Voigtlander 50 APO LANTHAR arrives and .... I'm too busy to go out and shoot with it right now....

 First of all, I have to blame a writer for putting a major crimp in my schedule. I found a book on my shelves that I bought a while back with the intention of reading it on vacation. That vacation got cancelled by the pandemic and I shelved the novel for later... lost in my library for several years.

I rediscovered the book yesterday morning and I seem to have acquired a problem in that I can't put it down. The writing is too captivating; too real, and the plot is as exciting as a long string of free Leica lenses. The dialogue is pitch perfect. Who could walk away from a perfectly crafted story to do anything else?

It's by some obscure writer, last name of Sanford, and his protagonist is a cop named Virgil Flowers. The book is entitled, "Deadline." I am suggesting that you give it wide berth because once you turn past the first page you'll find that you've stepped into a dangerous reader's tar pit. You won't want to leave  your chair to eat and you sure won't want to waste time sleeping. 

The big issue for me is that I'd booked a second photo shoot here in the studio for a client at Abbott U.S. and I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull myself away from the paper pages long enough to set up the studio and get the client in and out. I was able. Just barely. 

But now I'm sitting at my desk trying to read while simultaneously watching files upload and download and get written to thumb drives. This addictive book has tossed a bag of nails into my schedule.

You know a book is a winner when you'd rather keep reading it than to open the box from B&H with the newest miracle lens nestled inside. Tragic. Almost unthinkable. 

And patently unfair. In fact, if I am ever able to track the culprit down I'm going to be giving this Sanford fellow a piece of my mind. Not that I have lots to spare. but the productivity loss...

I was able to pull myself away from the novel for just long enough to photograph some very small medical appliances with the Leica SL2. I had to compose with a lot of room around each piece in order to have enough depth of field to keep the entirety of each product in focus. To make this work I fell back on my old trick of using the multi-shot hi-res mode to create 180+ megapixel raw files which I could then crop into and still give my client about 40+ megapixels of good, noise free data to work with. 

Thank goodness for bright LED lights and also the awesome performance of the Sigma 70mm f2.8 Art Series Macro lens. Today's optical MVP. 

The 50mm APO will have to wait for its turn at tomorrow's portrait shoot. A super sharp, contrasty lens and a bunch of bright faces....what could go wrong?

Stay tuned.