garvey_p

January 21, 2003

Yes, its own section would be nice. Its own forum would be unneccessary.

Better yet, I would just as gladly see the "Rangefinders" section renamed "Rangefinder, Viewfinder, and Folding Cameras" or something like that, since most VF camera questions get put in the RF section anyway. And these three types have enough overlap that they could be lumped together, IMO.

Or make a section for "Folding Cameras (see Rangefinders)." There are so many ways that this could be improved.

January 20, 2003

Just for kicks--converting those 1950 prices (as seen on the old 1950 ad posted on Monghan's site, I presume) to 2002 dollars:

The $115 Bessa II with Skopar = $858.21

The $152.50 model with Heliar = $1138.06

Are you sure Fuji prices are well out of your reach? I mean, if you are considering the Bessa II with Heliar, they're about the same (or within a hundred bucks) as a like new Fuji 690. Also, when pricing a Bessa (I or II), you might need to factor in a CLA and/or bellows replacement (despite seller claims to the contrary), which combined could cost $120-$200, sometimes more.

January 20, 2003

"I'd really love to be able to look at that article..."

Then scroll down 11 threads--the entire text is there already.

This thread, however, wins today's redundancy award.

January 18, 2003

Aaron:

The quick way to do that is to go to Google, type in your keywords into the search box, and add the following (also in the search box, after the keywords):

site:photo.net

for example--

rollei rangefinder site:photo.net

January 18, 2003

<H5>January 19, 2003</H5>

<H2>The Picture Man</H2>By TOM VANDERBILT

<TBODY>

<TR>

<IMG align=left alt=E border=0

src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/e.gif">VERY photographer is a

photographer of transition. The shutter blinks, confines history to a moment or

a mood, but elsewhere, life moves on. The image left behind is part of a world

that is already receding.

Bruce Davidson has been taking pictures for more than 50 of his 69 years.

Throughout his career, he has been a particular poet of transition, his lens

drawn to places and moments on the verge of historical eclipse. Much of his work

has documented life outside New York City. There is, for example, his

melancholic 1956 series on the "widow of Montmartre," an old Parisian woman who

represented a last link to the era of Impressionism. There are also his

prelapsarian photographs of the Clyde Beatty traveling circus, taken as tent

shows were yielding to indoor coliseum events.

But to walk the hallways of his Upper West Side apartment is to realize

instantly that this city is his favorite viewfinder muse.

"You could spend weeks in here," he said the other day, gesturing to a

towering stack of filed prints and negatives.

"If I sold every print in the collection I could buy the building I'm living

in," he added, at which point his wife, Emily Haas Davidson, demurred, blushing.

"Not that they're coming knocking," he said.

There are other photos on the walls, among them a shot of Marilyn Monroe

taken from the doomed desert filming of "The Misfits" ("I found Marilyn Monroe a

lot more interesting than the horses," he said, mischievous eyes peering over

his spectacles.) The bulk of the work, however, on the walls or in the books he

has arranged on a living room table, is a sprawling visual genealogy of New

York. From the subways of the 1980's, where Mr. Davidson found deep chords of

humanity amid the ruin and graffiti, to the now-vanished Garden Cafeteria on

East Broadway, where Yiddish-speaking intellectuals hunched over newspapers and

bialys, his New York, his photographs, are of a city that no longer is.

Yet art hangs on after people and places have moved on. In Mr. Davidson's

photographic New York, the city sees itself as it was, and learns something of

what it is. Next month, on the heels of "Time of Change," a collection of his

photographs from the civil rights era, a new version of "East 100th Street," Mr.

Davidson's classic 1970 book of photographs of a block in East Harlem then

called the city's "most notorious slum," is being issued by St. Ann's Press, a

small publisher of high-quality art books. Some 35 never-before-published

photographs are included. In a career that has included books like "Subway" and

"Brooklyn Gang," award-winning films and countless exhibitions, including a

current one of the civil rights pictures at the International Center for

Photography, his portrait of a single New York block will probably stand as

among his most enduring works.

Photographing Inner Space

Mr. Davidson, who was born and raised in Oak Park, Ill., and educated at

Yale, got his first glimpse of East Harlem in the late 1950's, when he was

living in Hartsdale, N.Y., and commuting to his job in the lab at <ORG

value="EK" idsrc="NYSE">Eastman Kodak</ORG> in Manhattan. From the Park Avenue

viaduct he would peer into the windows of East Harlem, particularly at night,

when the light illuminated a view beyond the brick walls. But not until a decade

later did he set out to get beyond those walls, after hearing about a block said

to represent the nadir of urban poverty and ruin.

