May
25
An Elph is my new Leica bicycle
Filed Under Personal, Photography, gadget thoughts | Leave a Comment
I was a photojournalism student at the University of Missouri in the early ’90s when I discovered the Leica M. In contrast to the massive steel Canon and Nikon bricks we all used at the time, Leicas were small, elegant and unimposing.
Image from a fantastic New Yorker article on the Leica mystique
Despite my lavish $4,000 annual income, I vowed to acquire one. Luck would smile upon me (in the guise of a friend’s crazy photographer boyfriend) and I soon had not one, but a pair of well-used M2s.
My big Nikons (and later Canons) were the workhorses, with their choice of wide-angle and telephoto lenses, motor drives and fancy light-meters. Framing in an SLR was precise, showing you exactly where your focus was and what you would be capturing on film.
But I always had one of those little Leicas tucked away under my arm, loaded with forgiving Tri-X black-and-white film. In the large, bright viewfinder, everything appeared in sharp focus with transparent lines to show you *about* where the edges of your frame were. Focus was fast, but not precise- that’s why God made Depth of Field. There was no built-in light meter. Most of the time I’d set exposure by experience and let the film’s latitude take care of the details.
The Leicas were all about shooting fast and loose, ideal for catching quick, unguarded moments at unexpected times; the perfect tool for making pictures when you weren’t Making Pictures.
Fast forward about 10 years. Digital had finally stopped sucking and I bought a pair of Canon EOS 10d SLRs. Instantly in love with the ease of digital, my old Leicas were immediately relegated to the closet. I’ve been an digital SLR user for years now, but I’ve continued to long for that fast and loose, go-anywhere camera in digital form.
Sep
19
drowning in pictures…
Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment
This is kind of a strange post, but I sometimes find spitting things out all organized-like helps me think…
I’ve been a professional photojournalist for many years (though I’ve been promoted beyond my personal point of incompetence and rarely shoot for work any more). I was lucky enough to begin my career shooting film and was trained not only in 35mm but medium and large format. I’ve also experienced the birth of digital photography first hand: my first copy of Photshop was version 1.0 and came on a single floppy disk. I was lucky enough to experience the best of both worlds from the very beginning of my career.
All of our work now, of course, is digital. Even in my private work, I find very little reason to shoot 35mm film, though I do maintain a fondness for the extremely wide tonal latitude of B+W film.
Over the years, as digital has gotten better and better, I’ve sold off virtually all of my film equipment– EOS film bodies first, a few medium format cameras, my Leicas and both of my 4×5 view cameras (a cheapish monorail and a fantastic Super Graphic). I still have a single EOS1n dedicated to shooting Illford XP2 film, but the digital Canon 5d’s I use now are absolutely without question the finest hand-held cameras I’ve ever used, period. Image quality is stunning, and the digital work flow is, at least for me, a dream. The quality, combined with the ease and speed of digital work flow, has pulled me away from film almost entirely.
About 6 months ago, we had our first child, a daughter. As any doting father, much less a recovering professional photographer, I’ve shot literally tens of thousands of images of her already, almost all digital. With digital cameras, I’m shooting with wild and liberating abandon. But I’ve started to grown less than completely satisfied, not just with the end product but the process itself.
