The Online Photographer

Joe Kashi's Wedding Present from his Wife (a Nagaoka)

Words and pictures by Joe Kashi

Joe Kashi's wedding present from his wife

Joe Kashi: Here's the back story about my Nagaoka 4x5. It was my first large format camera, a 1976 wedding present. I still own and use it.

While at MIT in the early 1970s, I had some photography coursework with Minor White and first became acquainted with large format photography in the process. But, I could only afford a screw-mount Pentax Spotmatic and a few lenses, which I also retain.

After MIT, I moved to DC in 1973 to attend law school. While in DC, I married a woman who was an accomplished artist, a painter in oils. (By the bye, she studied at the Corcoran through high school.) We often backpacked in West Virginia's Spruce Knob/Dolly Sods wilderness, and getting a super-light and compact large format camera seemed a natural.

Just before we married in 1976, we saw an ad for a new Nagaoka, then being imported by Graphic Imports of Honolulu. We surmised that any craftsman still building wooden cameras in 1976 was elderly and likely not long for this world—that was 44 years ago! So, we promptly ordered one as my wedding present from her. My camera is engraved as serial number 517. I recall that it cost about $600 new, a non-trivial sum for a law student in 1976. [Inflation Calculator: $2,741 today —Ed.]

The only lens that I could afford back then was an older 120mm Goerz Dagor, which turned out to be a sharp, handy lens that worked well with 4x5 color film, even though it was not coated.

Some of my nicest early images were made with that 120mm Dagor, so of course I sold the lens, the only time I've ever sold any photography gear. I regret doing so to this day and could never find another Dagor in that focal length. Currently, the camera sports a 145mm Zeiss Double Protar VIIa triple convertible lens.

Fast forward to 2020, when I have been living in semi-rural Alaska for decades. Now, my preferred non-digital format is 5x7 B&W. When I saw the article about Mr. Nagaoka not only alive but still at work, I hazarded an inquiry about whether he might be willing to construct a 5x7 field camera comparable to my 4x5. Apparently, he's ill at the moment but I'm willing to wait.

If Mr. Nagaoka is able and willing to make a 5x7 comparable to his compact 4x5, I promise to put it to good use. I've looked for a 5x7 Nagaoka on eBay for years without success although some were reputedly made in years past.

Although I have other 5x7 cameras now, I have zero doubt that a new Nagaoka 5x7 would be the epitome of a super-light-weight but practical 5x7 field camera. (Outdoor photographers can be a bit weird about an extra pound or two. It's probably no surprise that my digital preference is Micro 4/3.)

I've weighed the Nagaoka against other ultra-light-weight 4x5 cameras like my Toho FC-45X and Calumet-Gowland. The Nagaoka is noticeably lighter than even these, and easier to use.

By the way, it folds intuitively and easily. I've never had a problem with the bellows.

Out of curiosity Friday evening, I looked for other Nagaoka cameras on eBay and found several. One 4x5 claimed a serial number identical to mine, 517. After a double-take, I double-checked. Mine's definitely #517.

That eBay camera is advertised as "mint" but looks as though it's been used to pound large nails. It seems such a shame to do that to a camera that was jewel-like when left Mr. Nagaoka's small shop!

Joe Kashi

UPDATE Monday Sept. 21 from Joe Kashi: "Hi, all: A few replies consolidated as one comment:

1. Between 2006 and 2018, I went fully digital, mostly Micro 4/3 but also with a full-frame kit that's heavier than the 4x5 outfit. I began adding large format film back into the operational mix two years ago because I felt that I was becoming stale using a digital-only approach. The slower, more thought-out large format film approach is, for me, a good complement to digital-only. I occasionally take my Olympus Pen-F along to meter and use its B&W mode to help frame and visualize large format images faster. Melding classic and modern tools makes sense.
2. Unfortunately, I don't have a large format photo gallery online. While I've had a fair number of solo exhibits and juried show acceptances, there's no online gallery. I'm still a firm member of the mounted large print school.
3. The closest optics that I've found to that classic 120mm Dagor are a late-model Schneider 120mm Angulon, itself a more recent 'reverse Dagor' design, and a multicoated 125mm ƒ/5.6 Fujinon NWS. They’re both sharper, almost as light, and less expensive used than classic Dagor lenses. Redesigned late model US-made and Swiss-made Dagors using modern optical glass and still-repairable shutters are superlative but very expensive on the used market. Typical of most classic field cameras, the Nagaoka handles lenses from 75mm (21mm-e on full-frame) to 300mm (85mm-e) without fuss or hassle. Large format is largely extreme-wide-angle through short-telephoto photography."

Original contents copyright 2020 by Joe Kashi. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Fred Haynes: "This is a pretty camera! Jewel-like is right. The metal fittings are shiny and new looking. Are these fittings and controls off the shelf? Or does Mr. Nagaoka custom manufacture those as well? As beautiful as it is, it’s not something I’d be interested in unless I was younger, lived in a more picturesque part of the country, and had a good working darkroom, and a few bucks in my pocket. The last is the most important! Oh, I like the pictures you took that support the writing. Very nice!"

William Schneider: "In 1984, Petersen's Photographic magazine published a 'buyer's guide' comparing features and cost of various studio 4x5 cameras and folding field cameras. In a fit of nostalgia from reading recent posts, I scanned the summary chart and placed it online. This list, while chock full of view camera choices, omits some field cameras like Tachihara and Ikeda. It was indeed the golden age for view camera photography."

Philip Ramsden: "My introduction to 4x5 was while working for Leica in the 1980s. We had the Linhof agency. So my wife found a Linhof 'press type' camera, no movements and a 127mm lens. It served me well until I started teaching Scientific Photography at one of our colleges. We taught students to use movements on our 4x5 studio cameras. My next move was to an Ebony because Linhofs are heavy. Ha ha! Ebony is one of the heaviest timbers around and my camera is probably as heavy as the Linhof. But the results are superb. I only shoot B&W and process at home. If the shots are good enough I have a 4x5 enlarger so can make an 8x10. Bliss. I still shoot 35mm B&W and digital with Fuji cameras but that is for colour. Thanks for all the photos of the Nagaoka."

Luke: "I took my 4x5 Crown Graphic to the baseball stadium back when the Braves were big losers and the place was only one-third full. I set it up across the field from the spectators to shoot back at the action. A security guy soon showed up, saying 'No video!' After he got a closer look, he said: 'Oh! That's the kind of camera they used to take your picture sitting on a pony when you were a kid!' My antique 'pony' camera captured a view of about half the stadium. With a loupe on the original chrome, I can easily see my wife and her dad in the crowd, and see his wristwatch."

The 10th Camera: Why No Pentax?

The "10th camera," the one not on my Top Ten Favorite Cameras list from the other day, is not an iPhone. I do appreciate my iPhone camera and take pictures with it all the time, but it's not quite there from a technical standpoint. It's perfectly adequate for taking pictures to be viewed on...itself. And for emailing and texting. (And for putting on the blog, maximum width 800 pixels.) But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be as happy with it if I were making even small prints. Although I should try that. I also don't own the latest thing in iPhones; mine is a 7+, released almost exactly four years ago. There's just nothing wrong with it so I haven't replaced it yet.

Oddly, there was, as several people pointed out, no Pentax on my list. I love Pentax, and I've owned and used many over the years. And my experience over a long period of time is that Pentaxians are just the nicest people. From Ned Bunnell, former President of Pentax USA, who reads TOP, to all the people I knew on the PDML, the Pentax Discuss Mailing List, they're typically courteous, friendly, and polite people. IMHO Pentaxians are the brand fans least likely to pick fights, flame, or troll.

My experience with Pentaxes, though, is that none of them were ever quite "just right"...for me. The screwmount Spotmatic is a lovely experience, and few of them are bad, but when it got down to it there's not one specific model that had everything I'd want. I've tried a great many of the K-mount cameras, from the original KX/K2/KM trio all the way to the autofocus MZ-S. The famous MX is lovely, but I prefer aperture-priority autoexposure...which the ME Super has, but the ME Super is not as solid or well-built as the MX. The LX is one of the best cameras of its era, very hand-friendly, and a great size and weight—I own one. But the shutter is like a sharp shot of a stick on a snare drum (I'm exaggerating—it's loud, is all). The loud shutter is that camera's Achilles' heel. I'm sure you remember, though, that Achilles' heel is what led to Achilles' death!

That's sort of the way my experience has been with Pentax...there's always something that holds each one back from being quite all the way right. So what was it with the digital cameras? It was the lack of the lens I needed. For years, all Pentax's digital cameras were APS-C, and yet they didn't ever have an APS-C lens with a 35mm- or 40mm-equivalent angle of view. I stuck it out for a long time but eventually got tired of waiting. (Fuji gives me three to choose from.)

Not only might your "mileage" vary, but your actual experience might vary too—I haven't used or owned every single Pentax, especially many of the more recent digital ones. The full-frame DSLR gets high marks from users.

But all that is why no Pentax appears on my personal favorites list. All of the Pentaxes I've ever used have stayed in use for a few months to a year or two, and I've enjoyed most of them, but none has ever become a real go-to or a top fave.

You know how people always say "that's just me"? That's just me.

The 10th camera
The one I almost picked to be the 10th is the Leica R4. Not a perfect camera by any stretch, and not a "pure" Leica—it was part of the long Leica-Minolta collaboration in SLRs. But my short ownership of that camera, using it with the 35mm and 90mm Summicron-R's I borrowed from Mike Hintlian—was the brief peak of my chosen film technique and "look." The pictures using Tri-X and a yellow filter on the lens and D-76 were how I wanted my photographs to look. Despite using it for only a brief time, I have a whole stack of workprints I made with that gear, and they've been a pleasure for me to look at from that day to this. I'd never nominate the R4 as a top camera of its era or as an eBay treasure, but it's one I remember with fondness.

So the 10th camera has to be the Minolta CLE, a small rangefinder with a very nice little 40mm lens. I don't know how I forgot it the other day. Maybe it was because I'm not really a rangefinder guy—despite the fact that this is the third one on my list of ten—but the CLE and its 40mm ƒ/2 M-Rokkor were so nice. Stephen Gandy has a nice page about it (he's a rangefinder guy). I wish I owned one, but you can't have everything.

Photo by Lordcolus, CC by 2.0

Minolta CLE and 40mm M-Rokkor

Of course I've always gotten comments on gear from other photographers, but that M-Rokkor was the only lens I've ever owned that routinely got compliments from non-photographers. Just reg'lar ever-day ol'-fashioned 'Murricuns. Of all the great lenses I've owned. It happened a number of times.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve Justad: "I had a Leica CL with the 40mm ƒ/2. It now resides in the Boulder, MT, landfill. It was such a POS I could not forgive myself if I sold it to anyone. It was totally unreliable. Focus mainly. It seems the weight of a flash unit, a Visitor 283, would get the prisms(?) out of alignment and then away goes focusing. Maybe someone fixed the problem for the CLE, but I doubt it. I had similar problems with Leicaflex SLs. Unreliable build."

Nicholas Hartmann: "I am looking at a Minolta CLE (in the glass-fronted tchochke cabinet in my office) as I write this. It belonged to my father, who had two of them that he used as walking-around cameras, and one later became mine on indefinite loan. It was my gateway drug to rangefinder cameras: small, light, quick to use, beautifully made, and less intimidatingly Germanic than an actual Leica. The Rokkor 40mm lens was perfectly matched to that camera, producing images that were both sharp and round, if you know what I mean. The CLE stopped working a number of years ago but the lens is still making pictures: fitted with an inexpensive adapter to a Micro 4/3 Olympus body, it is now a tiny but solid 80mm ƒ/2 short tele that works just as well on a digital sensor as it did on film."

Dave Jenkins: "Mike, you have been on a roll with a series of great posts since your 'burn-out' episode. Maybe you should burn out more often. On topic: I have never owned a CLE, but I've had two CLs at different times and consider them one of the most inconvenient cameras I've ever used. Heresy, I know. The 40mm is great, though."

