📷 Leica M10-D + Mandler 35mm F2 "7 elements"

Street Photography in My Hometown, Aarhus 

It’s difficult to reinvent yourself when you’ve taken more than 200,000 photographs within the same geographical area — a Danish city of roughly 300,000 inhabitants. 

And yet, somehow, Aarhus never seems to run out of new photographic opportunities.  

I’m often drawn to the clean lines, the characters on the streets, the colours, the patterns, and the way the cityscape comes together. Street photography is a difficult discipline. It requires you to constantly be on your toes. To use your creativity. To see connections that 
sometimes haven’t even existed until the very moment you find yourself standing in the middle of the scene. 

Above all, you have to stay alert. 

Using the Mandler 35mm f/2 on my Leica M10-D allows me, when stopped down slightly at f/5.6, to zone focus, and not worry about hitting focus with absolute precision. It means I can react much faster — and often capture photographs I simply wouldn’t have gotten with a conventional autofocus system. 

The Mandler is incredibly sharp when stopped down to f/5.6. But open it up to f/2, and it reveals an entirely different character, with a beautiful rendering and wonderfully soft background blur that can work surprisingly well in a variety of street photography situations. 

There’s something deeply satisfying about wandering the familiar streets of Aarhus with the Mandler attached to my Leica. 

And ultimately, that’s what photography is all about for me: 

Having fun. 
Exploring. 

And seeing if I can preserve some unique memories along the way.