Author Archives: Leicaphila

Beware of Men With Guns Selling Black Paint M3’s

Another “Black Paint” M3, # 1095310, has shown up on Ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/191513054364…%3AMEBIDX%3AIT, offered by a seller who goes under the nom de plume “blkconcepts”. (If you click through to his feedback profile you’ll note his avatar is a hand holding a handgun in a slightly menacing manner.)

The seller claims its a legit factory painted Black M3, citing the serial number:

Camera is shown to made in Black in correct serial bracket ….. see photo that I included & this website for your proof that this is authentic …. l-camera-forum.com/leica-wiki.en/index.php/M3

According to the wiki, the batch is both black and chrome; 1093801-1097700** Leica M3 (Schwz Lackiert+chrom-ss). An enterprising capitalist could easily find a chrome M3 from that batch and repaint it black. Voila, an “official” black paint M3.

Is this one legit? It may be. Who knows. But the seller’s provenance doesn’t instill confidence. Looking at his feedback, you’ll see he’s been accused of selling fake Leica stuff before, in particular batches of M3 boxes that he apparently has knocked off himself. And burrowing down through his Ebay history, you’ll find this transaction, which takes on an ominous perspective for the present auction:

Item returned 4***2 ( 5291*) During past year
LEITZ, LEICA M3 – BLACK PAINT CAMERA BODY, RECENT PAINT, OVERHAUL & CLA! (#191089777670) US $932.00

This particular camera does betray signs of being a fake. The black rings around the two flash output sockets on the back of the camera are black. On authentic black paint M3 bodies those are chrome. The white lettering on this particular camera seems remarkably nice, and the brassing looks contrived.

However, there could be an explanation that doesn’t involve deceit. As Tom Abrahamsson, he of the Abrahamsson Rapid Winder, notes, back in the day there were a lot of black M3 top plates floating around outside the official control of Leitz Wetzlar. Leitz would transform your chrome camera into a black camera for a fee. Dealers and importers had orders and none in stock – so Leica would fill the void by sending the dealer black paint top and bottom plates. Bigger Leica importers had their own engraving machines with correct numbers. They removed the top plate, engraved the number of the chrome one on the black top – and then “destroyed” the chrome one. It wasn’t that expensive either – somewhere around $ 100 at the time. There are also numerous factory “non black paint list” bodies that were special orders. These do not show on the “official” lists – only in the shipping documents.

So, who knows, maybe some dude who loves guns and operates a sideline business of forging Leica M3 boxes to sell in units of 10 on Ebay somehow got himself a nice Black Paint M3, all legit. And the guy who bought this one on Ebay for $3100 got himself an authentic black paint M3.

Leica Celebrates The Man Responsible For The Rise of Nikon

On November 28, 2014, 98 year-old David Douglas Duncan spent the evening regaling guests at the Leitz Park Wetzlar with accounts of his fascinating life as a photographer. Wine was imbibed, anecdotes exchanged. A wonderful time was had by all, according to all extant accounts. His visit marked the introduction of a new exclusive Leica M special edition: the M3D ‘David Douglas Duncan’, the aim to honor the former Life photographer as one of a distinguished group of Leica photographers well as to celebrate 60 Years of M Photography.

The special edition Leica M3D is limited to 16 units. It is an exact replica of the four M3D’s Leitz created for Duncan in 1959. The original M3D was an M3 designed to use a Leicavit winder. The original M3D became the basis for the Leica MP, which Leitz manufactured in small production runs from 1956, and was specifically aimed at professional photojournalists.

During his career as a Life photographer, Duncan became closely associated with Leica – to the point that they manufactured the original M3D for him. Ironically, Duncan, who used a IIIc throughout his coverage of the Korean War, mounted Nikkor lenses on his Leica, most notably a Nikkor-S.C. 50mm 1.5. Duncan had been introduced to the Nikkor optics on a visit to Tokyo in 1950. His use of the then little-known Japanese optics helped set in motion the wider acceptance of Nikon products and Nikon’s rise to prominence in the 1960’s in conjunction with the slow transformation of the Leica M from a pro’s working tool to what is now a luxury boutique item.

David Douglas Duncan’s Leica IIIc with Nikkor-S.C. 5cm 1.5

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In 1950 Duncan visited Japan to take pictures of traditional Japanese arts. While there his assistant, a young Japanese photographer working as a Life stringer, Mr. Jun Miki, took his photograph with an 85mm f2 Nikkor on a Leica IIIf. This candid shot of Duncan by Miki turned out to be one of the most important photographs in the history of Nikon and Japanese camera makers. Shown the enlarged 8 x 10 photograph, Duncan was astonished at the sharpness and the image quality of the Nikkor and sought to meet with its manufacturer. A meeting was arranged between Duncan and Life photographer Horace Bristol, with the president of Nippon Kogaku, Dr. Masao Nagaoka. After Nagaoka loaned various Nikkors to Duncan and Bristol for testing, both ended up replacing their personal lenses with Nikkors.

Shortly after, The Korean War commenced, and Duncan shot his iconic war reportage with a Leica…and Nikkors. Duncan used two Leica IIIc, both fitted with Tewe Polyfocus finders and the Nikkor 5cm. The effect was immediate. Life cabled Duncan after receiving his first Korean photographs, quizzically inquiring, “Why are you using a plate camera???” The difference the Nikkors produced was easily seen. The slightly higher contrast range of the Nikkors translated better for newsprint output than the lower contrast of the Leitz optics, yielding better prints for newsprint’s resolution of around 80/120 lines. Within weeks every Life staff photographer passing through Tokyo had bought a set of Nikkor lenses.

Carl Mydans and Hank Walker, two photojournalists covering the Korean War, also purchased Nikkors on Duncan’s advice. Walker also purchased a Nikon S body. The Korean War took place during a bitter Korean winter, with temperatures routinely below -30 C. While many cameras froze and wouldn’t work, Walker’s new Nikon S worked perfectly throughout and produced the photographs that won the U.S. Camera Prize in 1950. Mydans’ photographs, also using Nikkor optics, subsequently won the prize as well. On December 10th, 1950 the New York Times featured a full article on the emergence of Nikon’s use in the ranks of professional photojournalists, and Popular Photography soon followed with articles of its own.

Gradually more Korean War era photojournalists shifted to Nikkors, with some using Nikon S bodies in preference to the Leica. Nikon capitalized on its professional popularity by establishing repair support and cleaning services for those with the assignments in Korea, benefiting from the input of those using the Nikon S and lenses in the harsh Korean environment. Not many companies have the luxury of such extensive in-field testing, and Nikon ultimately used these experiences to develop the iconic Nikon F.

Nikon has always been a curious mix of tradition and innovation. Unlike Leitz, they early on recognized the future potential of SLR cameras. Based partly on input from photographers like Duncan using their cameras in the Korean War, Nikon realized that SLR cameras provided advantages not available with rangefinder cameras. In 1955 Nikon launched a program for the development of SLR cameras in conjunction with the development of SP and S3 as the successors to Nikon S2 (1954). Nikon adopted the same body mechanism as in the SP/S3 to produce the F, employing the layout and geometry of the shutter button, film wind-up lever and other components except for the viewfinder and other parts essential for SLR cameras, with the intent to produce the Nikon F in parallel production with SP and the S3. The rest, as they say, is history.

Beware the Digital Dark Age

“Even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is” Vint Cerf, Google Vice-President, February 2015

Vint Cerf, Google VP, is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be irretrievable and future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century. According to Cerf, we are entering a “digital Dark Age” which will occur as hardware and software become obsolete. Our most pressing concern, right now, should be to resolve the problem before we are in so deep we inadvertently eradicate our own history.

Momentos of our lives increasingly exist not as tangible artifacts but as bits of information on hard drives or in ‘the cloud.’ As technology advances and the software and hardware that mediates this information changes, our information – the proof of our lives and the content of culture – risks being lost in the wake of accelerating digital transformation.

Speaking at a conference in San Jose, California, Mr Cerf likened the problem to the Dark Ages, following the collapse of the Roman Empire. “If we don’t find a solution our 21st Century will be an information black hole. Future generations will wonder about us but they will have very great difficulty knowing about us. We think about digitizing things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse than, the artifacts that we digitized.”

“We stand to lose a lot of our history. If you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives which is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, all of the world wide web, then if you wanted to see what was on the web in 1994 you’d have trouble doing that. A lot of the stuff disappears.”

“We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them the same way we preserve books and so on we need to make sure that the digital objects we create will be rendered far into the future.”

Mr Cerf told the BBC he worries often about the blind spot we seem to have concerning the permanence of things digital. “Old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed. And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is.”

So how can we guarantee that personal and human history is transmissible long term? According to Cerf, the solution is digital as well, which is somewhat disconcerting to say the least. “The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future…Imagine that it is the year 3000 and you’ve done a Google search. The X-ray snapshot we are trying to capture should be transportable from one place to another. So, I should be able to move it from the Google cloud to some other cloud, or move it into a machine I have. The key here is when you move those bits from one place to another, that you still know how to unpack them to correctly interpret the different parts. That is all achievable if we standardize the descriptions. And that’s the key issue here – how do I ensure in the distant future that the standards are still known, and I can still interpret this carefully constructed X-ray snapshot? (italics added) It’s not without its rough edges but the major concept has been shown to work,” Mr Cerf said.

Of course, a digital solution to a digital problem suffers from the same drawbacks as the problem it seeks to address, which seems to be lost even on Cerf. In our privatized hyper-capitalist world, where governments shy from even the most basic cultural mandates, private interests would have to provide the service, and even the most robust private companies have limited life spans. Do we really want to delegate our cultural memory to Google or Apple or Microsoft? IBM, anyone?

