I had time over the weekend to play around with various files from my recent trip so I tried to envision some of them as black and white images. You know --- Monochromes. I used various tools in Lightroom to make conversions from color files. Cheating. Yes, I know.

I am a constant sucker for columns and arches.

Ooooh. I do like this ceiling better in black and white than in color.  Hmmmm.

Artist at work. In my favorite "artist shirt." Navy blue. Linen. 

Since I am shy and introverted I try never to get close to strangers...

Couch in hotel lobby. I sometimes walked through the front door dead tired. Flopped down on the couch and begged for cappuccino.... And, voila, there it was...

The public spaces in the hotel were covered  with wonderful, square,

black and white prints. Even in the elevator. I'll get the name of the artist.

He or she was very good. And a very good printer to boot.

I wanted Crew Café to be my favorite coffee house in all of Canada.

But it wasn't. That honor went to a small chain I first discovered in Vancouver and 

then re-discovered a block away from my hotel in Montreal. It's called,

49th Parallel and the coffee is superb. As are the freshly made, (on the premises)

donuts in all shapes and forms. Pistachio glaze anyone?

If I visit Montreal in the Winter I will certainly need a coat like this one.

I think it's stylish and would fit in well with the vibe of the city. 

Don't want to be caught out in some puffy North Face marshmallow jacket.....

Ah, the "beautiful people." You can always tell because they love the idea of 

the red carpet and the men wear more gold chains than the women. 

These also seem to be "that type of man" who wears his loafers without 

socks. An odd nod to 1970s fashion.

Yes. Mannequins. Get over it.

 All of these were originally shot in color/raw with the Leica and then converted to my taste. Some of you will like the effect while others will savage it. Don't really care because it looks good to me.

And, incidentally, I am the client....

A morning spent bouldering in Pedernales State Park. I take another stab at becoming proficient at both defying gravity and also making landscape photos.

 

After months of tormenting heat we've finally gotten a few days of Fall-like temperatures here in Austin. It's nice to be able to sleep with the A/C off and the windows open at night. Lows got down into the 50s last night. Wow! 

With the good weather the current center of our attention I decided to make good use of the opportunity and get out of town this morning. I'd been wanting to get back over to Pedernales State Park to see how the hot spell affected the park and I wanted to spend some time playing around with the Fuji GFX 50Sii; just to take a break from "Leica, Leica, Leica."  Pedernales State Park is also kind of the opposite of a location like Montreal. Non-urban. Nature without the rough edges shaved off.

The "Falls" area is a huge field of rocks and boulders that have been worn and shaped by millennia of water sporadically and sometimes emphatically rushing through a narrow valley. Sometimes it's dry but after upstream flooding the whole area is subject to flash flooding. 

The boulder fields are varied. None of the Falls areas is even remotely ADA accessible and quickly navigating some parts require making leaps and jumps over from one high rock crown to another with ten to twenty foot deep chasms in between. I like the challenge but as I get older I tend to be more cautious. I'm not less able to leap but I don't trust my sense of balance as completely as I did just a few years ago. You don't want to make a jump, fail to stick the landing, and then flail in an attempt to not fall to down into a rocky crack in the earth. It could hurt. It could be embarrassing. It might even be fatal.

Kids love the rock fields. And kids can be absolutely fearless. Dogs are more focused and deliberate. Didn't see any cats out climbing the rocks today.

Since I've been completely obsessed with the Leica M lately I thought it would be smart to take a break and instead sample what the Fuji GFX has to offer. I took two lenses. One is the Fuji GFX 35-70mm zoom. It's pretty much perfect for stuff like this because it's sharp, goes wide, and it's a nice range of focal lengths. As the counterpoint I brought along a lens I haven't used much lately. It's the Mitakon 135mm f2.5 for the GFX mount. It's heavy and completely manual but where the 35-70mm tops out at a FF equivalent angle of view of about a 55mm the Mitakon reaches out to about a 105mm equivalent. So, it's quite a different look. 

The big lens (Mitakon) went into the very small, black backpack along with a quart of water, my phone and a small white towel. And a small first aid kit. I was once a Boy Scout. Accidents happen. "Be Prepared." I've nearly always carried a first aid kit along on shoots and outdoor adventures. I've bandaged up models, assistants and sometimes just unlucky strangers, many times. The worst was when  a model on an ad shoot decided to wade barefoot in a stream while we were all focused on shooting something else. She stepped on a broken bottle and got a bad and bloody cut. It required all my Boy Scout skills to clean the wound,  pack it, wrap it, and staunch the bleeding. She survived. But it sure put a damper on the shoot. 

The first aid kit was not required today. 

