Instant quote

January book of the month

A “kit lens” is a camera lens that is included with a camera when you buy it. Generally not top-of-the-line glass, kit lenses usually come in standard focal lengths and are intended to get you started with a camera quickly. My (micro four thirds format) Panasonic Lumix GX85 came with two kit lenses: a Lumix 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 and a Lumix 45-150mm f/4-5.6. While the former has come in quite handy as an all-around daily carry zoom lens (24-64mm full-frame equivalent angle of view), the latter just hasn’t proved very useful at all, especially after I purchased the Lumix 14-140mm f/3.5-5.6. In fact, I haven’t used the 45-150mm in over two years. So yesterday I finally got off my butt and asked for an instant quote from MPB.com, the used photo gear buy/sell site based in the UK, with a branch in Brooklyn, NY. I self-rated the lens as “like new” because it really is, and got a quote of $48. For a mediocre piece of gear I’m not using, that’s not bad. I went ahead and boxed it up, printed and taped on the required shipping labels, and drove it down to our favorite shipper, Pak Mail on High St. near 13th Ave. It will go out with FedEx on Monday. Boom! Now I wait. But it’s out of the house, and that’s the main thing.

Finally got around to ordering my January “book of the month”—Mrs. R and I both allow ourselves one book per month “on the house” that doesn’t come out of our gadget funds. Ramit Sethi would call gadget funds “guilt-free spending”—an essential part of any conscious spending plan. Anyway, my January book is The Unseen Saul Leiter, edited by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo (D.A.P., 2022). Blurb quote (from the Amazon page):

Now firmly established as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was relatively little known until the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color, when he was already in his eighties. Choosing to shoot in color when black and white was the norm, Leiter portrayed midcentury New York’s street life with a gorgeous painterliness that evoked the sensuality of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries Rothko and Newman. His studio in the East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has commenced a full-scale survey of his more than 80,000 works. This volume contains works discovered through this project—specifically, color photography from slides never before published or seen by the public. It is edited by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, and is embellished with texts that describe how Leiter assembled his slide archive and how it is being catalogued and restored.

Read my friend Blake Andrews’ review of The Unseen Saul Leiter at the photo-eye blog here.