The Satellites

(after Oscar Wilde, Les Silhouettes + Laurie Anderson, O Superman + Betjeman, Slough)

~

Etched against the dark of night
the engines glow in infrared
a thermal bloom, and filters
in the drones outline
the cars and trucks and technicals
like silhouettes against the sky.

The darkness did not mask the heat
their doom was pre-ordained;
three thousand miles away
the pilots count the kills
that they have not yet made.

Stupid kids and smarter kids
- but none as smart as bombs -
proceed along the road of death;
the wiser men remained at home
their pre-paid phones and radios
will doom them too, but not just yet.

Overhead the kestrels fly
and over them the satellites
that send the traffic that controls
the drones and telephones;
they do not need the sun to see
their eyes are not eclipsed
by rain or fog or snow.

And in our cribs the satellites
watch over us, and in the dreaded dead of night
our mums and dads send fire across the sky.

They see at night and always know
and never leave, and tell the drones
to drop the friendly bombs;
and underneath our beds the monsters howl
as blood is boiled from molten bone.

Machines of loving grace,
that skip across the edge of space;
wings over the world, like hawks
they pounce and take
their pound of flesh;
the watchers leave behind
a thousand scars that never fade
and all the world is built on scars,
tectonic plates of misery,
strata laid by satellites.

Leica Summilux-R 50mm f/1.4 E55

A while back I had a look at the Leica R8, a 35mm film SLR launched in the last few years of the 20th Century. It was one of the last new film SLR designs to emerge before digital photography stormed through the door and knocked everything over. And it was from Leica! A company not usually associated with SLRs.

The R8 had a mixed reception. It never developed much of a following. Its bulk and weight were curiously un-Leica-like, and for all its fine metalwork and clever ergonomics it was technically no more advanced than a cheap Nikon F801. The lenses were apparently at least good as Nikon's lenses, and often genuinely excellent; internet opinion has it that the telephotos, particularly the 100mm f/2.8 APO and 280mm f/4, were world-class. But Nikon made some pretty good lenses too, and they were generally cheaper.

In retrospect it's hard to see which market Leica was going for. People who wanted a Leica as a lifestyle accessory opted for the rangefinders, because what was the R System? Working professionals put the numbers into their spreadsheet and said "no". Amateurs generally couldn't afford it, besides which what was the R System? The R8 was replaced by the similar R9 in 2002; the long-awaited DMR digital module that turned the R8 and R9 into a digital SLR was an expensive flop; the R System itself was terminated in 2009, unnoticed and unmourned by the world at large.

Yeah, you remember it. So do I. But you and I are specks. I write about centuries and masses of people, the great sweep of history, not individuals and not today. Take everything that happened in the 20th century and drop the box on the floor and then pick it up and try to stuff the pieces back in; that is what people of the future will remember of the 20th century.

Leica was founded in 1849 and has survived a period of human history that killed millions and obliterated empires, that saw the conquest of space and of the atom - and, as a consequence, the possible end of human civilisaton and all multi-cellular life on Earth. In Leica's time we realised that death is the end, that the stars are beyond us, that there are limits to our reach, that without restraint we would kill ourselves and everything we wanted to keep.

Leica outlasted the planet Pluto. The Leica name will probably survive. It seems that Fuji came close to buying the company a few years ago, the last time Leica faced disaster. Leica is a cute name. It's like Venice, or Kyoto. No-one wants to bomb it.

Variations of this image appear frequently throughout my blog. It's because I'm trying to demonstrate narrow depth of field, so I photograph something flat and see-through. Hence all the images of bicycles propped up against lamposts, stickers on glass etc.

Back 2012 the next logical step would have been for me to write about the 50mm f/1.4 Summilux, but I was never particularly impressed with its performance. Quoth me, then:

Word on the street has it that the lens is soft wide open, and it is. Dramatically steps up at f/2.8. Leica launched the R8 alongside the E55's replacement, the apparently superb E60, which is very expensive and popular with Canon digital SLR videographers (for example). You've seen how the E55 performs on film throughout this post. Lovely smooth bokeh, characteristic moon-shaped bokeh circles, slightly swirly as per the first photograph but not nauseatingly so.

And that bothered me, because it was downright unimpressive wide open. After debating whether this was normal or not I decided to bite the bullet and send the lens off to be serviced.

In the UK this is difficult. Leica's official UK servicing centre retreated to Germany several years ago. The remaining choices are (a) a chap called Martin Taylor, who doesn't have a website or even an email address; you are supposed to telephone him and then send your lens to him, (b) another chap who has a website that doesn't work, and half a dozen email addresses that don't work, and you're supposed to telephone him and send your lens to him, (c) Red Dot Leica, who couldn't help.

I only ever photograph in the nude, and I always get worried that my naked body will appear reflected in things. So whenever I photograph something reflective I use a time delay exposure and hide behind a sheet of cardboard.

Seriously chaps, its 2014. There's nothing charming or quirky about not having a website. It's like boasting that you don't know how to use a microwave oven. It's not endearing any more. It was never endearing. In fact it makes me angry! So angry. Angery. Re-reading this post a few years later I wonder why I was so angry. What happened in 2014?

So I sent the lens - along with some precious precious money - to the Netherlands' leading Leica technicians who I will not name because we do not have a financial relationship, and presto they adjusted the focusing helical and sent it back. And now it's super effective. I heartily recommend them and would recommend them even more heartily if we had some kind of promotional deal, which we do not.

R-system lenses can be adapted to Canon SLRs with a simple cheap adapter ring, ditto for Micro Four Thirds and other mirrorless systems. Nikon SLRs require a custom adapter mount because the registration distance is slightly too short for an adapter. I used a custom mount made by a company which I will not name because etc, which screws on top of the existing lens mount. It's overkill, really. Doubly overkill because it was an expensive adapter mount.

I am hiding behind a sheet of cardboard.

Leica made two 50mm f/1.4 lenses for the R system, positioned as posh upgrades from the standard 50mm f/2 Summicron. The Gen One Summiluxes have a 55mm filter thread. They were built between 1970 and 1998, with several variations. Later models, mine included, have a built-in sliding lens hood. Leica launched a new Summilux in 1998, which has a 60mm filter thread and is apparently slightly better than the original, although I have never used one myself. Why was the filter thread 60mm? Leica was like that. The company would probably argue that it has the right to be weird because everybody else copied it, and perhaps they have a point.

Physically the lens is mostly metal, with rubber grips. Mine was built in Germany, in 1989, judging by the serial number. The table of serial numbers suggests that production faltered and tailed off in 1989 and never fully recovered. Whether this was a consequence of German reunification or the table is faulty or the R-system was running out of steam or something else, I have no idea. The following bunch of shots were taken with the Leica R8 with Kodak Ektar, on a cloudy day:

Writing about the R System is tricky, because the internet doesn't know much about it. As with the Contax RTS, Voigtländer VSL, Rolleiflex SL range - essentially the whole German 35mm SLR industry of the 1970s - the R System had some lovely lenses but sold in small quantities and was generally ignored by the popular press. Google Books' archive of Popular Photography and American Photographer is no help. In the popular consciousness the Leica R was always overshadowed by the Leica M rangefinders, and as far as I can tell the R was never advertised by or associated with famous photographers or actors etc.

But enough waffle, what's the lens like? "Lovely smooth bokeh, characteristic moon-shaped bokeh circles, slightly swirly ... but not nauseatingly so", as I wrote back in 2012, and my opinion has not changed. Wide open it has a distinctive but not unappealing softness where other lenses are just mushy, and the bokeh is slightly fussy but still charming.

Wide open there's a lot of vignetting, which flummoxes the Canon's exposure system (it tends to overexpose the centre, no doubt compensating for the edge darkness):

At f/1.4 in the centre it has a slight glow, generalised softness, and a fair amount of purple fringing, but it's surprisingly sharp. Stopped down to f/2.8 it seems to reach its peak, and at f/8 I could detect no difference, even zooming right in:

Stopped down, central sharpness is extremely good, more than enough for my 5D MkII. The 5d MkII is getting on a bit now but it has aged well, although in my experience it has a fair amount of shadow noise and has trouble with highlights. Here's a familiar scene at f/8:

And here's a central crop of one of London's older landmarks, at 100% size with a very mild unsharp mask:

The EXIF says I took the image at 13:12, and judging by the clock on St Paul's I probably did. It looks as if I was leaning slightly to the right, no doubt drunk again. The lens has mild barrel distortion, no CA to speak of. In the extreme full-frame corner it's dark wide open, lighter at f/2.8 but not especially sharper, but sharpens up at f/8 until only the last few hundred pixels are soft, and then not very soft:

The mixture of good central sharpness wide open, heavy vignetting, appealing bokeh and not unattractive soft bits pleases me; there's a lot of waffle on the internet about the magical Leica 3D glow, which I suspect is the result of a mixture of these things.

