Looking for a Night Street Shooter - Part 5 - Summicron 50 Test Run

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One of the first things I did after purchasing the Sony NEX was throw on my Leica 50mm Summicron and go for a stroll. I set the camera to black and white, increased the sharpening and contrast just a touch, and took off to Sunnybrook Park.  There’s a post and rail building there that is always fascinating to shoot as it has lovely details, especially in black and white.

I popped off about 50 shots, and when I got back and uploaded it on the computer, the results were astounding – believe me, all the good things people say about Leica lenses is absolutely true!  The tonality was excellent, the out of focus areas (bokeh) were smooth and buttery, and the sharpness out of this world.  Quite the combination!

Looking for a Night Street Shooter - Part 4 - The Camera and Lens hit the street!

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After some initial test shots in the house, the first test for the NEX and Voigtlander 35mm was a 20 min walk in the College and University area in downtown Toronto as we walked to an appointment.  With the colour settings on ‘Vivid’ and the black and white settings on slightly higher contrast and sharpening, the softer Single Coating of the lens is reversed.  Initial impressions – nice shallow depth of field, very discreet and lovely overall results – a winner!

Some things I don’t like so much about the NEX are the fiddly menus system, lack of a hot shoe and no availability of an electronic viewfinder.  The fiddly menu system means it is a pain in the butt to quickly change from black and white to colour, and the hot shoe would be good to add a 50mm viewfinder like the Leica SBOOI.  The electronic viewfinder, like on the Panasonic, would be great too, but the zoom in style manual focus assist on the screen is well thought out on the NEX.

Even if there are some limitations, I still really like the results and I am looking forward to trying out my other Leica lenses on it.

In these two shots of a gothic building on College Street (one as a reflection), the tones of the photo suggest an imposing or even haunted feel.

In this photo the colour was set to 'vivid' on the camera, but interestingly it makes the bright colours really pop (flower), but the duller colours even more muted (ground and branches).

All photos straight out the camera - no modifications on Photoshop

Looking for a Night Street Shooter - Part 3 - The Lens

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So I needed a wide angle Leica M mount lens, that’s  very compact, and preferably with a fast aperture for shallow depth of field.....which normally means MEGA bucks.  A new Leica 35mm Summilux is $6,500!!!  And even a ratty 40 year old used one is approaching $2K!!

After looking over cameraquest.com – a website specialising in Voigtlander cameras and lenses – I discovered a solution may be at hand.  

Voigtlander is the name of an old German camera company, that was at it’s zenith pre-WWII and enjoyed a revival in the 1950’s.  About 12 years ago the rights to the name were acquired by Cosina in Japan, who then started making Leica mount cameras and lenses.

Four lenses seemed a possibility – the Voigtlander 35mm f2.5 Snapshot Skopar had excellent reviews, was very compact , but not really that fast.  The 28mm f2 Ultron was a bit too big to be pocketable, and the 40mm f1.4 Nokton a little bit too telephoto for APS-C sensor.

However the new 35mm f1.4 Nokton Classic looked just right – very compact, fast aperture, Leica M mount....and not ridiculously expensive.  Interestingly, it comes in two forms – Multi coated for higher contrast and punchy colours (like almost all other new lenses) and the special Single Coated model that had lower contrast, but gave more shadow detail.  Nice for Black and White.

Most blogs rate this lens well.  It has a little bit of barrel distortion with some light fall off at f1.4, good sharpness, and is overall similar to the previous generation Leica 35mm Summilux (non-ASPH); though not quite as good as the latest ASPH model.  The corner light fall off isn’t so much an issue on a NEX due to the APS-C crop sensor, but would need to be remembered when shooting film.

There weren’t any used ones to be found on eBay or locally, but just as I was about to buy a new one from Camera Quest, a used one popped up on Kijiji, with a $250 saving vs new – PERFECT!!  So I contacted the seller faster than a cat with its tail on fire, and it turned out that the lens was basically brand new, so we did the deal.  He had bought it and then decided he wanted a Leica Summicron for his M9.  This guy was loaded – he had just bought an M9 and a 50mm Summilux as he was “just getting into photography”.   A $12K spend alone!  Plus a $3,500 35mm Summicron.

This 35mm f1.4 Nokton I purchased turned out to be a Single Coat example.  Buying new, I would have chosen the Multi Coat as it suits my photographic style better, but as one forum suggested, its easier to increase contrast and saturation on a more neutral picture on Photoshop, than go the other way around.  So really, not a loss.

Right camera, right lens, READY TO SHOOT!!

TO BE CONTINUED......

Photos continued from Nuit Blanche Art Festival, October 2010

Sony NEX3 with Voigtlander 35mm f1.4 Nokton lens

Looking for a Night Street Shooter - Part 2 - The Camera

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Then the Sony NEX came out.  Initially I thought it was kind of pointless because the 18-55mm kit lens looked ridiculously large with the very small body, and more importantly, made it totally unpocketable.  I did however like the large APS-C sensor, similar to what is in the Sigma DP-1, and that it had interchangeable lenses.

