rxmd
May contain traces of nut
Hi everybody,
again I've got a couple of thoughts that I'd like your comments on.
Everybody knows that Leica users tend to be conservative people. But after reading a lot over the last months I think some of them aren't really conservative so much as inflexible in their approach to photography, and I wonder how that comes about and what it means.
With the M8 there were all these discussions about in which ways it departed from the M line and what changes this meant for Leica photography. The kind of discussion about wind levers and smaller sensors. Some users apparently were quite inflexible about this, especially about field of view and the unacceptable 1.3 crop factor - the change from 50mm to apparent 65mm or from 35mm to apparent 47mm apparently was completely out of the question for many to compromise on. Now I understand that if you spend lots of money you have certain expectations, but what astonished me was how some people appeared quite entrenched that their style of photography was impossible under the new conditions. While there are some good arguments why a cropfactorless camera would be a good thing, I wonder why a 39 degrees FOV is so special vis-a-vis 32 degrees with the same lens? And how much of a difference the DOF really makes, in practice? And how much you really need an expensive fast superwide, when you can get a cheap marginally slower superwide and crank up ISO at the press of a button? I would presume that a good digital rangefinder would offer enough advantages and differences that people would be ready to brace themselves for some changes in their work, but apparently change can only be taken in very small amounts at a time. In other words, people have become entrenched in how their Summilux delivers a certain perspective that it is too much if the perspective changes by a very slight amount; they have become inflexible.
(Maybe the SLR crowd doesn't have this problem so much because they know better by now, or because they've got zooms, I don't know.)
There were other examples before the M8. A classic one is the M5. Packed with features in a convenient package, yet it fails catastrophically, largely because of two reasons: 12 mm extra length, 7 mm extra height. Apparently this was already too much for parts of the userbase, let alone to carry it vertically. Talk about being inflexible!
I wonder how this comes about. The only reason I can think of is that Leica users are very much emotionally invested in their gear, to the point when they really think that some perspectives are more natural than some other slightly different ones. Or where they really think they can take good pictures only at precisely the perspectives they are used to from their lenses. Or where they really think that the ideal rangefinder camera is 138x77x36 mm carried horizontally and everything else is a deviation. Have all these people forgotten what it was like when they got their first and second cameras and lenses, how they explored it with an open mind, tried it out and experimented with the possibilities? If a new camera offers you something unique and entirely new, does it really matter if the fields of view or the dimensions are exactly the ones you're used to or slightly different?
In my opinion being a good photographer should transcend the use of a particular device. I should be able to give a good photographer an arbitrary camera (say, a 1977 Praktica EE-2 SLR with a Biotar 58/2 lens) and he should be able to produce meaningful pictures in spite of the slightly odd focal length and the weird camera body after the second roll or so. Maybe not exactly the same as with other cameras, but good ones nevertheless. So why is it that people become so entrenched and inflexible? Is it only because Leicas are expensive? Because they are "a myth"? Because there are some hidden laws of nature which the M2 embodies and the M5 and M8 fail to embody? I would be interested to hear what you think about this, especially if you feel affected by this.
Philipp
again I've got a couple of thoughts that I'd like your comments on.
Everybody knows that Leica users tend to be conservative people. But after reading a lot over the last months I think some of them aren't really conservative so much as inflexible in their approach to photography, and I wonder how that comes about and what it means.
With the M8 there were all these discussions about in which ways it departed from the M line and what changes this meant for Leica photography. The kind of discussion about wind levers and smaller sensors. Some users apparently were quite inflexible about this, especially about field of view and the unacceptable 1.3 crop factor - the change from 50mm to apparent 65mm or from 35mm to apparent 47mm apparently was completely out of the question for many to compromise on. Now I understand that if you spend lots of money you have certain expectations, but what astonished me was how some people appeared quite entrenched that their style of photography was impossible under the new conditions. While there are some good arguments why a cropfactorless camera would be a good thing, I wonder why a 39 degrees FOV is so special vis-a-vis 32 degrees with the same lens? And how much of a difference the DOF really makes, in practice? And how much you really need an expensive fast superwide, when you can get a cheap marginally slower superwide and crank up ISO at the press of a button? I would presume that a good digital rangefinder would offer enough advantages and differences that people would be ready to brace themselves for some changes in their work, but apparently change can only be taken in very small amounts at a time. In other words, people have become entrenched in how their Summilux delivers a certain perspective that it is too much if the perspective changes by a very slight amount; they have become inflexible.
(Maybe the SLR crowd doesn't have this problem so much because they know better by now, or because they've got zooms, I don't know.)
There were other examples before the M8. A classic one is the M5. Packed with features in a convenient package, yet it fails catastrophically, largely because of two reasons: 12 mm extra length, 7 mm extra height. Apparently this was already too much for parts of the userbase, let alone to carry it vertically. Talk about being inflexible!
I wonder how this comes about. The only reason I can think of is that Leica users are very much emotionally invested in their gear, to the point when they really think that some perspectives are more natural than some other slightly different ones. Or where they really think they can take good pictures only at precisely the perspectives they are used to from their lenses. Or where they really think that the ideal rangefinder camera is 138x77x36 mm carried horizontally and everything else is a deviation. Have all these people forgotten what it was like when they got their first and second cameras and lenses, how they explored it with an open mind, tried it out and experimented with the possibilities? If a new camera offers you something unique and entirely new, does it really matter if the fields of view or the dimensions are exactly the ones you're used to or slightly different?
In my opinion being a good photographer should transcend the use of a particular device. I should be able to give a good photographer an arbitrary camera (say, a 1977 Praktica EE-2 SLR with a Biotar 58/2 lens) and he should be able to produce meaningful pictures in spite of the slightly odd focal length and the weird camera body after the second roll or so. Maybe not exactly the same as with other cameras, but good ones nevertheless. So why is it that people become so entrenched and inflexible? Is it only because Leicas are expensive? Because they are "a myth"? Because there are some hidden laws of nature which the M2 embodies and the M5 and M8 fail to embody? I would be interested to hear what you think about this, especially if you feel affected by this.
Philipp
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