Mylos

If you read the Photo.net Leica forum, it’s striking to see how many people are trying to sell off their Leica gear, some of them apparently to finance a digital SLR purchase. I come from the opposite direction, but an interesting phenomenon to be sure. The Leica has taken the status of a fetish among certain photo snobs, what with all the special collector editions and all, and one would think it would be immune to purely practical considerations… Or maybe some people anticipate the resale value of these fine cameras will fall as photography goes digital and are trying to realize it now.

A wacko sect called the Raëlians claimed it has successfully cloned a human being. When I was an undergraduate in Paris, I saw some posters of the then nascent sect, with such fascinating captions as “Raël – the stars’ messenger” and such amazing feats of circular reasoning as “If Raël is not a major prophet, the equal of Christ, Muhammad or Buddha, his revelation is false. That is impossible.” Poking fun at them used to provide us with hours of entertainment in our dorm (granted, we were easily amused).

This isn’t amusing any more. While these people are not homicidal maniacs like the Aum Shinrikyo sect (which launched Sarin nerve gas attacks against the Tokyo subway), they must be stopped, and a comprehensive, global ban on reproductive cloning instated by the United Nations.

Galen Rowell

Sierra Club, ISBN: 0871563673 Publisher, Buy online

Galen Rowell was a world-class mountaineer and photographer. He passed away with his wife in an airplane crash on August 11, 2002.

He was a master of color landscapes and had the knack of catching unique combinations of light in the memorable photos that can be seen in his Mountain Light Gallery. Interestingly, he eschewed the large format cameras used by Ansel Adams and used exclusively 35mm cameras from Nikon (thus thoroughly debunking the orthodoxy that 35mm cannot be used for serious landscape photography).

In this book, Rowell lays out his relation to mountains, his artistic vision and his photographic techniques, in an engaging and lively style alternating between theoretical text and more illustrative intermezzos with detailed descriptions of the story behind each image (reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. Like Ansel Adams, he was a member of the Sierra Club, but ecological preoccupations are woven subtly in the text. He shows a photo taken near a 4900 year old bristlecone pine that was felled by a botanist who couldn’t be troubled to special-order a core sampling borer from Switzerland.

The photos in the book are gorgeous, but this is no mere coffee-table book (it is too affordable to be one, for starters). All in all, I believe this book is a must-read for anyone interested in landscape photography, even if you are not into the strenuous physical style he favored.

I saw this movie in the early hours of this morning, and was unfortunately disappointed. While the photography, acting, special effects and narrative are top-rate, Peter Jackson has taken far more liberties with the book than in the first episode. This actually impairs the narrative. Here are some of the most important examples i can point out:

• Theoden is portrayed as indecisive, defensive and defeatist. This is completely at odds with the book after Wormtongue is exposed.
• Similarly, the Rohirrim are portrayed as a small band of despondent civilians, almost a rout, and not as a proud warrior nation scrambling to muster and regroup under the newly reestablished leadership of its king and heir.
• Eomer is shown as banished, not merely in disfavor, and is absent from most of the battle of Helm’s deep (apart from appearing as a contrived deus ex machina where in the book Huorns led by the Ents mop up the bulk of the orcs). The friendship between Eomer and Aragorn is not given any development in the movie, when in the book it is far more important than Eowyn’s infatuation with Aragorn.
• Faramir character is shown in an unflattering light, in complete contradiction to Tolkien. In the book, he nobly resists Boromir’s fate and assists Frodo in spite of his misgivings on Cirith Ungol, while in the movie he forcibly takes Frodo towards Minas Tirith.
• In the book, the elves are almost completely absent from direct military confrontation (apart from Elladan and Elrohir, who are not at all represented in the movie). In the movie, a contingent from Rivendell (incongruously led by a galadhrim) assists in the defense of Helm’s deep. The elves’ ambivalent attitude to the War of the Ring is completely misrepresented.
• The interaction between Saruman and Sauron is completely trivialized as a simple allegiance, when in the book Sauron manipulates Saruman, who has his own agenda with the ring. The dissensions between the Uruk-Hai of Isengard and the Orcs of Mordor in the band that captured Merry and Pippin are portrayed as simply a matter of eating the captives or not, when in the book there are complex political influence games between races of orcs.
• In the movie, Treebeard is blissfully unaware of Saruman’s wanton destruction of trees until Pippin rubs his nose in it. In the book, he is quite aware, but must carefuly consider that striking back could lead to the wholesale eradication of the ents.
• Last but not least, the final charge by Eomer’s cavalry off sheer cliffs into the tight pikes of the orcish phalanx is one that would normally achieve the same effectiveness as the charge of the Light Brigade (not to mention some tasty Rohirrim-Mearas kabobs for the hungry Uruk-Hai). The way Gandalf overwhelms the orcs with his radiance is as hokey as the much-reviled Lord of the Rings cartoon by Ralph Bakshi.

All this might seem like nit-picking, but whereas the changes made in the first episode (essentially exchanging Arwen for Glorfindel, although I did regret the absence of Tom Bombadil and the barrow-downs) did not alter the narrative, those made in The Two Towers are in complete contradiction with the book.

It seems to me the whole plot was twisted to glorify the members of the Fellowship of the Ring, specially Aragorn, at the expense of impugning the character of the others, specially Theoden, Eomer and Faramir. This is petty and mean-spirited at best.

Hi, my name is Fazal and I have a camera problem.

I guess I should have heeded the first signs almost a decade ago when I bought a ridiculously expensive but oh-so-cool Nikon 35Ti. The incubation period was long, and I thought having shifted to digital in 1998 would protect me, but this year alone I bought a Nikon FM3A and a Leica M6 TTL (unlike the pictures, my FM3A is chrome and my M6 black).

What is it about these technologically obsolete cameras that makes them so compelling? Clearly, retro nostalgia, harking back to my first camera, a Zeiss Ikon Contaflex Super, plays a role, but there is more to it. And I certainly intend to use them, unlike some Japanese who collect them with almost fetichist care (as narrated on this page).

Much of the appeal these cameras have lies in their timelessness and near-perfect design, like those of other classics like the Rolleiflex TLR or the Porsche 911. More importantly, the more relaxed (some would say inconvenient) shooting style, due to manual exposure and focus, forces one to pay more attention to the picture taking process.

Arguably, this leads to better images than the blunderbuss approach (specially with digital cameras where there are no film costs to moderate shooting frenzy). But this also means more conscious cognitive time is passed in the process of taking pictures as opposed to the mere end-result.

Thus the real reason these cameras endure lies in the mutually reinforcing combination of conscious time spent handling (fondling?) the camera and the tactile or visual pleasure experienced in using them. These cameras are about photography, not photographs.