WARREN CONNECTICUT – A freezing windy day here. I ventured out briefly to capture a moment of decent light and was driven back by the weather.
Day 1,612 of one picture every day for the rest of my life.
On this day four years ago (day 151): Citcorp.
Category: Interior
TURKS AND CAICOS – I got bored with the beach today so I found myself without a picture fairly late in the day. Got this with my iPhone in a friend’s apartment complex. I’m showing it in the original color and translated into black and white.
Day 1,603 of one photo a day for the rest of my life.
On this day two years ago (day 871): Look up – a nice example.
Categories
Friday January 17, 2014
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More work on “bokeh” shots around the house (those of you who follow this blog will know that bokeh refers to the quality of the out of focus portions of the image). Taken with my Leica Monochrom camera and a 50mm Luxocron lens.
Day 1,555 of one photo every day for the rest of my life.
On this day last year: Rat, not a work of sculpture at the Lever House but a real inflatable rat.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – We have an antique linen pillow case framed over our bed – it’s elaborately embroidered in white on white (actually creme on creme). Its very hard to read, let alone photograph. Today I shot it with an iPhone app called TurboScan that is meant to scan documents. TurboScan shoots in very high contrasts and actually rendered the text, “Sempre Uniti,” which in Italian means “Always United”, a declaration of love.
Day 1,544 of one photograph a day for the rest of my life.
On this day last year: Santa Monica Beach.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy day with my cameras. We drove back to New York (from Warren) to get Maria to a doctor – she’s had a hacking cough for two weeks now. When I arrived I found that FedEx had delivered two packages, one with my 2x tele-extender for my Leica R 280mm lens (which I can use on my Leica M camera), one of the great long lenses of all time. I also received a 75mm Leica Summicron Asph., which it turns out is a marvelous lens. The first two frames below are Baby V (our granddaughter) taken with my Monochrom and the new 75mm. In the next image I’m experimenting with the quality of the out-of-focus portions of the image (so-called “bokeh”), which is creamy and lovely, a real accomplishment for such a highly corrected lens. Finally a couple of out my windows with the 280mm and 2x tele-extender set up on a tripod. Looks fine but this combination is really fussy in use.
Apologies for the gear talk. What’s more important here is that Baby is making the transition, at just short of two months old, to having a personality. You begin to get a bit of that in the series of pictures below, taken over about a five minutes period.
On this day last year: Lipstick building. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 5cm. Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar from 1945 – this lens rocks.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – New Years Day is a quiet day. A time for reflection and list making. My resolutions this year include improving my mastery of my Twitter account and having more fun in the office. Also more time with our grandchild, Baby V, who is in the process of turning into a “who” rather than a “that” and is pretty well documented here. Anyway, I did take a picture today with my Leica Monochrom and 1958 Dual Range Summicron:
On this day one year ago: Maria grunged up. The only usable (on technical grounds) image last year was this genuinely pedestrian picture of Maria, so I resorted to trickery on my iPhone to try to make it more interesting.
Categories
Monday December 9, 2013
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More old lenses. Today I’m experimenting with a 5cm Nikkor-S (Contax mount) f1.4 with a Contax to Leica adapter that I found on ebay (the focusing helicoid for the Contax was on the body, not the lens, so this is a complex adapter). This lens, which is from the mid-1950s, does much better at close focus than infinity, where there is all kinds of junk going on in the corners. Here are two samples on taken with my Monochrom. This lens has a lovely signature in an intimate setting.
A second old lens: an 8.5 cm f2.0 Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar from 1937, also in Contax mount with a modern copy of the adapter referred to above. The mount had a slight ding which caused serious hassles fitting it to the adapter. After fussing with it on and off for a couple of months I finally got it working this week. The focus cam is not correct for Leica so the rangefinder is only accurate at close focus (1.15 m) but is extremely accurate there. This with an M so I could use the EVF to focus and converted to black and white. This is a sensational, charismatic lens, especially given that it is 75 years old. I’ll be doing more work with it.
The Nikkor from the Mad Men era:
The Sonnar from pre-War Germany – not a great image – I’m trying to figure out what this lens can do.
On this day one year ago: White House.
