Avotius
Some guy
All photos taken with Leica M6 TTL, Leica 35mm f2 Summicron version 3 and Ilford XP2 or Fuji Superia 200, except the first shot under this which was with the Ricoh GRD.
Leica M6 TTL with Leica 35mm f2 Summicron III sans hood.
The 35mm lens has always been a favorite for the rangefinder photographer, a wider angle and easier to use amount of information then the 50mm length. In fact I recall someone once said that 50mm lens was the hardest to learn but if you could then all the others would come a lot easier. Working with the Leica 35 III and the Voigtländer 35mm f2.5 PII taught me that I really am more of a 50 person. For me 35mm is just too wide to get really close in with the details and also not wide enough for my style of street shooting. Seems when I want to go wide a 28 is handier then the 35. I think the 35 is a challenge for me to get compositions that flow in the right directions, more elements in the frame but sometimes without the necessary coverage for my style of shooting makes 35 a kind of loose cannon. When I use my digitals it seems the 28mm equivalent always takes the majority of my pictures from my Canon 20D with 17-40 or my GRD.
People standing around a shop window talking.
When working with the Leica 35 Summicron version 3 I was always feeling that I wanted to be closer and then sometimes that I just was not wide enough. Also the day these photos were taken we were in a huge rush, only an hour and a half was allocated for talking pictures and I ran through this old town, across the river it sat by and up the mountain so I could go photograph this several hundred year old lords manor that was now a place for old people to live out their days. I think this can be seen as many of my compositions are rushed and don’t have much harmony or line play in them.
Sitting around the front door passing the time.
I have had this Leica lens for only a little while and in that short time I have really come to appreciate all the work that went into this lens. The focus is beyond smooth, the best I have ever used, it makes my Zeiss 50 Planar lens feel rough and stiff. The tab is nice to use and well distanced. The focus throw of the lens was a lot more then I was expecting, if you were looking straight on to the camera and lens, close focus would be clockwise at 3 where infinity is at about 8 which is more then it is on the Voigtländer lens. With the Leica lens when moving to close up I have to shift my fingers positioning a bit and sometimes I loose the tab where on the Voigtländer lens that doesn’t happen. Also the aperture rings on the Zeiss lenses are better, the one on this Summicron is a little hard to get your fingers on sometimes and I search around a bit for it on occasion.
Seems like sitting around is most of what Chongqing countryside people do.
This shot I was right on the table and near the limit of close focus and had to use my thumb to focus, weird but worked. The frame lines on the M6 are not as accurate as those on the Bessa R2A in my opinion.
This old guy playing cards to pass the afternoon in the countryside takes a long hard look at me every time I pass by, and I return the favor by takings some snaps.
The character of this lens is a lot different then my other lenses, I would say it renders highlights brighter with that creamy look more then my old screw mount 50 Elmar red scale, also the Zeiss 50 Planar has much stronger contrast then this lens, pushing highlights towards white where the Summicron is preserving these in the gray areas. This looks is both good and bad for some things. For keeping shadows and highlights in areas like this where contrast is very high, the Summicron is a good lens to have.
Light coming in from the street makes a nice atmosphere to enjoy a milk while the cat wanders around your feet. The dim light and the warm Chongqing countryside air drains the drive out of people, and sitting around in the shade playing cards or killing time is part of what gives this area is laid back character.
Most of China’s light however….the sky here is most areas is a perpetual gray, which means a lot of the light here is diffused, so when this light falls on some objects like the wood panels of the houses here a low contrast lens can make things look muddy. I noticed this with my Elmar as well, and in discussions with my teacher about such problems he said the best thing I can do is use a filter which wont cure the problem completely and will introduce a lot of other problems, or just use a different lens.
It seems wherever I got around the town, this old guy is there too.
One thing that does work well though is that in bright situations like this mountain side picture, the lower contrast greatly improves to ability to catch details in the haze of clouds here. No doubt this is where a high contrast lens like the Zeiss or Voigtländer would have blown the sky
Up in the hills where they farmers grow their crops, many paths weave around like these going along the rice paddies. Paper money for the dead burns along the path, a gesture to an ancestor passed on.
I know many people prefer the older Leica lenses for their lower contrast classic look, also the ability to preserve shadow detail. I am kind of on the fence about this, the lower contrast look can be really neat, like how my Yashica GSN renders black and white, but also the look can get a little tedious when you are not going for that effect and only after the fact realize that a high contrast would have been better in the situation where you don’t always want to keep shadow details. Of course I know a lot of things can alter those effects like developing and filters, not to mention Photoshop, but sometimes its nice to work with a well sorted negative first then go from there.
While he sits there watching TV, I wonder where he got the Amway bag.
The Summicron renders images on film that are very easy to scan though, the latitude of the negatives and scanner are less of a problem when trying to scan a film like XP2 where a high contrast lens will be harder to control.
Typical street of an old style countryside town, houses sit across from each other and the paths usually narrow.
Flare is very well sorted with this lens, in the couple hundred frames I have shot, no flare spots has been noticed in area of them and only a very mild veiling glare in situations where most lenses would be lost. Back lighting is also very well controlled as this shows.
I took this picture of the gf Wangyi standing there because many years ago she had taken a similar photo standing in the same place. Note the strong resistance to back light overpowering.
Color on the other hand is hard to say with this lens. I use lenses with both color and black and white so they have to be good at both. I think the Leica lenses are better at black and white, and the Zeiss lenses are better at color. This lens gives a rather flat look to colors, which I have heard been described like an oil painting, yes a neat effect again, but maybe not the best all rounder.
The families house with door panels removed exposing the insides to the sunlight, the family goes about its daily business as If nothing is different. The flat stone sitting outside the door is for baking rice cakes, the shelves are lined with jugs of fermented peppers, red paper giving away its contents. I like the circular flower pattern in the middle of their floor which is made of broken ceramic rice bowls pressed into the concrete floor.
For color photography I no doubt pick up my Zeiss 50 Planar every time and I find its black and white just acceptable, then the Leica is a good black and white lens and maybe not the best color lens, hard choice to make really, but for color photos I really prefer the Zeiss 35 Biogon, which is funny since I ended up with the Summicron, but it is the better all around lens for me even if it is a 35…actually I am giving serious thought to maybe the Zeiss 28 Biogon instead of the Leica 35. An upcoming trip to Hong Kong will let me play around with all the details more.
This old guy was sitting there at the door to the main part of a large manor on top of a hill, when I asked him if I could come in all he did was give me a big smile 🙂
Overall….im a bit torn, the fact that the lens is a Leica doesn’t really interest me much, the fact that my camera says Leica at first was really cool but the effect has worn off and I am notice a lot of things about it that I wish it had and competitors like the Zeiss Ikon do, but then again there is no free lunch here either. Would I do it again? Hard to say. Will I sell the lens later on down the road for one of Zeiss’s offerings? Strong maybe. Its still too early to say, I have only taken a few hundred pictures with it and printed only a handful of photos in the darkroom from it, but that is the nice thing about this lens, because it says Leica, I can always sell it and be good if I so desire. My upcoming trip to Hong Kong I am switching films to a lucky find of TRI-X that I found at the only film shop in town then will reexamine my findings here.
Once again, people just killing time outside.
Leica M6 TTL with Leica 35mm f2 Summicron III sans hood.
The 35mm lens has always been a favorite for the rangefinder photographer, a wider angle and easier to use amount of information then the 50mm length. In fact I recall someone once said that 50mm lens was the hardest to learn but if you could then all the others would come a lot easier. Working with the Leica 35 III and the Voigtländer 35mm f2.5 PII taught me that I really am more of a 50 person. For me 35mm is just too wide to get really close in with the details and also not wide enough for my style of street shooting. Seems when I want to go wide a 28 is handier then the 35. I think the 35 is a challenge for me to get compositions that flow in the right directions, more elements in the frame but sometimes without the necessary coverage for my style of shooting makes 35 a kind of loose cannon. When I use my digitals it seems the 28mm equivalent always takes the majority of my pictures from my Canon 20D with 17-40 or my GRD.
People standing around a shop window talking.
When working with the Leica 35 Summicron version 3 I was always feeling that I wanted to be closer and then sometimes that I just was not wide enough. Also the day these photos were taken we were in a huge rush, only an hour and a half was allocated for talking pictures and I ran through this old town, across the river it sat by and up the mountain so I could go photograph this several hundred year old lords manor that was now a place for old people to live out their days. I think this can be seen as many of my compositions are rushed and don’t have much harmony or line play in them.
Sitting around the front door passing the time.
I have had this Leica lens for only a little while and in that short time I have really come to appreciate all the work that went into this lens. The focus is beyond smooth, the best I have ever used, it makes my Zeiss 50 Planar lens feel rough and stiff. The tab is nice to use and well distanced. The focus throw of the lens was a lot more then I was expecting, if you were looking straight on to the camera and lens, close focus would be clockwise at 3 where infinity is at about 8 which is more then it is on the Voigtländer lens. With the Leica lens when moving to close up I have to shift my fingers positioning a bit and sometimes I loose the tab where on the Voigtländer lens that doesn’t happen. Also the aperture rings on the Zeiss lenses are better, the one on this Summicron is a little hard to get your fingers on sometimes and I search around a bit for it on occasion.
Seems like sitting around is most of what Chongqing countryside people do.
This shot I was right on the table and near the limit of close focus and had to use my thumb to focus, weird but worked. The frame lines on the M6 are not as accurate as those on the Bessa R2A in my opinion.
