Monthly Archives: May 2011

The New Yorker

Photographers

A veritable treasure trove.

When Apple originated ‘in app purchasing’ a while back, I confess I was troubled by the concept. The idea is that you download an app – a game or a magazine – and can then purchase content from within that app on your iDevice. The charge would hit your iTunes account and all you need do is input your password at the point of purchase. The good thing is that, so far, Apple has kept subscriber information to itself, unlike the company which does evil for a living. The bad news is that it smacks of abuse of monopoly power. The iPad/iPhone duo represents something approaching a monopoly for mobile smart devices and a publisher in the app store has to pay 30% of his selling price to Apple. Sure, he can simply sell his app from his own web site and keep the lot, but then he loses the publicity and search visibility afforded by the AppStore. A 30% listing fee sounds horribly greedy and unfair to me.

The other frustrating thing about the iPad is how slow publishers have been in rolling out subscription priced magazines. There have been a few single issue releases at ridiculous prices or you could use the Zinio app which is OK, even if some of the more popular magazines are missing and little use is made of touch functionality.

But things seem to be changing. This week Condé Nast bit the bullet and released its The New Yorker app in the AppStore. You can buy 4 issues for $6 or 52 for $60. I downloaded the free app and bought 4, my iTunes account being billed for the cost.

Why would photographers care about a magazine whose primary claim to fame is that it features some of the best writing in the English language? Simple. A significant portion of that writing is about great photographers. And while readers mostly think of The New Yorker as a repository of prose, poetry and superb cartoons, there are more photographs by great photographers than you might think.

The very best thing about a subscription, even the four week one, is that it grants you access to the full archive of issues back to the first in December 1925. These are scanned and so-so navigable on an iPad. Better to go to your big screen desktop, login there (your iPad subscription works equally well at www.newyorker.com). The scans are high quality and in color, so you get yellowed page edges and all. You also get all the ads from that issue which is actually a fascinating thing to behold. By contrast, current issues are well formatted for reading on an iPad and navigation is well done.

The first thing I did was to use the free text search function to dial in ‘Cartier-Bresson’ and in seconds I was reading Dan Hofstadter’s riveting two part piece from October, 1989, chronicling the many hours the author had spent with the single greatest street photographer there ever was. Don’t worry, you can enlarge the original:

The search function on an iPad is very slow compared to the same on your desktop; the app is all of a few days old so I’m sure the kinks will be worked out soon. Search is ‘free text search’ – right now there is no contextual or topic menu. Let’s hope they fix that – you know – politics, economics, arts, etc.

This is simply a fabulous piece of writing, and includes substantive focus on HC-B’s years in Asia. There is a gripping description of how he came to take his famous picture ‘The Last Days of the Kuomintang’ with depositors jostling outside a bank trying to convert their currency before the murderous Chairman Mao took over. Few pictures show more energy and tension:

There are no fewer than 64 hits for my search:

Next I dialed in another all time favorite, Irving Penn and, lo and behold, there was a show stopper picture from 1948 of one god taken by another:

Immediately memories of a concert I was lucky to attend at Carnegie Hall in the early-1980s came flooding back, Lenny theatrically conducting Mahler’s Fourth with no less than the Vienna Philharmonic and its Boys’ Choir doing the choral bits, complete with boy soprano and all! Bernstein only had two energy levels – full and dead. My apartment at 310 West 56th Street was a three minute walk from Carnegie Hall which I could see from the window, notably the apartments atop which used to be rented to struggling musicians like Bernstein. There he conceived West Side Story and there he met an unknown young librettist named Stephen Sondheim …. talent attracts talent. I used to gaze fondly at that location, imagining the meeting of these two giants of the music world.

As for the cartoons, well they alone are reason enough to subscribe:

You don’t have to be a New Yorker to like The New Yorker. But if you are interested in great photography and unmatched writing about photographers, it’s a bargain. There’s just one ‘gotcha’ – renewal of your subscription is automatic when it expires so watch out and be sure to change that. Sneaky and not what I would expect of a class publisher.

Seems you can cancel by phone:

Just think. One day Condé Nast will upload all of the issues of Vogue and Vanity Fair for on line viewing. I will be first in line.

Meanwhile, feast your eyes on this cover from December 4, 1937 and then click the picture to subscribe:

Constanin Alajalov imagines the opening night in 1937.

Rudy Burckhardt

Book reviews

A fine street photographer.

The Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) wisely chose New York as his home, well away from the stolid burghers of his place of birth. There he found the excitement of the streets as can only be found in a few of the great metropolises of the world – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, London – where else is there? His street snaps take three guises – candids, vernacular works (contemporary advertisements and the like) and architecture.

Click the picture for Amazon US.

All are done with a lovely gentle touch, with none of the occasional brutality of fellow traveler Walker Evans.

Recommended for all enamored of the street photography genre. This generously illustrated book is some $32 from Amazon, but I found mine for all of $11.95 at Edward R. Hamilton – they may have a few left, so hurry. The book includes an interesting essay on Burckhardt by Phillip Lopate.

