Photos by Leslie Hancock:
The Blog

Book Review Bis: Spending the Fourth in Bed

2008-07-05T16:37:00.005-04:00

7/4/2008

Neil:

A very pleasant day. Fireworks popping or plopping in the wet distance. Chris called from Beverly Hills where she said she was sitting beside a pool across the street from the hilltop palace of Paul Allen. I've spent the day in bed, except for getting up to wash and dry and fold and shelve laundry. Read a few chapters of Marvin's book, watch a South Park episode, read and write some email, feed the cats, take a shit, eat some more... My idea of a really swell day.

The book includes some passages from other books, like Greil Marcus' The Old, Weird America:

"Here both murder and suicide are rituals, acts instantly transformed into legend, facts that in all their specificity transform everyday life into myth... Here is a mystical body of the Republic...a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act."

Yeah sure. For some, art is a springboard to their own flights of fancy, like the "reviews" in the New York Review of Books that briefly mention a book, then fly off on the reviewer's own unrelated tangent for five or ten thousand words.

Art criticism of this kind is the equivalent of homeopathy. The final product is so dilute it contains not a single molecule of art. Yet somehow it's supposed to make us feel better. As Dylan Thomas said in another connection, "The reward is purely psychological."

Book Review: Gregory Gibson, "Hubert's Freaks"

2008-07-05T16:29:00.005-04:00

Cher Marvin,

Thanks again for that Gregory Gibson book. I'm enjoying it very much. Mr Gibson's a good writer, and his subject's fascinating. The story balances on photography's fulcrum, the tipping point between real and ideal, phenomenon and noumenon, existence and essence, medium and message, form and content, expression and intention, hardware and software, it and bit. The Arbus photos, the MacGuffins, are one kind of thing to Bob and another to Doon, and something entirely different to Diane, and another thing to you, me, Bill Barfield and the Davis boys. Are they physical objects that can be authenticated and stamped and sold? Yes. Are they icons that form part of a cultural gestalt? Sure. Are they geometry printed on the viewer's mind like the ink stamped on your hand when you go into a comic-book convention? Certainly. All of the above and more.

Hot stuff.

Tyranny of Content

2008-03-09T10:19:00.007-04:00

A letter to Arthur:

This evening I viewed "Children of Men," which apart from its preposterous plot and silly ending was top notch. Don't know why people insist on adding a plot to things which are in essence evocations of a particular time and place, real or imagined. Anyway, the movie had great shooting scenes and provided a nice picture of what I expect, more or less, from the 21st Century once it gets well under way. Sort of a shame, really, because it could've been a swell century -- but people are what they are.

This tyranny of the plot – it has to tell a story – is infuriating in all the arts. Who doesn't love a tone poem or the 1812 Overture or Wellington's Victory or Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening Post? Who doesn't wonder what Ulysses is about? Who hasn't heard folks complain their life lacks meaning? In other words it lacks a story line, music, and a laugh track.

Don't much care for computer games, or games of any kind, since I always lose, but I bought one once and almost enjoyed it. It was a realtime simulation of Flying Fortress raids on German targets in WW2. What spoiled it for me was the plot. Just when I was getting off on the Zen of flying, droning over a patchwork landscape towards a distant speck of a city, our formation would be attacked by German fighters or some other adventitious distraction.

Pentax K20D

2008-03-01T13:07:00.011-05:00

We're building a house. I shouldn't spend a penny I don't need to spend, but when I saw that the new Pentax DSLR was available I ordered one from B&H. It arrived two days ago, so I've had time to do a little testing. We all know what a picture is worth, but I'm pressed for time this weekend, so you'll have to put up with a thousand words instead.

First I tested the K20D against my K10D, using tungsten (hence constant) lighting, a tripod, DNG files, and the same lens swapped back and forth. Of course the file sizes were different. The K10D has a ten-megapixel sensor (3872 x 2592 pixels) and its DNG's are over 10 megabytes in size. The K20D has a 14.6-megapixel sensor (4672 x 3104) with 23+ megabyte DNG's. Assuming everything else is equal, you get a 20.6% linear advantage by moving from the K10D to the K20D – at 240 pixels per inch, my minimum for printing, the native document size of the K10D is 10.8" x 16.13" while that of the K20D is 12.93" x 19.47".

The K20D's ISO settings range from 200 to 3200. I compared the two cameras at 200-1600, using various ways to compensate for the variance in pixel density. It's easy to make this story short, since there weren't any striking differences. I feel that the K10D shows a bit less noise at ISO 1600, but it's hard to tell. And as you'd expect, if you down-res the K20D's images or up-res the K10D's, the sensor with more pixels has an advantage in resolution.

This morning I tried the K20D against my Canon 20D. The Canon has an eight-megapixel sensor (3504 x 2336 pixels) and 8+ megabyte raw files (in Canon's CR2 format). Its native doc size @ 240ppi is 9.733" x 14.6". Its sensor is a bit smaller than the Pentax/Samsung APS-C, with an adjustment factor of 1.6X as opposed to 1.5X. The best I could do to allow for this difference was to use a 70mm lens on the Pentax and a 60mm on the Canon, and to move the Canon physically closer to the scene I was photographing.

In this case the differences were obvious. I let both cameras set focus and exposure with the aperture at f/8. The Canon's images were always about one EV lighter. That's a known feature of Canon DSLR's, at least according to reviewers. I don't think the Pentax images were too dark, but I'll admit I haven't pursued this angle.

Another difference, less striking but still obvious, was noise. The Canon shows less noise at all sensitivity settings. Again that's in keeping with Canon's reputation. I'm not disappointed in the Pentax (especially considering its pixel density), and I'm very pleased with the Canon.

Then there's resolution. Of course the Pentax provides a bit more detail in the images. That said, the Canon's performance was very good, and this Canon is two generations behind their 40D. Impressive as ever.

And finally there are the imponderables, nuances I have trouble describing. In earlier posts to this blog I've babbled on about a certain snappiness and luminosity in Pentax images. I value that look very much, especially for B&W. I don't know whether to give the credit to their lenses (I use only primes), the way they've tuned their sensor and processor, or some combination of ingredients. Whatever it is, the K20D and the K10D both have it. That doesn't necessarily mean you'd like it (whatever It is) yourself. It's certainly easier to get a good standard image from the Canon with minimal work in Photoshop. Canon delivers a slick, smooth look that's just the ticket for most purposes. Yet I value the Pentax look myself.

Three Letters

2008-03-01T08:37:00.012-05:00

How many metas? Dear friend read a review of a book. The book's argument inspired him to write a rant to me and to a mutual friend who plays and loves the Blues. The gravamen:

White attitudes dominate and mold even the most exclusively black genres. It is easy to say this is due to market forces, but in general I have found that dignity is chosen over money, life or happiness – at least when there is an option. This implies to me that, in this minor context, a lot of the real blues has been lost. From the larger point of view, it is obvious that a lot of other things of value have likely been smothered in the same fashion.

My first response follows.

Well! The French would be in no doubt about this one. What Gaul! But I'm a WASP, like it or not. What, I ask the Little Man Within, are your thoughts on the matter?

Silence. The Little Man knows not from Blues or Jazz.Je dois combler cette lacune de ma seule pensée.

