[Leica] Out & about with the Heliar

[Alex Brattell <alex@zetetic.co.uk>]

I've been away quite a lot recently, little trips here and there. The 15mm
Heliar is light enough to be in the bag at all times, besides it is my new
toy, I've had it about 6 weeks so it has come out to play most days.

I've had extreme wide angles before - a 16mm Russian lens for my Pentax LX
which I have a strange affection for, and a 65mm f8 for 5x4 which is more
useable in terms of rendering of perspective but compensates by being very
hard to see through! The Heliar on the M6 seems, so far, to be hassle free
in terms of good metering and useable, well built viewfinder.

The quality of the Heliar has impressed me, it's not just a pretty face (and
it is very cute). I've really enjoyed keeping an eye open for situations
where a huge foreground would suit a massively diminished background.
Looking through contact sheets, and considering what I've printed up so far,
I've found that most 'views' don't work for my taste. The distortion of
perspective is beyond that which you can identify with - it simply seems to
make the view different to what you 'psychologically' saw rather than
enhancing it, as can often be done with a 24mm for example when the
foreground just takes you through, into the 'scene'. What have worked better
are whacky portraits and 'constructions' - little kitsch figurines on a wall
in Bristol with a maze of tiny back yards in the distance for example. I did
a picture of my girlfriend's sister in front of her terraced house which
looked fantastic - her legs were very flatteringly lengthened, and the way
she related to the very diminished house was great. A leaking bag of rubbish
outside the house which was left as it was as a jokey piece of realism ended
up as a good compositional element, the leak dribbling dramatically into the
vast foreground.

Yesterday I was on a job illustrating a feature for a Sunday newspaper, and
got to photograph inside London's Millenium Dome, supposedly the largest
covered structure in the world. Access was restricted to the 'Preview
Centre', the light was uninteresting for details with a long lens (which in
any case I wasn't carrying - 90mm was the longest). The place is so @#{~%ing
massive that the mind couldn't scale it, to the extent that it looked
smaller standing right beside it than from half a mile away.  For a
structure of such absurd proportions only one lens will do! My Heliar ate
the Dome, or at least took quite a chunk out of it, and graduated from
novelty item to vital optic!  (By the way, I think the main reason that St
Paul's cathedral is such a satisfying building to look at is because it is
the biggest size that the mind can actually grasp - anything bigger is just
scenery!).

If this lens was sold at (new) Leica prices, I simply wouldn't have it, and
now of course I'm very pleased that I do. Enjoying the Heliar as a novelty
is a bit of visual Helium (nitrous oxide?) that loosens one up nicely and
finding effective uses for it is fun. The distributors should run a 15mm
competition.

Alex





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                         alex@zetetic.co.uk
    http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~abrattell/

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