Caution!!! It's easy to screw up with an optical rangefinder camera. You have to pay attention.

There are many wonderful advantages to using rangefinder cameras; cameras with optical viewfinders. They are quick to focus, very exacting at focusing wide angle lenses. They show you, with most normal lenses (down to about 35mm) what objects are outside the frame lines which allows one to anticipate a moment better. As in: "Oh. Look there's a nude bicyclist about to enter the frame from the left. Let's make sure to get her into the frame as well...."

Most rangefinder camera shutters have fast reaction times as well. But there are several gotchas that tend to snag the less attentive user. Or those who are new to the whole optical viewfinder thing. I own a handful of Leicas but only one is an optical rangefinder camera. The others work just like all the other mirrorless/EVF cameras on the market, complete with previews in the finders. I haven't shot with an optical rangefinder camera in well over a decade but with all my previous experience what could possibly go wrong?

Well....... let me count the ways.

The image at the top of the blog post is of three people in the Jean Talon market, shopping. I had previously been photographing some close ups of food. I pulled the camera up to my eye, momentarily forgetting that the finder would show a sharp image in front of me no matter where the focus was set. I would not be looking "through the lens" and was totally responsible for focusing. But since the finder image looked sharp, and I was rushing to get the shot, I just went ahead and snapped the image. And....it was perfectly focused for close up objects...but not the objects I wanted to be focused on. Lesson one is to always focus with the rangefinder or, alternately, use careful zone focusing. Don't rely on the sharpness of the optical finder for any sort of focus confirmation. Never. Don't. 

I wanted to include an image to showcase my second caution but I was too lazy to spend time making a black, featureless frame so you'll just have to work with me and imagine that just under this type is a black rectangle. Okay?

And it would be a black rectangle if you made the same mistake I did when shooting in Montreal from time to time. On my first shot of the day I would see something fun and exciting, bring the camera to my eye, focus carefully, and then take the shot. I'd hit the "chimping" button to see what I got only to be confronted by a dark LCD. Then it dawned on me that I'd seen this problem ten, twenty and thirty years ago. I had left the lens cap on the lens. The optical finder just shows me what's in front of the camera but not what's coming through the camera. The optical finder works even if the lens doesn't.

My advice? leave the lens cap in the hotel room or take it off and put it in your pocket as you step outside the door. It's actually kind of embarrassing to have worked professionally for 45 years as a commercial photographer, bragged about the fortune I've billed for my work, and then to have that kind and patient person I've asked to photograph remind me that my lens cap is still on the lens.....

Yes. Embarrassing.

This exquisite portrait of a Tim Horton's, extra large coffee cup (not mine) is a good way to illustrate my last point about the vagaries of rangefinder cameras. As above, when you set the lens on your camera to f2.0 and shoot up close the finder will still show everything in the frame as being sharp. You have no confirmation that the background will be rendered into a silky warm bath of bokeh until you stop and review the file you've already taken. 

By the same token if you comped the same scene and wanted everything in focus and set f16 as your aperture you still have no way to preview the actual effect, you can only check in after the fact to review it. 

The finder is neutral to issues of depth of focus and depth of field. It's all on all the time. 

Remembering these key issues will help you minimize your frustration. I wish I had written this and then read it before stepping out on day one of my trip and making each and every one of these common rangefinder camera mistakes. 

One good point for optical viewfinders = they'll keep you focused on your game or slap you down hard. 

Just sayin. 

 

Montreal has everything. Even mannequins....

Seen in the Old Town...

A "Poor Man's" Leica Monochrom. Canadian adventures in black and white. Oops! I meant Monochrome.... (someone asked....).

 

the artist at work. Does the Intercontinental Hotel have nice restrooms?

Indeed they do. 

After getting my fabulous diploma certifying that I had indeed graduated from the University of Texas at Austin I threw away all the valuable knowledge I had gained over my seven long years of disciplined studies in several fields and became.....a photographer. Believe me. That had never been my plan.

My goal at the time was to make images like the Life Magazine photographers of the 1950s and 1960s. Grainy, gray collages of detail layered over out of focus backgrounds with both a sharpness and a softness the intersection of which remains, to the this day, indescribable. Alas, it turned out that I was not a natural artist. I had to find my way through photography like I've found my way through nearly everything else in this life. By putting my shoulder to the grindstone and pushing relentlessly. I had (have?) no natural sense of composition and my ability to combine colors is almost laughably poor. Seems the only natural ability bestowed upon me by the fates, the gods or happenstance is the ability to doggedly pursue a task or a craft until I have achieved some measure of competency. And then to go on trying year after year to knock the rough edges off my skills. 

