Ode to a legend -- the Leica M4

For me, the M4 is the camera that reached the pinnacle of analog design. It was the natural sequel to the M2 and M3 designs into one body with a few more bells and whistles added. The one time Leica attempted to diverge from this basic M design with the M5 model in 1971 led to such an uproar that the M4 was reinstated only a few years later and has continued to be the basis for flagship camera design of the company even up to the newest M 240 digital model.

My 1968 black painted M4. I sent it back to Leica for a factory replacement of the viewfinder so it now has six lens frame lines of the M6 instead of the original four. I did this because I use a 28mm lens a lot and usually have the Leica meter on top of the camera taking up the slot where I would normally put an auxiliary optical finder. And look at the beautiful engraving on top. Don't see that much anymore. 

There were several iterations of the M4. The M4-2 was introduced in 1977, followed by the M4-P in 1981. Each new version added a couple of new features -- a hot shoe, motor-drive capability, extra finder frames -- but modernized the production line and replaced the black enamel with a more durable black chrome.  I always had a penchant for cameras with black paint over brass. After a little use some of the paint wears through to the brass and the camera takes on an individual patina that identifies it as yours. Excessive brassing becomes a battle-worn badge of honor, something to be worn proudly, as if to say, "I served".

The Leica M4 with MR-4 meter mounted on top.

The M4 was introduced in 1967 and produced until 1975 with a little break while the M5 ran its short-lived, orphened course. The M4 had framelines for 35mm, 50mm, 90mm and 135mm lenses in a 0.72 magnification viewfinder. Mine was made in 1968, and had a later, standard factory addition of the M6 viewfinder adding 28mm and 75mm frame lines.

I always liked the look of the Leica meter. Not that it worked all that well -- I still carried around a hand held auxiliary meter for more accurate readings -- but it slipped conveniently into the accessory shoe, had a high/low range, and synchronized with the shutter speed dial, all pretty advanced stuff for 1968.

The handle-crank rewind knob was one of the late-to-the-party innovations Leitz added to the M. The one on the M4 was angled so it could be operated quickly without constantly scraping your fingers on the side of the camera -- something of an anachronism in today's digital world, but much appreciated at the time by photographers needing to get the spent roll out of the camera quickly and reload it for the next breaking shot. 

Adding the angled rapid rewind crank was considered a big deal at the time. I can still recall discussions with veteran photographers who were convinced that Leitz maintained the slow turning rewind knob on the M2 and M3 to avoid rewinding the film too fast and causing static light discharge that might damage a film frame.

The M4 did away with the removable film take up spool, and introduced a faster film loading system that gripped the end of the film automatically to load it onto the spool. 

The self-timer lever was an M4 luxury -- some say frivolous addition -- eliminated from later versions of the M series. After all, pros don't need self-timers. 

The M4 was the last of a breed. It reminds me of souped-up, propeller-driven fighter aircraft at the end of WWII. Each had reached the apex of analog, hand-crafted design on the cusp of fading into oblivion in the face of a newer technology. The planes were replaced by jets, the rangefinder by the SLR. Fortunately, the M-series camera hit a very responsive chord in the human psyche that has made it last even into the digital era. For many, Leica M is the icon of professional camera, and retro styling based on the Leica M design is undergoing a renaissance in cameras like the popular Fuji X-Pro1.  And let's not forget that in keeping with the M analog tradition Leica continues to make the M7 and MP film cameras today.

Nikon 1 AW1 camera is now available

The new Nikon 1 AW1 underwater camera is now available at B&H. It is a 14.2mp camera that is waterproof down to 49'. It has Nikon's CX sensor which is 1" with a 2.7x image size multiple, can shoot at 15fps, and do HD video. Anyone remember the Nikonos?  I suppose this is the new digital replacement. With summer coming, this camera should be flying off the store shelves.

I will be doing a full hands on review of this camera in a later blog post. Stay tuned.

If you are planning on purchasing this camera with lens, you can help support this site at no extra cost to you by purchasing from one of our affiliate sellers listed below -- and thanks for your support.

