I went shooting with my friend Henry last weekend and he let me borrow his Leica M Type 240. I haven't tried that camera before so thought it would be interesting to try it out and see if I like it. We decided to head to Kichijoji's Harmonica Yokocho. It is a great choice if you are looking for fun place to eat and drink for a night. In the 1940s it was an underground flea market but now a few alleys of unique bars, restaurants and shops. It’s about 20 minutes from Shinjuku by train…

Today's Configuration: Leica M Type 240 Leica 21mm f/1.4 and Noctilux 50mm f/0.95

One thing I liked about the 240 was being able to shoot in LiveView. It is helpful to set up a scene and then wait for the image to appear in the frame. You can do the same thing holding the camera to your eye but this comes off a bit more natural. I was also using an electronic viewfinder. It was helpful to not need to change it all the time for different lenses but found it a little strange that you needs to push a button to activate it and turn it off. I kept forgetting to do that. I'm surprised there isn't a sensor built it to turn it on when you raise it to your eye and turn it off when you lower it. It seems like an oversight.

Harmonica Yokocho is a bunch of little alleys full of small open air bars...

One thing I noticed with the metering on the 240 when I got the images in Lightoom is that most of them were over exposed .5 to 1.5 stops. I'm not sure if it was settings on the camera but they were noticeably overexposed.

Meet Henry... We stopped for a little break and bumped into a buy who was well into his evening already and began to school us on life.

Very enthusiastic....

I saw this guy sitting across the bar and headed over to say 'Hi' and shoot a portrait of him.

As we left our new friend tried to drag us out to karaoke. It was only 6PM and we had a lot of shooting left to so moved on...

We jumped on the train and headed to Shinjuku to check out the camera shops and shoot some more...

I love walking around and shooting in these little alleys... We checked out the camera shops and a cool watch shop.

We bumped into some fellow photographers...

Meet Benjamin... He is a Commercial Photographer living in Tokyo. Just that morning we were mailing about needing to catch up.

And Steve... Ben's brother.

We headed Yakitori Alley to grab a bit to eat.

Henry's friend Mayumi joined us for dinner...

Urban Cowboy...

What do I think of the 240? Hmmm. It was interesting. I enjoyed LiveView. I find my images and the colors of my images much better right out of my M9P. I would like to play more with the camera and explore video which is attractive to me but overall it didn't make me want to run out and buy one. I think my M9P satisfies me for now.

I'm about 80% of the way through what I am calling my 'Digital Cleanse'. I am sorting out my digital life and really getting organized. I want to move everything possible to the Cloud so that I can access as much as possible via the web while on the go...

My Documents: I cleaned up what was a very cluttered 'My Documents' folders and deleted a lot of old data and organized the remaining neatly into folders.

My Contacts: I went through all of my contacts and cleaned up email address and phone numbers. I moved all of my contacts to Google Contacts. I find it so much more flexible than Apple contacts that I was previously using.

Lightroom: I went through 20,000 images and deleted any non-keepers and key worded and organized all of my images with smart collections. I can easily find whatever image I want very easily now. Now that I cleaned up my Lightroom I took the opportunity to migrate to a new smaller portable drive. The newest Western Digital 1TB drives are only $99 USD and very small.

iPhoto: I have more than 16,000 photos in my iPhoto. About 6,000 of them are from my iPhone and the remaining 10,000 are from other cameras before I started using Lightroom. I am going to import those and keyword them into Lightroom. I am going to migrate from iPhoto to Picasa.

Google Drive: I upgraded my Google Drive to 1TB. I can't believe it is only $9.99 a month now. I moved all of the folders left in My Documents to Google Drive so they are available on any computer, my phone and my tablet. I am going to be using it to backup my music and Lightroom library.

I'm sure like many of you my life is digital and it is important to keep it organized. I don't do great when everything is disorganized so it feels good to make so much headway.

I'm continuing to work towards the publishing of my book. I rescanned a few of my images this week to make them better suited for printing. If you haven't yet checked out my ShootTokyo: The Book project on Kickstarter, please do!

Thanks for stopping by today.