Category: Photography

Or are they.

First let me state, Leica rangefinders are not for everyone.  You don’t get the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) view.  Your not seeing the same perspective, it suffers from parallax errors.  The cameras are very manual, including focus, so getting a well exposed image, focused correctly and framed as you want can seem a challenge.

The bodies start from £3990 for an M-E with no lens, up to £6000 for a Monochrom.

The lens are from £980 to £7350 for the famous Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f0.95 6-Bit in Anodised Silver.

Out of reach for many.

Second hand you can get a M8 for £1000, if you want full frame then there is the M-E for £2750, and a good selection of reasonable lens in the £1000 range, so you can get started for £2000.  But you say this is old kit, so lets try a little experiment, what is more expensive, shooting a Leica or shooting Pro Digital SLR?

Well I went to a well known store and prices up a typical pro kit.  Two D4s, zooms to cover 12mm to 200mm and a small selection of quality primes, a wide-angle, standard, portrait and macro.  No exotic telephotos, just a typical range a pro would want.

Now this is where you may say it gets unfair and I am playing favourites to Leica, but typically Leica users own 1.8 lens a user.  The Leica user typically has a wide angle and a standard lens and travels light just with what.

So I went to a well known Leica dealer and priced up new a brand new M-P, 35mm f/2, 50mm f/1.4 and 90mm f/2, an outfit for the Leica user.

Now I know the SLR outfit is far more useful, flexible and can handle more types of work but the fact is:

Pro SLR outfit £17000

Leica M outfit £13000

So are Leica’s expensive, well yes but then so is a pro digital slr outfit and with an slr, you tend to buy everything and the kitchen sink, whilst many photographers have discovered the joy and simplicity of a rangefinder and just one or two stunning high quality optics.

it seems a long time since the Photography Show at the NEC in Birmingham. While there I got a great deal on the new Epson V850 Pro Scanner.

While reviewers have had the scanner in their hands since the end of last year it’s been impossible to get in store.

I was warned that it was likely to be the 1st June before I would get mine. Well this Monday direct from the importers it arrived.

I’ll spare you the in boxing video but it’s now installed and setup in my office which was a bit more of a challenge then I expected, but I’ll go into that tomorrow.

I was reading Terry White’s website this weekend and caught this review of a new product by Westcott, an LED flexible light.  Similar to a small softbox but flexible, it looks like a cool and useful product.

http://terrywhite.com/f-j-westcott-flex-led-light-review/

Last week I quoted Henri Cartier-Bresson who said that “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”.

Well this past week I have been practicing my street photography and zone focusing.  Basically pre-focusing manually and then taking the shot as soon as the scene develops.

This can be for me a very hit and miss affair, but I am getting better.

While in my local coffee shop I snapped a quick shot of the barista who was making my coffee.  Despite me reading recently about always being prepared, I had not increased my ISO enough and still had the lens set to f/8, so my shutter speed was close to 1 second, rather then the 1/60 second upwards I prefer to get a sharp image, still you can see what was going on and its not an unpleasant image despite nothing being in focus due to very severe camera shake.

So maybe Henri Cartier-Bresson was right?

 

 

If you don’t get Black & White or Rangefinders move along now.

Leica’s do cause debate and a Black & White only camera even more.

So yesterday Lecia announced the replacement to the old Lecia Monochrom. The old camera was based on the M9 the new on the CMOS M 240 P.

Output from the new camera and we have only seen images from prototypes is very like the old but better high ISO performance and the old one was no slouch.

What may get people to upgrade is the better electronics. The M9 series gave great image quality but is was the feel and noise of the shutter and the low resolution LCD screen that let it down.

The colour M 240 does fantastic Black & White and with the ability to use the colour channels in your preferred editing software you can adjust the tones as you like.

For hardcore Black & White users, getting rid of the Bayer filter and the noise and artefacts it can produce gives more of a film feel. It does make tonal adjustment more difficult and the use of red, orange, blue and green filters where appropriate is required.

For most of us a colour camera is likely the better choice.

Of course the Lecia Monochrom is not the only Black & White camera. There is now a Black & White medium format back available.

I hope Leica continue to make the old Monochrom as an introductory model like they did with the old M9  which became the ME.

It looks like Black & White is here to stay whether taken with digital colour, digital Black & White or film.

Reviews at http://www.slack.co.uk/2015/Elliott.html