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Archive 2011 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss

  
 
Mescalamba
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p.8 #1 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Very good framing and camera with excellent CCD sensor + Leica lens. I guess he would be able to do same with other cameras, but way CCD sensor is able to separate colors and create illusion of depth (or better say, capture depth) in scene is just for CCD cameras only.

Not mentioning ugly contrast glow that some Sony CMOS sensors produce. Halo effects around trees against blue skye etc. You wont see any of this with CCD.

CMOS photos are usually flat (bit 3D with right lens ofc), but CCD are not flat even with minimum tweaking. I would say that CCD is maybe closer to film.

Ofc its matter of photographer and his skills, but I think those photos would be much harder without CCD based camera. Would be very interesting if he had S2.



Jul 20, 2011 at 06:58 PM
akul
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p.8 #2 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Luka - This was quite a treat to my eyes, my spirit. Very inspiring and also educational. I won't say which one was my favorite. They are all different, and very well shot beautiful images. Even ones that you said did not like too much, like Zion shot, I still find it quite nicely composed given what you were shooting.
On the side note, I am going on a road trip ( car camping ) this summer for two weeks in North East US. New Hampshire, Maine, to Nova Scotia, and I calculated 150 to max 200 shots a day when I got additional memory cards. It is great to hear how many shots you have taken, and confirm my estimate is probably not too far off. Last year, I did not have enough memory for a two day camping trip to Glacier National Park, as I had to leave my laptop in Missoula for the camping part of the trip, and ended up shooting many shots in JPGs. I don't want to repeat that mistake again.



Jul 20, 2011 at 07:13 PM
joe88
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p.8 #3 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


charles.K wrote:
+2 Stunning series!!!


+++3!! Superb shots. Well done

I'm glad you bought that 90Cron AA before this trip and I'm quite sure you would feel the same too.



Jul 20, 2011 at 07:49 PM
Smridevan
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p.8 #4 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Absolutely amazing photos...love the Glen Canyon shot! I'm looking forward to hear more about your experiences carrying around all those great lenses...


Jul 20, 2011 at 09:12 PM
Smridevan
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p.8 #5 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Being a newbie, I jumped the gun before seeing the rest of the posts....great pictures! I especially enjoyed the narrative of your experience and perspectives of America along with the pictures. It feels like reading a travel book or brochure with a more personal touch. Bravo!


Jul 20, 2011 at 10:50 PM
rscheffler
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p.8 #6 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Yes, very nicely done Luka! Goes to show you that it's possible to get decent images at midday... in fact I think there is an interesting starkness to Yosemite, almost like a lunar landscape with some trees

The parallel I would draw is to some modern architecture that IMO looks very impressive under very stark light.

We're so used to seeing these natural landmarks photographed during the beauty hours. At least for me it ends up becoming 'yet another beautiful light photo'. On the other hand, most of the midday images out there are tourist snapshots where the photographers have no idea how to use the 'bad' light as an advantage or at least post process for a better effect.

BTW, the full rez 90AA image you posted: What was your focusing technique? Did you rangefinder focus or just set it at infinity?

denoir wrote:
I took 2908 pictures – that’s an average of about 150 per day. I deleted about 20 which were out of focus or had motion blur. Otherwise I generally don’t delete pictures.


I think I shot nearly that much in four days in Swizterland Which reminds me, I still have to post some of those over in the Leica thread



Jul 20, 2011 at 11:15 PM
corposant
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p.8 #7 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


denoir wrote:
As for statistics, here are the percentage of shots grouped by lens, place and aperture:

As you can see I’ve kept it in the f/5.6 – f/8 region for the most part to get the most out of the lenses at the expense of DOF control.


Very interesting, Luka, and by the way, great pix from what was probably a great trip.

I am sure it's probably somewhat gratifying that for the most part, your most expensive lenses were utilized the most! I guess in hindsight you could have saved yourself a lot of weight by leaving the Canon gear at home ("accidents notwithstanding!")...