Rob de Loe: "My first proper SLR was Pentax. I owned several, culminating with a nice little Super Program. I still have a Pentax ME sitting in a box somewhere. I like Pentax—always have. To me, Pentax is the Honda Civic of cameras: reliable, not fancy, high quality, gets the job done. I still use Pentax lenses on my Fuji GFX 50R camera, but this time it's Pentax-A 645 lenses. They're excellent quality, and, in true Pentax tradition, no fuss, no muss. They also have a large enough image circle for shifting.

"I don't think I'm a proper Pentaxian because I'm not using Pentax bodies. (Not sure if that's a rule!) But you're right about Pentaxians. The PentaxForums site is a fantastic resource with loads of friendly, helpful people."

Last Man Standing

I mentioned (and pictured) a Wista field view camera yesterday. You might be interested to know that Keiichiro Nagaoka, builder of a similar but competing 4x5, is the last craftsman still building wooden cameras by hand in Japan. He was 82 years old as of the end of 2019 and has to make his own metal parts now (no more subcontractors willing to do it), but he's still building new 4x5's and 8x10's, just as he has since he started way back in 1962.

Here's the link to a September 2020 article about him originally published in Saray magazine: https://serai.jp/hobby/1002833.

Most people probably already know how to do the following, but those who don't will appreciate this: To auto-translate a whole web page, open Google Translate. In the right-hand pane, choose the language you wish to translate into. Enter the URL (web address) in the left-hand pane, then hit the "go" button in the right-hand pane (the rounded square with the arrow in it to the right of the URL). The auto-translation will open in a new window.

Keiichiro Nagaoka, from the Saray magazine article

Compliments of the participants in a thread at the LF forum (largeformatphotography.info) started by mhayashi, here's a look at what Nagaoka-san's workshop in Ueno, Tokyo, looks like from the street; here's a PDF of a Nagaoka brochure, and here's a video about him in Japanese. These give us a portrait of a happy craftsman who has spent his life doing what he likes.

One of the participants in that thread is Joe Kashi, who is also a TOP reader. Maybe Joe, if he is reading this, could send me a portrait of his Nagaoka, and tell us the story of it?

My old friend Oren, curator and custodian of the Stately Oren Manor View Camera Museum and Graveyard*, always preferred Nagaokas because they are lighter than competing 4x5 field cameras.

Heavy, man
Apropos of weight, the Wista-of-sainted-memory came in at least three woods—cherry, Japanese rosewood, and ebony. The cherry one is the lightest; and the rarest kind, the ebony, is the heaviest by a good margin. My own preference far and away is the rosewood one.

You will virtually never see a Wista with pristine bellows

Should you be interested in a Wista, the rarest of the rare happens to be up for auction right this moment: one on which the bellows are not crinkled from someone forcing it to close who doesn't know how to close it! Virtually all Wistas for sale have such crinkles in the bellows. It's cosmetic damage only—crinkled ones still function—but if you buy this pristine one, for heaven's sake learn to close the camera properly—do not force it—it's counter-intuitive but not hard to learn if you just work it out—and keep these "survivor" bellows in good shape!

Chances of that happening: close to zero, unless someone reading this really does buy that. It's rare that I can predict the future, but here's what's going to happen to that camera: the buyer will have trouble folding his new camera and ham-handedly try to force it to close, and those perfect bellows will become crinkled, just like all the rest. For such is life.

TOP is off tomorrow. See you on Sunday! I am still not caught up on the comments from last Sunday, but I will work on them till I am. Hope you have a nice weekend.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren and the folks on the LF board)

*That is, he, shall we say, owns, um, more old wooden view cameras than might be strictly required for purposes.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Neil Partridge: "I'm never likely to use, own or even hold a bellows camera, but I'm intrigued: what's the right way to close one? Is it just case of doing it slowly? Is there a sequence to follow, perhaps with things being loosened off? Sorry I don't even know how one works!"

Mike replies: They all close differently. Or rather, there are different ways to close different cameras, and you just have to learn how yours works. It's like anything else. Buy a new car, you have to groove new habits for operating the controls thoughtlessly. The Wista folds in a way that's a bit counter-intuitive, and you need to learn how to do it and then develop a routine to do it properly. It's not rocket science—you could figure it out in five minutes with no instruction. But when you try the way that seems like it's obvious and it doesn't want to work, the thing to do is not to simply apply more pressure to force it. When I sold mine, there were no crinkles in the bellows.

Matt: "After working with a folding 4x5 for a few years, I scraped together enough cash to buy an ebony 45s...a non-folding work of art that also happens to be a wonderful camera to work with. It is quick to set up, a joy to use, and very easy to lock down solid. Being able to set it up without the extra steps of a folding camera has meant fewer photos missed. It has its downsides...more limited movements than some cameras, and shorter bellows than others, but it is one of the few cameras I’ve owned that makes me happy just pulling it out of the bag. I hope the same will be true for whoever buys that Wista!"

Lee: "The cherry Wista 45 DX I bought in 1982 has bellows that are in great shape, and not crinkled. I used it to shoot a portfolio to get freelance studio assisting jobs, and I shot with it around Europe for a year.

"A French electrician and photo hobbyist got curious about the camera in Fiesole when I was shooting Etruscan ruins. We gave him a ride back to his hotel in Florence, and he hosted my wife and I in his Paris apartment a month or two later. He gave us a ride around Paris in his 2CV the evening we arrived, pointing out the various places around town where sex workers were picked up by their clientele. He was working on his Ph.D. in psychology, and that was his area of study. You never know where an interesting camera will take you."

Kodachromeguy: "Mike, even most metal folders (Wista, Toyo Field, Rittreck) have wrinkled bellows. The Rittrecks seem especially prone. Maybe folding a field camera does take a rocket scientist."

Malcolm Myers: "I have a Nagaoka 4x5. Sadly, it doesn't get the use it should. One day I'll get back to it."

Mike replies: As I said, mostly I cannot predict the future, but....  :-(

Michael J. Perini: "Lovely story about Mr. Nagaoka, I love it. For me, the quintessential wooden view camera has always been the Deardorff. It does everything you need and no more. Wista and Nagaoka made wonderful cameras but the best out of Japan were those from Ebony, especially their truly innovative wide-angle 4x5's which could be had with stainless steel or titanium hardware."

Fred Tuman: "A Nagaoka saved my commercial career. We were starting a very high-end residential wall coverings shoot in Coconut Grove, Florida. The prep time alone for this project cost thousands and it was all on my head. My usual large format kit consisted of six large cases with two Linhof 4x5's, 8000 watt seconds of lighting, tripods, light stands, etc.; weighing in at about 150 lbs. All of this goes on the airplane with my assistant and I. As a backup I also take with me, as a carry-on in a backpack, the Nagaoka and three small lenses, plus six film holders. My assistant carries a light tripod, three small light stands, and three Vivitar 283 flashes with built-in slaves.

"As you are about to guess...all the checked-in luggage goes to a destination unknown. The client (with his wife and two kids) are anxiously waiting with three stylists to get this production going. The Nagaoka performed brilliantly. For three days we shot all the vignettes with this modest combo. Thankfully, after the third day,the children were getting restless, and the client took them to Disneyland and had the confidence enough to leave me be. The rest of my equipment miraculously showed up and we could get our business done."

Mike replies: Fred's story is another example of the pro's dictum: always have a backup!

Open Mike: My Top 10 Favorite Cameras of All Time*

["Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, which is sometimes off-topic but not today.]

-

In no particular order, but roughly chronologically:

Zeiss Ikon Contaflex B. This belonged to my father, who let me use it when I was a kid. It was an SLR with a fixed 50mm ƒ/2.8 Tessar lens, and I believe a leaf shutter. I loved it, especially the shutter sound. I had a job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand when I was 14, and left it on the electrical junction box outside when I was unlocking the store one morning to open. I took my bike inside but not the camera. When I finally remembered and went looking for it, it had vanished. I was interested to learn that the cop who took the report was semi-illiterate—he had a lot of trouble writing his brief description of the theft, and I'm sure he didn't appreciate me helping.

Contax 139Q—A budget model, the 139 Quartz was still elegant and even had some cutting-edge tech. Early Contax (brand, not model) cameras had been a clean-sheet collaboration between Germany and Japan in the mid-1970s. Zeiss, which had been chased out of the camera business, made the lenses, and Yashica, a Japanese maker of popular consumer cameras, made the bodies, which featured industrial design by Professor Ferdinand Alexander ("Butzi") Porsche, grandson of the founder of Porsche and designer of the fabled Porsche 911. This was the camera I went through art school with, so of course I used it constantly. I had to change brands when I joined a professional studio after graduation; everyone else used Nikons, and the equipment was effectively pooled. If I had continued to use Contax I wouldn't have been able to borrow equipment from my partners, or lend mine to them.

The Wista 45DXII, designed by Sadamu Wasutake

Wista 45DXII of sainted memory—it was rosewood, and gorgeous. Wista cheapened these considerably through time; recent ones are nowhere near as nice as the one I bought by mail order from an outfit called "Fields and Views" in Old Chatham, New York, in the 1980s. Mine had real leather bellows that had a heavenly aroma. I was never much of a view camera photographer, but I still miss that camera. A significant use of it, for me, was as a teaching aid. It also got me out of being mugged once—I was being threatened by three "inner city youths," and in an effort to get them on my side I let them look through the camera. As soon as the first one saw the miraculous image on the groundglass, he transformed into an excited kid. His two friends started clamoring to see too. I explained to them how everything worked, and the four of us parted friends. Sadly, I had just used my last sheet of the film for the day, so I missed the chance to make a portrait of the three of them, a big regret.

Mamiya 6—One of my earliest writing assignments was reviewing medium-format cameras for the old Darkroom Photography magazine, and it opened up a treasure-chest of toys I would previously have had no access to. I was pleased and amazed when Mamiya sent li'l ol' me their then-new Mamiya 6 with its clever collapsible lensmount, including all the lenses and accessories. It was allegedly the pet project of the then-President of Mamiya, who was a Leica fan. I was an impoverished ex-student living in a shabby Georgetown, D.C. walk-up, and the value of the outfit exceeded my net worth at the time I got to use it. I bonded with it, and even did some good work with it in the short time I had it, and for a long time afterward I wished I could have continued to use it forever. But it was well beyond my pay grade for a long time. I did own one much later, but the moment had passed.

Canon EOS RT—Fascinating story behind this camera, which I'm sure I've written about. I was an insider with Canon for a time, having written a long article called "The EOS Revolution" at the time of the changeover to the EOS lensmount. For the article I got to meet some bigwigs in Canon USA and was loaned all (all) the new equipment. Canon reprinted the article and distributed it for several years (despite my poverty, I refused the very generous payment they offered because I felt it would compromise my editorial integrity). I feel a little guilty here for not naming the Nikon N8008 which I used for far longer, but I was really more enamored of the slick, elegant RT with its pellicle mirror, a wondrous technology that camera makers love and camera buyers do not. I shot one of the only weddings of my career with that camera, and the EF 35mm ƒ/2 lens taught me about bokeh.

Leica M6—I bought this when I quit professional photography around 1992, with 35mm and 50mm Summicrons. It wasn't the first Leica I had used but it was the first one I bought new. It was a wonderful experience—the pictures really did have that special Leica look, the super-solid, tank-like body was a special pleasure to handle, and I was fully susceptible to the lore and legend of the marque, which imbued my appreciation with a luster other cameras couldn't provide. I was very proud of it. Owning it imparted a seriousness to my sense of personal mission and also inspired me to work harder. Alas, a year after my son was born in '93, money had gotten tight again—this was right before I got hired as the Editor of what became Photo Techniques magazine—and I decided I couldn't keep that much cash wrapped up in one possession, especially when I had to drape it on my body and risk losing it by one means or another (cf. several of the stories mentioned above). And away it went.

Olympus OM-4Ti and Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2

Olympus OM-4T—I've realized that in the past I tended to obsess about cameras and lenses as a distraction and diversion from bigger problems in my life. So in the troubled years of early sobriety (today is my 30th anniversary sober, by the way) after my son was born in dramatic circumstances, I obsessed about Olympii like I have no other marque before or since. I learned everything there was to know about Yoshihisa Maitani and the development of the OM system, virtually memorized The OM Lens Handbook, and resolved to "settle down" my camera-nomad tendencies by sticking with my next camera (the Leica's replacement) for a minimum of three years. That camera was an OM-4T, and I ended up keeping it for five years. I had a darkroom in my kitchen, which is probably not ideal from a food-safety standpoint. If I had to pick one camera as the most favorite of all the ones in this list, the OM-4T would be it. (Although, curiously, the OM-2N had everything I needed.)

