Shooting with the Contax G2 is such a joy. However, looking back at some of these photos, I am so disappointed with how so many of my photos were out of focus. I like my images tack sharp but the focusing of the Contax is atrocious. I guess i never realized this because I never got these photos enlarged or scanned, i just looked at them through contact sheets.
That’s probably the main reason why i stopped shooting with it. I have no confidence with it’s focusing and there are so many photos that would have been great but the sharpness gets to me. You can get super sharp, crisp images if you get focus right but that’s the tricky part. Relying on it’s autofocus system did not give me a lot of confidence. You couldn’t see what was in focus and you had to rely on a meter in the rangefinder to tell you the distance of what’s in focus. The manual focusing isn’t that great either, you had to use a wheel in the front of the camera and use that same focusing meter in the camera. It was so slow. This camera would be perfect if it had a more traditional focusing system of a typical rangefinder.
With all that being said, I had a lot of good memories and fun shooting with this camera. It made me love a rangefinder. Now i have a Mamiya 7II and a Leica m4.
These images were taken in Baguio about 14 years ago. I am sure I have more rolls from this trip, which I will probably get to scanning next week.
