On Leica cameras

Cameras, Lenses

Beware of the Leica camera. It starts as a romance. Soon, it is an affair. Before you know it, flirtation blossoms into passion. Finally, it settles into infatuation. The four stages of a lifetime relationship.

Someone one asked me why I use a Leica when all around use an SLR. Why film when digital is the standard? Fast, instant results, low cost. My glib reaction was not unlike that of the Ferrari driver. “If you have to ask, you do not get it.” But that is no answer.

In truth, it is hard to explain an irrational attraction to this wonderful machine, the Leica camera. After all, it just takes pictures, right? It cannot do close-ups, right? And what is that you say? You have to process then scan the film? Ugh! Worse, like all infatuations, it can get dangerously expensive, no?

Then again, why even bother with this antiquated technology, unless it is some sort of affectation, a preference to live in the past, some perverse desire just to be different?

The SLR is superior in so many ways. A huge range of lenses. You bet. Automatic focus? Naturally. Shake reduction? You got it. Extreme zoom range? But of course. Macro capability? Every one has it. Motor drive? Would that be three or six shots per second, sir? Digital? Hard to get anything else today. Several hundred or thousand pictures a roll? Standard. Instant gratification? Naturally. 5, 10 or 15 megapixels? Take your choice.

However, maybe yours is a quieter world, eschewing the crass vernacular that is modern life. You value performance and results, not promises and looks. You appreciate iPods and cell phones as much as the next person. They are just not you.

Then you have one of those flashbacks. And all is clear as memories created with that ever present, sweet, speedy, silent Leica come flooding back.

Spring in Paris was especially welcoming that year, the air with that indefinable smell. Beauty, culture, women, food. The couture attired lady and her cocker glance up at you for the briefest of moments, unaware that their image has already been recorded. The spectator looks curiously at her friend, the latter surveying the nude on the wall of the Louvre with unusual interest, captured in an instant. The morning promenaders in the Jardin de Tuileries caught just so. A fraction of a second later and the scene is gone, its denizens no longer perfectly arranged like some latter day Seurat canvas.

Summer in San Francisco. The old man makes his way along the narrow sun lit street. Echoes of Edward Hopper’s lonely city abound in the lazy afternoon sun. He does not even know you took his picture, yet you were all of a few feet away. The little boy in the back of the pick-up in Union Square, lost in wonder, is another easy catch, before the swirl of traffic whisks him away. Did you take that? No, it took itself.

Autumn in New York. The sky has the pallor of cold cream. You are on walkabout, just for fun. Maybe something interesting will crop up. Then there it is. The huge Yogi Bear balloon overhead. It’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Click. You are enjoying your warming drink in one of those cozy Madison Avenue coffee shops, when a red flash catches the corner of your eye. No time to think. The soft, instantaneous camera shutter is released even before the viewfinder is at the eye. That blurred umbrella will forever say Autumn in New York. Clouds of steam emanate seemingly from his head, as the rain-coated man makes his way down Park Avenue, shoulders hunched, hands buried deep in his Burberry to stave off the cold. You take the picture without even thinking, focusing a matter of a moment, exposure second nature. You are in direct contact with what you see. No mirror, no motors, no flashing lights. Just a simple viewfinder. I am a camera.

Winter in London. The light is, well, London light. Gloom, rain, depression. Yet click, the girl in the railcar is caught, the iris unthinkingly turned to full aperture, the shutter as slow as you dare, too quiet to arrest her slumber. Hope that one comes out, you think. And of course it does. The little boy marches behind the band down Pall Mall, stretching his legs as far as he can. A young man in the making. Click. He is yours for ever. The dowager outside the Rolls Royce showroom gives you an icy stare. How dare you, she is thinking. Too late. Got her!

That ubiquitous Leica, quiet, unassuming, its amateur looks aiding the whole deception of invisibility, its petite size making sure that it is your constant companion, it is a machine that transcends time and technology. Not very good at lots of things at which its marvelous technological superiors excel. One day it, too, will be digital, with all the advantages that storage medium offers. And it will be fast. But it will never pretend to be a Swiss Army Knife for it knows one thing.

It is there for the moment that it alone can capture. And it is always with you.

Memory, nostalgia and family albums

Photography

I have been involved in creating electronic and book format versions of the many pictures in our various family albums for some two years now. This is proving a non-trivial task.

For one, the source content is, at best, poorly organized. Quality of the original pictures, which go back over one hundred years in some cases (one hundred years!) varies from wonderful to execrable, and some of the old albums need to be carefully unbound before scanning.

I’m not exactly sure how this started. I suspect that my mother’s death in early 2003 at the age of 88 was a driving force, confronting me with the reality of the impermanence of memory and the rapid passage of time. Add my son’s birth a year before mother’s death and the whole project assumed a sense of urgency and haste. It is no small hindrance that on my side of the family the prime link to the past, the Rosetta Stone, if you like, which can put life in those old pictures, is my eldest sister who, at 65, is some 12 years my senior. She knows the pictures better than anyone, being especially well versed in the pre-WWII ones. How all of this survived WWII not to mention any number of subsequent relocations as my parents became refugees from their native Poland, is not so much a mystery as a miracle.

For the past couple of years I have been unwrapping, disassembling, scanning, reassembling and returning a host of albums, not to mention many loose pictures.

The final tally is some 300 pictures.

As our audiences for the results vary in technological sophistication, it became clear early on that three variants of the output would be called for:

1 – A traditional web site, available to anyone with an Internet connection

2 – A CD or DVD that can be mailed to anyone willing to use a computer but without an Internet connection (don’t laugh, most of the world still lacks one)

3 – A book, not just for the techno-agnostic, but because it’s still the nicest way of relaxing with printed materials of any sort. Ever try to read your computer in the bath?

Now I’m at the point where everything is scanned, retouched and otherwise mended in Photoshop, and neatly stored in Apple’s wonderful iPhoto awaiting final agreement on order and narrative details.

Of course, it occurs to me that one hundred years hence, the DVD or CD will no longer work in anything on the market, the web ISP will likely have gone bankrupt and the book will have long curled up and yellowed. At least some succeeding generation can then rescan the book and start all over again.