Ribfest Street Photography

Ottawa, for photography (of any kind), is a great place: it's the country's capital, and so is filled with culture in the form museums, tours of various kinds and events and festivals of every kind.  For example, the weekend that just passed saw the Busker Festival, most of which I unfortunately missed.  There's always next year.  There are also great landscapes (say, Gatineau Park) not too far from downtown.  Music festivals abound, as well, with everything from Escapade to Bluesfest to the Chamber Music Festival.

One of these such events is Ribfest, which generally happens in mid-ish June.  (This year, if you care, from the 18th to the 22nd.)  Being a big fan of Digital Rev and Eric Kim, and admiring the videos of Street Hunters, I decided to do my own walk-around video.  I was a bit nervous shooting this, but once I started shooting, my video shooting didn't seem to matter too much; people didn't seem to notice or care I was using two cameras at once and I was more preoccupied with shooting photos than worrying about my video.  I basically walked down Sparks from beginning to end and back, snapping things I found interesting.  Beware: lots of ribs in this video.

I gloss over a few things in the introduction of the video and I'll quickly go over these now.  The video was shot with my Canon S100, which I was holding in my left hand and I was shooting with my Leica M in my right.  I shot all the photos with a Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 lens (bought from Digital Rev, incidentally).  The two main reasons for the lens choice are twofold: one, leading up to Ribfest, it just seemed like the best choice of the three lenses I own to get the mood and look I wanted to capture; and two, because I was shooting with one hand, I couldn't futz around with focusing, and at 15mm at f/5.6 or smaller aperture, pretty much everything was in focus.

Another thing about this lens, as Ken Rockwell points out, is it's not ideal on a digital sensor, as there's a lot of funny colours on the edges of the shots.  This is absolutely true.  I don't mind the purples on the edges, as I think it frames the shots nicely, and because everything was shot on the same lens, all the shots have somewhat uniform look.

I had a lot of fun doing this thing and when I find a friend, or if I can convince my cat to hold my S100, I may use my 50mm lens in a later endeavour. Let me know if I can improve on anything in the video, or if you even like this video.  It's long at over half an hour, but I like this type of video, and so I hope you like my contribution.

Dreams

This year marks Leica's 165th anniversary, and the 60th anniversary of the M system. Leica gas also been my dream camera since I've known photography in any capacity. To celebrate these milestones, I decided to buy a Leica. (Well, that's not really why, but I'll go with that because it makes me seem more debonair and sophisticated than I really am.)

Without getting into too many details, I was lucky enough to purchase my dream camera and lens back in April of this year: the Leica M (Type 240), with the Noctilux 50mm f/0.95.  I am in no way able to afford this on my salary, and I may go into details on how this purchase was funded later on, but for now, just the fact that I have this camera should be enough.

I may do a review of it later on, but because there are enough good reviews from other people already, I don't know if I have anything else to add.  I may do a mini-review later, then - something simple to start off another post.  Suffice to say that I am incredibly happy with this toy and if you have the opportunity to play with one, jump on the chance.  It was a massive gamble on whether I'd actually like it or not (given I had never played with a rangefinder before), but I have zero regrets about the purchase.

In any case, one thing I didn't see is an unboxing video of this camera.  So, the point of this short post, is to put up my unboxing video.  It's short and awkward, and I had a beard back then.  However, you get to see exactly what's in the box.  I have a video of the Noctilux somewhere in my hard drives, so once I find it an upload it, I will probably post a link of that, as well.

For now, enjoy this video!