Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/19

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Subject: [Leica] My kind of digital M camera
From: Jeff S <four_season_photo@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 21:26:58 -0700 (PDT)

http://www.boulder.net/~4season/images/se30.jpg
http://www.boulder.net/~4season/images/leica_m3.gif

Background info: I was feeling kind of yucky for the
past few weeks (West Nile Fever perhaps?) and wasn't
up to my usual hikes and photo outings. But I was
mostly too restless just to lie around. Fortunately, I
had something to tinker with: Someone on the next
block had a bunch of Macintosh computers out by the
dumpster, free for the taking. The Mac SE/30 depicted
had been rained on at least once, was filthy, and had
video problems. I have since done a thorough cleaning,
some resoldering, installed a new CRT and realigned
the video, and located a mouse of the correct era. It
now works perfectly. Yes, the fat black borders are
correct-that's the only way to get the aspect ratio
exactly right. Slight tilt and off-centeredness were
typical-can be tweaked, but I'm not sure I'll bother.
Back in 1988, you'd have had to trade a lot of Leica
gear for one: List price for the basic SE/30 was over
$4K, and this one is "loaded" with 8 megabytes of RAM
and a Micron Xceed video card. The lighting of the Mac
photo is crap, but it's an idea in progress, so bear
with me. Anyone got Leather Goddess of Phobos for the
Mac?

Photographed with a 4x5 camera. It's a double
exposure: First exposure was with the video off, and
with the Mac's cabinet exposed around Zone 5.5 or so.
Second was with the video cranked up, and the white
areas of the screen exposed around Zone VII. Exposure
was deliberately longish to eliminate artifacts of the
video sweep.

The 1-bit photo of the M3 was actually done by placing
camera onto a flatbed scanner. Scanned in with Xsane
software as 1-bit, with all brightness/contrast being
adjusted prior to the scan. Needed reflectors on the
left and righthand sides to pick up some of the
details on the curved ends of the body. For some
reason, I like this 1-bit image a lot, and may
experiment with higher-res versions suitable for
printing. I'm thinking of somehow taking it to sheet
film or transparency and maybe eventually trying a
platinum print of it, for the sheer irony.

Sobering thought: When the Mac SE/30 was new, the
Leica M6 had already been on the market for a number
of years, and so had William Gibson's novel
Neuromancer. 

Jeff

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