Sony F-707—My favorite of all my early digital cameras, although I loved the 6-MP Konica-Minolta 7D too. The F-707 had something that camera makers just don't even pursue any more—namely, it was great fun. The camera was early enough that it had a lot of problems, most notably that its noise effectively maxed it out at ISO 400 and reds were oversaturated, but it had a lovely Zeiss zoom, its swivel-body design was very useful, and it even had an infrared mode that allowed you to literally shoot in the dark. Using it was a blast. I've been sorry ever since that Sony abandoned the form-factor, which was really very nice. A modern F-707/F-717 with a square sensor in the 1" size range would be a very successful camera, I'm convinced.

Fuji X-T1—when I got it in 2014, it was Fuji's flagship. And it was my first Fuji. I bought it out of embarrassment! I had requested a review sample from my friendly contact Issac Buchinger at B&H, and when he asked for it back at the end of a month, I had not even used it. So he kindly let me keep it for another 30 days...at the end of which time I still hadn't touched it. Finally, three or four months in, with Isaac pleading with me to return his employer's property, I bit the bullet and bought the thing just to save face. So in the early days I felt like I had kind of backed into ownership. As with my current car, though, it's one of the only possessions of its type I've liked better as more times goes by...usually you like things less as time goes on because the "new" and the "special" wear off. But the X-T1 is extremely comfortable for me. I use it with the largest hand grip, and every feature seems just right to me now, from the easy-to-use AE comp dial to the flip-up viewing screen. And 16 megapixels is fine. From time to time I even consider buying a second one.

So that's the list. You might notice that there are only nine cameras on this top ten list...that's because I'm sure I'm forgetting something. It's a particular mental glitch that I've noticed over the years about the way my brain works—if I need to remember a set of things—pretty much any set of things—I'll blank on one of them. I learned, for example, never to go around a class naming each student, because, inevitably, one name, which I otherwise knew perfectly well, would vanish from my consciousness just at the wrong moment. And I almost always return from the grocery story with one item I meant to get missing. So I'm pretty sure that as I think about this list over the next few days, I'm going to have a faceplant "duh!" moment, and one more fondly remembered favorite camera is going to pop into my mind.

If and when that happens, I'll tell you about it, of course.

Mike

*Every writer has pet grammatical and usage peeves, and "...of all time" is one of mine. Things like "Top WWE Hall of Famers of All Time" sound ludicrous to me, in this example because the WWE Hall of Fame has only been around for 27 years (André the Giant, who played Fezzik in The Princess Bride, was the inaugural inductee and the only one I know of). I myself sprang into existence in 1957, which kind of renders moot the numberless millennia and geological eras before that year for purposes of the current listing. Not to mention that cameras themselves are somewhat limited in the reach of time as well. But oh well—people know what you mean by "of all time," so I guess I'll relax and shut up.

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[Ed. note: Rob's comment below is longer than I would usually "Feature," but I liked hearing about his experiences as a golf photographer. Hopefully you will too.]

Rob Griffin: "I know that you have written about the Canon RT a few times here at TOP. The RT made my working life much more enjoyable. Working in the golf industry, I used to shoot professional tournament golf action quite often. When I first started shooting sports, I was a Nikon guy for sure—a majority of sports shooters were. When shooting tournament golf, one major problem with SLR film cameras is noise. The mirror flopping around and the shutter going off make a lot of noise. In the dead quite that tour players demand while playing their shots, a SLR with a motor drive chugging along at five or six frames a second sounds pretty much like a hay bailer coming down the fairway.

"The rule when taking photos of golfers during a tournament was that you don’t dare press the shutter button until the golf club has made contact with the golf ball. Photographers would try to time the release of the shutter so that the ball would be in the frame just after leaving the clubface. Hit that shutter button just a fraction too soon and you could easily be yelled at by a very angry golfer and his caddy, not to mention that the spectators would let you know what a miscreant you were. Sometimes, even though you had been sure not to fire before the ball was well on its way, the golfer, after hitting a less than perfect shot, would look and point in your direction to let everyone know that it was that camera guy and his noisy camera that caused the errant shot. That was a problem a golf photographer just had to live with.

"The first time I was shown an EOS RT at a camera store, I was amazed. It seemed almost silent, even at five frames a second, compared to any other SLR available at the time. The lack of noise sold me. I bought it on the spot. It became 'my' camera. Life as a golf photographer became much more enjoyable.

"While the quietness sold me, I also found that there was more to like. The RT was a bit smaller and lighter than most SLRs, always a help when hauling two or three cameras and lenses around a golf course for eight or ten hours. The pellicle mirror meant there was no black-out when the shutter fired. I had not realized how distracting the mirror jumping up out of the way of the shutter was. Now, with mirrorless cameras, many photographers can enjoy that benefit.

"I think the lack of viewfinder black-out was the also the reason that I felt that I could hold the RT steady at a full stop slower shutter speed than SLRs I had used before. It's sort of like, in baseball, how a catcher has to learn not to flinch or close his eyes when the batter swings the bat.

"One of the drawbacks to the pellicle mirror was losing about a 1/3 stop of light, so ISO 100 became in effect, ISO 80. I also know that there were concerns that the light passing through the mirror lead to a loss of sharpness. I never felt looking at my photos that that was the case. [I second that —Mike]

"I tried to tell other guys shooting tournament golf what a great tool the RT was for the job but I don’t think I convinced anyone other than myself. So maybe I was wrong about it all along [you weren't! —Mike]. I know that Canon did not sell a whole of lot of them, then closed the model out at a very discounted price. Today, on the used market, I think the price is usually pretty low.

"I still have one RT. With the Canon STM 40mm ƒ/2.8 lens it makes a fairly compact go-anywhere rig. I have been shooting a roll of film every now and then. I also have an OM-2N so I was happy when you mentioned that model in your section about the OM-4Ti. Sorry, I got a carried away a little and this comment got a bit long.

"Oops, one more thing to add: I always wanted a Mamiya 6, but now they are pretty much out of my price range. Rats!"

Mike replies: The Canon EOS RT was the opposite of most products. They're designed to sell, not primarily to satisfy buyers after the point of purchase. The important thing is that the idea of them has to appeal to prospective buyers. They have to check boxes off the shopping list and not appear to have any obvious downsides. The RT had two big turnoffs for prospective buyers, both of which you point out here. But most people who used them learned that they were great. The problem was that you had to use one for a while to understand how great it was. And that the apparent downsides were actually not. So Canon started out convinced that the camera would sell by the bushel, but learned otherwise, as buyers never got to the point of understanding what Canon already knew.

The Camera I Miss the Most

If you'll go to the previous post (just below this one), you'll find quite a lot of comments, and quite a lot of Featured Comments. I thought I'd add my own pick, from up here in the bully pulpit.

Oddly enough, I think the camera I miss the most is a Leica R4s with a Leitz-era 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron-R and 90mm Summicron-R (I'm hazy on the variants of the latter, now, but the one I used had the narrow focusing ring). I used them a little more than 20 years ago now. Michael Hintlian, who is a fine and accomplished photographer himself, loaned me the two lenses when I was Editor of Photo Techniques. After trying to buy a camera body from eBay—one described as "mint," which arrived not only dirty and dinged but broken*—I bought a worn but functioning R4s from Josh Hawkins at Oak Park Camera. Later, I bought that 35mm lens from Michael; then he wanted it back because he missed it, so I sold it back to him. I really should have kept it, but I'm just not the type to refuse to sell a guy's lens back to him if I know he wants it back.

I wonder how much work and time it would take to rummage through the boxes in the barn to find some pictures taken with that camera and lens. I know I have lots, but finding them could be tough. We'll see.

The lens was designed by Walther Mandler at Elcan, Ernst Leitz Canada. It was way, way overbuilt mechanically. Rather brilliant optically, although a friend dismissed it as "just another super-sharp, soulless lens." I liked it, though. Although it did have some quirks, it seemed to mesh with Tri-X 400 really well, at least to my eye. (That "Tri-X" is no longer made, by the way—the film you buy under that name today is the new Tri-X 400, which is "improved" and not the same film. But then, Kodak made many small, unannounced improvements to Tri-X over many years, and no one ever really knows which exact version of the film someone else is talking about when they say "Tri-X.")

For a long time I've been in the habit of looking at R7's on eBay. That's the most recent variant of the R4–R7 lineage of which the R4s was a part. The R4s was a simplified, supposedly "budget" version of the R4. It was still expensive when new, though, and at various times they've sold for more on the used market than the R4 because people seem to put a premium on their greater simplicity. I know I did.

(The same variant—the cheaper, simplified version—of the R5 was called the R-E. One of my students when I taught had a brand new R5 which had just come out at the time—his outfit cost a rather humiliatingly large percentage of my annual salary at the time.)

R7's are very cheap now and it would be easy to buy one. The R lenses, however, can be adapted, so they're still expensive. That's probably a good thing—keeps me from buying in. One complication is that I don't actually like 35mm Summicron-R's...something I know because I tried to buy one to replace the one I sold back to Michael. I didn't like it as well. The new one was a "Leica" branded one, and I  suspected the coatings were different by then. What I liked was Michael's lens. That particular 35mm Summicron-R, I mean. And there's no going home again on that.

(Just a word of advice that's of fairly limited relevance in the digital age: when you find a lens you particularly like, particularly if it's a zoom, you should consider your affection to be just for that particular lens, not the make and model generically. There's just enough sample variation in lenses (particularly zooms, but primes too, sometimes) such that the last little measure of ineffable magic—for your own definition of "magic"—is likely to be a property of the particular specific lens you tried rather than of every single sample of that same model. See Roger Cicala for plenty of lowdown on that.)

Let's put it this way: If my ship were to come in (which won't happen because I don't have a ship at sea, to stretch the analogy), I'd get a couple of R7's and those two Summicron-R's and shoot Tri-X for the rest of my life, getting someone else to develop, proof, and workprint the pictures. (Because that's what it would take to make film just as easy as digital—ha!)

I'd make the final prints myself, in the basement of the house I would of course build because, you know, that ship and all**.

However, back here in what I conceive of as my provisional, temporary situation, known to all others as "my real life," I don't use film. So the whole exercise is simple nostalgia. I've come to believe that my pining for that old camera probably derives from the simple fact that I just wasn't done with it at the time I had to give it up, such that I'm left with a permanent lingering sense of unfinished business—a lack of closure

 

if you get my drift

 

That's all it is. Probably. Subject to further experiment, possibly...I'll keep scanning the horizon from the widow's walk***.

Saturday post this week
Happy Street Photography Day tomorrow! I'll be back in the morning this week with some thoughts about that.

Mike

*And the seller had the cojones to explain to me that "mint" was only the fifth-highest description in his condition hierarchy, the slimy weasel. Behind "Mint+," "LN–," "LN," and "LN in box," I think it was. Scurvy bilge-rat.

**Hundreds of years ago, European investors would buy shares in the speculative voyage of a ship, whether its mission was trade, whaling, plundering gold from the New World, predatory privateering on the open sea, or whatever. If the ship was successful in its mission, then, when it returned from the voyage—which could take multiple years—the investors would reap a rich payoff according to how many shares they were due. Certainly, from such investors, "I'll pay you when my ship comes in" must have been common to hear. And, with communication in a primitive state, no one on shore knew how the voyage had gone until the ship returned. Our familiar expression today no doubt derives from the fact that if a voyage was wildly successful, an investor could potentially grow rich on the proceeds of even a single voyage...when his ship came in!

***When a ship in the age of sail was lost at sea, it would simply fail to return. Wealthy seafaring men often equipped their coastal houses with rooftop cupolas or platforms, the better to see to a farther horizon. Many is the time a captain would not come back, and his wife would climb to the rooftop walk to scan the sea for the ship that was never coming home, often far past the period of any reasonable expectation. Hence the term "widow's walk" for these lookouts.

