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For Easter, Only a Leica

That “Z” in “Zu” looks pretty suspicious… or am I just imagining things?

Bruce Davidson and His Leicas

Bruce Davidson’s Leicas

Bruce Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten . After attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, he was drafted into the army and stationed near Paris. There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson. When he left military service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1962 and documented the civil rights movement in America. In 1967, he received the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and used it to document the social conditions on one block in East Harlem.

Q: Why do you like the Leica so much and why is it a great tool for what you do?

A: For me, the things that define the Leica mystique are that it’s small, it’s relatively light, quiet and unobtrusive. Modern reflexes look like sneakers; they don’t look like cameras. They look like something else from another world. That’s why I’ve always had Leicas in my life. For example, right now I’m thinking about doing something where I want to walk around. I want to be very invisible and not aggressive in any way. That means quiet and that means Leica…

…most of my bodies of work from the circus photographs in 1958, the Brooklyn gangs and even the civil rights movement, the Leica worked because it’s quiet, mobile and has excellent optics. I remember during the civil rights movement, when I wasn’t sponsored, but on a fellowship, something happened to my Leica and I called Marty Forscher, the Leica repairman for all the professional photographers. He talked me through it and I fixed the camera myself on the road — which was pretty amazing.

I’d like to back up to the question “when did Leica come into your life?” It came into my life when I was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). At that time, in the early 1950s, there were 140 students in the photography department, including two women. Of course, I was smitten by one of them and I was trying to court her. I met her at the women’s dorm in the living room sitting on a couch. She said, “I want to show you something.” She ran up to her room and came down with this huge book of photographs called The Decisive Moment, a collection of images by Cartier-Bresson, and we sat together looking through all of the amazing photographs. I had never seen anything like it. She said to me, “I really love this photographer.” So, I said to myself, “If I could take pictures like this guy maybe she will love me too.” So, I went out and spent all my monthly allowance on a used Leica. I actually tried to imitate the imagery of Cartier-Bresson. Of course, it didn’t work. The young female student ran off with a history professor, and I was left with Cartier-Bresson. That’s what started me off. I began to take street photographs.

Q: So how was it meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson when you were in Paris?

A: It all started when I went from RIT to working for Eastman Kodak. I had my own studio at Kodak, but I was bored so I decided to apply to Yale. I got in and took Yosef Albers’ color course. I then was drafted into the military and was sent to the Arizona desert. It was the most remote, isolated camp you could find — 7,000 feet up in the desert. I would hitchhike on weekends to Mexico to photograph bullfighters, and I made friends with Patricia McCormick, a female bullfighter. While thumbing my way from the fort to the Mexican border, I came upon an old guy in a Model T Ford and I stopped him. The town was called Patagonia — really just a post office, a grocery store, a bar and a railroad site. And this old guy took me in and I lived with him on weekends. I forgot about the bullfighting and I just photographed this old couple with my Leica. That was my first full-bodied work and if you look at it closely today, it really predicts the way I would spend my life photographing.

Q: Can you share the story about how you discovered the Brooklyn gang?

A: As I remember, there was a gang war going on that was all over the Daily News. I took the subway to Brooklyn, found the group and took color photographs of their wounds and bandages for their lawyers. That started my relationship with them and the rest is history. It was slow going in the winter months, but when they went to Coney Island in the summer, that’s where I took the most pictures….I think got in with them because I had a Leica. It was small, it was quiet and discrete, and it was simple. I would take pictures of them and then I would bring the pictures back to show them. I didn’t judge them. I wasn’t a social worker. I just photographed the mood of these teenagers — a street gang.

Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 5cm 1.5 for Leica

For a very short period during World War II, the Carl Zeiss Optical Factory at Jena built Sonnar lenses in the M39 lens mount used by their biggest competitors, Ernst Leitz Cameras in Wetzlar. During WW2 trade with Nazi Germany was either restricted or forbidden in most countries. The German government, needing foreign currency for the ongoing war effort, appointed the president of Carl Zeiss to coordinate export of German products, probably because of Zeiss’s established contacts with foreign companies.

Carl Zeiss-made Contax foreign sales, along with Leitz’s, had plummeted during the war. However, German military organizations were commissioning Leica cameras to be used by military photographers and German journalists assigned to the Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine and the Wehrmacht. To ensure ongoing Zeiss production, the president of the Carl Zeiss Jena plant ordered that Leicas should be fitted with Carl Zeiss lenses. And so Carl Zeiss in Jena retrofitted several Contax mount lenses for the Leica Thread Mount: a Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 50mm f2.0, a Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 50mm f1.5, a Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 85mm f2.0 and a Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 135mm f4.0. All were produced and sold, although in quantities limited by the contingencies of war, until the end of WW2.

By the end of the war, the Russians had overrun Jena and appropriated the Zeiss manufacturing plant there. The Soviets ran it under their auspices for some time, continuing to produce Zeiss optics under the Carl Zeiss Jena brand, including the M39 LTM Sonnars. The company that remained, “Carl Zeiss Jena,” was not a “fake” company bearing the name of Carl Zeiss; it was the same company in the same factories where all the pre-WWII lenses were made. The company name remained “Carl Zeiss”, and the location of the company remained marked on the lens as the wartime lenses had been.

The Soviets subsequently dismantled the factory and transplanted it to Charkov in Ukraine. They took with them to Charkov Zeiss designs, machines, stock, and workers forced to relocate to Charkov, where the Zeiss factories were reconstituted by the Russians as restitution for the German’s destruction of the Charkov FED plant during the German invasion of the Ukraine. They left, as a legacy, an unknown quantity of Carl Zeiss Jena lenses in M39 mount. These Zeiss Sonnar lenses are the progenitors of the the Jupiter-3 (50mm f1.5), Jupiter-8 (50mm f2.0), the Jupiter-11 (135mm f4.0) and the Jupiter-9 (85mm f2.0), which would be built to the same design, and often with the same machinery, as the Zeiss optics built in Jena. The Russians even adapted the Contax-mount Biogon 35mm f2.8 to their Jupiter-12 35mm f2.8 in LTM.

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The legitimacy of M39 LTM Leica Mount Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnars are often called into question by web “experts.” The problem is that much of the factory records were plundered or lost during the Soviet occupation, offering fertile ground for all sorts of whacky “Red Scare” theories about the Russians “faking” CZJ lenses. Contrary to what is usually claimed, almost all the M39 lenses that have come onto the modern market are genuine and can be established as such with some critical examination (see below). What seems to confuse collectors is this: many of the CZJ Sonnars are post WW2 Russian Army Of Occupation lenses, which are only different in build date from their WW2 German build counterparts. However, the internal components are the same as the 1941 to 1943 assembled lenses, and they were assembled with Zeiss machinery and know-how. All Jena factory made WW2 CZJ M39 lenses made during the war had “ears” just as their Contax counterparts did (remember, these were retrofitted Contax lenses), while the post-war Russian-made LTM lenses were produced with Jena factory optics, machines and parts, often don’t have “ears”, but are still legitimate “Carl Zeiss Jena” lenses.

Another thing which confuses collectors is that, even before the partition of Germany, there were three organizations with the name of Zeiss. Carl Zeiss Optical, established by Carl Zeiss; after Carl Zeiss’s death sole ownership passed on to his partner Ernse Abbe, who established Carl Zeiss Stiftung which would acquire Carl Zeiss Optical as one of its core divisions. Carl Zeiss Stiftung grew and diversified, in 1926 acquiring four camera manufacturers, merging them to form Zeiss Ikon, its photographic equipment division, based in Dresden. Zeiss Ikon bought lenses from Carl Zeiss Optical for its cameras but Carl Zeiss Optical was free to supply its lenses and other products to other camera makers too. Given all of the above, confusion and misunderstanding seem to trail vintage Zeiss optics at every turn.

Illegitimate CZJ lenses do very infrequently pop up for sale, usually by sellers in the former Eastern Bloc. These are Contax lenses hacked into Russian Jupiter lens mounts, being sold as original Carl Zeiss Jena M39 Sonnars. Or they’re Jupiter-3s with the front lens ring removed and replaced with a fake Carl Zeiss Jena lens ring. Those are the fakes. But it seems to me that there is no practical incentive to try and turn an old Jupiter 3 into a CZJ. The effort and expense of machining a CZJ front ring and replacing it in a early 50’s era Jupiter 3 doesn’t match what little extra money the CZJ would bring over a Jupiter 3 sold as such. So, the bottom line is this: if you’re lucky enough to have found one along the way, your CZJ Sonnar is probably genuine, irrespective of the irrational claims of some self-appointed experts who see fakes everywhere.

