Category Archives: Philosophy of Photography

“If Only I Had a Leica”

For Leicaphilia by Dax H.*

Leica is a camera to last your lifetime and perhaps your heir’s lifetime. Buy one or two and you will never need another unless you’re a combat cameraman, (they get broken, flooded and wore out) or you’re into long telephoto or extreme wide or fisheye or microscopy. In this case you probably need an SLR.

Leica M bodies and lenses are superb, virtually flawless. If you shoot slides/transparencies you will perhaps see the quality difference depending on what camera/optical system you’re comparing it to. If you get your exposures spot on, If your chosen processor gets the processing spot on. As for prints, the old saying is “exposed through a Leica, printed through a Coke bottle bottom”. If you’re printing through a generic enlarger lens, perhaps dirty, at a less than optimum f stop, film plane not parallel with the easel, you will not see any of the Leica magic in your prints. If you have the skill and knowledge for complete control over everything from the moment of exposure until you hold and view that dry print, then you can say you are holding a Leica image. Few people can say this truthfully.

There’s the old saying “If you can’t make them good, then make them big”. If you want a big print, use a bigger piece of film. To understand why, try this simple experiment: take a 35mm camera, with a normal 5cm lens, (a Leica with a Summicron will do). Load it with your favorite B&W film. Then beg or borrow a 2 1/4 camera such as a Yashica Mat 124. Keep it cheap, no need for a Rollei or Hasse. Load your cheap Yashica with the same emulsion you’re using in the Leica. Take them both out on a tripod with a cable release and shoot. Process both rolls together in the same chemicals and then print the 35mm negs and the 6 by 6 negs to 11 by 14 inches. Print them with the same enlarger. You will be amazed at how much better the 6 by 6 print looks compared to the 35mm enlargement, even when exposed on a relatively cheap 6 by 6 camera. Square inches of film always wins, no matter how “perfect” the 35mm lens is. If you wish to make prints no bigger than a 5 by 7 or 6 by 9 inch print then 35 mm is brilliant! A properly controlled print from a full frame 35mm negative can rival (I didn’t say beat) a contact print from a 5 by 7 negative. If you only make 4 by 6 prints produced by commercial photo finishers, it makes no difference if you expose that film through a Leitz lens, a Argus C-3, a NIkon lens, as long as that camera and lens are working up to specification, the film is fresh and your exposures are correct. At 4 by 6 inches you will have to do close side by side comparisons to see a difference and on the same roll on the same day, due to chemical and equipment changes at the printers. I see no advantage image wise in using a M series Leica system for commercial, machine made prints for less than 5 or 6 times enlargement.

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Dear Lord what a slave I’ve been to my Leicas. In the past 40 years I’ve been a caretaker and bodyguard for my Leicas, worrying about knocking them into solid objects, having them stolen, tying the camera bag to a table leg when out to dinner, slinging it under my arm in a suit coat while trying to dance with a lady, not going in areas where it will be recognized by punks that will mug me for it, trying to keep it dry in the rain, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, locked up when not at home.

I am now a retired combat cameraman/ photojournalist/ picture maker. My Leicas – a IIIF, three M3’s, one M2 and a M6 – are still locked up. So are my Nikon F and F2AS and the Hasse and the Rollei TLR. I still use them on the odd occasion; they are brilliant cameras for the working man, I’d say the best a photographer can get. Most of my shooting now is either printed by myself, (yes, on a Leitz enlarger), to either 4 by 6 or 5 by 7 inches, (not big but very good). If I want bigger prints, I grab a 2 1/4 camera or a 4 by 5 or a 5 by 7 camera. I can only display so many 16 by 20 prints on the walls of my house. If I’m not doing my own B&W prints, then I shoot color and have it printed by a semi-custom commercial printer.

When I shoot 35mm I now use a Voigtlander Bessa R with either a 61LD Industar or a Industar 50 or a Jupiter 8 or a Jupiter 3. My other casual-use cameras are a Zorki 4 or a FED 1 or a Kiev 4. All with FSU lenses. They are great fun. For a 4 by 6 inch print it doesn’t matter what camera or lens you use as long as it meets specification. Even at 5 by 7 these “cheap” cameras will compete in image quality with virtually anything using the same size film. They’ll never be treasured by my heirs, have virtually no resale value and as one fellow said “He who steals my cameras, steals junk”, but they are fun to shoot, produce wonderful images and I don’t worry about them. I can go out and enjoy myself. Of the cameras mentioned the Voigtlander is my go-to camera. It’s superb. [Editor’s Note: Yes, the Bessa R’s are superb. I have a Bessa R2S that I use for my collection of Nikkor S lenses; it’s a simple, well-made film camera with a big, bright viewfinder, easily one of my favorites.]

My advice: stop worrying about the camera you use and have fun! The key is using the correct camera for the job. Don’t get hung up on myth and mystique. The camera is only a tool, and what a fun tool it is. Any camera and film of today will produce images that Sudek, Stieglitz, Atget, or Bresson would be proud to record. You will see more difference and character in your images by just changing a film and or developer combination than you will by changing camera brand or lens brand.

You have now heard the results of my lifetime of experience with Leica cameras reduced to a few paragraphs. Make what you like of it. Now go out and make some worthwhile and memorable images and stop losing sleep about what your images will look like if “You just had a Leica”.

Dax H. is a retired combat photographer. Now 66, he has supported himself 100% from photography since he was 16 years old. He started with a Speed Graphic and flash bulbs and a IIIf Red Dial with a Summarit 1.5.

Ignore Everybody

“Whoever cannot see the unforeseen sees nothing.” Heraclitus

Robert Frank called photography an art for lazy people, and I agree with him, as far as that goes, especially in the digital age where you can point your automated camera at something, apply some funky filter with the push of a button to what you’ve captured, and send it out on social media for the world to see, a finely finished product with nothing much to say.

It’s actually saying something that’s difficult. Successful creative works are never the product of technological factors. They make no concessions to current taste and listen to no counsel but their own. This is not to say, however, that there aren’t foundational skills you need to master as a precondition to saying what you want to say. Developing the skill sets necessary to be creative is rule based. Once you understand the rules, you’re better able to get out of your own way and let the process and your own creativity bring you to someplace unexpected.

Likewise, slavishly ape-ing others isn’t going to get you there either. Emulating either the conceptual or formal decisions of other photographers will not teach you where those decisions come from or how they were arrived at, but is merely a shortcut to your own creative solution, since your mentor has done all the legwork. Structured creative guidelines can easily become comfortable formulas that inhibit unanticipated solutions. A photo workshop is a bus tour; real creativity comes with the unstructured walk.

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The solution to creating your own vision is to identify and observe the “rules” and then learn to break them. Creativity arises out of the tension between the rules and your imagination. But don’t confuse true creativity solely with a false concept of “originality.” Enduring, authentic aesthetic choices are rarely without some stylistic antecedent, but are historical and culturally specific, grounded in cultural tradition. So look at other work, lots of it. Not just any, however, but the stuff that’s lasted, that’s remained relevant across constantly changing, ephemeral fashion. You can’t move your thinking beyond an established aesthetic if you don’t know where that aesthetic begins and ends. On the other hand, too close of a focus on a given aesthetic can result in a closed perspective. Originality can only exist with a standard from which to deviate.

So, the “rules” are pretty simple when it comes to creative pursuits: Learn to use your tools. Learn the formal and conceptual ideas that govern the use of those tools for your given creative end. Learn the history of your medium and acquaint yourself with the best of what’s previously been done in the field. Then, ignore it all and take your own way.

“Exactly What It Was Like”

By Wayne Pinney for Leicaphilia.

I am the perennial novice. I own leica M film cameras, as well as a IIIg and IIIc. Hand developing film has opened a great new world. This photo of my daughter’s peagle (beagle, pekingese mix) was taken recently with my Ricoh GR Digital I- the original 8.1 MP camera. I have been using it a lot lately for the reasons much like the ones articulated here. The Ricoh is so convenient, and at high ISO does an exceptional job of duplicating film grain in B&W mode.

As I look at the photo, I find that I love it…..more than many other photographs I have taken of cherished moments and people. Tonight, a thought occurred to me regarding the magic of such photos: Is it possible that their magic is related to the fact that the camera, when used on the spur of the moment, and without benefit of preparation, captures something exactly as the chaos of the moment dictates how the brain receives and stores it……something that, because of its fleeting blurriness defies spoken description?……taps deeply into that nebulous thing that makes photography so unique? You know, that thing Barthes struggles with. As I look at the photo, I keep thinking: “Yeah! That is exactly what it was like.”

Wayne Pinney is a self-described “perennial novice” who lives in SE Indiana.

An Astronomer Falls in Love with a Film Leica

By Henry Joy McCracken for Leicaphilia.

“Show me a great photograph taken outdoors in the daytime that couldn’t have been taken with a roll of Tri-X at any point since the 1950s”

I’m an astronomer, and have been interested in astronomy for as long as I remember. I wonder if there is a connection between this and my interest in images and photographic images. Astronomers of course can only take the pictures or spectra, they can never interact with their subjects. Some people say, half-jokingly, that it isn’t really experimental science in the strict sense of the word because we can never actually do any experiments. For a photographic analogy, in our work we are more Cartier-Bresson than William Klein or Garry Winogrand, the latter of which was always cracking jokes and interacting with his subjects.

Nevertheless, I was always interested in taking photographs of terrestrial objects too. I grew up in Ireland in the 1970s, and I remember pleading with my mother to let me take one picture, just one picture with the only camera we had at the time, a polaroid instant camera, and finally she gave in, and I took a picture of our garden. I must have been six or seven. I waited, and anxiously peeled apart the backing layers. My blurred thumb was in the middle of the frame: nobody had told me how to take photographs! I’m trying hard here not to fall in the classic Irish trap of writing an autobiographical text, because that’s not what I want to do, but it’s amusing to note that there reason we had these cameras at all was simply to take pictures of headstones. My father made tombstones, and there was no catalogue or internet web site of course, so my mother and I were sent out to take pictures of the ‘greatest hits’ of the local cemeteries, and for that you needed a camera. We soon upgraded to a Pentax K1000, and I was allowed to pictures of tombstones with it. I still have that camera today, almost thirty years later, and it still works, although the meter is broken.

Time passed. In the early 2000s, I switched to a small digital camera and shortly afterwards I moved to Paris. For me at the time it seemed one of the most important attributes of a camera is that it should be small and light, as I wanted to always have it with me when I was traveling; no, I didn’t know about Leica back then. To be honest, I never really thought much about photography since this switch to digital, even though I continued to take snapshots. Finally, I bought a better electronic camera and got rid of all the zoom lenses. I learned the latest software tools and stalked around the streets of Paris taking random images with my fixed focal length lens, as you are supposed to do. I looked at books of all the great photographers once again, and went more often to the museums. It is easy to be educated about photography here in Paris. Then a strange thing happened. I realised that I was spending a lot of time on the computer manipulating the colour and tonality of my images. Directly out of the camera they looked very flat and neutral, as they are supposed to. These digital images are supposed to be a literal representation of reality, but something was always lacking. Should I increase the contrast? Reduce the contrast? Convert to black and white? I couldn’t decide. The images were perfect, but just not right. Well, I said to myself, if you are spending all your time converting your images to black and white, why not just shoot directly in black and white with a film camera?

I like to be in control, so this proposition seemed crazy at first. I couldn’t give my negatives to someone else to develop. It would mean mixing up chemicals and developing in our small Parisian apartment and scanning the negatives afterwards: no space for a darkroom. But I thought I would give it a try. I bought a roll of HP5+ for the old K1000 and took 36 photographs, getting it developed at a shop in town to start with. My first reaction when I saw the first scan from one of these images on my computer screen was, “yuk, this is out of focus”. But it was not out of focus. It was simply because I was displaying the scan of a 35mm negative full-screen on a high-resolution 27” monitor, something which was never meant to be done. You have to understand my background: I’ve spent many years working with the largest digital images from the largest astronomical cameras. They are some of the most technically perfect electronic detectors ever constructed by humans. These cameras have revolutionised astronomy and made possible enormous advances in our knowledge of the Universe in the last few decades. But, despite this, there were one or two images in that first roll which were interesting, and I decided to continue.

Six months later: I have now developed and scanned more than fifty rolls of film. In one of the few film shops left in Paris, somewhere around roll number 6, I bought a second-hand Leica. I remember the first thought I had when I lifted it up: this thing is damn heavy (being used to light electronic cameras). But after advancing the film and pressing the shutter a few times I thought, hmm, now I understand…

The whole experience is paradoxical. Yes, the images are what we would call today “low resolution” but pictures of people on film look real in an indefinable way which is never matched by digital capture. After a few months of staring at scans of my negatives, I realised walking around Paris I was surrounded by these plastic digital images everywhere. I had never seen them before, really. In astronomy, photographic images were always a major pain to deal with because of the roll-over in the bright part of the density/intensity curve. But this effect, combined with grain, makes the images much more appealing to look at. No, you would never want to measure anything on this, but it certainly looks better. And no, it cannot be replicated in software.

