Category Archives: Leica Camera

Leica Introduces An All New Film Camera, The Leica M-A

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Kudos to Leica. They’ve introduced a new film camera – the Leica M-A. The M-A is identical to the still available Leica MP but has no meter, needs no battery, and contains no electronics. Think of it as an ‘updated’ M4. The M-A isn’t completely new: In typical Leica fashion, Wetzlar offered a ridiculously overpriced stainless steel collector’s edition of the Leica M-A, the Leica M Edition 100this past Spring.

The M-A will be available in black chrome (yes, no retro “black paint” version) or silver chrome from Leica dealers starting October 2014. The price in Germany is 3,850 €, international prices will be announced later.

My only quibble is the knurled rewind, which has always been a PITA. I would have preferred the much more efficient rewind found on the M4, M6 and M7, a small quibble indeed in light of the fact that a camera manufacturer sees the continued viability of analogy photography and is actually committed to producing new cameras to meet the demand.

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From Leica:

With the Leica M-System, Leica Camera AG, Wetzlar, is one of the few manufacturers still producing both analogue and digital cameras. In this, the company can draw from decades of experience in the construction of the finest precision-engineered cameras. Now – 60 years after the first Leica M rangefinder camera, the M3, left the factory to significantly change the world of photography – we have chosen the occasion of this anniversary to present a new analogue model: the Leica M-A.

As a purely mechanical rangefinder camera, the Leica M-A stands for a return to photography in its most original form. Without reliance on a monitor, exposure metering or batteries, photographers can explore entirely new creative horizons. Because, with a camera reduced to only essential camera functions, users of the M-A can now concentrate entirely on the essential parameters of subject composition – namely focal length, aperture and shutter speed – and on capturing the decisive moment.

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From its shutter-speed dial and the aperture ring on the lens to the characteristic rangefinder focusing principle – the technical specifications of the Leica M-A are essentially based on the currently available analogue Leica MP. All of its precision-engineered components and functions are designed and constructed for absolute robustness and a long working life, and are housed in a painstakingly hand-built metal body. This ensures that the Leica M-A, as a product with particularly enduring value, brushes aside every challenge with absolute dependability.

The visible elements of the Leica M-A are as timeless as the precision-engineered principles employed inside it. For example, the Leica red dot was omitted to emphasise the classical simplicity of its design. Seen from the side, the Leica M-A is significantly slimmer than its digital counterparts.

The camera can be supplied in a choice of two different finishes: the classic appearance of the silver chrome version carries forward the traditions of 60 years of Leica M design. In the black chrome alternative, the M-A is reminiscent of the style of the M Monochrom and sets new standards in unobtrusiveness and discretion. While the silver chrome version of the M-A displays its origins in the engraving on its top plate, only much closer scrutiny of its completely matt black counterpart reveals the discreetly engraved Leica script on its accessory shoe.

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Each Leica M-A is supplied complete with Kodak Tri-X 400 black-and-white film, which is also celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Since its appearance on the market in 1954, its unmistakeable look, exceptional sharpness and tonal gradation, extremely broad exposure latitude and very good shadow detail made this black-and-white film a firm favourite and the classic medium for art and reportage photography.

The Leica M-A will be available from authorized Leica dealers starting October 2014.

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For Just $40,000 You Can Photograph Your Cat With a Titanium MP

 

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Above is a used Leica MP. It’s made of titanium. It’s currently for sale at the Miami Leica store for $39,995. First come, first served.

The Leica MP Titanium (0.72) camera was introduced in April 2007 to commemorate the 1st anniversary of the opening of Leica Store Ginza in Tokyo, Japan. It was produced exclusively for the Japanese market and was available only at the Ginza store in Japan. All exterior metal parts and fittings are made of titanium, similar to the Leica M7 Titanium and the Leica M9 Titan. The camera weighs approximately 90 grams less than a regular MP.  A signed (by then-CEO of Leica Steven Lee) certificate of authenticity is included.

Which gets me thinking: if I had $40,000 burning a hole in my pocket and I wanted a titanium 35mm film camera of exceptional quality, I could always go to Ebay and pick up a nice titanium Contax G1 for less than $125. And I’d still have $39,875 left for film. Of course, it’s not a Leica, but it’s a damn fine camera with a host of truly exceptional dedicated Zeiss lenses, each the equal of the latest stratospherically priced Leica offerings. And it has ‘modern’ features that the Leica lacks, like Auto Focus and Auto Exposure and a built in motor drive, all housed in a beautiful titanium body, just like the $40k MP. But that’s not the point, is it?

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“Collectors,” the sort of people who would buy a titanium MP, aren’t buying one so they can use it to take pictures. You’re not going to see a stubbled photojournalist pulling one from a beat up rucksack in some third world hot spot. I get that. And, given the crazy prices collectible Leicas go for, you can easily make the argument that a titanium MP might be a pretty safe investment. But….

Being old enough to remember when beat up Leicas were routinely pulled out of rucksacks in third world hot spots, I’m still emotionally married to the idea of the Leica as a functioning photographic tool. Call me a relic, but that’s why they’ve always appealed to me: traditional Leicas – the M2, M3, M4, and to a lesser extent the M5 and M6 – were the simplest of photographic tools. Nothing more than the strictly necessary features, nothing that presumed to do the thinking for you. Of course, that minimalist ethic is long dead photographically. Pick up the latest issue of PDN and every young up and coming hotshot has a big plasticky Nikon or Canon with a lens the size of an RPG launcher draped around his or her neck, extolling the necessity of its’ 100 Point Matrix Auto Focus. Or, even more depressing, go over to Rangefinder Forum or your favorite photo forum and join the discussion about which bag goes best with your M240 and attached Noctilux; while there, you can post pictures of your cat taken at full aperture.

Maybe its this obscene denigration of Leica’s real history that has caused throw back Leicas like the titanium MP to have become fetish objects commanding insane prices, collectors attempting to hearken back to an era where cameras were not computers but simple, reliable mechanical instruments. In my mind, however, a better way to scratch that itch is a buy a “real” Leica, a beat up M4, say, on Ebay. You can find beautiful examples for under $1000, cameras you’ll actually use to photograph things. With the money you’ve saved, you can travel the world for a few years all the while documenting your travels with your beloved M4. Or you can just stay home and photograph your cat with your Noctilux wide open. Either way, you win. And you’ll have plenty of money left for that fancy Filson bag.

 

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Why I Love My Leica

From The Gaurdian, The Observer
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John Naughton bough this first Leica as a graduate student at Cambridge: ‘It was a second-hand M2 with a 35mm Summilux lens and foolishly extravagant for a skint young scholar.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

I’m a photographer. No, let me rephrase that: I would like to be a photographer. In reality I’m merely an obsessive who takes lots of photographs in the hope that some day, just once, he will produce an image that is really, truly memorable. Like the images that Henri Cartier Bresson captured, apparently effortlessly, in their thousands. Think, for example, of his famous picture of the guy leaping over the puddle; or the one of the two stout couples enjoying a picnic on the banks of the Marne; or his magical picture of a cheeky young boy carrying two bottles of red wine on the rue Mouffetard in 1954. I like this last one particularly, because the lad in the photograph is about the same age as I was then and I often wonder if he’s still around, and what he looks like now.

