Monthly Archives: July 2011

Desperation Purchases

Photography

When you like to pay retail.

For all I know, the retail photography hardware business of Keeble and Shuchat (“Shuck-It”) on California Avenue in Palo Alto has been around for ever. I know I have been an occasional visitor for over two decades now, but it’s not because I like to pay full retail and it’s most certainly not because I like paying an additional 10% to be squandered by California’s politicians, in the guise of sales tax.

No. The only time I visit K&S is to make what I call a Desperation Purchase.

You know the sort of thing. It’s Friday evening, you have to dash off some big prints and, bother, but the printer just ran out of yellow ink. Amazon will not deliver until next Wednesday. Or that 18″x24″ paper of which you laid in a good supply from Atlex just seems to have mysteriously run out. And you absolutely must have those prints made by Sunday night.

That means a trip to K&S is called for. Gritting your teeth and grasping your credit card, you set off, assured of two things. One is that you will be totally hosed down on the cost. The other is that there’s a fair chance K&S might actually have what you need. After all, generations of wags have referred to the store – actually stores, as there are two opposite one another – as Kostyou and Suckit or some variation thereon. But when it’s Saturday or Sunday, they are the only game in town. Sure, there’s Adolf Gasser in SF, dead on its feet and seemingly going out of business for a decade now, and Kaufmanns on 25th Street in San Mateo for the develop and print set, but when you want pro choice, Kostyou & Suckit it is.

Two other parts to the ritual of visiting K&S involve visiting their large gallery above the ‘retail’ store (the one across the street is the ‘pro’ store) and checking out their Leica collection.

The visit to the gallery has but one goal, which is to fulfill the forlorn hope that the display of prints in there will have none of the following features:

  • Monochrome
  • Yosemite
  • Big mats signed ‘3/500’ in pencil

Well, it’s been two decades now and I have yet to succeed. Quite why anyone bothers photographing Yosemite any more beats me, and why they do it in monochrome will remain one of the great mysteries of life. Buy an Adams poster, for God’s sake. Kitsch is cheaper that way and he was a better snapper than you. As for the mats – that’s all do do with being an ‘artist’. You couldn’t possibly understand.

The other reason, checking out the Leica collection, never disappoints. K&S has but two things of real value – its buildings on prime real estate which they really should sell to a developer. And its Leica collection in the Processing shop above the retail store which is probably worth even more.

So while my latest trip this last Sunday complied with the routine – tired Yosemite pictures and a goggle at the Leicas – my real goal was to get some air. No, not the hot kind the sales clerks were busy spouting to prospects. People who shop here are either making a Desperation Purchase or are from the wilds of the Amazon and have yet to hear of the other Amazon. I didn’t need any hot air. I needed the compressed variety. Yes, another Mac hardware failure was forcing me to pony up at full retail. You see, one of the great features of the ventilation design of our MacMini – used as a TV server and DVD player – is its ability to suck up every mote of dust in the environment and deposit most of its catch on the laser beam sender in the DVD player. This means DVDs will not play and it happens every 4-6 months.

You have too options.

Open up the Mini, extricate the DVD mechanism and clean it. This is the Looney Option. Your chances of opening the Mini without major damage to it or yourself are slim. And the possibility you might actually reassemble the thing in working order slimmer still. Plus the visits to the nut house after doing this will cost you dearly.

The second is the Genius Option, so named because an Apple Store Genius clued me into it. You get a can of compressed air (no, not Contact Cleaner, guaranteed to destroy your laser sender, which is why Radio Shack would not be a good place to shop), stick the red wand in the spray orifice on the can, ram the wand into the DVD slot and blast around in all directions. Ten seconds later and your Mini is fine again …. for the next six months.

And that is what found me at K&S on a sunny Sunday afternoon, buying a can of compressed air. They had no fewer than four brands to choose from (premium air, regular air, discount air and the one I bought) on the basis that There’s One Born Every Minute and, air being air, I did the mental math and bought the one with the lowest unit cost. Even so, I felt I overpaid.

Enough compressed air for ten MacMini fixes.

