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.
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.
My recent post Why do voters put up with bad politicians?
@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?