[Leica] Looking forward to a week of shooting with the DMR

[mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)]

> 
> Douglas Sharp wrote:
> 
>> Hello Mike,
>> I've now been using Leica lenses on my 20D and a 300D (Digital Rebel)
>> for quite a while with excellent results, same applies for Zeiss
>> Contax/Yashica mount lenses and M42 screw thread lenses of various makes.
>> These were taken with a Macro Elmar 100/4 and a Yashica
>> 55/2,8 macro.
>> http://gallery.leica-users.org/New-Old-Pictures/MG_1487_edited_3
>> and
>> http://gallery.leica-users.org/album150
>> 
>> I use the Novoflex adapter for Leica, Hama for M42 and a C/Y adapter
>> from Foto Huppert in Germany, beautifully machined all of them.
>> cheers
>> Douglas
> 
> 
>  
Love those little buds against the white but what's that fuzz thing you've
got going on there, Mr. Sharp?!?!
Looks like post process third party ultra fuzz software!
The Jimmy Hendrix of digital optics analog verisimilitude!
I bet the original captures don't have quite the Yashica Zeiss made in Japan
Glow! But I guess it could be a T* Softar on the actual lens during the
shooting of the actual picture and I didn't know it. Softars can fool you as
can other diffusion filters.
Sometimes, I've been told those filters are etched with "LASER" beams.

I usually hate flower pix. The flowers tend to be better than the pix on the
long and short of it.
I'd almost rather pick them and put them between two semiunabridged
dictionaries and some wax paper and wait a year. Then hang them in one of
those fat frames on my wall.
It's hard to make "ART" when what you're shooting "ART" in the first place.
Two "Art's" equal a "non Art" perhaps in many a case.

But with the simplification of bringing them inside against "the white" as I
think of it I can definitely dig it. Black's good too as far as I go.
Mapplethorpe. 
But white as Avedon says "EMPTIES" *

Thing is though these studio tabletop buds illustrate a prime example of
stuff you CAN shoot without an automatic aperture.
To be clear here by "automatic aperture" I'm not referring to auto exposure
aperture priority whatever. Which is what I thought people on the lug were
talking about in reference to this before.
But an aperture which stops down to the f stop you've set as you click the
shot. Not having to shoot at that f stop or set it down there last minute
manually.
Not a problem with tripod shooting.

But would be a problem with my shooting people on my white backdrop with my
studio strobes. Which is an f16 and be their hand held kind of deal.

This whole using lenses on Canons and other cameras but loosing your
mechanical automatic aperture linkages has not been clarified on the LUG as
to what you can do and what you can't. You CAN of no problem if you are an F
widest aperture on the lens and be there shooter. Or, Like Ted, still be
able to do it stopped down a few.
But NOT if you're a zone focus DOF kind of guy. The Orson Wells Deep focus
approach.

The film I saw last night with Topher Grace in it was by DOF FILMS. A new
Hollywood production company I guess. Maybe an x Leica shooter!?

Mark Rabiner
Photography
Portland Oregon
http://rabinergroup.com/


*
>From Richard Avedon Portraits 2002:
As one who is addicted to white backgrounds, it seems odd to me that a gray
or tonal background is never described as being empty. But in a sense that?s
correct. A dark background fills. A white background empties. A gray
background does seem to refer to something-a sky, a wall, some atmosphere of
comfort and reassurance-that a white background doesn?t admit. With the
tonal background, the artist is allowed the romance of a face coming out of
the dark. You won?t find any portraits with white backgrounds before
Schiele. Maybe in drawings. Never in paintings, with the possible exception
of the white icons of Novgorod. It?s so hard with a white background not to
let the graphic element take over. It?s so hard to give emotional content to
something so completely and potentially caricatural, dominated by that hard,
unyielding edge. And that, of course, is the challenge and importance of it.
If you can make it work successfully, a white background permits people to
become symbolic of themselves.

Mark says: (stuff Avedon no doubt learned under his early tutelage under
Alexy Brodovitch A tad odd he didn't give him credit on that.)