Built to Last

This picture was taken last week in Arizona; I used my Leica IIIb, with the Voigtlander Color Skopar 21mm/f4 super wide-angle lens. This picture was taken sometime after I had dropped the camera by accident on a rather unforgiving pavement. Ouch. Luckily, either than a bent filter ring (which I can likely fix), the camera survived just fine. I can’t help but think that if this had been a modern day plastic camera it would have broken into a number of pieces.

Pardon the cliche, but they don’t make them like the used to!

It’s Not Always About Sharpness

This image is of a fellow cast member from Man of La Mancha, taken at a recent fund-raising event. It was shot using my Leica IIIb rangefinder, and an postwar 50mm/f2 Summitar lens. It was not a very bright room, and I was shooting available light, so even though I was using Tri-X (a reasonably fast film) I had to shoot wide open, at either 1/20th or 1/40th of a second.  I knew that not much would be in focus, but the face and eyes were, and I was able to capture a lovely expression. The Summitar lens has a reputation for fairly swirly out of focus areas when wide open; some people don’t like the effect, others enjoy this characteristic of the lens, and I am in the latter camp — I like what it adds to the image.

In Perspective

Today’s image was taken recently with my Leica IIIb and Voigtlander 21mm Super-Wide angle lens. Although this kind of lens does not distort an image the way a “fish-eye” lens does, depending on the angle you can still get plenty of distortion. In the image below though this is accentuated by the building itself, Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum. (A very interesting place, well worth the visit by the way.) Its walls have a number of interesting and unusual angles, and in this image it is tricky to tell where the building ends and the lens distortion begins.

Found Surrealism

A five minute walk from our house is a perfectly ordinary convenience store, but on an outside side wall is some plaster, wires and plastic pipes that seems to turn into poles suspended in a sky, clear with one cloud. No post production trickery, just light.

Customer in a Coffee Shop

I took this shot using my Leica IIIb and 50mm Leica Summitar lens. I had stopped into Broadview Expresso, a non-chain coffee shop on Broadview Avenue, not far north of the subway station bearing the same name. I had come in for a coffee, and when I asked if the seat next to his was taken he said go ahead, and started to engage me in conversation. We chatted for a while, and then when I was leaving I decided to ask if I could take his picture (and asking people I don’t know if I can take their pictures is something I rarely do, and definitely need to do more of!). I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

From Russia With Luck

In a recent post I mentioned I had picked up a well-used, but still working 1939 vintage Leica IIIb 35mm rangefinder body; it did not come with a lens, and not wanting to shell out or trade for a genuine (read:expensive) Leica lens, I decided to roll the dice and get a Soviet Russian made Jupiter 8 50mm/f2 lens.

The phrase “Soviet craftsmanship” is not heard often, and I knew that buying this lens would be chancy; these lenses are know for having good glass, but shoddy workmanship. I’m happy to report that mine seems to work fine; a sample image from my test roll is below. I have a 50mm f2 Summarit on its way (I had to trade away “the Beast” Pentaax 6×7 to get it), but for now I will enjoy my Russian surprise

(Leica IIIb 35mm rangefinder, 50mm f2 Jupiter 8 lens, Ilford HP5+ film, developed in HC-110 dilution H)

Two Different Products, Two Different Philosophies

This is my recently acquired Leica IIIB rangefinder, dating from 1939 (it currently has a Soviet Russian lens on it, a genuine Leica lens is on the way). I could only afford it because it’s in bad shape cosmetically (which I will fix) and I offset part of the price via various trades.

Today’s post is not about the camera though, but about the philosophy and world view behind it, compared to the Apple iPhone 4.

When the iPhone 4 was released, Steve Jobs compared it to a “Leica camera.” Now apart from the fact that the Leica did not need a rubber band around it to work (unlike the iPhone 4 which for at least some people needed what was basically a rubber band around it for proper 3G network connectivity), there are huge differences in the business practices of Apple, and Leitz, the maker of Leica cameras. In the article Hell is Cheap, China, Apple and the Economics of Horror, a damning account of Apple’s business practices are presented, and can be summed up by the following quote from the article:

“Companies like Apple don’t outsource to China because the workforce is better-educated or more highly motivated. They don’t even outsource just because the labor is cheaper there. They outsource because employers who defraud their workers can make products more cheaply, and those who ignore their safety can produce them more quickly.”

Now let’s compare Apple to Leitz, the company that made Leica cameras. According to a Wikipedia article, at Leitz, progressive measures such as “ Pensions, sick leave, health insurance — all were instituted early on at Leitz, which depended for its work force upon generations of skilled employees.” Further (as I just learned the other day), in the late 1930′s Leica started a project called the “Leica Freedom Train” in which Jewish employees, families, and even some friends of families were “assigned” to foreign countries, ostensibly to sell Leica cameras, but in reality to save them from the steadily increasing persecution which found its tragic culmination in the Holocaust. Leitz was taking enormous risks in doing this, but did it because it was the right thing to do, and because they cared about their employees.

Apple, the way in which you subcontract to arms-length companies to try to maintain plausible deniability regarding how workers are exploited proves to me you are no Leitz, and your products do not deserve the comparison. Shame on you.

I have a number of Apple products, and I feel guilt and conflict about benefiting from the suffering of others. I can take some small satisfaction knowing that all of my vintage film cameras (made mainly in Germany, Japan and the U.S.) were made by workers who we paid a living wage, and whose skill was respected and valued by their employers.