Genealogy

 Both of these cameras have a common ancestor, the German Zeiss Ikon Contax.  That fact turned out to be useful when the film advance on my recently acquired Nikon S locked up.

 

 

Since the Nikon S and the Kiev IIa both have Contax lens mounts, I was able switch lenses, putting the Nikkor-S 1.4/50mm on the Soviet-era Kiev IIa. As a test of the compatibility I loaded the Kiev with some expired Plus-X and took it to Old Town.
 

The Plus-X was from 2011 and had been in my refrigerator for about five years.  I thought at first that I would give it an extra stop of exposure to compensate for the film's age.  However, Bob Eggers told me he had better luck just shooting old Plus-X at box speed and developing longer than fresh film would require.  So I took his advice and processed in HC-110b for seven minutes at 20 °C.

redoing the past

Midway through the 1960s I was looking for a career change. I enrolled in a commercial photo course given by a school in New York's financial district.  Toward the end of the program, I bought a boxy case to hold the matted photos I had made during the course, and I took that on job interviews.  I did get a few job offers, but the ultimate outcome of the undertaking was that I decided I did not really have much of an aptitude for a career in photography.  I did learn some useful things about photography, however, and I liked the pictures I made from that time.The negatives from my photo school days were all lost over the years, but I did hold onto my portfolio case with some of the mounted prints I had kept.

I was nearly ready for retirement when I finally got back to doing some more photography.  I shared some of my early digital work on Photo.net and I decided to make some copies of my New York pictures to put on line as well.  At the time I did not want to cut up the big matte boards on which I had mounted several projects, so I just made digital pictures of the individual photos using a primitive Epson digital camera.  That seemed a good idea at the time, but looking at the pictures on Photo.net years later I saw that the images were very small and of rather poor quality.

I decided that I would like to have some better digital copies of my early work, so I set aside my nostalgic qualms about cutting up the mattes so that I could copy the individual prints on my Epson flatbed scanner.  The outcome would have been better had I held onto the original negatives, but the new digital copies are quite a bit better than the ones I made originally with the little digital camera.  The photos in this series were made with a Nikon S rangefinder camera.  The film was likely Tri-X.  The pictures were shot over a period of several weeks on the streets of New York's Chinese community.

DAY

NIGHT

Kodak Retina II (Type 014)

In the first half of the Twentieth Century, Kodak was to cameras what Microsoft was to computers in the second half. Both companies achieved dominant market presence partly by snapping up smaller rivals with innovative products. One of Kodak's early coups was the acquisition of the Nagel Company in Stuttgart which had just developed the daylight loading 35mm film cartridge and cameras to use it. What followed was a series of finely crafted compact 35mm folders marketed as the Kodak Retina.

My Retina II is a post-war model with a 50mm f2 coated Schneider-Kreuznach Retina-Xenon lens. Speeds on the Compur-Rapid shutter range from 1-1/500 second; it is very smooth in operation and nearly noiseless. The size of the camera is only fractionally larger than the contemporary pocket cameras like the Vito II and the Ikonta 35, but this Retina has a coupled rangefinder which corrects for parallax.

In operation, the Retina II is a little slow to use because it had a knob film advance and manually cocked shutter, unlike later models which featured lever winders with automatic shutter cocking. The swing-to-the-side door on the Retina II, as with all the retina folders, interferes slightly with the right hand grip and makes single handed operation nearly impossible. With the lens aperture scale inscribed on the bottom half of the lens, the camera needs to be tilted back 90 degrees to see and set the f stops. None of these features turns out to be very significant once one becomes fully accustomed to using the camera, and any shortcomings really pale in comparison to the outstanding images which are produced by this precision instrument.

I was at first disappointed in the performance of my Retina II because it had an intermittent severe light leak. The camera back made a little popping noise when pushed on; assuming that was implicated in the leak, I packed light seal strips all around the perimeter of the back. That got rid of the slight movement and pop in the back, but not the leak. The only possibility that seemed to be left was a problem with the bellows. In fact, when I extended the lens and looked very carefully, I found that one side of the bellows was completely detached from the inside of the film compartment. I daubed on some Pliobond glue and closed up the camera to let the joint dry overnight. The light leak was gone after that. However, my inexpert repair skills left a slightly bumpy seam at the base of the bellows which can be seen along the left border of my images when I print the full frame including a small portion of the surrounding film -- I kind of like it.

Most of the shooting I have done so far with the Retina II has been on city streets. Knowing I was working with a reliable, quality camera having a lens of extraordinarily high resolution gave me a lot of pleasure and self confidence in the shooting experience, whether I was taking quick hip shots or making more carefully composed compositions of architectural detail. The Retina II is not as thoroughly documented on the the Internet as are later models, but it can be acquired for less than what you will pay for the later IIa and IIc models and the image quality is every bit as good.

Some pictures from my Retina II:

The Retina II Manual is at the Butkus site.

The Light Gatherer

I've been following the photographic artistry of Norman Montifar for quite a while at Flickr and on his blog.  Now he has produced his first book, self published through Blurb and entitled The Light Gatherer.

Most of Norman's pictures are made in and around New York City.  Quite a few might be classed as street photography, but his scope is really wider than that.  As he says in the book's introduction:  "...It's an exercise in observation, studies of the nuances of natural light and capturing the unexpected when subjects turn up in totally unpredictably interesting ways."

