NEW YORK NEW YORK – We had a party this evening in honor of a visiting German friend. I shot it with my Leica Monochrom and a 1837 Carl Zeiss Jena 8.5cm Sonnar lens. The Sonnar was designed for a pre-war Contax rangefinder camera, not for a Leica, so it took two adapters (one of them is quite complex) to fit it on a modern camera. It’s the classic small camera portrait lens of its era and has lovely rendering, but focus is flakey so I adjusted it so that focus was accurate at its close focus distance and focused by moving my body. I bought it in anticipation of the Leica M, which permits through-the-lens focusing without relying on the rangefinder, which doesn’t couple accurately with this lens. Here are some samples:
On this day last year: Superbowl.
