Sun in Splendor

The Romans called the rugged coastline of western Brittany, Finis terrae . Finistère, the end of the world, where even today, time appears to have come to a standstill. French photographer Michèle Le Braz set off with her Leicas M6 and M7 to capture the soul of the Finistère country and its people in timeless black & white. [ Leica e-magazine ]

The digital Leica M8 really is tempting, despite the crazy-high price (nearly US$5,000). That is far too much for even a very fine camera. Even taking into account its luxury-item "surplus value," it ought to be priced between US$2,500–US$3,000. I imagine that would be the price, were it not for the strength of the Euro relative to the dollar. But putting the price aside, there is another thing that must make even a brand enthusiast -- or brand loyalist -- to reflect on whether it would be worth the trouble to make the change. The thing is, the Leica M8 's digital sensor turns a wide angle lens into a "normal lens," and a normal lens into a "long lens." To get the wide angle coverage to which I have become accustomed with my Leica M6 + Summilux 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens — and keeping the unique characteristics for which I have used Leica lenses in the first place — I'd have to buy another lens -- a Summicron 28mm ƒ/2 . That would lose a stop in speed, too. ...

Here's how the Leica M8 deals with digital artifacts introduced during low-light exposures — When using higher [ISO] sensitivities — and in particular with dark, even surfaces — a certain amount of noise will become apparent. To reduce this annoying phenomenon, following exposures with slower shutter speeds the LEICA M8 automatically takes a second "black picture" (taken with the shutter closed) . The noise present in this parallel picture is then digitally "subtracted" from the data set for the real picture. This doubling of the "exposure" time can be significant — in particular at longer exposures — and must be considered. During this time the camera should not be switched off. For shutter speeds of 2s or more the message Noise reduction in progress... appears in the monitor. — Leica M8 Manual

In A special note for Leica M8 users , Leica points out an interesting design choice, and its consequences: Above-average sensitivity for infrared light (synthetic fabrics are rendered with a slight magenta offset) . During the development of the LEICA M8, we made important design choices to insure that the camera delivers the quality in images the Leica M System is known for. Keeping the protective glass cover on the sensor as thin as possible on the one hand has the benefit of allowing the full potential of Leica lenses on the LEICA M8 to be utilized with respect to their sharpness and contrast rendition, but it also absorbs less of the infrared light. In everyday photographical use the resulting above-average sensitivity for infrared light may lead to a faulty color rendition, especially in the case of synthetic fabrics which - depending on the ambient light - cannot be rendered fully black but only with a slight magenta offset.

Wonderful photos at River of No Return , taken with a Noctilux, the superfast — ƒ/1.0 — 50mm lens from Leica. The photographer is Shig, also known as "Fast-Eddy" , whose photo gallery is here . The Noctilux. I don't have a Noctilux ; I've never even seen one, except in product brochures. It costs US$3,795. Its owners rave about it. Here are Web sites which treat this legendary lens . Available light. I like to take pictures in available light. I take pictures mostly after dark. My first Leitz lens was a ƒ/2.8 40mm Summicron. I struggled to get photos at night on dark streets and in bars and restaurants. For a long time, I regarded an ƒ/1.0 lens as a kind of holy grail for low-light photography. Low-light technique. Right now the experienced photographer will shake her head — what I was struggling against was not a slow lens (ƒ/2.8 is not slow), but my own lack of technique. I wasn't getting the most out of a fine lens — after all, mos...

Carson Wilson has published an intriguing essay, Oranges and Apples -- There is some truth in this observation: people now use digicams instead of film for many purposes. But their choices often result from economics rather than the technical superiority of digicams. Digital photography is amazing and impressive in many ways, but if you choose it over film, expect to make sacrifices . I've assembled articles here exposing these sacrifices. I do this, not to make a case for film, but to temper the popular view that advances in digital photography have now made film obsolete. [ MORE ] [ Oranges and Apples ] t d f Buy Leica cameras at Amazon.com -- Your purchase through this link will support my photography!

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Biography is the first full biography ever published -- a vivid portrait of this complex, curious, brilliant man. Cartier-Bresson. The twentieth century was the century of the image -- and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was the eye of the century. Through the decades, this eye focused on Africa in the 1920s, the tragic fate of the Spanish Republicans, and the victory of the Chinese Communists. It was Cartier-Bresson who fixed in our minds the features of his contemporaries: Giacometti and Sartre as characters from their own works; Mauriac mysteriously levitating; Faulkner , Matisse , Camus , and countless others captured at the decisive moment in portraits for eternity. Cartier-Bresson was among the founders of Magnum , along with Robert Capa and others. He was married to Magnum photojournalist Martine Franck . The biography. An intensely private individual, Cartier-Bresson confided in his close friend Pierre Assouline over a number of years, ...

