Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/06/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Thought I'd point the LUG towards two photo shoots I have on a fashion sit: www.i-brow.net. Check them out quickly; they are about to come down as the site mounts the next issue. These shoots illustrate why it's kind of hard to judge lens quality on a Web site. If you click on "Tokyo Pop," you'll see my first digital shoot: all street stuff, hand-held, with an Olympus 2020. Not a bad little camera, even though it feels like a toy. And the images port over to the Web nicely. Still, the lens on the Olympus -- a zoom -- is no match for Leica or Rollei glass. (Click on thumbnails to get enlargements.) If you click on "The Relaxation of Elly Chou," you'll see a staged fashion shoot at the Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. These were mostly shot with Rolleiflexes (2.8E Xenotar and 3.5E Planar) mounted on sturdy tripods. And they mostly look dreadful -- the magazine did a dire job with the scanner. All of the color work was on chromes; the only thing that scanned well is the black and white photo, which was a print. The best chrome -- and the worst scan -- is the image of Elly sitting on the edge of the huge brass tub: on the Web, she looks like an alien. All of this to say: you can't judge stuff by how it looks in a browser. Those Rollei lenses are two of the sharpest ever made. And the Oly prosumer zoom seems to put them to shame. I'm hoping to get some of my recent Leica work up on the Web, so this won't be entirely off-topic. (Dunno where as yet.) cheers, Douglas Cooper (Oh, and if you pick up the latest edition of Interiors magazine, you'll see an architectural shoot of the Sonoma spa, done mostly with the Voigtlander 15mm Heliar and 25mm Skopar mounted on a IIIf and a Canon IVsb.)