Hello, here is Izumi again!

The time before last time I said I was going to tell you of a decision I had made, so here it is.

I have indulged myself and been a bit of a lens otaku (again, you say?) and bought myself a 25mm Leica Summilux lens that is made by Panasonic for my PEN. I can justify myself (if I really need to) with several reasons. One is that it's winter and the light is a lot less now so I need a fast lens for my stalking (I know the 20mm is f/1.7 but the 25mm is f/1.4 so it's a bit longer and a bit faster which can be useful for me). Secondly it's the photographic equivalent of a nice warming bowl of winter stew (I wonder if M Cartier-Bresson also enjoyed a nice cassoulet and glass of red after a wintry day of treading the trottoirs of Paris?) and thirdly it is a bit of a present to myself for selling several prints at my recent exhibition at Artpresso.

And fourthly, speaking of M Cartier-Bresson, it enables me to feel closer to him by viewing and shooting through a lens with Leica written on it.

But enough of reading, it's time for some looking.

First though, I must show you how smart PEN looks wearing the Leica lens.

As I have mentioned recently, it is the middle of winter so my morning walks begin before the sun has risen for the day. Therefore my photographs with the Leica lens must begin likewise. You will have noticed that it can open to f/1.4 which is very handy in these circumstances. Sometimes I feel it is more wide open than my eyes are.

It is talked about that there is something special about Leica lenses and what they can do to photographs so I wonder if there is anything to be seen here.

Now it may be that my reading about the "Leica look" has gone into my brain and that is affecting my eyes, but there does seem to be a certain glow and sharpness to these photographs.

And when I open up some of these photographs in Camera Raw to adjust them I find that there is virtually no change that I want to make before I save them as .tifs to do the final adjustments in Photoshop before they arrive at these pages.

Or is it just the particular lighting and exposure of those photographs agreed so much with the lens and my PEN's sensor? More testing and walking will tell, I think.

I will tell you that I am very pleased to have the lens on my PEN and I am thinking of other places that I can use it, not just pre-dawn darkened streets.

You will see here what I decided upon.

The only slight little niggle is that even though it is a Leica lens there is no place on it to put the red dot.

Now I say an early morning goodbye,

Izumi.