Leica Manual
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Isn’t it funny how the passage of time can give you a completely different perspective on things. The reason I’m saying that is that I unearthed an old Leica manual out of a box of books in the attic yesterday and have been having a look at it, through fresh eyes, so to speak.
This is a book that I haven’t read for years-probably since the early 1990s-when I was mainly interested in landscape photography in the Ansel Adams mould. Over the years, I’ve gradually moved away from that type of photography towards the travel and street genres. This 1973 book has very little of interest for budding landscape photographers even though there is a chapter on applying the zone system in 35mm photography written by Ansel himself. I probably read that and then put this weighty tome away.
I was gobsmacked when I picked it up yesterday, though. There’s a great chapter on photojournalism by Arthur Rothstein, one of the great American photographers who catalogued the Dust Bowl during the Depression. The portraiture section contains some great images by such as Will McBride, Ralph Gibson, Eva Rubinstein and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
But it’s the section titled Contemporary Leica Photography that I love. There are several great photographs by Elliot Erwitt, HCB and McBride. Another chapter, Pioneer Leica Photography, starts with a photograph by Andre Kertesz taken in 1928 and includes other fine work by HCB, Rothstein, Peter Stackpole and others.
I even enjoyed the wave of nostalgia when some notes I’d made on the zone system, obviously done on a typewriter and on paper that has now yellowed, fell out from the centre of the book. I must have been struggling to make sense of it all at that time and wrote everything out to get it clear in my own head.
Obviously, there’s a shed load of stuff on Leica cameras and lenses and lots of useful technical information on how to get the best out of 35mm negatives. All good stuff.
I think I’ll keep this one by my bedside, at least for a few weeks…
Source: http://pentaxk10dblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/leica-manual.html