If you know what you’re looking for, it’s not difficult to spot a fake. The first step in determining whether its a fake Zeiss lens converted from a KIEV is to look on the lens’ focusing ring. Russian lenses use metric screws while Zeiss used non-metric screws. Additionally, the Zeiss ring has one short and one longer screw; converted KIEV lenses have equal length screws; the Kievs will typically have a big “M” for the focusing scales while real CZJ’s will have a small “m”; and the “T” engraving on the front shield, which should be red, will often be white on the fakes. *

In his book Non-Leitz Leica Thread-Mount Lenses, Marc James Small states: “For the most part, [the wartime] lenses have serial numbers in the 2,6xx,xxx to 2,8xx,xxx range, are ‘T’-coated & marked, & all are inscribed ‘Carl Zeiss Jena.'” The 276 series was the last true wartime series, 279 and up were produced in the Jena plant after the Russians had completely taken over Zeiss plants and production. Thus, my copy, #2,866,450, the one shown in the photos, would have been produced in the Russian run Jena plant post-war using Zeiss optical glass, parts, labor and know-how.

I bought my copy from a guy who was selling camera equipment he had inherited from his father years earlier. It was dirty and unused for probably 30 years before he put it up for sale on Ebay, from Ohio, with some really cheesy photos and a description that clearly indicated he had no idea what it was. In talking to him afterwards, he told me his dad had brought it back with a camera from Germany during the occupation, but that’s about all he knew. The lens, bearing all the marks of being legit, cleaned up nice. I had it disassembled and the tech said it had the internal markings consistent with an original.

Older lenses like the CZJ Sonnar weren’t designed with the same tolerances as today’s computer designed and robotically manufactured optics. They don’t have the same materials and were subject to more impurities. They age and discolour. They often have a single coating rather than being multicoated like modern lenses. The Carl Zeiss Jena 5cm 1.5 Sonnar is a cool lens, both as a collectible and as a user, obviously very vintage in character – not very contrasty, not super sharp wide-open but better and better as it’s stopped down. Wide open it has a beautiful soft character with a creamy rendition of out of focus areas, nothing like the clinically harsh and contrasty look of modern Zeiss optics built by Cosina. The photos below are good examples of its character.

I find it a great lens to use on my M8, a way to build some imperfection into a digital image. Or, better yet, pair it with some Double XX pushed a few stops and developed in D76: perfect.

Carl Zeiss Jena 5cm 1.5 Sonnar. Photos by Andrew Fishkin.

* I’m definitely not an expert, so please take what I’m saying here with a healthy dose of skepticism; I’m essentially repeating common wisdom with respect to telling the real from a fake. If you have better information, and if some of mine is wrong, please feel free to set me right.

Garry Winogrand and His Leica M4….errr, M3?

So, here’s a picture of Garry Winogrand with his famous M4, you know, the one he ran about 100,000 rolls through and generally beat the hell out of, the camera itself now somewhat of an icon. Except that, as alert Leicaphile Andrew Fishkin points out to me, the shutter advance lever is most definitely not an M4 lever, but rather the old style M2/3 full metal lever. So, given the presence of a dedicated exposure numbering window next to the shutter release, this would appear to be an M3 as opposed to an M2. Whatever Winogrand was doing with an M3, well, we’ll never know.

Winogrand’s M4

As for the lens, the more I look at it, it looks like a 21mm Super-Angulon and not the 28mm Elmarit he “always” shot with. So much for “what everybody knows” about Winogrand.

Why I Shoot Film…And Print My Negatives

Digital photography renders a certain look, nothing much like the film aesthetic. Whether you find it better, or worse, is a matter of preference. Among traditional photographers i.e. film photographers, it’s become a cliche to complain about the sterility of the digital photo when contrasted with the thick, expressiveness of film. It’s the reason why many of us claim we still shoot film. The film look. Some of us, having trained our eye with a lifetime of looking at and creating images captured with film, much prefer the film look. Its familiar, understandable, capable of being manipulated in manners we’ve learned through trial and error to create what we want to communicate.

Which poses a question: If and when digital technology advances to the point that it can reproduce the appearance of films and formats precisely, will the processes of analogue capture alone be enough to keep using it? For hand made processes, where idiosyncrasies are intrinsic to the print, undoubtedly. But what of industrial films, which are designed to react with light in a consistent way without variation? Now that we can mimic the film look with our iPhones and a 5 dollar app, what further purpose does the slow-mo variant – loading film, tripping mechanical shutters, rewinding film into cassettes, waiting for the results while we employ arcane development procedures – serve? All this so we can escape blown highlights? Or is it so that we may continue to claim photography as a learned craft, our expertise hard-won, allowing us to look down at the happy-snapper as a trivial dilettante, engaged in something beneath us?

Only the most shallow, or willfully ignorant, can deny the revolutionary nature of the changes being wrought by the “digital revolution.” Unlike film photography, where an image is transcribed physically onto a material substrate, digital media translate everything into “data”, waiting for a machine to reconstitute it. Digital photos are coded signifiers, usually clicked on a screen, infinitely repeatable abstractions in which original and copy are exactly the same, yet just as easily transformed into something completely different.

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The 2D experience of digital tech is fundamentally at odds with the physicality inherent in human perception and action. There are very deep biological factors at play in creative endeavors. The hand and handiwork is what sets us apart as a species. The earliest divergence of the species that would evolve into modern humans began with an evolutionary reconfiguration of the hand allowing sophisticated tool use. This is, literally, what sets us apart as humans and defines us. Some would argue that rationality came along as a byproduct of the use of tools, as sort of a evolutionary development of the neural software necessary for tool use. This evolutionary heritage has obvious implications for our lives as creators. Humans have an innate need to physically master things as part of the creative process. The physicality of the process is a large part of the need it serves. The musician with the violin, the painter applying an impasto of paint, part of the need creative processes meet is necessarily physical. A large part. Creativity doesn’t just meet emotional or intellectual needs. It should meet physical needs as well.

From earliest humanity, creating something has necessarily required a tactile interaction with materials and substances along with a deep intelligence that could not be learned without material manipulation and embodied experiences and an understanding of the cause and effect relationship that exists between our actions and their consequences. In photographic practice, this meant first understanding the mechanics of the camera, an understanding of cause and effect with respect to the aperture, shutter speed, the clunk of the shutter, the movement of the film thru the camera, the nuances of the chemical development process, the laborious printing until we finally got the one print that conformed to what we saw in our mind’s eye. Now, the skill required of photographers is the ability to manipulate surfaces without any real understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved, where the machine is smart so that the human can remain stupid.

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A few years ago I saw a Walker Evans exhibit at the Getty in Los Angeles. Small, simple 5×7 contact prints of work he had done in Havana in the 50’s. Something about the photos themselves, their physicality, the jewel like beauty of the photograph as a physical thing, how each print embodied an irreducible idiosyncrasy, moved me profoundly; beautiful photos that could not only be seen, but also touched, read, received and manipulated. It seemed as if they could only be fully appreciated by means of this physical relationship, and in that relationship they would always remain partly elusive. It was what made the work so beautiful to see.

Even the most detailed digital rendering, viewed virtually, is able to preserve only a vestige of the physical photograph’s real, dynamic nature, a handmade object Like Walker’s contact prints, irreducible to any single dimension. The are, rather, visual wallpaper, endlessly replicated, and so numerous now as to render us numb to whatever physicality they might possess. For better or worse, they are no longer analogue, palpable, singular in its object like a traditional work of art.

It has become unfashionable these days to speak of the problematic consequences of the digital revolution. All the more reason to do so. I am not a Luddite, or just an old guy asserting the tyranny of the traditional status quo. I am noting that the path we choose often determines our goal, and the goals digital capture holds out to us as photographers are becoming radically divergent from photography’s traditional aims. What is being lost in the new digital paradigm is the physical experience of photography, the activity that has traditionally constituted photography, the physical making of one unique and idiosyncratic thing as part of the creative process. Do you feel as if you’ve created something when reviewing an image on a screen? Yes, you can print a digitally produced photograph, but how many of you actually do?

Digital technology is propelling us further and further away from the idiosyncratic and tangible unique creation. Now we have a movement of electrons and the inscription of 1s and 0s housed somewhere ethereal, producing an endlessly replicated synthetic universe viewed through a screen. We are losing the sense of the photograph as a unique physical thing. There is lived-in feel of a beloved photograph that you’ve taken, developed, printed, matted and framed and that you’ve had hanging on a wall somewhere forever. You have a connection to that one photo – how it was taken, how you developed it, how you chose to print it, how you framed it. All tangible qualities, something more than a jpg nested on a hard drive with a few thousand others, or displayed as a screensaver on a smartphone.

The Leica M262. Now with More Leica Fairy Dust

Internet camera reviews are funny things. They’re usually either uncritical raves – “best camera ever!” – emotionally based, without much factual basis, or they’re just plain incoherent. And then there are the Leica reviews.

