Dan's Cameras Part Nine - False Starts
I eventually got to the point where I decided I wanted to start photographing again. More than anything, I’d missed the process of photographing, being out in nature and seeing things anew, the craft of making a powerful image. But I realized that I wouldn’t have the space or energy to continue working in 4x5, and hauling all that gear around seemed no longer reasonable. And 35mm was, well, 35mm. It doesn’t really give one a sense of craft . . . which on reflection now seems silly, but nevertheless that is what I felt at the time.I started looking around at different cameras and realized that I might be able to get that same feeling of craft with a medium format camera. The Hasselblad was certainly a fine machine, but it was that damned square format so I started looking at what is known as 645 cameras. Basically, they produce an image 6 cm by 4.5 cm. I ultimately decided upon a highly recommended camera (Michael Reichmann on Luminous Landscape recently said it’s still the medium format system that felt most natural for him to use of all the ones he’s tried), the Contax 645.
Contax
It not only is a beautiful machine, but it has fully manual controls in a way that required absolutely no additional learning on my part. Best of all, it used Carl Zeiss lenses that are, well, simply superb! Although quite heavy, the lenses are incredibly sharp and well built. And while the lenses can be used in an autofocus mode, I’ve never used them that way. The manual mode of focusing is smooth as silk and to look at the image in the viewfinder is stunning. It’s large, bright and easy to focus!
Thing is though, it’s a film camera. I thought it would be easier to process medium format stuff and to get it scanned, but that did not work out as well as I’d hoped. So I still wound up with longer periods between when I shot and when I saw images than I’d hoped for and I was simply out of practice. For the most part, I was less impressed with my photographs.
Then I heard about a new digital format that came out that folks were saying was very very good and fairly inexpensive. Since a full-size digital back for the Contax would run me $15,000 - $45,000, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try the new micro-four-thirds format. I settled on a Panasonic and a couple of lenses that weren’t too expensive in an effort to see how good digital had become and to be able to shoot lots of images to get back into photo shape.
Lumix G1
It was a decent camera, even good in some situations, but I quickly ran into limitations that really disturbed me. Most significantly was one of dynamic range - the range between dark values and high values in an image that the camera’s sensor can record detail. Back then even the best DSLRs only had a dynamic range of about 6 stops; the Panasonic had about 5. That was similar to color slide film. I was used to working with black and white film that could produce a 10 stop range. I thought digital had gotten much better, but it hadn’t. I also never got used to adjusting my aperture and shutter speed with dials on the front and rear of the camera. Whenever I picked up my 35mm gear and even my 4x5, my hands went immediately to the right place - aperture on the lens, shutter speed on top. That was why, in part, the Contax felt so right - it catered to my muscle memory.
I guess my expectations were a bit too high for the Lumix, so I started moderating what I would expect it to be able to do and focused on trying to create better compositions and simply accepting that I may not always be able to capture what I was hoping for. On a few occasions though, it did great and I have a few images that I think are very good I made with it. And it certainly gave me a flexibility and quality of photographs of Holden that I hadn’t had previously. And the reality was I wasn’t seeing things well at all. It wasn’t just with the Contax, but compositionally with the Lumix I wasn’t satisfied. I was simply out of practice and the only way to fix that is to keep on photographing and photographing.
My way back to quality photographs was going to take a while and a lot of effort. So I buckled down and kept trying to go out and make decent images. It was going to take some time.