Pixiq

“Mamma;” the little boy screamed. His mother snatched him up and covered his eyes with her hands. The crowd gasped and pulled back.

A cab screeched to a stop in front of me, the driver stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Mon dieu. Qu’est que-ce?”

That’s the common reaction I get from Paris to Port Orchard when I’m out shooting pictures with my Point-zilla.

You can keep your big old, Canon Mark 5D with a 600mm f4 lens, if you want to make a really big impression you need a camera like Point-zilla. It is an earth shakin’, picture makin’ machine and when you have a Point-zilla people respect you. It’s the world’s largest Point and Shoot pocket camera, if you’ve got big pockets as big as Captain Kangeroo’s. No siree Bob, this isn’t one of those teensy-weensy fit in your skinny legged jeans digitals.

The Point-zilla is my pimped up Panasonic LX3. It’s a Minolta-Konica/Lumix hybrid held together by surplus Chinese Red Army parts. They don’t make them like this baby any more—well actually they never did.

Point-zilla like most monsters was spawned in the darker recesses of the human mind and it fed on frustration. It’s a short story but I’ll make it long.

I grew up on rangefinder cameras and from my first Argus C4, which resembled a brick and came in handy when you needed a brick. I’ve always preferred the rangefinder’s optical viewfinder window to the Single Lens Reflex camera’s through-the-lens image. From my point of view, shooting with an SLR is like taking pictures through a tube, it’s very claustrophobic. (Note” I do own SLRs and dSLRs but prefer my rangefinders.)

Now I don’t know about other photographers but I feel that I have an innate angle of view that is I “naturally” see the world in wide angle. I am a wide angle person. Drop me into a crowd with my rangefinder and a super-wide 15mm lens and I am in shooter’s heaven. With a long telephoto I start tripping over people and taking shots of their feet.

Consequently most of the lenses for my rangefinder cameras were wide angles. My “normal” lens was a 28mm lens, my wide angle was 15mm super-super wide and my telephoto, which I hardly used, was a 75mm lens.

When I switched to digital I kept my rangefinders but began to use a Nikon D body with a 10-20 mm Sigma lens to get my digital wide-angle fix. But it wasn’t the same. 

Then I saw the Panasonic LX1 “Point and Shoot” and it was love at first sight. I mean the damn thing had a Summicron lens, the Holy Grail of lenses for some of us rangefinder buckaroos. Put a Summicron on it and I’d buy a pig in a poke.

I remember well the day the LX1 arrived at my door. I lifted it gently out of its wrapping and hefted it in my hand. It handled and felt a bit like my old Leica CL, just a little lighter. But those first frames I shot convinced me that I had a professional camera in my hands and that we were going to make beautiful pictures together.

I began using it a lot, loving the way it handled color and sharpness. Yet deep down, in those dark places we photographers hide in, something was nagging at me. At first I couldn’t put my shutter finger on it and then I realized what the problem was.

The LX1 and the later LX3 (which I subsequently bought) both have a 24-62mm zoom lens, in terms of the equivalent angle of view in 35mm. I realized that it just wasn’t wide enough for me.

So I dug into my camera junk closet and found a .80X wide angle accessory lens I had bought in 2004 with my first digital camera, a Konica-Minolta A-2. The A-2 is long gone but I held on to the accessory lens—just in case.

The .8X converter turned my 24-62mm zoom lens into a respectably wide 19.2-49.6mm (equivalent) wide angle, a better range for me. I did try to go even wider with a .5X accessory lens but it caused vignetting, or darkening, of the image corners.

I was fortunate that the Minolta accessory lens is a serious piece of glass, well made and well corrected. In fact it is so much glass that it weighs than more the LX3 it mates to, this helps balance of the camera in my hand as I hold it by the adapter connector.

The point of Point-zilla, of course, is that it was my way of building a tool for my vision. While far bigger than a standard point and shoot because it is so strange looking, people often react as though it wasn’t a camera. And because the angle of view is so wide, they are rarely aware that they are in the shot. It’s fun to shoot with Point-zilla and enjoy the wider world it sees. It reminds me that photography should be fun.

P.S. When I wrote about accessory lenses in an earlier post there was a comment about them degrading the camera lens’ sharpness. Well, wide angle lenses are great for architectural shots and the photo of the shopping mall in Southern France in the gallery, retains its absolute sharpness and detail enlarged to a 30x40 inch print.