Yearly Archives: 2018

HCB – The early years

Bio, Photographers

The master of surrealism.

There is no rule, when it comes to painters and photographers, as to when you do your best work.

One school of thought has it that you peak in your twenties, all sturm und drang, ready to fight the world and its evils. Another has it that you age like fine wine, the greatest work done before the Grim Reaper drops by.

There are no rules. No generalizations.

Take Raphael (dead at 37, too much partying). In that short span he never created anything less than perfect. Or Caravaggio (39 – whoring, boozing, fighting), each of whose handful of canvases was perfection itself. And Modigliani (36, general excess and illness), every work just so.

Then, at the GR end of the spectrum, you have Monet (86) who only every got better as a visit to L’Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris confirms, your head spinning, those ephemeral water lilies all around. Or Leonardo (67), his head bursting with ideas and creating great art to the very end. Or Picasso, whose frenetic output ceased on his death at 92.

There are no rules. No generalizations.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was the man who made me a follower of photography, at an age when I could not even afford a camera. This master lived a very long life yet gave up photography in late middle age. As the remainder of this piece shows, there’s an argument to be made that he in fact had said most of what he wanted by 1939, aged just 31.

The Kensington Public Library, not far from my parents’ London home, had a fine collection of photography books – meaning books of pictures, not of gear usage – and the Dewey system being what it is one book in the 770 section was the first to catch my eye. That book contained HC-B’s early work, and by ‘early’ I mean images made before June 1940 when the Germans captured him and locked him up. I must have been about 11 at the time and was reasonably well schooled in the Impressionists with a smattering of the High Renaissance thrown in for classicism’s sake. And I had never seen anything like it before. The work was astonishing and I knew then and there that I wanted to take pictures like that.

HC-B had studied painting under André Lhote and the cubism touted by his teacher immediately translated into surrealism in his photographic work, started in 1929.

HC-B was 21 years old and he emerged fully formed. His images from the next decade redefined photography as we know it.

All images are © Magnum Photos.



Marseille, 1932.


The Quai St. Bernard, Paris, 1932.


Plasterers, Paris, 1932. How on earth do you improve on this?


Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932. A symphony in monochrome.


Brussels, 1932. The acme of surrealism.


Hyères, France, 1932. The Decisive Moment defined.


Tuscany, 1933.


Valencia, 1933.


Madrid, 1933. An image of unforgettable power.


Barcelona, 1933. Rare wit in a man seemingly devoid of humor.


Spain, 1933


Trieste, 1933. An image which, for me, always fortells Germany’s concentration camps.


Valencia, 1933. Maybe the greatest cubist/surrealist image ever created on film.


The Shoe Fetishist, Natcho Aguirre, Mexico, 1934. Reportorial and utterly surreal.


Hyde Park, 1937, as the Gathering Storm beckons.


By the Seine, 1938. The image of France that started my photographic odyssey.


The last days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai, 1948. A rare post war image
that recaptures the dynamism of ‘The Plasterers’, above.


While sparks of his austere pre-war vision were to recur through the remainder of his long life – HC-B died in 2004 aged 96, though he gave up photography in 1975 – the fecundity of the pre-war years was never recaptured. The post-war images trend, for the most part, to the purely reportorial, the pre-war surrealism largely forgotten. Some aver it’s because HC-B was wealthy, the heir to the Bresson thread works which had made his parents rich. He did not have to try hard. I do not subscribe to that belief. He worked like a dog all his life, traveling the globe for the big picture magazines, always at the center of the action. The death of Gandhi? Mao Tse Tung’s overthrow of Chiang Kai Shek? The Paris riots? HC-B was there. Maybe the relative ‘prettiness’ of the images demanded by Life and the like diluted his vision? But if you want to see that vision in full flower, look no further than his images of the 1930s.

Perhaps the worst advice HC-B ever got was from fellow Magnum snapper Robert Capa:

I’m not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I’m a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won’t have an assignment and you’ll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be ‘photojournalist’ “.

He should have stuck to surrealism.

Nikkor 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6D IF AF lens

Nikon lenses

OK, with some reservations.

The 24-120mm Zoom Nikkor was made from 1996 through 2002. Many regard it as the worst AFD zoom, in much the way the 43-86mm Nikkor is similarly damned in the MF era.

My copy of the 43-86mm zoom shows that, in its Mark II version, the lens is a capable performer, and a lovely compact package on a smaller film camera body.