It's a medical metaphor, almost. Nothing is clean. Our minds are a medley. Every flavor's floating around swapping juices with every other. It's silly to say Jazz or the Blues were ever pure. The songs aren't sung in African languages; the instruments aren't finger pianos or nose flutes; the religious sentiments aren't animist. Even the old Jubilees were slave songs.

Furthermore. Like it or not, any human performance is a collaboration with the audience, though that audience may be only a vague hope, as in the case of my photography. Consider (most of) the photographs of the very great Henri Cartier-Bresson. If HCB had not made a few dozen ultra-famous, iconic, universally recognizable photographs, the rest of his production would have fallen out of sight, dismissed as snapshots, synonymous with banality. But we (the audience) know the ne plus ultra photos, so we suspect there's something in the rest so subtle we missed it first time around. Presumably Henri has a gift for seeing things that the rest of us lack. We may have to work a bit to see what he saw. See?

Context. Fish don't know they're wet. When we're at the beach and somebody shouts "Shark!" we get out of the water. When the shark sees a net or a harpoon coming, he can't get out of the water. It's much easier for people to fish than for fish to people. And in the context of the Blues, it was much easier for WASPs to trap and consume Black Folks' Music than for the Black Folks to absorb and savor, say, Stravinsky.

Advantage. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Paul Simon went to Africa and made a record promoting African musicians and showcasing African influences on his music. He was widely congratulated on bringing Africa into the mainstream of World Music, right? Wrong – he was widely accused of "stealing" African ideas and culture for his own enrichment. This was easy to prove: The record he made used motifs and performers he admitted were African; and it made money which went into his bank account. If that's not theft, what is?

So the Africans were tricked again. When will they learn to keep their culture pure, to eat it in secret? Yet if they do, are they somehow finer than before? Is all enjoyment condescending? Does a man give a woman pleasure or does the woman give it to the man? Why should a man care if a woman feels anything or not? And if he does care, can that be anything more than condescension? Because he finds it titillating? Because it makes his old lady more willing to do it? Those intellectual mothballs have been ventilated in who knows how many feminist books over the last forty or fifty years.

In the final analysis, is intention so important? New York and most other self-respecting polities now punish criminals for "hate crimes" – if you shoot a man because you want his money, or because he stole your girl, that's one thing; but it's worse to shoot him because you're prejudiced against his race, religion or sexual orientation. Intention counts as much as the action itself. Should that be the rule? Should we punish folks who (pace Mr Eliot) do the right thing for the wrong reason? If it's the rule in matters of criminal justice, should that rule extend to art appreciation?

I don't know. As I said, I'm only a WASP, and a male of the species to boot. I'm beyond insult – there's no bad word for what I am. Therefore almost anything I do or say can be called patronizing, condescending, paternalistic, insincere, sentimental and self-indulgent. I plead guilty, knowing any other plea will be thrown out of court. Silence in Court! Soon we'll all be dead. Our Blues-loving friend answered, reasonably: "I don't follow Les' train of thought at all this time." So I tried again.

Authentic isn't always best. No doubt the folk songs of Hungary have their charm, but I prefer the folk-inspired music of Bartok. Probably a Russian village wedding is interesting, once, but not as interesting as Stravinsky's "Les Noces." Raw moonshine from the Carolina highlands might be fun to try, but Heaven Hill it ain't. The 19/20th Century's intellectuals and artists were revolutionary in finding great value where previous Europeans had seen only crude, savage, inept, infantile, primitive attempts to make music or sculpture or poetry. You can see this even in the 18th Century, when Rousseau preached the perfection of the noble savage and Gothic and Irish and Scottish legends (viz. McPherson's "Ossian") became chic.

However. The Euros lumped together things which really were in the usual sense "primitive" (masks from New Guinea, totem poles etc) with things which were as highly developed as their own arts and crafts, but which came from cultures which the British and French patronizingly considered inferior – pre-Columbian art, the music of northern India, even Chinese and Japanese stuff. The 20th Century in particular rebelled against fuddy-duddy "establishment" taste and celebrated children's drawings, subway graffiti, folk songs, hillbilly crafts, Grandma Moses, tattoos, prison art made with chewing-gum wrappers, you name it.

And that was great. It was liberating and refreshing and necessary and important and all good things. However.

There's also been a tendency (and I trace this to Rousseau, the dog) to exalt "naive" art at the expense of more studied work. At first this was (as I said) liberating and refreshing. However. I can't help preferring the work of Klee (let us say) to that of the children who no doubt inspired him. I can't help preferring the work of Picasso to that of the mask-makers who inspired him. I can't help preferring Stravinsky's Russian wedding to a real Russian wedding.

Etc.

So what shall we say of the Blues? Well, the true grit of Leadbelly has a quality and a charm that's inevitably missing in the performances of, I dunno, Janis Joplin, not to mention Gershwin. Certainly it's more authentic, closer to the source – shit, it IS the source. But yet...

Since I don't much care for Gershwin, and consider Janis Joplin sorta lowbrow, maybe the Blues isn't the best vehicle for me to argue this case. But I think you get my point. To give an operational definition, I suspect that if somebody held a gun to his head and gave him a chance to study up on the sources, Stravinsky could have written music indistinguishable from Leadbelly's Blues; but Leadbelly could not have written "Pulcinella." Picasso could have produced African masks that would fool anybody but a museum curator, but the mask-makers could not have produced fake Picassos.

Undsoweiter. And no, I'm not commenting on some supposed racial qualities or limitations. Bartok and Kodaly recorded and cherished the folk songs of their own native country, and were certainly able to write imitations nobody could tell from originals, but the folk singers, however gifted, would likely not have been able to produce operas or sonatas.

Knowledge is a good thing, not (as the Rousseau contingent would have it) a bad one. It isn't the opposite of ignorance; it subsumes ignorance. An educated and intelligent man knows everything his little boy knows and then some. However. It's important to be able to see things from the little boy's point of view. Some grownups can manage this. On the other hand, no little boy can see things from the educated and intelligent point of view. A child lacks data. He's bound to be childish. The educated and intelligent man can be child-like – quite a different thing.

Well, so it goes. I've finished my coffee and my argument, such as it was. You may accuse me of being an elitist, to which I'll answer: Yes. Again, it's only because some elitists hawked the idea of universal equivalence ("leveling," the 17th Century called it) that "elitism" became pejorative.

The friend answered, "Maybe." So to put the matter to rest and shoot myself in the other foot, I wrote this third summa:

The distinction between arts and crafts has always been factitious bordering on fictitious. Fick it. We now salaam to paintings and statues that were made for the same reasons we now make snapshots or buy garden gnomes. Music we think of as the summit of the art was elevator music for the nobility. Again, it was the counter-Enlightenment (what you scholars call the Romantic movement) that invented "Ars Gratia Artis," which by the way is the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. (I wonder how many people know that Rousseau's first publication, "On the Arts and Sciences," argued that the arts and sciences are bad for us.) Whence the millions of paintings, drawings and cartoons of Beethoven as the archetypal demented and tormented genius.

Etc. Of course the fact that many artists really are and were demented and tormented gave breath to that archetype.

Shit Happens

2007-08-19T10:10:00.000-04:00

Shit happens. Does it mean anything? Usually not. Then why all the talking heads telling us what to think about two or three recalls of toys made in China? What does it mean? It means most toys are made in China, right? Naive fool! It means much more than that! Cross my palm with green and I'll tell you. So say the talking heads.

