WARREN CONNECTICUT – This is the final day of my one week forced march with my now less-new 15mm Zeiss lens. Today I’m exploring the lens’s “bokeh”, the character of the out of focus portions of images. This is actually fairly difficult since with a 15mm lens not much is out of focus. So I got really close to some flowers (8 inches or so) and took advantage of the cloudy day to shoot wide open at f/2.8, with a bunch of stuff in the background. The answer: this lens has lovely, creamy Leica-style bokeh (typical of lenses from the Walter Mandler era) with gentle focus to out of focus transitions. Very nice if you can find a situation to use it.
Day 1,732 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Still shooting really, really wide with my 15mm Zeiss lens on my Leica Monochrom. Today I was in Union Square shopping in the greenmarket for groceries for a dinner party. The picture below was the best of a poor lot for the day. Another square crop (planned that way in shooting) to get rid of a too-large foreground. It looks “meh” to me but has actually been quite popular on my Twitter feed. I guess I got it wrong on the editing end.
Day 1,730 of one photo every day for the rest of my life.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More familiar territory with the ultra wide 15mm Zeiss lens on my Leica MM. This lens continues to interest me, but I am looking forward to the end of the week that I’ve committed to keep it on my camera. I reshot Citicorp this morning and 1185 Park Avenue this afternoon. The lens let me shoot all of 1185 without stitching (a reshoot of June 30, 2014). I had to point up a bit, however, to get the top of the building, which meant that I had to correct sharply converging vertical lines in Photoshop. The resulting “stretching” of the top of the image magnified the Zeiss 15’s very slight “mustache” distortion to the point where it is visible, especially in the upper right corner of the image. I really have to shoot level with this lens.
Day 1,729 of one picture every day for the rest of my life.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More work with the really wide lens, this time on Park Avenue in the 50s. For the first image below I shot level in portrait orientation and cropped the foreground out, resulting in a square format. This is a common technique shooting very wide – the need to level almost always results in too much foreground. I grew up shooting 2 ¼ inch square so this isn’t a burden for me – I tend to see in squares anyway. I shot the same tree looking up a bit and it was much less successful at every level. The commonplace look up and view of GCT demonstrate this lens’s lovely rendering.
Day 1,727 of one picture every day for the rest of my life.
Square cropLook upBeen here
On this day two years ago (997): Alexander, at our weekly Sunday family dinner.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A new tool/toy arrived today: a Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 lens for my Leica M and Leica Monochrom cameras. I’ve actually been looking for a Leica R 15mm f/2.8 for a while (they are no longer being made), but they are scarce and collectable and thus expensive. A recent review by Irwin Puts, a tireless writer of technical reviews of high end camera lenses, claims that the the Zeiss 15mm, which is a new and extraordinarily complex design, performs as well as the Leica R 15mm. The Zeiss lens is expensive, but I found a slightly used one on ebay at a $1,200 discount from new. It arrived today.
I’m going to leave the new lens on my Monochrom for a week, which should force me to understand what its capabilities are. Initial impressions are very positive. The fit an finish are lovely. Out my window brick wall torture tests show effectively no linear distortion (usually a major issue with very wide lenses), and little or no chromatic aberration or purple fringing (ditto). At f2.8 there is some funkiness in the corners, which disappears by f5.6 – performance that is consistent with the lens’s MTF curves. It comes with a graduated center filter which I’ve kept on full time so vignetting is not an issue. Some of the “look up” shots from today have large areas of strong highlights which evidence excellent flare resistance.
One of the keys to shooting very wide is keeping the camera level and orthogonal to the plane of any buildings. This is actually hard to do visually (small errors translate into major geometric distortion) so I added a spirit level to the camera’s hot shoe. Since the Leica also needs an accessory finder for this lens I’m using a Thumbs Up product that provides a second hot shoe (which isn’t really hot) so I can use both the finder an a level. Here’s what the setup looks like.
15mm Zeiss
Day 1,726 of one picture every day for the rest of my life.
Brick wall torture testLook upMore look up
On this day last year (day 1,361): Sunflower in Todi.