And speaking of dusting off, the first thing you have to do when you make your way up the stairs to Processing is to dust off the lone sales clerk you will find there. It’s the same guy you saw 11 years ago when he joined from Adolf Gassers, which had started going out of business back then and is still working at it. You will find him asleep at his 11 year old iMac (the one with the mushroom base and screen-on-a-wand), dreaming of the old days when film was grainy and darkrooms were red. We get to chatting and he regales me with how some jerk at Stanford is teaching a summer photography class and has told all his students they must learn traditional ways and expose 50 rolls of TriX (fifty!) during the week. Must be on sales commission. Unfortunately, the class is massively oversubscribed so K&S has to go to Kodak for more after they run out. Of course Kodak, being a few weeks away from bankruptcy, doesn’t have anyone to answer the phone. We reminisce about the good old days, how these young people all want instant gratification rather than selective depth of field and generally bond while he loses his train of thought a couple of times.

Anyway, as I’m making my way out to get seriously depressed by the execrable black and whites (“All fiber paper, no RC here” I am told) in their gallery, the man shouts to me “Hey! I sold an enlarger yesterday!”. They have seven on display – six ‘new’ ones and a very used and very corroded pre-war Leitz Focomat IIa for which they are asking the silly sum of $700. “No kidding!” “Yup, had it here on display for 10 years. Sold it to some kid at that Stanford class for $160.” The others? They have been on display 10 years too. Look hard and you will see wear marks from all those years of dusting.

Leitz Focomat IIa – 60mm and 95mm lenses for 35mm and 6×6 film.

Well, never let it be said that a visit to K&S is not entertaining, perhaps the most amazing thing being that it’s still there. And it’s a great place for air – hot or compressed.

One Magic Second

About the Snap, Paintings

Just divine.

One Magic Second.

Date: July 2, 2011
Place: 24th and Folsom Streets, San Francisco
Modus operandi: Loitering about.
Weather: Fabulous morning light.
Time: 10:10:46 and 10:10:46
Gear: Panasonic G1, kit lens at 86mm FFE
Medium: Digital
Me: Creating an indelible memory
My age: 59

Our boy has been taking cartooning lessons at the Sirron Norris studio on Valencia in the Mission District. Sirron is a marvelously talented cartoonist and his work is to be found on murals all over the Mission District. As he relates it, the only thing he recalls wanting to do as a child was to draw, and his vocation has become his profession. While Winston labors away under Sirron’s watchful eye, I traipse around the area hoping to catch a snap or two of the vibrant street life that is everywhere. Truly, few square blocks of San Francisco so abound with possibilities as do these.

Phil’z Coffee at 24th and Folsom is very much at the center of Mission District culture. On any morning you will find the locals gathered for a cup of joe and some gossip. And, if you get lucky, you will see some beautiful people there.

Phil’z Coffee at 24th and Folsom Streets. G1, kit lens @ 23mm, 1/500, f/4.7, ISO 320.

I was meandering along 24th Street yesterday morning and idly turned the corner onto Folsom where my eye was instantly drawn to this serenly beautiful young woman, posed as if for Titian and his oils. She saw me raise the camera deliberately to my face, gazed back at me untroubled and unthreatened, then looked down, lost in thought, the morning sun outlining her swan-like neck. The magic moment was over so quickly I found myself wondering if it had really happened, yet the processed film suggests it did. This is the sort of thing any street snapper absolutely lives for. Literally, One Magic Second.

Swan Neck. G1, kit lens @ 41mm, 1/320, f/5.6, ISO 320.

So fleeting was this moment that a check of the EXIF data for the two snaps shows both were taken within the same magical second of time – 10:10:46 am, July 2, 2011.

This sort of thing used to be the province of the rangefinder Leica but, frankly, that camera’s antiquated, slow manual focusing could scarcely be a worse choice for the modern street snap genre. Quite why anyone buys these anymore leaves me mystified – too slow for street snaps, no zoom lenses, too limited for anything else and silly-priced. Doctors and dentists, I suppose. Or should that be hedge fund managers?

Update: I shared these snaps with a friend who writes eloquently:

“That look…… the right half shows the shyly flattered contentment …(wild inward pleasure)….at being considered actionably photogenic.”

Bottega Veneta

Photographs

Now that’s a LARGE print!

It’s five years since I confessed to my liking for Really Large Prints, and I have to say that I like them as much today as I ever did.

But when Bottega Veneta, the luxury Italian leather goods store, decided to lease this space on Stockton Street in San Francisco’s ritzy shopping area, they hid their improvements in grand style!

