Roy Hargrove Quintet - Jazz Showcase Chicago

These were taken during the Sunday matinee at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago. Every year Roy Hargrove sets up camp for a year end "residency" - this year from December 26 all the way out to January 4. With at least 2 shows per night, that's a lot of time for the band to  hit its stride.  Overall, a great show and I can't wait to see him again next December.

These shots were taken with the E-M1 and Ricoh GR. The Olympus is outstanding for concerts - autofocus is very snappy, there's no mirror slap to distract the audience or band, and the 75mm 1.8 really lets you get in close to the action.  My biggest problem stemmed from my own stupidity - I had the OM setup for JPG shooting instead of RAW.  The noise reduction applied to JPGs is pretty heavy handed - the 2nd shot below is with the 12-40mm 2.8 lens and the ISO bumped up to 3200.  If you zoom in 100% the noise is pretty awful, details are smeared and the noise looks "clumpy".  If I had left the camera on RAW then I could have used Lightroom's NR sliders and gotten a much better result.

The GR is (not surprisingly) not ideal for concert photography especially when light levels start dipping down.  The 2.8 max aperture means that you're shooting at ISO 2500-3200 which isn't where I want to be with this camera.  I find ISO 1600 to be really nice with RAW and 3200 starts to fall apart, especially in the shadows.  

E-M1 with 75mm 1.8

E-M1 with 12-40mm f/2.8

Ricoh GR

Ricoh GR 

Olympus 45mm f/1.8

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 M7 review

These are some initial thoughts on the Leica M7 (and Motor Winder M - 14408).

If you've used Leica in the past, then every time you handle a "new" piece of equipment for the first time you're usually struck by the feeling of familiarity.  Every camera, every lens, every accessory proudly displays its lineage - if you've used an M3 then you can instantly use an M7 (and an M9, but that's a slightly steeper learning curver).  The shutters are the same (cloth, capped at 1/1000s), the viewfinders largely the same (mostly unchanged since the M4-p), loading film is the same (that is to say, a pain in the ass), ergonomics identical.  The only exception I can think of is the M5 - that was about the most radical departure for Leitz orthodoxy that you can imagine.  But the M7 is no different from the other classics.  The shutter firing mechanism is different and there are more electronics involved but you can sense that Leica engineers spent a large amount of time figuring out how to keep the camera shooting characteristics largely unchanged for the shooter.

So what's different for the M7?

Autoexposure (AE)
The big one, it seems this feature caused some diehards to throw their hands up in disgust - at least until they actually used it.  Then it seemed only natural to include a feature that was standard issue in the 1980s.  So why didn't Leitz include this feature in the 80's?  Well, they actually did start to innovate with the M5 and the introduction of that camera body almost wrecked the company (you can read about that story elsewhere on the internet).  One can only guess that if the M5 had been a smashing success (it wasn't), then there may have been more of an incentive to introduce AE in later bodies.  As it turned out though, introducing electronics into the standard M body was impossible at the time so they increased the dimensions of the M5.  Because of this failure, I'm assuming that adding AE became much less of a priority (at least in relation to keeping the body dimensions and handling the same as the classic Ms). Fast forward a couple of decades and it became technologically possible to add the electronics and keep the body the same, so they did it.

So how does it work in practice? Very well, actually. If the ultimate goal of photography is to distill the experience down to simply framing and capturing moments then it succeeds admirably.  Granted, I can most of my exposure through guesswork and a handheld meter which makes it just as fast as AE but probably not as accurate in most cases. The exposures themselves seem to be much more accurate than those on my M3 & M4, I'm assuming because the electronically controlled shutter means no more inaccurate shutter speeds.  

Quiet Shutter

Before shooting with an M7, I would have said that nothing could beat my double stroke M3 - it has the merest whisper of a snicker for a shutter sound and it's largely the reason it was love at first sight for me.  But incredibly, the M7 has it beat especially at slower shutter speeds (1/15s or slower).  It's almost completely silent, and doesn't have the click/whirring sound that other Leicas do at slower settings.  Even at the faster settings it's quieter - amazing.

Ergonomics

The ISO dial on the back is truly meh and really could have been implemented differently.  Turning the wheel feels slightly gritty on mine, as if there's a bit of sand stuck underneath it.  To change exposure compensation you have to press a button then rotate the outer wheel.  To change the ISO settings you rotate the small inner wheel (too small for my fingers) - there's no button to press first though so conceivably you could accidentally rotate this without knowing it.  An ideal design would have safety locks on both compensation on ISO dials.  

The shutter speed selected is displayed in the viewfinder, if you've used an M9 or M8 you're very familiar with this.  It's pretty unobtrusive and you won't notice it after a while.  

Besides that, this thing is pure Leica and if you've used one you've used them all. 

