joe88 wrote:
Thanks Charles, Juano, Luka, Ryan & Ty. Hope I didn't miss anyone.
Ron, love the sun spots on that swan shot. If I didn't have my 50Cron , I would definitely get the 50/2 Planar. I like the rendering on this lens a lot.
Luka, nice shot of the bridge on the previous page with the 35Lux. The X1 shots are pretty good for a compact camera, really.
Ryan, another nice set with the 35Lux. Love the play of DOF on the first shot and also like the creative composition on 4.
Lovinglive, congrats on the 21Lux! Post some shots when it arrives. I'm sure the M9 is somewhere around the corner waiting for you to pick her up
Ty, chose the FL first then the lens. Do you prefer 35 or 50? Else just get on the waitlist with the dealers (or pay a premium on the bay) and take whichever that comes first. Meanwhile get a 50Cron or a ZM50/2 Planar for your everyday walkaround.
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I just bought a refurbished Dell desktop (iCore 7) to replace my 4 year old Thinkpad for photo editing. Definitely faster Wanted to consider a Mac but it was over twice to price for the same configuration, figure I'll stick to 64bit Windows. I guess everyone else here is on the Mac?
denoir wrote:
I seem to recall you saying something in the lines of "I'll bet my 90 Cron AA that you won't be using the M9 in six months"
Hmm, no, I am pretty sure that what I said was "if you haven't sold your 5DII in 6 months, I'll take the M9 off your hands for 100 Euro".
I am just going through pages 40-60 and beyond of this thread, to see how you got started with the M9, and the swing is pretty dramatic in your opinions of all things Leica M.
I also came across an old comment of mine:
"I think you hit the nail on the head with your description: Leica lenses are typified by the 75 Cron: they don't get in your way or in your face like Zeiss glass. The subject is the subject, not the photo.
In fact, this gets down to the bottom of why I sometimes prefer Zeiss, sometimes Leica. The Zeiss is great for making photos with a great look. The subject is somewhat less important. The Rokkor is also such a lens. There is so much added to the scene compared to with the naked eye that the subject is often not even mentioned in the discussion of the photo. It is all about "I love the lively boke" or "amazing colours" or "look at the micro-contrast".
The Leica gets out of the way. The modern Leicas have very little to no CA, are sharp edge to edge, and have very neutral boke with no extraneous features, more perfect than perfect. The ultimate lens designer's lenses. When you look at a photo made with a Leica, it is all about the subject. This is possibly why photojournalists have such a strong historical tie to Leica.
Sometimes I am just walking around making photos of whatever. Zeiss lenses are perfect for this. However, for some subjects I prefer Leicas, like portraits."
Reading this makes me sad. I used to write so much nicer. Now I just get wrapped up tight by goofballs making outrageous statements. I need to focus on the positive again, and use the Hide Me button quicker.
Just for the record, and I know this is all just ribbing, but here is what was actually said:
A hunch. How long should we wait until one of us can claim victory? A year? Two? I would guess that you won't have it in six months, or less likely, that you will have changed your mind about some of the things you don't like now, if you use it enough, but I obviously can't know. It is just that you spend a fair amount of effort making posts explaining how the Leica is not a Zeiss
I guess the "less likely" won out in the end, i.e. you changed your mind about some things. I know, I know, you are going to tell me that you like the camera more than you thought, it serves the purpose that you wanted, i.e. lower weight and more compact, yadda, yadda, but I don't think you would have guessed how much you have used the M9 vs. the 5DII, nor that you would end up liking the 35 and 50 Lux ASPH, when the shots you had examined didn't excite you.
It has been an interesting journey for sure, and I am as surprised as you are at how it has gone.
I have a growing desire for an M9. Sigh. What can I sell?
Carsten ... thank you! I appreciate the comments I really think you would appreciate the M9 even with its short comings
Ryan ... thanks a lot
Joakim, beautiful rendering! I love the depth in both the shots.
Carsten, I agree with most of the things you've written, but I'd like to clarify a few things. First, you are right that I have changed my mind about Leica rendering in general. At the time I started with the M9 I was so into Zeiss that I thought the Leica rendering just looked wrong. Zeiss ZM (18/4, 25/2.8 35/2 & 50/1.5) were somewhat of a disappointment as they were not quite in the same league as the Zeiss ZE lenses.
In addition the raw output of the M9 usually requires postprocessing (contrast and colors adjustments) or it doesn't look all that great. When I started with the M9 I was used to the Canon + Zeiss ZE combination that essentially required zero PP except for some careful resizing for web. So I was initially underwhelmed by what I got. My opinion of the 35/2 at the time was that it was really good stopped down but that something was missing wide open. Plus both it and the 50/1.5 Sonnar were not very good for wide aperture landscape photography (something I do rather often) due to very nervous bokeh.
