Category Archives: Leica

All about the wonderful cameras from Wetzlar.

A part of me is no more

Cameras, Leica, Photographs, Photography

After 35 years, my Leica M3 is sold.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

Did I really needed to sell it? After all, it was so hard to buy, back on August 2, 1971. It had won many prizes and kept me in film and paper when I was a poor kid trying to make his way.

“It could be worth a lot one day” I thought.

“No, it’s a machine for taking pictures and it needs to be used. And I will not let it lie around gathering dust.”

Trying to console myself.

So right before packing it and including an autographed copy of my book, every picture in which had been taken with that M3, I ran through the shutter with the tape recorder on. There was that familiar second curtain bounce, common to all Ms, at 1/15th and 1/30th. The sound of the escapement on the slow speeds. The joyous sensuality of 1/60th or 1/125th. Not so much a click as a susurrus. The delayed action – so useful, I wonder they ever deleted it from later models.


A great shutter, one last time

But one thing none of the above can recreate is the feel of that Leica body and the flare free nature of the great view/rangefinder, equalled by the M2 and destroyed in later models by accountants who thought they knew better than the engineers.

And all those pleasant memories.

Pictures speak louder than words.

Roll 1, Picture 1 – a winner:

Girl on a train. My first ever Leica photograph, August 2, 1971. Roll 1, Picture 1. M3, 50mm Elmar, TriX

Then, but a few rolls of TriX later, that crazy wolfhound at Cruft’s Dog Show:


Crufts Dog Show, 1972. M3, 90mm Elmar, TriX at 800ASA

Or how about that tough guy with the balloons?


Balloon Guy, 1973. M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX

My first big prizewinner – Photographer of the Year, 1974, Photography Magazine (UK):


Comparisons, 1974. Reg Butler sculpture show, Holland Park, London. M3, 50mm DR Summicron, TriX

Or that Parisienne – I leave it to you to guess her profession:


Lady and dog, Paris, 1974. M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX

These and many more like it chronicle 1970s London and Paris in my book.

In 1977 that M3 accompanied me in the cabin of PanAm’s 747 with a one way ticket to America, leaving behind poor, socialist England, with its class distinctions, foul climate and punitive taxation.

And the magic continued, this time in color:


Late sun, Anchorage, Alaska, 1978. M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64

Later, when the west coast beckoned, the M3 was just as much at home:


Ojai, CA, 1990. M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64

But it would be disingenuous to preach ‘Change or Die’, as I am wont to do, and have this magnificent machine gathering dust in some never opened cupboard, a victim of digital technology.

So the Leica M3 had to move on.

May its next custodian have thirty-five great years with it.

Sob.

Cameras and loyalty

Cameras, Leica

Change or die.

I mentioned a while back that a friend had asked for help in selling a couple of film cameras on eBay. Now while eBay may be a conduit for some of the least honest people on earth – the sponsor smartly gets to act as innocent broker sloughing off responsibility for combating fraud on cheated buyers – it is nonetheless one of the more effective venues for getting rid of junk. Chances are good that someone out there wants it.

I admit I was a tad shocked at the dear relative’s lack of loyalty to these fine machines. But I know her to be a wise woman so I started reflecting on her decision.

The two cameras concerned were a mass produced and totally uninteresting (to collectors, at least) Canon Rebel and a much more collectible Kodak Medalist II which, owing to its strange appearance and bulk, makes the grade as an instant display piece. One immensely capable the other, well, just immense.

Arguably you would not want to use either to take pictures. The Rebel is surpassed handily by its digital descendants whereas the Medalist is really not competent in a world of 10 megapixel sensors and fabulous lenses, if you can even find film for it.

Knowing this I realized that my task would not be an easy one; however, as I am a big believer in the old saying that has it that you have to spend money to make money, I fitted the Rebel with two sets of new batteries (one for the data back, the other for the camera) and ran a roll of film through it, the better to show prospective buyers the quality this combination could produce. You can probably say with reasonable certainty that this will be the very last roll of film I will expose in my lifetime.

The Medalist could not be accorded like treatment as I could not find 620 format film in time, but it would appeal to a display collector, I reckoned, rather than someone looking for a daily user. All I did here was to clean it up and take a nice set of display pictures showing this magnificent piece from every conceivable angle.

