Category Archives: Photography

Redwoods redux

Photography, Technique

The next trip will be to take VR panoramas.

While I wait for my panorama head to be delivered, there’s a three week waiting list, here’s the first venue I will be visiting for some ‘serious’ virtual reality panoramas:


Redwoods. Crown Graphic 4″ x 5″, Kodak VC160.

I’m hoping that a 180 x 360 degree panorama, where you will be able to mouse up, down and all around, will finally convey the sheer size of these magnificent California redwoods, something I have never done to my satisfaction with regular still pictures. No, I will not be using a film camera….

You can read more about Virtual Reality photography here.

One of the best practitioners of the genre is a fine French Photographer named Eric Rougier and I urge you to visit his web site and enjoy the many panoramas there. To really see what VR is all about, just take a look at the interior of Notre Dame in Rougier’s magnificent interactive panorama.

So you thought f/1.4 was fast?

Lenses

How about f/0.85 back in 1934?

‘Glamor’ lenses for 35mm cameras, the ones with bragging power, have either entailed large apertures or extreme length.

On the extreme length end, it was rather like the cubic capacity of motorcycles. Once you hit the magic thousand, you had bragging rights. So when Vincent motorcycles (then known as HRD) came out with its magnificent Series A twin in 1936, it was a ‘thousand’ (actually 998 ccs) that graced the frame and made it the talk of the town. On the lens front, thousand mm lenses have been around for ever, even if they were never priced at amounts the amateur could afford. No, you had to use someone else’s money to buy a Zeiss Mirotar 1000mm mirror lens for your Contarex back in the sixties. That or choose between a car and that lens. Nikon already had lenses of this length and greater. Canon had a 1200mm ages ago and it was a regular refractive rather than mirror optic, some 853mm long. That’s almost three feet! Get one of these and you could say yours was longer than anyone else’s with little fear of contradiction.

The Canon 1200mm f/8 telephoto lens

Quite how you were meant to keep this monster steady unless your tripod was built like the Maginot Line is unclear to me, but hey!, you were the big guy on the block so who cared? Sure, Nikon had the 2000mm mirror lens, weighing in at 40 lbs. but, let’s face it, it was barely two feet long so the only bragging rights it conferred was how long it took you to recover from the hernia induced by lifting it on your tripod. Or, for that matter, from lifting the tripod sans lens if it was one sturdy enough.

The Nikon 2000mm f/11 mirror lens

So long was long and nowadays these monsters are as passÄ— as bell bottoms and wide flower ties. Reminders of silly one upmanship and passing fads. The longest Nikon and Canon lenses I can find in the B&H catalog are 1000mm (a mirror lens with a modest f/11 aperture) and 600mm (with a whopping f/4 maximum), respectively.

But for the average man in the street, fast was always more intriguing than long. If his ship came in, a nice 50mm f/1.4 was more likely to grace his camera than a 2000mm f/11. Heck, you could actually use the thing. Indeed, even before WW2, Leica and Zeiss offered f/1.5 50mm lenses. Back as far as 1925 Erich Salomon was taking his great candids with an Ermanox 4.5 x 6cm plate camera fitted with an f/1.8 lens. So speed goes back a few years. Once modern anti-reflective coatings started to be used about 1942 (wars and technological progress being synonymous) these lenses began to transmit something close to their stated apertures. Later Leica gave the world the Summilux, an f/1.4, originally a 50mm and later joined by 35mm and 75mm versions. All superb.

In 1953 Zunow came out with an SLR, largely made of pure cheddar with an f/1.1 lens. Four were sold and have never been heard of since. I recall seeing one and that lens was certainly impressive to look at. In 1956 Nikon equalled them with an f/1.1 for its screw thread Leica clones.

So in 1961, not to be outdone, Canon came up with the 50mm f/0.95 for its Canon 7 rangefinder cameras which used a Leica thread mount. So large was the lens it had a separate external bayonet mount to fit around the standard mount on the camera body. User comment suggests this was truly one of the worst lenses of all time but, what the hell, it was under f/1.0! “Brighter than the human eye” the advertisements screamed. I’ll bet it sold a lot of Canon 7 bodies with f/1.8 lenses. You could always say you could get three faster lenses in case of need – f/1.4, f/1.2 and this worthless wonder.

