Category Archives: Photography

David Hockney passes

Paintings, Photography

The greatest living artist.

David Hockney, Yorkshire born artist and some time Angeleno, has died aged 88. A two pack a day man he chose to disregard his doctors’ advice and outlived the lot. Clearly he had what I think of as the ‘Keith Richard gene’.

Acrylics, giant murals, iPad and iPhone paintings, Polaroids – Hockney did it all. And his sense of fun, his sheer joy of seeing, pervades all. After graduation from the Royal College of Art Hockney was soon selling his prodigious output, having always been a workaholic, and moved to Los Angeles the first chance he got. Heck, if you were from Yorkshire – what Monty Python once called ‘The Third World’ – you would have moved, too.

While Hockney denigrated photography as ‘not really seeing’ he was an adept user of the medium, never less than with this cover for a newly revitalized Vanity Fair:



Hockney’s shoelaces.

Then there’s this exceptional Polaroid collage of an intersection in the California desert:



Highway 138.

The book of that deYoung exhibition linked in the opening of this piece remains available and is a great introduction to (later) Hockney art.

Alfalfa

Leica, Macro

Picked on my morning walk.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

Gorgeous colors in a very small bloom.




Click the image for a larger version.

With the bloom just 3/4″ across I used the 80mm El Nikkor reversed on the Nikon BR2A ring for best resolution, all on the Nikon PB-4 bellows, making for a twice life-sized image on the sensor.

Leica SL2-S, 80mm El Nikkor f/5.6N reversed at f/16, PB-4 bellows, 3 strobes, 10 images focus stacked in Helicon Focus.

Linhof

Cameras

Large format, Leica quality.

Mention of my recently acquired Linhof Twin Shank Pro tripod prompts a further piece on the Linhof company.

The Linhof Company of Munich started business in 1887, which makes it the longest surviving camera producing business. They make medium and large format cameras to this day, and their web site is here. I’m not too sure who uses these large format film cameras any more as medium format digital easily manages to compete on output quality with far lower production costs and faster turnaround, at a comparable price. But they remain things of beauty.



The Master Technika Classic still made today.
$9,400, lens extra.

Back in the 1940-1970 time frame Leica made a bewildering range of accessories for their film cameras but they were mere pikers compared to the prodigious output of Linhof.

Click on this image to download their 1957 70th anniversary product catalog which is no less than 119 pages long:



The 1957 catalog. Click to download. 62mb so it may take a while.

In addition to a long section on the care and training of employees – right down to a picture of the resident nurse standing by to deal with machine shop injuries – there’s this wonderful image of a Leitz optical measuring machine:



The Leitz Contour Projector in the Linhof works.

Have fun perusing this wonderful journey into a past of exceptional mechanical engineering.

If 4×5 is something you want to experiment with be warned that used Linhof prices are high. A lower cost of entry – with similar functionality if lower engineering quality – can be found in the affordable Graflex range of US made cameras. I had a lot of fun with my Crown Graphic.

Spiraea

Leica, Macro

Using Helicon Focus’s Retouching feature.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.




Click the image for a larger version.

Because of the depth/tilt of the subject I used the tilt and shift functions of the Nikon PB-4 bellows to get the top and central bud/flower groups sharp:

With subjects like this with considerable depth and complexity Helicon can struggle and may render ghosted images in certain areas. The app has an excellent retouching tool which permits selection of the sharpest constituent image for that area and allows you to brush over the area with ghosting, replacing it with the correct/sharp area from the single constituent image. I had to use that tool on a couple of the leaves here which Helicon originally ghosted. It takes less time to do than to describe and is a unique feature of Helicon specifically aimed at stacked images, and not something that is available in regular processing apps like Lightroom. If you look at the leaves just above the central petal group in the enlarged version you can see a couple of ghosted areas I omitted to remove.

Here’s the setup – the camera is turned together with the bellows through 90 degrees on the tripod, whereupon the bellow’s swing front panel becomes a tilting one and the shift becomes rise/fall. Then tilt and rise are applied. The 135mm Leitz Elmar used here has a decently broad image circle, allowing this approach without robbing edge definition so long as the tilt is not too extreme. The shift function also helps by restoring the image toward the center of the image circle. Very cool and you can focus stack with far fewer images than would otherwise be called for. The 80mm El Nikkor with its larger image circle would have been a better choice for tilt and rise use, but the greater working distance of the 135mm Elmar makes lighting easier.



Tilt and shift.

Leica SL2-S, 135mm Elmar at f/16 on the Nikon PB-4 bellows, 3 strobes. 30 images focus stacked in Helicon Focus.