When shooting outdoors for clients on hot, Texas, Summer days one can have the best of intentions to bring out the "big guns." To pack the camera bags full of various, glorious prime lenses, a brace of big camera bodies and zoom lenses galore. But the heat and the weight will soon suck out all of your creative energy and leave your best intentions dehydrated and half fried. Better to simplify anywhere you can... The less you carry the further (and faster) you can go.
Two weeks ago we were on a shoot at a real estate development in far Southeast Austin. No cloud cover and, since the development is still in early days the shade trees weren't fully grown yet. I bought too much gear but left most of it in the trunk of the car for some unintended, spa-like, heat treatments. What I ended up doing as my heat management/image management strategy was to pick one great camera body and one flexible and magnificent zoom lens, leaving everything else behind. It was a good solution.
The camera and lens fit just right in a white canvas camera bag I wore cross body. Mostly in front of me. I could reach down and grab the camera/lens combination when I was ready to photograph and drop it back into the white bag as soon as I was ready to move on to the next shot or the next location.
The entire shoot was outdoors. By 2pm you could see the tar bubble on the side of the roads. We were drinking water continuously. You could feel the radiant heat bouncing up from the roads, trails and sidewalks in the same way I used to feel the heat off the griddle when I worked my way into the profession by supplementing my income as a short order fry cook in a diner. Fun times. Sweaty times. Never thought I do a heat bath for work at 69 years of age... But the miraculous thing is that it was still fun. And the pared down kit make the day manageable.
The camera of choice was a Leica SL2. I have a pair so I always have an identical back-up when I use one of the them. The camera has 47.5 megapixels of resolution and a very wide dynamic range when used at its native ISO. The EVF is glorious. And I've accrued a bucket of batteries for these cameras which means I never have battery anxiety which is like range anxiety with electric powered cars.
But the star of the show is usually the lens and that was certainly the case in this instance. While the Leica 24-90mm lens is hefty and big it's also a tour de force of optical engineering. Here is what Leica writes about it:
"Construction Details:
Of the 18 elements in six moving groups, four are aspherical lens elements and 11 are elements made from glasses with anomalous partial dispersion for the correction of chromatic aberrations. Only one very light element is moved for focusing. Very fast, almost-silent, precise focusing is enabled by a specially developed drive concept comprising a stepping motor and linear positioning. This means that the overall length of the lens does not change during focusing.”
Essentially it's a near flawless zoom lens that covers the full range of focal lengths I would normally use on just about any job. The lens also has built in image stabilization which is great on bodies like the first generation of Leica SL cameras and my little Sigma fp, both of which are bereft of in-body image stabilization. The lens adds its own. It's also highly weather resistant as is the Leica SL2 body.
It was the perfect combination of tools for a challenging environment. That, and a really good hat.
Dang sharp...even wide open.... although the chances of using it outdoors at f2.8 were ... limited. As in "none."
Do I still like and use the Leica 24-90mm f2.8-4.0 Aspheric? On just about every commercial job I've undertaken since I bought the lens five years ago. It's big and heavy but it makes up for those drawbacks by being the best performing zoom, optically, that I have ever used. And that's cool.
The lens is still in the current line up from Leica. When I bought mine, new, it was just over $4800 USD. The current price for a new one is a little over $6300. Amazing.
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