Long week at work. Two days of photography. Two days of post production. Twenty four portraits in multiple locations. Four cameras deep.
I'm always curious about cameras. I try different approaches to shooting with them all the time. I haven't used the Fuji GFX enough, and I'd been neglecting the APS-C format Leica CL for quite a while, shoe-horning everything towards the Leica SL and SL2 cameras. Because I always think of the SLs as work cameras. To get out of that rut I thought I'd mix things up a bit this week.
I had five portraits to shoot in a tiny office at one location on Tuesday. I packed the CL and the M240 and used them as my go to cameras for that job. Three subjects were photographed with the CL coupled with the Sigma 56mm f1.4. The other two images were done with the M240 and the 75mm f1.9 Voigtlander lens. Both cameras worked fine and functioned with flash without issue. I used two Godox V1 flashes, firing into umbrellas and triggered by a Godox Leica trigger. All good.
I have to say that in this instance I preferred the look of the smaller format CL over the M240. The way the 56mm lens rendered detail and out of focus areas seemed "cleaner" to me. Both sets of files were good to go for the client and I could have used either camera interchangeably. Which I guess I actually did....
The next day I made 19 images in 19 different locations around a downtown office that spanned a full floor of a high rise. Some locations varied only by a couple of feet and a few degrees of rotation difference while others were done in far away hallways and various conference rooms. The look for these portrait was predicated on putting the backgrounds out of focus. Working in a very big conference room on the 17th floor of an office building meant having interesting views out the floor to ceiling windows no matter which way I turned. I was interested in balancing the light inside with the bright sunlight outside and it became an interesting game. I'll write at length about that some time...
For the "big office" job I decided to bring three completely different cameras with which to play. I started shooting with the Fuji GFX. The only lens I brought along for that camera was the Pentax FA645 120mm f4.0 Macro lens. An AF lens that only manual focuses on anything other than a Pentax Z645 body. It's a great lens and the out of focus areas I got were wonderfully soft but full of color. The detail in faces and fabrics was astounding. Maybe too much detail for portraits... I ended up shooting in the Superfine Jpeg setting since the raw files are so large and I have a tendency to shoot A LOT OF FRAMES...
The next camera was the Leica SL coupled with the Leica 24-90mmm zoom. This combo is just so competent and straightforward that it's boring. In single area, face detect AF the camera and lens nailed getting sharp focus on the eyes on every subject I pointed them at...every time. And the images were technically perfect. Nice color. Beautiful tones. This combo sucked all the friction right out of the process. The one weak spot? Again, it has mostly to do with file size, being that there's no compressed raw file size option on the SL. Doesn't exist. So each of the DNG files is enormous and that slows down my post production.
For the last half of Wednesday I pulled out the impish Leica CL and then pivoted to the opposite extreme and mounted the almost obscenely over-engineered Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Milvus lens on it. I say, "over-engineered" because the lens outweighs the camera by a factor of at least 3:1 and, bundled with the Nikon to L mount adapter the lens becomes very large. But of all the combinations I shot with on Wednesday I have to say that I had the most fun with this combo. The camera is stripped down to the bare essentials. No confusing array of buttons or features. The EVF is fine. Good really. And in that Leica you can set the camera to give you a compressed DNG file which makes life so much easier on the backend of a shoot.
As I've written a couple of hundred times, the final target for nearly all photography these days is the web. Portraits mostly see duty sitting on websites and occasionally are pressed into service on a printed book cover, a trade magazine byline page or some other un-demanding use. When looking at the images in post I have to say that the smaller format makes the files look cleaner. Maybe a result of not having to work hard compressing down detail and color variations into tiny files. Which can sometimes feel like filling up an eight ounce glass with everything in a gallon jug.
I snacked on a plate of crisp, cold apple slices and a stack of fresh, raw walnut halves as I finished making separate galleries for everyone to use for final image selection. Now I remember how long a week can seem when you book it up to the hilt. Thank goodness there is always time for swimming.
The silver lining; beyond having fun subjects for my endless camera and lens testing, is that all of these days are paid gigs and generate appreciable cash. Cash I'll likely fritter away on something like an SL3. But at least I won't have to grapple with the guilt of having to pull money out of savings to momentarily appreciate a new camera... Maybe that's a good reason to keep accepting jobs. But probably not.
The winner? The CL and the 50mm. Runner up? The Fuji. The camera you should use if you can only use one and you have to get the shot? Oh, no question. That would be the SL. Arrows for Courses.