Nikon 1 AW1 Mirrorless Digital Camera with 11-27.5mm Lens can be ordered from:  BH-Photo  Amazon   

Fuji 56mm -- the perfect portrait lens

The portrait focal length for a full frame lens is considered to fall between 75mm and 105mm because is provides the least amount of perspective distortion on a face. Wider than that and excessive rounding occurs. Longer than that and telephoto compression begins. The ideal portrait lens would sit right in the middle at 85mm, or 56mm on an APS-C sensor. Of course, this is all a rule of thumb and also depends not only on the distance from the subject, but also on the desired subjective effect.

The Fuji 56mm is not only tack sharp, but maintains its sharpness even at its widest aperture of f/1.2 where it also delivers the sweetest bokeh effects of any lens out there. This series of photos was taken with filtered daylight and the lens aperture either wide open or close to it.  One nice thing about this mid-range portrait length is that it allows you to come in close to fill up the frame with just the head, or pull back to include more of the body, while still maintaining an ideal perspective.

Here is the link to my complete hands-on review of the Fuji 56mm f/1.2 lens.

If you are planning on purchasing this camera or lens, you can help support this site at no extra cost to you by purchasing from one of our affiliate sellers listed below -- and thanks for your support.

The Fujifilm XF 56mm f/1.2 R lens is available for ordering at:   BH-photo  Amazon

Homage to Malevich and the Suprematists with the Fuji X-T1

In 1918 the avant garde Russian artist and founder of the Suprematist art movement, Kasimir Malevich, painted his purely abstract compostion, "White on White" -- a skewed white square painted onto a square canvas also painted white. As manifestations of the Suprematist art manifesto with its basis in pure artistic feeling, this painting, along with "Black Square" painted in 1915 revolutionized the art world and finalized its departure from a reliance on real-world subjects, introducing instead completely non-objective, abstract geometric compositions. They seem tame by today's standards, but were quite shocking for their time.

Kasimir Malevich Suprematist compositions, "White on White", 1918, and "Black Square", 1915.

Every now and then I give myself a photographic exercise based on a theme. This weekend I decided to pay homage to Malevich by limiting my palette to purely abstract compositions in black and white. While Malevich used paint, photographers use light and shadow to create fluctuations in tones.

I set my X-T1 camera to square format and black & white and used two lenses, the 60mm macro and the 56mm f/1.2 with a Nikon 6T close-up lens on it. In both cases I set the camera to manual focus because I was shooting wide open and wanted to place the focus point in very specific locations. I usually shoot the Fuji  X cameras in RAW plus jpg. Most of these images were from the original jpg compositions with a bit of post-processing added contrast.

Folded papers and shadows

Folded newspapers

Paper corner

Chair in morning light

Folded sheet of paper near a window

Shadow reflection of leaves on a window sill

Vent with shadow

Open book, study 1

Open book, study 2

Two sheets of paper with shadow

The white blouse

Tulips with window frame

Discarded white towel on the sidewalk

Diagonal street stripes and tar

Empty store window sign -- probably my most Malevich-like composition

The look - my least Malevich-like compostion, but I couldn't resist the eyes

Fuji X-T1 light leak repair update

Fujifilm Support in the USA now has an announcement regarding the X-T1 light leak issue with mention of the serial numbers affected:

"...the 'flare effect' is only applicable with a limited number of early produced X-T1 cameras. More recently produced X-T1 cameras have already been modified, so if you are an owner of an X-T1 camera bearing a serial number of 41A05201 or higher, there is no need to be concerned about this issue." 

In case you missed my original blog post on this issue, this is how the light leak will appear in your images when the side door is left open on the X-T1 and a strong light is allowed to enter through the HDMI and microphone ports.

I recently spoke with Fujifilm USA repair center in New Jersey. Now that the fix has been announced, they will take your name, email, and X-T1 serial number and notify you by email within a few days when they are ready for your to send in your X-T1 for repair.  Give them a call at: 1-800-800-3854. The repair is expected to take about a week to complete.

