It has been a brutal tax season this year, including extensions.  Hopefully Congress and the Senate will not delay the tax law again as it hampers my photography time!

After two months I received my M9-P and Monochrom back with all of my lenses.  The Monochrom was out of adjustment and severely front-focusing.  With the shallow depth of the sensors and the narrow deapth of field of the Summilux lenses, this was a disaster.  Eager I was and went out to shoot as soon as I could pull everything out of the styrofoam peanuts.

Before I go further, I would like to say the folks at Leica in New Jersey are extremely helpful and I have had nothing but professional service from them.  It is always hard to be without camera equipment, but having camera equipment well adjusted is even more important. Leica not only cleaned my sensors, but made sure the sensor plane inside the camera body was perpendicular to the light from the lens.

While I read many articles on the web about adjusting the focusing mechanism on the Leica rangefinders, there is no question now that I would only use Leica to make this adjustment for me.  I had not thought about the sensor plane and there is no way I could have adjusted that on my own.  So, now I have two M bodies with sensors aligned and the rangefinder focusing adjusted properly and lenses that work great between them.

The gallery below is my time shooting some through Main Street in Old Town, Rock Hill where my office is.  I love the early morning time here as the lighting and the building windows produce great reflections.  In fact, my current study is reflection and light.  I am concentrating on windows and street lights, lit of course.  Black and white images are from the Monochrom and color from the M9-P.  Everything was shot wide open, either a 35mm Summilux at f/1.4 or a 75mm Summicron at f/2.0, both ASPH’s.

[Show as slideshow]

The best part is now I am back to the photography series I started earlier this year.  The book on the X-Pro1 from Fujifilm is nearing the first draft completion.  I’ll be formatting this text in Apple’s iBooks for a trial run with that technology.  If that process works well, I’ll try to keep cost down by using electronic delivery through iTunes.

This text on the Fuji X-Pro1 is not another user’s guide.  We’ll be talking about the unique attributes of the X-Pro1 and how to use them to obtain the best technical images.  We’ll talk about sensors, light and what you need to know to understand how an image should look digitally, before pressing the shutter.  We’ll also talk about the lens lineup and some characteristics of the lenses to avoid and to capitalize on.  There is a whole variety of technical information, brought to you in a way that really allows you to understand what is going on in your camera and use it in your every day photography.

This venue is then entrance into some work that will allow me to take my earlier work in Physics and Photography (before realizing tax and audit work was my career calling) and put together a series for both beginners, intermediates and advanced photographers.  Coming from a film background, which I still use, and applying that understanding to digital work has been a life long study.  My goal is to leave you with something you can use and pass on – for there are many much greater photographers than myself.  My strength is the knowledge and application mixed with an eye for creativity.

So, if I’m slow to post, it’s because I’m frantic on the keyboard!  Thanks for staying tuned.