Needless to say, skepticism is essential. Addressing digital conundrums with digital solutions shows a tunnel vision too often associated with technological advocacy. The loss of the tangible, the real, is a frightening prospect that simply isn’t being addressed at present. Still in the honeymoon phase of digital reality, we as a culture are content to remain blindly and willfully ignorant of the problem. The stakes, however, are enormous, as we are speaking about the very basis of human culture, which is dependent upon the uninterrupted transmission and permanence of accumulated cultural and personal artifacts and experience. I’ve recently written about the same problem being addressed by the film industry. And this is why tangible media like paper and film are essential and will always remain so. To admit so is not Luddism, but a real progressiveness based upon a skeptical stance to the ultimate benefits of computer technology. when the alarm is raised we should listen.

Even Cerf ultimately gets that. His suggestion for archiving things you want to save: Print them out and save a tangible copy to avoid losing them through outdated operating systems.

“We have various formats for digital photographs and movies and those formats need software to correctly render those objects. Sometimes the standards we use to produce those objects fade away and are replaced by other alternatives and then software that is supposed to render images can’t render older formats, so the images are no longer visible. This is starting to happen to people who are saving a lot of their digital photographs because they are just files of bits. The file system doesn’t know how to interpret them, you need software to do that. Now you’ve lost the photograph in effect.”

“If there are pictures that you really really care about then creating a physical instance is probably a good idea. Print them out, literally.’

Leica To Offer Faux Brassed Leica M

According to LeicaRumors.com, Leica will announce a new M240 camera made from raw/coated brass, already brassed straight from the factory for your fondling convenience.

The new Leica M-P (Typ 240) “Lenny Kravitz” version will come in a kit with two different lenses: a pre-brassed 35/2 ASPH and 50/1.4 ASPH (black paint E43). Only 120 pieces will be produced.

Why anyone other than friends and family of “Lenny Kravitz” would buy one is a complete mystery.

The Elephant In The Digital Dark Room

“Six major Hollywood film studios have gotten together to help Kodak remain in the movie business. Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. have all signed deals on advance purchases of Kodak’s film stock, which will help keep the company’s production plants operational. Kodak is the last company to make motion picture film, which some filmmakers prefer for aesthetic reasons.“We were very close to the difficult decision of having to stop manufacturing film,” said Jeff Clarke, Kodak’s chief executive, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Now with the cooperation of major studios and filmmakers, we’ll be able to keep it going.”” TIME, Feb 5, 2015

The qoute above is deceptive. It presumes that the ongoing demand for film is a result of certain filmmaker’s “aesthetic preferences.” And it is, as far as that goes. But that’s not the whole story about why the motion picture studios want to “save” film production. It’s not even the main reason. The main reason will surprise you, but, like the proverbial elephant in the room, nobody is talking about it.

In the “analogue age,” a movie studio would bundle up a completed master of a motion picture and ship it off for physical storage somewhere cold. Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. have for decades been archiving and storing their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material in salt and limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

It’s an inexpensive archiving system, a highly effective means of preserving the motion picture heritage. Archived 35mm film stock remains stable for centuries under proper climactic conditions. With digital, however, the film industry is discovering that its core assets, its digital motion picture masters, aren’t as permanent as the film stock they’ve replaced. It’s a BIG problem, but studios, in their shortsighted quest for the bottom line, at least until recently, haven’t really been paying much attention.

And there’s an object lesson here for photographers, or at least those paying attention.

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Hasn’t digital made information of all kinds more available, and less expensive to produce? Isn’t it so much cheaper to shoot digitally, without the need for the expense and bother of film and the ridiculous analogue processes that sustain it? Well, it does, and it is, but unfortunately at the expense of the media’s permanence.

In 2010 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business titled “The Digital Dilemma.” Their findings: To store a digital movie master costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. And to keep the enormous amount of ancillary data – outtakes, alternative scenes, assorted ephemera – produced when a picture is produced using digital processes, rather than on film — increases the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, exponentially higher than the $486 it costs to dump the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the Kansas salt mine. A film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report claimed that the problems with digital movie storage could cause the film industry a return “ to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away,” what he referred to as “digital extinction” over a short span of years.

At present, copies of almost all studio movies, even those shot using digital processes, are still stored in 35mm film format, giving the movie 100 years or more of shelf life. Most modern motion pictures are edited digitally, and then are transferred to film, which results in images of lower quality than a pure film process, and this is what becomes stored for posterity. But the ongoing conversion of theaters to digital projection is sharply reducing the overall demand for film, eventually making it a problematic market for Kodak. If film were to go away, pure digital storage will be the norm, and with it the persistent problems of digital’s lack of permanence.

In addition to digital’s lack of tangibility, digital hardware and storage media are much less stable than 35mm film. Hard drives fail in as little as two years when not regularly used, and even the most archival grade DVDs degrade and become unreadable within 2 decades. According to the report, only half of “archival quality disks” can be expected to last for 15 years. Digital audiotape tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades and becomes unreadable. Constant changes in technology only add to the digital confusion: as one generation of digital storage replaces the previous, archived materials must be transferred to the new format, or they eventually become unreadable. My graduate thesis, written on an 80’s era IBM and saved to one of those giant floppies, is unrecoverable 30 years later. There’s no equipment to read it. Meanwhile, every negative I’ve ever sleeved from 1971 onward is perfectly preserved in binders, ready to be wet-printed or scanned. Before your faith in technology causes you to dismiss this as anecdotal hysteria, consider this: recently NASA discovered that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975 because the format was now obsolete. Think about that.

“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations, said of the quandary facing motion picture archivists. As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.” I would submit that it’s not just a quandary faced by the motion picture studios, but one faced by all of us who document our lives for the benefit of posterity. And it’s one you avoid or ignore at your own peril.

But, more so, a cultural peril. Each successive generation is the steward of its cultural memory. We bear the responsibility of handing down our memory to the future, but that stewardship can be problematic given the ephemeral nature of current digital technology. Digital technology may put the transmission of this knowledge at risk. Ironically, when the world is saturated with images, we run the concurrent risk of no image enduring. Our digital memories, the evidence of our lives, now ‘exists’ only in a virtual world, a patter of 1’s and 0’s not really located anywhere, and, because of the accelerated pace of technological change and obsolescence, increasingly susceptible to degradation, erasure and loss. Meanwhile, traditional media, paper and film, is tangible, real, and can still be filed away and retrieved without the mediation of technology.

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When I was 12, my father bought me a camera. Crazy with my new found love of photography, I’d photograph the neighborhood kids at play. A year or two ago I pulled those early negatives from the shelf and found pictures of a young neighbor boy, a sweet little child I used to babysit, who had died suddenly and unexpectedly at three years of age from a viral infection. Confronting those pictures after 45 years, I realized I had in my possession something incomparably precious to someone somewhere, the recorded memory of a life tragically taken from a father, mother and siblings. The right thing to do was to see that they were returned to his family. To that end, I did an internet search and found his brother, and emailed him what I had found. Would he want these negatives I had of his brother, now 45 years gone?

Within minutes of sending my email I received a response. With it was attached a picture:

It was a picture I had taken of his brother which I had given his mother shortly after his brother’s death. He told me he had had this picture on his bedside table for the last 40 years, and it was one of his most important possessions, something he had found comfort in since he was a child, since it perfectly captured how he remembered his brother, with a shy smile and happy eyes. Yes, of course, he would be incredibly grateful for any others I could send.

It was, even for me, an emotionally powerful experience, full as it was with the power of a simple photograph to memorialize the ineffable and conjure distant memory. I had given a profound gift to another human through the simple intercession of a photograph.

Photographs allow us to give this gift to the future. In 50 years, will your heirs retain possession of your photographic patrimony?

For a related post go here.

Robert Frank’s Guggenheim Trip and the Making of The Americans

From the National Gallery of Art, The Robert Frank Collection*:

In October 1954, with the guidance of Walker Evans, Frank applied for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, proposing to drive across the United States photographing American life.

He was awarded the fellowship and in the summer of 1955 began his 10,000-mile journey with a trip to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. He then traveled with Mary down the East Coast, photographing in North and South Carolina and Georgia. That fall he drove to Florida, and from there he crossed the country, through Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada, arriving in California around Christmas. While in California, Frank applied for a renewal of the Guggenheim fellowship. When it was granted in April 1956, he drove a northern route back to New York, passing through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The map below charts the three routes driven by Frank during the period of his Guggenheim fellowship.

Red: late June – mid-July 1955
Gold: summer 1955
Blue: October 1955 – early June 1956

A dotted line indicates an unconfirmed route.

Back in New York by June 1956, Frank developed film, made and reviewed contact sheets of all 767 rolls of film shot for the project, made approximately 1,000 work prints, and began to sequence the photographs that would become his seminal book, The Americans.

After choosing frames from his contact sheets to print, Frank annotated his work prints with the corresponding number of the roll of film, often in red grease pencil. He then spread them on the floor and thumb-tacked them to walls, grouping them by themes such as race, religion, politics and the media, as well as subjects including cemeteries, jukeboxes, and lunch counters. Frank moved the pictures, sometimes ripping them, and eliminated hundreds before arriving at the 83 prints to be included in The Americans. He continued to refine his selections through June 1957.

The Americans, 1955–1957

In October of 1958, French publisher Robert Delpire released Les Américains in Paris. The following year Grove Press published The Americans in New York with an introduction by Jack Kerouac (the book was released in January 1960).

Like Frank’s earlier books, the sequence of 83 pictures in The Americans is non-narrative and nonlinear; instead it uses thematic, formal, conceptual and linguistic devices to link the photographs. Unlike Peru, in which the order of pictures was not firmly established, The Americans displays a deliberate structure, an emphatic narrator, and what Frank called a “distinct and intense order” that amplified and tempered the individual pictures.

