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Leica M3

Cameras, Film, Leica

A reunion.

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

I have been patiently building a small collection of classic photography hardware in my home theater, the emphasis being on cameras which were revolutionary in the way they changed the medium. Further, electronics are anathema to this collection which focuses on the great machines of the mechanical age.

If there is one 20th century camera which rules it has to be the Nikon F, the first bullet proof single lens reflex camera which, incidentally, can claim to have ended the Viet Nam war. Most of the searing images from the front lines of that conflict were made on the Nikon F which became de rigeur hardware for any aspiring photojournalist. The Nikon came along in 1959 along with a large range of fine lenses, but 5 years earlier 1954 saw an introduction almost as significant, in the guise of the Leica M3.

The screw mount Leicas with their poor ergonomics, unchanged since the 1930s, were suddenly a thing of the past.


Clunky with poor ergonomics –
the Leica IIIF predecessor to the M3.

Gone were the dual shutter speed dials, replaced with a single dial with equally spaced click stops. Gone was the slow and fussy screw mount for lenses, replaced with a robust and long wearing bayonet mount. Gone was the slow and clumsy knob used to advance the film, replaced with a beautifully ergonomically engineered advance lever. Gone was the antediluvian film loading system which dictated a long leader on your emulsion of choice to allow insertion from the baseplate past the twin sprockets. An opening film back made things far easier. Gone was the need to manually reset the film counter for every new roll, for the M3’s counter reset automatically to minus 2 when the take-up spool was removed.


The opening film back greatly simplified reloading.

But, most importantly, the masterstroke of the Leica M3 was the superb combined rangefinder/viewfinder. No more did the user have to focus through one peephole and compose through another. And the latter really was a peephole, one of the worst viewfinders in any camera. Now the generously sized rangefinder patch appeared in the center of the large and very bright viewfinder and, unlike the contemporary Zeiss Ikon Contax IIa, the edges of the rangefinder patch were perfectly sharp allowing for alignment focusing as well as coincident use. A masterstroke, and still to be found on today’s ridiculously priced digital Leica M11 and variants. 80 years and counting testify to the exceptional design. And not only was that combined rangefinder/viewfinder big and bright, it would automatically show the correct frame lines for 90mm and 135mm lenses when they were fitted. And the icing on the cake was that the finder was automatically parallax compensated, the frames moving diagonally down to the right as the lens was racked out.


A masterstroke – the fine M3 finder.
In this snap the 135mm frame appears inside the 50mm one.

As there was no built in light meter Leitz provided a coupling selenium cell version which slid into the accessory shoe and coupled with the shutter speed dial. All you had to do was note the aperture reading indicated by the needle and transfer that to the lens, which was as fast as exposure measurement got before the days of automation. It worked well and I used that slip on selenium meter, which needed no battery, for 35 years. It never let me down.


The Leicameter MC.

You can read more about Leicameters here.

Above all, along with all these functional improvements, the Leica M3 was – and remains to this day – beautiful to behold. And to hold and operate it was a dream, everything in the right place with a wonderful feel of solidity. The M3 was reliable as long as you sent it for a good cleaning and lubrication every decade or so. This, after all, was no Nikon F when it came to brute robustness, but it was no shrinking violet either, being tough and dependable. Whack the body and the rangefinder might go out of alignment but even the home klutz can realign things with two provided screws. Ask me how I know. During its 12 year run Leitz made almost a quarter million M3 bodies. Compare that with the Nikon’s 15 year run through 1974, during which time Nippon Kogaku churned out 4 times as many Nikon Fs. No, the F did not need service every decade.

The M3 was my first ‘serious’ camera bought after three years of scrimping and saving in 1971 when I was 20, and was my ‘go to’ camera for the next 35 years. It was finally sold in 2006 when the Canon 5D full frame DSLR came along. Yet, truth be told, I never quite got over that sale, which bowed to my vow not to own anything I was not using. Well, that vow has been broken with the arrival of my home theater collection and finally a Leica M3, the last addition, has joined the other classics on display.

These include:

  • The Minox B spy camera of the 007 Cold War generation
  • The Contax IIa similar to the one Capa took to Omaha Beach on D Day
  • A Nikon F of course
  • The Rolleiflex 2.8D which every fashion maven was using in the 1950s
  • A Bolex H16 movie camera on which Spielberg cut his teeth
  • A Calumet/Cambo monorail studio camera which takes 5″ x 4″ sheet film, much loved by the Hollywood glamor photographers of the early days of the talkies
  • Classic Leitz, Linhof and Gandolfi tripods, the latter over a century old

Not a microchip, sensor or battery to be found in the lot.

