Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/10/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 24/10/00 10:29 am, Douglas Cooper at visigoth@cloud9.net wrote: >>> Winogrand, now, used a Canon 50/1.4 LTM on his Leica M (as do I, >>> much of the time). >> >> Odd--I'd had heard that Winogrand shot with a 28. The photos in _The Man in >> the Crowd_ sure look wider than 50. >> > > It's true; he must have used a wide as well. But the Canon information is > from Sherry Krauter, so I assume it's accurate. She > gets a lot of requests for 50/1.4's for this reason. Winogrand's main lens was a Canon 28/2.8 LTM. (I had one of these and it's a nice lens and, yes, wide open it glows). However he did shoot with other lenses, and other cameras. Some of the zoo photos that didn't make it into the book were taken with something like a Nikon 105. He experimented with even wider lenses but found that the 'look' of the lens tended to overwhelm the picture. Earlier in his career, when he was working for magazines and ad agencies, he used a whole variety of stuff including, I assume, medium and large format cameras. Towards the end of his life he bought an M4-something and a motordrive, which partly accounts for the thousands of undeveloped rolls he left on his death in LA. Just before his demise he seems to have realised that his shooting had got the better of him and talked to friends about buying an 8x10 view camera and moving back to NYC to do portraits. I think he may even have bought the camera. I wish we could have seen those pictures. His film was tri-x developed in various usual and unusual ways. He sometimes marked film cans with the light conditions and pushed and pulled accordingly; he also sometimes pushed it to 1000 asa so that he could shoot at 1/1000 to get the crispness he liked in pictures. He also claims to have developed it by inspection under a green safelight. I think the developer was D76. He was a staggeringly heavy shooter: one student remembers meeting him at the airport and on the drive to the campus he shot ten rolls out the cab window. Another remembers him shooting 8 rolls while he walked a city block. He seldom metered as he shot, but adjusted the exposure by eye. He never really got on top of his backlog of film: hundreds of undeveloped rolls sat on top of his fridge. It took around two years to get round to developing film, which GW said was necessary to put some distance between him and the pictures. He used to make hundreds of prints at a time, exposing them one after another by the seat of his pants until he had a big pile which he then developed. By all accounts his exposure judgment was pretty good. In his later years he didn't print much of his own stuff: he used to say that anyone who could print could print his pictures. But he wasn't at all blase about print quality. His own sometimes slapdash methods were at odds with his interest in and knowledge of the technical aspects of photography. sources: figments of the real world, bystander, personal communications with various of his former students - -- Johnny 'still researching that biography' Deadman http://www.pinkheadedbug.com