Mostly Black & White

28c3, First Time, First Day

chammann — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:48:32 +0000

Here are some pictures from my first visit to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin:

The Rocket in front of the BCC

Media attention

Club Mate in the Dungeons

Pong on a Game Table IS Fascinating!

It's not just a Gametable, it's The Painstation! Loose at Pong and your hand gets grilled, slapped and pierced.

She Crotcheted "Free Bradley" around the Hand Railing

Nick Farr, Sporting a Beard this Year

Cory Doctorow is Anything if not Self-Assured

The biggest lecture hall is illuminated with a memory of Erich's lamp store.

Step Right Up

chammann — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 04:34:58 +0000

Photographing photographers has become quite an obsession of mine

Yes, of course I take photographs on the street as well with the Leica M9. Here are some examples from yesterday’s visit to the Christmas Fair. I like picking out scenes out of the crowd with the 24 mm Elmar.

Flocks of girls...

... and itty-bitty Santa hats

By the way, the M9 quickly becoming my main camera, I might be tempted to sell my Leica MP. Very reluctantly, I must add! It’s the camera you see in this post, an a la carte model with black lacquer and finer Vulcanite and it comes with a Voigtländer pancake 35 mm f/2.5 and a Leicavit M. First one offering me above 2000 Euro and paying me by Paypal gets himself a christmas present that will serve him a lifetime (or as long as they make 135 film). Contact me if interested by commenting on this post.

Seeing What You’re Doing, Or Not

chammann — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:52:50 +0000

Sometimes you've got to frame your art carefully

Here’s another practical experience with the Leica M9 and the Elmar f/3.4 24 mm. I’ve been photographing a friend’s exhibition opening here in Berlin the day before yesterday. It had quite a turnout of people coming to see his imagined botanical drawings. Mingling with the crowd, I was looking for interesting angles and chanced upon this:

In the gallery (If this website had sound, I'd play the relevant Dire Straits title now…

Holding the camera above the heads at outstreched arms and angling it down approximately pointed at groups of people gave me the graphically most interesting shots of the evening. If the floor had been even lighter colored, the shapes could perhaps have floated in white space. Something to remember for a later project.
Then yesterday I did documentary photos of the artwork and the gallery installation, see lead photo. And I was glad I had bought this in the Berlin Leica Store in the morning:

Leica Zoom viewfinder 21 - 24 - 28 mm, aka goggles

It was used (is no longer made, and, curiously, sports a shame-faced “Made in Japan” script. Voigtländer? Or from the period of cooperation with Minolta?) and the only accessory viewfinder they had that gave a good approximation of what you’ll get on sensor with the Elmar f/3.4 24 mm. We tried a Zeiss 21 – 25 mm finder that was too wide and the original Leica brightline viewfinder was on order with an uncertain delivery date. Leica’s being overwhelmed by it’s own succes lately.
So, this was just an example that you can work both ways with a Leica and a wide angle. To frame or not to frame…

The Leica in the Landscape

chammann — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 05:03:38 +0000

Banks of fog under a clear sky

Ok, sort of a reprise on the previous post. In coming to know the Leica M9 better, I’ve lacked occasions for people photography (but that’s coming up this weekend with a visit to Berlin!). What wasn’t lacking was autumnal fog and foliage around here. Plus, I’ve been monetizing my Hasselblad equipment (a bit of an emotional good-bye) and getting a Leica M Elmar f/3.4 24 mm wide angle for the proceeds.

Here it is on the M9

Nifty cutout in the already quite compact lensshade

So, how does one work with a Leica in the landscape? Everything’s the same as with a large format field camera, except you don’t have movements and you don’t have to lug around a crushing field pack. In fact, I make do with a small Billingham bag that holds the camera, a spotmeter, four lenses, various accessories and a bottle of water. It is positively light on the shoulder! Over the other shoulder (or as a substitute for a walking sick) goes the tripod, as I mentioned in the previous post, a combination of Calumet carbon legs and Really Right Stuff’s medium ballhead with Arca clamp.
Oh, and about the spotmeter: I’ve yet to use it in the field. Call me lazy, but it is more convenient to check the histogram and adjust accordingly. The spotmeter’s place is up for grabs.

