The Good Stuff.
2.11.2023
Walking through Austin with a big, fat Leica SL and a big, fat Panasonic 24-105mm f4.0 zoom lens. And I met a young YouTube influencer who is doing extremely interesting work...
2.09.2023
The announcement of a new, lower priced, Leica 50mm Summicron triggered in me a renewed interest in the Panasonic's 50mm f1.8 lens. On paper the optical formulas seem identical....
I'm excited that Leica is finally making some "inexpensive" prime lenses. It will probably drive great uptake of SL products by some consumers who may have been sitting on the fence because of the previous high lens prices. But I'm now less excited about selling off a Lumix 50mm f1.8 lens which I gotfor a sale price of $350 sometime last year. While I'd love to have the all metal Leica version it seems to me that I already have the guts in hand. (That sounded gory...). Spending another $1,900 to duplicate, or near duplicate, a product I already own strikes even me as a bit wasteful....and as you are probably aware I have a high tolerance for wasteful extravagance when it comes to camera gear.
I have spent this week more or less paralyzed by the aftermath of our wildly destructive ice storm. How paralyzed? Well, there are only so many tree services and trash services in the area and even fewer if you weed out the shadier "entrepreneurs." Our property has lots of tall, old live oak trees and a number of them lost big limbs and branches (which I think are the same thing...). Some of the fallen branches were even up to eight inches in diameter! And long. And heavy.
As you might expect from someone who refuses to own a lawn mower or power saws of any kind you'll probably take it for granted that I don't own a chain saw. Nor do I own a big pick-up truck attached to a voluminous trailer in which to place fallen wood and transport it tfor disposal.
I think manual labor is noble and especially so when someone else is doing it for me. I've saved a fortune throughout my life by not slicing off a foot in a lawn mower accident or making divets in my forehead (and frontal lobe) by way of a skill-lessly handled chain saw. I also have no intention, ever, of climbing up thirty or forty feet into trees that have just demonstrated an inability to keep all their branches intact in order to detach more flimsy/damaged branches.
So, Monday was spent trying to get tree services on the phone and then, falling that, getting my friends on the phone to see if they had tree services that could be recommended. One supplier who, with his crew, were supposed to come by, saw the big wood into smaller pieces and haul off all the stuff that hit the ground during and shortly after the ice storm. They hit a snag when their trailer broke and had to reschedule for yesterday. They made it over and worked hard. While they were working the rain was stopping and starting. They didn't have their "climb up the trees" tools with them in the morning but promised to come back and mitigate two big, cracked limbs with big leaf clusters in the afternoon. We paid them for the first part of the job --- debris removal. But when they needed to reschedule the branch "take down" yet again I reached out to several referred services and found one that was willing and able to take out the branches that night. Good thing too as they were hanging precariously over my neighbor's driveway. The driveway in which the neighbors routinely park their two cars...
No they need to come by to chop up the newly gravitized branches and haul the new debris away but we haven't heard from them yet today and the light is dropping quickly. along with the temperature. I feel confident that they'll return and finish ---- mostly because we haven't paid for their services yet. Happily, the danger of the damaged branches falling on someone's head has been taken care of...All clear.
But organizing this kind of stuff all takes time and you really want to be on site when there's a lot going on around your property. Hence the paralysis. I've been hanging around the house waiting, calling, waiting, supervising, negotiating, waiting. Next up we need to get in touch with our home owner's insurance carrier and have the roof inspected. I didn't see any damage when I went up and looked but I'm no expert. I'm sure with the number of households in Austin that saw wide spread destruction the wait times will be.... interesting.
In the meantimes the various services we've used so far will come in at around $1200. Jeez. I could have bought a cool lens instead... but the CFO prioritizes house stuff over hobby indulgences and I don't have a majority on the board of directors so there's no sneaky way around it.
With all this being said, and after carefully studying the Leica and Lumix lens diagrams and descriptions of the optical formulas, I decided to really look hard at the differences... So this afternoon I put the Lumix 50mm on a Leica SL and rushed out into the sunlight to walk and shoot and see just how good or bad that Lumix lens really is. I'd shot with it before but needed a reminder.
Here's what I shot:
It was a sleepy day in Austin. Warm, sunny and calm but sleepy. Very few people were outside. Most were traveling from somewhere to somewhere in their cars, hiding behind the deep window tints. Speeding through the crosswalks. But I did my best to show off the lens. All images shot at f2.8 or f4.0. All shot as in camera Jpegs, set to a medium size (12 megapixels) and lightly corrected in post. So far I'm thinking the already purchased lens might just work for me. Or...I could buy that trailer and chainsaw and try making up for my home care expenditures by going into the tree business and then have it both ways. Seems a bit radical to take a chance with my work routine just to buy a lens the likes of which I have seven or eight already. But your mileage may vary. Mine always does...
Just in case I'm keeping my pre-order for the Leica version in place. Anybody care to make this interesting? Betting on my insatiable avarice for lenses? There are crazier business deals floating around out there. Just ask Adam Neumann. He's planning to buy rental properties and then have the renters do their own maintenance to make them feel like owners. Yeah. I thought that was bat shit crazy too.
Look at these test images on your 90 inch, 10K monitor by clicking on them to make them larger. Otherwise---how will you see the differences? Certainly nothing to get excited about on a cellphone screen.