To cut a long story short, both cameras sold, albeit neither attracted much interest. It’s the low selling price of the Rebel – $65 including new batteries, three rolls of film and a nice Canon carryall – that prompts this journal entry. Here, after all, was a camera that was selling a handful of years ago for what? $250? $300? The one I sold for my friend had probably seen a dozen or two rolls of film through it and was as close to mint as it gets. Like the proverbial Cadillac owned by the Little Old Lady from Pasadena of days past. In other words, thanks to digital, the Canon, a camera of great flexibility and yielding fine negatives, had depreciated some 80% in the blink of an eye.

It occurs to me that this sort of thing doubtless happened in previous generations where a technological breakthrough had obsoleted or bankrupted a predecessor technology.

Old man Gutenberg and his press did a number on all those Benedictine monks who had the market in illustrated manuscripts well and truly cornered. Being a pretty smart lot, however, (and I admit to bias here, having been educated by them), they went where the money is. Meaning booze. Benedictine Dom Perignon invented the cork stopper, making transportable champagne a reality and the now unemployed Benedictine artists transitioned to making Benedictine liquer, making many happy and themselves rich. Nice transition. And say what you may about religion, there’s a lot right with a bunch of chaps that knows a good liquer or glass of champagne.


That was then, this is now. An illustrated Benedictine manuscript fragment

In medicine the local barber gave way to penicillin, the surgeon and his anesthetics. The latter, in turn, is fighting a losing battle against smart pharmaceutical chemists who are rapidly obsoleting the scalpel with their targeted drugs. Amen for that.

The Ford Model T did a number on the horse and buggy business. You now enjoy a horse as a recreational avocation, flaunting the key rule of not owning something that eats as you sleep.

The light bulb did it to candles. The latter now serve as a backstop when lightning hits the local generator and provide continuing work for the local fire brigade and insurance adjuster.

Newsprint is where film was a few years ago. Meaning scared and about to die. The computer with a properly targeted news reader application will allow a user to digest hundreds of stories daily where in the past he might read that many on a topic of choice in a week.


Hundreds of stories at a glance. The NetNewsWire news reader on an iMac.

The main street movie house is in the early throes of death, replaced by the DVD which, in turn, will soon yield to downloadable movies. No need to leave the armored compound you call home.

The iPod killed the CD.

Those are some of the big wrecking technological changes that immediately come to mind. Back to the topic of photography.

Digital changed photography more than any technological change since Kodak’s ˜You press the button, we do the rest”. Actually, that was not so much a technological change – after all Kodak was selling cameras pre-loaded with roll film which technology had been around for a time – as it was a brilliant marketing change. Place the customer first (something Kodak has long since forgotten) and the world will beat a path to your door. In like manner, the iPod made better that which already existed, made it easy to use and made it sexy. The photographer uses the latter as a temporary storage device for his digital pictures which are overflowing the storage card in the camera on that extended trip. When he’s not listening to his tunes or watching movies on the same device, that is. So now Apple has changed that old Kodak dictum and it reads “Your press the button, you do the rest”.

And with this change in photographic technology I believe a new behavioral set of circumstances has come to pass. Namely, that brand loyalty is, for the most part, a thing of the past.

In the old days a serious photographer was a Leica man or a Zeiss man or a Rolleiflex man (sadly, few women were allowed into the club). Later he became a Nikon or Minolta or Pentax or Canon man. Or woman. He swore by Kodak or Agfa or Ilford film. For his dad, it had been GM or Ford. They had not let him down in the past and were not about to do so now, having grown with him.

Look at the exquisite care Leitz, for one, took with transitioning its many happy users from the anachronistic screw mounting of lenses on bodies with simply awful viewfinders and ergonomics to match, to the fast and infinitely more capable bayonet mount and magnificent finder of the Leica M. Though the first bayonet Leica, the M3, came out in 1954, Leitz was releasing the latest in its line of screw bodied cameras as late as 1957, finally discontinuing it in 1960. Forward lens compatibility was also assured – what better way to preserve the value of that investment? – so the M body was one millimeter thinner, allowing a screw to bayonet adapter to be fitted while preserving infinity focus. And gradually those old pipe smoking fuddy duddies at the camera club came to realize that maybe a lever film advance and the world’s best integrated view/rangefinder weren’t such bad things after all.

