I spend a lot of time on trains and in train stations. This is one shot that even I am very pleased with.

I have been productive, but not so much in writing, here on the blog.

For some reason that I really can’t explain, and I really don’t care enough to try and figure out, I have been attracted by older, uncoated lenses, Elmars.

This week’s PAW was with one:

That one was something of a torture test, lamp over a table, low light and a slow lens. It was taken wide-open.There is another one of Ewa that I like a lot, taken outdoors:

In fact, the whole shoebox from this week is with the same uncoated Elmar.

It’s the compactness and simplicity that attracts me, I think. I just enjoy making nice pictures with them.

Tom Fenwick, a quiet member of Leica and Rollei mailing lists, sent me a combination lens hood for two older lenses I have, the 5cm and 9cm Elmars from Leica. True to Leitz tradition, it has a silly name: FIKUS. It is like a telescopic tube. In its shortest form, it is a shade for the 50 mm lens and in its longest form, for the 135. Inbetween you can adjust it for a 90mm.I usually have trouble getting contrast out of these old lenses. They are not coated so black and white likes to “wash out” readily. The hood helps

That one was taken at 1/15 of a second, wide-open. There is good separation in the darker tones, so the contrast was not created by just boosting it in Photoshop.The 90 Elmar worked better as well. I really wish I could get a good portrait of Ewa, my wife. One of these days …

I liked that one, but the finder I am using with the lens is not very good (it’s a Helios (Japanese) finder with framelines for 35/85 and 135, but it is closer to 40 and 90. But not quite, and when I use it for a 90, I have trouble getting a good composition in the frame.The picture of Ewa was taken with an old black barrel 9cm Elmar. I took it apart to clean up most of the fungus that had started to etch itself onto an internal lens. I picked it up cheap.All film this week was Fomapan 400 developed in Xtol 1:2. The first roll was developed for 14 minutes and the second roll for 13 minutes. I can’t really compare though because the first roll was metered using a Nikon F3 and the second roll was metered using a Gossen Digiflash.

The results can be seen in the shoebox for the week.

The last two weeks have left me run ragged, but I am finally home again and can post a PAW. It hasn’t been only work. Last week-end some LUGers from the Benelux area and I met up in Brussels.

A LUGer is a member of the LUG (Leica Users Group).

But first I was in Oslo. Visits to Oslo have been less and less frequent, and I feel better and better about it.

So I am not hang my hat there very often and calling it home any more:

But the trip Brussels was nice, very nice. There are some shots from the visit at my shoebox for these weeks.

For a week 6 main I chose:

While I was walking around, I came across a group of young girls at the market place looking for people with blue eyes. Now that all the LUGers who could really speak French were gone, I dared to carry on a conversation in French and explained that I might not fit the criteria; someone might say my eyes are green.

They fetched their leader (teacher). She approved of my eyes and the teacher took a picture of them with me as proof. In this shot, we are in the middle of discussions about what color my eyes are:

All of those were taken with a IIIf. The IIIf is an older Leica camera. I like it because it is small and is easy to have along.

The lens in the first one was a Jupiter-12, a Zeiss Biogon copy from the former Soviet Union (FSU), and the other two were taken with a Voigtländer Color-Skopar 21mm.