The Official Head-Case Photography Thread.

[Knuckledragger]

TBH, even by Leica standards the Sumilux glass is completely not worth it.  Ignoring the massive cost difference for a second, the F/2 Summicron versions are a fraction of the size and weight of their F/1.4 brethren.  Heavy lenses get old quickly, especially when attached to otherwise lightweight camera bodies.  The 50mm F/2 Summicron is a "bargain" by Leica standards (even moreso on the used market.)  The Leica 35mm F/2 is possibly the best camera lens in the world for actually taking photos.  The only photographer I've ever known personally who shot Leica used a M6 (late 80s serial IIRC) with a 35mm Summicron.  He joked that the "swappable glass" part was optional.  He used that combination long into the digital era.

[padam]

I would say it is personal just like headphones or other things, you either like fast glass or you don't.
I love them, the Summilux 35 is phenomenal (either for stills or video), much more cinematic than other 35mm lens I've tried, very small and light for what it is (also had the Distagon ZM which was also superb but a little bulky and heavy, but it handled just fine on the M6TTL).
I also have a super tiny Canon 35mm f2 LTM which is quite great, yet I almost never use it.

I would not pay full price for any Leica product, for the Lux I've only paid 2300$ which was really not much more than a Summicron.
(With that said, I am sure I would do just fine with a Summicron as well, maybe it is more fun to use.)

Some crappy 35 1.4 shots here

I have also looked at a few images I took the RF 35/1.8 lens and while I thought it looked a little ordinary, it is really not bad at all.
So I would also consider just an R8 and this lens and call it a day, much lighter to carry than a Leica and very easy to use. (I assume same EVF as the RP, which isn't very big or high-res but still usable)

Edited March 4, 2023 by padam

[blessingx]

I’m in the modern Voigtlander camp, but anyone considering the Light Lens Lab 35mm “Summicron” (or 50mm “Elcan”)? 
 

As for iOS apps, I’ve settled on the similarly named, but different, ProCamera (can turn down HDRish processing with ProRAW and supports 14 Pro MP) after getting caught in a billing loop with Halide (not allowed to make one time purchase, unwilling to pay for a subscription). Also Snapseed has recently picked up ProRAW editing capabilities. 

Edited March 5, 2023 by blessingx

[Torpedo]

Maybe the M11 is a bit too much, but with the right lens and some practice 60Mp isn't a problem. The M10R is a good plan B if they drop prices a bit. I considered the M240 for a while, but I'm always distrustful buying things with Leica's "luxury aura" second hand online.

There are a few things of the M11 that I don't like, I much preferred the bottom cover to the special battery, but I've heard its charge lasts good for a shooting day.

[blessingx]

Big news. DPReview.com to close. The only hobby site I had a longer relationship with than ones on headphones. 

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5901145460/dpreview-com-to-close 

[mikeymad]

sad, that was my go-to site.

[HiWire]

I love that site! 📷 

Someone should crowdfund to continue the site.

Edited March 21, 2023 by HiWire

[blessingx]

 

[padam]

 

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

I'd watch those guys wherever they went, nothing like some good ol' drinking game camera comedy.

I just hope the wealth of info on DPR doesn't disappear forever. Between the forum, sample galleries, studio tests, there is so much useful knowledge there that deserves to be preserved. It's the single best archive of information of the digital photography era.

[HiWire]

Yes, I'll follow them to PetaPixel and I also hope the DPR gets archived.

[blessingx]

Of course days after I bought the Hasselblad 907x 50C for waist level shooting. Coming 4/20 (maybe). 

 

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Good thing they put an antibacterial coating on the lens, keep that staph infection rate low for all the kiddies poking at it and asking "granpa, wha's dat?"

[Knuckledragger]

I've had this rant brewing for a while.  In the world of photography, large format photographers are the biggest dicks in the room (in the Tice sense.)  If the subject is holding still, large format (which is basically anything between 4x5" and 8x10") cameras do things better than anything digital and do it with 100-150 year old technology.  Large format cameras can correct for perspective in ways that even the most sophisticated SLR lenses cannot.  Large format photographers shoot at tiny apertures far beyond the point of maximum sharpness for any lens and deep into the diffraction loss territory.  Their lines rendered per square inch is much worse than any digital camera but they make up for it by ...having more inches (I swear I wasn't trying to make so many dick jokes when I started.) 

Film stock is many orders of magnitude better now than it was in decades past, but apart from that it's quite possible to use camera equipment from before the war (the great war) in 2023 and be a functionally state of the art photographer.  There's a rather large issue of color vs B&W stock and reciprocity failure that I've ignoring, but it's not directly relevant to the subject I'm going to address here.  As I've alluded to in many posts, I now live in Vartha's Mine Yard full time.  This storied island is and has been the home to many talented photographers (including at least one super famous one.)  There's man in his 60s a who lives here now and shoots with a late 19th century LF camera.  I have yet to see his work, but I'm very interested in doing so.  

Tangent: Large Format is one of the last signposts before sanity starts to disappear completely.  After 8x10" the world of Ultra Large Format begins with 11x14" AKA "My contact prints are better than yours."  ULF is where madness sets in.  I've seen an 11x14" camera.  It was ginormous.  Anything beyond is lunacy for lunacy's sake.  Of course, the final destination for a photographer that has utterly taken leave of his senses is ...alternative and historical processes.  The people who make cyanotypes, tintypes, daguerreotypes etc. are artisans, craftsmen and people who make me look totally sane as I'm ranting about the mintue details of the work an obscure Eastern European electronic music producer at the end of my radio show.

