Love in the Night

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"Love in the Night" was shot on a Leica SL, using an adapted R-mount lens (the Vario-Elmar-R 1:4/80-200mm).  The Leica SL is a gorgeous camera and I really enjoyed the design ethos that drove its control scheme.  Unfortunately, I no longer own the camera, and I never took the time to take detailed notes on its operation while I had it-- a missed opportunity.  The design of cameras is fascinating to me, as it's one of the few ways in which I believe most modern cameras actually distinguish themselves from one another (as image quality has not been a 'real' issue for most bodies in years).

Composition sketch, showing a left-weighted frame with some leading lines at right

Back to the photo.  I caught this couple late at night while walking home from a favorite coffee shop in Astoria back in 2016.  I cropped this to a 16:9 aspect ratio in an effort to try out some different framing styles, and ended up settling on what I felt provided a more 'cinematic' feel.  Coupled with a muted color palette (both as the result of some editing and some natural desaturation from shooting at ISO 6400) and shallow depth of field (the 80-200mm is a fairly long tele, after all), the overall result feels like it could be a still out of a film.

This is a favorite of mine for a lot of reasons, and it's a good example of the interesting moments that happen every day and are generally lost without record.  I don't say that to wax poetic or to try and cast this as a tragedy; I just find many of these scenes interesting and try to capture them when I can.

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