The answer to yesterday’s puzzle.

At the conclusion of the previous journal entry, I asked readers to determine whether film or digital was used to record the eight images included.

Here are the technical data for the pictures:

Image #1: Canon 350D, 17-85 Canon at 75mm (120mm equivalent), 1/50, f/7.1, ISO 100
Image #2: Canon 5D, 200mm Canon, 1/2000, f/4.5, ISO 200
Image #3: Canon 5D, 24-105 Canon at 58mm, 1/500, f/4, ISO 400
Image #4: Canon 5D, 24-105 Canon at 35mm, 1/250, f/5.6, ISO 250
Image #5: Canon 5D, 24-105 Canon at 73mm, 1/350, f/6.7, ISO 200
Image #6: Canon 5D, 24-105 Canon at 28mm, 1/6 (hand held and IS used big time!), f/4, ISO 800
Image #7: Canon 5D, 15mm Canon fisheye with ImageAlign used to ‘defish’ the picture (12mm equivalent), 1/750, f/8, ISO 400
Image #8: Panasonic Lumix LX-1, 6.3-25.2 Leica at 14mm (63mm equivalent), 1/1250, f/4, ISO 100

In other words, not a roll of film in sight. Properly exposed and processed digital is indistinguishable from properly exposed and processed film until the ISO gets over 200, in which case the Canon 5D beats film hands down every time.

All pictures processed (very little) in Apple’s Aperture.

How did you do?

There is no such thing as a ‘film look’ – only bad processing.

I confess to finding all the talk about the classical ‘look’ of printed images taken on film to be so much rot.

(Please note: The pictures in this journal entry are purposefully large to enhance screen quality, so they make take a while to load on slower connections.)

Unless you make prints from film using an enlarger – an all analog chain if you like – every image we see is to a greater or lesser extent digital. Film has to be scanned to be shown on your computer. That’s digital. The scanned image has to be printed on some sort of printer, be it ink jet, dye sublimation, laser, using pigment inks or dyes. All digital. And, obviously, everything seen on the computer screen, where, let’s face it, 99.9% of photographs are now viewed, is digital.

This journal entry was prompted when I read a piece on a chat board written by a fellow extolling the ‘Leica glow’ in images which, he claimed, only his film based Leica camera and lenses could deliver. No indication of the basis for this judgement or, indeed, anything about how he makes prints. The thrust of his poorly reasoned argument seems to be that digital looks ‘plastic’ (the English I learned suggests that plasticity is a good thing in an image, but I’ll let it go) whereas film looks real.

It’s unclear to me why some, like this person, still fight digital imaging. It might be that people who write on chat boards are like visitors to a hospital. They only go there because they have a problem, even if the disease is hypochondria. Part of it is, I suspect, that some practitioners have given digital a bad name through excessive sharpening, contrast, saturation and so on. That hardly exonerates poor practitioners of analog printing who loved garish excess, like Ansel Adams. The reality is that you will get lousy results with any process if you have a lack of skill, taste or both.

Another reason for proclaiming the superiority of film may well be that its defenders have invested such huge amounts in now largely worthless equipment that some sort of justification is called for. They are, of course, Label Drinkers. You buy a Rolls Royce and it has to be good, even if the thing breaks down constantly. How could you admit otherwise? Everyone knows it’s the best. Clearly, the resale value of gear is irrelevant, and all that matters is whether it helps you take good pictures. The only problem for these fellas is that they have to have the latest and greatest and, well, trade-in values on that M6 or M7 Leica just aren’t what they used to be. The ridiculous price of the digital M8 just compounds their problem. Here’s a $5,000 body (no lens!) which is not weather sealed, has manual focus, limited automation and no zoom lenses. Absent low light snaps, where it probably excels, it’s an overpriced, bulky, point-and-shoot (which is what Leica rangefinder photography is all about) far less capable for the most part than any number of $400 offerings from the far east. So economics become a prop for an ill reasoned position. Not the first time that has happened. Makes film a lot more appealing, though, if you are stuck with those old bodies.