The Canon 50mm f/0.95 lens. Like most marketing exercises, fast and worthless.

By the way, Canon tried again with a 50mm f/1 lens in their ‘L’ line early in the 21st century. Testifying to the poor performance of that lens, suggesting Canon had learned little from their prior experience, that lens was discontinued a couple of years ago and now has, you guessed it, collectible status. Must make for a nice paperweight, I suppose.

Leitz’s approach was different. The German character, not renowned for its sense of humor, reckoned that anything faster than f/1.4 actually had to be capable of taking sharp pictures, so they took it in baby steps, first coming up with the f/1.2 Noctilux with its exotic and costly aspherical element. Needless to say, the lens was superb and the limited production run of some 2,000 has ensured its collectible value. Meaning, sadly, hardly anyone uses one of these any more, most rotting in some collector’s cage.

It took Leica another 10 years to work out how to do it with spherical glasses and how to make it faster, and the f/1.0 Noctilux was born in 1976. It remains in production to this day and is probably the first useable f/1.0 lens for a 35mm camera ever made.

But Leitz always were horrible at marketing. Had they but searched their long and distinguished history, they would have found this and it was made in 1934 with an aperture of f/0.85! Or maybe they knew and were embarassed that 42 years later they could only manage f/1.0?

The Leitz 75mm f/0.85 Summar. From Theo Scheerer’s ‘The Leica and the Leica System’, Fountain Press, 1962

And you thought f/1.4 was fast?

By the way, want a $300 f/0.70 lens which will blow any of the above away for definition? Simple. Place that inexpensive Canon 50mm f/1.4 on your EOS 5D, set the speed to 1600 ISO and enjoy finer grain than TriX film at 400 ISO. Two stops gained from f/1.4 make it an f/0.70 with the depth of field and definition of an f/1.4. So Canon finally made a decent sub-f/1.0 lens, by virtue of that wonderful full frame sensor in the 5D!

A great Quick Release tripod attachment

Cameras

A fine QR head system that can only have been designed by a photographer.

A few years ago the very idea of a tripod was anathema to this photographer. Sure, I knew about them and tended to regard them with emotions somewhere between pity and contempt. As a Leica using street photographer there was no way on this God’s earth I was going to use a tripod. Lenses longer than 90mm simply did not compute and TriX, pushed if necessary to 800ASA, and those wonderful, fast Leica lenses, all suggested a tripod was – well, just not done.

Then, as my interests graduated to include landscapes and longer lenses, the tripod once more reared its ugly head, so a few years ago I picked up a nice old Linhof for a few dollars. The good thing about this tripod is that the legs are cantilevered, meaning extra bracing with little increase in weight. The bad was that it came with a pan and tilt head which has to be one of the worst designs of all time. The scale markings are never visible when needed, they are not calibrated, and the locking knobs are so small and inaccessible that they represent nothing so much as an accident waiting to happen. A few dollars later and a nice, if well used, Leitz ball and socket head graced the top of the Linhof’s center column.

I came across that genuinely rotten pan and tilt head the other day when first dipping a toe in the waters of Virtual Reality photography. Since that first encouraging experiment, I have decided to invest in a proper panorama head with a rotating base and nodal point correction, so this time it really is curtains for that pan and tilt head. I have yet to find any use for this wretched design in the field of still photography. A ball and socket head is not only easier to use, when it comes to turning the camera through a right angle there’s simply no contest.

Enough grumbling. When I got sort of serious about tripod use I realized all that screwing the camera on and off the tripod was just so much waste of time, not to mention the risk factor of dropping the camera while messing about with the locking knob. So I searched around only to be astounded at the ridiculously high prices asked for most quick release devices, many tailored to a specific manufacturer’s tripod line. Finally I tracked down an importer of Sima products who did a nice resin QR base with small and light plates which attached to the camera’s base. These worked OK, though truth be told they were somewhat overpowered by larger cameras and lenses. After the effort of selling all my medium format gear and replacing it with the Canon EOS 5D, I decided to rethink the QR issue, especially now that the camera body whose life depended on the QR head ran some $3,000! A good used Leica M2 or M3 body at $1,000 is no joke, but we are talking the price of three of these in that full frame digital wonder that is Canon’s claim to the Greatest Camera on Earth.

