Keeping a cattle dog down, a foggy walk, selling the 40mm?

December 07, 2024

Nobody Puts Ruckus in a Corner

Ruckus, the resident menace, recently had a certain procedure performed that many male dogs experience when they reach a certain age. On December 3rd his manhood was taken from him in the early hours of the morning. He’s now “fixed.” He had a rough couple of days with some bad reactions to medications but this morning, four days out, he’s feeling quite a bit better and it was becoming increasingly obvious that he wasn’t going to be able to handle the inactivity for much longer. So we got ready in the morning and set off for a local wooded park to get him a short walk.

We left the house a little before sunrise. I was worried it’d be too dark to shoot anything so I grabbed the M262 and the 40mm so I wouldn’t have to worry about pushing film and then not finishing a roll and being stuck with having to finish a roll pushed to 3200 or some nonsense like that. The weather has been interesting the last couple days, with a lot of fog settling in to the valley and temperatures dipping below freezing overnight causing a lot of ice and frost on things. It can be pretty beautiful and atmospheric, albeit treacherous if you have to drive on it. Thankfully this morning it was just beautiful, a dense fog hanging over the landscape giving way to fog and hoarfrost the higher you climbed in elevation.

Selling the 40mm?

In my 28mm article I mentioned that I had been planning on picking up a 40mm due to the interesting qualities of the 40mm focal length. Basically, it sits about equidistant from 28 and 50, the two focal lengths I have really come to enjoy shooting lately. I’ve had the 40 for a bit now and have used it on quite a few outings, and while the 40mm Heliar is indeed a beautiful little lens, and I do and have always enjoyed the 40mm focal length, I really struggle to use it on the M system. There is just enough inaccuracy in the framing with the 35mm lines to make it just a little off. I find myself frequently checking framing and composition on the back of the camera when shooting the 40 in a way that I can’t stand. When a tool injects itself in to the workflow on a regular basis I find it really bothersome and the framing issues trying to shoot the 40 on the M system is one such instance.

I’ve also found that it suffers from the 35mm effect, being in that kind of weird no-man’s land between the standard feeling 50mm and a real wide angle like the 28mm. I had thought that it might be sufficiently different from 35 to feel a little less wishy washy but so far I haven’t found that to be the case. So I end up with a lens that is clunky/intrusive to use on my M cameras and has some of the same qualities that I don’t like about 35mm lenses. Shooting 40 on an SLR feels very different, it’s a great focal length on an SLR but on the M I struggle to get along with it. I suspect I will be putting it back up for sale soon. If you read this and are interested in an LTM 40mm Heliar let me know. Like I’ve said, it’s a fantastic lens. It has a beautiful rendering, sharp as hell, and the focal length is one I usually love. Just not on an M camera.

My ramblings aside, here is a small gallery of images from the morning

Leica M4-2 + Zeiss 50/2 + Kentmere 100 @ 400

Intimations of Winter, and Aletheia

December 02, 2024

In some of the last days of November we got our first real bit of snow. All told it was just a couple inches down in the valley but there has been some serious accumulation at higher elevations. A lot of SNOTEL sites are reporting well over 100% of normal for snow water equivalent, at least on the Western side of the Rockies. Winter is off to a good start so far. I grabbed the Leica and the 50mm Zeiss Planar and a roll of Kentmere 100* before we headed out the door for a walk.

There is always something so beautiful and moving about a walk in a freshly snow laden forest. There is a stillness, a quiet to everything even when the snow really starts coming down as it did toward the end of our walk here. And there is this sense of freshness to everything, not just in the way that everything feels somehow cleaner with a dusting of pure white snow. I mean in the sense of that peculiar experience that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls aletheia in his later philosophy, the coming forward or presencing of beings in their particular manifestation, the experience of Being in the fuller sense of the term. The forest of fall gives way to winter in the fine dusting of snow, and before our eyes the world manifests itself to us anew. Perhaps that very stillness of the winter forest is a condition for that mysteriousness (re)presencing of things. Maybe therein lies the magic, or at least some sliver of it.

Obscure and notoriously impenetrable German philosophers aside, below is a handful of other images from that walk.

*Kentmere 100 shot at 400 and developed in Ilfotec-HC 1+31 for 14.5 minutes

Minolta XD5 + Minolta 28/2.8 + Kentmere 100 @ 400

The autumn forest, pushing Kentmere 100, and shooting some more 28

November 17, 2024

I haven’t posted in a little bit (relatively speaking I guess) so I figured I’d put up a round of photos from a roll that I shot on the afternoon of November 13th. I lent out my TTArtisan 28mm that I would usually shoot on the Leicas to a friend of mine so I hadn’t been shooting much 28, sticking to the Zeiss 50 or the Voigtlander 40mm on the Leicas. I’d been nostalgic about the 28 so I decided to grab my grandpa’s old Minolta XD5 so I could shoot the Minolta 28/2.8. I grabbed another roll of Kentmere 100. I’ve only got one more roll of it before I’ll have shot through it all.

Ruckus | Minolta XD5 + Minolta 28/2.8 + Kentmere 100 @ 400

It’s fall, and the forest is much more open but even shooting midday (albeit a cloudier midday) there wasn't quite enough light to get away with a 100 speed film so I had to shoot the Kentmere at 400. I’ve found that Kentmere 100 does push surprisingly well, which I wouldn’t usually expect from a slower film. I typically develop it in Rodinal or Ilfotec-HC. If I’m shooting in very contrasty light I will tend to stand develop in Rodinal because of the way the stand development can tame contrast. In less contrasty light the Ilfotec-HC does a good job of rendering a natural looking contrast without losing too much shadow detail. This roll was developed in Ilfotec-HC 1+31.