Is the Leica 35mm Summilux-M ASPH f/1.4 lens good for landscapes?

This is one of my two, go-to lenses when I shoot landscape photography. It offers amazing edge to edge clarity and micro contrast that’s second to none. Having the option to shoot wide open at f/1.4 also gives you the creative landscape option of adding some fantastic bokeh to some scenes

Yes, it is an expensive lens to invest in but from my perspective, it’s a one-off purchase that will last me a lifetime. Therefore the answer is a big YES, but only if the 35mm angle fits with your style of landscape photography. If I want to show a wider perspective, the second of my go-to lenses is the Leica 21mm Super-Elmar-M ASPH f/3.4 which I will detail in a later blog.

To my great surprise, I was recently reunited with the first digital camera I bought for my business way back in the year 2000. I sold it to one of my clients many years ago for them to shoot some in-house photography when I wasn’t needed. It was rediscovered in a cupboard after it had developed a fault that made it uneconomical to repair due to obsolescence. Needless to say, I was delighted to welcome it back even though it sadly doesn’t work.

As a professional commercial and industrial photographer since leaving Salisbury College of Art in 1986, I shot most of my assignments on medium format film systems by Hasselblad or the Mamiya RZ 6x7’s. I also shot a lot of work using the large Format 5x4 and 10x8 Format film cameras made by Sinar. The only time I would shoot with a 35mm camera would be if the client wanted 35mm transparencies for a slide show with the industry standard Kodak Carousel projectors.

As it with a lot of things I purchase, I usually do a bit of research and due diligence to make it’s right for me in every aspect in terms of cost, build quality and value etc. Therefore, coming from a medium and large format film background, the early professional digital cameras represented poor value for money with poor image quality. For example, the very first Digital SLR, the Kodak DCS 100 from the early 1990’s, which was basically a customised Nikon F3 film camera tethered to a separate hard drive, offered images at 1.3MP at a cost of approximately £15K! Needless to say, I didn’t jump into digital imaging early!

In January 2000, Fujifilm announced the ground breaking FinePix S1 PRO. Finally, there was DSLR that could give me 10x8” image at 300ppi, use Nikon F lenses and cost less than £1800. I bought this, a MacBook and a copy of specialist reprographic software, GF Print Pro, that could increase the file size using a fractel algorithm instead of the poorer quality interpolation enlargement method. I remember testing this and going up to a 24x20” image at 300ppi and was being blown away by the quality. I think the overall investment was approximately £3K.

The key specifications are as follows:

Sensor: Super CCD 23.3 X 15.6mm

Image Size: 3040 x 2016 Pixels

Lens: Nikon F Mount

Shutter Speed: 1/2000thto 30S

ISO: 320 to 1600

Storage: Compact Flash or Smart Media Card (Dual Slot)

Connection: USB

In my next blog, I’ll dig out some of my old S1 Pro images for you to have a look at.