The Demise Of The Catalog - And Its Resurrection

I loved October when I was a kid in the Canadian bush - the catalogs arrived for Christmas. Hudson's Bay Company, Eatons, Sears, Montgomery Ward.

Big thick buy-anything from a .303 Enfield to a baby-doll nightie catalogs were issued once a year and were the basic go-to for all of us out there in the woods. We could write down to Calgary or Edmonton - or over east to the main stores and they would put stuff in the mail or on the next CNR freight train and it would eventually reach us. We reckoned that the Mounties might occasionally lose their man but the Hudson's Bay Company would always get our order to us.

Now the Christmas catalogs were thinner, brighter and glossier. They were pointed affairs and it was at us kids that they were pointed. Toys, sweets, clothing, Christmas decorations, and then all the other ephemera of the season that our parents might have wanted to get for themselves -  never looked past the toys but I could let my folks know which ones I wanted ( like, them all...) and most times something appeared on the day. The catalogs were more than just a quick list - they were inspiration books that proved to be playthings in themselves for the months leading up to December 25th. They generally had accurate depictions of the articles for sale - unlike the fraudulent sort of advertisements that we saw on the back of the comic books. You could trust the Christmas catalogs.

Used to be the same with camera manufacturers - big thick catalog books from Leica were the staple of photographer's dreams. Linhof books were like texts - you learned more from careful perusal than ever you did from your teachers. Indeed, Linhof books were written with a Germanic rhythm to the text and a ponderous exactitude to the images that marked them apart even from the Leica house magazines. Leica images were ...umm...lousy ( Ouch, ouch, ouch... but it is true if you look at the LFI) but Linhof's were perfect.

Hasselblad produced their Forum...and traded on NASA and the moon for decades while displaying some pretty basic images. Oh, we tried to emulate them but that is another story.

Today Nikon make a series of pamphlets to advertise their cameras, lenses, and flashes, and they are beauties. Good images, enough technical information on the back to satisfy the geeks, and generally a pretty fair explanation of the thing in advertising terms in the middle. They function as a great wish-book for people to take away and chew over - paper salesmen, in effect.

Olympus has produced a rather artistic catalog for the latest E-P5 camera and a number of their lenses. It has incorporated drawings on modern style of the design features of the body - to inspire you to appreciate it as a work of sculpture rather than an instrument. Do that if you must, but not where we can see it. Anyway, it is a wonderfully glossy catalog.

Ditto Panasonic - though we get fewer of them here than other manufacturers. They tend to give out more of a general listing and they make a LOT of different models...I suspect that these sorts of catalogs are outdated as they appear since the production lines are faster than the writers.

Deare Olde Canon...who produce some dynamite gear and conduct a very good promotional day whenever they release new products...have eschewed the big pamphlet or printed catalog. Go on-line to see their gear and read all the good reviews and see it in-store...but I can't help feel that they would do better if they followed the lead of Nikon and gave us a collection of take-away books. They did a wonderful hard-cover book for their lenses and many people have it, but you really need to give someone a small thing that they can leave around the house for their family to see...

And finally...Lee. Makers of wonderful filters and gels. Great quality stuff. Desired by professionals and amateurs alike. Costly. They do a great catalog, however, and we have a lot of their catalogs. They send them out in all their deliveries. Can't supply their most popular filter, mind, but they can supply catalogs. I think they run on the soviet system...

I am getting cynical in my old age. And good at it too...

Ivory And Ebony

The advance of digital photography has seen some remarkable trends - none more so than the photograph that slows a waterfall to a mist - or levels a moving sea. Or removes all the people from a busy city street. We mean the interposition of a very dark neutral density filter into the light path which permits a very slow shutter speed.

The name that is on everyone's lips is Big Stopper - it is the catchy tag for the Lee company's 100mm x 100mm resin filter. It fits into their standard holders and drops 10 stops of light. I wish I had invented the name Big Stopper - it is the sort of thing that you can bandy about at a camera club meeting and sound really cool.

Oh, would that you could go into a shop and buy one. Like into our shop, for instance. Because of their great popularity and the drought that has been affecting the English filter fields...we never seem to have enough of them delivered to satisfy the clubmen. Please do not think that I am criticising English manufacturing practice - I am sure that if you wanted a Quad amplifier or a Manton shotgun you could find them at any corner store...

But for whatever reason, the Lee filters are hard to get. We have found another good answer for the landscape photographer. B+W make 1000x filters in screw-in sizes that will do the same job as the Big Stopper. Kenko make an ND 400 that gives you 9 stops of darkening. And Promaster make a wonderful variable neutral density filter that looks as though it would do 1 to 10 stops. To prove it to myself I put one over a light box at the two extremities of adjustment - have a look at how dark it gets.

The video people can also use this sort of a variable filter to do fade-outs at the end of video shots.

I should purchase one in the largest size lens that I use, then adapt it to smaller lenses with simple step-dow rings. The whole deal would be cheaper than Lee, but don't let that influence you.

New Packaging For A Favourite Product

Here's the new product packaging that came in this week for the Lee Big Stopper filter.

The Big Stopper is Lee's way of slowing the world down - 10 stops of light reduction with no annoying colour shifts. You can smooth out skies, make waterfall misty, and put a soft fog effect on the restless sea.

You can photograph city streets full of busy travellers and have most of them disappear - of course you can do that by broadcasting live from Parliament, but we're talking art, not angst.

This new packaging is fun - a neat tin box with internal padding to protect the filter. I have no idea why they changed it from the  previous padded pouch, but it makes a nice change on the shelves.

Note: Big Stoppers sell like hot cakes and are less fattening. If you want one get it now before we sell out again.

The Little Guys Get To Play Too - With Lee Filters

We've been selling Lee filters for years to professional and advanced enthusiast photographers. They value them for the clarity of the filter - no colour casts - and for the sturdiness of the holder system. They can get some filters that are unique. And they can adapt them to some very strange lenses...albeit in some very strange ways.

Okay - up to now I have only known about their big range - lo and behold we now have some of their Seven Five product in store. It seems to be a miniaturised version of the larger filter holder and of the graduated neutral density filters.

The principle of the thing is the same - a dedicated adaptor ring for the front of your lens, a holder clamped onto it, and the neutral density filter sliding up and down in the holder. But in the new small size, it can go onto mirrorless and micro 4/3 cameras.

The astute photo enthusiasts will realise that this might free them from having to take a large DSLR on a long trek into the bush for a landscape photo just to make use of an ND grad system. Now they can take their Panasonic, Olympus, Nikon, Canon, or Fuji and pack it into a very much smaller space.

Those who still wish to take larger gear are recommended to contemplate a 4 x 5 monorail outfit with full compendium up the side of Bluff Knoll in a rainstorm...

Note from the pack shots that there is a starter kit with one ND grad and also a three pack of different strength filters. They are all small enough so as to justify carrying the lot on your next venture - local or overseas.