The Leica M3 had a long life, being made through 1966, and while there were minor variations, it was largely unchanged during those 12 years of production. Early models had a two stroke lever wind as Leitz wrongly believed that a rapid single stroke would tear the film’s sprockets, or maybe cause electrostatic sparking and fogging. Choose which version you like, but I tend to the sparking story as early models had a glass pressure plate, eventually replaced by a conventional – and conductive – metal one, which worked every bit as well. Or better. Somewhere in early production the film transport gears were switched from soft brass to steel, conferring harder wearing properties. Some nuts claim that the earlier brass gears were smoother to which all I can say is …. nuts. About the same time the strap eyelets were moved from the side of the top plate to the front of the body, making for a better balanced whole with a more elegant design.

Early shutter speed progression was the non-linear 1/2, 1/5, 1/10, 1/25 etc. one, later replaced by that in use by every other maker, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30 and so on. Sometime around 1958 the rangefinder rectangle sprouted two protruding rectangles top and bottom which approximated the depth of field at f/16 and f/5.6 with the 50mm lens if the misaligned coincident images fell within their breadth. Hmmm. A solution looking for a problem.

While all M3s appeared to come with the front panel self timer lever, early models did not include the frame preview lever which allowed previewing of the 90mm and 135mm fields of view if neither of those lenses was fitted. The thicker 50mm frame lines were visible regardless of the lens fitted and if a 35mm optic was your thing Leitz provided one with auxiliary ‘goggles’ which made the 50mm frame show the wider field of view. A tad clunky but it worked for me for over three decades.


The 35mm Summaron with goggles for the M3.
These were easily removable on the early f/3.5 version.

And when my first Leica M3 arrived on August 2, 1971, with a modest 50mm collapsible Elmar lens, I was ready to hit the streets, having spent the scrimping and saving years boning up on Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau. These were two great if humorless French street workers, whose work I was determined to emulate with an added soupçon of humor. I eventually added two more modest lenses, a 35mm Summaron and a 90mm Elmar, sufficient for most tasks for which the camera was designed. And while my trinity of lenses represented the bottom of the line Leitz options their resolving power was just fine for big prints.

That Leica M3 was simply made for me and represented as fine a street snapper as was available, before auto everything and zoom lenses rendered it and its many derivatives obsolete.


As fine and humorous a street snapper
as was available.
Crufts Dog show, 1972. Leica M3,
90mm Elmar, TriX.

And now it’s in my collection and, yes, the serial number is almost identical to that of my first one, making it August 1958 vintage.


The Leica M3.

Now all I have to do is find a lens for it. I rather fancy that 35mm Summaron with goggles which was used for most of the pictures in my book ‘Street Smarts‘.

Want to buy one? Either make sure it has had a recent documented CLA (Cleaning, Lubrication and Adjustment) or budget up to $500 to have it brought up to snuff. Even the youngest M3 is almost 60 years old and those lubricants, if original, are probably dried up. Cosmetic appearance and function are unrelated.

Minting it

iPhone, Photography

No more Mr. Nice Guy.

The cell phone is an indispensable part of our lives. Hardly a genius observation. The camera in that cell phone is not only a fine photographic tool, always with you, but it’s also used for scanning QR codes, reading bar codes in the supermarket to detect unhealthy ingredients, and taking pictures of the minuscule print on product labels so you can actually read the text. Why, you can even use the cell phone to, you know, make calls, not to mention receiving spam messages from our Russkie friends inviting you to share your credit card information because of all the toll charges you owe and suggesting you fend off the Dobermans at the IRS with Comrade Ivan’s assistance.

I have been a loyal (read ‘stupid’) Verizon customer for the best part of two decades, when the other day I received this email. It’s hard to conceive of a more crassly worded announcement. Translated, it reads “Thanks for being a loyal customer, chump. Now bend over.”:


Corporate greed redefined.

That’s a 13.5% increase on my current rate in an economy whose inflation rate is below 3%. That’s not going to happen and triggers Dr. Pindelski’s New Year’s resolution: Any rate increase over 3% results in immediate dismissal of the provider.

