NEW YORK NEW YORK – I found myself on Fifth Avenue early this evening with my Leica Monochrom and a 50 mm Summicron Asph. lens. Those of you who follow this site know that I’m usually a wide angle shooter and of course the 50mm is not a wide angle lens.
I get wide images with a norma focal length lens by shooting multiple overlapping frames and stitching them in Photoshop. I typically shoot three, four or six frames. This gives me very large, very good files to work with, so I can make perspective changes without unacceptable quality loss. In effect this technique turns the 50mm into a wide angle zoom. Good technique is important: all frames have to be exposed consistently and a single mistake in one frame ruins the whole image.
I don’t use a tripod, even at night. I brace against a street light or other structure and take advantage of the Leica lens’s good wide open performance and the camera’s good high ISO performance.
Here you go. The third image, by the way, is an iPhone shot of a platinum print of an image taken in May 2010. This was a three frame stitch of images taken with a smaller-sensor camera, a Leica M8.2
Day 2189 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
On this day two years ago (day 1459): Schloss Elmau. Taken with the same camera and lens combination (Leica Monochrom + 50mm Asph. Summiocron).
