Fresh Pie! - Piewacket

Entries in dng (1)

Wednesday

Feb172010

For the Love of Leica

I am excited to announce that I am working with legendary camera maker, Leica. I am testing out one of their newest releases, the M9. An old-school rangefinder style camera in a sleek state of the art digital body.

I first fell in love with Leicas when I borrowed a M3 from a friend many years ago. An early model, it was tricky to load, so I only shot one roll with it. Luckily that was all I needed. There is something so magical about the way that it captured my subject, my then seven year old nephew Matthew. All of the images below came from that one, near perfect roll of film.

My first digital camera was a Leica Digilux 1 an exceptional point & shoot. I loved this camera, it helped pave my transition from film to digital. However with just 4 mega pixel and a fixed lens, it was a little limiting and I moved onto Canon SLRs.

Izzy at age 4 shot with a Leica Digilux

Over the next two weeks I will be shooting as much as possible with the M9 which arrived just as snow was blanketing the city last week. I also received a Leica Summilux-M 50mm 1.4 lens. With fading light I shot just a few quick set ups in my studio with stunning results.

I have to admit, I have become use to the auto focus on my Canon lens and I have not used a range finder since borrowing that M3 so many years ago. Focusing requires a careful alignment in the viewfinder, which can be tricky. It takes some getting use to but wow, I am loving the results. The images above and be below were shot at F2.8 or less.

Simplicity is the genius of this camera, it is very easy to use with clear manual functions. It is also fairly compact and light weight. It also works well with my existing software, Lightroom and CS4. I have not had to download anything, which is very nice. I am excited to try shooting some portraits with this camera. David Farkas offers an excellent technical breakdown on his blog.

Below are two images processed from DNG files which it uses rather than Raw. I am itching to shoot some human subjects, and will get my chance this weekend. In the mean time, my parent's rescue dog (note her torn ear) Daisy fills in as my first moving subject. You have the option to shoot in B&W but in this case I did the conversion in Lightroom.

A simple still life of onions shot outdoors with indirect light. I swear the red onion looks so real. As though you could pick it up right off the screen.