Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/10/29

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Mythology v Reality - A Call For A Thoughtful Discussion
From: Mark Walberg <Walberg@simmons.swmed.edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 11:15:39 -0600

BD, About the old pictures and the old and new lenses, I saw an interesting
set of pictures recently.
  I sent this post last week to a few of the LUG sorry to those who have
got it twice.
   Last weekend, I found myself a a local college looking at a display of
prints that depicted Texans and Oklahomans who were living off the land
earlier this century.  After looking a while, I thought that many of the
prints looked like Dorthea Lange's work, which in fact, many of them were.
Although I doubt that she used a Leica, these were very good pictures that
drew the viewer (me) in, and seemed to really tell something interesting
about the subjects.
   But, not all of the pictures were hers.  Next to many of her pictures
were much more recent prints of the same people in the same setting taken
by a different photographer several decades later.  The photographer that
took the more recent pictures clearly tried to approximate Lange's style in
portraying the older versions of these people.  It was very interesting to
see how the people looked now (well, in about 1977).
    However, the more recent pictures were clearly taken with a more modern
lens.  They were sharper, with more crispness and higher contrast.  I found
that this was really distracting.  The contrasty details pulled attention
away from the people, thereby losing a lot of the presence that Lange's
prints have.  Now, Lange's prints are not fuzzy.  I think they aren't quite
as sharp as the more recent pictures, and the grain is more prominant in
some of them, and the contrast is lower.    It made a big difference in how
the pictures look.  It seems to be a good example of how the quest for
exceeding sharpness and high contrast can get in the way of a good picture.


  BD, about your suggestion that the old Leica lenses differ only because
of "lack of sharpness", I agree that that is part of it.  However, I think
there is more to it.  The lower contrast of the older lenses is clearly
beneficial to some pictures.  Also, the out of focus rendering is really
different between lenses.  Take a look at the out of focus parts of a
picture taken with a Summar at a wide aperture, and you will see what I
mean.

  So, I was looking through the HCB Aperture book last night, too - I've
got it out from our local library.  I wonder how some of those pictures in
there would look if taken with a current generation, sharp as my old
barber's freshly stropped blade  Summicron, with every last bit of flare
suppressed.  I think many of those pictures would still look great.
However, there are definitely some that would suffer from all that crisply
rendered detail, which would distract your attention away from what makes
some of these pictures great.
- -Mark Walberg

PS:  Oh, and I'm sure we all agree here with what you said about the Leica
being the camera that really made it   "allowed photographers, as I have
noted before, to go where no (camera) man had gone, and shoot what none had
shot; (and) allowed the capturing of the decisive moment for the first
time."

BD Colen wrote:
>.... But...
>I spent some time the other evening looking for the umpteenth time at my
>little Aperture HCB book. What struck me was how many not-quite in focus
>shots there were. How soft the lenses used for many of the photos were. And
>how what makes these photos great has nothing to do with technical
>excellence of equipment, but of vision. What makes these great photos are
>the framing, the balance, the subjects, the capturing of the decisive
>moment, the seeing of something another person with the same or better
>equipment might stare directly at and never see.
>
>I will have the timmerity to suggest that there is no "magical" quality to
>the old Leica lenses, just lack of modern sharpness. Perhaps what we wax so
>endlessly and elequently about is not this mythical Leica something that the
>lenses had, but the fact that we are a bit put off by the razor sharpness of
>image created by the modern lenses we run out to buy as they come off the
>designer's bench. Yes, I love the Summilux ASPh. Yes, it's flare suppression
>is unparalleled, and it creates images upon which I can cut my fingers. On
>the other hand, how much lighter and smaller is the previous 35 Summilux.
>And how many staggeringly good photos did it create, how many images in
>Requiem were made with it?
>
>HCB, Eugene Smith, Capa, et al, made images we all revere with lenses that
>today sell used for less than $500 and "don't hold a candle" to today's
>optics.
.............