You can think about this obsessiveness, this quest for the one perfect picture, as a kind of illness. If so, then I’ve had it for more than half a century. And I’m not the only sufferer. Only the other day I was reading a profile of Derrick Parfit, the celebrated Oxford philosopher, who believes that most of the world looks better in reproduction than it does in life. Unlike me, though, Parfit has specialised. There were only 10 things in the world he wanted to photograph, writes Macfarquhar, “and they’re all buildings: the best buildings in Venice – Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal – and the best buildings in St Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building”.

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Sunday on the banks of the river Marne. 1938. Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

 

Accordingly, between 1975 and 1998, Parfit spent about five weeks each year in Venice and St Petersburg. (That’s the kind of thing you can do when you’re a fellow of All Souls.) Like me, he dislikes the harshness of the midday sun, so he’d wait for morning or evening light. He would wait for hours, reading a book, for the right sort of light and the right sort of weather.

When he came home, Parfit developed his photographs and sorted them. “Of a thousand pictures,” Macfarquhar writes, “he might keep three. When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the 20th century – cars, telegraph wires, signposts – and usually all people. Then he had the colours repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted – which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head.”

Now that’s a serious case. My condition is nothing like as bad as that. But I recognise the longing for perfection. Parfit contracted the illness because a rich uncle gave him an expensive camera (make unspecified). I caught it via a chance encounter when I was 13.

I was brought up in rural Ireland, which in the 1950s was a pretty sober society, priest-ridden and poor – not unlike Poland before the Berlin Wall came down. On Sunday afternoons, my parents insisted that the family go for a “drive” – an idea I found tedious in the manner of teenagers the world over. On one such Sunday we wound up in Killarney, Ireland’s answer to the Lake District, and we were walking through the beautiful grounds of Muckross House when we came on a young woman sitting on a bench. She was in her 30s, neatly dressed and with a self-possessed air.

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A photograph taken by John Naughton on 20 April 2013 in a caravan park in Kerry. John says: ‘The “austerity” regime imposed as a condition of the EU bailout was visible everywhere in Ireland at the time. The little boy was dejected because nobody would play football with him. It was one of those metaphorical moments.’

 

We sat on a nearby bench and my father engaged her in conversation, much to my embarrassment. It turned out that she was English and on her first visit to Ireland. Da asked if she was enjoying it. “Very much,” she replied. What did she like about the country? “Oh,” she said, “that’s easy: the cloudscapes.” She explained that she was a photographer and Ireland had very interesting light because of the way the sunlight was filtered through the clouds.

At this point I sat up and began paying attention. I had never heard this kind of talk before. “What sort of camera do you have?” I asked. She explained that she had two – “one for colour and one for black-and-white”. I was astonished: in our world families had (at most) only one camera; and any photographs they took were in black and white. Seeing my amazement she asked if I would like to see one of her cameras. I nodded eagerly. She reached into her bag, took something out, leaned towards me and placed it in my outstretched hand.

I nearly dropped it! I was expecting something of the weight of a Box Brownie. Instead I found myself holding a silver-grey metallic object that looked more like a scientific instrument than any camera I’d ever seen. “It’s a Leica,” she said. “It’s made in Germany.”

The rest of that afternoon is lost in a haze. I do remember her talking about how one should use a yellow filter when photographing landscapes in black and white (it deepens the blue of the sky and makes clouds stand out), about framing and composition, and some stuff about focal lengths. But what I came away with were two ideas: one was that photography was something that was challenging, interesting and rewarding; the other was that if you wanted to do it properly you needed serious kit.

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Oskar Barnack, inventor of the Leica camera, 100 years ago.

 

That kit was invented 100 years ago this year in Wetzlar, a small town in Germany, where a 35-year-old technician invented a camera that would shape the way we perceived the world for the rest of the 20th century.

His name was Oskar Barnack, and he worked for a company called Leitz which made microscopes for scientific research. He had been hired by Ernst Leitz, the proprietor of the company, in 1911 and by 1913 had risen to be its director of research and development. His abiding passion, however, was not microscopy but photography, an art form that at that time required not just technical skill but a physique strong enough to lug around a large plate camera and its load of 16.5cm x 21.6cm glass plates.

Barnack suffered from acute asthma and the weight of the kit caused him difficulty in breathing, so he set out to reduce the load. He first tried fitting four images on to a single glass plate, but abandoned that approach because the quality of the images was poor. (At that time photographic prints were mostly produced by contact printing from the negative and so quality was directly proportional to the size of the negative: the bigger the glass plate, the better the result.) Barnack concluded that lightweight photography would have to be done with something less dense than glass plates, and with smaller, lighter, cameras.

At this point, he had a stroke of luck. One of his colleagues, Emil Mechau, was working on a project to improve the performance of movie projectors, particularly the infuriating fluttering of the images when projected on to a screen. He was working with 35mm celluloid roll film – a format invented by Thomas Edison in the 1890s which eventually had become standard for the emerging motion-picture industry. Barnack had found the lightweight recording medium he sought. All that was needed was a camera that could handle it.

Barnack set about designing and building one. The prototype he came up with was made of metal (hitherto cameras were hand-built, often exquisitely, with hardwood). The camera took one picture at a time, the film being wound on manually by means of a sprocket wheel that engaged with the holes on the sides of the film strip. Because the film moved horizontally – rather than vertically as in a movie camera – he decided that the dimensions of each image should be 36 x 24mm, and that a roll of 36 images would fit in the camera body.

Thus were set the basic parameters of 35mm photography. There remained, however, one problem. Since the 36 x 24 images were tiny by the standards of the day, the only way to produce large images of acceptable quality would be to print them via an enlarger. The tiny images would have to be phenomenally sharp, which meant that they needed lenses of extraordinary optical quality. Here again Barnack was lucky: one of his colleagues at Leitz was a genius with optics named Max Berek, who designed a 50mm lens (the first Elmar) that delivered the kind of optical performance Barnack’s camera needed.

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The Leica 1, 1925, the world’s first 35mm camera. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

The first three prototypes of the camera were produced in late 1913 and early 1914. It was called the Ur-Leica (Lei from “Leitz” and Ca from “camera”). It was astonishingly small, fitting comfortably into one’s hand, had a two-speed shutter, an automatic frame-counter and Berek’s f3.5 Elmar lens (which collapsed into itself when not in use, making the camera even more compact). It was a breathtaking, revolutionary device that would change photography for ever.

It would be some time before the world found out about it, however. One of the first photographs Barnack took with the camera shows a spike-helmeted German soldier who has just affixed to a public building a copy of the Emperor’s Order for total mobilisation. Germany, along with the rest of Europe, was descending into the first world war.

