Through other eyes
Mission Beach Cafe The Mission, San Francisco, California
Leica M8, Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f1
1/16sec, iso 640, 50mm (67mm)
One thing you can never do enough is lend your camera to other photographers, it’s fun to process images that came from the eye of another. While Matthew was asking me about my Leica, I lent it to Kara after a brief tutorial on how rangefinder focusing works, and she snapped this pair of photographs of the restaurant.
Mission Beach Cafe, The Mission, San Francisco, California
Leica M8, Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f1
1/16sec, 640, 50mm (67mm)
I set Leica to have a medium high ISO, widest aperture, and a rough guess of an acceptable shutter speed so the only thing she needed to do was focus. After a couple trials she was off and running. You’ll note that the shutter speed is way past the handheld “shake limit” of the camera—that’s because that rule doesn’t apply for rangefinders and their stealthy shutters.
In the first photo, post-processing was done by Silver Efex Pro. If you do black-and-white digital photography, ignore everything else and just get this. It does everything. Just for fun, I did set some u-points to increase the contrast on the lettering, and it really pops from the background. A color filter was used to also provide contrast.
The second image was an attempt at color. Here, because the subject is the sign, Topaz Simplify did an amazing job of cleaning the image. It helps the people are just bokeh, one of which is me in a blue shirt, so Topazing doesn’t add artificiality. Also, since no color processing is done, you really get a sense of the muted color tones that are synonymous with Leica.
