Photographing lower Manhattan with a Leica M and Fuji X-T1

Yesterday was a sunny day so I continued my project of re-photographing New York City with the new World Trade Center in it. For this session, first I took the ferry to Governors Island, and afterwards I did a helicopter fly-by in preparation for some sunset aerials I will be doing over the next two weeks, if weather permits.The purpose of this helicopter trip yesterday was to determine the angles, altitudes, distances, and focal lengths I will be using for the actual sunset shoot.

For this session I had two camera systems with me, the Fuji X-T1 and Leica M (240). My reason for taking these two systems was because later this month I will be making an extended trip to Europe and am considering taking both of these cameras with me. I was trying to determine what lenses I will take for each.

On this day I primarily used the 21mm Elmarit-M f/2.8 lens on the Leica, along with the 35mm Summilux f/1.4.  On the Fuji I stayed mostly with the 18-55mm zoom and occasionally the longer 55-200mm zoom. I didn't need the 14mm or 10-24mm for the Fuji because I had that focal length covered with the 21mm on the Leica.

It would be unfair to make any real comparisons between the results from the two systems because good prime lenses will always out-perform a variable aperture zoom. The results from both cameras were very good, but those from the Leica had a noticeably higher resolution, which might be expected from a full frame 24mp sensor as opposed to a 16mp APS-C sensor.

Below are only a few of the many images I took during the day.

For the black and white conversion I used a moderate infrared technique to enhance the blues in both the sky and water while leaving the city in bright contrast.

What I liked about this over-all scene showing the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the financial area of Jersey City on the left was that there was so much boat traffic in the harbor on this sunny, summer day.

This is the view of lower Manhattan and the Battery from Governors Island, which is a short ferry ride away.

The main reason I went to Govrenors Island was for this panorama of lower Manhattan including the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on the right.  The panorama was put together from two images taken with the Leica M and 35mm Summilux lens. Combining the two images rather than simply cropping a wider shot gave me a much higher resolution image for making large prints.