Leitz survived the war and the ensuing depression. The first commercial Leica – the Leica I – was launched at the Leipzig Fair in 1925. It was already much more sophisticated than the prototypes. It had a built-in optical viewfinder, shutter speeds ranging from 1/20th to 1/500th of a second, an accessory shoe – and Berek’s Elmar lens. Just under 59,000 of the Leica I were made and those that survive are now among the photographic world’s most coveted collectibles. Five years later, the first Leica with interchangeable lenses was introduced. The revolution was under way.

Leica cameras transformed the embryonic genre of photojournalism. Journalists had been using cameras almost from the dawn of photography: think of Roger Fenton documenting the Crimean war, Matthew Brady doing the same for the American civil war or Jacob Riis’s photographs of the lives of the poor in the tenements of 1890’s New York. These pioneers were constrained by the bulk of their equipment and their reportage was correspondingly static and formal. In most assignments, aspiring photojournalists stuck out like sore thumbs, or at any rate like the tripods they were obliged to use.

The Leica changed all that. Suddenly it was possible to be unobtrusive. The camera fitted in a coat pocket. It didn’t need a tripod and was quick and quiet to operate. So photography became fluid, informal, intimate: the technology no longer got in the way of telling the story. So new kinds of storytelling evolved, published in the new illustrated magazines such as Picture Post and Life.

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Alberto Korda with his 1960 portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara which became a global revolutionary icon. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

 

These publications developed new ways of laying out and presenting stories, creating the narrative not with slabs of text but with photographs, captions and short pieces of text. Freed by Barnack’s 36-exposure rolls from the straitjacket imposed by glass plates and cut film, photographers were suddenly able to take as many shots as they needed, enabling editors back at base to choose from their contact sheets the images that best suited the narrative they were creating. The heyday of this kind of photojournalism was from 1925 until the 1960s, when the illustrated-magazine format began to wilt under the pressure of television news and features.

At the heart of photojournalism was the Leica. Almost all the great photojournalists of the period had at least one of them in his or her bag. (The only exception I can think of is our own Jane Bown: she always worked with Japanese SLRs.) Many of the images that became, in one way or another, iconic of the time were shot on Leicas: Nixon jabbing his finger at Khruschev; Alberto Korda’s photo of Che Guevara; Robert Capa’s photographs of the D-Day landings [Editor’s Note: Capa shot a Contax, including the D-Day pictures; somehow the story has been transformed as another famous event shot with the ubiquitous Leica. it wasn’t in this instance.]; Cartier-Bresson’s photograph ofGandhi’s funeral pyre; Bert Hardy’s image of the Queen attending the Paris Opera in 1957; Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of a Gestapo informer being publicly exposed by a woman she had betrayed. And so on. Leica seeped into popular culture, such that when Dorothy Parker was asked to review Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera she replied, “Me no Leica” and everybody got the joke.

Leicas have never been cheap (the latest model in the M-series costs about $6,000 just for the camera body) but when you handle one you can see why. They are beautifully engineered precision instruments, and that kind of precision costs money. They have a reassuring heft and solidity, and shutter actions that are exquisitely balanced and quiet. (Even today some US courts define acceptable noise levels for courtroom photography in relation to the noise level of a Leica shutter.) And they go on for ever (my venerable M4-P dates from 1980 and still seems as good as new) – and Leitz will fix and service them if they falter.

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Normandy. Omaha Beach. The first wave of American troops lands at dawn. June 6th, 1944. Photograph: Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

 

Until the early 1970s the cameras contained no electronics – not even an exposure meter – which meant they were astonishingly robust. The playwright Arthur Miller once recounted an occasion when he and his wife, the photographer Inge Morath, were invited to dinner by Fidel Castro. “On arriving in the Palace of the Revolution,” Miller recalled, “my wife was immediately required to give up her Leica before meeting Castro. The man taking the camera promptly dropped it from a high bin to the stone floor.” Later on in the evening, however, an aide handed Castro a book of Morath’s photographs. On seeing them Castro “promptly ordered an underling to return her camera to her. And he had no objection to her photographing him the rest of the evening.” The Leica still worked flawlessly.

The other reason why Leicas are eye-wateringly expensive is the glassware. Leitz lenses are astonishingly good in terms of sharpness, resolution and colour rendition. The top-end Noctilux f0.95 50mm lens, for example, is capable of admitting more light than any other lens in the world. But at nearly £8,000 it can also deplete your current account faster than any other lens in existence. I know only one person who has this lens, and he long ago made so much money from technology companies that he doesn’t notice the cost. But even a standard 50mm Summicron f/2 lens costs around £1,600.

These prices attract the derision of some amateur photographers, who see them as proof that Leica has sold out – abandoned the business of serious photography for the universe of luxury goods dominated by Louis Vuitton, Breitling et al; the world of the Financial Times‘s nauseating “How to Spend It” supplement. It is true that the red dot that was the badge for the Leica brand had become something of a fashion icon – to the point that serious photographers took to obscuring the dot with black tape. (In recent models, Leica has abandoned the dot.) But people who buy Leicas as fashion accessories often come unstuck, because you have to know what you’re doing in order to use the M-series cameras. There’s a lovely sequence of photographs online of Eric Clapton using his M8, for example. He takes the photograph, then looks in puzzlement at the LCD monitor and the camera until he eventually realises that the lens cap is still on. The Queen, meanwhile, has been an assured Leica user for decades. And she always takes the lens cap off.

Like other great engineering companies, Leica nearly missed the digital revolution. Initially, the new technology didn’t seem to pose a challenge to high-end photography: the pixellated images produced by sensors the size of a baby’s fingernail were too crude. But the bell began to toll for analogue photography in 2003 when Canon released the EOS 300, the first competent digital single lens reflex, and Nikon followed soon after with its D70. It was only a matter of time before larger sensors would start to produce images as good as those obtainable from film.

As the Japanese giants raced to introduce sensors that would match the size of Oskar Barnack’s original 35mm frame, Leica looked like a rabbit transfixed in the headlights of an oncoming car. Instead of updating its M-range to take digital sensors, it fiddled about in an alliance with Panasonic to produce expensive but essentially derivative consumer cameras which were really just rebadged versions of Japanese originals. For a time it looked as though Leica would go the way of Kodak,, another company that had dominated analogue photography but failed to master digital.

In the end, Leica was rescued from its near-death experience by a wealthy Austrian entrepreneur, Andreas Kaufmann, who gradually acquired a controlling stake in the company between 2002 and 2006 and turned it round. The first digital M-camera, the M8, was launched in 2006. It was a flawed product, but at least it showed that it was possible to combine Leica’s traditional mechanical excellence with bigger sensors. And when the M9, with its full-frame 36 x 24 sensor, appeared in 2009 it was clear that the firm might weather the storm. Which it seems to have done: last year Leica reported annual revenues of around €300m and its 600 employees have moved back to a futuristic headquarters in Wetzlar, aided no doubt by the sacrifices of fanatics like me who took out second mortgages to buy M9s.