I was expecting this:
and what I got was this:
I consider myself to be a bokeh connoisseur, and I was definitely not pleased. Have I changed my opinion in that regard? No, not a bit. What I have learned though is not to try to take those kind of shots with ZM lenses. They are essentially not corrected for spherical aberrations which makes the foreground blur nice and the background blur not so nice.
I subsequently removed closeups from my list of things that I could do with the M9, just like I removed wild life & action photography from my list when I started using manual focus lenses on the 5DII. I still have Canon AF lenses should I need it and if I want to do closeups and experiment with bokeh, I have the 5DII. The M9 is not the tool for it. The 90 Cron V3 has opened up that a bit, although it's nowhere near as good for closeups as for instance the Zeiss 100 MP.
Then came the 75 Cron. I was at that time still hoping to be able to do closeups, but that hope was destroyed rather quickly. The dirty secret of the 75 Cron (but not of its smaller 50 sibling) is that it's next to useless wide open at MFD. The contrast drops immensely and you get a fair amount of spherical aberrations.
This is wide open at MFD.
So is this.
It is partially fixable in post:
But what do I do with something like this?
At medium distances it has in my opinion a style related to mid range Canon lenses (but optically better). You have a narrow foreground plane and the rest is just a non-descript blur. I could have done it with a photoshop filter:
An attempt at a bit of PP, but it's not better..
I could go on for quite a while ripping it apart.
The truth is however that I'm as much to blame for it as the lens. I was clearly using it the wrong way. I have Zeiss lenses that I like very much (85 Planar for instance) that can produce awful results if used incorrectly. With the Zeiss lenses I knew beforehand the weaknesses, which I did not with the Leica. In fact I've found that the 75 Cron really excels at some types of shots:
* Close distance (not MFD though), stopped down:
* Wide open, for head & shoulder portraits:
Here's one of my parents that demonstrates the difficulty to focus this lens accurately wide open. They're standing next to each other, my dad is in focus while my mom is not. It's not the easiest lens to use!
* Wide open at medium distance when there is something in the background not too far from the subject:
So it does have its uses. I'm not particularly good at using it though. It will be back from Leica any day now (broken aperture ring) and I'll give it another go and try to see if I can make it work in some other ways.
That I liked the 35 Lux ASPH was not too much of a surprise, even if I had not seen many samples beforehand. I use it the same way (except for closeups, but I had given up on them by this time) I would use my Zeiss 35/1.4. It works well. The 90 Cron V3 was a pleasant surprise. Although not in the same league optically as the 75 Cron, I really liked the rendering from day one. The 50 Lux ASPH.. well, one would have to be blind not to like it!
So, in conclusion I can say that over the past six months I have learned what the M9 is good at and where a DSLR is more suitable. For the subset where the M9 is good, it's really good and I've adapted my photography to it. The flaws and weaknesses I mentioned early on are still there, but I've learned to avoid them or work around them and I've accepted them as a part of the package. The good outweighs the bad by a large margin and for handheld use I definitely prefer the M9 over any other camera that I've used.
Alright, I did the suburbs with the X1 yesterday. Today I went for the complete opposite - Djurgården in Stockholm. It's a peninsula adjacent to central Stockholm and that is inhabited by a combination of the über-rich and of artists. Usually a combination - i.e über-rich with artistic pretensions. The houses there are like Leica lenses - even if you have the money you can't buy them. Nobody is selling.
You can find a lot of wonderful weird houses there in all sizes and shapes and it's a great place to photograph.
And the ducks there.. I've never seen such well behaved and law abiding ducks anywhere else
Nice summary of your thinking about the M9 over the last 6 months.
The boke in that 35/2 Biogon berrybush shot is just horrendous! Not even a mother could love it. Nice family portraits. I really like the shot of the two muslim women, and the third house shot!
Thanks Ryan. I like your 1st 35Lux shot on p189, beautiful B&W tones, classic looking.
Charles, wonderful expression captured on the 75Lux shots on the previous page. Very nice.
Joakim, very nice B&W tonality with the 50Lux. You should use it more often now that its getting warmer!
Mr Bokeh connoisseur (aka Luka ), what a journey for you past few months huh? Wow, those houses are really beautiful, and I like the rendering of the 50Lux on #2 & 3 a lot. I wonder why the 75Cron has such poor MFD performance? Did you ask Leica to check while it was there? From what I've seen, this lens is really beautiful for portraits and people.
Luka, with the type of photography you do, eg creative and shallow DOF, you ought to try the Noct 0.95 at some point. I'm quite sure you'll like the 0.95 now that the 50Lux ASPH works for you. As an example, both the #2 & 3 shots can benefit with an even shallower DOF for the kind of look that you like.