Although not immediately evident, The Americans is constructed in four sections. Each begins with a picture of an American flag and proceeds with a rhythm based on the interplay between motion and stasis, the presence and absence of people, observers and those being observed. The book as a whole explores the American people—black and white, military and civilian, urban and rural, poor and middle class—as they gather in drugstores and diners, meet on city streets, mourn at funerals, and congregate in and around cars. With piercing vision, poetic insight, and distinct photographic style, Frank reveals the politics, alienation, power, and injustice at play just beneath the surface of his adopted country.

Since its original publication, The Americans has appeared in numerous editions and has been translated into several languages. The cropping of images has varied slightly over the years, but their order has remained intact, as have the titles and Kerouac’s introductory text. The book, fiercely debated in the first years following its release, has made an indelible mark on American culture and changed the course of 20th-century photography.

* THE ROBERT FRANK COLLECTION, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON D.C. The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, was begun in 1990 with a generous gift from the artist that included 27 vintage photographs, one of the three extant copies of Black White and Things, 1952 (a handmade book of 34 original photographs made between 1948 and 1952), 999 work prints, 2,296 contact sheets, and 2,241 rolls of film, as well as annotated book dummies for The Lines of My Hand. In the three years that followed, the Gallery acquired a total of 61 objects, including one print of every photograph reproduced in The Lines of My Hand, 1989. In 1994 Frank gave the Gallery another large donation that included 91 vintage photographs, 442 work prints, and 814 contact sheets. In 1996 he gave a third gift, this time including 12 photographs and his volume of photographs, Peru. Then in 2010 Frank gave one photograph and his volume of photographs, 40 Fotos. Most recently, Frank gave four photographs, six contact sheets, one work print, and three videos in 2012. The Gallery has continued to collect works by Robert Frank, acquiring 61 objects from 1994 to 1996, seven objects in 2000 and 2001, three objects in 2006, 20 objects in 2010, and one object in 2011.

Nearly all accessioned objects in the collection came to the Gallery directly from Frank’s own collection. The exceptions are: four objects given in 1991 by, respectively, Amy and Philip Brookman, George F. Hemphill and Leonore A. Winters, Christopher and Alexandra Middendorf, and the Middendorf Gallery; 16 objects given in 1996 by John Cohen; six objects given in 2000 by Jane Watkins; one object given in 2001 by Lee and Maria Friedlander; and 20 objects given in 2010 by the Estate of Kazuko Oshima.

The collection is available online at http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank.html

1976: The Year Art Photography Changed

Prior to 1976 ‘serious’ photographers shot black and white. William Eggleston changed that. On the 25^th May 1976, courtesy of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the accompanying book, ‘William Eggleston’s Guide’, color photography arrived as a serious photographic medium. The subject is a rather laconic view of fly-over America, subject and era lending itself perfectly to the Kodachrome aesthetic. Eggleston had pioneered the photographic trope of the banal as interesting, the ordinary as revelatory. While this idea, played out as it has subsequently been, now might seem trite, it was revolutionary in 1976.

The MMA reprinted the book in facsimile in 2002 along with an essay from photography critic John Szarkowski.

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Eggleston is a Leica gearhead. He owns over 300 leicas. This is a picture of a a handbuilt case he uses to store and transport some of them. This particular case holds 13 different Leica cameras and a couple of old Canon rangefinders for good measure. The case itself is a leather briefcase that Eggleston retrofitted with wood panels.

Eggleston is particular about the earlier Leica thread mount bodies. In addition to standard issue models, his collection includes rare limited-edition and custom-painted bodies. He claims he uses all of them. Eggleston admits his gear fixation “has grown into something of an obsession.”

Ironically, the photograph above was shot by Eggleston using a Fuji X-Pro1.

Leica M2-R w/ matching DR Summicron and Goggles

(click on photo to see larger definition photo)

This is a (my) beautiful collector grade Leica M2-R, 1969-70, no. 1249498, chrome, with a Summicron f/2 50mm lens no. 2181428, close-up finder and lens hood.

In 1960, Leitz contracted with the US Army to supply an M2 with rapid-load three prong take up spool. These were designated as the Leica M2S. After the Army cancelled the order in 1968, numbers 1248201-1250200 (2000 units) were designated Leica M2-R and were sold to the public in the States only through Leitz New York in 1969 and 1970.

Leitz sold the M2-R as a kit with a very late version of the 50/2.0 DR Summicron with close focusing goggles. The DR Summicron offered with the M2-R was a second generation optical design produced between 1956 and 1968. The Summicron was a revolutionary design when first introduced in 1953 and has been updated optically only twice since. The DR Summicron was introduced in 1956 as the first iteration of the non-collapsible M-mount Summicron. This revised edition incorporated a harder front element and different geometry with the rear element recessed 4mm deeper than the collapsible version, with weight increased from 220g to 285g.

Both this lens and the Rigid are considered to represent the pinnacle of Leica’s manufacturing quality. The DR is also superb optically. A 50 DR measured the highest resolution ever tested by Modern Photography Magazine at over 100 lines per mm.

The DR Summicron (SOMNI/11918) has two focusing ranges, normal and close focus to 19 inches. Later DR’s have a dual feet and meter focusing scale, with a simpler Leitz logo, and focus to 20 inches. The “goggles” (SDPOO/14002) fit on the lens for close focusing and places ocular lenses in front of the M2-R’s rangefinder and viewfinder windows. All DR Summicrons are silver with the exception of 1 black paint unit made to special order.

M2-R’s with the late model DR Summicron command prices upwards of $3000-4000 depending on condition.

Why We Shoot Film

Results from the ILFORD PHOTO film survey

At the end of 2014 Ilford conducted a comprehensive international survey to help them better understand film users. Thousands of users from over 70 countries completed the survey and the results were inspiring.

That support for traditional film is growing was confirmed by the 30% of respondents who were aged under 35, with 60% of them using film for less than 5 years.

For many of those the interest began after receiving a film camera as a gift from family or a friend. Canon, Nikon, Mamiya, and Pentax cameras all featured strongly in the survey, with a large percentage also being bought on EBay.

Around 84% of respondents said that they had taught themselves how to use film with a little help from books and the Internet and more than 49% now develop and print their own pictures in a darkroom.

Of those who responded, 98% used black and white film with 31% shooting it exclusively. Just 2% use only colour film.

Interestingly 86% of respondents used roll film, and the Lomo and Holga cameras proved popular in this category.

On-line groups and Forums are used by 90% of respondents for product information and technical advice with a similar number finding what they need from www.ilfordphoto.com.
When asked “What first attracted you to using film?” comments included

“It’s fun”

“It’s retro”

“I wanted to slow down and really think about what I was doing rather than just shoot 15 versions of the same shot to get it right. As I have grown into film, I also enjoy the craft aspects of it. Developing etc.”

“The fact that there goes a lot more thinking in taking a photograph. Because of the “limitation” of 36/12 pictures on a roll you think more about a shot you take. While with digital you just shoot.”

Steven Brierley, Director of Sales and Marketing at HARMAN technology/ILFORD PHOTO, commented “Thanks to the film users who took part in this survey, we have confirmed what we thought, which is that the recent growth in film sales can be attributed to the new users coming through. We are providing support to these new users and making it easier for them to find darkrooms should they wish to. It’s a year since we launched localdarkroom.com and we now have over 650 tutors and sharers in more than 60 countries around the world. Without the support and help from the film community who complete our surveys, this couldn’t have happened”

George Bernard Shaw With His Leica

F11 and Be There! (Exposure for Dummies)

One of three types of photographer is probably reading this: 1) A crusty old pro who knows everything about film photography and could teach me a thing or two; 2) A gearhead with the latest digital kit who stumbled upon this site while looking for Thorsteen Overgaard’s latest missive on the magical properties of the Leica Experience; or 3) A younger photographer increasingly turned off by the dummy-proof automation of modern computerized cameras. This post is for those in camps #2 and #3, although I suspect a good portion the #2’s will dismiss it as the rantings of a bitter old man with no relevance to their Nikanon or Leica M or X and that big A on the shutter speed dial (“Dentist Mode”) that takes care of such pedestrian concerns. For those of you still paying attention, let me tell you a story.

Back in the day (i.e. until about 40 years ago), most professional cameras were not automated in any way. No electronic or computerized circuits to do any thinking for you. Just a purely mechanical light tight box with an aperture and shutter speed dial to control the flow of light onto the film plane. No exposure meter. This was true of the “real” Leica M’s, the M2/M3/M4s hand assembled in Wetzler, the ones loved and used by most of the 20th century’s iconic documentarians. Yes, we had those annoying meters that would slide onto the accessory shoe, but they were bulky and inconvenient and they marked you as an incorrigible dilettante. Real photographers knew how to expose, external meter be damned.

Practice makes perfect. One benefit of using a meterless camera is the skill you develop in guestimating exposures. When I learned the intracacies of exposure in the 70s, I walked around with a hand held meter and estimated exposure for various lighting situations. After a few weeks, it became instinctual. Once you get the hang of it, the ability to see and correctly judge light, you’ve freed yourself from the tyranny of the machine. You’re no longer a monkey pushing a button. You see more; you notice light in ways you’d miss when using the A setting and letting the machine do the thinking for you.

It also makes a great parlour trick, at least with your technologically sophisticated digital shooters using matrix metering on their bizooka sized Nikons and Canons. Never miss an opportunity to screw with them at their expense. I recently had a conversation with a nice woman, the wife of a friend, who has taken up wedding photography as a profession. We talked photography, and cameras, and the business of photography. I showed her my humble little Leica M2, a vintage curiousity to her, no doubt, and we spoke about how it worked, and about the subject of manual exposure, of which she was unfamiliar. I explained the Sunny 16 rule and demonstrated how it worked in practice, correctly estimating a number of varying exposure situations which she subsequently confirmed with her dSLR. She seemed amazed that i could accurately “guess” the correct exposure in differing lighting situations while she pushed buttons and changed meter matrixes with a serious expression on her face.

