Venice Beach Skatepark

Recently I hit the Venice Beach Skatepark with my Leica M11 and selection of lenses. The goal was to shoot through the sunset, and keep the lenses wide open. If you’re not aware, “wide open” means that the lens is at the point where the most possible amount of glass is exposed. This creates a very shallow depth-of-field, where very little is in focus. The trade-off though, is that the things that are in focus really pop off the image.

Two of my lenses are Summilux lenses, meaning that they shoot down to f/1.4. That’s a lot of glass exposed. My other lenses are a Summicron (f/2), and a Summarit (f/2.4). Shooting wide open is incredibly difficult, and I can admit that most of my shots were misses than hits. I knew it would be this way, so I over-shot to ensure that the odds of a low hit-rate would still give me a handful of images that I could be proud of and excited about.

The following series are some of my favorite from this shoot.