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Carl Siracusa: "Back in the day I owned a Leica R7, with the 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron, for a couple of years. Liked it a lot at first—the only R camera (when introduced) with auto-exposure, big viewfinder, spot metering, and it just felt right in my hands. Then the foam material that Leica used to line the mirror box started to crackle and disintegrate, requiring an expensive repair that I was told might not last. (Later found out this was a common problem with R7's.) And the shutter lag finally became just too annoying for the kind of street photography I like to do. By then the lens had become very desirable, so I ended up selling both for much more than I paid for them. I do miss it though!"

Mike replies: That's one pitfall of being Leica. If you're going to present yourself as being a cut above, then when you fall on your face it's extra embarrassing. Leicas are just cameras, and, like all cameras, they have problems sometimes. But it's annoying when you've paid extra for a camera that is supposedly "at the limits of the technically feasible" or whatever their tagline used to be, and something simple up and goes SNAFU. You might just deal with it if it happened on a mass market, affordable brand, but when the same thing happens to a Leica it's irritating. The 35mm Summicron-M I had—bought new—started flaking paint chips off its aperture blades, which then got deposited on an inner lens surface right in the optical path. I had it cleaned once, but when it happened again I just sold the whole shebang. On an ordinary lens it might have seemed like a tolerable problem, but on a fancy name lens that cost several times what a Nikkor did, it felt like betrayal. (Earlier, my Nikon 35mm ƒ/2 had a problem with oil on the aperture blades, a known defect. Maybe I just have bad luck.)

Some of the R cameras of that era had a particularly embarrassing problem—the bottom plates weren't sealed, and when you set the cameras down on any moisture the liquid would wick up into the body and wreak havoc with the electronics. Leica's workaround was to produce a little plastic tray to keep the bottom of the camera up and off any liquid. But it took away the tripod mount and made the battery less accessible. Here's a picture from eBay that shows the plastic tray detached from the bottom of the camera:

This wasn't so bad in itself, but it wasn't something buyers should have had to put up with on a camera that claimed to have unusually good engineering.

Thomas Mc Cann: "On reading your eulogy many years ago I bought a Minolta 7D and was as entranced with it as you were. Eventually I moved to Nikon but often regretted letting it go.Years later in a camera store I saw a 7D secondhand for sale and asked to see it. Profound disappointment. It just didn't hold up. Distance lends enchantment."

Mike replies: Yes, and exogenous factors can enhance our experiences, too. When I was shooting with the Leica R, I felt extremely proud to be using the legendary Leica brand—even if most of the public didn't know the R4s from an AE-1. That feeling of status and stature, even if wasn't imaginary back then (which it might have been), wouldn't lend any shine today. Today it would be just another old film camera, a curiosity.

John Krill: "I don't miss any of the cameras I used in the past. None. Nada. Zip. Not even the M3. We all know what brand the M3 is, don't we? I fully enjoy my current go-to cameras. For film it is the Contax G1 with the standard lens, the 45mm ƒ/2. For digital it is the Fujifilm X-Pro2. Can't ask for a better pair of cameras, period. So why should I miss the old stuff?"

'Leica Cannot Keep Up With Demand'

New black Leica M-A unmetered film camera.
Curiously, in stock at B&H Photo as of this writing.

There's a meme going around the photosphere that "Leica cannot keep up with the demand for film cameras." Here's an example. It's because of comments made by various Leica bigwigs lately.

I have no doubt that everything those gentlemen said was true, but we need more data. I mean, it could be that they have two guys assembling 36 cameras a month and now they're getting 44 orders a month. It doesn’t precisely mean either that demand for film cameras is surging generally or that Leica is selling film cameras hand over fist. I mean, it could mean that, but we need a little more drill-down for adequate interpretation.

Big grain of salt, is all I'm saying.

Change of sub-topic but not subject
...Here's a related question: if you were getting a film Leica—and let's say you could afford anything—what would you get? Brand new? Leica currently makes two film cameras, the M-A (meterless, so no battery) and MP (metered, so one or two button batteries that last a year plus). Curiously given the "can't meet demand" theme, B&H has the silver MP in stock and the black M-A in stock). Or vintage?

I'd go used, but I'd be torn. The plain everyday M6, which was an M4-P with a built-in, coupled but non-autoexposure light meter, is the most practical Leica and the most common on the used market (I'd search out a Leitz example). But I think I'd hold out for a really good M4 (all of those were Leitz) and have it serviced. Repair ace Sherry Krauter told me long ago that the M4 was the best-built Leica, as well as the only one that didn't improve, degrade, or fluctuate over its production lifetime: all built to the same high standard from first to last. Although Leicaphiles will dispute this every which way, it's good enough for me. I shot with an M4 for a year and it was a luminous experience, one of many in photography I'm grateful to have had.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve R.)

[CORRECTIONS galore: I somehow managed to make a high density of mistakes in this, for such a short post. The picture was originally labeled as an MP, which is wrong; fixed now. Also, the M6 meter is not uncoupled as I first said; it's coupled, just not auto-exposure. Also fixed now. Thanks to Pieter K. and Carl W. for taking care of dotty Uncle Mike, who obviously isn't taking his pills. —Ed.]

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Chris Nicholls: "As the happy owner of an M6 (with 0.58 viewfinder to suit my spectacles) and an M4, I'll confirm that you can't go wrong with either of those."

Dan Khong: "My best Leica is nicknamed the Hexar RF. It has aperture priority auto exposure and motor drive. Miles ahead of the pack."

David Saxe: "Over the past 30 years, I have owned every Leica M series film camera except the M5. If I were to buy a pure nostalgia/retro film camera it would be the M3. It had brighter viewfinder and with only three framelines it didn't need to nest them inside each other. Also like any other film Leica, it allowed me to use my favorite lens—the Dual Range Summicron."

Nigli: "I have a friend who has a Leica. Her father took a photo of Che Geuvera with it. I want that one."

Bruce Appelbaum: "Five years ago I bought a Leica M7 starter kit that included the 50mm Summicron lens. I paid about $5,800 for the whole thing, which was a great price—Leica had dropped prices because they said the dollar was very strong.

"The nearest thing to the Leica were a couple of Voigtlander Bessa rangefinder cameras. The Voigt cameras went out of production and the remaining stock of 4A, 4M, 3A, and 3M versions closed out at less than $1,000 for the body only. I cannot recall which other Leica bodies were available in 2015, but none of them was offered with the lens. The two cameras in stock are now about $5,200 each and the same lens that came with my M7 is now $2,600. Sales tax not included in any of these numbers.

"Do I like the M7? Yep. Using it has improved my photography by limiting me to a prime lens and a 36-exposure roll of film. No exposure bracketing to run through high dynamic range software, and I have to move my ass, not a zoom ring, to frame the photo.

"My issues: it seems like film prices go up a lot every time I need to stock up, and since I do my own B&W negative developing, chemicals are more expensive, and Kodak no longer sells one-liter packs of D-76.

"P.S. I have a very understanding wife who allowed me to splurge for a camera and lens what could have been a nice down payment on a car."

Larry Canaday: "So...I still have the M4 I got in Germany in 1969. For about five years it (with two Summicrons) was my only 35mm and accounted for well more than half my photographic income. I'll get some Tri-X and let you know the results."

BDR: "It’s funny this should have come up today, as I just bought a brand new silver Leica MP yesterday. The prices of used Leicas with meters have gone up so much over the last few years, that purchasing new suddenly seemed more reasonable."

Mike replies: I dearly hope you bought it through my links. Someone buying a Leica through my links is the holy grail.

Rob L: "I'd stick with my M6—meters are helpful, and I know what the one in my M6, at least, is telling me when I shoot TMY or HP5+. I do agree, the M4, or M4-P, is likely more solid, but heck, the film rewind knob on mine took a nasty hit in the late '90s and I just kept dealing with the slight grinding on turning until the brass smoothed out, and it's still fine, so how much more do I need? What still strikes me is how elegant the M6 remains. a simple indicator of exposure if you wish to pay attention, two controls to adjust exposure, one for focus. You may get things wrong but it's hard to be confused."

Mike replies: That's a great line, "You may get things wrong but it's hard to be confused." My memory is getting less sticky these days but I hope I remember that.

David Lee: "I was into Leica for quite a long time. Now I don’t know what to do with them. When I daydream, I say to myself that I will buy an M10 and sell the M6’s and just keep the lenses. Then reality bites and I realize that I am not getting an M10 and I will not shoot film anymore. We need someone to come up with a digital back door that fits any M body. That’s me daydreaming again."

schralp: "Sorry, this reminds me that when it comes to Leica, the emperor has no clothes. Seriously, $5,200 for a box with a shutter that spools film by and allows viewing through another window? And, a couple hundred more if you want a meter to guide your decision making. I certainly hope you’re right; that is to say, there was a demand for 44 and they only made 36."

Speed: "Why would anyone want to use a film camera today? ...Wonders someone with a manual-transmission car. OK. I get it."

Luke: "I used to lust after a Leica M. It's a lovely analog machine. The whole focus-by-proxy thing, though...a helicoid, and a cam, and some levers, and windows and frame lines, and a best guess. The only M that Imaging-Resource ever tested was very badly misaligned, and focus was trial-and-error only. My first cheap digital Rebel many years ago was an astounding masterpiece of precision manufacturing for very few bucks. Now, that's amazing."

[Luke tested products at Imaging-Resource for many years. —Ed.]

Rick in CO: "Best all around film camera I've ever used, which I had to sell to get into the Leica digital M, was the Mamiya 7. Great lenses, easy to use and light enough to carry anywhere. Still miss it!"

scott kirkpatrick: "On 'Leica Bigwigs.' Leica's not big enough for the wigs to have grown much. The lead owner, Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, is from an Austrian family which cashed in its real estate enterprises about 20 years ago, was looking for a classy new investment, and were drawn to Leica by its partnership with Hermes. Hermes left soon after, but the Kaufmann family stayed for the cameras. CEOs and finance guys have come and gone since then, but there is a tier of product managers that seem to have come up through the ranks. They also seem to love cameras. Stefan Daniel, who is quoted in your linked article, is a special case, and a real jewel. He's the VP with overall responsibility for products, but he started as a teen-aged intern doing camera and lens repairs. He claims that on certain very old and treasured R lenses, he is the only one left at Leica who knows how to fix them and can do so. His taste is for simple products and user interfaces, and it shows. So when Daniel (and Peter Karbe for lenses) talks about new products or about Leica history, they are not just selling something. They have been there and are willing to share opinions about why things have been done as they were."

Fred Tuman: "In 1974 at the impressionable age of 18 I walked into Olden's Photo Store with $350 in my hand looking to buy a Leica. The salesman showed me a beat-to-death Canon 7 and said this was the best my hard-earned sum could manage. I stared at the wrinkled metal shutter for a long time seeing my dream slip away.

"Then a miracle happened. A priest tapped me on my shoulder and said if I could drive him back to his parish, he might have some Leica stuff I'd be interested in. Luckily I borrowed my brother's car to get into the city, so off to the garage we went. All the way back to Queens, he kept asking me what type of photography I liked to shoot, and from the conversation I knew he was legit and the real deal. We went to his quarters and his room was decorated with excellent photojournalist-style photos taken from around the world. He pulled out from a cupboard a Leica M2, a 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron, a 50mm ƒ/3.5 Elmar, and a Leicavit. (at the time I didn't know the 'Vit' was worth more than the rest of the bunch.) I happily gave him my $350, and started my love affair with Leica that has never ended. It's the only camera you don't look into...you see through. I use my digital M of today exactly the same way as that first M2."

A Useful Factoid for Car Shopping

Surveys of the membership of Consumer Reports reveals that all of the cars most likely to make it to 200,000 miles (CR identified ten) were made by either Honda or Toyota*.

All I can say to that is, my Acura, which was made by Honda and has a Civic Si drivetrain, has 120,000 to go, and I hope it makes it.

It would be handy if we had projected longevity stats for camera models, too, wouldn't it? I had two early digital cameras that died, but my Fuji X-T1, as I've mentioned before, has been holding up to continuing use better than expected.

