Herb Keppler's wisdom

On the joys of collecting:
"Among the many things I resent about digital imaging is the slamming of the door on one of my favorite hobbies, camera collecting. Aside from getting a discontinued model cheap to use as a backup, can you tell me why someone would be excited about buying an obsolete digital camera for any purpose other than to use as a doorstop?"
(Popular Photography & Imaging, August 2007)

Film is here to stay:
"No, no, dammit, film is not going to disappear, so stop writing me scaredy-cat letters about how 'we duffers are gonna fade away silently clutching the last rolls of Kodachrome to our breasts.'"
(Popular Photography & Imaging, September 2007)

Relating a comment by renowned photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt:
"After Nikon introduced the first motordrive-compatible in 1954 (2.5 fps), I asked Eisie if he ever used a motor. 'Never,' said Eisie. 'It might miss something that this would have caught.' He wiggled his shutter release finger at me."
(Popular Photography & Imaging, April 2007)

If you were alone on a deserted island and could only have one camera and lens, what would it be?
"An all-mechanical Nikon F with a coupled selenium meter (no battery) and a 105mm macro lens to photograph flora and fauna, big and small, and to take a fine portrait of the person who rescues me!"
(Popular Photography & Imaging, August 2006)

Herbert Keppler: 1925-2008

Remembering a great photographer, journalist, savant, mentor and gentleman...

Herbert Keppler -- Herb or Burt -- was known throughout the world for his extremely popular columns Speaking Frankly and SLR in the American magazine and arguably the world's most read photography journal, Popular Photography. During his 57-year career as a writer, editor and publisher of photographic magazines, which earned him a worldwide reputation as one of the most respected and revered authorities in the photographic field, he also did a lot to popularise Japanaes cameras and Japanese technology.

On 4 January 2008 Herbert Keppler died peacefully in his sleep, after a short illness, at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, New York, with his wife Louise, daughter Kathy and son Thomas at his side.

Read Jason Schneider's tribute to Keppler here:

In Memoriam: Herbert Keppler, 1925-2008

Some memorable quotes from the old master:

The Wit and Wisdom of Herbert Keppler

For Pop Photo's special Burt Keppler click here

Roger and Frances on why they love film

Welcome to Film

There are no books and precious few articles for those who want to go from digital to film: surprisingly few editors are far-sighted enough to publish them, say Roger and Frances Hicks. "Well, we still use film, and here is why, garnered from our own experience and that of others who have never stopped; or have gone back to film after trying digital; or who, after growing up on digital, have decided to use film either alongside or instead of digital.

"The last point is important. We use both digital and silver halide. We also ride motorcycles as well as driving cars, and eat vegetables as well as meat. You don't necessarily need to abjure the one in order to enjoy the other -- unless, we have to say, you want the best possible results on the lowest possible budget, in which case silver is a clear winner in most cases. Increasingly, too, people take a hybrid silver/digital route, scanning and printing from film. In colour, this is the way we do it, though in black and white we still print the vast majority of our pictures in a traditional 'wet' darkroom."

Roger and Frances conclude: "You may get hooked. You'll be so intrigued by the pictures that you'll buy a good quality scanner, or maybe even set up a darkroom -- which is easier than you might think, as evidenced in the free module on our darkrooms. Then you'll want another camera, and some more lenses... Nah, stick to digital. You don't want to enjoy yourself that much."

Film is dead, long live film

David Griffin, writing in National Geographic, notes:

The May 2008 issue of the magazine is a special, one-topic issue covering China. An interesting—although not necessarily planned—fact is that most of the photographs were shot on film. This could turn out to be the last issue of NGM in which the majority of the photographs were not shot digitally.

Of the five main contributors: Fritz Hoffman, Lynn Johnson and Greg Girard shoot film; while Randy Olson and George Steinmetz use digital. I had a chance to sit down with Fritz recently to talk about his thoughts on film vs. digital.

