Yearly Archives: 2006

Stumbling about

Photographers, Software

Visit twenty new photography sites daily

One of the great frustrations of finding new photography on the internet is not knowing where to look.

You read about a site here, a friend recommends one there, in other words pure serendipity.

Now the StumbleUpon tool may not remove the random chance aspect of the search, but it does at least make finding new work easy …. and enthralling. The tool plugs into the Firefox browser and appears in a menu bar like so:

If you don’t use Firefox you can download it free from the web. Mine runs on an Apple and it may even run on a Windows PC, though candidly I couldn’t care less whether it does or not as I do not care to use the deeply flawed Microsoft operating system. I prefer something that does not constantly lock up.

The picture above is a screenshot of Firefox from my iMac. Download the tool (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), tell it you are interested in Photography and then click on the ‘Stumble!’ icon. You are taken to a random photography oriented web site. Click again and another site pops up. The rate of repetition is very low, so if you see something you like be sure to bookmark it.

Sites vary but the ratio seems to be about 80% photography: 20% technical instruction.

Every time I have Firefox on the screen I find myself heading for the Stumble! icon and discover wonderful images on many talented photographers’ web sites.

Cameras and aesthetic design

Cameras

Why are so few beautiful?

A friend kindly emailed me to alert me that a web chat board was offering a camera as a prize for the best picture taken in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson. A worthy goal which will doubtless see some great work submitted.

Then I got to looking at the prize and was struck by how inexcusably ugly it was. Going by the name of the Zeiss Ikon ZM, there is no other way to describe this brick than in one simple word whose meaning needs no explanation: Ugly. I was going to preface the U word with a vulgarity describing part of the anatomy, the bit you sit on, but good taste prevailed. You get the idea.

Equipment, it seems to me, is merely a tool to do the job, so dwelling on it to excess is not productive. But this kind gesture on my friend’s part, who suggested I should submit some of my street snaps to the contest, got me thinking about the aesthetics of equipment, or more specifically, why so little in the way of camera gear is remotely attractive to look at.

So, like most photographers, I thought about the equipment I have owned, have borrowed and have lusted after. And in the interests of keeping this piece upbeat, I will concentrate on the cameras my eye remembers as beautiful, a work of art to hold and use, rather than all the others. And that is important to me. The old saw that has it that a poor worker blames his tools has it all wrong. It should be that a good worker uses beautiful tools. You think Michelangelo and his buddies didn’t discuss paints, brushes and canvases? Sure they did.

So I won’t refer to the brutish ugliness of the Nikon F, nor the brick like facade of the Mamiya RB67, nor even the Leicaflex SL – a face only a parent could love – in this brief Statement of Preferences. And I will most certainly not refer to the Kodak Ektra.

The post-WWII list is, sadly, a short one.

Headed, of course, by the chrome Leica M2. The most perfect blend of form and function ever designed. Color it black and you have nouveau riche – the young up-and-comer’s Porsche 911. Make it chrome and….aaahhh! Yes, this one is mine. With the wonderful 35mm Asph Summicron, no less.

But before that exemplar of taste and execution came along there was something equally fine to be had in the Zeiss Ikon Contax II and IIa. Forget the metered version with the ugly bump for the selenium cell meter. The un-metered camera was simply beautiful and aeons ahead of the cheesy looking screw thread Leicas of the time with their miserable viewfinders. A top hat compared to a cloth cap. Note the beautiful symmetry of the finder windows and the knobs, the gorgeous proportions of the body. You just must pick it up.

No Rolleiflex twin lens reflex can be left out of this reckoning with, perhaps the metered 3.5F at the pinnacle, the lens being just the right size for the body, something lost in the 2.8 variant. This one was mine until I gave it to a friend.

Whether it was because so many of the greats used it – Avedon, Penn, Beaton – or whether it had that secret something, call it balance, proportion, despite the rectangular shape, the Rollei is a beautiful camera.

Some miniature format cameras had that something called beauty too. Two of the best were the Tessina and the Minox. Regardless of their clandestine Cold War role in life, these two, especially the watch like Minox, had the secret ingredient. Have you ever opened a Minox for action? Try it. Sensuality redefined.


At the other end of the size spectrum, Linhof had what no American manufacturer could approach. A divine aesthetic sense. I won’t say anything about the Crown Graphic (heck! I own one) but just feast your eyes on this Super Technika.

Aaah!

Now that is a camera.

Now there’s a lot of German equipment permeating this piece. A nation that makes fine cameras and killing machines. But its eastern emulator, Japan, has had some pretty fine things to contribute to camera aesthetics too.

Take the fine line of early Canon SLRs. This is an FT. Note the finely sculpted controls and the general balance of the machine.

Olympus made a fine effort with the Pen F and even the bold gothic letter “F” seems to work well for this courageous, innovative design. A camera with a sweet, feminine grace, with a bold escutcheon. I loved mine. Wish I had never sold it.

They tried later to recapture the spirit of the Pen F with the OM1 but the magic spark was, alas, gone.

Then two really great Japanese designs come to mind. One very good – the Pentax MV/ME. Another camera with jeweled precision and an absolute joy to use. My ME Super fell apart but not before we had had the most wonderful relationship.

