When 'Enough' Is Not Very Much At All...

A typical Duder collection of cameras and lenses for going out taking pictures. Still looking for a compact kitchen sink…

Now, anybody who’s seen me arrive at a studio or location to take pictures will know that this article is going to take me out of my comfort zone: if I thought a kitchen sink might possibly be useful I would definitely take one with me…

But this article is about the delights of stripping right back, and I suspect that this automatically rules out a zoom lens, because that involves covering at least a few bases, if not all. Think more of the person with a well-worn Leica on their shoulder, and a couple of spare rolls of film in their pocket. It’s about travelling light, with confidence. I have a memory of an advertisement from the Sixties, or maybe the Seventies, in which a girl in a bikini wandered around with nothing but a Barclaycard tucked into her briefs. Nothing else is necessary for a consumer society. I finally found the ad on YouTube – when I was a student, trying to hire films for the Engineering Society, I remember that it was both the most popular hire, and the most unavailable, so I waited 50 years to see it…

(After which, I nearly got lost in Cadbury’s Flake ads, of which there are many! But I digress.)

Maybe the point is that we tend to worry about what we can’t do, instead of concentrating on what we can. The legendary violinist, Paganini, often snapped three strings while performing so that he could show off just how much he could do with only one string. That’s confidence!

My friend Jon Bowdige, performing with The Bones – with four strings, but his electric violin doesn’t need all the parts that Paganini’s violin needed to be functional. Notably, the body is solid, and with some electric violins, it can be both fibreglass and vestigial…

I have a friend who has done various mechanical and electrical things during his working life. He’s not rich, but I think he’s made his life interesting: he sometimes changes direction for fun, often when the risk of significant financial success seems to be threatening. The vehicle he uses for work is well-equipped for what he does, but when he’s driving a car, his approach to a full toolkit could be described as happy-go-lucky. And there is a certain logic to this, because he’s inventive, and is undeterred by facing a vehicle that won’t go holding one small screwdriver. And I’ve seen what he can do – another friend describes the process as ‘putting the fluence on it’ – where ‘it’ is any given problem.

When we load our camera bags with many lenses and accessories, we are giving ourselves technical flexibility, so that we have the resources to photograph almost anything with the aid of one or another piece of kit. The alternative is to develop an inner flexibility so that one can find an approach to any subject with very limited equipment.

I know it doesn’t look it here, but I really do feel comfortable with an Alpha 7 and an 85mm lens…

For me, this means an 85mm lens on full frame, most of the time – and I’ll write more about that later. But in different specialist contexts, it can mean other very specific outfits. For instance, the Ricoh GR series has proved popular for street photography, where travelling light is a big asset, and the lack of a viewfinder is no impediment. Similarly, the Fuji X-100 cameras are remarkably high quality and versatile cameras for travel and just carrying around. In both cases, the wide-angle lenses mean that portraits have to be approached carefully to avoid unwanted distortion, but otherwise they seem to be delightful general-purpose cameras.

Looking back in time, a little, shows an awful lot of cameras with fixed lenses and strictly limited capability. But if what you are shooting is within those capabilities, there’s no problem. This box and folding cameras have recorded expeditions and achievements that might have escaped more capable gear which requires greater time, knowledge and effort for making pictures.

The exception that proves the rule: although my Fuji X10 has a zoom lens, I experimented with it as being the nearest I’ve got to an X100, when set to 28mm. The small sensor and a modest aperture allow great depth of field, and it’s easy to shoot from the hip.

Wildlife and sports photographers often work with few lenses, and most have a favourite – I suspect that limiting them to a single, fixed focal length would merely increase their determination to bring back the perfect image… When the subject is so specialist, the focus is necessarily very narrow – in more than one sense of the word.

In all cases, the problems with finding the right lens and swapping things around disappear when there’s no optional optic. You can focus on making pictures, and wondering about things has less ability to claw its way into your mind and distract you from pictures. Your increased mobility (barring those landscape and sports outfits…) may well mean that you can range further and faster, and also, at the end of the day, you may have the stamina left to go round one more corner, to climb one more hill.

I own a Leica M6, bought secondhand from a friend who found it less useful for dance photography than he had expected. At first, I found it very laborious and clunky in operation. With experience, I’ve discovered that it can be easier to use in some circumstances than more automated cameras. Where the light is steady, you take one reading and shoot away: when the subject distance is constant – as it often is in the studio or in the landscape – you focus and leave it. That it will never get past a frame a second doesn’t matter, because holding and using a camera that feels so special and so different gives an intensity to shooting, and somehow films stretch out so that 36 frames is ample.

Although some Leica users go for a swanky leather bag and hand-tooled camera strap, an M-6 is a highly functional tool as it came out of the box. Despite enormous restrictions in almost every way compared with a modern digital camera, it simply works, and works right. Bad workmen improve rapidly to match their excellent tools.

Although changing lenses on the M6 is easy, and there are ingenious ways to use longer lenses on it, I find I’m most comfortable with the standard lens. Wide angles are fine, and focus is very accurate, but so far, I’ve not found my mojo with them. It may or may not be relevant that the wide-angles I have available are much older than the camera, and not as crisp as the Summilux 50mm. (Maybe it’s time to experiment!) Longer lenses are not naturally as useable as shorter ones – the focus accuracy is, relatively, less, and the viewfinder image is bounded by yellow lines in the centre of the field. And yes, Leitz has produced workarounds, but they detract from the elegance of the camera, as supplementary lenses and gimbals that make a mobile ‘phone a ‘better’ camera do.