What finally forced me to get my act together was the enthusisam I feel for Virtual Reality photography. Given that this requires a tripod to be lugged to the venue of choice and much mounting and unmounting of camera, panorama head, etc., I did some serious research and came up with a very reasonably priced range of quick release tripod adjuncts from Manfrotto (imported by Bogen to the US). So while waiting for the three week backlog on the panorama head of choice to clear (more about this later) I procured a handful of Manfrotto’s best and have to say I am delighted with both the quality, the ergonomics and the price. That’s a combination I have yet to encounter in a woman. Whenever the first two factors are just so, you can bet the third is out of sight.

Here’s the #3299 base ($28) with the included camera plate. The base has an ingenious safety lock which has to be released to permit the large lever to move which, in turn, releases the camera plate. The metal used is a light alloy, more than up to the job. It’s the sort of pot metal used in low stress car components like door handles on German cars or just about anywhere in the case Italian automobiles. Manfrotto is, come to think of it, an Italian company.

For a fairly heavy camera like the 5D you really want to avoid torquing sheer hell out of the attaching bolt in the interest of the camera’s safety. Even though the camera plate has a substantial rubber platform, a long heavy lens with no tripod socket of its own (like Canon’s 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ say), with the camera oriented vertically is going to need more fastening torque than I am comfortable with. Manfrotto thought of that when they designed the #3157NR plate ($12) (11/2008 update: the plate is now named the 200PLARCH-14RC2, is identical and now costs $19 from Amazon – it now comes properly assembled for use with the 5D and no messing with the circlip is required) :

Note the finger hold which precludes the need for a screwdriver when attaching the plate to the base of the camera. The essence of this plate is that it has a small lip which abuts the base of the camera, replacing torque with physical restraint, as shown in the following snap:

Depending on the design of your camera you may have to remove a small retaining circlip (E clip) for the bolt and flip the head around as I had to do this with the 5D which requires the lip abuts the rear of the camera. On others it may have to go towards the front, which is how it is shipped. No big deal, and clearly explained in the excellent instructions. While the camera plate does block access to the small battery compartment for the camera’s clock, in practice that has only to be accessed every five years or so, so it’s hardly an issue.

Here’s the whole thing mounted on my Linhof with its Leitz ball head:

In this underside view, with the camera oriented for portraits, you can see the small brass quick release lever – note the unrestricted access to the main battery compartment:

To attach the camera, you simply place the base plate with camera attached, front tilted slightly forward, into the tripod base. As you level the camera into the tripod base the camera plate depresses a small brass button in the tripod base which in turn releases the lever and locks the camera in place. You then rotate the brass safety lever which has the effect of locking the release lever in place. On one of the two tripod bases I bought the big lever would not click all the way home without manual assistance but after a few mount/dismount cycles all was well. Nonetheless, I would suggest you press the big lever home just in case, to ensure all is tight. Then operate the brass safety lock.

To remove the camera, release the safety lock and pull back on the big lever.

How does it compare size wise with the little Sima? See for yourself:

The overall size of the tripod base is much the same but the surface area of the camera plate is maybe twice the size. And no screwdriver is needed unlike with the Sima. The whole assembly is very rigid, even with a really heavy camera like the Crown Graphic with a heavy telephoto lens extended all the way.

If you are buying one of these, do realize that the tripod base comes with one plate (no lip) so buy additional plates as needed for your equipment. I used the two flat plates for my 4″ x 5″ Crown Graphic where the lip would not work owing to the large flat mounting surfaces involved; the Crown takes one plate either side so it can be switched effortlessly from landscape to portrait mode. One of the tripod plates went on the Linhof tripod, the other on the Manfrotto monopod. And lest you think that small Leitz ball head can’t handle it, let me assure you these things were probably used to raise the Golden Gate Bridge during construction. Doesn’t have to be big to be strong, and you can pick these up for some $100 used, which is a lot less than the going rate for all those exotic ball heads on the market. I mean, really. $750 for a ball head? That is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.

