Slick or Sick? (Part 1)

From a letter to a friend who's not especially interested in photography.

I got out long enough to make some photos this afternoon, and will try to get to the zoo tomorrow. Forget whether I ventilated to you my adventures in photo hardware. As you know I have a Canon EOS kit that serves me well. It produces very slick, unctuous, elegant photos. And often that's exactly the look I want – for a long time it was almost the only look I wanted, because my idea was to make ironic photos, showing wounds and dead animals and too-pretty flowers in the format of a fashion photo or coffee-table book.

But you can't drink the same wine forever, and over the last few years I've become more interested in colorless, elliptical, empty, "hard" photos. I was able to get the look I wanted only in black and white, and then only with film. It required extremely sharp and luminous lenses. For that I had a Contax rangefinder camera, the G2 you saw many a time. But film's fading away, so I sold the G2 and its wonderful glass, which left me without a very good way to make des photos ardues.

This year I heard about the Pentax "Limited" lenses – expensive primes, supposedly among the very best lenses optically (though they're "limited" in ways that make them unattractive for pro work). Pentax has long had a reputation as the "poor man's Leica," their lenses supposedly having that "Leica look": brilliant and sharp. I tried one such (on a cheap second-hand Pentax digital body) and find it to be as good as I'd hoped. I don't think it needs to make any apologies to Leica or Zeiss. Since then I've bought two more. Today was my first serious outing with the second one, and it's even better than I expected. So I think I may have found a way to get the effects I want. Naturally I still have the Canon for the other effects. I guess you could say the Canon gear is for color and general gorgeousness, the Pentax for B&W and true grit.

Here for example are three photos:

• Contax/Zeiss B&W in the style I described – raw, gritty, bald, grainy, hard
  
• Canon digital B&W: hopelessly slick, elegant, witty
  
• Pentax digital B&W – not the same as the Contax/Zeiss style (for example, not grainy), but hard, painfully sharp – no-frills photography
  

Lest you think the difference has to do with the studio lighting, here's a Pentax studio shot using much the same lighting as the Canon B&W shown above – cuttingly sharp, but not slick; hard to describe the difference, yet I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

PS: Since sending that note, I did another photo. This one was taken with the Canon, and you can see that this is where the Canon shines: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/06_october/061014131325_G