[Leica] What is in a name (Shakespeare)

[imxputs@ision.nl]

It has been proposed about the Leica glow:
You use them wide open or one stop closed, especially in high contrast
environments, and it's there. The use of silver rich emulsions gives you a
richness in the grays that more modern emulsions don't have. As to the rest
I don't know because the glow is right there on the negs when scanned. It's
partly halation, partly coma, partly flare, partly spherical aberration,
partly the shape of the film's response curve... it's a lot of stuff,
really. It's a 'look'. Thankfully it's so overdetermined that (a) you can't
fake it in Photoshop (b) Erwin doesn't think it exists.

Well to be honest, flare and halation do exist and can be seen. And spherical 
aberration and coma do lower local contrast and produce halation around light 
sources. These phenomena are characteristic of all bad lenses and are not 
typical of Leica lenses. No question about this. But why call these phenomena 
the famous Leica glow? Flare is flare and it is bad. The wellknown Hamilton 
pictures of dreamy hardly dressed young girls were made with excessive flare to 
create a dreamy atmosphere. Any bad lanes can produce this effect. If you call 
that "The Glow" I fully agree with you. 
But the concept of "Glow" is supposed to be something mysterious, that can be 
created only with oldere Leica lenses and some sorcerer's formulae.
When you call the phenomenon of flare with its proper name, that is flare, I am 
with you and then this phenomenon does exist.  

I do agree that silver-rich emulsions produce special effects which in 
themselves are unrelated to the use of flare as a pictorial effect. And indeed 
the use of negatives with a low CI value and the use of papers with a soft 
gradation and the use of diffusion enlarger will all add to produce prints with 
a low overall contrast. I do not think that these combined effects produce a 
longer tonal scale and a richer quality of grey values than when you use 
negatives with a normal CI value and papers with normal gradation. 
But now we are jumping into a Zone Theory Discussion which is very interesting, 
but not for this forum.
 
Erwin