Technical Info
This section os now a bit old. As of june 205, for the last nine months of so I've been shooting with a Pentax istD. I do miss the Leica a lot sometimes, but with practice it is possible to pretend the digital SLR is a good street camera.
As you might have already noticed, I shoot mostly black and white film. I like Kodak Tri-X 400 a lot, but also use Kodak Tmax 100 and 3200, and Fuji Neopan 100 and 1600.
My main camera is the Leica M6, with a Summicron 50mm lens, although I've recently gotten a Pentax *ist D, my first serious digital camera, and am experimenting with it in the street.
My 35mm SLR cameras are Pentax. I own an autofocus body (ZX5N,) but usually favor my older, manual focus MX. It is are solid little precision machin that feels great in your hands and is excellent to walk with. Just looking through one of these viewfinders after using an autofocus camera is enough to love them. Along the same lines, I've been using mostly fixed focal length lenses.
I also use a Canon Canonet rangefinder sometimes. It is a small camera made in the 70's, very silent and with an excellent, fast lens. They are not very hard to get, and if you want a camera with good optics and manual control for under $80, this is the way to go.
Sometimes, I shoot medium format film, either with a couple of Russian Lubitel TLRs, or with a plastic Holga toy camera. I often make experiments, like my one element, one group Pentax SLR lens design, which you can see here.
I scan film using a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 film scanner. I tweak things in Photoshop (although always trying to only do things possible also in a traditional darkroom--don't ask me why) and print with an Epson 1160 inkjet printer using PiezographyBW or MIS archival black and white inks. These inks yield an amazing range of tones, some say superior to traditional prints.
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