Seeing With the Minox by Peter Zimmerman It's no harder to take good pictures with the Minox than with any other camera. It's no easier either, but it is different. Since there are only 88 square millimeters on a Minox negative compared to 864 on a 35mm negative, there is not a square millimeter to waste. The photographer has to use the whole format in the camera, as the great Leica photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson did with his pictures, and not plan on cropping later. So you, as a Minoxer, must think about what makes a good Minox picture, not just what might make a good picture. General principles of vision through the Minox viewfinder The Five F's of Minox work determine the success of a picture:
The subject has to be strong; it must fill the frame or come close to it. The Asubject@ is not necessarily one thing or one person; it can be an area, a group of buildings or a group of people. It can be a bunch of flowers or a single blossom. But it cannot be a small, distant, object. Neither should be lots of little things loosely thrown together. As an example: Look at an airliner overhead; recreate the scene from your memory. It's on its landing approach and maybe 2,000 feet up. Look closely; you can see and perhaps identify the airline logo on the tail fin. It's no problem to count the engines and see the wheels drop down. If you've good eyes, perhaps you can even make out the windows. This is possible because your eye and brain are working together. Your brain is looking only at the airplane, while it ignores the rest of the world. The eye is repeatedly scanning the plane itself, sweeping the details across the very most precise part of your retina. The time-averaged multiple data samples are combined in your cranial computer to produce an image which is actually better than the eye could deliver on its own in one Aframe@. The camera sees the airliner once, for a very brief period, and has no brain that knows to concentrate on the distant plane. On a Minox picture that airliner will be small, barely recognizable as an airplane. There won't be much detail in a standard 3x5" print, and little more in a 4x6. If you make an enlargement, more details will emerge, but the image will break down before the windows on the plane can be made out, maybe even before the landing gear can be seen silhouetted against the sky. The picture may even be blurred a little because your hand shook a bit. The camera has only snapped one frame in time; it cannot concentrate on a single subject the way your eye and brain can, working together. And when you look at the static print, your eye and brain can no longer work to improve the view as they did in real life.
The Minox picture is further limited by the fact that the Minox negative is very small, and the focal length of the lens is only 15 mm. If you had taken a picture of the airplane with a Leica and a 50 mm Summicron lens, the image of the airliner on film would have been 3-1/3 times as long, and covered 11 times as much area on the film. Although the image of the aircraft would still have been too small to make out much detail in a standard print, what is there can be enlarged more successfully.
Consider pictures of Washington, D.C.'s famous cherry trees in full bloom (FIG 2). From across the water looking at the trees in the distance, a Minox picture will show only a pink blur; there is no hope of making out individual branches, and certainly not of individual flowers. A Leica photo will do better, although even when it is enlarged single flowers will be invisible. This is a nice >record shot' with a Minox; it shows you were there and conveys a sense of what the scene was like. But there will be little sense of that razor sharpness that the Minox can deliver. But walk over to the closest tree. Surely one flowering branch is hanging within reach of your arm and the Minox's measuring chain. Set the camera for 18" (or 0.6 m on a metric camera), stretch the measuring chain until it just reaches the middle of one bunch of three or four blossoms. Take that picture. Even in the 3x5" print the flowers will nearly fill the frame; every detail should be visible. A few flowers behind your subject will form a nice slightly out of focus halo. Try it again: set the camera for 8 inches (0.2 m) and put the first bead on the chain in the middle of a single flower. If you stay exactly the right distance from the flower, it will be razor sharp, but that's hard to do in the field, and impossible if the wind is blowing. Twelve inches (30 cm) is about as close as practical outdoors.
The great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said it first, and best. ALess is more.@ And it applies to Minox pictures as well as to great buildings. Choose one subject in closeup to stand for all of the more distant ones. Show the tree to indicate the forest. The Minox is particularly well suited to the job because it can focus on subjects so close to the camera. Landscapes Just because the details of the distant cherry trees weren't sharp doesn't mean you cannot take good landscapes with your Minox; it only means that you have to plan them a little bit. A good landscape photo needs a reason to have been taken. There must an
area of real interest, real detail, with a strong shape and lines leading the viewer into
the picture. The familiar rules of composition -- placing the subject off center, perhaps
using S-curves or diagonals -- have not become cliches because they are wrong, but rather
because they work well, most of the time. With a Minox it is perhaps even more important
to have a strong subject which dominates the picture that it is with a larger format
camera. Eilean Donan castle in Scotland is a good example of a Minox landscape. The castle
stands against a cloudy sky, its roof lines and structure making clean edges which impart
a strong feeling of sharpness to the whole picture.
