Leica bashing on usenet groups.

[captyng@vtx.ch (Gerard Captijn)]

Very often maybe only 2-3 pictures on a 36-roll are really good. In
addition, practice shows that we often need to expose many rolls to produce
one really  excellent, exhibition quality image (National Geographic
probably won't disagree with these statements given the level of film
consumption of their photographers). Why?

I use my Sony television set with a remote control that has a freeze frame
button. As television slices reality into 24 images per second, an hour
television offers 86.400 individual images, each individually accessible
with the freeze button. Using the button however, one finds that
approximately 90% of the images are useless. Eyes closed, bizarre
expressions, movement blur, etc. Try it yourself once. I would guess that
one has to look at 20 - 40 pictures to see one reasonable image and far more
than that to find an excellent one. It's something like playing the
roulette, we are in the domain of chance operations.

Our Leicas expose generally in a range of 1/30 - 1/500 second, which has the
same effect as freezing reality on a TV screen. The chance to produce a good
picture, ideally the one that we visualized when we pressed the shutter
button, should be in the order of 1 to 15 against us, depending on the subject. 

Remember Gary Winogrand? He understood and used chance operations. He
exposed hundreds of rolls of film and stored them in a box. Years later he
opened the box and considered these many forgotten pictures raw material, a
source for discovering and printing fine images (in music, John Cage worked
along comparable lines). It could be that the closer the shutter operates to
the exact moment that we visualize the future image, the better the chances
are to produce the picture we want. Maybe something like this. Immediately:
1 to 2, 20 milliseconds: 1 to 5, 100 milliseconds: 1 to10, 1 second: 1 to
100, 1 minute: 1 to 1000 and 1 week: 1 to infinity. I cannot substantiate
these numbers but they are based on "best feel" resulting from many years of
photographic practice. Winogrand worked with Leica M rangefinder cameras.
  
The conclusion? Modern autofocus SLR's have a delay, between pushing the
button and effective exposure, of in the order of 100 milliseconds depending
on their construction. A Leica-M rangefinder camera operates with 17
milliseconds time parrallax. Once exposure and distance are set, the Leica-M
is probably very superior for street/candid etc. photography as the
possibility to produce the image that we visualised is far higher than with
a 6 times slower SLR.

Our friends in a certain photographic discussion group might have missed
this aspect of Leica M photography as well.

Gerard Captijn,
Geneva, Switzerland.
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