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 should rename this site “Birches R Us”, or “All Birches all the Time”, or perhaps “Birch City”. They are irresistible. Maybe I should cut them all down to eliminate the temptation. Well here we go again. More birches. Growing up in Utah I had a thing with quaking aspens. Similar deal but even more impact. The white bark just gets to you. Oh and let’s not forget the ferns. Taken with my M9 and Noctilux lens.
More Birches
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:
BirchesBirchesJapanese MapleCandiceTed
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.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I spent the better part of a physically dreary day preparing for a dinner party here. Desultory photography. Food and photography are my two great loves and I don’t seem to be able to do them at the same time. I took some snapshots at the party with my Sony NEX-7. Here’s one of them.
Winston
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.
Pebbles, leaves and treesLeaves and trees
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.