Simple lines and colors

Panasonic, Photographs

Sometimes a simple abstraction strikes you, and you press the button.

Simple colors. Simple lines. An air of mystery. What is around that corner?

Lines and colors. Panasonic Lumic LX1, ISO100.

With the small Lumix LX1 and its superb Leica lens, there really is no excuse. Nowadays I always carry a camera, in contrast to those occasions where even the compact Leica M3 and its small 35mm lens were too much to lug around. The only thing to remember is a spare battery.

Kodachrome

Book reviews, Photography

Everything looks worse in black and white

Smirking with ridiculously self-satisfied glee at a joke he has just told to the wife of one of his flunkies, Hitler reaches for the cookie bowl. His pasty faced complexion contrasts strangely with the tanned, Aryan health evidenced on the woman’s beaming face, her gingham dress replete with red and white stripes.

Turn the page and there’s a post-Bitzkrieg Warsaw in September, 1939, its ancient buildings just so much rubble, with a proud, well fed line of Wehrmacht soldiers guarding their spoils, grey helmets shining in the sun, the sky a pure azure, doubtless wondering about that evening’s forthcoming excesses at the cost of their Polish captives.

One more page and Rotterdam is in ruins, one hour after the German bombardment, the sky a threatening dark indigo this time.

One more page and it’s the turn of the French, surrounded by German troops, brown shirts everywhere.

Yet another page and there’s a rotund, self-satisfied German actress in Hitler’s Chancellery, massive gold necklace and ruby red lips glistening just so in the Berlin of 1940. Enjoy it while you can, baby.

The sheer depressing nature of these pictures, blow after blow after blow, each speaking to the Master Race’s self-pronounced superiority, has a strange way of jolting the viewer into reality. Suddenly you are wide-eyed with amazement when you realize all these pictures, by unnamed photographers, were taken on Kodachrome.

Many, many years later Paul Simon was to crystallize the essence of this very American invention in the lyrics of his song. He was doubtless writing about the demise of TriX:

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of edu—cation
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they’d never match
my sweet imagination
everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Leave your boy so far from home
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

And if you want to catch the spirit of the piece, go no further than the lovely Coneheads on DVD, to see what I mean.

The Leica may have been the greatest machine invented for photography, and its gritty, grainy black and white film stock enshrined an era seen through the eyes of street photographers everywhere. But the snaps were not color. And pragmatic Americans, ever looking for the latest gadget, the true reality, wanted color. So Kodak gave them Kodachrome.

The single greatest photographic invention since the Leica.

The book is ‘Kodachrome, 1939-1959, The American Invention of our World’, and you can get it for chump change from Amazon.

Yalta, 1945. Stalin decides the future of Western Europe while WSC and FDR look on. Click the picture.

It is, perhaps, unfair to refer to this as Kodak’s invention, though Kodak deserves credit for letting two professional musicians, one a pianist, the other a violinist, take up laboratory space in upstate New York in 1930. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. just happened to be keen amateur photographers and geniuses at chemistry. Clearly, God did not allocate talent equally. After thirteen years of research, Kodak announced Kodachrome on April 12, 1935 as the first continuous tone color film. Imagine a thirteen year development cycle for anything today.

That early emulsion faded badly but by 1938 the Leopolds (‘Man’ and ‘God’ as they were known in Rochester) got it right and the Kodachrome you can still – if only just – buy today is little changed. Best of all, unlike any other color film ever made, processed and properly stored it is virtually fade proof. History may not record how Mannes and Godowsky felt about their emulsion being used to photograph the creator of the Final Solution, but the oh! so satisfying picture of German prisoners of war in a prison cage on Normandy beach (page 44) doubtless warmed the cockles of their hearts, especially as it was taken on the emulsion they created.

Kodachrome in 1938 was some 12 ASA in speed. Later, as Kodachrome II it became 25 ASA, where it stayed until being discontinued, now as Kodachrome 25 (I suppose that sounded faster) a couple of years ago. Meanwhile Kodak had also added Kodachrome X (later Kodachrome 64) and Kodachrome 200. For years, such was the repute of this emulsion, National Geographic would only accept Kodachrome slides for reproduction in its pages.

