Shooting M mount
Sigfrid Lundberg's Stuff 2012-01-18
Figure 1. Some of my current photographic equipment. All of it is Leica M-mount. None of it is from Leitz/Leica.
The Leica brand is so strong that it influences peoples' secret wishes. Many buy cameras that look or work alike. This is the Leica envy. I too suffer from it. Last year I did something about it. Since November last year I've been shooting M mount (See Figure 1). I have no real Leica stuff. I could possibly afford it but then I would have to sacrifice a lot from the other parts in my life to get a marginal improvement of my kit. I've lost all my interest in the rangefinder technology, but I admire the lenses. There are high quality alternatives to Leica glass. I own lenses from Voigtländer, Zeiss and Minolta.
I acquired the Ricoh GXR Mount A12, also known as GXR-M. That body has some advantages. It is M mount, i.e., I can use these lenses without adapter. It is optimized for use together with manual lenses. For instance, Ashwin Rao describes how he is able to do manual focus fast enough for sports photography. That impressed me, and it the factor that settled the issue for me. Focus peaking have become even more important for me since my eye sight has deteriorated since I ordered it.
Figure 2. I can use Nikon F glass as efficiently as Leica M lenses.
It also has really good image quality. Sean Reid was the one who convinced me that anti-aliasing filters are detrimental for image quality. Finally, the user interface is very well thought out. See Luminous Landscape's The field report.
The GXR-M is a true exchangeable lens camera. You mount whatever you have, possibly using an adapter. I have a Nikon F to Leica M adapter (Figure 2). I works nicely, even at infinity for the lenses I've tested.
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My name is Sigfrid Lundberg. The stuff I publish here may, or may not, be of interest for anyone else.
On this site there is material on photography, music, literature and other stuff I enjoy in life. However, most of it is related to my profession as an Internet programmer and software developer within the area of digital libraries. I have been that at the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen (Denmark) and, before that, Lund university library (Sweden).
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