Leica has just released the M262, what looks to be a nice attempt on Leica’s part to offer a digital M with the simplicity of their iconic M film rangefinders. No fancy live view, EVF, movie mode etc. Just a 24mp digital rangefinder with the M form factor. Were I shopping for a digital camera (I’m not) I’d give it a look.

No fault of Leica, but the reviews have been the usual nonsense. This from clapway.com, under the heading “Entry Level Leica M Is Better than 10 G7x’s“:

When you think of Leica cameras, you possibly consider its price, then possibly adhered to by its high quality. Without a doubt, Leica cameras and lenses can take some pretty stunning photos (quality-wise, structure is an entirely different story), however, its price tag has consistently been an obstacle to entry for numerous a photographer.

I’m not sure what that all means, but then again, I’m not sure I should expect much from a website called Clapway.

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I’d expect more from WIRED, however. This from their website:

IT’S HARD TO think of a $5,195 price tag on a camera as “cheap.” But in the realm of Leica products, that cost places the new Leica M (Typ 262) at the entry-level end of the company’s pricing spectrum. Leica made this new model for people with bank who just want a damn good, relatively easy-to-use rangefinder camera with a full-frame sensor. Forget all the other frills…..

The camera’s features have been pared down on purpose, and not just to make it (relatively) more affordable. Anyone who has shot with a Leica rangefinder knows that the experience is unique; it’s slower and a lot more manual of a process to get the exposure and focus precisely the way you want.

So far, so good. But then, this:

But when you get that perfect shot, it looks distinctly incredible—the famed “Leica look”—and makes you want to shoot more and more.

Oh boy. Trust me: no one, I mean nobody, absent peeking at the EXIF data, will be able to differentiate a shot from this camera from, say, a shot from a nikon d610. Its not as if the Leica sensor has been infused with some ethereal something that creates the Leica look (although I would argue that the M8 CCD sensor, with its extended IR sensitivity, does come close to giving you a unique look.)

That somebody vetted by WIRED could fall for this nonsense shows, in addition to the author’s weak capacity for independent judgment, the seductive power of a branded narrative in service of parting people from money. Otherwise rational people, in denial or ignorance of the facts, are always vulnerable to those who tell them what they want to hear. And usually, people tell you what you want to hear because they’re trying to sell you something, or trying to justify the exorbitant price they’re asking. I get that. But when supposedly objective reviewers start spouting this nonsense, I can only shake my head.

So we now have a new digital generation prattle on and on about the Leica look, now transmuted to the cameras themselves. Exactly what this “look” is is all quite mysterious. Depending on who you ask at any given moment, it might mean anything from low contrast images showing pronounced astigmatism and chromatic aberration to contrasty, tack sharp photos. Whatever it is, of course, it is a function of a camera’s optics, not the camera itself, so it’s particularly curious when these characteristics somehow get ascribed to cameras and not lenses.

But then, back to this:

With this new M model, Leica strips the shooting experience down to its bare essentials.

Yup , thats it. Why couldn’t you have stopped there?

Confessions of a Leica Fondler

Yes, I am a camera fondler. I’ll admit it. After all of the pretentious high-brow screeds about the superiority of film to digital you’ve read me post to this site; after all the barely concealed distaste for the basement bound losers and retired consumer drones who compulsively troll internets forums with their gross inanities, when push comes to shove, when I’m completely honest with myself, the biggest reason I dislike digital is this: digital cameras are boring, inconsequential utilitarian, soulless, artificial hunks of plastic incoherence. You can’t fondle them. Or, to be more precise, they give you no reason to. Fondle a Sony A7 with one of those Zeiss Tuit monstrosities? I think not.

Right now, as I type this into my computer, an obscenely elegant Leica IIIg with attached Leicavit and Carl Zeiss Jena 5cm 1.5 Sonnar, sits within arm’s reach, for no other reason than so I can occasionally pick it up and fondle it. It doesn’t even have film in it (ever tried to load a Barnack Leica?). It’s just there for emotional support. Next to it sits a Nikon SP with a W-Nikkor 3.5cm 1.8 and a external finder, also with no film, although I did take it out this morning and ran a roll of HP5 through it [and no, I didn’t take it to the cafe to take pictures of smiling people and their pets; that’s for fondlers who are also dilettantes. I’m not one if those. I took pictures of serious stuff]. The SP is there in case I can’t reach the IIIg, I suppose.

I’ve been this way since I was 12, when my seventh grade teacher, Mr. Smith, a slightly creepy middle aged guy who for some reason took a keen interest in me, pulled me aside in a vaguely forced conspiratorial manner to show me his…..Nikon F. Holy shit. You’d have thought he showed me a stack of Playboys. I was gobsmacked. Something about that Nikon F spoke to something deep within me, something in my loins, some inchoate desire I didn’t even know I possessed, and I knew then that my future would be as a photographer.

Yours Truly, at 13, with my first “real” camera, but already dreaming of a Leica. 1971. I was already ahead of the curve, taking selfies in mirrors, probably before even Vivian Maier. I was always a cool kid, ideas all my own.

That chance encounter with Mr. Smith’s Nikon set me on the road for my lifetime’s journey with film photography. Cameras lusted after, many bought with hard earned money, darkrooms built, tens of thousands of negatives sleeved and filed away. Discovering, some time in the early 70’s, an even more rarified object of desire, the Leica rangefinder – considered an esoteric, vintage throwback even then – and in particular, the new M5, a radical step forward for Leitz, and, based on how it looked in the pages of Modern Photography, now having supplanted the Nikon F as the ultimate object of my desire. I knew the hardcore Leica users didn’t accept it – too big, too boxy, too sophisticated, too expensive – but I didn’t care; this was my fantasy, not theirs.

Atlanta, GA, 1970, overexposed Tri-X, and an Argus/Cosina SLR. The first photo I’d ever taken where, when I saw it in a contact sheet I said, “Yup, that’s good – I don’t care what anybody else says.” I was 12. I entered it in a middle school photo contest. It didn’t win; it didn’t even place. A very nice shot of a horse in a field with a sunset won.

My first cameras were bought for me by my parents. Parsimonious hard working blue collar folks, they saw no need to spoil me with what I wanted; instead I got the consumer grade Mamiya/Sekor, or the Argus Cosina SLR, or a Minolta SRT. But I wanted the M5, or at the least, a Nikon F. So one day, having saved my after-school money, I walked to the local camera store and bought a beat up black Nikon F with a chrome FTN finder and a chrome bottomed back plate, everything all beat to hell. But it worked, and I loved it, and used a Vivitar 35mm 2.8 on it because I couldn’t afford the Nikkors. Had that camera for years, shot the hell out of it, used it till it was falling apart and then sold it to some naive chap on Ebay maybe 15 years ago. Bet its still working.

In 1977, one year out of high school, I finally scrimped and saved enough to buy my first Leica, a spanking new M5 from Cambridge Camera in New York City. It had been sitting in inventory for 3 years, an orphan. Nobody wanted an M5. But, it was my dream camera, and they were selling at a steep discount, and that’s what I wanted, damn it, an M5. I’ll remember that day till the day I die: the drive into NYC through the Lincoln Tunnel, walk to the camera store, the purchase from the slightly bemused salesman (finally, a sucker who wants an M5!) the walk back to the car with the M5 and 50mm Summicron in my hands, feeling like Robert Frank.

I still have that M5. It’s the one camera I will never sell. Bought an M6 as soon as they were introduced. Subsequently sold it to a guy in Paris in 2003 who neglected to tell me that it was a collectible, one of the earliest serial numbered M6’s he had ever seen. No matter; never much liked the camera anyway. It seemed emblematic of the beginnings of Leica’s shift from professional tools to collectors’ trinkets. In the meantime I was stocking my shelf with real Leicas – M2’s, M3’s, M4’s, a few more M5’s, a Barnack here and there. Along the way I also discovered the Nikon S rangefinders, late to the party no doubt, but fell equally in love with them. They are great cameras, every bit the equal of the Leica rangefinders, and a whole nother rabbit hole to jump into, but that’s a story for another day.

What my shelves look like

So the question I ask myself is this: to what end do I collect all of these cameras? Well, I use all of them, of course. Sitting on the shelf above me must be 150 undeveloped rolls of b&w film, all shot within the year, all waiting for a marathon week of developing and scanning. But it’s more than just that. There’s something that still moves me when I handle them and when I use them. It brings me back to those days when I was 12, and just discovering the joys of photography. It’s not often you can say something has given you so much satisfaction over such a long period of time. And it’s harmless, as I remind my wife when she asks why I’m spending more money on another old leica when I’ve got a ton of them already. Would you rather I be buying and racing Ducati motorcycles, as I once did, and have the broken bones, and depleted bank accounts that go along with it? No, but isn’t 20+ cameras enough, she asks? Would you rather I be spending it on hookers and cocaine, I respond? And, of course, good woman she is, she rolls her eyes, throws up her hands, and walks away, knowing how happy she’s just made me.