Amusingly, the same psychology – it’s expensive so it must be good – comes into play when they finally spring for that M8, having dumped the M6 or M7 at a huge loss. They are now duty bound to proclaim that the digital Leica takes better pictures (!) than anything else out there. But of course.

Unless you are taking pictures in very challenging lighting, requiring fast lenses and low noise, high ISO sensitivity, and you need to make really large prints, then there is simply no difference in the image taken with costly gear like the top Nikons, Canons or Leicas and the $300 point-and-shoot. Digital or film, it makes no difference in regular prints. Up to, say, 8″ x 10″ in hard copy prints or up to a 30″ computer screen, it all looks great. I was reminded how terrific some 6 mp images taken on a Nikon looked, when I examined them on the 30″ Apple Cinema Display the other day in the Apple store. The only reason I know they were Nikon digital originals is because that’s what it said on the file information. You simply could not have asked for a better image – dynamic range on the screen greatly exceeding anything a print could offer. Like looking at projected slides in days of old.

Reverting to that chat board thread, one correspondent confidently stated that he can always tell which images on his computer screen are digital (whatever that means – I suppose he is referring to the original being snapped with a digital camera) – which left me laughing helplessly. Anyway, for that expert and fellow travellers, here’s a selection of my snaps from the archives wherein I invite you to guess which are digital and which film. Meaning, in my world, which were taken on a film Leica as opposed to a digital Canon 5D. And don’t go guessing by aspect ratio – both my Leicas and the 5D share the same native 3:2 image ratio and I crop away depending on my mood. All will be revealed tomorrow. Oh!, and by the way, I hope you enjoy the pictures!

By the way, there as those dogs again….

Well, just one Leica left.

Be under no illusion. Selling off the last of my Leica equipment was emotionally wrenching. These may be mass produced machines, true, but when something has been a part of you for more than a third of a century, well, parting is not easy.

I cannot but reminisce about some of the wonderful optics that made their home on my Leica and Leicaflex bodies. And, in truth, there were more optics than one could recall without saying, in the same breath, that he was privileged indeed to have enjoyed so much that was wondrous. For whatever their future, Leica can claim, without any fear of exaggeration, to have made most of the best lenses that have graced any camera. Ever.

Some stand out not so much for their optical prowess as for the results they delivered. And if I sound a bit like Woody Allen reciting his favorite things on this earth, towards the end of the beautiful film that is Manhattan, well, so be it. Favorites in the early years were the 90mm Elmar – small, modest, unpretentious, yet always willing. The perfect match for that stroke of genius we know as the M3 viewfinder. On those trips to Paris it ceded primacy to the 35mm f/2.8 Summaron. The ‘eyeglasses’ this needed to frame properly with the M3 were not the most chic of Leitz’s designs, but the lens was superb in every way, certainly more affordable to this impecunious student than its f/2 Summicron stablemate. Suffice it to say this optic saw more use on the M3 than anything else during my monochrome London years.

As affluence raised its head after a year or two in the world’s greatest democracy, the M3 was joined by a Leicaflex SL with the ne plus ultra 50mm Summicron-R.

Hard to do anything wrong with that combination. Certainly, the svelte style of the M3 was missing from this bulky pair, but the camera came with the best viewfinder and focusing screen ever built into an SLR – a fact that remains true to this day – and once that body was mated to the superb 180mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt-R, well, this photographer had found his Chateau Lafite Rothschild of landscape equipment. Throw Kodachrome into the mix and you have maybe the finest equipment the twentieth century ever made available to an aspiring photographer. With but one exception, read on below, this was the best lens I have ever owned.

