PML: Prague (With Fuji-X and Leica M)

Prague is one of the most charming cities in Europe. Presently the capital of the Czech Republic, the city is the product of more than 1,100 years of fascinating history.

Originally settled in the 9th Century as the capital of the Bohemian state under Wenceslas I (the same King Wenceslas in the Christmas carol of the same name), the Prague we can still see today resulted from the rule of of King Charles IV, beginning in 1346. He was determined to make Prague the cultural center of Europe.

King Charles' plan was given a huge boost in 1355 when he was crowned the Holy Roman Emperor, making Prague the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Prague's importance was reflected in many huge building projects, including St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague's New Town, Charles University, Karlstejn Castle and the Charles Bridge. 

Prague is a very bustling city. People are out at all hours, and many places draw crowds. But the Charles Bridge continues to hold a special place in the daily life of Prague. Completed in 1402 (that's 90 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue!) It's a very old bridge in a very old town. On the Bridge, the Photographer of Modern Life mingles with ancient history.

More than just a connection between the two sides of  the Vltava River, the Charles Bridge serves as a meeting place, a marketplace, and a promenade. Lined with 30 statues of saints, the Charles Bridge resembles more a suspended garden than a throughway. It's a great place to take in the breeze off the river and do a bit of people watching. You'll see plenty of tourists, but also plenty of fashionable locals, as well as more than a few artisans.

There are plenty of places in Prague that compete for your time and attention, but be sure not to leave out  this impressive feat of historic architecture. When in Prague, take as many opportunities to cross over the Charles Bridge, especially in the early morning or at late evening when the crowd thins out. 

Leica M (240) Cheat Sheet

Leica is steeped in tradition. Often mistakenly assailed for its slow adoption of new technologies, what you get with a Leica is only the technology that makes sense within the Leica approach to photography. Many things that are great features of, say, a DSLR, simply have no place on a rangefinder.

Leica's M system took a turn after the M9. Whereas the M9 used a CCD sensor, the new M line (just "M"—versions are now designated by a Type specification) uses CMOS. Setting aside a slew of differences between the technologies, relevant here are things that a CMOS can do that a CCD can't that prompted Leica to add a bunch of stuff just because they could. Simply, a CCD produces analog output, and a CMOS produces digital output. Having digital output from the sensor means the ability to use that data faster, meaning you can add things like video recording and live view, and you can clutter up the menus with all kinds of new and exciting (read: relatively useless) options for things.

Cameras are like any other tool: you select a tool because it matches the task you have in mind, and the idea you want to capture. I pick up the Leica when I want the fewest impediments between me and the scene I intend to capture. Aperture and shutter speed immediately adjustable. ISO a button away. With a clean viewfinder, there's nothing left but picking the right lens, and manually focusing.

The capabilities of CMOS over CCD led Leica to include a lot more software and hardware stuff in the M over the M9. In Teutonic fashion, Leica contained themselves to adding one button on the top plate, a thumb dial on the back, and cleaning up the thumb pad. Like any modern digital camera, though, there are lots of menu screens with lots of settings. If you're like me, though, you don't really want all that when you're picking up a Leica. The Leica is for simplicity, and getting to work fast is the goal. 

I looked at the indecipherable manual and the menu screens so you don't have to. If you just want to get the M working, and fast, here's your cheat sheet:

1) The battery

The M comes with a big battery. It's lithium ion, and doesn't weigh as much as it looks like it would, but it holds a serious charge. If you are shooting the M like it has film in it (and you should), you can expect the battery to last days. If you're always using live view and spraying and praying, I can't help you. 

What you need to know: 

• When both lights on the front of the charger are on, the battery is fully charged. You can leave it there if you want without harming it.
• You check the battery charge with the silver "Info" button.

2) Image Numbering

I like to know which camera I used to make a picture and I'm allergic to EXIF. Like most digital cameras, the M lets you customize its numbering scheme. I set the image numbering prefix to "240M." 

