Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/03/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Eric, If only my clients would accept negatives or even my scans to disc that is what I would produce in difficult mixed lighting situations. I have yet to come across any client who would be happy with negatives when they need slides. I have also never seen a passable slide produced from scans and shudder think what they would cost (especially when I would need to offer several hundred for the client to choose from) even in the States: in China you would be adding days or weeks and many thousands of dollars to a job, which even a big budget client would find unacceptable. In most of the world IME the luxury of service bureaus, photoshop-savvy customers and people who know what is what generally are rare: I have often to deal with clients, or at least their representatives with whom I am dealing, who ask for medium format "because the quality is better" and then wonder why these guys with the famous Hasselblads keep producing square pictures... I never ask what format they want any more, never tell what I am going to shoot with (I just say I have all formats from 35mm to 4x5 and I use whatever is appropriate) and the clients seem to like what they get. The only information I ask for is how is the photography going to be used (and half the time they don't really know until I get them to find out!). Despite all this 90% of my clients insist they need transparencies (and then wonder how to get decent prints later...) and I think that like most professionals worth their salt I produce results that satisfy my own standards which are in nearly all cases, at least technically, greatly higher than the client's. I think there is no need per se to shoot with Leicas professionally, just a preference on the part of the photographer about what we like using and whatever the lovely colour or contrast or whatever you get with the Leica lens the picture should still be strong enough had it been taken with a lesser optic. These are matters of taste but matters of technique - and here I finally return to the point - are prerequisites of professionalism: if my client wants sharp clean colour transparencies for a slide presentation to the CEO then they better not be green tinged due to lack of correct filtration. I at least would cringe at the prospect! I just wish Leicas were not so eccentric in their filter fittings. By the by - I checked my catalogue from Foto Brenner, one of if not THE biggest German mail order dealers, and they have no 60mm, no Series filters and no Leica filters either in their catalog. But if you want a shift adapter for Mamiya lenses on Nikon bodies they've got those ;) Bests Adrian Adrian Bradshaw Photojournalist Shanghai, China