Last night, there was an art opening for an exhibition entitled Ghost Chasing Ghost V1 curated by Gary Ross Pastrana at the Final Art File gallery with parallel exhibits from the Bastards of Misrepresentation and Johnny Alcazaren.
Certainly there was plenty going on and with Yori opting to come along I had the opportunity to finally test the Leica DG Summilux f1.4 25mm lens in an event. What follows are some photographs who have not gone through post except for some cropping for better composition and presentation.
The lens at maximum aperture of 1.4 is really set for portraiture and focuses at a shallow field. You can see a small amount of vignetting from its outputs which helps to keep the focus of the viewer at the frame center; It is highly visible in light colored plain backgrounds such as this:
Taking shots of a lot of people isnt really adviseable with this lens as you can see in the next photo; the lens did try to focus on something specific as well which is not ideal.
Even taking a photo with three people had been a challenge which couldve been easily solved if I had used the 14. This next photo was taken about 2 meters away and I was only able to fit in this much:
The next one was taken farther away so as to get the gear on the frame as well, this photo also shows how much a large aperture can really help, I was even asked why I wasnt using a flash to which I just answered that the lens is taking care of it for me.
Here you can see an effective separation between the foreground and the subject/s which includes me in red, shot by Yori:
When using it for portraiture, the camera should be a significant distance from the subject in order to fit the lower body like in this example:
The lens isnt totally useless for shots taken from a distance and the sharpness and detail are maintained as is the case with this next photo:
Here are the artists along with their works for that particular exhibition in order Alvin, Bembol, Rain and Victor:
Curator and wife Gary and Ae Pastrana:
as well as me and my partner
I had once run through an exhibition using the 14 and that is very good for taking in large pieces as well as sprawling ones and great for taking group shots if any were required. While it was quite tempting to change to it while doing this particular run it’s a tradeoff between clarity and range which can simply be compensated by moving away from the subject… if there were available space.
The Summilux is certainly useful for subdued lighting environments such as exhibitions who trade off ambient lighting for accentuation, while it almost doubles the weight of the GF3 it is a very welcome heft.; none of the shots above used flash mind you.
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