doris_chan

"20D....wysiwyg totally"

Claudia, borrow his camera, work only in RAW and come back and tell us if it really is

wysiwyg.

Preston, I hear what you're saying (and I can think of a few photographers who would fit

the bill) but you really are way off the mark if you imagine that Peress would make a

suitably obedient dog. You'd need to muzzle him to make him safe.

"with PS.....we will see an erosion of good taste"

There was no shortage of "bad taste" in the wet darkroom.

"It just gets too easy"

Other than not getting your hands wet it's no easier or harder than working in a traditional

darkroom.

"Maybe we should be admiring the National Geographic photographers.....nothing but

Kodachrome, at most adding some slight color correction filtering at the time of exposure"

Even leaving aside the notorious "moving pyramid" incident, this is wonderfully ironic. For

a long time the images in Nat Geo have been some of the most photoshopped in the

industry, the difference between an original transparency and what appears in the pages of

Nat Geo can be utterly startling. You could use Nat Geo as source material in a seminar on

"How Not To Oversharpen in Photoshop".

"1950's and 1960's....we learned to burn and dodge. If we wanted a printable image we

had little choice. It wasn't to be creative. It was to get the job done!"

Al, y'know what? It's exactly the same in 2005. If somebody shows you a jpeg straight

from their camera it's every bit as ugly and simplistic as an unbalanced traditional print.

Nothing's changed other than the recording medium.

Y'know James, I didn't imagine it possible that I could "really offend" someone with a

comment about a camera brand. Utterly bizarre. And why would the utterance of the word

Taliban

result in the deletion of a thread? Is there now a list of banned words? If that is the case

then we really are edging into Talibanesque territory.......

"Cognitive Dissonance......Those who want a Leica most badly (but can't afford it) are most

prone to throw rocks at it"

Chris, thank you for so eloquently encapsulating in a single post all that is most disturbing

about the minority here who are true Leica supremacists. One of the biggest conceits of

the Leica Taliban is the notion that only those who don't own a Leica can retain a healthy

scepticism towards the more outlandish claims of brand supremacy. Also, thanks to Andy

for

retaining his grace and humor.

Preston, what a strange and bitter contribution.

Do you really think that a photographer of the stature of Gilles Peress would be swayed in

his judgement by the occasional free, loaned, or discounted camera? It's hard to imagine a

photographer who would be more difficult to "buy", he's spent his whole career (at

real personal cost) going against the prevailing grain of reportage cliche. The irony (if

you're suggesting that Leica owns him) is that the bulk of his recent work has

been produced with a mixture of Canon EOS and Contax G2 cameras. As you clearly feel

so strongly about the subject why don't you fill us all in on the sleazy details of Peress'

gear deals.....?

All this talk about Gilles Peress and nobody mentions his images. If people want to see

what Peress can actually do with a Leica and a 28mm lens they might want to buy his book

Telex Persan. Similarly, if they want to see what he can do with an EOS and wide zoom

they could buy The Silence, his coverage of the aftermath of the Rwandan massacres. Very

different approaches but equally astonishing results.

"595g minus 205g - or about 390 grams....."

You're obviously a man with a head for figures Andy. What do you reckon, will this lens

have a higher street value than the equivalent measure of cocaine? These things matter to

some of us, it's why I won't use the Cosina offerings - they're way too cheap.

"Oh yeah! 50 ASPH.....Killer, incredible, just blazing sharpness...."

I'll take your word for it, because I certainly can't see it. You might have been better off

spending the money on a decent scanner.........

Come off it Mike, we all know that the 28 f1.8 is unusably soft at every aperture. Me and

Yakim keep

telling you this but you stubbornly keep on believing the evidence provided by your own

eyes. Strange guy......

Despite the fact that digital has a "look" (just like different emulsions have different looks),

that look is not so overwhelming that it isn't overcome by the individual style of a

photographer. Recently I was looking at a photographers edit from a story that was made

on a combination of Kodachrome, Fuji 800 neg, and digital - you really couldn't say with

any certainty what the origin of any particular image was, you had to ask. I see plenty of

digital images that, if I didn't know better, would convince me that digital was not up to

scratch - but when you see images like that it's a fair bet that the photographers film

images look just as bad/ugly.

Paul, they're Olympus E1s, and I should point out that they're supplied by Olympus. Having

said that, they like the results that they're getting and they wouldn't use them simply

because they're free. The problem for a lot of serious reportage photographers is that

Canon 1 series digitals are just too big and heavy (unlike on a 1v you can't just throw away

the big battery pack)- they're fine if you're a sport or local press photographer but can be

overwhelming if you putting in really long hours in a hostile climate. The attraction of the

Olympus is that it's compact but also well sealed. Personally, I don't thing they deliver as

much as an EOS20D.

