Re: [Leica] A Humbling Experience

[Mark Rabiner <mrabiner@concentric.net>]

"Noel H. Charchuk" wrote:
> 
> Glenn wrote:
> I am terribly humbled by these antique pictures; I cannot produce this
> type
> quality with my high tech gear.  The sharpness, gradation, and other
> visual
> characteristics of these prints are breathtaking.  I realize that these
> pictures
> are contact prints, but are the wonderful films and lenses that we use
> today in
> reality lower in quality in the essential operating parameters than those
> of
> that time?
<snip>
> I suspect the album Glenn discussed may have been done by a photographer
> with talent, if it moved him so much a 80 or 90 years later.
> Noel Charchuk

In my particual example it was not in my opinion a question of talent
but an example of fairly straight documentation of subject matter than
the person with the camera had sensitivity for; thier own relatives.
They were not trying to produce art and they in some sense didn't. They
wanted to record their relatives and where they lived. They didn't
realize how telling these images would be and in the context of a time
frame  which overlapped them. They might or might cared or agreed on the
eloquence of the technique they had access to:
Box cameras shooting brownie film which were contact printed by the drugstore.
Snapshots
Glenns were done by a photographer but in common is the results obtained
by a simplicity of technique.
Contact printing from larger negs taken with simple cameras.
We can love our Lieca's and still have some time to true ourselves by
going back to the basics every once in a while. Good for the eye as well
as the soul.
Mark Rabiner
Reminds me of the last scene of Titanic with the Munsters sipping
champagne at the bottom of the ocean. Kind of eerie! Kind of poignant! :)