By contrast, the 24-120mm, with its high 5:1 zoom range, comes with more design compromises. For one, the lens is not constant aperture, the speed falling to f/5.6 at the long end. Second, there is considerable weakness in the edges at 24mm with poor definition and chromatic aberration aplenty. The optic also comes with a reputation for sample variation and the plastic content means there’s a bit of wobble in the extended part of the lens at longer focal lengths.


Shown here at 120mm, fully extended. The lens hood is as useless as these things get.

Then again, mine came mint, boxed, with caps, hood and no fewer than three 72mm filters – UV, IR (!) and ND. Quite why you would want an ND filter with a lens that is already natively slow beats me, but whatever. And the price of entry – and proceeds of exit if it’s not for you – was a very modest $83 shipped. After selling the useless IR and ND filters, my cost was $17!

At 24mm the lens is compact and the zoom action is by a rotating collar rather than trombone action, meaning the lens ages well with none of the slop common in well used push-pull zooms. You can compare sizes with the 85mm f/1.8 AFD, a decidedly superior optic, in this image:


The zoom is at 24mm. Note the dual aperture indexes – blue at 24mm, yellow at 120mm.

The good news here is that the lens is very sharp in the center at all apertures, with negligible chromatic aberration. AF is satisfyingly fast and very welcome given the lens’s small maximum apertures. There is fairly pronounced vignetting in the corners at anything below 50mm but that is easily corrected using Adobe’s lens correction profile in LR. At the edges the story is different. I’m reproducing extreme corner test images here as the center ones are so good. In all cases the lens correction profile was applied. These are 40x enlargements:



At 24mm, f/3.5 and f/8.


At 70mm, f/5 (fully open) and f/11.


At 120mm, f/5.6 (fully open) and f/11.


As Adobe does not include a profile for this optic with LR, I used that for the later VR version and it works well:


Lens correction profile applied in Lightroom.

At 24mm the extreme corners really suffer at full aperture, only coming into their own at f/11. At medium and long settings things are much better, as disclosed above.

Handling of out of focus areas is rather so-so, if not awful, at the long end using wider apertures. (At the short end it’s tough to get anything out of focus). See above.

So your under $100 investment gets you a lens with a wide zoom range, decent performance at most settings except at full aperture at the wide and, and so-so out of focus handling. But if you want to carry just one wide-range zoom for outdoor snaps, the 24-120mm AFD Nikkor checks many boxes. Use with a polarizing filter is tricky as the front element rotates some 30 degrees through the zoom range. Adjust the filter once the focal length is set.

Comparing the results with images from the Canon 5D using the 24-105mm L auto kit kens, the Canon shows even greater barrel distortion at 24mm and poor corner definition and chromatic aberration in the corners fully open. The Canon is larger and heavier, owing to its constant aperture design and is generally a stop or two sharper than the Nikon. It also costs a lot more.

For a comparison with the Nikkor 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 AF D lens, click here.

Two fine 85s

Nikon lenses

As good as it gets.

Recent articles here comparing the AF/AFD era autofocus Nikons, like the 20mm and the 50mm/1.8, confirm that the AF/AFD ‘plastic fantastic’ lenses certainly use a lot of plastic, but fantastic they are not. The old ‘metal era’ lenses outperform the AF ones easily, and are far better constructed in addition.

With the 85mm f/1.8 Nikons, the story is a little different.


85mm f/1.8 MF, 1969 vintage and the AFD version made in 1997. The AF takes a 62mm filter and hood,
not the usual 52mm HN-7 for the MF.

Previous experience with the AFD optic showed it to be quite special from f/2 down, but I was surprised to see how much better it was compared with the older MF lens, in which I had installed a CPU. Something was wrong. I was using the focus confirmation light in the Nikon D700 to determine focus, and it was clear that the MF lens was not at best focus with the viewfinder LED lit. So off to the bookshelf, which disclosed that the MF was focusing slightly in front of the target. An angled shot confirmed my suspicion:


Green line is where I focused. Red line is sharpest point.

The MF was not properly collimated. Refer back to a piece I wrote six years ago on how to collimate MF Nikons fitted with an aftermarket CPU. One of the functions of the CPU is that the point at which the body’s focus confirmation light illuminates can be shifted back or forward, eight small steps in each direction. One shift using the ’20’ function and this is what I got:


Green line (LED illuminated) and red line (sharpest point) now coincide.

