[Leica] Power

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

Jeff Moore: >>>I have to say that I've experienced a similar shift.  I'm
not nearly ready to give up my other focal lengths yet (especially in
the wider direction), but I *have* found myself toting a 50mm more and
more...I've found myself gravitating from things which seemed perhaps
more modern and trendy to something which initially seemed bog-dull but
whose essential rightness comes shining through with use.<<<

Power to you.

If one is not looking to the gee-whiz focal length effects to add
animation and excitement to pictures, then one is forced to come to
grips more directly with more basic issues: i.e., what's worth taking a
picture of, and how best to look at it.

For many hobbyists, photography is a ceaseless search for ever more odd
and arcane tricks by which to add life to pictures. The smarter strategy
is to try to stop being clever.

Quoting from an interview I may still have around here someplace, by a
photographer whose name won't be remembered:

"One intriguing thing about photographic optics as a technic is that it
is almost completely concerned with enabling photographers to recover
false angles of view.  I use one lens with a fixed, ordinary angle of
view.  I like this about it.  I chose this angle of view because of the
accuracy with which it renders the volume of spaces.  What it doesn’t
allow me to do, though, is see with telescopic vision or all over
everyplace like a pop-eyed fish or with extra-high resolution.  I don’t
zoom in or zoom out, spy on stuff, isolate subjects, obliterate scale,
or any of that..."

- --Mike