India with the M9

Returning to work after a few weeks travelling is always a difficult day, more so if you've just spent those weeks in India.  Well known for it's colourful sights, potent odours, and delicious food, India does not disappoint.  It's such an assault on the senses that it can be overwhelming when it comes to photography - where do you start?  We were travelling by car on this occasion so this allowed me to take quite a bit of kit with me.  A D700 with 24-70 f2.8, 70-200 F2.8 VRII and a 24mm PC-E.  I also packed the Leica M9 with the Zeiss 35mm f/2 and Leica Summarit 50mm f/2.5.


Looking through my photos over the weekend, it was apparent that all my kit got used.  There's nothing more annoying than hauling stuff half way around the world just to sit in your bag the whole time.  We spent a few days in Corbett wildlife reserve, so the 70-200mm got plenty of use there.  The rest of the trip was focussed on Rajasthan, with it's many architectural highlights, so the PC-E lense was perfect.  Many people rate this as a specialist lense, but to me it is hugley versatile.  Apart from the obvious correction for architecture, it's great for stitching 3 shot panoramas, and also for pefrect front-to-back focus for landscape shots.  I also occasionally use it as a walkaround lense where space is tight.  The manual focus is a breeze, nothing like the awful focussing rings of the autofocus lenses.  Super smooth and responsive.
I'm posting up a few photos over the next few days, most of which will be on my flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/51617596@N02/)