Rangefinder language

[Rui Morais de Sousa]

While I am a firm believer that no brand x or y can on it's own make a better photographer out of someone, I do believe on a certain camera-type produced style: large format, bird-photography, macro or microphotography are obvious examples. So, I will restrict this topic to what can be summarized as "action photography" - street, travel, portraiture, available-light, photojournalism... Having said that, I would be pleased to post my point of view:
If you analyse the type of work made by some photographers in the 50's, 60's or 70's, you would often clearly see (maybe more than see, you could sense), who was using a RF (Robert Frank), a SLR (Ernst Haas), or a TLR (Fritz Henle).
I dare to say, that it existed a "rangefinder language" (composition, rapport with subjects, etc.).
I would be pleased to know your opinion, and, if you agree with me, what defines it. Do you think that it still holds true today, or are we loosing our rangefinder vocabulary? Rui

 

[dave lackey]

Ummm...there are no real absolutes...that is a slippery slope, at least for me.

Action photography (sports, racing, etc.) is what I have done for years and the Nikon DSLR's I currently use definitely help my work. Without them, I would never deliver the images that I need to deliver. I would never consider a RF or anything less than a D2X, D2H, D3...

Now, having said that, yes, we are blurring the ability to distinguish apples and oranges if we use the same criteria for judgment. For example, my digital images from our family Christmas were sharp, detailed,color-correct and...boring. My color images from my M3 and Summarit were "dreamy", soft, flare👍, not sharp at all but had a magnificent charm. Anyone could tell the difference.

Likewise with a D3 or D700 for low-light. But, the images are much different from my film low-light images. Can't speak for the M8 RF, but, I find the RF film results are so different (with my lenses of choice) that it is easy to determine who is using the RF...

Hope this kind of addresses your question...thanks for the post.:angel: