dirtystylus

Point and Shooo…wait

For the last few years I’ve been primarily been using a combination of a Lomo LC-A and a couple of M-mount rangefinders (a Bessa R2A and a Leica M4) for taking photos. But the cost of good film processing is rather prohibitive (a decent lab here in NYC will generally charge around $20 per 36-shot roll for 4×6 proofs and a CD) so I’ve been looking to shoot more digital for everyday walkaround stuff. I get this urge every three months or so, and always return to shooting with the Lomo and rangefinders. The primary reason isn’t some romantic attachment to film, it’s that they’re fast to operate.

I have an aging, battered Canon A85 that I use every now and then, but it frustrates me – setting stuff using multiple button presses is time-consuming. I realize that I could get a small DSLR (say, a Pentax K100D with a pancake lens) but I’m thinking of something more pocketable. I would’ve thought that three years later the digicam market would’ve gotten better by leaps and bounds, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here’s the few contenders:

The Ricoh GR-D: 28mm is a bit wide for my taste, but the results I’ve seen (especially B+W) have been far more interesting than the usual digicam snaps. The GR-D2 is rumored to be around the corner, though, otherwise this would be in my hands already. Some have criticized the lack of an optical viewfinder (you can mount one to the hotshoe, though) and the noise at higher ISOs, but its vocal defenders contend that the noise approximates film grain quite well in B+W.

Ricoh Caplio GX-100: 24mm to 72mm zoom (I don’t like zooms usually but this one has a step-focus feature to jump to the classic focal lengths – 24/28/35/50/72), anti-shake. Otherwise the control scheme is very similar to the GR-D. If I had to choose a camera specifically to replace the A85, I’d probably get this one since the zoom and anti-shake make it more flexible for when Jordan’s using it.

Finally, there’s the vaporware Sigma DP-1, which has intrigued me ever since it was announced – a big sensor in a digicam. Sony did this first with their R1, but that body was SLR-sized. Besides the sensor, however, it appears they were paying close attention to the GR-D – fixed 28mm, hotshoe. f/4 is a bit slow, but if the results at high-ISO settings are ok, then losing a stop probably won’t matter too much. If it ever comes out, that is.

Of course, if someone wants to give me one of these I won’t complain.

New (Old) M4

Just back from a thorough CLA (Clean-Lube-Adjust): chrome M4, with a 50/2 Summicron.

While in North Carolina Jordan and I visited her family friends Walt and Marianne Brauner at their farm. Walt noticed the Bessa I was using to shoot while walking around their property, and he asked me if I was interested in his old Leica. He told me it had been sitting in the basement unused for about a decade. He sold me the body and lens for a song – I guess that he was simply happy knowing that I would get a lot of use out of it.

The M4s don’t have a built-in meter, so I may get a small one to mount on the accessory shoe. For now I’ll guesstimate and rely on the exposure latitude of print film to cover my errors in judgment.

one. one. one. one.

I’ve finally put up my one-year photography project at shutter.dirtystylus.com.

I also just received the iPhoto book and poster in the mail; I’ll take some quick digital pics of both and post them shortly. I will also try to include my impressions on the Bessa/Zeiss combo I used for the project.

Curiously, no sooner had I put this project to rest than Zeiss announced a new superfast 50 in M-mount. Mike Johnston’s The Online Photographer has the details.

Sony Drops the A-bomb

Sony finally released details of their first foray into the dslr market after acquiring Konica-Minolta’s business. The ‘Alpha’ A100 keeps the in-body anti-shake of the late Minolta lineup, and adds anti-dust measures as well. The most exciting thing to me is seeing their relationship with Carl Zeiss continued in the lens lineup – although whether we’ll be seeing new designs or just older ones in a new mount remains to be seen.

Still, with a list price scraping $1000 for the Alpha, I’d probably look to Pentax first, with its K100D now outfitted with in-body anti-shake, as well as a nice lineup of pancake primes (21, 40, 70).

That’s if it’s even worth the bother. The problem I have with the current dslr market is that the need for backward compatibility with existing lenses has eliminated a good opportunity to truly break new ground with camera design. I think Olympus is the only company that isn’t hamstrung in some way by the need to support older lenses. Yet even though they’ve demonstrated an ability to think different (live-view slr) they haven’t really capitalized on the opportunity to create smaller, lighter cameras. Their lenses are as big and bulky as their competitors, when we should be going in the other direction. I’m hoping that the Leica-Panasonic partnership in the 4/3rds camp brings something more to the table (some nice, compact zooms or primes would be nice for a change).

One and one is one.

Yesterday I realized that I had blown right past the end date of my one year/one camera/one lens/one film experiment. That means I’ve spent the last year shooting (almost) exclusively with a Bessa R2A, a Zeiss 35/2, and some Fuji NPZ 800 (or whatever Fuji’s calling it these days). I’ll be spending the next few days sifting through the output; the results will probably get condensed into an iPhoto book as well as a gallery on the revamped shutter.dirtystylus.com. Expect more on the culmination of that project shortly.

What reminded me about this was a pair of strangers asking me about my camera yesterday. One was an older guy who was curious about rangefinders. We had a nice conversation about the pros and cons of digital, and I clued him in to the shockingly wide range of great lenses for M-mount rangefinders. Since Leica’s patent on the M-mount expired a few years back, everybody’s been making M-mount lenses – Leica, of course, but also Zeiss, and Cosina/Voigtlander. That’d be like Nikon, Canon, and Pentax all making lenses for the same mount: unheard of.

The second guy asked me if I was a pro (which made me laugh, of course) and wanted to know a bit about the “Leica” I was carrying. I had to explain that no, it wasn’t a Leica, but then again I didn’t have 3 grand lying around.

Today I just read the new digital rangefinder from Leica – the M8 – is going to cost $5,000. I’m hoping that either Zeiss/Cosina or Epson/Cosina (who already make the only digital rangefinder out there, the RD-1) has something cooking for the mere mortals out there.