The week between the Christmas and New Year holiday is generally a quiet one in the downtown Roanoke region. Save a few local residents enjoying the week off, along with a few stragglers already back at work (such as myself), the normally busy streets and alleyways can provide a veritable wealth of stoic charm and tranquility. Read more
Each architectural project presents its own unique set of challenges. Read more
Late night capture of historic Saint Andrews RC Cathedral | Roanoke, Virginia. Read more
Established in 1899, Roanoke Country Club officially opened it’s doors to members in 1908 with a nine hole golf course and two tennis courts. As a welcome haven for local railroad workers and their families, the site was ideally located in the rolling hills just outside of downtown Roanoke near an area known locally as Shaffer’s Crossing. Renowned for it’s massive engine turn-table, this was the only yard in which to turn a locomotive around within hundreds of miles for many years.
Today the club boasts 27 holes of USGA golf as designed by renowned architects A. W. Tillinghast (1919) and Lester George (2002), including 6 outdoor and 5 indoor clay tennis courts (1940), an olympic-sized swimming pool and a newly-renovated clubhouse (2000).
The railroad moved it’s offices south more than 30 years ago, causing many who had built their homes around the grounds to place their properties up for sale or lease and head south to Atlanta with their jobs. Homes of all sizes and distinction surrounding the property today stand as rings in a tree, revealing the historic charm and style of a generation past.
Photos: (upper) rear view of clubhouse and practice green, (lower) Dogwood #9 green; summer 2014. Exposure via Sony a7R + Leica 18mm Super-Elmar M, processing via PhotomatixPro and Adobe Photoshop CC.
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As one of the oldest buildings in downtown Roanoke, Virginia, the Crystal Tower is an historic structure that hearkens to another time. From the garrisoned roof to the hitching-post in the basement, the old Ponce de Leon hotel continues to carry it’s allure of the past.
On a recent photo-walk with my daughter, I wanted to show her the old dirt floor and spring where the horses and masters of old would relax and have a much-needed drink after the tiresome mountain trek into the valley. But these are new days. While the spring and hitch have been preserved, the old dirt floor has been replaced with new construction and the dark, shadowy basement is now bathed in new wall-to-wall light.
On our way out, the mixing warm and cool of incandescent and fluorescent light grabbed our attention so we decided to stop for a few bracketed exposures, resulting in the image above. Oh, it’s nothing I’m sure. But we still had fun trying to come up with a name. Not sure what the strange lights overhead are supposed to be, but we like to (jokingly) refer to it around here as the Crytal Tower UFO…
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This article was originally posted on Photofocus.com.
One of the biggest challenges for those who enjoy making landscape and architectural photographs is to locate and acquire the ideal wide-angle lens for the job. While no amount of gear is a replacement for experience and skill, we invariably learn as we go that certain projects will call for a solution beyond our existing means. Fortunately for photo-kind, powerful in-roads for testing and using specialized gear have surfaced to level the playing field, allowing photographers of all stripes full-access to the best tools and equipment available.
If the idea of shedding pounds from your bag in exchange for a ton of quality resolution is appealing, the Leica 18mm f/3.8 Super-Elmar M aspherical wide-angle prime is in a league of it’s own, especially when attached to the Sony Alpha A7R full-frame mirrorless body.
Here’s a quick look at the overview from the experts at LensRentals.com:
“The Leica 18mm f/3.8 Super-Elmar-M is a relatively compact lens that features one aspherical element, offering high resolving power with wonderful image quality. While the f/3.8 aperture doesn’t allow for extreme low-light shooting, it does provide simple focusing due to its large depth of field. Despite being an 18mm, it has very little optical distortion, making it a great option for architectural and landscape photography. The retrofocus design allows for great corner sharpness at all apertures, as well as a limited amount of color shift. It does have Leica’s 6-bit coding that allows the M9 to correct for vignetting.
Please Note: To best make use of this lens, we suggest the use of an external viewfinder to aid in composing.”
As touched on in a recent article spotlighting the Sony Alpha a7R, combining the resolution and craftsmanship of Leica with the stealth and focusing capabilities of the Alpha full-frame mirrorless lineup is hardly a fair fight for the competition. While an external viewfinder is a necessity for accuracy with rangefinder systems, Sony’s on-board focus-peaking all but eliminates this need entirely.
Being accustomed to using less expensive and bulkier wide-angle lenses myself, I was shocked to see how tiny this lens really is. Weighing in at 11oz, the lens is 2-1/4″ long with about a 2-1/2″ max diameter at the hood. Having the small stature and appearance of a glorified point-and-shoot, I’ve been able to work (with permission) on and off-tripod without issue day or night.
Leica M-designated lenses can be adapted to the Sony A7R’s E-mount via the Sony NEX camera to Leica M Lens adapter, regardless of the desired focal plane. As mentioned in the overview above, this adapter does generate a light-to-moderate vignette in the corners to be mindful of in post. The effect is nominal when wide-open at f/3.8, but does become more pronounced as the lens is stopped down.
As Leica M-series lenses are now thoroughly profiled and embedded in Adobe’s Lens Correction workflow, adjustments for distortion, aberration and any unwanted vignette can be minimized in post by way of Adobe Camera Raw.
The Leica 18 has an aperture range of f/3.8 to f/16 with a fairly steep curve in regard to depth-of-field, allowing the lens to acquire a broad focus as early as f/8. At f/3.8, the lens is plenty shallow for landscape purposes and just open enough to mitigate any undesired flaring. If you need a more shallow solution, you may consider trying the Leica 21mm f/1.4 Summilux-M Aspherical Lens to add even more creative command.
While working with manually-focused prime lenses is a notoriously slower and more precise workflow, I find that by working with a quality prime over a wide-angle zoom can bring a more uniform look to a project overall, and allows for much faster decision-making in regard to framing and composition.
The Alpha 36-megapixel Exmor sensor and Leica’s high-resolution glass combine to create stunning HDR results with a wealth of creative flexibility. Just be aware that stacking 36mp RAW exposure brackets can make short work of a hard drive if you’re used to smaller file sizes.
I have to re-iterate here, as the argument will no doubt arise, that absolutely no amount of gear can replace skill and experience. Whether shooting with a kit lens or a high-end prime, it’s not the equipment. It is always the person behind the machine and how much that person cares about their subject – be it people or places or things. I’ve learned in time that what I might want as far as gear can be a fickle and expensive lesson. But when it’s time to go wide and I need a lens that cares, the Leica 18mm Super-Elmar M is tried and true.
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Flying in with the sun at Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport, Roanoke VA.