I bought my first Leica when I was a graduate student at Cambridge. It was a second-hand M2 with a 35mm Summilux lens and foolishly extravagant for a skint young scholar. In retrospect, though, it was one of the wisest purchases I ever made – not because it was an investment (though it could have been that) but because it taught me everything I know about photography. It forced me to think about what John Berger called “ways of seeing” rather than merely taking shots. It also pulled a comforting rug from under my feet: no longer could I blame my inferior work on the cheap lenses and crappy cameras that were all I could afford. With the same kit as Henri Cartier-Bresson, if I failed in the quest for the perfect picture then I only had myself to blame. Forty years on, that’s still the position. Still, tomorrow’s another day…

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Takahashi “Jewelryware” M4

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This is a Takahashi Leica M4. Takahashi was a Japanese painter and engraver well renowned in the 70′s and 80′s for his extremely highly detailed and precision repainting and engraving work. This particular M4 has been refinished with a crystalline stone fleck coating, known as ‘Jewelleryware Coating’ in Japan. According to Bellamy Hunt of Japan Camera Hunter,  this is the last camera Takahashi painted before retiring. 

It certainly is beautiful, although I’m not sure what you’d do with it other than putting it up on a shelf and admiring it, which seems to me a bit of a waste.

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Using a Leica MR4 meter

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An excellent tutorial on the use of the attachable Leica MR4 meter by Michael Geschlecht,  from L Camera Forum:

The MR4 meter is a reflected light meter that couples to the shutter speeed dial of many M cameras. It has a sensitivity range of EV +2 to +18. That means with a film of ISO 100 It will give you readings from F1.4 @ 2 seconds to F16 @ 1/1,000th of a second. That covers pretty much of what most people need in many circumstances.

Once you attach it to the M3 it will read an angle of view more or less equal to the angle of view of a 90mm lens. This is the angle of view shown by the frame lines either when you insert a 90mm lens into the camera & attach it or when you push the lever under the large, clear viewfinder window in the front of the camera inward in the direction of the center of the camera. Until that lever stops moving. Regardless of the lens mounted. Unless the lens has permanently attached “goggles”. 

If the lens on the camera has permanently attached “goggles”: Push that same lever outwards until it stops & use the 135mm frame. Sounds silly but it works correctly.

Replacement Wein 1.35 volt zinc-air “button” batteries are available. Just check in any camera store or find them on the net.

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To mount the meter on the camera & properly couple it to the shutter speed dial:

First set the shutter speed on the camera to “B”.

Then pull out the film advance lever to the “stand off” position.

Then rotate the dial of the MR4 meter to “B”.

Then slightly lift up the shutter speed dial on the meter until it stops.

Then rotate that dial in the direction of longer exposures,ie: 120 seconds..

Then slide the meter into the accessory shoe.

Then rotate the shutter speed wheel on the meter back to “B”.

The wheel should now click down & the pin on the underside of the meter’s shutter speed wheel should drop into the little cutout between the “2” for 1/2 second & the either “4” for 1/4 second or “5” for 1/5 second. Depending on which model of M3 you have.

Look to see if everything engaged properly. If all is right you are ready to go.

A meter coupled to the shutter speed dial means: You only have to set the aperture after you make a reading. Unless the shutter speed set before you took the reading is not appropriate. Very fast & handy.

Alternatively, you can take a meter reading, then rotate the shutter speed dial until the aperture you want to use is aligned with the indicator arm. The shutter speed has also been correctly set for the proper exposure.

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Whichever works in whatever direction is equally fine.

There is also a “battery check” slide on the front of the meter. If the meter arm goes up to or slightly passes the white dot: The battery is OK. The battery currently in the meter may still be OK even if it is years old. If these types of batteries are not used frequently they usually still last for many years.

USING THE MR4 WITHOUT SCRATCHING THE LEICA TOP PLATE

Often the meter will rub against the top of the camera and leave permanent scratches. This can be avoided by turning the appropriate leveling adjustment screws on the bottom of the meter’s mounting shoe. There are 5 screws holding the foot to the meter, 2 small ones & 3 larger ones.

If you look from the back of the camera, as you try to slide the meter into the accessory shoe, you can see if the screws need adjusting. There should be a clearance of about 1&1/2 mm.
The 2 tiny screws lift & balance the meter above the accessory shoe & the 3 larger screws lock the shoe & hold it in place. Like a tripod.

A little fiddling with the 5 screws as per above, if necessary, should set the clearance so the meter clears the top plate by about 1&1/2 mm while still allowing the pin to drop into the slot in the shutter speed dial on the camera when the shutter speed wheel is returned from somewhere in the 4 seconds thru 120 seconds range to the “B” position.

Once the pin drops down at the “B” position the shutter speed dial should be rotated to all positions to make sure that the pin continues to engage the slot & does not slip out between any of the the settings “B” thru “1000”.

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I Love Leica. I Hate Leica. I Love Leica….

In It Might Get Loud, a 2008 Davis Guggenheim documentary about rock guitar and the creative process, White Stripes front man Jack White builds himself an electric guitar in his barn. A piece of wood, a Coke bottle, a guitar string, an electric pickup, a hammer and a few nails, and pretty soon White is belting out an eerily hypnotic riff that might be right at home on one of his albums.  It’s there right at the beginning of the film, to make the obvious point: it’s not about the guitar, it’s all about the guy playing it. Cut to the next scene – White driving a late 50’s era Mercury down a Tennessee dirt road, declaiming on the debilitating drain of technology on the creative process, in White’s words “the disease you have to fight in any creative field.”

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I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Leica ever since the onset of the digital era. I love Leica film cameras. To my mind, the best, most functional, least ostentatious cameras ever made are the M2, M3, M4 and M5. Nothing superfluous, no bells, no whistles, everything you need and nothing more. Perfection via simplicity and design. No wonder people still pay premium prices for Leica film cameras long into the digital age. You will pry my black chrome M4 from my fingers when I die. Not a second before.

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     My Black Chrome Leica M4

It wasn’t always that way. When the Leica I debuted in 1925, most photographers dismissed it as a “toy designed for a lady’s handbag,” too small and imprecise, beneath the requirements of a ‘serious photographer.’ And shortly thereafter, Leitz offered the first in a continuing line of questionable collector’s editions, starting in 1929 with the gold plated, lizard skinned Luxus Leica I, over the top limited editions that have caused some to question the commitment of Leitz to the needs of serious photographers.

But, after the initial skepticism, and the discovery of the liberating effects of being able to slip a camera in one’s pocket, the Leica was greeted with fierce devotion by a generation of the twentieth century’s greatest photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, maybe the greatest documentarian of his time, called shooting with the Leica like “a big warm kiss, a shot from a revolver, like the psychoanalyst’s couch:” 

I have never abandoned the Leica, anything different that I have tried has always brought me back to it. I am not saying this is the case for others. But as far as I am concerned it is the camera. It literally constitutes the optical extension of my eye.

