Fast flare.

The 50mm f/1.5 Leitz Summarit.

1972/3 saw me as a member of Leica Postal Portfolios which was a photo interchange/critique club where you circulated a large box of 12″ x 15″ prints by mail, adding yours and critiquing those of other members. It seems that it exists to this day. There were some 12 members in my group, a friendly bunch of Leica fanatics. You learned a lot and made some great friends. We all did our own processing and printing.

One of those friends loaned me his Leica 50mm f/1.5 Summarit lens which was as fast as they got back then. Two stops faster than my pedestrian f/2.8 Elmar, it was based on a 1930s Zeiss Xenon design (Leitz paid Zeiss royalties) and, while coated, still flared pretty mightily at full aperture. And full aperture it was when I headed out on the street to the nearest telephone booth:

Call girl. The Summarit at f/1.5. TriX.

I actually rather like the way the flare works here, enhancing the feeling of night. I just “rescanned” this with the D800 and it’s come up better than ever.

Two ended.

The Pushmi-Pullyu is a two headed unicorn-gazelle cross, one head at either end. It features in Hugh Lofting’s ‘Doctor Dolittle’ children’s books from the 1920s. In the Rex Harrison movie of 1967 it becomes a llama, but the design is much the same.

I was reminded of this when snapping these giraffes in London Zoo in November, 1972

Leica M3, Visoflex II, 280mm Telyt. TriX.

That hardware was a real pig to use but it worked fine with giraffes!

The Leica M3 with the Visoflex II and a 200mm Telyt. TriX.

The long Telyt lenses had manual pre-set diaphragms, weighing a ton, and the mirror attachment (adding further tonnage) required that the mirror be re-cocked/lowered manually after each exposure. A Nikon F would have been a better idea.

Hullo, matey.

London. August, 1972.

It takes three years to learn the 25,000 streets which constitute London and the aspiring licensed cab driver will spend that time on a bicycle or scooter learning all of them, when not studying maps at home. Scientists say it’s the most prodigious feat of memory known to man. Indeed, studies by my alma mater, University College, London, have found that during this period the hippocampus, the memory part of the brain, grows substantially in size, presumably to accommodate this fount of knowledge.

Quite how London’s traditional cabs survive in an age of Google Maps beats me but, you know, there will always be an England. This happy member of that elite group – back in the day the cabs were black and drivers were white – was only too happy to say ‘Hullo’.

Leica M3, 50mm Elmar, TriX.

Note for the pedantic: The alphabetic suffix on UK license plates started with the letter ‘A’ in 1965, one letter a year, so you would think that the ‘J’ in the license plate connotes 1974. But this was actually snapped in 1972. Why the difference? Taxi cab plates do not adopt the usual passenger car system!

Camden, London, 192.

Ah! The fruits of an English comprehensive school education.

Leica M3, 50mm Elmar, TriX.

Fruit and veg.

England is certainly not the agricultural powerhouse that is France and the United States, but when I was a lad growing up in London they grew fine fruit and veg and, yes, exported a lot of that. Now exports are zero in the wake of the greatest act of economic suicide – Brexit – since George III lost America. Oh! well. The produce was fresh and chemical free, back then.

These were snapped in the fall of 1971 along the North End Road which not only featured produce vendors but also the occasional spiv unloading clothing which had fallen off the back of the truck, one wary eye out for the cops.

Leica M3, 35mm and 90mm Elmar lenses, TriX.

Amazingly, the market exists to this day.