"At the time we were sending rockets to the moon," Mr. Davidson said. "I felt

the need to photograph inner space. I wanted to explore the block as an entity,

to treat it as a molecular structure."

For the next two years, he gradually won a place in the community, becoming

known as the "picture man," each morning taking still-wet prints to give to his

subjects, whom he photographed with a large architectural-view camera.

"I wanted to lend the act of photography a sense of dignity," he said. "This

wasn't a 'Candid Camera' running around taking pictures with a noisy motor

drive. I wasn't spying or intruding.' ''

As a result, his subjects, despite peering out from small, dark rooms (often

adorned with images of John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ), or standing among

rubble-and-weed-strewn lots, brim not only with a reverence for the occasion but

also with hope and humanity, as if by staring into the lens they were seeing

both the best image of themselves and a view of a better world.

Windows are the fragile yet impermeable boundaries between public and private

life in New York, so not surprisingly a few of the shots were voyeuristic

glimpses of children peering from behind the security gates of gray tenements.

More common, however, was an interior shot that showed the life through the

window.

"I wanted to explore not only the rooms, but what you saw out the window,

across the courtyard and into infinity," he said. "Not only the room, but what

the room saw." It was a view he had never seen. As Mr. Davidson recalled, "I was

very affected by the mood of the rooms, the little sense of embellishment, the

lace curtain, the plastic covering the couch." One photograph shows a woman, a

young woman, but as Mr. Davidson noted, "She just looks to me as someone who in

her young life has really seen it." She is clutching herself on a bed, sheets

drawn up around her, exposing a dingy mattress. Behind her in the middle of a

tired wall hangs a single object, a heart-shaped Valentine box.

The poignancy of the gesture was just one of many instances in which Mr.

Davidson, in getting through the windows, was able to render what had been

treated as a social abstraction - poverty - into a world with sharply defined

lives. New York may be a public stage, but it is filled with private actors who

carry with them their own worlds and identities, which they keep protected.

Mr. Davidson, once called "the outsider's insider," has not so much shed

light on these discrete New York worlds with the sharp flash of a Weegee, but

rather illuminated them from within, as if he were a kind of social lantern.

The Lost World of a Street Gang

In his 1959 series "Brooklyn Gang,'' published originally in Esquire with a

text by Norman Mailer, and in 1998 as a book, Mr. Davidson entered the lives of

a South Brooklyn street gang called the Jokers whose usual haunt was a local

candy store.

"They had had a rumble that was written up in the newspaper, and I went out

and offered to take photographs of their wounds, in color," he said. He stayed

on. "They had a youth board worker with them, and I had a tendency to come when

I knew he wasn't going to be around." Mr. Davidson was 25 at the time, living in

a one-room walkup in Greenwich Village.

"I had a kitchen/darkroom combination with a red light in my refrigerator,"

he said. "I had a mattress on the floor, no girlfriend, and lived like a

monk."

The photographs today portray a lost world of stickball and boardwalks, of

Vaseline hair and rolled sleeves, Kent Filters and Karl Droge Big Squeeze Ices,

basement dances and Susie the Elephant Skin Girl at Coney Island. The atmosphere

was tight and intense, filled with flinty looks and an almost accidental

glamour, where tattoos were more a fierce indoctrination than a calculated

lifestyle choice.

As with his other projects, Mr. Davidson needed entry, and he got it in the

form of the gang leader, known as Bengie.

"He was kind of a brilliant visual guy," Mr. Davidson said. "He took me to

this roof, and I remember thinking, 'This kid's going to throw me off the roof

and then rob me,' but he's pointing down at the stickball game and saying, 'Get

that,' and saying: 'Oh, there's the Statue of Liberty. You can see it through

all these television antennas.' "

The images of that summer have an eternal quality to them, as if the gang

might still be drinking beer in paper cups on the beach, but the Jokers' world

was already beginning to change. Heroin was making an entrance; one gang member

died from an overdose at 19.

A few years ago, Bengie got in touch with Mr. Davidson.

"I went out with him to the old neighborhood," the photographer said. The

candy store where the gang used to hang out was gone. "He took me for a cafe

latte." The neighborhood had changed, and so had the Jokers; Bengie is now a

drug counselor, and Mr. Davidson's wife is writing a book about his life.

In the apartment, Ms. Davidson pointed to a photo of Bengie back then,

glaring out from a wall, standing beneath a thermometer that says "Have a

Pepsi." "You can see the frustration," she said. "He's so angry. He looked right

out at Bruce, and the thermometer behind him seems to be registering his anger,

rage and depression."