In 1932 the Leica II arrived, along with a coupled rangefinder for precise focusing, and shortly thereafter the Leica III with subtle improvements and slower shutter speeds up to 1 second. Production of the “Barnack” Leicas continued until 1960.

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      My 1957 Leica IIIg

I still use a IIIg Barnack, simplicity defined, with knurled knobs to wind and rewind the film, no meter, a shutter speed dial to set the mechanical cloth shutter, and a simple aperture ring on the lens itself. Even today, it feels right in use, comfortable in hand, the photographic equivalent of a well-worn pair of leather shoes built to last, certainly an infinitely more pleasing ergonomic experience than that offered by today’s crop of professional digital cameras, which in reality are more computer than camera, with voluminous instruction manuals and nested menus to match. With the IIIg no instruction manual is needed – well, in fairness, some might need one to figure out how to load the film – and one needs only some fundamental knowledge about how apertures and shutter speeds control light and how light interacts with film. Load your film and go out and shoot. No chimping. This is why I love my Leicas – IIIg, m2, m4, m5, and (to a lesser extent) my M7.

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And yet, I’ve often claimed to hate their digital cameras, in spite of the fact that I’ve owned two (an M8 and an X1) and loved them both. When I think about it objectively, the current Monochrom seems to me the closest thing to a traditional Leica film camera in the digital age, embodying the same ethos, but transformed somehow to meet the digital reality. And the fact that I’ve loved the M8 and X1, both much maligned by digiphiles, while philosophically “hating” Leica digital offerings, should tell you something about my ultimate sympathies. In reality, I’ve realized, I don’t hate Leica digital cameras; what I hate is digital photography. Of course, as an ‘amateur’ (not because I work in a different field, but because I do what I do for love), though one who has studied documentary photography in some fairly august institutions and with some incredibly fascinating people, I have the option of choosing a medium without reference to cost, efficiency or technological expectations. Some of us just prefer our photographic tools to be simple, much like Jack White prefers his Montgomery Ward electric guitar to a Fender Limited Rosewood Telecaster.  

The strengths of Leica’s digital cameras are the very thing they’re criticized for by the digital generation, and its because Leica’s philosophy has been to give their customer base a digital camera that mimics, as far as is feasible, the feel and function of a traditional mechanical film camera. They are, to the extent that a digital camera can be, simple, stripped to the essentials much like their film equivalents. The technology is kept in the background as far as that is possible, the experience meant to be a viable digital simulacron of the analogue experience.

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 If there’s one thing I do wish, its that Leica would move past the stale arguments about “IQ.” That battle was fought a long time ago, and unless you want to print 50 inches on the long side (which is itself absurd for a traditional photographer), the debate in the digital era now should be about functionality, ergonomics, the feel in the hand, the tactile experience, the “haptics” of the photographic act. The 12 mp Leica X1 is uncluttered and simple, as close to a traditional mechanical film camera in the digital age as you’ll find. The criticisms of the camera are perceived “faults” only if you buy into the misguided priorities of advanced digital cameras. They become irrelevant when you look at the X1 as Leica’s attempt to duplicate, as much as possible, the tactile and ergonomic experience of a traditional analogue camera. Slow AF? Scale focus. Actually, I’d prefer manual focus. Slow lens? You don’t need fast lenses in the digital age. Just crank up the ISO. A 2.8 fixed lens allows Leica to build a small pocketable camera. Low res LCD? Big deal. I’m of the opinion LCD screens have been the worst thing to ever happen to photography: instant feedback is expected, at the expense of being in the moment. Of course, the X1 needs the screen because that’s how you compose; but if you put an optical viewfinder on the hotshoe, just like I do with my IIIg, you’re good.

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         Auvers sur Oise, 2013, taken with a Leica X1

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My grandfather lived to be 96. He loved to drive his car, and he drove virtually every day until the day he died in 1998. Not bad for a guy with a stiff neck who had to back out of his driveway onto a busy urban avenue in New Jersey without looking. 

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     My Grandfather, “Gramps,” 1994, Lansdale, Pennsylvania

“Gramps” was a man who loved his cars, and he loved the Nash Rambler above all else. To him, the Nash Rambler was the pinnacle of automotive engineering. He had pictures of Ramblers hanging throughout his musty old house, and he never missed an opportunity to extol the Nash’s virtues to his bemused grandchildren. By the late 60’s/early 70’s when I was coming of age, Gramps had been relegated to buying AMC cars (the successor to Nash). AMC are the folks who brought you the Pacer, which has (rightly) gone down in American automotive history as one of the most hideous cars ever built. But my grandfather swore by his AMCs, because, of course, they were the same folks who built the Nash, and nobody, especially not his snotty-nosed know-it-all grandson, was going to convince him they weren’t the world’s best vehicle. I started driving in 1974, my first car a 1962 Volkswagon Bug with holes in the floor and rust up to the windows, and every time it broke down my grandfather would come get me and invariably remind me that if I had bought an AMC he wouldn’t be needing to pick me up on the side of the road so much.

I’m reminded of my grandfather and his Nashes when I pull out my Leica film cameras at family gatherings. The next generation – sons, daughters, nieces, nephews – look at me the same way I remember looking at him when he’d launch into his Nash soliliques: bemused and half pitying for an old man clinging to a disappearing world, unable to emotionally adapt to newer, better technologies. “Why do you use that old camera?” They’ll ask, half mocking, as they take selfies and pictures of their food with their iPhone. “Don’t you have to put the film in some chemicals before you can see the pictures?” And then I patiently explain to them about grain, and latitude, and the beauty of HP5 in D76, about contact sheets and being discriminating in what one pictures and shares, and they look at me with a look that attempts to conceal the fact that they think I’m a pitiable old man. Put aside for the a moment the following: I still have a full head of hair with a luxurious ponytail, I race 175 horse power motorcycles around closed circuits at 175 mph, and I listen to The White Stripes in my spare time.

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     My niece and her boyfriend, “Buddha,” with that bemused expression reserved for interacting with the pathetically un-hip.

What I like about my old Leica film cameras, and what I find lacking in most current digital cameras, is the way the simplicity of the technology, stripped to its essential functions, allows you, paradoxically, an easier creative flow. The technology isn’t in the way. I’m not bewitched by it, lured into believing that it offers something creatively not offered by a simpler device. It’s Jack White’s point: creative acts aren’t the product of a technology, whether it be a guitar or a camera; they are the product of a unique creative human act. The guitar, or the camera, is simply the conduit, and that conduit can either refine, or coarsen, the connection to our creative vision. In the words of Anthony Lane,

The truest mechanisms run on nothing but themselves. What is required is a machine constructed with such skill that it renders every user—from the pro to the banana-fingered fumbler—more skillful as a result. We need it to refine and lubricate, rather than block or coarsen, our means of engagement with the world: we want to look not just at it, however admiringly, but through it. In that case, we need a Leica.