But their earlier Pentax Spotmatic was, after all, an impossible act to follow. Here was a camera that was a joy to behold. To hold. To use. Forget all that nonsense you read about the Japanese being imitators. Just take a glance at the raw sensuality of the advance lever. The most beautiful thing to ever grace a mass produced object. And note those angled “Zeiss” corners. The sincerest form of flattery is imitation. This was something that you would think should have set an example for the designers of the miserable looking Zeiss Ikon ZM, that execrable excresence passing for a camera. An example of which, sadly, they seem damnable unaware. As unaware as they are of their company’s glorious history of design.

2005 – taking stock.

Photography

So what was accomplished, photographically speaking?

I was hanging some of my Really Large Prints the other day in the new home theater I had built – it’s actually a converted garage – which gave me pause to ask “What did you accomplish last year”?

As a matter of course I make it a practice to write down what I did right and wrong in managing money during the year for, while the lawyers keep reminding us that ‘Past performance is no guarantee of future results’ I tend to hew to Churchill’s variant which has it that ‘Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it’. In re-reading these self critical pieces over the years, recurring patterns of erroneous behavior are identified and, hopefully, remedied.

So to take a like approach to photography seems to make better sense as my driving goal is to take better pictures.

But what does ‘better’ mean? Those which get exhibited? Sold? Hung? Probably a mixture of all three. If you don’t show it you will never know how good you are. If you don’t sell it you are a commercial failure which may be good or bad. If you don’t hang it why on earth are you taking pictures in the first place? And while ‘exhibit’ takes increasingly new guises – books, cell phones, computers, the internet, a well framed picture hanging on the wall remains the touchstone of photographic display.

Well, what about the successes? Listing these first makes it easier to enumerate the failures.

I published my book Street Smarts, containing 100 monochrome pictures taken in London and Paris in the seventies. It taught me how hard it is to get all the material together, how difficult it is to get it all submitted and looking just so, and how impossible it is to sell a book of pictures. This is the ultimate vanity project – you may feel good about doing it but don’t expect to make money. Best of all, this allowed me to get all that monochrome content well and truly out of my system and free me up from the legacy overhang of being a ‘street’ photographer. That genre is done, for me at least.

I got rid of a bunch of excess gear that was just collecting dust, and I’m not a gear collector. Now I’m down to one 35mm system (Leica M), two 6×6 systems (Rollei 6003 and Mamiya 6) and one 4×5 system (Crown Graphic). I fancy the clunky Rollei 6003 will hit the block in 2006. Too much gear still!

I learned lots about 4×5 when I picked up my 50 year old Crown Graphic and a couple of extra lenses for a song. What a blast to use and negative quality that remains unsurpassed to this day.

I started this blog which forces me to put down in writing what I am thinking about the world of photography. Write it down, the old rule has it, and it’s serious. Talk or think about it and it’s noise.

I got selected for a one man show – due in 2007 – at a local gallery after showing the director my prints. That felt really good as it confirmed that I have the drudgery of printing/mounting/framing down to where it no longer intrudes in the creative process. It felt even better to know that someone else liked my work. And no, she did not ask me what camera I use. And, best of all, all the pictures were New Work, not recycled old stuff.

I started a Photoblog and came away with mixed feelings. The positive is that there’s lots of great work out there. The negative is that most of what’s out there is sheer, unmitigated garbage. I also learned that my dated use of film as a recording medium is incompatible with the ‘picture a day’ pressure in the Photoblog world, so I stepped back and now post one a month, if that. Feels better until digital matures and all that film equipment can go to a collector at some ridiculous premium to what I paid for it. Thank God for the Japanese – where would the used Leica market be without them?

I built my home theater which comes with one huge photographic advantage. Lots of display space.

I confirmed, if ever confirmation was needed, that the products of the Microsoft Corporation are one of the biggest frauds ever pulled on the consuming public and remain blissfully happy with my iMac three years after making the switch. No downtime, just speed to get the drudgery part of the photographic process done. Bottom feeding tort lawyers continue to sue cigarette and hamburger vendors. Wrong place to fish. When will they realize that Microsoft has killed more people than these twin evils combined? Just think of all those coronaries at the keyboard of a Windows PC….

I learned, as age encroaches, that many tasks are best delegated to those better skilled to do them. Processing, framing and so on. I add no value here.

I re-immersed myself in books about art and photography and tried hard to sharpen my vision.

Hmmm. Not a bad list. Feeling pretty good. OK then, what about the not so good bits?

My vision still lack clarity. Thematic approaches to photography make sense. The ‘always carry a camera’ thing is meaningless. Carry it with a mission and you get somewhere. I tried to apply this last year by focusing on three themes – The Fading Past (old wall signs), The Beach Creatures (driftwood at the beach) and The California Forests (I’m quite useless at these but keep trying).

I would like to become technically better with the 4×5 format for it has so much to offer. Maybe it’s just in the nature of things, I tell myself, that the equipment is clunky and a mess to use.

I would like to delegate all printing of Really Big Prints as it’s simply a waste of time when others can do it better and you are messing about with the yet again clogged ink jet printer at home. And I’ll bet the cost is comparable. Got to find a good printer for 2006.

I cannot consistently take good pictures. Maybe that’s because I do not do it enough or maybe it’s the unexplainable nature of the creative process. Sometimes you can do it, mostly you cannot. I do know that machine gunning for pictures is anathema to me and only results in a drop in quality so some other mechanism is needed. One thing I have found that works is to scout out a location without a camera, pre-visualize it – then come back later with the equipment. That seems consonant with my working style.

And, finally, I am still very keen to go all digital, but have yet to find a camera which does it for me.