Imagine the size of the printer required to make this ….

Stockton Street. G1, kit lens @18mm, 1/400, f/9, ISO 320.

I had to wait for ages for traffic to clear and for the pedestrians to be arranged just so. Look carefully and you can make out the front door for the construction crew.

Olympus gets serious

Micro Four-Thirds

Two new lenses.

[column width=50% padding=3%]

I have but three lenses for my Panasonic G1 and that’s pretty much all I need.

Two are from Panasonic, with OIS built in – the stellar 14-45mm kit lens and the wonderfully compact 45-200mm. The third is from Olympus and it’s the ultrawide zoom, the 9-18mm MFT.

While the Olympus zoom suffers from barrel distortion to varying degrees, click this link and you can download my profiles to remove these distortions in LR3 or in Photoshop. Unlike for the Panasonic lenses, the G bodies do not correct distortions from the Olympus lens range, so if it matters you have to do it manually. It takes seconds for the occasional architectural snap which requires such correction. That apart, I have found the 9-18mm to be an outstanding optical performer, indistinguishable in practice from the excellent Panny 14-45mm kit lens as far as definition goes.

[/column]

[column width=45% padding=2%]

The Olympus 9-18mm is an indication that Oly is getting serious about making better lenses for its underwhelming Pen MFT bodies. I write ‘underwhelming’ as any camera whose primary mode of viewfinding requires the user to hold it arm-outsrteched, inches from his face, is not a serious camera for this photographer. First, I like to actually see what I’m viewfinding. Second, adding Oly’s clunky clip on EVF makes the whole thing bulkier than any G-series Panny with a built-in (and outstanding) EVF. Third, I prefer to remain unobtrusive. And last, I would rather not look like a dork. The sole advantage I can see to Oly’s bodies is that OIS is built into the body, meaning it works with any lens, whereas with the Panny lenses, selected lenses have OIS built into the lens. The Oly 9-18mm has no OIS but it is hardly missed at those focal length on my G1.

Now Olympus has announced two very interesting lenses for MFT – the 12mm f/2 (24mm FFE) fast ultrawide and the 45mm f/1.8 (90mm FFE) portrait lens.

[/column]

[column width=50% padding=3%]

Priced at $800 and $400, respectively, and available in July and September 2011, these fill two important niches, but it’s the latter lens which especially interests me. Since selling my 5D outfit, which included Canon’s simply superb 85mm f/1.8 portrait lens I have lacked a wide aperture portrait lens.

Sure, I can emulate shallow depth-of-field by selectively blurring details in Photoshop, when they are rendered too sharp with the Panny kit lens at 45mm. At 45mm the Panny kit lens is a modest f/5.6 and often has too much d-o-f for head-and-shoulders portraits. But using PS in a studio portrait to keep the eyes sharp and the ears blurred is not so easy. The Oly 45mm is a full 3.5 stops faster than the kit lens at 45mm so will afford far greater control over (shallow) depth of field. Thus it interests me greatly.

[/column]

[column width=45% padding=2%]

It remains to be seen whether these new Oly lenses are up to the performance of the 9-18mm, but at the prices asked I would guess that the quality will be fine. Obtrusive chrome finish? Who cares what color it is in the studio? Size? The Panny kit zoom at 45mm protrudes some 3.4″. Best as I can tell, the 45mm f/1.8 is much more compact, protruding maybe 2.5″ or as much as the kit zoom at 14mm, its smallest size. So this promises to be a truly compact portrait lens but with enough barrrel to permit support from underneath the lens. Lack of OIS? I’ll be using it with my Novatron studio flash outfit so camera shake is not an issue.

It will be a long wait to September for my 45mm f/1.8!

Curiously, the machining of the Oly’s focus collar is identical to that on my first portrait lens, bought in 1972, the estimable 90mm Elmar f/4 for my Leica M3:

[/column]

The Oly’s technology is just a tad more sophisticated. The Elmar was f/4, manual focus, manual aperture (the aperture ring rotated with the focus collar!), was twice the length of the Oly and the lens head unscrewed for use on bellows and close-up devices. There were no electronics in sight and construction was serious chrome coated brass. A fine optic which ran me £32 or $492.61 in today’s money. So the Oly is almost 20% cheaper!