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On a cloudless sunny day, the correct exposure for any subject is f/16 at the shutter speed nearest to the film speed. For example, if you are using ISO 125 film (the now defunct Plus-X), the correct exposure would be 1/125 second at f/16. This is called the “Sunny 16” rule. The “Sunny 16” rule gives us an base setting to use in mentally calculating exposure since it contains all the elements you need to know for proper exposure: film speed (ISO 125), aperture (f/16) and shutter speed (1/125).

Is it 100% accurate? No, but neither is your in camera light meter, which works with reflected light. If you need consistent, accurate meter readings, you need either 1) A grey card or 2) a hand held incident meter. As a practical matter, your film has enough latitude to compensate for a guestimate a stop or two off. You ‘might’ lose some shadow detail, or your photo may need to be printed on a non-standard grade paper (or you could just fix it in Lightroom), but you’ll get the shot, which, of course, is what matters. You’re not Ansel Adams. Stop obsessing about tonal values and shoot the damn thing. This is not spectometry, its photography. The more you practice the better you will be able to simply look at a lighting situation and immediately know the correct exposure for your purposes.

The “Sunny f/16” base setting, combined with your knowledge that each change of one step in a factor doubles or halves the exposure, makes it easy to select a correct exposure for any photographic situation you may be confronted with. Each step up or down in one variable represents a doubling or halving of the amount of light required to make a correct exposure. For example, an overcast day would halve the light falling on the subject. If the light reaching the film is cut in half, ONE other variable needs to be changed to increase (double) the amount of light. In this case the shutter speed could be reduced to 1/60 second OR the aperture could be increased to f/11 OR the film speed could be increased to ISO 200. Any ONE of these corrections would provide the correct amount of light. Make the correction that best suits your photographic purpose (decreased depth of field — the distance in front and behind of the subject that is acceptably in focus — or enhanced apparent subject motion).

In the same sense, a change in any of the variables can be offset by a reciprocal change in any other variable. For example, you may need a faster shutter speed to stop action. If you choose 1/500 second, the light will have been reduced by two steps (cut in half from 1/125 to 1/250 and cut it in half again from 1/250 to 1/500). You could compensate for this by opening up the aperture two steps (from f/16 to f/11 will double the light and f/11 to f/8 will double it again). You could also make the same correction by increasing the film speed by two steps, called “pushing” a film (pushing an ISO 100 film to ISO 200 doubles the light and from ISO 200 to ISO 400 doubles it again; so, a 100 ISO film rated at 400 ISO would be a “two stop push”). Or, you could increase the aperture to f/11 and push the film to ISO 200.

THE FINE PRINT

Film Speed:

Film speed is a number that indicates the sensitivity of film to light. Film sensitivity is measured by a set of standards established by the International Standards Organization (ISO). The number series for film speed is:

25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200

Moving to the right, each number is twice the preceding number, and represents twice the sensitivity to light as the preceding number. There may be some intermediate steps (such as 64 or 125) on your dial. Set the light meter or camera for the same number that is on the film.

This leaves only two things to adjust to achieve the correct exposure while making a photograph; shutter speed and aperture (f-stops).

Shutter Speed:

Shutter speed indicates how long the camera shutter remains open to let light onto the film. The number series for shutter speed is:

15, 8, 4, 2, 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000

These numbers are whole seconds or fractions of seconds. They aren’t expressed on your shutter speed dial as fractions, but that is what they represent:

15, 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/4000, 1/8000

Again, each number moving to the right is half the value of the preceding number, and represents half as much light as the preceding number.

Aperture (f-stops):

Aperture refers to the size of the opening inside the lens that the light must go through to reach the film. Aperture is measured in f/stops as indicated in the series below:

1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, 45

These are actually fractions. They should read as follows:

1/1, 1/1.4, 1/2, 1/2.8, 1/4, 1/5.6, 1/8, 1/11, 1/16, 1/22, 1/32, 1/45

Like the shutter speed series, each progression represents half as much light (moving to the right) as the preceding number.

The numbers represent the ratio of the focal length of the lens to the diameter of the lens diaphragm opening. The designation “f/2” means that the diameter of the aperture is 1/2 the focal length of the lens. The designation f/32 means that the diameter of the aperture is 1/32 the focal length of the lens. f/2 on a 100mm lens means that the diameter of the diaphragm opening is 100/2, or 50mm. The amount of light reaching the film is dependent on the SURFACE AREA of the opening, NOT the DIAMETER. The method of calculating the surface area of a circle is Pi times the radius, squared (Pi is approximately 3.14; the radius is half the diameter, squared means that the number is multiplied by itself). Therefore, in our example, the surface area of the opening would be 3.14X25X25, or approximately 2000 sq. mm.

Looking at the next f/stop, which is f/2.8. 100/2.8=35.7mm. The surface area would be 3.14X17.85X17.85. If you multiply it out, you will see that the surface area is now approximately 1000 sq. mm, or HALF the surface area of f/2.Therefore, each succeeding smaller aperture lets in half as much light as the previous f/stop.

Leica In the Nazi Era

By the 1930s the family-owned firm of Leitz, Inc., was internationally recognized as a premier German brand. During the Nazi period, and throughout WW2, Leitz produced cameras, range-finders, and other optical systems for the Nazis. The Nazi government needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz’s single biggest market for optical goods was the United States. It’s an inconvenient historical fact that might make many, even today, uneasy about patronizing Leica, Leitz’s corporate legacy.

As with much complicity during the Nazi era, the realities can be nuanced, making moral generalizations difficult. Certainly this is the case with Leitz family and its covert efforts to support and save German Jews. Like many German industrialists during the Nazi era, Leitz family patriarch Ernst Leitz II joined the Nazi Party and remained a member throughout the 1930s. Recently however, historians have claimed that the Leitz family and Leitz as a company took an active role in quietly subverting Nazi harassment of German Jews, and many of these claims detail heroic efforts in behalf of German Jews by the Leitz family and the corporate edifice of Leitz, Inc. “The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train,” by Frank Dabba Smith, details the various ways the Leitz family and corporation acted in attempting to save its Jewish associates.

Upon Hitler’s ascension to power and the implementation of the Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities, Ernst Leitz II began helping Jewish employees, acquaintances and families leave Germany. Leitz established what has become known as “the Leica Freedom Train”, allowing Jews to leave Germany in their role as Leitz “employees” assigned overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, friends of family members were “assigned” to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, and the United States. After Kristallnacht in November, 1938, these overseas assignments intensified. Jewish “employees” and families would be sent by sea to New York, where executives in Leitz’s Manhattan offices helped them resettle and found them jobs in the New York photo industry. Many new arrivals were given a Leica camera and paid a stipend by Leitz until they could find work. This “Leitz Freedom Train” reached its greatest urgency in 1938 and 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York on a regular basis. At the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, when German borders were closed, hundreds of Leitz Jews had escaped to America with the covert assistance of the Leitz family and Leitz Inc. Out of this humanitarian migration came many designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers for the American photo industry and writers for the American photographic press.

Leitz’s actions in behalf of German Jews were not without consequences for the Leitz family and company management. The Nazis jailed Leitz executive Alfred Turk for friendliness toward Jews and freed him only after a large cash payment to the Reich. The Gestapo imprisoned Ernest Leitz’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, after they caught her helping Jewish employees cross into Switzerland. She had initially fallen under suspicion when she had attempted to improve the living conditions of 800 Ukrainian slave laborers who had been assigned by the Nazis to work in theLeitz’s Wetzlar production plant. After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officer d’honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.

Why are Leitz’s honorable actions during WW2 not more widely known? According to writer Norman Lipton, the Leitz family desired no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the family was dead did the “Leica Freedom Train” finally come to light.

Can The Camera Shape the Photographer?

An interesting conversation with Mike Avina, Chris Farling, David Horton, Hector Isaac and Tom Young from www.observecollective.com. Some are photographers who have “graduated” from film to digital but still understand the enduring strengths of film capture, others having taken up photography in the digital era. A very germain conversation for those of us who use Leica rangefinders, whether film or digital.

A recent magazine ad for the Fujifilm X-T1 said, “The camera you carry is as important as the images you make.” But among street photographers, it is not cool to obsessively discuss “gear.” We take that for granted – cameras are just tools. While that is true, there is no better tonic for “photographers’ block” than a new camera or lens. Some photographers have truly found their vision when they switched to a certain camera. Back in the pre-digital days you had a camera. It was either a Leica, or an SLR. And you kept it forever. Today with so many choices of equipment, a photographer can pretty much find the perfect camera to suit their shooting style and personality. Or is it the other way around? In this post we hope to discover how the equipment a street photographer uses influences what their pictures look like.

OBSERVE
Chris, you were shooting with an Olympus E-P1. Your work was solid and gaining some notice. Then you bought an OM-D E-M5 in the spring of 2012 and it seems like your vision really blossomed. I immediately noticed the quality of your work ramp up several notches and that trend continues. Do you feel that you held a vision that the OM-D finally released? Or did the new equipment present possibilities the E-P1 didn’t… i.e., eye-level viewing, fast autofocus, etc.

Chris Farling (CF)
I don’t want to diss the E-P1 overmuch in that the E-P1 itself was a quantum leap over the fully automatic mode-style shooting of the digital point-and-shoots that I had owned over the previous decade. When I committed to ponying up the $$$ to buy the E-P1, I made a parallel commitment to being more serious in my study and practice of photography. It was with the E-P1 that I really dug into controlling aperture and shutter speed and exploring different focal lengths and lenses. I’m actually glad I started with a camera that had some clear limitations (no VF, iffy sensor, slow AF, & poor high-ISO), much the way you need to play the $&@! out of a student horn before moving onto a more powerful but perhaps more complicated or less forgiving instrument in music. Everyone starting out wants to buy some perfect camera that will make them a brilliant photographer overnight, but the paradox is that it’s only through working around limitations that you grow and develop good habits. If you start out with everything handed to you, it can breed in you a certain laziness and you’ll most likely get bored and frustrated.

