An Old Photographer and a New Store

Three photographers and a minder

Yesterday evening, I was at an event at the Leica headquarters in Wetzlar. Jürgen Schadeberg was inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame and a new Leica flagship store was opened. Here’s a series of photos I took with the M Monochrom as the proceedings unfolded:

Three shots around the first one.

Mr. Schadeberg is famous for the portraits he took of Nelson Mandela while he was imprisoned on Robben Island.

There was an interview format where the honoree could hardly be stopped telling one more story of his long photographic life.

Then he was decorated with a M 10-P with his name engraved on it.

Shooting it right back at them!

Being led off the stage, he was obviously proud and protective of his new Leica 😉

Then it was over to the new flagship store. Laudatory speeches were held.

A ribbon was cut by a crowd of Leica higher-ups.

Mr. Kaufmann, Leica’s chairman of the supervisory board, standing proud behind a row of Leica’s cheapest cameras.

There were demonstrations of the manufacturing process.

An occasion for meeting people and conversations, it was all very convivial and open.

This ends the photo series. I took more pictures on Kodak Portra 800 in my Leica IIIG, but they are yet to be developed. If they’re any good, I’ll make a second post of them, they’d clash with the black and white ones if I appended them here.

I want to thank the Frankfurt Leica Store for the invitation to this event.

Clouds

Ansel and Martin meet.

Lately, I’ve been fascinated with clouds:

I Screwed Up

Choosing from a menu

Just coming back from a day trip to Hamburg with my father. We had

Mirrorlessless

Vanilla ice cream, Apfelstrudel and a 45.7 megapixel beast

I’m being ungrateful and have been replacing the Nikon D800 that served me so well shooting the wedding with a new body. Ten days ago at Photokina, mirrorless system cameras were all the rage. I had a look through a Nikon Z7 and found the electronic viewfinder straining to my still blissfully good eyesight. Same with the other manufacturer’s EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens, that moniker should be standard!) camera proposals. Only the Leica SL stood out, but that one is a bit out of my price range, especially it’s autofocus lenses.
I kept the Sony alpha 7RIII for last and had a salesman at a big camera store in Nuremberg demonstrate it to me last Saturday. But when neither he nor his colleagues

Shooting a Wedding

A legally married couple, happy!

The long awaited wedding of my son and his bride has come and gone. In this post, the emotional content is not the topic, though I hope it will appear in the example photos that I add as they develop. No, I want to talk about my experiences as a wedding photographer and the technicalities of the photographs.

They don’t make them like they used to

I get nostalgic for old film cameras.

Like this Leica M6 TTL in chrome. It sat in the second hand glass case at my dealer when I was visiting yesterday.

‘cron

Free, Joel? Really?

As big a Leica fanboy as I am, I have seldom bought a Leica lens for new. The penultimate time was long ago, with a MP a la carte came my Summicron 50 mm that still serves me well. The last time was yesterday.

Bremen Walk

Fab Four

Some photos from last Saturday:

Atom Heart Mother Rejects

Rangefinder Genetics

As smooth as the drink

As soon as I gave my Leica M6 to my son for his 25-th birthday, I missed it. That’s the way heart-felt presents should feel.