Monthly Archives: July 2009

Dorothea Lange

Photographers

A Depression era icon

I have finally set to right the inexcusable omission of a monograph on Dorothea Lange from my library.

Where Walker Evans mostly photographed things, Lange photographed people. And her pictures always seem to get to the emotional heart of her subjects and the horrors of the Great Depression.

The monograph, titled ‘Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime’, is a splendid review of her work, covering the period 1932-59 and, as with all monographs published by Aperture, is of the highest quality.

It’s overpriced new, but my used copy came from Strand Books for under $40. That’s another bookseller which should be in every photographer’s address book.

In the photographer’s words:

“You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing …. You force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say “What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?”

The book relates the story of how she came to take her most famous picture, that of the migrant mother in Nipomo, CA. The story is so incredible that I will not retell it here and suggest, instead, that you buy this book to read all about it.

If you want to see the depredations visited upon this great nation by stunningly incompetent administrations of both parties, aided and abetted by a seemingly uncaring and callous Federal Reserve, you need go no further than Lange’s great humanism, as displayed in her pictures.

John Gutmann

Photographers

Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it

A newly elected US president of patrician education and with sophisticated communication skills has just replaced one who destroyed more wealth than all his predecessors combined. The new wunderkind immediately sets to dramatically increasing the length of a catastrophic depression by increasing tariffs on trade and immigration and destroying business confidence by capricious fiscal policies and increased taxation to go along with his populist platform.

2009?

How about 1929?

It was to the disastrous fiscal policies of the FDR presidency that a fleeing John Gutmann resorted, pursued by the Master Race which sought nothing but ill for non-Aryans. To put this in perspective, imagine thinking that 1933 America – Gutmann’s choice as a refugee from Germany – was the best possible place to be! Which, I suppose, puts in context what he left behind. On a much smaller scale I am reminded of coming to America from England in 1977 and thinking that the then current US administration was actually not so bad compared to the catastrophe I had left behind.

Unlike his compatriots who mostly settled in New York, Gutmann made San Francisco his home and I only recently learned of his photography after seeing a sample in the splendid book, Capturing Light, which now graces my bookshelves.

It did not take long to add a monograph on Gutmann’s work, entitled ‘Culture Shock’. Here is the cover picture:

Gutmann started life as an art student in ’20s Berlin, that fertile melting pot for artistic talent at the time, but fascist control of the media and arts by 1933 made his position untenable, so he left for America, purchasing the newly introduced Rolleiflex just a month before leaving. His imagery built on his expressionist and surrealist leanings and is most reminiscent, to this viewer, of the work of Martin Munkácsi and Alexander Rodchenko. As the essay introducing the book states, “To Gutmann’s eye …. everything in America was exotic and strange”. I know the feeling.

While it’s out of print, my pristine example of ‘Culture Shock’ was obtained for very little at Powell’s Books which anyone interested in the visual arts should have in his bookmarks. Highly recommended if you enjoy an unusual vision strongly applied to everyday life.

Olympus EP-1 …. woof!

Cameras

A real dog

Coming from David Pogue, the New York Times’s technology writer with a knack for making the technical understandable, is a review of the new Olympus EP-1.



Click the picture for the review

Well, sorry to say, the camera is an awful disappointment, and an expensive one at that. No viewfinder, horribly slow focusing (Panasonic refused to share its superbly fast focus technology from the G1 with Olympus) and, yes, you guessed it, miserable shutter lag. Hard to understand why anyone would waste the development budget on a camera which, while adding interchangeable lenses to a small body, otherwise does absolutely nothing to conquer the three bugbears of compact point-and-shoots.

An LCD screen passing as a ‘viewfinder’, slow focus and shutter lag.

And, at $800, considerably more than the G1 which, for a little more bulk, has none of these problems.

A real dog.

And thank you, Mr. Pogue, for pulling no punches.

Where is the genius of the company that gave us the stunningly original Pen F half frame SLR or the ‘better mousetrap’ of the Olympus OM1 full frame film SLR under designer Maitani?

The G1 kit lens

Micro Four-Thirds

In a word, impressive

I continue to be mightily impressed by the kit lens which comes with the Panasonic G1. At 14-45mm (28-90mm full frame equivalent) it has a most useful range of focal lengths and while the maximum aperture of f/3.5, falling to f/5.6 at the long end, is nothing to write home about, the lens is a fine performer. Back in the days of film, the Leica M street snapper found himself carrying 35, 50 and 90mm lenses for a similar focal length range. Swapping these was no fun, though the offset was that they were 2-3 stops faster in a very compact size. And the lenses were as good, if no better, than the kit lens supplied with the Panny.