I’m also partisan to the idea, expressed here and elsewhere, that the steady increase in resolution and sensitivity is completely pointless in terrestrial photography. In astronomy, of course, that is not the case, and we have been very grateful for our highly sensitive wide-format CCD detectors. These detectors have now trickled down from military to science to consumer. But how has this increase in creative and artistic possibilities been translated into better art? Show me a great photograph taken outdoors in the daytime that couldn’t have been taken with a roll of Tri-X at any point since the 1950s. Instead of making the image, we are assailed by an enormous range of technical choices. We are now spending an enormous amount of effort adding more and more transistors into smaller and smaller components, and a lot of the smart people who were working on ambitious projects (like the Apollo moon program) are now writing apps for mobile phones. Unfortunately, image-making seems to be the “collateral damage” of this trend.

All of this seems me to be why it is so important to take pictures on film. The process of taking the photograph is separated from the act of taking the photograph. I am not able to say if it has made me a better photographer (though being human of course I would like to think that it has). But it has certainly made taking pictures more enjoyable. There is no computer involved, and today computers are involved in almost everything. For the first time in my life, I had my photographs printed and framed by a certain Parisian agency that still employs two people to make photographic enlargements. I put them on the wall in my office and at home. I look at those photographs and I know that no computer touched any part of the image, which is strangely reassuring. I was motivated to make a physical object from the images I had made, something which never occurred to me with digital images.

The Leica is also a unique tool to take photographs with. Again, I was skeptical: during my first tour around Paris with it, I couldn’t even figure out at first how to hold it without blocking the weirdly-positioned viewfinder. The ergonomics of a bar of soap, as I have heard on the interwebs. But what is great is this: you press the shutter button and after the dry click nothing happens. Nothing changes in the viewfinder, nothing changes in the camera, other than the fact there is now a latent image of the thing you have just seen through the viewfinder recorded on a small square of film. To take another image, just advance the film, that’s all. The other wonderful thing is that one is conscious of light in a way one is never with a digital camera. After a few weeks I could estimate the illumination just by looking. The other paradoxical thing: despite being completely manual, the camera is actually easier to operate than any digital camera I have ever used. You look at the sky, you look at the object you want to photograph, and you set the aperture, shutter, and focus distance. Once they are set, they never change. Nothing changes them for you. For sure there are inconveniences. We are used to the amazing
performance of digital detectors at night. But now what I find it is that when I take pictures at night on film, they actually look like they are taken at night! And it is really true what they say: these cameras motivate you to take pictures.

I plan to spend 2016 explaining to my astronomer friends just why film is so great – and reassuring them that no, I don’t think it is a good idea to replace that CCD by a photographic plate. And, of course, taking photographs on film: http://52rolls.net/2016/01/01/im-h-j-mccracken-52-rolls-in-2016/.

H. J. McCracken is an astronomer at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.

The Role of Chance

Imagine that you set out on a walk at a certain time, having intended to do it at that time and not another. Two blocks from your home you meet a stranger with a weapon. He assaults you. Neither the fact that he is where he is, at that time, and you were where you were, at that time, are accidents. But the convergence of both acts is.

Of such cases, Jacques Monod, the Nobel winning scientist and author of Chance and Necessity concludes: “Chance is obviously the essential thing inherent in the complete independence of two causal chains of events whose convergence produces the cause of the accident.” These chance accidents, Monod concludes, are essential for reality to exist, for they create the possibility of “absolute newness.”

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The English art historian Horace Walpole was entranced by a Persian fairy tale about three princes from the Isle of Serendip who possess super powers of observation. In a letter penned in 1754, Walpole suggested that this tale contained a crucial idea about human creativity: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this talent, which was a creative skill rather than merely a result of luck.

Monod and Walpole were onto something that most creatives understand and nurture. Serendipity and chance breed the creative. It’s an idea of the artistic process that has a deep pedigree. Leonardo Da Vinci suggested that art students observe the random spots and stains on walls, for in those creations of happenstance the artist would find an unrefined beauty, untainted by the complications of the rational ego.

In my experience, the most interesting photos aren’t summoned; they just happen, at times and in a manner of their own choosing. It’s less down to your skill than to your preparation. The best you can do is be open to it, ready and able to recognize and receive it when the chance manifests itself. Hence, the old adage “f11 and be there.” But it’s anathema to current photographic trends, with the fetishization of the super-sharp and hyper-real that’s accompanied the digital age. And that’s partly why I value it so much. The most enjoyable photographs, for me, are random. They are the happenstance convergence of optics and light. And in this sense they are always unique, singular, uncontaminated with cliched compositional considerations, more in line with a reality with too many possibilities to be reduced by the false values of clarity and precision.

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I find that being outside of the mainstream of photographic practices has liberated me in creative ways, differentiating what I do and how I do it from the general photographic culture. Given that I’ve gotten off the technological hamster wheel, I feel free to allow the serendipitous into my practice. Stick a lens on a body – any lens, any body – and shoot. Point at stuff and shoot – out car windows, walking down the street. Just shoot. Don’t worry about how sharp your lens is, or what film you’re shooting, or the tonal range of the scene. Don’t bother metering, just guess. But shoot.

I like to take my camera with me while driving – an old meterless Leica with a 35mm lens, loaded with HP5 pushed 2 or 3 stops, exposure guessed at, focus approximated – and point it out the window occasionally and depress the shutter. Sometimes I get an image I like and I keep it.

The Responsibilities Of Film Photography

Me and my Dad, 1970.

Call me a contrarian, but I’ve always seen things in a slightly skewed perspective from the average guy. Having lived on both sides of the cultural divide, first blue-collar, and then the recipient of an extended education, I know puffery and outright bullshit when I see it. I’m much more proud of my state school diploma than I am of my Ivy league degree, feeling I worked a helluva lot harder to earn the former than the latter, see no reason for a Rolex when I can wear my Seiko 5, and much prefer the indigenous culture of Mississippi to the derivative New York City culture where I was raised. Given a choice, I’ll choose a $12 Rebel Yell bourbon over the $150 bottle of Port Charlotte Islay single malt that sits untouched on my sideboard. A Modernist, I find Joyce and Pynchon unreadable when compared to the profound simplicity of Primo Levi. In short, I’ve seen both sides of the life, and prefer the simple values of the unpretentious to the vanity and prejudices of the fashionable.

I remain a “film guy”. Lately, I’ve been giving an inordinate amount of consideration as to why that might be. Part of the reason, certainly, is that I’m getting to that age where I’m thinking about what I’ll leave to the next generation. For me, photography has always been about documentation, capturing life lived both small and large, recording who I am and what I want life to be, and for this, I want something tangible, something I can put in a box that’ll be found and hopefully passed on to posterity. I don’t trust digital 1’s and 0’s to be there to do that, and I suspect we are being sold a bill of goods in our headlong embrace of the virtual future, not really thinking through its ramifications for the transmission of culture across generations.

But maybe it goes a bit beyond that. I’ve come think that there might be something about the practice of film photography that makes it so important for me as well. It takes patience, and that patience is, in a small way, a commitment to the future as much as it is a connection to the past. The craft of photography. Another word we’ve lost sight of.

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My Dad Being a Goofball, 1971.

Photography is and always has been a technologically driven medium. In order to stand out from the pack, photographers seek the unique, and technology usually provides the quickest perceived means to that end. The irony, of course, is that the majority of photographers attempt to differentiate themselves by pursuing the same technological advances, ending up right back where they started — creating work that’s indistinguishable from everybody else attempting to do the same. And so technology cranks the wheel again.

Unfortunately, each new advance in camera technology widens the gap between how a camera operates and how I actually need it to operate. To a modern photographer on the technological treadmill, it seems to me the simplicity of traditional film photography should be liberating: no more straddling the bleeding edge; no more learning and re-learning the latest computer techniques; no more money thrown at the next big trend, only to see it quickly fade into cliché. But it’s a tough sell, usually poo-pooed by digital technocrats as being the death rattles of a dead technology.

For some of us it’s as simple as appreciating the beauty of the mechanical works of art that create our photography. Photographic tools, like the Leica and Nikon RFs of the 50s, can be functional art in themselves.. In them, the tactile aspect is still supreme and there is something to mastering a technology without the neurotic need to constantly upgrade in an elusive search for better results. But of equal or even greater value for many of us is the deliberation required by analogue processes, a deliberation at odds with the requirements of current photographic usage, a mindedness and focus not required, and increasingly becoming lost, in the transition to digital.

Which all helps explain why my shelves are stocked mostly with mid–20th century mechanical film cameras. It’s because no other class of camera has ever satisfied my photographic tendencies, aesthetics and desires nearly as perfectly as the 35mm mechanical rangefinder.

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Le Pure Cafe, rue Jean Mace, Paris

One of the benefits of living in Paris is the food. The best of it is found, not in the latest trendy Michelin-starred haunts of status seekers and haute bourgeois or in tired standbys found in guide books, but in the local cafes you’ll find on virtually every corner of the city. Almost invariably, the meals you’ll find there are inexpensive, simply presented, and incredibly good. Unlike an American meal, where we too often equate quantity of choice with quality, somebody has taken the time and effort to prepare and present one or two dishes simply and elegantly, with the means and in a manner that allows you to savor the experience of enjoying it. One of my favorites is Le Pure Cafe, in the 11th on rue Jean Mace, right around the corner from Le Belle Equipe, where medieval-minded lunatics recently slaughtered 20 people for the sin of enjoying life.

What does this have to do with photography, you ask? To paraphrase Elliott Erwitt, photography should be taken seriously and treated as an avocation, and the analogy to cooking comes to mind: Taking photos digitally and editing them on a computer is like cooking a TV diner in a microwave in your flat. Easy, efficient, fast. if so, then the film process is the simple yet elegant meal, cooked with attention to every step in the process, served to you in Le Pure Cafe. Film process – how pleasant and elegant it is to use as a craft — is its enduring strength, much the way the Parisian cafe meal can never be compared to a “lunch” at McDonalds.

My Brother In Law Being a Goofball, 2013

Film photography is now a niche with no aspirations to popular appeal, aimed squarely at discerning users who savor the craftsmanship required of it, while the convenience of digital has made it the tool of choice for those who desire the shortcuts of quick and easy. The act of film photography is the act of tending to an increasingly moribund craft, tied to a set of values, of practices, a kind of thought process that I believe is worth preserving. For me, A traditional all mechanical camera, be it rangefinder or SLR, loaded with a roll of HP5, a 50 or 35 on it, is the most simple and most enjoyable form of photography. Just look at the light, the shapes, the evolving situations, expressions.

With that comes responsibility. Let’s hope we film aficionados, the people who occupy that niche, are able through our efforts to keep film alive for future generations. Technological change is too often not cumulative but rather a “Faustian bargain” in which something is sacrificed in order for something new to be gained. Will we sacrifice what is of real value in the photographic experience for the new we’ve gained?

The Only Way to Colour is With Film

By Greg Krycinski for Leicaphilia. Greg is a London based photographer and writer who writes an interesting blog about creativity at www.ditchitall.com/ . Greg is a “film guy.”

Right, let me start with two confessions I need to make and upon these you can decide whether you’d like to read what I have to say or not.

Firstly, my beginnings are in digital. I’m guilty of HDR, saturating to hell and other, horrible things. But I guess this is exactly the reason why I spent so much time in recent months shooting exclusively in monochrome. From one extreme to another. Somehow, without loving the cheesy and poor images at the beginning, I would never get to the other end of the spectrum (as stated here in Film Photography and the Revival of the Imperfect, HP5 pushed to 1600 at 1/8th sec handheld images). Lack of colour, lack of any clarity or sharpness, lack of technical excellence, yet so much emotion, like this image by Daido Moriyama for example.

Daido Moriyama

That’s where my second confession comes. I’ve been photographing in black and white almost religiously lately and I am a huge advocate of monochrome for many different reasons. However, I’ve recently cheated and loaded my almost 40 years old Nikon with a roll of Portra 400. I fell. In. Love.

Enza village floods with school children around 4PM every day. The yellow hats and red rucksacks just want to be photographed.

I was always of the opinion that loading a camera with a new roll of film is like the beginning of a new chapter in a book. Part of the mystery solved, new clues, new turn of events, new start so to speak. Well, loading a roll of Portra after numerous monochrome emulsions over the past months felt like a completely new book. Change of scenery, characters, period of time and even change of the genre altogether. Like after Stephen King’s oeuvre I suddenly found myself reading a Tolkien novel. It’s new, it’s refreshing, it’s exciting.

