What's wrong with these Summicron shots?

[lutz]

Here's a tip: Briefly open your other eye (most probably your left eye) to doublecheck your levelling. If the framing (as seen through the viewfinder with your right eye) appears tilted - correct it. :-) Cheers.

[leica ron]

Leon, I would get you to examine the way you hold the camera and to see how much movement there is when you press down on the shutter release.

 

Are you sure you aren't accidentally pushing down on the shutter too hard, causing the whole camera to move down to the right on horizontal shots and to the top right on vertical shots ?

 

Put your camera on a tripod, compose carefully and use a shutter-release cable. If this works fine, then it's not the camera !

[bernard_korites]

I find it hard to believe anyone would take a picture with that amount of tilt. I think it is more likely he reversed the first pic in scanning and has a misalignment in his viewfinder causing all pics to tilt in one direction.

 

Leon, get a Nikon SLR and all your problems will go away.

[frank uhlig]

Operator error, sorry. I will not believe that the film window is cocked, nor that the viewfinder is by that much.

 

Incidentally, if you study Cezanne landscapes, he will most often have the level horizon rise to the right. It works great for him. So there is nothing wrong with (slightly) tilted horizons. The best of us do deliberately what irks you here. The reason for this annoyance is that you have done it unconsciously. And you drop the horizon to the left 2 out of 3 times .. No Cezanne, sorry.

 

Try harder to level your camera body. You have earned the lots of money to afford the best and newest. Show now that you can use this gear correctly and consciously as you wish!

[leon chang]

I don't believe it's a misalignment of the viewfinder since I didn't have this problem with the Elmar 2.8 50. It could also be that the 0.72 factor of the viewfinder makes the framelines for the 35 'cron appear very wide and almost out of my field of view. Maybe I therefore didn't frame the camera very well?

 

By the way; what causes a misaligned viewfinder??

[bernard_korites]

<<--Incidentally, if you study Cezanne landscapes, he will most often have the level horizon rise to the right. It works great for him. So there is nothing wrong with (slightly) tilted horizons.-->>

 

What's that supposed to mean, Leon should put up with titled horizons even if he doesn't want them?

 

I just looked at a dozen or so Cezanne landscapes and I didn't see one where Cezanne artificially skewed the horizon to rise on the right. Not so say that he never did, but I don't recall that being one of Cezanne artifices in his landscapes.

 

The difference here is, even if Cezanne did tilt a horizon once in a while, he never complained about since it would have been intentional. In Leon's case it is unintentional and he is complaining about it. Is Leon supposed to think he's a Cezanne because his pics are unintentionally coming out skewed?

 

It sounds to me like you're trying to justify a defective camera, presumably because it's a Leica and, as we all know, Leicas can do no wrong, why else would they cost so much!

 

There is obviously something wrong with Leon's camera - either the viewfinder/lens combination is not suitable for him or the camera, most likely the viewfinder, is defective.

[juergenf]

Leon, this may an intersting read for you; John Szarkowski on famous Leica photographer Gary Winogrand.

 

"In the street pictures of the early sixties Winogrand began to develop two pictorial strategies that he found suggested in certain pictures in Frank's The Americans. The first of these related to unexplored possibilities of the wide-angle lens on the hand camera. The conventional conception of the wide-angle lens saw it as a tool that included more of the potential subject from a given vantage point; most photographers would not use it unless their backs were literally against the wall. Winogrand learned to use it as a way of including what he wanted from a closer vantage point, from which he could photograph an entire pedestrian (for example) from a distance at which we normally focus only on faces. From this intimate distance the shoes of the subject are seen from above, its face straight-on, or even a little from below, and the whole of the figure is drawn with an unfamiliar, unsettling complexity.

 

To pursue such a strategy while photographing people on the street means that the camera back is never vertical, as prescribed by classic procedure; if the figure fills the frame the lens will be pointed at the subject's navel, and the camera back will be inclined some forty-five degrees downward from vertical. In this posture any lens will violate our belief that we should see the walls of buildings as parallel to each other, but the wide-angle lens, because of its broader cone of vision, will exaggerate the effect, and destroy all sense of architectural order. To retrieve a kind of stability Winogrand experimented with tilting the frame, making a vertical near the left edge of his subject square with the frame, and then a vertical near the right edge, or a dominant vertical anywhere between. In the process he discovered that he could compose his pictures with a freedom that he had not utilized before, and that the tilted frame could not only maintain a kind of discipline over the flamboyant tendencies of the wide-angle lens but could also intensify his intuited sense of his picture's meanings...

 

It should be pointed out that Winogrand scorned technical effects, including wide-angle effects, and that he abandoned his attempts to use the extremely wide-angle 21mm lens because he could not control or conceal its attention-getting mannerisms. He said (repeatedly) that there was no special way that a photograph should look, and he could not abide a lens that made photographs look a special way.

 

Years later, when students (at lecture after lecture) asked him why he tilted the frame, it would give him pleasure to deny that it was tilted, meaning perhaps that the finished print was always hung square to the wall, or reproduced square to the page. He also said that the tilt was never arbitrary, that there was always a reason, which is true if one counts intuitive experiment as a reason. Sometimes he said that it was, on occasion, simply a way of including what he wanted within the frame, but his proof sheets make it clear that he would often tilt first one way and then the other, trying to find the configuration of facts that would best express the force of the energies that were his subject. Sometimes he suggested elliptically that he tilted the frame to make the picture square and secure."

[jtdnyc]

Juergen, I thanks for the quotation. I think it's a good explanation, perhaps unintentional, of why artistes like the work of Winograd but everyone likes HCB's.

[leslie_p.]

"Less beer, more espresso."

 

Brilliant!