In discovering William Mortensen's book series on photography I came to appreciate his clarity of thought expressed in his writings.
Reading further in the 1934 Camera Craft publication I stumbled upon the following article. It's written about using a Leica 35mm camera. Up until now I've only seen photos of him using 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 cameras, so his use of 35mm came as something of a surprise to me.
1934 was rather early in the adoption of what they used to call the "miniature camera", so these insights and demonstrations of practical use are quite interesting.
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Most of us will recollect, among the more terrifying experiences of our childhood, the day that we were carefully scrubbed and led to have our pictures taken. Two details usually dominate such remembrances. First, a man who bounded about, dishevelled and distracted, doing strange things and making strange noises. This odd creature we subsequently identified as the photographer. Second, an apparatus slightly smaller than a freight car but much more alarming in appearance, apparently designed by a Spanish Inquisitor out of spare parts of a draw-bridge, which glowered horrifically under a black hood at the far end of the room.
When the owner of a modern miniature instrument compares his compact handful of camera with this medieval monster and realizes that it can do everything that the monster did except frighten children into convulsions, it is obvious to him that, in the material sense, photography is at present making huge advances. Unfortunately many a Leica or Contax owner is failing to take full advantage of the peculiar abilities of his
camera. He seems content to treat it as a sort of super-Kodak for securing super-snap-shots which he steps up into unimaginative enlargements of the drug store type. The miniature camera, of course, admirably fulfills such pedestrian purposes as keeping records of travel and sporting events and Junior with his new bicycle and similar domestic history; but it is not so generally realized that it excells all other types of equipment for photography of the creative, pictorial type.
Some of the advantages of the miniature camera as applied to pictorial work are so
obvious that they need only to be mentioned. Such for example are its cheapness of operation facilitating free experimentation, and its small size which makes it very apt in securing angle shots and in taking prompt advantage of accidentally provided opportunities.
The lens of short focal length (50 mm) that is regularly supplied as stock equipment with both kinds of miniature cameras, is, if properly understood, the type best suited to pictorial purposes. Such a lens has, of course, much greater depth of field than one of the longer focal lengths which are the standard choice of most of the old-line photographers. This increased depth of field has the effect of rendering the subject in terms of flat patterns of light and dark areas instead of in terms of greater and lesser definition.
To be sure, the short focal length produces in certain instances considerable abberation and distortion of drawing. This point have all of us is a favorite with the proponents of long focal lengths. We seen pictures in which feet, protruded toward the camera, take on freakish dimensions, or in which a horse, photographed head-on, dwindles to dwarfish hind-quarters. Such pictures used to be exhibited as demonstrating the faults of a short focal length; rather, they demonstrate faulty arrangement of subject-matter. Slight resourcefulness on the part of the photographer of such awful examples would have enabled him to compose his material into a two-dimensional plane and simultaneously eliminate the abberation and produce a more pleasing pictorial result. The short focal length lens, by forcing its user thus to arrange his material, forces him also to give thought to such primary pictorial considerations as linear patterns and notan values.
I have come to much prefer, for pictorial use, the view finder of the miniature camera to the ground-glass of cameras of the reflex type. The very smallness of the image in the view finder causes one to judge its pictorial values in terms of large planes and broad patterns of light and dark. Indeed it is impossible under normal conditions, to see things in the ground-glass in the two-dimensional aspect they will assume when photographed. For when one closes down the diaphragm to bring the back-ground into focus, the image on the glass becomes too dim and dark to be of any use.
The quality of selectivity, which distinguishes pictorial photography from photography that is merely realistic and fact-recording, is readily achieved with the miniature camera. Of course the very flexibility and portability of the little instrument gives it extreme freedom in the selection of subject-matter and effective angles; but a more significant selection is achieved in the mere process of enlarging the 35 millimeter negative to an 11x14 print. This tremendous amplification emphasises planes and patterns and subordinates details, keeping perfect gradation with no apparent loss in definition. A landscape is seen by the miniature camera, not as a group of contradictorily clamouring details, but as large masses and simple planes as the artist sees it. Similarly a portrait with a miniature camera reveals the structure and dominating characteristics of a face, rather than its lesser details, its textures and its blemishes.
The various procedures of Projection Control— framing, local printing, dodging, distortion, and montage which I have discussed in previous articles, are all applicable to miniature negatives and greatly increase the small camera's scope for selectivity.
Such special processes as the little-understood bromoil transfer and the neglected paper negative are particularly happy mediums for working up the products of the miniature camera. Both are susceptible to a high degree of control and provide a great stimulus to a worker with imagination. In an article to follow, I will consider the advantages of the paper negative to miniature pictorialists.
Most minicam owners nowadays are greatly hampered in getting the best out of their cameras by several technical obsessions that are earnestly fostered by dealers and manufacturers. These obsessions are four in number and are concerned, respectively, with (1) grainlessness, (2) speed, (3) colour correction, and (4) gadgets.
