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Famliy snaps with M9 and Biogon 2/35
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 12:13 am    Post subject: Famliy snaps with M9 and Biogon 2/35 Reply with quote
Yesterday I went to the house of my sister-in-law's daughter. I took with me my M9 with the Biogon 2/35.
Knowing that the place was very small and crowded with children and animals, I put a UV filter on the lens as a safety measure.
I did forget the lens hood at home.
It was an interesting experience and I learned a few things:

- focusing with a rangefinder in a strong backlight situation can be very, very hard;

- parallax error when focusing very close is so strong that you can not trust your viewfinder anymore:
I got lots of photos where I did frame the extremities in, but they were cut out;

- using a UV filter in a strong backlight situation without a lens hood creates such internal reflection that can defeat even a T* coating.
No more UV use for me except in extreme situations where unavoidable.

Here's a small selection from the day, displaying my acquired great-grandchild Michelangelo and my sister-in-law's dog Morgana:

1.


(this is a 100% crop from the previous. Some moiré was generated on the fur)


2.


3.


4.


5.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 9:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Nice shots, Orio, and I do envy you with your M9 (just a little). Well, quite a lot, actually Very Happy

I don't think parallax is your problem in losing parts of the image at close range, it's more likely to be Leica Camera's somwhat odd ideas about frame-line coverage. On the M8.2 and M9 you get less than you see at close range, more than you see at long range, and something like what's in the frame-lines at (I think) around 5 metres. I have an original M8 where the frame-lines are pretty much correct at around 1 metre and then increasingly inaccurate as the subject distance increases. At infinity the difference is quite considerable.

I don't recall ever having had major framing problems with M2, although I suppose the coverage must vary as distance changes, whatever the distance chosen for greatest accuracy.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 1:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
i really ilke this kind of informal shooting, and these are very sharp.

i recall when you first received the m9 you posted that the unaltered images carried a green cast. may i ask if this is still true and you pp out the cast or if there was some in camera adjustment you made to eliminate it?


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 2:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
great funny portrait, this biogon is so damn good !


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 4:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
rbelyell wrote:

i recall when you first received the m9 you posted that the unaltered images carried a green cast. may i ask if this is still true and you pp out the cast or if there was some in camera adjustment you made to eliminate it?


Yes, I had that problem. The situation improved after I bought the Biogon (I first only had the Jupiter-8 which gave the images a yellowish tint). But I finally solved the problem when I bought the Color Checker Passport tool. I created my custom colour profiles with it, and now my M9 photos are fully consistent colour-wise with the photos I take with the 5DMkII, as you can see in my last Carnival series.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 5:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
thats good to hear and im sure a reief to you as well. is the color checker a leica specific tool?


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 5:32 pm    Post subject: Re: Famliy snaps with M9 and Biogon 2/35 Reply with quote
brilliant shots, Orio!

did you try using a viewfinder magnifier to help focus better in strong backlight situations? maybe a polfilter could have also helped in this case?


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 5:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
rbelyell wrote:
thats good to hear and im sure a reief to you as well.


Yes, well, not that there was anything that I couldn't fix with fine tuning the white balance, but have the tuning embedded in a colour profile is much more convenient. Besides, I can make different profiles for different situations (afternoon, morning, evening, cloudy, studio, etc)

rbelyell wrote:
is the color checker a leica specific tool?


No, it's a colour checker board that comes with an application that automatically creates colour profiles to be used inside Adobe applications (Lightroom, Camera Raw, Photoshop). You can of course manually create profiles for other applications if you are able to do it. With Lightroom it's very simple, you take a photo of the checker board at the beginning of a session, then once in lightroom, you select that photo and start the application plugin, which automatically creates a profile based on the photographed board, and places it in the folder of the profiles. You then leave and restart Lightroom, and find the new profile as a choice, together with the already existing profiles.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 5:39 pm    Post subject: Re: Famliy snaps with M9 and Biogon 2/35 Reply with quote
Hari wrote:

did you try using a viewfinder magnifier to help focus better in strong backlight situations? maybe a polfilter could have also helped in this case?


The problem is that strong backlight in the rangefinder window means that the ghost image is very faint. With still subject one could make it work, but with ever moving subjects, in the time you use to localize the ghost image, you have to refocus...
Polarizer? That would be awkward to hold one in front of the rangefinder window - provided that it would serve at all (which I have no idea of).


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:03 pm    Post subject: Re: Famliy snaps with M9 and Biogon 2/35 Reply with quote
Orio wrote:
Hari wrote:

did you try using a viewfinder magnifier to help focus better in strong backlight situations? maybe a polfilter could have also helped in this case?


The problem is that strong backlight in the rangefinder window means that the ghost image is very faint. With still subject one could make it work, but with ever moving subjects, in the time you use to localize the ghost image, you have to refocus...
Polarizer? That would be awkward to hold one in front of the rangefinder window - provided that it would serve at all (which I have no idea of).


Yeah ... sometimes it is a pita to see the rf window ... also when shooting horizontally - maybe i have this problem even stronger because i wear glasses

wrt the polfilter - i meant the usual screw-on polfilter in front of the lens to reduce the impact of the strong backlight ... i love shooting against the light and a polfilter helps

Btw, do you also use CaptureOne to process your M9 files?


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
thank you for explaining--i use lightroom and think i should try it.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:38 pm    Post subject: Re: Famliy snaps with M9 and Biogon 2/35 Reply with quote
Hari wrote:

wrt the polfilter - i meant the usual screw-on polfilter in front of the lens to reduce the impact of the strong backlight ... i love shooting against the light and a polfilter helps


But difficult to set with a RF camera... polarizers are really for SLR

Hari wrote:
Btw, do you also use CaptureOne to process your M9 files?


Occasionally. I have the licence because I bought it long ago and I always upgraded it out of curiosity. But I would never buy it new, except for a couple of features (focus area check, Moire filter), Lightroom is superior.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
rbelyell wrote:
thank you for explaining--i use lightroom and think i should try it.


It's very useful especially in those mixed lights situation (studio with different light sources), or, like in the case of M9, when the embedded camera profile is not optimal.
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