WASHINGTON DC – Still here. Meeting. But slipping out in the early morning to catch the AM magic hour and some magnolias. The cherry blossoms are also out but they are concentrated on the Tidal Basin, which is uncomfortably far from my hotel given my tight schedule. So I settle for magnolias. These are with my Leica M and 18mm Super Elmar lens. This is a nice travel kit, by the way. The Leica is a camel in terms of battery capacity. I’ve been shooting a week on a single charge.
MagnoliasCivil war memorialAmerican Bar Association
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I spent today (photo wise) messing around with my new Leica S, Leica’s medium format competitor to Hasselblad and Phase One. There continues to be a lot to learn. Here are a couple of examples.
Faux flowersKithcenwares
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.
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 – A good day in the country. There was a moment when a shaft of sunlight illuminated a vase in the kitchen – a fleeting moment caught with my Sony Nex-7 and 24mm Summilux lens. Later in the day I walked around with my infrared camera, a Panasonic LX3 that has been adapted so that it’s sensitive to infra red light only.
