Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]From: Bill Erfurth <m6rf@yahoo.com> wrote: >Just for the hell of it, let's spend one week...talking about Nuts & Bolts stuff. Things like, taking photos, using a 90mm lens to shoot something rather than a 50mm lens...Places you have been that are good photo-ops, taking holiday photos... You mean do without our daily AA fix? This might get a bit boring... However, here's my contribution: Last month I took a vacation in Italy, with my time divided between Venice and Florence. Since we sometimes see questions on the topic of "I’m going on holiday to Europe - what lenses should I take?", here’s some quick notes on what I found useful. Since my rangefinder cameras are a mixture of screw and bayonet, my lenses are intended wherever possible to support both types of camera. For most of the time, I used an M6 fitted with either the 35mm f2.8 screw-mount Summaron or the 28mm f2.8 Elmarit. In churches and museums, the f1 50mm Noctilux became the de facto standard lens, with typical exposures of 1/30 at f1 with Kodachrome 200. More often than I liked, I had to hand-hold 1/15. Where paintings, frescos or tapestries were well lit, an 85mm f2 Jupiter-9 allowed me to pick out smaller areas, or to stand further back to reduce the amount of upward tilting required. When taking photos in churches and museums, I had a lot of trouble from flare in the rangefinder patch of the M6. When photographing in churches and museums without a tripod, there is often very little choice of camera position if one is to fill the frame and avoid background clutter, lights and unwanted reflections. Several times I had to abandon attempts to take a photo because the rangefinder patch was unusable. (It's one thing to lose the picture because the light was too dim, or the subject was too wide for the lens to capture, but to lose the picture because the rangefinder doesn't work is no joke. It's a bit like buying a Rolls-Royce or BMW car then finding that it won't run on cobbled road surfaces!) For most of the time, my IIIg was fitted with the 20mm f5.6 Russar. In narrow streets, inside churches, and in courtyards and cloisters this lens proved ideal. About 10 per cent of my pics were taken using the Russar. Its slowness was a problem indoors, however, requiring with exposure times as long as 4sec at f5.6, with doors, doorframes, church pews and other objects being used as improvised camera supports. By half-way through the holiday, I’d taken only a handful of photos using the 13.5cm f4.5 Hektor, so for the rest of the time this lens remained back at the hotel. I can think of only one occasion in the remainder of the holiday when I wished I’d had it with me. Just before heading off on holiday, I’d found a 50mm f1.5 Jupiter-3 at a real ‘bargain-basement’ price, so this was given a try-out. The Jupiter is a copy of the pre-war Carl Zeiss Sonnar, and even at full aperture produced images of good contrast and adequate sharpness. While the Noctilux weighs a massive 580 grammes, the Jupiter is only one stop slower but weights a mere 250 grammes. If I were to repeat the trip, I might be tempted to load the IIIg with 400 ISA slide film and fit it with the Jupiter-3. This would have been a lightweight alternative to the Noctilux, and certainly a cheaper one - the Jupiter was less than 1/35 the cost of the Leitz behemoth! However, earlier Noctilux photos taken of tapestries in Brugge show a definition at f1 which a 60 year old lens design will be hard pressed to match at f1.5. I saw only two other Leica users during the trip - one with a black M6 in Venice and another with a chrome M2 in Florence. Regards, Doug Richardson