What you need to know: 

• You can set image numbering to your preference on Menu 4->Image Numbering.

3) The 240 Monochrom

I can't afford a new Monochrom. Given the choice between the M9-based Monochrom and converting color files to achromatic with the M (240), I opted for the M (240). (This was an economic choice—not an artistic one.)

A rangefinder doesn't work like the Fuji Monochrom can: you're not going to see any image previews in the viewfinder. That said, you can set the M to make an achromatic JPEG along with the DNG file. When you do, the Live View function will display as achromatic. 

What you need to know: 

• Tap the Set button. Go to File Format. Select "DNG + JPEG fine." Boom. Done
• In Lightroom->Preferences->General tick the box for "Treat JPEG files next to raw files as separate photos. That way, when you import into Lightroom you'll have a set of achromatic JPEGs to review (and work with, if few adjustments need to be made). 

4) Live View

I sometimes shoot with the LCD back in sensitive environments where I don't want to bring the camera to my eye, or when shooting at difficult angles. The M's Live View is well implemented and works well for these tasks. Nicely, the Live View works like the ground-glass focusing screens of old. 

What you need to know: 

• Menu 3->Focus Peaking->Red (shows up really well on the achromatic screen you just set above).
• Menu 3-> Focus Aid->Automatic
• Menu 4->Exposure Simulation->Permanent

Bonus Bits

Finally, here's two bonus bits of information to get you up and running with the M and out making images:

• The Set Menu is where ISO changes get made. 
• When the camera first powers up (or wakes up), it displays the ISO setting in the rangefinder window. 
• Menu 5->Auto Power Off->Two Minutes. You can leave the camera's power switch set to "S" or "C" and it will come to life rapidly with a half-press of the shutter while still preserving your battery.

The Dozen Puzzle

At a recent Meetup, I was reminded of a pesky question that has long plagued me: why does film come in 12, 24, or 36 exposures?

I always shoot rolls of 36 exposure film. Of course, sometimes that roll takes awhile!

The upper limit is somewhat understandable. An arbitrary cartridge size was chosen by Oskar Barnack at Leica many moons ago (there are 12 lunar cycles in a solar year, and 12 hours ante and 12 hours post meridiem), and given the thickness of the film base, only a certain length of film would fit in the cartridge. That length is roughly five feet (there are 12 inches in a foot), and turns out to allow 36 exposures of film (each of which is 24x36mm (i.e., 12*2, and 12*3)).

Where do all these 12's come from? From the cellular to the social to the religious, 12 is everywhere:

• 12 biochemical salts in every human cell
• 12 ganglia in the human body
• 12 cranial nerves
• 12 ribs on the ribcage 
• 12 finger bones on each hand
• 12 basic hues in the color wheel
• 12 jurors on a jury
• 12 roses
• 12 face cards in a card deck
• 12 cans in a fridge pack
• 12 eggs in a carton
• 12 Tribes of Israel
• 12 days of Christmas
• 12 Apostles
• 12 major gods of Olympus

Whether the result of Oskar Barnack's arms or a magical attraction to the number that's (literally) part of our DNA, 12 somehow works. It gives a sense of getting a great deal (the word itself stems from the Germanic compound "twalif," meaning "two-leftover"), and its divisors provide a lot of organizational flexibility (which is quite handy when cutting negatives).

The Leica M6 isn't the fastest film camera to load. Which is maybe why I pick longer rolls.

Because I've found no clear answer why film comes to us in 12, 24, and 36 increments—or why we think that's normal—I'm sure to spend some of the 24 hours of the day over the next 12 months pondering the question.

Happy New Year's to you all! And here's hoping your next 12 * 5 inches of film are your best images yet!

Film to Digital

Modern photography marks a strange place in the history of the art. After a century of evolution, the steps of creating and sharing images became fairly settled: shoot film, process it, print it, show it. Over the decades, advances in the science increased the number of frames one could shoot and how fast, improved exposure, and paper became so cheap that the default processing became to print every frame on the roll. You could get a roll of film processed and printed in less than an hour, anywhere. Not so long ago, film processing kiosks were more numerous than coffee places are today.

