Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/10/08
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hey Martin, Don't be afraid, I think most of the people in the LUG have the obsession of taking good pictures! It may be the reason why they are looking for informations about the best lenses the lens that will make us the equal of HCB or Gene Smith... Of course it does not exist and everyone can be a great photog with say...a Zenit...but I think we are just dreaming about equipment stuff... It's psychologically relevant to say that thinking about equipment and of course the equipment we don't have which is necessarily the one we need to take awsome pictures, is a way to forget to think about the real point : the way and to oportunity to take pictures! I'm sure we can have nice bokeh with an old screwed up "takumar" (I know there are pentax fan around there), what we need is the object to photograph and to find the manner to make the good picture! But hey, I know how HCB took his pictures : he set the camera speed to 1/125 and the aperture to f/8 and pressed the shutter release button. It's so strange that when I'm doing exactly the same things I don't get anything good....or sometimes it's not that crappy... Basically, it's easy to talk about technique, that's what we're doing but it's so difficult to talk about taking pictures...There are rules but man, it's simple, you got to SEE! That's the point! How to explain it, I don't know. All I know is that I don't SEE right... It's always the same debate. Yesterday, someone was talking about guitars. Even though you got the Gibson L5 "Wes Montgomery" model, you got all the music sheets, you know how Wes plays (you can even look at him playing on videos) but you ain't gonna sound like him...never, ever. for music, we've got to Hear!! So the Gibson user group would talk about the woods employed for the guitars, the pickups or whatever the technical point the 'd like to talk about but how to talk about HEAR... Finally, there are some magics in the human beings and that's what's interesting about them... Thib.