Jul 20, 2011 at 11:28 PM
Lotusm50
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p.8 #8 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


wayne seltzer wrote:
You may have read about all the state park closings due to the California budget crisis. The amount of money going to state and National Parks like Yosemite is being reduced and we will have to see what happens in the near future. Of course some state parks like Pt. Lobos near Carmel/Monterrey has resorted to closing the park before sunset and giving out ~$100 parking tickets to unsuspecting people like me if you are there after 7pm which right now is when the light starts to get nice for photography there. We were only a half hour late
...Show more →


(political commentary on)

Just wait. If some get their way, the National Parks would be privatized or sold off to industry for exploitation. Imagine a nice big copper or silver mine in the middle of one of Luka's lovely images. The near universal access to all this natural beauty could be severely curtailed, and potentially disappear for future generations.

Cutting the relatively negligible costs of running State and National Parks does absolutely nothing to address the structural budget problems the Nation faces, yet can do much damage.

(political commentary off)




Jul 21, 2011 at 01:03 AM
joakim
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p.8 #9 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


I'm blaiming it on the iPad and the (swedish) auto-spelling. Sorry about that but it did turn out kind of funny.
I'm on the road right now on a trip through middle Sweden so you'll have to wait until next week before you can get your revenge



Jul 21, 2011 at 02:28 AM
philber
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p.8 #10 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


More splendid work, Luka! My favorites are the Yosemite set (Y2, 4, 5, 6), but of course Z-5 is too sweet to pass... Well done!


Jul 21, 2011 at 02:38 AM
carstenw
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p.8 #11 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Lotusm50 wrote:
(political commentary on)

Just wait. If some get their way, the National Parks would be privatized or sold off to industry for exploitation. Imagine a nice big copper or silver mine in the middle of one of Luka's lovely images. The near universal access to all this natural beauty could be severely curtailed, and potentially disappear for future generations.

Cutting the relatively negligible costs of running State and National Parks does absolutely nothing to address the structural budget problems the Nation faces, yet can do much damage.

(political commentary off)



Cutting a single stealth bomber from the budget would probably fund all the national and state parks for 10 years.



Jul 21, 2011 at 02:30 PM
denoir
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p.8 #12 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Thanks Dmitry, Mescalamba, Akul, Joe, Smirdevan, Ron, Corposant & Philippe

akul wrote:
Luka - This was quite a treat to my eyes, my spirit. Very inspiring and also educational. I won't say which one was my favorite. They are all different, and very well shot beautiful images. Even ones that you said did not like too much, like Zion shot, I still find it quite nicely composed given what you were shooting.

On the side note, I am going on a road trip ( car camping ) this summer for two weeks in North East US. New Hampshire, Maine, to Nova Scotia, and I calculated 150 to max 200 shots a day
...Show more →

Thanks for the kind words! As for storage I had the laptop to which I downloaded the images. I left them on the hard drive but also made copies to three separate external drives. I kept one of the extrnal drives (a very small 250GB SSD disk) in my camera bag that I always had with me, one in the main luggage and friend kept the third external disk in her backpack. I did not want to take any chances.

Yet I managed to make a very serious mistake. Usually I would offload the images every evening and I'd continue shooting on the same SD card next day until it was full. The idea was to keep the images as long as possible on the memory cards as well. I had four 16 GB cards for the M9, and one 64 GB and two 32 GB CF cards for the 5DII.

The system worked well enough until Mono lake. When the SD card was full, I switched to a new one - or so I thought. In fact I inserted the same card again, formatted it and continued shooting. I had not downloaded the images from the card the evening before. So I lost all the shots from Las Vegas and from Death Valley.

As those pictures were at the end of the SD card and I had not yet filled it up with new photos I bought recovery software which managed to retrieve every single image. So I was very lucky.

From that point on I made sure to very clearly label the SD cards in sequence (A, B, C & D) and made sure to change them in strict sequence. I also made a habit of write protecting a card once it was full and only removing the write protection after I've downloaded the images.

Toothwalker wrote:
Wow. My my total number of keepers since November 2005, when I went digital, is less than that (2200 out of 13000 taken).


My total number of images since October 2001 when I got my first digital camera is about 72,000 photos with around 60,000 taken in the last 18 months. My record was in May 2010 when on a safari in South Africa where I shot around 8,000 frames in a single week. That was of course during my 8 fps AF period. The number of frames shots per day dropped drastically once I made the switch to manual focus glass.