Making the most of a distracting zoo environment with a Fuji 55-200mm zoom and the X-T1

One afternoon in Florida we took a break and visited a local wildlife preserve hoping to get in some fun photography of the animals. Problem was all the animals were in cages with very narrow openings in their wire fencing, and in most cases the backgrounds were inappropriate and distracting. To get around this problem I put my longest lens, the 55-200mm zoom, on the Fuji X-T1. Zooming the lens to its longest focal length helped minimize the obstruction from wire cages.  I also set the lens to its most open aperture, and positioned it as close as possible to the wire cages. This gave me the lowest depth of field and threw the wire cages mostly out of focus.

This Florida Panther was my most difficult image to deal with because the wire fencing was right over his face. 

You can see the original photos below. The most distracting  fencing was in the Florida Panther shot because he was so close to it.

These are the original photos of some of the animals with their distracting elements. I limited myself to head shots to keep the lens at its longest focal length and minimize the focus on the foreground wire fencing. The focus point was placed on the eye of each animal. 

I found some tropical palm leaves growing nearby and photographed them totally out of focus to substitute as backgrounds later in Photoshop.

Caracara

For all the bird portraits I created a selection mask around the head to eliminate the background and substitute one of my out-of-focus palm leaf photos instead. Later I put a vignette around the images to concentrate the attention around the birds face. 

Canebrake Rattlesnake photographed through a Plexiglas window. For this one I had to deal with some odd lighting.

Green Heron

Green-winged Macaw

If you are planning on purchasing this camera or lens, you can help support this site at no extra cost to you by purchasing from one of our affiliate sellers listed below -- and thanks for your support.

The Fujifilm X-T1 camera body only is available at:  BH-Photo  Amazon

The Fujifilm 55-200mm zoom lens is available at:  BH-Photo  Amazon

Lifestyle shoot with the Fuji X-T1 -- a debriefing review

I call this a "Debriefing review" to differentiate it from my regular "hands on" reviews, which are based on normal use tests I do for about a week with a new piece of camera equipment. For this debriefing review I put the camera, in this case a Fuji X-T1, through a specific shooting event to gauge its handling characteristics under fire. Since it came out, I have suspected that the X-T1 might be the first mirrorless camera capable of dealing with the demands of a fast paced lifestyle shoot, and I set out to see if my suspicion was true.

I was in Florida where we arranged to have two models meet us on a beach just after sunrise for a three hour shoot. The watch-word for the shoot was "energy". We wanted the models to me very active and bursting with enthusiasm. This meant keeping both the models and I me in constant motion, and necessitated a camera capable of executing very fast, continuous focus adjustments at mostly open apertures. To put even more technical stress on the situation, I decided to shoot using very intense back lighting with no fill whatsoever, save for what was provided naturally by the sandy beach. I wanted a very light and airy, blasted out look to the scene. I needed a camera that could handle such an extensive dynamic range.

Typically, in a shoot like this I would use a Nikon D4 and f/2.8 zooms. We did have a D4 outfit with us just in case things went wrong with the X-T1. I can tell you up front that I never once felt a need to switch over to the Nikon system. I did the entire shoot with the Fuji X-T1, ending up with over 2100 RAW images for later editing.

I used four Fuji lenses:  The 18-55mm was my main working lens, followed by the 55-200mm zoom. For portraits I switched to the 56mm f/1.2, and in one situation needed the 14mm. 

Auto-focus was my biggest worry going into the shoot, but the X-T1 held its own, returning an extremely high ratio of focused images despite the back light, and despite the 8fps continuous shooting speed.  My first SD card was a new high-speed Sandisk UHS-II, and it made a difference. I could tell immediately after I filled the 32GB card and had to switch to a slower UHS-I.  No question I will be picking up some more of the faster cards.

Color balance with the X-T1 was right on, although it might not be readily apparent from looking at the shots. I was using early morning light and pushing it to the warmer side in post-processing. 

The models repeated this running scene coming towards me about a half dozen time to insure I had focus. I needn't have worried. The X-T1 returned as many in focus shots as I would expect from the D4, which I consider to be the king of auto-focus.

I had many scenes where the action was changing rapidly and I had to keep the camera shooting at a fast clip to capture a spontaneous moment. I doubt this would be possible with any other EVF (electronic view finder). Their refresh rates have been just too slow. The EVF in the X-T1 is a world apart from any other out there, and fully capable of keeping up with the action. Without this EVF I doubt that a lifestyle shoot like this would even have been possible.

