A goal for the new year: show more portraits.

 Michelle. Photographed on medium format Kodak EPY transparency film.

Camera: Rollei twin lens 

"Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." Spoken most often by people who have failed to focus adequately.

 

Jen. Photographed with a Rollei 6008i + CZ 150mm f4.0

On Ilford FP4 Plus film. 

Film scanned with a camera.

There are plenty of situations in which sharpness doesn't really matter. But it's always nice to get the technical stuff right. Even when you don't have to. I like to see sharp eyelashes and eyes in portraits. I am not Julia Margaret Cameron...

OT: Three great swim practices in a row to start out the new year. Even got a compliment from one of my coaches (kind of backhanded...), he said he'd never seen a person with white hair swim a nice butterfly stroke before. I'll take it. Now eating scones and drinking coffee while scanning old film. 

Hope I don't spill anything. If I do we'll run with it and claim it was intentional as it is "Art." 

Swim, run, walk, sleep, have fun, keep your spouse happy. You might not live forever but you'll sure have more fun. Exercise and love, the fountains of youth.

The proof is in the image. Not the talk.

 

Lou. On film. 1995

Tri-X

When we go looking for information on the web we often have to wade through "stories." Stories about mythic lenses, or someone's experiences with this or that camera, or lens. Stories about how hard it was to get the image right. We are often told we should believe the technical information being shared with us because this or that photographer has owned 50 different cameras and 100 different lenses. We are told we should revere the photographer because of his vast knowledge and experience. But now, as I've gotten some experience separating fact from optimistic memory, my sole filter; my diviner of truth versus rosy fiction, is the final image. The final result. Is the lens really great? Show me! Are you an incredible lighting designer? Show me! Did you actually achieve much in the darkrooms you've waxed nostalgic about? Show me the prints! Did you leverage the access you've bragged about in the big leagues? Show me. Show me what you did with it.

I  photographed the image above in September of 1995 with a Contax RTSIII camera. How do I know? Because that camera printed the date set on the camera in between the frames. You can see it on the top and bottom of the image. I also know that this image was photographed with a Contax/Zeiss 85mm f1.4 Planar lens because it was nearly impossible to use any third party lenses on those old SLR cameras. And that was the long lens I used for making portraits. How do I know that I shot the image on 35mm Tri-X? Because it's on the edge print of the film I stuck into the film holder in order to make a current day scan. 

When I write about stuff from "the good old days" I like to back up my stories with actual images that I made in that time period. I think providing proof of the process adds credibility to the information. 

I wish that everyone who wrote about, or made videos about, their techniques or their gear or even their creative vision would append an actual image, or a set of images,  made using that gear or that technique so we could see for ourselves if it was really all that. 

When I look at the image I scanned (above) I am a bit amazed at just how good the tones and sharpness of an image can be when the original negative is "scanned" through a modern, high-res camera and lens. Especially if you take the time to make a 170+ megapixel raw file via a multi-shot/high res feature. And it helps if you have the fundamentals of post processing at your disposal to work with the resulting files. 

I'm also amazed at the image because the negative has been sitting, largely unprotected, on my physical desktop for the better part of a decade and accidentally got dropped, naked, onto the concrete floor of my office a couple of times. I brushed the dust off and was surprised at just how resilient film can be. 

I'm happy to see that even 28+ years ago I was able to properly focus and expose film. Also happy to see that my  film developing techniques were at least adequate and that my film washing regimen helped the image withstand the chemical ravages of time. All without voodoo film developers and weird rituals.

But mostly I am happy to see that the image holds up well stylistically and that "scanning" really does work well with black and white negatives. 

So, when someone tells you that "shooting duplicates of your film" isn't nearly as good as using a dedicated film scanner and that the images resulting from scans of old, 35mm film can't compare with the results of a modern digital camera file you might want to take a step back and ask them for some sort of proof of their expertise. Maybe they can provide a nice image that directly illustrates their point. And when they rave about a certain lens from the film days well, let's see the results. That could be a new goal for photographers, bloggers and vloggers for 2024.

And when we talk about images from our film past perhaps we can provide the "reference material" to bolster our recollections. It would be comforting for most readers...

Don't tell me how smart you think you are. Show me.

Doing your own film scanning is like running your own time machine. If you keep digging through binders you find all kinds of old stuff.

 

Kirk. Circa 1978. Early Fall. Up in Chamonix climbing mountains with a girlfriend.

I was in France with a girlfriend. We spent most of September that year trekking around and tent camping. We stayed for a while in Avignon and then headed West toward Carcassonne and Perpignan. When we swung back through Paris my friend, Christian, suggested we go visit his brother in Les Houches, just down the road from Chamonix. His family had a nice house there. It was primitive then, outside of Chamonix proper (1978), but friends tell me now that it's a thriving ski resort area. After a few days acclimating to the altitude and digging into the family's amazing wine cellar we headed over to see what Mont Blanc was all about. I did a lot of (non-technical) climbing in a well worn pair of Vasque hiking boots and old denim jeans. 