Here's the kit deployed to photograph the foggy/sunny scene in the lead photograph

So, how does the Elmar f/3.4 24mm lens fare? Quite stunning, in fact! It is Leica’s version of an unstressed lens construction, meaning that by forgoing a wide aperture you gain small size, a flat field and high resolution starting with the open aperture. Diffraction sets in at apertures smaller than f/5.6.
On the few occasions that I’ve used it to capture street scenes, I’ve used it in close proximity to my subjects, e.g. in a crowd. You focus and recompose and the wide angle makes your “victims” think your not photographing them. Try it sometimes, this really works!
Oh yeah, the recomposing part: there are no framelines for 24 mm in the M9′s viewfinder. Till now, I make do and take the whole of the viewfinder image as an approximation for what you get with the 24 mm lens. Works quite good for far and medium distances, but I’m keeping my equipment eyes peeled for a used 21 – 24 – 28 mm zoom viewfinder.
The Elmar-M f/3.4 24mm resolves so fine of a detail so evenly that it is the first lens that has produced moiré on the M9′s sensor for me. I was photographing architecture with some fine regular details. No problem in nature, no repeating patterns there.

Really Right For The Wrong Purpose

chammann — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:07:15 +0000

Lauchagrund at dusk

Leicas are for street photography, right? Perhaps reportage and situational portraits, too.
But then, the newest incarnation of the Leica M Gestalt is one of the best digital cameras on the market. It’d be a shame to limit it’s potential to hand-held use. And as every photographer worth his salt knows, the simplest way to make your photos sharper is to use a tripod.
A Leica on a tripod is an abomination. But not with this:

Really Right Stuff BM9-B Set for Leica M9

California aluminum miller extraordinaire Really Right Stuff produces Arca norm compatible plates for almost any camera, and this is his creation for the Leica M9. Note the cleverly intergrated handgrip. The base plate goes on the M9 instead of the usual base plate. Yes, you can carefully maneuver the camera body and the strap lugs so that it all just falls into place although this contraption has objects on both sides of the camera body. Close, but well considered tolerances.

Here's the camera mounted in it from the front ...

... and the rear ...

... and the bottom.

Mounted, the lithe M9 becomes kinda ruggedized (and regains the substantial weight that the M film bodies have). There’d be no problem with the Winogrand maneuver (except for the recipient of that move).
And how’s it working out in the field? Well, fine as usual if you avail yourself of the splendid Arca system in it’s RRS incarnation. For the lead shot, I set the camera on a RRS BH-40 LR II ballhead (on Calumet CX8144 carbon legs) and exposed for 30 seconds. Working like this is controlled, safe and a joy as the equipment works precisely and just gets out of your way.
That’s what we want, right?

Black & White Portraiture with the Leica M9 and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2

chammann — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:21:53 +0000

My father at 79

In my opinion, the forté of the Leica M rangefinder camera is the instantaneous portrait, the situational snapshot, the view from the corner of the eye frozen in time.

Or a special look from a child's eyes

Traditionally, this has been done in black and white and a bit of grain never hurt anyone there, quite the contrary. Tri-X in Diafine comes to mind. Are we giving up this aesthetic when we use the modern incarnation of the Leica M?
We don’t need to, and I think I’ve found an authentic simulacrum in the workflow I used to make the photos that go with this post. Let me sketch it for you (and as all recipies this should be taken only as an idea for your own experimentation):
I set ISO to Auto ISO and work indoors and at open aperture or close to it. Unless my subjects roam in a tungsten-lit studio, this’ll push ISO above 1000. With the M9′s sensor doing what he does, this will produce some noise that looks remarkably like film grain. Think T-Max 400, not 3200. Of course, in mixed light situations, color balance will be wonky often. Don’t mind that, we’ll skip color and go right to black and white. I like to use Nik Silver efex Pro for this conversion on a copy of the RAW file in Lightroom. In version 2 of this software, there are some interesting presets.