Under the vogue for grainlessness there have been marketed thousands of gallons of developer - some good, some useless, some consisting of old stand-byes in fancy bottles with new labels, and some definitely poisonous, to susceptible individuals. As a matter of fact, grainlessness is not particularly related to extremely modern methods and formulas.
I have, in my files, many ten-year-old negatives that were developed in the tabloid Rytol solution and are nearly devoid of grain. For pictorial use a certain amount of grain is rather an advantage than otherwise, as it produces a vibration that is more effective than a (technically) more perfect print. In making bromoil transfers considerable grain in the matrix is permissible as the graininess of the processes tends to counteract the grain of the original print.
The speed obsession takes on two manifestations: speed and lenses. Instead of working out the possibilities of a lens of moderate aperture, the bedeviled minicam owner sets his ideal at something that looks like a locomotive headlight, and hastily acquires F 2 and F 1.5 and dreamily contemplates the day when he will be able to own F 0.9. Save for very special problems, such stupendous apertures are not of the slightest use to the average worker. Speed is a quality that can be gained only by the loss of other qualities much more important. A lens of F 2 aperture is quite incapable of obtaining the depth of field necessary for pictorial work. Of course such a lens may be closed down till the desired definition is obtained, but the lens in such a case might as well have been F 3.5 in the
first place, thus saving one the embarrassment of a large amount of excess baggage of expensive and un-needed glass. The weight of such lenses out of proportion to the camera, and is apt in my experience, to cause vibration of the tripod. Films have similarly become afflicted by the speed mania. Speed emulsions and super-speed emulsions have made their appearance, and without doubt extra-hyper-ultra-super-speed emulsions are
just around the corner. One five-hundredth of a second on par-speed is film is amply rapid to care for all normal events of man and beast. As in the case of lenses, film emulsions are speeded up only by the sacrifice of desirable qualities. It has been my experience that the super sensitive emulsions invariably produce degraded half-tones with greatly increased grain.
The obsession for colour correction has led some owners of miniature cameras a merry dance of desperate experimentation with strange types of films and with filters of all colours of the rainbow and some new ones. The result of this experimentation has for most workers been very meager, and many of the so-called "successful" prints would have been much better if they had been done on ortho film without filters. Frequently indeed, the distortion of colour values is a pictorial advantage. If one accepts the premise of the creative pictorial worker that the end of photographic art is not fact but the interpretation of fact in terms of the medium, the zeal for colour correction is seen to be of little account. The conversion of colour into a scale of grays is a matter of accepted
convention, and the change of the relative position of some colours on this scale does not alter the convention.
The obsession for gadgets is perhaps the most prevalent of all the minicam owner. There are adjuncts, false ideals that afflict the average appurtenances and attachments without number that monthly sing their siren songs from the adverising pages of photographic journals. Some of it is special equipment designed for specialists, but a great deal of it
is gadgets, dingueses, thingumies and doodads of a fantastic degree of uselessness that seems to have been conceived in the fertile brain of Rube Goldberg. The special equipment is undoubtedly well adapted to its purpose, but for the average amateur to stock up on boxes of lenses and racks of filters is not only unnecessary but a distinct hinderance to his advancement in his craft. Many a miniature camera is now lying discarded on the shelf because its disgusted owner was not able to make his ponderous and overwhelming equipment do what it was supposed to do. To try to improve one's pictures by buying complicated equipment is like studying differential calculus in order to learn to add two plus two. Many an enthusiast has sunk a thousand dollars in equipment without bothering to learn how to make a correct exposure or how to correctly develop it.
In speaking of the vanity of gadgets pioneer struggler with miniature cameras I do not speak lightly. As a pioneer struggler with his miniature camera who has sowed his wild para-phenylenediamine and wasted his substance in riotous experimentation, I speak from the heart when I say that gadgets are the prime time-wasters and energy-disperser. There was a time when I too lent an ear to their seductions and tried them all. Every dingus that could be hung onto a camera, every foul brew that could be used for developing, every paper, every film that the market offered— with these I wasted my youth. My once great beauty, alas, has faded, my back is bowed and my feet are flat; but I have learned to abjure gadgets and haphazard experimentation.
This attitude does not imply any blindness to genuine advances in methods or equipment. But such significant advances always so obviously and unmistakably fill a definite need that there is no possibility of confusing them with the common run of ingeniously useless inventions. Such an advance was made recently, for example, in developing the automatic focusing device for the projection enlarger. In general the use of new things is prone to run ahead of the proper understanding of them. Many a minicam owner would do well to leave technique to the technicians and put his camera to the almost forgotten task of taking pictures.