But then I got thinking – a NEX with the tiny Sony 16mm wide lens is very small – perfectly pocketable, but 16mm is just a bit too wide angle to be a general use lens;  and it didn’t really get good reviews either.  PhotoZone described corner sharpness as “at f/2.8 there is no resolution to speak of”.  Not a glowing endorsement, but still might be a usable occasional lens given the tiny size and weight.

Then I got to thinking - an adapter and one of my early collapsible Leica lens would work great!  The film / sensor plane to lens flange distance is much smaller on rangefinders (unlike SLRs than need space for the mirror box), which would keep the total size of the lens on the NEX small.

After checking a new one out a Henry’s,  I started looking around for a used one and I eventually found a nice NEX3 kit for sale with a 16mm lens (way more useful than the kit lens, even with the very average corner performance) AND a Leica M adapter.  PERFECT!   I already had an adapter for early screw mount Leica lenses to later Leica M mount, so all my Leica gear is usable!  

The only problem is that I had no Leica mount lenses wider than 50mm that fit.  A Full frame 50mm becomes 75mm on an APS-C sized camera – too tele for street shots.   35mm equates to 50mm on Full Frame – the “standard” lens as it is close to human sight focal length and perspective.   The 35mm Russian Jupiter 12 that I have (a copy of the early Carl Zeiss Biogon – which Russia literally stole the design from Contax, post Nazi Germany; but that’s another story....) would not fit as the rear element is hugely bulbous and would damage if I tried to mount it on the NEX. 

Right camera, need a lens.

TO BE CONTINUED......

Photos continued from Nuit Blanche Art Festival, October 2010

Looking for a Night Street Shooter - Part 1 - The Need

I really like street photography.   It captures the mood of a place, and what people are doing in their day to day lives.  My wife and I often walk streets together – her looking at interesting shops, me taking photos.

For quite some time I’ve been on the look out for a small pocketable digital camera that was versatile and delivered great image quality.  Such a camera is perfect for street photography, easy to whip out when you need to, and very discreet.

Several cameras have come out that have satisfied some of my criteria, but I dismissed all of them:

Point n’ shoot digitals – very poor high ISO performance, controls too basic, limited depth of field adjustment, shutter lag; but they are small and very pocketable

Sigma DP1 – Too expensive, non-interchangeable lens; but the large APS-C size sensor was interesting.  The same type as most D-SLRs, with good low light / high ISO performance.

Leica X1 – A slightly nicer Sigma DP-1 that is stupidly expensive.

Olympus EP-1 / Panasonic GF-1 – I loved the idea of interchangeable lenses on a compact camera, and being able to use adapter to fit many other brands of lenses, specifically for me, Leica and Nikon.  I also liked the available wide angles – 17mm Olympus, and fast 20mm Panasonic f1.7.  Both very compact, but they have huge distortion when not self-corrected by camera software – not a good sign for a lens purist like me.  The four-thirds sensor is also too small, creating too much high ISO noise.  No good for night street photography where low light / high ISO performance is critical.  It also doubles the focal length of all my Full Frame lenses – again no good for street photography where a wide lens is much better suited.  I also like shallow depth of field effect, and even the four thirds sensor adds 2-3 stops of depth of field compared to a full frame sensor.

Nothing really seemed to work, so lugging a D-SLR around was going to continue.

TO BE CONTINUED......

The photos in this post and the rest of the upcoming posts in this little series are taken at the 2010 Toronto Nuit Blanche (Night time Arts Festival) with my Nikon D700 and a Nikon 50mm f1.2 – an awesome low light combination; and my benchmark for night time street photography. However the size makes it unsubtle, and a little worrysome when you remember the value of the camera that’s very visible in a slightly sketchy area; which is in a large part why this adventure for a smaller camera is taking place.

Polarised Flatiron

It’s a good thing for EXIF data on image files as I had no idea how I took this image.  It says Nikon D700 shot at 24mm; so I was probably using my Tamron 24-135mm f3.5-5.6 zoom lens.   This lens is sharp, has a handy zoom range and doesn’t distort too much – all in all a good lens, if a bit heavy.  It’s quite cheap on the 2^nd hand market too, around  $200-$250, which makes it a great all round lens for full frame.  Certainly a far better alternative than both of Nikon’s 24-120mm lenses.

I also used this shot as a trial image for some experimentation with GIMP – a free online image manipulation tool.  It’s nowhere near as good as Photoshop, but the price is right and it does the job for basic manipulation.  Here, I inverted the image to a negative, then added a polarisation affect and changed the contrast.  I like the end result – it’s a different photographic take on a famous Toronto Landmark.

Peeling paint

This photo I like a lot.  It’s very simple, yet at the same time effective.  It’s just of a window with some peeling paint on the window sill at a small museum in Owen Sound.

I shot it with my Nikon D700 with a Nikon 50mm f1.2 lens at f1.2.  I then added a little sharpening and contrast, cropped it slightly, and done!