NEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy, distracted day. I got a couple of ok images in passing with my iPhone.
An Ugo Rondinone megalith at Rockefeller Center via iPhone
On this day one year ago: Birches. I’ve been trying to kick the birches habit, but not to much effect.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy day – no time for niceties like taking pictures. I did my end of a long day thing with my iPhone around the house. Here’s a pretty good looking dragon.
On this day last year: Basketball.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Another very old Carl Zeiss Jena lens on a adapter. This one is a 1937 Carl Zeiss Jena 8.5cm Sonnar f2.0. It’s consider one of the great portrait lenses of all time.. Very nice but on the adapter focus is a bit flakey. It should work better with the Leica M that I have on order which permits focusing through an electronic through the lens viewfinder. Once you sort out focus the images that it produces are lovely
On this day one year ago: small barn.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I spent today (photo wise) messing around with my new Leica S, Leica’s medium format competitor to Hasselblad and Phase One. There continues to be a lot to learn. Here are a couple of examples.
On this day last year: White brick apartment
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’ve got another new old lens to fuss with. The Zeiss Jena all time favorite from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s is the 5.0 cm f1.5 Sonnar (5 cm equals 50mm). It’s a classic design with a classic look that had a very long run (primarily on Contax rangefinder cameras). I found one at a reasonable price on e-bay in a Leica screw mount which can be easily adapted to a modern Leica (and many other contemporary digital cameras). The Contax mount is much less useful because it doesn’t include a focusing capability – the focus control was part of the camera body on Contax rangefinder cameras.
When the lens arrived I noted a couple of odd things about it: it has no depth of field scale and the distance scale is denominated in feet, not meters, an oddity given that its serial number suggested a wartime provenance (the Germans weren’t making lenses to send to the UK and US at that point in history). In the course of some research I learned a lot more about the lens, which I’ll describe in a future post.
So here is an example shot with my Leica Monochrom. Note the beautiful character of the out-of-focus portion of the images – one of the real charms of this lens.
On this day last year: iPhone riot.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Wow. A very long and demanding week in my day job. I’m beat. Too tired to raise a camera to my eye. I’m home mid-afternoon and ready for a nap but I pulled it together to shoot some images around the apartment. Here’s a porcelain piece from Spin in Shanghai. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summicron lens. This is odd. This image has been received with much praise in the informal network that I use as an editorial resource. It was a casual capture on a day when not much was happening. I guess this is the benefit of shooting every day – a monkey typing on a word processor long enough will eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare.
On this day last year: at the office with my iPhone.
MUSTIQUE – Our last day in the Grenadines. I’ve gotten a strong positive reaction to the photo of Maria’s bathing suit below (taken with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Noctilux lens), probably because that it carries a suggestion that Maria has shed it and is nearby sunning. Actually she’s off packing and the swimsuit is just on the post drying off. Context is all. Then a selfie of me in a mirror that I quite liked.
On this day one year ago: Thanksgiving.
