Hi folk;
Question; what do YOU do in the middle of the night when you just can't
sleep?
Answer: Don't answer that <g>
Lately I've been waking up at 2 or so due to a darned persistent cough
(courtesy my visiting student son who shared it with the family) that wakes
me up when I lie down, so I end up reading for a couple of hours until things
quieten down. Noam Chomsky, for one; then the other night I picked up a
copy of THE LEICA WAY by Andrew Matheson. 1953. I bought it at a
school fund-raising sale in 1987 and never poked my nose in it very far until
now.
Matheson says a few interesting things. Leica lenses he reckons should not
be used for landscapes to get the whole landscape in focus. Better to isolate
one component; a close one. In another section he writes: "It is not always
good policy to utilize the full depth of field. For instance, we may be taking
a
distant landscape with a foreground stretching fairly near. To obtain the
maximum depth, we would have to focus on the hyperfocal distance, so that
both near and distant parts are reasonable sharp. Neither, however, will be
as sharp as if we focussed directly either on the foreground, or the distance,
itself."
Merklinger says the same, with a technical explanation, in
http://home.fox.nstn.ca/~hmmerk/DOFR.html
(Took me a while to find this again as I misplaced my HDD copy and couldn't
remember the author's name accurately. Now I have 2 copies !).
I have already started to use this advice, and when I use the full hyperfocal
distance, it is with the knowledge that overall image resolution will suffer as
a
result, so I'd better need that kind of shot.
Finally, the overwhelming impression I have of the examples of Leica
photography in this book, is that in that period, they were much more
concerned to record the minutae of human life. Photos of chorus-girls, ballet,
fairgrounds, candid shots (portraits) of people in all situations, pageantry,
stage scenes, city things (statues, fountains, street life, children playing in
streets, people in musea and galleries, acting); stuff I can't be bothered
with.
Maybe I don't like people all that much?
But there is much to be learned about the sense of timing, composition,
lighting, and seeing things where you find yourself.
Brian
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