It's another aspect of apophenia, that human quality of finding faces in clouds and significance in everything that happens. These days intelligent folks find secular meanings; in the Middle Ages the meaning was a moral. T.H. White's translation of a medieval bestiary is a good read. The panther attracts his prey by opening his mouth and emitting a seductively sweet breath. Even so Satan lures us into his chow chomper with promises of sweet joy. The whale pretends to be an island so that shipwrecked mariners will camp on its back; then it dives and drowns them all. Even so Satan etc. Undsoweiter ad nauseam.

Shit happens, and some shit works. Story of evolution, story of the universe.

Photos happen too. And they're chock full of, um, meaning – ask any head.

Locksley Hall Springs to Mind

2007-08-19T09:56:00.000-04:00

Comment to the photo linked above, by Karen Habbestad:

Like many of your recent photos, this suffers from Webification – it needs the details that the Web takes away. Even if it were higher-res, most folks probably don't have monitors and lighting suitable for viewing it.

I'm having the same problem. My printer died, and after some reflection I let it lie despite knowing what I've just said about the Web. Fact is, almost nobody ever saw the prints anyway; they cost more time, trouble and dollars than they were worth. Besides, the luminance range of a print can't compete with what you get on a luminous screen. Like printed books, photographic prints are retro. I know: retro has its charms for some, as witness the Hummer and the PT Cruiser. But I'm too old now to be charmed by recent history.

Problem is, the new tech isn't there yet. Everybody knows that pictures in frames hung on the wall will soon give way to hi-res walls that can display whatever scenery or Morris wallpaper or framed Rembrandts you like, so long as somebody pays the toll on copyrights for images created after 1923. But soon isn't now, nor is it soon enough for the checkout generation.

That said, I love the photo, with its balanced-off-center static composition, the fulcrum of the weeping "Delta," and the perfect underscore of the granite curbstone. View it is a bit like listening to a string quartet played over the telephone – if you know the music, it clicks into focus and you hardly notice what's missing.

Requiescat

2007-07-17T12:45:00.000-04:00

You surely know Michael Reichmann's indispensable website, The Luminous Landscape. Like many other photo blogs, the Landscape recently noted the death of John Szarkowski, "The highly influential photography curator and author" whose "influence on the acceptance of photography as a mainstream art medium can not be underestimated." (Overestimated, I hope Mr R. meant to say.)

I didn't know John Szarkowsky, so will skip the perfunctory expressions of regret. I'm willing to believe he was a good man who will be missed, but I decline to miss him on the grounds that he helped win photography the Fine Arts Seal of Approval. There's something wrong with the whole idea of les beaux arts.

Mind you, I'm the worst kind of art snob myself, oohing and aahing over Rembrandt's drypoints and Bach's Musical Offering. I can recite French poetry and was once a Joycean scholar. But that's just me. The little man within, the one who turns out the refrigerator light, knows better. He knows that the finest work is what's done with no regard for how it'll look on the walls of a museum, or on a page under glass at the Morgan Library. Painters and poets and musicians weren't godlike until the Romantics deified them a few years back. They were people who made books or images or music that other people would pay to read, see or hear. They were no more self-conscious than anybody else. Then, alas, they became what Robert Crumb's song calls "fine arteests."

R. Crumb, bless him, delights the little man within. Photography does too. I know, I know: my own photography veers into pretension all the time. But the little man (my genius, in the sense that Socrates spoke of his "genius" -- an inner cricket, a shit detector, a conscience) has to sleep. Sometimes even Shakespeare took himself too seriously. (Remember Shakespeare? His plays were so lowbrow he had to give them across the river from London, next to the arena where English bulldogs fought English bulls.)

Long may photography (and comic books) thrive en narguant les académies de beaux arts. Trop souvent les musées ne sont que des mausolées, ou les Szarkowski font l'office de croque-mort.

Ash from the Fire

2007-07-15T23:56:00.000-04:00

The best-written and best-edited photo blog I know is Mike Johnston's "The Online Photographer." In a recent post there, Gordon Lewis asked: "What Is Your Photographic Legacy?" Friend Fiertel sent a comment to the effect that the finished work is "ash from the fire" and that it's "the doing that matters most." I couldn't resist adding my one cent (lightly edited here).

"The doing matters most" (from N. Fiertel's comment) might as well be "Only the doing matters." As far as I'm concerned, when I die the world ends. Is there life after death? (Your life, my death.) Don't know and don't care. Making photos gets me out and about and gives life the illusion of purpose. One foot follows the other. If anybody applauds, that's gravy.

Arm-Waving or Drowning?

2007-05-28T15:56:00.000-04:00

A friend sent me the URL of an arm-waving video full of such paradigm-shifting facts as: China and India have more honors kids than we have kids, the top ten jobs that'll be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in the year 2000, the world's eleventh biggest country by population is MySpace, there are five times as many words in English now as there were in Shakespeare's time, every day three thousand books are published, the amount of technical information in stock doubles every two years and will soon double every 72 hours, da dee da, da dee dee.

Well...as usual, I don't get it. Is this an inspirational or motivational presentation? If so, what's it supposed to inspire or motivate me to do? Commit suicide? Have more children?

There are a couple of fallacies in what I take to be its arguments. For one thing, people are atomic. Nobody is more than one person or less than one person. Being surrounded by a billion other people means little more than being surrounded by a million or a thousand, or however many you can see at one time. If I'm in water more than six feet deep, do I care whether it's sixty feet or six thousand feet deep?

No doubt there's a certain critical mass of people needed for certain things to happen or to be economically feasible or even physically possible. But that mass is smallish, unless you're talking about building a dam with your bare hands. The Egyptians and Greeks, among others, developed high civilizations and made big monuments (physical and rational) with populations in the low millions, of whom very few had the knowledge or the leisure to read and write. In Shakespeare's time I suppose there were fewer than a million literate people in the British Isles, but they produced...well, Shakespeare.

I can only read so many books or see so many movies or meet so many people. Shakespeare had it easy, since there were only a few dozen books in English from which he could steal his plots. Likewise the scientists of the year 1700 had it easy because there was so much low-hanging fruit, so many things to discover and describe. It was possible for any intelligent person to master the little that was known of biology and physics and chemistry.

So there are advantages, but also disadvantages, to large populations and large bodies of knowledge. I'm sure that in general larger is better (assuming you have good methods of access, which is why the Net is so important – hard copy has become very limiting, mainly because it can't easily be indexed and searched), but a billion isn't a thousand times better than a million, or anything like it.

All this talk about the Chinese and the Indians and such is rather nonsensical. People communicate. Any team of researchers, any school of any size, any discipline, is made up of people from lots of different places. Are the Chinese researchers, or Chinese engineers and architects, going to stay in China and keep foreigners from copying or even seeing their work? Seems unlikely. Will it really matter if the cure for AIDS comes out of China or India or England or America? I suppose it makes a difference in terms of local prestige, but it probably won't even make a difference in profits, since the company that owns the patents will be some multinational.

As for all those people with unmeasurably high IQ's, I'm not impressed. A reasonably high IQ is necessary but not sufficient for success even in fields like particle physics. Hey, who knows, maybe too much thinking hampers discovery. Einstein was notoriously slow in some ways, and Oppenheimer, who discovered almost nothing, notoriously smart. Many other talents are involved in the sciences, it seems. As for the arts...

At any given time the world has room for only a certain number of great-greats. I tend to think of it in terms of surface versus volume. Think of the number of people in the world as molecules in a drop of water. The drop forms a sphere, with only a small percentage of the molecules on the surface. Let's pretend that those surface molecules are the famous people, the ones who write famous books that make a difference, or who contribute to famous discoveries, or who are famous movie actors, or whatever. Good. Now suppose the number of molecules is multiplied a hundred times. Wow, much bigger population, right? But look you, the surface of the drop is only ten times bigger! And if you multiply by a thousand instead of a hundred, the discrepancy's even worse. There's more room at the top, but not much more room. Disappointing.

I don't say those are exact ratios or proportions, but I'll bet it's something along those lines. So look what happens. If I'm a literate citizen of Periclean Athens, I see Socrates wandering around town every few days, and if I want to I can stop him and talk philosophy. If I write a book, and have any talent at all, it'll literally be a classic. If I decide to study, I dunno, bees, and take the time to write down what I notice, I'll be the world's greatest authority on bees and the author of the seminal apiary text. But not now. Now, in order to make a deep and significant contribution to science, I need first of all to be freakishly smart, not smart like Phi Beta Kappa but smart like Oppenheimer. Then I need to have twenty years or so of serious education, just to come up to speed with what's already known in some tiny slice of science. Finally I have to have great luck, reading or seeing or meeting just the right things or the right people at just the right time to connect some dots. Odds are enormous that what I discover will be trivial, like hooray, here's a new subspecies of marine snail. Finding or making something marvelously new and important and fruitful is vanishingly unlikely.

When I realized this, yea many years ago (and the world was much smaller then, or bigger, if you like to think of it that way), I became depressed and stopped striving. Wouldn't you?

So tell me again just how that presentation is inspirational.

Retiring Predisposition

2007-04-30T12:38:00.000-04:00

As I may have mentioned before in these notes, I'm getting old. Sooner or later (let me be coy about the numbers) I'll be retiring. On April Fool's Day Chris and I flew (flew!) west to vet retirement venues. Better late than never, I took the advice of the guys who used to tell me, as I walked past their peepshows on Times Square, "Check it out, man, check it out." We spent three weeks checking out Northern New Mexico and Southern California.

We took two cameras, my Canon 20D and Chris's K100 Pentax, and two zooms each: for the Canon the 10-22 and 24-105; for the Pentax the 16-45 and 50-200. Since the K100 has image stabilization built into the body, and the 24-105 has Canon's IS, we did without tripods. Results were good, I think. You can see my photos at my April gallery, Chris's at hers. True, in my case what came out of the camera were mostly postcards; but I was there as a tourist, not a photo-Basho.

The K100 is Chris's only DSLR, but I have a Pentax K10 with a nice range of Limited lenses. Why didn't I take that kit instead of the older and in most ways less capable Canon 20D? Briefly, this wasn't a photo expedition. I felt I needed something that would give me good results with minimal tsuris, though not necessarily the kind of painfully-sharp, B&W-in-color look I've mentioned in connection with the K10. So I picked the DSLR I'd always pick if asked to do a routine job of work: the Canon with 24-105 f/4L IS zoom. I used that combination 90% of the time, only falling back on the very wide 10-22 for the occasional odd shot.

The 24-105 is a marvel. No kidding. It's not a heavy lens by Canon pro standards, but it's built like a brick shithouse, well sealed, smooth to zoom and focus, and sharp all over. There's a bit of barrel distortion at the wide end, and if you correct for that in Photoshop you lose a bit of the wideness, but that's acceptable to me. The bokeh isn't great, but I seldom use OOF backgrounds, so I can live with it. The f/4 limit sometimes had me shooting at ISO 1600, but with the 20D that was tolerable.

You can see what all those but's are adding up to: a literally professional package. Pros go out to get a good-enough picture, one they can sell. If they come back with something that's better than good, whoopee -- but they have to come back with something, and compromise is inevitable. Of course there were photos I'd rather have made with a Pentax Limited prime, and the less-mellifluous Pentax sensor, and a tripod, but those will have to wait till I'm well and truly retired.

Lick of Black Paint

2007-02-04T18:31:00.000-05:00

R.D. commented: "I feel an odd urge to caress this death-head. How much to ship via USPS?"

Beautiful shape, no? I believe it's the pelvis of a deer. We all carry objets de vertu inside ourselves; a lick of black paint would perfect them.

Ataraxy

2007-01-18T21:03:00.000-05:00

R.D. is sad and said so. I said back:

Art is the answer, or at least an answer. If done right, it can give you the relief a pearl gives an oyster – the indifference celebrated as nirvana, scorned as acedia. But do it wrong and you risk enlightenment, which may make things far worse.

Gear

2006-11-28T20:49:00.000-05:00

It's been a hot time for new gear. In a few days I'll pass my Grand Climacteric, midway between Brave New World's expiry age of sixty and the biblical threescore and ten, so I'm treating myself to lenses and cameras. Carpe diem, for tomorrow, or the day after that, we die.

My faithful reader (I think I have one) will recall that after trying this and that nostrum to replace the wonderful Zeiss-G glass I sold when I moved entirely to digital, I settled on the Pentax "Limited" lenses, and bought some Pentax DSLR's to go with them. For the record, at the moment I have on hand the DA21/3.4, FA31/1.8, DA40/2.8, FA50/1.4 and DA70/2.4. I bought the entry-level K100D for (my wife) Chris (with the 16-45 and 50-200 zooms) and a DL for myself. Pentax doesn't currently make pro equipment, but a few days back I took delivery of one of their first 10D's, currently their flagship DSLR. This is all meant to be for handheld black-and-white mostly. (I also picked up a new Canon 60/2.8 EF-S macro for studio work with the 20D.)

The Pentax choice was a good one, I think. Of the lenses I bought, the 40/2.8 is probably the least exciting, but it seduced me the a kitten will, it's so damned cute. Image quality is very good, but the other lenses are better than that. The 21, 31 and 70 seem exceptional to me, though the 21 has AF problems – it focuses a bit long on all three bodies.

Albums for September through November are full of lens tests and sample shots, and I'll say no more about the Pentax kit here. I'm pleased with it and that's that.

Where's Simplicio?

2006-10-24T20:07:00.000-04:00

Here's a little exchange of emails with my friend and Canadian artist Neil Fiertel. I'll refrain from prettifying my prose.

From: Leslie Hancock
Subject: Fotos
To: Neil Fiertel

A few worth showing, I guess.

http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061022104426_G – American Bison http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061022111848_G – Bear photo #1 http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061022115707_G – Dog's geometry http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061022124731_G – Bear photo #2

My favorite of that lot is the last one. I was repelled by the zoo's fake bear decor and tried for a photo that would make it look even fakier. Note the Hollywood clouds, for instance...