Mike

*Source: CR Consumer Reports magazine, August 2020, p. 61

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Joseph L. Kashi: "340,000 Alaska miles on a 1998 5-speed Saturn SW2 small FWD station wagon, and still going reasonably strong.

"[Sardonic commenting on] of course Saturn went under: reliable, efficient, no-frills vehicles at a fair price, good customer service, and no rip-off [sardonic commenting off]."

Mike replies: I read this great article about Saturn in Forbes, a magazine I seldom see, in a dentist's office in 2010. Very interesting and revealing. GM and the UAW succeeded too well in their original mission, and neither of them could stand it! You'll enjoy this if you've never read it.

Joe Kashi: "Following up on my 340,000 mile Saturn SW2 and other equipment longevity comments, I read the Forbes article that you kindly listed and it mirrored what the people at the Anchorage Saturn dealership told me. We later bought two reconstructed mid-model Saturn VUE AWD SUVs. They're likewise still going strong at well over 150,000 miles. Our 1983 Chevy K-10 Blazer still plows snow reliably but needs a few repairs every now and then—plowing is hard on a vehicle. Our relatively simple 1963 Cessna Skymaster twin-engine aircraft remains capable, safe, and airworthy. It's not as flashy and fast as some more modern aircraft, but several airline captains who have flown with me up in the Alaska mountains preferred it because it was 'real flying, not monitoring automatic systems.' There wasn't a lot to go expensively wrong, such as turbochargers.

"Photographically, I still use several 1926–1928 vintage uncoated Zeiss/B&L Protar VIIa and 1950-vintage Kodak Ektar and Goerz American Dagor lenses along with a variety of modern multi-coated Rodenstock and Fujifilm large format lenses on 5x7. These older top-tier Protar, Ektar, and Dagor large format lenses produce images that are comparable with modern lenses. All of the above are old tech, but capable of modern results. At the end of the day, I prefer practical, non-frilly equipment of all sorts that keeps working reliably and indefinitely if regularly maintained."

Mike: My uncle Cam had a Skymaster. Chosen for redundancy. He was a conservative pilot, and would taxi all the way to the far end of the runway to take off. By the time he passed the tower he would be about eye-level with the controllers. Their standard exchange, repeated every time:

Tower: "Got enough runway there, Cam?"

Cam: "Can't use runway you don't have."

Juan Buhler: "I don't know about cars, but I have two dead Leica M8's and one dead Leica M9, all from faulty parts, like screens or sensors. Is Leica the Maserati of digital cameras?"

Roger Bradbury: "I once heard about a Nikon F5 that went in for a regular service. It had had over one million shutter activations. Allowing for a few activations without film in the camera, a million activations is 27,000 36-exposure films. That's more than twenty rolls of film a day, five days a week, for five years. Wow."

Sunday Support Group: Guide to Good Used Cameras

A reader who's also a Patreon supporter asked me the other day if I could please do a guide to used cameras. Most cameras over the past few years are pretty good, and a lot of them have a lot of life in them yet. What are the good bargains?

I regret to say that, much as I might wish to, I can't comply. First problem: I haven't used all used cameras, namely, the main cameras introduced over the past six or eight years. Secondly, I haven't researched which ones are inexpensive on the used market right now.

The list would be dynamic anyway, unfortunately. The used market for cameras is fickle. Years ago, when a friend bought his Leica, I tracked prices of that particular model for a few years just out of curiosity. The prices ran in very distinct cycles—for a while prices would be high, then low, then they'd ramp up again. (My friend got his for $600, if memory serves, compliments of a dent on the back of the top plate that made it unappealing to collectors and perfectionists. When collectors drive up the prices of equipment, you always wanted to look for something like a nice dent that discourages their interest.) The prices seemed to be not so much the result of fluctuations in demand as to the fact that that model just went in and out of style. I'm sure people who play the stock market know about that...it's the old "hot/not" dichotomy, which sometimes tracks with actual value and sometimes doesn't.

I've already vented plenty of times about items like the Olympus OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2 and the Minolta CLE, to which excessively high prices have clung like skunk-stink. Such items appear immune to the market. Owners just think they're valuable and that they should bring a high price, and that's that. You seldom see things like that bargain priced.

A denizen of the Pentax List once got tired of a certain lens being touted as "rare" and actually collected and collated the data. Turned out the lens was the second most common lens on the Pentax used market at the time! No matter. The conventional wisdom was that it was "rare," and everyone repeated it because everyone repeated it, and therefore it had to be priced high.

If you're looking for bargains, such things are the opposite of what you want to be looking for.

You can have just as much fun with a IIIc

One more issue in valuing things I've noticed over the years is that the last revision of anything tends to retain a premium in pricing. Doesn't matter when it was released; the gearhead brain latches on to "later = better." That's even true of the Leica IIIg, the swan song of the screwmount Leica introduced when the M3 was already in production...in 1956! I wasn't even born. The IIIg wasn't even very characteristic of the rest of the screwmount "Barnack cameras," because of its improvements. Still, later = better, even if all the tech is thoroughly ancient in any case, and IIIg's command a premium to this day. Bargain hunters should look at something more plentiful and common like the IIIc.

Name one
If it's something I don't know, it's hard to recommend. Is a Canon 7D a good bargain? They're cheap; they were relatively high end when new; but I don't know how well they've held up, and I haven't used one so I don't know how good they are or not, or whether they have specific issues.

You see the problem. I'd hate to recommend something not knowing whether it might create headaches for new owners.

One of the few used cameras I can recommend right now is the Fuji X-T1. It was Fuji's flagship camera when it was new, and it's now been reiterated three successive times, so it's well out of date. It doesn't have the latest 24-MP sensor. Speed, in several parameters, is lower than the current versions.

However, they're cheap now, and mine has held up very well. I've used it enough that there's "brassing" on some of the knobs and surfaces, but nothing has broken. I don't baby it, either. I find its speed to be more than adequate for the kind of shooting I do. The high-speed continuous is still good for firing a little burst at people to avoid blinks, and I actually like the slower bracket shooting speed better—I don't know why, I guess because it lets me see each image as it goes by. For B&W, I actually like the old 16-MP sensor better than the new one, and there's nothing wrong with 16 megapixels for most users who don't make prints approaching 16x20 inches (A2) in size.

And they're cheap. Nice and cheap. To get a snapshot of pricing I always check the "Sold Items" on eBay, not current listings. Prices for the body only seem to be running between $250 and $350, and even some with a lens or the battery grip or for the "silver graphite" special edition are within that range. A body-only with a "very low shutter count" of 730 exposures (someone's backup?) but with a few cosmetic issues recently sold for $284.70.

If you just take pictures, and aren't concerned with status, that's one bargain.

I like mine with the Fuji MHG-XT Large handgrip. My X-T1 lives in the car now, in case I see something interesting when I'm on the road. Of course, I've only used two tanks of gas since March, so both the car and the car camera are seeing low usage these days, but that's COVID, not the camera.

Anyway, if you were to compile a Guide to Good Used Cameras, that's the kind of bargain you'd be looking to highlight. You want something that was good when it was new, has held up well since then, and that isn't being overvalued by the market.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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MarkB: "...Three...two...one...aaand the price of used Fuji X-T1's has gone up thanks to the TOP-effect of mentioning it as a bargain.  ;-) "

Panny Fan (Good Grief, It's Tough Being a...)

Why don't camera companies ever do what I want? Don't they know they're supposed to? Obligatory LOL.

I happened to notice the other day that you still can't buy a GX9 "body only."

As Charlie Brown says, AAUGH! (I actually remember learning to spell "Aaugh!" like Charles Schulz did when I was about nine. Reading all the way through a Peanuts Treasury one weekend at the house of some family friends was an important facet of my childish education.)

I still own four Micro 4/3 lenses (the 20mm, the 12–35mm, the 45mm Macro—all Panasonics—and an old Oly kit lens). I figured I'd hang on to them for when Panasonic came out with a Mark II version of the GX8.

But then the camerapocalypse happened and sales started to plummet almost as radically as they once soared, and it became obvious that a GX8 Mark II was not in the cards. I'm not blaming the company.

Still, it's frustrating being a Panny fan. The camera that got me into the fold, the GF1—beautiful, solid little brick, not the greatest sensor—was never updated. When that died I got a GX1, and tried to like it but didn't. My second-favorite Panasonic, the GX8, which I liked a lot but which also had a few problems, was replaced with an updated GX7, a camera I had also owned but hadn't bonded with. (Reading between the lines, you can see I was sticking with Panasonic but not batting 1.000.) They updated my favorite lens, but failed to improve its flaws. What? All they did was change the cosmetics and add a shiny little surround to the front element, as a fake way to make the front element look bigger—a dubious move at best—but they didn't improve the too-slow autofocus. When I finally decided okay, okay, there's never going to be a GX8 Mark II so maybe I'll just go along with the program and get a GX9, dang it all—well, that wasn't going to work either, because you couldn't buy the camera without buying the kit lens too.

I hate being forced into things like that. I already have a Panasonic Micro 4/3 midrange zoom I like, thank you. The 12–35mm ƒ/2.8. And it was expensive, too, bub. I don't want to buy another zoom. Yeah, I know I could buy the kit and sell the kit lens, but what a hassle. Besides, you know me...I'd have to compare the two lenses before I sold one on. More work for me. And then I'd probably get lazy and neglect to sell the kit lens and then I'd have another extra Micro 4/3 zoom in my camera closet next to the old Oly. So I figured I'd just wait until the GX9 was available all on its lonesome, and maybe I'd pick one up.

Never gonna happen, apparently. (You can get a card and a grip for an extra two dollars, though.)

I don't need a camera, so I guess this doesn't involve me. (Although I haven't actually needed a camera since 1980, so I don't know what that's got to do with anything.) But it seems strange that Panasonic wouldn't sell me a camera the way I'd like to buy it if I did want to buy one. Guess now I have to figure out if I should sell my Micro 4/3 lenses. I hate to leave the system. I love the system.

I have only one thing to say:

(Here's the link to that.)

I wonder if other people have love/AAUGH! relationships with camera companies.

I did stumble across a nice 3-D printed grip for the GX9 on eBay. Oh, it's $21 and fifty bucks for shipping...yeah, that figures!

Charlie Brown Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Kylian: "Hey Charlie—never paid too much attention to the spelling of AAUGH, but I can draw Snoopy in less than 30 seconds. This has not gotten me as far in life as your orthographic skills have gotten you. Camera companies sometimes come sooo close to getting it right (using my parameters of course) that the miss can be particularly frustrating."

Wes Cosand: "And many of us who have been Panasonic users for years already have a copy of this kit lens which we don't use but were forced to buy with a previous camera. I would have purchased a GX9 but then I'd have two unused 12–60mm lenses."

John Camp: "There's nothing wrong with the GX8. It's the most nearly perfect camera ever made.  8-) "

Cameras Are Always About Lenses for Me

I had thought that, after quite a bit of wonking around, Part the First of the Great Quixotic Medium-Format Film-Camera Shootout was getting set to begin! The formal post, I mean, about shooting with both. Meanwhile, I've been shooting with a lovely OM-2N.

Alas, problems with the medium-format gear still. I cannot induce the otherwise operational Rolleiflex 6008AF to autofocus. Eric Hiss of Rolleiflex USA (see his Addendum to the previous post on this subject, just added) went through some troubleshooting with me, but...nuttin'. It's asleep. He says this is not a common or usual failure. The lens is otherwise all but new.

Of course it still works fine as a manual focus lens. Maybe I'll just use it that way. But you know, once you get a tiger by the tail you just want to hang on—so I'll probably have to send the lens off to a technician to get looked at, in hopes that a fix can be found.