"I'm Bruce's biggest fan," she added as an aside. He says that no one can

explain his photos better than his wife can.

The 'Picture Man' in East Harlem

On the morning of a recent winter storm, East 100th Street between First and

Second Avenues seemed a serene, enclosed world. The hard edges of buildings and

streets were shrouded in snow, and one struggled to make out signs: A faded

polychromatic Jesus in a shop window, above the words "Yo Reinare"; a bumper

sticker saying "Allah Is the Way"; a placard in a tenement window urging

"Stronger Rent Laws Now."

The world that Mr. Davidson had captured decades before seemed a faint echo.

On the north side of the street, then home to a block's length of tenements,

stand a park, a set of baseball diamonds and a construction site. Where

tenements once stretched all the way to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, there

are now tall buildings and a sense of open space.

There are no rubble-strewn lots, no boys flying kites from rooftops, but

there are ominous warnings on buildings from the Manhattan district attorney's

Trespass Program, and if you stand on a corner for a few minutes, you will

attract furtive whistles from passers-by, the usual tenuous calling card

offering illicit urban transactions.

When Mr. Davidson first sought access to these precincts in the late 1960's,

he had begun by approaching the Rev. Norman Eddy, a Union Theological Seminary

graduate who had opened a storefront church on the block. Mr. Eddy told Mr.

Davidson he would have to meet with a citizens' committee to get permission to

photograph the block. Residents were still furious over a newspaper article that

described the block as "a microcosm of the worst conditions and worst elements

of the city."

Mr. Eddy, who still lives in the neighborhood, does not deny that things were

bad on East 100th Street. "There were, at the very least, 4,000 people living

between First and Second Avenues," he said. "There were shootings, drugs,

prostitution." But there was also a vibrant sense of community, and, emanating

from the small storefront churches and citizens' groups, a burgeoning spirit of

revitalization. "The community we had on the block was unparalleled," he said.

"That's one of the gifts of blocks, where the people on a block can get to know

each other in a very intimate way."

They would soon know Mr. Davidson, too. Once he had withstood a grilling from

the citizens' committee, promising to photograph only with a subject's

permission, he became a fixture on the street, the "picture man." Throughout the

year, he occasionally returned, to photograph a family reunion or a brochure for

the neighborhood group. Mildred Feliciano, 71, a longtime resident active in

community affairs, says in a new afterword to the book that residents showed Mr.

Davidson's photographs to five mayors in their efforts to improve conditions.

"These photographs are not only historical," she wrote, "but helped in the

rebuilding of our community."

Mr. Davidson, for his part, emphasizes that he is a photographer, not a

social worker. "I tend to find myself in worlds that I explore," he said, "and

it isn't until I'm through with it that I realize what I've done and what it's

done to me, and what effect I might have on people that see me photograph or see

my photography."

He has a motto for his work: "Be there when the conditions are right for you

to be there." In 1968, the residents of East 100th Street were ready for the

world to see another side of the block. The world did, not only in the book, but

in a 1970 show at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1998, with a fellowship from the

Open Society Institute, Mr. Davidson returned to the block to rephotograph it.

He was impressed by the changes. "There's a lot of new building, some of it

quite expensive," he said. "There's still a lot to be done, but there's an

undercurrent of positive things happening."

On a recent trip to the block, Mr. Davidson was approached by several youths.

When he showed them the new edition of the book, they recognized one couple,

young lovers leaning against each other in what Mr. Davidson remembered as a

"hopeful" image. Damon, the man in the picture, had been killed by a close-range

shotgun blast to the back, the youths said. The woman, they think, is still in

the neighborhood.

Among his subjects the second time around were the participants in an East

100th Street program called "Reviving Baseball in the Inner City," which uses

baseball as a character- and community-building endeavor. Mr. Davidson's 1998

photographs show the park and baseball diamonds that have replaced the block of

tenements. Yet already that picture has changed, with an incoming housing

development reclaiming much of that land. Mr. Davidson reports, however, that

the builders are preserving space for two diamonds.

Splendor and Squalor in the Park

Another discrete New York world that Mr. Davidson entered as it was on the

cusp of transition was Central Park. His 1986 book of the same name catalogs its

life in all its splendor and squalor: the dead leaves of winter, the covert

courtship rituals of humans and other animals, the shoulders of the steely city

crowding these sylvan pockets, a homeless man sleeping in a box framed by a

pastoral scene, the people who come to the park to escape their everyday lives

and the people for whom the park is everyday life. Mr. Davidson joined the

secret daily life of the park, the encamped homeless, the habitual bird

feeders.

