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Leica 28mm Summaron-M f/5.6 Lens Review

This little lens is absolute magic.

I’ve owned it for a few days now, and I rarely want to take it off my camera, especially when I’m out on the street and it’s bright outside.

This is the ultimate street photography lens. 

Selfie (taken indoors) with the new limited Leica 28mm Summaron-M f/5.6.

The Perfect Street Photography Lens

• It’s incredibly small (smallest M lens ever made!). 
• It has an absolutely fantastic rendering, very classic look while retaining a modern edge.
• At f/5.6, nearly everything is in focus — perfect for street photography.
• 28mm is a great focal length for street photography.

Sample Images

As you can see, the microcontrast rendering of the 28 Summaron-M lens itself incredibly well to black and white photography, and colors, while muted, can easily be “popped” in post production, with much success.

Things to Note about the 28mm Summaron-M

• This lens’ minumum focus distance is 1m, not 0.7m like most modern Leica glass.
• The focus mechanism does not rotate between 9 o’clock and 6 o’clock like most Leica glass does. This range is used for the standard street distances you’ll be shooting it with — but for closer objects, you have to go all the way to 1 o’clock, which definitely takes some getting used to. 
• Because the lens is so small, it’s easy to accidentally have a finger at the edges of your frame. This just requires some adjustment to the handling vs. standard Leica glass.
• The focus mechanism locks at infinity, and requires a depress of the adjuster to unlock it. This comes very naturally, but takes a little getting used to. 
• Mounting and dismounting the lens is a little difficult, as there’s little to grab on to, other than the focus adjuster. This is why it locks at infinity.

I highly recommend this lens for street photographers. 

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Learn more about the Summaron-M 28 on Amazon.

Pro–Level Camera Recommendations for 2018

I’ve compiled a list, for a coworker, of professional-level cameras I recommend at this point in time, at various budgets.

Things these cameras all have in common, and why I recommend them:

• Image quality vs. compact-ability. A large camera never gets taken anywhere. The only useful camera is the one you have with you.
• Fantastic user experience, simplistic designs, direct control, no unnecessary buttons/dials (the Sony gets a few points knocked off for it’s deep menu system — but once it’s configured, it’s point-and-shoot).

Lower Budget:

• Fuji X100F (https://amzn.to/2xhpS4r) — overall my favorite camera on earth. Optical/electronic viewfinder. Great lens. Simplicity. Pure photography.
• Sony RX100V (https://amzn.to/2KZgowF) — extremely compact, in my bag at all times, has a great pop-up electronic viewfinder.

Higher Budget:

• Leica Q (https://amzn.to/2scKVjs) — fixed lens, absolutely stellar image quality. If you’re looking to make art, but keep it simple, this is the camera to get.
• Leica CL (https://amzn.to/2IOaSjF) — interchangeable lenses, APS-C sensor. Fantastic image quality. Very compact. 

Highest Budget:

• Leica M10 (https://amzn.to/2KZThC8) — this is the ultimate in manual photography experience. You purchase it with your heart, not your mind.

Notes

I’ve owned all of these cameras. If you want to see any sample images from any of these systems, ask away :)

As for cameras that are lowest budget, I don’t really have recommendations, other than going with older models of the X100 series, or picking up used copies of any of the above bodies (recommended). Your iPhone will take better photos than most cameras that cost less than the ones on this list.

Also, of note — all of the lenses attached to these cameras are prime lenses, meaning they are of a fixed focal length, as opposed to zooms. You “zoom with your feet”. This is both a superior photography experience, and is an optically superior design decision.

The Sony camera does zoom, which is useful, but you end up using it zoomed out at 100% about 98% of the time.

​Positive Thoughts on the GitHub Acquisition

I met (and became friends with) the GitHub crew when they were merely 8 employees, hacking away on their newly popular product. I’ve followed the team/product extremely closely over the years, with keen interest, and maintain relationships with some of the founders.

I’m also one of the top users on GitHub (depending on how you measure) — so I feel as though my opinion on this acquisition is worth sharing to the community.

