The end of the beginning – 2019

Bio

A fabulous birthday gift.

These biographical pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

Words cannot express this father’s feelings when, last night, my son Winston received the below, just in time for my birthday. There could be no finer birthday gift:





Our many college visits over the past couple of years have focused on the northeast and on Ivy and Little Ivy schools, Union being one of the latter. You can read about those visits here; the index includes two visits to Union College. The little Ivies are typically one tenth of the size of the Big Ivies and focus more intensely on liberal arts studies.

To quote Winston’s illustrious namesake: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Well done, Winnie!

Automotive shantytown

Photographs

In wet collodion.




A dying breed.

Usually I find the use of antiquated photo technologies to be an exercise in pretentiousness, but this lovely photo essay on a dying automotive shantytown in Queen, New York, is an exception. The images were recorded on tintype using the wet collodion process which requires a recently moistened plate to work.

Click the image to see the essay.

How to destroy a legacy

Cameras

Give your brand to the Russkies.




The unspeakable in pursuit of the unbeatable.

Great move, Leica. Have the sausage fingered Russkies cannibalize your brand, with your permission. I recall selling Zenit SLRs as a kid working holiday jobs in camera stores in the 1960s. Not only do they remain the worst made machine I have ever handled, like their makers the product literally stank, once you removed it from the box. At least, unlike this piece of detritus, they were cheap.

That Kraut Commie Mark was right. Capitalism will hang itself with its own rope. Heck, there may even be morons out there who will shell out $7,000 for this garbage. Leica, what are you thinking of? Maybe it’s time for a medical check up for the CEO?

Of current interest

Cameras, Photography

After the clearance.

I made mention, a while back, that my gear cabinet now looks like this:





The superb camera(s) in the iPhone 11 Pro had seen all my MFT and FF gear off to eBay before all that hardware became so many worthless door stops. In terms of dynamic range, versatility, image quality, night mode, Deep Fusion, tons of computational magic and compactness, nothing compares to this superb camera …. which also happens to do lots of other things when called for. Your DSLR is as sophisticated as a hammer in comparison.

I have no regrets about that decision as I am not a collector, a species which I have never understood. Why you would want a machine in the home which is never used for its intended purpose beats me, and always has. Further, all those unused shutters and gear trains will die almost as quickly as the electronic components in modern hardware, leaving you with useless junk.

So the other day I found myself thinking what of the hardware on the market holds any interest for this photographer after, that is, upcoming iPhone Pro releases.

Well, one obvious choice is the medium format Hasselblad which weds a decent sized sensor with large pixels (meaning low noise) in a compact package.




50mp and little change from $9k with the 45mm lens.

The camera is light. Weighing in at 2.6lbs with the 45mm (35mm FFE) lens – it’s a relative featherweight for this sensor format – it has no flapping mirror, a near silent shutter and auto-focus. Reviews suggest it’s not that fast to use so studio and landscape genres suggest themselves as prime subjects.

The other camera of interest is the Leica M10-D, a street snapper where Leitz has mercifully deleted the LCD screen every camera seems to come with, allowing the snapper to get on with the job of pressing the button. That’s totally in keeping with the original Leica M aesthetic and design intent back to the M3 in 1954 and earlier.




24mp and a whopping $11,290 + tax with the 35mm Summicron.

In all my years of using digital bodies I have never used the LCD screen for anything other than formatting the card. If you cannot visualize what you are photographing until after the event and need instant confirmation, well that’s fine, but not my working method. Viewfinder, focus, compose, click, move on. Check the technical details later. 2.1 lbs for the combination which is almost as much as the Hasselblad.

Think about that.

But the Leica has a disabling feature for these aging eyes. No auto focus. In this day and age paying $3k for an MF lens with a rangefinder of middling accuracy is simply not on.

As for all the rest of them, all those tedious DSLRs and mirrorless bodies with no computational intelligence and nothing to distinguish one from another …. yawn.