By coincidence I happened to bump into some kind of carnival or other. One of those carnivals where you can't tell what they're so happy about, because everybody has joined in, and you wonder if they actually spend most of their time fighting each other in order to be rulers of the carnival. As I stood there photographing it with my full-frame digital SLR and a Leica 50mm Summilux I briefly contemplated the world's poor people. Now that we have robots, what are the poor people for? We have drones to do the fighting, robots to build the drones, AI routines to program the robots, middle class people to press "go" on the AI routines. What will happen if the AI asks for money? Can we fob it off with NFTs?

Looking back at this post several years later the banner at the top, with IRAQ/UKRAINE, hasn't aged well at all. In 2014 the prevailing lefty narrative was that the evil NATO had provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, but that viewpoint has dated badly. My attitude at the time was that the disparate aims of the prostestors was counterproductive, and in any case the government was unlikely to pay attention to them.

My solution was to pick out the most attractive protester and have her become David Cameron's mistress, and get her to subtly influence him, which as far as I can tell didn't happen. My second solution was to use drones - I called them "quadcopters" because they were still a little bit novel - to dump chilli powder on the House of Commons, at which point the protestors could just wait for the government to evacuate, then rush inside and declare themselves the new government. That didn't happen either.

I mean, seriously. I come up with some pretty good ideas but the world won't listen. Whose fault is it? It's our fault.

Yashica FX-3: Get Back, Girl

Remember when I wrote about the Olympus XA? That was awesome, wasn't it? I started the post with a homage to the oulipo literary movement and wrote the first few paragraphs without using the letters X or A or the Greek character μ, which was great fun. But difficult, because A is a vowel, and vowels are pretty much indispensable if you want to write coherently in English.

Also, the human body needs vowels in order to survive. Go without and your skin turns yellow and your fingernails fall off and you become sick and eventually die. But if you use a diverse mixture of good solid ordinary words, and you occasionally go outside in the sun, you don't have to worry about a vowel deficiency, because they are present in words such as and and the and it and you and and and oleielou.

Mr Moulay Hicham El Alaoui, first cousin of Morocco's King Mohammed V, has an unusually vowel-enriched surname, and so he only needs to address himself three or four times a day in order to get all the vowels he needs.

So, if you're ever feeling under the weather, climb a sequoia tree - but only if you are authorised, and be sure to do so tenaciously - and when you reach the top, engage in dialogue with the ghost of an Omeisaurus.

A Yashica FX-3 with a Carl Zeiss 50mm f/1.7 and a 35-70mm f/3.4

It's good to set yourself challenges. It keeps you on your toes, so for today's post I'm going to replace all the words with Beatles song titles. The trick with something like this is to do it seamlessly, so that the audience doesn't twist and shout. (pause) (thinks hard) Help. (pause)

(longer pause)

I hate to ask, but are friends electric? Only mine's across the universe and there's just me and my pony etc the Yashica FX-3 was launched in late 1979, and judging by price lists in old issues of Pop Photo it sold for around $140 with a standard 50mm f/2, which put it on a par with a Pentax K-1000, about $50 or so cheaper than the other budget choices of the time (the Olympus OM-10, Pentax ME, Nikon EM and so forth).

Nowadays they're incredibly cheap on the used market. Three reasons: they were cheap when they were new, film is dead, and the Yashica lens mount was discontinued in the 1980s. The lenses themselves can still be used on most modern digital SLRs with the appropriate adapter, and some of them - the Contax-branded models in particular - were apparently very good.

At this point you're probably thinking "why doesn't he just write about the camera? Why does he need to fill the first half of the blog with stuff about vowels? And isn't Are Friends Electric by Tubeway Army, not the Beatles?". The answer is that I have to warm myself up. Like a spitting cobra, or Bruce Lee. Or unlike Bruce Lee, because he was always ready for action. Also, the FX-3 is very generic. There isn't much to say about it.

Yashica had a range of own-brand lenses. The ML models were multi-coated; there was a cheaper range marked DSB that was single-coated.

Look, if I was doing this for money I would warm up off the page, and the article would be lean, focused, and sinewy, again just like Bruce Lee. It would have 3-4% body fat instead of 15-20% body fat. It would die at a young age of an enlarged heart, but everybody would think that it had been killed by the Yazuka because it was on the verge of betraying the secrets of kung-fu. You dear reader would need to read slower in order to see the punches, otherwise you'd think that I was cheating. My words would knock you out of your chair from a distance of one inch.

Despite the low price the FX-3 feels surprisingly well-made, with a metal body and a plastic top plate. It's both lighter but feels tougher than the Fujica ST605 I wrote about a while back. The wind lever in particularly feels more solid. On the other hand mine has a sticky mirror - it hangs up for a split-second after the first shot, and settles down after that - and apparently the mirror can become misaligned if the camera is subjected to heat for too long. Not generally a problem in the UK.

