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rico wrote:
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Regarding light metering, Desmolicious mentioned external meters for the M. The Leica offering (MR) connects to the speed dial and allows you to set the shutter speed while taking the reading—not science fiction! For myself, Sunny 16 and a few rules-of-thumb take care of exposure. Once upon a time, everyone and their granny set exposures manually using the table printed by Kodak on every carton of film. Has humanity regressed so badly mentally? You don't have to answer that question!
Since we're talking about Leica cameras and the Sunny 16 Rule, in an oral history interview for the Smithsonian, Ben Shahn recalled the photography lesson he received from Walker Evans.
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BEN SHAHN: Well, I told you I shared a studio with Walker Evans before any of this came along. I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate... So I asked my brother to buy me a camera because I didn't have the money for it. He bought me a Leica and I promised him - this was kind of a bold promise - I said, "If I don't get in a magazine off the first roll you can have your camera back." I did get into a magazine, a theater magazine at the time. Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited. I must tell you this because I thought I could always ask Walker to show me what to do and so on, and it was a kind of an indefinite promise that he made. One day when he was going off to the South Seas and I was helping him into his taxi, I said, "Walker, remember your promise to show me how to photograph?" He says, "Well, it 's very easy, Ben. F9 on the sunny side of the street, F4.5 on the shady side of the street. For a twentieth of a second hold your camera steady," and that was all. This was the only lesson I ever had.
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1/20 at f/9 on the sunny side of the street would mean that the film they were using was about ISO 6. Walker Evans went to the South Seas in 1932, the same year that the Leica II was introduced. Ben Shahn mentions later in the interview that his brother bought him a second-hand camera for about $25 so perhaps he had a Leica I.
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