[Leica] Kill...Tripod...Thread...*

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

My dear Luggers,
I'm beginning to feel like a fly trapped on flypaper--the more I say,
the more I am misconstrued. I don't usually have this much trouble
making myself understood. I am clearly at an inarticulate low ebb, and
not putting the least bit of thought into my use of language.

One more attempt.

       (deep breath)

I'm not angry.

       (click and exhale...er, or maybe it is exhale THEN click)

I'm not implacably dead-set against the use of tripods.

I meant only to say that anyone who uses a tripod for all or almost all
of his or her photographs is perhaps not using 35mm as it was meant to
be used, since one of the format's great felicites is hand-holdability,
portability, and operational flexibility...in that it enables
photographers to take photographs more quickly than tripods can be set
up, or in places where tripods cannot be set up (such places do exist:
in free-fall, say, having just leapt from an airplane with a parachute
strapped upon one's back. That's one place where a 35mm camera can be
used, but where tripod would be useless, or at least cumbersome.)

From this it was intended to follow that many 35mm photographers--even
good and great ones--take many shots hand-held. Dare I inch out farther
upon my precarious limb, and claim that _most_ photographers take _most_
of their 35mm photographs with the camera hand-held? Is that rash?
Forgive me.

Then I tried to assert that most any tripod--I had to qualify that: most
any tripod that is decently designed and competently deployed--will hold
a camera steadier than you can hold it in your hands.

From this I expected people to make the logical leap that virtually any
tripod will give you steadier shots than you can hand-hold.

With me so far? I hope so, because by this time in the bygone thread I
was already sinking deep into the tar-pit of crossed purpose and
miscommunication.

My point was that, since you hand-hold most of your shots anyway, and
most any tripod will hold the camera steadier than that, then
IT...DOESN'T...MATTER what your tripod legs are made of.

Attacked for this radically iconoclastic (yet somehow still dogmatic)
viewpoint, I then went further (too far, I know--very much too far--I'm
so rash, such a hothead, and, believe me, I suffer for it in this life)
and tried to claim that most people could never tell, from a slide or a
print, whether the Leica that made the slide or the print was perched
fixedly upon, let's say, a Gitzo tripod made of steel and aluminum, or
upon a Ries tripod made of wood.

For this, I was ridiculed by all those manifestly in possession of that
skill. Here, we spoke of marimbas and glockenspiels, URLs were posted,
and a battery of the many references arrayed against me were cited.

I'm now feeling chastened, humbled--nay, humiliated, having been forced
to submit to the great indignity of the public (not to mention facile,
puerile, superficial, and inept) armchair psychoanalysis of the
faux-erudite Bernard, an excruciating fate for anyone (although this
sentence ought to send him scurrying for that dictionary of his again
like a rodent after crumbs, heh heh)--and contrite. I shall never again
attempt to tell anyone to get a life and stop worrying about what his
tripod legs are made of. I've come around. It makes a lot of difference
in photography; it is an important technical issue; science backs the
idea.

I've learned my lesson. The next time I see a particularly vivid and
clear photograph exhibited at a museum, I will do the right thing and
murmur sagely, "wooden tripod legs, most probably." Luggers within
earshot will nod in approval, and my reputation will begin to be
restored from the low depths to which it has sunk.

- --Mike

* Disclaimer: not every statement in this message can be interpreted
literally by looking up the dictionary definitions of the words used;
the scoundrelly writer is using rhetorical tricks and devices.