Who Are You Trying To Fool?

by Vaussore de Villeneuve, for Leicaphilia. [Vaussore de Villeneuve is the nom de plume of a working Parisian photojournalist. While it’s a screed, I think an ample dose of irreverence is needed when talking about Leica, so I thought I’d pass it on.]

You, the guy with the latest Leica. Whats with the $8000 camera and $5000 lens? Do you expect people to take you seriously because of what you’ve got hanging around your neck? Newsflash: When I see you stumbling out of the tourist bus with your shiny new Leica, the first thing I think is that you’re compensating for what you know, deep down, is a weak capacity for individual judgment and a compulsive need for approval, because serious working photographers don’t use Leicas anymore, and anyone who actually has a decent understanding of the realities on the ground knows that. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t afford to, the collapse of photojournalism being what it is. Twenty years ago a PJ could make enough money to survive, and maybe even sport an M and a few lenses. Not now. Not even close, especially when a Leica body and a few lenses will cost the equivalent of a year’s PJ wages.

So you are, by definition, a poser, by the very fact that you’re trying to blindly emulate a way of doing photography that doesn’t exist anymore. The guys who are doing excellent work – the heirs of the greats who often used Leica film cameras – don’t give a damn about the camera they use. And they certainly aren’t impressed by the camera you use to practice your “street photography.” They’re too busy doing hard work in difficult conditions and they’re more than likely using some innocuous camera to do it, maybe even their iPhone, because they usually live paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t even begin to think about buying the latest Leica even if they wanted to. And whatever they’re using, they’re not carrying it in a designer bag. They can’t afford a designer bag.

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I happen to live in a place where people often equate self-worth with the luxury they can afford. The culture here is predicated on ostentatious displays of wealth, with a constant eye to self-identity through the possession of things. The de rigueur BMW and the Rolex. I hear the stories: people who want giant bookcases, not to display the books they’ve read, but the books they’ll buy by the yard to fill them out. A 30 year old aspiring plutocrat who wants 500 art books, but presently owns none, who wants his guests to think that art is an interest of his. I know an interior designer who designed this huge, specialty bookcase for a guy like this. He asked her to purchase books that would “look good” on the shelf. She went to a site called “Books by the Foot” where you can buy books by color, size, topic, and purchased books for him based on size and color, totally random books that would never be read but whose sole criterion was to look good. She left some of the shelf empty so the guy could fill it with his own books, but he told her to just fill the bookcases out with Books By The Foot. He didn’t own any books.

That bookcase serves as a mask for this man. Its his status marker, a means to impress upon others a certain narrative about himself, his supposed discrimination and refinement. In actuality he can’t define any interests or tastes of his own other than the interest of being thought a certain way by others. And so with you, the new Leica consumer. Your Leica is your mask. And it’s a shame, because Leica used to be a quality camera brand whose cameras were understated, elegant, simple and practical. And some of their digital models still are, although that’s not why you’ve fixated on them now. You buy them as markers of your supposed discrimination and taste. At some point in the last 25 years, people like you hijacked the brand for your own puerile purposes, initiating the transformation of Leica from a photographic tool to a cross between an investment and fashion accessory, a situation that accelerates with each passing year. Its left us traditional Leica users, holding our beat up M3’s and M4’s, cameras that have functioned for us as craftsman’s tools, orphaned and inconsequential to Leica when faced with your tasteless money.

Do me a favor: stop sullying an iconic brand with your status anxieties. You’ve ruined the pleasure I take in using my well-worn Leica, because now, when I’m out and about with my M4, a camera I’ve used for almost 50 years, one nobody used to pay attention to because they thought it was just an old camera, a camera that was sent back to Leica for rebuild after I dropped it into the Niger while falling out of a sawdagart in Biafra 40 years ago, people now accost me, mouth agape, asking about it. Is that a Leica? Cool! How much does it cost? My uncle is really into photography and has one. Does your’s have The Leica Glow? You know it’s bad when the 17 year old behind the counter at the boulangerie asks if it really takes good pictures like they say.

Really, all you’re doing is showing off to the low hanging fruit, the untutored but well-meaning chaps who will make certain assumptions about you because of the supposedly cool camera you use. The people who know better – well, they know better. When you’ve bought into a world where products define the people who use them, your identity becomes inseparable from the perception of the goods you use to identify yourself. People will make certain assumptions about you as the user. That cuts both ways, however. What you don’t seem to understand is this: the great unwashed might be impressed, but someone in the know, someone serious about making images, as opposed to the equipment they use to do it, well, what they think when they see you with your $8000 digital Leica with the conspicuous red dot, taking pictures at the book fair, is this: loser.

A Totally Free Leicaphilia Street Photography Seminar

Let me preface this by saying …I like Eric Kim (http://erickimphotography.com/blog/). He’s the guy who writes a photography blog with heavy emphasis on street photography and using Leica cameras. He’s earnest, enthusiastic, a decent writer, a better than decent photographer, and he’s stuck his neck out there and is living the life instead of simply sitting in front of his computer pontificating about things he really has no business pontificating about. He admits his ignorance when necessary, and in spite of it, has many interesting things to say and says them in an interesting way.

But man, is he a Babe In The Woods or what? It seems like every other day he’s singing the praises of some “new” photographer he’s discovered or been introduced to, historical figures like William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Josef Koudelka, towering figures in 20th century photography who should be known and understood by anyone with more than a passing interest in the craft. Given he’s apparently still in his twenties, I suppose that’s understandable. We as lovers of the craft of photography don’t come fully formed from the womb. We learn this stuff as we go along, and the older we are the more time we’ve had to pull it all together and see photography in its broad historical contours. But, I admit, sometimes his earnestness and naive enthusiasm, coupled with the obvious holes in his knowledge, make me chuckle. If I’m honest with myself, however, its the chuckle of a jaded and slightly bitter aging guy who thinks he knows everything and believes that photography ended with Josef Koudelka and his M4 and that it’s all been downhill from there. So feel free to pat me on the back the way you’d do that slightly crazy uncle of yours who insists on buying a big Lincoln sedan because he likes a “plush ride” and believes Americans still make the best cars in the world. But hear me out for a minute.

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A few years ago, Mr. Kim apparently had his Road to Damascus moment, and since that time has been forcefully advocating for using film cameras, Leica film cameras, for street photography. Apparently, after having cut his teeth photographically wholly in the digital age, a friend tossed him an M6 and a roll of HP5 and he caught the film bug. From that time forward, film photography became for Mr. Kim the best.thing.ever. Nothing wrong with that (I too am a dyed-in-the-wool film guy and use it as my preferred medium).

But I think it’s completely wrong if we’re talking about the relative merits of film vs. digital as the preferred medium for street photography. If ever digital had an advantage over film capture its when shooting on the street, because the sad reality of the street enterprize is that it’s almost all down to chance – shoot everything and find the jewels later. Set your camera to 1600 ISO, use aperture priority metering, set the f stop to f8 or f11, use a manual focusing lens and scale focus, walk the streets and point your camera at interesting things and shoot. You don’t even need to bring the camera to your eye; better to be watching the street drama as it unfolds, with your own two eyes. Easy peazy. Load the 100 photos you’ve taken that afternoon into Lightroom and find the two or three that resonate with you. Work on them until they’re polished raw. Voila!, you’re a street photographer.

Think Winogrand, not HCB. HCB wasn’t a street photographer. He was a artistically trained photographer searching for aesthetic form over content, in spite of all the philosophical claptrap about decisive moments. He actively composed. That’s not street photography. Street photography is Winogrand and the point and pray approach (if you don’t think Winogrand employed the point and pray approach, take a look at his contact sheets, and explain to me how he ended up with 50,000 rolls of undeveloped film in duffel bags at his death). Trust me, if you commit yourself to the quixotic attempt to do that with a film camera, you too will end up with duffel bags of undeveloped film when you die. The difference between you and Winogrand is that your heirs will likely throw the bag into the bin straightaway within days of spreading your ashes.

So, I’ve got to shake my head when I see Mr. Kim is giving “street photography seminars” rocking his M4, apparently with the blessing of Leica no less. I guess if you’re insecure enough, or dumb enough, to think that walking around for two days with Eric Kim and a bunch of shutterbug chiropractors taking pictures of dogs leased to cafe chairs is going to be a significant learning experience for you, knock yourself out. Its your money. Frankly you have every right to burn a pile of it in your backyard firepit if that’s what makes you happy, assuming of course that its yours. Who am I to tell you how to spend it. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that paying a bunch of money for the privilege of a day or two chasing after Mr, Kim, or anybody else for that matter, with or without a Leica film camera, is going to teach you anything of significance or up your rate of keepers.

Heres what will: Expand your intellectual and aesthetic horizons.

