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 p.1104 #3 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
David - looks good! Great tonality in many of these. And yeah, you don't want to blow the highlights with the MM. I'm sure you know - zero highlight recovery. 
I hadn't heard about the building collapse (well, parking garage). I guess it wasn't significant enough... but I did happen to catch the NJ house exploding from a gas leak. Looks like all those dash-cams are coming in pretty handy for these kinds of news reports.
dolina wrote:
Ron,
Lovely image from your M240. What does 90AA mean?
Looking at your EXIF it appears you are shooting with a 90mm lens. My friend with a film Leica claims it is very difficult to focus with 90mm or 135mm lenses. Is this true with a digital RF?
The Leica D-Lux Typ 109/Panasonic LX100 does have a built-in EVF not to mention 4K resolution video, WiFi and NFC. I almost went with that but the smaller 4/3rd-inch image sensor (by 6.7mm diagonal) and zoom lens put me off.
I would recommend it over say a 1-inch image sensor Sony RX100 Mark III unless pocketability is a main draw.
I am anxiously waiting for the M Monochrom replacement to be announced/shipped. This is the RF I am most interested in as it is the most unique full frame camera one could buy. For the price it should be. 
glowrider,
I understand the JPEG vs RAW arguments and shoot mostly RAW in my Canon system but if I expose and focus properly images from a Canon/Leica then a SOOC JPEG is pretty much "good enough" especially when all I am plan to do is resize, watermark and upload.
In the case of the Leica I tend to err towards JPEG because I'm paying the Leica premium for that "look"....Show more →
LX100 is high on my interest list and I'd likely get it over the RX100 based on capability, though even 20MP of tiny pixels might come in handy at times... FZ1000 too...
Sorry about the cryptic 90AA... habit and easier than writing out the proper full name.
The longer the lens, the more challenging it can be on a rangefinder. Wide angles are easy. 50 is pretty easy too, depending on the lens. 75+ gets more difficult. There are several factors at play:
- your eyes
- camera's/lens's rangefinder calibration
- focus throw of the lens
If you can't see the RF patch clearly, you're in trouble. One of the common approaches by many shooting a 90 is to buy one of the viewfinder magnifiers, either 1.25x or 1.4x to magnify the central area and enlarge the RF patch. It can help, but what I've found is then I end up spending more time looking at the patch trying to get it *exactly* right and end up missing stuff. With a rangefinder there's a degree of intuitiveness to the RF patch - getting it to about right and possibly letting depth of field cover any error. But with 90+ it's more difficult, and also with the fast 50s and 75s. I also change lenses a lot, so it would mean having to constantly put on and remove the magnifier. A tip suggested to me early in my RF learning curve by the helpful guys here, was to instead get the right diopter eyepiece for my eyesight, and it definitely made a difference, to the point where no longer bother with a magnifier.
Camera/lens RF calibration is a given and needs to be spot on with the longer lenses, especially on digital because it's so forgiving. But if it is off, it's still possible to intentionally misalign the RF patch slightly to compensate on the fly, if that makes sense. If in doubt, and if possible, stop down.
A lot of the newer lenses have faster/shorter focus throws. This is great at wider focal lengths as it's less critical to get spot-on focus, but also makes it easier to follow focus something moving around. A lot of the older longer lenses have really long focus throws. Even some of the old 50s. I have a Nikkor 105/2.5 from the late 50s(?) that is something like 330˚ throw and takes forever. Same with some of the 50s from that era. In contrast, the Leica 90/2.5 Summarit is a fast/short throw lens, but it can be challenging to nail focus at times. Luckily the one I have is spot on with my camera's RF. I recently added the 90AA and it's between the two extremes. It has a longer throw than the Summarit probably because it's an f/2 and needs more focus precision, but also it's larger in diameter. I'm still learning it, but it's not perfect with my camera across the full focus range. It's fine at near distances where it would matter most for portraits and detail type shots. But by around 5-10m it front focuses a bit. At infinity I just set it to the infinity stop and ignore the slight RF patch misalignment. If I focus far distance objects with the RF it will end up a bit front focused. Apparently some of the more complex lenses, like the 90AA and 75 Lux/Cron are a bit temperamental when it comes to RF consistency across the entire focus range. I haven't tried 135 much, but it too can be tricky. I think it depends a lot on what you shoot. For me it's either near distance people photos, or far distance landscape where half the time setting it to infinity is fine, or stopping down will cover slight mis-focus. The biggest problem I have with 90 is that even at f/11 depth of field can be too shallow for what I want in focus...
If all else fails, I just use the EVF on the M240, if the situation allows. But the shots here, particularly the nearer distance stuff at the top of the page, were all with the rangefinder.
An M240 Monochrom will be sweet, if the current Monochrom is any indication. But I'm sure just as there were differences moving from CCD to CMOS from the M9 to M240, there will again be similar debates around a monochrome M240. If you do end up in the system, give yourself tim to learn it. It's also easier to start off with a 35mm or wider lens, though 50 is also good. Just the longer and faster the lens, the more critical focus becomes.
Does the X have any film preset looks? Normally I totally ignore these, but a short while ago Adam posted some M240 SOOC Jpegs of his wife set to one of the presets and it looked fantastic, IMO. Might be worth trying with the X if it has this option. I think what I liked most about the X(113) sample images from Leica at the time of launch was the similarity of lens character/rendering to some M series glass, at least at nearer distances. Perhaps even rivaling the RX1's 35 Sonnar, in some respects.
I worked about a decade in newspaper prepress... I'll take a RAW file any day over Jpeg, but that was hardly ever the case at work, as everything was Jpeg based. Reality is, Jpeg is fine for 95% of situations where the photographer was careful enough with exposure and white balance.
M240 & 28 Cron, 50 Lux ASPH, 90AA
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The little Nissin i40 looks appealing. It's the right size, IMO, but alas, looks to be only TTL with the popular systems, or manual output. No auto-thyristor, I believe. You could get one of those for your Sony and it should at least fire on the Leica. Maybe even with the Sony off-camera TTL cord (but without TTL of course). It might end up being a case of getting one of those cheap Chinese knock-off flashes with a cheap radio trigger. But again, no TTL... Honestly, I try to shoot available light as much as possible. The MM should be even better for this since for my use flash is often more for clean color than anything else. No worries about that with the MM.
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