WASHINGTON DC – I’m here in DC at some client meetings. They start around 8:00 AM but that let’s me get up and catch the morning magic hour with such monuments and flowering stuff (there’s a lot of it) as are within walking range of our hotel. These are all with my Leica M and an 18mm Super Elmar M lens – my go to wide these days. That’s the same contrail in the first two images.
On this day last year: Blond. Yawn . . .
WASHINGTON DC – Still here. Meeting. But slipping out in the early morning to catch the AM magic hour and some magnolias. The cherry blossoms are also out but they are concentrated on the Tidal Basin, which is uncomfortably far from my hotel given my tight schedule. So I settle for magnolias. These are with my Leica M and 18mm Super Elmar lens. This is a nice travel kit, by the way. The Leica is a camel in terms of battery capacity. I’ve been shooting a week on a single charge.
On this day last year: Hartsdale house.
WASHINGTON DC – I’m leaving out the ironic references to “Our Nation’s Capital”. It’s sad to see this disfunctional sprawl close up. But this is a lovely time of year here with the magnolias and cherries in blossom so let’s enjoy the chance to photograph. I spent this afternoon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum guided by the Museum’s director, Betsy Broun. The courtyard, pictured below, is one of my favorite spots for a casual lunch in Washington, but this was my introduction to the collection, which is splendid. It shares the former Patent Office building the the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery. Anyway, the courtyard:
Here’s what’s in front of the Museum Vaquero, Luis Jimenez.
On this day last year: Birch madness. I think that almost everyone who has a camera ranks birches as nearly as irresistible as dogs and babies. I have posted no fewer than 11 pictures with “birches” in the title since a started this project. None of them is much good. Repeat after me: “I won’t shoot birches. I won’t shoot birches. I won’t shoot birches . . .”
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Still shooting with my Leica M and the 280mm lens. But not much. This was a busy weekend of preparation for meetings next week. I shot some junk landscape but ended it with this, shooting straight up, something that I do in New York a lot. I’m a sometimes amateur astronomer – this image illustrates one of the three reasons that Warren is a poor venue for star gazing: We’re at a relatively low altitude, the jetstream passes directly overhead, and we’re on a commercial aviation flyway. All of these atmospheric factors contribute to poor seeing. Anyway . . .
On this day one year ago: Seder.
THE HUTCHESON PARKWAY AND WARREN CONNECTICUT – Still working with my new Leica M. I’ve added an electronic viewfinder (an EVF) that allows one to focus and compose through the lens, which dramatically opens up the range of lenses that are usable on this camera. About a year ago I had purchased a 280mm Leica R lens in anticipation of this day (prices were good then, they aren’t now). This lens has a reputation as being optically the best in its class, but the platform it’s built for, the Leica R, has been a dead end. The lens, the Leica M and the EVF work reasonably well together. The combination is not useful for sports or game because the EVF introduces some shutter lag and the the frame to frame rate is slow. But it works very well for the landscape kind of stuff that I do where I only very occasionally need a lens this long.
Well here we are in front of the ugliest cell tower in the world. Some genius decided to make it look like a pine tree. Actually a sequoia with a bad haircut. A Marine whitewall job. Remember that I’m in the Northeastern US. This is deciduous land. Even a small evergreen tree looks out of place here. But this monster? Here it is in all of its glory, three frames stitched.
In a more modest vein, more from this camera and lens combination, which I like a lot:
I’ve dreamed of having a lens that permits me to shoot this church from this angle for a long time. I’ll be revisiting this.
Two frames stitched:
Finally, Basil confronts a barn:
On this day last year: Sloppy execution.
By the way things got really sloppy on this post. I’ve edited it many times. The photos were attributed to the wrong date (despite my fail-safe file naming convention that includes the capture date) and was posted out of date order several times. I’ve been busy and have been maintaining this blog tired. Sorry for any inconvenience. I promise to stop editing this post. Someday soon.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Another day of experimenting with the electronic viewfinder (EVF) on the Leica M. There was a Leica reflex camera in the film era, called the Leica R, that had some remarkable telephoto lenses – the 180mm and 280mm are particularly highly praised. Of course in a post-film world the Leica R and its lenses are of little interest since Leica has not made a digital successor to the R. R lenses are accordingly not in high demand in the used market. Serious Nikon shooters buy them and have them converted to Nikon mount, a process akin to brain surgery and of course they don’t autofocus.
The EVF permits me to use a Leica R 280mm lens on my Leica M (by means of a simple adapter). So I spent a couple of hours shooting out my window. The view through the EVF and the 280 is poor: it’s slithery and jumpy (because of the slow refresh rate of the EVF) and too contrasty to make valid exposure judgments. The focus aid, however, works very well. Based on the viewfinder I thought that I was getting junk, but all of the images ended up being well focused, exposed and composed. The lens is indeed excellent, although the digital camera exposes some red/green chromatic aberration that was probably not evident on film – its easily corrected for in Lightroom. Here are some examples:
On this day one year ago: Good light.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A day of experimentation. That means taking mundane pictures of mundane subjects trying to understand a new piece of equipment, in this case my Leica M. The electronic viewfinder for this camera arrived today. It permits focusing and composing the camera through the lens via a tiny video screen imbedded in the viewfinder. The view is not great, but it does permit using telephoto or exotic lenses on the M, which would not otherwise be possible using a rangefinder camera. So . . . I’ve got a 1939 Carl Zeiss Jena 85mm Sonar. This is a famous and historic lens, widely used for portraiture back in its day. It was designed to be used on a Zeiss Ikon film camera so it takes a fairly exotic adapter to use on a Leica M mount camera like the M, and the M rangefinder doesn’t couple with it. Used wide open as here it produces low contrast dreamy images. Here here it is, focused through the electronic viewfinder. .
The setting is our dining room. The picture is one of Andrew Moore’s images from Russia.
On this day last year: Patrizia’s party.
