The Old Man and the Pentaxes Outside a small village in Finland, in a little wooden house in a forest, there lives an old man. He has four small dogs and a few Pentax cameras; a couple of P30s and an ME Super. He has a handful of lenses too. Unfortunately, although he's been used to the best, he has fallen on hard times. He can no longer go out and buy stuff like other folks can.
One day he asks himself: "What can I do with my meagre equipment where a larger format will not be needed and will offer no possible advantage. I must find something at which 35 mm excels and can't be beaten, anyway, anyhow, anytime. That will make me happy I'm sure." He looks at his wrinkled brow in a mirror and sighs deeply. "What a shame I don't have my lovely Linhofs, or my Hassie, or Rolleiflex. Most of all I miss my beautiful Questar. Oh dear me." A few sparse tears run down his dry rugged cheeks. He calls to his little dog and she climbs laboriously onto his lap. He starts to think. But he already knows what 35 mm can do better than any other format. But he has to kill time somehow. The snow has all fallen from the trees so he can't go out and take pictures. He did that last week anyway when the place looked like fairyland and it was -27C in the yard. Besides he has no film. He has to wait for his pension to come through. So he has to think it over and over and over ... he falls asleep with the little dog curled up in his lap. Time passes. "Ah!" he exclaims brightly, suddenly awake. "Eureka!" and he lifts Zozo from his lap and they both stretch. His bones creak and crack. "Any final image that ends up smaller than the 35 mm frame cannot be improved upon by being put onto a larger format," he tells his reflection in the cracked mirror by his bedside, loudly, with absolute confidence. "What do you think?" he asks Zozo. Zozo wags her tail in agreement. "I know what," he says walking through to his little study where the computer sits waiting for his attention. "I'll tell my buddies about this. Many of them only have 35 mm and will be happy to hear about this great discovery." He sits down and writes a message which in essence say's the following: "Where the final image does not exceed the film size there is no point in using bigger film," he mutters as he taps away at the keys. Talking to himself is a habit that has slowly crept upon him over the last couple of decades. "And where do we find such conditions?" he asks Zozo who has followed him and is now under his feet. "In macro work where the final image is smaller than the film size." He continues. "And also in the exit pupil of a transmission microscope, a telescope - especially the Questar my own dear favourite - or any optical system where the image will fit on 35 mm." He mutters smugly, "using bigger film will be wasteful. Ha! Why put a 1 inch image in the middle of a larger piece of film?" Then he thinks about the good old days. His laboratory in that far off land, closed down after his departure, his loyal staff, now all over the globe. And the sunny days that go on and on. More tears flow. He goes on typing for a while. "Why does Carl Zeiss use 35 mm in their Photomicroscopes when they could just as well use 220 roll film?" he suddenly asks Zozo who is now fast asleep and snoring. "Because the image fits the film!" he screams aloud jumping from his chair which falls over backwards. The little dog runs like hell for the door and the old man groans because he has disturbed a weak lumbar disc that has given trouble for years. He finishes and sends his message. The poor old bugger! He doesn't understand his fellows very well. He fails to anticipate their reactions. That they will insist, absolutely and without compromise, that the image be enlarged to fit the larger film, never mind what. No matter what he says. He doesn't anticipate either that his remarks will cause anger. Nor does he know that he, in turn, will be frustrated and angered. Later he tries giving examples: an image at more than 1000X exiting from the eyepiece of a microscope fits on 35 mm and so that's all you need. He talks about his beloved Questar. All is ignored. Make it bigger they all say. Make it bigger. Bigger is always better. Grain! Print size! Resolution! Tonality! The old man is bewildered. Aghast! Hurt! And finally angry. All he wanted to point out was that one should use the film size most suitable for the image. People hurl remarks at him like - 'self-proclaimed education' he doesn't know what that means, and believes the author doesn't either, but takes it as an insult and to heart. But, for some unaccountable reason, he never has the sense to say, during all the resulting furore, that the whole idea behind his brilliant discovery was to let people who only had 35 mm know that there was something that their equipment could do that would, and could, not be improved upon by the use of a larger format. He failed time after time to get his buddies to accept this simple point: that if the final image size was restricted to that which would fit on 35 mm film that was all that was needed. Magnification didn't matter, enlargement and print size and grain too, didn't matter either. Those were all well know weaknesses, or strengths, of the photographic process that everyone, even beginners, know all about. He repeated himself and so did they. "Why," they said, "use 35 mm when you can use 10 x 8?" Its not sensible! Why not blow up the image on 10 x 8 by 10X or more and get a wonderful picture. Less grain, more sharpness, better tonality and so on and on. The old man gave up and went to bed where he sobbed himself to sleep. He dreamt about photographing small things, that even when magnified many, many, times, would still fit on his tiny piece of film. He awoke, sweating, one morning with a moon shining outside his window. "Holy shit!" he cried out, "why can't they see, its so simple. If the reproduction ratio is 1:1 or 1:0.001 - it doesn't matter as long as the final image fits on 35 mm film. Aaaaaargh!" His little dog woke at the shouting and ran barking around the room in excitement. Then the old man's nose began to bleed and he looked around for a box of tissues. After he'd stopped the haemorrhaging he sat on his bed in a daze for a long time. He wished he had a bottle of whisky. Maybe he'd get one for Christmas? "Some hope!" he muttered. The small light beside his bed suddenly went out but he just sat there, doing nothing. He began to dribble and started singing, rocking his old frame from side to side: "There's a long long trail a-winding, Into the land of my dreams ..." he stopped. Then he scratched his head because he wasn't quite sure where he was. He looked at the barely discernable face in the mirror beside his bed. "Who the hell are you," he asked, puzzled and afraid. Dr E D F Williams http://personal.inet.fi/cool/don.williams Author's Web Site and Photo Gallery Updated: March 30, 2002
