LEICA M10-D ALMOST ANALOG
The Leica M10-D is essentially an analog camera with a digital sensor. There is no viewing screen and the camera was designed to be the same size as the Leica M6 film camera. There is even a winding lever on the camera. It doesn’t cock the shutter though. Its only function is to act as […]
STREET SHOOTING
Street shooting is improvisation. Musicians who improvise know their scales so well they don’t need to think about them when they play. They think of how they want to sound and express themselves automatically. The same is true with street shooting. Exposure and focus are obvious skills. But a skill more difficult to master is […]
NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
This photo got me thinking about negatives. I made the shot in Indiana when I was a teenager. We’d moved there from Alaska during my senior year of high school. It was dusk, and the negative is thin. I didn’t even notice the photo at the time. So the negative sat there, and sat there, […]
WORTH THE WAIT
Street shooting requires an instantaneous reaction to what you are seeing. It’s this need to react immediately to whatever is happening on the street, in the moment, that excites me the most when I’m shooting. I usually don’t wait for a picture to happen. I prefer to move into situations rather than stand still and […]
GOING MANUAL
There are lessons from the days of film photography that will make a digital a shooter better photographer. I grew up shooting manual cameras. There was no Google back then and it took time and effort to get information about shooting skills. But the information was there. Experienced photographers taught us what they knew through […]
WORKING INSIDE
Shooting on the inside – Working your way in. One of the advantages of Leicas over bigger and noisier cameras is they let me work on the “inside” of situations. Working with wide angle lenses it’s possible for me to stand in the middle of, or very close to the situation I’m photographing without disturbing […]
IN THE BAG
I have the perfect Leica camera bag. Because it hasn’t been made for twenty years, out of paranoia the bag will wear out, I keep buying other bags. They always disappoint me and end up hanging empty on hooks on my wall. Years ago, the suitcase and travel bag company, Eagle Creek, made a small […]
TRAVELING LIGHT
I really love being there. I almost always hate getting there. I like air travel because it gets me where I want to go quickly. I don’t like air travel for every other reason I can think of. I won’t bother mentioning them. You know what they are. Well, I will mention one. Baggage and […]
BLACK & WHITE HYBRID WORKFLOW
Leica M6 film camera[/captioThis isn’t a post about the ongoing battle between film and digital. I shoot both depending on my needs. [Note: This post is updated for 2021.] In my ideal world I shoot film. I love the small, quiet Leica M6 bodies. I love taking a picture, forgetting about it, then rediscovering it […]
HOPI-NAVAJO LAND DISPUTE
In early 1975, a mutual acquaintance sent anthropologist, Harry King, to me for some advice. Harry had a grant to study the Hopi/Navajo Indian joint use land dispute. The Weatherhead Foundation, who had given him the grant, wanted Harry to take pictures. Harry asked me what kind of camera he should get. This was too […]