Fritz was quick to point out that it is not so much about the method of capture, but for him, more about the camera. Fritz shoots primarily with a 35mm film Leica rangefinder. “If you have ever held one...it’s a love affair” he explained. “A camera is something you become one with...I see in a way that matches the camera and its lens.”

Fritz was an early adopter of digital technology, working with a Nikon SLR six years ago (which indeed were the most primitive days of digital). But he found the cameras simply too bulky for the kind of intimate and personal photography he has mastered. He still feels today's professional SLRs are still too cumbersome.

One digital camera that Fritz does actually carry with him now is a Canon G7 point & shoot (the newest model is the G9). He tends to use it to check lighting, color balance and also as a way to make visual notes—he may shoot a Chinese sign and then later have it translated.

For a shot of Shanghai’s skyline at night, Fritz was using his G7 point & shoot to check the lighting, and then shot the scene using his Leica and film. Later, when editing the story, the digital snapshot proved to have captured detail that was beyond the range of the same scene shot on film. The photo that ran across two pages of the magazine was the only digital photo that Fritz made, and it was shot with his little G7.

When it comes to digital vs. analog cameras, Fritz cites a sentiment that I have heard from other pros: digital cameras tempt you to look at the preview, or constantly check settings. Fritz explains succinctly: “Film keeps me in the moment.”

But Fritz is thinking about moving to digital, but he wants to do it when he feels that he has found an appropriate aesthetic reason for doing so. Fritz notes that “digital images are like sugar-coated Rice Crispies, they’re too glossy. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just not right for what I’m doing right now. When I go to digital, I want to do something new with it.”

More at http://ngm.typepad.com/editors_pick/2008/05/film-is-dead-lo.html

Out of focus

An anonymous owl, with eyes wide open at f 1.2, once said: " One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photos out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photos out of focus are a style."

While another wise owl said, at f 2.8: " Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film."

How prescient! Now no one will have film anyway! Digital delirium...

Picasso

Pablo Picasso, the greatest (in my humble opinion!!) of 20th-century artists (NB: not just painters!), is supposed to have said:

"I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn."

One of the great apocryphal quotes of the century??

Picasso

"I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn."

-Pablo Picass

Berger on photographs

John Berger, the writer and critic, had this to say of the art of photography:

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

Quotes from Giants # 2

Ansel Adams

"""""

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.


There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.


Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.


"""""

Henri Cartier Bresson

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

"""""

Dorothea Lange

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

"""""

Eudora Welty


A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

"""""

Mary Ellen Mark

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

"""""

Quotes from Giants

Voices of some of my revered photogs:

Don McCullin

Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. - Don McCullin, Sleeping With Ghosts : A Life's Work in Photography by Don McCullin

"""""
Although I take my work seriousily I cannot take myself seriously. When you think of it, everything has happened by accident. I have always believed that I don't own my photography, rather that it owns me. It gave me a life, an extraordinary life which could never be repeated. I feel as if the gift of seeing what is really going on in the world is mine only so long as I put it to proper use. There is nothing to be claimed and nothing to regret, except that we go on treating our fellow human beings so badly.

"""""
I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.

"""""

I don’t believe you can see what’s beyond the edge unless you put your head over it; I’ve many times been right up to the precipice, not even a foot or an inch away. That’s the only place to be if you’re going to see and show what suffering really means... I've spent fourteen years getting on and off aeroplanes and photographing other people's conflicts. I will never get on another aeroplane and go photograph another country's war.

"""""

Soldiers firing rifles in war make ordinary pictures because without the action, the smell and the noise, you have no truth...

"""""

You can only demand respect from the energies around us if you practice respect yourself.

Pentax K10D

Last year, in a letter to the editor of Better Photography, among India's leading magazines devoted to matters photographic, I wrote as below. (BTW, I still subscribe to the views expressed here!)

=====

As a longstanding reader of your magazine, I was disappointed with this year's first head-to-head group test of the three consumer DSLRs from Canon, Nikon and Pentax, which is featured in your current issue.

