Leica Glow ? whats that?

proenca said:
Ok, I'll try to shed some light here.

Leica Glow, or traditionally what people call Leica Glow is some sort of light bleeding that occurs on highlight areas and bleed out : causing a glow.

Certain older lenses have this characteristics and some people like it a lot for black and white photography.

Found a photo on Flickr, from other photographer, which shows this perfectly :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andretakeda/3335606778/

Note the woman's face, seems that the light "bleed" over the flace to the rest, causing what people usualyl call the "leica glow".

On color , usually gets to the form of glowing and chromatic aberrations but blurred, like this one :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aryschien/2897810401/
( look at the ipod )

Lately, people just tend to use the expression Leica Glow to define some lens as in their ability to draw the picture, rendering an almost 3D effect to it or very well defined sharpness...

so take your pick, hope it helped
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What a surprise to see my photo linked here... I was wondering why I had more than 100 views in this image today.

Actually I don't know what glow is. But when I saw this photo I said to myself: "maybe we have something here...".

Regards.

André
 
takeda72 said:
What a surprise to see my photo linked here... I was wondering why I had more than 100 views in this image today.

Actually I don't know what glow is. But when I saw this photo I said to myself: "maybe we have something here...".

Regards.

André
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Sorry if I offended to link to your photo, but to me is a classic example of Leica glow : as a respect, I didnt paste the picture but a link to your set, choosing your photo.

Which by the way is a great shot :)
 
Well Brian definitely gets the award for posting the most images in a thread ... that's impressive! :p
 
I think it depends on whether one wants the highlights to accent the picture in the way the lens seems to make them do. Both these with 33 year old lux 35.

In the first the highlights are one the keyboard - "glow" a bit cheesy but nice

In the second the background and some features are very light and this makes the other features stand out
 

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Keith said:
Well Brian definitely gets the award for posting the most images in a thread ... that's impressive! :p
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Thankyou. I have more. I figure those that just want to lob insults will not have the patience to wait for all of the images to download to their computer. Those who are interested, will.

And WHO thought of using a COMPUTER to design LENSES is at fault for stripping the GLOW out of modern lenses. This unspeakable act occurred in 1953 with the Whirlwind I! It's been a longtime since I read the ACM proceedings in which an IBM 7030 "Stretch" was used to compute a nine-element super-speed lens.

BUT, It's not my fault!

Infrared Digital photography- that's a maybe.
 
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Hi Brian,

awfully long loading time, feels like I'm back in the era of my first modem (which was a 14.4k so I should count myself -a- lucky and -b- young ;)) :p

Anyway, do you happen to have the bibliographic data for that article in the Proceedings of the ACM?
 
I googled it.

I will check at the NRL library, we used to have a historical section that went ALL the way back to the beginning of the computer era. NRL hosted the world's first computer symposium, and some of the proceedings are still there. I used to spend my breaks reading up on first generation computers. I also tracked some of the optical design software used early on. I've grabbed a few manuals as they were surplussed. My best find ever: the original Programmers Manual for the IBM Mark I published in 1946. In 1980, I saw "Captain grace Hopper" giving a talk, and brought the book up for her to autograph. Her remark, "Where the hell did you get that! I wrote that book!"
 
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I'm gonna defend Leica on this one. Yes, there is such a thing as "Leica glow". It was very evident in an old Summar I once owned and have seen it many times in others photos. Be it a "feature", flare, chromatic aberration - whatever, it's a pleasing characteristic in the same way that "note of hazelnut" is a pleasing characteristic of certain good wines, that's really the aftertaste of the old wood from the barrel it was aged in...
 
Sparrow said:
Brian; is Alan Turin known in the in the rest of the world?
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As in Alan Turing? As in a Turing Machine? As in the Play "Breaking the Code", Derek Jacobi cast in the role?

Saw the play at Ford's Theater, studied the man and his machine in college.

I also have an assembly language programming manual for the EDSAC. I'll check the list of programming examples for lens computation.
 
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Dave Wilkinson said:
Surely you have heard of 'the Turing shroud' Stewart?
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Of course. It's a mediaeval fake computer case. They had to fake it because computers hadn't been invented yet.

Seriously, I sometimes wonder about the Turing test: the idea that you could converse with a computer without knowing it's a computer. The internet sometimes seems to me to offer a sort of reverse Turing test: correspondence with an alleged human being who might as well be a computer, because they have all the social graces, wit, education and charm of an early Psion with a broken shift key.

Cheers,

R.
 
I would have had a great time going on a double date with a HAL-9000. HAL has a twin sister machine, SAL, in the book 2010. That computer has one great sense of humor. Do computers dream when they are asleep? I suspect so.

http://www.wonko.info/hal9000/hal.htm

The HAL-9000 assembly language could not be anymore difficult than the FPS-120b. The programmer was responsible for pushing data through the various pipeline stages for the adder, multiplier, and memory fetch units. It was very fast for doing FFT's and image processing. Those were fun days.
 
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Brian Sweeney said:
I would have had a great time going on a double date with a HAL-9000. HAL has a twin sister machine, SAL, in the book 2010. That computer has one great sense of humor. Do computers dream when they are asleep? I suspect so.

The HAL-9000 assembly language could not be anymore difficult than the FPS-120b. The programmer was responsible for pushing data through the various pipeline stages for the adder, multiplier, and memory fetch units. It was very fast for doing FFT's and image processing. Those were fun days.
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Yeah!....I still chuckle every time I think about 'em :D
 
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