Happy, yet troubled.

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Here’s a slideshow of 36 favorites from that opening salvo of 1,000.
36? Why, that’s the length of a roll of Kodachrome ….
Click the image to download the slideshow – it takes a while.

It has been a couple of months since I bought a used Leica M10 digital body, adding a selection of inexpensive and uniformly excellent lenses since. My return to the Leica M fold was after a 20 year hiatus, that in turn was preceded by 35 mostly happy years with the Leica M3 film body.

So what prompted this costly move? And we cannot proceed without admitting that when it comes to digital M ownership the elephant in the room is the price of entry, new or used. While a decent film M2 or M3 can be had for $1,500 reckon on $4,500 for an unmolested M10 and $6,000 or more for an M11. To put that in perspective my near mint Nikon D800 body cost $500 and came with a sensor every bit as good, including autofocus and anti-shake in the two AF-S lenses I favor, the 16-35mm and the 28-300mm. And when it comes to robustness and color rendering, there is little to choose between the marques. Forget all that talk of the ‘Leica look’ in images from an M. That’s just confirmation bias from owners contemplating the reduced status of their pocketbooks.

Well, I suppose the answer was that I wanted to relive the past, in part, for that first 35 years of M use saw me migrate from ingenue kid to seasoned snapper and, until the relatively affordable Canon 5D came along, a snapper more or less happy with film as a recording medium. Published work and prizes galore defined the early years of M3 ownership though once I started making a real living the desire for those faded. And the 5D changed everything. Resolution and the ease of image manipulation both jumped an order of magnitude and, best of all, the seemingly interminable wait for the return of results was no more. Plus there’s something really rather dumb about using an analog medium like film then having to have it scanned to share results. You think you are using ‘film’? How about a Noritsu scanner? Your work still becomes digital, if rather slowly. And as age increases every remaining hour is scarcer, and waiting is not a good thing. I really would prefer to see my snaps before I croak.

However, Leica, late to the game and having lost the professional market to Nikon, Canon and the upstart Sony (née Minolta), decided to reposition the M as an aspirational, luxury Veblen good and the wisdom of that decision is reflected in its recent record financial results. Realistically, the digital Leica M has no competition when it comes to design and function. But the realization dawns that once upon a time the film rangefinder Leica was the fastest way of focusing a lens. Now in the digital age, it is the slowest. But it still works for me.

And aesthetics and design integrity cannot be denied here. I have always maintained that a good tool makes you a better operator, be it a Starrett T square or caliper which make you a better carpenter, a Porsche which makes you a better driver or a Leica which makes you a better photographer. Each is beautiful in its own way. The happy result is that you feel duty bound to try and do justice to these long-evolved machines and, let’s face it, the Leica M is a thing of quite special beauty. The severe Bauhaus lines owe nothing to the mess of the Barnack Leica era with its plethora of knobs, buttons and protrusions and the Nikon F’s brutal lines certainly copied nothing from the M3. Today the amorphous blobs from the Japanese all start looking alike, all are immensely capable, are invariably tremendous value at their many price points and …. lack character.

Now there’s character and there’s character. In a British sports car character is defined by a reluctance to start and often a greater one to proceed. That’s not good character. That’s schlocky engineering. But Leica has been refining the M body since the M3 of 1954 and, while their first stumbles into digital were disappointing, with the M10 they finally got the size and shape back to M3 and M2 dimensions and, goodness, absent the film winding lever, the camera feels and almost sounds like that M3 of yore. And that inspires me mightily to try and do it justice for in the history of twentieth century cameras three defined the medium – the original Leica I, the M3 and the Nikon F. The M3 poses a mighty legacy to aspire to.

Today exposure automation in the M10, first seen in the film M7, is greatly welcomed. Sure IBIS would be nice but technology must shrink further before the M body can accommodate it. It’s a good bet it will eventually. As for auto-focus, forget it. Have you seen the size of lenses which have it? (Contax made a magnificent effort decades ago by moving the film plane instead of the lens to achieve AF, but again the question remains whether the svelte M body can accommodate that technology. One can but dream.) And there’s a special pleasure to using the M rangefinder which is, if anything, further improved over the already stellar design in the M3 and M2. A switchable internal auxiliary magnifier, in lieu of the clunky screw in separate eyepiece, would be welcome for use with fast 90mm and any 135mm lens, but again that body is already so tightly packed it may be asking too much.

But there’s no denying there’s an undeniable tactile and aural pleasure to using the M10 and I confess to a frisson every time I release the shutter. That alone (almost) makes the high cost of entry (almost) bearable. Almost.

In the opening I stated “Happy, yet troubled”, for the simple reason that there’s something rather obscene about spending almost $5,000 on a used camera body when competent alternatives can be had for a fraction of that amount. However, I console myself that with the cost of a 36 exposure roll of film, processed and scanned, now approaching $50, with 1,000 exposures under my belt I have recovered almost 50% of the $3,000 cost premium over the film body. Another 1,000 exposures or so and I’m ahead of the game ….