A while back, speaking with my sister in West Sussex, it transpired that the UK has many cell service providers and her monthly rate of $19 covers two lines. Hardly a new economic concept – all competition drives down price. My new Verizon rate would be $127 monthly.

So I searched the web for a lower cost provider with good coverage and found Mint, whose coverage map you can access here.

Here’s the map – use the above link and you can enter your address for a more granular reading:


Mint coverage – a few holes in the West.

It’s similar to T Mobile’s, suggesting that Mint is buying excess capacity from T Mobile:


T Mobile coverage.

The Mint service provides for a 3 month $15 monthly teaser rate for two lines, whereupon the rate rises to $45 monthly. That’s a full 65% less than Verizon’s, an annual saving of $984. Heck, two years of this and I get that Leica M for the home theater.

Both my iPhone 12 (physical SIM) and my son’s iPhone 15 (eSIM) are ‘unlocked’ versions, meaning that Greedy Apple got $10 more for each phone. This premium was paid with the distant thought that a carrier change might be made sooner or later. If your phone is tied to a specific carrier you cannot switch, but at a $984 annual saving you can afford a new phone when you do.

There are two aspects to the switch. The easy part is getting an eSIM download from Mint, which arrived in the email 30 minutes after signing up. Secondly, the physical SIM for my iPhone 12 arrived one day later by overnight FedEx, along with the little pin to open the SIM door in the phone’s side. Impressive.

The hard part – you guessed it – is first you have to get the crooks at Verizon to release you from their usurious charges. You are meant to get a ‘Number Transfer PIN’ which you enter in the Mint application but, shock news, the link from Verizon is broken. Fortunately there are several ways of getting this Number Transfer PIN, and one of those worked for me. See below:


How to get the Transfer PIN.

My son’s iPhone was up and running on Mint within 10 minutes and my service was transferred 24 hours later when the new SIM was installed in the iPhone 12. Here is the happy result:


Up and running on Mint.

The only caveat is that the physical SIM is tiny and it took my son’s deft fingers and excellent eyesight to get it installed in my phone.


Tiny new SIM.

The service works well and all that’s left to do is to make sure the crooks at Verizon cease charging me while I enjoy the savings.

Because the transfer process is non-trivial and Verizon will make sure it’s as opaque and as difficult as can be, few will bother to make the change to a cheaper carrier. They already know that the integrity of cell carriers is right down there with that of cable TV providers and big banks. So they will bend over, grin and pay up. Thus the 13.5% increase to suckers (like me) will mightily boost the income of a business with a very wide ‘moat’ (meaning prohibitive costs of entry for prospective competitors).

And don’t make the mistake of thinking that Mint is a high integrity outfit. Right after signing up I received an email telling me that my data allocation of 5 MB per month was about to run out and that I should sign up for more at ridiculous cost. A quick check proved that this was a lie. One month later I have only used 2% of the allocation. Don’t fall for this scam.

So I did the only thing logically possible. After firing the bastards I loaded up on Verizon stock. Little competition, oligopolistic pricing and a very safe 7.2% annual dividend. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.


Reaping what I sow.

Other providers? I expect that the insurance company crooks and the gardeners will be the next in the firing line. This is too much fun, replete with schadenfreude.

Update March 19.2025:. Two months into our three month trial period and my son (in NY) and I (in the west) have had zero issues with the Mint Mobile service on our iPhones (iPhone 15 and 12, respectively), so we signed up for a one year plan at a mere $15 per month. Compare with $123/month at Verizon. And yes, VZ stock is up 14% since I bought it plus that high dividend yield. What’s not to like?

Shocking hypocrisy

Hall of Shame, Mac Pro, Macintosh

Apple’s planned obsolescence.

The other day I sadly took my 2010 Mac Pro to the recyclers. The resale value approximated what it would cost to ship this behemoth and the last six generations of OS X releases saw to it that none would run on the machine, denying me the security fixes announced seemingly monthly.


Can you spell ‘planned obsolescence’?.

While this piece is focused on Apple, like thinking applies to all computer hardware makers. They conspire with the software authors (in Apple’s case they conspire with Apple) to make sure that older machines can no longer run the upgraded operating system and many of the related applications. The conspiracy deepens when you look at the horrendous costs laid on users by ethically challenged businesses like Adobe who, in obsoleting earlier versions of their apps, use the planned obsolescence strategy to force you into a rental payment system, euphemistically known as the ‘subscription model’.

