mardi 11 octobre 2005

Lenses I've looked through... Leitz Telyt 400mm f/6.8 Throughout most of my photographic life, both amateur and pro, I used lenses which didn't fit into the normal line-up found in most camera bags. I would never have classed those optics as male jewellery though, they were bought for their specific advantages which I exploited in a graphic way. One example which looked quite ridiculous on one of my shoulder-slung Nikons was a Nikkor 8 mm f/2.8 Fisheye which I hid under my jacket as best I could for a year before selling it on for a more discreet Nikkor 16mm "full-frame" Fisheye which didn't cause people's jaws to droop when they saw it. Another extraordinary lens I owned for some time was a Leitz 400mm f/6.8 Telyt complete with pistol grip and shoulder stock... the latter creating similar stares from passer-by and subject of it's attention to embarrass me more in the long term. Still, at least I was able to use such a dangerous looking lens in the 1980s... twenty-five years on and I would probably be arrested, or shot, before such a piece of equipment could be raised to the eye - such is the nervousness of the security services in this day and age! However, my experience with a Leitz Telyt 400mm is the subject of this "Lenses I've looked through" theme. As I said, I liked lenses which potentially gave different, or at least interesting, images. My main 35mm camera system in the late 70s early 80s was based on a pair of Leica M bodies... namely an M4/2 and M4/P with Leica Winder. I had a bag full of lenses ranging from the 2,1cm f/3.4 Schneider Super-Angulon through 28mm Elmarit, 35mm Summicron, 50mm Summicron, 90mm Summicron, 135mm Tele-Elmarit... plus 200mm, 280mm and 400mm Telyt lenses. Using the three latter optics also required a Visoflex housing to convert a Leica M "rangefinder" body into a "single lens reflex" so they could be focused. The rangefinder base of a Leica M is only long enough to accurately focus with a 135mm lens... and that is borderline as the cameras are better with wide-angles and become progressively worse as the focal length increases. Actually, the mechanics and theory says that... but I always found the 135mm focal length easier to focus in a Leica rangefinder than a similar focal length lens on a Nikon SLR. Anyone who has used the Visoflex system knows that it works... but only just. It is the slowest, most awkward and complicated way of shooting subjects from afar than any other system I know of... barring large-format! But the product photo above doesn't tell the real story... the brochure on the Leica M4/2 states... "The Visoflex III housing extends the range of the Leica M4/2 into areas usually reserved for SLR cameras, while maintaining the quiet shutter action of the rangefinder camera. For the photographer who does macro or extreme telephoto work only occasionally, the Visoflex offers these facilities without the need to adapt another camera system. To attach the Visoflex III to the Leica M series cameras is as simple as changing it's lenses." [really!] The chart below that statement illustrates the Viso, lens and adaptor combinations... and for my Visoflex III reflex housing I also needed Adaptor Rings 16466, 14020, 16469, 14182 plus Universal Hand-grip with Shoulder Stock 14188. Today, when high-speed sports mean that if you blink you miss it, such a system would be a dinosaur... in the 70s and 80s it was merely quirky. The only sports images I can recall, or find in my files, taken with the Telyt 400 were at the Bristol Powerboat GP which was not a particularly testing event for co-ordination between brain and camera shutter release. Finding myself at Le Mans for the 24-hour race that same month with the same kit proved a more realistic affair for action technique... but I packed the lens away early it was so difficult to use and limited myself to the 135 mm Elmar for length... simply moving closer to the action. On the other hand for less speedy subjects the 400mm Telyt was reasonably easy to operate once you had the system set-up. Having a pistol-grip and shoulder stock made everything quite stable to hold, and pan if the subject moved. It's really neat feature, though, was the "follow focus" mount which, when the thumb of the left hand depressed a locking button, allowed the hand to slide the focusing mount in-and-out "trombone" fashion to follow focus. It needed practice... but when perfected was fast. Novoflex had a similar system until recently which, via adaptors, could be used on many makes of SLR camera. My two most published images taken with this lens are "Black & White Horses" (seen in a copper and gold toned version above) and "Boats - Thames Estuary." Both were quickly spotted and exposed three of four times at slightly different exposures. This was my standard practice with Leica M cameras because the M4/2 and M4/P models didn't have a built-in exposure. The horses were taken on Ilford XP-1 400 "chromogenic" film developed in C-41 colour chemistry, and the boats on Agfapan 100 developed in Rodinal at 1+50 dilution. I have scanned a detail of the boats from a 1% area of the 10x8 print and enlarged it 333% to approximately 150x200 pixels. On your screen you will be able to see the individual links in the chain plus, perhaps, the individual twists of the braids in the ropes below the pulley block, and there is detail to the chipped, rusting paint work at the top of the boom arm... so for central resolution and contrast the Telyt 400 shows it's paces well... but it should being a well-corrected achromat. What's difficult to get used to with any Visoflex lens combo on a Leica M is the relative dimness of the projected image on the ground-glass screen. Gone is the brightness of the direct-vision viewfinder replaced by a dark image from a slow f/6.8 aperture lens... so shooting with a Telyt 400 is certainly easier on a sunnier day. Coupled with the manually operated aperture... and stopping down to the working aperture the moment before exposure, would drive most of today's younger generation of photographers to despair. There again, I found the lens good enough to use wide-open much of the time... although I note that Erwin Puts writes in the "Leica Lens Compendium"... 400mm : At full aperture overall contrast is medium, vignetting is below half a stop and, as theory has it, on-axis performance is much better than in the field. From image height of 6mm contrast drops rapidly and only quite coarse detail is rendered with good clarity. On-axis fine detail is recorded crisply. but only until image height of 3mm. Stopping down from f/8 to f/16 improves overall contrast, extends the circle of good definition to 12mm, and increases the micro contrast of fine detail. generally we have good quality only in the centre part of the picture. The absence of larger colour fringing gives this lens good clarity." Yes... I agree, the braided ropes in the centre of the image are remarkably well reproduced whereas the mooring buoy and boats propellor in the lower corners are soft when viewed through a magnifying loupe. Overall, however, the image is striking and reproduces well. As for the horse image... the Agfapan's grain produces a different type of image and the overall feeling is of better sharpness compared to the printed "dye-clumps" from the chromogenically developed negative. A couple of decades on would I choose to use a Leitz Telyt again? Probably not as I'm enjoying a period of largely 50mm "standard" lens working. As I said, it would be too difficult using such a long lens fitted with a shoulder stock in a public place in many parts of the world today... and most would find an auto focus digital SLR with a regulation 70-200mm zoom quite adequate because of the x1.5 most DSLR cameras adopt and the lack of digital grain, or "noise" seen with this new technology. However, gone also would be the joy of having "captured" an image probably against the odds... doing it the hard way... the old way. For some, that method is still important as proof positive they are photographers who make the decisions and are not trapped in the auto-everything syndrome which has almost completely taken photography over. 10:57:35 PM    comment []