In certain ways, colour is nothing more than simply a compositional tool, not much different from your rule of thirds or diagonal lines. Despite this, it seems to me that when you get into the colour mindset after plenty of time spent with monochromes, it simply becomes a subject in itself and it somehow makes colour photography that much more purposeful. It is certainly more difficult to break away from the documentary side of photography and venture into abstract or fine art than black and white (at least to me it is).

My take on abstract in colour. Carps (“koi” in Japanese) are distinguished additions to any Japanese pond.

“Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.”Greg Anderson

I am a huge advocate for black and white and, saying that, I believe that digital cannot match the final results to film. When it comes to colour, well, that is even more the case. The saturation, hues and the colour palette is just that little step ahead, even the results from a one hour photo lab. I’m afraid that the scans shown here will not demonstrate what I am trying to convey as to appreciate the things I’ve mentioned you should really be looking at prints. I am aware that digital is convenient, and gives better (sharper, cleaner or whatever better means in current climate of obsession with quality) and faster results, results being the key word here. But photography should not be about the final results, it should be more about the process of getting there, in which film is the winding B road, challenging and extremely exciting, whereas digital is the fast but boring motorway, designed only to get you from A to B.

Anyway, I’m back with Tri-X in my beater Nikon. It somehow feels “back at home” and it certainly suits the gloomy London, where I find myself at the moment, at least for now.

Film Photography and the Revival of the Imperfect

Artists use the tools that serve their purposes, and those tools evolve with evolving technology, and as the technology changes, often the artist’s purpose subtly changes as well. The history of painting, as an example, is in part a history of the changing chemical composition of paint allowing new and different painting styles. Artistic innovations that have a technological component take nothing away from the genius of those that use new technologies for creative ends. But new abilities made possible by technologies can distort creativity by making the creative end subservient to the means by which it is produced. They can become, in Thoreau’s words, “improved means to an unimproved end.”

If you are a painter, you can paint with oil paint, acrylics or watercolor. It’s essentially the same process using different materials, the end results varying to the extent that different paint mediums allow more easily for different modes of painterly expression. For most of photographic history, by contrast, photographs were only made from photographic film strips that ran through a camera, were chemically processed and made into prints that were published, hung on or projected onto walls, or pasted into scrapbooks. Over the past decade the transformation to digital processes has changed how photos are produced, distributed and consumed, and has given rise to the common idea that film is now “dead,” with no further application to the visual arts than as a quaint antique throwback.

Given the ubiquity of digital photography and the standard photographic tropes that have come to predominate in its wake, its easy to forget that photography using film is still available as a viable option and still works as it always has. Film isn’t dead. There is nothing inevitable or necessary about the end of film, no matter how seductive the digital technologies and gadgets that have transformed photography. There’s a false determinism that shapes discussions about traditional film photography and obscures the fact that film photography has been eclipsed not because digital is inherently “better,” but because it’s easier. Some of us prefer the slow road, and we need not apologize or defend in the face of the ignorance of the digital masses.

There’s another factor at work in this transformation, one that I find the most insidious from a cultural perspective: it is the quixotic desire of digital users for a false perfection, the need to idealize photographic representations and distort what we experience as the real. It is a compulsion for the perfect view, clinically produced, with the imperfections of the real surmounted and dissolved. Everything turned to the aesthetic of the commercial and the false reality of advertisement. It’s partly in the nature of digital mediums – easy, quick and immediate manipulations- but is also the result of a cultural shift brought about by a contrived reality drummed into us on billboards, in our printed materials, and on television by consumer capitalism, where everything has a sales value and everything for sale must be perfect.

I find the use of film to be a welcome antidote to this cultural airbrushing of reality. What I love about film photography are its imperfections – the formalism of black and white, the serendipity of the grain, the inexactitude of vintage optics, the contrast and blur of HP5 pushed to 1600 iso and handheld at 1/8th of a second. Choosing to use film, subjecting oneself to the confines of its imperfections, is a reaffirmation of traditional photography’s unevenness, an embrace of its variability and an acknowledgement that, if we are to approach perfection, we may only do so via the imperfect. “The grandeur of the Old Masters,” as Delacroix put it, “does not consist in the absence of faults.” Seduced by the exactitude of digital photography, current photographic tastes threaten to banish clumsiness, serendipity, human flaws and necessary imperfections forever, falsely idealizing the quotidian and threatening a schizophrenic disjunction between what really is and how we represent it to others. Our response should be a return to the imperfect, rediscovering the blemishes and waywardness of life, and the real perfection that lies therein.

Digital “Photography”: Based On A True Story

Which One Do You Prefer?

“Digital capture quietly but definitively severed the optical connection with reality, that physical relationship between the object photographed and the image that differentiated lens-made imagery and defined our understanding of photography for 160 years. The digital sensor replaced to optical record of light with a computational process that substitutes a calculated reconstruction using only one third of the available photons. That’s right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It’s reality but not as we know it… Veteran digital commentator Kevin Connor says, “The definition of computational photography is still evolving, but I like to think of it as a shift from using a camera as a picture-making device to using it as a data-collecting device.”

I ran across the above quote in an article in Time Magazine entitled “The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming,” which, to put it charitably, is normally not the first place I look when I want cutting edge philosophical discussions, given its pedestrian readership usually located on the far end of any cultural curve. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting article, discussing things some of us, myself included, have been articulating since the inception of the digital age. Just a few years ago, saying essentially the same thing on a popular photo forum, I was roundly derided as a kook by the usual suspects. It’s not as if ignorance and lack of expansive thinking don’t have a consistent pedigree; if history teaches anything, it’s that the revolutionary implications of technological changes are never seen by the average guy until they’re impossible to ignore. Now, if Time is any indication, maybe it’s a message finally resonating with the generally educated public: the passage from analogue to digital “photography”, from a philosophical and practical perspective, is less an evolution than a revolution of the medium. What we’ve wrought, with our CMOS and CCD sensors that transform light into an insubstantial pattern of 1’s and 0’s, is not merely a difference of degree from traditional photography but rather a fundamental difference of kind. You can even make a claim that digital photography really isn’t ‘photography’ in the etymological sense of the word at all. As Mr. Connor suggests, its more accurately described as “data collecting.”

Until recently, photography worked like this: light reflected off people and things and would filter through a camera and physically transform a tangible thing, an emulsion of some sort. This emulsion was contained on, or in, some physical substrate, like tin, or glass, or celluloid or plastic. The photograph was a tangible thing, created by light and engraved with a material trace of something that existed in real time and space. That’s how “photography” got its name: “writing with light”.

Roland Barthes, the French linguist, literary theorist and philosopher, wrote a book about this indexical quality of photography called Camera Lucida. Its one of the seminal texts in the philosophy of photography, which means it’s often referred to while seldom being read, and even less so, understood. To summarize Barthes, what makes a photograph special is its uncanny indexical relationship with what we perceive “out there,” with what’s real. And its indexical nature is closely tied to its analogue processes. Analogue photography transcribes – “writes”- light as a physical texture on a physical substrate in an indexical relationship of thing to image (i.e. a sign that is linked to its object by an actual connection or real relation irrespective of interpretation). What’s important for Barthes’ purposes is that the analogue photograph was literally an emanation of a referent; from a real body, over there, proceeded radiations which ultimately touched the film in my camera, over here, and a new, physical thing, a tintype, or daguerreotype, or a film negative, was created, physically inscribed by the light that touched it.

Now photography is digital, and the evolution from film to digital is not merely about of the obsolescence of film as the standard photographic medium; rather, it’s the story of a deep ontological and phenomenological shift that is transforming the way we capture and store images that purport to copy the world. Where we used to have cameras that used light to etch a negative, we now have, in the words of Kevin Connor, digital data-collecting devices that don’t “write with light,” but rather which translate light into discrete number patterns which aren’t indexical and can be instantiated intangibly i.e. what is produced isn’t a ‘thing’ but only a pattern which contains the potential of something else, something else that requires the intercession of of third thing, computation.

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The First Photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1827, Le Gras, France

In August, 2003, I was sitting in the garden outside of Joseph Niépce’s Burgundy estate, where, from the window of which, Niépce had taken history’s first photograph. I was enjoying a pleasant late Summer afternoon in the company of George Fèvre, one of the unsung masters of 20th Century photography. A personal friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, George was the master printer at PICTO in Paris and was the guy who printed HCB’s negatives from the 1950’s until HCB’s death in 2004. If you’ve seen an HCB or Joseph Koudelka print on exhibit somewhere, in all likelihood George printed it.

George was an incredibly nice man, humble to a fault, full of fascinating stories about the foibles of the photographic masters and very thoughtful about the craft of photography.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, Behind the Gare St. Lazare (1932). Picto Labs, Paris. Hands: George Fèvre, Paris 5/11/87 © John Loengard

Up to that day I lived in the old familiar world of traditional photographic practices: aperture and shutter, exposure, film type, developer characteristics, contrast filters and paper grades, a world whose highest achievements George had helped promulgate. What better person to talk to about photography, and what better place to do it, where it all started.

Of course, I wanted to hear his stories, first person accounts of iconic photographers and their iconic prints, and George, always the gentleman, obliged without any sense of the significance of what he was remembering. To him, the specifics of how HCB or Koudelka worked, the quality of their negatives, and how George used them to create the stunning prints that made them famous were nothing special, all in a day’s work for him. What George was interested in talking about was Photoshop, something he had just discovered and of which he was fascinated. And he said something curious to me, something I always remembered and something I stored in memory for a better time to reflect on it.

What George said was this: Photoshop was amazing. Anyone could now do with a few keystrokes what he had laboriously done at such cost in the darkroom. It was going to open up the craft in ways heretofore unimagined. But it was no longer photography. There was something disquieting about the transformation. Photography’s tight bond with reality had been broken, its “indexical” nature, as Barthe would put it, had been severed, and it was this bond that gave photography its power. We were arriving at a post-photographic era, where image capture would become another form of graphic arts, its products cut free from ultimate claims to truth. There could be no claims to truthful reproduction because there was nothing written and no bedrock thing produced, just a numerical patter of 1’s and 0’s instantiated nowhere and capable of endless manipulation. The future would be the era of “visual imaging.”

Since that day, the cataract of digital innovation has not abated but intensified— we all know the litany because we are caught up in it on every side: 36 mp DSLRs with facial recognition and a bevy of simulations, camera phones, Lyto, Tumblr, Facebook — do I need to go on?

George Fèvre, Le Gras, France, August, 2003

The changes have brought their benefits: giving people the chance at uncensored expression, allowing us to easily capture and disseminate what we claim to be our experiences. Of course, there are also new problems of craft and aesthetic. Previous technologies have usually expanded technical mastery, but digital technology is contracting it. The eloquence of a single jewel like 5×7 contact print has turned into the un-nuanced vulgarity of 30 x 40 tack sharp Giclee prints taken with fully automated digitized devices and reworked in Photoshop so as destroy any indexical relationship with the real.

We are currently living through a profound cultural transformation at the hands of techno-visionaries with no real investment in photography as a practice. All the more ironic in that this has happened at a time when popular culture now bludgeons us with imagery: while photography is dead, images are everywhere. You see imaging on your way to work, while you’re at work, at lunch time, on your way home from work, when you go out in the evening. Your computerized news feed and email inbox is full of it. Even what you read has become an adjunct to the primacy of the image. The problem is that the images digital processes give us possess no intrinsic proof of their truth, its non-instantiated computated product endlessly malleable and thus cut free from ultimate claims to truth. And it’s this claim to truth that gives photography its uncanny ability to communicate with us, to make us reflect, or to aid us in remembrance, or to help us see anew.

Are You A “Pro?”

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

A few days ago my wife and I travelled to Indianapolis to watch the MotoGP races there. For those of you unfamiliar with MotoGP, its the motorcycling equivalent of Formula One racing. The fastest, most technologically advanced motorcycles in the world ridden by the most talented racers in the world. Its huge in Europe and Asia. Top riders, some of the highest paid athletes in the world, are rock stars in Europe. And yes, they’re athletes, as anyone who has hustled a 200 hp 350 lb cycle around a road course at speeds approaching 210 mph knows well.

I brought a Hexar RF with 28mm. I’m not interested in photographing motorcyclists on the track. I’d rather photograph the spectators doing what spectators do and watch the racers do what they do. During practice sessions I found a great spot in the infield close to turn 13 and watched the riders, knee and sometimes elbow down, railing through the corner. While there, I watched a clutch of pro photographers, all with the latest gear and bazooka sized lenses mounted on monopods, find their angle and burst fire their Canikons as the riders came through the turn.

