WASHINGTON DC – An ugly rainy day and a tough one from a scheduling point of view. I dashed down to DC this morning for some meetings, and had a car drive me back for a working dinner in New York (air transport ion between NY and DC is chaotic in bad weather). I brought my Leica but didn’t have much of an opportunity to use it. This is out the window of the car in a part of DC that doesn’t seem to have a name.
DC Fringe
Dandelions. A tough subject. If you print the yellow the way it really looks it tends to blow out the detail. This year the dandelions has come and gone – the season is three or four weeks earlier than it was last year.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I’ve given up trying to make my Noctilux work with my Sony Nex-7. Back to the drawing board – this time with my Leica M9.I spent an our making a minor adjustment to infinity focus on the M9 – it had gotten slightly out of whack. I expected the worse. I’ve been having trouble using the split image rangefinder because my right eye, my shooting eye, has gotten fairly astigmatic. So I switched to shooting with my left eye. Bottom line – focus is right on. I’m having no trouble focusing the lens on the M9 at f.95. Here are some samples:
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I tried a new iPhone app today called 645 Pro. It offers “raw” files, actually tiffs, that appear to me to have a stop or more of dynamic range that the iPhone jpegs and present fewer digital artifacts. It eats battery life so I’m waiting for a new release before I press it any further. A couple of examples in a “rocks and trees” vein.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I spent some time today working with my Questar telescope as a close up lens. The Questar is a Maksutov-Cassegrain design – the first of these that was available in the US commercially. It was an object of lust in the 50s and 60s – some number of years ago I found that they were still being made in New Hope PA, so I bought one. These are inherently long focal length, small aperture designs that are good for planetary observations but poor for deep space objects. It’s focal length is 1280mm. My Sony Nex-7 is fairly easily attached to it via a Rube Goldberg combination of adapters. The Sony works well on the Questar because the camera is light and its resolution matches that of the telescope fairly well. Here’s a leaf shot with the Questar. Depth of focus at this focal length is paper thin. Note the funky bokeh (the out of focus portions of the image) – this is a common issue with folded optics which have central mirrors partially blocking the exit pupil.
Leaf
Here’s the Questar set up to take the above image taken with my iPhone.
Questar
Here’s the new boat, re-cropped to exclude Roger. With Roger in it it was a snapshot. Excluding Roger and moving to a square (almost) format leaves a composition of circles and angles and to my eyes makes the picture more important.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Our Callery Pear trees, running at full throttle. These aren’t really pears – they are a distant cousin of the rose, originally from China, but now widely used as a cultivar here. They are highly valued for their symmetry and dense, long lasting foliage. This is very early for them – we’ve had a warm, dry spring. Taken with my Alpa TC, Phase One back and 32mm Rodenstock lens.
SPRINGTIME IN THE BERSKSHIRES – It’s hard not photographing Spring in Warren, here in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains (actually where I grew up the Berkshire mountains themselves would be considered foothills, and just barely at that). You’re going to have to suffer through flowering trees and shrubs on weekends for a few more weeks. I’ll try to keep it gritty during the week. Taken with my Alpa TC and 32mm Rodenstock lens.
Pear tree
On this day last year: One of Will Ryman’s roses on the Park Avenue Divider. Faux spring. This was taken with a Voigtlander 15mm lens on my Leica – I kind of liked the blue cast on the edge so I didn’t correct it.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Glowing morning light in the stand of white and red oaks and sugar maples next to our house. Nicely seen but badly executed. Somehow nothing I shot today is in focus. It seemed like I was doing what I always do but the results are wildly defective. How can this happen? I’m going to fuss with my gear a bit to make sure everything is ok (this particular rig – the Sony Nex-7 and 24mm Summilux lens has never let me down before, and indeed this combination does not demand a high level of technique). I’m worried. I overcooked some past earlier this week and Maria was quite testy about it. I’m putting a small version of the image up because at this resolution you can’t see the defects.
Sloppy execution
On this day last year: Bricks and more bricks. At least last year I got an in-focus image.