This is my photography history:
http://peltarion.eu/img/usr/photocount.jpg

My actual interest in photography started beginning of last year, as indicated by the three regions in the bottom, cumulative graph. The three regions define different "eras", the red being Canon AF, blue Zeiss MF and green Leica rangefinder.

In the top graph I've marked out longer trips and when I got my cameras.


I can do that, variations in framing and/or exposure, but keep only the best.


Apart from blatantly unusable photos I keep everything. Disk space is cheap. I rate the images in Lightroom so that I can view the database at a chosen quality level. In theory at least. In practice I have a huge backlog when it comes to rating images, but I plan on dealing with it when I get time.

rscheffler wrote:
BTW, the full rez 90AA image you posted: What was your focusing technique? Did you rangefinder focus or just set it at infinity?


Just set at infinity. I've previously verified that the mechanical infinity on the lens really corresponds to the optical infinity.

denoir wrote:
I think I shot nearly that much in four days in Swizterland Which reminds me, I still have to post some of those over in the Leica thread


You can guess what I'll be posting for quite a while

Edited on Jul 21, 2011 at 08:38 PM · View previous versions



Jul 21, 2011 at 03:03 PM
carstenw
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p.8 #13 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


I think I didn't really say this explicitly last time, but the photos you have posted in this thread are utterly fantastic, IMO as good as most landscape photos I have ever seen, barring a few special Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and so on shots. I have to congratulate you on how far you have come, which is all the more astounding when I think how briefly you have been doing it.


Jul 21, 2011 at 03:44 PM
dj dunzie
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p.8 #14 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Brilliant work. I would suggest you make a coffee table book, or at least a calendar, from all these outstanding images, and sit back raking in your fortunes! Many kudos.


Jul 21, 2011 at 04:01 PM
AlexanderR
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p.8 #15 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


carstenw wrote:
Cutting a single stealth bomber from the budget would probably fund all the national and state parks for 10 years.


Uh, probably not. Thanks for playing. Oh, and we need all our gear to continuously pick up NATO (and it's European membership) slack.





Jul 21, 2011 at 04:57 PM
deadwolfbones
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p.8 #16 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Guys... let's not.


Jul 21, 2011 at 05:12 PM
AlexanderR
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p.8 #17 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


deadwolfbones wrote:
Guys... let's not.


Probably a good call, DWB.

On another note, great coverage of the SW, Denoir. Love the images and the info on how you approached the trip.




Jul 21, 2011 at 05:21 PM
denoir
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p.8 #18 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Thanks a lot Carsten, dj dunzie & Alexander


Jul 21, 2011 at 08:38 PM
Keith B.
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p.8 #19 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


Mescalamba wrote:
Very good framing and camera with excellent CCD sensor + Leica lens. I guess he would be able to do same with other cameras, but way CCD sensor is able to separate colors and create illusion of depth (or better say, capture depth) in scene is just for CCD cameras only.

Not mentioning ugly contrast glow that some Sony CMOS sensors produce. Halo effects around trees against blue skye etc. You wont see any of this with CCD.

CMOS photos are usually flat (bit 3D with right lens ofc), but CCD are not flat even with minimum tweaking. I would say that
...Show more →

Mescalamba, Do you think all this would still be true if these Leica CCD's had an Anti Aliasing filter installed?



Jul 22, 2011 at 01:26 AM
akul
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p.8 #20 · US Southwest with Leica & Zeiss


denoir wrote:
Thanks for the kind words! As for storage I had the laptop to which I downloaded the images. I left them on the hard drive but also made copies to three separate external drives. I kept one of the extrnal drives (a very small 250GB SSD disk) in my camera bag that I always had with me, one in the main luggage and friend kept the third external disk in her backpack. I did not want to take any chances.

Yet I managed to make a very serious mistake. Usually I would offload the images every evening and I'd continue shooting
...Show more →

Ouch. That is the worst fear to format a wrong card. I am glad that you could recover most of them. I have now assortment of five CF cards in varying sizes totally 64GB. Two of which that are the same size are marked with A, B. They are also placed in the card folder in a order I plan to use, start with larger size, and smallest size as the back up. Hopefully, I don't confuse myself. See how it goes.







Jul 22, 2011 at 05:43 AM
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