So, I give Leica credit. In this age of 100,000 RGB Metering Sensors, “Scene Intelligent Auto Mode with Handheld Night Scene and HDR Backlight Control Modes,” image stabilization, face recognition technology and 14 fps burst modes, I can still open up my B&H catalog and order a brand new Leica MP or M7 film camera, or, if I prefer digital, a Monchrom with manual focus and completely manual exposure capabilities, just like my M4. That’s remarkable in this day and age, and Leica deserves profound credit. Enough, I suspect, to allow one to look the other way at the occasional Hello Kitty Limited Edition.

 

 

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A Leica M6 and Tri-X v. the Leica Monochrom

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An interesting comparison of 35mm Tri-X shot with an M6 versus the digital Monochrom, identical subjects, identical lenses, by French photographer Alexandre Maller (www.alexandremaller.com) posted on summilux.net. All photographs are by Mr. Maller.

3 lenses used: -. Summicron 35 asph – Summicron 50 V – Apo-Summicron 90 asph. 

Silver images: Tri-X exposed at ISO 400 and developed in Ilford LC 29-1. The negatives were then scanned at 3200 DPI original size with an Epson V700,.

Digital images: 400 ISO DNG , then post processed in Adobe Camera RAW 6.6. 

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In resolution and detail the digital files are superior, but I prefer the rendering and the particular dynamics of the film – the rendering from highlights to shadows and grain distribution over various tones looks more pleasing to the eye, fuller, warmer, less ‘plasticky’ even looking at limited web-sized pictures. After over a decade of rapid development in digital capture the best digital engineers still haven’t mastered the art of digital film emulation. The clinical digital sterility is still there with the Monochrom, especially seen on mid tones and highlights. To achieve the look of film with the Monochrom, which is what Leica purports it to do, you’d need to add digital grain to certain midtones, soften highlights (often impossible with digital files because they’re clipped), and expand the shadows.

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Tri-X (Above). Monochrom (Below)

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Tri-X (Above). Monochrom (Below)

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Tri-X (Above). Monochrom (Below)

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Tri-X (Above). Monochrom (Below)

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Which leads to the obvious question: why spend $7500 on a digital camera that emulates the “film look” when you can just buy a used Leica M film camera for $1000 and a 100′ roll of Tri-X and get the real thing? And another thing to think about: in 50 years that M4 you buy on Ebay for $950 will still be working just fine, no batteries needed, while your Monochrom will have been consigned to the junk heap decades ago.

The M4, all parts made by Leitz, is all mechanical, all parts capable of being replaced without much ado by a competent repairman or machinist. The MM (and all digital ‘cameras’) are consumer electronic commodities meant to be replaced by newer, “better” commodities every three years or so. Your Monochrom employs specialized chips and other parts, not made by Leica and therefore out of their control, which exist in finite supply: a proprietary shape and voltage battery manufactured by a third party, proprietary code to run itself, a proprietary imaging chip. Your Leica MM also depends on a host of other third-party technology (e.g. computers, image processing programs, web browsers) over which neither Leica nor you have any control. In 15 years, while your M4 loaded with Tri-X sits happily on your shelf next to book binders full of sleeved negatives you can touch and manipulate at your leisure, your Monochrom, all electronics and tiny motors, will be unrepairable because there won’t be parts. And good luck finding and/or retrieving all your MM DNG files.

 

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Ralph Gibson Gets Old, Surrenders To Convenience

By Bruce Robbins, January 21, 2014. This article originally appeared under the title A Less Beautiful Ralph Gibson in www.theonlinedarkroom.com. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Ralph Gibson has gone over to the dark side, his beloved Leica MP and M6 film cameras replaced by a digital impostor that looks the same but eats pixels instead of silver. Who’da thunk it? He’s just published his latest book of photographs, Mono, all of which are digital. Ralph built his reputation on a certain look in his photographs, lots of contrast, empty black areas and sharp composition. He now believes he can achieve the same look with a digital Leica Mwhatever. Maybe he can but that’s hardly the point, is it?

Even one as ill-versed in Ralph’s work as I could quickly grasp that his photographs were organic, they had vitality and soul. More so than most other photographers’, his images lived and breathed. I saw that straight away when my pal Phil Rogers (who’s art school trained – rolls eyes) educated me about Ralph’s photography last year. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea and doubtless would give zone system aficionados conniptions but, love it or hate it, it was the antithesis of the perfect digital image. So I loved it.

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Now, regardless of whatever direction Ralph’s future photography takes, we’ll all know that it’s not born of some deliberate combination of over-exposure and over-development – a technique arrived at over decades – but of some footering in Photoshop. No longer will it be unique. Now it’ll be just the same heavily manipulated pixel pap that I’m getting fed up of seeing on Flickr and other forums. (The Online Darkroom Flickr group is a rare exception. Check it out.)

Ralph, who was 75 last week, will now need to rewrite his personal website as well if he’s going to sell his new images there because he states, “All black and white prints are silver gelatin unless otherwise requested.” Somehow, I can’t see too many prospective buyers saying to Ralph, “No, it’s OK. I’ll pass on the hand-made, silver gelatin darkroom print. Just pop me out one of those nice, modern inkjet thingies.”

Some readers might think I’m going over the top but I don’t think I am. If you want an analogy between film and digital, I’d compare them to making a chair. Imagine if you were a craftsman who selected the seasoned wood, sketched out the design for the chair in a notebook, cut the timber to length, shaped it, carved the mortise and tenon joints, assembled it and finished it off with French polish.

Now imagine you had a computer on which you could design the chair. Imagine you could fire that design off to a CNC machine that carved the chair out of a block of wood and spat it out ready made and finished in varnish. The initial vision in both cases – the design – is the same. The latter would be the more perfect but which would you rather own?

Or here’s an analogy from the music world. You write the song, rehearse it with your favourite musicians and record it live. Or, you write the song, programme various computer-controlled synths to play the the various instruments absolutely flawlessly and record that. Which record would you rather listen to?

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Why as a society are we so hell-bent on moving away from things made by human hand to soul-less computer-based crap? The lack of human input is so prevalent in the manufacturing process it’s palpable. I was a motoring writer for about 15 years and test drove hundreds of cars and I’d virtually no interest in any of them. They were the motoring equivalent of white goods.

Hand Built

The vehicles I like are mainly pre-1970s (although I had a soft spot for my MX5  because it was the Lotus Elan I couldn’t afford). If I won the lottery, after the DB5 and E-Type, I’d be paying visits to Morgan and Bristol and that’s it. In fact, when doing the motoring column, the only motoring magazines I actually bought on a regular basis were from the kit car industry – hand-built, you see?

Getting back to Ralph, I was aware he’d been “dabbling” with digital for years but, from what I’d read, he always seemed to be quite dismissive of it. Not in a bad way but he made it very clear that everything about his images screamed film and always would.

As far back as 2001, Leica were trying to tempt him with digital cameras without success. Listen to what Ralph said in an interview at that time, “Digital photography is about another kind of information. Digital photography seems to excel in all those areas that I’m not interested in.

“I’m interested in the alchemy of light on film and chemistry and silver. When I’m taking a photograph I imagine the light rays passing through my lens and penetrating the emulsion of my film. And when I’m developing my film I imagine the emulsion swelling and softening and the little particles of silver tarnishing.

