[Leica] Take a bow

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2009-01-13-03:53:16 Alastair Firkin:
> G'day Luggnuts, I think you should all take a collective bow. My
> Yearbook 08 and 12 Leica Users came in today, and the level of
> photographic achievement is quite outstanding.

I've been savoring the LUG Yearbook, going kind of slowly from the
front, and there's some great stuff in here.

Howard Cummer's "The Floating Poodle of Mougin" really makes me smile --
it's a fun picture in its own right, as well as seeming perhaps like a
canine-cast Gare Saint-Lazare reference.

> There are some great highlights and plenty from which to learn. I
> still find Blurb b/w a little "muddy" but overall reproduction is
> quite beautiful.

In color, too, some efforts can get muddy but others defy muddiness.

I'd love to know if there are any special secrets to those photos which
remain colorful or luminous despite the printing process -- like Simon
Jessurun's girl who catches and holds you with her gaze, or the way
neither of Lee Hermann's photos gets muddy, or the fresh, clean look of
Tuulikki Abrahamsson's pictures...

I really like hers, particularly "Ceci n'est ni un nuage, ni un morceau
de d?tritus" or whatever the actual title might be.

And Henning Wulff had no trouble with muddiness, whether with the
naturalistic girl 'n' cat or the scarily-bright Doctor Ted.

I'm decently happy with the way my pictures came out -- the one of the
romping dogs, in particular, was never a paradigm of beautiful color,
having been eked out under fluorescents, but I love the critters' energy
and motion.  (Page 49.  The typo about a "50/1.5 ASPH" is mine -- 1.4,
of course.)

If you don't have your copy yet -- for shame!  There's great stuff here.

 -Jeff