The E-P1 was also my first experience using fixed prime lenses and that more than anything helped me to “see” as a street photographer would and to be able to pre-visualize frames to some degree. It was really a wonderful camera to experiment with and learn on and I don’t think I will ever sell it.

OBSERVE
So you’re saying that a more basic camera can provide a better learning experience?

CF
Exactly. It really did liberate me when I upgraded to the E-M5 along with the Oly 12mm f2 lens because I had much of the basics in place from the E-P1. Most of the gains weren’t surprising in that I knew what I wanted out of this new camera and what advantages it held over the old one. I honestly can’t imagine needing a more powerful camera in the foreseeable future.

OBSERVE
That was a pretty wide lens to start with! Just what are those advantages the E-M5 gives you?

CF
The one thing that I want from a camera more than anything else is versatility. And I include the lightweight form factor of the m4/3 system as a key part of that versatility. Not for me the heavy necklace of an SLR… I like to be able to shoot quickly and reflexively and so I don’t even want the camera to be on a strap. The E-M5’s EVF was a real boon to helping me execute better edge-to-edge compositions. I for one really like having all the settings info available in the EVF, though I know many prefer optical ones. The touchscreen, which allows you to tap a focal point or even to release the shutter directly, added even more flexibility. The almost instantaneous AF (as well as the simple zone focusing capability of the 12mm lens’s pull ring) meant that I could depend on my own sense of timing and reflexes and not worry that the camera wouldn’t respond when I was ready. The E-M5 helped me to learn more about on- and off-camera flash. Perhaps the most useful thing, surprisingly enough, was simply the extra customizable dial and button, allowing me to have immediate tactile access to virtually any setting I would want to change quickly in anticipation of the next shot. Also, it bears mentioning that the rich Olympus JPG quality from both cameras has influenced my color sensibility.

As much as I like the E-M5 and feel that it has helped me develop and execute my vision, I’ve since adopted the APS-C sensor Ricoh GR as my principal camera, reserving the E-M5 for special situations where I want the different lenses or the weatherproofing. In many ways, the Ricoh is a step backwards in quality and features, yet it is so perfectly portable and well-designed in its flexibility (a real photographer’s camera) that those advantages trump all other considerations. Plus there’s that awesome TAv mode that let’s you specify both aperture AND shutter speed… I find the Ricoh is the perfect camera for my style of quick close-in shooting with a fixed 28mm-equiv. and I suffer little when adapting it to other types of shooting.

OBSERVE
So with the E-M5 you became accustomed to the convenience of customizable dials? That would make the GR a logical move because, since the line’s inception, it has been praised for its flexible interface. As DP Review said, “We’ve often referred to the Ricoh interface as arguably the best enthusiast-focused interface on a compact camera.”

David, you followed a similar path as Chris, moving from an E-P2 up to the OM-D E-M5. Among this group of photographers, you used the focal length closest to what is considered a “normal” lens: 20mm (40mm equivalent). There is less margin for framing errors than with a 28mm or even 35mm. As a graphic designer, tell us how the precise eye-level framing of the OM-D has influenced your photography, especially with the 20mm lens.

David Horton (DH)
When I first started dabbling in SP, I was using a Canon G9 which has a 35mm default lens. I liked that length a lot. When I moved to the E-P2, I opted for the Panasonic 20mm (40mm equiv.) because it was considerably faster than the 17mm Oly lens* (34mm equiv.) and it received considerably better ratings and reviews.

OBSERVE
*You mean the Olympus 17mm f2.8 Pancake, correct?

DH
Yes. Oly’s first 17mm prime did not have very good performance especially in the corners. Although I used the Pany 20mm almost exclusively for over a year (and was very pleased with the IQ of the lens), I often found the focal length limiting. I wished it was a little wider.

The primary reason I moved to the EM-5 was speed. Although I adapted to the slow autofocus of the E-P2, I was missing more and more shots. Although the add-on EVF on the E-P2 was acceptable, it was a bit cumbersome. I shoot exclusively through a viewfinder. So the ergonomic design of the built-in viewfinder on the EM5 was also very appealing. What I didn’t know until I received the camera is that, to benefit from the increased speed of the EM-5, you also had to have one of the newer Oly lenses. At the time I bought I camera, the fast Oly lenses only existed in 12mm and 45mm lenses. The 12mm (24mm equiv.) was too wide for me. I waited for at least three months for the rumored 17mm 1.8 lens to come out. (It was my dream lens.) I preordered it and got it as soon as it released. I’ve used it exclusively since the day I got it. The combination of the EM-5 and that lens is extremely fast.

The other thing I like about the EM-5 as opposed to something like the Fuji X100 (which I also considered) is the ability to change lenses. Although I rarely do, it’s nice to have that option. I always carry the 45mm 1.8 Oly lens (90m equiv.) with me too, just in case.

OBSERVE
It is nice to have the ability to change lenses, particularly when on a trip, even if you don’t do it often.

Mike, you have used quite a variety of equipment, from Leica M3 to Sony RX1 and many things in between including compact P&S’s and the Ricoh GR. I know that you are a dedicated student of photography with a deep curiosity about what is possible. Does this explain your variety of equipment? You seem to always come back to shooting b&w and I have the impression that, ideally, film is your medium of choice and because of that much of your digital work looks like film.

Mike Aviña (MA)
I’d like to challenge the conventional wisdom of sticking to one camera and one lens. There is a time and a place for sticking to a narrow set of gear. When you get completely accustomed to one focal length and one camera the gear does become more intuitive, you can set up shots and frame them before you pull the camera up to your face because you know where to stand at what distance to include given elements. That said, smaller cameras have certain advantages: deep depth of field, very fast autofocus, and tilt-screens. There are world-class photographers that have discovered and exploited these advantages. I just purchased a published book shot entirely by phone–the images are superlative. I’ve made 12” by 16” prints from an LX7–they look great.

To answer your first question–yes, I prefer film. The dynamic range of film and the separation of subjects one can achieve with shallow depth of field on a fast lens is a necessary creative tool. I have never used complicated post-processing to add blur to digital images; this is a method that ends up looking artificial. A wide, fast lens on either a full-frame sensor or over film is therefore a must-have. Shallow depth of field however is only one tool and not one I use all or even most of the time.

OBSERVE
Arguably, you can come pretty close having a digital image file look like it was shot with film in post processing. But the methodology of shooting film is a whole ‘nother animal.

MA
Film versus digital is probably better left for another discussion! I also have an abiding love for small, pocketable, point-and-shoot cameras. As others have mentioned above, small cameras are easier to haul all day. In addition, shooting like a tourist, with innocuous little shots framed through the LCD rather than a viewfinder, is often more effective than pulling a big rig up to your face and clacking away. Even with a small rangefinder, people react more when you pull a camera up to your face than they do to an apparent tourist snapping casually with the LCD. I tend to frame faces off center; when using a wide angle lens this means people are often not sure they are in the shot because it isn’t clear you are shooting at them. The shooter and the subject have a complicit agreement to the fiction–the photographer is shooting something else; the subject ignores the shooter as long as it isn’t too intrusive. This helps one work close in crowded spaces. Having a bundle of different tools allows flexibility and simultaneous exploration of different creative options.

OBSERVE
You make a very good point Mike. Why shouldn’t we use whatever tool best suits the situation? Some of our peers carry dslr’s with a zoom lens mounted that will cover most scenes. Maybe one of them will comment to the pros and cons of a zoom.

Interesting path you have followed Chris… from LCD framing, to eye-level framing, back to LCD framing. I found myself “borrowing” the small Samsung EX2F I bought for my wife and became addicted to the tilt screen. I find that I am very comfortable shooting from waist level and I really prefer the perspective of that PoV, rather than “looking down” at everything from my 6’2″ eye level.

How hard was it to adjust back to the loose framing of the GR’s LCD screen versus the precise eye-level framing of the E-M5? The concrete canyons of NY offer some shade to better see the screen, but how do you frame in bright sunlight when you travel? How often do you use the optical viewfinder?

CF
I do use the optical viewfinder on the GR sometimes (in a way, it’s less obtrusive and noticeable than holding the camera out from your body) but I have a tougher time seeing all four edges of the frame in the viewfinder than I do with the screen. As wide as I generally shoot, I have to kind of scroll with my eye in each direction and that’s too limiting and slow for me. I also don’t like the tunnel vision that develops where you can’t receive new information about the way the scene is changing and what’s happening on the margins with your peripheral vision. With the OVF, you also don’t see the central AF point if you’re using that to lock AF and then recompose. It may seem like a minor point, but I’m also very left-eye dominant so I have to block my whole face with the camera when using the VF, even if it was a corner-mounted one.

OBSERVE
An interesting observation I have made is how most of us frame on an LCD using both eyes, but frame through an eye level viewfinder with one eye closed. Truth be told, for street photography, framing using any device is probably best done with both eyes open, but a hard habit to get into with an eye level viewfinder. I find an optical viewfinder more conducive to shooting with both eyes open and it gives you the advantage of seeing what is going on outside of, and about to enter or leave the frame.

CF
That is an interesting point about shooting with both eyes open. That may be what I like about using the LCD of the GR. Viewing the LCD in sunlight hasn’t bothered me too much with either the E-M5 or the GRD since the screens can be made pretty bright. Most of the time your own body acts as shade and, even when it doesn’t, you can still easily see which shapes and areas of light and dark correspond to what you’re seeing with the naked eye. I think it’s actually kind of cool having a slight degree of abstraction (less detail) when considering the composition, the same way a photo thumbnail is often easier to use for judging the effectiveness of a composition in editing than the enlarged version.

