It was champagne all round last night at the official opening of Leica’s impressive new store and gallery in Duke Street, Mayfair. The great and the good of the Leica world were out in force, including Dr Andreas Kaufmann, chairman of the supervisory board and managing director of Leica Camera AG and Karin Rehn-Kaufmann, Leica’s art director who is directly responsible for all Leica Galleries throughout the world.
We are now into the third week of the new Macfilos website and things are running more smoothly than I could have hoped for. We have a few minor back-end problems but all will be sorted out soon. The most obvious one of these is that the Lightbox image magnification is not working, despite being switched on globally. This is something we are investigating and hope to have it fixed soon.
Leica today announces the much-heralded 35mm Apo-Summicron lens for the SL system. Back in October when we were with the LHSA group at Wetzlar, designer Peter Karbe was clearly very enthusiastic about the future product and felt that it could be one of the finest optics ever produced by Leica.
It fills a gap in the SL lens line-up but comes at a time when the L-Mount Alliance is broadening the appeal of the standard. From the outset, the 35mm App-Summicron will complement not just Leica’s own SL but also the two new Panasonics, the S1 and S1R.
The 35mm App-Summicron-SL will be in showrooms in April and will cost £3,900, including VAT, in the UK.
My previous articles on the Paklenica National Park in Croatia, which I visited in the winter of 2015 to 2016, described my travels in the Velika Paklenica river gorge and valley and the east side of the valley.
James Ravilious, photographer son of the neo-romantic artist Eric Ravilious, was featured impressively in the first part of a BBC Countryside episode earlier this month. Ravilious’s work in recording the North Devon countryside has been well recognised and the BBC’s documentary gives a rare insight into the man at work with his beloved Leica.
With the arrival of the L-Mount Alliance and the prospect that a large proportion of Sigma’s existing lens range will become available to SL and CL/TL users, we are looking forward to exciting times. To start the ball rolling, Sigma has just confirmed that 11 Art lenses will be produced in L-mount versions.
Canon’s new EOS RP was initially assumed to be Pro addition to the range, so powerful has the P suffix become in our minds. I’m referring to Leica minds, where a crafty mid-range P (for Professional) invariably sets the juices flowing.
The SLR has been the dominant camera type in photography for the last 70 years. SLRs are more intuitive, easy to focus, and versatile when it comes to mounting lenses of any length. So why does the rangefinder, as a design, persist into the modern era? There is not a single reason why anyone should be using these archaic and fiddly cameras when more advanced and efficient machines exist.
The Ricoh GR is one of the best-kept secrets in the world of photography. Those who use it are almost messianic in their devotion. And here on
More pictures of the forthcoming Leica Q2 have been leaked on the Japanese Nokishita site. Rumours have already suggested that the new body will be weather sealed and that the viewfinder will be upgraded to an organic EL device of 3.68MP. A what? Well, I looked it up here and this is what I discovered:
