Monthly Archives: March 2014

Robert Doisneau – Les Halles

Book reviews, Photographers

All gone.

Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) (pronounced “Dwaano”) is the quintessential Parisian photographer. Where Cartier-Bresson emphasizes composition and the man in the landscape, Doisneau focuses almost exclusively on the people themselves. Doisneau’s intimacy is counterpoint to HC-B’s detachment. Both approaches work in the hands of these masters, but Doisneau’s is uniquely suited to the documentation of Les Halles, the produce market in central Paris which he photographed from 1933 through its demolition in 1971.

As Covent Garden in London and the Fulton Street Fish Market in New York were destroyed to make room for condos and stores that can be found in any other metropolis, so was Les Halles, with its exquisite cast iron frame designed by Baltard, consigned to the scrap heap. Doisneau’s record is priceless and irreplaceable.


Scalding Room, 1968.

The book contains over 120 images with an interesting prologue documenting the long history of Les Halles, and is highly recommended for all who love warm, involved candid photography. Very much a man of the people, Doisneau was clearly welcomed and loved by the people of Les Halles. There is nothing clandestine here as Doisneau was simply not that kind of phorographer.

Click the image to go to Amazon – I derive no benefit if you do that.

Bruno Barbey

Photographers

Magnum photographer.

Bruno Barbey’s book ‘The Italians’ is a warm 1960s memento made up of his street images taken in Rome, Naples, Milan and Genoa. Though printed a little too dark for my taste, the images are those of a photographer who believes in getting in close to his subjects, invariably depicted with warmth and dignity. Barbey is a Frenchhman born in Morocco in 1941.


1964 – Piazza di Spagna, Rome.
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Cheap Arca plates

Hardware

From Desmond.

One of the things which irritated me about the otherwise excellent Surui K-40X ball head for my old Linhof tripod was that the Arca plates for additional cameras (it comes with one) were overpriced at over $40 each.

I needed additional plates for my 350mm and 500mm Nikkors, each with lens mounted tripod fixtures, a clamp for my Manfrotto monopod, and a small plate for the Pansonic GX7, and was not about to be hosed down for overpriced pieces of alloy with simple, machined v-notches.

Shopping Amazon I chanced on the Desmond brand of knock-offs (a knock-off of a knock-off) at Amazon and proceeded to order the following:

The first two are for the Nikon D2x and the 350mm Nikkor. Hullo! $6.50 each! (The 500mm Reflex Nikkor already has an original, overpriced, $40+ Surui). The second row is for an Arca-compatible clamp for my monopod which sports an old Leitz ball & socket head (superb!), replacing the previous Manfrotto QR plate. And the last is for the GX7, a very small plate for a very small body.


The full-sized plate for the Nikon D3x/D2x


The clamp for the Leitz B&S head. Comes with a 3/8″ to 1/4″ reducer.


The camera plate for the Panasonic GX7.

All the plates come with a D-ring for the retaining screw as well as a generously sized slot which will accept a variety of coins for torquing down.

Reactions? All fit fine. The safety locking slot/button on the stock Surui clamp works perfectly.

And the lot costs about as much as one Surui ‘original’ knock-off. In fact I like the big camera plate so much I have replaced the Surui on my D3x with the Desmond, relegating the Surui plate to the less used D2x. Life is too short for all that screwing ….


On the Nikon D2x.


On the 300mm Nikkor.


On the Panny GX7 – small enough to be left in place.
The battery/SD card remain accessible, but
you can no longer flip up the LCD.

The Desmond plates have a 0.48″ wide dovetail at the broadest point, compared with 0.53″ for the Surui. This means that fewer turns are needed on the unlocking clamp on the ball head to release the camera – 0.75 turns of the locking knob for the Desmond compared with 2.75 turns for the Surui plate. Nice.

Nicely made and dirt cheap, what’s not to like?

Full frame bargains

Canon 5D, Photographs

From Canon.

One of the signal advances for photographers has been the continuous improvement in processing software. The enhanced capabilities for shadow recovery and highlight taming in products like Lightroom 4/5 (and doubtless in others like DxO, CaptureOne and Aperture – none of which I use, but competition always does its thing) give new life to old picture files.