It’s also interesting that you say you prefer shooting from a more mid-body angle than always looking down at everything. Being 6’2’’, I have the same issue and, while using the 12mm lens almost exclusively for a year, I became cognizant of the great care one must take in controlling the perspective distortion with a wide-angle lens. Even having backed off to the 28-mm equiv. of the Ricoh, I still think that the default orientation with such a lens should be relatively straight on and not tilted excessively.

DH
My biggest gripe with the EM-5 is you have to rely too heavily on the digital interface. I wish there were manual knobs to adjust the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Since I don’t use the LCD, I have it turned off. To adjust any of these settings, I either have to hold the camera to my eye and turn the knobs or turn the LCD on and adjust them. Neither option is ideal or fast enough. This is what I find so appealing about the X100 or a Leica. I also can’t wait until they design better battery life for these digital cameras. As Chris can tell you (from spending a day shooting with me), I opt to carry a number of batteries with me than worry about preserving battery life in the camera. I turn it on and leave it on. When I need to react quickly, I don’t want to have to wonder if the screen’s going to be black when I bring it to my eye.

OBSERVE
That’s what evolution has brought to cameras, David. With a basic film camera, like an M3 or Nikon F you have two settings: shutter speed and aperture… and, of course, focus (and film choice). Cramming so many features into a small digital camera leads to compromises.

Mike made a good point about not limiting ourselves to a single tool. Sometimes we tend to set unnecessary limitations for ourselves. Although we may at any given time favor a particular set of gear, I think most of us here have more than a single camera. We always have the option to change cameras if a project or different direction comes to us Having your equipment be intuitive is the most compelling reason for limiting equipment choices. When I saw you this last summer Mike, you were using the Sony RX1. The IQ is the obvious reason why this camera has a strong following. Is it your perfect camera? If not, what would be? The others can answer this as well.

MA
The M3 is, for me, more or less the perfect camera–I am just reluctant to keep spending the money on film. The chemicals also concern me. For an everyday digital shooter the Ricoh GR may be my favorite. The RX1 has laggy autofocus which hinders the advantage of the high IQ and beautiful rendering that the Zeiss lens offers.

OBSERVE
David, you mention that you use an eye level viewfinder exclusively–is that because you want precise framing? How come you didn’t gravitate toward a DSLR? There are plenty of choices in size and features to fit any budget and many SP’ers use them. Was it because you already had m4/3 glass?

DH
I certainly find my framing more precise and that’s certainly one of the primary reasons I shoot this way. Perhaps, the more significant reason is that I feel “more at one” with the camera and the subject(s). I shoot a lot of portraiture and even when I’m not shooting conventional portraiture, it’s very important that I’m in sync and “connected” with my subjects. Facial expressions and details are very important to me; these are impossible for me to see if I’m relying on a screen. Shooting with a screen is fine for shapes and loose compositions but it’s not very precise—certainly not precise enough for me.

The reason I’m not interested in a DSLR is size. I don’t like to draw attention to the camera and a DSLR certainly does that. I’m also not interested in lugging one of those suckers around the city on a regular basis. I will occasionally lust after the IQ of DSLR sensors but the trade off is not worth it to me. I’ve spent the day shooting with friends that use DSLRs and after a day walking 10 miles around a city, they are not happy campers. The smaller and lighter the camera, the more likely you are to bring it with you.

OBSERVE
Tom, you use a full-frame DSLR. While the 5D is not huge by DSLR standards, it is huge in terms of what everyone else here uses. Obviously it’s hard to be inconspicuous. How do you work around that? I would assume that the quality and precise framing a DSLR offers is important to the type of pictures you want to create.

Tom Young (TY)
There’s a number of different reasons I shoot with an SLR. For one thing, I don’t only shoot street. I also do weddings, events, the odd corporate photography gig. I even shoot landscapes! Egad! So while the 5D is a big rig, for many of the situations I find myself using my camera its size doesn’t really matter, and its image quality is definitely a plus.

But for my street work it can also be an asset. I shoot in a town that is really dark in the winter. During the darkest months, the sun doesn’t get up until after I get to my day job, and is already down again before I leave. And I dabble a bit with flash, but available light is generally my preference. I love the night, really, the strong contrast, dramatic brightness surrounded by black. The full-frame SLR lets me work in that environment and still get nice clean shots.

OBSERVE
I would imagine the high ISO image quality to be a must in the arctic. But how do you deal with subjects when they see you pointing that big honker at them?

TY
Hey wait a minute, Edmonton may be north, but it’s not the artic!!! I find that the right attitude is the key to remaining inconspicuous. People may be more likely to notice my camera because it’s big, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will care what I’m doing with it. When I first started shooting street, it seemed that people noticed me more than they do now, probably because I spent a lot of time sweating bullets about what I was doing. I really didn’t want to be noticed. And I assumed people would think it was odd. I hadn’t squared in my own head what my motive was. I knew what types of images I wanted to produce, but I didn’t have a clear sense of purpose. Best way to stand out in a crowd? Look embarrassed or uncomfortable while wielding a big camera, or worse, a small camera.

OBSERVE
That is excellent advice Tom.

TY
With experience, that fear has dropped way off for me. Now, when I pull out my camera, I’m pretty confident about what I’m doing. And while the odd person may raise an eyebrow, most people don’t seem to think anything is unusual about what I’m up to. I can only assume that means that I look like I belong in the landscape now. Hidden in plain sight, in a sense, despite the fact that I don’t really try to hide my activities any more. So I think the knock against SLRs being too big for street work is a little overblown.

Mind you, it probably helps that I’m not a terribly in-your-face shooter. If I was shooting Gilden-style, the big camera might tip people off before I could get close enough…

OBSERVE
A lot of photographers feel that anything longer than 50mm equiv, or even 35mm, is “against the rules” for street photography. How do any of you feel about that David? You sometimes use the Olympus 45mm f1.8 (90mm equivalent).

DH
I think many “rules” of street photography are pretty ridiculous. I try not to pay a lot of attention to the rules. I believe all that really matters is the success of the shot. Yes, there is an energy and authenticity that comes from a wider lens that is very appropriate for the street—there’s good reason most of us use them most of the time. But limiting yourself to that perspective exclusively is a bit short-sighted (sorry, couldn’t help myself). A lot of magic can happen when compressing images. It can be a very painterly way of seeing, especially with a large aperture. You paint with colors and shapes rather than objects or subjects. It’s a slower, more studied way of seeing. Saul Leiter is a perfect example of this. It all depends on the mood you’re trying to achieve, the story you’re trying to tell.

OBSERVE
You shoot with a Fuji x100, Hector. Am I correct in understanding this is your first camera? You don’t have previous experience with film? The x100 is a popular camera with street photographers. You mentioned that it took awhile for you to feel comfortable with it. I have heard other reports that there was a steep learning curve with this camera. How does the hybrid viewfinder help or limit your shooting style? Is a fixed focal length limiting… do you ever wish it was a little wider, or longer?

Hector Issac (HI)
You are correct, Greg, I had no previous experience with film or any other medium and the Fujifilm x100 was my first camera. Recently, I was asked by a friend… Why that camera? I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t, but I’m glad I got it.

For most of those coming with a broader photographic background, the x100 was a struggle, for me it was a love/hate situation that still exists. After my first try, I almost sold it, then it was left on the shelf for one or two months. It took me about another three to four months to get comfortable enough to get what I wanted. The main issue back then (cough cough) was the autofocus, well … it sucked, so I decided to learn to work manually and zone focus, rather than sell the camera and buy another… Best decision I ever made.

I’m a bit obsessive when I’m interesting in learning something, so my learning curve was rather steep given the amount of time I spent to learn my camera and about photography in general. The hybrid viewfinder helped me learn the camera’s frame lines, even if the lag was a problem.

OBSERVE
Thanks Hector. I have heard from others that the x100 has a steep learning curve. But those who master it love it to the point of becoming evangelists. Interesting choice as a first camera but it seems that diving in on the deep end and making the commitment has served you well!

There are many ways a photographer’s equipment choices shape the pictures they produce. Even though the street photography genre has been slow to embrace anything other than straight, unmanipulated images, today we have so many more choices in equipment and post processing than we did on the pre-digital era. While it should be easy to create a signature look, remarkably much of today’s street photography is fairly homogenous.

The Leica Camera: A Tool, or a Luxury Item?

Leica started out as maker of small, simple cameras. If you needed a small, exceptionally well designed and made 35mm film camera, they offered you the tool. Any elitism that accompanied the Leica camera was a result of its status as the best built, most robust, and simplest photographic solution. You paid for the quality Leica embodied.

Over time, as technology trends accelerated and Japanese manufacturers like Nikon and Canon grabbed the professional market, Leica shifted gears, no longer competing on whether or not their rangefinder cameras were the most useful or most efficient tools for a given purpose, although, for certain limited purposes – simplicity, quietness, discreteness, build quality – they remained exceptional as tools. Starting with the digital age, Leica now competed primarily on luxury, which is a fundamentally different promise than the optimal design of a tool.

Leica is now a luxury tools company. The cameras they sell cost more, but some photographers still choose them, some for the identity that comes along with the use of a luxury good and some for the placebo effect of thinking one’s photographs will improve by virtue of some special quality it is assumed Leica possess. But there remain some of us who still use Leicas because a Leica rangefinder is still the most functional tool for us in the limited ways they always were. We still identify with Leica not a a luxury good but primarily as a maker of exceptional tools, and this creates the ambivalence many of use feel towards the brand as currently incarnated. The ambivalence is a result of the tension of a Leica as a tool versus a luxury item.