The Panasonic G3 – Part I

Micro Four-Thirds

The best street snapper yet?

With today’s announcement of the Panasonic G3, scheduled to ship in June, Panasonic may have created the best street snapping camera yet. What follows is largely viewed from that perspective.

Some history. The Panasonic G1 was the first Micro Four-Thirds camera. Like the first iPad, there was so little wrong with the design that there have been few compelling reasons to upgrade. The GF1 and GF2 bodies deleted the eye-level finder, rendering the body largely useless for serious photography. The short lived G10 used a cheapened EVF and was discontinued shortly after release. The G2 added a movie mode and a touch screen – the latter the ‘push’ rather than the true touch type in the iPad and iPhone. A solution looking for a problem. The costly GH1 and GH2 bodies added sophisticated movie modes with the GH2 sporting the second sensor design in the G range, all the others having shared the one from that original G1. That sensor brought more megapixels and reviews suggest that the noise levels are now down to those in APS-C cameras.

The Panasonic G3 – complete with strange model designation.

While the G3 does not get rid of the faux prism hump, it is nevertheless of great interest to street snappers. My G1 has seen more pictures taken with it in my 21 months of ownership than any camera I have ever owned, and I have been banging away for some 50 years now, since I was a kid. My shot counter shows well over 10,000 exposures. So any improvements to the G1 make my radar screen. Nearly everything I have been reading about the G3 suggests it’s worth upgrading to one, especially as I now have no back-up camera, my Canon 5D gear all sold in favor of the smaller, lighter Panny and its three lenses – the Oly 9-18, the 14-45 kit zoom and the 45-200 Panny, all superb and all very light and small.

Here are the major changes in the G3 compared to the G1:

  • The body is smaller, the unnecessary hand grip slimmed down. Smaller is always better.
  • The battery is smaller at 7.3mAh vs. 9 mAh, or 20% less. As I routinely get over 400 exposures on a charge with the G1, getting ‘only’ 320 is hardly an issue.
  • The EVF eye proximity sensor is gone – this would switch off the LCD when the camera was raised to eye level. No problem. The only time I use the LCD it when formatting an SDHC card; otherwise it remains folded with the screen in to the body.
  • The focus mode dial top left is gone. I use AF all the time so I don’t care and there’s still touch manual focus when the shutter release is part depressed and the focus mount is touched. Apparently the MF enlarged area now appears in a window so that should make this even more useful.
  • The AEL/AEF lock button is gone. Not good, but there are two programmable function buttons in its place where the AEL function, which I use quite a bit, can be assigned.
  • All the dumb-as-it-gets scene modes have disappeared from the mode dial. Hooray. Let’s also hope they made the click stops more robust.
  • The single shot/motor drive/delayed action lever has disappeared and is now a menu choice. I use single shot only so it does not matter.
  • The mode dial now has two Custom settings – wonderful. I will set one at ISO 400, the other at ISO 1600.
  • As with the G2, the thumb wheel is on the rear, not on the front as with the G1. I cannot tell you how frustrating the placement of the one on the G1 is – I am still frequently depressing it accidentally, going into +/- exposure mode, when all I want to do is change the aperture (I snap only in aperture priority mode).
  • The square format mode has been dropped (no problem) but there’s still a choice of 4:3 or 3:2 – the latter essential for one brought up with 35mm Leicas. That’s all I use.
  • The body is rumored to use an alloy frame, replacing the plastic one. Nice, I suppose.

Sadly, no blue model is available, the silly choices being white, red or brown. All ‘Yecch’ colors. Black is the way to go.

As with all previous Panny MFT bodies, there is no OIS shake reduction. That’s built into select Panny lenses. Only Olympus MFT bodies have in-body OIS.

There’s some sort of setting to blur backgrounds which I have yet to understand. No matter – I simply use Auto Blurâ„¢.

The simplified mode dial on the G3.

But the most important changes are under the skin. First, Panny claims that the speedy autofocus in the G1/G2 is now even faster, and comparable with that found in most DSLRs. This may actually make that slow focusing dog, the 20mm Panasonic lens, useable. I returned mine after a trial run which delivered 30% of my pictures out of focus. For comparison, the kit lens has a focus failure rate in my hands of maybe 1%. Second, the new 16mp sensor, likely a variant of the one found in the costly $900 GH2 body, has been installed. That probably means one to two stops less noise and should substantially clean up noise at 1600 ISO. My G1 with kit lens ran me $640, whereas the G2 is $700.

I have ordered a black body only for $600 and will write more when I have had a chance to wring it out. The learning curve should be low, owing to the similarity in the bodies, and I already know my three lenses are just fine for what I do, so I’m optimistic that things should work out well, with the G1 moving to the role of back-up body. Mechanical noise? No way of telling until I try it, but let’s hope it’s the same or less as in the G1, which is a very quiet camera. Indeed, the low frequency of the noise emitted by the G1 puts any M Leica to shame.

Part II is here.