NEW YORK NEW YORK – My Leica Monochrom has been my constant companion now for two months. It’s developing a bit of patina. For those of you who aren’t photo gear nuts you should know that this camera is entirely manual. No autofocus. It has a rangefinder – you align a split image in the middle of the viewfinder. I’m modestly astigmatic, which makes aligning the split image problematic. I’ve finally gotten glasses that correct my astigmatism so I’ve been walking around practicing focusing with them. Here’s from a bathroom in our apartment shot with my 35mm Summilux lens af f1.4 (which provides very shallow depth of focus). I intended to focus on the tiles and that’s how it came out, with the towel a little out of focus. So I’m still in business with the Leica.
Bathroom
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is the second year in a row for a freak storm for us at the end of October. Last year in Connecticut a major blizzard dumped an unprecedented amount of heavy snow while the leaves were still on the trees causing major damage. We lost power for a week and roads were impassable for the better part of that time. We were trapped. Based on that experience we decided to ride out Superstorm Sandy in Manhattan. I spent a good part of Sunday and Monday on preparation – not in a mood for pictures. Here’s a large lead acid battery that’s designed to power a telescope that I’ve adapted to be a power source for charging mobile phones and the like in a power failure. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summilux FLE lens.
Sandy prep
On this day last year: Freak storm. As I said before, we had a freak blizzard in Connecticut last year.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I stopped at the Nespresso store on Madison Avenue to buy a coffee machine and some coffee for the country. Here’s a picture taken with my Monochrom and 28mm Summicron lens.
Coffee
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This afternoon I had a meeting at the ICP where I found the pay phones hidden – perhaps out of embarrassment for this ancient technology. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summilux FLE lens. A bit earlier I caught a window washer out of my office window.
They hide the pay phonesOut my window
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Here’s a picture of a picture taken with my Leica Monochrom and Nocitlux lens. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Very large picture
NEW YORK NEW YORK – There’s some stuff looming on my calendar – Maria’s birthday and our anniversary fall back to back at the end of this month. I’ve tried to break the pattern of last minute shopping for gifts, so here I am hard at work shopping. Leica Monochrom and Leica 50mm Dual Range Summicron.
Happy Birthday Maria
NEW YORK NEW YORK – What a mess. This morning I worked on cameras (which is overdue). I shot a test roll on my new M4 to check shutter speeds and cleaned lenses and the sensor on my M9. I walked around the neighborhood and captured a dozen or so images for this project, and shopped to update my wardrobe a bit. Here’s the mess. On August 21 (that’s tomorrow but remember that I post these about a week late) I took another pass at cleaning the M9’s sensor, but I hit “format card” on the menu on the camera. rather than “clean sensor”. In other words I wiped out the images for August 20. I spent a couple of hours with disk recovery software trying to fix the problem but failed. This is the third time that mess ups involving storage media have jeopardized this project. People talk about storage media failing, but it’s actually much more likely that people fail.
Anyway the test roll of film that I took with the M4 saved the day – it came out fine. Here’s one of the test images taken with my M4, Ilford Delta 100 film and a 50mm Dual-Range Summicron lens.