This Will Be Good

Microsoft is a good company, now. They’ve been showing a lot of good–will towards both the developer community and specifically the open source community over the past several years. Their releases of SQL Server for Linux, .NET Core, Linux support on Azure, VSCode, and other projects (like financially supporting Requests!) have done nothing but prove to me that:

1. Microsoft understands that the world wants open source.
2. Microsoft understands the ethos of open source software, and doesn’t want to capitalize upon it by changing it.
3. Microsoft has the best of intentions, and I trust them.

That’s the gist of what I’m getting at here — there’s a vocal part of the developer community that is very concerned about this acquisition, and I think some of them have some valid concerns, namely—

• Microsoft is not known for tailoring good user experiences, unlike GitHub.

Rest assured, GitHub will be a separate functional unit from Microsoft, and will continue to operate as it has been, design-centered and all (shout out to the legacy of @kneath).

Git Community Implications

Because of the number of community members upset about the acquisition, a number of people are looking to host their code/projects elsewhere.

I think this is actually very healthy for the git ecosystem. Git is a bit over-saturated with GitHub usage — it’s a completely decentralized system, and people should be encouraged to run their own infrastructure for it, instead of “just use GitHub”.

So, I’m looking forward to GitHub still being the sane reasonable default, but not today’s reality of “uh, why aren’t you on GitHub?”.

Moving? GitLab vs. Phabricator

Anyone looking at GitLab as a replacement — I heavily recommend looking into running a Phabricator instance instead. It’s utterly fantastic software — Facebook uses it to manage their entire engineering workforce.

I personally run a Phabricator instance over at code.kennethreitz.org that mirrors all of my important repositories. In addition, I use it for higher-level project management.

So — in closing — have no fear & check out Phabricator.

Joining DigitalOcean!

I’m very happy to announce that I’m officially joining the DigitalOcean developer relations team, just in time for PyCon US 2018! I couldn’t be more excited :)

I'll be at the Digital Ocean booth periodically, if you want to come say hi! I'll also have some presence at the PSF booth as well.

Heroku will always hold a special place in my heart and soul. I’ve been working there for 6.5 years, and it’s time for something new :)

Call for Sponsors: Requests 3.0 Development!

Dear friends,

Work on Requests 3.0 is now underway, paving the way for the future of one of the world's most heavily–relied–upon Python modules.

After losing our primary open source maintainer (who was sponsored by a company to work on Requests, and other projects, full–time), we are seeking community financial contributions towards the development of Requests 3.0.

If you (or your company) uses Requests in a professional context, we encourage you to make a contribution towards our efforts to help make the world a better place (for humans™).

Learn More.

If you (or your company) would like to support us, but prefer another method of payment, please don't hesitate to reach out with your requirements. Sponsorship opportunities (with website placement) are also available, upon request. 

Many thanks,
Kenneth Reitz

✨🍰✨

​Pipenv: One Year Later & a Call for Help

Last Friday marked the one year anniversary of my latest project, Pipenv, which is now the officially recommended packaging tool for the Python community from Python.org.

It’s been a lot of hard work — and very humbling to see how warmly (for the most part), the community has embraced the project.

Latest Updates

• The documentation receives about 1,700 views per day.
• Pipenv has been installed 97,791 times this month.
• 57% of the installations are using Python 3.
• The project’s repository has been moved over to the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) organization.
• Nick Coghlan, core CPython developer, has officially joined the team, as a Senior Contributor.

I’m currently working on releasing Pipenvlib, a project which makes it easy to interface with Pipenv projects from Python code.

There’s been no progress on getting Pipfile added to pip proper — this will likely take a while, as bandwidth is extremely constrained on the pip team.

Moving Forward: a Call to Action

The Pipenv project needs help — we have too many incoming issues and reported bugs to be able for our small team to handle.

If you’d like to get involved with the project (and have previous open source experience), we’d love to have you on board. We need more direct contributors to help make this project sustainable.

The project will be fine without any additional contributors — but the level of quality we are striving for requires more development man hours than our team is capable of producing at this time.

So, if you’re qualified and able, please reach out to me, and I’ll set you up ASAP. :)

Many thanks for reading! And, as always, thanks for using my software :)

Sony RX100 Mark 5 Thoughts

I recently did my first photoshoot (nsfw) with the Panasonic GX850, and realized that it was a little bit too entry–level for serious photography. So, I did a little bit of research and ended up picking up the fantastic Sony RX100 Mark 5, an even smaller camera. My first photoshoot (nsfw) with the Sony proved it to be a superior camera for my needs. 