While some "artists" and "writers" seem to love to trot out and confess to all the bad decisions they've made in life; perhaps in order to forgive themselves for some innate sloth or infection of procrastination, I have no big dramas caused by poor analytical decision making to fall back on as fodder for the blog. Or to excuse my photography. I've never been divorced. Never fired from a job. Never bankrupt (still time though....). Never suffered from disease, obesity or addiction. In fact, from my point of view, it's been pretty much smooth sailing. 

I guess the smooth journey and a life as an eccentric artist are mutually exclusive. Perhaps I should take a workshop in eccentricity just to see if anything sticks. I always read stories of the tortured artists, or the painters and writers tormented by their own devils. I'm always fascinated by the dysfunction. While my big conundrums have revolved around questions like: which jobs to accept and which to turn down? Or, what to have for dinner? Or, is a rollover to a Roth IRA a good move in a down economy? (yes!). Or, should I bring home some flowers for B.? (the answer is always "yes"). 

by the same token....

Some people seem to have a natural ability to make great black and white images right out of whatever digital camera they may have in hand at the moment. I'm more plodding. More of an endless "trial and error" guy. But part of my mindset is that while I may not have a natural ability to conjure exactly the right tones on demand I can nearly always put my own super power of doggedly concentrating on trial and error until I have something just right. Or as just right as I can get it. And on every adventure I try to put aside some time just to experiment. To try to get closer to what the cool guys are able to do. 

I know that some are very successful shooting in color, in raw, and then using the majestic power of post production software to convert the images into glorious black and whites. I lack that talent. And, I like to see the images as they'll turn out by looking at the rear screen of the camera --- just to be sure I got something right.

I've tried the "black and white" settings on Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony and Leica cameras and there is a difference. I think most camera makers just default to the process of removing the color saturation to make a monochrome file. The Leicas I've used seem to alter the color filtering characteristics of the shot when set to black and white. It's like a head start. 

Some black and white aficionados seem to prefer an endless range of tones from "just subtly black" to the "vaguest hint of detail" highlights and mostly gray, gray, gray in between. Nice for 1960s, 1970s landscapes but not quite my cup of tea. Certainly not my cup of double espresso. I want "bite" in my black and white images. 

When I use any of my various Leica camera models for black and white I start by switching to Jpegs. You can set the camera to show black and white while shooting raw but when you get into the processing stage the image shows all the color. I want the image to maintain its original integrity all the way through. So I choose the least compressed Jpeg file setting. Then I engage the "black and white" setting in the profiles. 

I think the standard B&W profiles, in all cameras, are all too flat so I increase the contrast setting. In Leicas there are only three basic contrast settings: zero, +1 and +2. Of course you can always decrease contrast by the same amounts but who would want to do that??? I add the snap of +1. I find plus two to be over the top. 

If there's a lot of detail in the subject matter I also nudge the sharpness setting up to +1. I'll live just fine with the occasional halo. 

When I pull the files into Lightroom (my fave) the only big move I make to tweak the files is to move the clarity slider over to +20. This increases contrast in the mid-range, where files need it the most. If you are one of those "long tonal range" folks you'll likely want to ignore every single word of this working methodology. If you try it you might burn your eyes from the snap and happiness of the files. But I'm here to tell you that to my way of seeing photographs treated this way are much better for web use.

Flat, low contrast files always remind me of the early days of digital when people mistakenly tried using super-wide gamut profiles like ProPhotoRGB for web and inkjet print work with the faulty idea that any of the other profiles would just be throwing away huge parts of the color space. Nope, the smaller profiles better fit the final outputs. Too big a gamut made everything look flat, pale and muddy. 

I output everything as an sRGB file. It's more or less universal for web use. But it will change. It's not locked in forever. 

Here are some samples I shot one evening with the Leica M240 set up as I described.  And, yes, you can focus a rangefinder in low light. Maybe better than your cameras can AF. Just a thought.

Not in a museum but in the public spaces of the Underground City. RESU.

Along with a big, endless horizon pool.

VSL Reader, Ron White, asked to see some of the photos from Montreal that I took with my iPhone. Glad to oblige.

 

amazed that Canada still has pay phones!!!d

All of these images were done with an iPhone XR which is about a zillion generations old and has only a fixed 26mm lens. I have several apps such as Filmic Pro and Halide on it. Both can shoot in raw -- I think. I just use the software that comes native on the phone. These are all untouched and right out of the phone's camera. The files are nice but seem just a little "thin" to me. 

Hope this is useful. I mostly used the phone to make images in the Jean Talon open air market. 

it was easier.