What's Your Daily Driver?

Over the years, I've heard plenty of stories about famous photographers using macro lenses instead of a conventional 'standard' lens. For instance, apparently Salgado had a 60 mm macro lens permanently attached to his Leica reflex camera while he kept wide angle optics on his rangefinders. This approach kind of makes sense, provided the field of view of the macro lens isn't too narrow. I enjoy shooting this way because it allows you to get in close, too. 

In the case of the Pentax 67, my favorite lens is the 135 mm f/4 Macro. You don't hear much about this lens, and I don't know any stories of famous photographers using it. Today, folks tend to favor the 105 mm lens because of it's large maximum aperture, but as far as I am concerned the 135 is a pretty solid choice as a daily driver.

Sizing things up

One of the things that fell by the wayside during the past year was buying bouquets of fresh flowers for the house (and, of course, to photograph). Unfortunately, flowers just didn't make it onto the minimal shopping list all that often; instead, we relied on our own garden. Fine, but I do rather miss photographing the fancy store bought blooms through their life cycles. Anyway, I was rummaging through piles of negatives for flower photographs and I happened across some that I took with an old Pentax auto110 camera. 

What a sweet little imager! The film is 16 mm stock, comes in little pop-in cartridges, and funnily enough, is still available. I found a source of something called Fukkatsu film. How could I resist buying a few rolls? The negative size is pretty tiny, 1.3 cm by 1.7 cm. With that in mind, the quality of the Pentax optics is pretty stunning, resolving plenty of detail in the sunflower. By the way, I always enjoy how one or two little petals wend their way to the center of the flower.

As good as church letting out

Recently, I came across and purchased a set of books published in 1980 by Lustrum Press, all edited by Carol di Grappa. So far I have found three -- Landscape: Theory, Contact: Theory, and Fashion: Theory -- that seem to form a series. Contact: Theory features discussions about contact sheets, a fascinating topic, worthy of discussion in itself. The topics of the other two volumes are just what you'd expect from the titles. All three present the work of an interesting cross section of photographers. Some are no longer alive after 40 years, and others have faded from our attention. But the work is solid, and it is informative to go back and read what was on folks's minds half a lifetime ago.