Sony Nex-7 Metabones Leica M - E mount adapter and Leica Summicron 35mm F2Leitz Summicron 35 mm F2.0 mounted on the Sony Nex-7 with the Metabones Leica M - E mount adapter. The adapter has proved to be very tight with this lens. Sony Nex-7, Metabones Leica M - E mount adapter, and Leica Summicron 35mm F2 Vers.1

Leica Summilux 50mm f 1.4 Vers.1 = 75mm f1.4 with the 1.5 sensor crop

Leica Tele-Elmarit 90mm F2.8 = 135mm f2.8 with the 1.5 sensor crop

Leica Tele-Elmarit 90mm F2.8 = 135 f2.8 with the 1.5 sensor crop

Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 Vers. 1 = 52.5mm f2.0 with the 1.5 sensor crop

Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 Vers. 1 = 52.5mm f2.0 with the 1.5 sensor crop

Rolling Review -

This is the first post in what I hope will be a long series of blog posts about my experiences with the Sony Nex-7 and legacy Leica M lenses which were part of my fathers collection in the early 70's. I am using the Metabones Leica M mount to Sony E mount adapter. UPDATE: I have since purchased a used Novoflex which is 100% better in both construction and use. I will not be trying to rehash what folks have been writing about for the last two years but to give you my honest opinion of my experiences with the equipment. The images above are some basic shots of Rockport Harbor and the surrounding area and are just test shots and not meant to be "art". They are all jpegs that have gone through Photoshop, toned or converted to B&W, resized, and sharpened a bit. You will not see any pixel peeping shots of 100% blow ups - it's not my style. I'll let the pixel peepers do that.

First off, I have to tell you that the Nex-7 is a joy to work with. As much as I love my rangefinders I don't shoot film any more and this camera gives me the look and feel of those wonderful Leica bodies. It's small, hangs around my neck like my M3 and feels good in my hands. Right off the bat I was shooting tons of frames using the camera in full manual and using the OLED to focus with using the wonderful fringing feature. A couple of times I employed the magnification feature to focus on a specific area which was a bit tricky. If you are using a medium telephoto like the 90 it gets a bit jumpy.

The first problem that I ran into was with the Metabones adapter. My 35mm went on the adapter very tightly. It seems to be getting better but is still really tight. I try not to force things so it was hard getting it onto the adapter. The 50 mm was much easier and the 90 mm was somewhat in between. Initially this really bothered me as I really don't want to do any damage to my lenses. I am on the alert for the much more expensive Novoflex M mount to E adapter. Update: I now own a Novoflex which is much better. I can not recommend the Metabones as it is too much of a tight fit.

Now for the big disappointment! I was dying to use my Leica 21mm f3.4 Super Angulon, my favorite lens of all time. The combination of the Metabones adapter and this lens did not work on the Nex-7. The lens recedes to far into the camera body and it touches the plastic housing around the sensor. What a problem - I'm still looking for a solution. If it prevails I might have to opt for the Sony 16 f2.8 which is a 24mm in 35mm terms. UPDATE: I have since purchased the 20mm 2.8 which is a pretty nice little pancake lens. I have not used it much and am in the process of doing more real world testing with it. Here are two blog posts about the Sony 20mm f2,8 pancake lens here and here.

One of the things I enjoyed was to have two other lenses in my coat pockets. With my really large Canon L glass this is not possible. I felt transported back to my formative days shooting with the Leica M3 and M5. Since I have no zoom, moving myself to re-frame the shot, focusing the lens and adjusting the exposure was pure heaven. It brought me back to my roots and what I really love about photography. With the new cameras any idiot can point the thing on auto and come up with something decent. In the old days it was all you not the camera.

Update: All of the images I shot today were also shot in Sony raw. I have run them all through Lightroom 4 and have noticed that some are not quite as sharp as I would like. I know it must have something to do with how I am focusing the camera. There seems to be no reason for some of them to be out as there was no movement on my part and the shutter speed was high. So tomorrow I am going to be really careful when focusing. I like the fringing of what is sharp but when you use a rangefinder you know when it's in focus when the two images combine. When using this camera on manual you can adjust everything so you can focus at f16 and still see what's going on but the fringing hits most everything. So it's a bit difficult to figure out. I will try to be more organized with my thoughts as well not just ramble on about my experiences. I am going to shoot with the 135 f4.0 tomorrow as well. I can't wait to see what happens.

John Dominis was a staff photographer at Life Magazine for 25 years and was one of their most versatile image makers. Click here or on the image above to go to theTime/Life web page to see some of his most iconic images.

As a young photographer growing up the images Dominis made for Life helped me forge my photographic sense of place. His images of scenics, celebrities, wildlife, sports, and war were some of the best images of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Now, as a 30 year veteran photojournalist I can see a little of his vision in my images from time to time. Thanks John for inspiring me to a great career. 

