Despite all the ranting about a flawed lens and a (potentially) misaligned rangefinder, my new toys do deliver great shots. It just takes some adjusting. Nonetheless, I do hope I can get either camera or lens adjusted so that at least at one given aperture setting I get in focus what I’m focusing on …

"Juxtaposed" | Leica M8 + Nokton 35/1.4 @ f/8, 1/350 sec, ISO 160

This was of course processed in Lightroom, but the M8’s out-of-camera JPEGs aren’t actually that bad if the white balance is correct. When first processing the DNGs, I had a hard time getting the same look in the processed pictures that I saw in the ooc pictures. Again, it takes some adjusting …

In other news: I’m not reporting on the new Sony NEX cameras, as everyone on the web seems to be doing so. Go somewhere else to find your information!

I don’t seem to be getting anything in focus with the M8 + Nokton. I’ve been doing tests over and over and over, and results seem to be highly contradicting. What I can say for sure is that from f/2.5 onwards there’s a back-focusing issue, meaning the lens draws sharp what is slightly behind of what I was focusing on. Below f/2, it first seemed the lens was front-focusing, i. e. drawing sharp what was before what I was focusing on, but in another test I couldn’t make out anything as sharp since before f/2 the lens just isn’t sharp enough to determine what’s in focus anyway.

I’ve got a feeling that both rangefinder and lens aren’t correctly aligned, but the rangefinder problem seems to be the only one that can be solved (as reportedly most Nokton 1.4’s have focusing issues).