[Leica] Who Needs Fine Focus and Good Exposures?

[buzz.hausner at verizon.net (buzz.hausner@verizon.net)]

B.D. and I have had this conversation many times before, and...

...my position is that "bad" exposure and focus, and great globs of grain 
can just as easily contribute in a positive way to the impact of a 
photograph as detract from the image.  Regarding Capa's pictres of D-Day, 
the very qualities of the pictures...bad exposures and jarringly blurry 
images...may give one a sense of the chaos of battle, any battle.  I stand 
by my hypothesis that fine focus and spot-on exposures (granting that 
'spot-on' is a subjective judgement) are vastly over rated as contributing 
factors to great photographic images.

Buzz Hausner
> 
> From: "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>
> Date: 2004/07/28 Wed AM 09:58:36 EDT
> To: "'Leica Users Group'" <lug@leica-users.org>
> Subject: RE: RE: [Leica] night summer in Paris
> 
> Yes and no, Buzz - If the lack of focus, proper exposure, and/or grain
> distract, then the image is devalued. Were Capa's images not of the
> D-Day landing they'd never have been accepted for or as anything. And,
> the damage done to the negatives actually adds to the impact of the
> prints, because it adds an element of blurr, of action, and a sense of
> the danger faced by the subjects and the photographer. But this Paris
> Night photo is a lovely image degraded by its technical flaws, because
> while one is taken by its composition, the smile of the woman, the man
> on the right, one also looks at it thinking, "was this processed in
> orange juice? How far was it blown up? Did the photographer crop a tiny
> segement of an otherwise crappy shot, trying to save it?" I'm not
> suggesting that the later is the case at all, but I do think that
> focus,exposure, and grain count for something... ;-)
> 
> Yr Buddy....B. D.