The visceral

Motorcycles, Photography

Of bikes and cameras.

It’s easy to wax poetic about the mechanical age and the great machines which were created back when. And while it’s true that the pleasure of operating a wholly mechanical device vastly outweighs modern all electronic creations, it’s not all sweetness and light.

The main problem is that machines of that age were not especially reliable when new and time has hardly been an ally. So the feel when reverting to the use of something old is akin to that of the Windows user who has that palpable sense of fear every time he turns the power on. “Will it start?”

Defenders of the mechanical age will praise its machines not just because of their charisma but will invariably go on to add how all the parts are still available and how these things can be fixed ad infinitum. What they omit to mention, of course, is that the products of the electronic age which we live in hardly ever need fixing and are so inexpensive to replace that fixing makes no economic sense.

I was the happy user of Leica M2 and M3 cameras for some 35 years and they were a delight to use. Sure, each had its quirks and sometimes they just did not like to be rushed, but they were beautiful to behold and wonderful to use. They were visceral. You got tactile and aural feedback. Heck, you even got olfactory feedback if you fried the thing in the sun. But do I need to mention the constant round of repairs, realignments and lubrication services? Still, this was the very best there was so you smiled and put up with it.

While the Leicas have moved on, usurped by a Canon 5D, there is little comparison. The 5D is superior in every respect, from its drop dead awesome sensor to its auto everything options and vast ability to tailor settings if you so please. It never breaks, can bang away all day, the plastic and magnesium body shell is far less prone to damage and …. the thing has all the charm and efficiency of a refrigerator.

Motorcycles are like that. There has never been a time in my life that two-wheeled powered transport did not fascinate me and the one motorcycle I have ridden throughout these past twenty years of ownership is my BMW Boxer twin.


My 1975 BMW R90/6. A product very much of the mechanical age.

It has many comparisons to a Leica M. It needs frequent maintenance. Things go wrong – nothing major that would leave you stranded but still these things have to be attended to. It wears out its spark plugs. The carburetors are 1920 technology. The air-cooled, horizontally opposed motor, which does so much to contribute to a smooth ride and a very low center of gravity, was conceived by BMW in WWI for aircraft use. To this day, the blue and white roundel, designating a spinning propeller against an azure sky, is used on all the factory’s products. When mine was crafted in the old Berlin factory (by German mechanics, not Turkish gastarbeiter) its pinstripes were applied by the ladies in the finishing shop, by hand. The early use of alloys throughout the machine makes for a fully fueled weight with luggage of under 550 lbs – half that of your neighborhood Harley. And while I putter off in near silence, the pig on the Hog will have woken all and sundry with his foul, polluting noise. He needs the enormous engine just to haul his beer belly around.

Yet, for all its quirks, I have kept the BMW whereas the Leicas moved on three years ago. The reason is simple. I have ridden the latest machines and owned a couple. Like the 5D they are insanely competent and reliable as a refrigerator. Fast beyond anyone’s need for speed. Brakes to die for (or not, in this case). But, whereas I expect that sort of boring reliability in my camera, it’s hell on earth when riding. The modern machines simply do not speak to me and when I’m riding, that’s a conversation I desire to have. It completes the plot comprised of wind, weather, scent, touch, feel and smell and that, I suppose, is why I ride.

One of the few remaining modes of transportation where the journey truly is greater than the destination. Yes, the chances I may die are far greater than sitting in my airbaggedoutofsight car but only one of those two passengers will have enjoyed the final journey.

Online digital storage

Photography

Don’t take the risk

News items include daily reports of online photo storage sites closing down, giving users a scant 24 hours of notice to download their snaps.

While I do think MobileMe – Apple’s version – is safe, I would think twice about spending on online storage for your precious images. Apple has too much reputational risk riding on MobileMe and with over $25 billion in the bank is not about to go our of business, but you have to wonder about the other guys. Sure, online storage is nice as you can retrieve your images from anywhere with a computer and a broadband connection, but it’s not much use if your provider just went broke.

If you must use these, at least make a local back-up and store it in a location remote from your workplace. Heck, stick the backup drive in your car’s trunk as a minimum.

Hubble trouble

Photographs

Dying for lack of funds

While the plumbers and wrench wielders (they are wrongly referred to as ‘astronauts’ by the media) perform some of the costliest repairs on earth (oops, outside Earth) it’s clear that the magnificent piece of imagination-turned-to-reality known as the Hubble space telescope is on its last legs. That’s a shame. Still, unlike the guy with the beer belly who gets $100 an hour for turning up when he feels like it and charging you whether it works or not, at least the NASA plumbers turned up more or less on time.


The Hubble space telescope

The pictures that Hubble has sent back are like nothing else we have seen before, and doubly exciting for that.