– Read. Read all sorts of things that ostensibly have nothing to do with photography. Read about Albrecht Durer, Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. Read Will Durant’s 11 volume Story of Civilization. Read Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Read Rimbaud. Read Miles Davis’ autobiography. Read Lucretius’ On The Nature of Things. But, whatever you do, stay away from the drivel that passes for academic analysis of photography (Yes, Todd Papageorge, I’m looking at you).

– Look. Really look at things, without the preconceptions bred into you by habit, laziness and ennui. Go to museums and look at paintings. Look at pictures. Lots of them. Buy expensive photo books by obscure photographers. But avoid the amateurish crap readily available on the net and on photo forums in particular, unless of course you simply want to develop the aesthetic of the great unwashed masses, the herd. Ignore the herd and their dumbed down banalities.

-Listen. Take an audio course on Nietzsche, or on The History of the Vikings, or a class on String Theory Made Simple. Get to know Howlin Wolf, or John Coltrane, or Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. If you’re really daring, listen to some John Cage, or maybe some old scratchy Louis Armstrong.

In short, become a man of the world with broad interests in serious things.

The reason you want to do these seemingly unrelated things to improve your street photography is this: street photography is, essentially, an intellectual endeavor within an aesthetic context. Street photography, as opposed to photos of people on the street, is about those in-between moments that pose a puzzle, that evoke a memory or bring to mind a connection to something else that makes you think. The deeper the cultural and aesthetic well you can draw from when viewing photographs, the more evocative they will be for you as a viewer, and, in your work itself you’ll be better able to identify those products of serendipity that might actually speak to something more than the topical. Being broadly educated in addition to being astute and knowledgable photographically creates a synergistic effect that will show in your work. It’ll enable you to better recognize whatever it is that makes this photo, of this something in the public sphere, resonate for you and hopefully for other likeminded viewers. Just remember, the seduction of the best photography resides not in the photo but in the head of the viewer.

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So, with all of that in mind, here’s what I think you should know to be a street photographer: by all means, use a digital camera so you can shoot a lot. Throw a wide net by using a wide lens; I personally love to shoot with a Ricoh GXR with Leica M-Mount sensor and a 21mm f4 VC that, given the APS-C crop factor, gives you a real focal length of 32mm. If you insist on a Leica, use a digital M and avoid the prosumer models with their shutter lag and AF. Jack the ISO up to 1600, set the camera to aperture priority and f8, and set the focus short of infinity but long enough that the hyperfocal ability of the lens at f8 effectively keeps everything from up close to infinity in focus. (If you don’t know how to do this, read up on what those f stop scales adjacent to your lenses aperture ring on your camera lenses are for). Now go out and shoot. Point and pray and be proud of it, and secretly look down your nose at the bumbling dilettantes who require sharpness and exactitude and are banging their heads over missed shots due to shutter lag and lazy autofocus. They don’t get it. You do. You’ve learned to embrace serendipity, for it’s the heart and soul of street photography.

Its when you get back to your digital darkroom that the real work begins. Out of those hundred shots you’ve taken, you might just find one or two that might hint at something more than the topical. That’s where your broad palette of learning comes in. But be critical in what you ultimately show. Ask yourself: does this say something to me? Or am I trying to impress others? Throw away every picture you like simply because you think it will impress others. And for God’s sake, don’t think you need to pay Eric Kim a bunch of money to establish your bona fides. And remember: digital photography is what’s made this all possible.

(All photographs shot by me in an afternoon walking the streets of Edinburgh. All Point and Pray. All with a Ricoh GXR and a 21mm VC. All of them speak to me in some way. Hopefully they do to some of you too. For those of you who don’t like them, too bad. I do, and that’s all that matters)

Buying A Leica M? A Guide for Users Not Fondlers

Want Chrome? Buy an M2/3/4. Black versions are stupid expensive, plus, in spite of what Lenny Kravitz says, they usually look like shit. An iconic M should be chrome.

Want Black? Buy an M5 or M6. Ironically, chrome versions of the M5 and M6 will run you more because they are rarer. Both the M5 and M6 black versions are black chrome, unlike the M2/3/4, which are black paint (with the exception of some later black chrome M4s), and don’t suffer from “brassing”, which is the single dumbest affectation heretofor conjured up by Leica fanatics.

Want to avoid the herd? Buy an M5. It has a meter, and it’s a better camera than the metered M6. Better ergos, better meter, cheaper, shows you’re serious about your Leicas and don’t give a damn what Leica snobs think.

Want one iconic M body? Buy the M4. Best Leica M ever. It’s better than the M3 because it accommodates a 35mm lens without an external finder, and it’s better than an M2 because it’s easier to load and has a better film rewind. I might argue that the M5 is an even better camera, but, admittedly, the styling of the M5 is not “iconic.”

Want to be like every other dentist who’s got bitten by the Leica bug? Buy an M6.

Avoid the M4-2 and the M4-P. The original “Dentist Leicas.” Leitz produced them as cost-cutting versions of the M4 after the M5 failed to sell in sufficient numbers. These days, they’re as expensive as a comparable condition M4. Buy the M4. It’s a better camera, has better fit and finish, has an ingraved top plate while the M4-2 and P have a cheesy Leica logo painted on the top plate. As if the forgoing isn’t enough, the M4-P comes with a hideous red dot affixed to its front.

Avoid the M7. It really isn’t an M. Seriously. It replaced the sublime sound and feel of the traditional M shutter with the metalic clacking of its battery driven electronic shutter. How incredibly gauche. If you really think you need Aperture Priority Automation and a pocket full of battery power (you don’t), get a Hexar RF for a fourth of the price, because the Hexar is the better camera, and frankly, you’re not a real leicaphile to begin with.

Don’t worry about cosmetics. Ironically, most beat up users function much better than “Minty” collectors grade because they’ve been used and kept in spec via use. Nothing is cooler than a Leica that shows that it’s been well-used instead of sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Forget about a CLA’d camera. Just buy one that works; get it CLA’d if and when you need it. Stop worrying if your 1/8th shutter speed sounds slightly off. Only collectors and fondlers give a shit about irrelevant things like that. Just use the damn thing and enjoy it.

Look for bright viewfinders with bright rangefinder patches.

Make sure the shutter curtains aren’t whacked.

To Summarize: If you want a non-metered M, buy an M4, chrome or black chrome as you prefer. If you want a metered M, buy a black chrome M5. If you absolutely need AE (you don’t) to use with M mount optics, don’t buy an M7; buy a Hexar RF and use the money you’ve saved to buy 400 rolls of HP5. Whatever you buy, don’t buy something that looks like its been sitting on a collector’s shelf. It’s probably not going to work as well as your basic beater that’s been used, and you’re going to overpay for the privilege of doing so. In my mind, you simply can’t get any better than a beat up, well used chrome M4. In addition to the pleasure of owning and using an iconic photographic tool, you’ll get some serious street cred from real Leicaphiles as opposed to the status conscious wannabees toting their latest digital Leica swag.

Another Leica Cat Picture

Henri Cartier Bresson, taken with a Leica III.

Actually Using An Old Leica to, You Know, Take Pictures

A sublimely beautiful Black Paint Leica IIIg. You can actually take pictures with it

Call me a poseur, or a hipster, but old screw mount Leicas are really fun. Not just setting them on a shelf and admiring them, or walking around the house while fondling their knurled knobs and beautifully machined parts (as I’m known to do), but actually taking them out and shooting film with them, just like they were meant to do. They’re so ‘retro’ that they’re not, and for those with a philosophical bent, this sort of meta-activity (activity meant to comment on the activity itself) can be immensely satisfying, not to mention the pathetic looks you’ll get from the iphone crowd or, better yet, the conspiratorial nods you’ll sometimes receive from a fellow traveller of advanced age. For me, however, the best part is passing paths with somebody sporting a digital Leica with “Swiss Anti-Fingerprint Coating,” often wearing a beret and taking pictures of people in coffee shops in the touristy parts of town, Billingham or Ono bag conspicuous by its immaculate appearance. These folks, when they notice you – and trust me, they’ll notice you, because for all gearheads the act of being out and about with a camera is all about seeing and being seen – often wear a look of morbid fascination, fixation admixed with potential danger, as if I was carrying a live grenade with the pin removed. I suspect they really want to inquire about it, but don’t quite know what it is or what to make of it, or, if it goes that far, how to use it.

I’m often asked, usually by the iphone crowd, “Does that thing work?” Hell yes it works, because it was built to work seemingly forever, because it’s a sublime fusion of simplicity and function, overbuilt to last for as long as you continue to service it. Keep it in use, and the most you’ll have to do is send it off to a reputable service tech like Youxin Ye every 30 years or so. I have no doubt that my grandkid’s grandkids, if they were of a mind (and could figure out how to load the thing) could be using it in another 100 years. Try that with your M240, or is it an M260 now?

