Maxwell Street Market - January 2015

The market was a little sparse this weekend - usually things don't start hopping until spring.  But Maxwell Street is open year round so there's always something going on.  This Sunday it was almost 40 degrees so I grabbed a couple of cameras and sprinted out the door.  Maxwell Street is pretty much my default go-to location for street shooting, there's always a broad & diverse group of people and you can usually find a few characters as well.  

Two things to note - I finally got around to using my 21mm f/3.4 Super Angulon on the Monochrom. The rear element on this lens sits very close to the sensor which means light will hit the corners at an angle - causing corner softness and vignetting (and a red color cast if you're shooting digital color). I'm not terribly pleased with the results - the vignetting is a bit strong for my tastes.  But I don't have any other super wide lenses so I'll just have to make do or use it exclusively on film.

Point 2 - I'm super in love with the Ricoh GR.  As a street shooting pocket sized camera it has no equal.  I just put it in 2m snap focus mode at f/8 - everything from 1 meter to infinity is in focus so taking shots is instantaneous. And image quality is just incredible when you're shooting f/8 and ISO 200.  

Nikkor 5cm f/1.4 Images

I've recently taken to shooting this lens on a Leica body using an Amedeo Nikon S to screwmount adapter.  Prior to that, the lens was used exclusively on a Nikon S2 - another interesting camera body that I'll review soon (having used it for 3 years now, it's due for some comments).  

The adapter itself has the build quality you'd expect if you were going to use it on a Leica - pure metal and impeccably finished.  Since the 5cm f/1.4 is basically just an optical unit, the Amedeo adapter provides a mount plus a focusing helicoid.  It also has the outer bayonet (used by the 35mm f/2.5 & 85mm f/2 PC, among others).  My current plans are to use this on a screwmount Leica IIIF along with my M bodies, so I bought the screwmount version which I then couple with a LTM-M adapter (he also sells adapters that are native M mount).

My overall feeling on this lens is that it runs loops around the 50mm f/1.5 Summarit (another comparable lens from the same time period).  Of course, my Summarit has a good amount of haze and some cleaning marks - a mint copy might be a better lens.  Wide open, images are rendered with a pleasing "roundness" - stop it down and it becomes as sharp as any other lens.  This is a low contrast lens - great for using with the Monochrom sensor as the RAW files give you a great palette to start postprocessing with.  

I'll continue to update this post as I continue to use this lens:

Nikon S2 - Fuji Acros 100

Nikkor 5cm f/1.4 on Monochrom

Nikon S2 - Fuji Acros 100

Nikon S2 - Centuria 400 converted to B&W

Gabriella

The Zeiss 50mm C-Sonnar f/1.5 with an orange filter on the Monochrom.  This lens has a very special look to it but it does have focus shift wide open.  It hasn't bothered me very much, I just lean in a few inches based on how close I am to my subject.

Leica M4

This is the Leica M4 along with two Summicrons. The monster is a 90mm cron, known as the v2. It's a hefty lens and simply towers over 90mm rangefinder lenses. All this heft has a purpose - even though its about 50 years old the optics are still stunning (when it focuses correctly). Which brings me to the problem. The rangefinder mechanism in general is pretty inaccurate and prone to errors. For a wide angle lens a bit of focusing slop isn't necessarily a deal killer - any slop will probably be covered up by increased DOF at with a wider focal length and with the lens stopped down. At telephoto lengths the slop becomes harder and harder to ignore - on a 90mm lens at f/2 the DOF is razor thin.  Unfortunately my lens has a pretty big front focusing problem, about 30mm or so by my measurements.  As soon as I saw the test chart I immediately boxed up the lens and sent it to DAG Camera.

This is a shot with the 35mm Summicron, shot wide open on an M9 (see original here).  This particular version won't win any beauty contests, it has a rather large blob on an interior lens element that was attacked by fungus.  The fungus was cleaned out but the coating on that section is completely gone.  This is at the edge of the lens, so there's a slight loss of contrast wide open.  Stopped down to f/2.8 and it's razor (I mean razor) sharp.  And by f/5.6 it's game over - the amount of micro-contrast is nothing short of spectacular.

And the 90mm Summicron, here on Acros 100 and an M3 (original found here).  It was very sunny out, so I stopped down to probably f/11 here which explains why everything was in focus.

