Telephoto

I had been looking to get a telephoto lens (something longer than 50mm) to learn some portraiture, but then I realized I could just use a smaller sensor.  A friend of mine was good enough to lend me his old Olympus E-P1, which has a micro 4/3 sensor, a crop factor of 2.  Basically, if you stick a 50mm lens on it, you get an equivalent field of view to a 100mm lens because the sensor is half the size of a full frame sensor.  Today I bought an adapter (that thing labeled "LA-MFT-LM" in the picture) that adapted my M mount lenses to the camera.

The Zeiss Planar 50mm f/2 held up pretty well.  No surprise there.  What caught me off guard was how tough it would be to focus manually.  The E-P1 doesn't have any kind of focus peaking, so I had to eyeball it, which isn't all that easy on a little LCD screen.  Also, most of the focus throw on the Zeiss is spent on objects less than 10 feet away, and it really tightens up where I need it most, which is past 10 feet, in order to get them in frame now that I have a 100mm equivalent.  After a while, I gave up on trying to shoot moving targets.

Another thing was, since I only ever shot it on film, I never realized how much color the Zeiss sucked in.

Next I stepped into Essex Market to grab some groceries.  Groceries tend to hold nice and still.  

Here, I realized how thin the depth of field was wide open on a 100mm equivalent.  Even with the crop sensor, there was only one pineapple in focus at about 10 feet.

Then I took the ferry home.

Shooting a long lens was definitely interesting.  It feels like a lot more footwork because when you're so far away from things, you have to walk farther along an arc to rearrange them in your frame.  When you're in closer, moving a few inches to the side makes a big difference.  I think I'll stick to using this setup for posed portraits, which I'm looking to figure out.  I'm just having too much trouble trying to make it work out on the street.

Normalizing

Yeah, action fell off big time around here.  It was all because I was preparing for the wedding, shooting the wedding, and then actually producing a product from the wedding.  It took an incredible amount of creative energy, and I just could not get myself to do anything else.

I'm going to need some time to get back into the groove.  On the bright side, I'm back with a new camera (the Leica M3) and a new lens (the Voigtlander Ultron 28mm f/1.9, which debuted at the wedding).

Anyway, this is just a quickie post, just for me to get my rhythm back.  These are on the M3, with the Zeiss Planar and Tri-X pushed to 1600.  There was plenty of light, but this was at 1600 because I was planning to shoot some personal stuff in a dim restaurant.

Wedding Photography

So, I photographed a wedding.  I am not a wedding photographer.  It was the most challenging creative project I've ever undertaken.

I would have run off screaming if it had been anyone other than my friends Sirui and Kenny.  They've always been extremely supportive and enthusiastic about my photography, and knew my style very well, so it really helped set expectations.

In terms of digital gear, all I have is a Sony RX100, and a Fuji X100S.  The Fuji could possibly have held up at a wedding, but its focal length would not really have been ideal.

I had to go with film.  I didn't want to rent or borrow a DSLR and go with a camera I wasn't familiar with.  If I had a choice, I'd have gone digital.

My loadout for the day was my Voigtlander Bessa R2A, a 50mm Zeiss Planar f/2, and a 28mm Voigtlander Ultron f/1.9.  For film, I had 5 rolls of Fuji Pro400H, and 5 rolls of Kodak Tri-X.  Pro400H is a great color film.  Kodak Portra is cheaper and probably better at capturing skin tones, but I wanted the Pro400H because there would be lots of plants around, and I like the way it captures greens and blues.  Kodak Tri-X is a super dependable black and white film with a clean, even grain that was used a lot for journalism.

The morning started in a beautiful Williamsburg apartment.  While Sirui was getting made up, Kenny and a handful of friends and bridesmaids were tasked with preparing small succulents, which were to be given out as nametag holders and party favors.

I was free to wander around the apartment with my camera and grab some proper angles in a more documentary style.  Personally I think it's the strongest part of the album.

And then we got to the venue, and things went kind of crazy.  It was a small wedding, stuck into a small area behind the restaurant.

At some point while I was panicking, I accidentally opened the camera up and light-leaked a frame of Sirui putting on her earrings.  It looks kind of cool, I guess, but I would rather have had the photo.

I couldn't move around as much and kept bumping into people.  The first kiss and the ring exchange were blurry and out of focus.  I have no excuses for that.  It wasn't even a particularly dynamic moment or anything.  This might as well have been taken on a smartphone.

I could probably have managed better if I had a second camera body to fall back on.  I had actually bought a Leica M3 a day before the wedding to shoot alongside the Voigtlander, but the shutter froze up the day I bought it and it was in for repairs while the wedding was actually happening.

Anyway, let's move on to the better stuff.

Once the ceremony was over with, it became a party again, which is more my speed.  I got myself lost in the background noise and people became layers of compositional elements.

Later on, we switched venues, and I shot a roll of Tri-X to push to 3200.  I was surprised any of the photos came out at all, but there were actually a good handful of keepers.

In conclusion, if you ask me to photograph your wedding, I will probably say no, but if I say yes in a fit of temporary insanity, this is what you would get.  I'm pretty happy with the results (and so are the bride and groom) because this is just my style, but it's not really what you'd call wedding photography.

I don't know how to pose people, and my gear really isn't suited for portraiture or anything set up, so the pictures that people stood in place and asked me to take of them were pretty weak.

Going with film was an enormous gamble, but in the end I think everything worked out.  Kenny and Sirui trusted me to it, and I gained a good deal of trust in myself.  Not being able to see the pictures I was taking was incredibly stressful.  Getting the color negatives back from the lab 4 days later was a huge relief, but it was 4 days of complete anxiety that I'd flubbed the most important shoot I'd ever done.

The wife and I compiled it all into a photobook from Blurb.  The hard copy should be arriving today, but you can have a look at it online here.