The lenses arrived. They are as cute as can be. Tiny and mechanically perfect. Here's my quick, first look at the Carl Zeiss 28mm f2.8 Biogon ZM.

 

I opened the box in the dining room, put the 28mm lens on the SL2 body, turned around and snapped my first photo of the day. Just a shot of my living room at the house. Not perfect but fun. For me.

What I quickly found was that when used on a digital camera like the SL2 the 28mm does have some vignetting. The lens is certainly sharp enough across the frame but there is a slight blue shift in the vignetted areas. A partial and mostly successful workaround for this is to go into the SL2 menu and find the M rangefinder lens profile that most closely matches this lens. For my taste it's the profile for the Leica 28mm Elmarit. The version just before the ASPH version. Applying this in camera to my Jpeg files (yeah. I was shooting medium sized Jpegs.. .. ..) went a long way to correcting the vignetting and the slight corner color shift.

Speaking of color, I found the rendering of the Zeiss 28mm to be cooler (more blue) than the rendering of the Leica lenses and Voigtlander lenses I have been using. Correcting the color back to where I like it also tames the apparent/inherent (almost like poetry...) contrast of the files a bit. All part of the learning curve when trying out new lenses for the first time.

The focusing ring is about as perfect, in terms of placement and feel, as I could ever want and I was so happy to get back to an aperture ring calibrated in thirds of a stop instead of the full stop settings of the two recently acquired Voigtlander lenses (40mm and 56mm). The lens came without a hood and while I didn't have any issues with flare I'm getting an aftermarket hood just to help keep my greasy fingers off the front element of the lens. 

Below are samples from yesterday's walk. In a surprising break with tradition I did not stop for coffee. I'm finding that I have so perfected my selection of fresh coffees and my unerring brewing process that I have now spoiled myself for coffee done nearly anywhere else. Oh sure, I'll still go out for coffee but more for the social aspect of it than anything else. Sad when perfection in one field ruins your routine in another.. .. ....

Yeah. It's just construction but clicking in on the yellow cranes shows off the saturated color 

palette that seems built into this lens.

A nod to the visitors who want relatively straight up lines in their images... ..

As seen on Sixth St. 

A good test of sharpness and detail at f5.6. Yes. Very "usable"

In defense of the lens, the bottom corners were falling into shadow naturally.

The difference in color here is more down to the shadows being in shaded areas while the rest of 

the scene "sees" reflected daylight. Pretty accurate --- from a physics point of view.

There is a sucker born every minute. And a group of con artists just waiting to fleece them. 

Austin was host this week to a "conference" or cheerleading session about crypto currency.

The Great Tulip harvest of our century. Can't wait to fire up the diesel generators, log into the bank of servers and harvest me some BitCoin. While ruining the environment. Now, where have I put my "Ponzi Scheme" playbook? But the people seemed so earnest. 

They even have their own shuttle bus. That's how you know they've arrived. 

but can the lens do close-ups? 

Sad. One of my favorite stops in downtown, the café/restaurant at the main library,

the "Cookbook Café" is now shut down. No idea if it will re-open or if something 

else will take its place. But you know how much we fear change!

Next up we play with the 28mm's best friend, the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Biogon ZM.

And maybe we'll give them both a whirl on the front of a couple of Leica CL cameras

at Eeyore's Birthday Party tomorrow afternoon. 

Might be the way to go photographing for fun without the big cameras.

Landscape crew did a nice job with the lawn. Not sure what kind of mowers they were using... .. .