Having picked this up through an offer that I could not resist, I realized why Leicas are some of the best cameras made, precision engineered rangefinder with bright frame lines that have been standard up to the new digital M series as well as a weight that suggests ruggedness (something lacking in the Russian counterparts of which most of the internals are cheap metal or plastic which becomes rigid and brittle over age) I quickly ran through a roll of Kodak BW400CN to check that the shutter speeds and operation was functioning correctly. Indeed it was! I was most pleased by the smooth and relatively quiet shutter which allowed me to handhold at slower shutter speeds, especially without recoil from any mirror as with traditional SLR’s.
 

Below are photos from the first two days of ownership! Just a straight scan with minor curve correction and dust removal in PhotoShop.

As a small(ish) but definitely compact camera, I think this will be one that I will carry around with me on most days alongside the X100. Will be interesting as I’m starting a 365 project as of the New Year (TOMORROW!)

Here ends the last post for 2011! Thanks for reading and see you all tomorrow after the apocalypse!

FujiFilm X100

Most readers and those who know me in real life will know that I regard my X100 as my favorite camera, however for this shoot I only managed to get two images, partly due to wanting to finish two rolls of film and using the Ricoh in place as a high end compact camera.

Ricoh GXR M Mount Module + Zeiss 18mm f/4 ZM

Nikon FM2 + Voigtlander Nokton 58mm f/1.4 + Kodak 400 Tri-X

Kiev 88 + 80mm f/2.8 + FujiFilm Provia 400X

A famous line by Marshall McLuhan is “The medium is the message”, and for quite some time I had pondered on when it was appropriate to shoot film and/ or digital. There are obvious pro’s and con’s to both, which I won’t dive into here (I may be inclined to ramble on in an essay later on), but I found myself using both film and digital equally when the opportunity arose to work with the talented Harl Ow MM#1082043.
 
We went for a post apocalyptic feel on the iconic Cockatoo Island, just a short ferry ride from Sydney Harbour. Without further ado here are the images!
 
Nikon D7000 + Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX

Ricoh GXR M Mount Module + Zeiss 18mm f/4 ZM (My Review Here)

Nikon FM2 + Voigtlander Nokton 58mm f/1.4 + Kodak 400 Tri-X

Holga 120N + Fuji Provia 400X

What do you think of the images? The two sets of film above are straight scans with just light curve correction and dust removal to preserve their original qualities. In my opinion, does it really matter if Tri-X from the FM2 is a bit grainy, or the Provia lacks dynamic range and is blurred by the simple meniscus lens on the Holga? There’s a certain charm thats rendered through shooting with cameras other than digital and being reliant on Photoshopping to produce the same effect. This was the first time I loaded up colour (in particular transparencies) into the Holga and could not be more pleased with the colour rendition, expect to see more and hopefully another shoot with Harl Ow in the future!

The two primary things which made the Ricoh an intuitive camera to adapt to was the simple control, reminiscent of a film camera (you can also operate in aperture priority mode) through changing the aperture on the lens itself and a multi-purpose dial to change shutter speeds, the other being that of the focusing assist, which uses focus peaking similar to that of a high pass filter in Photoshop highlighting sharp edges which greatly assists with manual focus lenses. This experience is a pleasant one, akin to that of the Sony NEX system and is one of the Olympus’ shortcomings in which the EP series only magnifies the center spot. The Ricoh also offers magnification but I did not find a necessity for it.

Now to where it matters! Image quality!

Colour

Colours on this unit were more than acceptable. Never before had I used a camera with such good tonal rendition. I found myself using the “natural” setting more often than standard, however in all of the different colour modes you can actually adjust the saturation, contrast and even sharpness. The B/W setting also had a sepia mode whereby you can select the tint colour. I found the B/W with contrast adjusted to 9 giving the most pleasant effect where both blacks and whites are rendered prominently.

Lens and Sharpness

The two lenses which I had used over the course of this trial were both Carl Zeiss; the Distagon T* 18mm f/4 ZM and the Carl Zeiss Biogon T* 28mm f/2.8 ZM. The M-mount lenses with an APS-C sensor certainly gives me an angle of view that I’m comfortable with, in a relatively compact package. I much preferred to carry this unit around rather than my Nikon D7000. The lack of AA filter on this module is a joy, giving the optimum performance of the lenses. AA (Anti-Aliasing) Filters are featured on many digital cameras in the market in an effort to reduce moire, however at the cost of resolution. I found that without the AA Filter, the images were rendered differently to that of other digital cameras I own (with the exception of the Fuji X100, whereby the lens is optimized for the sensor), there was a level of unprecedented sharpness especially when photographing cats… seriously, who doesn’t like cats? (Also below is one pretty cool cat.)

The last thing I feel important to address in this review is the EVF itself. The high resolution screen certainly made it a pleasant experience, however two things that warranted my concern were: lack of locking mechanism when mounted onto the hotshoe; I was worried that the viewfinder would come loose and detach itself, secondly being having taken the place of the hotshoe, I had no EVF and had to rely on the viewfinder for composition whilst using a transmitter for strobes, but a screen is a screen and composition didn’t suffer.

All in all, great compact system, end of rambling.

1. Lensbaby Composer Sweet 35
2. Ricoh GXR with A12 M-Mount Module
3. Stealth Holga from HolgaMods

Lets start with the Lensbaby! This one had the least use for this shoot, as to get a large enough sweet spot I had to stop it down to f/8 to f/11, which, given the late afternoon/ dusk lighting conditions rendered me unable to see through the viewfinder on my Nikon D7000 at all. However the shots that were produced are indeed something unique and the optics are superior to that of the original double glass insert.

Next up is the new Ricoh GXR M-Mount Module, on which I used a Carl Zeiss 28mm f/2.8. Two things I had encountered using this was: It was either a transmitter for the strobes or using electronic viewfinder on the hotshoe and encountering the same issue as the lensbaby with the manual aperture stopping down and hence decreasing the brightness of the visible image, in this case the electronic LCD couldn’t shift the brightness of the preview enough so I had to guess the focus using the distance scale on the lens itself and composition which proved to be relatively easy. Here are the results out of the Ricoh which were processed through Photoshop:

The final camera used for this shoot is a Stealth Holga from HolgaMods. I had always wanted to try my hand at lomography but was aware of the different quirks, idiosyncrasies and faults of the cameras, that is until I found HolgaMods where Holgas are fixed up to actually work (with both apertures!) and even calibrated with a close focusing mod. These are straight scans of the negatives (Kodak 400 TX), from this experience I learnt that I still have a way to go in terms of guessing distances and that the viewfinder in the Holga suffers from minor parallax error and is slightly narrower than whats captured by the lens.

Below are some shots from the Kiev, which was loaded with Kodak 400 TX and Fuji Astia 100F, unfortunately by late afternoon, the 100F proved to be too slow and most of the shots were blurred.

As usual, there was a digital camera to accompany me, in the event of a worst case scenario related to using film and here are the shots from my Fuji X100!