AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTORS' SOCIETY INC.
Back Focus is the Society magazine published 4 times per year. From Back Focus #75... |
In the Outback with a Pentacon Six - Paul I Boon |
Photographically recording the condition of field sites is always a significant part of my work. Whilst my colleagues use various little digital things for their photos, I constantly amaze them with a bewildering array of cameras and related paraphernalia whenever we go on field trips together: old (and not so old) Leicas, Canons, Minoltas, Pentaxes and Yashicas, with the odd Nikonos thrown in for the really wet trips. As I was to be away for over a month in one of the most photogenic parts of Australia, I had to give very serious thought to the photographic equipment I’d take. For once I was not limited to what I could carry on a plane or on my back, as we’d be traveling in our trusty old LandCruiser: I could thus take a vast armory of bits and pieces, in a variety of formats. The expedition is shown enjoying morning tea on the road from Mildura to Lake Mungo in Figure 1. So the title is not quite correct: in fact I was in the Outback with three and a half cameras. The first was my Pentacon Six, along with its 50 mm f4 and 65 mm f2.8 Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogons and a Schneider 80 mm f2.8 Biometar. I’ve covered these lenses in a previous article in Back Focus, No 63. As the Pentacon lacks a light meter, I brought along a hand-held Zeiss Ikophot selenium meter which, like the camera, dates from the 1950s or so. The second camera system was considerably newer: a R9 Leica with 35-70 f4 Vario-Elmar R (i.e. the Solms zoom lens, not the much less admired Sigma-derived one with the same range of focal lengths but the variable aperture that goes from f 3.5-4.5) and 90 mm f 2 Apo-Summicron R. I used Fuji Velvia 50 in both the Pentacon and Leica. The third camera was a Canon G10. The Canon is a compact digital with an unnecessarily big 15 MB sensor but, more importantly, a good old-fashioned optical viewfinder. The half camera was my son’s (Harry) Spotmatic F with SMC Takumar 55 mm f1.8. It ranks as only a half, as he was adamant that he wouldn’t let me use it. Even when I’d run out of film in both the Pentacon and Leica and the setting sun was creating fabulous images in the sandstone ruins at Fumina (just north of Leigh Creek) and I was pleading to have the Pentax for just one photo, Harry declined by saying “You’ve got enough cameras Dad”. Mind you, this was coming from a lad who had previously asked me “Dad, when you die, can I have your Hasselblad?” The three cameras are shown in Figure 2. The award for staggering image quality, though, must go to the Apo-Summicron R. It is simply the most perfect lens I have ever used. One night I was photographing (into the setting sun) some camels browsing on a mulga-vegetated hillside: every branch was clear, every hair on the camel’s nose visible even at f2, every shade and colour perfectly reproduced, and an unbelievable ability to simultaneously hold detail in the shadows and in the highlights. The only problem with the Leica set-up is the weight and bulk of the whole system. Perhaps its value was a bit worrisome too: I was careful never to let it sit in view on the front seat of the unattended LandCrusier, even in a seemingly remote area with no-one about. But the camera I reached for when I was alone for a moment and really wanted to take photographs was the old Pentacon. It’s so simple, so straightforward, so rewarding. Yes, it’s a handful to cart about and it’s impossible to take a photo quickly or without drawing the perplexed attention of onlookers, marveling that some-one would use such an antiquity instead of a modern digital thingy that can also make phone calls, set your diary and probably also make a cup of tea (sorry, latté for these people) in the more advanced models. The Schneider Biometar returned startlingly sharp transparencies that are a delight to look at. This is perhaps not a surprise, as I read somewhere recently that the Biometar is simply the original 5-element Carl Zeiss Planar but, because of the old schism between West and East Germany, it wasn’t allowed to be called a Planar. Of course, having it made recently by Schneider in the (unified) Germany solved the quality-control problems that may have afflicted the original East German lens. Ditto the 50 mm Flektogon with regard to image quality, and at all apertures. The much older 65 mm Flektogon is a bit soft at open aperture but sharpens up wonderfully at f5.6. And remember that this is a lens that ceased manufacture in the early 1960s, so it’s no spring chicken. Although many people hate the square format of a 6x6 camera, I find it perfect for the photos that I take. Aside from the boringly technical images needed for reports, my flights of photographic fancy extend to photographing trees and, for the big squat River Red Gums, a square format is perfect. Finally, there is much to be said for a waist-level finder and a ground glass to compose on: it’s very easy to hold a camera steady while it rests on your (middle-aged) tummy and so much more stable than holding a digital thing at arm’s length. To finish up the Pentacon saga, a good word for the Ikophot light meter. It’s never let me down, and is a perfectly designed piece of equipment. How was it that Zeiss could design a photographic tool that was so perfect for its intended purpose in the 1950s, but many modern-day camera makers consistently produce things that are all but unusable? (Like menu-driven protocols to set film speed or aperture in digital cameras.) So much for the equipment; what about the photos? In the northern parts of South Australia, we spent most time in the northern Flinders and Gammon Ranges and these areas are a photographic wonderland. We visited the River Red Gum near Wilpena Pound that Harold Cazneaux made famous with his 1937 photograph. It’s still there, just as enduring as he had imagined it to be (Figure 3). As another aside, note that the 3rd Edition of Cazneaux: The quiet observer has just been republished by the National Library of Australia. It’s a steal at under $40. The desert environment is simply stunning in the Flinders and Gammon Ranges, and the Ridgetop Tour (run from Arkaroola Wildrness Resort) is a ‘must do’. The day we did the tour was awfully overcast and the light really flat, but somehow this lack of strong shadows made the images so much better. Perhaps it was a case of Velvia’s super-saturated colours compensating for the general flatness of the light, and the overcast weather not creating too much contrast between those bits in the sunlight and those in the shadows. Figure 4 shows what to expect. |
My work often takes me to odd and remote places, and the last six months has been no exception. I’ve been running a project on the ecological impacts of tourism on natural ecosystems and, after we’d worked on systems in Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria, recently extended it to include the arid zone of northern South Australia and southern parts of the Northern Territory. I was to be away for 5 weeks for this part of the project, so took my family with me rather than be stuck alone in a series of isolated hotels by myself. 
Having three cameras that spanned 50 years of the development of photographic instruments proved an interesting experience. The Leica was, as expected, superb. The metering system performed faultlessly and always produced images that were perfectly exposed. Even in the desert with unbelievably strong contrasts in lighting and a tonality that hardly ever conformed to an assumed 18% reflectance, every transparency was exposed correctly; my attempts at bracketing in conditions that I ‘knew’ would fool the meter were completely unwarranted. The Vario-Elmar R zoom lens performed as well as I had remembered it did in the past: beautifully contrasty, saturated images with absolutely no flare at all, even when shot into the sun. This lens delivers a very strong, and initially slightly disconcerting, differentiation between the plane in focus and the planes in front and behind. There’s an almost etching-like sharpness to the image but still an incredible three-dimensionality: no gently gradating fuzziness between what’s in focus and what isn’t with this lens. (As an aside, I wonder whether the soft gradation so enjoyed in many older lenses is simply uncorrected spherical aberration?) 
