Salad Days
Mission Beach Cafe, The Mission, San Francisco, California
Leica M8, Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f1
1/16sec, 640, 50mm (65mm)
If you date a guy with a camera, expect to be photographed a lot—even if you didn’t have time to dry your hair before heading out.
In this case, I was messing with Matt’s Noctilux which creates a 100mm EFL. Because of this, I had to put my back fully against the window to get far back enough. Accurate focusing is surprisingly easy because of the insanely bright electronic viewfinder (8 times brighter than your eyes!) and the ability to zoom focus. The bokeh of the bar seating in the background is phenomenal—and shows why this $6000 lens gets it’s silky smooth reputation.
I felt like shooting in color again for post-processing practice. Indoor lighting, once adjusted for contrast and color balance, ends up looking too flat, so this time I added back in some saturation using nik Color Efex Pro’s sunlight filter.
Great pics sir 🙂
I love Mission Beach Cafe, specially on Pot Pie Tuesdays, but you really should try the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 on your E-P2 to see what it is capable of.
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@Fazal Majid: Alas, they’ve been on backorder forever. I blame T.O.P. for telling people that about that trick. 🙂
Well, I bought the GF1 for the 20mm f/1.7 and the fast AF, as my Sigma DP2 was just too slow for anything but static subjects. The praise for the prime lens is not hype (tack sharp wide open, and fairly pleasing bokeh) and it is well worth the wait. I also have the Voigtländer adapter for M-mount lenses, but found it less than practical in real-world use.
The only minus point is the fact it doesn't have an orientation sensor (the GF1 doesn't have an orientation sensor in the body and requires the lens to have one to auto-rotate the pictures, which is quite bizarre). On a E-P2, that should not be an issue.
My recent post Why do voters put up with bad politicians?