I already had a 50 Summicron, technically also a vIV but in the earlier mount with the focus tab and Canadian built. I bought that lens at Calumet Photo in Chicago for something like $300, about 22 years ago when many were unloading used analog equipment. It was cosmetically very rough but I got lots of good use from it. Even with all the wear it would be easy to sell it for lots more than I paid for it.
Why another one? The built in hood and the coding are advantages for current use on the digital body. It's clean, near mint condition, with the box and leather pouch and caps. The price was fair, toward the lower end of the range I've seen for clean examples recently and I've yet to lose anything on a Leica lens so there's that. But really I just wanted a newer and cleaner one and the opportunity presented itself, and there's been some recent unexpected additional income. Although it's the same optical formula as my older one, this one seems very slightly sharper on the M10, I won't speculate about why.
I like to have one lens on an M body for extended intervals, and the plan is for this to be my primary lens for the M10. It won't come off very often. For landscape outings I'll normally include a 28 Elmarit-M aspherical in the bag, small and light and also six bit coded so no chance of forgetting to enter the lens if changing back and forth. The 50 Summilux pre-aspherical will continue to live on the M6 body because I really prefer the way the 'lux renders on film but am not as happy with it on digital.
Recently I started scanning old negatives, with an emphasis on selecting the very best images. Starting semi-randomly with 2007, of very roughly 4,000 negatives about 20 were scanned, and a few off those will drop out. Last night I went back to the beginning, looking through the really early stuff. I expect this will be mostly a winter project, something to do on rainy days and long nights. The system is in place now to facilitate that.
There's really nothing at that level to scan from the very earliest years. As a photojournalist it was a job, not fine art. Later I learned they aren't incompatible, but my early learning came mostly from the prior generation. Most of those guys were ex military photographers, ex photojournalists, guys from the Speed Graphic era of contrasty images and predictable subject matter. I was, literally, taught to put the emphasis on efficiency, to treat subjects as just one more assignment and not think too much beyond the essential technical stuff. Considering I was 15 when I sold my first photo, at first I didn't question that a whole lot. It was later, in my early 20s, that the rebellion came.
The first image that really stands out was taken in the summer of 1998. It was for a model composite, part of a series of shoots. I think the stage mom was in part trying to. set me up with her daughter, but there wasn't much interest on my part. Nice kid, pretty girl, not very interesting intellectually. She was a gymnast and dancer, relatively good muscle tone which meant, in 1978, she was a little ahead of her time. I was interested in that muscle tone, it was something different then and it lit beautifully, but she never made it past local sporting goods work as a model. Anyway there were a lot of technically competent images but with not a lot of spark to them. She wasn't real expressive and I hadn't learned to draw it out yet. The one really nice photo happened half by accident. I guess the location contributed and her pose had a dancer's grace, and she had a soft smile that appears to be natural. I think the framing between small trees on the left and right was an intentional part of the composition, what I didn't see til later was that the shrubs in the background, 20 feet behind her, when foreshortened with a short telephoto completed a darker circle. The model was centered in the lighter opening, and her extended fingertips just touched the darker edge of the outer circle which framed the border. At least I recognized right away on the negative that we had something special, and I made a bunch of prints of that one including some archival and selenium toned portfolio prints. The image also was one of three used on the composite.
So for those first years... from early 1971 through early 1981... just that one image stands out from all the rest, from probably a couple hundred thousand negatives run through multiple cameras on paid assignments plus a much smaller amount of personal work. That all changed in 1981.
What was new was that suddenly it wasn't just a job. When I took my first photos of the Chicago punk scene in December 1980, there was a new excitement, a new passion that hadn't been there before. It wasn't til early March that I did more photos, including my first band photos (Bauhaus and Da were on that couple of rolls from early March. A few photos from that show have been published and exhibited several times, and I selected two of them as standouts. Then in April, portraits of new friends in the alternative music scene. Three of them were special, two who became close friends and one I barely knew, and who died unexpectedly just months later.
