[Leica] Flare this

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

> There is a lot going on in this discussion but underneath it there seems to
> be an ethic which makes the following equation:
> 
> ideally corrected lens = good
> non-ideally corrected lens = bad
> 
> That may be true in a lens designer's mental space, but it is certainly not
> true in every photographer's mental space.


Hey Deadman,
Give up. I tried the reasonable approach before; it doesn't work. <g>

Nice articulation of the ideas, though.

A few years ago, Sally Mann called me asking if I could find her some 8x10
film without any anti-halation backing. She wanted to get the "look" of
those old 19th-century pictures where bright light flares to white and seeps
into all the adjacent dark areas. I found her a manufacturer who was willing
to make up a batch.

Why would anybody go to such trouble to induce a certain kind of flare?
Because she's an artist and it's an effect she wants to use, of course. Or,
at least, she wants to play with it to see what she might achieve.

The real bottom line, I think, is that some of us are willing to treat
photographs as if they were art, and just look at various pictures with
whatever visual properties they have--"bad" or "good"--and see if they work
artistically, emotively, expressively. Sometimes sharpness helps, sometimes
it doesn't. IT DEPENDS. Others of us are concerned with a scientific
approach to technique that does sublimate your equation above, so sharpness
is always good, flare always bad, etc.

When Dan made his brave (but evidently foolhardy <g>) attempt to describe
the "certain glow" that old prints have, and I responded so
enthusiastically, we were both just talking about a certain look of certain
pictures. One effect out of many. Nothing magic, nothing mysterious even.
Has more to do with tonal rendition than it has to do with lenses. It's just
a printing style. I happen to like it. I come reasonably close to it in some
of my work. 

The artists understand it immediately. Tina understood right away. Other
people resist understanding it because it somehow offends their value system
or something. WhatEVER, but Don't Tread On Me.

It's one look. It works. If somebody else likes it, great. If somebody else
doesn't, then don't print that way. Go print like Ralph Gibson already. What
do I care? How can we be arguing about this?

- --Mike