biogon test roll, take two.

This past Saturday gave me an opportunity to test out my new Zeiss ZM-Biogon 35/2 lens under much-better-than-overcast conditions.   Lovely, fair, mid-50s, sunny weather, in fact.  Mark and I headed to Bocca Lupo over in Cobble Hill for brunch — the huge windows flooded the room with great light.  The Biogon seems pretty sharp in this light; not nearly as tight as the Summicron, but much better optics than my Nikkor or Super Takumar.  Then again, my SLR lenses and cameras do a much better job of getting up nice and close for food shots, so I suppose there’s always a tradeoff  — SLRs for food, and the Leica for just about everything else, perhaps.   The color contrast with the Biogon at f/2 is pretty great, maybe not as contrast-y as the Summicron, but much more so than a lot of the photos I’d seen on Flickr taken by other Biogon users.  (The Ektar no doubt helps a bit in that regard.)  Do I miss the lack of the fabled Leica glow in the photos?  Maybe a little bit, but not enough to regret buying the Biogon, and certainly not enough to plunk down the $3k for a Summicron of my own. 

On the walk over to brunch, Mark and I stumbled upon a house that neither of us had seen before, not in the daytime anyway.  We decided it was perhaps the best house in the neighborhood; I would almost say in all of Brooklyn, but all of those big Victorian houses in Kensington might take the collective cake.  But a wee house like this, an actual standalone house, in the middle of brownstone Brooklyn, is always a nice surprise, especially one this lovely.