Whipped Cream Difficulties

More Leicas!

I’m not all that interested in the digital Leicas, though. The Leicas I drool over are the vintage film ones. Yes, I shoot digital, but I still have a secret fondness for film and certain film cameras.

“Leica makes a lens the way it should be made, with metal and glass, while everyone else is making plastic lenses that are meant to be thrown away in a couple of years,” said Ken Rockwell, a photographer and expert on cameras and lenses. “The Leica lenses are so special because they are smaller, faster and sharper.”

Leica’s lenses can vary in price from $1,650 for the Leica 50mm f/2.5 Summarit-M, to the Leica 50mm f/0.95 Noctilux-M, which costs $10,950. Once you have recovered from seeing the price of the Noctilux-M, keep in mind it is considered one of the best low-light lenses in the world and has such a wide aperture it can shoot almost in darkness.

Speaking of low-light lenses, I’ve been wanting to link this:

In the 1960s, NASA commissioned Carl Zeiss to develop a set of extremely large aperture lenses to capture images of the dark side of the moon in its Apollo missions. The company ended up creating 10 Carl Zeiss f/0.7 lenses. Six were sold to NASA, one was kept by Carl Zeiss, and three of them were sold to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick used those lenses to shoot scenes lit only by candlelight in Barry Lyndon (which, I have to admit, I haven’t seen yet: I’ve often heard it called “Boring London”, but it is one of those movies I feel obligated to see). Anyway, these lenses still exist, and you can rent them along with a camera modified to take the lenses if you really need to shoot something in very very low light.

The family of Henrietta Lacks has made a deal with the National Institute of Health:

…the data from both studies should be stored in the institutes’ database of genotypes and phenotypes. Researchers who want to use the data can apply for access and will have to submit annual reports about their research. A so-called HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the N.I.H. will review the applications. Two members of the Lacks family will be members. The agreement does not provide the Lacks family with proceeds from any commercial products that may be developed from research on the HeLa genome.

This is kind of a big deal, for reasons outlined in the NYT article. The very short version: Ms. Lacks died of cancer in 1951. Scientists discovered that cells from her cancer were able to survive in lab environments, and those cells have been used in research since her death. However, her family was never compensated for the use of her cells, and didn’t even know her cells were being used until many years later.

The above is a very simplified version of the story. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (which is mentioned in the NYT article) is an excellent book about Ms. Lacks, her cells and their use in research, the family of Ms. Lacks, and the ethical questions involved. If you have not read it, and have any interest in bioethics, I commend it to your attention.