The Image
This is my first image with the Leica M EV1, and I wanted to test it with a lens known for odd focus points. But first, I wanted to photograph something important. You see, this flower vase seems insignificant, but my great uncle Alfred L'Atrelli was an artist. Born in Florence, Italy, he studied oil painting. He was a talented chef and could play the piano by ear. At a very early age, he would sit with me on his porch and teach me to draw. Many years later, after his death, my great-aunt let me pick a few paintings out of his studio. I picked two that were flower arrangements in a deep black oil wash. It took 30 years for the oil to come through and become the beautiful oil painting I see every day on our wall. So, this is why my first image with the EV1 is a flower arrangement, in honor of my Uncle Fred.
The Lens (A Pencil to Draw With)
Back to this lens. The Summilux-M 35mm ASPH has incredible image quality, but was the generation before the FLE, or the Floating Lens Element, which changes the lens spacing ever so slightly as focus is made closer rather than at infinity.
The result of this earlier generation lens is that not only is f/1.4 a difficult f-stop to focus at, but the focus shifting of the lens when stopping down to f/2 and f/2.8 is sufficient enough that one can even still miss the subject focus! Because this lens was released in the film era, the thickness of film helped resolve some of the problems (and still does today). However, for digital work, the focus has to be spot on, or it just doesn't work.
In fact, you can have Leica clean, lubricate, and adjust the lens (a CLA) and ask them to set the focus for wide-open at f/1.4, knowing it will affect f/2 and f/2.8. Without asking for that adjustment, the focus is close at f/1.4 and remains close at f/2 and much better at f/2.8
Solving the Focus Shift Problem
Why all this discourse on the lens if the camera is the topic? The EVF fixed my problem of having to guess where the focus was in the wide-open apertures for this lens! I would regularly shoot a few frames and rotate the focus tab ever so slightly to make sure one of the images was spot on. Yet, I was able to do this on the first image, the first try, and relatively quickly.
There are plenty more lenses to try and plenty of time to try them. But, I am excited that the first set of images I made were focused where I wanted them to be. I just received this lens back from Leica New Jersey, where the Leica Camera N.A. service center is. The great folks there added 6-bit coding so I could record the lens in my EXIF, and they also set the focus for me at f/1.4.
After I took this image, I mounted the lens on my M11-P Safari and got similar focus results. So, I'll spend some time using other f/stops and see what happens!
I'll also spend some time and talk about my initial settings in another post. I think it will be important later to see how I change as I settle in with more use. For now, here is the JPEG out of the camera for this image, totally unedited. A great first image with the EV1.