Their modern descendants are the same folks who deny the reality that film is in its last innings. But Leica, in its clever marketing, had managed to preserve a past generation of users, making them upgrade, and attracted a whole new generation who saw the M for the superbly capable instrument that it was. Brand loyalty, in other words, was well used. Whether they get away with it again with the ridiculously overpriced and soon-to-be-obsolete Leica M8 remains to be seen. They had better watch out – those M bayonet patents are long expired.

Now fast forward to 2006. At the beginning of the year I was a Leica M loyalist of some 35 years standing. Newer Ms had come along – truth be told none were as well made as the M2 and M3 I had been using for all that time – but there was no reason for ‘upgrading’, if an upgrade it really was. I tried an M6 and found the rangefinder worthless pointed into the sun. Those on the M2 and M3 worked fine. That’s what happens when accountants take over from engineers. The lenses got better and better, true, so I upgraded those, but when something better came along it would clearly not be from the house of Leitz, or Leica as it had become. It happened to be from Canon in the guise of a (barely) affordable full frame sensor in the EOS 5D DSLR which instantly obsoleted all my medium format gear. I couldn’t sell the latter fast enough before it became worthless. Bye bye, Rollei.

And had you told me that I would make my daily user a camera which was made by a consumer appliance maker – the Panasonic LX1 – and that this would replace none other than the vaunted Leicas, well, I would probably have had serious doubts about your sanity. And that was just a few months ago. Panasonic had made a better mousetrap, Canon had made the best, near grain-free sensor in the business and brand loyalty simply made no sense. So when my friend wisely wrote to me, in response to my email agonizing about selling the Leicas, with just three words, I knew there was more than a grain of truth in what she wrote.

Ain’t Change Wonderful?

Let’s extrapolate that thinking for a moment. The other day I watched a brief Sony promotional video on YouTube where a charming Sony technologist was extolling the virtues of the new Sony Alpha A100. I have spoken highly of this camera, based on its paper specifications, in the past, not least because it is a rebadged Minolta with Sony’s capital and genius behind it. What do you think the smart Japanese engineer said on that video? Why, he took a leaf straight out of Leica’s book. “Just think”, he said, “there are six million Minolta lenses out there that will fit our camera”. Respect the past while selling the future. It was not lost on me, either, that each of those six million lenses had just got two new leases on life, courtesy of a digital sensor and a vibration reduction mechanism built into the body of the camera.

So one day soon someone comes along with a sensor as fine grained as Canon’s in a much smaller package (it does not have to be full frame if the quality is there). The camera has vibration reduction built into the body, not the lens. The viewfinder has focus confirmation for manual focus lenses just like some Pentax DSLRs. Now my tired eyes can see when things are sharp as the little light comes on. And the mount will respect the legacy of the past by being Nikon or Canon or Minolta or Pentax, or even Leica M. For all those tens of millions of lenses out there. And maybe that brilliant manufacturer somehow obsoletes the flapping mirror and pentaprism with a crisp, straight through electronic viewfinder with no ghosting and high contrast. So much cheaper and more reliable than all those mechanical parts.

And what do you think I will do? Why, dump the Canon and move on, of course.

As they say on Wall Street, “If you want loyalty, get a dog”. And I already have one of those.


Bert the Border Terrier. Loyalty personified, unless a cookie is involved, that is.

I like Leicas as much as the next man….

Hall of Shame, Leica, Photography

…but I know disinformation when I see it.

Can you believe this guy?

How many more people are going to buy into this ‘Freedom Train’ disinformation? This appalling apologia has now been around for some fifty years.

This is the same Leica company that gave us the Luftwaffe Leica, provided optics for Panzer tanks and most certainly did not depart Wetzlar for moral shores in 1939. Nor did it look to leave during the largest military build up the world has seen in the period 1933-39, being a major supplier of optics to their government. It’s not like they had no warning….

“Boy, oh boy, Ernst. Did you see the P&L this quarter? Are those Wehrmacht orders something, or what?”

I would have posted this comment in this writer’s web site but, predictably, comments are not possible. Why would they be when you write naïve nonsense like this?

Mr. ‘Conscientious’ should find his conscience and question what he reads before repeating it as fact. That’s the sort of ‘reporting’ you find in most of today’s newspapers. Until you learn to question what you read, Mr. C, please stick to photography.

But of course we know that the Leitz company did not collaborate with the Nazis, they were only following orders and they really love their country, etc., etc. As this advertisement from the November 1942 edition of Foto Beobachter confirms – a perfect match for that Luftwaffe Leica:

Look, Leicas are nice, but let’s not deny history.

