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EOS 5d accessories

I’ve got two items specific to the Canon EOS 5d (not the 5d mk II) and I no longer own a 5d.

Item one: a Really Right stuff B5D-L quick release L plate (see product page on Really Right Stuff website)

Item two: a 3rd party 1500 mAh battery pack for the 5D.

The QR L plate new from RRS is $140. One sold, used, on Ebay for $75 (see listing)

$50 + shipping for both.

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M9 plans

Ed Richards asks/comments:

I am curious about what you have in mind for the M9. What you have been posting for the last few years – since you went digital – does not strike me as M9 material. In fact, my assumption, based partially on my own rangefinder shooting a long time ago, is that the Lecia is a people camera first and last. (Maybe a dog camera as well, but you could not prove that be.)

Ah. Yes. People camera first and last. Yes, that’s the perception, I agree. Rangefinders have a reputation as the ideal ’street photography’ camera. Street photography is, I guess, primarily about photographs of people. And, as Ed observe rather indirectly, I don’t do much photography of people. That’s because, by design, I don’t spend a great deal of time around people, and as a general rule it’s hard to photograph things you don’t spend much time around.

Some of that is, perhaps, an error of Callahanian slant; I have no desire to photograph people, but I’d like a camera with which I might photograph my wife. Or, as Ed points out, my dog. Specifically, I don’t photograph people I don’t know. And street photography is about photographing people you don’t know.

The other part of street photography is the streety bit. Again, by design, my life does not feature a lot of contact with streets. Where I live, we don’t call them streets, we call them roads.

Here’s the thing. Street photography is about making photographs in a situation where you want the camera small and light, because you have to carry it around for long periods. You want it unobtrusive, because you want to avoid the observer effect. And, because the scenes you’re trying to photograph are not just ephemeral, but fleeting and fugitive, you want a camera that handles well, can be operated quickly and with little fuss, and is, above all, responsive.

And by responsive, I mean “when you press the button, the shutter opens”. So you don’t want a camera that, when you press the button, the camera engages in lengthy deliberations about focus and exposure before deigning to open the shutter. You don’t want a camera that, having examined the focus situation, decides the lens is not in focus and refuses to let the shutter open. What you want is “when I press the button, the shutter opens RIGHT NOW”.

And this is because street photographers don’t stand around, camera viewfinder to eye, for hours on end waiting for the arrangement to be right, whereupon they open the shutter. They amble about, and when some quiet inner voice prompts them, they lift the camera to the eye, make any final femtosecond adjustments to focus or exposure, and let the shutter go. And then they go back to letting the camera hang by the strap, or hold it in their hand at their side. Street photography is a subset of what I’ll call ‘impulsive photography’, or maybe ‘intuitive photography’.

Impulsive photography is about feeling the impulse to make a photograph, and having the time needed to get to the point where the shutter opens be very short. There’s no time to get your mind in there, jiggering things up. Now, go read this blog post I wrote back in November 2009.

And that’s why I want an M9. For me, Leica M rangefinders are very much thoughtless cameras. And they are ideal for impulsive photography, even if you are nowhere close to a street filled with people you don’t know.

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Leica M9

Paul Lester says “I’m interested to find out what Paul Butzi’s account of the M9 will be as he is waiting for his to come in. He usually has a pretty straight-forward, unbiased opinion and doesn’t hold back in his assessment of the tools that he uses.” Paul also links to this open letter by Michael Reichmann, about what Leica ought to do to the M9 to produce a really good camera.

I’m eagerly looking forward to getting my hands on the Leica M9. So, to throw a bone to all three of the people who might be interested in my evolving view of the M9, I’ll get started telling my story now, before I actually have an M9 in my hands on a permanent basis.

To begin with, this purchase doesn’t mark my entry into the world of Leica M photography. Amongst the huge pile of idle photographic gear that I sold to generate the cash for the M9 purchase were two M6 bodies, heavily used. And by heavily used, I mean heavily. For a surprisingly long period I carried an M6 with me pretty much everywhere I went, and I made a lot of photographs with those two bodies. Now, for different people “a lot of photographs” means different things. So, let me put it this way: at the peak of my Leica m6 activity, I was exposing 5-10 36 exposure rolls of TMY or TMZ per week, and the restraint on that volume was not the camera or my willingness to make more photographs but my inability to come up with a workflow that let me handle all the exposures.

