Re: [Leica] Re: Just for the hell of it - a trip to Venice & Florence

["roland" <roland@dnai.com>]

I juist acquired a Jupiter 85mm f 2 and in my first tests stopped down for
the outdoors have found it to be very sharp.   
Roland Smith

- ----------
> From: Doug Richardson <doug@meditor.demon.co.uk>
> To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: [Leica] Re: Just for the hell of it - a trip to Venice &
Florence
> Date: Monday, November 22, 1999 11:05 AM
> 
> 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
>