Ahem.  As I was saying, I have a small confession to make.  Since moving to MV, I've become a bit of a Facebook Boomer.  That's really saying something as I loathe Facebook and ...don't really like the baby boomer generation.  It turns out that on an insular place like MV, most of the locals communicate ...in a private FB group.   Even my (sainted, octogenarian) mother who has never used FB in her life, is aware of this group.  I now log into FB multiple times a day to check out what's going on about town.  As one might expect much if it is "need a place to live" "lost dog" "found dog" "why is that on fire?" etc.  Old Zucc's AI sure has noticed the uptick in my FB usage.  I'm now getting all sorts of notifications from FB that I haven't before ("We've got a special survey just for people like you!"  "The FB Messenger App for OS X is ready to download!")

I figured a good way to get known on MV (in spite of being a 4th generation Vineyarder, my grandfather ran the fish market in my town in the mid 20th century) was to show off some of my photography.  I've been posting a couple shots I've taken in the last ...18 years on MV to the group.  My other main skill is putting words together about why exactly I really do or do not like something, and I've been using the positive side of that trait to explain my history on MV and the subjects I've photographed.  So far I've gotten a consistently positive response.

There are a lot of photos posted to the MV FB group, and the vast majority of them are current tech smart phone overly HDR snapshots that drive me nuts.  It's not that I'm such a snob that I can't appreciate snapshots taken by Joe and Jane Average, on the contrary, I love work like that.  Photography by the people is often the most interesting.  What drives me batty is the pseudo HDR math "everything is the same brightness level" look that smartphone camera software produces.  It's designed to appeal immediately to the untrained eye.  It makes me want to scream.

Once a while, a real artist shows up.  As I said, there are a lot of really skilled photographers on this island and many of them make use of very specialized camera equipment, often to spectacular effect.  In the summer of 2001 a fella with an LF camera did an interior shot of one of the Victorian cottages here on MV:

"Gingerbread House, Methodist Campground, Oak Bluffs, MA, July 19, 2001.  8x10 camera, 165mm @ F/22, 4 seconds, Tri-X film, minus development."  As I said, LF cameras excel at things where other cameras falter.  Correcting for perspective in architectural photographer is no mean feat (I know, I've tried and more or less universally failed.)  When I saw the above image posted to the MV FB group, I excitedly commented how impressed I was and that a 165mm lens is "quite wide angle" for an 8x10" camera, roughly equivalent to a 22mm lens on a 35mm camera.  A day or so later, I got a notification of reply to my comment on FB.  I won't quote it here, but it had been dipped in bromine and condescension.  The photographer corrected me that the FoV was closer to 28mm because of the "crop factor" of 8x10.  

Motherfucker.  That's not crop factor.  That's ASPECT RATIO.  If you're going to be so thoroughly pendantic, you've now taken on the task of being correct about the minutiae at hand.  I suppose one could make a case that camera lenses produce image circles and the film plane is "cropping" a square or rectangle out of them, but that's not how the terminology works in common usage.  

Unfortunately, sometimes LF photographers are the biggest dicks in the room in the ...TubeRoller sense.  (How's that for an OG HeadFi reference?)

Also, I should learn to take things less personally.

[n_maher]

On 3/21/2023 at 2:36 PM, mikeymad said:

sad, that was my go-to site.

Same.

[blessingx]

On 3/23/2023 at 6:18 PM, Knuckledragger said:

What drives me batty is the pseudo HDR math "everything is the same brightness level" look that smartphone camera software produces.  It's designed to appeal immediately to the untrained eye.  It makes me want to scream.

Unfortunately, it's training those eyes for that look. Next stop AI. 

 

 

[mikeymad]

"Where are the clouds?"

[Torpedo]

These are the loudness wars of photography: "kill the contrast".

[jpelg]

Pentax: "I haven't been around this many people in a long time."  (both funny & sad/true)😂

[blessingx]

A few phone snaps from a photo fair today. Showing a rare example of will power I came home with -1 cameras. These are held three times a year in Newark, CA, but also show up once in year in Portland (coming September), if anyone up there is interested. The 2.7MP Nikon D1, originally $10K in today’s dollars, that I picked up for $40 here last show, were going for $75 today. #digicamtrend  

[blessingx]

[dsavitsk]

On 3/25/2023 at 7:32 PM, blessingx said:

 

Contax 645 was the camera I dreamed about. But the pair of Mamiya Super 23s next to it are super underappreciated gems. It's a whole 120/220 rangefinder system with multiple backs (6x45, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, polaroid),  and sharp lenses, but more importantly it has bellows and a ground glass back so tilts and shifts and swings and macro work are all possible.

[blessingx]

Nice camera and thanks for the link. 

 

DPReview is being archived

https://old.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/11ya4fa/dpreview_is_being_archived_by_the_archive_team/ 

[Knuckledragger]

Every thing I said about ULF cameras in that rant earlier, summed up in one image.  Palpably ancient.  Cartoonishly oversized.  In skilled hands, superior to more or less everything to this day.  I both hope to get there some day and pray that I never do.

[mikeymad]

I thought it was hilarious that you could just stuff a whole human in there.