Day with an M9

Yesterday afternoon I trekked down to Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) for the second time this semester -- the first having been for a wedding that I shot with my friend Angela. Here's a sample shot from that:

It was day two of New York Photo Festival 2011, featuring tons of galleries, photo book sales, free wine, demos by photographers from Win Initiative, and free Leica tryouts. Allergic to paying for the chance to view (and maybe buy) art, I skipped the galleries and went straight for the Leica booth. After waiting half an hour and surrendering my ID and credit card, they let me take out an M9, a full-frame 18-megapixel digital rangefinder with a $7,000 price tag.

When asked what lens I wanted, I pulled out of the air a lens I had read about in Popular Photography years ago, the Tri-Elmar 16-18-21mm f/4. The Tri-Elmar is weird in that its focal lengths are discrete: you skip from 16, to 18, to 21, rather than zooming continuously between them. As a result, it doesn't open up past f/4 -- not a problem, given the amount of diffuse, cloudy light -- and its minimum focus distance is 20" (versus 10.2" for the Nikon 16mm AF-D fisheye).

It also has to be used with a special finder that looks like a bizarre scientific instrument. The top knob is for adjusting focal length (which changes the boundary lines when you look through), and the bottom one is for adjusting for parallax (the offset between what the finder sees and what the lens sees). What's more, you have to focus with the camera's viewfinder (unless you're a rational person, unlike me, who will just trust that with such ridiculous depth of field you don't need to meddle with focus at all) and then compose with the external finder. In short, the learning curve is a bit steep.

On the other hand, the camera has an external shutter speed wheel and aperture is set via a ring on the lens (which nicely has half-stop increments), so it handles just like any rangefinder built since the '30s. And of course it's manual focus only, buttery smooth like a Leica lens better damn well be.

When I got outside, there was a band playing with a dancer, all in hermetic costumes and animal makeup/masks, for photographer Brett Beyer of boutique Stock Photo agency Win Initiative. He had some Broncolor lights set up around the band (triggered only by him, of course), but there was enough ambient light that I could get some fine shots. (Excuse the jpg fuzz in all of these: Flickr and Blogger don't get along as well as they used to.)

I actually had to bring each of these up around 2/3 of a stop in Lightroom because I shot them pretty dark. As I later figured out, the meter in the M9 freaks out when there's even the tiniest bit of backlight in a scene and overcompensates like crazy -- if, that is, you're even looking through the internal finder and holding the shutter half-way down to get a meter reading. This effect was even worse when the sky was in the frame. Since the M9 has no auto-exposure lock, to correctly expose a scene with the sky in it, you have to: 1) point the camera at the darker thing in your scene, say the side of a car; 2) turn the shutter speed ring to A, press shutter half-way down, and read the correct speed from inside the HUD; 3) set the shutter ring to that speed, recompose, and shoot. Or, of course, just eyeball it. Perhaps my D700 has spoiled me a bit...

Though the M9's default image profile (in .dng format) was pretty flat, with a bit of contrast in Lightroom, it turned out some really nice images. It recorded color especially well, though it may have shifted a bit green (easy to correct in LR).

At times I wished the Tri-Elmar 16-18-21 were the Summilux 21mm f/1.4 so I could get more dramatic depth of field effects, but you can't have everything:

More images here.

Now that school is over, I should be posting more. Stay tuned for my plans...