One thing I really grew to love was the tilting screen. This feature made it so much easier to get the camera really low to the sand for shots like the the two below.  I get really nervous working on sand with cameras. It takes so little sand to ruin a lens or camera so I try never to touch the sand myself because I don't want to get any on my hands to transfer to the equipment. With the tilt screen I was able to hold the camera low while still maintaining a good distance above the sand.

One of the few beach scenes I did with a front light, but still no reflector fill.  Just let the camera's natural dynamic range cover the full exposure. 

For the shot below done after the beach shoot, I had the 14mm lens on the camera and held it high above the models while composing and shooting with the tilt screen. 

A feature I enjoyed in post-processing with the new RAW release candidate for Adobe Bridge, was having the Fujifilm film profiles available. I found it convenient switching an image to one of the profiles -- Provia, Velvia, or Astia -- and tweaking the colors and contrast from there. Saved me a lot of time. 

Really nice background bokeh was achieved by using the 56mm lens at a wide open aperture for all the portrait shots.

Almost all the scenes had a blasted out background and highlights, but that was the look I wanted. It takes a really good, modern digital camera to deliver a wide enough dynamic range to shoot like this without loosing too much detail. The X-T1 delivered.

Everything was shot in manual exposure mode at ISO 200. There were quite a few times I found myself wishing Fuji had given its X cameras a base ISO of 100 instead. Sure would have made it a lot easier shooting with open apertures on a bright day like this.

I used the VG-XT1 vertical battery grip on the camera to provide extra power and better handling. I have to say, this accessory is a real winner. It makes the camera so much more comfortable to handle in a fast moving situation.

A real surprise was how long the battery lasted. According to the Fuji specs, we should expect around 350 shots per charge. I shot over 2100 RAW images throughout the day and only used up part of the one battery that was in the accessory battery grip. Seems unusually frugal to me, but I'm not going to complain. Some day I am going to have to find out just how long I can make two batteries last.

For close-up portraits I switched to the 56mm f/1.2 lens. I wanted to use it wide open, or not more than f/2, so I needed to put a 3-stop neutral density filter on the lens to cut down the exposure. 

This close-up was taken with the 56mm at f/1.8.

My one major beef with the X-T1 was with the focus buttons. They are just too small, making them hard to hit without looking. I found myself constantly having to take my eye away from the viewfinder to look at the focus wheel directly in order to find the buttons. This is something Fuji is going to have to address in a future version of this camera. Perhaps over time I will get used to them as they are. Perhaps my thumbs are just too big for such a tiny camera. In the meantime, it is annoying and really slows me down. One possible solution I am trying is to add the AF-Focus Area function to the Fn1 button on the front of the camera because it is easier to find and press.

Another portrait done with the 56mm lens set to  f/1.6. The model's eyes are tack sharp. 

I mentioned in my initial review of the X-T1 that I thought it might be the first mirrorless camera to truly move to a usable level on a par with a pro-DSLR, and I was curious to try it as my only camera during a lifestyle shoot. It was a real pledewinare to work with such a small outfit. I was able to work entirely out of my photography vest for the entire shoot. 

The real test of the day's experience is whether or not I will choose to shoot with the X-T1 outfit again. I can answer that with a resounding "Yes".  The camera and lenses were spot on, with the results as good as any camera system I have used for this type of shooting. The convenience of such a portable system delivering such excellent results is just too enticing to give up. Plus, the new fast aperture zooms Fuji has coming down the pike are only going to make this system even better.

My complete hands-on review of the Fuji X-T1 can be read here.

This summer I will be giving a workshop on Shooting Lifestyle with Available Light at the Charleston Photography Workshops. 

If you are planning on purchasing this camera, you can help support this site at no extra cost to you by purchasing from one of our affiliate sellers listed below -- and thanks for your support.

The Fujifilm X-T1 camera body only is available at:  BH-Photo  Amazon

The Fujifilm X-T1 with 18-55mm lens is available at:  BH-Photo  Amazon