Category Archives: Lenses

A Gorgeous Bit o’ Bottle

Lenses

Just mind you don’t fall in the water.

Hearst Castle is the most popular tourist destination in central California so I took the precaution of booking a ticket in advance rather than be faced with a long wait for the tour bus which takes you some two thousand feet above sea level to Hearst’s opulent home. While I may have trashed Hearst for his part in dragging down the quality of journalism, a visit to his Castle on the central coast makes me feel a lot better about how he spent his money. As one of the tour guides pointed out, this magpie of a man expended some 78 of his 81 years collecting, starting with a trip to Europe aged three when he asked his mother why they couldn’t simply buy all the the things he liked. Got to like that!

While waiting for the bus – I chose Tour 2 which takes in the upper levels with all the living quarters, the kitchen and the two pools – I chanced on a fellow photographer using a pretty exotic looking Canon L lens finished in white enamel. Now I had seen these things at televised sports events but had never actually encountered someone actually using one, so my curiosity was piqued.

I confess to being in two minds about that red stripe that Canon places on its best glass. On the one hand it tells fellow photographers that you are serious (or maybe just seriously rich) about your images. On the other, it smacks vaguely of driving around in a Rolls Royce or Mercedes. Rather ostentatious and an invitation to thieves everywhere. Short of resorting to brush and paint, there’s really no simple way of blacking out the offending red stripe, unlike the ease with which electrician’s tape can be used to take out the obnoxious markings on the camera’s body.

Mick M. responded that the lens was a 70-200mm f/2.8 L zoom, and an impressive piece it is. Hard not to be noticed with all that white paint which, I suppose, must leave the nature photographer for ever seeking camouflage. Mick then opened his camera bag to disclose a veritable cornucopia of Canon L glass. Let’s see, there was a 24-70mm zoom, an 85mm f/1.2 portrait lens (yes, f/1.2!), an extender for the zoom and a strange looking duck with an enormous, bulbous front element. Proferring it, Mick explained this was a 14mm f/2.8 ultra wide angle. Not a fish eye. A genuine wide angle. This, I confess, had me greatly intrigued, and when Mick explained that his cameras were a 20D and 10D, the fact that these have small image sensors led me to pounce.

“Why not stick that wide on my 5D and see what 14mm really feels like?”. It was the only trump card I held, what with the one body and just the 24-105 L on it.

What ensued was that the loudest sound to be heard in Hearst Castle’s parking lot was that of jaws dropping. Mick’s, when he held the camera up to his eye, and mine shortly after. Now I had used a 21mm Asph Elmarit on my Leica for many years, to the extent that in some ways it had become my standard lens. Despite the cheesy, distorting, plastic viewfinder it came with, the lens itself was seemingly perfect in every way. Sharp at all apertures, compact and distortion free, it left nothing to be desired optically. Point it into the sun and flare was noticeable by its absence. The Leica 21mm has moved on once I concluded that 24mm at the short end of the Canon’s zoom range was fine for my purposes, but not without a twang or two on the heartstrings. We had become firm friends.

I can only guess that there is some sort of macho rivalry between lens makers – maybe I should refer to them as programmers – when it comes to making the widest lenses. I checked B&H and Leica has a 15mm for their reflex camera (costing about as much as a new car, needless to add), Nikon has a 14mm, and the various after-market manufacturers have 14s and 15s aplenty. Given that all of these run $1000 or more, they can hardly be mass market items and about the only use I can envisage on a daily basis is for unscrupulous realtors looking to make interiors larger. “Here is the bathroom” instantly become “Here is the palatial bathroom”.

Nonetheless, the impact of the lens in the viewfinder was overwhelming, and framing with it, walking towards a subject, gave this user a distinct feeling of unsteadiness owing to the width of the field of view, far in excess of what the human eye perceives. To cut a long story short, Mick very generously offered me the use of the 14mm and I reciprocated with the use of my 5D into which he needed only place one of his digital film cards to have a go. I got first go and on arriving at Hearst’s home in the sky one of the first sights was the outdoor pool. The weather was just so, a wisp of a cloud or two in the sky and a pleasant mild day in California. How do people in the mid-west get through the winter?

Having a fair amount of experience with ultra-wide lenses I knew enough to avoid the bane of all these optics which is boring, extraneous foreground. You really have to get in close, so I proceeded to attack the pool with aplomb, forced to sight through the finder, never having used something this wide before. I can ‘think’ 21mm, but 14mm is like a scene from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ by comparison. And vertigo was the order of the day as I teetered on the edge of Hearst’s ten foot deep outdoor pool! Now you absolutely have to use the hood with this lens, if for no other reason than there is no way to protect the cyclopean front element with a filter. It is simply too bulbous. And here’s a snap of the pool taken with Mick’s lens.