My girlfriend was a runner and in good shape. Up and down the steep angles like a mountain goat and me, a swimmer, huffing and puffing to keep up. But so much fun when you are young and unfettered by schedules, budgets or worldly concerns. Our biggest burdens at the time were our backpacks.

I'm not sure what the name of the peak was where she grabbed my Canonet QL 17 mk. 3 point and shoot camera and snapped this shot but I know the we were there the last week that the little café/way station was open. Most of the higher altitude infrastructure closed down back then when the first snows hit. 

After a couple weeks of kicking around in those mountains we headed over to Grenoble and then on to Geneva. The mountains are fun.... once you get past the altitude blahs and the thinner air. 

I took most of the photos on that trip but I'm thankful that my friend snapped a few of me. That's quite a head of hair.

from a noisy and very underexposed Fujifilm 100 slide. Adobe to the rescue...

Portraits are more interesting to me when I start a session with a plan. Even if the plan falls apart the minute we start photographing.

 

Lou. Image "camera scanned" from an Agfa XPS Portrait negative which 

originated in a Hasselblad MF film camera. 

It was a cold November day back in the early 1990s and I had just taken delivery of a new lens for my Hasselblad medium format camera. The one that shot square images. The lens was the 180mm f4.0 which promised to be much sharper and contrastier than my older 150mm f4.0 Sonnar lens. The 150s were good lenses but were plagued by flare whenever there was a light anywhere near the front of the lens. Even if it was off to one side. Since both lenses had the same minimum focus distance I could also get a bit more magnification/isolation of my subject with the longer 180. 

My favorite talent at the time was LouAnn. She was gorgeous, patient, smart and cool. And happy to be photographed. I called her up and we arranged a time to go over to Laguna Gloria Art Museum, just there on the lake and surrounded by acres of sculpture gardens and big trees. My goal was to test out the lens by photographing my favorite subject: portraits. 

It was chilly and windy and we didn't stay out long. But we stayed long enough to fill three or four rolls of 120mm black and color film with portraits that ranged from full body to head and shoulders. My favorite frames were the ones done, as an afterthought, on color negative film. Agfa hired me at one point to test and show their new color negative stocks and I found an affinity for their ISO 160 Portrait film. XPS 160. It was a soft emulsion made to handle a skin tones with a very forgiving dynamic range and less saturated colors. My intention had been to do mostly black and white test shots since I had a well equipped black and white darkroom and could rush back to the studio, soup film and start printing later that day. The color film languished. Eventually one of the assistants ran it over to the color lab and asked for development and a contact sheet. 

We were insanely busy back then and so I looked at the contact sheet for thirty seconds and then moved on to something else. When I moved the business from downtown to my own neighborhood everything got packed, labelled and secured. The color negatives sat in one of the filing cabinets for more than 25 years. Untouched. Unused. 

Then, just before Christmas in 2023 I bought some scanning gear and got interested in going back, pre-digital, to all the medium format film I'd shot in the golden age of film. I came across an envelope marked, "Lou, 1994, Agfa XPS, 180mm Sonnar Test," and decided to take a look. 

I inspected each frame with a loupe and found this one. I really liked the serious and calm look on Lou's face. You might have seen the color image a day or two ago but I also wanted to see how well I could do in scanning a color negative and converting it to a black and white image, but without having to buy everyone's favorite scanning conversion software, "Negative Lab Pro."

Since I'd already made the color file and had gotten the color close to my original vision I worked on from there. I did a few tweaks to the color channels but most of my work was just to get the contrast and the zones of tone right on Lou's face. The skin. 

One thing struck me immediately when I made the very first scan of this negative. The Hasselblad 180mm f4.0 had the absolute worst bokeh of any lens I have ever shot. I think it's because the leaf shutter has only five blades. The simpler design is more rugged but it seems to over ride the aperture's appearance in out of focus highlight and create hard, five edged patterns all over the background of a frame. It's awful. So bad that I spent time blurring and darkening the background in these samples to hide the awful performance of the lens. Amazingly, since studio work was never done with highlight and lights sources in the background I never noticed that fault of the lens before taking it outside. It never showed up. But wow, there are no bokeh balls back there. Just hard edged polygons. 

So, my plan for the session was to get some good black and white images with the new lens and to show off how well the Hasselblad 180mm works at throwing the backgrounds out of focus. I came back home chastened by the industrial chaos of the lens and, at the time, (pre- modern PhotoShop) no way to correct the background. But with current tech and current software we can fix so much and now I can enjoy the look of the portrait here and not be put off by things that are now fixable. I still wouldn't want to shoot outside the studio with that lens again. Give me a little flare but leave my backgrounds elegant and soft.

check out the bokeh in this partial shot....

It's just terrible. 

So, my plan of becoming famous by using this particular lens totally feel apart. Nice to know it from a test. Once you identify a fault you can generally avoid it. but ..... yikes. And that lens was $2500 back in 1994. What the f*$k was I thinking?

