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When I came back from work, I took Emil out for a walk. The sun was already setting, and with all the clouds in the sky the light was truly magical!  Leica M8 + Biogon 35/2 @ f/8, 1/180 sec, ISO 160 Continue reading A few landscapes and sunset impressions from today Why, of course you can! While it might sound awkward at first – at least to us spoiled youngsters who grew up with all-automatic cameras -, it is indeed possible, and quite easy, too!  The editor of this blog | Leica M8 + Biogon 35/2 @ f/8, 1/60 sec, ISO 2500 What I did was set the lens to its closest focusing distance, the aperture to f/8 for large depth-of-field, hold the camera at arms length away, pointing to the right of my chin, let the auto-exposure do its job and shoot. The result needed only some minor tweaking (mainly conversion to b&w). Of course taking your self-portrait is much more convenient with an automatic camera with face detection – but it’s much more fun with a rangefinder! It seems there’s more exciting stuff coming! According to a thread at rangefinderforum.com, Cosina are going to present us with a new lens, the Voigtländer Heliar Classic 75mm f/1.8! On full-frame, it’s going to be a nice little short tele, ideally suited for head-and-shoulders portraiture, and on the crop-factor M8 it’s a medium tele ideally suited for classical head-only shots. With its f/1.8 initial aperture, it will also be able to deliver some nice subject seperation. According to the op at rangefinderforum, its retail price will be around $ 700 USD. If Cosina did it right, this might be a viable alternative to Leica’s 75mm f/1.4 Summilux-M! You can find Cosina’s official information on this lens translated from Japanese to English here, and a larger picture plus more specs at the Camera Obscura blog. UPDATE: Flickr user T&T and Mr B has a set of test shots with the new Heliar 75/1.8, check them out if you’d like to see how it performs! UPDATE 2: According to photoscala.de, the retail price in Germany will be € 699. New Orleans based photographer Richard Thompson III was among the first to try out the Noktor HyperPrime 50mm f/0.95 Micro Four Thirds lens, and has recently updated his flickr pool with some stunning new captures. The reason for my reporting on this is that when the Noktor was first announced, a lot of people bashed the lens for being a tweaked CCTV lens with mediocre image quality. But as you can see from Richard’s pictures, in the right hands this lens can be made to shine (as is true for virtually any lens). If you like his work, be sure to also check out his website. I’ve come past one of their graffiti’s several times, but recently they seem to have decided to “decorate” some more places with it. In the second picture, they seem to have been disturbed while painting “Locos”, and in the third, they didn’t even get that far.
For a larger version, please visit the gallery. |
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Copyright © 2010 efix:photography - All Rights Reserved |
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August 23rd, 2010, 10:32 pm | 