Specifically, my grouse is the short shrift given to the Pentax K10D in the face-off with the Canon EOS 400D and the Nikon D80. As you no doubt realize, there are several ardent users of Pentax cameras in India, as well as an abundant supply of lenses and accessories that can be had for fairly reasonable prices in the secondhand market. Pentax is one of the few camera companies to have maintained backward compatibility with its lenses for its digital offerings, so much so
that you can still use -- with certain limitations -- the screw-mount lenses that date to the era of the Spotmatic. Thus, there is more than cursory interest in what Pentax has to offer in the digital era for Indian consumers.

In your group test, the only thing you found acceptable with the Pentax K10D was its handling and ergonomics. Contrast this with what the world's leading photography magazines and sites had to say:

"The features of the Pentax K10D are sure to amaze Pentax lovers, and the photo world in general...Pentax has seriously raised the bar with the K10D...Best for: Any kind of shooting, particularly in less-than-ideal environments and weather. And a real boon for Pentax owners longing for a higher-end DSLR...Bottom line: Pentax's reputation as the lightweight among DSLR makers is officially obliterated with this well-made, fine-performing, highly satisfying
camera." ---- Popular Photography

"The K10D offers several unique benefits the majors can't match including image stabilization with every lens, pro quality dust/weather/moisture seals, two RAW formats, and an automatic dust reduction/removal system - all at a very competitive price. Serious shooters may have a few issues (like Pentax's lack of long glass), but for many photographers - including those with a closet full of old FA, KA, or K-mount lenses, the K10D may be just the camera they've been
looking for.." ---- DigitalCameraReviews

"We were happy with the K10D's image quality. Our test images were consistently well exposed and had good color saturation...The K10D offers a lot of camera for under $1000.00 USD - with 10.2 megapixels of resolution, body-integral Shake Reduction (SR), automatic dust removal, a weather-proof body, 3fps continuous shooting performance, dual battery grip option and great image quality – it's an easy choice over the K100D for those seeking a more advanced dSLR camera system." --- Steve'sDigicams reviews

"The pictures are of a very high quality, thanks to the SAVOX VIII and the PRIME processor. The JPEGs from the camera could have been a little sharper and the white balance could react more accurately to certain light sources, but there is little reason to complain. Pentax did very well with noise." --- Let'sGoDigital

In contrast, your review says "the Pentax just did not reach the last mile." Your ratings for Value for Money and your conclusion that "it all boiled down to the money" are even more difficult to fathom since nowhere are prices (either MRP or street) mentioned. So how are readers expected to make an informed decision?

For a magazine that normally finds every camera to have some value and is invariably "recommended", your treatment of the Pentax K10D appears unfair and unjustified.

Film Cameras Officially Dead In Japan

According to a report in Wired magazine by Charlie Sorrel, So few film cameras were sold in Japan in the last two months that the trade body CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association) has stopped compiling sales figures. According to Amateur Photographer, only 529 35mm film cameras were made in Japan in February. We're not sure how that figure was reached, but if we compare it to CIPA's own figures, it looks like there really were only 529 actual cameras sold, an incredibly low number.

CIFA's figures are only compiled for member companies, and the last update for film was in January (subsequent reports list figures for lenses only). But here's how they break down for January. New digital still cameras sold: 5,417,563, up 128% from the previous year. New film cameras sold: 1580, a tiny 2.8% of those sold in January 2007.

So, in Japan at least, film is now a niche product. We still don't think it will die, though, anymore than CDs killed vinyl. Film will just be one more boutique process for the curious. We predict that there will be a resurgence in 2018, and all the cool kids will be carrying Instamatics, writes Sorrel.

FM2, K1000, F1, ME, A1, OM1, LX

If you can decode the figures in the title, welcome home, classic camera afficionado...

Hang on while I go dust the specks off the viewfinder of my Pentax LX...

1/125 at f 5.6

Don't click that shutter release just yet... (Huh? What's that? Shutter release? Or so the digital dildoes will wonder...) ....

Hang on, classic content will be up soon!


kg

1/125 at f 5.6