There I was, a “photographer,” with my humble film camera enjoying a lived life, with photography as a personal pursuit that gave me pleasure, and there they were, “professional photographers” with the latest expensive kit, there presumably because they were being paid to be there doing what they do. And it got me thinking. Why do we fetishize this idea of being a “Pro”, as in “the Pro’s use camera X or sneer at camera Y”, or your camera is used by “Pro’s” while my camera is an “amateur” model? For that matter, how much skill does it take to photograph a sporting event? More precisely, does one need an aesthetic, a vision, or are a professional sports photographer’s skills more in the nature of technical expertise and experience? Could you train anyone to do it competently? And why does this matter?

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

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At two different periods of my life, upon entering university and then again in pursuing graduate work, I’ve gravitated to photography curricula, only to quickly realize that the pursuit of photography as a remunerative activity held absolutely no interest for me, certainly not if it meant photographing vain people in fashionable clothes, or wide-eyed brides or worse yet, boxes of widgets for consumption. I’d rather dig graves, which I can see might have some lasting societal benefit.

This is not to denigrate people who go into the profession of photography, whether it be for journalistic purposes, or as commercial or wedding photographers. I know their jobs demand skills I probably don’t possess, and it’s certainly not for me to look down on anyone who does a honest day’s work. It’s just that I don’t think they have any enhanced claim to a prestige or position of authority denied the amateur who loves the practice as an avocation. In many cases, they have less.

Controlled psychological studies show that doing things for their own sake — as opposed to things that are merely a means to achieve something else — makes for mindfulness and joy. In one recent experiment, college students were given puzzles to solve. Some of the students were paid, and others were not. The unpaid participants continued to work on the puzzles after the experiment was finished, whereas the paid participants abandoned the task as soon as the session was over. And the unpaid subjects reported enjoying the experience more.

Which is confirmation that the most rewarding experiences are often “useless,” in that they have no practical application beyond the experience itself. Aristotle makes this point in his Nicomachean Ethics; he admires learned men because “they know things that are remarkable, admirable, difficult, and divine, but useless.” In my experience, the least practical things in life are the most important and enduring, primarily because their value derives from the doing itself. Photography is that way for me.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

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This is why I find the assumption that being a “Professional Photographer” gives you a privileged viewpoint, and why I find internet forums dedicated to photography, which almost universally buy into this deference, so puerile and oft-putting. Discussions of photography there inevitably turn into discussions about accreditation. The debate about the quality of your ideas devolves into a debate about whether or not you possess the right to speak about these issues, usually with an eye to your vocation.

As for internet photo forums, usually we’re among gearheads whose interest is in the technological aspects of photography. In this context, to some extent, the expert dynamic makes sense. Expertise is our common means of validation when it comes to technical matters. There’s a frustration in having to listen to someone spew nonsense about some technical issue you know a lot about.

However, beyond a certain rudimentary level, technical skill is largely irrelevant to photography as an aesthetic endeavor. You may use a big, expensive camera, and possess a vast array of technical knowledge, but that’s irrelevant to your creative ability. By and large, gearhead forums are full of strong opinions and really bad photography, and the really good stuff, the stuff produced by photographers with a vision, is found elsewhere. I see a lot of good work on Tumblr, posted anonymously and without reference to gear or tech speak and all the other things people who have nothing to say find to talk about.

We constantly need to remind ourselves to practice a healthy disrespect for self-appointed experts, or “Pros,” when we speak of creative efforts. Art isn’t just for those who have been educated to speak its language. “Expertise” can be an cudgel to make everyone talk about the same things in the same way. But there’s no one true way to view a piece of art; no one privileged perspective that will give you the ‘correct’ experience of Eugene Atget, Alfred Steiglitz, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore or Antoine D’Agata. A partial view may be as meaningful as a whole one, and being alienated by a work of art is as valid as obsessive interest. Sometimes “outsiders” are ignorant, but often they can have interesting things to say despite, or maybe even because of, their ignorance. The problem with demanding a certain kind of knowledge or a certain kind of expertise in criticism is that it can insist upon a certain kind of conversation, expertise used as an excuse to shut out of the conversation those who disagree with you.

There’s also a type of reverse snobbery at work here when we talk of Leica users. Today, few if any working professionals use digital Leicas, and for the few that do, it seems more an affectation than a considered choice based on need. Today Leica’s consumer demographic is the status conscious amateur, easily enough caricatured as the dentist who fancys himself HCB. But this is to do precisely what I’m arguing against in the foregoing polemic: making certain assumptions about someone because of the what they’re paid to do, or because of the tools they choose to use. The tools you use, or the expertise you put at their service, isn’t relevant. What you create with those tools and expertise is. If you want my respect, irrespective of how you earn your living, or whether you use a fancy camera or not, don’t assume I should know you have something to say; show me your work.

The Unseen Real/Unreal Seen: Musings on Street Photography

Garry Winogrand, NYC, 1967

Photos simplify. Reality is that which is in a constant, never ending state of becoming or dissolving. Photography is a lie because it arbitrarily designates moments as finished, complete, comprehensible in themselves. But it can also uncover the hidden, the tentative and ephemeral, the subtle and evanescence invisible to accustomed seeing.

Are photographs “true,” or do they just as easily lie to us? This is a renewed discussion in light of the endless manipulative possibilities of digital photography, but in reality it has always been a problem inherent in the medium itself. Previously, when photographic images were less common, the power of the image was nearer the power of reality, and the naive belief in the inherent opacity of photographs was rarely questioned. Visual culture during the period of photograpy’s adolescence was not intended mainly as an aesthetic experience but rather to inform and educate. The underlying presumption was that photographs recorded what was “real.”

As the uses of photography became more varied with the beginnings of mass photography at the turn of the 20th Century, the nexus between the photograph and the reality it supposedly depicted became became problematic for a thoughtful few, while the general public remained happy to think of photographs as true depictions of what “really happened.”

Now camera phones and ease of digital dissemination have made photography ubiquitous. We photograph the minutia of our daily lives: what we eat, how we interact with friends, the nuanced ways we daily transform our selves. Certainly so In the case of “street photography,” which enjoys immense popularity these days. candid, unposed photos of people in public spaces have never been easier. Tumblr and other social media platforms are full of candid photos of people in public places. Unfortunately, most of it is banal and pointless, aspiring to nothing more than the memorialization of a given moment.

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Street photography has always inhabited an ambiguous position within the debate about the truth of photography. The premise of candid photography is to capture a a fleeting moment that stands for a larger truth. Street photographers would say that It is not about prettiness or decoration. A banal subject can make a beautiful photo. Common life, common things, glorification of the obscenity and filth of the street. The best aspires to a reality truer and deeper than anything immediately at hand, something more intense and deeper than the ordinariness daily life surrounds us with – what the Greeks called anagnorisis – when the mundane surface is stripped away and the essence is revealed.

Real “street photography,” in contrast to photos taken in public places, including on streets, is a relatively recent photographic movement and aesthetic, practiced first in the early 60’s by the American photographer Garry Winogrand. Winogrand, who came of age as the photographic heir to the candid documentary style of Robert Frank, redoubled Frank’s non-mannered, capricious approach and made it the means to how his photographs would present the reality that confronted his camera. His historical significance and uniqueness is to some degree because of his discovery of heretofore neglected subjects, but it is mostly about form: he made his photos an exercise in compositional serendipity, completely foreign to the prevailing mannered aesthetic. But there is also a deeper break with tradition; Winogrand’s genius and the true source of his originality was his ability to disappoint expectation: instead of the forms expected of the photographer as creative artist, Winogrand presented the starkness of ‘what we see’. The greatness of the photos was that they changed the nature of the form and what we now expect to see. I love Winogrand’s aesthetic and, like most photographers educated in the history of the visual arts, have been profoundly influenced by his way of seeing. I consider myself a “street photographer.” But I also acknowledge that what gives the best “street photography” its power, its skewed instantaneous perspective, is ultimately a result of its cavalier way with the facts. Like all good art, the best street photography is transitional, emergent, hung between what has passed and what doesn’t yet exist.

The puzzles posed by street photography are a result of this in-between moment. It is compelling in its ambiguity. Its what makes a Winogrand picture so interesting. Mystery is power, and the not-understood is more interesting than what is unambiguous and clear. But its also what makes good “street photography” a fiction, false to the reality of everyday life. It is the conceptual mistake that gives rise to philosophical parlour tricks like Zeno’s Paradox: the claim that a flying arrow is really always at rest, and at any moment of its flight it is at only one point in space, that is, motionless; its motion, however actual to the senses, is logically, metaphysically, unreal. Its also the mistake of photography, best exemplified and amplified by “street photography, ” both its seduction and its lie. Really good “street photography” is a cheap trick, a conjurers’ tool for the clever.The false philosophical assumption of the street photograph is that time and motion are discontinuous, composed of discrete points or parts, and that a view of a discrete part tells us a truth about the larger whole. Sometimes it may, but not necessarily. Sometimes, the woman standing in the street, laughing at a joke, is only that and nothing more.

Enough is Enough

“At the moment the writer realizes he has no ideas he has become an artist.” – Gilbert Sorrentino

I thought of the above quote when thinking of writing a piece for this website. Frankly, I’ve been in a fallow period and simply not very motivated to write about Leica film cameras and the arcane minutia us leicaphiles obsess over. Maybe, after all these years, I’ve become an “Artist.”

It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve been involved in the visual arts for 45 years, as a painter and photographer and a documentarian. I’ve never made much money doing it (it’s not my vocation but rather a lifelong avocation) although I’ve been professionally trained and know my way around a gallery or two, both as a “Fine Art” photographer (yech!) and as a painter.

Untitled, Acrylic on Canvas, 30×40, 2015

As this website attests, I’m mostly just a camera freak, a fondling gearhead, bottom of the photographic food chain, not much better than the guy on Rangefinder Forum discussing which bag goes best with his M240. Guilty as charged: I love old mechanical cameras, with a preference for Leicas because, frankly, they’re the best mechanical cameras ever built. But I also love my Nikon rangefinders (I’m completely enamored with my black paint S3 Olympic) and a brace of Nikon F’s I currently own. And, as someone firmly grounded in the film era, without the need to keep current technologically, I do realize my photographic concerns and critiques are anachronistic in the extreme, the product of having the luxury to discourse about what constitutes a meaningful interaction with one’s photographic tools without the burdens of deadlines requiring 80 finished prints for a wedding client, or a set of photos to illustrate a newspaper article.

But…there’s something about the incredible technological advances in image capture that just doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s grounded in the uncomfortable recognition that photographic realities have passed me by, and I’ve become the functional equivalent of the grumpy old guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But maybe it’s something more than that. Maybe it’s it that the skill and vision traditionally required of a photographer seem to have been subsumed in the race of technology, which itself is redefining both the skills required to succeed in the profession and the ways we measure what constitutes photographic excellence.

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a story about Robert Frank, who, if you’ve ever read much of what I’ve written, you’ll know I think is one of the three or four most brilliant and creative photographers of the last 100 years. Great article, although I made the mistake of reading the reader’s comments on the Time’s web version a few days after it was published. Typical of the comments was one from a photographer, no doubt who had come of age recently, who, to paraphrase, said that he was a professional photographer, and while he wasn’t familiar with Frank there certainly wasn’t anything he saw in the accompanying photographs that would make him want to learn any more about him. To him, Frank’s photographs were amateurish, crude. Sigh. In my less charitable moments I’m tempted to call that man what he is – an idiot.

Maybe photography has become too easy. Any idiot can do it, and any idiot can mistake what he does – exposed and framed right, razor sharp from corner to corner – with being “good.” Ease of use has created a generation of photographers who can produce tack sharp, technically perfect photographs, and invariably they’ve confused their technical expertise with having something to say. Very rarely these days do I see photographers with something to say. The best photography has always been a black art, an alchemy that turns matter to spirit. Technology has nothing to do with it.

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I recently ‘inherited’ a Nikon D2x, a full bells and whistles pro digital tool that sold new, with backlog, for $5000 9 years ago. Curiosity getting the best of me, I did a google search to see what was being said about the camera today. Current opinion is that the camera is a relic, unfit for any serious use because of its dated sensor that craps out over 800 ISO, in spite the fact that 10 years ago it was being lauded as an exceptional image maker. It’s the same dismissive attitude one sees toward the M8 or M9 today.

Of course, back in the film era, when we didn’t have the technological advantages digital provides, good photographers, photographers with a vision, found a way to produce stunning work. If you needed a large print (11×14 or above) you used either a low ASA fine grain film or a 2 1/4 negative. You needed sufficient light for proper exposure, so using a larger negative with higher ASA film remained the preferred alternative. Somehow we managed, some of us with less effort than others. We referred to it as “skill.” You had the choice of using a faster film or a faster lens to achieve good results in low light. I don’t really remember using any film faster than ASA 400. Lenses went down to f1.2, f1.4 but were expensive and true technical quality was fleeting. Somehow great photographers managed to produce some remarkable images during that time and photojournalism flourished.Then came digital and all changed. Technological mastery replaced skill and vision and it became necessary to have the latest camera body to make an acceptable photograph.

