Getting a Canon 5DmkII really made me love shooting stills again, something I had not really done much of since my late teens. It’s an amazing camera and with it’s auto focus and amazing low light it’s been a joy to shoot stills with. The one thing though is it does a lot of the hard work for you, it’s hard to take a bad photo! Now that’s good of course and the images I have gotten have been wonderful, best I have ever taken…but I wanted to feel connected to photography like I used to in my teens with my first Pentax… It was not until I used Rick McCallum’s Leica M9 that I suddenly felt a rush of excitement and even a wee bit of nostalgia. There was something about the feel of the camera, the manual controls, the handling and of course the images that made me feel way more connected to shooting stills than I have done with my Canons. It felt like I was taking the photo…sounds strange I know but if you try one you will know what I mean… Rangefinders are so much harder to use, focusing is different, framing is very hard and often obscured by the lens as this is not an SLR, what you see in the viewfinder is not what the lens sees!!

But it’s so rewarding when you get it right… Of course this comes at a price, a crazy expensive price, especially if you want the Leica glass. So for the past 8 months I have been saving up to get myself an M9, 3 Voigtlander lenses and 1 Leica lens. The all Leica glass will come in time when I win the lottery! They are an investment, they hold their value so well. But the Voigtlander lenses are pretty damn good for the money, there is a lot of snobbery out there but honestly I am amazed at the quality, especially the 50mm F1.1 and 35mm F1.2. The 50mm F1.1 is around $900. The Leica F.95 50mm is around $10,000!! Now that lens is in a class of it’s own and I have used it and the bokeh is so buttery it melts in your mouth, but for the cash the F1.1 is stupendously good too, great build quality and sharp and smooth…though if Leica read this and want to help me out I will be VERY grateful!!!! My first M9 from Adorama arrived this week and had a nasty big old crack in the sensor, heartbreaking as I had been waiting ages for this camera. T

hankfully I was able to source a replacement as Adorama had no more in stock, this camera is pretty hard to get hold of… The size, the discreetness of the camera and the ability to shoot at really low shutter speeds without shake due to no mirror has been so much fun, a lot of the shots I took tonight were at around 1/6th to 1/8th of a second! Yes, it’s ludicrously overpriced and it’s certainly not going to make me any money. I am an amateur photographer but a pro cinematographer…My Canons bring in the dough and I love them to bits. But I want to really take my photography sideline to a new level and concentrate on that when I am not filming. This is an investment in learning a new skill and feeling great when it works out! It’s also fulfilling a life long dream… I took the camera out for the first time properly tonight in Palm Springs to get the weekly Thursday night street thingy…I took just one lens the 50mm (I also have the 35mm F1.2, 15m F4.5 and Leica 28mm F2.8 (although that has not arrived yet), I bought a second hand Leica Leitz 90mm off of ebay and that should arrive soon. T

he 15mm is not great on the M9, it’s better on the film ones as it does weird stuff with colours in the bottom left and right of the image as you can see below as it’s too close to the sensor…shame as its super wide and super sharp and damn good price! Chair Covers In Thailand It was damn hard shooting with this, getting focus was hard and framing is tough too but when it worked I felt so rewarded. TJob Lot Hardwood Flooringhere is something SO nice about going out with just a smallish camera and one lens and seeing what you can get. TOutdoor Furniture Market Chicagohe Leica M9 has a full frame 35mm sensor like the 5DmkII a HUGE plus. The M8 had many issues, this is a much better camera If you want to try one out, the only place that rents them is Photo Village in NY, I bought 3 lenses there and a bag. G

reat service and nice people. But to be honest if you have a T2i or any other DSLR that is just great anyway, I know this is out of the budget of a lot of people, it took a lot of saving up for me to realise my Leica dream. The Canons take amazing photos, I am just trying something new and challenging myself…any camera is better than none, after all I take an enormous amount of photos with my iphone 4 and love it so much, especially the instant ability to tweak the images and share, nothing like it! Anyway below is my first few photos taken with the camera in Palm Springs tonight…far from perfect but I enjoyed it and that is what is important, I got real pleasure in taking these photos even though I know I can do a lot better…and I will…this camera will always be with me. My new best friend 😉 You can see my first attempt on flickr or watch the slideshow below… « A simple but very direct way of showing the difference between full frame and crop sensor

EDIT: Photos from SANTA MONICA!!! The great Mid-West meet up in Chicago and one in Santa Monica »My 11-year old and I attended an event held by CoderDojo LA at the Google LA offices this morning.  The CoderDojo movement is a free, non-profit aimed at turning young kids on to programming.  Their target age group is 8-16, and they use the Scratch drag-and-drop programming language (available at scratch.mit.edu) to introduce the kids to general programming concepts.  Most of the kids who attended were in the 8-12 year age range.  This morning’s session featured some activities that got the kids to create brief snippets of Scratch code to perform tasks like animate an object as it moves across the screen or make an object change color when a user presses a key.  The kids were then introduced to an existing program that displayed a picture of a drum set, which animated the various drums and played drum sounds when each drum was clicked.  The kids were invited to make their own modifications to the existing sketch or create their own musical instrument in Scratch instead.

My son and I worked on the structured activities, but we were also very interested in checking out the latest version of Scratch.  Scratch 2.0 was released just a few weeks ago, and has some advanced new features.  It is technically still in beta, and currently it is only available online.  If you want to work offline, you will still have to use Scratch 1.4, though the developers are working on rolling out a downloadable version of Scratch 2.0 this summer. Some of the new features in the 2.0 release include: The last feature was definitely the most interesting to us.  My son wrote a simple program that uses the webcam, and whenever the user “touches” the sprite with a black object (he was waving a black pen in front of the camera), the sprite moves to a new location on screen.  Here is a link to the project he created: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10732001/  Being able to use the webcam to interact with the Scratch programs allows you to create games with Kinect-like interactions.