Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/02/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 05:59 PM 2/25/2000 -0800, Mike Leitheiser wrote: >I don't understand this picture Marc keeps painting. Marc says that the >photographers owned their own gear so they wanted to use cheaper Japanese gear >because of the risks involved. That part of the picture makes sense to me. At >the same time he says they had to hype the quality of the Japanese goods to >impress the boys paying their way, the editors buying the work and apparently >they were succesfull. Thats the part I don't get, how does it go? I have no idea what the question is. Almost all editors in 1950 would only accept cut-film (large format) pictures. Medium Format (Rolleiflex, of course) was accepted by a few. Some eccentrics got away with miniature-format, such as Eisenstein, but it was hardly common. Sending 35mm negatives in was tantamount to immediate rejection. To allay this, photographers sent with the pictures the details of the gear used to take the pictures. "Zeiss Ikon" and "Leica" and "Ektra" worked. "Nikon" was unknown, as was "Canon". If you were an editor, you wanted pictures that would work. You have a connection with a fine photographer who has been shooting one kind of gear. You want to send him to Korea. You ask him what gear he will be using, and he answers, "Nikon", and your immediate response would be, "what in the hell are you blathering?" Remember that this was in an age when Japanese products were regarded as laughably horrid in quality. Hell, guys, I am only half-a-century old, and I remember those days! (You went to the dime store, and there was a toy. It said "made in Japan", and the clerk laughed as you paid for it, and said, "made from the steel off of US ships those bastards sunk, I bet".) I lived in California when the Japanese car invasion started, and the common reaction to a Toyota was, "a piece of junk". It is a long time ago. But, basically, imagine yourself as an editor in a world which had never heard of Nikon or Canon, and you have a Real War on your hands, and your prize ace dude tells you he is going to use such gear. Your heart would drop. So, they demanded assurances, and Duncan, and others, rigged tests to calm down the home folks. In a perfect universe they would have been honest, and said, "I will be using a Made-in-Japan theft of a German design. You find the German lens acceptable. This lens is an exact copy." But, being working pro's, they chose a simpler and faster solution to the credibility problem. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!