So it was with the memory of that great recycled Mac Pro that I read this well researched article in Macworld magazine. The bottom line is this:

So, in answer to the question: How long do Macs last? We’d say five to eight years, but beware that you may not be able to replace any faulty parts in a Mac when more than five years have passed since Apple last sold it.

Imagine if your house or your car lasted only 5 years. But, the hypocrites in Apple Marketing are the first to tell you about their environmentally friendly packaging for the new Mac Mini. It’s cardboard for heaven’s sake. See for yourself:


Hypocrisy redefined.

Any mention of the fact that your new Mac will be toxic landfill 5 years hence because Engineering was told by Marketing to make sure it’s obsolete by then? And because avoiding that required just a few lines of code? You must be joking.

Mac Mini M4 after one month – Part VI

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

It will do, and is fine with LRc.

In Part III I set forth some technical measurements which indicated that the performance of the 2024 Mac Mini M4 was pretty much on a par with that of the 2010 Mac Pro fitted with dual 3.46gHz 6-core Intel CPUs, 80gb of memory and a speedy Nvidia GTX980 GPU. By contrast the M4 Mini has a single 10 core CPU and just 16gb of very fast memory. This testifies not only to the great performance gains realized by Apple with its in house Apple Silicon M4 CPU with its integrated GPU, but also shows just how awfully good that old behemoth, the Mac Pro tower was almost 15 years ago. Sadly, Apple’s planned obsolescence strategy, which saw to it that the Mac Pro was now six generations of MacOS behind, forced the upgrade. Well, that and the aggressive pricing of the new Mini, and my electricity bills will fall!

I now have a month of heavy daily use with the M4 Mini under my belt, much of that with the Apple Silicon optimized Lightroom Classic (LRc – v14.1.1), an upgrade from the prior Lightroom v6.4), so the following observations are mostly subjective.

Start up is much faster at 4-6 seconds compared with 20 for the older version, if I get a beachball it’s maybe once or twice a week, and with previews enabled image-to-image flipping is instantaneous. There’s the very occasional delay of 3-4 seconds for the image to render in full definition but that was also much the case with the Mac Pro.

More significantly, the latest version of LRc adds significant functionality in terms of localized image adjustments with both the Remove and Masking tools well implemented and easy to use, largely obsoleting the more complex variants in Photoshop. Indeed as I hate paying rent I dropped PS all together and made a one-off purchase of Affinity Photo 2 which does all I need on those rare occasions where LRc cannot do the trick.

A good example of the use of these new to me tools is in this night snap of a retailer’s window in Carmel, CA. The host of images I took in that setting all have a common factor which is that the dynamic range is very high, necessitating exposure for the highlights, to avoid burn out, with a post processing need to bring up the shadows. In the case of these ‘before’ and ‘after’ images not only was the shadows slider used to bring up the shadows across the whole image, I then selectively masked the fountain at the lower left to bring the sparkle in the water to life. The difference is, err…., night and day:


Before.


After.

In learning some of these new features I invested in Scott Kelby’s book. It does not cover the recently added Remove/Generative Fill functions but is an excellent learning resource, greatly superior to any video I have seen.

Returning to the Mac Mini M4, it never gets more than a tad warm to the touch, is small enough to nestle at the back of the keyboard tray and performs equally to the old Mac Pro at a fraction of the cost. While there were many frustrations regarding application incompatibility when switching from Intel to Apple Silicon CPUs these are now behind me, though I still hate paying Adobe $10 monthly in rent for LRc. Otherwise, what’s not to like?

Networking Macs

Macintosh

How to do it.

While the Apple TV 4K is a very capable streaming device, Greedy Timmy in Cupertino has seen to it that you cannot make it stream content from hard drives connected to other Macs in the home. Yes, Greedy Tim wants to sell you more hardware. Imagine!

This is irksome as my home theater has some 40tb of movies stored on hard drives connected to the Mac Mini in that location but the fact that I have an Apple TV 4K connected to the OLED TV in the living room does not mean I can access those movies for display on the TV. Frustrating.

