Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I have been following Erwin's comments for what, two or three years? He has a gift for putting into English descriptions of lens performance that matches what I get with the lenses he describes. There is no question that he can be relied on to state what a lens can do. But...better performance is not everything. This thought process comes from Erwin's comments about TMX. It is sharper, it is finer grained. But in my system the highlights blow out, and the midtones are ugly: sharp, fine-grained ugly. Which leads me to bring up the art of photography. Photography is a craft as well as art. Most of the time the latest from Solms is the best answer. The lenses are incredible wide open into the light, holding detail from shadows into the highlights with little or no flare. Yet I ended up making prints for my parents of flower shots taken with the Sima soft focus lens: you want to talk soft flare? Stephen Gandy is correct that sometimes a Summar wide open into the sun is just the right photo impression. I have some portraits taken of children with Delta 3200 shot high key: soft and grainy. My point is that often this list goes into the limits of perfection. Finding your personal limits and your personal style is as important. Will you stick the lens into some strangers face, will you try portraiture with a 21 to get you out of your funk, will you do something knowing that the odds of success are small just to see what the results look like, will you keep pushing that shutter trying to figure out a lighting set up, will you follow your muse instead of the group dictates: or will you get into some pissing contest about whether the gen III is better built than the gen V? For the professionals on this list, the above is the most difficult of all. You are hired for your past work with some expectation of similar work, how do you not go stale? How do you find the time to work out new things while holding your standards? I hope I haven't bored anyone, but moving into making better images is more important to me than whether someone is or isn't of some or another political persuasion: any image publicly presented makes a statement that is shared between the artist and the person looking at the image. Heading for the fallout shelter Don Dory dorysrus@mindspring.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html