It is a "point and shoot", but it offers a level of control that I'm comfortable shooting with (Auto ISO, Aperture Priority mode), so this classification means nothing to me. It's a camera, in every way as much as the Fuijfilm X100F is. 

I couldn't love this camera more. It's small, compact, has a reasonable lens (which I keep at 24mm most of the time), and a fantastic sensor. Its color reproduction (the aspect the Panasonic was lacking the most) is top–knotch, potentially beating out even my previous Fuijfilm X100F.

It's small enough to easily fit into my pocket, so I always have it with me. Despite reviews to the contrary, I find its battery life to be quite adequate.

The pop–up viewfinder is my favorite feature of the camera — after shooting without a viewfinder for a while, I realized how essential this tool is for the type of work I prefer to do on the daily.

The articulating screen is another big plus — as it allows me to view the screen while having the camera above my head, which is something I often try to do while shooting cityscape photography. It also does the opposite, of course, allowing for me to view the screen while the camera is far below my head, close to the ground. Overall, the screen on this camera is just excellent, especially for the price.  

Conclusion

Overall, I'm thrilled with this purchase, and I highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for something small and pocketable.

Shop Sony RX100M5 on Amazon.

Panasonic GX850 Review

I recently decided to switch cameras (again). This is something I do every few years, out of boredom, mostly, and it always inspires me as a photographer.

I usually end up switching between Leica and Fujifilm cameras, but this time is different — I decided to pick up my first Micro–Four–Thirds camera — the smallest one on the market. One that’s so small, it even lacks a viewfinder.

I opted for the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens, which is the closest thing to my preference of 35mm f/2.0 (on full frame).  

Size Beats All & Inspiration

For me, size is king right now. I want the smallest camera reasonably possible, as I want to carry the body with me everywhere, and every millimeter counts a lot towards the feel of the camera on your body.

I was very happy with the superior quality and size of the Fujifilm x100F, which I highly recommend to anyone — and while this camera is absolutely a step back in terms of image quality, it holds a candle, and, most importantly, it inspires me — something that, after several years, the Fujifilm no longer was doing.

Creative inspiration is the most important quality a camera can have, and I’m finding it in this novelishly–small Panasonic camera.

Overall Impressions

The 3:4 aspect ratio is a serious downside to this sensor size. Luckily, the camera offers 2:3 cropping for JPEGs, and when importing images from JPEG+RAW mode, Lightroom CC (even on the iPad) automatically applies the crop to the RAW image. So, my GX850 is effectively a 2:3 camera, with some extra vertical pixels to play with if I ever need them.

I’m impressed with the image quality, given the size and price of the camera. The camera pales in comparison to the Fujifilm x100F, which was to be expected, especially when it comes to things like getting white balance just right, but overall I’m quite happy with its quirks.

The dynamic range of the resulting images are “good enough” to work with, far from excessive, and is taking some getting used to, for more creative work.

The form factor is worth these tradeoffs, in my opinion. There’s also something comforting/humbling about shooting with what’s considered an “entry level” camera when you’re a professional–level shooter.

Life Without a Viewfinder

So far, life without a viewfinder is quite okay. I was very apprehensive about this, but the portability of the camera (meaning I always have it on me), is easily worth the trade–off of not having a viewfinder. Plus, I have experience with a viewfinder–less system from the Ricoh GR, so I knew what I was getting myself into.

Shooting with a screen has a few unexpected benefits:

• You’re less noticeable on the street.
• People don’t consider you a professional when they do notice you, so they don’t mind you snapping a photo, and mostly ignore you.

Most importantly, the screen articulates 180 degrees upwards, for selfies or shooting 4K video of yourself. This is a very fun aspect of the camera that I don’t expect to use often, but I expect that when I need it, it’ll be considered quite useful.

Final Thoughts

I love this camera. It’s inspiring me to shoot.

That’s something that the fantstic Fujifilm X100F was no longer doing, hence me getting rid of it. I miss it dearly already, but there’s no need to hold on to things that are no longer serving you.

I expect myself to pick up the next iteration of the X100, once it’s released. It’ll likely be time to be re–inspired then :)

Working with iCloud, Macs, & The iPad Pro

While mostly obviously identify as a software engineer publicly, the majority of my time is not spent writing code always.