In equipment of the extremest simplicity lies the best hope for success in pictorial work with the miniature camera. Such a list of essentials as the one that I shall presently suggest will, I fear, seem insultingly meager to the minicamist who is prone to console himself for lack of results by treating himself to fresh equipment, after the manner of the well-known feminine habit of buying a new hat to rouse the drooping spirit. The list,
small as it is, is adequate for all purposes, saving only the most specialized, and one could easily spend several life-times in learning to use it properly.
Here then is the list:
Miniature camera with 50 mm lens.
Cable release.
K2. filter.
A hood.
6 magazines.
Green viewing glass.
Vertical enlarger with good lens and condensers.
This equipment is used in connection with the following materials and formulas.
Eastman Panatomic film.
Defender Medium weight white rough matt paper.
For developing, D76 (Eastman) or a similar boric acid-borax formula.
Equipment of value only as it is used, and nothing is included above that is not immediately useful in the making of pictures. Abjured along with hampering excess of equipment are all faddish procedures relating to temperature, rinsing, washing, drying, etc., over which minicam owners have spent tormented days and sleepless nights. Much more important are skilful handling, clean apparatus, fresh chemicals, and good sense.
As I have claimed such pictorial advantages for the miniature camera, I have chosen for demonstration a pictorial subject involving an extreme degree of romanticism and illusionary quality. "Indian Serenade" despite its delicately lyric vein and exotic atmosphere, is assembled from quite common and ordinary materials. The picture was taken indoors, and the lengthy perspective was not greater than twenty feet.
The material components of the picture were the following:
A white wall.
A dish pan of water.
A cement floor.
Two people.
A baby spot.
Some artificial flowers.
Gleanings from rag bags.
Eight yards of pink gauze of two shades.
Two grass mats.
Prunings of a rose bush.
A musical instrument.
The picture is arranged in a series of parallel planes. The first and most distant plane is comprised of the sky and mountains, the second, of the tree and figures, the third, of the foreground. Thus a clear sense of recession and space is given, without loss of two dimensional quality.
A rough pencil sketch served to establish the main planes of the picture, to give an approximate idea of the linear and notan pattern, and to indicate framing and relating of the figures to the picture-space. I find that use of such a preliminary sketch is indispensible, as it compells one to visualize in advance and obviates aimless experimentation at the time of shooting.
The set was carefully arranged before hand. Directly in front of the white background was laid the pink gauze, bunched up to represent the mountains, the paler colour serving for the distant ranges and the darker for the nearer ones. Five feet from the background the grass mats were put down, the flowers sprinkled about, and the tree suspended from the ceiling Then for about fifteen feet in front of the grass mats, the cement floor was well wet down, laying in the water in streaks parallel to the background. The costumes consist simply of a few bits of cloth pinned about and draped. The materials were selected for their photographic and notan qualities rather than their intrinsic beauty, taking due care, of course, to avoid extreme contrasts of black and white. Authenticity was not aimed at; rather the endeavor was to suggest the spirit of the oriental garb with as few elements as possible.
In arranging the models it was found necessary to seat the man on a small stool in order to create the desired pyramidal composition. The tree was shifted somewhat and a few twigs lopped in order to bring it into more harmonious conformation with the figures. The flowers were adjusted until they furnished effectively placed accents.
The white background was well illuminated, and from another source characters were given a flat front light. For the moon a "baby Klieg" was used, which with the aid of a cardboard mask was made to cast a spot of intense illumination on the background. To avoid hitting the characters with the shaft of light it was necessary to place the Klieg to
one side. This of course produced an oval moon until the hole in the cardboard was altered to correct this distortion.
Finally, the whole set-up was studied through a blue glass, observing the notan pattern, noting and correcting a few bad contrasts. The moon was moved to its most effective placement relative to the heads, and a last slight rearrangement was made of the foliage.
The camera was placed on a low tripod, about five inches from the floor and twenty feet from the back wall. This low position of the camera was chosen to get a low horizon line, giving dominance to the figures and making it easier to build a pyramidal composition. It also secures the best reflections from the wet floor. A large number of exposures were taken, about three rolls in all, with slight variations in exposure, and gradual and slight changes in the inter-relationship of the smaller elements of the picture.
Enlarged proofs about 3 by 4 inches were made of all the perfect negatives in the three rolls. Then followed a long process of elimination and selection on the basis of two standards subject interest and notan pattern. When the group was reduced to two or three the final choice was on a basis of subject interest. Thus three standards of choice entered into this stage of the picture.
1. Negative quality.
2. Notan pattern.
3. Subject interest.
A considerable amount of Projection Control was employed in making the final print. Much care was used in framing so as to secure the proper relationship of the figures to the picture space. Dodging with the finger tip was resorted to in order to liqhten the moon and darken the tone of the rest of the picture. Through dodging also were secured the deep tones in the upper corners of the picture.
( To be continued )
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