Re: A simple question...

Neil Harrington wrote:
Paul Furman wrote:
Neil Harrington wrote:
You've surely seen Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother." If you've ever
seen a large print of that you've immediately noticed that the focus
is wrong -- Lange was using a large-format camera, depth of field was
extremely shallow and the plane of best focus was not on the
subject's eyes where it should have been, not even close. The texture
of part of her clothes is tack sharp but her eyes are not sharp at
all. (On web images this is harder to see. I used to have a big
Graphic-Graflex book with this and some other famous photos in very
high quality full-page prints, and the focusing error really jumps
out at you.) But it's still a great shot.
http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/fsa/8b29000/8b29500/8b29516v.jpg
Interesting observation although it's possible the focus works better as shot, emphasizing the children & ragged clothes, where the woman's face is already plenty strong as a feature. Probably a stretch but maybe...

If you saw the large high-quality reproduction in my old Graphic-Graflex book, I'm sure you'd agree that the focus was a mistake. Actually, for that shot, I suppose that using such a large-format camera in the first place was a mistake on account of its very shallow depth of field at that distance. But I guess that was the camera she *had*, so that was that.

I assume she was shooting that big beast hand-held, since she mentioned making four or five shots as she moved closer to the subject. With the slow films of that time she must have been shooting wide open or nearly so, in order to use the shutter speeds to get the sharpness she got. On the larger reproduction I recall parts of it were beautifully sharp -- but they were the wrong parts, in a very shallow plane, and the eyes were not sharp at all. Of course, those old Graflexes I'm sure just had a plain ground glass with no focusing aids. I suspect those Graflexes were more complicated to operate, too, than our familiar 35mm SLRs.

Here's a simulation:
http://edgehill.net/Misc/photography/lange-migrant-focus
you be the judge

It is possible given these two options from her proofs, that she might have chosen the one emphasizing the ragged clothes & children.

--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

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