I still remember with amusement, if without surprise, the debacle when the Hubble was first launched. A Hughes subsidiary – yes, you guessed it – owned by who else but General Motors? – royally cocked up the manufacture of the mirror so that the results beamed back to earth compared unfavorable to snaps taken using the bottom of a Coke bottle for a lens. In a world where we prefer being nice to enforcing accountability, no heads rolled and the taxpayer had to pay up as usual for government incompetence.

In this case, let it be added, the fix was brilliant and it’s one I have been advocating for camera makers for ages. It’s the software, stupid!. Some engineers a good deal smarter than the clods at Hughes who made the mirror wrote code to correct the aberrations introduced by the badly made mirror and all was sweetness and light. Lousy lens, great software. Far cheaper than the other way around. Here’s what I’m talking about:


Hubble space snaps before and after the software fix

This is what good DSLR lens design so needs – small lenses, huge zoom ranges and great software to fix what ails the design compromises.

But the Hubble is a pleasant reminder of America’s technical genius and ‘can do’ spirit, coupled with a broader sense that sharing all these great images with a curious world can only be a good thing.

On to Mars!

Must quality pay?

Photographers

The best succeed

Let me preface this piece with a childhood story. Mine.

Like you, the first music I recall was the result of my parents’ ancestry, upbringing and beliefs. That meant a strict diet of Beethoven and, as a true Pole, Chopin. There was no choice in the matter and, candidly, I had no clue that anyone else even wrote music. Modern beliefs would damn my parents for this exclusionary tactic but I think they are wrong. Consciously or otherwise, I was being exposed to the best of the best. That leaves an awful lot of grey matter free for the dull realities of making ends meet.

To close that little episode, let me just add that the very first music I remember from my childhood – maybe 5 at the time? – is the Eroica. Talk of starting at the top. No two chords in music anywhere rival the hammer blows at the start of the symphony, proclaiming simply that the future starts now. Bach, Handel, Scarlatti – none of that really matters any more. So yesterday. Western music is easily divisible into three eras. Before-Beethoven, after-Beethoven and Elvis. And it emboldens me not a little to add that I got my old mum to listen to The King when she reached 80, and she proceeded to tune him in for the last seven years of her life. That’s what I call an open mind!

So quality in composition – be it musical or photographic – makes for a very short list of ‘great’ composers. When did you last listen to Jean Baptiste Lully, the darling of his age? Exactly. Or adulate those bloody awful baby pictures Aunt Vi just snapped, with quantity and her waistline indistinguishable, on her new digital?

Which, somewhat circuitously, brings me to my point. If we listen to just a handful of composers and look at the work of just a few photographers, are we denying the existence of a broader reality, an undiscovered ocean of quality, or are we simply being smart in our selectivity?

I think it’s the latter. I look at the work of thousands of unknown photographers during the course of a year, yet I recollect the images of one or two. I will seek their work out as time passes. Without exception I am sure they will become famous, being beyond secure in my taste – which extends to sending rude notes to morons who email me with detritus passing for comment. If you don’t like what you are reading here, please take a dump elsewhere.

So.

You have to be famous to be good.

HCB was famous and we saw he was good. But had he not made efforts – strenuous efforts – to become famous, we would not know whether he was good. I cherish the work of very few other photographers. Not because I am being exclusionary, but because I have seen the work of most and I know quality when I see it. There is no need to go down market.

Horowitz played like a God. Maybe not the way Chopin played, but the way he would have been amazed at. I listen to very few other pianists. Not because I am being exclusionary, but because I have heard most and I know quality when I hear it. There is no need to go down market.

I do not know of any photograph of Horowitz taken by Cartier-Bresson, but if there was one, I believe it would have had the same intensity and insight as HCB’s portrait of Giacometti, one of the very greatest pictures ever taken.


Alberto Giacometti on the Rue D’Aléma in Paris

If you are into Giacometti, that is.

Aboard Air Force One

Photographs

A pleasant memory

Yesterday’s column reminds me of my Air Force One experience. We were told to line up just so and under no conditions were we to take pictures. Probably five to life at Guantanamo if you dared.

Screw that, says I. I own a part of this plane – I paid for it. Or, as its last custodian once famously remarked when some leftie tried to cut him off at a meeting he had funded – “Mr. Chairman, I paid for this microphone!”


Aboard Reagan’s Air Force One

A moment’s clandestine work with my point-and-shoot digital – near silent and unobtrusive if the flash is off – is all it took. The guard securing this national treasure and repository of military secrets – in reality a 40 year old Boeing 707 which you couldn’t give away for scrap – was but two feet away.

You can enjoy the same experience by making your way to the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, just north of west Los Angeles, and while you’re there, you can learn about the last great leader our nation enjoyed.

The line waiting to get in: