The Online Photographer

The E-P1 to Scale

In the continuing absence of hands-on primary experience, maybe this will help with the E-P1 size debate. A regular reader who's become a friend of the site sent me this illustration he made. He took the images from various places on the web but they're presented scrupulously to scale. (Personally, I think each of us should just wait to judge until we see and hold the camera for ourselves. But we're here to please.)

Left to right, Canon G10 (1/1.7" small sensor), Olympus E-P1 (Micro 4/3), Canon 450D (APS-C), and Canon 5D Mark II (24x36mm or "full-frame"). Click on the image to see it a bit larger.

Mike

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Featured Comment by JK @ Studio Hatyai: "For close to a year, c. 1992, I carried a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder around Tokyo pretty much every day. It was a fairly big, clunky, noisy camera, but within a few months I stopped noticing those things, as you do with something you’re using all the time. The curious thing was, most of my subjects seemed to stop noticing it about then too. Somehow they were picking up on my casualness with the thing.

"Ever since then I’ve quit worrying about the exact size, color, shape etc. of a camera, at least in terms of its potential discretion. Much more than anything else, subjects respond to your ease with your gear, and your ease with them."

Mike replies: I had a weird experience once with that very camera that confirms part of what you're saying. I had one for a few days to try, and I felt very awkward and nervous pointing it at people. One time, believe it or not, I pointed it from my 4th-floor balcony at some nearby construction, at one guy working on a roof, and as I was looking through the camera the construction worker looked right up at me and glared. It seemed to me at the time like he had sensed himself being watched or spied on. It was uncanny, but I don't think it was a coincidence. Although it might have been, of course.

15,000,000 Nanoseconds of Fame

Not many people can say truthfully that they've been published in The New Yorker: I noticed that our own Geoff Wittig, who has written many book reviews for TOP, got a letter published in that magazine this week, in the context of his formal expertise (Geoff's an M.D. in real life). Nice going, Geoff!

Mike

Changing Scenery

By Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune

Mike
(Thanks to G.K. Froehlich)

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A veritable Smith & Wesson.

The Nature and Art of Workmanship

Writing about Steve McCurry's new book The Unguarded Moment the other day and thinking about how well it "goes with" his earlier book Looking East reminded me that for some while now I've been meaning to write a post about books in pairs. I have a quirky tendency to shelve books next to other books that I sense they fit with. Sontag sits next to Barthes, Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word is shelved next to John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Why? I guess sometimes the pairings are obvious; sometimes it's because the two books nurture or amplify each other, sometimes it's because I feel they balance each other out or contradict. I guess it has no real meaning...it's just a personal idiosyncrasy. I'm still not sure I'm ever going to inflict that particular essay on you.

But as I was thinking about it again I was poking around on Amazon seeing what's in print and what's not, and I came across David Pye's lovely little book The Nature and Art of Workmanship again. This rare little gem hasn't always been easy to get in the 41 years since it was published, so I thought I'd just throw out another recommendation for it for whatever it's worth. Pye was Professor of Furniture Design at The Royal College of Art in London from 1948 to 1974, and this book pertains mostly to furniture...on the surface. The book is really about the philosophy of craftsmanship, however. Read it with a flexible and open mind, and you can apply many of his ideas to many other fields, to many arts and most crafts. It can be easily seen as pertaining to the "crafting" of photographs (fine art prints, at the very least) and in some ways, I think, even cameras(!). I know that ever since I first read it I've found it helpful to think of his concepts of "the workmanship of risk" and "the workmanship of certainty" with regard to photographing—in a way it's what Garry Winogrand was talking about in that marvelous and thought-provoking little video we linked to a while back.

Right now, here, today, I'm not going to jump into the deep sea of talking about photography's relationship to craft, either historically or the way it's been changing again lately. It's a big subject. In any event, this is not a book that's directly about photography. But it's one of those rare books in which someone who's been thinking for a lifetime about a subject he knows deeply makes an attempt to share his hard-gained wisdom with others. In that way it's the opposite of much of the cookie-cutter, research-and-regurgitate, processed, pasteurized book product that passes for being publishable all too often these days. I certainly enjoyed it when I read it, and I treasure it on my shelves now, and I recommend it to you with feeling if it sounds like it might appeal.

Mike

ADDENDUM: Well for Pete's sake, I forgot the U.K. link. And Prof. Pye was a Londoner, too. Sorry.

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Featured Comment by Dale: "Just for perspective, I keep my copy of Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History next to my Gary Larson collection."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "Sontag next to Barthes, eh? Something tells me this is a charged statement.

"Might it be that when you see statements, for example, like this in Sontag's On Photography: 'For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common than [a frontal view]: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.'

"...and this from Barthes' 'Photography and Electoral Appeal' written decades earlier: 'A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common than [a frontal view], suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.'

"...placing one volume in close physical proximity to the other is your symbolic editorial correction for the fact that Sontag didn't have the courtesy of even crediting the original with a footnote in this and similar examples? Just wondering."

Mike replies: Ah, that ill-defined line between "influence" and plagiarism. (Which brings to mind the question, how does one reproduce a Sherrie Levine in a book?) Your comparison of these quotes raises one ugly specter: that I might have found Barthes so difficult merely because his language (in translation) is less clear....

Anyway, there's that, and that they seemed to have had such a mutual admiration society going, and that their writings and all the related fuss were roughly contemporaneous, and that the books are roughly the same size and thickness...regarding that last, I'm not proud—I didn't say this habit of mine strictly made any sense.

Featured Comment by Glenn Gordon: "Here's a bad PDF of a piece I wrote in 1996 for Woodwork magazine on David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship. It was good to see your mention of the book—it was seminal for many craftsman that I know.

Download "The Workmanship of Risk" by Glenn Gordon

"Speaking of pairing books, I’ve always shelved Pye's next to Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman (or at least I did until some unknown borrower failed to return the Yanagi; it’s one of those books I keep having to replace, lending it too often to people who disappear.)"

Dreams, Reveries, Mysteries, Memories: 'Emmet Gowin: Photographs'

Here's a deep treasure fished out of photography's recent past, rescued and revived by Steidl and the Pace McGill Gallery (where there was a show of the work this past spring). Emmet Gowin: Photographs is another of my long-time favorite photobooks, available once again, after many years, in a lovely new reprint. A straightlaced young man from a strict upbringing married into a more freewheeling, open, and expressive family and made art of the collision, with the fully open eyes of one who belongs but sees everything as if it were new (and astonishing). A book made out of the energy of young love and new freedom, and ambition.

In retrospect this is something of a period piece. The sparse highlights pulled up out of the inky blacks is a printing style that now looks very '70s. Gowin includes Sommeresque landscapes, extreme wide angles, the dense, textured, flat-field arrays that would preoccupy his later work, and a Callahan-like extended portrait of his wife Edith. But it's the snapshot-made-art quality of his new family's faces, bodies, activities, environs, and lives that are the core of the book. Lives and deaths, I should say.

Some of the pictures were made with a medium-format lens mounted on a view camera, making the pictures circular, with the areas outside the image circle carefully burned to gray or black by the photographer (who had the reputation of being a virtuoso printer). The effect is like a keyhole, or like a peephole in a door, although we're looking in, not out. It enhances the feeling that we're seeing something private and essential.

I knew this book very well as a student, and in the mid '80s I got to meet Edith Gowin. I told friends at the time that it was like meeting Lincoln, another famous subject of many photographs. To me she had a legendary quality. She spoke, however, in a high-pitched voice with more than a trace of a mountain twang, her words full of warmth and generosity. (Lincoln, too, is described by contemporaries as having a peculiar-sounding, high-pitched voice.) Not at all like the imposing, vivid, and somewhat dark figure, half wild lover, half earth mother, that inhabits the book.

Emmet Gowin: Photographs contains one of my all-time favorite pictures, too, called Nancy, a picture that could neither be simpler nor more rare. (Reproduced in this article from a while back.)

I'll probably have to get the new edition, which is very faithful to the old one but better made (and hardcover). Even though I must say I don't like the new cover. The edition I have, in paperback, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. It cost me $4.47, which means I bought it used. I got it perhaps four or five years after it came out. One of the essential books in my library. I look at it every year. A book that's grown with me, like a much-loved piece of music.

Mike

(Here's the U.K. link.)

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Taking Pen in Hand

A couple of readers sent me this link, to a young woman in England with a German (or Dutch?) accent handling the Olympus E-P1. Sometimes seeing someone handle a camera can give you a better idea of what it really looks like.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Sailer and Hugh Crawford)

(P.S. Somewhat annoyingly, I can no longer post YouTube videos directly here, because the minimum size of the videos now exceeds the width of my column. You know what they say: oh well. I wonder what would happen if I reset the size constraints manually....)

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Featured Comment by Maarten B.: "German accent, definitely. The name is German too. For a Dutchman like me it is very easy to hear."

Featured Comment by Clayton Lofgren: "Another one with funny accent."

Workingman's Leica

 
The Hartmann Leica, $1475

After I published the post called "The Leica as Teacher" on May 28th, followed by "Why It Has To Be a Leica" the next day, a number of people contacted me to say that they'd been inspired to try the "one Leica, one lens, one year" experiment that I was suggesting. (Good going and good luck to one and all, by the way!)

My old friend Nick Hartmann did that very experiment—one lens, one Leica—but he did it for almost a decade. He contacted me last week wanting to know how he might de-accession his old trusty Leica and 50mm Summicron while at the same time helping it to get into the hands of someone who might want to use it for its intended purpose.

So: one Leica, one lens for Sale. Cosmetically it's what would be called a "good user"—it has a few scars, and some scratches on the baseplate. Probably the worst thing appearance-wise is that Nick blacked out the engraved camera name and the "red dot" with a sharpie, and, when that didn't quite work, covered them with black electrician's tape. He's removed the tape, but the engraving and the red dot don't look so hot.

However, it's been treated well and scrupulously maintained since new. Nick bought it in September of 1996 and used it "almost daily" until April of 2005. During that time he logged 500 rolls of film (you can see some of his work online), which means the camera has seen about 20,000 shutter actuations. The M6 shutter will go to about 100,000 shots before needing service, and has been known to last for as many as 400,000. So there's a lot of life left in this one.

The lens is also somewhat "experienced," but the rear element has been protected by being on the camera since new, and the front element has always had a protective filter on it.

Mike and Zander at the Cozy Corner, Oak Park, by Nick Hartmann

Nick shot one of the best photo archives I have—for years when we'd see one another I'd drag Zander along to whatever restaurant we met at, and Nick would take pictures of us, then send prints to me. I have them all in an archival box, and the set as a whole is a lovely record of me and my son over the years of my adventure in single parenthood. Most of those pictures, of course, were shot with this very camera and lens.

Anyway, if you're one of those who are thinking of trying the "Leica year" experiment, here's a camera you can use. Nick would like to get $1475 for the camera and lens, which seems a fair going price. He'll stand behind the sale, as will I: in June, a year from now, if you'd like to re-sell the Hartmann Leica again (assuming of course you haven't done anything grievous to it in the meantime), I'll advertise it again here on TOP and you can pass it along to someone else who wants to try it.

Anyway, if you're interested, leave a comment to that effect and I'll pass your email address along to Nick. (In order, if there is more than one.)

Mike

BONUS: In the spirit of passing useful things along, the buyer of the Leica can also do a favor for another (perhaps young, perhaps impecunious) photographer he or she knows: Nick will send a "good user" Canon EOS Rebel XT DSLR and an EF 50mm ƒ/1.8II lens to a photographer of your choice, for free. Just let him know the name and address of the person you want the DSLR to go to when you make the arrangements for the M6.

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UPDATE: About ten people have expressed interest now, in the comments and via email (it's about 6 p.m. here in the Midwest). Nick won't be in his office until Monday morning, but he'll get in touch with people then, in order. If it doesn't go to #1, then it will go to #2, and so on...in any event I think we can safely say it's sold now. Thanks to everybody who expressed interested, and if you just missed it, sorry about that.

Wanted To Trade

I hope Ken doesn't mind us pointing this out, but it is pretty funny....

Mike
(Thanks to Michael Nesbitt)

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Featured Comment by Stephen Gillette: "A cautionary tale for all of us husbands to ponder. The '92 Subaru Justy comment really scares me. I think my wife would aim higher, but then again...."

UPDATE: The link is gone now. It was trivial—a Craig's List ad ostensibly by a woman from North York, near Toronto, wanting to trade in her "slightly defective" husband because he is obsessed with reading Ken Rockwell's website and wastes money buying all the latest cameras. One of the things she listed that she would take in trade for him was a '92 Subaru Justy. —Ed.

'Call Bruce McBroom'

Cartoonist Curtis Tucker with an early romantic interest, some time in the '70s

Photographer Bruce McBroom tells Alex Altman the story of shooting the last of the great pinup girls...

"...It was just Farrah and myself. It was before the days where you had to have stylists and hair and makeup and background art directors and assistants. It was just me and Farrah and my Nikon, at the home she shared with Lee Majors, a house on Mulholland Drive overlooking Hollywood, with a beautiful view...."

Mike
(Thanks to Ken Tanaka and Curtis D. Tucker)

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ADDENDUM: Another example of one of the fundamental mysteries of still photography...how one shot can work so well and another, similiar shot doesn't. Although obviously an homage to the Farrah poster, this promo picture of another '70s pinup girl, Loni Anderson of "WKRP in Cincinnati," falls flat. (Although perhaps that isn't quite the right phrase....)  —Mike

 

News Blips

Michele McNally, Picture Editor for The New York Times, is answering questions, through tomorrow. Some good answers already.

Phase One has purchased Leaf. (Warning: PDF link). As Our Humble Correspondent, the Curator and Chief Featherduster at the Northeast Kingdom Field Camera Repository and Odd Format Graveyard puts it, "not something that's going to affect the average TOP reader. But in the small puddle of the MF digital market, it's an enormous splash."

Will there be a professional version of the Olympus EP-1? The BJoP's interview with Mr. Akira Watanabe.

Michael G. Dougan, Tambay (the Watchman)

This is the first picture I've personally seen from the new Fujifilm GF670 / Bessa 667. Brief review and more pictures by Michael Dougan at Japan Exposures.

Mike
(Thanks to Charles F. Heuer, Oren, Eolake, and Dirk)

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