The litter in littérateur. » Technology

40mm Leica Summicron-C: The best cheap Leica lens

Ricky — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:30:43 +0000

Steve Huff recently posted his choice for the best budget Leica lens, the 35mm f/2.5 Summarit-M. It’s the second least expensive lens in Leica’s current lineup, and I agree that it’s the best bargain new M-mount lens you can get from Leica.¹ However, one of the great things about shooting Leica is that there’s a robust secondary market for lenses. And for the price of a new 35mm Summarit, you can purchase a faster f/2.0 used 35mm or 50mm Summicron. You can even get the pre-ASPH version of the 35mm lens that people refer to as the “Bokeh King.” In fact, there are several used Leica lenses you can purchase for the same cost of or less than a brand new Summarit.

My favorite, and what I believe to be the best bargain lens for any camera system is the 40mm f/2.0 Leica Summicron-C. This lens was made for the Leica CL, and you can get used copies for $250-$400 depending on condition. (Note that the 40mm Minolta Rokkor-M is, essentially, the same lens with its own nickname, the “water lens.”) However, it will, contrary to what you might hear, work on any modern M-mount body. It renders very much like the 35mm Summicron but can be had for about 75% less. Put it on an M8, and it effectively becomes a 50mm lens with the 1.33x crop factor. The only problem is that most M bodies do not have 40mm framelines. However, it’s simple to modify the 40mm lens to bring up the 35mm framelines, which are more accurate and even precisely so on the original M8.

Moreover, the 40mm is probably the lightest, smallest lens Leica has made in the past 40 years. Mounted on a camera body, it makes for a very small, perfect package. The filter size is a little odd; a modern 39mm filter won’t screw all the way in, but it attaches well enough, and I’ve never had any problems with my filter coming loose or falling out. Finally, this lens works quite well as a portrait lens with the 2x crop factor of the Micro Four-Thirds system. If you’re looking to purchase a copy, check eBay and KEH. They both often have these lenses available, though you may pay a premium on KEH.

Here are some sample photos from the 40mm Summicron-C.

The company’s least expensive new lens, the 50mm Summarit-M doesn’t quite render as nicely as the 35mm version from this line. However, it’s still a bargain, and you find find used copies of the 50mm Summarit for as low as $600 on eBay. ↩

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Rediscovering film with the Leica M7

Ricky — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:47:26 +0000

Six years ago I gave up shooting film entirely and made my transition to digital photography complete. In the process, I moved from an SLR with nice lenses to a series of point-and-shoots whose convenience, I thought, compensated for their subpar image quality. Eventually, I gave those cameras up and moved on to more robust digital cameras…a couple of which have inspired me quite a bit. So last week when I had the chance to shoot a couple rolls of film with a Leica M7, I wasn’t expecting much, having not shot any film since 2004.

I took the camera to cocktail night at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, a fun event where admission gets you unlimited drinks and appetizers from some of the best bartenders and chefs in San Francisco. This is the organization that puts on the event, and I encourage everyone to attend, if they do another one.

Before I could go or shoot anything, I had to load up the film, which is quite easy. Some people complain about it being more difficult than it is in other cameras with a rear door that flips out. Perhaps, this matters for critical jobs where you need to reload film very, very quickly, but it didn’t bother me at all, nor did I find loading the film slow in any way. I’ll have a video of the process up later.

A few years ago in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane described the sound of a Leica shutter as a seductive kiss. I had never handled a film Leica M series camera before last week, and I have to say that Lane’s ostensibly cheesy observation is dead-on. After I loaded my first roll of Kodak Portra 400VC in the camera and advanced it a couple frames, I thought there was something wrong with the shutter. “Why isn’t it making more noise?” I asked myself. Seduction begins with a little mystery, I suppose.

Handling the camera was great, especially with one of Gordy’s wrist straps. It just feels absolutely right when you’re holding it. And I had mounted on it my favorite lens of all time, Leica’s 50mm f/2.0 Summicron. To test it out before going to the Ferry Building, I took it to Elite Sports soccer store on Haight, where Boone and I watched Spain defeat Germany in the World Cup.

One of the great things about the Leica M cameras is that you can shoot them at very low shutter speeds—even with the 50mm lens, I can reliably get shots as slow as 1/10 second. It’s like having a faster lens or better high ISO performance or just, generally, an extra stop! This comes in quite useful indoors where light is usually low. With the exception of the first shot below on the street, I don’t think any of these were taken at speeds above 1/50 of a second. Normally, on an SLR with a 50mm lens mounted, that would be the minimum shutter speed that someone could expect to use—here, it was my maximum shutter speed.

Another thing I like about the M7 is the viewfinder. It’s bright and the focusing patch is fairly easy to align in most conditions. The camera I was using had a viewfinder with 0.72x magnification. As I don’t find much use for wide angle lenses, I think a 0.85x viewfinder would suit me even better.¹

Looking through the viewfinder, I was able to wait until I saw something I wanted to photograph, whether it was someone walking through the frame or an already framed subject looking towards the camera or smiling. The viewfinder is easily the brightest on any camera I’ve ever used, so I feel like my perspective on a given scene is not particularly compromised even though I’m looking through it. Conversely, when I’m looking through an SLR’s viewfinder, I feel less a part of my surroundings. When I’m looking at a liveview LCD viewfinder on the back of a digital camera, I feel like I’m somehow watching a cropped, delayed, and pixelated version of what’s really happening in front of me. Not so with the M7.

