An Austin take on the bucket hat. Eat your heart out Tilley Hats!
I was anxious to get out after lunch and spend some quality time with the new camera. Then we had a 30 minute torrential rain burst. It cleared up but the weather reports predicted more showers through the afternoon. I didn't want to drown my newest camera during its first week with me so I decided to leave it in the sealed titanium camera case (with its own oxygen supply) and take a different camera and also a lens I'd been ignoring for too long.
I've had mixed feelings about the Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 Nokton Classic since I took it with me to Vancouver and discovered that the M to L mount adapter I was using was inaccurate and allowed for focusing past infinity. The adapter also hampered my ability to focus the lens via scale focusing and finally, the flawed adapter limited my minimum focusing distance.....by a lot. The bad feelings lingered I guess. The lens has languished in drawer number 3 for the better part of a year.
But recently I splurged and bought a Leica branded M to L adapter and it's been great with my other M mount lenses. I thought today would be a fitting day to put the 40mm on the SL2, take it downtown and see what the lens is really capable of. Warning: You might not see a profound difference between the technical qualities of these photos compared to other similar photos from other lenses. Believe the words if you are at a loss...
The 40mm Voigtlander Nokton Classic turns out to be a very nice lens once you learn to use it correctly.
I was absolutely entranced to find a bit of flooding in the downtown area.
We've been without rain for what feels like ten years so just having water in the
street seems miraculous. Wow.
To prove my fallibility I spent a bit of time with my shooting camera, the Leica SL2,
set to the wrong ISO and was shooting at shutters speeds between 1/30 and 1/13th of a second.
Happy accident since I liked the moving subjects around the centered family blurring in
an artsy way. I probably should have pretended that I intended for this to happen...
1/13th of a second.
Scary people with dogs. 1/20th of a second. I guess I can still handhold stuff
even though I drink too much coffee.....
Same effect here. Notice the left arm of the woman on the right hand side. Movement blur.
It's like magic.
Soon I discovered my mistake and decided to switch from shooting Jpegs to shooting raw files. I also started using auto-ISO. The three images just below, shot in shade, were basically f8.5 and ISO 3200.
I thought the files from an SL2 at that ISO setting would have more noise but this seemed to work well.
I have been discovered and happily got a smile instead of a rebuke.
contemporary art style.
Ah. The wonderful dynamic range of a Leica DNG file.
And the high sharpness of the VM lens when stopped down to smaller apertures.
Downtown acrobat, swimmer and diver.
man with kind dog.
The Pecan Street Festival was under the watchful eyes of our public servants.
This shot was done wide open. Before you decide it's not sharp
look at the lens ring around the front element.
Above: documenting the photo combo.
Not selling or reviewing either.
Just mentioning them in passing.
Fun with zone focusing.
This event was a downtown craft fair.
All of the images above are from the one
hour I spent walking down one side of Sixth St. and back
on the other. I feel like I can say that I am
able to shoot "street photography."
And portraits.
Everyone I encountered was polite and kind.
Maybe they were reacting to my energy.
I was trying to be polite and kind.
The SL2 and the 40mm VM are great for this kind of work.
