After a weekend of pulling out stacks of paper, moving filing cabinets, rolling up carpets and other prep work for house upgrades there was a lot of pent up desire to be outside with a fun camera.

 

I've been shooting in Jpeg+Raw lately with the M 240, mostly to give myself a choice, when I review files, between black and white and color. The image above looked much better to me in black and white while most of the files below seemed to depend on color to carry the day. 

The Leica M 240 and the 50mm Voigtlander lens seem to be a perfect match. When I use wider lenses on that body, especially the 28mm, you have to move your eye around the finder to really see the frame lines with any degree of accuracy. And that's presuming that the framelines are accurate in the first place. A big assumption given parallax and the changing magnification as the lens focuses toward the minimum focusing distance. The 35mm focal length is the last stop before the inconvenience of wider angle lenses seeps in. I was going to go through the process of finding just the right diopter attachment so I would not have to wear my glasses with the wider angle lenses but I've pretty much decided that in the same way the Q2 is a camera with a fixed 28mm lens and the Fuji X100V is a fixed 35mm lens, the M240 might most comfortably be considered a camera with a fixed 50mm lens. At least the way I use it.

At some point, if I ever warm up to using the 28mm on the rangefinder I'll hunt down a very nice 28mm bright line finder to put into the accessory shoe of the camera. Then I'll focus through the regular finder and then compose with the bright line accessory finder. But for now? I'll keep sticking the 28mm on the front of the SL2 and be happy with it. Or, alternately, I'll stop worrying about where the edges of the frame lines are in the M 240 finder and just merrily shoot without making a big deal out of it. It's not like I'm using this particular lens and camera combination for client work, after all.

I could lie and chalk up the performance here to the fantastic dynamic range of a decade old sensor or I could be honest and admit that I started with a dark file, used an A.I. filter to accentuate the color and contrast of the sky, then made another layer in Lightroom and used the brush tool to select the area under the eaves and on the wall adjacent to the eaves and in shadow. Once selected I color corrected the underlying area (it was too blue), warmed up the white on the sign with the hand, and opened up the exposure on the underlying area as well. I finished it off by adding some clarity slider to the selection but not to the global frame since I wanted the sky to go out of focus. Lightroom makes area by area corrections much easier to do now and I rarely have to go into PhotoShop to get what I want.

Why am I happy with the frame above? Well, I screwed up the exposure by one stop. I forgot about the 1/4000th of a second limit and, using ISO 500 and f4.0, I overexposed and subsequently got into an argument with my camera. But I was able to pull back the details in the file by reducing the exposure in post. I'd read that the sensor in this camera and earlier M digital cameras had limited dynamic range but I think this is a repudiation of some of that reporting. Sure, if you are off by two stops I'm betting your file is screwed but one half or even one stop? Worth a try every time. Or....you could just take the time to get the exposure correct. (Red-faced with shame....). 

the City of Austin likes murals. They'll commission people to paint them on just about anything. 

Above and below= Two versions of the same frame. Color and "Monochrome" AKA: black and white. 

I went back and forth but after looking at them for a while I decided that I like the black and white version better. Not sure why. Retro charm?

Great idea but I'm pretty sure Willie doesn't want the job and wouldn't like the salary....

On this image and several below I used the Lightroom feature: Lens Blur to selectively blur the background. You'll note that because it analyzes the original frame to determine it's "depth" via a 3D mapping routine the focus falls off in a natural progression the further it "extends" away from the main subject. You can control the amount and intensity of the fall off as well as modifying the range of the effect. I absolutely love it and will probably never have to buy a fast lens ever again (kidding? maybe). 

A bit overdone in these examples but easier to see that way....

Nothing beats an A to B comparison, right?

Top one is with the Lens Blur filter using default settings. 

The bottom image is unfiltered. As it appears right out of camera. 

Not a huge difference but enough. 

One click. that's it. No time having to select the subject, etc. 

This is either machine learning or artificial intelligence but whichever it is

I like it.

I used a "dramatic sky" filter from the LRC presets and toned it down by 50%. 

Is any day really complete without a dose of Mannequin? Especially a mannequin with what appears to be a pyramid in the background. 

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