I am having a tough time seeing the transition from film to digital as all progress. Is it easier, more convenient? Yes, certainly. Does its use facilitate better photographs? It certainly hasn’t made my photographs better, and I can make a case that it’s made the process much less satisfying as well. In spite of all the ‘progress’ the photographs I see look more generic and uninspired than ever. As for me, I’ve not missed a single image I wished to capture because of a deficiency of the obsolete camera I’m known to use. I have, however, missed a few because of my lack of a vision. Do photographers today understand that difference?

You’ll Be a Better Photographer if You Use a Leica

“The essence of communication is intention.” Werner Erhard

Let’s face it: Leica cameras are ridiculously expensive and technologically crude. They lack common features found on cameras a fraction of their cost. They can be finicky and incredibly expensive to maintain and repair. Their digital offerings, when not plagued by manufacturing defects, have been years behind the curve in an industry where technical obsolescence is measured in months, not years.

I’ve owned a few digital M’s along the way, but exercising the rational part of my brain, sold them and have since settled on a Nikon D800E for exacting work and a couple of Ricoh GXRs for easy digital capture. Both the Nikon and the Ricoh produce stunning files, and, if there exists in the digital era certain cameras that approach the minimalist perfection exemplified by the Leica M in the film era, the Ricoh GXR is surely one of them. The folks at Ricoh hit it out of the park with the GXR and it’s A12 M mount, but also its 28mm and 50mm AF modules mating a dedicated sensor to impeccable optics. I remain completely blown away by how good my photos are from the GXR. As for the D800E, well, we’re easily talking resolution and dynamic range found in medium format 6×9 cameras. That’s crazy.

And along the way I’ve followed, admittedly with a certain amount of schadenfreude, the debacle that is the delaminating CCD sensor of the M9, ME and MM. As I understand it, Leica still sells the MM and ME with a sensor they know, at some point, is going to need replacing, for no other reason than its defective by design. Yet, people are still queueing up to buy them, knowing all of the above. And, I must admit, in moments of weakness, I’m tempted to plunk down five grand and pony up for a Monochrom, outdated, delaminating CCD sensor be damned. When all is said and done, I must admit, that’s one cool camera.

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It used to be that a ‘serious’ photographer had to do things and master techniques that required specialized knowledge and training. Any art school graduate who’s been made to read Leslie Stroebel’s Basic Photographic Materials and Processes as a foundation of their studies in photography learned that a serious interest in photography required an understanding of its technical aspects, aspects that required considerations of mathematics, physics, chemistry, psychology and physiology. Armed with the skills such knowledge provided, we could easily differentiate ourselves from the dilettantes who took snapshots and dropped their rolls off to be developed at the corner drugstore. We were serious about the craft of photography, and we versed ourselves in its chemical and physical underpinnings and the means to manipulate its variables to produce something unique, a product of our specific vision. And it was this knowledge that was a prerequisite of our photographs being qualitatively better than the snapshots of the dilettante, even if, in practice, there was little about the photographs themselves that might have distinguished one from the other. Our photographs had intentionality.

Digital photography is radically democratized. Everybody can do it, and do it well without any real understanding of the mechanisms involved. My niece, who knows nothing about photography as a craft, routinely produces stunningly beautiful photographs with her iphone, photos with more power and aesthetic character than 99% of those uploaded in endless procession by “serious” photographers on enthusiast sites like Rangerfinder Forum or Photo.net. She has an “eye.” Digital image-making (I hesitate to refer to it as photography) is essentially idiot-proof; point the device, press the button, send out the result for other’s perusal. If you’ve got an “eye,” chances are your results will be good, often better than the best creations made during the film era by serious photographers with advanced knowledge and painstakingly acquired technical expertise.

If we profess to value the dissemination of visual reality, this is good, an advance, because we as photographers are freed from the encumbrances of the technological constraints that stand between us and the creation of our vision. Now all of us can document our lives and the lives of others around us without first hurdling the technical bar existent in analogue days. Photography need no longer be a craft, a practice that requires something other than a common aptitude. Anyone can do it, and do it well.

But there’s a catch. The tools we use, and the manner in which they allow us to use them for our creative purposes, have an authority in the process, because they function to structure our attention in a certain way. The design of the tool conditions the nature of our involvement in our creative practices, an “ecology of attention,’ in the words of philosopher and social theorist Matthew Crawford, that may be more, or less, adapted to the skills needed to meaningfully involve the craftsman in his creative actions. Tools do matter. I would suggest that, in spite of the tired cliche that “it’s not the camera,”, your skills are dependent, in a real sense, on the camera.

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Maybe this helps lead us to an explanation of why some of us consciously reject the ease of modern photography, preferring instead to treat our photography as a craft that requires a certain intentionality. Many of us believe that the values that Leica has heretofore embodied – simplicity grounded in the assumption that the photographer understands the process and is best able to choose the appropriate variables, aesthetics driven by functional concerns, a need for the transparency of the camera in the process because it is ultimately only a tool in service of our particular vision – are necessary aspects in what we define as “photography.” We’ve learned and practiced a craft we define as “photography” that requires knowledge, skill, intentionality, and we see these aspects eroded to the point of irrelevancy with the remarkable inovations of the digital age.

So, we chose to “do it the hard way,” even though its now no longer necessary as a technological necessity. Granted, an evocative photograph is an evocative photograph irrespective of the means of its capture, but many of us still find a great satisfaction in the process of photography, a process that requires specialized knowledge and tools that allow us to translate that knowledge into a photograph that embodies our intention. And for these purposes, there exists no better camera than a Leica M. It’s minimalism of design and function creates the perfect tool with which to exercise intentionality in the practice of our craft. We get to do the thinking and make the appropriate choices. To do so it requires of us a sophisticated knowledge of basic photographic principles. We ‘take’ the photographs, not the camera.

Do we get ‘extra points’ for difficulty? No. A good photo is a good photo, whether I take it with my unmetered M4 and chose a film and developer to enhance the effects I’m looking for, or whether my niece pushes a button a her iphone. We both may create beautiful photos, but I’ll do so as a ‘photographer’ who understands and values the process, while her motivations, concerns and interests in what she’s doing may never have reached the level of mindfulness. To my mind there’s a huge difference between us, not merely a difference of degree but a qualitative difference in who we are and how what we do defines us. “Snobbish” ? Possibly. True? Most definitely.

And that’s why I’m intrigued by the Monochrom. It looks, feels, and operates like a traditional analogue camera. No ‘modes,” no image stabilization, no wifi, no mindless automation. You get to choose. Is it hopelessly crude from a technological standpoint? Yes. But if you’re looking at it with those technological parameters as decisive factors, you simply don’t understand how the function of photography is a guiding interest for a remaining few. Insofar as a digital camera is capable of recreating the minimalist design and function of a traditional analogue camera, its the best current option for carrying forward the practice of mindfulness in the photographic process, a practice many of still desire in an age of the mindless ubiquity of iphones and social media.

You Are What You Shoot

“Every image he sees, every photograph he takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait. The portrait is made more meaningful by intimacy – an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience.” – Dorothea Lange

I guess we are all familiar with an approach to diet that claims “you are what you eat”. If you keep stuffing yourself with a home roasted salmon with asparagus, some decent grain and a healthy salad, there is a good chance that your life as well as your persona will show that. Same goes for someone who lives on a six happy meals a day diet. Do not despair however, I will not try to convince you to eat healthy or preach about the health benefits of broccoli. This rule, or rather an idea, can be applied to any aspect of ones life.

If you are what you eat then you definitely are what you shoot.

Every photograph is a portrait of some sort. Not only people, but if you photograph landscape for instance, it will be a portrait of that particular landscape feature. When Michael Kenna spoke about photographing Tree by the Lake Kussharo ( http://procameraman.jp/Interview/overseas_File08_201207/Japan/Kussharo%20Lake%20Tree%20Study%201%20Kotan%20Hokkaido%20Japan%202002.jpg ) he referred to it as a portrait of “that old lady” and he spoke about her it that very fashion, as he would about a human being. If we take that every photograph is a portrait and bring words of Dorothea into the picture, every single photograph we make becomes, in a sense, a self-portrait.

We are One

“I am that old man crossing the street. I am that woman passing by. I am the rolling hills in the mist. I am Nikon.” Hang on… Actually, this one is bull, but I guess you get the idea.

What I found, in my not-too-long photography adventure, is that vision is single most important skill, or rather an ability, that you can have available to you. Vision, in a sense, that reflects your inner projection of the world around you. As an individual, you perceive the surroundings with an unique viewpoint. If, for instance, Josef Koudelka had your personality, along with your character, his photographs would look a bit different. In no way better or worse, he would still create great work, but it would carry a different feel to it. I often find people refer to it as a “style” in photography. It is not about what format you are shooting with, where you usually put your subject within the frame (upper left junction, anybody?) or how you expose your shots. This does play a role, but a very minor one. What makes up for a style is how you “see” your subject, how you interact with it and what is the out coming emotion. If you can convey this, you have found your style, and it is nothing else, but your Self reflecting off the lens. That is when your work becomes great, even if your photographs are a bit underexposed.

Finding your Self

My former kendo sensei, when asked how one could get better at kendo outside of the dojo, answered: “eat well, live well and be happy”. Becoming a better person will make you become a better artist. There are tons and tons, and then some more books on self-development. It is a well overused term and, just as creativity, I have grown to hate it. But the idea is showing the right direction, regardless of the label. Math writes itself here. Nasty character will show up when photographing people in a demeaning way, exploring their flaws and insecurities. Interest in people and human condition will make you approach them with respect. If you are driven by nature in your daily life, a little stream by your house will make for an astonishing print. One that will show it in its greatness.

Follow your drive. Answer this question: “If money were no object, what would I do/photograph?”. Way too many photographers lose their drive as they pursue a “career” in photography, changing directions as the wind changes, heading where the profits lay. Go with whatever resonates with you the most. The rest will show up when the time is right.

What we do, and how we do it, determines what sort of personality do we carry with us on a daily basis and thus what we photograph it shows a reflection of our inner voice. We need to listen to it intently. Skills, equipment aside, this is the thing that matters most. A skill that needs practice, but if you give it a lot of time and patience, it will reward you as no other. Have that in your tool box and you will far surpass master technicians with not much to say.

Greg Krycinski is a photographer and an author. You can find more of his work at www.ditchitall.com, a blog about creativity and self expression in arts and crafts.

Dear Leica: Please Build This Camera!

The Konost FF Digital M-Mount Rangefinder

In spite of all its digital era missteps – M8 IR filters, M9 delaminating sensors, Lenny Kravitz Editions – I give Leica grudging credit. They’ve attempted to keep alive their traditional virtues – minimalism and simplicity combined with technical excellence, into the digital age. And for the most part, they’ve done a decent job; the Digital M’s retain a certain charm, a timelessness, vaguely reminiscent of the traditional M film cameras, although their form factor has been increasingly compromised by electronic bloat.

But, to my mind, they are inexorably travelling a slow road to irrelevancy in a digital age. The most obvious problem is their price and what you get for it. Leicas have always been expensive, but in the mechanical age the Leica price differential – what you paid for what you got – wasn’t as seriously out of whack as it is today. Back then – the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, the years of the classic M’s – you paid twice as much for a Leica that was built for long, hard use, a tool of unsurpassed quality that would remain viable indefinitely. Many of us are still happily using those Leica cameras built in the 50’s, cameras that will be working when my grandkids get old.

A Black Chrome Leica M4 – The Best 35mm Camera Ever Made

Unfortunately, The days of finely crafted mechanical cameras are long gone. Today, cameras are computers, and Leica offers to sell you one for five times as much as a similar offering from Fuji. Actually, something that isn’t even as advanced technologically as the Fuji offering. And then there’s Leica’s stubborn problems with quality control; in spite of the “robust build” mantra newer leicaphilies continue to mindlessly bleat about in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Leica digital quality has been dodgy at best.

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What Leica desperately needs to do is to rethink, from the ground up, what ‘Leica Quality’ should mean in a digital age, and how a new definition of quality can be accomplished with more cost effective production methods. The concept of the overbuilt hand assembled camera is a dead end, a mechanical era anachronism, unnecessary and counter-productive in the digital age of limited life cycles. Here are some easy ways to reduce production costs without impacting ‘quality’ i.e made properly for the necessities of the digital age: replace brass with lighter, less expensive materials; design for easy assembly; replace handbuilt processes with automation where appropriate; outsource simple parts to cheap production countries; standardize form factor and parts among camera lines.