From: Neil Fiertel
Date: October 24, 2006 9:07:01 AM EDT
To: Leslie Hancock

The problem I have with photo in controlled environments is that the photo is in essence a documentary of the designed space done by someone else. I know that lighting and whatnot makes it continually changing but I have trouble putting aside the very nature of the space as being an original statement from you. The Bison image is of course a kind of odd statement of nature reality...it does not exist in most of the world but as a picture, I guess it is more of a kind of jounalism due to the overriding statement. For me, I do not want photography or any other art form to be too much out front about what it is about. Your forays into shooting folks I think requires a certain amount of thought in terms of what you want the people to be in the image...are they formally a significant part in terms of their very shapes and forms, do they act as actors in a tableau or a prop in some story line? Sounds tacky but I sense that there has not been an internal decision on your part what the figure is actually in your images for. They seem often to be a kind of prop or a very strongly felt...they are strangers...they do not share intimacy with the viewer which I find to be a problem for me at least. I want to feel involved with them in thier thoughts or experience in a voyeuristic way. Even a hand can have that kind of connexion. One needs a telephoto I suppose for you to be comfortable doing that and I suggest that though you like the look of the wide angle...you do not have the aggressive personality that would allow you to barge right into someone's life and thoughts with a camera blazing away...nor the body armour to pull it off... Better then to stand way away with a 500 mm lens equivalent and IS and go for it without anyone being aware of it. Frankly, if I were to do that kind of photo that is what I would do as I would never move in with a WA on someone whom I did not know. I might be off the mark and no doubt you will have a rationale for the images of people...formal this and that, ironic this and that but anyway...this is what I see missing...further knowledge about them or more importantly...about you... Look at the great shots of Nachtwey, Cartier-Bresson, even Brandt who surely is the coolest of the lot...they still get into the skin of their subjects... Neil

From: Leslie Hancock
Subject: Clement Greenberg's Bald Spot
To: Neil Fiertel

Most interesting thoughts, thanks. I too have thought a lot about such things – too much, probably, since that inhibits the gestural quality of graphic arts.

Mixed media, or mixed-up media, have great appeal to me because of their complication. Movies, comic strips, still photography mingle strictly formal considerations (geometry, color, figure and ground and so forth) with documentation and narrative in an impure way that appeals to the slob in me. Sometimes the biggest component is the one the viewer brings to the page, which I can't foresee. In that sense, and also in the sense that a photo of something does begin with the something, and owes something to that something, which if it's a construction like a stage set or a work of art or just a funny face, means the photographer's at best a collaborator, and collaborators are often shot. But I can live (or die) with that. As you note (elliptically) in mentioning my refusal to engage the people in my people pictures, I try to be invisible and egoless, and to prize the final product rather than my own claim to fame.

"They seem often to be a kind of prop...they are strangers...they do not share intimacy with the viewer." Yes! It's what I want. Sometimes I even black them out entirely: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061022134050a. To that very end.

The great thing about photography is that it doesn't have to strive for mimesis as painters and sculptors do, or used to do. The mimetic quality is a given, the raw material to work with as we list. It's so convincing that people consistently mistake the photograph for the thing itself, looking at a picture of the Grand Canyon and saying "Oh, that's so beautiful," when what they mean is that the Grand Canyon is beautiful – a strange and terrible metonymy, yet one that provides us photographers with a huge lever to move people's feelings. One we have to learn to use wisely.

Always important to remember that a photographic or sculptural rendering of, say, a pretty girl is not a substitute for a pretty girl, being only skin deep and therefore ultimately frustrating or even physically dangerous. But a picture (or other representation) can be prettier than a pretty girl, the artist having contributed something extra. In which case we see (for once) that it's the picture, not the girl, that's pretty.

Naturally, I don't wanna be dogmatic or stuck in a rut, so when I see the chance I make a picture even if it's just for pretty, and if I see the chance to make one of those under-the-skin portraits I'll do that too. I don't know many people intimately, though, so the few such photos I've done are of you or Chris or just a couple other folks. I like this one of Chris a lot: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_september/060918222146_G. (Plus it shows off the B&W style I'm pursuing.) And this oldie is one of my favorites also: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_July/060711121643_G.

Further to the issue of people as props and up-front statements in photos. Certainly I agree with you about photos or other images that make a facile statement, like simple propaganda pictures of the slanty-eyed, bespectacled Jap with a skewered baby on his sword. That kind of thing repels me, unless I get some kind of campy kick out of it. But there are degrees of subtlety and satire, and I do appreciate, and practice, some of them, though usually with the aftertaste of having sucked on something dirty. Probably my feelings about certain issues are too strong and should not be indulged – like that photo of the Statue of Liberty with a huge barbed fence around it and a sign saying (you can't make these things up) NO ADMITTANCE.

More commendably, I think, I try to evoke feelings or even thoughts through the fabric of the image. Consider one of the photos I sent you last night: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061022115707_G – "Dog's geometry," I called it. Surely the people there are props. I did think about making their faces entirely black, but decided that would be going too far. Anyway, the point is that the flattened perspective, the painful sharpness and accumulation of detail, the lack of a central subject, the darkness, in other words the look and feel of the picture, not its specific contents, should tend toward a point of view, very literally a way of seeing the world, that I want the viewer to experience, or share, or "get," for the moment they spend inside the image.

Can you dig it?

From: Leslie Hancock
Subject: PS
To: Neil Fiertel

Remember, though it's always wrong to generalize, you and I feel an attraction of opposites probably, 'cause we stand at different ends of the earth regarding art and people – you're certainly more emotional and attuned to human beings and humanism and humanity and feelings and issues of fairness and justice and love and hate and content, while I'm certainly unfeeling and dislike people and distrust feelings and prize logic and reason and formalism. Hot vs cold. Warm and fuzzy monkey vs dead fish on a bed of ice. Romantic vs classical. Bread-and-circuses vs let-them-eat-cake. Haha, but something in it.

From: Neil Fiertel
Subject: Re: Clement Greenberg's Bald Spot
To: Leslie Hancock

You see...the two pictures of Chris are real...they are fine art works because they are not merely documents but allow the viewer to see what you see in the subject. They are relational and thus tie all areas together. They would have been invisible to the world had you not seen and tied this to a visual object. They evoke and elucidate as it were and are not just documentation. Do this more often as these two examples attest and you are doing what I call art...some of the images you took of me as horrible as I look..work for the same reason. In spite of your wish to remain anon you cannot and thus, release your own self in these images... Good for that... Neil

Slick or Sick? (Part 2)

2006-10-15T14:14:00.000-04:00

A PS to Neil.

Don't want you to think I've kicked over the Canon EOS for Pentax. Two different looks. As I said, today I used the Canon to photograph the cat, and you can see that this is where it really shines – that slick studio look.

Tick-Tock, Tech Talk

2006-10-15T13:22:00.000-04:00

Time passes, unless Gödel was right, and shit happens. Shit subsumes private correspondence like this email to Neil. It's topical – he went to a photo expo.

Very interesting news from the show, thanks. You should read the dpreview test of the new Canon Digital Rebel or EOS 400D or whatever – annoying that cameras have a bunch of different names, presumably chosen to appeal to different markets. I guess Americans want to think of themselves as dangerous rebels – baaaaah, me da meanest sheep in da flock! Anyway, Phil Askey compares the Canon, the Nikon D80 and the Sony/Minolta/Konica/whatever/it/is. The Nikon had the least noise, the Sony the most. The Sony's main feature is its image stabilization. The Canon does a shimmy to get rid of dust at startup. The Nikon just sits there looking a little ashamed of itself. As you know, my own way of approaching these things is lens-first. If Contax ever had a booth at such shows, which I doubt, there would've been only two or three people there – the mothers of the reps. Their cameras were good but certainly not mainstream. Their lenses, too, were out of the mainstream, being non-autofocus and non-weather-sealed and non-internal-focusing. All they had going for them was exquisite image quality, plus being built like Jayne Mansfield. Likewise for Pentax. I was tentative at first, but it seems to be true that their "Limited" lenses are, like Contax/Zeiss, out of the mainstream, eccentric, retrograde, unsuited for professional use, but exquisite imagers.

