Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/21
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Johnny,
Not meant to be a pipe dream, but a practice to emulate. I should have made
it clearer that H.C-B 'took the picture in an instant' by raising it to his
eyes and framing it, but the prefocus was something he did most of the
time, he had his assistant mark the lenses with her nail polish to his
preferred distances, (cf. 'Magnum', Russel Miller, Secker and Warburg) and
as you'll notice many of his famous street photos feature less than
perfectly sharp forground subjects.
Your psuedonym reminds me of a lovely paperback, 'Shots from the Hip' by
Johnny Stilletto, (AKA Philip Thomas), published by Bloomsbury, ISBN 0 7475
1186 1
Sadly he's not a Leica user though his pictures all look as if they should
have been taken with one!
Jem
- -----Original Message-----
From: Johnny Deadman [SMTP:deadman@jukebox.demon.co.uk]
> Beaumant Newhall describes (in his autobiography, 'Focus') a lovely cafe
> scene where he was with H.C-B...
This is not such a pipe dream, actually. If I was shooting with an M I
would
automatically set it for the ballpark exposure when I went into a new
lighting situation eg the cafe. It would then be easy to focus according to
scale ("without looking at the camera" is IMHO perhaps a slight
exagerration). I have some very nice pictures taken in exactly this way.
Important to be using a 35mm or wider lens, as the framing is pretty hit
and
miss.
- --
Johnny Deadman