Now combine this with a renewed focus on simplicity as a guiding aesthetic and ergonomic principal. No auto focus, multi-function dials, movie modes, EVFs, or other various digital bloat. Just a simple camera with minimal bells and whistles – a shooting experience akin to a traditional Leica film rangefinder, with manual focus, manual aperture, and manual shutter speed controls, with a decent sensor that doesn’t need replacing every year. A beautiful, minimalist form factor like the iconic film M’s, but not merely a slavish retro throwback. The ability to use M mount lenses. Competitively priced. Give us that, Leica, and people like me will beat a path to your door to buy it.

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And it looks like we may get it, but not from Leica. U.S. Based Konost plans to launch a full frame digital rangefinder that hardens back to the minimalist ethos that made Leica famous. And it sounds – and from first photos, looks – really cool. The Konost FF is an aluminum bodied 20 megapixel M-mount “rangefinder style” camera that uses a secondary image sensor rather than a traditional rangefinder mechanism. The secondary image sensor, located in the round window next to the lens, produces an image calibrated to the lens position and then electronically displays it as the rangefinder focus patch in the optical viewfinder. Users compose shots using the optical viewfinder and manually focus the camera in typical rangefinder fashion by superimposing the two images.

Konost also plans a smaller version of the digital rangefinder with a 12-megapixel APS-C sensor, and the Junior, a JPEG-only fixed-lens camera with a 1-inch-type sensor. They’ll all share the same basic body architecture.

The full frame model will use a 20-megapixel (36 x 24 mm) CMOS sensor, a maximum shutter speed of 1/4,000 second, and a 4-inch rear LCD monitor. The Konost FF will use M-mount lenses and simple manual controls.

Konost plans to release The camera in 2016. “Like any small start-up, there are still many things to do and our resources are limited. However, we are doing our best everyday. We are just a group of engineers building our own dream camera. We’re not stopping until it’s out.”

It’s a great idea for a really promising digital camera that will finally bring the promise of traditional rangefinder simplicity to the digital age. It’s what Leica should have done 10 years ago. It’s still not too late, before a small US based start-up steals a march on Leica. Leica will have no one but themselves to blame if they do.

Simplicity as a Creative Imperative

This was originally published at Ditchitall.com, a blog about creativity.

Ockham’s Razor is a philosophical maxim attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate” which, translated literally means “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” In simple terms, it means this: The simplest solution is almost always the best. The truth of Ockham’s maxim spans disciplines and endeavors. Simplicity possesses an elegance which is a proof of its truthfulness.

Simplicity is also a powerful spur to creativity. Simplifying counters the endless psychic demands placed on us, demands that take us away from the free and open consciousness that is needed for any creative activity. Why? because simplicity encourages focused attention. Simone Weil called attention prayer, and attention is the faculty that pulls us out of habitual ways of thinking and seeing and joins us to the infinite potential of the world.

Creativity is an inquiry. It requires sustained concentration. Form in art is how we bring that attention to life. For Weil, it is the answer to our creative prayer. Attention is necessary to any formal creative act, as important as the time we have, but it is rapidly depleted by modern technologies originally meant to expand creative possibilities but which have grown new, unexpected, hydra-like complexities.

To simplify doesn’t mean to reflexively give over to automated processes that we can do ourselves. In fact, it is the opposite. Simplicity creates a virtuous circle: it promotes attention, attention then demands creative processes at odds with automation, which in turn reinforces simplicity. To automate a creative process short circuits the relationship with our creative muse. It does so because it subtracts the tangible, the need of the creative impulse to interact with something palpable, something it can feel, hold, manipulate and transform. What neurobiology and common sense teach us is that it’s difficult to penetrate to the sense of things without taking them in hand. Tangibility, the feel of a thing, provides us a sense of agency and mastery by allowing attention that is coherent and concentrated.

Simplicity and tangibility are both means to attention, attention to understanding, and understanding to the coherence of our creative endeavors. It is by attending to and manipulating things that we understand the world, and it is only with understanding that our creations are true.

Bluebird, 2066, Acrylic on Canvas

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I am a painter and a photographer, although these days the bulk of my creative pursuits involve photography, both as a documentarian and a publisher of the blog Leicaphilia. What I’ve learned in pursuing creativity for over 40 years is the value of simplicity: simple ideas and simple tools to craft them. Simplicity unclutters your creative pallet. You don’t need exotic places to create meaningful photographs; in fact, I would argue that your best photographs will be of those things close to you and intimate to your understanding. Likewise, fixation on better gear will not make your photographs “better.” Over-investment in technology for creative pursuits is a dead end. I’ve long ago lost any interest in artisty that depends on technical advantages.

What I’m not arguing for is an enforced simplicity taken to its extreme. Rather, I’m advocating a simplicity within the context of your creative endeavors, in order to free your creative impulse. If you merely want to photograph something as a means to record its existence, a completely automated camera phone will do fine. When I need to record something quick and easy, without ultimate archival concerns, my method of choice, often as not, is digital capture, usually with recourse to many of its automated features. But I’m a traditionalist when it comes to the art of photography. I like the distinction Robert Hass makes: a snapshot is the picture of a thing; a photograph is the picture of a mind perceiving a thing. My preferred means of practicing photography as a creative activity is with a simple all-mechanical film camera.

At base, photography is simple. All you need is a light tight box, a means to focus and control the flow of light, and a light sensitive material. It can be done with a cardboard box sporting a needle hole. When you use an old film camera, you can see how the lens opens, how the film moves across the focal plane, how adjusting aperture and shutter physically effects the operation of the camera and ultimately the production of the photo. You learn how to manipulate these variables to your own ends.

Today’s photographers press buttons and things happen but they often never acquire real mastery over the world of things. They activate options from nested menus that intitiate incoherent processes. The results are a pattern of disembodied zeroes and ones. Formerly a tangible thing – a celluoid strip of negative imprinted with light – is now only a neural memory stored in silicon, without heft or substance. Photographers have become symbol manipulators, and what is in danger of becoming lost is a fundamental knowledge of the tangible, replaced by the mysteriousness of virtual reality.

Digital cameras are opaque to mechanical understanding, designed not to betray the physical nature of their workings. That is a shame, because understanding how our tools work is important in helping us understand our craft and to understand our world. Using a fully mechanical device doesn’t allow you to have that technical detachment. If it doesn’t work, if your photos aren’t successful, your failure is obvious and you know who is responsible. One of the most important things in any craft is learning from your mistakes, and ultimately enhancing and controlling errors. When cause and effect isn’t hidden by the complexities of your tools, creative acts can provide a kind of moral education which also benefits intellectual creativity.

Ironically, the technologies that have promised to simplify photography too often radically complicate it. Lets not speak here of the ongoing archival conundrums posed by digital technologies – I’m speaking here the efficacy of different tools to human creativity. Simple tools- a mechanical camera, say – give us enduring satisfactions because they become, in their simplicity, transparent as creative mediums, while creative “technologies” – let’s use Adobe Photoshop as an example – become an end in themselves, and too often create an obsessive, insatiable craving for the next version, the 2.0 that will finally deliver what they’ve promised. Of course, the “updates” never end. The ironic and toxic result of the technologies saturating our environment is they flatter us with delusions of our autonomy and agency, when in fact we are their slaves. Creative technology is at its best when it is invisible, invisible when its simple and thus capable of our full attention. Only then can we truly attend to creativity.

Who the Hell is Peter Lik and Why Doesn’t He Use a Leica?

“Peters Whisper”, Peter Lik

Apparently, Peter Lik is the guy who claims to have sold the world’s most expensive photo (see $6.5 Million Landscape Is World’s Most Expensive Photo). Lik sells his work through 15 of his own branded galleries, the kind you find in touristy hot spots where the Nouveau Riche tend to congregate. He claims to have sold over 100,000 photographs for more than $440 million. The New York Times, however, is questioning his claims. At auction, the most his photos have sold for is $15,860, and that is his only verifiable sale that has brought in more than $3,000. Hucksterism, anyone?

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On a related note, I found this nugget on Mr. Lik’s blog, Exposed (!). Apparently he’s not a “Leica Guy”:

Austrian artist and photographer Ernst Haas once said, “Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.” It is important for photographers not to get discouraged by the standard of their equipment (or lack thereof). So if you don’t have top-of-the-line equipment, don’t sweat it. It’s the talent and tenacity of the person clicking the shutter that is the most critical ingredient in getting great shots.

And he is right, although he may not be the most believable of messengers given his technologically driven creations, but that doesn’t make the message any less true.

And as for his art, well, ‘Art’ is what people say it is, and clearly, he’s selling enough of his to rightfully claim that many people see his work as ‘Art.’ Is it something I’d buy? No. But aesthetic sensibilities vary, and the majority of folks don’t understand critically acclaimed creations that require an aesthetic, cultural or intellectual context, as attested by the fact that Steven Speilberg movies have a much larger audience than something by Györgi Feher.

Frankly, you can argue that most ‘Art’ today is a confidence game, defined by a power structure of curators and dealers with little criteria other than what will make them money. In photography, Cindy Sherman comes to mind. But its been that way since the mid 1800’s, when the rise of bourgeois wealth created a demand that the new vocation of art dealer arose to meet. With it came the self-promoting Artist, whether it be Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray or Thomas Kincaide and Peter Lik. And with it came the art enthusiast who waits for others to say “this is Beautiful art” before he can say the same. It’s just the way it is.

Which is not to say there ultimately isn’t any objective standard one can use to define great Art. If you’ve ever visited the Vatican and stood in awe in the Sistine Chapel, or sat in a church in Mississippi and listened to a gospel choir sing Amazing Grace, or listened to John Coltrane interpreting a blues standard, you know transcendent Art exists. And Mr. Lik is correct: it’s got nothing to do with equipment and sterile technique. It’s about vision, about an idiosyncratic conversation with the otherwise unobserved.

Take this photograph by Daido Moriyama for example: I’d trade every Peter Lik print ever produced for one 11×14 print. Why? Because it speaks to me, and that’s my definition of “Art.”

The Elephant In The Digital Dark Room

“Six major Hollywood film studios have gotten together to help Kodak remain in the movie business. Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. have all signed deals on advance purchases of Kodak’s film stock, which will help keep the company’s production plants operational. Kodak is the last company to make motion picture film, which some filmmakers prefer for aesthetic reasons.“We were very close to the difficult decision of having to stop manufacturing film,” said Jeff Clarke, Kodak’s chief executive, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Now with the cooperation of major studios and filmmakers, we’ll be able to keep it going.”” TIME, Feb 5, 2015

The qoute above is deceptive. It presumes that the ongoing demand for film is a result of certain filmmaker’s “aesthetic preferences.” And it is, as far as that goes. But that’s not the whole story about why the motion picture studios want to “save” film production. It’s not even the main reason. The main reason will surprise you, but, like the proverbial elephant in the room, nobody is talking about it.

In the “analogue age,” a movie studio would bundle up a completed master of a motion picture and ship it off for physical storage somewhere cold. Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. have for decades been archiving and storing their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material in salt and limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

It’s an inexpensive archiving system, a highly effective means of preserving the motion picture heritage. Archived 35mm film stock remains stable for centuries under proper climactic conditions. With digital, however, the film industry is discovering that its core assets, its digital motion picture masters, aren’t as permanent as the film stock they’ve replaced. It’s a BIG problem, but studios, in their shortsighted quest for the bottom line, at least until recently, haven’t really been paying much attention.

And there’s an object lesson here for photographers, or at least those paying attention.

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Hasn’t digital made information of all kinds more available, and less expensive to produce? Isn’t it so much cheaper to shoot digitally, without the need for the expense and bother of film and the ridiculous analogue processes that sustain it? Well, it does, and it is, but unfortunately at the expense of the media’s permanence.

In 2010 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business titled “The Digital Dilemma.” Their findings: To store a digital movie master costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. And to keep the enormous amount of ancillary data – outtakes, alternative scenes, assorted ephemera – produced when a picture is produced using digital processes, rather than on film — increases the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, exponentially higher than the $486 it costs to dump the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the Kansas salt mine. A film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report claimed that the problems with digital movie storage could cause the film industry a return “ to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away,” what he referred to as “digital extinction” over a short span of years.

At present, copies of almost all studio movies, even those shot using digital processes, are still stored in 35mm film format, giving the movie 100 years or more of shelf life. Most modern motion pictures are edited digitally, and then are transferred to film, which results in images of lower quality than a pure film process, and this is what becomes stored for posterity. But the ongoing conversion of theaters to digital projection is sharply reducing the overall demand for film, eventually making it a problematic market for Kodak. If film were to go away, pure digital storage will be the norm, and with it the persistent problems of digital’s lack of permanence.