After years of providing for old age, a process that common sense dictated was something you would be foolish to trust to government, the photographic ethic saw a return to the M and its street capabilities. The so-so 50mm f/2.8 Elmar gracefully gave way to a lovely Summicron, the last model with the removable lens head, and the increased contrast and lovely tonal rendition of this masterpiece, now used exclusively for color, were a joy to behold.

Small, fast focusing, it has moved to a good home. It served me faithfully for the best part of two decades.

The 90mm Elmar gave way to a Leicaflex design mounted in an M mount, the 90mm f/2.8 Elmarit-M. Nowhere near as compact as the old Elmar, its lens element did not rotate as you focused, so the apertures were always clearly visible on top. Almost worth the trade off in size and weight, and the jump in definition and resolving power was out of this world.

But the M3 lusted after something better still, and before you knew it the Elmarit-M was joined by a brand, spanking new 90mm Asph Apo-Summicron-M. The only new Leica lens I ever owned and there are no words in the vernacular to describe the capabilities of this optic. It is as if the M3, released in the early ‘50s, had finally found a lens to do it justice some forty years later. Suffice it to say that it simply intimidated me every time I mounted it on the camera, for the knowledge was certain that there was simply no way I could do it justice. Without a doubt the best lens I have ever owned.

But that was far from the end of it. Like the poor kid who grew up lusting after Ferraris but never dreamed he would own one, I chanced upon a new 400mm f/6.8 Telyt.

This lens had always fascinated me when I was a kid, just like those Ferraris.

The lens had been owned by a collector (Ugh! A lawyer to boot, as if that was a surprise) for twenty years and never taken out of the box. Sacrilege! The lubricants in the trombone focus action were dried up, the schmuck lawyer’s protestations notwithstanding, making focusing about as much fun as a root canal, but a quick trip for relubrication saw another example of Leitz’s genius mated, with the appropriate adapter, to the Leicaflex. The design may only have used a couple of glasses but, goodness, was it sharp. The thing was a foot and a half long, making for a discomfiting feeling in later years as everyone was now watching everyone else, but it cranked out some great pictures despite the perceived threat to life and limb of all and sundry.

Reverting to the streets, where I had pretty much grown up as a photographer, called for something really wide, so why not the best? The late ‘90s market was booming, everyone was an investment genius, money was cheap and, so it seemed, was the outrageous 21mm Asph Elmarit-M.

The third best lens I ever used. Sure, the clip on viewfinder was simply lousy, plastic casing and all, and the lens hood was consigned to the garbage can as soon as I looked at it, but it replaced a bizarre, if cheap, Russian 20mm Russar (a design that Comrade Stalin appropriated from Zeiss) and showed this user what a super-wide was really about. This one really became a part of me. I find it hard to believe that the coverage and micro-contrast of this very special optic will be exceeded at this focal length.

And finally, because I simply had more money than sense at the time, why not a 135mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt-M?

I already knew what the magical combination of apochromatic glasses and Telyt design could do, so the 135mm replaced a long string of 135s – the Hektor, the Elmar, and the Tele-Elmar. It badly embarrassed all of its predecessors.

There were many others, of course. Like old girlfriends, you never forget them. (There were, I hasten to add, more lenses than girlfriends, in case you get the wrong idea). Each had its genius. Each its faults. All were loved. And remain so to this day. (Lenses and girlfriends).

So now I have one Leica left. My M2, with what is perhaps the ultimate street snapper’s lens, the 35mm Asph Summicron-M. Yes, another gift courtesy of the Internet Bubble. The pairing is on extended loan to a fine English photographer, and will probably return home sometime in 2007. That Summicron replaced a very modest 35mm f/3.5 Summaron which, despite its unprepossessing looks, was as good as you could wish, at any aperture. Indeed, with the sole exception of the 50mm Elmar my M3 started life with, all those wonderful Leica lenses never much cared what aperture you selected, for they were equally good at anything the lighting conditions dictated. And the 35mm Asph is maybe the only design where Leica finally got the lens hood dead right.

