NEW YORK NEW YORK – We came back to New York today – a long travel day which starts at 6:00 AM in Santa Monica and ends at 6:00 AM in New York – in both cases in the dark this time of year. As you know I sometimes struggle finding a good image on air travel days and this was no exception. In the end I shot a water bottle in our kitchen in NY our of desperation. I also made a few pictures of Francesca but they were terrible. So here’s the water bottle taken with my new Leica S.
Bottle
Well ok. there’s always this one taken on the plane messing around with photo booth on my iPhone.
Selfie
On this day one year ago: Vacant lot. Maybe January 10 is just a bad day for me.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’ve got another new old lens to fuss with. The Zeiss Jena all time favorite from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s is the 5.0 cm f1.5 Sonnar (5 cm equals 50mm). It’s a classic design with a classic look that had a very long run (primarily on Contax rangefinder cameras). I found one at a reasonable price on e-bay in a Leica screw mount which can be easily adapted to a modern Leica (and many other contemporary digital cameras). The Contax mount is much less useful because it doesn’t include a focusing capability – the focus control was part of the camera body on Contax rangefinder cameras.
When the lens arrived I noted a couple of odd things about it: it has no depth of field scale and the distance scale is denominated in feet, not meters, an oddity given that its serial number suggested a wartime provenance (the Germans weren’t making lenses to send to the UK and US at that point in history). In the course of some research I learned a lot more about the lens, which I’ll describe in a future post.
So here is an example shot with my Leica Monochrom. Note the beautiful character of the out-of-focus portion of the images – one of the real charms of this lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I enforce a “no pets or cute kids” rule. Really. Well I’m making a sort of exception today for an image that started out as a picture of a standing vase from Spin in Shanghai in interesting light but ended up as a picture of Basil the Norwich Terrier. He’s a pet for sure so the picture breaks the rule. I’ve added a two frame stitch from the scuzzy stretch of Broadway in the 20s in case you’re a stickler and don’t want to look at a transgressive dog image. Your choice. Both taken with my Leica Monochrom; Basil with a 35mm Summilux FLE lens and the building with a 50mm Summilux, which is just back from a cleaning and adjustment from Nippon Photo Clinic.
Spin meets BasilBroadway
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Wow. A very long and demanding week in my day job. I’m beat. Too tired to raise a camera to my eye. I’m home mid-afternoon and ready for a nap but I pulled it together to shoot some images around the apartment. Here’s a porcelain piece from Spin in Shanghai. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summicron lens. This is odd. This image has been received with much praise in the informal network that I use as an editorial resource. It was a casual capture on a day when not much was happening. I guess this is the benefit of shooting every day – a monkey typing on a word processor long enough will eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Olive plate
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Well this is finally the last week of November, the busiest month of my year. I have a week of meetings and calls which is distracting me from the visual world. I found a few moments this morning to explore our living room with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Dual Range Summicron lens.
Couch
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I spent the morning working at my day job and got away in the afternoon in time to stand in line to vote. We had some family and friends over to watch the returns. By 11:00 PM I still hadn’t gotten my picture, so i finally shot the television with Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summilux lens.
Obama wins
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
