Richard & Caroline's Blog

Its been a stressful week. You can continue to this page if you want to find out my natural solution to reduce stress. Timmy the Greyhound is unwell and needs an operation to investigate.  We are hoping for the best and fearing the worst.

This lunch time I went for a walk with my Leica M10 with the latest firmware to give it a test.  I’ll have to post a blog about dynamic range but the base ISO of 100 is not actually the base ISO but a slight pull setting.

We have been a little worried about Timmy the Greyhounds weight recently.  In this hot weather he has been off his food.  So we took him off to the vets on Saturday for a check up and a blood test.

Hopefully its just the hot weather and nothing too serious.

 

The lovely Cherry B is retiring this summer, I have photographed her a number of times over the years and she is one of the most professional models I know. No matter what your skill set you will always come away having enjoyed yourself and with great images.

I booked her for a final farewell shoot in May and we played around for the first half of the session with various sunglasses and hats before getting down to business for the actual shot I wanted.  See below.

Everyone was expecting a new Leica L mount camera the other week to be announced during the official opening of Leica’s new HQ.  It did not arrive but its still expected soon.  We are also starting to get rumours of a new Leica Medium Format camera to arrive before the end of the year.  The Leica S system is great, and the lens and quality cannot be faulted with the exception of a far to high rate of failure of autofocus motors in the lens, which Leica say they have now fixed.

With high end now hitting 200 MP and mirrorless cropped medium format at 50 MP from Hasselblad and Fuji the 37.5 MP Leica S2 is looking out classed.  They need something soon.

Friday saw the release of new firmware from Leica.  The interest for me is that they are re-introducting the aperture guess in the exif data.

The Leica M range have no way of informing the camera what aperture they are using, but in previous M digital cameras like my M8.2 it did make a guess.  The M10 did away with that as Leica did not want inaccurate information in the Exif data.  Thanks to pressure from the users, Leica have now brought this back.

The weather last week here in the UK has been hot and with bright sun little cloud cover and high contrast, with more forecast to come.  Not something we are usually used to here in the UK, at least for more then a few days.

Modern lens are designed for high sharpness and high contrast.

But when shooting some subjects, either into the light, or at high noon, modern lens and high contrast scenes just do not mix.

Here in this woodland scene, the strong light was defused somewhat by the mist and its all been well handled by the Leica 50mm Summilux lens despite shooting into the sun.

Here close to noon in late May the bright sunlight was nearly too much. I wanted a black and white look but the contrast was difficult to handle, so I used the brushes in Lightroom to tone down some areas of the shot and brighten others.  Even so its far to contrasty and sharp to  be mistaken for a vintage image.

Here with its mix of modern architecture and bright colours, the high contrast seems to work.

Another image I have given the black and white treatment too. Again taken near noon during a walk with Timmy the Greyhound along the Fossdyke Canal. The high contrast of the scene has not really worked.

The last two images actual suite the high contrast. In particular inside of the church. In Adobe Lightroom and the original RAW file there was enough detail to remove the lost detail in the shadow but I decided to leave it with the high contrast and let the dark become lost.