Though taken directly into the light, the lens seems flare free with just one small internal reflection visible in the picture. An extraordinary piece of design and execution. Will I be rushing out to buy one? No way. It’s the sort of thing I would use once a year and is inconsistent with my desire to minimize equipment, but thank you, Mick, for your generosity in allowing me to take a few pictures with this gorgeous bit o’ bottle.

If you would like to see a travelogue of a few more snaps from Hearst Castle, please click here.

And for a cheaper, wider, better lens than the 14mm, just click here.

On Leica cameras

Cameras, Lenses

Beware of the Leica camera. It starts as a romance. Soon, it is an affair. Before you know it, flirtation blossoms into passion. Finally, it settles into infatuation. The four stages of a lifetime relationship.

Someone one asked me why I use a Leica when all around use an SLR. Why film when digital is the standard? Fast, instant results, low cost. My glib reaction was not unlike that of the Ferrari driver. “If you have to ask, you do not get it.” But that is no answer.

In truth, it is hard to explain an irrational attraction to this wonderful machine, the Leica camera. After all, it just takes pictures, right? It cannot do close-ups, right? And what is that you say? You have to process then scan the film? Ugh! Worse, like all infatuations, it can get dangerously expensive, no?

Then again, why even bother with this antiquated technology, unless it is some sort of affectation, a preference to live in the past, some perverse desire just to be different?

The SLR is superior in so many ways. A huge range of lenses. You bet. Automatic focus? Naturally. Shake reduction? You got it. Extreme zoom range? But of course. Macro capability? Every one has it. Motor drive? Would that be three or six shots per second, sir? Digital? Hard to get anything else today. Several hundred or thousand pictures a roll? Standard. Instant gratification? Naturally. 5, 10 or 15 megapixels? Take your choice.

However, maybe yours is a quieter world, eschewing the crass vernacular that is modern life. You value performance and results, not promises and looks. You appreciate iPods and cell phones as much as the next person. They are just not you.

Then you have one of those flashbacks. And all is clear as memories created with that ever present, sweet, speedy, silent Leica come flooding back.

Spring in Paris was especially welcoming that year, the air with that indefinable smell. Beauty, culture, women, food. The couture attired lady and her cocker glance up at you for the briefest of moments, unaware that their image has already been recorded. The spectator looks curiously at her friend, the latter surveying the nude on the wall of the Louvre with unusual interest, captured in an instant. The morning promenaders in the Jardin de Tuileries caught just so. A fraction of a second later and the scene is gone, its denizens no longer perfectly arranged like some latter day Seurat canvas.

Summer in San Francisco. The old man makes his way along the narrow sun lit street. Echoes of Edward Hopper’s lonely city abound in the lazy afternoon sun. He does not even know you took his picture, yet you were all of a few feet away. The little boy in the back of the pick-up in Union Square, lost in wonder, is another easy catch, before the swirl of traffic whisks him away. Did you take that? No, it took itself.

Autumn in New York. The sky has the pallor of cold cream. You are on walkabout, just for fun. Maybe something interesting will crop up. Then there it is. The huge Yogi Bear balloon overhead. It’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Click. You are enjoying your warming drink in one of those cozy Madison Avenue coffee shops, when a red flash catches the corner of your eye. No time to think. The soft, instantaneous camera shutter is released even before the viewfinder is at the eye. That blurred umbrella will forever say Autumn in New York. Clouds of steam emanate seemingly from his head, as the rain-coated man makes his way down Park Avenue, shoulders hunched, hands buried deep in his Burberry to stave off the cold. You take the picture without even thinking, focusing a matter of a moment, exposure second nature. You are in direct contact with what you see. No mirror, no motors, no flashing lights. Just a simple viewfinder. I am a camera.

Winter in London. The light is, well, London light. Gloom, rain, depression. Yet click, the girl in the railcar is caught, the iris unthinkingly turned to full aperture, the shutter as slow as you dare, too quiet to arrest her slumber. Hope that one comes out, you think. And of course it does. The little boy marches behind the band down Pall Mall, stretching his legs as far as he can. A young man in the making. Click. He is yours for ever. The dowager outside the Rolls Royce showroom gives you an icy stare. How dare you, she is thinking. Too late. Got her!

That ubiquitous Leica, quiet, unassuming, its amateur looks aiding the whole deception of invisibility, its petite size making sure that it is your constant companion, it is a machine that transcends time and technology. Not very good at lots of things at which its marvelous technological superiors excel. One day it, too, will be digital, with all the advantages that storage medium offers. And it will be fast. But it will never pretend to be a Swiss Army Knife for it knows one thing.

It is there for the moment that it alone can capture. And it is always with you.