I've gotten only a little past that so far, there are a couple of July images selected to scan soon, and there will be several more in the balance of 1981 and 1982. Then it's going to skip some years, because after spring 1983 I burned out on the extreme intensity of the post-punk scene and mostly put the camera aside until the late 1990s. After that I was on a different path but one first inspired by those 1981-82 images, one that was much easier because of things first learned then. Part of the rejection of the materialistic values of the older generation of photographers (not all of them, because of course some of the earlier street and art photographers later became influences, but I hadn't found them yet) was very conscious and intentional... listen to the lyrics of the Joe Jackson song "Look Sharp" sometime, it resonated with some of us... although it went even deeper than I understood at the time.
My first published photo ran on February 18, 1971 in the high school newspaper. Over the next year I'd stepped up to handle PR photography for the school, so my work was in pretty much every weekly paper in the Chicago north suburbs every week. I'd had images run in the big three already: The Tribune, Sun-Times, and Daily News. It was a job, and often a busy one. Most Monday mornings I'd drop 45 to 90 prints on my editors desk, nine copies of the selected image for each assignment.
I'd gotten to know most of the cheerleaders and pom-pon girls fairly well by this time, I'd learned that if I shot part of a roll of them at halftime when I had not much else going on, they'd buy prints of themselves. Monday I'd bring proof sheets to the cafeteria and quickly be mobbed by attractive young ladies.
In late spring 1972 this inevitably jumped up a level. I don't remember exactly how if happened, except that they approached me and asked to do photos. The first one was Robin, on May 18th. Pretty blond, not very expressive, a year older than me. I hadn't learned to handle backgrounds yet in this kind of work. Lots of distractions back there. In spite of that she liked the images. She had plans I didn't know about yet, after graduation a month or so later she got hired as a Playboy bunny in Lake Geneva.
The following week, on May 22nd, I did a set of photos with Sandi and Randi, both cheerleaders. That's Sandi in the image above. Those branches in the background could have been thrown more out of focus, but the backlighting worked better than the previous set.
Sandi was easily the most popular girl in school that year. Homecoming queen, cheerleader, from a well known Park Ridge family, everyone knew her. She wanted photos, so after school we piled in her yellow 1967 Chevelle and drove to a park off Dee Road, people in other cars honking and waving all the way across town. We found relative calm in the park, and I got a handful of OK images on the one roll shot that day.
I learned a few things that day. One was to pay more attention to the background, although I'd probably learned that in the aftermath of the shoot the prior week. Second was that the most popular girl in school was actually very nice and very easy to get along with, once one got through the hundreds of others vying for her attention. Third was that being a sort of competent photographer was one very good way to get her attention. She was a year ahead of me, and moved in different circles. If I hadn't taken those photos of her at games, if she hadn't bought some of them, I might never have met her.
June 1 was the first of three sets of photos with Rosanne, a pom-pon girl a year younger than me. This was a more organized sequence. The first few models had been for fun, this time I was getting paid by stage-mom. The first couple of shoots were to practice and get better acquainted. One was in a local park, the second was a day trip to Indiana Dunes. The third shoot was for real, composite photos to take to the Michigan Avenue agencies. We used her large white living room and I bounced a flash off the ceiling for a high-key look. My luck held, they were excellent images (by this time, a year and a half into high-volume pro photography, I'd had plenty of practice and was technically not bad on a good day, but still a little inconsistent at times. I hadn't made and learned from every possible mistake yet). A few large prints, stage-mom had the comps printed, and they headed for Michigan Avenue. They were hoping for some occasional work. Rosanne was signed exclusively by the first agency they walked into, and I saw her in Marshall Field's print ads for the next several years.
Ironically, the successes came from this first batch of models. I had plenty of models to work with for years after, and made a fair amount of money in the process, and it was way more fun than photographing high school football or basketball games. But few of these ever went anywhere with it, and none scored big the way Rosanne had until much later.
These thoughts came from scanning some old negatives yesterday and today, and on a whim after the main project was done I went back to the box of really old negatives that recently resurfaced. I have pretty much all of my negatives from December 1971 to present, and they're all organized and labeled... I know all the dates above because they're written on the envelopes/sheet protectors. Only the ones from the first less than a year of photojournalism work are missing. One thing about film, it's fairly easy to find things. I went through about 4,000 negatives in four binders from 2007 for what started this current effort, to find about 20 images and it took only a few hours to locate and scan. Not that simple with digital, and some of the earliest digital work is backed up on CD's that I can no longer read without going out and buying a CD reader. How long do CD's hold data, anyway? I guess one of these days we'll find out. The later backup drives are better, only one has failed so far to remind why redundant back-up is a really good idea.
