wenige Minuten später

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...

This funny feeling of being asleep for two years keeps on coming back from time to time, but there has been progress, after all. Now I can use Presto (Greater Toronto's version of the Oyster Card) on all buses and at all subway stations. The new GO Transit cab cars have already become a new norm, and so are the new streetcars around downtown Toronto. The airport train still runs, and now costs significantly less. However, the construction is still neverending at Union Station, and overall, public transportation is still kind of a joke. I would've liked to buy the pancake lens for my Leica M from Voigtländer, the 2.5/35 Color-Skopar that has been raved about online, especially for its moderate price (I wanted something "cheap", so I can save up for, say, a Summilux, later). But being in Canada, the land of being mostly ignored and super slow delivery, the one store I knew sold them no longer had them in store. I ended up purchasing my first Carl Zeiss lens, the 2.8/3...

I pulled an ICE, I know. The last month had been a little hectic. I had to move twice in a span of about 2 weeks, and now I'm getting ready for another move in another 2 weeks. It was bittersweet to say goodbye to my carefree grad student lifestyle in Europe, but I had to face reality again sooner or later. The first morning I woke up in Ontario, again, the last two years felt like a long dream. If it wasn't for the new contacts on my phone, the blog posts, my new camera, and my new degree, maybe the whole Germany thing really didn't happen at all. Two days ago, I finally had my first chance to test out the Leica on foreign soil. The weather didn't cooperate, but I was lucky enough to see a few trains in a span of just 90 minutes. Via Rail's P42s had a new paint job to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the country, but they looked like they were never sandblasted and was just painted over (those spots on the nose where paint used to chip off). So here they ar...

At some point in time, long enough after I have arrived in Germany, S-Bahn Rhein Ruhr brought some old rollingstocks back onto the S1 Line, citing technical considerations. What's curious about this change was that the vintage trains ( Class 420 EMUs or Eastern German locomotive-hauled trains with the x-Wagen on the tail-end) did not run the entire route. In fact, the S1 was cut into two portions, one from Dortmund Hbf to Bochum Hbf (later to Essen-Steele Ost) which utilized older equipment exclusively, the other from Bochum Hbf to Solingen Hbf, and only had the newer Class 422 trains. I don't suppose the majority of the passengers that frequent this route had been greatly affected, thanks to the numerous Regional Bahn and Regional Express trains that stop at the major stations between Dortmund and Solingen, but it felt weird to me. I mean, after all, once a railroader, always a railroader. Class 422 on the left, and the older train got cut off by me... Given all the...

It's 2017, and I've finally bought a SD Card that's fast enough for low-compression 1080p video recording! A few years too late, but I had to test it out with my 70D. It's still a very good camera for what I use it for anyway, and it does 1080p recording at 30 fps (doesn't even sound as impressive as the iPhone, I know, but meh). So with my little Gorillapod, I set up shop at Düsseldorf Airport and Düsseldorf Benrath yesterday. Here are the results after some basic editing with iMovie. Maybe when the money situation gets better, I'll get myself a nice microphone and tripod and explore some of this video stuff a little more. I don't expect huge results, knowing the limit of my creativity, but hey, this stuff is kind of fun.

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 w...

The persistently cloudy weather these days has been discouraging. But good things (sometimes) come to those who wait. All I needed was a few minutes of cooperation from the weather, and luck was on my side, just as the sun was about to dip below the Cologner skyline. I had to do quite a bit of cropping to get the result I wanted. Although it was a 50mm f/1.5 Voigtländer Nokton lens I had used, the end result was probably closer to something from a 90mm lens. Focusing on a rangefinder on a 50mm lens was easy enough for this shot since all I had to do was leaving it at infinity. The aperture was closed down to something like f/5.6 or f/8, although I probably had enough light to go all the way down to f/16. I didn't want to take a chance with moving trains and depth-of-field wasn't an issue here. Having metered the bright sky before I clicked my shutter, I was pleasantly surprised about how clean the shadows were once I brought them up in Lightroom. This heartbreakingly be...

I have to confess. Lately, updating my old blog, Train of the Week, on a rigid weekly schedule, had become a bit of a chore. Although it has been around for longer than I originally expected about half-dozen years ago, it still doesn't feel all that good to phase it out, regardless of whether or not anyone actually reads it. No, the trains are not going away. This new blog, although still mostly railroad-themed, will be more than just trains. And, hopefully, without restricting myself to a schedule that sometimes I dread, the content will become of higher quality again. And of course, none of that is actually the main point. The success of this refresh will be defined by the re-ignition of my interest in blogging. I want to make blogging fun for myself again. Before I stop typing, the unsightly URL of this blog, "wenige Minuten Später," German for "a few minutes late," is a common occurrence in my experience of living in Germany so far. So is the phrase ...