Along came digital and everything got subtly disrupted. Suddenly, we could shoot even more, faster, and see the images instantly. We could post them to Facebook and Instagram, or drop them in an email, and it seemed like there was more sharing. But just as suddenly, the only way to share an image with someone in person was to grab a computer or an iPhone. No longer could a picture easily be put in a frame, stuck to a mirror, or handed to someone else. Suddenly, getting a single print from a digital image took more steps than it had ever taken to develop a whole roll of film, and at more expense.

Inkjet printers stepped into the breach, but the quality is poor, especially when compared to the illumination a screen gives, and the cost of entry is very high. Giclée looks great, but is very expensive and time consuming to set up right. There are a seeming plethora of options for printing a digital image on metal, glass, canvas, ceramic, and just about any other surface. But like giclée, these options are expensive and very difficult to set up to get satisfactory results. The days of assuming a good-looking print from a negative are all but gone. I'm hopeful that eventually the powers that be will enable digital printing that looks good, is accessible, and affordable.

In the meantime, we are stuck with a mixed bag of solutions. For sharing digitally, digital cameras can't be beat. For displaying images, it's all a bit awkward and expensive. My dissatisfaction with the numerous methods I've tried for getting a hard copy of a digital image is one of the primary reasons I've returned to film. Achromatic film can be processed in a bathroom and printed there, too. A 100 sheet box of 8x10 paper is still cheaper than a couple of giclées. And at the end of it, you have an actual print you can display and share. It continues to surprise me how easy it is to get a very satisfactory print with even the sloppiest of darkroom skills. Film, for now, solves my immediate problem of having a tangible product.

The problem with film, of course, is in the opposite direction: sure you can show the print to someone in person, but how do you share that same image with the worldwide audience of the web? Again we are faced with unsatisfying solutions.

I've had a variety of negative scanners over the years, and none of them have been satisfying. More accurately, they've been puzzling. Often a negative scan will reveal detail that a print loses. At the same time, the digital scan loses sharpness, detail, texture, and contrast. There's clearly a lot of potential for a solution, but the technology is still lagging behind its realization.

Getting back into film meant getting back into scanning. There are a few high-end options, but I'm a bit skeptical of investing too much in digital technology. I've been burned too many times by the loss of support and maintenance for digital products and find that it's better to hit the mid-range and upgrade it in a few years' time.

Thus I arrived at the Epson V600. It's a versatile scanner, which serves not only as a flatbed, but can also scan 35mm and 120 film at high dpi. For the purpose of scanning negatives to share as illustrations of a point, it works well. It's not the world's fastest scanner, but I can load up 12 images and then work on something else for 20 minutes. At the end of it, I'll have 50 megabyte, 4800 dpi TIFF images I can then add into Lightrooom for final tweaking and web export. The scans are not such that I would make a print from them. But that's a pointless consideration anyway when one has the original negative.

The weakest part of the Epson is the negative carriers. They are plastic, and are supposed to snap into place to hold the negatives. Because of the thickness of the plastic, the negatives will bow unless you have perfectly flat ones (and who does?). This means the images will be slightly out of focus. Moreover, the plastic tabs do not snap securely. (I have two sets, so this is a design issue and not a one-off problem.) There are third-party negative carriers which apparently improve the situation. There are also options for wet scanning, which also improve the scans.

Considering my present use, the stock Epson works well enough. At its price point, it performs far better than I expected. To get a film image up on the web, it's hard to beat. So long as you accept its limitations as a tradeoff for the very low price, I recommend it.

Below are some examples of the differences between the detail picked up in scanning the negative as opposed to scanning a print. But nothing shows the detail like the silver print.

Negative scan.

Print scan.

Negative scan.

Print scan.

Negative scan.

Print scan.

