Spy special.

Spying is not what it used to be. Today’s Russkie steals data after hacking your cloud server or uses his cell phone. The images are perfect, sent by encrypted cellular mail and infinitely enlargeable.

Ponder then the pre-war and cold war spy’s challenges. He had to make images of those stolen military secrets in poor lighting, had a limited number of snaps on a roll and the chances are that his exposures were off, his shutter speeds too slow and the result a grainy mess. Then along came the Minox camera in 1936 and his life was made considerably easier. For the first time a truly pocketable, high quality camera could make half decent images and the minuscule 50 shot film cartridge was not that hard to secrete away. The original Minox measured just 3.1″ x 1.1″ x 0.6″, and weighed but 4.6 ozs. The cartridge was smaller still. The 8 x 11mm negative, just 10% the area of a 35mm film original, was useable in the right hands.

Small and stealthy. Shown extended and ready for action.

Appropriately enough the first Minoxes were made in Latvia, one of the three Baltic states sharing a border with Comrade Ivan and forever looking over its shoulder at the gathering Russkie hordes on its border, waiting to invade. They used AK47s, not Minoxes, to do their thing. So production was moved to – where else? – Germany after the war, and the Russkie spies were no longer home grown but came from Cambridge (Burgess, McLean, Philby, Blunt) or Los Alamos (Klaus Fuchs). But nationality notwithstanding, the Minox soldiered err, spied, on.

The Model B shown above included a selenium exposure meter and the neat metal lanyard provided just the right distance measure for a sheet of A4 with nuclear trigger drawings. A complete subsystem grew up around the camera including an enlarger and projector (to better enjoy your holiday snaps from Chernobyl) and there was even a binocular attachment for when you needed a real close up of Comrade Stalin’s murderous mustache.

Once the Cold War faded the Minox faded with it, later attempts at compact 35mm cameras a flop. At one point Leica bought the maker, proving that German financial acumen was not bred at Harvard Business School. But it was the spy camera of choice for some 50 years and is quite beautiful to operate and behold.

Watch designer.

Thoughts of the Swiss generally migrate to images of good chocolate and grubbing money launderers for the bad guys of the world. Switzerland has not been invaded for some eight centuries now as despots and murderers need a safe haven for their ill gotten gains.

But when I think of the Swiss I try to put these thoughts behind me and focus on what they do best, and that is the manufacture of mechanical wrist watches. And I do not eat chocolate. Further, when you think of the many masterpieces Geneva has produced, it’s those designed by Gérald Genta which spring to mind, for the Swiss Genta (1931-2011) created the three iconic designs of the twentieth century wristwatch, and I have been lucky to own all three.

Genta with some of his masterpieces.

Few would dispute that Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet are the premier watchmakers in the world. In the mechanical camera world that title would go to Ernst Leitz and Carl Zeiss. In the wristwatch world the laurels belong to these two makers, in business to this day. Successful people are not about to plonk down good money for some battery driven, mass produced piece of garbage and neither PP or AP admit to making anything but mechanical watches, though both strayed into the awful territory of batteries and quartz crystals a few years ago when these things were trendy.

Genta started his innings at Patek with the most elegant wristwatch made, in 1968. The Golden Ellipse, in its many iterations, remains a classic, if no longer made in a world brutalized by rap music and populist social sites. My Golden Ellipse dates from the late 1990s and has been – and remains – a trusted companion ever since. It still takes my breath away on every occasion which sees me checking the time, frequently for no other reason than to gaze upon Genta’s masterpiece. Yes, you have to wind it each morning and yes the lizard strap has a finite life and yes it needs occasional cleaning and lubrication, just like those Leicas and Contaxes of yore. And yes, there is nothing else like it on the planet. And yes, Roman numerals are de rigeur.

The Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse, first made in 1968.

You can get the Golden Ellipse with any number of face colors and fancy bands and hobnail bezels and date displays, but the classic remains the white face, no date, lizard strap version with the polished gold bezel. Mine.

Genta’s next great creation was a true tour de force, and it was the first modern sports watch, the magnificent Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. Originally made in all stainless steel, the port hole design (hence ‘Royal Oak’ after any number of great British fighting ships) included the hexagonal screws embedded in the octagonal bezel and it is simply glorious to behold.

The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, first made in 1970.

Sports watch design would never be the same again and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it was Genta who ripped off his own design on his return to Patek, in 1976. That design, named the Nautilus in furtherance of the nautical tradition, dispensed with the Royal Oak’s daring exposed screws and became the most famous sports watch made. Patek still makes them in extremely limited numbers, and the limited production runs see to it that prices remain stratospheric. Mine has graced the old wrist for some two decades now and you will not see me wrenching in the garage or riding my classic BMW bike without it. Elegant it may be but this is a working watch. I send it to Patek every few years to have the scratches removed.

Some Nautilus examples.

Yes, you have to be named Guido and affect golden chains on your hairy chest for the one shown at left, but the Nautilus transcends kitsch, making its own statement. Not that there are no frustrations, for ownership means that when something goes wrong the generally useless American authorized distributors will tell you your watch has to go back to Geneva for repair. Mine has now made the trip across the ocean twice in the past two years, first for overhaul and replacement of the white on black date display with a black on white one (blame my old eyes for that) and then for repair of a broken clasp on that ridiculously wonderful metal wrist band. Please, forget leather straps on a Nautilus. So it has been on my wrist just 3 months of the last 24 (the virus saw it sleeping in Geneva in the PP repair shop for many months) and it is now finally back on these shores.