This quick tweak now permitted proper comparison of the performance of the MF and AF lenses.

In the image pairs below the image from the MF lens is at the left:




At f/1.8.


At f/2.8.


At f/4


At f/5.6


Rendering of out-of-focus areas is similar, with that of the MF optic marginally preferable to my eyes. Both lenses are fully usable at f/1.8, a tribute to Nikon’s designers.

It’s clear that the MF lens is superior through f/2.8 after which differences are slight. The traditional warmer tones of the MF lenses are again notable here.

So the AFD lens is really good, and my studio image of my son Winston taken in 2012 testifies loudly to that fact:


Winston in his karate outfit. D700, 85/1.8 AFD Nikkor, two Novatron heads.

Either optic is a wonderful addition to any snapper’s arsenal. The MF lens is slower in use but outstanding in every way, while the AF version excels in the studio where critical focus on the eyes is made easy by the autofocus function.

Nikon F100

Film, Nikon bodies

Culmination of a film odyssey.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

Spurred on by a friend who is an enthusiastic film user, I determined that a logical approach to finding the right combination of film hardware, services and EXIF software was called for. The market is bursting to the seams with lightly used film cameras available at scrap prices and the renaissance enjoyed by film itself is reflected in the number of labs offering processing and scanning services along with a growing number of emulsions after the nadir of a few years ago.


My film body odyssey – Nikon FE, N90S and F100.

Hardware:

The choice of brand was simple. I have some two dozen F-mount Nikkor lenses, mostly manual focus with AI conversions and chips installed by me. A few are newer AF optics though as recent pieces here have shown, the old lenses are generally superior to the more recent ones, and at lower cost.

Bodies are insanely cheap and there is no earthly reason to save a few dollars by buying a beater, when mint examples can be had for little more. The early metered bodies from the FE/FM series, known for their toughness, can be found for around $100 so I started with a Nikon FE, a small and ergonomically superb offering, far more robust than contemporary Leicas with their rangefinders fading and all sorts of alignment issues, along with rotting rubber shutter blinds where Nikon uses titanium. And at 10% of the cost of those Leicas, what’s not to like? Mine ran me $100 plus $30 for a better focus screen. The FE falls naturally to hand and I had a blast using it but I found that the absence of a focus confirmation LED in the finder was a feature sorely missed by my aging eyes. Use a lens f/2.8 or slower, even with the improved FM3 focus screen installed, I was never quite sure critical focus had been established and was often sawing the focus collar back and forth to get there.

Thus the next step was to find a Nikon film body with autofocus which, with a manual Nikkor fitted, conferred the advantage of that confirmation light. Along came a Nikon N90s, another body renowned for its durability and costing a whopping $50 in the original box, no less. Heavier than the FE owing to the focus and film advance/rewind motor, the body is a delight to use with AF Nikons or unchipped MF ones, but the aftermarket chips installed by me on every one of my manual focus Nikons refuse to communicate with the body’s exposure meter and are thus useless. With AF Nikkors the body works perfectly. The only known issue is a tendency for the chintzy coating on the back to degrade and get sticky, but my body came with that removed, exposing the black plastic underneath. Isopropyl alcohol is the indicated solvent here and the result looks fine, matching the finish of the rest of the body.

So a better mousetrap was called for and it came along in the guise of the Nikon F100, meaning the $200 I splashed out wildly on the mint body and high capacity battery grip was financed by the proceeds of sale of the FE, the N90S and the F100’s battery grip which does little for this occasional snapper other than adding needless weight and bulk.

The F100 is superb in every way. The body takes four AA batteries like the N90s, disposes controls in a manner almost identical to those on my favorite digital body, the D700 and comes with an eyepiece diopter adjuster built in which is a boon for non-stock eyesight. With four AA cells installed in the body holder the external battery holder with its 6 AA batteries can be dispensed with leaving a body barely heavier than the N90S. Unlike with the FE and N90s you cannot change the focus screen, but you do not need to. The focus confirmation light works perfectly. The apertures of my MF Nikkors are correctly registered by the metering system with aperture priority exposure automation. That’s a huge deal as I have many and they are all here to stay. And the F100 focuses AF Nikkors very fast. Weaknesses? Rumored to be very tough on batteries, but no problem for a ‘one film a week’ guy, plus they are common and inexpensive AAs. The earlier bodies had a fragile rewind fork – you can identify it easily as it’s pointed. If your body’s s/n is greater than 21673xx you will find that the spigots on the rewind fork are now squared, not pointed, and much more robust. (The s/n is engraved black on black underneath the bayonet mount at the base). Finally, the perfect body, though the sensual pleasure of the FE’s manual film advance is gone.