It’s the software, stupid

Leica, Software

Software can yield far greater improvements than optics.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

You might fairly accuse me of worshipping at the altar of the gods in Wetzlar when it comes to optics. For the last 75 years of the twentieth century, Leitz Wetzlar, as it was most of that time, created two great cameras – the screw thread Leica and the M3 and its variants – and dozens of the best lenses known to photographers. And while I may have moved away from Leica rangefinder cameras in the absence of a digital option, I have had the rare pleasure of using many of Wetzlar’s lenses on my rangefinder and reflex Leicas.

My first Leica lens was the 50mm Elmar. It’s sole limitation was the boob behind it pressing the button on the M3. Twist the mount counter-clockwise and the lens neatly collapsed into the camera body, passing for what was compact back in 1971 when I got mine. August 2, 1971 to be exact. The 90mm Elmar and a superb 35mm Summaron followed. In each case these were the ‘beginner’s’ option (meaning cheap, by Leitz standards), and only years of hard work later did a Summicron grace the M3. That was the incomparable 50mm Dual Range, the brass mount having last seen duty as the main engine bearing in a Panzer tank. And I’m afraid that mention of any of the dozen others that came and went would be a tedious exercise in the overuse of superlatives. For the M these included the 21mm Asph Elmarit, the 35mm Asph Summicron, later and mercifully lighter versions of the 50mm Summicron, a 90mm Elmarit, Tele-Elmarit, Elmar-C and Asph Apo-Summicron, a 135mm Hektor, Elmar and Apo-Telyt, 200mm, 280mm and 400mm Telyts, and on and on. Each magical in its own way.

Map reader. 1973. Leica M3, 50mm Elmar, TriX/D76.

For the most part, these lenses were designed the old fashioned way. Hard graft with calculators and logarithmic tables, long hours melting ever more exotic glasses, interspersed with occasional bouts of sheer lunacy. The ‘we made it because we could’ lenses like the original 50mm f/1.2 Noctilux with its aspherical grinds, the NASA commissioned 180mm f/3.4 Apo Telyt R which finally brought the red spectrum in line with the rest of the colors to give an image of startling definition, the fabulous 75mm f/1.4 Summilux (if only you could focus it right – that sort of thing needs an M3 vewfinder!). And while computers played an increasing role in the design of later lenses, the long heritage of optical excellence at Leitz, Wetzlar, West Germany saw to it that they were programmed right. The reality is that if lenses for 35mm cameras can get any better no one will notice as the magicians at Wetzlar had long ago exceeded anything film could resolve.

These thoughts have been coursing thorugh the old brain increasingly as I look at the modern processing workload. Now bear in mind that this is coming from someone who adopted a beginning to end pure digital workflow only earlier this year with a Canon 5D. Until then it was film + scanning, which took over from film + color lab, which in turn had supplanted film + darkroom/bedroom. And what strikes me most is how much software has become a dominant part of picture processing.

Start with the in-camera software that tells the sensor RAW or JPG, maybe with various amounts of contrast, sharpness and other processing included. In to Aperture or Photoshop where chromatic aberration (color fringing) at the edges has to be repaired. Then the barrel distortion has to be removed at the wide end of the zoom. Another tweak and the vignetting is gone. Three aberrations I simply do not recall having to deal with in the days of the Summicron and its brethren. Because if they were present, they were not visible. So on that scale, I suppose, one would rightly argue that Canon lenses simply do not hold a candle to those from Leitz Wetzlar. OK, so you have to laboriously manually focus the Leica lens, and the aperture is manual and the only way to zoom is to walk closer or fall in the water…. But from the sheer standpoint of optics, if I had to bet my life on resolving power and freedom from aberrations, it would have to be Leica every time.

The reality is, it no longer matters. Good software can correct all those problems in seconds. Further, because the digital ‘film’ in the 5D is far superior to the one from Kodak which I used in the M3, the overall result is better in every conceivable way, and it’s mostly due to software. I believe designers are getting the message. Increasingly we are seeing new technologies like image stabilization add more definition than any film based user could hope for, and we are probably very close to the point where very large aperture lenses with vast zoom ranges with minimal bulk are around the corner. The necessary optical compromises will be corrected in the camera with tailored software. For that matter, the lens need no longer be interchangeable as the zoom range will be so large it will accomodate all conceivable needs.

