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Retro style in photographic equipment: where does fashion end and need begin?

Leica
Retro-design cameras, retro-krutilki for mechanical shutter speed and aperture, with retro buttons and thread for retro cable for the descent. Retro effects. Bayonet and adapters for retro optics. Complete with cameras with a screen size of more than three inches, they forget to attach only a retro cape so that the photographer, hiding with the camera and tripod, could more accurately make a retro composition using Live view, a 36 megapixel sensor and a petzval bronze lens, as fast as a pinhole in a matchbox.

The pictures - solid vintage. The lady in the tour against the background of "Moskvich-401", popularly known as "Stirlitz", boil a rusty kettle on a kerosene stove. The collapsed wall of the church, decorated with a life-affirming inscription: “NoGGano”, serves as a vintage retro background for a girl who ineptly works as a bedboy. Black and white pictures. Sepia. Uranus. Cyanotype Artificial cracks and punctured edges in digital images, forcing the viewer to believe that every byte of this particular image has been in all imaginable alterations since the days of Nissefour Daguer before Operation Desert Storm. Cute girls with iPhones in their hands look at us from the pages of a retro photo, forcing us to believe that we, contemporaries, could now listen to their memories of the Japanese attack on Port Arthur.
No, I do not criticize indiscriminately the whole retro-style as a phenomenon. Everything has its meaning and its place, and for retro-style this value and place can certainly be logically defined. But I, the proud owner of Fujifilm X-E2 with mechanical spinners and retrodesigns, as well as the Fujifilm X-A1 with the most common PASM disc, have found myself not only once or twice that the wondrous mechanics of the wheels and buttons of the first of the designated cameras put everything more often when responsible shooting in position "A". But once I went through the whole school of film photography, I didn’t part with “Kiev-4A” and I still can not hesitate to say “paraphenylene diamine tetraacetic acid”, although the eczema caused by this bloody acid has cured a good quarter of a century ago.
I try to understand what we, photographers, are looking for in “retro magic”, both from a technical and aesthetic side. And if the criticism of such things as compositional bad taste goes far beyond the limits of the subject matter of this site, then we can not only talk about the technical side of the matter, but also need to.
And, yes, I constantly wear a rangefinder “Jupiter-9” on one of the “fudzhikov” without any signs of enlightenment. I love this retro lens, although I don’t see any “magic” in it. This is an honest analogue of the "hundred-thirty" under the crop, with good plasticity of the figure, very reasonable resolution and cost as much as five hundred rubles. Excellent for open air portraits. And for magic - to parapsychologists and psychics, please ...

Briefly about the main thing


What is this article about? About not letting yourself be deceived by the “fashion trend” on retro-style, but to clearly understand in each specific case what and how you can achieve with retro photo equipment.
The algorithm of self-analysis on the subject of retro can be represented as a tree in which the final solutions are highlighted in bold text:
What do you want from retro?
1. Shooting?

2. Pictures?

3. It is not clear what you want?
- Take a couple of films on a functional film camera.

The considered algorithm of actions, generally speaking, is surprisingly not universal. But he has a valuable property common to all algorithms, namely: its use makes it necessary to leave alone purely “spiritual” considerations in the style of “I want something like that, but I don’t know,” to streamline thoughts and do the same thing, that is, photographing. And in order to bring some theoretical basis for this algorithm, in the following sections of the article I will try to consider certain aspects of what is generally called a “retro style”.

