Murals

Photographs

Off the wall.

As long as I can remember I have had a fascination with murals. In addition to presenting a visual history of a time and place they fade gracefully and can add a particular sense of poignancy to a location.

Click the picture below and you will be redirected to my photo site with a selection of two dozen favorites from recent years.

Click to view.

These were taken on a wide variety of gear – from the Panasonic G1 at the high-tech end of the scale to a Crown Graphic 4″ x 5″ at the no-tech end.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Movies, Photographs

A Western masterpiece.

It took an Italian to make the greatest Western movie of all time. When Sergio Leone came to make Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) he already had three of the finest Westerns under his belt – The Man with No Name trilogy with Clint Eastwood. But for this, his final effort in the genre, he set out to surpass himself. He did so, in spades.

Forget Shane, forget The Searchers, forget High Noon, forget The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, forget The Long Riders.

Once Upon a Time in the West is in a class of One.

What makes this masterpiece so special? A great director, of course, who has an innate grasp of what the railroad meant to America’s growth in the nineteenth century and an organic sense of the great expanses of the west. A script which is direct, simple and easy to follow. The finest actors – you cannot make a great movie with pikers. Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards. You can’t improve on that. Superb cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. But the glue that holds the whole project together and escalates it to greatness is Ennio Morricone’s extraordinary score, in turns lush, comical, poignant, tragic and triumphal.

At almost three hours in length this is not a movie for modern attention spans. Nor is it one for poky screens. With a 100″ screen you begin to understand what Leone demands – that you must be totally immersed in the picture, at one with the landscape of Monument Valley and the West. But you really need to see this in a revival house on something 250″ or more in glorious widescreen, which fits the infinite vistas of the west just so. And if you have never been through Monument Valley in Utah and Arizona, you must go. Your appreciation of the vastness of the west will redound to your enjoyment of the movie.

Not only is the whole an immersive, captivating experience, there are individual pieces of magic which, even out of context, are memorable like in no other Western. The opening 14 minute sequence, with barely a word spoken, culminates in an explosive shoot out. Yet during those fourteen minutes you are treated to an orgy of sound – wind, creaking floorboards, rusty signs swaying, the ticker tape machine, the fabulous sequence of Jack Elam with the fly – it’s all there. And it is magic.

Here are some favorite vignettes:

Jack Elam, awaiting Bronson’s train.

Al Mulock in an extraordinary ultra wide close-up, awaits Bronson’s train.

A sadistic Henry Fonda about to kill the McBain child in cold blood.

This was Fonda’s only bad guy rôle, and his greatest by far. The mix of sadism and delight in what he is about to do in the original is palpable and chilling.

When Cardinale’s character arrives in Flagstone, the railroad town in Monument Valley, there follows what is simply the greatest soaring pan shot in cinema history. Not even Hitchcock comes close to anything like this and only Kubrick’s opening Steadicam work in ‘The Shining’ even compares.

She enters the station house:

The camera then rises in the air and soars over the building , showing her exiting the other side:

Morricone’s music soars with the camera and there, in one 10 second sequence, you have a perfect encapsulation of what America’s nineteenth century growth was all about. The effect simply cannot be conveyed in a static web page.

Jason Robards’s lovable bandit rogue provides comic relief, suitably aided by Morricone’s score.

There are many stunning still photographs, like this one of Claudia Cardinale.

Perhaps the most memorable still is of Cardinale lying on her bed after attending her husband’s funeral. The shot, from above, views her through a black veil.

One of the most effective techniques used by Leone is the super close-up of the many craggy faces in the movie, never more effectively than with Bronson’s. On a huge screen this is quite overwhelming.

Bronson at the final shootout with Fonda.

An orgy of pictures, sound, emotions, the triumph of right over wrong, this is any photographer’s ultimate movie.

Update February 28, 2016:

Ennio Morricone just won the Oscar for the best film score for his music to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Hateful Eight’ at the age of 87. The oldest ever recipient of an Oscar. He should have received it 48 years earlier for ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Or for ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ in 1966. Or for ‘The Mission’ in 1986. Or for ‘Bugsy’ in 1991. Or …. heck, this will do fine. Just delighted for him.

Update July 5, 2020:

Ennio passed away.

Fuji disappoints – again

Fuji

Good try, no cigar.

Having flipped my Fuji X100 for a quick profit, sight unseen, box unopened a while back, predicated on the realization that its software made even Microsoft Windows ’95 look good, I was excited to read about their latest offering, the X10.

Everything about it at first glance looks right. A fast f/2-2.8, 28-112 zoom lens, a real optical zooming finder (you know, like the Olympus C5050 had a century ago), and an ergonomic design that just screams ‘hold me’. Then you get to the sensor.

The Fuji X10.

APS-C? Nope.

OK then, MFT? Nope.

How about (get the barf bag) a 6.8mm x 8.8mm (euphemistically called a 2/3″ in the trade to fool buyers – last I checked 2/3″ was around 17mm) piece of doo-doo? That’s all of 58 sq. mm., compared with 225 for MFT, 329 for APS-C and 864 for full frame. So the area of the crappy little sensor in this largish body is but one quarter of that in the G1, and the latter struggles with noise above ISO 400 or in poor light. No need to say more.

There is a fortune waiting for the manufacturer who can make a body just like this and implant a proper sensor for, goodness knows, there’s enough room in there. Price it as a premium compact, sell it for $750 (15 of these gets you an obsolete Leica M9), and you clean up. How hard can that be?

Meanwhile, I continue to wait on Amazon to ship my G1 upgrade, the G3, an event I now expect to occur when the US balances its budget.

Here’s the X10 superimposed on the outline of the Panasonic G3 – think there’s room for a proper sensor in the X10?

X10 with G3 profile in red.

The extra height of the G3 results from the flash in the ‘prism’ hump, easily moved to the side, as the X10 does.

A smart move from Panasonic

Micro Four-Thirds

Exploiting movie quality.

It’s no great secret among amateur movie makers that the Panasonic GH2 MFT still camera is also a state-of-the-art movie camera.

Click the picture for more.

The above link will take you to a full description of the GH2’s movie capabilities and will also allow viewing of movies made using the camera. The appeal of the GH2 over the (still waiting for mine!) G3 is that it accepts professional microphones, as opposed to limiting the user to a poor built-in one.

Now Panny has done something very smart in its recent announcement of two lenses which are clearly aimed at movie makers. With a software update the GH2 will be able to use power zoom with these optics, with variable zoom speeds. This makes for smooth zooming and a professional result. Two lenses have been announced, the ‘X’ in each designating the power zoom option.

These give an aggregate zoom range of 28 to 350mm FFE which will fulfill most movie making needs. Add an ultra wide (where no focussing is needed) and you are set.

With the addition of these optics it seems to me the GH2 (and G3 or GF3 but not earlier models) user has a still camera which will make a ‘no excuses needed’ semi-pro movie camera at very modest cost.

A friend writes:

Video – I share your enthusiasm for the development of high quality video in still cameras – I’ve enjoyed “one camera, two media” for the last ten years or so. On the other hand, I feel that 1080P AVCHD is a triumph of marketing over quality. Others have tested it against 720P MP4 and found the latter sharper; I’ve confirmed this informally and now get 1920×1080 playback using 1440×1080 MP4. Using MP4 you can make routine edits without rendering, which takes minutes instead of hours, and saves a generation. Here is a sample below (converted to Flash on Vimeo. The Algae scooper in our lagoon is kind of interesting too. (Editor’s note: ….and clearly designed by Rube Goldberg!).

Click to view.