Ah yes, quite right ... Leica.  I remember clearly in the 1970's the awe associated with the name "Leica".  Although Leica was late to designing an SLR film camera when compared to the products offered by the Japanese, having made rangefinder cameras whereby the principle lens only captures the image for the film and the viewfinder is a separate window adjacent to the lens for composing your photograph.  The principle lens was usually a slight wide-angle, say 35mm, so the offset was immaterial.  These old-fashioned rangefinder designs were selling for far more than the state-of-the-art SLR cameras from Japan, which were the most popular cameras.  Contax and Zeiss Icon from (West) Germany did have SLR offerings but at considerably higher coast as well.  The Leica came out with the Leicaflex, a cleanly designed SLR at over $2,000. when the Japanese king was a Nikon F at just over $500.  What a difference in price!   Canon also had an SLR but it was heavy and unpopular.  My Minolta SLR was about $300. and that seemed like a lot of money back in 1968.  I've never used a Leica so I don't know what it feels like, but the reverence for the brand remained for years.  I assuaged my longing for German-made gear by buying a Linhof tripod, which I still have.  While hopelessly out-dated by today's standard of technology, I still love it.  That's another sign of getting old ... loving old gear.

The way that I understand it, Leica and Panasonic have an arrangement, like a collaboration, whereby Leica does not make the lenses but allows Panasonic to make them strictly to Leica standards and they can thereby cash in on the Leica name.  I would really like to know how different lenses of the same configuration compare, including Leica, Leitz, Zeiss, Canon, Nikkor, and third-party lenses by Tamron and Sigma and then graph the results to reveal "bang-for-the-buck".

Full sun, slight breeze, not humid ... just right.  There are still a few warblers around ... mostly females.  Didn't take many photos because of blurred vision from eye meds.  See GTA Reports.


Magnolia warbler


Female Redstart


Red-eyed vireo


Meow


Could be Least flycatcher (eye-ring, narrow convex bill) or it could be a Wood Pewee.  Didn't hear it call.


Yellow-bellied flycatcher  (greenish-yellow below, wide triangular flattened bill, flexed body)


Female American Redstart

Leica it appears nowadays.

If your team decide on getting a rental ... get it right ... go out and rent it yourself.

 When I looked out my window this morning I saw that it was overcast directly above me but that there was a clear swath of sky in the west and therefore approaching. I figured that the blue would invade the zenith within the hour so maybe I should get dressed and head out.  I donned my fatigues despite the lethargy of my personal fatigue and related stiffness, in all the wrong places, but I knew that it would all mellow once in the field.
 
 
 I decided to stay local. The first bird that I spotted was a single Tennessee warbler into the sun.  By the time I positioned myself for a photo it was gone.  Rats! No, no, there weren’t any rats, I was just upset.  I went close to a pond, of sorts, and spooked a Green heron that flew into a tree to mock me.  I switched from silent shutter to noisy fastest shutter-mode just to show my annoyance.  The heron finally decided that I was no threat and flew back down to water level to fish.  A kingfisher flew over my head from behind and landed on a nearby perch and immediately saw me and moved elsewhere and perched again, now too far away for a photo.   Absolutely no tolerance, that bird.  A few minutes later a Pileated woodpecker flew over my head from the other direction.  I got a few frames of the heron both in the tree and on the water.  Even the turtles didn’t mind my presence and you know how timid they can be.