Creamy FOREground blur?

After a bit of luck, the farewell bid to two of my favourite EF and EF-S lenses, and some additional cash, I acquired myself a 34-year-old f/2 90 mm Leitz Canada Summicron lens. It's not in perfect shape, but it's good enough to have me believe that the previous owner, or owners, have seldom used it. After all, 90 mm is not terribly useful in general photography, but it sure makes trains look nice (so yeah, weirdos like me might find it useful).

After nicely forcing a friend of mine into doing some pro bono modeling work, this lens, at f/2, wow. But that's not the point of this post. This lens is supposed to be nice for portraits. I'd be more surprised (feeling cheated, and perhaps devastated) if it wasn't. What I really wanted to do, was to point it at some trains. Crank the focus ring to infinity and off I went, to some random S-Bahn stations I deemed suitable on the map.

The last mark on the focus scale before infinity is at 50 ft., or 15 m., it may just work out, given the narrow field of view it has. The weather was the typical cloudy affair (when it's not rainy), but it helped with this little experiment, for the most part. I was using the fastest of shutter speeds this camera could physically give me without any filters. Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? (I probably have straightened and cropped some of these pictures, but not in any significant way, i.e., they are pretty close to full-crop).

This is one of the first attempts. The TGV was going away, and I jumped the gun just a tad, and the nose is noticeably soft. I like the blurred look of this patch of grass between the tracks. This is at Düsseldorf-Reisholz.

An IC coming towards me, and the nose is just on the verge of beginning to become soft.

This lens is not easy to focus with a rangefinder. It looked fine through the viewfinder, but in fact, the nose of this Austrian Taurus was out of focus. My internal tape measure needs some tuning that's for sure. The location has changed to Düsseldorf-Volksgarten.

Closed in on the locomotive, and tried my best to refocus the shot. Turned out pretty well, if you ask me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feeding my GAS

At one point or another, we all fall victim to the notorious GAS, or the so-called Gear Acquisition Syndrome. To be honest, I was actually quite proud of the fact that I went through a bit of a down-sizing first. I went from a dSLR and a bunch of useless lens options, to only a few items of real high quality. That only lasted so long, before I became so mesmerized by the magical-looking Bokeh classic Meyer-Optik-Goerlitz lens made. At the first opportunity, I jumped onto the Indiegogo bandwagon, and pledged into the 1.9/75 lens. Like anybody who’s too eager and excited to even read the big print, I completely missed the fact that although the lens will come in M-Mount, but will not have rangefinder coupling. Say what? Of course, my M Typ 262 is so basic, that it doesn’t even support an external EVF. Now what? I guess I can still mount it onto my little E-M10, and use it as a 150 mm lens, but that defeats the purpose a little. For certain applications, the lack of rangefinder coupli
Read more

Steady, Ready, Go

Image
Sometimes, it's difficult to remember the basics. Case and point, I've always thought the 90 mm f/2 lens is so difficult to use, that most of them become out of focus simply because of focus-recompose. But it turns out, I was so deep down the "difficult to use" rabbit hole, I consistently forgot to check my shutter speed under less-than-optimal lighting. A simple rule of thumb (I don't have stabilization anywhere on the camera) states that the shutter speed should be the inverse of the focal length. Sometimes it may pay well to bump up the ISO and accept a slightly more noisy image, than a blurry one. In all fairness, my Leica M isn't the best performer in the dark, but at ISO 3200, it still isn't bad at all.  Lighting isn't bad at all, but I forgot to change ISO from 3200 Shutter speed was ample fast for me to nail the focus on the eyes -- The weather finally stopped sucking last weekend, and I finally drove my couch-potato-ass out of my ap
Read more

Where has the time gone

Image
At some point, I remembered starting to rejoin the workforce, and all of a sudden, here I am, with my blog completely neglected, and myself being no better financially than Day 1 at work. Nothing is as easy as you think of it before you really get into it. Anyway. I did have some chances to take pictures with my beloved Leica, although they were few and far between. I’ve also partly switched from trains to my new cat. She’s the most adorable thing. Oh, and I traded my APS-C sized Canon in for a Micro 4/3 Olympus mirrorless, so I can effectively double the focal lengths of my M-Mount lenses. That’s the direction I’ll go, I think. I might get one actual MFT lens at some point just so I have auto-focus when I need it, but otherwise, it will be aperture dials and manual focus all the way. Heavy Instagram filter applied, shot in Montreal with the good ole 2.0/90 wide open on the Leica M Forgot what lens, shot at wide open, with the Olympus (thank heavens for focus peaking), in
Read more