My new (5-year-old) Leica SL
When I first saw the Leica SL, I was amazed by its brutalist audacity. Coming from the M series, this was not what I pictured when thinking “Leica”.
Leica SL, the brutalist beauty
And yet the SL appealed to me immediately. It was powerful, flexible, beautiful, and very, very expensive. In fact, it was so expensive that I eventually stopped thinking about it. Then, when the SL2 came out last year it all came rushing back.
So, after five years, I bought one.
This came only a month after I purchased my dream digital camera, the Leica M10-P . Why would I do that? Well, as much as I adore the M10-P; its size, classic design, build quality, and optical rangefinder, I’m finding that I struggle with focusing. Rangefinder focusing has, for years, been my favorite way to manually focus a camera. Snapping those two offset squares together was fast and accurate, regardless of lighting. My eyes must be getting old because I now have trouble doing it.
When talking about the SL, people tend to talk about three things: Size, price, build quality, and the viewfinder.
One of the first things people mention is the price. OK, sure, when new, it was crazy expensive. Fine, but I paid only about 1/3rd of the original price, so let’s move on.
Leica doesn’t build cameras to a price point. They build them to a standard. A very high standard. This, then, is part of why they’re so expensive. And the minute you pick up the SL you can feel it. It is a brick. Solid, heavy, dense, and confidence-inspiring. Machined from solid blocks of aluminum, the camera feels amazingly well-built. Every control feels precise and just right. I value these things highly in a camera.
The SL is weather sealed, which is important to me, even though I rarely find myself needing it. I can’t explain it, but knowing I can use the camera in freezing or rainy weather is comforting, even if I hardly ever do it.
How about that electronic viewfinder? The internet was right, it’s awesome. For a long time, I was dead set against using an EVF. Then, they got better. And better. The EVF on the SL is so good that I barely notice it’s an EVF, except that it shows exact content and exposure of the image I’m about to make. It’s great. I thought the viewfinder on the Leica Q was good, but this is even better.
An EVF like the one on the SL makes manual focusing easy. This is awesome because I have a few nice Leica M-mount lenses that work perfectly on the SL using an adapter. Using M lenses on the SL seems to be as popular as using native lenses. After a day of testing, I can see why. The big, bright viewfinder and focus peaking is a combination practically purpose-built for it.
Let’s talk about the size. The SL is a big, heavy camera.
Here it is next to the M10-P
Leica SL and Leica M10-P
No doubt about it, it’s big, but put an M-mount lens on it and things get much more manageable.
SL with adapted Summilux-M 50mm
For me, there are two modes when it comes to taking photos; I’m either out specifically to take pictures or I’m not. If I’m out to take pictures, the size of the camera does not matter. I might feel differently if I was into street photography or planned to hike miles uphill for landscapes, but I normally do “editorial” type photography or portraits. Camera size isn’t a meaningful factor for me. If I’m not out specifically to take photos, I put the little Ricoh GRIII in my pocket.
Aside from my focusing problems with the M10-P, I bought the SL because I wanted something more flexible. And I still wanted a Leica, for all the reasons above.
Sometimes, I want more than what the M cameras can do. You know, fancy things like focus automatically and use zoom lenses. For this, I bought one autofocus zoom lens, the Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 Art lens and it seems fine as an all-purpose lens, especially considering the cost compared to the other options.
For specific things like portraits, I may consider one of the 85mm or 105mm L-mount options by Panasonic or Sigma. The Leica SL lenses are still way too expensive to consider, as lovely as they may be.
I’ve only had the SL for a couple of days, so it’s too soon to tell how well it will work in real life, but so far it’s everything I expected.
Prepare for an onslaught of dog photos, self-portraits, and snapshot of random objects around the house.
Alice, unimpressed by my new camera
Am I losing interest in shooting film?
Film photography is a lot of work. Not so much the actual shooting part, that’s work no matter what the medium, but lately I find the rest of the process (developing, scanning, storing) to be more trouble than it’s worth.