So, will I sell both? Well, the M2 body must move on. I am simply not returning to the drudge of film/processing/scanning/dust removal that digital obsoleted. Further, I have little interest in cropped digital sensors, especially at the outrageous price Leica is asking for the M8, so unless the House of Leica comes out with a full frame sensor, affordable M9 (as likely as finding integrity in a politician), and stops making all those darned excuses about technology, the 35mm Asph will go also. Modern point-and-shoot digitals get better daily at prices, compared to the M8, that represent impulse buys. They also permit cost effective annual upgrades, something no M8 owner will like to contemplate after a mere twelve months of ownership. And that, by the way, is why I think Leica’s M8, after the honeymoon is over, is doomed to fail.

Complacency is easy. Change hard. Neither negates the fact that technology marches on.

How things change

The addition of the Panasonic Lumix LX-1 to my equipment earlier this year, replacing my rangefinder Leicas, brought with it something new and exciting, over and above the superb overall capability of this pocketable digital camera.

An exceptionally wide image aspect ratio, meaning the ratio of height to width. The Panasonic uses a 16:9 sensor, which is identical to the format of most contemporary movies or, stated differently, 1:1.78.

Looking back over the past century but a handful of aspect ratios have dominated photographic images, or at least in-camera originals. None has been this wide.

Early plate and large format cameras used 3 1/4” x 4 1/4” film or 1:1.31. The 4” x 5” format, 1:1.25, popularized a whole range of printing papers in like ratio – contacts, 8” x 10” , 12” x 15” and 16” x 20”. Until digital came along most photographic prints were made in these ratios, because that’s how the paper was sold and that’s how frame and mat manufacturers made their products. In other words, close to square.

The story has it that when Oscar Barnack, the Leica’s inventor, was ruminating on how best to transition from a hernia-inducing field camera to something pocketable (boy, would he have loved modern digital point-and-shoots or what?) he decided to make the film frame 24mm x 36mm, or 1” x 1.5”, to reduce the grain effect of the movie film stock he had decided to use. A movie frame was a scant 18mm x 24mm and old Oscar decided, rightly, that that was just too small to permit a decent enlargement. So he doubled the size and thus was the famous Leica format born with an aspect ratio of 1:1.5, in contrast to the far squarer 1:1.33 of the movie original.

Of course, his efforts were, for the large part wasted, as printers were stuck in the 1:1.25 rut, so 17% of Barnack’s negative area was thrown away through cropping at the printing stage. Too bad he didn’t elect 24mm x 30mm, thus increasing the number of shots on a roll to 43 from 36, rather than wasting all that film.

Some photographers, most notably Henri Cartier-Bresson, made a fetish out of necessity, insisting that the composition of their originals was so perfect in every way on that long Leica negative that any French printer who would dare even think about cropping the negative would be deported to England, there to suffer a life sentence known as English cuisine. Truth be told, if you look at any book of Cartier-Bresson snaps and hack a bit off the long dimension, the picture loses nothing at all in power. Hey, don’t knock the artifice, it worked for him, no?

Brassai, extroverted Hungarian that he was, threw convention and aspect ratios to the wind and thought nothing of cropping one good picture into two or three even better ones. Viva Brassai!

So Cartier-Bresson’s and Leitz’s predilections notwithstanding, 1:1.25 pretty much ruled the roost for most of the twentieth century. Add television, which adopted much the same ratio for its first fifty years, and you have a critical mass hard to overcome. Shame, really, because it’s a really boring look. Too bad few photographers learned anything from that great nineteenth century beachscape painter Eugene Boudin who though nothing of painting on canvases which were 1:2 or even longer in aspect ratio. He was doing nothing more than using a shape to fit the subject.