Rangefinder Flare
Ugh.  Flare is a major problem - my RF patch flares indoors, outdoors, everywhere.  Low light or bright light.  To counteract this I ordered a SHADE from leicagoodies.com and it's helped tremendously (but simultaneously lowering the brightness of the framelines by a stop or two).  I had a similar problem with my M4-p.

Can't use IXMOO cassettes 

This one is a big disappointment to me, as I have roughly 30 IXMOOs that I use on a regular basis.  But the addition of the DX reader required a slight narrowing of the space where the film is inserted.  This amounted to a couple of millimeters but it was just enough to prevent the IXMOO from fitting.

Compared to:
For now, I'll just do a quick comparison with my current stable.  As time goes on, I'll update this review with what I remember from my previous bodies.

Leica M3 - this is still a sentimental favorite, although it doesn't get as much use as it should.  If you use a 50mm (or the 40mm Summicron) then there is no better body. Period.  Focusing accuracy is just incredible and easily beats the M7 where it counts - accuracy, magnification (.91), and flare (there is none at all).
Leica M4 - a jewel, probably the best of the post M3 bodies.  Combines the build quality magnificence of the M3 with the more modern handling of the M4-p/M6 lineage.  This might be the last M body before cost cutting and the use of more modern materials.
Leica M9 - best digital camera I've ever used, warts and all.  Full frame without adding very much bulk to a standard M body.  Battery life sucks hard.  High ISO is poop.  LCD is shite.  Frame buffer is non-existent.  Who cares? Buy more batteries, turn off the chimping, buy fast glass, shoot at ISO 1250, use Lightroom, and get a DSLR if you want to bang away like Rambo.  This is a serious camera built around the idea that when building a camera, image quality is the only consideration.  They engineered the hell out of the sensor and it's an amazing combination of digital sharpness but it still somehow looks like film.  Hmm, I should write a review for my M9 soon.  I think the time is ripe, it's only been released for 4-5 years now.  But compared to the M7 it suffers a bit because of the handling issues - battery, LCD, slightly thicker, and the shutter sound is pretty loud in comparison.  The M7 is just graceful somehow, which is lacking a bit in the M9.

Conclusion
Well, after 10 rolls in about a month I can say that I'm sold - this is pretty much the best M body that I've ever shot with (and I've shot with most of them).  It simply makes you want to go out and shoot. 

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.

OM-1 Results

Overall verdict: a great camera, I'm really needing a split image screen though (the matte screen is alright but I'm having problems adjusting).  I liked it so much that I found a 28mm f/3.5 OM lens to add to the collection.

Olympus OM-1

It's a new toy :) While shopping for a fresh bottle of fixer at Calumet (a hopeless quest btw), I noticed they had a couple of new shelves full of old 35mm gear.  The strange part - most of it was reasonably priced (especially for a big name old-school non-online store not named ebay, craigslist, or rangefinderforum.com).  There was the standard Nikon AI/AIS lenses and some old Canon FD stuff, but this little guy stood out from the pack. 

First Impressions

1. Very small.  I have pretty small hands and this thing just disappears into them.  It's comparable (and probably smaller than) the Nikon FM2n I used to carry around.  
2. Viewfinder is clean.  By clean I mean uncluttered - besides the analog meter in the lower left corner the viewfinder is completely free from shooting information.  To some this is a bad thing - I'll admit that seeing aperture/shutter info in the VF has its benefits - but sometimes you just want to see the scene without clutter of any kind. 
3. The On/Off switch is inconvenient at best, straight annoying at worst.  You can see the layout from the birds eye picture above, instead of following almost every other SLR company Olympus decided to put the meter On/Off as a rotating switch that's decoupled from the shutter mechanism.  This is annoying for a couple of reasons - the first is battery drain (inadvertently leaving the switch in the On position will drain the battery).  The second reason is ergonomics - if you're framing with the camera and notice that the meter is off it's almost impossible to reach up with your left hand and switch on the meter without taking your eye from the frame.  
4. The control layout is different from any other SLR I've used.  The standard configuration is to place the shutter speed on the top plate next to the shutter button and the aperture control on the lens. Olympus decided to buck this trend by putting the shutter speed around the base of the lens mount and the aperture control of the lens around the filter area of the lens.  
5. The film advance isn't quite as smooth as I'd like it to be.  I've handled damn near every 35mm Nikon, along with a couple of Leica's and the Oly isn't even close - the F3HP just absolutely destroys the OM-1 (and the M3 dual stroke just back from a CLA is just heavenly).    

That's it for first impressions, I'm working my way through a roll of Tri-X so I'll be able to write more on this camera later - hopefully the shutter speeds and meter are accurate (they seem pretty good so far).

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.