Friday April 5, 2013

NEW YORK NEW YORK – Another day of experimenting with the electronic viewfinder (EVF) on the Leica M. There was a Leica reflex camera in the film era, called the Leica R, that had some remarkable telephoto lenses – the 180mm and 280mm are particularly highly praised. Of course in a post-film world the Leica R and its lenses are of little interest since Leica has not made a digital successor to the R. R lenses are accordingly not in high demand in the used market. Serious Nikon shooters buy them and have them converted to Nikon mount, a process akin to brain surgery and of course they don’t autofocus.

The EVF permits me to use a Leica R 280mm lens on my Leica M (by means of a simple adapter). So I spent a couple of hours shooting out my window. The view through the EVF and the 280 is poor: it’s slithery and jumpy (because of the slow refresh rate of the EVF) and too contrasty to make valid exposure judgments. The focus aid, however, works very well. Based on the viewfinder I thought that I was getting junk, but all of the images ended up being well focused, exposed and composed. The lens is indeed excellent, although the digital camera exposes some red/green chromatic aberration that was probably not evident on film – its easily corrected for in Lightroom. Here are some examples:

On this day one year ago: Good light.