As I said in the previous post, I haven’t been shooting a ton in the last few weeks. Life happens, etc etc.. But a few days ago I took to the woods with a camera. I’ve been shooting the old Canon 6D quite a bit lately but I decided to switch it up this time and grab the Leica for the first time in months. At first I paired it with the Zeiss Planar but last minute before I left the house I took that Planar off and threw on the old Leica Elmar. It was a sunny day and the light was pretty harsh and I wanted to shoot the Elmar in a challenging situation to see how it performed as far as flare resistance. So, away we went to the woods.
I did miss the “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” factor of the SLR format at first but, I’ve made a hell of a lot of photos with a Leica so the muscle memory came back pretty quickly. And as always the rendering out of the Elmar is so beautiful. I kind of forgot about that uniquely beautiful Elmar rendering that I’ve written about so much here until I uploaded the photos and went, “Man I love how that lens renders.” It also did surprisingly well in handling the hard light. It does flare in the right conditions, pretty wildly sometimes. But overall if you pay attention to what you’re doing it’s pretty easy to live with. I was also using a cheap screw on lens hood that helps shield the front element.
The shooting color thing is, well, still a thing. I’ve noticed at this point that when I look at work I try to shoot in black and white I just feel like something is missing. I think that I’ve stumbled on something in color work that I’ve struggled to make work in black and white for a while. I do think I can shoot competently in black and white, to be clear. But, I’ve come to find more and more that color work is able to do something that I’ve had a hard time doing in black and white work. This all sounds vague and esoteric, but, isn’t a lot of this all inherently vague and esoteric when we try to dig in to it?
At some point (and I know I keep saying this) when the words have swirled around in my brain long enough and condensed in to something resembling human language I’d like to put together some updated thoughts on the contrast between color and monochrome photography. Anyways, if you’re here thanks for stopping by and I hope you’ve enjoyed the article! Here’s Ruckus to take us out
