The Leitz 800mm f/6.3 Telyt-S
Photo by Mark Duncan
By Frank Breithaupt
Reprinted by permission
From News Photographer
December 1978
It was early morning, one
hour before the vacationing President was scheduled to make his way by raft
down the Salmon River. Around a bend,
half-mile downstream were several photographer on a swinging footbridge.
When the President’s raft
came into view, Harry Cabluck started making exposures with his hand made 800mm
Leitz f/6.3 lens at 1/125th of a second with his tripod mounted camera on a
swaying bridge.
Cabluck, a 10 year veteran of
the Associated Press, insists that the shot shouldn’t have worked.
Instead, he captured a
classic last august – a tight photo of President Carter’s raft floating down
the river with the President standing monumentally in the bow like the famous
Leutze painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.
“It’s the first time in my
life I’ve ever planned something and executed it just the way I thought it
would be,” Cabluck said. “Hell, even
getting married wasn’t planned out that way.”Cabluck has a history of getting
pictures no one else does because of his planning and his 800mm prototype: the
“agony and the ecstasy” at the 1976 Olympics, the Carter family after the
Inauguration walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with the Capitol dome in the
background, and key plays in baseball games where his attachment to the lens
began.
With AP in Pittsburg, Cabluck
borrowed the prototype from Walter Heun, technical director for E. Leitz, Inc.,
for use in the 1974 All-Star game in Pittsburg.
In Heun’s hands, the lens had
been used to photograph the Apollo 8 launch on December 21, 1968, of Borman,
Anders and Lovell on a 147 hour lunar flight.
Once in Cabluck’s hands, it
was lost to Leitz. “They figured it
would be better to sell it to me than to just let me have it,” Cabluck
explained.
With his 800, Cabluck said
that getting the picture is not all that difficult. “It’s not so much me as the lens,” he
said. “A lot of people think that it’s
me, but anybody with that lens in their hands is going to make a good picture.”
Well, not quite.
As Hal Buell, AP’s assistant
general manager for news photos put it, “Harry knows how to use that lens. And when to use it. It’s an excellent piece of glass and the
whole thing comes out to nice pictures because Harry’s a very talented buy.”
Putting himself into a
situation where he can use his lens is where Cabluck”s real talent comes in.
With a call to The Idaho
Statesman, Cabluck checked lighting, distances and angles. He talked to the White House people. The weight of the lens – 32 pounds – was a factor. “I figured, what the heck, I’d carry the 800
out there. It’s a pain in the neck, but
I just live with it.”
The white House said he
wouldn’t have to carry his equipment – two Halliburtons, one for the camera,
the other for the 800 – more than 50 yards from the helicopter landing area to
the footbridge. “I said great! I can carry everything 50 yards.”
But then surprise. The helicopter left and Cabluck had to lug
his two cases a mile to the pickup point.
“It seemed like five in that altitude.
And I am just cussing myself all the way – you idiot, I said, the
pictures won’t work, they’re soft, the film is all bad, the light was so bad…
an 800 from a swinging bridge, the raft is moving right at us, the bridge is
moving, my heart is beating and it shouldn’t have worked. Who would shoot an 800 on a tripod at a
moving raft even if the camera was bolted to the earth?”
But after processing it was
all worthwhile. Weeks later he was still
doctoring his elbows from carrying his cases that Idaho mile.
During his decade years with
AP, Cabluck has been sent as far north as the Montreal Olympics, as far east as
Yankee Stadium, as far south as San Juan, P.R., and as far west as Beijing,
China.
Cabluck has become known as
“Dancing Bear and his Magic Lens.”
“There’s just a certain
superstition I have about it – I’m not superstitious, ordinarily, except when
it comes to that lens.”
Cabluck was a staff
photographer at the Fort Worth TX Star-Telegram for 11 years (his brother,
Jarrold, is a Fort Worth freelancer).
Harry Cabluck recalled the first shot he sent fro AP over the
Star-Telegram transmitter – the aftermath of an unconfirmed tornado in 1958:
“It was just a cop standing
on the side of a building. A crummy
picture. But I got all caught up in the
excitement of having my picture transmitted.
I was the guy that made the print, wrote the caption, wrapped it around
the drum and watched the thing go. It
was a big thrill.”
Cabluck’s superstition may be
a gag with AP staffers. Nevertheless the
say, “This looks like a job for Harry and his magic lens.”
And Harry does the job.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DON'T FORGET TO SEND IN YOUR ENTRIES
LEICA Barnack Berek Blog PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST
For more information click here
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Upcoming shows in Tamarkin's Rangefinder Gallery
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