In short, I moved from Contax SLR's to Canon DSLR's because of Canon's super lenses and super CMOS sensor, and from the Contax G2 to Pentax DSLR's with Pentax "Limited" primes.

Unfortunately last night it became clear I've caught Chris's cold, so I won't be going out with either camera today. But yesterday I did get to spend an hour or two in the woods with the Pentax, then made some photos of the cat's gaping wound with the Canon "L" zoom. Using the two in rapid sequence reminded me why the Pentax isn't used by pros, or by the "advanced amateurs" who hope to be mistaken for pros. The Canon simply focuses, instantly and silently, and when you press the shutter it goes Bang, and you've got a clean shot in the can. The Pentax works, but it's just adequate -- autofocus is noisy, in low light it hunts for focus or may not focus at all, and the shutter makes a floppity-flop noise that tells you what you're getting is a picture of a moment a third of a second later than the moment you chose. (The G2 had those faults too.) Plus if you're holding the lens with a finger or two you may be slightly shocked to feel the focusing ring turn. Antique city. But then the images, well... They're in the Zeiss/Leica class.

So why you don't got a Leica, Mr H? Yeah, well, when the M8 does come out you'll stand in line six months waiting for one, then have the joy of paying $8K for a body with one lens which is not autofocus.

Incidentally, you'll recall I said that Pentax is finally going to bring out ultrasonic lenses. But what about their vaunted compatibility? Well, the (still unmarketed) 10D will have a lens mount that supports their new USM connections. But to stay backward-compatible with earlier bodies, the lenses will be focusable via the ancient turning-screw connection used in current Pentax AF. And, obviously, the 10D will have a motor in the body to turn the screw of those earlier lenses – couldn't work otherwise. El-kludge-o.

Canon came to this cusp back in the 80's and (intelligently) went the other way. They designed the EOS mount for new lenses only. This orphaned all the older lenses and bodies, but it opened up a whole new market, and for a long time they were the only ones with silent, instantly-focusing lenses. Your perception of the difference in audience appeal between Nikon and Canon testifies to the wisdom of their choice.

Slick or Sick? (Part 1)

2006-10-14T21:33:00.000-04:00

From a letter to a friend who's not especially interested in photography.

I got out long enough to make some photos this afternoon, and will try to get to the zoo tomorrow. Forget whether I ventilated to you my adventures in photo hardware. As you know I have a Canon EOS kit that serves me well. It produces very slick, unctuous, elegant photos. And often that's exactly the look I want – for a long time it was almost the only look I wanted, because my idea was to make ironic photos, showing wounds and dead animals and too-pretty flowers in the format of a fashion photo or coffee-table book.

But you can't drink the same wine forever, and over the last few years I've become more interested in colorless, elliptical, empty, "hard" photos. I was able to get the look I wanted only in black and white, and then only with film. It required extremely sharp and luminous lenses. For that I had a Contax rangefinder camera, the G2 you saw many a time. But film's fading away, so I sold the G2 and its wonderful glass, which left me without a very good way to make des photos ardues.

This year I heard about the Pentax "Limited" lenses – expensive primes, supposedly among the very best lenses optically (though they're "limited" in ways that make them unattractive for pro work). Pentax has long had a reputation as the "poor man's Leica," their lenses supposedly having that "Leica look": brilliant and sharp. I tried one such (on a cheap second-hand Pentax digital body) and find it to be as good as I'd hoped. I don't think it needs to make any apologies to Leica or Zeiss. Since then I've bought two more. Today was my first serious outing with the second one, and it's even better than I expected. So I think I may have found a way to get the effects I want. Naturally I still have the Canon for the other effects. I guess you could say the Canon gear is for color and general gorgeousness, the Pentax for B&W and true grit.

Here for example are three photos:

Contax/Zeiss B&W in the style I described – raw, gritty, bald, grainy, hard
Canon digital B&W: hopelessly slick, elegant, witty
Pentax digital B&W – not the same as the Contax/Zeiss style (for example, not grainy), but hard, painfully sharp – no-frills photography

Lest you think the difference has to do with the studio lighting, here's a Pentax studio shot using much the same lighting as the Canon B&W shown above – cuttingly sharp, but not slick; hard to describe the difference, yet I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

PS: Since sending that note, I did another photo. This one was taken with the Canon, and you can see that this is where the Canon shines: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061014131325_G

Against Professionalism

2006-10-07T15:13:00.000-04:00

A close friend is traveling through China. He's sent back photos, but says today's batch may be the last: "This is not art. It is not a labor of love. I probably won't send any more photos." (Part of) my reply to him follows.

Chris and I have both enjoyed the China snapshots. I know very well I can see the buildings and monuments and streets and like that in lots of guidebooks and photo spreads at Borders, but there's something convincing about snapshots, as Cartier-Bresson well understood.

The day after 9/11 one of the people who posted to the photo critique site I frequented put up his own photos of Ground Zero. He lived nearby and simply went into the disaster area immediately after the buildings fell, and had pictures, not especially artful, of dead folks being toted off, and similar horrors. He simply avoided the cops and the officials in the confusion – which, I should say, is what Great Photographers like Mr Nachtwey, who was on the scene also, had to do, since bystanders and sightseers were definitely not welcome.

Anyway, one of the other regulars came down hard on this guy. The regular is a NY pro photog who visited the critique site with a very uppity attitude, making it clear he was slumming and deigning to drop a few pearls of wisdom in front of the swine now and then. He said in no uncertain way that the amateur had no place at Ground Zero, that he was "just a shutterbug" who was taking advantage of the Great Tragedy That Changed Everything, that he wasn't "trained" for it and constituted a clear and present danger to himself and others. Such work should be left to the Pros.

I said nothing online because I was too mad to be convincing. But the whole point is that there's something inherently unbelievable about "professional" photos – even if they're not staged, they look that way. Some part of the viewer's mind has doubts. Too good to be true. So we tend to see the things in Pulitzer-winning news photos and National Geographic travel photos as events in a sister universe, probably the same universe we see on TV, but not our universe. C-B's greatness inheres in his ability to make "art" photos as convincing as snapshots – hell, they are snapshots in any meaningful sense, but with the qualities of composition and drama you'd expect from something staged.

Anyway, lest I get carried too far from the point, what I mean to say is that your snapshots of Dalian and such places have the immediacy of snapshots. Seeing them convinces me that the place looks that way even to the people who see it every day. Art it ain't, maybe, but then we don't live in a museum either.

Pentax SMC P-DA 21mm F3.2 AL Limited

2006-10-01T14:50:00.000-04:00

For the moment there's a shortage of info online about the Pentax DA 21mm Limited lens that came out last summer. It's a digital-only design, made to work with Pentax DSLR's like the 100D and 10D, and "Limited" not in the sense of a limited production run but like the three "Limited" lenses Pentax introduced in the late 90's and early noughts to match their new flagship film SLR, which never made it to market.