These are great big cameras, even the supposedly cruiserweight Pentax which I have courtesy of a loan from a kind reader (thank you, John). The Rollei is heavier than some 4x5s. As set up here, they both have nearly identical lenses—on the left, the Schneider-Kreutznach Xenotar-AF made for this camera, which Popular Photography called "One of the best 80mm ƒ/2.8 lenses for a 6x6cm camera we have ever tested," and on the right, the Schneider-Kreutznach MF Xenotar for the Exacta 66, my first sample of which was the best lens I've ever tried, adapted to the Pentax 645NII with an Arax breechlock-to-Pentax-645 adapter. Both are 80mm ƒ/2.8's. The lenses are effectively contemporaneous: the Exakta 66 was sold beginning in 1986, and the Rolleiflex 6008 from 1988. Although the AF version did not appear until 2002, it's a direct descendant of the manual-focus mid- to late-'80s Schneider lens of the same specification made for the Rollei 6000 series.

Configured this way, the Pentax is of course only manual focus, and has to be used on metered manual exposure. However the focus confirmation still works. The Rollei is natively just as highly automated, but as shown here has to be used as a manual-focus camera because of the non-working AF, again with focus confirmation available. I really do hope I can get the lens working properly again.

My plan is to run a little film through all the film cameras I have, after bringing them back up to snuff, for the purpose of writing about them. A little journey through the past.

Mike

P.S. It has been nagging at me somewhat that the results from an ordinary Micro 4/3 camera can give these old battle tanks a run for their money! I've been remembering Dave Levingston's B&W prints from his Class of '69 project. Those didn't give much if anything away to medium-format film prints of the same size. But, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Malcolm Myers: "I think there's more to film photography than sharpness or detail. It's more akin to driving a classic car or listening to vinyl. You do it because it offers a different experience. Also, for people of my age (51), it allows you to buy and play with the cameras and lenses you dreamed about as a teenager, but could never afford at the time."

Mike replies: That's it.

Dave Levingston: "Thanks for that very kind mention."

Joseph L. Kashi (partial comment): "Not so long ago, film purists laughed at 'toy' cameras using digital technology. Before then, large format film photographers disparaged 'miniature' 35mm cameras, which gradually displaced 4x5 Speed Graphic and other press cameras. Now, film seems to be regaining a strong avant garde niche. Kodak is now reportedly selling twice as much film as in 2014. Working 4x5 press cameras in good condition sell in the $800 range. The more things change...."

Rolleiflex 6008 Batteries

Look what came!

The two black oblong rectangular things in the lower part of this picture, one still in its plastic bag, are Rolleiflex 6000-series rechargeable batteries. Originally they contained NICAD cells of something like 700 mAh (milliampere hour) capacity, but the batteries are no longer made and most of the existing ones are getting pretty old now. I have five, but as of five years ago only two could still hold much of a charge. The two batteries you see here have been expertly re-celled with brand new hand-selected modern NiMH cells. They provide about 1100 mAh of power when fully charged.

You know you're a gearhead when you get all excited over batteries. But then, the Rollei SLX, 6002, 6003, 6006, 6008, and my 6008AF—unlike the mechanical TLR seen in the upper left here—are useless without batteries.

The thing on the upper right, on top of its box, is the new Type D charger sold by Eric at Rolleiflex USA. It's made by DW Photo GmbH in Braunschweig, Germany, which is carrying the torch of the old Rollei medium format tradition (although it no longer owns the rights to the Rollei name). Type C and N chargers made back in the day by Rollei will work with the new NiMH cells, but won't charge them all the way. The Type D charger will charge them fully.

The part of this in short supply are the battery housings, i.e., the fused black outer casings (sometimes called "cassettes") you see here. Those are no longer being made. They're getting rare—a quick check of eBay usually turns up no loose ones, just those being sold as parts of camera outfits.

I would have loved to get out with the 6008AF today—glorious day—but I still have a few issues with the camera to work out. But the batteries were the biggest issue. Now solved.

$20 picture
I stopped to "scout" a picture yesterday. Taking a tip from Carl Weese, I've been scouting locations with digital and returning with a medium-format camera if what I find looks promising. Unfortunately, yesterday I pulled all the way off the road—forgetting momentarily that it had been raining for three days straight.

I was reminded very quickly. The earth by the roadside turned into oozing black mud under my wheels, and in no time I was dead stuck.

But I'll tell you, people are great around here. It wasn't two minutes before a black pickup truck pulled up in front of me and a local man hopped out and asked if I needed help. After exploring the situation, he hooked a tow strap to the back of my car—he didn't have a chain—and, with my car helping, pulled me right back on the roadway. Didn't take five minutes. He didn't ask for money, but I gave him a twenty for his kindness. A bargain for me—after all, he'd saved me a tow fee, and probably more than an hour of my time.

Wasn't that kind of him? Very nice guy. Name of Cody. I hightailed it to the car wash to get all the mud off the undercarriage.

Fizzle
Wouldn't you know it, though, the picture possibility was a dud—as I suspected, there's no way to get a clear view of that particular chasm and waterfall by the roadside because of the trees in the way. You never know until you get out and check it out on foot, though.

Fortunately, that doesn't usually cost $20.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

ADDENDUM from Eric Hiss (Rolleiflex USA): "Mike, Thanks for the shout out! I have a few comments to add: DW Photo GmbH are the same people who have been at the Rolleiflex factory for decades, really not holding the torch so much as carrying on as usual but under a new business name and with a smaller product offering (no TLR's), and smaller staff. They are currently making the Hy6 Mod2 cameras and lenses as well as servicing them. It's the same platform as your 6008AF but two design generations newer.

"With regards to the batteries—there's just a lot of information to share and I'll do that on a separate post on my website. However for now let me just tell people that the NiMH [nickel metal hydride] cells now almost always have higher capacity than the C-type and N-type chargers were designed for, and they will only reach 1100 mAh no matter what. G and M chargers are not compatible with the NiMH cells. The big enemy of the batteries is heat—don't let your batteries get hot in the charger. Higher capacity cells take longer to charge, don't reach full capacity (even if you put them in twice), and get hotter than the originals during charging—even when the rebuilder leaves in the temperature sender (most don't). When you have a G or M charger you can still rebuild your batteries with modern NiCad [nickel cadmium] cells—the modern ones do not suffer from memory issues like the older ones did. If you are using higher-capacity NiMH cells, then the D-type charger will charge them fully without generating excess heat.

"There are a lot of people rebuilding their own Rolleiflex 6000-series batteries which is fantastic! There are battery internals for RC models that fit (although they're a little tight), so someone with modest skills can do it. The problem is that many fail—it's eight cells in series, and only one bad one will take out the whole thing. Each cell needs to be load tested, then the whole thing tested again after assembly and then again after fitting into the pack. Time-consuming! I use Key Camera [1428 Main St., Longmont, CO 80501, 303/772-7690] now to do the rebuilding, and I supply them with 1300 mAh internal cells from the factory. I offer a service from my site to rebuild, but it's also the same price to send your batteries to Key Camera directly.

"I don't deal with any lithium rebuilds because of the liability, and most all I've seen do not come with chargers that monitor each cell individually—with the exception of the ones from Wiese Fototechnik (which are great). But for some reason I've never seen a Lithium solution that works for all 6000 models, so check first.

"Lastly, if you have any dead 6000 battery packs, I'm in short supply ( I don't even have a battery for my own 6008AF!) and would be willing to buy up any that aren't being used for $25 each."

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Featured Comments from:

Niko X (partial comment): "Mike, the Rolleiflex 6xxx series is a beautiful system, but the scarcity of batteries makes acquiring such a system seem like a risky proposition."

Mike replies: I'm not investing in the system now, except to bring it up to working order as described in this post. I bought the Rolleis when they were at their cheapest—I had reviewed a 6008 for Camera & Darkroom and had always coveted one. I don't recall the year I bought them but it was in the first half of the 2000s, when digital was all the rage and film cameras—especially professional film cameras—were going begging. I've never shot with them outside of a few handfuls of rolls. I didn't have access to a darkroom, and it was too frustrating to shoot and develop the film but not be able to print.

Hasselblad had long dominated among professional studio photographers in North America, and Rollei was similarly dominant in Europe. After such long reigns, the downfall of the formerly proud pro marques turned out to be swift and severe. (See this post.) The Rollei stuff seemed almost impossibly cheap to me when I bought it. It was not a wise purchase, but for a few dimes on the dollar I couldn't resist. Well, I didn't, anyway.

Fortunately, though, back then I bought five batteries and two Type C chargers along with the other equipment. I traded in one of the Type C chargers for the new Type D—Eric gives you an $80 credit. The other one is new in the box, still in its shrink wrap...as was one of the bodies and backs I bought. They were advertised as used but they were unsold store stock. It's unfortunate that I only bought one AF lens...those have gotten very expensive now, due to rarity. An 80mm Xenotar AF lens alone now sells for more than I paid for the lens, a body, and a 120 back.

Mark Sperry: "Very nice! Eric encouraged me to get the 6008AF since I'm an all-film guy. However I could not resist the temptation of the Hy6 Mod2, and I haven't regretted it one bit! Fabulous system, the 6008 included."

Sara Piazza: "The same thing happened to me about a year ago. I pulled onto the side of the road, onto what appeared to be solid ground, and was quickly up to my gunwales in mud. Strangers stopped to help, to no avail, so I did end up calling AAA. After three trips to Ireland in the last year-and-a-half I have gotten much better at judging where to pull off on the side of the road—looking for soft spots, hidden ditches, blind curves, and planning carefully for easy re-entry—made slightly more challenging when the traffic is coming from the opposite direction than you're accustomed to. Even now, back home in the US, I am still second-guessing myself when I'm pulling back out onto the roadway. Am I on the right? Or the left?

"And yes, there's the familiar disappointment of discovering that the shot does not turn out to be as imagined. The other side of that coin is seeing a potential photo and saying to yourself, 'I'll come back later for that one,' and then of course every single thing is different. Or gone.

"I've always appreciated your writing, even more so now when we all have more time to think, tinker, and read. Stay well. Sara from Martha's Vineyard."

Mike replies: I think the only reason I don't live in the British Isles is that I know I'd become permanently confused over left and right on the roadways! I've always been slightly dyslexic—when I was six, I formed a club with my friends which was proudly labeled "Mike's Clud." I have fond memories of Ireland, but if I lived there I'd soon be run over, while looking the wrong way for oncoming cars.

Gerard Kingsma: "I can't resist—your adventure immediately reminds me of one of my biggest takeaways from the week-long workshop I was honored to attend with Jay Maisel. He sent us one our merry ways each afternoon with one single assignment: Go Out Empty. Clear your mind and don't think beforehand of the pictures you're going to take. Don't plan. Because the pictures you're looking for won't be there (disappointed!) and you'll likely not recognise the wonderful opportunities that are staring you right in the face. Instead of scouting locations—what if you had had your wonderful Rollei with you, all set and ready to go? You might have had a wonderful portrait of Cody."

Mike replies: Wise words. Jay is a wise man.

Robert Hudyma: "Ifixit has detailed instructions on how to re-build your Rollei battery pack. Just the thing when you are stuck indoors for an indefinite period. Ifixit Rollei 6000/6008 Battery Re-Build."

Mike replies: That's the very page that convinced me to hire somebody else to do it! But I'm sure people who are handy with electronics and soldering would get along okay.

Old Dreams

My big frustration
One of my biggest and longest-lasting frustrations with camera equipment—hope I'm not being a broken record—was the fact that Zeiss never made the lens I wanted.

I chose my first "real" camera when I was taking a lecture course in optics at the University of Maryland, the better to learn more about lenses. (It was a great course—wish I could remember the prof's name, to give him due credit. He was a great explainer.) Halfway home I would get off the Washington Beltway and pop in at Industrial Photo, a large camera store on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, now long gone of course. There, I befriended a counterman named Ray. I was even a guest at Ray's spread once, a rural farm where he raised pot-bellied pigs for pets. Ray had quite a pot belly himself.

There was one big long counter that was divided by brand. Each brand had a section of countertop and a set of shelves behind it loaded with gear. I'd flit around like the gearhead nomad I was to become, pulled between East and West—Nikon and Canon to Leica and Contax. Japanese, or German? I almost bought a Leica—I could have afforded an M4-P and a 50mm Summicron—but I reasoned that it would be much more expensive to buy a second and third lens. I finally decided on Contax—a premium nameplate of Yashica at the time, before Yashica was bought by Kyocera—as being the best of both worlds: Japanese bodies, German lenses. Carl Zeiss made the lenses for the system.

