This post was originally intended to part of a column or article and was written when Shutterbug was a real magazine. Lonnie Long, one of my Instagram followers, asked what my favorite camera was. After some thought I couldn’t decide between my Contax G1 rangefinder or Contax Aria SLR film cameras. So I decided to dust off and update the piece for today’s post.
Today’s thoughts by Joe Farace
“I don’t have the words to describe it, but I know it when I see it.”—former Shutterbug Editor
The title of today’s post was a question I Asked myself when this post was originally going to be a magazine article that I tentatively titled “The Contax Effect.”
What is The Contax Effect?
I initially got into the Contax system.during the film era, when my wife made a deal with Mile High Camera to trade one of my Nikons for a lightly used Contax G1 and brand new Carl Zeiss f/2 Planar lens. When Contax introduced the jewel-like Aria SLR in 1998, I know I had to have one and by then I was hooked. What happened next surprised me. I don’t know when it happened but I gradually noticed and felt that my photographed appeared to get better than it had been up to that time. “It couldn’t be the cameras, could it?,” I asked Mary but she said “I think it is.”
To get some comments on my theory, the first person I talked with was a former Shutterbug editor (quoted above,) who originally introduced me to Contax cameras. When I told him that I found using these cameras had improved my photography, he told me that other Contax photographers he knew discovered the same thing but they weren’t sure why. Neither was I as it turned out.
How I Made this Photo: I photographed this colorful window box during my last visit to London using a Contax G1 and Carl Zeiss f/2 Planar lens with Kodak color negative film, with an unrecorded exposure. The Kodak Photo CD scanned image was opened in Apple’s iPhoto, when the version of the software at the time would do this; it doesn’t anymore. The file was transferred to Photoshop and slightly tweaked using Color Efex’s Tonal Contrast filter.
So I asked a few others including a highly placed executive in one of the largest camera stores in the United States. He came into the retail world as a working professional photographer and I was surprised to learn that he was originally a Contax user too. His theory about the so-called Contax Effect had to do with the aesthetics of the camera itself. “People smile when they see pretty things,” he told me. “When a person looks at the beautifully designed shape of a Contax camera. They just naturally smile and relax.”
Then I asked a camera repairman what he thought. While he agreed there was something to this theory, especially the “beautiful camera” idea, he suggested the camera’s fine construction and Zeiss lenses “bring out the best” in a photographer. He suggested that a camera built as extraordinarily well as Contax SLR and rangefinder cameras inspire a photographer to work harder to try and exploit the best these cameras have to offer and thus create more aesthetically pleasing images. He believed the right camera can improve both your photographic outlook as well as the images themselves. He cites the first Exacta he owned; He was so impressed with that camera’s engineering and precision that he worked harder to make images worthy of it.
All of this speculation is just that–moot. There have been no Contax digital cameras since 2004’s and that was a bizarre Contax i4R point-and-shoot (at left) but wouldn’t it be something if there were?
PS. These day, I have been trying to catch some of that Contax Effect and purchased a Contax 167 MT to, you know, see what happens.
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