After a couple hours of photography and some more pleasant hiking around and looking at stuff. I headed home to have a late lunch and to look at the results of my photographic handywork. See below for examples...

Even though the weather is mild the sun was still bright and direct. And you know what that means! Wide brimmed hat, long sleeves with some sort of ambitious SPF rating, long trousers and grippy hiking boots. I need to make a clever cover for the GFX body so it doesn't overheat in next year's sun fest.

The images below were all shot with the GFX body and the Mitakon 135mm f2.5.

Everything is manual and I'm never certain I'm getting the best focus accuracy if 

I just depend on focus peaking when the lens is already stopped down to a taking aperture of

f8.0 or f11. My process, when I have time, is to open the aperture all the way to f2.5, focus with as much accuracy as I can right there, and then stop down and take the image. 

It's a pain in the ass for anything that's moving in any direction other than parallel to the camera. 

But for portraits in the studio it's a technique that works just fine.

The Mitakon required an increase in saturation, contrast and sharpness to make it more closely match the Fuji lens. But it's certainly not bad. Especially not for the princely sum of $250.

I stopped in Dripping Springs to wash off my car. The Drippin' Wet Car Wash is my favorite 

self service car wash I've found. It always works, it's always clean and it's easy to just 

slide right off the highway. And get back on again.

Joyous day. Nature in the first half and then over to Will's house for his 

amazing smoked ribs in the evening. And with a nice crowd as well.

Life = good.

Walking down the main drag in the Old Town in the early evening. Wow.

 

This is my idea of an ideal street scene. It's got a little bit of everything. 

Also on the stream on Flickr.   https://www.flickr.com/photos/56796227@N02/

Leica engineers their default Auto-ISO in the M240 to go from ISO 200-800. You can change it but will you endure brutal noise? Let's find out.

 

One can generally assume that a camera maker knows its products better than....well... anyone else. When I mention the M240 to some photographers they generally tell me that it's a good camera, overall, but I should not expect to use ISO settings above 1600; max. I take most people's advice with a grain of salt. Some people's advice with a whole shaker of salt...

The scene above was shot on the streets at night. I wanted to make sure camera shake didn't mess up my images so I set the shutter speed to 1/125th of a second. Seemed to make good sense when using a 50mm lens on a camera that does not feature image stabilization. My exposure setting for this image was 1/125th of a second, f2.8 and ISO 2500. I thought the exposure was just right since the most important things in the frame are the two images in the center. I didn't want the whites to blow out into no detail land so I metered them carefully and proceeded with the exposure. 

If you enlarge the image you'll see that the main subjects, the two prints, are well exposed --- with detail in the white areas and good color overall. And you'll see that everything else falls into the shadow zones. My experience is that if you have made a competent exposure you won't be plagued by noise; at least not in anything above middle gray. The noise you will see will be in the shadow areas and will be more prominent if you try to use the shadow slider to pull up the shadows. But why would you? The shadows are there because...there were areas that fell into the deep shadow area of the exposure curve. 

If I don't make big adjustments in terms of shadow recovery the files look good. The highlight areas look really good and well saturated. The frame looks natural. But if I try to pull up the shadows by, say a stop, it's the equivalent of using an ISO in those areas equal to double the set ISO. It means the shadow areas are being exposed at ISO 5000. It's a dangerous area for an older sensor. If you push beyond a certain point; say one to one and a half stops, you will start to see chromatic noise and, eventually, banding in the shadows. 

A year or so ago this would have been a tough hurdle for an image. Too much noise in the shadows, coupled with banding is a lot to overcome when it comes to projecting technical competence of the overall system to viewers. Now, with the inclusion of A.I. driven "Denoise" in Lightroom, you have a fighting chance of saving the file even if  you do need to "lift" the shadows. But you can only go so far. 

I think Leica is far too cautious with their default Auto-ISO setting in the M240. I would feel safe in most situations with ISO 1600. Or ISO 3200 with perfect exposure and a reliance on the powers of the Denoise feature. 

Each camera is different. Each photographer has different tolerances for how much noise is too much noise in a file. I like clean files but I also like shutter speeds I can handhold. It's almost always a compromise. 

But in this case I suggesting that you try out the different upper ISOs to see where your personal tolerances lie and also that you nail exposure well enough so that you don't burn out highlights but you don't underexposure them by more than half a stop either. The less you need to increase exposure, obviously, the cleaner your files are going to look. 

This is one of a number of reasons that the older Leica M cameras (and maybe M digital cameras in general) are not a camera I'd recommend to anyone who is new to the all manual, rangefinder operating process. There's just too much pre-knowledge and testing to make it logical for everyone. 