Case in point, my first serious DSLR was the original Canon 5D (2006). When I pull up images from that body in LR5 they appear with an exclamation point lower right alerting me that an older version of LR was used to process them. Update those to the latest version (Develop Module->Settings->Process) and your images can enjoy the benefits of the latest in processing technology.

I have gone back and re-printed some of these and the results really are impressive.


The indoor pool at Hearst Castle.

The above 5D Mark I image has high dynamic range. Updating to the 2012 Process from the original 2003 in LR5 allows easy recovery of the shadows and taming of the highlights with the related sliders. A touch on the Noise slider takes out what ails the shadows. A quick click in the Lens Profile section has the 15mm Canon Fisheye image de-fished for a linear rendition, into the Print module and the 18″ x 24″ print will knock your socks off.

Sure, neither the original 5D or its ‘pro’ equivalent 1DS Mark II had sensor dust removal, but I can assure you that my Nikon D700 did and it was almost useless. You still had to clean the sensor with moist alcohol swabs, as I now do with my Nikon D3x. The price of a lightly used, amateur owned 5D or 1DS Mark II? How about $450 or $800? If there’s a better bargain for a photographer looking to make really large prints from full frame negatives I do not know of it. And you can forget the overpriced ‘red ring’ Canon ‘L’ lenses. The 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye (discontinued), the 35mm f/2 USM, the 50mm f/1.4 USM and the 85mmf/1.8 USM ‘cooking’ variants deliver all the quality you need, at bargain prices. Just avoid the cheap and nasty zooms if you are printing big. For web display any FF DSLR is overkill.


The exceptional Canon 1DS Mark II.

Nikon? There are no FF bargains yet. The D700, which has an excellent low noise sensor sells lightly used for a surprisingly high $1,300, the D3 (same sensor, pretty much) for $1,800.

New prices of the 5D and 1DS Mark II? How about $3,000 and $8,000, respectively? Do you really need the latest and greatest or would a small fraction of the extra money be better spent on a large format printer, paper, ink and some mounting supplies so you can really show your work for once?

Richard Steinheimer

Photographers

A photographer of trains.


Click for purchase through Amazon. I get no payment if you do that.

Being a train photographer means your output will immediately be subject to comparison with that of O. Winston Link in much the same way a street snapper’s work will be hauled up against that of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Neither is a winning proposition.

Regardless of genre preferences, any photographer’s library should include Link’s Steam, Steel and Stars and HC-B’s The Man, the Image and the World.

On those grounds, Richard Steinheimer’s book of fine railway photographs would not be your first choice but even if you care little for railroad photography, it deserves serious consideration.

Steinheimer (1929-2011) was up against it from the start as relatively little of his long career coincided with the age of steam. A steam locomotive makes the machine the star, regardless of setting. Link’s genius was to personalize it in the guise of the proud operators in the last days of steam he so magnificently photographed. (‘Documented’ would be a rare insult, indeed). Steinheimer’s work is more detached, more focused on the machine in its expansive settings in the west. People are not his forte. Link, by contrast, added that something special with his social awareness.

Steam appeals to the romantic in us but I can assure you that there was nothing romantic about traveling in a steam train. I took one from London to Dundee, aged eight in 1959, to visit my eldest sister, then a student at St. Andrew’s University. Forgetting to close the window as we entered a tunnel, I exited covered in soot and smelling like a linebacker after the Superbowl. There was nothing romantic about it, other than to a distant observer’s viewing the Flying Scotsman’s patrician progress through the beauty of Scotland’s countryside, a head of steam defining the machine’s progress.

You could also argue that taking pictures of steam trains is rather like photographing Angelina Jolie. Even your bad ones are going to look pretty good. On that basis, O. Winston Link is the Irving Penn of train photographers.

Steinheimer certainly added a special something to his images, generally incorporating the expanses of the great American west with outstanding compositional sense. The book is well printed, if not as well as the Link one and, unlike the latter, can still be found new and unblemished. Unsurprisingly, the cover picture is of a steam train ….