Scenes Seen/Vintage Digital: Leica M Type 240 – Voigtländer Ultron 28mm f/2.
Another post about a few images captured out in the wild with this combination.
Not much more to say. Great rangefinder camera. Great rangefinder lens. I could not ask for better in either regard. But before I continue. Let me get the last part of the subject title out of the way.
Parasite.
Merriam Webster defines it thusly:
an organism living in, on, or with another organism in order to obtain nutrients, grow, or multiply often in a state that directly or indirectly harms the host
So, grief as a parasite.
For reasons I could not quite make out I have felt like there has been a cloud over me this week. I spoke of this in a post earlier this week.
I pushed through that night and finished a roll of film. I have stayed ahead of this cloud for the rest of the week until today. It found me again a bit overwhelmed. I thought it was the same old:
I do not feel right when I do not shoot. I do not shoot when I do not feel right.
But there was something more going on. Then it hit me.
My Father passed away February 29th, 2019. The last months in the before time. Now nearly six years on I occasionally delude myself that I have pushed though some grieving threshold. The gaping hole in my life will feel somewhat less painful. And most days this is true. But a little more then a week out from this anniversary I wish I did not have to acknowledge, no matter how inevitable it is, I have come to realize that grief is a parasite. It may shift. It may diminish. The only medicine seems to be time. And time does help with the symptoms. But it is not a cure. There is good news though.
- I realized this largely because I forced myself to go out and shoot.
- Once I made this realization I immediately started to feel better.
Even though I got myself out and about rather than stewing in a funk… I did still struggle with making a third attempt to visit Duke Gardens. Made every excuse in the world not to go. But I made it.
Sidebar: Also decided to stop my local camera shop to do a bit of a purge. As much as I tried to fight my worse gear tendencies but I overdid it. FIlm and digital. What goes? None of your beeswax. What might I get? I do not know. Perhaps nothing. We will see. And we are back in 3, 2, 1…
Duke Gardens.
I went a little nuts admittedly. Left film out of the equation this time. Went with only one lens. This allowed me to focus on capturing images rather than deciding on what to take images with. On to the way too many images I took today.
On the way.
The Camera Shop.
The Arrival.
On the way home.
Thoughts.
Warning: Bold statement ahead.
Over many years and including many image capturing medias and surface areas I have not ever netted better looking results.
But there are a few tricks that need to be employed.
Old sensor.
The Type 240 is rocking older image capturing tech. With that capturing scenes with wildly varying exposures, the key for me has been under exposing. While newer sensors seem to use dark magic to recover blowouts, that is not the case here. Shadows can be successfully recovered much more easily, however.
Tiny lens imperfections.
For its spec this is a small lens. Most IQ attributes are handled very well. But there can be magenta aberrations in backlit scenes. Fortunately this is basically done away with by using a slider in Lightroom.
Other than those two items I have found few downsides.
Focusing.
Manual focusing is a breeze once you have a good handle on rangefinder focusing.
Hyper focal focusing is your friend.
While out and about set the aperture and infinity to f/5.6 and you are good to go. Pretty much anything past about 8 feet to infinity will be in focus and clear across the frame.
Easy.
Both the lens and camera allowed me to create some images that I really like. That is about it. That simple.
Another successful vintage digital fit.
And more importantly for me paersonally, that old grief parasite has been dealt with as well.
Happy capturing.
-ELW
Eric L. Woods 