A 24mm Perspective…
Sony 24mm f1.4 GM (left) and Leica 24mm f2.8 Elmarit M (right)
I’ve always been a big fan of 50mm lenses and have often said if I could only shoot one lens this would be it. The problem is, there are times when you need more information captured in the frame and it’s not always possible to get far enough away from the subject to do so.
For this reason, I’ll often use a 40mm or 35mm lens to get a little more information in the frame as a more universal approach.
If I have a second lens in my bag, rather than going telephoto, it’s usually a wide, or even an ultra-wide somewhere between 16 and 24mm. Wide lenses capture spectacular levels of detail and used well, can create a unique perspective and some really interesting images.
A wide lens lends itself well to street photography, a favourite genre of mine. You can capture more context in a given scene around your subject.
This month I’ve been exploring two, high quality, fixed focal length lenses and working out how best they fit with my workflow. I’ve used them almost exclusively for a month or more to really get to know them.
Sony 24mm f1.4 GMaster for my auto-focus Sony Cameras.
Leica 24mm Elmarit M f2.8 for my film and digital M series cameras (manual focus).
Each lens has its own character, but both are super sharp and crisp, contrasty images.
As expected, the Sony produces a decent amount of bokeh (blurred background) when used wide open at f1.4. You don’t often see this character with wide angle lenses as there is always a fairly wide depth of field (amount of the frame in sharp focus).
On the Leica lens, the wide depth of field helps with zone focussing, a useful technique in street photography, where you set a fixed aperture (e.g. f5.6 as shown below) and a distance which is read off the focus scale (e.g. 3m also shown below). Next, lock in a shutter speed for the right exposure and the camera becomes ‘point and shoot’ when you’re subject is focus anywhere between 1.5m and infinity, which is pretty useful. All you have to do is point the camera in broadly the right direction to get an in-focus shot of your street subject.
Leica 24mm showing focus scale, set at 3m & f5.6, you have a range of 1.5m to infinity for zone focussing
Going wide with a 24mm lens (X-PAN style)
Some time ago, I was able to try a Hasselblad X-PAN, a medium format camera giving panoramic crops from 35mm film with an aspect ration of 2.4 x 6.5.
I instantly fell in love with the format but not with an expensive and old camera which there are no spares available for. If anything goes wrong with it, the camera becomes an exotic paperweight.
Modern digital camera with lots of megapixels, will give you plenty of image resolution and the ability to crop for a panoramic view with lots of detail. One thing I like to do is to create wide (panoramic) pictures with a 24mm lens, then crop them X-PAN style at 2.4 x 6.5, or even 1 x 2.1
X-PAN Crop of the M4 motorway (from the passenger seat) - taken with the Sony
X-PAN crop - Isolation on a very wide seat, taken with a Leica M11 Monochrom and 24mm
X-PAN crop - Bristol Harbourside taken with a Leica M11 and 24mm
X-PAN Crop - Millenium Square, Bristol - M11 & 24mm
SS Great Britain - M11 Monochrome & 24mm
Park Street on the Sony
Harbourside Street Photography on the Sony
Leica M11 and 24mm Elmarit M
In the following photos, I used a mixture of zone focus, for the street shots and composed images for the landscapes. Pictures taken out and on my travels shows the amazing quality of this relatively cheap Leica lens. It’s quite old and with no 24mm frame lines on the M cameras for 24mm, I guess it’s not so popular. I’ve had it for a while now, but I picked it up at a very good price.
Leica M11 Monochrom & 24mm Elmarit M
With technically 4 times more resolution and incredible low light performance, the Monochrome cameras are perfectly suited to push any lens to its absolute limit when it comes to resolution. The 24mm Elmarit M might be more than 20 years old but it did not disappoint. The level of detail rendered in the images was nothing short of jaw dropping.
The ability to crop in also makes this an awesome street lens.