My father at his desk

Here I used “Wet Rocks” to drown the background in black. The gnarly lead photo of my father on his 79-th birthday was made even gnarlier by applying preset 15, “Completely dynamic (hard)” which seems to have used a quite obvious burn-in on the background. And the photo of my daughter further up in the text was done with the soft version of this preset. In all presets of this software, it pays to go into the preset’s submenues and play withtthe adjustments, e.g. grains per pixel, luminance, shadow and highlight recovery and so on. Sometimes the influence on the final image is subtle, sometimes not so subtle.

Old Lenses, Good Enough?

chammann — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:51:23 +0000

Old scooters are certainly good enough, and stylish, too!

Ok, second post about my experiences with the Leica M9. As seems to be the case with all high-resolution digital cameras (and the Leica M9 can surely be counted among them, if not for it’s 18 MPix then of course for the lack of an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor), it is very demanding of the lenses you use. For example, the Voigtländer Color Skopar 35 mm f/2.5 that I used with great success on the Leica MP (down to the resolution a Kodak Ektar provides) seems somehow limited in resolution on the M9′s sensor. Granted, this is pixel-peeping, but when you get down into the files at 100%, the details turn pointilist. For example, leaves on a tree in a landscape scene look like small brushstrokes of an arbitrary form. And mind you, we’re not yet at a level here to see JPEG artifacts. This effect is visible in the RAW files as well and interestingly it is evenly distributed over the image area.
But there was a more serious gap in my M lens lineup: I had no 50 mm lens I could use on the M9. The Voigtländer Heliar 50 mm f/3.5 that I have would resolve enough detail, but it has the problem of being a retractable lens. The M9 user manual allows NO retractable lenses apart from the two current Elmars (that don’t protrude (much) into the camera body when pushed back) and I know I would someday forget this if I mounted it in the extended position. Finally I’m a bit suspicious about the long-term parallelity of lens and sensor in such a lens.
Even in Germany, at the source, so to speak, Leica M lenses are in hot demand recently, and scarce. So I was lucky to find a Summicron M 50 mm f/2.0 in used, but impeccable condition at Meister Camera in Hamburg yesterday.

Cocoa and cream, mhmmm!

I chose it over the Summarit for the creamy bo’keh. The Summarit has corner-intense diffusion circles that swirl around the image center. Interesting, but after a while it’s only a distracting gimmick. On the other hand, out-of-focus areas depicted by the 50 mm Summicron are so creamy, Clapton would be tempted to reunite his band.
The Summicron’s resolution is certainly up to the demands of the M9′s sensor, but you’ll have to nail the focus. Yesterday, I did a lot of snapshots of my daughter that looked interesting on the camera’s rear display. A lot of them had to be relegated to lesser use after I examied them on the computer. I’m speaking of portraits or medium distance scenes at f/2.0 or f/2.8. Here’s one that turned out to sharp on her eyelashes.

Binning Polly Pocket dolls with a friend

So, a new lens always teaches you something new. Even if you’ve had it before.

From NAS To DRF

chammann — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:09:15 +0000

A celebratory drink, unsharpened (left) and sharpened, no shadow noise at 360 ISO

Updates have been few and far apart on this site, but this is going to change. The day before yesterday, I traded in all my Nikon gear for a Leica M9 body. I had been thinking a long time about getting that digital rangefinder camera. In my gear acquisition history (It’s a veritable saga, I tell you! Repeated raids on my wallet combined with never-dying hope for the next great piece of gear that’s going to advance my photographic prowess. So I thought.) is an Epson RD-1 that I never should have sold. I still think back fondly and remember the quality of the 8 MPix files that I got from a Summicron 50 mm f/2.0 (stupidly also sold) on that body.
Yeah well, seller’s remorse … Selling all that Nikon gear was a sacrifice that had to be made. I will especially miss the F6, the 70 – 200 VR II zoom and the 50 and 25mm Zeiss ZF lenses with their wonderful bo’keh. But then, equivalents remain with the new setup and the Canon gear that I wrote about here.
So, what’s in it for you, dear reader? I wont bother you with the 999-th “test” of the Leica M9, this has been done to death. But I will from time to time post about my subjective impressions from working with the camera, the “feel in hand” so to speak. And I’ll show you picture examples that shine a light on the capabilities and pitfalls of this digital rangefinder.

