Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/12/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Mike Gil wrote: > If the giants of sports photography such John Zimmerman, Mark Kauffman, and > Neil Leifer of Sports Illustrated fame used manual focus lenses, why can't > the new kids do the same. > > There are very few sport photographers that can match their genius today > given the AF technology. Two that I know--John McDonough and Andy Hayt--not only do a lot of MF with Nikons, but also use Rolleis and Hasseys--and they are VMF--Very Manual Focus. I may have told this story before, but about a year ago I had finished a couple weeks of shooting power boats on lakes and was going over the 250 rolls of film with the art director in Seattle. There are, primarily, three of us shooting for the company. I use mostly Nikons in MF (plus an occasional M shot) and the other two use Canons. About half way through reviewing the film, the AD said, "Gosh it's nice to have so much in focus to choose from." This floored me, and I questioned him. He said with the others they usually had to pick not the best frame given action, models, etc., but what was in focus. I still can't understand this, but looking through hundreds of sheets of their slides, it appears to be a combination of focus and just plain softness of the lenses or movement from slow shutter speeds, despite that we all use gyro stabilizers. Recently I was at a oil refinery in Texas for an annual report and saw a couple large cranes out of service because of their computers. Yeah, computers. Sometimes whiz bang features don't dependability make. donal - -- Donal Philby San Diego www.donalphilby.com