Thing is, I enjoy spending time in the darkroom, processing film. It’s meditative; the perfect hobby for an introvert. I have various wonderful old cameras, which are often reason enough to shoot film. But is it worth the trouble?
If forced, I must admit that I like being seen as a “film photographer.” It makes me feel like I’m in a group separate from the masses. I like being an outlier.
The trouble, I’m finding, is that I don’t really like the results I’m getting. I’ve shot maybe 20 rolls of film this year and a couple dozen large format negatives. Not a ton, but I’ve gone through them and there are only a handful that I really like, and most of those I only like because of their filminess.
By “filminess” I mean grainy, blurred or otherwise odd in some way that screams “I’m not an iPhone photo!” Is that really the characteristic I’m going for?
I look at a lot of film photographs on social media. I’ve begun noticing that they’re often not very good. Aside from the fact that they were made on film, they’d be entirely forgettable. A lot of the images look like nothing more than an excuse to use a cool camera or a way to finish the roll.
In fact, this attitude is what I see in my photos, and I don’t like it.
As usual, I’m overthinking things, but the infrastructure I have amassed in order to ease the process of shooting film is ridiculous. If the results were better, I wouldn’t mind. I’m tired of getting to the end of the long, sometimes tedious and difficult process only to look at the images and think, “meh.”
Film photography is a wonderful hobby, but maybe I need a little break.
Manual Schmanual
I’ve prided myself on my ability to shoot a Leica M3 or Hasselblad 500C/M with no meter, no auto-focus, and no auto-exposure. Who needs it? Real photographers certainly don’t! Plus, being fully mechanical means that the cameras require no batteries and should be repairable forever. It’s a badge of honor.
Except, and maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, I’ve grown to like letting the camera do at least some of the work. In fact, I prefer it. They’ve gotten pretty good at it and if I’m honest they do things better than me most of the time.
I guess it depends on the camera. For example, the big 4×5 cameras are slow, deliberate beasts, so having to adjust things just so is part of the experience. On the other hand, when just walking around with a digital or 35mm film camera, I want something fully automatic. Since most of the time I’m in walking-around mode, this means that most of the time I want to let the camera do the work.
The realization that I now prefer automation came to me after I bought the Leica M10-P. The Leica of course has a meter and aperture-priority exposure. But it needs to be focused manually. When I must manually focus, I love using a Leica’s rangefinder, but unless I’m range-focusing in bright light there’s no way I’m faster at it than I am with a modern auto-focus camera. Also, it takes two hands and sometimes it’s better when I can just lift a camera to my eye and press the shutter.
Manually focusing a camera is a pain I simply don’t feel like dealing with.
So, I’m finding that although I have my dream camera available, I most often pick up the little Ricoh GRIII. The Ricoh is much faster to use and, honestly, the images are comparable to the M10-P (shhhh, don’t tell anyone).
The same thing has been happening with film cameras. I stopped using the fully manual, no-meter-having Leica M3 and M4 and started using the M6. I wanted a built-in meter. Even more surprising is that lately I’ve been grabbing the big old Canon EOS-1v or Nikon F100 instead. Those cameras don’t have anything approaching the soul or joy of use of a Leica, but I kind of just want to point and shoot and move on, ya know?
I don’t know if this slow drift away from manual cameras is just a mood swing or if it’s permanent, but it’s changing how I think about shooting.
A variety of 35mm SLR film cameras
Here are my remaining 35mm SLR film cameras. Clockwise from front-left, they are.
Film cameras
Canon AE-1 Program. An AE-Program was my first real camera. I received one from my parents as a graduation gift. Today, though, it’s my least favorite. It just doesn’t feel good to use.
Nikon F100. This might be the single greatest deal there is when it comes to film cameras. These are semi-professional, high-end cameras that sold for around $1,400 (In 1999 dollars. One would cost more than $2,100 today). These can now be found for under $300. Great cameras.