Sceptical? Look at the Kodak P712 digital camera announced earlier this week. The lens is equivalent to 36-432mm (432mm!) with a smallest aperture of f/3.7. F/3.7! The camera costs $499 and weighs probably under one pound. Compare that with the 400mm f/4 DO Canon lens, at $5,200 and 4.3 lbs. And it doesn’t even zoom. Sure, I have no doubt the Canon lens is better, but how long do you expect that to last?

Case in point. My Panasonic LX-1 (click on the entry at right) has a Leica lens that reads ‘DC Vario-Elmarit 1:2.8-4.9/6.3-25.2 ASPH.’ Phew!. Not like saying 50mm Summicron now, is it? To make sure things are not blurred the camera has image stabilization, because some unnamed brilliant engineer at Panasonic thought it up. Auto focus makes sure it’s focused right adding yet more definition to the competitive equation. This lens is like a 28-112mm on a regular camera. At its longest setting it extends 1.5″ from the barrel on the camera’s body.

So, supposing I want a 24-105mm f/2. That would translate to a 5.4mm – 23.6mm lens which, fully corrected, would doubtless be a lot bulkier than the one on the DP. Now throw out the large front element, there to reduce vignetting. Get rid of several of the others there to confer minimal color fringing. And the hell with barrel distortion. Curvature of field and all those insurmountable problems with edge pixels and wide angle lenses? Nonsense. Just bow the edges of the sensor towards the lens as the focal length changes. Flexible sensors? Why not? Zoom? The next generation of sensors will obsolete optical zooming and do it all electronically. About time. Program around all of that with some smart software, fix the image on the fly when saving (or even when viewing if it’s that horrible to look at) and your 24-105mm f/2 zoom is now 1″ in diameter and 1″ long. Wow! So we gradually return to the days of the Box Brownie with its miniscule single meniscus lens, but with an image readily enlarged 12 times or more.

And who will be the genius designing these new ‘lenses’? It won’t be a god the likes of Max Berek or Walter Mandler in Wetzlar. It will be some kid who is really sharp at coding who happens to like a superb picture from the one ounce piece of plastic passing for a lens attached to his camera. The great days of optics are yet to come and their designs will emanate from the keyboard of some unknown master even now getting his lips around the teat on that plastic milk bottle.

Gorilla. 2006. Panasonic Lumix LX1, 6.3mm DC Elmarit Asph, ISO100, image stablizer.

Digital Leica – not!

Cameras, Leica

Panasonic disappoints with the L1.

I should preface this by saying I have not used the newly announced Panasonic L1, so it’s really premature to criticize, but a review of the specificationss underwhelms.

I was really looking forward to this camera, hoping it would be the digital Leica all ex-Leica M users like me are waiting for, at a non-Leica price. They will sell for $2,000 with the Leica zoom lens. Not bad.

The disappointing Panasonic L1.

Now the ergonomics look promising. A real shutter speed dial, a pretty exciting Leica lens (alternatively designed by Leica or Panasonic, depending on where you read on the Panasonic web site) with manual zoom and iris controls, and a nice M-look camera body. Throw in image stabilization, a vibrator to shake off sensor dust and a 16:9 widescreen picture option and what’s not to like?

How about a lousy viewfinder? The L1 shares the prism optics of the Olympus E-330, which uses a side flapping mirror (like their Pen F half-frame film camera did some thrity years earlier) and mirrors in lieu of a pentaprism to turn the image right way round. Result? A very dim image. Don’t believe me. Check out the on line reviews.

How about a lousy sensor? Use it above 400 ISO and all is lost in noise. It’s the same sensor used in the E-330. Don’t believe me. Check out the on line reviews.

How about a very small image in the finder? It’s the same optics used in the E-330. Don’t believe me. Check out the on line reviews. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just look through a Canon 5D after trying a Rebel or 20D/30D. I have. Night and day. The L1/E330 is like the Rebel in this regard.

As for all that ‘live preview’ nonsense, why did they waste their time? No one needs this in a professional grade camera. And the E330 does it better, if you must have it, for less.

Too bad. I was kind of excited about that Leica lens. Guess we’ll have to wait for the Digital Leica M but, no, I’m not holding my breath. I’m just holding on to my wallet.