This is why I really bought the Sony NEX-5. I’ve had a Leica M6ttl for a few years and have shot some urban street photography projects with it over the years, generally on visits to UK or European cities. The Sigma DP1 often substituted, but I liked the look of film and the rendering of Leica lenses.
Because of their mirrorless designs, the micro 4/3rds and Sony NEX cameras can be used with an adaptor to mount other lens systems, including the Leica M system. They’re manual lenses, so loss of autofocus doesn’t matter. They meter at the aperture set on the lens, but with the sensor and display technology in modern cameras, that doesn’t matter either. One is no longer looking through a dim viewfinder, its an optimized LCD display on the camera’s back.
The Sony NEX-5 has two great advantages for this use. The LCD is bright and high resolution, helping frame and focus. It also detects the use of a legacy lens and provides a focus assist button on the back. Select the option and you get a 7 or 14x magnified view of the center of the image. It works very much like a rangefinder spot on the Leica. Point it at the desired area of focus then recompose. On the NEX-5, pressing the shutter half way snaps the display back to normal.
It works exactly the way I used the M6. Use the rangefinder to set focus or focus range. For most street shooting, I’d be at f/8 to make focus less critical for rapidly changing scenes. If I wanted the isolation of selective focus, it was down to f/2 and some more consideration about where the subject was or would be.
One of the reasons that the M cameras rendered so wonderfully on film was the way the body held the film so precisely flat compared to most SLRs. Loading was more of a pain, but seemed to be worth it. Now with digital sensors,we always have perfectly flat sensors, so some of the M camera body advantages are now no longer relevant. My latest set of tools have largely surpassed the film look. With the high resolution of the D7000 and NEX-5, I get better pixel quality and light sensitivity than any film. VIncent Versace’s Oz techniques with Photoshop lets me pull out any look I want given that I start with the pixel quality.
This morning was my first chance to get outside with the Leica and NEX-5 combination. My widest Leica lens, the 35mm f/2 Summicron becomes a 50mm equivalent crop on the NEX-5 with its 1.5 cropped APS-C sensor. In the street, I like the 50mm equivalent because I often don’t get as close as I’d like to a scene. I’d need to get a 24mm lens to bring back the full 35mm lens point of view. One of the reason’s I went with the Sony over micro 4/3rds is the Sony 1.5X crop compared to the m4/3rds 2X crop. The price and quality of the Metabones adaptor is great.
The light wasn’t anything special this morning, overcast with some haze around. Great for getting long tonality captures and use of some in computer lighting techniques to create a composition.