Boudin does Boudin

Towards the end of the twentieth century, home ink jet printers became affordable in even fairly large sizes, and for whatever reason someone decided that the carriage would allow a paper width of 13” and someone else came up with a paper length of 19”. That just happens to work out to 1:1.46 so I like to think that inventor was a Leica man or the spirit of a much put-upon French printer had inveigled itself into the design process, because now the loss from a Leica negative was a mere 3%. HC-B could rest in peace, and given that a well printed ink jet print is indistinguishable from a wet process one, everyone was happy. I love the 13” x 19” format, finding it large enough to hang on the wall and long enough to afford the option of keeping everything in those many years of Leica negatives. It has become my default print size, replacing 8″ z 10″ for proofing purposes.

Before we segue to the current millennium it would be unfair to make no mention of the square format, beloved of Rolleiflex and Hasselbald users. Of course they never printed square prints, but take away the decision whether the camera should be held this way or that and you have one less variable interposed in the creative process. So, I suppose, that’s a good thing. Nonetheless, hack it down to 1:1.25 and the 56mm square Hasselblad negative promptly lost 20% of its surface area as the cost of this flexibility, though it was still more than 3 times the effective surface area of the Leica. So, for the most part, printers at Vogue and Harpers Bazaar hacked away, but at least one photographer decided to transmute this limitation and make of it an affectation. That photographer is Michael Kenna, and he resolutely prints most of his work in a square format. I’ll leave it to you to decide about his work, but if 1:1.25 is boring, then 1: 1 is near catatonic when it comes to visual interest.

I’m not sure what possessed Panasonic to adopt the 1:1.78 in the LX-1 (16:9 in common parlance, Europeans and Japanese preferring to put the long side first), but Hollywood had been transitioning to like-format widescreen movies for years and, guess what, Panasonic happens to be a major manufacturer of television sets. Visit your high street big box store today and you will find that more than half the TV sets are 1:1.78 and, making a virtue out of necessity, the ads scream ‘Widescreen’. Five years earlier the only widescreen display you could find was limited to megabucks home theater installations with overhead projectors. ‘Pan and scan’, where movies are chopped or scanned to fit the 1:1.25 or 1:1.33 screen is butchery indeed and a 1:1.78 screen fits the new sets perfectly, at the expense of black bars on older 1:1.33 movies. A good trade. Just try watching Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West on a regular TV and you will wonder why this is considered by many to be the greatest Western ever made; switch to Widescreen and all is clear.

And for me, the widescreen format in the LX-1 is simply a revelation. I’m finding that I have to relearn how I think about pictures, just as I have to when making circular QTVR panoramas. Now I have no idea how to describe the aspect ratio of a QTVR 180 degree x 360 degree panorama, but it sure as hell isn’t 1:Anything!

Pindelski does Boudin

I’m beginning to learn to photograph and print in widescreen and my next order of mats and boards from the wonderful people at Documounts will, you guessed it, have some 18” x 32” and 13” x 23” mat openings. They will cut any size you want, though these custom sizes command a small premium to all that 1:1.25 stuff. More of that later.

For this photographer this seemingly small change in aspect ratio has opened up new vistas indeed.

You know, the things in the back of drawers you haven’t seen for ages

As I clear out the last of my film equipment I find I am still left with a lot of, well, stuff. None of this has much value and the effort-to-dollars-realized ratio is not very exciting but, having sold off most of the big dollar items, what am I to do? Throw these things away? Even if my time is worth more spent on other things, I feel a duty of care to these once seemingly indispensible gadgets.

Let’s see.

There is that wonderful Leica MC selenium cell meter which I bought some 35 years ago. It would clip to the top of my Leica M2 or M3 , couple to the shutter speed dial and provide accurate light readings whenever asked. Selenium cells, which need no battery, are meant to die from age but this one was always stored in the dark when not in use and remains as accurate today as it was over three decades ago. It’s the same one clipped to QE2’s M3 in that famous stamp where she can be seen holding the camera. Yes, she was an M3 gal back then. Now you should understand that she never paid for hers. No, she didn’t pinch it. Rather, Leitz, recognizing she was more German than English, honored her bloodline with, yes, you guessed it, a free one with her initials on it, no less! Sold for $40 (the meter, not the Queen).