Jane Russell frolicked in the hay for all to admire for a poster for her film ‘The Outlaw’ in 1944. Howard Hughes, who bankrolled the movie, famously remarked “There are just two reasons to go and see her”, summarizing succinctly what every American male was thinking. Americans were happy in 1944, if not gay, and Kodachrome captured Jane’s …. womanhood just so. No one organized a protest, men continued to eat red meat and smoke Marlboros, and women had 2.4 children and craved a starter home in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. Political correctness, refuge of cowards and lawyers, had yet to raise its ugly head. Marlene Dietrich looked ravishing in Kodachrome and jewels in 1948 (it’s OK, she was on our side) and General Douglas MacArthur could look macho in his jeep in 1950. Doubtless the vain General liked what Kodachrome did for him, even if Harry Truman later fired him for insubordination.

So a vital part of the chronology of American life, of what it meant to be American, is recorded for all time on fade free Kodachrome, in true colors that tell how it was.

There’s Elizabeth Taylor, ravishing in a white dress. The young JFK with Jacqueline Bouvier, film stars both, enjoying a game of tennis. Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson helping destroy one of the last great bastions of White American bigotry, baseball. Marilyn entertaining the troops, her generous lines lovingly rendered. Hitchcock looking like … well, like Hitchcock, ruddy pink face and cigar. Kodachromes all. The El still ran in New York and Kodachrome proves it. Gamine Audrey Hepburn and blowsy Jayne Mansfield showed their true colors. Tarty Shirley MacLaine juxtaposed with a sneering Elvis. Zapruder used Kodachrome in his 8mm movie camera to record JFK’s murder in Dallas. Tricky Dick tried to look like presidential material next to Ike. Not very successfully, let it be said. Even Kodachrome could not hide the fact that his sly smile might just be something to worry about. And even the great Walker Evans got in on the act with a storefront snap in Kodachrome, though in this instance it’s only fair to add that he should have stuck to black and white.

I used Kodachrome exclusively during the period 1977 through 1990. The absence of grain, the consistency of processing by Kodak, the tonal range and color accuracy, all were simply wonderful. Eventually color negative films would rival, maybe surpass, these qualities, and once you could scan the originals and save them to properly backed-up hard disks, fading ceased to be an issue. For in much the same way as I used TriX during the years 1971-1977, Kodak showed what world class products were all about.

You can still get Kodachrome. K25 is no more and Kodak doesn’t want you to know about the alternative as evidenced by a search on their web site:

But go the the B&H web site and Kodachrome 64 can still be had in 35mm cassettes, in 64 and 200 ASA speeds. Only one lab remains in America that can perform the wildly complex processing of this emulsion, and the lovely 120 film size disappeared years ago, as I found to my cost. Unearthing two rolls from the dark recesses of the film shelf in the fridge the other day, it transpired that no one, not even Kodak UK, processed this size any more. Oh! well, I had to throw them out. Just think, through the late 1950s you could get Kodachrome in sizes up to 8″ x 10″. Imagine that. Today it’s 35mm or nothing.

And the inventors? Kodak’s historians have wiped them from the memory banks. Search on Mannes or Godwosky and you get nothing. Shameful.


Matanuska Valley, Alaska, 1978. Leica M3, 50mm Summicron. Kodachrome II.
Taken by this newly affluent immigrant shortly after arriving in America.
At last I could afford not just color film, but Kodachrome, no less.

So if you still use film but have never used Kodachrome, please rush and get one of the remaining rolls now. Your scanner’s dust removal software will not work (silver is required in the emulsion for that and Kodachrome has none), it’s not especially fast by today’s standards, but do you really want to go to your grave and say “I never used Kodachrome?”. No, I didn’t think so.


Lake Elizabeth, California, 1990. Leicaflex SL, 180mm Apo-Telyt-R. Kodachrome 64. One of my
last Kodachrome pictures. After that, scanners became affordable and Kodak color negative film,
impermanent as it may be, provided a far faster processing turnaround.