This afternoon, on my list of things to photograph for the City of Bisbee, was an odd looking ex-grocery store, now privately owned, painted gray, and festooned with found objects, all painted red.
Different strokes....
As I arrived with my Bessa R and 35/2.5, there, standing exactly where I planned to make the shot was a tall elderly man, wearing a huge straw hat, and peering through the ground glass of a tripod-mounted Toyo 4X5 view camera. He had driven down some 250 miles from Phoenix to photograph the building. We chatted. He noticed my camera.
Is that one of those rangefinder cameras? Yes, I said. I've never understood why people use them, he said. What's wrong with SLR's?
Well, nothing's wrong with SLR's. (I've got some). I thought for a moment. Let's say
you're looking through your SLR, getting ready to photograph that building across the street. You're concentrating intently on focusing. You won't see the pretty girl walking and about to walk right in front of the building as you make the shot. Ruined shot, unless you feel the pretty girl makes the shot.
With a rangefinder, you see beyond the framelines. You can see her coming.
What about focusing? he asked. (his vision is not what it was, and he has to wear special glasses to focus on the groundglass).
Focusing is easy, I said, simply move the focusing lever until the two houses become one. That's it. At this point I handed him the Bessa R.
He looked through it for at least thirty seconds, saying nothing.
Use the focusing lever, I said, then lightly touch the shutter release to activate the meter.
After a time he said, My God. Everything's so clear. It's so easy to focus. My God. Now I understand, he said.
He wanted to know where he could get one. I told him about Gandy's site.
Ironically, here was a man who had been taking photographs most of his life, and he apparently had never looked through an RF camera.
Ted
