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 p.89 #8 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
Part 1:
denoir wrote:
The reason why I'm skeptical of the rendering style (or lack thereof) is that I look at a photograph the way I look at a painting. It's not about the subject but about the image. The subject is a part of it but so is the rendering (colors, bokeh etc). A van Gogh is interesting largely because of the impressionist rendering style (  ) and not because the focus of the painting is on an interesting subject.
I fully agree with Garry Winogrand's philosophy: "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."
To me the photograph itself is the interesting part and not the subject. An interesting subject can make a photograph better but for me it is still all about the image. Subject, composition, colors, bokeh etc are all constituent parts....Show more →
Part 2:
denoir wrote:
The ironic thing though is that by its insistence on being as neutral as Swiss foreign policy Leica has managed to partially undo the "subject first" ideal. When I look at a Leica shot I'm acutely aware that I'm not looking at the subject but at a photo of the subject. Zeiss on the other hand provides images that look more like you are looking at the real thing and not a photograph of the real thing.
Unless I am misunderstand something, you use my statement "the subject is the subject, not the photo", in two different ways. What I meant is that the Leica is more suited to neutrally rendering a given object, letting us see it on its own, isolated from the background, whereas the Zeiss adds a very crafted look to a photo, like Kodachrome, making the photo into an object of its own, including interesting background rendered in a characteristic way.
In part 1 you referred to Van Gogh, and in exactly the way I meant it. Van Gogh took simple, often uninteresting scenes, and painted them in an interesting way. Van Gogh may have preferred Zeiss lenses.
However in part 2, you say that the Zeiss is neutral and lets you see the photo exactly as you see the world, whereas the Leica robs it of something, leaving less. Well, both parts can't be true.
I think the key difference here is that the Zeiss does add something which the Leica doesn't add, but that in photos this addition is necessary to fake some of the depth information which is there in the real world, but is not there in a 2D image. The Zeiss adds, or enhances, 3D cues, to partially restore something which by necessity is lost, through heightened contrast, some kind of edge effect, more saturated colours, whathaveyou. The Leica just leaves it.
Some prefer one, some the other. The Leica is more documentary, the Zeiss is more pictorialist. I like both very much, but for different things.
Your style is very well suited to the Zeiss lenses. You mostly seem to photograph on overcast days, just walking around. The Canon delivers flat files out of the box, and needs processing to get the best out of them (at least with Canon or other lenses). The Zeiss counteracts that, by delivering sharper-looking, more punchy files. Hence you need to do less processing with a Zeiss (on a Canon, and similarly on a Nikon).
For different ways of making photos, like dedicated travel photographers, portraitists, or anyone else working in a single, dedicated style, one or the other will be preferable. For my Berlin Cemeteries long-term project, the Zeiss look is right. For my travel photography (and for my back!), the Leica is better.
Edited on Nov 07, 2010 at 03:54 PM · View previous versions
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