You don’t have to pay ridiculous Leica prices for Leica quality.

All the talk in yesterday’s column about Canon’s superb 85mm f/1.8 lens got me to thinking about how lens technologies have changed in the fifty or so years since the Canon was first designed – good designs do not die!

Multicoating was added maybe twenty years ago, brass gave way to alloys and then machined focusing helixes gave way to nylon gears and miniscule stepper motors in the lens mount. Materials got lighter and cheap aspherical surfaces (resulting from casting rather than polishing) became the norm is more specialized lenses. Exotic high diffraction glasses of yesteryear became commonplace.

So how is the user experience when comparing what I think is the finest portrait lenses ever made, the 90mm Leica Apo-Summicron Aspherical with the much less costly Canon at not much more than one eighth of the cost!

You would think the handling experience of the Leica optic on an M body would blow anything out of the water, and you would be close. The compact lines and very short throw of the focus collar on the Apo make for a sweet handling lens. All Leica Ms handle the 90mm focal length well when it comes to viewfinding, the result being that the M with the Apo is a sweet package.

Now the Canon is light for its bulk which surfaces the old prejudice that it cannot be durable. Time will tell. A surprising benefit of this bulk is that the camera and lens are very comfortable to hold, especially when oriented vertically which is the norm for most portrait pictures. Hand held the Canon has it all over the Leica in this orientation. Add the vertical grip and things probably improve further.

Then it comes to focusing and here, again, the conclusion is surprising. Nothing beats a Leica M3 rangefinder for manual focusing in the poor light of a studio environment. Nothing except for the 85mm Canon on a 5D with focusing on the central rectangle only. The old trick of focusing on the eyes then quickly recomposing was simple enough with the M3. With the 5D it’s a dream. Camera up, part depress the shutter button, recompose, click. Takes about a half second once you get into it. And it’s so dead right every time you begin to wonder how you lived without it. Depth of field is a scarcity in the portrait studio so focusing errors are cruelly revealed. Especially when you like to make 18” x 24” prints like I do.

So the new world of electronics and micromotors and LEDs and contrast sensors and on and on really has left the old world of mechanical-everything behind. Charming as that world seems, it no longer offers the best tool for the job.

Runaway winner of the 2006 Bad Taste award.

Kitsch is a German word used to describe taste so bad that you have to laugh that someone actually paid money for the item involved.

A friend (?) sent me a picture of this execrable excrescence, knowing full well it would incur my wrath. It looks too real to be a piece of Photoshop work. I was in two minds whether to share it in this journal but felt I had a duty to disclose. If you are thinking of doing this to your Leica, or maybe have already done so, please cease reading this journal. You are emphatically not a welcome reader of a journal noted for its good taste.

Before scrolling down to see the picture, please make sure you do so on an empty stomach.

The nominee shown here has to be the runaway winner of the 2006 Kitsch Award. And the year isn’t even over yet. There is no accounting what more money than taste will do.

Now you will have to scroll down – if you have the courage.

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No, that’s not your imagination. That really is a yellow Leica

Well, ball heads, to be exact.

Novoflex is a German company with a long and storied tradition of making camera gadgets. While their publicity machine in the US seems non-existent, the company for many years made a variety of adapters, bellows and follow focus mounts for Leica and other lenses which earned them a stellar reputation for quality and design. Indeed, for a while in the 1970s, you could buy the Leica 400mm and 500mm f/6.8 follow focus Telyt lenses from Leitz mounted either in the Leitz buttton release follow focus mount or in the Novoflex trigger release style.

The fact that their marketing in the US is lousy does not in any way minimize the quality of their products. Type in ‘Novoflex’ at the B&H site and you will be rewarded with no fewer than eleven pages of Novoflex products, from a $1,200 tilt bellows which can be adapted to just about any SLR made in the past fifty years, to a $19 plant holder clamp (no kidding) which can be affixed to a standard tripod screw.

Want an adapter to mount your Canon EOS lens backwards on the body for extreme close-up work? Novoflex has it. A nicely made, inexpensive, table top tripod? No problem. A forked joint, V-shaped tripod head to support the long barrel of an ultra-telephoto lens on a second tripod? You bet.

In other words, if specialty applications are your thing, there’s a good chance Novoflex makes it.

Having sold off a bunch of stuff left over from the old film camera days, I decided to reward myself with a toy. Something not essential, you understand, but nice to have. Now while I am not in any need of more cameras or lenses, having pretty much all I need, I do recall thinking that a really nice ball head for my Linhof tripod would be a good idea. Until now I have used a Leitz ball head which is very secure, the serrated ball locking firmly with very little force on the knob, but because I like to have both my tripod and monopod in the trunk of the car at all times, I concluded that one necessary luxury would be a second ball head. The Leitz could make its home premanently on the monopod, and the new head would live on the tripod. Like an old rather affluent friend who keeps mistresses in several of the world’s great cities. Luxury indeed!

Go to the Ball Heads section of the B&H site and you will find no fewer than nine pages’ worth. Phew! Sort in price order and the costliest, from Arca-Swiss, comes in at nearly $800. Now I like quality as much as the next man but I am not insane. Go down a few pages and you come across a truly funky one, suggesting that the folks at Apple are not the only ones who ‘Think Different’. It is, of course, from Novoflex, and is sold in three sizes (mine is the smallest – the ‘MiniMagic’). Here is how it compares with that inspired and ancient Leitz design:

The Novoflex MiniMagic ball head next to the full size Leitz one

In the above picture both heads are fitted with Manfrotto quick release tripod plates. The design of the Novoflex permits unobstructed rotation of the camera without having to locate the ’90 degree slot’ you can see on the Leitz design. Some inspired designer at Novoflex has basically flipped the design and made the base of the head accept the camera, mounting the ball on the tripod. Genius.

Electric blue adds a nice touch of fun to the inspired design

Novoflex states that the head will support 11 lbs, which means three Canon 5Ds with the standard zoom lens fitted. That’s a lot of weight.

Flipped 90 degrees the nylon friction pads are revealed. Cleaning the ball could not be easier.

The head is fastened by rotating the large serrated protruding handle.

Novoflex makes two larger variants, capable of supporting 15 and 22 lbs., respectively, but for 35mm and medium format work the smallest seems more than adequate, weighing in at all of 11.5 ozs. The larger ones come with friction control, but it’s not something I need; for that matter, gently tightening the handle confers an adequate level of friction control with this model, should you require that to level the camera with small incremental movements. Also, realize that you would have to add the Novoflex Universal Panorama plate if you want calibrated, level rotation, but for panoramas I think you are far better off with something like a proper panoramic head with nodal point offset.

A toy, you say? Think again!

In practice the head is wonderfully easy to use, nothing ever gets in the way, and you can rotate the camera well past 90 degrees for those occasions where your tripod is not especially level. It looks just super on my old Linhof tripod. Recommended without reservations; even the price of $240 seems reasonable for something you will use the rest of your life. And that old Leitz head? Happy as a clam on the Manfrotto monopod, one of the best tools I know of to make your lens deliver its best.

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?