Two panoramas

 

 

I have a superb 16mm to 35mm Lumix Pro lens for my SL2 camera. However I rarely use it. The problem is that for me the SL2 body with a lens is just too heavy to be a travel camera and invairably the best panoramas I see are when travelling.

Here are two faux panoramas which were taken with firstly (top) my X1 with its 35mm (equivalent) focal length Elmarit lens. It was a stunning morning and we were out early driving into the mountains from Salzburg in Austria when I saw this chocolate box view of the lakeside village of St Gillgen.

The second view was again taken early in the morning, this time in Istanbul, as I was walking across the Galata Bridge. I used my Q2 with its 28mm Summilux lens.

Wet day in Hanoi

An oldie which popped up whilst I was looking for another photo. A wet day in Hanoi.Taken on film back in 2004 with my Leica M6 using an Elmar 28mm lens.
 

Catching the Sydney light rail

 

Another rainy day shot taken a few weeks ago in Sydney. 

Seventy years ago Sydney had one of the biggest tram networks of any city in the world.Then in a spectacular own goal it was all ripped up. Not a single line was left. Melbourne on the other hand retained its huge network and expanded it. Now it has the biggest tram network of any city in the world.

Sydney has realised the error of its ways and is building a light rail system but construction is very costly, very disruptive and slow. The good news is that it proving very popular. A case of better late than never.

Keeping cool

 

We are only 10 days from when the clocks go back for the end of Summer Time but it's still very warm and humid and summery here.

It's been a very hot and long summer and Holly with her thick fur coat will be very glad when it is cooler again. She likes to go into the spare bedroom and lie on her back under the ceiling fan with her tummy exposed to sleep-as she was doing this morning when I took the photo.

The man in black

 A previously unseen photo from my Lightroom library. Taken late June in Paris with my Leica X1.

The EXIF data says it was taken at 3.39pm but that seems very unlikely as no Parisien cafe would be that empty at that time. More likely the time in the camera was still set on Sydney time so the time in Paris would be 7.39 am  but as it was a Thursday I have no explanation as to why the cafe was so empty with just the man in black enjoying his cafe.

F1 Flashback

 I've been a follower of F1 since I was 12 years of age.That's a very long time. I am very fortunate in that I've seen nearly all of the great drivers of the modern era race. Moss, Stewart, Clark, Brabham, Senna, Schumacher etc,etc. 

In the early years I was a very committed fan and I have been a reader/subscriber to the British magazine, Motor Sport, for over 60 years. 

My enthusiasm diminished over the years but has been rekindled in the last 8 years primarily due the Drive to Survive-the Netflix series. 

I loved the early years of F1 but much to my surprise I am really interested in the current F1 scene and in particular the technology of the current 2026 cars.

I know that the whole F1 scene is not like the old days but change is inevitable and I find the current cars and drivers extraordinary. I am also amazed at the huge following F1 is now enjoying across the world. Seeing the packed stands at qualifying for the Chinese GP yesterday really makes the point.

Here are two photos from my library. Compare them with today.

 

Firstly Pedro Rodriguez in a BRM P163 at the 1968 British GP at Brands Hatch. He qualified 13th and retired due to a crash on lap 58. Not a good day for him. No sponsorship allowed back then although given their lack of form I doubt if BRM would have attracted many sponsors back then even if it had been allowed.

The photo was taken at Kidney Bend with my Leica 3A and just a 50mm Elmar lens. My brother and I and friends were standing against the paling fence-no Armco then-and I lent over and shot the cars. It's a crop but not that big a crop. I don't have any other technical details. 

The second photo is a favourite of mine.Taken during practice for the 1981 Italian F1 GP on a very hot Saturday afternoon at Monza. Quite how I was lucky enough to be strolling down the pit lane that afternoon is a story in itself. I had my Olympus OM2 and just one 36 exposure cassette of Kodachrome. 

The photo shows the cars of the Talbot-Ligier team, sponsored by Gitanes cigarettes, being worked on outside their pit. What a total contrast to today's scene. It really could not be more different.The car nearest the camera was driven by Patrick Tambay who qualified 15th and retired on the 22nd lap with a puncture.

 

From a train

 

On the train returning from my trip to Sydney -see story below- I took this photo through the train window. At the time the train was running beside Brisbane Water and I shot it with Q3 43 on the macro setting with the aperture at f16 for maximum depth of field and at 1/4000sec to the freeze the speed.

This photo made me wish that I had taken more photos from trains. With so many amazing train journeys I have missed so many great shots because I feared that reflections off the window glass would ruin them.

 Back in 2010 I was on a wonderful rural train in Italy and I did take just one shot out of the window. I never really looked at it because of the reflections. I discarded it as junk but forgot to delete it. Now it lives- using Lightroom's new AI reflections removal tool where with just one click the reflections are gone. Very impressive. All those shots I did not take could have been saved but here's the one that has been -thanks to AI.

 Taken with a Canon G9 at 1/800th sec f4.0 ISO 80

 

 

Rainy Day

 I went down to Sydney yesterday to have lunch with a friend. He'd made a reservation at a harbourside restaurant near Circular Quay. A pretty safe bet after weeks of sunshine and heat and humidity. Well as it happened not a safe bet at all. A massive mass of moist air-related to the monsoon- had made its way south dumping rain across inland Australia and also the east coast of Victoria and New South Wales.