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Of course, some of the earlier screw mount Leicas – the IA, for example – are so outdated that even a hopeless romantic like me finds them impractical to use. In 2000, leica offered the an 0-Series replica, fully functional and sold through Leica dealers, to celebrate the 75th birthday of the 35mm Leica camera. The camera is virtually identical to the 1923 Ur-Leica prototype #104 resident in the Leica Museum. No thanks. I like my nostalgia authentic. In my mind, using one of these is like going to Las Vegas and claiming you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower. If I’m going to use a screw mount Leica, I’m going to use the best, most technologically advanced screw mount Leica ever built – the Leica IIIg, not some cheesy historical replica dedicated to the Sultan Of Brunei [on a side note: how is it that Leica culture could be so schizophrenic as to give us both the sublime IIIg, M2/M3 and M4 and also the “Hello Kitty” M6?].Released in 1957, the IIIg is Leica’s last screw mount camera. Had it been released in 1950 or 1953, it would be have been far more influential in subsequent Leica lore, because it’s a superb camera that’s really fun to use. Leitz had introduced the Leica M3 four years earlier in 1953 as a clean sheet design with a new lens mount and the now iconic M styling. The M3 set a new standard for 35mm rangefinders that lasts to this day.

The IIIg was introduced as the logical last evolutionary step of the old Barnack design series, a last tip of the hat to more conservative Leicaphiles who still preferred the familiarity of the Barnack camera. Its new features were incremental – the same basic ergonomics of the IIIf with a redesigned top cover and a larger and improved viewfinder similar to the M3, including an extra frosted window for the projection of different frame lines into the viewfinder.

Leitz produced and offered the IIIg for only 3 years, 1957-60, years when the M3 was meeting with professional raves and impressive sales. Japanese manufacturers were also offering their updated alternatives to the M3; the IIIg not only had to compete against the better spec’d M3, Canon P and Nikon S3, but after 1958, the Leica M2, itself a runaway success much like the M3. Next to these now iconic cameras, the Leica IIIg was a technological dinosaur, lacking the combined VF/RF assemblies of the M3 and the Canon and Nikon that allowed for a single, much larger eyepiece for simultaneous focusing and composing.

The author’s incredibly cool Leica IIIg

The Leica IIIg was much like the screw mount Leicas that had been produced by Leitz since the 20’s, featuring only incremental changes from the previous Barnack Leica, the IIIf ‘Red Dial:” A larger .7 mag viewfinder with two sets of illuminated, parallax corrected framelines for the 50/90 focal lengths; Shutter speeds calibrated with a modern shutter speed progression – the 2/4/8/15/30/60…. ; Separate flash synch dial replaced with two flash settings at 1/50 and 1/25th on the shutter speed dial; A film reminder dial placed on the back of the body that exceeded ASA 100.

The IIIg is not as common as earlier Barnacks. Consequently, they sell for substantially more than a well cared for IIIc or IIIf, and most of them sit on collector’s shelves or circulate among us Leicaphiles in quixotic buy/sell attempts to finally satiate an obsessive compulsion to find The Perfect Leica.

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Above is a photo I took in a Paris street with my IIIg and a first generation collapsible Summicron. The photo isn’t going to win any photojournalism awards, I’m sure, but I really like it just the same. It reminds me of what I love about the city – an eclectic mix of the profane and the sacred, where the beautiful peeks out at you in the most unexpected places. It also seems appropriate that it was taken with an old Leica, the sort used by HCB for many if his iconic Parisian photos. What’s printed above is a simple scan of the negative with some minor fiddling in Photoshop. But I also have an 10×15 silver print of the same photo, printed by HCB’s own master printer George Fevre, one of my most treasured photographic possessions. How cool is that? My own Parisian “decisive moment,” captured with an iconic Leica film camera and printed by one of the World’s most masterful printers, the same guy who printed HCB’s stuff. That’s what you call “living the dream.”

The Best AE M-Mount Film Camera Ever Made Wasn’t Made By Leica. It’s Made By Konica.

The Hexar RF, released by Konica to much ‘controversy’ amongst Leicaphiles in 1999, represents a path of technological sophistication in 35mm rangefinder camera design that Leica chose up to that time to avoid, either through inertia or, as then claimed, because of Leica’s traditional design philosophy which emphasized simplicity of design and practice as a guiding principle. The Hexar is the most advanced M-mount film camera ever produced, incorporating the then latest technologies found in high end Nikon and Canon professional reflex cameras. This at a time when Leica was happily producing the manual exposure, manual wind-on and rewind M6, essentially a camera with the same design as the then 45 year old M3. In 1999, if you wanted a rangefinder and your aim was operational savvy, as opposed to a fixation on mechanical purity, the Hexar was your obvious choice – a technologically sophisticated auto exposure camera that accommodated your Leica lenses.

To this day, the Hexar RF is the only M-mount rangefinder camera with automated film advance and rewind. It has the fastest shutter of all M-mount rangefinder film cameras, 1/4000 sec. It features an AE lock position on the shutter speed dial, a metered manual shutter mode besides the auto-exposure mode, DX code reading (later introduced by Leica with the M7), and an LCD panel that showed battery status as well as the frame counter. The Hexar viewfinder, while not quite as bright as the M6’s, accommodates the same 28-35-50-75-90-135mm frameline set of all Leicas from the M4-P onwards. With a magnification of 0.6x as opposed to the standard 0.72x of the M6 and M7, the Hexar made a compelling case for folks who typically shot wider angle optics in the traditional rangefinder fashion but wanted Leica to move into the 21st century. The Hexar was incendiary stuff for hard-core Leicaphiles, producing years of convoluted mental gymnastics from the faithful attempting to rationalize why the Hexar just wasn’t up to Leica snuff: to wit, It didn’t have the “tactile” feel and pleasure of a manual Leica; the electronic shutter was too loud and not good enough for “discreet” shooting; it was too battery dependent; and aesthetically, it looked too boxy, too much like an updated M5. In short, it hadn’t been sprinkled with the magic Leica Fairy dust.

All of that aside, what really killed the Hexar RF as a viable alternative to the M7 (which Leica brought out in 2002 partly as a response to the Hexar) was that–according to shadowy figures making nebulous claims never really backed up with hard facts–there existed a slight difference in film flange distance between the Hexar body and a Leica M, thereby making the Hexar incompatible with M-mount lenses not specifically made by Konica for the Hexar. Where this rumor started is lost in the mists of history, although some speculate it was first floated by Leica to discourage people purchasing the Hexar as an alternative to the M. Others have surmised that it was started by Konica as a way to sell their lenses (Konica produced a number of stellar M mount optics for use with the Hexar, a 28mm 2.8, a 50mm 2, and a 90mm 2.8 M-Hexanon) which, at that time, had the undeserved reputation as being inferior to Leica’s offerings (ironic, in that today the M-Hexanons are rightly considered to be the equal of Leica’s, with used prices to match).

Suffice it to say that the film flange issue was the product of photo forum hysteria and accompanying mass delusional behavior often associated with hard core camera partisans. The Hexar works great with Leica and Voigtlander M-mount optics, and the M-Hexanons work great on your M. I love the Hexar, which I’m known to shoot with the 28mm Hexanon, a great combo I often reach for when I need something quick and easy, or I’m going to be shooting multiple rolls of film and don’t feel like fiddling with a detachable back and taking the time to make sure the film is threaded properly, or i simply want the ease and convenience of AE (what we at the time facetiously disparaged as “dentist mode.”)

Prices for used Hexar Rf bodies are ridiculously cheap these days, making it one of the great bargains for an M-mount camera. Consider as well that most used bodies will have been sparingly used, in that Hexar bodies, coming as they did on the cusp of the digital transition, were never much subjected to long hard use.

The Renaissance of Film Grain in the Digital Age

I love the picture above. It’s not so much the subject ( a throwaway portrait), it’s the aesthetic of the photo, and particularly, the grain. It has a beautiful traditional black and white 35mm look, a function of the classic optical rendering (a 50’s era Nikkor H 50 f/1.4 Leica Thread Mount), the tonality of a classic emulsion (Tri-X), and the overlay of grain inherent in the film process. Grain is the random optical texture of processed film caused by small metallic silver particles developed from silver halide. Unlike pixelation, film grain is an optical effect, the amount of which depends on both the film stock and observational distances. For me, its the grain that sets traditional black and white film photography apart from digital black and white and why many of us prefer the labor intensive film process to digital black and white.