A man who had been photographed in a public place — Times Square in New York — sued the photographer in civil court , claiming that the resulting photograph had been shown and sold without the subject's permission. He lost the suit: it is — and has always been — perfectly legal to photograph a person in a public place in USA without asking anyone's permission . [ New York Times: Arts and Design 2006 March 19]

Browsing the stacks of the Santa Monica Public Library , I have discovered Rome for Ourselves by Aubrey Menen . Introductory Note. This is a book about Rome. It is, therefore, a book about history. I live in the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen a lot of history made in my time. I do not think much of it. I do not know anybody who does. This book is written with that experience in mind. A book about Rome must also be a book about great men. They bedevilled all my younger years. Most of them are dead now. One or two turned out to be maniacs: others have been shown to be fools. One or two great reputations remain. But I suspect that a great man is a person about whom one cannot yet tell the truth. So it would seem to me. I am a child of my times. ... I am ashamed to admit that I had never before heard of the Irish–Indian writer Aubrey Menen. He's smart and funny, and writes from a committed, original, and individual point of view. He wastes no time getting to the point. ...

Ma passion n'a jamais été pour la photographie «en elle même», mais pour la possibilité, en s'oubliant soi-même, d'enregistrer dans une fraction de seconde l'émotion procurée par le sujet et la beauté de la forme, c'est à dire, une géométrie éveillé par ce qui est offert. Le tir photographique est un de mes carnets de croquis. -- Henri Cartier-Bresson -- The Mind's Eye: writings on photography and photographers My passion has never been for photography "in itself," but for the possibility, in forgetting oneself, of recording in a split-second the emotion of the subject, and the beauty of the form; that is, a geometry awakened by what is offered. The photographic shot is one of my sketchpads. I have made photographs at different times in my life for different reasons. When I was a boy, I was much more interested in the cameras themselves -- the gadgetry -- than in the photos they might make. I had a hand-me-down Kodak dual-lens reflex, a little tin...

Mannikins in Siena, Tuscany. Taken with a Leica M6 camera with a Leica Summilux ASPH ƒ/1.4 35mm lens. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . Reading Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films . I am a little bit sad that the authors have so confidently sub-titled the book, The Complete Films , since the director is still alive, although very old, and disabled by a stroke. But even as recently as three years ago Antonioni had made a short film as an episode in the feature EROS . I hope that the authors of the book will be proved wrong. Antonioni is a very great artist. I am also reading, in a desultory way, The Dark Heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones . The author, a young Englishman named Tobias Jones gives a tour d'horizon of Italy in 2004 -- not the land of Verdi and Michelangelo, but the land of Berlusconi, the corrupt, super-rich media mogul who -- until very recently -- was at the head of the government. There's nothing remarkable about the form of the book -...

The new Leica M8 digital rangefinder accepts all M-series lenses The best reason for getting any Leica camera is the Leica lens . Leica lenses are superlative -- not just a little bit better but significantly better than other lenses for the "miniature" 24 cm × 36 cm (35mm film) format. A photograph taken with a Leica lens rivals a photograph made with a 6 cm × 6 cm | 2¼″ × 2¼″ "medium format" camera, in sharpness, resolution, contrast, etc. Now that extraordinary level of imaging quality will be available for digital images, too. I have a Leica M6 film camera with a 50mm Summilux ƒ/1.4 lens, a collapsible 50mm Elmar ƒ/2.8 lens, and a marvellous 35mm Summilux Aspherical (ASPH) ƒ/1.4 lens. It is wonderful. Many of the photographs in Sun in Splendor were taken with my Leica.

Someone has stepped away from his table at a café in the Marais neighborhood of the Fourth Ward (Quatrième Arrondissement) on the Right Bank of Paris. Photographed with Leica M6 and a Summilux 1:1.4/35 ASPH lens. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . I spent the day researching film festivals in the Levant -- the Near East. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) sponsors annual film and a photo competitions . In Giza, Egypt — home of the Pyramids — is the annual Ismailia International Film Festival — since its Web site is in Arabic (the English pages are all marked "Under Construction"), I have written a letter to its organizers, requesting information. The big, "prestige" festival is in the UAE — the Dubai International Festival . It takes place in December. The deadline for entries is in September. I want to send a reporter to cover it, so I am looking around for an English and Arabic-speaking journalist who is familiar with filmmaking, or filmmaker who ...

