Leica M10
Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH
35mm, 1/500 Sec at f/4, ISO200
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic V15.5.1
Photo of the Month – August
The full range of Leica’s now in Grey available
I love my silver M10 but have to admit when Leica announced the grey version with matching lens it really excited me. A classy grey, and for most budgets from the compact to the M.
Man on Ladder
Leica M10 with 35mm f/2 Summicron
If your walking the streets of your local town, look out for interesting scenes or people.
Leica SL3-S Released
This week we saw the release of the new S version of the Leica SL3. The S versions are often seen as a cheaper version of the SL but should be in fact considered a faster more video focused version. Once again we see Leica sticking with 24 megapixels. Like Nikon and the Z6 mark III, it seems to be a sweet spot in the performance stakes.
I will not bore you with details but it looks a solid release, if your an SL shooter, wanting to get into SL glass, or just want to shoot M glass but do not like a range finder, the SL range of bodies have something for you.
Southwold Pier
So here we are having fun on the end of Southwold Pier. In the end I packed very light. Two Leica bodies, an M4 and a M8, and two lens, an Elmar 24mm and a Summilux 50mm together with spare memory cards, two spare rolls of Kodak Tri-X and the iPad.
The above shot was taken with the M8 and the 24mm. All processed in Lightroom Mobile on the iPad. The colour looks a little odd as I used different contrast curves for the red and blue channel plus a little desaturation. An interesting look I hope you agree.
So far most of my photography today has been with the M4, the light was overcast and constant which made using an old camera without a built in meter very easy.
Post Processing for Print
With all the adjustments available to us in modern software I decided to do an experiment with the above photo.
First I did a very minimal development. No lens correction, no noise correction, some sharpening and a slight adjustment for blown highlights and deep shadow, hardly surprising with the high contrast subject matter.
Then a tweak of extra clarity (+15 from what ever I set for the screen), then off to soft proof and print.
The second version was much more aggressive, full lens and perspective correction, heavy noise reduction and then a little slight grain added to make the noise reduction look more natural. A touch more sharpening then off to soft proof, again extra clarity for the print.
I now had two prints but which was best. Well time to ask a few people what they thought.
I’ll let you know the results tomorrow.
Leica M-D Released
Today Leica took the brave (or some would say foolish) step of releasing a Leica Digital M with no rear screen. This is a mainstream model and not a special edition.
Like I said when the rumours started to appear, I like the concept. For my personal work that involves wandering around the streets of Lincoln, shooting street, it would be a fun and simple camera, just concentrating on the important things. With this type of photography you generally only get one chance of capturing the moment anyway so not being able to chimp at the screen is not an issue.
The problem is it could not be my main Leica rangefinder. As I use the rangefinder for portrait work and need to get the image right, checking the histogram is important to me. With Leica M’s being the price they are I can only really afford one digital M, so its hard to justify this one.
Leica 35mm Summilux T Lens
This lens designed for the Leica T has a field of view of about 50mm. As reviews start to appear it’s made quite a impact.
The T lens do produce great results but many users were upset that Leica had software correction to improve the results and to over come some issues.
Leica built quite a reputation with their M and R lens. Back when we shot film post lens correction was not possible. Film was more forgiving and people forget that with digital sensors some type of correction is generally required.
So no matter what lens you use there will be some correction going on.
For those who do not like software correction then possibly manufacturers could put options in their cameras to turn off and to control the strength. Even better go back to real RAW files without correction and have the correction controllable in your RAW processing software.