Because I was shooting film—expensive film that would need to be developed at additional cost—I was patient waiting for shots I was anticipating. I tried to avoid wasting a single frame, although I inevitably did because of user error, though not user intent. I spent more time thinking about what I was doing rather than blindly snapping away.²

The big advantage of the M7 over other M series cameras is that it has an aperture priority mode. I found this quite useful, as I could focus my concentration on controlling the depth of field and framing of my shots. Some Leica purists eschew the aperture priority mode, but I think it’s a nice convenience. Not using it or overriding it is easy on the M7, which has Leica’s traditional shutter speed dial.

Shooting, with a Leica, as many others have noted, makes you slow down. It makes you more careful about composition and exposure. And shooting with film compounds those effects. In general, I’ve spent the past few months trying to regain two abilities I feel I’ve lost in the Internet age—that to be patient—to delay gratification—and that to concentrate on something for an extended period of time.

Digital photography conditions us to expect instant gratification, providing us with instant previews of our images. In some cases, this is useful and helps us get the shot we wanted. However, more often it’s simply a distraction from doing the thing we should be focused on—taking photographs. Is there any other activity in which people so immediately evaluate their performance with such scrutiny as photographers checking the LCD image previews on their cameras? It’s like watching an instant replay of yourself walking down the street. Perhaps, it’s useful if you’re, say, recovering from an injury, but, probably, it will just make you miss the door that’s about to open right in your face.

When I had the M7, all I was thinking about was taking pictures. I was fully engaged with the process because it’s all the M7 could do. I couldn’t change the ISO or the saturation or the scene mode, and I definitely couldn’t review my images. How difficult it has become to engage so fully with an activity, to limit yourself thus! And yet, who would disagree that doing so is more valuable and memorable than not?

Moreover, the M7 makes this process entirely pleasurable. It’s small enough to take anywhere, and, combined with one of Gordy’s wrist straps, can stay in your hand for hours at a time, unlike an SLR. It feels like a well-made object because it is one. Everything from focusing the lens to advancing the film and releasing the shutter feels completely, wonderfully satisfying in a way that no other camera I’ve used before does. The shutter is the quietest I’ve heard. Approach a scene, lift the camera to your eye, focus, frame, kiss.

It isn’t just the process that blew me away; the results were awesome. I waited with anticipation for the local lab to develop and print my film. What would it look like? What surprises lay in store? I can say that I felt my patience was rewarded. Even though their content is boring, the prints I got back from the lab had a contrast and vividness that makes them look not only unlike digital images, but cinematic in a way that I absolutely love—rich, textured, almost tactile. Unfortunately, getting to that result means paying a lab for developing and printing, which is why I don’t think I can shoot exclusively on film. My digital color management and workflow isn’t quite yet at the point where I can use film scans to produce prints that are as good as those I received from the lab.

Despite the costs, the joy I had shooting with the M7 and the cinematic quality of the prints I got from the roll of Portra have convinced me that film still has a place in my photography. Now to find a suitable M-mount body for myself—³

Here are some images I scanned with my Nikon CoolScan. Unfortunately, this line of film scanners from Nikon is no longer available, and prices on the secondary market are high. My friend CK over at 39 East Photography uses the Epson V700, which he highly recommends and which can can larger batches of negative strips than the Nikon, saving you time. And we all know that time is money.

Next time I’ll share my thoughts on the Leica S2, which I was able to borrow from Leica for a weekend when I was in France earlier this year.

Here’s Lori waiting for the bus to go downtown.

Boone and Eric at cocktail night. The print of this image had a very cinematic feel to it, which I liked.

Boone at home.

I even liked the images that showed more of the film grain.

This bruschetta was very good.

Some of the drinks contained odd ingredients, such as sausage, beef stock, mango, and sandwiches!

This man sat next to me to watch the Spain vs. Germany game at the soccer store on Haight.

This boy watches his team get dismissed from the World Cup moments after his mom had purchased a Germany soccer jersey for him.

I even shot a roll of Kodak Tri-X, and made this print in the darkroom. Unfortunately, I was too lazy to do the work necessary to make a more contrasty print.

One final image of the M7.

I tried out someone’s M3 last weekend. It has a 0.92x viewfinder, which means that things appear nearly life-sized when you look through it. That would be perfect for shooting 50mm lenses. ↩
Okay, I admit I took one shot from the hip. It didn’t work out so well, and knowing the odds that that would be the case, I regretted it almost immediately. ↩
The Zeiss Ikon and the Leica M6 both seem like viable options. ↩

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Kodak Portra preset for Adobe Lightroom

Ricky — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:20:03 +0000

Ever since I discovered it in 2004, Kodak Portra has been my favorite 35mm color film. So, I was thrilled when I saw that Michael Gray had put together some presets for color films, including Portra 160VC and 160NC. Click here to download the presets.

