Just added this 12-page brochure, after buying it on eBay. On the Pentax ME page.

A few weeks ago while trying out my new Leicaflex on Boulder’s downtown mall I took this shot from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder:

This image is full-frame, uncropped and unstraightened. I just got lucky. But I liked the shot so much I decided to try more street photography, this time with my much newer Nikon D700. To see some of my work, check out my Street Photography gallery.

Photographers disagree on how street photography is to be practiced, especially about whether the photography should be surreptitious. Some make a distinction between the sneaky photographers, who they call voyeurs, and those who make no attempt to conceal themselves, who they call participants. The pejorative choice of words tells us which they think is better.

You can make whatever value judgments you like, but I’m only comfortable doing street photography surreptitiously. Maybe on the streets of New York it wouldn’t matter, but not in quiet Boulder, Colorado.

I’m new at this, so I’ve been trying out various techniques with various degrees of success:

• Setting the camera to fire automatically at intervals (time-lapse) of, say, 4 seconds, and just walking around with the camera around my neck. Sounds crazy, but it produced this shot:
  

• Firing from the hip with my finger operating the shutter, the technique I used for the shot at the top. And for this one:
  

• Similar to the previous method, but firing the shutter from a remote cable in my pocket. This was to avoid anyone seeing my finger on the shutter, which turns out to be entirely unnecessary. No one is looking that closely.
• Using a right-angle mirror on the front of the lens so I can appear to be shooting something at 90° to my actual subject. I haven’t tried this technique and don’t plan to.
• Using a right-angle mirror behind the camera so I can see the LCD from above, as though I had a twin-lens reflex. This works on my D700 because it has live view. I haven’t tried this yet, but will as soon as my mirror attachment arrives. I’ll report on it later. (I wouldn’t need the mirror gadget if the D700 had a pivoting LCD.)
• Looking through the viewfinder and shooting when the subject isn’t watching. I’ve developed a way to this that involves appearing to view something slightly off to the side, peeking at the subject in the corner of the frame, quickly pivoting the camera into position, shooting, and pivoting back while still holding the camera to my eye. Here a shot I took this way:
  

• Using a 180° fish-eye lens, and positioning the subject in the corner. With this technique I can get to within a couple of feet of the subject and they will have no idea they’re in the shot. Since I appear to be photographing something off in the distance, even the D700’s loud shutter isn’t a problem.

I didn’t think the fish-eye technique would be a good one, for several reasons: The subject takes up only a small part of the frame, so extreme cropping is needed, and, since they’re at the edge, they’re distorted. But I decided to try it out today anyway. The results are interesting.

Here’s a shot along with the full-frame image so you can see how much I had to crop it:

Here are four more shots. Some are more distorted than others, depending on how close the subject was to the edge of the frame:

If you’re never used a fish-eye, you might not appreciate just how close I was to these subjects. I was next to the woman smoking, not behind her. For the shot of the guys having lunch, my side was almost against the railing.

So, while the fish-eye technique is certainly works—you can walk right up to your subjects without them suspecting that you’re photographing them—I’m not sure I’ll be doing much of it, for exactly the reasons I listed.

The Leicaflex is my newest purchase. There are lots of pictures of it, along with the original brochure, an article from the April 1965 issue of Popular Photography, and even some photos I took with it.

Now that I’ve bought most of the cameras I want, or that are available, I’m willing to share my eBay secrets, captured in four rules. Here’s the article.

My newest acquisitions are Konica’s first 35mm camera (1948) and the Taron Marquis (1962), the first camera with a built-in CdS meter.

Just re-did the first page of my Classic Cameras site. No new articles (other than yesterday’s), but now they’re featured on the front page:

This you don’t want to miss: My new Concise History of the 35mm SLR in 19 short pages, with what I hope is a fun-to-use interface. (My day job is computer programming, in case you didn’t know that.)

Happy New Year! 2010 is nothing at all like 1959…

A review of the Kodak Instamatic Reflex, a 3-page ad for it, and a review of the Rollei 35.

And, I grabbed a Taron Marquis on eBay, as the only bidder, and went ahead and made a page for it with a review. The camera itself should be here after Christmas. The Taron Marquis was the first camera with a built-in CdS meter.

Most of the initial autofocus patents were awarded to Honeywell, and most of those were for inventions of Normal Stauffer, who worked at Honeywell’s Denver office.

I’ve added lots of material about two autofocus cameras, the Konica CD35AF, which was the first autofocus 35mm, and the Minolta Maxxum 7000, which was the first 35mm SLR with in-body automatic focusing.

The Minolta Maxxums were the subject of a lawsuit by Honeywell against Minolta, which Honeywell won and for which they received $127.5 million. They then went after almost everyone else, including Nikon and Canon, and got money from them, too. In all, $300 million.

There was no lawsuit over the Konica C35AF, because Konica licensed the Visitronic autofocus technology from Honeywell. By 1980 there were 6 other rangefinders that used the same system. See the web page for the details.

I have several articles about these cameras, information about the lawsuit, and abstracts of some relevant patents. Some information about Normal Stauffer, too.

Much of the material on my Classic Cameras site comes from old magazines, especially Popular Photography, which I read over-and-over during the 1960s. My own magazines are long gone, but I’ve been acquiring replacements on eBay, with great success. My collection is about 50% complete for the late 1930s and 1940s, nearly 100% for the 1950s, and pretty good for the 1960s, although not 100%. Here’s what I need for the 1960s and 1970s (I don’t care too much about 1981 and beyond):

1962: need June, Dec
1963: need Nov
1964: need April, Sept, Oct
1965: need Jan, June, Sept, Nov, Dec
1966: need Feb, Nov
1967: need April, May, August, Sept, Nov
1968: need Sept, Dec
1969: need Dec
1970: need all
1971: need all
1972: need all
1973: need all but July
1974: need all
1975: need all but May, August, Oct
1976: need all but Jan, May
1977: need all but July, August, Oct
1978: need all
1979: need all

If you have magazines to donate (I’ll pay postage) or to sell, please contact me by replying to this post. I won’t publish your reply unless you ask me to.