I used the lens a lot in the studio and it was generally well behaved. But the minute we needed to have speckles of highlights in the background the lens went back into the equipment cabinet and out came something "better." I was actually happy to eventually see that lens leave the studio. I hope the next owner had better luck. But that was a long time ago...

Some additional examples of photographs from the 75mm f1.9 Voigtlander lens for the M mount. Just to add more subject choices...

 

Another inexpensive keeper. I like it. Especially, and unexpectedly, on the Leica SL.

First outing with the Voigtlander 75mm f1.9 MC lens. Looks pretty good to me...

I wanted a longer lens for my Leica M240 camera. The longest lens I owned for those cameras before this was the 50mm Voigtlander APO f2.0. That one was amazing enough to pull me into the Voigtlander camp as a source of lenses for what is basically a personal, hobbyist camera system. I did consider the 90mm Voigtlander APO Skopar f2.8 for the extra reach but having owned Leica M cameras in the "film" past I remembered how tough it is to compose in the very small rectangle in the viewfinder that comes up when using that focal length. The 75mm focal length is a good compromise between the ability to isolate subjects but also to operate with confidence. Really, if your work always depends on a lens longer than 75mm I think you'll better off sticking with a "traditional" mirrorless camera like a Leica SL2. I often find myself using the long end of the 24-90mm Leica zoom with them but most of the time I get greater enjoyment from the diminutive Sigma 90mm f2.8 Contemporary lens. It's small, light and razor sharp. Even wide open. But doesn't work on the M cameras.

There is a range of 75mm lenses made for M mount cameras. Leica makes a very pricey 75mm f1.25 Noctilux M ASPH lens for the "reasonable" price of $14,000 USD, a much cheaper 75mm f2.0 APO Summicron for a paltry $4795, and I'm sure there are some used, older Leica 75mm f1.4 lenses floating around out in the wild. Voightlander makes a 75mm f1.5 Nokton Aspheric lens (in black or chrome) for a cool $1,000 --- brand spanking new. And, the lens I ended up buying, the Ultron, is available in both a multi-coated version and a single coated version. 

I read some reviews of the VM f1.9 lens including one by Phillip Reeve and thought I'd take a chance on it. 75mm f1.9 Ultron is small and light, has a twelve bladed aperture for great bokeh, three non-standard lens elements. An optical design of seven lens elements in five groups and the ability to focus down to half a meter. Most M lenses are limited to (.)75 meters so this is one of the few that focus closer. 

I bought mine in a "used, like new" condition from B&H for about $525. When it arrived I was surprised at how small and light it actually is. The lens came in the original box and also included a metal lens hood with a lens hood cap as well as a more traditional lens cap for the 49mm filter ring. 

On my first day out with the lens I decided I'd test it with a Leica SL camera. It's a camera with a sensor configuration that is much better optimized for M mount cameras than those in some competing camera brands and it's a good match for the flange distance and sensor configuration of a traditional M camera. But being able to fine tune focus via a high definition EVF and the focus magnification feature meant that I would not end up blaming the lens for any focusing errors that might come from using the rangefinder camera. It's slower to stop and check focus at a higher magnifications from shot to shot but these are mostly static test photos so that wasn't really an issue in this instance. 

 

Here are the "pros" of the lens: It focuses closer than most M series lenses. At f1.9 it's relatively fast and, since it is sharp even at f1.9 (at distances from one meter and beyond) that wide open aperture is highly usable for serious work. It's small enough so that without the lens hood the lens does not protrude into the image frame lines when used on an M camera. Being small and lightweight also makes it pretty damn charming when used on a bigger camera like the SL. Which means you can carry the combined package longer without wearing yourself out. 

There are two "cons." One is that the throw of the focusing ring is very short and you have to pay attention when you focus so you don't overshoot your "in focus" mark. It goes in and out of focus with the barest of focus ring movement. Secondly, at wide open and at apertures up to f2.8 the bokeh balls of lights out of focus in the background show what is sometimes referred to as "ninja" patterns where the edge of the light circle shows the repeating edges of the aperture blades. Certainly not an issue for me but worth noting. 

Would I buy it again? In a heartbeat. It's exactly what I wanted in order to complete my M series Leica system. And it's a magnificent portrait lens for the M240 cameras.

Images above and below. Text written back in pre-Christmas December. That's why you are seeing holiday shots in this post. Ah well. We can't always be timely. 

Hilarious tree topper at Austin Motel. 

The motel's motto, being a stone's throw from downtown and the Capitol Building is: "So Close yet so far out. I thought the above adaptation was great. 

Near the close focus limit and wide open.

the lens does mannequin photography quite well and the camera and lens together do a very nice job with red fabric. 

Sign for an old tree in the courtyard at Guerro's Mexican food restaurant right there in the middle of South Congress Ave. Just down the street from the Austin Motel.

far away and....

close up.

using my custom profile for Leica SL raw files converted to Jpegs. 

 

Thanks to (redacted commenter) for convincing me to take a few weeks off. Otherwise I would have been posting fun photographic content every single day between the 13th of December and the New Year. And moderating comments about photography at the speed of light... I am sure as readers you appreciated the time off...