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How to show invisible files in Mac OS X

Ricky — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:44:32 +0000

If you ever need to view invisible files in the Finder, open the Terminal application, type the following, and hit enter. If you want to hide invisible files again, repeat the process and change YES to NO.

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

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Barriers to entry and start-ups

Ricky — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:22:22 +0000

I’ve sat through more start-up pitches than I would like to admit over the past two years, and there’s one question that invariably comes up during every one: “What are the barriers to entry?” In other words, What will prevent someone else from doing exactly what you’re doing? It sounds great, right? Like, barriers to entry should be a good thing that every business should strive for. The problem is that the entire concept is premised on businesses operating in a monopoly environment. What people are really asking is, “Will you have a monopoly over your market?” And we all know monopolies are bad, right?

Look at industries with high barriers to entry and compare their stocks with those of other industries. You’ll find that those industries with high barriers to entry—automobiles, airlines, pharmaceuticals—have consistently underperformed the American stock market as a whole in recent times. Compare these industries with Internet businesses, which have fairly low barriers to entry. Could it be because the absence of barriers to entry drives competition, which drives innovation, which drives growth, which drives—well, you get the idea.

If you’re evaluating a business with high barriers to entry, you can almost assume that it’s doing to be slow, boring, and not particularly innovative. Fortunately, what many venture capitalists mean when they ask about barriers to entry is, “Do you have a patent?”

Let’s take Apple and the iPhone as an example here. The iPhone has been successful because Apple did something better than anyone else. They weren’t the first to make a smartphone or to make a phone with downloadable apps or email or maps. They just did it better. That Apple holds patents for things like multi-touch doesn’t mean that HTC and other companies can’t make smart/app phones. It doesn’t mean that they can’t design a new category of personal communication device that’s even more compelling and desirable to consumers than the iPhone. In fact, it suggests the very opposite—that to compete with the iPhone, you’ll need to make something better. This is not a barrier to entry, it’s an invitation to innovate.

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Drawing Google Street View

Ricky — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:15:04 +0000

This is the best use I’ve seen of Google Street View.

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New York in miniature

Ricky — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:28:14 +0000

Sam O’Hare spent a week making a neat video of New York City. He shot the entire thing with consumer-grade lenses on a Nikon D3 in burst mode. He added stabilization and the tilt-shift effect in post-processing. You can find more details about the production of the video here.

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On Facebook

Ricky — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:35:21 +0000

Charles Petersen’s article, In the World of Facebook, in the New York Review is probably the best essay I’ve read about any tech company in the past year or so.

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Because your MacBook should look like a real book

Ricky — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:46:25 +0000

Clearly, you want the BookBook from Twelve South.

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Why the iPad buzz doesn’t matter

Ricky — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:29:03 +0000

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about the iPad. It’s revolutionary! It’s too compromised to be useful! It lacks important features like a phone, multitasking, camera, Flash support, etc. What’s certain to me is that the reactions—pro and con—are pretty much meaningless right now. I was trying to think last night about previous Apple product launches and how I felt about them. As I recall, there have been two Apple products in the past ten years that, when introduced, immediately prompted me to say, I want that! One was the Titanium PowerBook in at MacWorld in 2001 and the other was the iPod with video in 2005. Both products were updates to existing product lines. In the case of the PowerBook, it added a design unlike any other that I had seen before. In the case of the iPod, I thought that video would be a great feature that was worth waiting for. (Everyone knew it was coming once Apple had introduced the iPod Photo.) But here’s the thing, I’ve ended up not using the video feature at all during the past four years, really. I watched one movie on a plane once, and that was it. It wasn’t until I got an iPod Touch with a larger screen and better battery life that I really bothered to use an iPod to watch video.

The greater point here is that no one disputes that the iPod and iPhone were both game-changers—products that people now love and that redefined Apple as a company and a brand. I can safely say that when they launched, I didn’t want either one. I didn’t have anywhere close to enough of my music in MP3 format to make the iPod useful, and it was expensive too! The iPhone was even more expensive when it launched, and I remember thinking that there was no way I would get one because it would never handle email as well as my BlackBerry did. Of course, I did eventually get one, and it still doesn’t handle email as well as my five-year-old BlackBerry. But I don’t care because it does so many other things that I value. I can read the newspaper—several newspapers—in formats that are actually useable! I can listen to Internet radio. I can listen to live baseball games. I can listen to NPR on demand. I can browse the web. I can read stories from the web that I started reading on my laptop. In short, I can do a lot of things that I either didn’t know I wanted to do or whose value wasn’t properly contextualized for me until I actually had and lived with the device for a while.

I’m not saying that the iPad will succeed, but I am suggesting that the factors by which people are predicting its success or failure are, more than likely, incorrect because they are captive to our previous experiences. Who knows that developers will come up with for the device? Who knows what features a second or third generation update might add? Who even knows what it’s like to live with an iPad in your bag or on your desk for even a week? If anyone can take a product for which I feel I had no need and make it desirable, it’s Steve Jobs and Apple. As usual, I’ll be rooting for them.

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