In other words, I made a lot of photos with those two M6 bodies. Along the way, I discovered that the M cameras existed in the form they did (and do now) because they are very, very good for the sort of thing they’re good for, and they’re not very good at everything else. That is, if the photography you are doing is the sort for which the M6 (or, I hope, the M9) is suited, then no other camera even approaches the utility of the M6. And if you’re doing any other sort of photography, the M6 will likely be a frustrating, irritating set of limitations that will tempt you to hurl the camera into the nearest deep body of water.

Here’s what makes the M6 so good at what it does: it has the following controls: a film speed setting, a shutter speed setting, viewfinder frame selector, and a cocking lever to cock the shutter and advance the film. There’s a rangefinder, which lets you adjust the focus, and there’s a built in light meter which measures light reflected off the shutter curtain and helps you adjust exposure. Aperture and focus are done by the lens. The rangefinder is built into the viewfinder, which has frame lines that show the framing for various focal lengths.

In actual use, that boils down to : film speed, shutter speed, aperture, focus, shutter. That’s it. There’s nothing to play with: no multiple metering modes. No depth of field preview, no autofocus with multiple modes and predictive tracking. For a camera that uses interchangeable lenses, the M6 (and by extension, the M9) is minimalist. And, for the people who find that helpful, that’s a very good thing. You do not spend much time showing off the capabilities of your M camera to a friend, because it only takes about ten seconds. You do not spend time memorizing how to activate the various features of the M6, because there aren’t any. What you do with an M6 is make photographs.

And the M6 is/was a camera that was, although somewhat dorky looking, highly refined ergonomically. It fits in my hands just right. It weighs just the right amount. The lenses are small and light, and typically quite fast. Learning to use an M6 doesn’t take long, although focusing with a rangefinder is a skill that is enhanced by practice.

And the reason I want an M9 is this: I recently held a friend’s M9 in my hands, examining it. I looked up, saw a nice expression on my friend’s face, and noticed the way he was aligned against the background. And without thinking about it at all, l lifted the camera to my eye, adjusted the aperture, tweaked the focus, and pressed the shutter release, all in one motion. What happened? The shutter didn’t fire, because the camera was off. And my M6 reflexes kicked in – the reason an M6 shutter doesn’t fire is because the shutter isn’t cocked – and my thumb reflexively moved as if to cock the shutter and advance the film. That’s not magic, that’s the result the M9 feeling like an M6 in my hands, and of running so much film through an M6 that all my interactions with the camera are governed by neural pathways worn smooth and deep with repeated use. The significance of this silly mistake was not that the M9 is rather a lot like an M6 except you can turn it off; the significance is that so much of the M9 is identical to the M6 that when I’m holding it, all of the habits and behaviors I built up with the M6 are triggered without any conscious thought.

And, for the photography I want to do with the M9, that’s a good thing. Or at least, I’m betting it is.

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iPad

A long time ago, a lot of photographers had slide viewers – little devices that either illuminated 35mm slides so you could view them through a large magnifier, or which projected the slides on a small screen for viewing.

Amidst all the furor about whether the iPad is genius or stupidity, I can’t help looking at the specs and photos of it and thinking that in many ways it’s clearly a step forward as a destination for photo books. Looking at one of my portfolio PDFs on it would be nearly ideal; you could hold it in your lap, the screen is surely quite good and about the right size for viewing while sitting in a comfy chair, etc.

Sort of a post-Kindle device.

Cameras

A while back I read on Paul Lester’s blog about the cameras we’ve used. I thought I’d make a list. I’ve probably left something out, but here’s what I can remember.

• Agfa 6×7 folder
• Kodak Instamatic 110 camera
• Pentax H1a and Spotmatic (actually belonged to my dad)
• Minolta Autocord (also belonged to my dad, but I have it now)
• a Pentax point and shoot 35mm autofocus camera (can’t remember the model)
• Canon EOS Elan
• Canon A2e
• Olympus Stylus
• Zone VI field camera (borrowed from my friend Bryan)
• Wisner 4×5 Technical Field
• Linhof Technikardan 45s **
• Olympus C-2000z (my first digital camera)
• Leica M6
• Minolta dImage X (an experiment in very small cameras)
• Canon a95
• Canon EOS 5d (my first digital SLR)
• Canon G9 **
• Canon EOS 5d mk II **

What’s striking to me is the cameras I remember really well.
I can remember the 6×7 folder as if I still had it in my hands, although it was given to me when I was very young and I couldn’t possibly have made very many photographs with it. I remember wanting to take a photo of a duck, and my dad warned me that in the photo the duck would be very small. In my mind, the duck was big and important, and then in the photo it was small and distant, and I remember quite distinctly looking at the photo and being disappointed but also thinking that perhaps cameras didn’t see quite the way people did, and wasn’t that interesting?
More on cameras later, perhaps.