The Online Photographer

The autofocus on this camera was evidently faulty, and I personally would've chosen a lower ISO setting, as the grain is unacceptably high.
Using a Canon lens would definitely have improved overall sharpness too - perhaps more attention to the resolution-graphs on dpreview might've helped here.
The photographer should also have cloned away those unidentifiable 'lumps' in the water behind the main subject - possibly he/she needs to take a tutorial on the latest features in Photoshop CS3...

I don't know whose comments are funnier; Mani's or Benjamin's.

Every time I see this Robert Capa image my shoulders tighten for a moment, an involuntary reflex I guess.

Mani, that's just the famous Leica bokeh.

Benjamin - Lighten Up!

Mani was making a point about how many photographers are completely wrapped up in how many megapixels the camera uses, DOF with APS cameras, and other mechanical aspects of photography and forget that the picture and the photographer is what should be more deserving of our time and attention.

Bruce

Not a good day for the sarcasm detector, eh, Benjamin? :P

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20070619/images/PAR115311.jpg

Wasn't this one staged?

I have family in Normandy, and have been in gardens (and it's quite ordinary) there were old dead trees can't be used for fire because the chainsaws break when you try to chop logs. Wood is full of lead and shrapnel. We like to depict history in epic proportions, but its day to day presence seldom faces all of us.

It's all covered in "Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa" by Alex Kershaw, one great, great story after another. Great post by the way, Mani...

Thanks Bruce - and others - for not having a humor bypass.

As someone who's recently returned to film because of an undefinable but persistent dissatisfaction with digital, this sort of visceral image represents exactly what i feel is lacking in today's meaningless(?) striving after lens-resolution, pixel-perfection, low-noise output.

I term it the 'beauty of accident' - these images that are grainy, blurred, 'wrongly' exposed speak to us in a language that goes way beyond all the irritating chatter on mega-pixels and optimal RAW conversion.
The current habits of 'shoot-chimp-delete-shoot' are no match for the dramatic unknown of opening the lens to allow light to fall on a strip of film for a fraction of a second, and then close again on the unknowable gulf before the magic of the darkroom reveals what happened in that snatched moment...

In a recent talk, an important curator for the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, in Madrid, Spain, with access to Robert Capa's contact sheets said that the man did not die because he can be seen alive and well in subsequent photographs, and that most likely the photographs were made while on maneuvers, and the man probably slipped while being photographed. He blamed the mis-attribution to the magazine that first published the picture. He talked as if the matter had been settled a few years ago.