In addition to digital’s lack of tangibility, digital hardware and storage media are much less stable than 35mm film. Hard drives fail in as little as two years when not regularly used, and even the most archival grade DVDs degrade and become unreadable within 2 decades. According to the report, only half of “archival quality disks” can be expected to last for 15 years. Digital audiotape tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades and becomes unreadable. Constant changes in technology only add to the digital confusion: as one generation of digital storage replaces the previous, archived materials must be transferred to the new format, or they eventually become unreadable. My graduate thesis, written on an 80’s era IBM and saved to one of those giant floppies, is unrecoverable 30 years later. There’s no equipment to read it. Meanwhile, every negative I’ve ever sleeved from 1971 onward is perfectly preserved in binders, ready to be wet-printed or scanned. Before your faith in technology causes you to dismiss this as anecdotal hysteria, consider this: recently NASA discovered that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975 because the format was now obsolete. Think about that.

“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations, said of the quandary facing motion picture archivists. As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.” I would submit that it’s not just a quandary faced by the motion picture studios, but one faced by all of us who document our lives for the benefit of posterity. And it’s one you avoid or ignore at your own peril.

But, more so, a cultural peril. Each successive generation is the steward of its cultural memory. We bear the responsibility of handing down our memory to the future, but that stewardship can be problematic given the ephemeral nature of current digital technology. Digital technology may put the transmission of this knowledge at risk. Ironically, when the world is saturated with images, we run the concurrent risk of no image enduring. Our digital memories, the evidence of our lives, now ‘exists’ only in a virtual world, a patter of 1’s and 0’s not really located anywhere, and, because of the accelerated pace of technological change and obsolescence, increasingly susceptible to degradation, erasure and loss. Meanwhile, traditional media, paper and film, is tangible, real, and can still be filed away and retrieved without the mediation of technology.

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When I was 12, my father bought me a camera. Crazy with my new found love of photography, I’d photograph the neighborhood kids at play. A year or two ago I pulled those early negatives from the shelf and found pictures of a young neighbor boy, a sweet little child I used to babysit, who had died suddenly and unexpectedly at three years of age from a viral infection. Confronting those pictures after 45 years, I realized I had in my possession something incomparably precious to someone somewhere, the recorded memory of a life tragically taken from a father, mother and siblings. The right thing to do was to see that they were returned to his family. To that end, I did an internet search and found his brother, and emailed him what I had found. Would he want these negatives I had of his brother, now 45 years gone?

Within minutes of sending my email I received a response. With it was attached a picture:

It was a picture I had taken of his brother which I had given his mother shortly after his brother’s death. He told me he had had this picture on his bedside table for the last 40 years, and it was one of his most important possessions, something he had found comfort in since he was a child, since it perfectly captured how he remembered his brother, with a shy smile and happy eyes. Yes, of course, he would be incredibly grateful for any others I could send.

It was, even for me, an emotionally powerful experience, full as it was with the power of a simple photograph to memorialize the ineffable and conjure distant memory. I had given a profound gift to another human through the simple intercession of a photograph.

Photographs allow us to give this gift to the future. In 50 years, will your heirs retain possession of your photographic patrimony?

For a related post go here.

Can The Camera Shape the Photographer?

An interesting conversation with Mike Avina, Chris Farling, David Horton, Hector Isaac and Tom Young from www.observecollective.com. Some are photographers who have “graduated” from film to digital but still understand the enduring strengths of film capture, others having taken up photography in the digital era. A very germain conversation for those of us who use Leica rangefinders, whether film or digital.

A recent magazine ad for the Fujifilm X-T1 said, “The camera you carry is as important as the images you make.” But among street photographers, it is not cool to obsessively discuss “gear.” We take that for granted – cameras are just tools. While that is true, there is no better tonic for “photographers’ block” than a new camera or lens. Some photographers have truly found their vision when they switched to a certain camera. Back in the pre-digital days you had a camera. It was either a Leica, or an SLR. And you kept it forever. Today with so many choices of equipment, a photographer can pretty much find the perfect camera to suit their shooting style and personality. Or is it the other way around? In this post we hope to discover how the equipment a street photographer uses influences what their pictures look like.

OBSERVE
Chris, you were shooting with an Olympus E-P1. Your work was solid and gaining some notice. Then you bought an OM-D E-M5 in the spring of 2012 and it seems like your vision really blossomed. I immediately noticed the quality of your work ramp up several notches and that trend continues. Do you feel that you held a vision that the OM-D finally released? Or did the new equipment present possibilities the E-P1 didn’t… i.e., eye-level viewing, fast autofocus, etc.

Chris Farling (CF)
I don’t want to diss the E-P1 overmuch in that the E-P1 itself was a quantum leap over the fully automatic mode-style shooting of the digital point-and-shoots that I had owned over the previous decade. When I committed to ponying up the $$$ to buy the E-P1, I made a parallel commitment to being more serious in my study and practice of photography. It was with the E-P1 that I really dug into controlling aperture and shutter speed and exploring different focal lengths and lenses. I’m actually glad I started with a camera that had some clear limitations (no VF, iffy sensor, slow AF, & poor high-ISO), much the way you need to play the $&@! out of a student horn before moving onto a more powerful but perhaps more complicated or less forgiving instrument in music. Everyone starting out wants to buy some perfect camera that will make them a brilliant photographer overnight, but the paradox is that it’s only through working around limitations that you grow and develop good habits. If you start out with everything handed to you, it can breed in you a certain laziness and you’ll most likely get bored and frustrated.

The E-P1 was also my first experience using fixed prime lenses and that more than anything helped me to “see” as a street photographer would and to be able to pre-visualize frames to some degree. It was really a wonderful camera to experiment with and learn on and I don’t think I will ever sell it.

OBSERVE
So you’re saying that a more basic camera can provide a better learning experience?

CF
Exactly. It really did liberate me when I upgraded to the E-M5 along with the Oly 12mm f2 lens because I had much of the basics in place from the E-P1. Most of the gains weren’t surprising in that I knew what I wanted out of this new camera and what advantages it held over the old one. I honestly can’t imagine needing a more powerful camera in the foreseeable future.

OBSERVE
That was a pretty wide lens to start with! Just what are those advantages the E-M5 gives you?

CF
The one thing that I want from a camera more than anything else is versatility. And I include the lightweight form factor of the m4/3 system as a key part of that versatility. Not for me the heavy necklace of an SLR… I like to be able to shoot quickly and reflexively and so I don’t even want the camera to be on a strap. The E-M5’s EVF was a real boon to helping me execute better edge-to-edge compositions. I for one really like having all the settings info available in the EVF, though I know many prefer optical ones. The touchscreen, which allows you to tap a focal point or even to release the shutter directly, added even more flexibility. The almost instantaneous AF (as well as the simple zone focusing capability of the 12mm lens’s pull ring) meant that I could depend on my own sense of timing and reflexes and not worry that the camera wouldn’t respond when I was ready. The E-M5 helped me to learn more about on- and off-camera flash. Perhaps the most useful thing, surprisingly enough, was simply the extra customizable dial and button, allowing me to have immediate tactile access to virtually any setting I would want to change quickly in anticipation of the next shot. Also, it bears mentioning that the rich Olympus JPG quality from both cameras has influenced my color sensibility.

As much as I like the E-M5 and feel that it has helped me develop and execute my vision, I’ve since adopted the APS-C sensor Ricoh GR as my principal camera, reserving the E-M5 for special situations where I want the different lenses or the weatherproofing. In many ways, the Ricoh is a step backwards in quality and features, yet it is so perfectly portable and well-designed in its flexibility (a real photographer’s camera) that those advantages trump all other considerations. Plus there’s that awesome TAv mode that let’s you specify both aperture AND shutter speed… I find the Ricoh is the perfect camera for my style of quick close-in shooting with a fixed 28mm-equiv. and I suffer little when adapting it to other types of shooting.

OBSERVE
So with the E-M5 you became accustomed to the convenience of customizable dials? That would make the GR a logical move because, since the line’s inception, it has been praised for its flexible interface. As DP Review said, “We’ve often referred to the Ricoh interface as arguably the best enthusiast-focused interface on a compact camera.”

David, you followed a similar path as Chris, moving from an E-P2 up to the OM-D E-M5. Among this group of photographers, you used the focal length closest to what is considered a “normal” lens: 20mm (40mm equivalent). There is less margin for framing errors than with a 28mm or even 35mm. As a graphic designer, tell us how the precise eye-level framing of the OM-D has influenced your photography, especially with the 20mm lens.

David Horton (DH)
When I first started dabbling in SP, I was using a Canon G9 which has a 35mm default lens. I liked that length a lot. When I moved to the E-P2, I opted for the Panasonic 20mm (40mm equiv.) because it was considerably faster than the 17mm Oly lens* (34mm equiv.) and it received considerably better ratings and reviews.

OBSERVE
*You mean the Olympus 17mm f2.8 Pancake, correct?

DH
Yes. Oly’s first 17mm prime did not have very good performance especially in the corners. Although I used the Pany 20mm almost exclusively for over a year (and was very pleased with the IQ of the lens), I often found the focal length limiting. I wished it was a little wider.

The primary reason I moved to the EM-5 was speed. Although I adapted to the slow autofocus of the E-P2, I was missing more and more shots. Although the add-on EVF on the E-P2 was acceptable, it was a bit cumbersome. I shoot exclusively through a viewfinder. So the ergonomic design of the built-in viewfinder on the EM5 was also very appealing. What I didn’t know until I received the camera is that, to benefit from the increased speed of the EM-5, you also had to have one of the newer Oly lenses. At the time I bought I camera, the fast Oly lenses only existed in 12mm and 45mm lenses. The 12mm (24mm equiv.) was too wide for me. I waited for at least three months for the rumored 17mm 1.8 lens to come out. (It was my dream lens.) I preordered it and got it as soon as it released. I’ve used it exclusively since the day I got it. The combination of the EM-5 and that lens is extremely fast.

The other thing I like about the EM-5 as opposed to something like the Fuji X100 (which I also considered) is the ability to change lenses. Although I rarely do, it’s nice to have that option. I always carry the 45mm 1.8 Oly lens (90m equiv.) with me too, just in case.

OBSERVE
It is nice to have the ability to change lenses, particularly when on a trip, even if you don’t do it often.

Mike, you have used quite a variety of equipment, from Leica M3 to Sony RX1 and many things in between including compact P&S’s and the Ricoh GR. I know that you are a dedicated student of photography with a deep curiosity about what is possible. Does this explain your variety of equipment? You seem to always come back to shooting b&w and I have the impression that, ideally, film is your medium of choice and because of that much of your digital work looks like film.

Mike Aviña (MA)
I’d like to challenge the conventional wisdom of sticking to one camera and one lens. There is a time and a place for sticking to a narrow set of gear. When you get completely accustomed to one focal length and one camera the gear does become more intuitive, you can set up shots and frame them before you pull the camera up to your face because you know where to stand at what distance to include given elements. That said, smaller cameras have certain advantages: deep depth of field, very fast autofocus, and tilt-screens. There are world-class photographers that have discovered and exploited these advantages. I just purchased a published book shot entirely by phone–the images are superlative. I’ve made 12” by 16” prints from an LX7–they look great.

To answer your first question–yes, I prefer film. The dynamic range of film and the separation of subjects one can achieve with shallow depth of field on a fast lens is a necessary creative tool. I have never used complicated post-processing to add blur to digital images; this is a method that ends up looking artificial. A wide, fast lens on either a full-frame sensor or over film is therefore a must-have. Shallow depth of field however is only one tool and not one I use all or even most of the time.

OBSERVE
Arguably, you can come pretty close having a digital image file look like it was shot with film in post processing. But the methodology of shooting film is a whole ‘nother animal.

MA
Film versus digital is probably better left for another discussion! I also have an abiding love for small, pocketable, point-and-shoot cameras. As others have mentioned above, small cameras are easier to haul all day. In addition, shooting like a tourist, with innocuous little shots framed through the LCD rather than a viewfinder, is often more effective than pulling a big rig up to your face and clacking away. Even with a small rangefinder, people react more when you pull a camera up to your face than they do to an apparent tourist snapping casually with the LCD. I tend to frame faces off center; when using a wide angle lens this means people are often not sure they are in the shot because it isn’t clear you are shooting at them. The shooter and the subject have a complicit agreement to the fiction–the photographer is shooting something else; the subject ignores the shooter as long as it isn’t too intrusive. This helps one work close in crowded spaces. Having a bundle of different tools allows flexibility and simultaneous exploration of different creative options.

OBSERVE
You make a very good point Mike. Why shouldn’t we use whatever tool best suits the situation? Some of our peers carry dslr’s with a zoom lens mounted that will cover most scenes. Maybe one of them will comment to the pros and cons of a zoom.