“But anyway, the big emphasis in digital photography is how many more million pixels this new model has than the competitor’s model. It’s about resolution, resolution, resolution as though that were going to provide us with a picture that harboured more content, more emotional power.

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“Well, in fact, it’s very good for a certain kind of graphic thing in colour but I don’t necessarily do that kind of photograph. So when it comes to digital, I have to say that digital just doesn’t look the way photography looks: it looks digital. However, I strongly suspect some kid is going to come along with a Photoshop filter called Tri X and you just load that and you’ve got yourself something that looks like photography (laughs).” My italics, Ralph’s laughter.


Photography or Digital

Now, everyone is obviously free to change their mind but I’m not sure there have been any developments in digital in the last few years that would negate anything Ralph said about his own view of photography or the materials he used. Did you see the way he spoke of “photography” and “digital” as two separate entities? Does that mean he’s no longer a photographer?

Why would a photographer who has built a considerable reputation using film ditch it in his 76th year? Is he getting too old to spend hour after hour in the darkroom or did Leica make him an offer he couldn’t refuse? Or was it the sudden realisation that all his earlier utterances about swelling, penetrating and softening (will that pass the censors? – ED) were wrong all along? Or was that just art speak designed to impress the pseuds?

Here’s Ralph’s (wholly unconvincing in my opinion) justification for taking the wrong fork in the road. Note that he concedes he’s now offering a less “beautiful” product.

These words about making images could be written in English, French, or any number of languages we know exist in the world,” he said in promoting his book.

“I am writing both about images and my life long relationship to the creative process. We could talk about the moon in many different languages but it would still be the moon being described.

“So when I work in digital, I might be describing the same subject but in a different language, a somewhat altered syntax. But the subject is the same. And the very moment I discovered that I could get my “look” on digital, I was convinced that this was a new language that I wanted very much to explore.

“Imagine my excitement after 55 years in the darkroom. It must be said that the silver-gelatin print is still more beautiful than the ink-jet but at the rate technology is progressing it is not inconceivable that the substrates will become even more desirable. For the moment I am totally inspired and enjoy picking up my Leica and expressing my thoughts and visual ideas. I have always liked picking up my Leica…”

Sorry, Ralph, mate. You’ve just gone from designer label to store bought.

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Postscript: On February 1, 2014, Leica announced a limited edition Leica Monochrom “Ralph Gibson Edition, priced at 21,000 Euros (around $28,000). A total of 35 units were produced.

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Gianni Berengo Gardin Talks About His Love of Film Leicas

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Gianni Berengo Gardin is an Italian photographer who has worked for Le Figaro and Time Magazine. Considered a artistic heir to Henri Cartier-Bresson, like Bresson he has long used and admired Leica rangefinders. His work has been published in more than 200 photographic books and shown in the most prestigious galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Now 82, Gardin boasts a personal archive of more than a million pictures.

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Q. How long have you used a Leica?  A.  Always: although in the fifties I used a Rolleiflex 6×6 because the clients preferred medium format to the smaller, 35 mm film, but I always had a Leica III in my bag for my own use. Then in 1954, when Leica released the revolutionary model “M” bayonet, I was among the first in Italy to buy it in a shop in Venice, where I lived. I had to pay for it in installments because German quality has always been expensive here in Italy. Since then I’ve owned and used, in order, an M2, M4, M6 and M7, and I still continue to use my M7 as my primary camera, even today. 

Q. It is still worth spending a significant amount on a simple Leica rangefinder when the market offers all kinds of models with all kinds of features at prices far more competitive? A. In the 50’s, the excellence of a Leica camera was clear. Today, the high level of optical and mechanical reliability remain, although the qualitative gap compared to other brands has narrowed. However, what remains important for me is the tradition of Leica. I feel a responsibility when I use my Leica, a responsibility to carry on the great photographic tradition of photographers from Dorothea Lange to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka.

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Q. You still prefer the film: Why? A.  I trust its archival properties. I’m afraid that digital capture, without a physical medium,  can not be sustainable over time.

Q. Have you tried a digital Leica? A.  Yes I’ve used a digital Leica. The quality is excellent and it certainly gives you the advantage of flexibility and speed, but for my type of work its not so important to see the result immediately. It is said that older men are attracted to younger women: for photography, for me its the opposite.  Instead of looking for the latest model I an romantically faithful to the classic models of the past. In my bag there will always be three film camera bodies and two wide-angles – a 35 mm and 28 – always allowing me to be close to my subjects. 

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New All Mechanical Film M Released – The Leica MA

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[POSTSCRIPT: on 9/16, 2014 Leica introduced a regular edition M-A (i.e. not made of Stainless or produced as a limited edition. You can read more about it here.]

The Leica M-A, fully mechanical, no meter. Announced 5/22/2014.

It’s beautiful, evidence that the M profile is timeless. I much prefer its look to the fattened contours of the digital M’s.

Unfortunately, to get it, you also have to buy a digital momochrom and three lenses as a kit. According to Leica:

As the first Leica special edition of its kind, the LEICA EDITION 100 brings together a purely mechanical rangefinder camera for film photography – the LEICA M-A – with a digital Leica M (LEICA M MONOCHROM) in one set. The combination of these two cameras is unique. Its symbolic character as an homage to the beginnings of Leica 35 mm photography and, in particular, to black-and-white photography makes the centennial edition truly special. This applies, above all, to its high-quality construction and finish: for the first time ever, both Leica cameras and the lenses in this set are made from solid stainless steel.

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Both cameras stand as symbols for the origins of Leica photography and the present day. The Leica M-A, with technical specifications based on the currently available Leica MP film camera, is a direct descendent of the Ur-Leica. Alternatively, the second camera, a Leica M Monochrom, is the contemporary variation of the theme composed a century ago by Oskar Barnack.

The set also includes three Sumilux Lenses with focal lengths of 28, 35 and 50 mm. Renowned for their combination of extremely compact size, speed and exceptional imaging quality, they ideally reflect the characteristic performance criteria with which Leica lenses contributed to the establishment of the brand as a legend. It also includes Kodak TRI-X 400 black-and-white film for use with the M-A. This film is considered a classic in the genres of art photography and reportage and is still renowned and extremely popular for its unmistakable look in prints.

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So, congratulations, Leica, for further feeding my love/hate relationship with you. In 2014, you offer an exquisitely beautiful mechanical film camera that harkens back to your classic M3 and MP (LOVE), and then you bundle it with 3 ultra-exclusive lenses and a limited edition digital, the whole set probably costing as much as my house (HATE) that will be snapped up by a select few of the beautiful people and set on a shelf somewhere.  Oh, and when I buy the set you’ll throw in some Tri-X for good measure (what, no D-76 in an individually numbered platinum beaker with engraved Leica logo?).

Meanwhile, I’ll keep happily snapping with my beater M2 and $2.79 roll of Arista Premium.