Or how about that wonderful, inverted cone hood that Leitz concocted around 1971? By inverting the cone and venting the rear, the amount of the hood intruding into the field of view, especially noticeable with the wide angle M2 viewfinder with the older design, became a thin line which you barely noticed after a while. Brilliant. $38.

Then there’s that superb Schneider 8x loupe used to check negatives or slides for sharpness before committing all that time to scanning them. For reasons best known to themselves, Schneider replaced the 8x and only sell a 4X which is not powerful enough to tell you much. A superb tool and indispensible for the film user, if of no use to a digital photographer. $90.

Next up is that sweet little Japanese Kopil self-timer – useful for those cameras like my unlamented Leica M6, which had none, or whenever a jar-free release was needed and no cable release was to hand. No use for that with modern equipment, what will all those options which include what color you want your coffee. $13. It served me well indeed.

Here’s one of the funkier items, though none the less useful for that. A Leica lens coupling ring, allowing two M lenses to be attached back-to-back for space efficient storage in the camera bag. Just be careful you don’t ram that $3,000 21mm Asph Elmarit in there, as expensive grinding sounds will testify to rear element-to-rear element contact! Big bucks for this one – $35.

And while we are on the topic of funky, what about this little gadget? It fits around the rewind knob of a Leica M2 or M3 which, in its absence, is a device designed by Torquemada and his boys, and guaranteed to flay the skin from your thumb and index fingers as you rewind the film into the cassette. A process which takes about a day, by the way. Strange that one camera, the Leica M2, can have both the best and worst designed components at the same time. This jewel, fastened with a set screw, rises with the rewind knob and gives you proper leverage to do a painless and speedy job. Much sturdier than the fragile 45 degree rewind crank that first saw the light of day with the Leica M4. How quaint rewinding film seems now. Another $30. When Leica made their ‘retro look’ MP a couple of years ago, they fitted it once more with that silly rewind knob, then immediately started offering these for $180 as an accessory. No kidding!

What about that cute Olympus Stylus Quartz Date, a clamshell design 35mm point-and-shoot with a 35mm Olympus lens, auto everything, and truly pocketable? This one went around the world with me several times. Lucky if I get $30 for it.

Now for the heavy artillery. There’s that Leica Bellows, modelled on the Golden Gate when it comes to rigidity, which was the bee’s knees in close-up gear thirty years ago with your Leica M and the Visoflex mirror housing. Beyond gorgeous in construction and I still cannot seem to unload this one, a bargain at $80, which includes a couple of beautifully machined adapters.

Next a couple of whoppers. First the 200mm Telyt, an f/4 lens of wonderful sharpness and zero automation. You have to stop down by hand though, in its defence, it fits just about anything out there with the right adapters – Visoflex I, Visoflex II/II, any number of SLRs and, yes, you guessed it, even DSLRs. $179 doesn’t seem a lot, even though it has seen better days. Why sell? Well, when you have a Canon 200mm L, with auto aperture, auto focus and a stop faster to boot, why torture yourself?

Finally, the piece de resistance, the wonderful 400mm trombone focus Telyt. Sure, I have adapted this to my Canon 5D and it works fine in auto aperture priority mode; the snag is that I take one 400mm picture once in a blue moon, and frankly for those occcasions, the sensor in the 5D is so good that a simple enlargement from a snap taken with the 200mm f/2.8 L is every bit as good, with far less bulk and full automation. Beyond mint this one and superb in every way, it’s a bargain at $645, original box, shoulder brace, the whole megillah.

Now hang on a minute. That little lot, if it all sells, adds up to some $1,000+. Now I don’t need any more equipment, as I have all I need. Then again, a few more books with photographs never hurt….