The project began as a National Geographic assignment, one he did not want.

"I hated the place," he said. "When my children were growing up" - he has two

grown daughters, both photographers, who live in Seattle - "it was like a dust

bowl. You didn't know whether they were going to sit on a hypodermic needle." He

exposed 500 rolls of film, mostly color, but the magazine rejected the work.

"They said there were too many homeless. They wanted me to photograph a drug

bust, which you almost have to set up to get." Undaunted, he returned shot the

park again, as he wanted, in black and white.

The city for him remains a continuing obsession. There are infinite worlds

still to explore: he has been photographing the city's waterfront off and on for

the last decade. As ever, there is the sense that what he photographs today

might be a last look.

"Before 9/11, I began photographing certain essences of the city, for

example, a view of the George Washington Bridge that I hadn't seen done before.

I also began photographing the elevator banks of the World Trade Center." He had

wanted to spend a year photographing the entire trade center, a city unto

itself.

Mr. Davidson, who had the distinction of being the Central Park Conservancy's

first artist-in-residence, would like nothing more than the photographic keys to

the city.

"My dream assignment," he said, "is that Mayor Bloomberg calls me up in the

middle of the night and says: 'I had this great idea. We should have an artist

in residence. I'll write you a letter with a seal that will allow you to go

wherever you want to go. And don't call me before you're finished.' ''

The picture man is ready.

Tom Vanderbilt is the author of "Survival City: Adventures Among the

Ruins of Atomic America."

January 18, 2003

</blockquote></center>Bob, I like the picture of the woman on the cellphone. Is the sign in the window ("Public Fighting...")sharp in the orginal? If so, that makes the picture even more interesting, IMO. Goes along with the seemingly hushed conversation, etc.

January 17, 2003

Oops--some bad HTML on the last one. It should be:

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003ptN">Rollei RF in Leica M--First Impressions</a>

and one more:

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003jip">Horror! Rollei's NEW 35mm Rangefinder!</a>

January 17, 2003

I tried searching for this same topic last night, and I gotta say that the search function leaves a lot to be desired. You'll have better luck by searching the site via Google.

But these should get you started:

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0047xt">New Carl Zeiss lenses for M</a>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003lBV">New Rollei rangefinder</a>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003jip>Horror! Rollei's NEW 35mm Rangefinder!</a>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003ptN>Rollei RF in Leica M--First Impressions</a>

January 15, 2003

RE: the Rollei RF

The RF body had a MSRP of $799, which means that the actual retail price should be more like $599 or so (based on retail vs. MSRP price comparisons for other cameras).

January 15, 2003

The Fuji GW670III and 690 are fully mechanical.

January 15, 2003

If you search the archives for Hexar, you will find lots of posts about the alignment problems. I was considering getting a Hexar until I had read about the problems. I am hoping that Konica would have fixed this by now--anyone get a recently made one?

Also, is there any speculation whether the Hexar will remain in production after the Konica-Minolta merger is complete, and if Minolta (they are taking over the camera end of things, post-merger)

would improve the QC on the Hexar?

December 12, 2002

Has anyone here tried the Orion 15 on a Bessa R or R2? Gandy says it won't work, but after doing some babelfishing on Japanese sites, I found reports that it may work on the CV bodies after all. Anyone here with any experience trying it?

Also, the Orion 15 is not RF coupled, correct?

Japanese sites:

http://member.nifty.ne.jp/Bou/CCCP/Pages/bessa_r.html

http://www.cameraguild.co.jp/cosinacamera/Russia.html

http://kuro704.cool.ne.jp/albm/021027/

http://kuro704.cool.ne.jp/albm/021025/

I suppose the pics speak for themselves.

December 12, 2002

What do you consider a good deal for a black Summicron 50? Are you looking new or used? For new, $700 seems to be the gray price to beat, from what I've seen (see http://accphoto.com/Pages/Shopping.htm, a reputable dealer according to many on this site). The Elmar is $475 there, and the 35 'cron is $1050.

Used Summicron 50's (later versions) tend to run not much cheaper than the new gray price (500-600 on eBay).

The same seller mentioned above has an eBay site, too, and has the 35 Ultron new for $315 (item 1944894223). He also has a mint Nokton 50 for $275, if you were still considering that. Not bad on the two combined, if you were looking to go the CV route.

December 11, 2002

I've noticed that they work only after I sign in. Maybe that will work for you, too?

December 10, 2002

The adapter is listed, by catalog number (45BD209A), on the description of the lens on the B&H website.

Apparently, though, they are out of stock on this item, and they are out of stock on the cheaper generic adpater, too.