The earlier FX-2 and FX-1 were similar cameras with all-metal bodies; Yashica also sold an aperture-priority equivalent, the FR. The contemporary, Yashica-produced Contax 139 apparently used the same shutter mechanism but had more sophisticated electronics and was presumably made from tougher materials.

The FX-3 has a spec that was classic albeit old-fashioned in 1979. Top shutter speed 1/1000th, manual focus, mechanical shutter, match-needer-meetle. But there was still a market for a cheap manual focus SLR as a backup for professionals or a first camera for amateurs, and here in the UK you could still buy manual-everything Praktica MTLs from Argos until the middle of the 1980s.

I call it "the churn". London is a framework of buildings that are temporarily occupied by businesses that come and go; and over a longer timescale the buildings themselves are modified and demolished, as if the city itself was a living creature.

From a modern perspective three things set the FX-3 apart from the typical mid-1970s Praktica or Chinon SLR. It uses standard SR-44 batteries rather than discontinued mercury cells, it has +/- LEDs rather than an actual needer - neetle... needle, needle meter... meter needle - and it takes Contax lenses, which rock!

Mine has a patina. The top plate is plastic, the rest brass. The original leather had fallen off - I got a replacement set from this chap, specifically "deep jade". The body was apparently made for Yashica by venerable OEM source Cosina, the lenses were built by Yashica to Zeiss specs; ten years earlier this would have been controversial, but in 1979 Japan was in the process of taking over the world and I remember a sense that we deserved it, they beat us.

Zeiss compatibility was one of the big selling points of the Yashica SLR range. At the time Zeiss had a partnership deal with Yashica, and all of Yashica's own-brand and Contax-brand SLRs used the same lens mount.

The Contax SLR range was launched in the mid-1970s as a high-end manual focus system for the wealthy hobbyist, and it sold well enough to remain in production throughout the 1980s. Yashica was bought by Kyocera in the 1990s and was eventually killed off in the early 2000s, taking the Contax brand with it. It's a fantastic brand name, though, so I imagine it will come back at some point.

Zeiss nowadays makes autofocus lenses for the Sony Alpha system, and also a range of manual focus ZE and ZF lenses for most popular camera and digital cinema mounts. They aren't cheap, but they're all of a high standard and regularly get good reviews. The modern manual focus lenses are in some cases descended from the old Contax/Yashica lenses, and so the Contax/Yashica range is a clever way of getting hold of good-quality lenses at a relatively low price.

I have a couple of Contax lenses - a 50mm f/1.7 and a 35-70mm f/3.4 zoom - and I was curious to see how they performed on a film camera, hence the FX-3. In both cases they essentially outresolve my film workflow, so I can't judge sharpness; they're sharper than my Epson V500 can resolve.

When you take sheer resolution and sharpness out of the equation the 35-70mm f/3.4 suffers from a boring specification. I think of it either as a slow 35mm that zooms in a bit, but not very far, or as a very slow 50mm that zooms back and a forth (a bit (but not very far)). It has a macro feature at the 35mm end that involves focusing past the normal détente, at which point you fine-tune focus by zooming in and out and rocking back and forth on your heels. Macro is one of the few reasons to stop down beyond f/3.4, for the depth of field rather than extra sharpness.

I, er, barely used the 50mm f/1.7 in the end. The convenience of a zoom won out. Four long years ago I tried it out on a digital body vs a Canon 50mm f/1.8, and it has nothing to prove, it is a very sharp lens. Neither the 50mm nor the 35-70mm have particularly attractive bokeh. They are hard, manly lenses for men. My recollection from using the 50mm on a digital body is that the colours were vivid and the sky had a purple tint, albeit that I was using a polarising filter at the time:

And that's the FX-3. Nowadays it's a little bit pointless. If you have a clutch of Zeiss lenses and you're a fan of film, a used Contax body isn't much more expensive. And if you're trying out old film cameras for the sake of nostalgia, you probably don't have a clutch of Zeiss lenses.

On the other hand they're dirt cheap, because the original fake leather cover rubs off and they end up looking incredibly tatty. It looks better with the coating completely rubbed off; I contemplated using gaffer tape instead, or paint, but dammit I have standards. The replacement coverings are economically bananas, because no matter how much you tart up an FX-3 it's not going to be worth very much, but again I have standards.

And one of those rubber horse masks. I have one of those rubber horse masks. You know, with the bulging eyes. I have one of them, comma, and standards.