Into the pines with the Leica M9

I had some free time the other day after an appointment and thought it would be nice to swing by a local park to find some photo opportunities. I haven’t been able to get out much lately, pandemic protocols aside, and I really wanted to stretch my legs and have some creative time. Being that it was a cloudy, cold day and around mid-morning on a weekday, I figured there wouldn’t be too many people in the park. I was right. I only saw two cars in the parking areas and had a hard time even finding an actual person. Perfect!

I had my Leica M9 with me, simply because I enjoy using it. The Leica forces me to think differently than when I’m using my Fujifilm X-T3. Being almost winter the wooded areas around here are pretty dull. Just a lot of sticks and twigs, and brown – lots of brown – and I thought the Leica would be a good fit. However, when I arrived at the park I saw an unusually large number of ducks at the reservoir. There are ducks on the water occasionally when I visit the park but I never really see this many. Maybe I’m just there at the wrong times. Now, I’m not a wildlife photographer but I always enjoy the challenge, so I was kind of upset I didn’t bring the Fuji for some telephoto work. Maybe next time.

Since I was armed with only the M9 and my 28, 50, and 90mm M lenses, I had to forget about the ducks and instead headed into the piney woods to shoot some sticks! As in a previous post, I was planning on shooting monochrome images, thinking color would be almost nonexistent. What I found was, though the color wasn’t really there, the tonalities were also not there for any kind of contrast to make impactful monochrome images. I did go back and forth on a couple images during processing and the color eventually won out….again.

All in all, it was nice being practically alone in the woods. Very relaxing and quiet. There wasn’t much of interest to shoot but it was still nice to get behind the rangefinder for a few minutes. I really should have brought my tripod though. The light was a little low among the trees.