Canon EOS-1v. The 1v was the best film camera Canon ever made. Or will ever make. It’s a solid, water-resistant, workhorse brick of a camera. I think if I were forced to keep just one SLR this would be it (with the F100 a close second).
Nikon F3. In production for nearly 20 years, the F3 is was a professional staple for as long as any camera I can think of. Mine is in great shape and works well, but I’m not in love with it. I can’t put my finger on the problem, but I never seem to reach for it other than to be sure and run a roll or two through it each year.
Olympus OM-1n. What a wonderful little jewel this is. And by little I mean little. Just look at it compared to the others. My copy is interesting because it came in a box of gear I bought on Craigslist. It was all dented and bent and basically unusable. The guy I bought it from said that it had literally fallen into a volcano (he was a geologist). I had a local camera repair shop attempt to fix it, and they did. It works great still today. The OM-1n has one of the biggest, brightest viewfinders I’ve ever used. I love it. I wish it didn’t use mercury batteries, though. I’ll never get rid of this one. I used to have a couple of the later OM-2ns and often consider picking up another.
I’ve been thinking of selling some of them. Instead, I’ve been loading them up with various films and shooting with them. It’s been so much fun that I’ve changed my mind and I’ll be keeping everything. At least for now.
I threw a singe strobe off to one side. It’s a little hot. It’s no picnic learning how to light things while using large format film cameras. The feedback loop is slooooow.
Shot with: Wista 45DX | Rodenstock Sironar-N 150mm | Ilford HP5+ 400 @ 320
Scanned with Fuji X-T3
Very expired ektar 25
I have lots of film stored in my fridge. Some of it is very old. I’m determined to shoot it rather than throw it out, so I ran a roll of Ektar 25 through my Nikon F100.
Let’s just say the results were less than stellar.
To be fair, this roll had expired nearly 25 years ago, so I wasn’t expecting much. Another thing I wasn’t expecting was that someone had already exposed about half the roll. It wasn’t me. I wondered why the number “13” was written on the leader. Now I know. They’d exposed 13 frames and then removed the roll from the camera.
The thing about shooting film is that even disasters like this can be interesting.
Using the Skier Sunray Copy Box 3 for digital film scanning
I hate scanning film negatives. Especially color film negatives.
Scanning software is universally atrocious to use. Getting good color from scanned film is such a hit-or-miss (mostly miss) proposition that I’d largely given it up.
Many people are moving from using film scanners (flatbed or dedicated) to “scanning” with digital cameras. I’ve been skeptical of this, but ever since the introduction of Negative Lab Pro it’s become more interesting. NLP makes it easy to get decent color from a digitally scanned negative.
To scan film using a camera, you need a copy stand to hold the camera, a lightbox or other bright, even light source, a macro lens, and something to hold the negatives.
I’ve been using my Fuji X-T3, 7Artisans 60mm Macro, Kaiser Slimlite, and the MK1 from Negative Supply. This all worked pretty well, but was limited to scanning 35mm film. I also shoot 120 and 4×5. Putting together a kit for every format using the pricey Negative Supply gear would run me well over $1,000. More like $1,699 for the pro kit.
I started looking around for something a little more reasonable and found the Skier Sunray Copy Box 3. The kit for 35mm, 120, and 4×5 costs $299, so I took a chance and ordered one.
My scanning station looks like this…
Sunray Scanning Station
Skipping to the chase, the Sunray box works great. The light source is ridiculously bright, allowing me to stop down and keep a fast shutter speed to avoid any shake. The holders are easy to handle and do a good job of keeping film flat. I was able to digitize a roll of 35mm film in less than 10 minutes.
My workflow for this is a little convoluted, since I use Capture One Pro for editing but NLP requires Lightroom Classic. I import the “scans” into Lightroom, crop, and convert in NLP, save TIFF copies of the edited RAW files, then move them into my C1 library for finishing. I’m still working on making this more efficient, but I’m getting the hang of it so it gets easier every time.