Try Adorama, unless you have something against saving money and getting the item you're looking for. ;-)

December 9, 2002

If you're buying new in the US, the cheapest Nokton I've seen is at Adorama for $325 (vs. 375 at Cameraquest) and they also sell the LTM to M adapter for another $45.

December 9, 2002

From the same site Grant mentioned:

http://www.holgamods.com/superwide/superwide.html

But this may be of great help: step-by-step instructions on how to convert a Holga to an F mount:

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/shinsaku/hiura/camera/holga/holga.html

December 8, 2002

If you've been doing portraits for 35 years, what 35mm film have you come to like? Buy that in 120 (when possible).

December 8, 2002

Why don't you get an electronics whiz to create some way to run your Hexar on an alternative power source (e.g., lantern battery, house current, etc.)? Got an engineer buddy? I assume you belong to some astrophotography groups--ask them how to do this and someone will probably take up the charge (no pun intended).

December 8, 2002

A new Bessa L is $100 but cannot use M lenses. The LTM to M adapter would be useless on this camera. (AFAIK, there is no such thing as an M to LTM adapter, although a lens hacker might be able to jury rig something).

When you find this magical M mount camera for $100, please tell everyone where you got it. ;-)

December 7, 2002

Chuck:

Where did you find this thing--Deutschland?

You can find a manual "hier":

<a href="http://wald.heim.at/sherwood/530146/Bedienungsanleitungen/bedienungsanleitungen.html">http://wald.heim.at/sherwood/530146/Bedienungsanleitungen/bedienungsanleitungen.html</a>

Hopefully, there's a bulb in the projector already. Even if it unmarked or burned out, some bulb dealer should be able to figure it out. Also, if you get the manual, that should help quite a bit.

This place is helpful and has tons of bulbs. There is a Liesegang USA Fantax model listed, but not yours. But you should take a look around here anyway. <a href="http://www.donsbulbs.com/cgi-bin/r/t.pl/equipmentresearchservice.html">http://www.donsbulbs.com/cgi-bin/r/t.pl/equipmentresearchservice.html</a>

If it is from overseas, you may need some kind of voltage adapter, too, as you probably already figured out.

Finally, I've seen a couple places that advertise MF slide processing with mounting:

<a href="http://www.arttechphoto.com/slides.html">http://www.arttechphoto.com/slides.html</a>

<a href="http://imagexperts.com/chrome2.html">http://imagexperts.com/chrome2.html</a>

<a href="http://www.procolor.com/guide/index.html">http://www.procolor.com/guide/index.html</a>

I've never contacted these places, so if you do, please report back what you find out.

Good luck!

December 6, 2002

"Replace it with 2 M7's."

A camera that is being fixed for the fourth time is worth two M7's?

"I think you'll find that M4-2's are good cameras poorly made (by Leica standards)" Quiz: Who said that? ;-)

December 6, 2002

A 35mm lens will impart a different look that a 50mm lens (i.e., Ultron and Summicron, respectively), no? ;-)

Do a search for Ultron here (and Nokton) if you haven't already.

Also, I am sort of in the same boat as you, have looked around at all the prices everywhere. Unfortunately, I cannot yet comment on performance but I can comment on what the market is like right now. This is what I have learned: it is a lot easier to find a M Summicron than a LTM one. And, oddly enough, it may be cheaper to get the M version (I'm guessing that this is partly due to the fact that there are so many of them out there). The collapsible M Summicrons can definitely be had for $200-$275 if you are patient. Then you would need an M compatible body, like the Bessa R2, which would end up negating some of the cost savings. But having an R2 might be a good backup for when you get the M6, and reports say the R2 is a better build quality than the R. Just a thought.

Finally, Cameraquest may have the best prices for the Bessa R and R2 bodies, but their lens prices are not the cheapest. The Ultron 35/1.7 and Nokton 50/1.5 are each $304 at Robert White (vs. $390 at Cameraquest), and the Nokton 50/1.5 is even $325 at Adorama.

Or just forget the whole thing until you have enough money to get the M6, which can be had, classic or TTL, for right around $1000 on eBay. Selling that Canonet should get you $125 closer to the prize. ;-)

December 6, 2002

1978 according to

http://www.cameraquest.com/leicanum.htm</a>

December 4, 2002

This page has some Zorki manuals on it. A manual for the C, specifically, is not there, but you can probably figure out much of what you need from the other Zorki manuals.

<a href="http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/marine/569/rusrngfdrs/index.html">http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/marine/569/rusrngfdrs/index.html</a>

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