The Beatles Dissolve and a Lens is Born

Picking a Leica lens is a black art. Leica designs a lens with certain qualities in mind, and then make that lens for quite awhile, leading to a market full of seemingly similar lenses and varying prices. Deciphering the basics is key to finding a lens.

Leica lenses roughly fall into six named categories:

• Elmar: These tend to be the slowest lenses (though the collapsible 50mm Elmar produced between 1957-1974 was an f/2.8). They have a lot of sharpness and clarity.

• Elmarit: Upping the speed to a standard f/2.8.

• Summarit: Leica started these designs to compete with lower-cost competition from Zeiss and Voigtländer. They don't match the quality of construction or glass of Leica's other lenses. 

• Summicron: When people talk about "Leica lenses," this is the line they're usually talking about. Fast at f/2, and with the "Leica feel" established in the glory days of photojournalism in the  early to mid 20th Century.

• Summilux: Fast f/1.4 lenses that have stunning quality. And prices to match.

• Noctilux: Feats of engineering. f/1 or faster.

Conveniently, until you get to Noctilux, the alphabetical list correlates to the increase in price!

Confusingly, Leica makes changes to its designs during the production life of a given lens. Researching these changes can be important, because the "same" lens may have been adjusted to meet certain demands, such as increased sharpness with a trade-off in contrast for use on digital bodies.

When I went looking for a street lens for the M6's, though, my factors were limited: 50mm Summicron, in good shape, for less than a new Hyundai. I found what I was looking for on eBay, from the UK.

This particular Summicron was made in Germany in 1970 (the same year Paul McCartney dissolved the Beatles). On the street, it's known as a Type 3, and Leica made this version for a decade. Some were made in Germany, and some in Canada. It has a bias toward more contrast than its predecessors.

It operates as if it were new, but the loss of paint leaves no doubt that it's not. The optics are excellent, and the smooth focusing and aperture despite more than four decades of use are testaments to why Leica lenses are expensive when new, and keep their value forever. I'm very pleased with the results, and look forward to adding a few more decades of use to this particular Summicron.

Excellent contrast on bwxx.

The Summicron is excellent at resolving fine detail.

First Look at CineStill bwXX

CineStill recently had a stock of 2,000 roles of Eastman Double-X movie film (which CineStill calls bwXX) loaded into 35mm canisters. I bought three.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I shot the first roll at EI 250 on a very bright, cloudless afternoon. I also did a few shots in late afternoon with strong light. The film was shot through a Leica M6TTL with a 50mm Summicron, using the internal light meter. No lens filter was used. I developed it in HC110 dilution B for 6 minutes at 68 degrees (fahrenheit). The negatives were scanned on the Epson V600.

Negative scanning is not the best method for evaluating a film. But then again, neither is the web. Until I can print it, I can only comment on how it looks scanned compared to Tri-X and Arista Premium. And it looks pretty good.

Reading in the afternoon sun.

For my second roll, I will either switch developers (D-96 is recommended, but I couldn't source it anywhere), reduce the time, or shoot it at EI 400. The negatives are rich, but maybe a little too rich. (I may change my mind when I print the negatives.)

The famous steps from the Rocky movie.

Even looking a bit overexposed, the film has great qualities to it. The grain is beautiful and smooth, and detail was held in both the highlights and shadows even in the extremely bright and contrasty light. The tones are rich, and definitely look nothing like a modern film. (The film has changed very little in the past 60 years.) The closest comparator I know would be Ilford's XP2 (which is a dye based emulsion) when printed on black and white paper.

The tower of Bryn Athyn Cathedral. 

My first impressions of this film are very positive, and I wish I didn't have to be so frugal with each shot. Finding the right EI and developer times are clearly key to getting the most out of this film, and that will be impossible with only two rolls left.

I hope CineStill restocks this film. (Otherwise, I might be stuck buying 400 foot rolls from Kodak!) I also hope that it performs well at 400, since shooting outdoors on bright and sunny days is more of a luxury than a common venue for me. Can't wait to see what the next couple of rolls provide!

Bryn Athyn Cathedral in the late afternoon.