A Hollywood studio, Dreamworks, has announced that it will produce a movie adaptation of the musical comedy, "Sweeney Todd," by Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim. Johnny Depp will play the title role (who will play Mrs. Lovatt?); Tim Burton will direct. The "book" of the musical shows the return of barber Sweeney Todd to London from a sentence of transportation to Australia, for a crime he did not commit. Todd has returned to take revenge on the men who sent him down. He opens a barber shop in Fleet Street, and begins slitting the throats of his victims, while shaving them. The bodies are sent to the tavern below the barber shop, where the bodies are made into meat pies, by the proprietor, Mrs. Lovatt. It has already been adapted for the screen three times, twice as silent films in 1926, 1928; and as a very good sound film in 1936. Two things were extraordinary about the Harold Prince's original Broadway production -- which I attended twice -- first, the extreme...

Pink shoe , originally uploaded by piecesofme2005 . For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . This photo makes a fine synechdoche of life -- and driving -- in Southern California. The powerful orthogonals of its composition -- plus the sophistication of the picture inset of the rear-view mirror -- make a lively photo too. The photographer has avoided the temptation of a placid composition to match the serenity of the subject.

A little girl ignores the splendors of Siena's cathedral. Photograph taken with a Leica M6 camera and a Leica Summilux ASPH 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . I just watched -- couldn't tear myself away from a presentation on BookTV about Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution by Charles Rappleye. The Brown family endowed Brown University , which is in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is my alma mater. I don't think about college very much, but this presentation set me to thinking about the people I knew there and the alumni I know now. It can't be any surprise that anyone who chooses to attend an Ivy League* school has a certain investment in the status quo. In Texas (where I was born) we say, "Dance with the one what brung you," and I think that is the natural attitude towards the system which puts a person into an Ivy. What this means is, first of all, a fundamental conserva...

A Carnival reveller in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. See more of my photos of Brazil in my flickr photostream . This photo — snapped during Carnival in Salvador, Bahia — I like, not only because of the image itself, but because of the way I snapped it. I was making my way through a crowd, something caught my eye, I glanced behind me, then I looked down and say this child. I had my Minox (a "subminiature" camera, about the size of a man's finger) in hand and I tripped the shutter without even raising the viewfinder to my eye. Serendipity! I really liked Brazil — I am learning Portuguese in preparation for a return.

Paris: Hôtel la Brêtonnerie, in the fourth ward (IVe Arrondissement) -- the Marais. Taken with a Pentax LX and a Pentax 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . When I was a very young man, I lived in the Marais -- a lovely old neighborhood on the Right Bank of the Seine. I came of age there, and I think of it as much my hometown as the place I grew up in Texas. But I hardly ever go back there -- I am not nostalgic or sentimental. The place it was, and the place it is now, are two places. On the other hand, when I had recently walked through the neighborhood after twenty years, I noticed that a little shop, named, "Les neiges d'antan"* | The snows of yesteryear , which I had walked by years ago, was still there. Where, indeed! *From the refrain, "Où sont les neiges d'antan?" | Where are the snows of yesteryear? in Ballade (des dames de temps jadis) | Ballad (of the ladies of former days) by François Villon, circa 1761.

Two boys are not interested in the Synchronized Briefcase Marching Team at the Doodah Parade in Pasadena, California. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . Public Access TV will cease to exist in October 2006. Back in the 1960s, cable-television companies were given local monopolies (only one cable-TV service per town); in return for that privilege, they were obliged to provide at least one channel on which any citizen could place programming. Now the United States Congress has been persuaded (read: bribed by cable-industry lobbyists) to rescind this obligation ... while leaving the monopolies intact. Not many people ever watched Public Access TV -- if you believe that 100,000 or 300,00 souls in a town is not many. The quality was poor, and the programs, amateurish. But they were authentic, people's programs, reflecting the concerns of citizens, not the concerns of advertisers or of politicians. I shall miss it.

Journalist Ezrha Jean Black in Hollywood. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream . The novelist John Braine remarked that "A writer is someone who writes; a writer is someone who counts words. " [My emphasis]. Writers are paid by the word. If interviews with writers were really about writing -- instead of publicity for the purpose of selling books -- the colloquy would center on word count, instead of characters, plot, etc. Journalists would discuss expense accounts. Earl Stanley Gardner -- famous for the "Perry Mason" stories -- said that, when he was starting out, writing pulp fiction, that in gunfights, no one ever died from the first bullet. "I was being paid by the word, and I made sure that the every bullet in every clip was fired before anybody died!"