Everything seems to work, so done with the IIIb for a while. Next step is to test some fairly economical film for general use in more modern gear, everything needed arrived today.
This camera has had a lot of frames through it. There's some wear, which shows as silver on the zinc top plate. It has a little of the "bubbling" characteristic of the zinc top plate, and perhaps encouraged by the mild, humid winter rainy season conditions here on the coast and occasional fine salt spray from all those shoots at the dunes. It's not that noticeable and if anything is a good reminder that this is a camera to use, not to look pretty on a shelf.
One of my few dislikes about the M4-2/M4-P/M6 series of bodies is the prominent white "Leica" on the front, I prefer to be a bit less obvious than that. So when the white began to scuff and flake off some years back, I used a toothpick to get the rest of it out of there. It's now much less obvious than the strongly lit photo would suggest, it's quite hard to see except up very close.
Using this body more often in recent weeks has reminded me that if necessary I could get by with just this one body and lens. The 50mm is my favorite on an M body and in the past I've gone possibly as long as two years at a time with this same lens mounted.
Anyway, I have four rolls of HP5+ ready to process, three of them from this camera and one a test in the IIIb. There's a bottle of HC-110 (what I prefer to use with HP5) on a FedEx truck on the way, supposedly to be delivered today, and also a few more rolls of film in that box.
First some background: This isn't my first screw mount Leica. The first Leica I ever owned was a IIIf black dial acquired at a garage sale in about 1978 or 79. It was externally in mint condition, but had a few tiny pinholes in the shutter from being left on a closet shelf while wound since, probably, 1950-something. I was still a working photojournalist at the time and the IIIf wasn't a realistic option for that work, so it was a curiosity that I played with in the studio. Not long ago I chanced on a proof sheet of a roll shot through that camera, a studio series of Marlene who I did model comps for, and apparently shot the one additional roll for fun. Except for the few tiny pinholes, they're respectable images. There were a few other test rolls through that camera, but not long after someone offered four times what I'd paid for it. So I took the offer and put the money back into lenses for my pro rig which I could in turn use to earn more money. A logical choice at the time, although I did later wish I'd gotten that shutter fixed and had a little more time with that first Leica.
As a result of that earlier experience, it took only minutes to get the hang of the IIIb.
The IIIb is in pretty good condition for an 85-year old camera. The top plate is excellent, just a few very minor scuffs, cleaner than most of my newer bodies. The baseplate has some larger scuffs, obvious but not bad compared to some older cameras. The leatherette appears to have been replaced, and there's a small tear in the front which may be from a botched install because it's otherwise pretty clean. The camera has been apart, there are minor marks on the screws, and the shutter looks suspiciously clean and new. As far as I can tell everything works.
The 5cm f/3.5 collapsible Elmar is a little newer, post-war. Except for minor cleaning marks it's in good shape.
The camera is tiny, considerably smaller than an M-body. With the lens collapsed it easily slips into a jacket pocket and that's a tempting attraction. Add a wrist strap and it would be really easy to carry this anywhere.
For me the main limitation is the tiny rangefinder and viewfinder, after decades of M use they feel really small. The rangefinder seems to be accurate enough if one has time to focus carefully; the rangefinder image is at 1.5x so it's pretty easy to use when not rushed. The IIIb was the first model to move the viewfinder window right next to the rangefinder, so it's then pretty quick to shift the eye over just a bit, frame, and shoot. Except that for careful composition, that viewfinder is really tiny. It's also set up only for a 50mm lens, not an issue for me since that's my usual preferred focal length.
Most everything else is slow and deliberate. Trimming the longer film leader, loading carefully, winding and rewinding with knurled knobs, lifting the shutter speed dial to change settings, metering with a handheld meter (or sunny f/16 rule, on a bright day; I'm badly out of practice but long ago could estimate exposures in most conditions pretty accurately). Slow and deliberate is OK though, when the camera is for pure creative enjoyment.
My original intent was to run a couple of rolls of film through this and then put it on the shelf with only very rare use. It's kind of fun to play with so far though. It might come out to play a bit more often than originally planned, we'll see.