Section one. Retro-style in modern photography


In order not to be confused in terminology, I will pre-divide two concepts: “retro”, that is, modern fake for old stuff, and honest “vintage”, that is, photographic scrap, taken out of a grandfather's suitcase or found in the nearest garbage bin. About the latter phenomenon, in order to avoid discrepancies, I note in advance the following: in the USSR they made excellent photographic equipment (if it did not fall into the percentage of marriage, as happened with my first Zenit-B), and all the wailing about the “terrible soviet artifacts named by misunderstanding cameras, this article will not be mentioned and discussed.
But back to business. Why are playful pens of photographers reaching for antediluvian lenses and modern mega-functional cameras with the “twists” of the era of the Aurora cruiser? Do you think that the matter here is in the spirit of the epoch, in the vintage of warm lamp and film technologies, in the fragrant charm of the metol-hydroquinone developer? I'm sure not. Everything rests on a difficult and not very conscious feeling: the direct control of non-linear processes.
Photography (both digital and film) is, as they say today, matan. Moreover, both mathematical analysis in the literal sense (it is needed here and there in photography, just to study nonlinear processes and control them), and in a more general cultural sense: the synthesis of art, science and technology under the control of the mind, awareness of the role of the creator in creation of creation based on the objective laws of the universe. This meaning of the word "matan", ennobled him, not by chance becomes more and more popular. Automatics does not kill "creativity" and not "spirit"; instead, it sometimes takes away the awareness of what the author does and transfers his functions to the machine - sometimes smarter and more attentive, but certainly not more sensitive than the creator, to the original concept of creation.
This is where the desire to turn torso and calculate tsiferki - desire, with equal force characteristic of photographers and car enthusiasts, aquarists and painters, radio amateurs and musicians. Direct control over the action, direct vision of what is happening and direct, based on accurate knowledge, intervention in the process - this is the true essence of the popularity of "krutilok" and "whistles", the essence of disputes in the forums about the "best boke" and "MTF curves", the meaning of sleepless nights, carried out after cutting out diffusion filters from a piece of nylon colander, which suddenly came up best on the diffraction properties of the Great Designer of the Creator (I do not ironically, when I write these words with a capital letter).
Did you know that yesterday? “About what”, you say? Then why so much anger and contempt for those who continue to shoot "in the green zone," or even on the iPhone? So many moans of "earlier it was better" and the smell of warm sour fixative dissolved in water mixed with a glass rod? Do you not realize, then, that your part of the work is not complete, that such things as composition, dynamics, and structure of the plan can be transferred to the “bydlodevice” with a single “Remove Masterpiece” button ?! Where do these vigils in the forums, workshops and in the trash with photographic equipment, if not from the natural desire to become above the laws of nature, putting them at your service ?!
Marketers, by the way, do not understand this. By releasing a “retro-camera”, they take care to “conform to the 70s style” (spirit of the 50s, to the zeitgeist of the pre-war “watering can”, to the smell of mossy French d'Agrerotype from the days of Galfa) ... But the convenience of analog control of nonlinear processes Alas, in second place. Therefore, there is a selection selection disc on most pseudo-analog "fudzhikov" in the eternal position "A". A photographer is confident enough to manage one or two parameters, and he will be happy. When camera manufacturers understand this completely and make no more mistakes, such as sticking an SD under one lid with a slot battery in the beautiful Nikon Df, then the heavenly pipes will pop up, then the followers of Nikon and Canon will reconcile with each other and " healers, ”then comes freedom, the happiness of nations and peace in photographic hearts.
')

Section two. Antediluvian lenses


"Vintage optics." So we call the process by which a skewed pipe from a FED with two surviving glasses of six gets up through an adapter of the company “Uncle Liao and nephews” to our super modern “carcass”. Putting "vintage glass", you must certainly take a picture of a drop of water on a piece of paper or a girl with a tourney. For everyone to appreciate the “bokeh” and “plasticity”, which is absolutely unattainable on these modern lenses of yours, automated at the very blend. To make it clear that the lamp spirit of those times, when this optics cost hundreds of bucks, and was made at one factory (and from some materials) with neutron initiators for atomic bombs, can never be surpassed by anyone.
Well, people tend to respect for old age. It is bad when they parasitize on this respect. It is bad when the Krasnogorsk plant produces its non-autofocus "Helios-40" almost fifteen thousand rubles for a new objectivator. It is bad when dealers, using the inflated myths about the "plasticity of the super-takumara" or "the amazing bokeh of Mayer trio-planes", begin to sell these terrible glass tiles of six to seven thousand plus shipping. But worst of all, when a crooked amateur photographer goes and rolls off this money, and then suffers: what did I get for my money, what did I, a fool, lack in my 18-55 IS / VR ?!
Let's try, following the example of the algorithm given at the beginning of this note, to disassemble the desire to possess the ancient lenses according to the results achieved with their help. So, with the help of outdated optics, we can get the following things:

I will not argue about the significance of any of these criteria. It is important that none of them, including the first one, add anything especially good to the technical parameters of the photography and the snapshot. Moreover, it does not bring “retro spirit” into the picture. We will discuss this in the next chapter, but for now you can take it as a rule of thumb: if you are not a collector, and a photographer, then a reasonable price for an “interesting lens” or even “legendary glass” from mechanical cameras of previous years should not exceed one hundred dollars, if he has a mechanical pairing with your camera (that is, it is relatively modern), then two hundred and fifty. Otherwise, sooner or later you will start to bite your elbows, looking at the shelf, filled with unnecessary optical junk. And, what's worse, spread the legends about the “wonderful moisture of Minoltov lenses” and the “matchless drawing of cucumbers”, increasing with their actions the amount of lies and chaos in the Universe.