In addition to the fragile rewind fork on earlier bodies (unlikely to be an issue with lightly used bodies), the only other issue with the F100 I have noted on chat boards is with the automated start and rewind of the film.

It appears that if you set Custom Settings to thread the film when the door is closed, and to rewind it after the last shot, the system can fail and start rewind part way through the roll. I believe the mechanism Nikon uses to determine when to start automated rewind is simply to measure the current demand of the advance motor. When the film is at the end, the current demand spikes and the advance motor goes into reverse and commences rewind. But a like current demand – triggering a false ‘end of film’ indication – can occur with a stiff cassette spool and/or a tight felt trap, which would simulate the ‘end of roll’ condition part way through the roll

Custom Settings are set thus:

The two Custom Settings for automated film loading and rewind are 8 and 1, respectively:

You want to make sure these are both set to ‘0’, the default setting, thus defeating the automation.

To manually commence rewinding the film at the end of the roll you simultaneously depress the ‘BKT’ (top left) and the ‘+/-‘ buttons (top right). (In the later D700 this button pair formats the CF storage card. Neat.) Each is marked with a red symbol.

The other Custom Setting to note concerns the use of the lens’s aperture ring to set aperture rather than using the front top wheel (sub-command dial), custom setting #22:

This is essential to enable aperture ring control for my MF chipped Nikkors as I cannot control the setting of the aperture using the sub-command dial, and as I also much prefer to use the lens’s aperture ring. So my Custom Setting #22 is set to ‘1’ and all my old lenses work properly.



By the time the F100 was made, Nikon’s design layout was pretty much firmed up.
The much later D700 is on the left.

Processing and scanning:

No one in his right mind wants film strips returned. A high quality scan of the processed film is what is called for and as mass scanner quality has peaked, holding on to film strips in the hope of better scans down the road is a quixotic approach. After a couple of false starts with labs in California, I found that Sharpprints.com, in Wisconsin of all places, was just the ticket. Excellent processing with high attendant volume assures fresh chemicals, complemented with high definition scans from their Noritsu scanner. Further, downloads are available fast and there are no downloading issues. And they are almost 40% cheaper than the uncaring and unresponsive coastal labs – $14 versus $22.50 a roll. The limitation is that this lab only processes color film requiring C41 chemicals (color negative emulsions), and does not process E6 color slide stock. They also process TriX and other monochrome film in Kodak HC110 developer.

EXIF data:

Other than telling you the scanner manufacturer’s name, no EXIF data is present on scanned film files. I find such data to be essential as I tend to search for images in my catalog by camera body and lens used. Thus I resort to a $10 application named ‘EXIF Editor’, available in the Apple OS X App Store.

It’s a tad clunky but can be integrated into LR for the roundtrip in Lightroom->Preferences->External Editing:


EXIF Editor set as an external editing option.

Batteries:

The F100 has something of a reputation as a battery eater. My body came with the auxiliary battery holder which holds 6 AA batteries rather than the 4 in the body’s handgrip. The latter must be removed when the auxiliary MB-15 holder is attached – see the first image in this article. The battery holder appears to add 40% capacity based on Nikon’s data:


Note the greatly increased power draw with big, long lenses
like the 80-200 f/2.8 AFD zoom – lower section, above.

I immediately sold my battery holder ($50) as it adds weight and bulk out of proportion to its sole utility value which is the addition of a vertical shutter release. You don’t need it. Further, cheap lithium batteries are now abundantly available – I paid $1.50 per cell at Amazon, and the table above suggests no one needs the external holder. If you must change batteries fast, new in-body Nikon MS-12 AA battery holders remain available for under $25 – in fact I had to buy one as it was missing from my body. Simple pre-load one with batteries of your choice and keep it in your pocket.

* * * * *

The results of this discovery process:

  • Three business days from mailing to availability of high quality downloadable scans.
  • The charm of using analog film in a digital world, with all the attendant benefits and challenges.
  • Properly EXIF indexed data files in my Lightroom catalog.
  • Negligible financial outlay.