Regarding your friend at Getty, if he really likes drum scanners then I'm guessing in his

film days he was working with transparency rather than neg. Drum scanners will give

startlingly good results with transparency, but can struggle appallingly with neg -

particularly with the more interesting emulsions like NPS and NPZ. A lot of pre-press guys

will be really dismissive of Imacon scanners, but, if you're working on color neg then they

really are the way to go. They're cheap (compared to a drum scanner), compact, fast, low-

maintenance, and really preserve the character of film emulsions - Kodachrome still looks

Kodachrome after scanning and NPZ still looks like NPZ. Too many scanners strip away all

character and make all emulsions look alike.

Regarding your musical query, apparently Boris is going through a bit of an old school

Chicago house phase. Anyway, I'm in Manila right now and it's very late, so goodnight.

Don't tempt fate Roger, if I am the Pest Control Doris then I might just put Shutterbug out

of it's misery......

Roger: "For sheer pointless offensiveness, Doris Chan probably won."

Well it's always pleasing to come first at something. Actually, leaving aside whether it was

offensive, I'd argue that it wasn't pointless. The point was that you appeared to be being

disingenuous in your original post.

"I am also puzzled at the charge that I am spreading misinformation or disinformation...."

OK, how about this recent classic? "Few editors are happy to run a 6 megapixel image any

bigger than about half page......" You then qualified this patently untrue statement by

reminding us of your "50+ books" and "thousands of magazine articles". If this isn't

misinformation then I don't know what is. Perhaps you can explain why editors are

cheerfully running covers and double-page spreads from digital cameras at Time, US

News, Newsweek (actually a number of their contract photographers are working with 5MP

Olympus cameras) Sports Illustrated, L'Express, Stern and countless other magazines

around the world? They aren't just resorting to digital when immediacy is the primary

concern.

"....but I can live with the charge, considering its source"

Have we met?

I hear you Claudia, but aren't you the one always wrestling in the mud with Z? It's also not

very useful when people like Roger (knowingly?) put out misinformation regarding digital,

film

or anything else.

It can be difficult to tell the difference between bacon and ham. Having said that, I can

state with a degree of certainty that Roger is pure ham, with a big side serving of cheese.

I'd also like to point out that Roger has published over 2000 books, over 3 million

magazine articles, and is president of MENSA. I only do so because Roger is far too self

effacing to bring attention to these matters himself.

Maestro, you've won me over. I'm starting to believe that digital is just a passing fad - no

serious photographer would consider using it because, as you so rightly say, the quality

just sucks. It wouldn't surprise me if it digital peaked, withered and died within the next

eighteen months.

Maestro: "Speak to anyone in the motion picture or highend graphics industry and the

claims that the......DSLRs can match film will be considered nuts"

I'd suggest you speak to a photographer rather than a graphics geek. You'll probably get a

sober answer pointing out the ways in which digital is better than film (and it isn't just in

terms of convenience) and the ways in which it's inferior (this will be the short part of the

conversation, relating mainly to dynamic range compared to color neg). I'm not sure why

someone in the motion picture industry would even have an opinion on digital stills

cameras, though it wouldn't be difficult to find credible film makers excited by the

potential of digital for their own work - you could try chatting to Steven Sodebergh or (at

the other end of the spectrum) Eric Rohmer.

ps Z, I'm everybody's friend, I'm like Michael Jackson "I love you all......."

The real tragedy for Japanese women is that they're such magnets for strange, Western,

misfit men.

Frank, I have to bite on this. Just who is "Iran's most famous photographer"? Abbas, Reza,

Manoocher, (the recently deceased) Kaveh Golestan.......? Iran punches above it's weight

when it comes to photographers.

"whining people like you"

Err, am I missing something? An awful lot of whining is coming from your direction.....

"Japan's treasure is its women"

Man, that's beautiful and profound. You could get a job writing inscriptions for greetings

cards. Next time, why not give us your insight into kids and puppies.

"I would love to hear about Japanese female photographers"

Why don't you point us in the direction of some? I'll give you a start - what do you think of

Hiromix?

"Doris Chan is a fat middle-aged Italian man......"

Progress at last. I'd much rather you ranted against me than against an entire nation.

Evan, I'm not going to try and pry it from the hands of my film Taliban friend - he might

reach for his AK47. If you want

to find a well used, well priced M6 I'd suggest putting a wanted notice up on the Rob

Galbraith forum, there's an awful lot of heavily used (and currently unused) Leica gear

sitting around in the homes of photographers. You're unlikely to find a really marked M6

on a dealers shelf because for some reason (I guess they know their market) they just

won't touch them.