Check out John Dominis's incredible photo essay War on Poverty: Portraits From Appalachian Battleground 1964. Click here to view

I have been thinking of shooting this scene for a long time. So after thinking about it for a couple of years I finally did it. I made this shot on a tripod with the 5D Mk3 and the 70-200. I love the sweep of the fence and the shoots of bamboo with the leaves of growth at the top of the frame. The colors are muted except for the white fence which will make a great B&W. I'm not much of a high color guy since I worked in the newspaper industry for so long making B&W prints. I have several different views of this scene which have a different feel. The leaves at the top make this photo for me.

This past spring I did some experimenting freezing water with shutter speed. The new ISO ranges of modern cameras gives us the opportunity to shoot at really high ISO's with no loss in quality. So I decided to make some shots at ISO 2000 in bright sunlight at 1/2000 of sec at f11. This was a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the water and for the most part give me enough depth of field for a really cool looking image. My only problem was trying to figure out which one I liked best so I included four in this post. I like all of them for different reasons they remind me of glass. A really cool experiment done with the Canon 5D Mk3 and the Canon 70-200 lens. I'm not sure what other folks reaction will be so let me know what you think.

Halibut Point State Park in Rockport, MA is a magical place at any time of year. But it takes on an almost ethereal quality when it snows. Last year, after a nice sticky 3" snowfall I ventured out to see what I could find. I was not disappointed. Everything was covered including the twines above. I made different shots as the light played across them. I love the light in this particular image. This shot reminds me of white chocolate covered pretzels. Another shot, of branches reaching out toward a quarry was this years holiday card. I called it snow coral because it reminded me of sea coral. I was able to make several pleasing shots including a nice pano of the main quarry. I have a print of it which is 14" x 50" above my kitchen sliding door. I made this shot with the Canon 5D MK 3 and the 24-70 f2.8 L lens at 24mm. The exposure was 1/640 sec at ISO 400 at f 10.

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HAPPY HOLIDAY'S

The other day I had a conversation with one of my sons who lives in Oregon. He really wanted a large image for the wall of his apartment. The problem is my printer is only a 24" printer. My wife suggested that I try a triptych to get the size up to about 60". Great idea! Now how do I do it. I am able to print images on canvas that are 20" x 30" so it seemed a pretty easy task to find a photo they liked and blow it up to 30" x 60". I found this great shot of the Tool Co. taken in 2010 with my G11. It's nice and sharp but with some slight barrel distortion. The color version has no real color in it to speak of and when I made the shot I was thinking B&W all the way. 

I have the image in my Lightroom library so I pulled it up and started working on it in LR. The B&W version I was getting did not give me what I saw so I used Silver Efex Pro 2 to get the effect above. I did a slight selenium tone which I think is kind of nice. I then used Perfect Resize to enlarge the image to 30"x60". The next trick was to make three even panels of this image. So I moved the image over to Photoshop and pulled up the ruler so I could figure where 20" and 40" was. I then used the crop tool and set it to 20"x30" and cropped the panels out and saving them separately. After doing this I pulled them back into LR to use Perfect Resize again to make the reflect wraps on the edges on the panels. Done. All I need to do now is print them and wrap them onto the stretcher bars.

Since all of this will be done on canvas I needed to run a test to see what B&W will look like printed on glossy canvas. The image above is the test print I used. This was done by copying and pasting the panels into a new Photoshop document. Then, since the panels are huge, sizing them down so they fit into the document well. The print came out beautifully. The only thing I will miss is the selenium tone as I will be printing in Advanced B&W mode in my printer. 

This shot was made with the Otterbox case on over in Marblehead last week.

Fall colors with the iPhone 4sShooting with the iPhone can be a challenge sometimes. When the light is low the camera still tries to shoot at a low ISO. In this case it was ISO 80. My exposure was therefore still kind of sketchy at 1/25th sec at 2.4

This shot of my backyard was made with the iPhone 4s. It was then put into Lightroom 4 for post processing. This rendering is very close to what I saw and remember. It did not take a lot of tweeking to get it to this point. I did crop out some unwanted items on the right and from the bottom but this is pretty much as I saw it. Most people don't realize that to get really good images out of your phone you will need to take it out of the case that you have it in. I took mine out of the Otterbox case so that the clean lens would have a chance of making a good image. Most folks have their phone in their pocket or purse and the outside can get really dirty and creating unwanted fuzziness in the image. Most iPhone apps do a pretty good job of making the images look better but they tend to overdo it a bit. I use Camera+ which has some neat features to it when it comes to shooting and editing in the camera app.

Pulling Skiff

This past weekend I was attending an Arts and Crafts show in Annisquam. Autumn is coming along nicely around Lobster Cove and this pulling skiff was resting comfortably at her mooring. The light was beautiful and this shot presented itself. I used the 300 F2.8 to make this shot with the Canon 5D Mk3 it has such a painterly look to it and will look wonderful on canvas. The large print I have at home is beautiful.