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RF vs. DSLR


MikeMyers

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As much as I love my Leica, I would hate to get by without my Nikon D300 as a companion. For me, there's just no beating the DSLR for anything telephoto. The 85/1.4 is a magificent lens. Maybe it's not on par with the best of Leica glass, but it does everything I want it to for portraits.

On the other hand, I'm more comfortable using the Leica as a stand-alone camera, with a 28 or 35mm lens.

I would hate to be forced to choose just one camera.

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One of the problems with the Leica M, if you require to change focal lenghts, you need to continually change lenses, and with Digital thats a NO-NO unless you enjoy cleaning the sensor.

 

On my last trip to ASIA ( Thailand) I took my Leica M7 and the 35mm asph but in future I will only take the Leica R and 28-90mm and for my Digital shots I will take the Canon G, nicely sits in my shirt pocket.

 

Good luck.

 

Ken.

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The "standing, in a hammock" joke has to do with a man who boasts about always doing things in the most difficult way possible (I'll leave you to guess what he does in the hammock, except that his girlfriend is there too).

 

Yes, you can do a great many unusual things with a Leica - but seldom as easily and flexibly as you can with the right SLR outfit. Close-up food photography is an example: the SLR shows you the exact framing, perspective and relationships between objects in the image, while the RF finder shows approximate framing and - thanks to parallax - a different perspective and relationship between objects. The SLR gives you an approximate preview of DOF (which is of course critical when close-up) and the RF gives you none. The SLR lets you use a tilt/shift lens for better control of DOF and perspective, while the RF doesn't. And so on.

 

I'm not trying to talk down RF cameras. I use my M8 more than any other camera. But it seems silly to pretend that they're more versatile than they really are, or that it's somehow morally or aesthetically better to try to overcome the Leica's limitations than to use the best tool for the job.

 

 

The above expresses how I feel. I do have tilt-shift lenses and so on, but they're all back home, and for me it was simply a choice of taking these "still life" shots with the DSLR or RF. I decided to make life easier for myself and bring the DSLR with me.

 

The only annoying thing is that the "people photos" and street scenes I also take are now being taken with my small Canon pocket camera, rather than the RF.

 

I decided I should only take one camera system with me (the P&S doesn't count) and that became my D2x.

 

 

I'll be leaving Thailand, heading to India next week. Some of the photos I take there are close-ups of people's eyes, showing clearly some kind of injury. I've found that the P&S does this amazingly well. The DSLR should do it even better. I don't think I could do it at all with my M8. The only way to make that possible would be to buy a Visoflex and turn my M8 into a DSLR.

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