Re: Close-ups with Super Angulon

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

At 11:52 AM 10/17/97 EDT, John Lowther wrote:
>
>Someone mentioned using his 21mm/3.4 Super Angulon for photographing
>the interior of architectural models.
>
>I have had fairly serious trouble with parallax using the 21mm viewfinder
>on close-ups: I get a lot more foreground than I expect from the
viewfinder...
>especially on low angle shots...
>
>What I thought would be a wild flower with Mt. Rainier in the background,
>came out gravel from the roadside in the foreground, flower in the mid,
>and Mt. Rainier in the background... F/16 and hyperfocal focusing so the
>DOF was from off the bottom of the focusing scale to infinity...
>
>                                               - John Lowther.

Hmmmm... as Tom McGuane so thoughtfully detailed for us, what I'm about to
say is a clear case of INTERATION. Use a 15mm, 19mm, 21mm, 24mm, what ever
suits you on an R Leica, and all of those problems disappear. There are
some things that just work better when you are looking THROUGH the lens
rather than OVER the lens. And I don't think a Visoflex can help you here.
You'll have to use the M camera with the built-in Visoflex. The M/Viso/R,
nicknamed R.

This is **NOT** a "my camera is better than yours" post. If one type camera
was perfect for every situation, there would be no reason to have two. You
can learn to cope with what you described above with the M/21, but it
always adds another level of complexity and anxiety (did I really get the
photograph?) to your work.

Now, there are plenty of people on the LUL that can give you advice as to
how to cope with the M parallax problem. Hopefully they will, as I know
many of them have solved this many many years ago. And probably have an
easy solution.

Jim