Dresden tourist, with the Summarit 75mm

First of all, it is a Leica, a close embodiment of the gestalt of the street camera. If you want to do street photography and reportage straight and in the style of the great of photographic history or if you want to modify in the admittedly questionable way like I did in the example above, it will provide.

At a deeryard, with the Voigtländer Nokton 35 mm f/1.2

One more impression from the first two days of using it: Characteristics of the M lenses you have will be exaggerated in comparison to them projecting their image on film. So, both my Leica Summarit 75mm f/2.5 and my Voigtländer Heliar 50mm f/3.5 appear sharper. Film, even SPUR DRX, didn’t bring them to their resolution limits. And, as is evident in the picture above, my Nokton 35mm f/1.2 appears softer at open aperture with a more pronounced falloff into that swirly bo’keh that I like so much.

Getting There (With A Few Caveats)

chammann — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:32:53 +0000

Erfurt market place provided a resolution sample scene

How far along are we with regards to cellphone photography? Well, the 8-megapixel camera in the new iPhone 4s is supposed to be one of the best, and we’re gonna find out some things about it in this post.

Center crop from the lead photo (all photos are clickable for 100%)

This is how all out-of-camera JPEGs should look like: not over-sharpened, smallest details resolved, but not harsh, intense, but not posterized colors. This would actually take well to a bit of sharpening, rare for a JPEG.

Corner crop to 100% pixels (if you click the image to enlarge the picture!)

Lens resolution seems to be ok in the corner as well. And about the noise in the blue sky: blues and greens always start first with noise because they are represented by fewer receptor sites in a typical Bayer array. But I must say I like the film grain-like appearance here. Of course, this area shouldn’t be sharpened, so I’d set a control point in Nik Sharpener.

Medium distance shot of an undertaker's window display

The camera handles more subdued color in the shade well, too. And just so that you know, You CAN be buried with your Strat!

Center crop on the text

Black on white text is always prone to corner effects, but the iPhone 4s camera avoids this pitfall.

A fluffy guitar strap

Detail is good here, too, even though I photographed by the the dim light filtered through the sopping bag’s sides. Autofocus had no problem under these conditions and nailed it on the red fibers.
Ok, so far, so good.

But wait there’s one more thing!

Not one for "f/8 and be there", are you, 4s?

Looking at the metadata from the shots I took, it appears that the camera in the iPhone 4s doesn’t know how to stop down. All shots were taken at maximum aperture, f/2.4, even this in direct sunlight. Diffraction would soon destroy resolution at such a small sensor size and of course it is easier to correct a lens for one aperture.
So, if you like to shoot at open(-ish, don’t expect Noctilux-thin depth of field!) aperture (and I do!) and can manage a bit of film-like noise, this is quite a useful little camera. But it will not open the pod bay doors for you, I’m sorry, Dave!

Hackbrett

chammann — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 05:07:12 +0000

A tablet computer for makers, not consumers

Or so Cory Doctorow would say. Though he’s had an awful lot of pro-iPad articles on boing-boing lately. Anyway …
To get the bottom line out of the way: I’ve had the Xoom for all of 16 hours and I already like it more than my iPad.
As for the reasons, my most estimable previous speaker has again put it well in an article posted a few days ago: Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better. Be sure to follow that link, I’ve nothing to add to that.
Of course, there’s the eye candy as well. As you can see in the lead photo, the Xoom tablet comes with a cool Tron-theme. Again, if that’s not your cup of tea (mine it is!), you could totally change it. This is just the default theme it’s OS, Android v. 3.0.1 aka “Honeycomb” comes in. Having fought against the user interface in previous versions of Android, I must say that Honeycomb is a big step forward. Much more intuitive and adapted to the bigger screen real estate. I’ve yet to look into a manual or call up a help screen.
As an example for the things you can do on a Xoom but never on an iPad: I’ve got my Bitcoin wallet on the Xoom, whereas all Bitcoin apps in the Apple App Store are about the rate of exchange or keeping a wary eye on your Bitcoin miners. It’s doing it vs. watching it.
So, the next steps on the Xoom require it being rooted. Working on it, right now adb on my Mac is laboriously self-updating. Some very slow progress bars, but that’s Java for you. Elegant and slow. I actually like hacking things to make them work, and the Xoom is going to be my Hackbrett.