However, there is a cheap solution which takes advantage of the very low used prices on 2014 vintage Mac Minis which are renowned for one thing. They are bog slow. You would not want to have to process your photographs on one of these tortoises, let alone manipulate much larger video files. But for my purpose, the streaming of movies, these machines are ideal and typically sell used on Amazon for $135-200.

I have two of these machines. One is in the home theater upstairs and has all those hard drives connected to it, routing the video and sound signals to the large projection screen using HDMI through an UST projector. It’s controlled using a Bluetooth mouse.

The second 2014 Mac Mini is connected using an HDMI cable to the downstairs OLED TV, and has nothing else connected. It’s also controlled using a Bluetooth mouse. While this second machine is the faster of the two shown above, the slower model is perfectly adequate for these purposes.

The third Mac, my workhorse Mac Mini M4 is the current very speedy device which took the place of the behemoth Mac Pro of 2010 in the home office. In the context of movies it’s used to rip DVDs for storage on those hard drives in the home theater, with the ripped movie conveyed to its destination over wi-fi.

You can see all three computers in the sketch at the introduction to this article.

While networking computers can be a black art (I really would rather not think about doing this with Windows) with Macs it’s relatively easy. The key is to set up the Sharing settings correctly – these are in System Preferences on the older Minis and in System Settings on the current Mac Mini M4.

Again, in my configuration I have three Mac Minis:

  • The Server Mac (2014 vintage) in the home theater where all the hard disk drive boxes are connected
  • The Remote Mac Mini M4 (2024 vintage) in the home office where DVDs are ripped and sent wirelessly to the storage drives in the home theater
  • A second Remote Mac Mini (2014 vintage) connected to a TV in the living room used solely to watch movies on that TV.

There are three steps to allowing files on one Mac (the “Server Mac”) accessible by another (the “Remote Mac”).

Step 1: On the Server Mac you need to make the drives visible on the network:


This is the (Server Mac) Mini with all the attached hard
drive storage in the home theater. You must give
access to those hard drives to other Macs in the
File Sharing panel. See “Shared Folders”.

Step 2a: On the Remote Mac you need to tell that Mac to join the network:


This is the (Remote Mac) Mini attached to the TV set.
It simply needs File Sharing turned on.

Step 2b: On the second Remote Mac which is used to rip DVDs:


This is the second (Remote Mac) Mini M4 in the office
used to rip movies and send them to the hard drives
attached to the Mac mini in the home theater.
Yes, the new interface is an abomination.

Step 3: Next you need to make those drives attached to the Server Mac visible to the Remote Mac(s):

To connect to the movie hard disk drives from a Remote Mac (meaning one not connected to those hard drives), on the Remote Mac open Finder->Go->Connect to Server and choose the remote disk drive(s):


Connecting to the hard drives from
a Remote Mac using Finder.

After choosing the Server Mac and clicking Connect, you will see all the drives connected to the Server Mac (the Mini to which all the hard disk drives are connected), thus:


Shift-click to choose all or
Command-click to chose individual drives.

Once you click OK all those drives will be accessible on your Remote Mac. This setting is non-volatile. Restart any of the Macs involved and the setting is preserved. Nice.

As having the home theater (Server Mac) Mini go down through a power cut risks corruption to the hard drives, that computer and all the hard drive boxes are connected to an APC UPS.

All the Minis and the Apple TV 4K streamers use either RF or Bluetooth for communications with peripherals like remotes, mice and keyboards so they can be hidden out of sight, so long as they are afforded adequate ventilation. In the case of the TV devices they nestle comfortably under the TV screen.


The Mac Mini and Apple TV 4K under the TV screen.

Those old Minis may not be speed demons but for routing video they are excellent and reliability is high. And if you power them through an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) they rarely go down.

The DVDpedia application used to catalog and run all those saved movies was profiled here. While Conor, the developer, has taken a hiatus he has nonetheless updated the application to run on Apple Silicon and you can download it here. I can confirm it runs fine on my Mac Mini M4 though the movie count flags are incorrect. Not a big deal. When first starting DVDpedia on a Remote Mac be sure to hold the Option key down before double clicking on the local (meaning on the remote Mac) DVDpedia application. When DVDpedia starts you will be asked for the location of the DVDpedia database and you should point to the database on the Mini which has all those hard drives connected. It’s under Library-> Application Support->DVDpedia->Database.DVDpd. That way any changes you make to the database either on a Remote Mac or on the Server Mac will be applied in the correct place. You only have to do this once.