I’m off to the other coast for a while—to lead a composition workshop in Maine. Since my last trip to Japan I haven’t traveled much, and have been enjoying serenity and photographing in my garden. But seeing new things and meeting new people is also great fun! Midcoast Maine is stunningly beautiful.

Here are two new recent Dahlia images! They are very different.

The spectacular almost-dinner-plate white bloom (shown immediately below) is the first from a newly planted bulb. The image is pretty straightforward, on black, made with my 50mm f/1.4 Summilux. The flower was large enough to avoid any macro complications.

The other, monochrome image is a macro (below), made using a bellows and focusing rail. The lens was a 5.8cm f/2.0 Helios-44mm – early m39 ZTM lens with 13 aperture blades, s/n 0023609. This is a soviet-era lens that I ordered from a dealer in the Ukraine (write me if you’d like the details, as they seem to be a reliable source for unusual Russian optics).

Fitting it on to my modern M-bayonet involved two adapters: one thin insert to tweak the screw size upwards from 39mm to 44mm, then a screw-to-bayonet adapter.

The lens itself is pretty interesting. Obviously it doesn’t have the sharpness or resolution of a modern Leica lens, but it does give some wild subjective rendering, like this high micro-contrast image captured with my Monochrom M.