Over the Easter long weekend, I made several attempts to photograph the setting moon at dawn from the clifftop of our vacation property on De Courcy Island. I haven’t developed that roll because I have run out of C41 colour negative developer, so I don’t yet know how the images turned out. However, I suspect that I will be disappointed—and not only because the sole film I had at the time was the lacklustre Fuji 200. As I made the photographs, I found myself lamenting the lack of a longer lens to bring the moon “closer” and to flatten the image. As all film photographers know, eBay is both a blessing and a curse, and no sooner had I returned to Vancouver than I found myself browsing the site for a 135 mm lens as a step up from the 90 mm focal length that I used on the clifftop. My “new” 135 mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R arrived from Japan earlier this week. The cityscapes in this post are among the first of the photographs that I have made with it.
I am pleased with the sharpness, contrast, and linearity of this lens. I am looking forward to using it to make more photographs of the city, particularly at night.
The photographs of False Creek were made from the roof of the parking lot on Lameys Mill Road, while the long views of downtown Vancouver from the east were shot from the bridge over the skytrain tracks on Clark Drive at 6th Avenue, near the cruciform East Van sign.
All of the photographs in this post were exposed on Fomapan 100 black-and-white film (shot at ISO 80) using a Leica R8 mounted with the 135 mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R lens focused to infinity. In all cases the camera was mounted on a tripod. Exposures were made at f/11 and ca. 1/45 s.