The Faces of Occupy Chicago

I recently processed a roll of film from a trip to LaSalle Street in Chicago, which is where the Occupy Chicago folks have set up camp.  I've been shooting events like that with a wide angle (either a 17-35 zoom or a 21mm prime) - it gives me enough depth of field where I don't have to worry about shutter speed or focusing accuracy and allows me to focus more on the content of the shot rather than the mechanics behind it.  Shutter speed - constant. Aperture - constant. Focusing distance - constant at 5-6 ft.  Then it's all a matter of positioning yourself where you want to be and closing the shutter.

I'm out there and for some reason I decide to take out the 90mm Elmarit. It's a great portrait lens (low contrast, kind of flare-y if stray light hits, but a great looking "glow"), but not really your first choice for a cramped-quarters street lens.  It turns out that putting a 90mm lens on naturally turns you into a street portrait guy as opposed to a pure street photographer.  I was mostly setting up in a corner, waiting for someone to come into my field of view and notice me, then hitting the shutter the split second after the deer-in-the-headlights look went away (there's a microsecond where befuddlement turns to puzzlement turns to slight anger turns to acceptance turns to resigned acceptance - it's a great moment to hit).  And that's the moment I think I caught here.  And it planted the idea of a future project (hopefully something I can get done before the Big Cold One hits Chicago) - The Faces of Occupy Chicago.

One of the faces of Occupy Chicago.

Leica M3 CLA

I recently had the pleasure of dealing with Youxin Ye, who quite simply is one of the most remarkable camera repairmen around.  When it comes to photography equipment, I tend to buy everything used.  You lose the possibility of warranty repair, but gain 30-40% in price reduction.  Unless you're talking Leica of course.  Then you're more likely to see a 30-40% increase in price (I'm exaggerating of course but prices are still pretty silly).  The only way to get affordable Leica gear is to buy used and to take a trip in the photo time machine.  I've bought a 60 year old 35/3.5 Summaron in absolutely horrible shape (hazy, scratches on the interior elements, stiff focus, the focusing cam was in backwards [!], and my 60 year old Summitar 50/2 had an incredibly stiff aperture ring - so stiff that I tended to set the aperture once per hour and vary my shutter in response to variations in exposure.  So, shutter-priority by necessity.  And finally my M3 - supposedly the crown jewel of rangefinders, I bought cheap and I bought in heavily used condition.  The vulcanite was starting to fall off and my primary concern was that the viewfinder seemed dimmer than it should - this was my first Leica so I didn't really have anything to compare to.  But most of the online cognoscenti seemed to agree that looking into an M3 viewfinder was like Staring Into The Eye of God.  I couldn't see the hype though - it was so-so bright and the 50 framelines are very big but I wasn't really entering a Nirvana state (didn't stop me from running more than 15 rolls of film through it in the first month).

For all of these repairs, the first person I contact is Youxin Ye.  He's extremely knowledge, priced very reasonable, and works incredibly fast.  I mean insanely fast.  As in he may finish your repair/CLA on the same day that the lens arrives.  And ship it the next day.

He took the Summaron and disassembled it, cleaned it.  The haze didn't go away fully (it's probably etched in the glass by now) but it did help matters.  The Summitar came back in fabulous shape, the aperture ring is Leica-smooth now, perfect.  And the M3 is now back in my greedy little hands in amazing shape.  The film advance (dual stroke) is just phenomenal - I dry-fired the shutter at least 10 times in a row just to feel how buttery it was.  The viewfinder is like night and day, the brightness was doubled (seemingly) - now I see why the M3 is regarded as the best camera ever.

So overall, I can highly recommend Youxin and his camera services.

Update [01/21/2015] : I thought I'd update this post with additional comments.  After shooting about 80 or 90 rolls of film with the M3, I noticed that the viewfinder was beginning to separate - it shows up as a light bar on each edge of the viewfinder glass (the inner element).  Eventually the separation gets worse and worse until the prism separates and the VF blacks out entirely.  My separation was getting pretty bad and the contrast in the finder was worsening so I sent it back to Youxin to recement the prism.  This work only took about 2 weeks and roughly $150 - way cheaper than I thought.  Now that I have it back it's even brighter and clearer than after the original CLA.  

http://www.yyecamera.com