Those older models were 31/1.8, 43/1.9 and 77/1.8. The DA-based "Limited" series are 21/3.2, 40/2.8 and 70/2.4, all pancakes, equivalent to 31, 60 and 105mm for 35mm format. The oldest man in the world probably couldn't say why Pentax picked those focal lengths, which give their users a pawky wide-angle, a too-long normal or a too-short telephoto, and what Leica used to call a "mountain lens." (I know, they do offer a 14mm DA, which is seriously wide-angle, but it's not "Limited" and it sure ain't a pancake.)

For years now I've been trying to find some digital replacement for my late Contax G2 and its brilliant Zeiss-G lenses. Fed Fuji's Neopan, that kit gave me just what I wanted in B&W look and feel, viz. Diva, this landscape, or the never-popular Dog Run. But film is for young folks; I no longer have the time to fart around with it. My EOS digital kit's fine, but I chose it for Canon's slick, unctuous look, which isn't what I want, or all I want, from black and white. Well...I've always liked Pentax, and believe their best lenses have a special snap, so decided to give them a try.

I began with the 31/1.8 on my wife's Pentax DL and got a happy surprise, as you can see here and elsewhere in my September album. Thus encouraged, I figured I'd build a B&W package using the 31mm as a normal lens. For a portrait-length tele I got the 50/1.4, and found it good. (Examples here and in other photos from 9/27.)

But what about wide angle? After some thought I chose the DA 21mm, taking its quality on faith in the absence of published tests. I wish it were a bit wider, but hey – this is supposed to be a Cartier-Bresson outfit, nothing very long or short.

Well, the 21/3.2 arrived from B&H two days ago. I don't have any bench equipment, but did some field testing to get to know its good and bad points. I'll spare you the intimate details; you can see the results of yesterday's outing to the American Museum of Natural History for yourself. (Caveat: I tweaked the photos in Photoshop just as I normally would, so you can't take the images as unvarnished samples of what the lens captured.) In sum, it's a good lens, with tonal qualities and contrast that please me very much.

It's sharp, yes. Sharpness has become something of a red herring, like megapixel count. It's a necessary but insufficient attribute. Two lenses capable of resolving the same pattern on a chart can be quite different in other ways. I expect a prime lens this well made to be sharp, and wasn't surprised to find it resolving as much detail at f/8 as the 31 or 50, or my Canon 24-105 "L" zoom, and let's leave it at that till somebody puts one of these things on the bench. What I want has to do with luminosity and textures and edges, qualities less easily measured.

So far so good. Two days aren't enough. I'll follow up on this later; for the moment I like what I see and hope I've found a winning combination. What's not to like? Well, f/3.2 isn't great, but it's only a wink away from the usual 21mm aperture of f/2.8, and after all Pentax was trying to keep the lens small – very small. But it's not easy for an SLR to focus a 21mm lens, which is why Leica and Cosina still make rangefinders, so the wider the lens the better. In low light I found that the DL wasn't always getting the focus bang on. Even in good light autofocus seems a bit iffy. Of course the very thing that makes focusing a WA lens hard, its great depth of field, goes a long way toward saving this situation. However, at the museum, where dimness rules, the DL often couldn't find focus at all, and I missed the shot. A decisive-moment combo this isn't.

That may have more to do with the entry-level Pentax body than with the lens. I'll get the 10D when it's available; maybe that camera will have better eyesight. I'll keep you folks advised.

My wife's DL? I kept it and bought her a new 100D, which suits her even better.

No LX2

2006-09-20T12:54:00.000-04:00

Time passes. Things change. I canceled my order for a Lumix LX2. My quest for a black-and-white box has taken a turn, maybe because of my pal Stu's going-away party at Murphy's.

Stu changed jobs, which is a whole 'nother story, good for him but sad for me. Many of us turned out to give him the usual sendoff at a local watering hole, and as usual I officiated as photographer, using the LX1, which I carry in my briefcase.

Places named Murphy's tend to be dimly lit, and I saw that without using ISO 400 I wasn't going to get any pictures at all. So I dialed 400 and went to it, asking myself: How noisy can it be?

Well...think "boiler factory," then think of your favorite colors. (It helps if you suffer from synesthesia.) In sum, though the LX1 does a good job at ISO 80, and image stabilization helps make 80 useful handheld, using it is a tour de force. I need a better black-and-white box.

After some thought and much reading of online opinions, I decided to try not a new camera but a new lens, the Pentax 31/1.8 "Limited." Quite a few reviewers, some with serious test equipment, seem to think it's one of the best lenses now on the market. Pentax is an eccentric outfit (31mm, I ask you), which has always endeared them to me, and their best lenses have been praised as having subtle qualities of luminosity and microcontrast that go beyond lines-per-millimeter. The Holy Name is often invoked; I've heard Pentax called "the poor man's Leica."

Never had a Leica, but I did have a Contax G2 kit, which I sold when I gave up on film. I've been missing the snap, crackle and pop of its Zeiss G lenses. Ever hopeful, and resigned by now to my own spendthrift ways, I bought a Pentax 31/1.8 from B&H and put it on the DL I gave Chris on her birthday. I've had two days to play with it, and the news is good. It's delivering just what I hoped for. The DL's multiplier of 1.5X makes it the equivalent of a 45mm normal lens, and I honestly believe it's giving me the look and feel I got from my beloved Zeiss Planar 45.

Of course there's a downside – there's a downside to everything, even death. The bad news is that the 31/1.8's like my Planar in more ways than image quality. It's intentionally retro, with a manual aperture ring and a noisy, slow, mechanical autofocus mechanism. It's open to the elements, with the usual Pentax-A cutout showing focal distance. True, unlike the Planar it can be focused by hand (and has good focusing feel); but in autofocus mode it has a rotating barrel which I keep fouling. In other words, though it's nicely turned out and looks good on the camera, it's mechanically miles behind any Canon USM.

No doubt that'll change. I'm supposed to get a rebate of $100 on the lens, nature's way of telling us that Pentax wants to clear the shelves for new models. Their just-announced DSLR is guaranteed to support future Pentax designs that use a focusing motor along the lines of USM, and rumor says such lenses are only a few months down the road.

So for the nonce I'm putting up with the 31/1.8's annoying shortcomings in exchange for some wonderful optics and the chance to recapture that Leica/Zeiss look. I may even buy more "Limited" lenses; all I want, really, is something as wide as my old Contax/Zeiss 28 and something as long as the C/Z 90. For very wide or very long shots, or the convenience of zoom, or for macro or studio work, I have the Canon 20D.

What Is Art? Mom Knew

2006-08-19T18:13:00.000-04:00

That right: My mother knew. She got the nub of the matter into a parable that must've come to her from her father. He knew too.

Once upon a time (said she) the great painter Leonardo da Vinci was just starting his career. He went to the King and asked to be given an important job. The King had never heard of him and said Leonardo must submit a sample of his art to show he was qualified. He thought Leonardo would go away and come back with a painting, but no. "Let someone fetch a large sheet of paper and a piece of charcoal!" said the young man.

Curious, the King made it so. Leonardo had the paper fixed to a wall, took the charcoal between his fingers and drew a perfect circle that touched the very edges of the paper. The King hired him on the spot.