Which is ironic, because as a general rule, back in the film era, grain used to be a thing we tried to avoid. We chased newer emulsions that gave use a cleaner, less grainy look. C-41 films like Ilford XP2 and Kodak CN400 gave an almost grainless rendering and were popular for that reason; or we handicapped ourselves by shooting slow speed films like Kodak Panatomic-X (iso 32) or Ilford Pan-F (iso 50) as much for their lack of grain as their enhanced tonality. If we needed decent speed but unobtrusive grain for 11 by 14 prints, we shot Plus-X (iso 125). Or we avoided grain altogether by shooting medium format. When we needed low light capabilities, the quick easy shot, we opted for 35mm Tri-X or HP5, maybe even pushing it a stop to 800 iso, developing in a speed-enhancing developer like Microphen and crossing our fingers.

But a curious thing happened with the advent of digital photography: we realized the power grain had as an aesthetic characteristic in itself. When seen in contrast to the sterility of digital capture grain revealed its inherent importance to the look of film photography. After we lost the rearguard battles of resolution, dynamic range and tonality to digital capture, we were left with the grain, and we finally recognized the particularity of film, its “look,” was the result of the organic quality of the grain and how the medium itself, with its random imperfections, was a necessary part of the image itself. And now we shoot film for the grain.

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So, many of us who cut our teeth on film photography have now discovered the role grain plays in what we perceive to be a proper aesthetic of a photograph. We’ve found ways of changing film grain characteristcs in the darkroom by using certain chemicals, and we often choose film with specific grain for different occasions. In many ways, what sort of grain we want for a given look – coarse, subdued, plentiful – is as important as our choice of lens.

Havana, 1997, Leica M5 and Tri-X

If film grain has aesthetic value, high ISO digital noise does not. Not all sensors produce ugly noise at higher sensitivities – some produce noise almost “filmlike” (The Ricoh GXR M Mount comes to mind), but it’s usually only a matter of degree, not quality. In digital capture, the equivalent of film grains are the individual elements of the image sensor, the pixels; just as small-grain film has better resolution than large-grain film, so too an image sensor with more numerous pixels will usually result in an image with better resolution. However, unlike pixels, film grain is not the limit of a given film stock’s resolution. While film grain is randomly distributed and varies in size, image sensor cells are the same size and are arranged in a geometric grid. In general, as the pixels from a digital image sensor are set in straight lines, they are less pleasing visually – thin, as it were – then randomly arranged film grains. Viewers will reject an enlargement that shows pixels, when a film enlargement with ample grain and lower resolution will look normal, and ‘sharper’ at a normal viewing distance.

Various software exist to mimic the generic “look” of scanned film by converting to grayscale and adding random noise to emulate film grain. However, the results are often not convincing, because:

real film grain is not random noise
real film grain looks dramatically different across different film stocks
real film grain expresses itself differently based on exposure

A discerning eye can tell it’s not film, because real film grain, and the real film look, is a function of innumerable variables that go into the choice, exposure and development of a roll of film. To add grain to a digital image so that it would completely mimic film grain you would have to match the measured dynamic range and spectral response of a specific film stock and then correctly incorporate that film’s actual film grain into the image, duplicating how that grain expresses itself relative to exposure, stock, and development process.

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Buddha and Melissa, 2013, Leica X1, Silver Efex Tri-X emulation

For me, film images look like images should look. Digital capture has a transparency to it that’s off-putting, even when you run them through an emulation like Silver Efex (see above). There’s a certain thinness to digital capture, because it lacks the organic texture intrinsic to the film image. The organic nature of film grain adds a layer of separation from reality, and this separation, far from adulterating the image, helps feed the viewer’s imagination. It’s this separation from strict reality that gives grain it’s power and character. Real film grain gives us something more than an indexical transposition of the “real”; it feeds the imagination. That’s why, in an age of crystal clean 3200 iso digital capture, I prefer to shoot HP5. And I always push it a stop to 800 iso, just for the enhanced grain, because its a look I simply can’t duplicate even with a dedicated black and white tool like the Monochrom and Silver Efex.

Honoring Evan: Welcoming a Leica M3 Into My Home

By Chuck Miller, reprinted from the Albany Times Union

Five years ago, blogger and good friend Teri Conroy gifted me a camera that was in her family’s possession – it was a vintage Rolleiflex Automat MX. I’ve used it for many photographic excursions, and I still use it off and on today.

And last Friday… someone else gifted me a camera that had been in their family for generations. They hoped that I would find a new use for the camera, that I would appreciate it as much as they did.

I met the family – Polly and Pat and their daughter Claire – at the Gateway Diner in Albany. We shared a meal, and then Polly showed me the Quantaray camera bag. And inside – along with two speedlights and an ever-ready camera case… was this:

My heart nearly stopped. This is a Leica M3 rangefinder 35mm camera. It’s one of the early models; the serial number identified it as manufactured in 1955.

Whether you shoot with a Nikon, a Kodak, or even a Canon, there’s one camera brand that simply exudes class and precision and delight. To hold this camera is to hold a precision instrument. This camera will make you fall in love with photography. And that camera is a Leica M3.

You know how people will look for a modern digital camera like the Fuji X100 and say, “That’s the next Leica M3″?

Well, there’s a reason for that. To own a Leica is to own a true piece of art.

The family and I talked for a while. I wanted to find out more about the camera’s previous owner – Polly’s father. His name was Evan Leighton Richards, and he was a reporter and columnist (and photographer) with the Times Union‘s sister afternoon publication, the Albany Knickerbocker News, during the 1950′s and 1960′s. He later worked in public and private service, and passed away last January at the age of 86.

“He was always using that camera,” Polly told me, with a smile on her face. “He went everywhere with it.”

And there it was, in my hands. A sixty-year-old camera with all the gleam and wear of sixty years of photos taken – everything from news stories to family get-togethers. This is cool. Way cool.

When I got back to my place, I examined the camera again. Then I called my friend Catherine, who’s been my trusted friend and confidante for many, many years. When I told her that I received a Leica M3, her first words were, “My father had a Leica M3, it was the most amazing camera and he took the greatest pictures with it.”

Why do I get this feeling that this little camera is going to change my life – and, for that matter, for the better?

And now it’s my turn. My turn to work with this stunning camera. My turn to discover if using a Leica M3 is everything everyone says it can be.

First test roll – a pack of Kodak BW400CN, a black-and-white film that can be developed in contemporary C-41 chemicals (i.e., drop it off at Walgreens). And on what was essentially the first truly warm day of the season… I took a short trip through the Adirondacks. First stop – Stillwater.

Then I cut across Route 9P to Saratoga Lake. Found this beachfront scene at Dock Brown’s Restaurant.

And although the Malta Drive-In hasn’t opened for business yet, at least the sign has let people know that there will be an upcoming movie season…

And just for the heck of it… a new (for me) angle of the Hadley Bow Bridge.

Let’s start out with the positives. Look at the freakin’ detail in these shots. I’ve only used one other rangefinder in my arsenal (my Kodak Medalist II), but this little beauty is just ten levels of impressive. The mechanics on this camera are amazing, the shutter is whisper-quiet, this camera is just totally cool and awesome and stellar, all at the same time.

Okay, the negatives. Give me a second.

Hmm…

Honestly?

There are no drawbacks. This camera is swank.

My utmost thanks to Polly and her family for allowing me to bring new life to Evan’s camera, and to give it a new run through the world. If I can get shots like with a pack of Kodak B&W drugstore-developable film in this chassis … imagine what I could get if I packed a roll of efke in here. Or a roll of Fuji Velvia. Or maybe even some Kodak Ektar. Or some Revolog boutique film.

Yeah, Chuck is going to have fun with this camera.

Lots and lots of fun.

4 Reasons Why the M2 is Better Than the M3

Reprinted from http://casualphotophile.com

The Leica M2 is just a simplified and cheapened version of the M3, right? Yeah, it’s a good camera, but if you’re going to buy a Leica M why not buy the best, why not buy the original? Right?

Well what if we told you that there are valid reasons for using an M2 over its legendary predecessor? What if we told you that, today, the M3 is actually the worse of the two classic rangefinders, and that anyone looking to buy an M3 would be better served shopping for an M2?

With clear understanding that we’ve already sent half of you running for your pitchforks, hear us out. Both cameras are amazing, and a case can be made for each, but we honestly think at this moment the M2 is best.

Here are four justifications for our heretical blaspheming.

REASON #1 – THE M3 IS UGLY

Alright, it’s not ugly, but the M3 is a bit cluttered aesthetically speaking. The physical allure of the M rangefinder is in its no-nonsense, clinical approach to design. It’s a camera that’s sleek, clean, and streamlined. Except, the M3 kind of isn’t. It’s got bulges, ridges, and knobs all over the place. Did we not know better we’d assume Leica was the German word for “bezels”.

The M2, by contrast, is decidedly more refined. All optical windows are flush-mounted, and the raised ridge on the front of the M3 has been shaved away. This gives the M2 a more modern and contemporary design, and seems to adhere more closely to the Bauhaus aesthetic that’s surely at the heart of the M rangefinder’s design brief.