 It was a shocker. A long drenching downpour .The restaurant reservation was hastily changed to an indoor restaurant and I took a rain jacket and some stout shoes.

I decided to take a camera and take some rainy day photos- a real change from brilliant sunshine and blue skies.

The Leica  Q3 43 is weatherproof and I decided to try taking monochrome using the monochrome preset in the Leica Fotos setting on the camera. Below are is a selection of the photos from my short visit. I am really surprised by their quality.The preset only works on the jpeg setting-the DNG files are still colour-but the jpegs are pretty good. There is a high contrast monochrome preset and next rainy day I will try that. 

 

Surf Boat competition

 It was a round of the Central Coast Surf Life Saving Clubs boat competition today at Terrigal Beach. I saw the competition being set up when I went down for my coffee at 7.00 am but unfortunately could not get down to see it until it was about to wrap up late morning.

It has again been very hot and very humid. I walked down to the beach with my Leica SL2 fitted with the Lumix Pro f2,8 70-200mm lens coupled to the Lumix 2x converter giving me effectively a f5.6 140-400mm lens. It's a really heavyweight combo. I soon realised that the 2x converter was unnecessary. The 70--200mm lens alone would have been adequate, but standing on a sandy beach in full sun is not a good place to start coupling and uncoupling lenses.

I just hit the beach as the last race was starting so I only manged to grab two shots. I would have liked to have had more time, but it is what it is and I could not have spent any longer standing on the beach in the sun anyway-it was ferocious.

Today the sea was very smooth. When there is medium or big surf the starts of these competitions are more spectacular however I'm pleased with these two shots and I was not stricken with heatstroke so I really cannot complain.

 

A little monochrome

 I've been in two minds about monochrome, aka black and white, photography for years. Usually I'm not enthusiastic and consider many examples of it as pretentious but recently I've become more appreciative. 

I've seen the monochrome photos in recent photobooks by Leica Ambassadors Alan Schiller and Phil Penman and the superb book, Paris Amour, by David Turnley. Also I've seen some outstanding monochrome photos taken by one of the participants of the Leica Photo journey in Morocco which I went on last October.

I have used Nix Silver EFX software to convert colour images to monochrome for many years but with my enthusiasm for this branch of photography rekindled I recently decided to invest in the latest, and much enhanced ,edition of the software, now badged as the DoX collection, to see what I can do with it. 

I've only just installed it so it's early days in my mastering of it but here are three examples I've converted today as I explored its potential. 

The top photo of granddaughter, Poppy, studying for her HSC exams was a neutral conversion in terms of the tone of the photo. The wedding party in Myanmar has warmer tones and the portrait is more silver in tone.

 

My first photo

 

In the past 65 years I have taken tens of thousands of photos. Indeed it may well be hundreds of thousands of photos and many have been discarded over the years but surprisingly I still have the first photo I took when I acquired my first camera in 1960. 

Back then I did a paperound, getting out of bed at an obscene early hour, often in the wet and cold -it was England -to earn money to buy that camera. A paperound involved carrying a heavy bag of newspapers round local streets delivering the right papers to the right houses. In those days there were quite a few different daily papers and weekly magazines and all hell broke loose if I inadvertantly posted the salacious and titillating News of the World through Mr Blunt's letterbox when he and his good lady wife, the rector's sister, were looking forward to some serious reading in the Sunday Times.

The best part of the round was at Xmas when I collected tips. Most householders were generous and for the few scrooges it was soon payback time when, quite inadvertantly, their papers, somehow, were left hanging half out of their letterboxes on a very wet morning. How unfortunate. Instant papier mache.

The camera I purchased with that hard earned cash was a 35mm Halina 35X. It looked somewhat like a Leica rangefinder and it even had a red dot on the front. It said it was made in Hong Kong but it was most likely made in China. The reason for the labelling was that Hong Kong was still a British colony then and so imports from there attracted a lower rate of duty. Clever people these Chinese.

I had wanted to buy an Agfa Sillete or a very nice German camera called an AretteA but both were out of my price range and I had to buy a lightmeter as well as the camera.  So instead, I reluctantly opted for the newly released Halina and to my surprise it was surprisingly good for its time and price. I have read that the lens glass was made by Pilkington in the UK but who knows? Sounds unlikely to me.

I used the Halina for about 4 years and then sold it to a friend and used the proceeds to buy an East German Exa but that's another story. 

 I know it is the first photo because there is some orange light seepage on the edge of the frame. The reason for this is that my parents gave me a present of a cassette of Kodachrome which cost very serious money and I was very anxious to squeeze as many shots as possible onto the film. I could not wait to try the camera and what better location than my home?

The house looks so prim and neat in the photo. 

Below it, through the wonders of Google Streetview, is it as it looks when the Google man drove past in recent times. The house has been extended. The front garden is a parking space. It looks sad. 

 

I am glad I have kept that first photo. When I was in the UK last year I did consider taking a train to Ewell West station to take a look at the house where I spent most of my childhood. I'm now glad I didn't. I would have been very disappointed.

 

"The caravan moves on"