer lunacy. The ‘we made it because we could’ lenses like the original 50mm f/1.2 Noctilux with its aspherical grinds, the NASA commissioned 180mm f/3.4 Apo Telyt R which finally brought the red spectrum in line with the rest of the colors to give an image of startling definition, the fabulous 75mm f/1.4 Summilux (if only you could focus it right – that sort of thing needs an M3 vewfinder!). And while computers played an increasing role in the design of later lenses, the long heritage of optical excellence at Leitz, Wetzlar, West Germany saw to it that they were programmed right. The reality is that if lenses for 35mm cameras can get any better no one will notice as the magicians at Wetzlar had long ago exceeded anything film could resolve.

These thoughts have been coursing thorugh the old brain increasingly as I look at the modern processing workload. Now bear in mind that this is coming from someone who adopted a beginning to end pure digital workflow only earlier this year with a Canon 5D. Until then it was film + scanning, which took over from film + color lab, which in turn had supplanted film + darkroom/bedroom. And what strikes me most is how much software has become a dominant part of picture processing.

Start with the in-camera software that tells the sensor RAW or JPG, maybe with various amounts of contrast, sharpness and other processing included. In to Aperture or Photoshop where chromatic aberration (color fringing) at the edges has to be repaired. Then the barrel distortion has to be removed at the wide end of the zoom. Another tweak and the vignetting is gone. Three aberrations I simply do not recall having to deal with in the days of the Summicron and its brethren. Because if they were present, they were not visible. So on that scale, I suppose, one would rightly argue that Canon lenses simply do not hold a candle to those from Leitz Wetzlar. OK, so you have to laboriously manually focus the Leica lens, and the aperture is manual and the only way to zoom is to walk closer or fall in the water…. But from the sheer standpoint of optics, if I had to bet my life on resolving power and freedom from aberrations, it would have to be Leica every time.

The reality is, it no longer matters. Good software can correct all those problems in seconds. Further, because the digital ‘film’ in the 5D is far superior to the one from Kodak which I used in the M3, the overall result is better in every conceivable way, and it’s mostly due to software. I believe designers are getting the message. Increasingly we are seeing new technologies like image stabilization add more definition than any film based user could hope for, and we are probably very close to the point where very large aperture lenses with vast zoom ranges with minimal bulk are around the corner. The necessary optical compromises will be corrected in the camera with tailored software. For that matter, the lens need no longer be interchangeable as the zoom range will be so large it will accomodate all conceivable needs.

Sceptical? Look at the Kodak P712 digital camera announced earlier this week. The lens is equivalent to 36-432mm (432mm!) with a smallest aperture of f/3.7. F/3.7! The camera costs $499 and weighs probably under one pound. Compare that with the 400mm f/4 DO Canon lens, at $5,200 and 4.3 lbs. And it doesn’t even zoom. Sure, I have no doubt the Canon lens is better, but how long do you expect that to last?

Case in point. My Panasonic LX-1 (click on the entry at right) has a Leica lens that reads ‘DC Vario-Elmarit 1:2.8-4.9/6.3-25.2 ASPH.’ Phew!. Not like saying 50mm Summicron now, is it? To make sure things are not blurred the camera has image stabilization, because some unnamed brilliant engineer at Panasonic thought it up. Auto focus makes sure it’s focused right adding yet more definition to the competitive equation. This lens is like a 28-112mm on a regular camera. At its longest setting it extends 1.5″ from the barrel on the camera’s body.

So, supposing I want a 24-105mm f/2. That would translate to a 5.4mm – 23.6mm lens which, fully corrected, would doubtless be a lot bulkier than the one on the DP. Now throw out the large front element, there to reduce vignetting. Get rid of several of the others there to confer minimal color fringing. And the hell with barrel distortion. Curvature of field and all those insurmountable problems with edge pixels and wide angle lenses? Nonsense. Just bow the edges of the sensor towards the lens as the focal length changes. Flexible sensors? Why not? Zoom? The next generation of sensors will obsolete optical zooming and do it all electronically. About time. Program around all of that with some smart software, fix the image on the fly when saving (or even when viewing if it’s that horrible to look at) and your 24-105mm f/2 zoom is now 1″ in diameter and 1″ long. Wow! So we gradually return to the days of the Box Brownie with its miniscule single meniscus lens, but with an image readily enlarged 12 times or more.

And who will be the genius designing these new ‘lenses’? It won’t be a god the likes of Max Berek or Walter Mandler in Wetzlar. It will be some kid who is really sharp at coding who happens to like a superb picture from the one ounce piece of plastic passing for a lens attached to his camera. The great days of optics are yet to come and their designs will emanate from the keyboard of some unknown master even now getting his lips around the teat on that plastic milk bottle.

Gorilla. 2006. Panasonic Lumix LX1, 6.3mm DC Elmarit Asph, ISO100, image stablizer.

Digital Leica – not!

Cameras

Panasonic disappoints with the L1.

I should preface this by saying I have not used the newly announced Panasonic L1, so it’s really premature to criticize, but a review of the specificationss underwhelms.

I was really looking forward to this camera, hoping it would be the digital Leica all ex-Leica M users like me are waiting for, at a non-Leica price. They will sell for $2,000 with the Leica zoom lens. Not bad.

The disappointing Panasonic L1.

Now the ergonomics look promising. A real shutter speed dial, a pretty exciting Leica lens (alternatively designed by Leica or Panasonic, depending on where you read on the Panasonic web site) with manual zoom and iris controls, and a nice M-look camera body. Throw in image stabilization, a vibrator to shake off sensor dust and a 16:9 widescreen picture option and what’s not to like?

How about a lousy viewfinder? The L1 shares the prism optics of the Olympus E-330, which uses a side flapping mirror (like their Pen F half-frame film camera did some thrity years earlier) and mirrors in lieu of a pentaprism to turn the image right way round. Result? A very dim image. Don’t believe me. Check out the on line reviews.

How about a lousy sensor? Use it above 400 ISO and all is lost in noise. It’s the same sensor used in the E-330. Don’t believe me. Check out the on line reviews.

How about a very small image in the finder? It’s the same optics used in the E-330. Don’t believe me. Check out the on line reviews. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just look through a Canon 5D after trying a Rebel or 20D/30D. I have. Night and day. The L1/E330 is like the Rebel in this regard.

As for all that ‘live preview’ nonsense, why did they waste their time? No one needs this in a professional grade camera. And the E330 does it better, if you must have it, for less.

Too bad. I was kind of excited about that Leica lens. Guess we’ll have to wait for the Digital Leica M but, no, I’m not holding my breath. I’m just holding on to my wallet.