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Who Knew? Mac Guys Love Old Leicas Too

5529429579_2c107e621b_zWhen I worked on my college paper a million years ago, my buddy Bruno had Leicas. This made him the coolest person in the whole wide world.

The cameras were tiny and had the smoothest-operating lenses I had ever touched. They were a feat of German engineering. For me, it was love at first sight. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop lusting for one of those tiny black boxes.

I immediately started my quest to get one. I had to have a Leica. And because this was the mid-’80s, I definitely wanted an M6, which was introduced in 1984. Hell, it was advanced. It had a meter. The first real meter in a Leica, if you disregard the much-maligned M5.

It turns out all my favorite photographers used the Leica. Henri Cartier-Bresson carried a Leica his entire career, using it to make the photographs in the seminal photobook The Decisive Moment,. Robert Frank shot his project The Americans, the one photo book anyone who loves documentary photography should own, with a Leica. And the list goes on and on: Marc Riboud, Eli Reed, Alex Webb, David Alan Harvey.

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At the time, I had to settle for an M4-2 but I never stopped coveting an M6. Just as the digital revolution started kicking into full steam, the prices on Leica’s film cameras took a slight dip and I snatched up an all-black M6, slapped some gaffer tape over all the logos and never looked back.

The M6 and I took to the streets every day. It was never an easy camera to use — it requires practice and focused attention — but when everything comes together in a single frame, there is nothing quite like it.

Unlike a single lens reflex camera, where what you see is what you get, the rangefinder of the Leica forces you to embrace the unknown. Because it does not use a mirror like a traditional SLR or DSLR, the lens can sit closer to the film plane, creating what Leica aficionados claim, with some degree of accuracy, are the most beautiful photos in the world. Just google the terms “bokeh” and “Leica.” The results should send you tumbling down an amazing camera-geek rabbit hole.

Maybe it is the amazing lenses, maybe it is journey over destination or maybe it is just my sentimental self playing tricks on me, but no other camera has ever captured my soul quite like the Leica M6.

Machine Crush Monday is Cult of Mac’s weekly riff on #MCM. Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/276921/machine-crush-monday-leica/#thzomHYPG3pT1KVB.99

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Justifying the Purchase of a Leica

In one version of our lives, childhood is a series of deprivations and desires whereby we want things we can’t have, some of which we grow out of or just forget. In my case, I was seized with heartache when I entered the newly opened 8,000-square-foot Leica store on Beverly Boulevard at Robertson in West Hollywood. Until then, I had forgotten how much I wanted to own a Leica….

…My own passion for photography and for cameras was kindled by a summer job, at 13,  in a midtown Manhattan camera store run by Hungarian Jewish émigrés. Back then, there was a hierarchy to everything, including desire. The serious young photographer graduated from taking snapshots to a single-lens reflex camera, such as a Mamiya Sekor (popular among my friends), or, if you were more affluent, a Pentax. From there you graduated to an Olympus, and then a Nikon. Professionals used professional versions of the Nikon — which were all black. For the truly discerning, however, the object of desire was the Leica.

The Leica felt solid and was fully manual (a plus to the camera geek), allowing for maximum choice, and therefore, maximum artistic control in each photo. It sat in your hand with a satisfying heft, a solidness that spoke to its seriousness of purpose. To me, it was the embodiment of the schwarzgerat (literally “the black device”), a finely tooled exemplar of German engineering so satisfying in its design and manufacture, so intelligently made, that its use gave pleasure and conferred status and excellence on the user. The reverence in which the schwarzgerat is held has been central to several contemporary classics such as the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or the secret component in the searched-for rocket in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” I aspired to the Leica, although I knew it was way out of my league. 

Everything about it said “German,” which might have added to its forbidden-fruit status, as my parents, Holocaust memories ever fresh, didn’t buy German. However, just as the overwhelming quality of the product convinced some Jews to drive Mercedes and BMWs, particularly after Israel accepted the wiedergutmachung — reparations from Germany — Leica was adopted by many Jewish photographers, among them Robert Capa and Cornell Capa.

Jewish guilt was further assuaged by an e-mail that has been making the rounds for the last several years (I’ve received it as least three times from three different sources), variously referred to as “Leica and the Jews” or “The Leica Freedom Train.” The e-mail tells of how, as the Nazis came to power, Ernst Leitz II, son of the founder, arranged for his Jewish employees to leave Germany. He strung Leicas over their necks and dubbed them Leica sales agents, allowing them to obtain travel visas when those were increasingly hard to get. The cameras themselves served as proof and were a valuable commodity upon arrival in a foreign land. In many cases, Leitz personally arranged introductions to photo businesses in the United States and other countries for his employees. This continued until 1939, when Germany closed its borders to all Jews. Even after that, Leitz’s daughter was involved in helping to smuggle Jews into Switzerland. As Protestants, Leitz said, it was just the right thing to do and he never sought any acclaim for his actions. 

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A spirit more truculent than mine might point out that Leica did not close its factories under the Reich, or move its operations to the United States or England — to the contrary, Leica optics were very valuable to the German war effort, and Leitz remained a Nazi party member. And although the company was never convicted of using slave labor, in 1988 it voluntarily paid into a fund set up for German companies to compensate former slave laborers. But this does not make what Leica did for its Jewish employees prior to 1939 any less true: Those “Leica Jews,” their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive because of the opportunity Leitz gave them…

…For many years, though, Leica had been off my radar. Then  I walked into the Leica megastore, a gleaming cube, replete with an upstairs gallery space showing the works of celebrated portrait photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Seal (yes, the singer, who is a brand ambassador for the company, as well as an accomplished photographer with special access to nude models lying on hotel room beds) and Yariv Milchan, the landscape and celebrity photographer (whose Hollywood connection is genetic — his father is entertainment mogul Arnon Milchan). It also houses a bookstore selling rare and well-chosen photo books, curated by Martin Parr of Magnum. And, finally, there are the cameras…

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….One might think this would be the worst possible time to be selling expensive cameras.  In the last few years, images made using smartphones and iPhones posted on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook have made everyone a photographer or a photodiarist of their meals, pets, friends and selves. Hasn’t digital and the Internet disrupted and leveled photography?

James Agnew, the store’s general manager, sees it differently. He believes the ubiquity of photos has created a backlash, and he believes there is “overall a return to the tradition of photography and a renewed call for quality cameras and images.”

What became clear from talking with Agnew — who prior to opening this new Leica store, worked for such luxury retailers as Giorgio Armani, Chanel and Van Cleef & Arpels — is that Leica is positioning itself as a luxury company. We live in a society where driving a Bentley rather than a Prius (or, rather, driving a Bentley in addition to a Prius) is a choice that the marketplace supports. So, for every 1,000 or 10,000 iPhone photo enthusiasts, there will be some who crave, or succumb to, the quality and the allure of a Leica.

And if they can’t afford one, then, like me, they can spend time at the beautiful new Leica megastore, lusting for excellence.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. His blog can be found at jewishjournal.com/tommywood.

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