Because of this, the iPad Pro is my computer of choice for pleasurable computing — creative work, consumption, writing, email, and even getting things done.

Embraced Workflows

I keep everything (Documents, Desktop, repos directory, Sublime Text configuration, etc) in iCloud Drive storage. For those who don't know, the location of this sacred directory is as follows:

cd '~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs'

Which, I always create a symlink to in my home directory:

ln -s '~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs' ~/iCloud

I still use Dropbox for a few things — specifically, my iTunes library, Game ROMs, and recorded video files (which I'm slowly migrating to Photo Library).

Photography

As a photographer, I keep all my edited photos (e.g. published JPEGs) in iCloud Photo Library, carefully organized, and they are automatically synced across all devices. This setup has worked great for me for years.

All "works in progress" are stored in Adobe Lightroom CC, which is accessible from any device, including my Windows PC, and is very pleasurable to work with. On the iPad Pro, moving sliders is lightning fast, with instant response time on the image preview — far faster than it is on any Mac. Syncing is also instant between the Mac and the iPad. I've seen no conflicts thus–far while using the software on multiple machines at the same time either.

It goes without saying, but Lightroom CC works great with the Apple Pencil.

Music

Korg GADGET is my guilty pleasure when it comes to music production. While I can only do "real" music production with Ableton Live on my iMac (which has real analog synthesizers connected to it, as a studio machine, as well as the essential Ableton Push), KORG Gadget provides a very high–quality yet contained music–making experience that works on both the Mac and the iPad (and iPhone!).

Other than the software synth being of upmost quality and design, I find the design of Korg GADGET to be very well thought out — I can make music with a mouse/keyboard (or just an Apple Pencil) with it, unlike with Ableton.

This is for one reason, mainly, and it's something that I hope Ableton introduces in the near future (but I won't get my hopes up)… The Piano Roll in Korg GADGET allows you to hide all notes not within the scale you are currently working with. This makes working with it tremendously more pleasurable for me, and enables me to make great music without putting on my music theory hat too deeply (as I don't have scales memorized, nor their patterns, though I know the emotional landscapes of the various common scales very well).

Even if you use Ableton as your essential workflow suite, I still recommend picking up the Mac version of KORG Gadget, as it makes all the built–in synthesizers/samplers available as VSTs — and they are of extremely high quality and repute.

It goes without saying, but Korg GADGET works great with the Apple Pencil.

Writing

I use an array of applications for writing — if I'm writing a single blog post, I use iA Writer, which is by far my favorite Markdown editor for both MacOS and iOS.

For more intricate writing, I use the excellent Ulysses software, which is great for writing intricate documents and organizing partially–formed ideas.

Both of these software suites sync instantly between MacOS and iOS with iCloud Drive.

Note Taking

I've tried literally every app in the app store for taking notes. Some are better than others. Some fit other people's needs better than others. I won't get into that here — I'll just share what works best for me.

Notability is the best iPad app for hand-written notes. It doesn't transcribe them, it just does a superb job at capturing them smoothly and instantly, has reasonably constraining (in a good way) organizing capabilities, and has excellent excellent support for the Apple Pencil.

There is also a Mac client available, which allows you to access your notes from your MacOS machines. Very nice. Well worth the money.

Coding

This is where things get a little bit tricky… coding on the iPad is quite possible—pleasurable even—but running your code is a different story.

To interact with Git repositories, I utilize the excellent Working Copy app, which supports the new Files app API for exposing your git repos to other applications, such as and editor like…

Textastic. This is the best code editor that I've found for iOS, and I've tried them all. It supports editing files from the new Files API, has great code hilighting, and is the closest thing I've found to a Sublime Text experience for the iPad. It even supports loading your own custom TextMate themes into the app, which is excellent.

A close second is GoCoEdit, which appears to be a relatively new app that doesn't have much awareness around it. I plan to contribute to it's ecosystem, if I have some extra time over the next coming months.

Other Options

I experimented briefly with a Google Pixelbook, and while I found it to be one of the best portable laptop computing experiences I have ever encountered, the software available for the device was heavily lacking — OneNote and Lightroom CC, for example, perform almost infinitely better on the iPad Pro than they do on the Pixelbook. I think this has more to do with the expected quality/market of the Android ecosystem than anything else.