Its a tension that Leica is having a difficult time navigating too. As a luxury item producer, Leica probably doesn’t care that its cameras aren’t cutting edge. On the other hand, Leica knows it will not survive if its product is not seen as a preferred choice of the status conscious. At some point in the evolution of every luxury branded tool, users who care more about tools than about luxury shift away to more functional options. You see this today in Leica purchasers’ demographics; the brand is perpetuated largely by those who identify a Leica as a status marker, whether that Leica be a used M purchased on Ebay by someone come of age in the digital era who wants to The Leica Experience, or a new digital M purchased largely by an affluent amateur. Professionals and serious amateurs who need the services of a small, discreet camera system have largely migrated to more sophisticated, less expensive options like the cameras Fuji is currently offering.

I suspect that the era of Leica as a working tool is gone, but the silver lining is that there remains a small but dedicated following who values mechanical Leica film cameras still as a functioning tool, and hopefully there will remain those who cater to them and service them. It would be a shame if that portion of Leica’s heritage were to be lost.

The Leica M4 System, 1971

The End of Photography As We Know It

“Nothing Regresses Like Progress” – e.e. cummings

Milan Kundara, in his novel Slowness, notes the bond between slowness and memory, speed and forgetting. Making the same point in a different way, Woody Allen tells about his experience of enrolling in a speed reading course. He read War and Peace in 20 minutes. The book, he says, “is about Russia.” For some reason, this makes me think of current photographic culture.

Digital technology has transformed photography, both in its practice and its cultural role. 1.8 billion images will be put online in 2014, and the increase is exponential: this is a 50% increase over 2013. The average person consumes around 5,000 images daily. In 1900, the total number of photographs in the entire world was around 2 million; in 2000 it was 85 billion and in 2015 it will be 3.8 trillion. In 2013, 25% of all of these images made were taken with smartphones, presumably by folks who don’t think of themselves as “photographers.” As a result of this image explosion and the technological advances making it possible, photography is no longer a specialist language. it is now a universal language, spoken via social media, most of it inconsequential chatter. We have entered the fast food era of photography. Photography has become one more experience of people whose lives are full of frenetic activity, the means for a speedy delivery of cheap sensations — individuals as nerve endings in an endless social network.

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But there has also been a change in the pace of photography as a practice – the photograph instantly produced and transmitted, and then just as quickly forgotten.

Digital partisans often think that nothing useful can be learned from the indigenous craft of traditional silver based photography. Most claim that it has been superceded by the ease, speed and potential of digital. Analogue photography is widely seen as a dead technology. But Film affords a return to the ruminative, something that has gotten lost with the ease and speed of digital. Slowing down via the processes of traditional photography can be a potent cure for the motion sickness of modern digital technology. Film photography is gourmet cooking in a fast food culture.

In today’s age of instant results, the protracted processes of film – taking, developing, proofing, reviewing, printing – seem an obvious drawback, but in reality it is one of film photography’s strengths. With traditional photography we are subject to the time between the shutter press and the final result. It allowed time to pass so you could clear your mind of the moment and have a more objective view of what you’d produced. It allowed a space for reflection divorced from the immediacy of the moment, gave a value, a weight to the significance of what you’d produced by virtue of the enlarged contextual frame time afforded. A printed silver halide photography became its own thing, a few steps removed from the immediacy of the moment. I’m convinced that the instantaneous nature of current technology has made us worse as photographers, more impoverished as visual artists. We’ve gained speed at the expense of reflection.

Creative products summoned at speed are not likely to be the best but simply the first, the automatic or habitual response as opposed to the reflective or idiomatic. Subtlety and nuance are lost at speed. Its the difference between traveling at 80 mph on the Interstate, where everything basically looks the same, and traveling a back road by bicycle. You simply see more when you slow down, and photography is dependent on refined seeing.

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There is always the danger, in these kinds of discussions, of indulgence in nostalgia, that to question the momentum of new technologies is to declare yourself willfully ignorant, a present day Ned Ludd. I think us who cut our teeth photographically in the analogue age should remain unapologetic, speaking for what might be thought of as a proper understanding of the proportions and values of photography as a practice. Yes, digital imaging offers us new forms of stimulus and engagement and can be captured without fuss and instantly disseminated worldwide at a touch. While I’m not competent to weigh the competing claims, one thing is absolutely clear to me: today’s immediate images are fundamentally different from a traditional printed photograph, a function of their instantaneous nature but also of the lack of the tangible and a more questionable indexical relationship of the digital image to reality. Whatever, it is indisputable that digital imaging will bring with it new forms of seeing, memory and even consciousness. But what is also clear is something important embedded in our traditional notion of photography as a practice is susceptible to being lost unless we acknowledge its value and take active steps to preserve it.

A little Luddism might go a long way; but so, too, would a photographic culture obsessed less with innovation and more with deceleration and the time needed for contemplation. Traditionally, Photography as a craft was above all a vehicle of contemplation and meditation, a way to achieve deep levels of absorption in a creative activity. The flexibility and autonomy of digital photography is now ours — but ironically, for many of us the constraints inherent in traditional processes now seem like freedom. Digital technologies outsource our creative tasks to automated technology, essentially stripping the process of its primary purpose. Today, the primary value of slow photography is as a means for deceleration, for therapeutic rather than the mundane purposes of daily life.

Formerly we lived moving back and forth between two poles, the solitude of making and the connectedness of communion, privacy and public interaction. The new imaging reality puts us somewhere in between, removing the requirement of technical competence while constricting the role of photography to mundane communication.

I suspect, when everything shakes out, that the photography/imaging divide will walk the line of communication versus creative expression, the immediacy of digital communication versus the handicraft of individual expression embodied by traditional analogue photographic processes. The dedicated “photographer” will have to tolerate being irredeemably at odds with a world of ever “smarter” photographic instruments operated by ever less capable “Imagists.”

So, film photography is dead to the extent that it might compete with digital imaging on equal footing, deigning to do what digital does but just differently. Rather, film photography is becoming an emergent countering medium, valuing slowness and re-engagement with material process. It signals a desire to return photography to a handcrafted and artisinal skill. Hopefully, a new generation will learn the same lessons film users were taught by photography. I hate to think of what the consequences will be if we continue on our track of relentless digital mediation. Will we see our hard won skills eroded, our intelligence debased, and our work devalued, if we sacrifice human responsibility to black boxes full of microchips and organic sensors?

I see the re-emergence of film photography as the tip of a cultural iceberg, a gathering opposition to the flourishing digital ethos in a visual culture gone rudderless on a sea of digitized Ones and Zeroes. It is the renewed recognition of a value placed upon the sense of connection to one’s creative tools, at least in the visual realm. It will be made difficult by the unrelenting corporate greed constantly pushing newer imaging technology upon us. What we need is faith in the essential simplicity of photography, its possibilities. This will not be easily offered. It will have to be fought for, and fighting will require us to find one another in common cause. Photography depends for its existence on photographers, and in the future we will be in very short supply.

The Leica M system 1960 (M2)

Educating The Digital Generation

Young photographer: “I had the pleasure to use a Leica M3 once. That’s a cool old camera. I can see why people still use them, the “retro” thing and all.”

Older Photographer: “It is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? Weren’t you surprised at its mass? Heavy as a brick, isn’t it? Built to last a few lifetimes. They certainly don’t make em like that anymore.”

Young photographer: “Yeah, a friend had recently bought it after reading about it on the net. He’s really into film these days. Sold all his digital gear and now looks down his nose at digital photography. Says its for “chimps.” Pretty condescending, but he’s a decent guy, and he did let me use it to take a few photos, even though he seemed reluctant to let me handle it.”

Older Photographer: “A true friend. I would only ever lend mine to a person who understands the value of the instrument. Sounds like your friend knew you would appreciate it.”

Young photographer: “Yeah, its build felt so solid. You can tell immediately that its a precision instrument.”

Older Photographer: “Like a microscope or other lab instrument from the house of Leitz or Zeiss. That culture inspired the high quality instruments of the 50’s and 60’s, cameras that could be used for life and inherited … before plastic and silicon. Think about this: The plastic, automatic, battery-driven camera has been around since 1980 or there abouts… 35 years. How many plastic cameras from that time are collectible and working today?”

Young photographer: “Good point. Although my friend’s Leica camera seemed hopelessly simple. It confused me. I mean, in this day and age of computers and smart technology, it just seemed so low tech. Like driving a 1956 Cadillac across country when you could be driving the latest Lexus. It sounds romantic and all until the car overheats and leaves you on the side of the road in some god-forsaken hell-hole in Arkansas. For example, I put the camera to my eye and tried to half click the shutter to lock focus and exposure……”

Older Photographer: “Half?! There’s nothing half about a Leica M.”

Young photographer: “….and then I realized that there was no half click option and I had already released the shutter and taken a picture!”

Older Photographer: “Yeah, but did you feel how buttery smooth the shutter release was and how quiet it was? Beautiful, huh? It just feels so right, and it’s also very functional for slow shutter speed use in low light because its very easy to release the shutter without shaking the camera.”

Young photographer: “Then, of course, I reflexively turned to the back of the camera where the LCD should have been and realized there was no screen to view the image, only a blank piece of plastic. Duh! It’s a film camera!”

Older Photographer: “That blank looking door on the back only looks like plastic. That’s a little frame that flips out to help with film loading. Next time you see your friend, check and see if he’s gotten into the digital Leicas yet. If so, it’ll have an LCD on the back but it will feel in a lot of ways like the older M film cameras. That’s why a lot of us older guys buy the digital versions; not because they’re intrinsically better (only rich dentists or dilettantes you find obsessively posting on gearhead websites think that) but because they feel comfortable, like an old shoe. It’s what we know.”