All very rational. Yeah, right.

I couldn't afford the RTS I wanted, so I bought a 159Q that was to become my constant companion for years. At first, I made do with the Carl Zeiss 50mm ƒ/1.4 Planar. That kit took me through my first year in photography school—to get a longer perspective, I'd shoot portraits horizontally and then crop them to verticals. Never did quite "take to" that lens. In my second year at the school (the third year of the program—I transferred in as a "sophomore," although they didn't call it that), I decided to make the big switch to a two-lens kit—to sell the 50mm and buy a 35mm and an 85mm. It was a momentous move for me at the time. Mostly it was because of frustration shooting with the 50mm on D.C.'s city streets.

Zeiss/Contax 35mm ƒ/2.8 Distagon like the one I used in photo school

The Zeiss/Contax 85mm ƒ/2.8 Sonnar became one of my favorite lenses, and I made a lot of portraits with it over the years. But the 35mm frustrated me. Contax and/or Zeiss had made the decision to offer a fast lens and a slow lens and nothing in between. Nikon, which at the time was the leading company, like Canon is now, offered its AIS lenses in three tiers—slow and cheap at one end, fast and high-quality at the other, plus a tier that split the difference. So its lineup of 35mm's consisted of the 35mm ƒ/2.8 which was compact and inexpensive, the 35mm ƒ/1.4 (very fast for the day) which was premium in its build and optical quality but large and heavy (again, just in the context of the times), and expensive. Nikon's AIS 35mm ƒ/2 was in the middle in all the different ways...quality, size, speed, and price.

All Contax had was the high and the low, the fast and the slow, the big and the small, the too-expensive and the too-cheap. The middle tier was missing. No 35mm ƒ/2. Argh.

I did end up switching to Nikon when I graduated and joined a professional studio (after teaching for three years). But not before I'd spent years grinding my teeth over the absent 35mm ƒ/2 in the Contax system. It was really what I needed. Of course I got it in the Nikon system, in the form of the then-new AF lens which is still in the catalog.

Jump forward a bit. I owned a Leica for a few years, an M6, for which I had a 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron, the one now called the "Pre-ASPH." Next I switched to Olympus because I got infatuated with the OM-4T. For that system, I used the 40mm ƒ/2 pancake. I chose that for two reasons: one, because Sally Mann, who I had interviewed for Darkroom Techniques magazine (the review was never published—well, because I never finished it—but that's okay, because it turns out she can speak for herself very well) said she had used it heavily for assignments around Lexington, Virginia, when she was poor, and she thought it was "just about right"; and two, because they were going begging. They were very cheap. The OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ2 spent a lot of time languishing unwanted on closeout, listed in the ads in the back of the photo magazines at just $69 or something very close to that. There were only 3,000 made, and only 1,000 came to North America, but they couldn't give 'em away.

OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2 is a nice little lens, but don't believe
everything you read in photography magazines  :-)

I took care of that. I wrote several articles and online posts in praise of the lens just as they got scarce (and just as the Internet really got going), and the price immediately leapt five- to tenfold and has never come back down again. A lens I once bought for $45 and $55 used has cost $400 or more for years now. I learned my lesson—if I was on the lookout for something, I waited until after I bought it to sing its praises in print!

It wasn't all that. Decent, like most OM Zuiko lenses, but the filter ring was also the aperture ring, which I never liked, so it always seemed fragile. I never knew why the form-factor of the little OM Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8 would not have served just as well. Optically it was nothing terribly special.

But I was home. I loved the focal length and I was pleased at how the little lens rendered; it didn't call attention to itself. Capable, competent, but modest.

Old dreams come true
So fast-forward to now. Wouldn't you know, a reader sent me a very nice gift, a box of old disused film equipment that contained either a.) junk, if you couldn't care less about photography, or b.) treasures, if you're one of us. Treasures to me! Such fun. Thanks again, Fred. Included was a very nice Contax RTS II. And lookee what I just scored for it:

A Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/2 SL in Contax/Yashica mount. What I always wanted, at long (very long) last. Reminds me of a saying I heard a long time ago that has stuck with me over the years: you usually get what you want, it just takes a lot longer than you think it will. As they say in Maryland, true dat.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve Rosenblum: "I have the Voigtländer 40mm in OM Mount and it lives on my OM-4t. It's a wonderful lens and nearly impossible to find now outside of Nikon and M Mount. Enjoy!"

John Camp: "If you shuffled through your prints now, photos made with that variety of 35mms and 40mms, could you still pick out which was made with which?"

Mike replies: Well, I can, yes, but that's only because I have a strange ability to remember the lens I was using for almost all the pictures I've ever taken. I don't try; my brain just does it. But it was more a matter of utilty. The Contax was a handy, portable size, but not only was I shooting at ASA/ISO 80, lenses in that era did not perform as well wide open as today's. So ƒ/2.8 was just past the edge of being too slow. The fast lens on the other hand was really huge, and beyond my means anyway. So I was kind of stuck, at least in the Contax system, and at the time.

marcin wuu: "I hope you're gonna use it. I noticed that all the gear I once craved and finally, after many years, acquired is sitting on the shelves. And I use the things that get the job done. All the dream stuff is pretty much just that—the dream stuff. Scratches the itch, but not much use in it. It's kinda sad."

Mike replies: I almost said as much in the post, but then I thought, why be pessimistic? But you're probably right. That darned old expression: you can't go home again.

Dave Stewart: "Bought a secondhand Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/2 SLII for Nikon F-mount over nine years ago. Still a firm favourite. Amongst various reports and tests, this article was influential. Hope that you like and enjoy using yours."

Vijay: "Glad you finally got the lens in Contax mount! Your writings led me to the Aria and the same lens. Enjoy!"

How To Buy a Camera in 16 Easy Steps

If you want to be a photographer, here's one process for picking a camera.

First, decide whether you want to be a photographer or a camera hobbyist. There's a little overlap but not as much as most people assume. To pick which camera to buy:

1. Reflect on what kind of shooter you are and what you want to photograph.
2. Set a defined limit for the shopping period. Several months, maybe even up to a year if you're saving your money. But set a limit. Do not violate this intention; it is crucial. Defer your decision until the end of your chosen time period. Even if you think you've made up your mind sooner.
3. Set your budget for a minimum of one camera and one lens.
4. Define a range or area of products to explore, i.e., compact cameras, fixed lens cameras, FF cameras, whatever it might be.
5. Try five or six of the leading contenders that you can see, hold, look through and test-fire in person.
6. Choose one or two of the most useful lenses. Plan to add up to two or three more in the future. Two to five lenses is all anyone ever needs. In fact, if you have more than five lenses, get rid of the ones you use least. The fewer lenses you use regularly, the better your photographs will be.
7. When the time comes, make your camera decision. Be aware that it isn't critical; the more difficult the choice is between two products, the closer they are to each other and the less it matters which way you go. If you're really stuck and can't choose between two cameras, flip a coin. It really matters that little.
8. Now, stop shopping.
9. Study the camera, its controls, and its manual. This should be done as quickly but as thoroughly as possible. Devote some serious time to it; study it like you're cramming for a college exam. Note that there will be a test...or rather tests, plural. On an ongoing basis.
10. Set up the camera for the way you're going to use it and stop worrying about that.
11. At first, force yourself to get out and use the camera regularly. Touch it every day. Handle it a lot. Give yourself shooting challenges. Work out how you're going to hold the camera for horizontals and verticals, from low and high positions, eyelevel or waistlevel, etc. Switch from one configuration to another and back again. You're learning it. Don't worry about what you're taking pictures of; just get out and do it. The point is to get fluent as quickly as possible. If you can't go out shooting, then shoot what you can where you are—dentist's waiting room, stopped in traffic, shopping for groceries, whatever, doesn't matter. Do this for several months.
12. Every day at the same time, take out the camera in your living room and and run through the settings and practice your holding techniques. Three minutes is fine. Five minutes is plenty. Ten minutes is too much—you'll never keep it up if you do that much.
13. You've stopped shopping, right? No more reading online reviews. No more perusing manufacturers' offerings. No more thinking about any equipment you didn't choose. Stop it. None of that matters at all.
14. After you've made friends with the camera, you can buy a second body, but only if you want to. Buy one that is identical to the first. It's just a backup.
15. After you've made friends with the camera, stop shooting randomly. Pick serious projects or ways of working and concentrate your shooting only on serious work. Aside from your nightly five minutes, don't shoot casually and randomly. Look forward to the times you get to use your camera! Be prepared for those times and savor them. 
16. Stick with the same one or two bodies and two to five lenses as long as you possibly can. Repeat the above process as infrequently as possible. Change will come, faster than you think; there's just no need to rush it. Wear that camera out.

And if you want to be a camera hobbyist, well:

Nothing wrong with that. Shop continuously and indefinitely and get bogged down in it like a mastodon in a tar pit; tie your identity to brands; familiarize yourself in excruciating detail with entire systems and product lines; buy too many lenses; compare features exhaustively; argue your choices online; pursue infinitesimal differences of image "quality"; learn about and critique the business strategies of the camera companies; amass cameras like treasure; and maybe take a few pictures every once in a while!

You detect a certain tone in that, of course, but, really, cameras make a great hobby. I've loved it, myself.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Earl Dunbar: "This is excellent advice. I’ve actually followed (most of) these steps on occasion, but not always. So guilty of being a gear guy at times.

"This does remind me, however, of a true story told to me at a camera shop (remember those?) I once frequented back in the early '80s. One of the clerks told me about a customer (someone I had seen in the shop but didn’t really know) who was taking forever to decide on a 35mm system. However it came about, at one point the shop allowed the customer to call Ansel Adams on the store phone. Virginia answered the phone, and when the customer asked for Ansel, she had him come to the phone. The customer proceeded to explain that he didn’t know which of two choices (Minolta or Canon, as I recall) was the best. Ansel answered, 'Which one do you like?' 'I kind of like the Minolta.' Ansel: 'That’s a good camera.' Customer: 'Thanks!' And he bought the Minolta. I swear this is true."

Bernard: "Are there even two cameras in that group that focus in the same direction, stop-down in the same direction, and have shutter speeds laid out the same way? I think not. It would drive me mental.... How do you expect to re-learn to play the piano when all the keys are in different places every time? You know, you may have been on to something with that whole one camera, one lens thing. It will be interesting to follow."

Dave Van de Mark: "This topic is right up my alley! Or is it alleys! Just having been awarded a grant by the National Park Service to do some specific work in the redwoods, I am into the search for what clearly will be my last shot at a high-rez camera—for very practical reasons: funds are minimal and I'm 77. So I must respond to your 16 points as I feel they apply to me. All in fun, of course. I'll skip past any of the above that I'm following much in the way you suggest.

1.) I am a wide angle landscape shooter, period. No more reflections needed.

2.) Time period for shopping is short due to project needing to start this spring. I am mapping out about three scenarios, obviously based on restraints I am required to live by.

4.) Only one range ideally: High resolution full frame mirrorless; fall back is APS-C Fujifilm.

5.) I cannot pretest anything and neither do I want to; 50+ years of photography 'experience' and massive amounts of online info will guide me here. Wish I did know more about how risky it is to buy refurbished.

6.) No plans to add more lenses; the greatest extent would be an excellent zoom with maybe—just maybe—one prime at my favorite long term focal length. Then that's it!

9. and 10.) relate to #5 in that I can't go pretesting anything, but once I make the purchase, I'll poor into it fast and furious to make sure it's 'right' so I can return it if not.

14.) My backup has to be what I own already.

16.) Your final point I have been living by for a long time—a Fujifilm X-Pro1 has served me very well but is near death and giving me fits at times.

"Finally, I don't fit at all into your 'hobbyist' description."

Mike replies: I have read with interest your comments about your Redwoods project and sincerely wish you well with it. I hope it is everything you hope.

Jim Arthur: "My first two film cameras sort of fell from the sky. I put no thought into them at all. My first purchase was planned more by the salesman than by me. I was in high school and had wandered into a Chicagoland camera store to see what a real (non-110) camera looked like. The salesman sold me a used Praktica for a song and started me down a long and winding road that’s really enriched my life. God bless that leisure suit wearing camera dude behind the counter.

