[Leica] IMG: New Studio BW portrait

[Geoff Hopkinson]

Hi Frank. yes, no, kind of!
Haah, no the camera has a single central AF point only and the way I
operate it focus wise for fashion indoors and out is to set the camera to
manual focus mode and the rear operating button to AF only, put the cross
hairs on the near eye and press that AF button and then reframe. Due to the
lens actually being on manual focus that setting then will not change until
I next press that button. So I might actually only repeat that process
every tenth frame or so for insurance where the subject distance is not
changing, if you can follow that. In studio the aperture is pretty much
standard here on f/9.5.
With more closely framed head shots and the 120mm lens  that still means a
small zone of DoF. with the iris of the near eye sharp the end of the nose
and often even the eyebrows are falling out of that. Bigger formats are
quite a different world.  The new medium format CMOS sensors are changing
the game again there with good high ISO performance when needed. Wide open
(f/2.5) in close like that the DoF might be no more than a couple of mms,
probably about like shooting with a Nocti if you like.
The S viewfinder is big and bright and the standard screen does work well
for manual focus actually. They have an alternate screen like the old
school film manual SLRs (I was brought up on) have. That is to say a
'ground glass' with centre split image and a micro-prism collar on that. I
have one on order but you can nearly buy a camera body like on of the
Fujiilm X Pros for the price!  Still no-one ever accused Leica Camera of
bargain prices and I have shot more than 5,500 frames with this S2 so far
and I'm getting to know it well. The files are truly a revelation and that
is coming from my M (Typ 240) with the best of their lenses too.


Cheers
Geoff
http://www.pbase.com/hoppyman

On 24 September 2014 11:57, Frank Filippone <red735i at verizon.net> wrote:

> Geoff.. Are you manually focusing during these sessions?  Or AF all the
> time?
>
> Frank Filippone
> Red735i at verizon.net
>
>
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