Section Three: Film and Film Cameras


The film is good. If you have someone to exercise it, or you know how to do it yourself. To shove a 12-frame Kodak Gold film into a camera by buying it at a kiosk around the corner, and then showing and scanning in the format of 3000x2000 pixels in the same place is not a sensible occupation. Nothing good will come of it, and you will spend a lot of money and time.
In Zakadye, the medium format film is almost not available, it is even more difficult to process it, and buying through auctions you always have a chance to buy anything or get a veil in the pictures from improper storage of the film during transportation. On the other hand, modern full-frame and even cropped cameras have so improved the quality of images that they have long been the tool of choice for the most "advanced" and picky masters. Is there any point in messing around with the tape? Perhaps there is: about the same as for an artist to work in oil in the age of acrylic. The time-consuming and poisonous process provides all the same increased level of “analog” control over all stages, which makes manual settings in cameras when shooting are so popular.
I repeat: it all makes sense only if you show the films yourself or give them to a good developer who is able and willing to work with your personal plan. And, considering the process of film photography from this side, and not as an “analog miracle”, we again come to the conclusion that it is necessary to use the most modern technical solutions to get the right film snapshot. The film is not a figure, it does not forgive mistakes at any stage of working with it. And a retro soap dish will always be the worst choice for a correct photo than an ultramodern film “canon” or “nikon” at a price of several thousand dollars. Plus a developing machine, reagents, a drum scanner ... To buy a full-frame digital mirror is cheaper! And in Vilia-Avto, you will get 10 to 90 percent of the shots clouded, depending on the curvature of the hands, and this is assuming that Vilia-Avto itself is technically sound.
Lomography, with your permission, I will not discuss this blog at all. Conscious and malicious deterioration of the technical quality of the results should not become a fashionable trend. If someone likes it, let him do it; but, as I already wrote above, photography is neither in terms of art nor technically.

Section Four: Photos in retro style


This feature is primarily art, not technology. Speaking about the technical side of the issue, I will say only one simple and quite obvious thing for 99% of people familiar with this phenomenon:
No need to use retro cameras and retro technology to get photos in retro style! All the necessary retro effects easily and simply put on a picture in the most ordinary photo editor! So do the professionals, so do you.
It would seem, obviously, that the idea of ​​imitating Cartier-Bresson with the help of a “watering-can”, and with the help of a 4x5 universal camera - Ansel Adams, is quite consistent with the idea of ​​imitating Van Gogh’s paintings, cutting off his ear. (I no longer touch the purely moral, as well as the legal aspects of such imitation!) Adams filmed the eternal beauty of nature, and Cartier-Bresson worked with his contemporary world. I am sure that both of them would not have abandoned the modern "Olympus" or "Canon" with high-speed autofocus. Moreover, I think that Cartier-Bresson would shoot almost all of his subjects in the program, and even in the "green" mode, if he had such a mode on the camera. Long time ago did you go to the "green zone", dear colleagues?
Although I made a promise not to touch on the artistic aspects in this article, I’ll still mention a couple of them. First is the lighting. Lighting on retro shots, except for shots of bars and similar places, can be of two varieties - day or very warm, always spot. And the candle, and the kerosene lamp, and the Ilyich lamp give light at a temperature of about 2000-2700 Kelvin. Not only the illumination of fluorescent lamps of indeterminate temperature, but also the diffused light from the flash (even with a light filter) on retro-frames always looks completely unnatural.
The second technical and art history aspect is, oddly enough, the requirement of the absence of traces of time on retro shots. If we see a girl in a blouse of a sample from the late 1940s, who cooks food on a kerosene - the kerosene and the pan should not be rusty, the jacket should not have faded spots, and the web in the corner of the kitchen and the ancient dust-covered buffet should generally be completely excluded. Otherwise, we do not depict the 1940s, but the usual slob and poverty. Unfortunately, many retro-photographers do not understand this, with pleasure and parading photographing fallen bicycle spokes, perennial descaling on teapots, patina and cobwebs over dented typewriter keyboards ... Retro should emphasize the unity of life, and not preach the cult of death and oblivion!

Conclusion


In conclusion, I will be brief. Do not confuse retro-shots, retro-design accessories (which may include the camera), and garbage vintage. Every vegetable has its own urn. And the “wheels”, like the “green mode”, have an objectively determined technical purpose on the cameras; so let's hope that cameras with analog control will become more and more every year.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/255949/

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