If I shot in the dark all the time this would not be among my top choices for a camera system. Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all make full frame mirrorless cameras with much better high ISO noise profiles. Sure, they are eleven years more recent. But there it is...

ISO 200 is great for sun drenched scenes. ISOs 400-640 are great all around, general settings, ISO 800-1600 are very usable but you do head into the territory with more rewards for perfect exposures. And 3200 is surely usable with some noise reduction. Beyond that you are in Seurat Pointillism Mode. Venture there at your own risk. 

Almost all noise looks a lot less offensive in black and white. Or monochrome. Or Monochrom. 

I just put a bunch of stuff up on my Flickr page. Lots of market stuff from Montreal. Take a look if you have the inclination...

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/56796227@N02/

Best, Kirk

Not quite "street" photography. Let's call it "market" photography instead. What can you do with a 50mm lens and a decade old camera?

 

I have to admit right up front that grabbing photographs of people in crowded markets is much, much easier when using a state of the art mirrorless camera equipped with a fast zoom lens. You can raise that camera up to your eye and click without having to do any brain work beyond composition. And that may actually make the most sense if your sole concern is finding the perfect composition. But it also, at least for me, makes the whole process too easy. It's like eating chocolate cake all day long. You just know every bite is going to be fun but you start to miss the substance of real food. 

This post is by no means a paean to the Leica M series rangefinder cameras. The idea of shooting with manual focus lenses on a body with the exposure setting at manual is something I have done and shown over and over again on the VSL blog. My collection of old, manual focus 50mm lenses is becoming legend among my photo friends. It's the not the brand or type of camera that I find important to my enjoyment of photography but the layers of skill required, beyond setting the auto everything camera menus, that keeps my attention focused on making the images instead of just pointing and grabbing at stuff with an automated system. In my world; my brain, there has to be some sort of friction to the process to make it meaningful and real to me.

In a way that's separate from whether the images are good or not. It's also a separate issue from whether your camera is the "silver bullet" or not. What I'm suggesting is that having to work at the production of art immerses you more completely and the challenge is part of the formula for having successful imaging fun. 

I've mentioned in a number of the posts I've recently written about my trip that my daily photographic excursions were all done with only one camera and one lens at a time. Occasionally, as in the photos I wanted to take of the Metro, I might have seen a number of situations while walking around with a 50mm lens where I knew that a wide angle lens, like a 28mm, might make a better choice than a normal lens. Rather than make those scenes try to conform to the 50mm, and rather than stuffing other lenses into my already crowded pockets before leaving my hotel for the day, I chose to concentrate on all the subjects what would readily conform to the 50mm angle of view and then make a mental note to come back later, perhaps the next day, with a different lens and use it to capture all the wide angle views I might have seen. 

It might seem more "efficient/logical" to just take along contingency lenses but in my experience if I mostly shoot with a 50mm and decide to add a 28mm my mind immediately rebels and starts seeing more and more stuff that might be perfect for a 90mm lens as well and then the equipment starts to multiple and that burden creates a momentum toward making choices that kills the purity of intention --- in the moment.

You may see it differently from me because your brain might be wired differently than mine. These thoughts aren't intended to be hard and fast rules for everyone. Just the way I work.

The photographs I'm displaying here were mostly done in a couple of hours last Saturday. Some, like the marching chefs in the street, were done later in the evening, elsewhere. But they mesh with the topic a bit so I included them.

The M cameras work particularly well with 50mm lenses. The floating frame, with information on all around the outside peripheries, is an aid to the way I compose. I like to see what more or less could be included as I frame. And I do frame stuff quickly. The M cameras are, to my experience, less than perfect for 28mm subjects in that I can't see the frame lines  in the finder at all while wearing glasses, but even with a diopter attached I have to move my naked eye around the frame to accurately see the inaccurate frame lines for the 28mm. The 35mm and 50mm lenses are the only two that work very well with the optical finders of M cameras with my vision. In order to get the most out of my M mount 28mm lens I should really buy a good, 28mm bright line finder to put in the hot shoe of the camera. But I won't because I can always go back to the hotel, toss the M camera in the safe and trot out the Q2 which promises (and delivers) a much better operational platform for the 28mm focal length. 

I was neither "on" nor "off" last Saturday. I was lazier than I usually am and my hit rate was lower. But I scolded myself for being goal or quota driven and decided that casual observation and the enjoyment of my time spent at that location was more important than making some sort of temporary documentation to share mostly with people I have never met in person. And once I gave in to the idea of enjoying versus working at photos everything started to look much better. Insouciance can be a great tool for creative undertakings.