This old guy playing cards to pass the afternoon in the countryside takes a long hard look at me every time I pass by, and I return the favor by takings some snaps.
The character of this lens is a lot different then my other lenses, I would say it renders highlights brighter with that creamy look more then my old screw mount 50 Elmar red scale, also the Zeiss 50 Planar has much stronger contrast then this lens, pushing highlights towards white where the Summicron is preserving these in the gray areas. This looks is both good and bad for some things. For keeping shadows and highlights in areas like this where contrast is very high, the Summicron is a good lens to have.
Light coming in from the street makes a nice atmosphere to enjoy a milk while the cat wanders around your feet. The dim light and the warm Chongqing countryside air drains the drive out of people, and sitting around in the shade playing cards or killing time is part of what gives this area is laid back character.
Most of China’s light however….the sky here is most areas is a perpetual gray, which means a lot of the light here is diffused, so when this light falls on some objects like the wood panels of the houses here a low contrast lens can make things look muddy. I noticed this with my Elmar as well, and in discussions with my teacher about such problems he said the best thing I can do is use a filter which wont cure the problem completely and will introduce a lot of other problems, or just use a different lens.
It seems wherever I got around the town, this old guy is there too.
One thing that does work well though is that in bright situations like this mountain side picture, the lower contrast greatly improves to ability to catch details in the haze of clouds here. No doubt this is where a high contrast lens like the Zeiss or Voigtländer would have blown the sky
Up in the hills where they farmers grow their crops, many paths weave around like these going along the rice paddies. Paper money for the dead burns along the path, a gesture to an ancestor passed on.
I know many people prefer the older Leica lenses for their lower contrast classic look, also the ability to preserve shadow detail. I am kind of on the fence about this, the lower contrast look can be really neat, like how my Yashica GSN renders black and white, but also the look can get a little tedious when you are not going for that effect and only after the fact realize that a high contrast would have been better in the situation where you don’t always want to keep shadow details. Of course I know a lot of things can alter those effects like developing and filters, not to mention Photoshop, but sometimes its nice to work with a well sorted negative first then go from there.
While he sits there watching TV, I wonder where he got the Amway bag.
The Summicron renders images on film that are very easy to scan though, the latitude of the negatives and scanner are less of a problem when trying to scan a film like XP2 where a high contrast lens will be harder to control.
Typical street of an old style countryside town, houses sit across from each other and the paths usually narrow.
Flare is very well sorted with this lens, in the couple hundred frames I have shot, no flare spots has been noticed in area of them and only a very mild veiling glare in situations where most lenses would be lost. Back lighting is also very well controlled as this shows.
I took this picture of the gf Wangyi standing there because many years ago she had taken a similar photo standing in the same place. Note the strong resistance to back light overpowering.
Color on the other hand is hard to say with this lens. I use lenses with both color and black and white so they have to be good at both. I think the Leica lenses are better at black and white, and the Zeiss lenses are better at color. This lens gives a rather flat look to colors, which I have heard been described like an oil painting, yes a neat effect again, but maybe not the best all rounder.
The families house with door panels removed exposing the insides to the sunlight, the family goes about its daily business as If nothing is different. The flat stone sitting outside the door is for baking rice cakes, the shelves are lined with jugs of fermented peppers, red paper giving away its contents. I like the circular flower pattern in the middle of their floor which is made of broken ceramic rice bowls pressed into the concrete floor.
For color photography I no doubt pick up my Zeiss 50 Planar every time and I find its black and white just acceptable, then the Leica is a good black and white lens and maybe not the best color lens, hard choice to make really, but for color photos I really prefer the Zeiss 35 Biogon, which is funny since I ended up with the Summicron, but it is the better all around lens for me even if it is a 35…actually I am giving serious thought to maybe the Zeiss 28 Biogon instead of the Leica 35. An upcoming trip to Hong Kong will let me play around with all the details more.
This old guy was sitting there at the door to the main part of a large manor on top of a hill, when I asked him if I could come in all he did was give me a big smile 🙂
Overall….im a bit torn, the fact that the lens is a Leica doesn’t really interest me much, the fact that my camera says Leica at first was really cool but the effect has worn off and I am notice a lot of things about it that I wish it had and competitors like the Zeiss Ikon do, but then again there is no free lunch here either. Would I do it again? Hard to say. Will I sell the lens later on down the road for one of Zeiss’s offerings? Strong maybe. Its still too early to say, I have only taken a few hundred pictures with it and printed only a handful of photos in the darkroom from it, but that is the nice thing about this lens, because it says Leica, I can always sell it and be good if I so desire. My upcoming trip to Hong Kong I am switching films to a lucky find of TRI-X that I found at the only film shop in town then will reexamine my findings here.
Once again, people just killing time outside.
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