hagerman@friday.DEC (03/22/86)
x
Hey, I'm glad you didn't rip me to shreds on my "don't denigrate
the Leica" stuff. I was riding a flame about four feet long, for
some reason.
Anyway, to prolong the discussion longer than probably needed,
I still think that there are two points here that could be
beat to death a little more.
1. Hand-held exposures at 1/2 second. If the print is going
to be reproduced in a newspaper, obviously there is a big window
for blurriness. For regular prints it seems to me that there
are a couple of ways of looing at it. If the print is to be, say,
and 8x10 then you could reasonably say that the acceptable blurriness
is whatever you can see at that enlargement. That's the argument
that the "never shoot at less than 1/250" people use (e.g. Blaker,
in Field Photography). Or another viewpoint is that the enlargment
will probably only be 3-1/2x5, so you can get away with more, so
"use 1/focal length". I guess it mostly depends on what your idea
of an acceptable print is.
2. Focussing in the dark. I'm a bit suprized to hear you say that
you can focus an SLR as easily as a rangefinder. It's generally
known ("fact", not "opinion"?) that there are two cases where
it's easier to focus a rangefinder.
Namely, in the dark (existing light) and with wide angle lenses.
With an SLR with an f/1.4 lens the image in the viewfinder is
substantially darker than with a rangefinder with a glass window,
essentially, to look through. Lining up two images of a highlight
in a Leica viewfinder is *much* easier than trying to resolve
two images on a ground glass.
And for a wide angle lens, the inherent depth of field simply makes
it harder to focus with an SLR.
But this is all academic anyway, because for all practical purposes a
modern SLR is a better choice than a rangefinder. In sum,
I agree with you and am just pointing out some of this stuff so
that perhaps the masses of naive SLR users out there will understand
that there are alternatives to their electronically
controlled, servomotor focussed, autowind-and-rewind image makers.
Incidently, I have an F3, too.
Doug Hagerman