And that’s why the classic photojournalistic setup, made famous by Don McCullin and others in Vietnam, consisted of a couple of Leicas with wide lenses, and Nikon cameras with longer optics. Relatively, focus accuracy with a rangefinder camera is better with wider lenses, while a telephoto on an SLR allows careful use of the very limited depth of field.

It’s worth mentioning that comfort with a minimal outfit isn’t the same thing as the exercise we’ve all heard about, and may have tried, involving deliberately restricting an outfit. That’s meant to be slightly uncomfortable and to encourage a creative approach. What we’re talking about here may follow on from that, when the realisation strikes that, actually, that ‘limited capability’ made things easier, not harder.

Street is a genre that I’m not much at ease with – but shooting from the hip while walking seems to have worked decently. f/5.6 and 1/300 with 200 ISO set.

Possibly the first time this ever happened to me was when I had borrowed a Rolleicord (that I subsequently bought, of course!) Several years before, I’d owned an elderly Yashicamat. I didn’t particularly enjoy using it: while it did the business, it wasn’t particularly well thought out, I felt, and it lacked the nice touches, the grace notes, that set lovely equipment apart. But the Rollei had several refinements, such as a bar that moved down the screen from the top as you adjusted the focus, compensating for the increasing parallax error. And so on a holiday in Porlock, I set out for a stroll around the village with nothing but the camera, my Weston meter, and a couple of rolls of FP4. Carrying that camera with its fixed lens and rather slow operation I felt equal to any challenge a sleepy Somerset village at the foot of a big hill could throw at me.

What might your own minimal outfit be? It depends on what you shoot. For me, whether in the studio or outdoors, it’s 85mm on full frame. In the studio, this can often mean that I can’t shoot full-length images. But that’s OK because there are loads of closer-in images that will work really well. (As an aside, I find one of the worst things about novice pictures of models in such studios is the weird feet… If you shoot from eye level, you may be looking straight and level at the model’s eyes, but you have a pretty aerial view of her feet! Waist level finders help, or articulated screens that allow portrait-format shooting without contortions, but the perspective will remain edgy, and easily upset!)

Rolleicord and film. The two pouches on the strap hold a pair of close-up lenses and a pale yellow filter.

If I was shooting street images, it might well be a 28mm or 24mm and zone focusing: many people like cameras such as the Fuji 100 or Ricoh GR for this, because they’re small and unobtrusive. A quiet shutter is a big plus unless you want to take the Martin Parr approach with medium format and flash. And there must be an honourable mention for Dougie Wallace and his work: I find that looking through his website makes me want to cheer. If ever images said ‘class warrior’ in big, bright capital letters, they’re his: if you find them offensive, I suspect he’ll be delighted that he’s got through to you. I recommend ‘Harrodsburg’ as a starting point.

Can I be controversial for landscapes, and suggest my own preferred 85mm, or (my only zoom selection) a 70-210? Instead of the broad vista, go for details that tell the story. This is especially effective for dull or rainy days when the big vistas simply aren’t available.

Flowers and plants suggest a macro lens – but the adventurous may want to take something like a Lensbaby Muse or Scout to make losing the background easier.

Architecture? Just your widest lens.

Sport and wildlife are way outside my own expertise, and almost outside my experience, but I am sure that those who work in such areas will have one lens that they use more than others – maybe a 400mm?

As a footnote, after writing the bulk of this article, I decided to try one or two of the specific ideas I’ve suggested. To some extent, because they’re outside my usual areas, the things I did are rather artificial, and had an air of ‘unusual new discipline’ – but I think I got some reasonable results.

Alpha 7R III and Sweet 80 optic in a Composer Pro 2 mount.

First, a trip to David Austin Roses near Albrighton saw me carrying nothing but an Alpha 7 with a Lensbaby 80mm Sweet in a Composer Pro mount on my shoulder. I suspect that the Sweet 80 is the hardest of the series to use, with a long view and a small sharp area, but it didn’t frighten me, and I feel that I got some reasonable results.

And second, some street shots, and a visit to the National Trust’s Wightwick Manor, ready to shoot buildings, the garden and people, carrying my Leica M6 with an elderly Canon 28mm f/2.8 lens. It’s probably not a lens that Canon would be proud of, 60 years on, because the edge quality is pretty awful at maximum aperture. Stopped down a bit it’s fine: and, of course, with street pictures, edge quality is next to utterly unimportant. It has the benefit of being small and light, and I have to admit that it’s a mechanically lovely lens, with a lock for the focus on infinity, like many pre-war Leica lenses. (It occurs to me that fitting this on an Alpha 7 with the shutter on silent would make life easier, and results faster, and practical experiments may mean that I use an almost-forgotten camera for future street attempts – see the images and comments about my Fuji X10 above.)

So it’s over to you: please post your own experiences of minimalism, and ideally include a picture or two with your comment.

For real minimalism, you need to see a Burlesque show. Performers are never nude, but their outfits are usually, in keeping with the theme of this article, minimal. But for the sake of keeping this article fully visible to non-members of the site, here’s the Triple Threat troupe at the start of an act. More images are available in my portfolio…