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.
13 comments:
Kt,
I think you are on to something. The "errors" you made resulting in subject motion blur are really interesting. I have to try that. I will have to dig through my stuff and find my ND filters. And, yes the lens is just fine.
The most fascinating shot for me was the photo of that police car. It's been a LONG time since I've seen a police vehicle that wasn't a Ford Explorer Interceptor.
40mm 1/30 of a second and be there :-) ! i love it, love the blurriness! which isn't surprising since i shoot a lot of questionable intentionally blurry photos :-)
I've never been to Austin, but having read your blog for years now I feel like I have—I love these walkabout posts with so many well-made images of people and the city. The "infrastructure" of a street fair is exactly the same where I live, on the east coast—we have all the same stands and food stalls, etc.—but the people and their vibes are different. I don't know how you go about interacting with strangers but you make a lot of people look great.
I really enjoyed your M240 post. Selfishly (as an M user) I have a few requests. I'd love to read about your experience shooting the Voigtlander 40mm on the M—how will you get on without exact framelines? And I'd also like to know how you find focusing M mount lenses through the SL2's EVF vs. the M's rangefinder: which do you prefer (and do you have to zoom to check focus on the SL2, or is the EVF good enough to avoid that extra step?). And I'd also like to hear your thoughts on Leica glass vs. Zeiss and especially Voigtlander. A few years ago I had exclusively Zeiss and Voigtlander lenses. Then I upgraded, at great expense, to all Leica lenses. And now Voigtlander in particular is releasing what seem to be spectacular lenses at a fraction of the price of their Leica equivalents.
As a (long time ago) UT grad I second Josh's comment about your "man about Austin" images. And await with interest hearing about your M240 experiences. I've had mine a long time and it does everything I want it to do, so no need for a newer model. I have recently added an SL and SL2 to the stable which I love as well. The only negative I've found with the SL2 is that with the 90-280 at the long end I have to use the electronic shutter at my preferred indoor event shutter speed (1/125) in order to get consistently crisp images. 1/2X focal length mechanical shutter speeds are fine. Apparently the mechanical shutter introduces some vibration that can affect the image despite IBIS.
A variable Neutral Density filter is something I own and carry for any wide-aperture lens I own. 1/30th at f/1.4 can be such a treat.
I generally look at your blog on an iPad and very seldom click the pictures to see them bigger. I'm on my PC now and decided I would check out the bigger versions. Much better. I'll have to do it more often.
I love the scary people with dogs photo. If that's street photography, I'm all for it.
For all your talk about the photos being subordinate to the writing, examples to illustrate what you're saying, these people shots really stand on their own. Great juxtapositions, character, compositions...
A question relating to your previous response to the reader who can't see differences from one camera/lens to another: I generally right click on the images, open them in a new tab, then hit the magnifying glass to get the enlarged (100%?) view. I can see clear (to me) differences between these shots and the ones you showed on your outing with the 240. You mentioned having 4 lenses to use with that camera - which one(s) were you using for that walkabout? I'm curious whether the differences are in the lenses or the cameras.
Kirk-
I need help. A while back you wrote about a large number of viewers from Singapore. If you have stopped them - how did you do it
I have received 5.3K viewers from Singapore on my blog in the past week. How do I stop this?
Richard Rodgers
fotorr@comcast.net
The women in the orange tanktop, which is a sight in itself, has a leash attached to her sons left wrist. What the hell?
Jay
Richard Rodgers, I took the blog dark for 24 hours and that seemed to turn it off. No other suggestions I know of.
Jay,
Separation Anxiety?
But it was partly the reason for the shot.
I recently bought a mint used voigtlander 35mm f2 Ultron ver I for my CL. The vintage look one. It makes a very nice compact 50mm.
It produces nice saturated contrasty colours and sharp images. Not clinically sharp. Sort of film like sharp. I really like it and it looks very nice, one sexy looking lens.
I' still getting use to manually focusing again.
The 40mm looks great too, its a nice focal length.
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