Interesting path you have followed Chris… from LCD framing, to eye-level framing, back to LCD framing. I found myself “borrowing” the small Samsung EX2F I bought for my wife and became addicted to the tilt screen. I find that I am very comfortable shooting from waist level and I really prefer the perspective of that PoV, rather than “looking down” at everything from my 6’2″ eye level.

How hard was it to adjust back to the loose framing of the GR’s LCD screen versus the precise eye-level framing of the E-M5? The concrete canyons of NY offer some shade to better see the screen, but how do you frame in bright sunlight when you travel? How often do you use the optical viewfinder?

CF
I do use the optical viewfinder on the GR sometimes (in a way, it’s less obtrusive and noticeable than holding the camera out from your body) but I have a tougher time seeing all four edges of the frame in the viewfinder than I do with the screen. As wide as I generally shoot, I have to kind of scroll with my eye in each direction and that’s too limiting and slow for me. I also don’t like the tunnel vision that develops where you can’t receive new information about the way the scene is changing and what’s happening on the margins with your peripheral vision. With the OVF, you also don’t see the central AF point if you’re using that to lock AF and then recompose. It may seem like a minor point, but I’m also very left-eye dominant so I have to block my whole face with the camera when using the VF, even if it was a corner-mounted one.

OBSERVE
An interesting observation I have made is how most of us frame on an LCD using both eyes, but frame through an eye level viewfinder with one eye closed. Truth be told, for street photography, framing using any device is probably best done with both eyes open, but a hard habit to get into with an eye level viewfinder. I find an optical viewfinder more conducive to shooting with both eyes open and it gives you the advantage of seeing what is going on outside of, and about to enter or leave the frame.

CF
That is an interesting point about shooting with both eyes open. That may be what I like about using the LCD of the GR. Viewing the LCD in sunlight hasn’t bothered me too much with either the E-M5 or the GRD since the screens can be made pretty bright. Most of the time your own body acts as shade and, even when it doesn’t, you can still easily see which shapes and areas of light and dark correspond to what you’re seeing with the naked eye. I think it’s actually kind of cool having a slight degree of abstraction (less detail) when considering the composition, the same way a photo thumbnail is often easier to use for judging the effectiveness of a composition in editing than the enlarged version.

It’s also interesting that you say you prefer shooting from a more mid-body angle than always looking down at everything. Being 6’2’’, I have the same issue and, while using the 12mm lens almost exclusively for a year, I became cognizant of the great care one must take in controlling the perspective distortion with a wide-angle lens. Even having backed off to the 28-mm equiv. of the Ricoh, I still think that the default orientation with such a lens should be relatively straight on and not tilted excessively.

DH
My biggest gripe with the EM-5 is you have to rely too heavily on the digital interface. I wish there were manual knobs to adjust the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Since I don’t use the LCD, I have it turned off. To adjust any of these settings, I either have to hold the camera to my eye and turn the knobs or turn the LCD on and adjust them. Neither option is ideal or fast enough. This is what I find so appealing about the X100 or a Leica. I also can’t wait until they design better battery life for these digital cameras. As Chris can tell you (from spending a day shooting with me), I opt to carry a number of batteries with me than worry about preserving battery life in the camera. I turn it on and leave it on. When I need to react quickly, I don’t want to have to wonder if the screen’s going to be black when I bring it to my eye.

OBSERVE
That’s what evolution has brought to cameras, David. With a basic film camera, like an M3 or Nikon F you have two settings: shutter speed and aperture… and, of course, focus (and film choice). Cramming so many features into a small digital camera leads to compromises.

Mike made a good point about not limiting ourselves to a single tool. Sometimes we tend to set unnecessary limitations for ourselves. Although we may at any given time favor a particular set of gear, I think most of us here have more than a single camera. We always have the option to change cameras if a project or different direction comes to us Having your equipment be intuitive is the most compelling reason for limiting equipment choices. When I saw you this last summer Mike, you were using the Sony RX1. The IQ is the obvious reason why this camera has a strong following. Is it your perfect camera? If not, what would be? The others can answer this as well.

MA
The M3 is, for me, more or less the perfect camera–I am just reluctant to keep spending the money on film. The chemicals also concern me. For an everyday digital shooter the Ricoh GR may be my favorite. The RX1 has laggy autofocus which hinders the advantage of the high IQ and beautiful rendering that the Zeiss lens offers.

OBSERVE
David, you mention that you use an eye level viewfinder exclusively–is that because you want precise framing? How come you didn’t gravitate toward a DSLR? There are plenty of choices in size and features to fit any budget and many SP’ers use them. Was it because you already had m4/3 glass?

DH
I certainly find my framing more precise and that’s certainly one of the primary reasons I shoot this way. Perhaps, the more significant reason is that I feel “more at one” with the camera and the subject(s). I shoot a lot of portraiture and even when I’m not shooting conventional portraiture, it’s very important that I’m in sync and “connected” with my subjects. Facial expressions and details are very important to me; these are impossible for me to see if I’m relying on a screen. Shooting with a screen is fine for shapes and loose compositions but it’s not very precise—certainly not precise enough for me.

The reason I’m not interested in a DSLR is size. I don’t like to draw attention to the camera and a DSLR certainly does that. I’m also not interested in lugging one of those suckers around the city on a regular basis. I will occasionally lust after the IQ of DSLR sensors but the trade off is not worth it to me. I’ve spent the day shooting with friends that use DSLRs and after a day walking 10 miles around a city, they are not happy campers. The smaller and lighter the camera, the more likely you are to bring it with you.

OBSERVE
Tom, you use a full-frame DSLR. While the 5D is not huge by DSLR standards, it is huge in terms of what everyone else here uses. Obviously it’s hard to be inconspicuous. How do you work around that? I would assume that the quality and precise framing a DSLR offers is important to the type of pictures you want to create.

Tom Young (TY)
There’s a number of different reasons I shoot with an SLR. For one thing, I don’t only shoot street. I also do weddings, events, the odd corporate photography gig. I even shoot landscapes! Egad! So while the 5D is a big rig, for many of the situations I find myself using my camera its size doesn’t really matter, and its image quality is definitely a plus.

But for my street work it can also be an asset. I shoot in a town that is really dark in the winter. During the darkest months, the sun doesn’t get up until after I get to my day job, and is already down again before I leave. And I dabble a bit with flash, but available light is generally my preference. I love the night, really, the strong contrast, dramatic brightness surrounded by black. The full-frame SLR lets me work in that environment and still get nice clean shots.

OBSERVE
I would imagine the high ISO image quality to be a must in the arctic. But how do you deal with subjects when they see you pointing that big honker at them?

TY
Hey wait a minute, Edmonton may be north, but it’s not the artic!!! I find that the right attitude is the key to remaining inconspicuous. People may be more likely to notice my camera because it’s big, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will care what I’m doing with it. When I first started shooting street, it seemed that people noticed me more than they do now, probably because I spent a lot of time sweating bullets about what I was doing. I really didn’t want to be noticed. And I assumed people would think it was odd. I hadn’t squared in my own head what my motive was. I knew what types of images I wanted to produce, but I didn’t have a clear sense of purpose. Best way to stand out in a crowd? Look embarrassed or uncomfortable while wielding a big camera, or worse, a small camera.

OBSERVE
That is excellent advice Tom.

TY
With experience, that fear has dropped way off for me. Now, when I pull out my camera, I’m pretty confident about what I’m doing. And while the odd person may raise an eyebrow, most people don’t seem to think anything is unusual about what I’m up to. I can only assume that means that I look like I belong in the landscape now. Hidden in plain sight, in a sense, despite the fact that I don’t really try to hide my activities any more. So I think the knock against SLRs being too big for street work is a little overblown.

Mind you, it probably helps that I’m not a terribly in-your-face shooter. If I was shooting Gilden-style, the big camera might tip people off before I could get close enough…

OBSERVE
A lot of photographers feel that anything longer than 50mm equiv, or even 35mm, is “against the rules” for street photography. How do any of you feel about that David? You sometimes use the Olympus 45mm f1.8 (90mm equivalent).

DH
I think many “rules” of street photography are pretty ridiculous. I try not to pay a lot of attention to the rules. I believe all that really matters is the success of the shot. Yes, there is an energy and authenticity that comes from a wider lens that is very appropriate for the street—there’s good reason most of us use them most of the time. But limiting yourself to that perspective exclusively is a bit short-sighted (sorry, couldn’t help myself). A lot of magic can happen when compressing images. It can be a very painterly way of seeing, especially with a large aperture. You paint with colors and shapes rather than objects or subjects. It’s a slower, more studied way of seeing. Saul Leiter is a perfect example of this. It all depends on the mood you’re trying to achieve, the story you’re trying to tell.

OBSERVE
You shoot with a Fuji x100, Hector. Am I correct in understanding this is your first camera? You don’t have previous experience with film? The x100 is a popular camera with street photographers. You mentioned that it took awhile for you to feel comfortable with it. I have heard other reports that there was a steep learning curve with this camera. How does the hybrid viewfinder help or limit your shooting style? Is a fixed focal length limiting… do you ever wish it was a little wider, or longer?

Hector Issac (HI)
You are correct, Greg, I had no previous experience with film or any other medium and the Fujifilm x100 was my first camera. Recently, I was asked by a friend… Why that camera? I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t, but I’m glad I got it.

For most of those coming with a broader photographic background, the x100 was a struggle, for me it was a love/hate situation that still exists. After my first try, I almost sold it, then it was left on the shelf for one or two months. It took me about another three to four months to get comfortable enough to get what I wanted. The main issue back then (cough cough) was the autofocus, well … it sucked, so I decided to learn to work manually and zone focus, rather than sell the camera and buy another… Best decision I ever made.

I’m a bit obsessive when I’m interesting in learning something, so my learning curve was rather steep given the amount of time I spent to learn my camera and about photography in general. The hybrid viewfinder helped me learn the camera’s frame lines, even if the lag was a problem.

OBSERVE
Thanks Hector. I have heard from others that the x100 has a steep learning curve. But those who master it love it to the point of becoming evangelists. Interesting choice as a first camera but it seems that diving in on the deep end and making the commitment has served you well!

There are many ways a photographer’s equipment choices shape the pictures they produce. Even though the street photography genre has been slow to embrace anything other than straight, unmanipulated images, today we have so many more choices in equipment and post processing than we did on the pre-digital era. While it should be easy to create a signature look, remarkably much of today’s street photography is fairly homogenous.

The Leica Camera: A Tool, or a Luxury Item?

Leica started out as maker of small, simple cameras. If you needed a small, exceptionally well designed and made 35mm film camera, they offered you the tool. Any elitism that accompanied the Leica camera was a result of its status as the best built, most robust, and simplest photographic solution. You paid for the quality Leica embodied.

Over time, as technology trends accelerated and Japanese manufacturers like Nikon and Canon grabbed the professional market, Leica shifted gears, no longer competing on whether or not their rangefinder cameras were the most useful or most efficient tools for a given purpose, although, for certain limited purposes – simplicity, quietness, discreteness, build quality – they remained exceptional as tools. Starting with the digital age, Leica now competed primarily on luxury, which is a fundamentally different promise than the optimal design of a tool.

Leica is now a luxury tools company. The cameras they sell cost more, but some photographers still choose them, some for the identity that comes along with the use of a luxury good and some for the placebo effect of thinking one’s photographs will improve by virtue of some special quality it is assumed Leica possess. But there remain some of us who still use Leicas because a Leica rangefinder is still the most functional tool for us in the limited ways they always were. We still identify with Leica not a a luxury good but primarily as a maker of exceptional tools, and this creates the ambivalence many of use feel towards the brand as currently incarnated. The ambivalence is a result of the tension of a Leica as a tool versus a luxury item.

Its a tension that Leica is having a difficult time navigating too. As a luxury item producer, Leica probably doesn’t care that its cameras aren’t cutting edge. On the other hand, Leica knows it will not survive if its product is not seen as a preferred choice of the status conscious. At some point in the evolution of every luxury branded tool, users who care more about tools than about luxury shift away to more functional options. You see this today in Leica purchasers’ demographics; the brand is perpetuated largely by those who identify a Leica as a status marker, whether that Leica be a used M purchased on Ebay by someone come of age in the digital era who wants to The Leica Experience, or a new digital M purchased largely by an affluent amateur. Professionals and serious amateurs who need the services of a small, discreet camera system have largely migrated to more sophisticated, less expensive options like the cameras Fuji is currently offering.

I suspect that the era of Leica as a working tool is gone, but the silver lining is that there remains a small but dedicated following who values mechanical Leica film cameras still as a functioning tool, and hopefully there will remain those who cater to them and service them. It would be a shame if that portion of Leica’s heritage were to be lost.