Young photographer: “Yeah, I get that, but man, I understand the Leica glass is amazing. Corner to corner sharpness. Great bokeh. Apparently they make it with some rare glass that costs a ton of money. Anyway, so after I realize I can’t see my exposure on an LCD, my friend came over and asked me what exposure and aperture combination I had chosen. I assumed it had been on Auto so I told him I really didn’t know. Apparently, there is no Auto setting on the camera. Honest mistake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a camera before that didn’t have an Auto setting. Teutonic simplicity is what my friend says. He seems to think you’re “not really a photographer” if you use Auto modes. He even mentioned the Leica M7 somewhat dismissively. I think this whole business, what he calls “purity of vision,” is pretty pretentious. But the cameras do look and feel cool; there really is a beauty about them as instruments.”

Older Photographer: “Speaking of automation, there actually are a number of automatic features on the Leica M, but not the ones that come to mind in the present era. For example,

1. When one removes the bottom to change film, the film counter automatically resets to zero.

2. When one advances the film the camera automatically charges the shutter and automatically increments the frame counter.

3. When the yellow image in the viewfinder is superimposed on the main image, the lens is automatically set to perfect focus an any light.

4. When one then looks at the scale on the lens, it automatically displays the depth of field for that focus setting.

5. When one changes from one lens to another, it automatically displays the correct frame lines for that lens.

6. When one sets shutter speed, aperture, or focus, the camera automatically and faithfully does exactly whatever it was commanded, no more and no less, and no guessing on its part.

7. When one overexposes or underexposes a record of the fact is automatically recorded on a piece of film for further evaluation. Learning happens, automatically.

8. When one uses this (or any) camera for an extended period of time, required actions become second nature. This is a kind of automation too, like riding a bike, swimming, or shifting gears.

9. The M7, M8, and M9 do have aperture priority AE. This was a major departure from all-manual by Leica. Purists like your friend call this “Dentist Mode.”

Incidentally, one will see “AUTO” engraved on a lot of old SLR primes, confusing new image makers. The lenses automatically open wide for focusing, then automatically stop down to the selected taking aperture for exposure, then automatically re-open again for bright viewing.”

Young photographer: “Yeah, my friend explained to me that I had to manually set the shutter speed and aperture. When I asked him what the proper settings were, he said I’d need to learn to accurately judge various lighting conditions because the M3 had no exposure meter. I was like, WTF?”

Older Photographer: “Well, it certainly can be confusing if you’ve grown up with a digital camera, that’s for sure. Most of us old guys use hand meters, and there are also clip-on meters that slot into the hotshoe on the top of the camera that you can use, but your friend was right; back in the day we used our best estimate of exposure. You’d be surprised how good you can get with a little practice. It becomes second nature. Some people, sounds like your friend too, argue that you really don’t understand the craft of photography until you truly comprehend exposure; you know, aperture, shutter speeds, how and when to vary them to achieve the effect you want, what exposure values to use in different lighting conditions and at different ASA – I mean ISO – ratings, things like that. But now that everything is automated, you probably don’t need to know that stuff anymore. Your camera does it for you. I wouldn’t worry about it, unless, of course, you catch the film camera bug like your friend.”

Young photographer: “Yeah, and its not just exposure, its focus as well. My friend asked me if my focus was good, which also confused me. The camera sets focus, right? So I was like, yes, it certainly looked like everything was in focus in the viewfinder. …. He asked “Did you align the two images ?” And, embarrassingly enough, I was like “align what?” Not my best moment I agree.”

Older Photographer: “Well, the rangefinder camera certainly is a different beast, and its not your fault you didn’t realize the camera had no autofocus. Speaking of which, its fascinating how the rangefinder came about; it had its beginning with artillery. Some of the early ones for cameras were accessories, miniature hand-held versions of what goes on ships to direct cannon fire. It was a pretty clever thing to put a cam on the lens of a camera to operate a rangefinder device. The one on the M3 is an amazing feat of mechanical engineering, although for my money the rangefinder in the Contax II is probably the best one ever put into a 35mm camera. Old Contax don’t have the hipster cache apparently, though.“

Young Photographer: “Well that was my first and unfortunately last experience with a Leica camera. He never did offer it to me again and I suspect its because he’s become really picky about that camera, like its too valuable to use. I go over to his house and he sits in his chair and practices using the camera without any film in it. Says he’s “exercising the shutter” to keep the low speeds from sticking.

But, you know, in spite of all that there’s just something really cool about an old Leica. It’s exclusive. It projects an image of refinement. And from everything I’ve heard, the glass is so good you can pick out Leica photos pretty easy. I’ve got half a mind to buy one to use shooting weddings. Black and white film wedding photography; expanding market for that retro look. I was thinking an M4 with a good zoom, maybe a Sigma until I can find the money for a Noctilux or Summicron; I’ve heard the M4 has the best viewfinder of all the M’s. How cool would that be, doing a wedding with something like that!?!??”

Older Photographer: “Well, best of luck with your new business. Work hard, learn your craft and most importantly, pick the right tools for the job and know how to use them. And if you ever travel my way, let’s meet up. You can use one of my Leicas for the day, get to know it a little better before you jump in feet first. I’ll even thaw some film for the occasion. And, if you let me use your 5D, I’ll be happy to take your picture holding my Leica. You can use it on you website.”

The Leica (Leitz Minolta) CL

In 1971 Leica decided to produce a compact Leica (CL) camera that would be a less expensive alternative to their pro model M5. In the late 60s and early 70s, production costs in Germany had risen high enough that it was beginning to price Leitz products out of an increasingly competitive sales environment. Leica looked for ways to cut costs while expanding their market share. To keep production costs to a minimum, they needed the camera to be manufactured by an outside company with hi-tech capabilities and lower labor costs than those in Germany. Leitz approached Minolta, and the Leica CL was born.

The Leica CL and the Leitz Minolta CL are 35 mm compact mechanical rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lenses in the Leica M-mount. They were developed by Leitz/Leica in collaboration with Minolta, and manufactured by Minolta between 1973 and 1976. Leica put their name on the CLs they sold, and they were put through “German quality control,” but that’s really the only difference between the Leica or (Leitz) Minolta CL. In reality, all of the cameras were made on the same assembly line in Minolta’s factory in Japan. In the U.S. and Europe, the CL was sold as the “Leica CL”. In Japan it was sold as the” Leitz Minolta CL” and “Minolta CL”. Sixty-five thousand serial numbers were allotted to the Leica CL, and additionally approximately 20,000 Leitz Minolta CL’s were produced. 3,500 examples of the Leica CL received a special 50 Jahre marking in 1975, for Leica’s 50th anniversary.

The CL came standard with either a 40mm f/2 Summicron-C or 40mm f/2 Rokkor M. When sold with a Leitz Minolta CL, the lenses were called Minolta M-Rokkor 40mm f:2 and 90mm f:4.

Leitz designed and produced the Summicron-C 40mm in Germany. Minolta produced the M-Rokkor 40mm f/2, which was an optical design identical the Leica Summicron-C 40mm and manufactured it in Tokyo with Minolta glass. The Summicron and Rokkor are identical in performance, and many people prefer the M-Rokkor as it uses a standard 40.5mm filter and hood. Minolta also produced a later version of the M-Rokkor for the Minolta CLE, the M-Rokkor 40mm f/2 mark II, which is multicoated and reputed to be slightly better optically than the Summicron and first version M-Rokker, although I suspect that’s down to internet speculation. Suffice it to say that the Summicron-C and the M-Rokkor in whatever version are very compact and incredibly sharp, still as good relatively today as they were 40 years ago.

Leitz designed the Elmar-C 90mm f/4 for the CL and manufactured both it and first production runs of the M-Rokkor 90mm f/4 for the Minolta CL in Wetzlar, changing only the bezel and markings for the Minolta lens. Later, after Leica had discontinued the CL and Minolta continued with the CLE, the same lens design was manufactured by Minolta in Japan. You can tell which was which by the “Made in Germany” and “Made in Japan” markings on the lens barrel. Minolta also subsequently produced an M-Rokkor 28mm f:2.8 lens for the CLE. All these lenses can be mounted on the CL too. M-Rokkor-branded lenses for the CL and CLE take the more easily found 40.5mm filter size.

The CLs are identical. The Minolta is a Leica, and vice versa. There are some differences between the CL and the M series Leicas. The shutter speed dial is positioned on the front of the CL. The shutter speed also appears in the finder display (the M5 shows the shutter speeds in the finder as well while the other M’s do not). Instead of the horizontal cloth focal plane shutter found in the M series, the CL uses a vertical cloth shutter. This allowed the CL body to be very compact, still the smallest M mount camera made by Leica. Much like the Nikon F, the entire bottom plate and back detaches from the CL for film changes. As with the M series, the shutter is entirely mechanical, a battery only needed for the meter.

The CL does not have a rangefinder as precise as that of a the Leica M. The rangefinder base of the CL is 31.5 mm and the viewfinder magnification is 0.60, leading to a small effective rangefinder base of 18.9 mm. This is too short for accurate focusing with lenses longer than 90mm and fast lenses used at full aperture. It has frame lines for 40mm, 50mm, and 90mm lenses, and the viewfinder easily accomdates a 35mm lens (just use the entire viewfinder frame). The 40mm frame is always visible.

If you’re looking to buy a CL, the Leitz Minolta version with 40mm M-Rokkor sells for about 60% of the Leica CL with Summicron. The only differences between to two cameras are the external engravings. I have one and love it. Its diminutive size makes it a perfect camera to take everywhere, and the optical quality of the 40mm M-Rokkor is outstanding. I find myself reaching for it when I’m heading somewhere with no particular photographic ideas in mind.

Beware of Leica Serial Number 1919603

WordPress allows me to see the search terms that lead to hits on the site.

Today, I couldn’t help but notice the following search (which apparently brought up Leicaphilia.com):

what does hell represent on the leica serial number 1919603

Damn if I know what that’s about.