Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, March 2013.
Shame on me, I had never posted a photo of the gorgeous cathedral of Strasbourg (the most beautiful of french cathedrals imho, and I’m not that biased, being born and raised in Lyons, not Strasbourg).
The hard part being, for that shot, to have a lens wide enough to frame and shoot that 142m (466 ft) one towered beast of a gothic beauty. The tallest in the world from 1647 to 1874.
In this case, I used the Super Elmar 21mm which is really one fine piece of gear. Well built, rather small and ultra sharp wide open. Even if its max aperture of 3.4 won’t allow the miracles its Summilux counterpart is capable of.
But the two 21mm wide angles of the Leica roster don’t play in the same league: the Super Elmar costs around 2300€, its bulky and super-expensive sibling costs a whopping +5000€.
Furthermore, the marvels of the MM in high iso perfectly counterbalances the rather modest aperture of 3.4. I shot @ f3.4, iso 4000 (!) with a speed of 1/12 sec and it’s rather sharp, with no grain, me thinks.
Of course, you can always go for the Voigtlander 21mm f4. It’s a great tiny lens for FILM cameras: it vignettes a lot, which is not a problem for me but bothers some, and, above all, it suffers from heavy color shifting when used on the M9. And that’s, in my book, a real issue: I don’t want to be obliged to “Corner fix” - a great plug-in able to fix those kind of problems -every shot.
But on the M Monochrom, is it a viable option? Yes, if you can live with the vignetting and a lot less sharpness. Anyway, I’ll soon kiss my sample goodbye, as I don’t use that focal length enough to keep two 21mm.
George S.Zimbel-Paris,1952.
“A Lot goes into a finished documentary photograph: a very personal view of life,a knowledge of technique,and of course, information.It is the information that grabs the viewer, but it is the photographer’s art that holds them.”
-George S. Zimbel-
Lucien Hervé, Le Corbusier: Façade of the Secretariat Building, Chandigarh, 1961
