Werner Ulrich's Home Page:  Ulrich's Bimonthly

Formerly "Picture of the Month"

July-August 2007

"Balcony, 1964"   It's a full year now that I started the Bimonthly – and yes, thank you for still reading it. Except for the introductory article of July, 2006, all the contributions since have been dedicated to my present series of reflections on critical pragmatism. These have been rather long and demanding essays, so I feel you and I deserve a summer break. Here it is.

For a hyperlinked overview of all issues of "Ulrich's Bimonthly" and the previous "Picture of the Month" series, see the site map

The magic of black and white pictures  Perhaps you remember my March 2005 page about the Voigtlander Vitomatic IIa, my favorite camera of younger years. Why not occasionally offer in the Bimonthly some of the old black and white photographs taken with the Vitomatic IIa back in the 1960s? Here is a picture of 1964 that goes well with the vacation period and which to me represents the charm of black and white photography as well as any other I find in my collection. I call it "Balcony, 1964," and it shows the view from a hotel room near Montreux at Lake Geneva.

It's the kind of balcony that makes you feel you need nothing else but sit down and relax.  Just be.

The balcony comes to life through the use of black and white photography as well as the picture's being taken as a contre-jour photograph.

As the picture is over 40 years old, I cannot remember the exact location of the hotel and its name; but I do remember vividly the moment of taking the photograph and particularly my struggling with the issue of depth of focus. The main focus was to be on the balcony, but with a view to enhancing the viewer's experience of the landscape rather than moving it out of focus; for it was the balcony's being situated in front of that magnificent background of lake and mountains which made it so special. As I was very close to the balcony – stepping back would have made the angle of view afforded by the window too small – giving full definition to both the balcony and the mountains was impossible, nor would it have produced an interesting picture. Finding the right balance of focus was the main issue then. It made me experiment a while; in the end I decided to ease the problem a bit by underexposing the picture slightly while giving a discreet preference to the balcony.

The old black and white negative film shows some grain and I have made no attempt to remove it. Film grain was for analogue photography what sensor noise is for today's digital photography: a source of image noise that tends to increase with photosensitivity and which (along with resolution and definition) limits the size of quality reproduction.

Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose. Photographic techniques change, but the trade-offs between recording sensitivity and quality, lens aperture and speed, object definition and depth of focus, and so on, remain the same. As does the charme of a simple little balcony above a lake!

Picture data  Analogue photograph of a late summer afternoon of 1964 near Montreux at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Camera: Voigtlander Vitomatic IIa (manufactured in 1963). Film: 35 mm black and white negative film, 21° DIN / 100 ASA (= ISO 100), type Adox KB 21. Aperture f/22.0, exposure time 1/250 seconds, focal length 50 mm. Digital file scanned from a 12 x 18 cm print of 1964, 1428 x 2068 pixels; current resolution 500 x 600 pixels, compressed to 105 KB.

July-August, 2007

„There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”

Ansel Adams (U.S. photographer, 1902-1984)

Notepad for capturing personal thoughts  »

Last updated 22 Jun 2014, 2 Jul 2007 (text; first published 1 July 2007)
https://wulrich.com/bimonthly_july2007.html