Witness this snap taken at the crack of dawn.

G1, kit lens at 37mm, 1/50, f/5.6 iISO at 500

It’s a picture which discloses two things. First, the Electronic Viewfinder in the G1 renders an early dawn scene as if it was bright daylight, making composition incredibly easy, even if it makes pre-visualization of the final picture difficult.

Second, check out the near total absence of halation (light halos around bright objects) in this enlarged view.

Finally, there’s only minor chromatic aberration (red fringing in this case) to speak of in this very high contrast, challenging subject.

That’s no mean performance from an inexpensive zoom loaded with plastic components. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that many of the ‘glasses’ in the lens are made of plastic. Who cares? It’s the results that count. And this is at full aperture for the 37mm focal length used.

It’s also just visible in this snap that the limiting factor in definition is grain (sensor noise), not lens definition. At 500 ISO things begin to deteriorate as image size grows. The larger image above is consonant with a 30″ x 45″ print, so it’s not like I’m complaining. On the other hand, had this been taken on the Canon 5D, the fine detail, such as the print in the menu on the wall, would have been easily resolved whereas it’s lost in grain here. And, whether you like it or not, if you make big prints viewers will invariably stick their noses in them.

For film aficionados, the ‘grain’ is much finer than that delivered by, say, TriX film. It’s comparable to a medium speed black and white emulsion like FP5 or to Kodachrome 64 in color slide film. So those extolling the wonderful definition of Leica M lenses at f/2 should pause. What use is great definition if your sensor – be it film or silicon – cannot resolve the detail?

All in all – decent sensor, great kit lens – it’s not a bad compromise given how diminutive the G1 is. Absent the usual sharpening on import of the RAW image into Lightroom 2.4 (Amount=100, Radius=1.1), the image is completely unprocessed. And Panny will only improve things, based on their recent rate of progress.

Runner

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs

iISO does its thing

The iISO function in the Panasonic G1 (“intelligent ISO”), according to the wretched instruction manual which ships with this otherwise fine camera, does the following: “The ISO sensitivity is adjusted according to the movement of the subject and the brightness”. (Page 79). I use this setting in my default setup for street snaps.

Here the CPU in the camera elected 1/500 second to freeze the running boy and an enlarged view in Lightroom confirms that his shirt is, indeed, tack sharp.


Runner. iISO, Panasonic G1

It’s a two edged sword, however. If you want movement blur, it has to be switched off or, much better, simply set the large mechanical mode dial on top to Shutter Priority, in which case iISO is switched off, though that fact is buried in a footnote in the instruction book. As I wrote earlier, Panny must have had some real live photographers involved in the design of this fine camera. Too bad they weren’t involved in the writing of the manual.

A note on AE lock: You can elect whether the ‘AF/AE Lock’ button on the top rear of the body locks focus, exposure or both, much as you can on the Canon 5D, my other ‘serious’ camera (though the G1 is to the 5D as a Ferrari is to a Mack truck). In both bodies I have set the button to lock exposure only, as focus can be locked with a first pressure on the release button of either.

Canon does this right. The AE lock lasts for some 10 seconds – ample time to recompose and take the snap.

The G1 gets it wrong. You have to keep the button depressed to maintain exposure lock until you press the button. That makes for some strange contortions of the hand.

The alternative in the G1 is to enable ‘AF/AE Lock Hold’, a separate choice in the Custom menu, but they got that completely wrong. Yes, it does lock exposure (and/or focus depending how you set ‘AF/AE Lock’) but the camera’s settings remain locked to your exposure even after the shutter is released. You can only unlock things by again depressing the button on the back of the camera. If you opt for a minimal viewfinder display as I do, you don’t know that your exposure is still locked until you notice a super bright or dim screen when making the next picture. You then scramble to unlock things only to find that your subject has gone ….

What Panny should do is change the firmware so that, with ‘AF/AE Lock Hold’ enabled, the lock is released after the exposure is taken. Let’s hope they change this, as selective exposure reading is a useful tool with dynamic range-challenged digital sensors.