My grandfather was born in the 1870's and set up for a while as a photographer. He kept at it, if only as a hobby, till my mother was born in 1903. I know because he once showed me his glass-plate negatives – he made his own collodion – and one of the plates was the obligatory nude photo of Mom on a bearskin rug. Later he became a cartoonist. One of his cartoons, which scared my mother in her girlhood, showed Capitalist Bosses sucking blood from the necks of toiling Mill Workers. (They sucked it through a pipette, presumably so the artist could avoid showing unseemly physical contact.) Later he took up painting in oils and water color, then wood carving, then sculpting in clay. Hey, he even won a medal at the Chicago World's Fair. No shit!

His view of art was pretty straightforward. The job of a painter was essentially to do what photography does, at least as a starting point – that is, to show you something you couldn't otherwise see because it was far away, or in the past, or hidden behind a big Keep Out. But painters had the advantage of being able to create settings and situations that never existed, and that couldn't be faked up no matter how hard you tried. Also they had color. So they had a leg up on photography, which could only show us things to which a photographer could get physical access, preferably in the daylight hours.

Of course my grandfather detested "modern art," but you couldn't call him an academician; he had no training and no particular interest in the history and appliances of art.

Footnote: Around 1950 Grandpa did a series of semi-abstract watercolors. But they could all be explained if you knew the key, which he wrote in pencil on the reverse of each sheet. For example, a sheaf of half-unrolled scrolls of different colors were "The Years," with one color representing the lean years, one the years of plenty, and black the years of pestilence and war. When he first showed us this series I delighted him by guessing at their meaning and getting nearly every one of them right, which made him think for the moment that there might be something to modern art after all. However, I peeked.

Lumix LX2

2006-08-08T17:15:00.000-04:00

Further to a few previous notes about the Lumix LX1, I see that Panasonic has announced its next edition, the Lumix LX2. (Specs at dpreview.com.) The new camera looks the same, which is good, and the Leica lens is unchanged – even better. The pixel count's up from eight megs to ten, the LCD's a bit bigger (for a full 9:16 image), and the ISO settings go up to 1600.

We'll see how it all pans out when LX2's start shipping at the end of September. I'm a little put off by the number of pixels, which seems an awful lot for a 1/1.65" sensor (about 6 x 11mm, nearly 400 pixels per linear millimeter). Everything else being equal, more pixels per square mm means more noise – the LX1's big flaw.

Of course Panasonic says everything else isn't equal. There's a new iteration of their picture-grooming firmware, the so-called "Venus Engine III," alleged to goose the image in some magical way that reduces noise. Maybe it does, but I don't suppose that'll help those of us who prefer to shoot in the Raw. Let's hope they've improved the sensor itself.

I had enough faith to preorder one from Amazon.com, but then I've always been an easy mark.

Better Late Than Never Dep't

2006-07-08T17:57:00.000-04:00

My year-old comment on a beautiful photo by Philip Coggan (click on link above).

This photo seems to have become iconic. Comments on it say more about the commenters than about the photograph, which has near-perfect composition and B&W tonality exactly suitable to the subject. As to the .45, let's not make too much soup from one onion. The hammer's down, the boy's smiling, with one eye closed and a playground stance. He is in fact playing, and looks a perfectly nice boy. Girls like dolls, boys like guns, cats eat mice, dogs chase cats. Somebody from Mars might be shocked, I guess.

Lumix LX1: Candid Camera?

2006-07-07T23:34:00.000-04:00

A few more words at random on the Lumix LX1 and what used to be called "candid" photography, or "available-light" p., and more recently "street" or "documentary" photography – you know, unposed and unlit photos of unaware people in public places, handheld and usually in black-and-white. That kind of photography's not my specialty; I'm pathologically shy. But I can do it, after a fashion, in touristy surroundings where everybody else is taking pictures too.

I've spent a lot of time over the last eight years keeping an eye out for good "candid" equipment, and came close to finding it with the Contax G2, Fuji Neopan 400 pushed to 1600 in TMax, and the Zeiss-G lenses. True, the G2 was noisy, its view/rangefinder sucked like a Hoover, and its optically superb lenses had problems with autofocus. ("Problems" covers a lot of sins, not just focusing failure. For example, in autofocus mode the G2 wouldn't release the shutter until focus was acquired. And after each exposure in single-frame shooting the focus would return to some zero point, requiring re-focusing for the next shot.) But I was very fond of it and sold it with regret, as part of a Brand-ish, all-or-nothing change from film to digital.

I also used, with good results, a Ricoh GR1, the cult-classic P&S with a fixed 28mm lens. A gem, but it was limited by that single focal length, and went the way of all my film equipment.

Quality digital P&S cams have many good points as "candid" cameras. They're tiny, unobtrusive, absolutely silent, and look like any tourist snapper. Some, like the LX1, have excellent zoom lenses, a clear advantage over rangefinders. However, those lenses are slow – the LX1's f/2.8 is considered fast in the P&S context – and tiny cameras have tiny digital sensors that aren't very sensitive to light. Boosting their electrical output means boosting random noise too, so in practice you're limited to ISO 100 or 200, three or four stops short of the 1600 most "street" shooters are used to. The combination of slow lens and low ISO bodes ill for available-light photography. I often find myself shooting wide open at speeds longer than a quarter of a second. Few of us can hold a flyweight camera still that long, even if we stick to wide angle.

Another serious drawback is the lack of a usable viewfinder. Many quality digicams (including the LX1) rely entirely on the LCD display, which means you wind up holding the cam out in a gesture that's hard to miss. If you need reading glasses, you'll have to put them on to make a photo – diopter correction impossible. And finally, no LCD works worth a damn in bright sunlight, where framing is by guess and by gosh.

Speed of operation is compromised too, at least if you insist on RAW files. (I do.) Tiny cam, tiny buffer – typically not big enough for even one such image. The LX1 doesn't compress RAW files, or so it seems: they're enormous, 16 megs plus another meg for the obligatory JPG. Writing that many bits to the newest and fastest storage cards takes three seconds or so, a lot longer than winding a Leica. During that interval you cannot take another picture. Best to close your eyes and count to three, so you don't see what you're missing. It might break your heart.

Progress is being made, of course. Many digicams now feature image stabilization. Panasonic claims this adds three stops, e.g. if you can hold at 1/30 without IS, with it you can handle 1/4, and I find that this isn't an exaggeration. (But IS can't stop subject motion, which is almost always a factor you need to deal with in street shots. ) The rush to cram more pixels (hence smaller ones, hence more noise) onto tiny sensors seems to be abating, since the difference between six and eight megapixels, much less between eight and nine, is nearly impossible to see in lettersize prints. Maybe now the big brands will turn their attention to making each pixel more sensitive. I well remember when the fastest film available was rated at ISO 125, and things happen faster in consumer electronics than they did in consumer chemistry.

Mind you, I'm pleased with the LX1. I've made a few photos with it that I think are pretty good. But using it for street work is a tour de force, like doing surgery with a linoleum knife. Oops!

There are rumors of an LX2, and hope springs eternal. But the new god is not yet. Nor am I about to go back to the old dispensation, where image stabilization means a tripod and every lens is prime. As the guys in that play kept saying, there's nothing to be done but wait for Godot.

Photos by Leslie Hancock:The Blog