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Bringing Vision To Life With The Leica M11 and Noctilux f/1.2 ASPH by John Barbiaux

Gear matters… I don’t mean it matters in the sense that the “best” gear will produce the “best” images, I simply mean that the right gear can be the difference between realizing a creative vision or not. I kissed a lot of frogs so to speak before I landed on the perfect lens/camera combination for me to bring my artistic vision to life and below is the story of how the Leica M11 and the Noctilux f/1.2 ASPH helped me create a body of work that most closely emulated the body of work I had in my minds eye.

Over the past three years I’ve been hammering away on a personal project called Life On Mars, documenting small towns and the American Dream largely following my curiosity and intuition. The title is a bit of a play on the town I live in, Mars, P.A., and capturing seemingly ordinary scenes that, after closer inspection, have a sort of foreign/martian beauty to them. I started this project using a Leica MP and MA using Kodak Portra 800 but quickly found it to be too slow and limiting for the images I envisioned… Eventually switching back to a digital Leica M, the M10P. Further, because of my job and family I was/am only able to shoot in the wee hours of the morning or late into the evening (i.e. low light) which necessitated a fast lens. Using a tripod is possible but draws unwanted attention when shooting in close proximity to folks homes (I’ve had several encounters with Police, all positive, at the behest of concerned citizens even without a tripod), so I wanted to handhold all images and needed a camera with a sensor that could push the boundaries of ISO and a lens that could basically see in the dark.

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