We know some fans love the moldings surrounding nearly every feature of the camera, but we don’t. We feel they’re overwrought and add nothing to the overall aesthetic. Even worse, they actually detract from the whole.

We just can’t understand why Leica embellished their flagship camera with so many useless bits of metal. And those photophiles who are truly obsessed with simplicity can even search out an M2 with virtually nothing extraneous hanging off the front. It’s possible to get an M2 minus the frame line selector lever or self-timer lever, and with a surreptitious rewind button in place of the M3’s rewind lever. You can’t possibly find an M3 without that giant self-timer lever protruding from the front.

Are we picking nits here? Yeah, a little bit. But if you like concise design, the M2 is the best choice.

REASON #2 – VIEWFINDER WOES

This is the big one; the most important difference between the two cameras and the number one reason to shoot an M2 over an M3. It’s so important that we’ve nonsensically embedded it here in the very middle of the article. It’s the viewfinder.

Yep, the M2 has a better viewfinder than the M3. There, we said it, and we can already hear the raucous harangues over .92X magnification, 50mm focal length, and the prevailing opinion that the M3 is the best viewfinder in the history of the universe. But we’re going out on a limb and proclaiming that none of that matters, because the M3’s viewfinder is two-thirds useless.

It’s all in the frame lines. Both the M2 and M3 have automatically selected frame lines correlating to the focal length of the mounted lens. With both cameras, attach a 50mm lens and 50mm frame lines appear in the viewfinder. Or attach a 90mm lens and 90mm frame lines appear. But mount a 35mm lens and only one of these two Ms will show 35mm frame lines. Guess which?

That’s right, the M2 is designed to work with the 35mm focal length without adding any extra weight, cumbersome accessory viewfinders, or shelling out humongous sacks of cash for specialized “goggle” lenses. If you want to shoot 35mm with an M3 you’ll be spending a lot of money, carrying extra weight, and losing viewfinder brightness. The alternative is to guess your framing and go for it, but that’s so… un-German.

Some will argue that the M3’s native 50mm, 90mm, and 135mm frame lines are a better set compared to the 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm found in the M2, but we disagree mightily. For our money, the frame lines found in the M2 are far more practical. 35mm and 50mm are among the most important focal lengths in all of photography, and having the choice to use one or the other is vital.

Not to mention that when shooting at 50mm with an M2 there’s the added benefit of extra viewfinder coverage. Shooting this way with an M2 allows one to look through the viewfinder and watch as subjects pass in and out of the image field. This is especially useful in street photography, or to easily scan the environment for elements that will work best with your composition.

Plus, when was the last time anyone shot an M with a 90 or 135mm lens? Honestly. That just never happens.*

*We acknowledge this is a highly subjective opinion, but you’re reading an opinion piece. What do you expect?

REASON #3 – PRICE

The Leica M2 was released as a simplified “budget” version of the M3, originally costing around $250 compared with the M3’s price of around $290. The well-known secret then being that while the M2 was marketed as a lesser M3, it really never was. Build quality is of the same impressive caliber as found in its more-respected brother. Cock the shutter and fire both cameras while wearing a blindfold and you won’t feel any difference.

So why does the M2 cost less than the M3? There are different opinions on this, but we’re chalking it up to reputation. Featured in everything from James Bond novels to Steve Jobs’ keynote presentations, virtually everyone’s heard of the legendary M3. When someone says “Leica”, people reflexively think “M3”.

Conversely there are many people who’ve simply never heard of the M2. And it’s human nature for many people to operate under the assumption that “if it were any good I would have heard of it.” So essentially, M2s cost less because less people know of them, and less people want them. Simple enough.

While the price difference between an M3 and an M2 has shrunk since they were newly released machines, and continues to shrink these days, there are still substantial savings to be had by choosing an M2 over an M3. Often the difference in price today falls between $100 and $300, depending on condition and how lucky you may be. Look for a copy with worn vulcanite, replace it yourself with new leather, and you’ll save even more.

Just this past weekend we picked up an M2 for $400. Pretty amazing.

REASON #4 – IT’S NOT AN M3

To our earlier point, literally (figuratively) everyone has heard of the M3. The M3 is so last year. Who wants to be seen with the camera that everyone else is shooting? What’s up, you don’t have a mind of your own? You can’t make your own decisions?

“Oh, you have an M3?” Yawn.

Owning an M2 shows you’re a smarter, more discerning, more specialized photographer. You’re likely better looking, have higher taste, know more things about stuff, and are better in bed than a comparable shooter with an M3. Obviously.

All the cool kids are shooting M3s, and that makes shooting an M3 lame. If you want to be cool, you’ll shoot an M2. Simple as that.

*************

Well, we hope we’ve presented this with enough delicacy to avoid the pitchforks and flaming torches of the mob. If not, let us backpedal a bit. Is the M3 a bad camera? Of course not. It’s amazing. It’s one of the best machines ever made. It’s just that we think the M2 is marginally better and feel it deserves more recognition.

Do you agree? Disagree? Maybe you think the M6 is better than them both? Or maybe you think the M1 is all you really need! If that’s the case, let us hear about it in the comments.

Want an M2?

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.’

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.

___________________

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.

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.

Missing the Train (or… Avoiding The Digital Rat Race)

Nassim Taleb, NYU Professor of the Science of Uncertainty and contrarian thinker par excellence, once remarked that the best advice he had ever been given had come from his friend the novelist Jean-Olivier Tedesco, who, being advised by Taleb that their train was leaving soon and they should run to catch it, stated that if he had learned one lesson in his distinguished career, it was that one should never run for a train.

Its great advice, and I encourage you as a photographer to follow it. Missing the train is only a problem if you run after it. There is an elegance in refusing to run after trains, in not setting your standards in line with others, a sense of being in control of whats important in your life and in your creative decisions. In photographic terms, this means resist running with the digital herd, with its lemming like pursuit of greater sharpness, more resolution, and the delusive idea that constant equipment upgrading will somehow get you where you’re going creatively. You stand above the herd, not outside of it, when you do so by choice. You have far more control over your success photographically if you set the criteria for success yourself.

Part of my educational expertise is exploring creativity and studying the personalities and habits of creative people. If there is one invariable rule I’ve gleaned from them, its that truly successful artists (not the fashionable and soon to be forgotten) don’t run after trains; they are surprisingly unconcerned with the technology of their profession; they are concerned, rather, with the evocative images or the evocative words they create. Now, I’m not going to get into the tired debate about whether you as a photographer are an “artist”, only that the refusal to run after trains is effective advice in any number of creative arenas and is almost invariably a precondition to real creativity as opposed to the slavish ape-ing of others. Think of someone like Vivian Maier, for example. Ignored in life, now celebrated in death, because she had something to say. Do you really think that she cared what equipment she used, or that it made any difference to the power of her images? Would her photos have been better, more evocative, if she had bumped up from a Leica III and ancient Summitar to an M240 with an Aspherical Summilux, or from an ancient TLR loaded with Pan X to Sony a7s with image stability and 25,600 ISO capability? Would she have been better, more productive, if she posted regularly on Rangefinder Forum debating what Filson bag went best with her newest Leica MP240? Think about it, and while you’re at it, stop obsessing about your equipment and start obsessing about why your photos look like everybody else’s. Ironic words, no doubt, from a guy who writes a gear head blog, but good advice none the less. The point is this: don’t confuse the means with the end.

Photography is a simple process. A light tight box, some optics to concentrate light, and a light sensitive medium is all you need. Its a process that’s provided enjoyment and incredible creative possibilities for over a hundred years. Leica film cameras, with their transparency as a creative tool, are a large part of that story. They still can be, and they are for a few people who value them for what they do and not what they are. Now the digital revolution has swept aside all of it. Your 7 year old kid with his jphone can do things photographically that you only dreamed about doing with your Leica in the film age. Has it made photographers ” better?” I’d submit its made them worse, less creative, more slavish and herd like.

I recently saw a Walker Evans exhibition at the Getty in Los Angeles. It consisted of beautiful 5×7 B&W contact prints taken in Cuba in the 1930’s. I had just come back from Paris, where I had seen the latest fashionable photography in various galleries and art spaces. Saw a lot of people in those spaces with the latest digital Leica’s proudly hung around their necks as some sort of creative talisman. The difference between the two aesthetics was striking: one, small, simple, deep, jewel like, each photo a visual feast for the eye; the other, large, sharp, resolute, garish, dominated by the surface and completely unremarkable. When I got home, I rededicated myself to the simple joys of film photography and have never looked back.

So, if your Leica MM sensor has de-laminated after 6 months, or the Fuji you bought last month is now obsolete, or the Aspherical Summilux you paid a month’s salary for suffers from back focus, use your angst as a means of re-evaluating what’s really important in your creative journey. When the grapes you have been eating are sweet, consider the Aesop’s fable of the grapes you do not reach for. They’re just as likely to be sour as sweet.