It is also possible to do a real landscape with the Minox, so long as the frame is filled with interesting material. Even if the reason for the picture is just to show the way the scene appeared, and not to show a particular person or object, it helps to get something in the foreground. Not far from Eilean Donan there is a small bay with a bit of a marsh in the foreground and picturesque cottages across the water. But the sailboat anchored in the foreground adds interest, sharpness, and depth to the whole. The windows in the distant homes can easily be seen, but the edges of their frames blur out slightly. It's not that the Minox isn't tack sharp at infinity -- it is -- but rather that the film cannot capture all the detail projected on it by the lens of the Minox BL used for these photos.
Backgrounds in Minox pictures are strangely troubling; sometimes the Minox has too much depth of field. With a 35 mm camera and even a 50 mm >normal' lens it is possible to make distant objects dissolve into a blur in pictures taken at short range so that power lines across the street would be no problem in a closeup of some flowers a foot or two away.
But most people pictures are of your family and friends relaxing and happy. Minox pictures are great fun, in part because the camera doesn't intrude. With the C, LX and EC there's no need to worry about setting exposure, and focus can be preset or changed in an instant. The A, B, and BL take just a moment longer to set the shutter speed. Your pictures may be better if you look for an unusual angle (the camera is usually held at eye level; try kneeling down, particularly for children and pets; a low angle usually means that the background is no problem either. The sky is almost always an acceptable backdrop. Once in a great while, break the rule and shoot the picture from above.
Buildings and architecture Great buildings make great pictures! Or at least they can. And they are among the commonest subjects for travelers and tourists. The rules for getting good shots are easy, and easy to follow. First, as always, watch the light. A beautiful facade won't photograph well if the noon-day sun is shining flatly on it, hiding the building's texture and eliminating any shadows. And if the facade is in deep shade, a black and white picture will lack interest and contrast. Look for slanting morning or late afternoon light. You might have to come back at a different time to get a good shot. A map of the city will help you plan when the light will be best. Remember that on the equinoxes the sun rises and sets in the East and West. At midsummer the sun rises quite a bit north of East and sets quite a bit north of West. In mid-December, the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest; in the northern part of Europe, sunrise and sunset are very close to south in winter. In between those four dates, sunrise and sunset lie in between those positions. An astronomer would be more accurate; a tourist doesn't need to be.
Watch that tilted camera. The Minox lens is by no means a wide angle lens, but when you aim the camera upwards at one face of a skyscraper, the result is a picture with strongly converging, sometimes even curved, lines. It can be very disturbing. The reason for this strange perspective is not hard to understand. Imagine yourself standing on a railroad track which goes straight out to infinity; the tracks are the edges of the building, and your eye sees them go off to the vanishing point. That same vanishing point is where the lines of the skyscraper seem to converge. In real life the brain is not disturbed because your eye and brain work together. Once a picture is on a piece of paper the eye-brain computer can no longer process the information to take out the unpleasant appearance. There are only three cures, and none may be really satisfactory: 1) Move far enough back so that the whole building is captured with only a slight tilt. That may require more distance than exists. If so, take the best picture possible as a record shot and be content. 2) Find a window facing the building from across the street or plaza and about half way up the building. Convince the owner of the window that you're not just snooping and persuade him to let you take a picture. It takes a bit of nerve, but the pros do it all the time. I've almost never been able to try, let alone succeed. But sometimes the window is in a department store; that works, if you can shoot through the glass. 3) Move in very close to the building, tilt the camera 'way back, and shoot. For some reason once the perspective is really exaggerated, the eye and brain accept the abstraction. Some pictures of tall buildings, ones obviously taken from ground level don't show this effect. They are taken with special perspective correcting lenses (on single lens reflex cameras) or with a view camera. The front of the lens is actually shifted up from its normal position while lens plane and film plane are kept parallel to the building. Sorry; this is one trick the Minox won't do. Objects 'n' things: A lot of pictures are of pretty things, flowers, statues, small parts of buildings, a Christmas tree or a Hanukkah menorah, jewelry. The Minox is a wonderful camera for this kind of photo because it can focus close but also has the wonderful depth of field so that most of your subject will be sharp. As always, the five Fs of Minox photography need to be respected. Make something interesting very sharp; look for psychological sharpness; use strong composition; and fill the frame.
Not all pictures are easy to classify. The Calder Stabile is in Chicago: is it a building shot, a landscape, or an object? The original print was rather colorless so a scanned image was manipulated in a simple program -- NDR Lite furnished by Minox Processing Laboratory to view their scans -- to yield this colorful version. Even the Minox EC can be used at fairly close distances to make superb pictures of things, as long as you take care to use it correctly and within its limitations, which aren't after all very great. Seeing, and capturing effortlessly on film what you see every day, wherever you go; that's what the Minox is all about.
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