Using Manual Focus Lenses on the Leica T
For several years I have been trying out legacy lenses on a variety of cameras. It’s great to be able to reinstate some of the lovely older lenses. I also have an unhealthy collection of M lenses, and although they mostly get used on my M cameras, it’s good to use them on other cameras as well.
I’ve tried using M lenses on the Sony A7 (quite good) A7r (not so good) Fuji X-T1, Olympus E-M1 and various other cameras. Some cameras produce colour casts with wider angle lenses, especially full frame cameras. None of them include the lens information in the EXIF, which is not quite a show stopper, but is irritating. In the end I had mostly given up on it – too many compromises, and most of the cameras worked better with their native lenses. An interesting experiment, but not that interesting!
When the Leica T came along last autumn and the Leica M-Adapter-T and EVF appeared around Christmas time, I was expecting to be enthused for a short while, and then rapidly run out of enthusiasm. Not so fast!
The first wonder was that the Leica M-Adapter-T saves the EXIF data relating to the lens if it is 6-bit coded. This is great – I like to know what I’ve been shooting with. I’m much too lazy to make a note of it, and not nearly clever enough to work it out from the image. Of course, this does not work if you stack adapters.
Above: Bracken in the morning dew.
FOCUS ASSISTANCE
Very soon after the introduction of mirrorless cameras with electronic viewfinders (EVF), various electronic focus helpers were introduced.
ZOOM TO FOCUS
(The T has this.) Initially this seems like a great idea: point somewhere, zoom in, check the focus, zoom out take picture. This is fine on a tripod, not so useful otherwise, as either you will have moved, or your subject will have, or both. Added to which any idea of the composition of an image you might have has completely gone. With most cameras you can choose where to zoom in. With the Leica T you can only zoom in to the centre spot, making it even more problematic (especially with lenses with a curved focus plane, in which case focus and recompose doesn’t work either).
FOCUS PEAKING
(The T doesn’t have this.) I always thought this was the holy grail and was very adamant that it should be implemented on the M (Typ 240), and it was. It seems like the perfect solution as it shows you areas which are in focus without having to destroy the composition by zooming in and out.
But now I am less convinced. It LOOKS good, but there are issues with it as well. High contrast areas are more likely to show in focus than low contrast areas. Worse than this, it’s almost imperative to focus wide open and then stop down – hardly the modus operandi for catching the “decisive moment.” The final problem is that focus peaking is not always very accurate either. Of course, I’m not suggesting that focus peaking isn’t sometimes useful, but having been a devout advocate I’m now much more equivocal about its use.
So, what’s a guy to do? His new camera has the zoom in, zoom out option (nicely implemented) but no focus peaking!
Explosion, shot wide open at f/0.95 with the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M and Macro-Adapter-M.
Suffolk, UK, shot with the Leica 90mm Macro Elmar-M and Macro-Adapter-M.
THE SOLUTION
Having rather fallen in love with the Leica T, I really did want to use some of my lovely M and R glass on it, but I don’t like magnified focus assistance when I am not using a tripod – and I don’t use a tripod very often.
The only solution seemed to be (shock horror) to focus with the EVF zoomed out. The fact that I really prefer to use the left hand dial on the Leica T for exposure compensation rather made this the only option.
Focusing is practice, I’ve told myself. So I have been practicing and practicing, and it has paid off. I’ve found that I can manually focus accurately with the Leica T and its EVF with all the lenses I’ve tried. Sometimes I get it wrong, but not as much as the AF using the 23mm and the zoom. In fact, for static objects when there’s time to focus, it works really well.
Although the camera has no focus peaking there is a kind of “shimmer” that you can see with most lenses over the area which is properly in focus. It’s not as apparent as the focus peaking in other cameras, but it’s usually more accurate. This discovery has prompted me to turn off focus peaking on my M (Typ 240) – with results usually better than with focus peaking on. Of course, it works over the whole frame – no focus and recompose required.
I recently received the lovely new Leica 90mm Macro-Elmar-M, together with the Macro-Adapter-M from Leica. It’s wonderful fun on the Leica T, and I’ve had pretty much complete success focusing using just the EVF – without the zoom focusing aid. Which leads me to…
THE ULTIMATE TEST
Having got to this point I thought I should try and work out a real test to see whether my instinct was right and that focus assistance was only useful on a tripod. More to the point, that it was possible to use the EVF to focus without zooming in, and without focus peaking.
So, it had to be a wedding – the real test of any camera/photographer partnership.
We had been asked to the wedding of one of our eldest sons’ very best friends. In fact, our son Silas was to be the best man. It was a lovely and informal humanist wedding at a country location, and there was a fine photographer employed to record the event. So I could afford to take the chance on complete failure. Which lens to use? Well, if it was to be a proper challenge, then it need to be a difficult one. The 50mm Noctilux-M was the obvious answer, and as it was a dull day, it was possible to shoot wide open at the maximum aperture of f/0.95. So that was what I did. I shot the whole wedding with the Leica T and the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M wide open (effectively 75mm at f/0.95). I took around 600 images during the day, all of them focused using just the EVF, with exposure compensation on the left dial, so no focus assistance at all.
The Look Look, shot wide open at f/0.95 with the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M.
Norfolk, UK, shot wide open at f/0.95 with the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M.
The Bride, shot at f/2.0 with the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M.
Of course, if I had been responsible for the wedding photos I never would have dreamt of doing it like this, but actually the results are fine, interesting and different. Obviously there are some out of focus shots, but there are always out of focus shots when you shoot at f0.95. There are also lots of good catches, and the album of the wedding has been very well received.
Perhaps more importantly, the camera was a real joy to shoot with in a wedding environment. Nobody was fazed by it. The almost silent shutter meant that you could shoot anytime any-where, and the raised EVF meant that most of your face was visible, which is the best way to engage with your subject.
THE CONCLUSION
The Leica T is a fine camera in its own right, and with its own dedicated lenses. However, the M-Adapter-T is there to be used, and it really does do a fine job, populating the EXIF information and allowing us to use our favourite M lenses.
There is an instinct that we need special tools, such as focusing peaking and magnification to manually focus on an EVF. However, the truth of it is, with a bit of practice, focusing accurately with the Leica T’s high-resolution EVF is relatively simple at any aperture. No crutch is required. Handheld focusing is perfectly straight forward, even in the most difficult circumstances.