If you are looking for a (relatively) inexpensive way to scan film negatives using a digital camera, the Skier Sunray Copy Box 3 is a very good option.
Roam and TheBrain, together
Where should I keep my notes, TheBrain or Roam? I decided earlier this year to use Roam, and was confident in that decision until TheBrain version 12 added backlinks.
Now all bets are off.
With proper backlink handling, I’m considering bringing private notes back into TheBrain. I love the Plex and how it enables me to quickly gather context about a topic simply by looking at it. I already have thousands of inter-linked thoughts in my Brain and finding things there has always been fast and easy.
But I still love publishing to my public Roam database, so where do I write about something that might just as well be public? For example, I would like to keep notes about this blog, but where?
How about both!?
I sometimes forget that TheBrain includes a nice built-in (webkit-based) browser, accessed by simply attaching a URL to a thought. This means I can drag any page from Roam into a related thought in TheBrain and it gives me the best of both worlds. The screen shot above shows an example. The Plex on the left shows all my links in TheBrain, and the notes pane on the right shows the page in Roam. I can edit the Roam content right in TheBrain, but I can also link private thoughts or take private notes in the Notes pane, like this…
TheBrain Notes pane
This is good.
The iPod Classic (revisited)
GQ told me that Now Is a Great Time to Go Back to an Old iPod and I believed them, so I bought one.
iPod Classic
This is a 7th-gen iPod Classic fitted with a custom board and 256GB flash storage. I got it from PiratePTiPods on Etsy.
I admit it was a bit of an impulse buy, but after a week of use I’m glad I have it. I’ve loaded it with a bunch of my favorite songs, and have not yet run out of things to listen to.
Loading songs onto it hasn’t been my favorite pastime. I use Roon rather than Apple Music so I had to fire up Music and drag-and-drop songs into the app, then tell the iPod to sync.
On the other hand, it’s wonderful to use. I really like being able to just reach over and play/pause/skip or change the volume without looking up from whatever I’m doing. Touch screens are no match for that click wheel when it comes to actually controlling music. And of course not having the device send me notifications every two minutes is nice, too.
Wired headphones are required, but this is preferable because I own pretty good ones. The best part is that they don’t have to pair or charge. Also, unlike every pair of AirPods I’ve owned, they always work.
This may be just a fun bit of nostalgia, but it’s a nice-sounding, pleasurable, fun to use bit of nostalgia.
Cheating with digital
Photographs should not be significantly altered in post. It’s cheating. This is how I feel. I suppose if you consider yourself a “digital illustrator” rather than photographer, then sure, but otherwise, it’s cheating.
And oh my how easy it is to cheat these days. Here’s an example. I took the following photo yesterday during a walk at the beach with my daughter.
Ok, I lied, the photo I actually took was this one…
Pretty similar, right? Except that my photo had no birds in it, and the sky was dull and boring, as far as skies go.
It took me about 4 clicks in the latest version of Luminar to replace the sky with something slightly more dramatic and to add a few birds, just for the hell of it. The result is the “same” photo but just jazzed up a little, right?
No, it’s not. It’s cheating and it’s not what happened. My goal when taking photographs is to record things I’m interested in or to show how I see things. I realize not everyone feels this way, but cheating like I did here ruins the photo for me. Yes, if I were scrolling through Instagram I’m sure I’d prefer the altered version, but it’s not how I want to do things.
It’s so tempting, though! If it only takes a few clicks to go from decent to Wow!, why wouldn’t I? I’d like to make the slippery slope argument here. I mean, just look at how awesome this sunset photo is!
KaBlamWOW!
But, you know, some hard-working photographer somewhere is spending days getting to beautiful places and waiting long hours for just the right moment. Then, finally, the light and sky and everything comes together for the shot. By cheaply and easily altering my images, I diminish the work done by those who are out doing it for real. It feels wrong. It feels like cheating and I want no part of it.