New Leica Cameras Announced

Just this month Leica announced three new cameras the S-2, M-9 and the X-1. Here is a video courtesy of B & H Photo of the New York City announcement with Seal and the CEO of Leica cameras.

Interesting Video

DW-TV of Germany put out this interesting story about Leica Camera and I thought that you might be interested in seeing it. The video shows where the company is headed and some of the upper end equipment they offer. The photographs they use and the photographers are all top notch. Sit back and enjoy.

Custom Mode

Today I was out in nature and decided to try the custom mode setting. This would allow me to use the enhanced zoom setting at a higher that the normal 3 meg limit. I would have to say that it was a success as I was able to get some pictures of wild turkeys that while using the normal setting would be to small.
I'm also adding some pictures of the settings setup I used on the camera. Of course there are a few more turkey shots to illustrate the difference between normal mode and custom with telephoto mode.

This first picture is of the mode selector nob in the Custom 1 position.


This shows the menu and the two selections I made: Number one was picture size 10m and number two Digital Zoom On. Which is found on the third menu page. Use the selector toggle to maneuver through the menus.

Turkeys taken without the use of digital zoom.

Turkeys taken with digital zoom.

Digital Zoom used to capture the top of Windy Hill 2+ miles away.

Just had to add this bird captured with the normal zoom. Good luck experimenting with your cameras!

Holiday Weekend

It is labor day weekend so I thought that I would share a few pictures taken today. The first picture highlights depth of field. You may have to click on the picture to see it in a larger mode.
What you see is that the unopened flower in the lower left corner is slightly blurred. As you move up into the picture the unopened flower in the middle right has a soft focus. Now look at the unopened flower in the upper left corner and see a perfectly sharpen image.
This picture was taken with the following settings in Aperture Mode: A:f2.8 / S:100 at focal length 5.1. If you wanted uniform sharpness you would have to raise the aperture settings to a higher number.

In this picture you see a close up of some lovely flowers that have been slightly softened in Adobe Photo Shop Elements. I used the dry bush filter and the effect is lovely and in keeping with the filtered light.

This picture is of a large tree blossom and a bee looking for a meal. Again I used Adobe Photo Shop Elements to process the image. I adjusted the contrast to highlight the subtle color changes is the leaves.
I hope that you all have a nice holiday and take a lot of pictures!

Video Mode Demo

In this installment I'm sharing a video that I put together just to demonstrate the video quality available to you with the Leica D-Lux 4.
The first clip was shot in 640 x 480 in filtered light with unaltered sound and video. The sound from the carousel ride is clear the picture is clear and the colors true.
Clip number two was taken in 1280 x 720 HD 16 x 9, you will note that you can hear the wind and audio was added for effect. No video enhancements, note the clarity of this clip and richness of the colors.
Clip number three was shot indoors and the light source was from ambient light coming through the windows. The video is sharp, true to color and the sound coming from the television is clear. No enhancements were done to this clip.

from Ted Goth on Vimeo.

My over all impression is that for a small compact camera the Leica succeeds in providing good quality video ranging from QVGA - WVGA - VGA and HD. It is not a replacement for a good high definition video camera but it certainly works well for impromptu videos and times you don't want to deal with a larger HD video camera. Note the picture in this post was also taken with the Leica set at ISO 80, speed 400 and aperture f3.5.

More Eye-Fi

Today I'm going to talk to you a little about how the Eye-Fi Geo integrates with iPhoto and share some tricks to speed up the process. First I want to mention the settings portion of the Eye-Fi Manager, getting this right the first time will help make the geo-tagging experience painless. If you need to see the accompanying pictures larger just click on the image.

This first picture is of the Eye-Fi settings menu be sure to chose iPhoto from the photo destinations menu or Eye-Fi will place your photo's in a separate folder instead of automatically importing them into iPhoto. Now go to the GeoTagging selection and turn geo-tagging on. I found that this takes a while before it initializes and turns on the tagging on your card. Once on it works well every time.

After you have successfully uploaded your photo's you will be able to go to the Eye-Fi Manager anytime and see photo's that you have uploaded and if they have geo tagging information associated with them. The manager saves thumbnails of your pictures and makes for fast reviewing.

iPhoto hints begin here by using the shift - apple command combo you can select a number of out of order pictures to work with. Just hold down the shift key and apple command key while selecting the pictures you want to work with your mouse. The reason i mention this is that several of the pictures may have been taken in the same location and you can map them all at the same time instead of one at a time.


As above you can all so select pictures in a contiguous manner by selecting the first photo and then holding down the shift key while clicking on the last picture you want to select. Now right mouse click on Get-Info from the menu - you can also use the drop down menu by clicking on photo and choosing Get-info this will bring up the next picture.

Mouse click on photo-place and choose map-it. This will then bring up a map like the one below for all of your selected pictures. I also take advantage of adding a generic description to the description box at this time. Just click on description and add in something that is common to all the pictures that you have selected. You will have now tagged all of the selected pictures with the proper information.

Now anytime you choose you can see exactly where your photograph was taken. I hope this helps you decide if geo-tagging is something worthwhile for you........

Geo-Tag

This post will cover my first experiences with the Eye-Fi geo-tagging feature and its integration with Apples iPhoto software. In my last post I described the installation and how the wi-fi feature worked. Now its onto why I purchased this product the ability to tag my pictures with the location they were taken at. I'm including several screen shots of the info as it is displayed in iPhoto. (Please click on the photos to see them full size.)
What I noticed when taking pictures with the geo tagging turned on was it took longer for the memory card to store all the information. I had to remember that the cameras buffer would fill much faster than I was used to. This may be a inconvenience if you are taking shots in burst mode. Having said that the rest of the picture taking process was uneventful.
After uploading the pictures I found as promised the location info was there. You can see in the extended photo data that the latitude and longitude are automatically captured. (Hint one thing to remember before uploading your pictures open the eye-fi manager software and have it connected to the internet to process the geo-tagging information.)
In iPhoto you will have to select each picture individually and the get info menu to map your picture. Once you click on the map it button the map should show up as shown below.
You can add a photo description as I have in this example. What I did next was to select the arrow button in the lower left corner of the picture to go to the next photo. This makes mapping the pictures go faster. You now can upload these pictures to any website that supports geo-tagging and you are done.