All of Norman's work shows a great eye for composition, whether his subject is a pattern of shadows on a city street, or people playing, working or just being themselves in their neighborhoods.  Throughout this urban tapestry, Norman always seems to find and portray a serenity that many other photographers of the City have missed. There is also a good deal of gentle humor to be found in his pictures of New Yorkers, but never of a kind that his subjects would find objectionable.

I am also particularly impressed with the level of craftsmanship which Norman brings to his work.  Meticulous attention to the details of the craft is present in every picture in the book; it is a work that can instruct and inspire anyone  regardless of experience and skill levels in photography.

Norman and I have exchanged a couple old cameras in the past, and I know from correspondence that the majority of the work in this book was done on film.  Pro that he is, though, if digital suits his purpose that is what he will use, but you will see none of the over-saturated digital gimmickry here that so clutters today's visual experience for all of us.  What you will find is classical technique attuned to the subtle rhythms of daily life in the City.

Street Photographer

I only recently came across the street portraits of Sheldon Levy on Flickr.  I'm obviously late to the game because he's posted 114 pages of photos spanning five years on the site.  It is worthwhile to start from the beginning of his photo stream to see how his style has developed over the years.  What you see is that he did more color in the past, and that he uses it very sparingly now.  He has also gotten much closer to his subjects, cropping out everything that is extraneous to the moment.  I would give a lot to watch this guy work the street for a couple hours.

Combating Entropy

I have added a new feature to my web site home page to facilitate showing some of my old camera work. Down in the lower right corner will be found a link called "Sunday Slideshow". I have stored my photos over the years on several photo sharing sites, and all offer an easy way to generate slide shows from directories of images. For this inaugural Sunday, I have turned the big selector knob of my webmaster control panel to the mid-1960s to display one of my personal favorite photo-essays, Chinatown Hip Shots.
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Nikon S -- Wikipedia

The NYC Chinatown essay was shot on a Nikon S that I bought in the '60s.  I sold it soon after shooting those pictures, much to my regret ever since.

The Vivian Maier Photographs

The photography of Vivian Maier was recently discovered by John Maloof who purchased an archive of her photographs at an antiques auction in Chicago. Maloof has been showing examples from the archive on a blog where he reports that:

"Out of the 30-40,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 10-15,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960's-1970's. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I still have about 600 rolls yet to develop..."

Judging by the photos that Maloof has published so far on his blog, Maier was one of the very best photographers of the Twentieth Century. The photographer's skill at capturing life on the street in Chicago has been recognized widely already on line. The question now is: What will happen with the Vivian Maier archive? One of the determinants in providing an answer to that question will be the establishment of a monetary value of the collection.

In my own mind, there is no question about the world-class quality of the work, but the market for photo art is more complicated than a simple esthetic judgment. Candid street photography does not currently attract a lot of market-place interest as a genre. The classic practitioners like Cartier-Bresson have a secure place in the art's history, but later practitioners are less noticed, and there are no doubt many fine street shooters working today who, like Maier, will never make a living from their art.

The negatives and undeveloped film currently in Maloof's possession are an example of another value issue. There is a vigorous market for found photos. Collectors avidly seek anonymously produced photographs in yard sales and junk stores which are unusual because of their esthetic qualities which may include bizarreness, humor or special subject matter; often the qualities for which such photos are recognized were quite likely unintended by the anonymous photographer. Found negatives and undeveloped found negatives are a different story; at present there seems to be virtually no market for such images. A possible reason for that is that found photographic prints are one-of-a-kind items, while negatives are infinitely reproducible. Additionally, in the case of a deceased photographer, the manner of reproduction of images at a later time affects collector value. A Weston photograph printed by a Weston family member or some other esteemed darkroom technician will have added value provided partly by clear provenance.

Another wrinkle in assessing value in the case of undeveloped exposed film images, known as latent images, is that the final resultant images are the product to a large extent of serendipity. Undeveloped silver-based photographic film inevitably deteriorates over time -- the more time, the more deterioration. The rate of deterioration depends on many factors including storage conditions and film composition. Even under ideal storage conditions there will be image degradation due to the constant bombardment of the film over time by background cosmic radiation.

And then, there is the issue of the skill of the person who develops the latent images. Coaxing quality images from old stips of found film requires very specialized skills and extraordinary dedication to the challenge. Most found film when processed reveals nothing, or images of little quality or interest. People who succeed in rescuing old latent images must have a fanatical devotion to the practice of a craft in which failure is a regular, unavoidable component. It is encouraging to see that Maloof is a skilled photogapher himself, but it is not apparent at this time if he has developed the skills needed to get the best possible images from the unprocessed rolls of film in the Maier archive. Even if Maloof has acquired those skills, it must also be recognized that applying them will result in images that are a collaboration between the film developer and the deceased photographer.

Maloof's handling of his extraordinary acquisiton of the Maier archive to date is very encouraging. He has posted the images publically on his blog accompanied by comments that indicate a genuine appreciation of the importance of the photographs. I am especially pleased to see that he has chosen to display examples of the work at a size that permits on line viewers to appreciate the photographer's artistic and technical mastery. My hope would be that the next steps would be to extend those good intentions further through well mounted exhibits and publication, perhaps by one of the major players such as Taschen. As to the ultimate disposition of the archive, we will have to hope that it ends up in the hands of some institution that will honor the priorities of preservation and public access.