Want a mechanical watch, and heirloom for your children to inherit? You need look no further than Audemars Piguet or Patek Philippe, two of the few manufacturers who still make their own movements (you want a Porsche with a Ford motor?) and both of whom were lucky to employ the design services of the greatest watch designer of the past century, Gérald Genta.

Mega cool.

You can now add a modern 50 megapixel digital back, tilt screen and all, to your classic 63-year old Hasselblad 500C body. How cool is that? $6000 for a product line extension like this almost seems reasonable, preserving the life expectancy of all those classic Zeiss and Schneider optics.

$9,000 to replace.

Seems like they made the M9 just recently.

All modern cameras are disposable, their life expectancy 2-3 years. Don’t be silly. Pass on that Leica. The best of the best is just $300 a year.

Update September 17, 2020:

A New Jersey repair shop claims to have analyzed the cause of the ‘sensor’ corrosion down to an untreated sensor cover glass, and offers a coated repair/replacement cover glass for $1500. Click here.

Back in the day.

There is no more need for folding cameras or for those with collapsible lenses. Modern iPhones give 99% of photographers more than they will ever need and we will see periscope zooms in small packages in a generation or two. Quality is unsurpassed for the designed display medium which is a laptop, and the technology superb.

But before the iPhone there were many attempts at crafting small bodies and these involved either retractable lenses or collapsible fronts, the latter approach generally requiring some form of light tight bellows. Here are some of the best examples of the genre.

The grandfather of collapsibles is the Leica, whose 50mm f/3.5 Elmar lens retracted into the already compact 35mm film body to craft a device which could (more or less) be slipped into a large suit pocket or into an overcoat. Leitz soldiered on with collapsible 50mm (and a 90mm f/4 Elmar) well into the M era (1954 on) and even the vaunted early 7-element Summicron came in a collapsible mount.

The Leica Standard of 1937

The hood made a nonsense of the concept and should be avoided. There was no interlock so if you forgot to extend the lens you would get a blurred blob in lieu of a picture. But the lens was decent (a 4 element Zeiss Tessar design ‘borrowed’ by Leitz), so long as you remembered to remove the lens cap.

A really clever variant, this one a folder, was the American Crown Graphic, much beloved of press men before smaller offerings came along. It took massive 4″ x 5″ negatives, was sharp as a tack and very light and compact given its capabilities, which included a tilting front and interchangeable lenses with rangefinder coupling. I found mine to be a delight to use.

Crown Graphic, collapsed. 1947.

Crown Graphic, tilt front on extended baseboard.
Note the coupled rangefinder.

The Crown Graphic was arguably a variation on the earlier Zeiss Ikonta which took 120 (2 1/4″ square) film and commenced manufacture in 1929, going through many versions with post-war models offering an excellent 75 or 80mm f/3.5 Tessar in a Synchro Compur leaf shutter. The Tessar used here was ‘better’ than that found on 35mm cameras for the simple reason that you did not have to enlarge the image as much when making prints. Truly compact when collapsed given the large negative size, this was one of the best high quality/small size cameras of the era.

A late 1950s Super Ikonta 533/16. The auxiliary lens attached to the main taking lens is a rotating prism for
the coupled rangefinder. Checkout the small size of the carrying case which
accommodated the camera with the lens collapsed. Uncoupled selenium cell meter atop.

Kodak had an excellent, if complex, set of offerings in their Retina series, all made in Germany, and culminating with the Retina IIC (no meter) and IIIC (uncoupled selnium cell meter), The front element was detachable allowing 35mm and 80mm converter lenses to be attached. These were gargantuan and the quality only so-so, but the base offering of the Rodenstock Heliogon or Schneider Xenon 6-element f/2 50mm standard lenses was excellent. The camera’s Achilles Heel was a pot metal rack for the base-mounted film advance lever which would strip with use:

Retina IIIC. The finder on late models came with 35, 50 and 80mm frames.
The raised flap on the meter denoted low light use. 1960.

Rollei came along with a stroke of genius in 1963 with the Rollei 35, whose ads correctly boasted that the camera was not much larger than a 35mm film cassette. The collapsible lens – with an interlock no less – was the time honored Tessar and a couple CdS meter was included.

The Rollei 35. The 35S variant offered an f/2.8 optic.

Period ad for the Rollei 35.

I travelled all over the world with mine and while focussing was by guess – there was no rangefinder – the results from the 40mm lens were excellent. Mine came in enameled black, making it pretty stealthy.

But the genius designers at Olympus were not to take this lying down and came up with something infinitely superior in their Olympus Stylus in 1991. It had autofocus for the 35mm f/2.8 lens, a length which was perfect for street snapping, and a flash was included. This was a clamshell design. Slide open the lens cover and the lens would extend. The camera was well made, housed in a tough resin shell, and I literally beat mine to death when it failed after many journeys and hundreds of rolls of film. Yes, the film rewound automatically at the end of the roll. One handed operation was a breeze and over 5 million were sold. I consider the Olympus Stylus the best collapsible camera made.

The f/3.5 lens became f/2.8 later.