five leaves friday.

Took the day off yesterday to give myself an extra long weekend, and met up with Kathryn at Five Leaves in Greenpoint for a very leisurely three martini Reisling lunch.  Always good to catch up with dear Shoobs, and always fun to poke fun at her ongoing love affair with John Adams (the miniseries, not the actual, er, dead president).  We also chatted about Downton Abbey, the British drama now making its stateside appearance on PBS, which prompted me to watch the first episode online this morning, and my goodness, it is awesome.

The place was packed on a Friday afternoon — man, sometimes I wish I was a member of the creative class.

I’m still having some problems with proper exposure on the Leica, despite the fact that it now has the right batteries and was telling me that I was metering properly.  Hmmm.   I’m thinking (hoping?) it might be the film — at B & H last week, I’d asked for Elitechrome 200, which I quite like and have a good feel for, but when I got home, I discovered that they’d given me Ektachrome 200, which I’ve never used before.   Elitechrome seems to be able to take a bit of underexposure; Ektachrome clearly does not.  Had I known, I would’ve asked my photo lab to develop the film pushed one stop, just to compensate for the unevenness of the negatives.   That said, it’s pretty wonderful to be reunited with the Leica again.