"My next film camera was a K1000 I received as a gift. I wasn’t pining for a new camera and hadn’t asked for one so the new Pentax came as a wonderful surprise to a penniless 20-something.

"My first two digital cameras (bridge and DSLR) were the result of many, many hours of research and hand wringing. The world of digital was new and it was obvious that the manufacturers were just feeling their way along so it really paid to compare. Looking back, I think I chose well.

"Now that I’m more experienced and the digital realm had matured, I’ve stopped obsessing over gear. I know what I need, like what I have, and can recognize when my manufacturer of choice occasionally creates a product that makes sense for me as a next step.

"I enjoyed your 16 easy steps. I think the list will come in handy for those just getting started at a time when photography has so many options. I followed most of your recommendations when I first started shopping for digital gear back in the day. I found it reassuring to take a strategic and systematic approach to my purchases. I started my DSLR journey with an APS-C kit and then once a year, after receiving my tax refund, I’d purchase a quality full-frame lens. I now shoot full-frame and still use the fine lenses I purchased many years ago."

Bear.: "Just four easy steps for me.

"Step 1. Research, consider, make comparison tables, worry about necessary and unnecessary features, bug camera stores for trials, make up my mind but constantly change it about everything from sensor size, to type, to lens and accessory range, to brand, etc.. This step may take so long that it needs to be repeated several times over several years because every camera on the list is upgraded or replaced, or the manufacturer wholly exits the market, or whole new systems are introduced into the market. (Note. It is important not to enjoy this step but to agonize over every aspect of it: see note to Step 2).

"Step 2. Wait for something critical in my existing camera / system to permanently and irretrievably fail beyond repair or recall. (Note. The greater the agony and time spent on Step 1, the longer Step 2 will take, which saves money).

"Step 3. Wholly disregarding everything at Step 1, impulse purchase a new camera / system based on a wholly irrelevant consideration. For example, because of a sale—naturally, a 10% discount on a $6k camera that I don't particularly need or want necessarily amounts to a saving which equals or exceeds the whole cost of a $3k camera that I do. Or because a camera is particularly useful for a type of photography that I know I will never undertake (say, astrophotography or underwater photography) but because it is remotely possible that I just might, one day, try. (Note. The less relevant the consideration, the more likely the particular camera / system will be impulse purchased.)

"Step 4. Use new camera / system extensively and discover that whatever it is that I have purchased, its capabilities far exceed my needs or abilities, which realistically might be met by a Kodak Brownie. (Note. This discovery will start a thought process that if I had only spent more time and agony choosing the correct camera / system, my photography would 'improve,' and that I should therefore consider a different camera/ system: see step 1.)"

James Sinks: "...And then buy a D700."

Five Film Cameras (FTY Experiment, Update 2)

El Inglés asked: "Does this [the "Sweet Sight" post] mean you've chosen the OM-2 as your weapon of choice for the 35mm part of your [FTY] challenge?"

[Ed. Note: "FTY" means my 20-Rolls-of-Film "Forward to Yesterday" Experiment.]

So as not to be coy or cute, I'll just put the answer out there. Right now it looks like I'll be trying (left to right) a Contax RTS II, a Pentax SL, an Olympus OM-2N, a Nikon FE, and a Pentax LX. It's a combination of what I already owned, one I was given as a gift (which initiated this whole thing), and ones I purchased for the project. I'll shoot at least one roll of film with each of these cameras so as to discuss them.

I'm thinking of adding a certain "modern" AF 35mm camera to the mix too, maybe, but we'll see about that. I need to watch my expenses.

Also, there's no telling yet how much energy this project will have. Again, we're several months away from starting the posts, and several people have bet that I'll never get it done, which is quite possible, so "don't hold your breath or you'll turn blue."

I plan to try several medium-format cameras as well. These include a Pentax 645NII, a Rolleiflex 6008AF, a Rollei TLR, and a Yashicamat 124G. I want to shoot at least one roll of film in each of these cameras so I can discuss them. Of these, the Pentax and the Rollei TLR are borrowed and the other two I already owned from times gone by.

I actually have two of the Rolleiflex 6008AF SLRs, both of which are, as far as I can detect, absolutely LN. I got them as "open box" units from a seller in Japan back when they were just too cheap to pass up. Tried to sell them about ten years ago but couldn't get a decent price.

Only two of these cameras have been overhauled. John Titterington did the overhaul of the Olympus, and Mark Hama did the Yashicamat 124G.

I was pleased to find that my LX I thought was dead could be coaxed back to life again—it had a jammed finder which finally came loose, and I had long thought the meter was dead, but it isn't. The Rolleiflex SLRs were hampered by aging batteries but I've figured out how to solve that problem. (It had to be explained to me slowly and carefully.) You can get the innards of the batteries rebuilt; the scarce bits are the battery housings, but fortunately I bought a number of those when I got the cameras.

By the way, I want to thank all of you who have offered all sorts of film-related donations and loans, including, well, film! Lots of people have, and I'm behind on replying. For the most part I don't think I'll be needing anything else. However, grateful thanks for the offers, and for your kindness and support.

Please note!
As an aside, I want to emphasize that I'm neither advocating, nor will I be practicing, a complete "return to film" or a renunciation of digital imaging in any way, shape, or form. If I wanted to ride horseback again (something I did a lot of when I was young) I wouldn't sell my car and vow never to drive a motor vehicle again. 'Nuff said?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

PWL: "What!!! Not a Minolta among them??? Sir, I am dismayed. (Sigh.) Even now, Minolta gets no respect...."

Phil: "I'm keen to hear what you make of all this as you work your way through it. I had my own back-to-film experiences starting about three years ago. The thing that really helped me is that I found that when I was shooting with film again, I slowed down and thought more carefully about framing and timing before firing the shutter: something I had learned to do at the beginning because film was expensive and you only had (what now feels like) a few frames on a roll. I find that has re-informed my digital photography, so to speak. I think I'm a better digital photographer now that I'm practicing some of those early lessons that film taught me."

John Igel: "Doesn't interest me in the slightest. Let me know when you start writing about digital cameras again."

Gary: "I will be following this with great interest, so don't slack, OK?"

David Comdico: "I'm looking forward to the film posts at TOP. The Olympus OM-2N is a fabulous camera. Small, great lenses, and an amazing viewfinder. It is a wonder how large it is for a such a small body. But I'm not sure you can really appreciate a camera or get to know it until you have used it for a while. Twenty rolls in one camera might do it. Regarding those 20 rolls of film, that's a mere 720 shots—an afternoon shooting digitally.  :-)   "

alex-virt: "I think if you just wanted to shoot film you would get one good modern SLR and just...shoot film. But this battery of half-century-old iron cameras clearly shows that your real intention is to relive the sensations of your youth. I'm afraid you're in for a big disappointment. Sorry.  :-)  "

Ross Attix: "GAS."

Tim Bradshaw: "So you're going to shoot 20 rolls of film over how many cameras? Seriously? Since I bought my CLE about two years ago I've shot 40 rolls in it. I'm somewhere near comfortable with it now, although I made the mistake of changing film stock at least once (not entirely my fault: Kodak are seriously taking the piss with the price of Tri-X). In another area, I've played my Gibson ES175 for maybe 20 years, all of that time with the same string gauges: I'm finally getting pretty comfortable with it, although the frets are now kind of worn. Seriously: pick a camera, pick a lens, pick a film, pick a paper, pick chemistry. Use that combination, a lot. Don't flit between cameras like some kind of insect. There's some guy who taught me this: I think he wrote a blog called 'The Online'...something? I forget the details. He knew what he was talking about: he wouldn't have done this."

Open Mike: People Don't Like Rangefinders

People don't like rangefinders. They like Leicas.

—Mike Johnston

I've been shopping* for oldster cameras for my 20-Rolls-of-Film project. It has been entertaining.

One thing I've noticed again is that prices for rangefinders tend to be high. That seems to be true whether you're looking at the last Bronica, the then-all-new medium-format vertical-format RF645 rangefinder made after Tamron bought Bronica prior to the latter's demise; or the made-by-Minolta almost-a-Leica CLE compact rangefinder that was one of the periodic threats to Leica's market; the modern Mamiya 6 (there's a much older camera of the same name) that came to be because the then-President of Mamiya in Japan was a Leica fanatic; or the rare early Japanese Leica copies you can explore on Stephen Gandy's CameraQuest site which are all sought after because Leica collectors want them for their collections. Some are priced higher than the real thing because there aren't as many of them around.

But really, the majority of photographers have never liked rangefinder cameras all that much.

What they like are Leicas.

This isn't going to be an exhaustive history, but there have been many attempts over the years to one-up the Wizards of Wetzlar. And the Champ knocks every one of them to the canvas. In many cases, the would-be competitors were trying to help Leica...they didn't want to vanquish the King, they wanted to show fealty to the King. Hard to say which approach is worse! Either one seems to doom the supplicants.

For example, rumor has it that Leica was directly responsible for the demise of the otherwise well-loved Epson RD-1, an early 6-MP digital rangefinder made by Cosina for Epson that was one of the early cameras to use the Leica M lensmount after it came out of patent protection. The story is that Leica went to Epson and begged them to kill the RD-1 lest the RD-1 kill Leica, which was struggling mightily to bring out its own digital M camera and had not yet, at that time, succeeded. The Land of the Rising Sun, the Isle of the Camera, where Leica is revered, acquiesced.

There was the Konica Hexar RF, another camera that, according to rumor, was originally developed to be a Leica rather than compete with it. Supposedly, Konica offered the camera to Leica to be branded and sold as a Leica, and Leica turned it down. With a Leica M mount, Leica M form factor, but thoroughly modern-at-the-time technology that leapfrogged the M concept decades into the future, you would have thought that Leica fans would have embraced the Hexar RF like a long-lost sibling. But no. They saw it as a threat to the German marque, and tore into it with a vengeance, slathering it with slander and thoroughly destroying any chance it had of becoming cool. I used to quietly note the occasions when Hexar RF owners would apologize for choosing to shoot with one. Konica quit the field not long after**.

The Zeiss Ikon, which was so generically named that people spontaneously dubbed it the Zeiss Ikon ZI just so it would have a real name, was yet another intelligent attempt to improve the peccadilloes of the M—it had a longer rangefinder baselength and film-loading that was as sensible as every other modern camera's, among other improvements—but it was made by—horrors!—Cosina, and that would never do. Cosina by then was making all its Voigtländer M-mount rangefinders, which Leica didn't see as a threat because they were all safely entry-level in nature, territory Leica itself did not deign to occupy.

Even Leica tried to kill the M cameras, and Leica itself failed! Read the story of Elcan, Ernst Leitz Canada, where the great Walther Mandler voyaged to the wilderness with all the old tooling for the M4 cameras that Wetzlar considered surplus to requirements. There, he made the M4-2 and the M4-P as legacy products and designed the tabbed 50mm Summicron as (I'm convinced) a budget lens. The company was going to move into SLRs, which turned out to be a decidedly spotty venture all the way until the end of the film era.

But the rangefinder would not quietly freeze to death in the Canadian cold. People wanted Leicas. (There's a parallel with Porsche: people want 911's.)

Now, of course, Leica is safe. It is the only carriage-trade, Veblen-good camera brand, and its digital products are well established. I consider digital M cameras to be essentially replicas, like modern copies of classic cars, but the only one in the world who agrees with me on that is...well, me. Regardless, the current M10, I hear, is a refined and sufficiently-iterated product and quite a nice camera. It has even slimmed back down to proper M proportions...the M8 and its followers were corpulent, M's that had eaten too much fat and bon-bons. The obese digital M's felt wrong in the hand to those weaned on proper film M's. I stand by the statement.

The current earnest and sincere Leica wannabe is the Fuji X-Pro3. Is there any doubt at all that it's a better "rangefinder-type" camera in virtually every conceivable way than an M10? No. But that's being objective, and this is not and has never been an evaluation where objectivity has any place at all. History demonstrates emphatically that people don't want a better Leica...they want a Leica. The X-Pro3 is safe from the Loyal Legions of Leicaphiliacs only because Leica is safe now. Leica survived; it's doing well; its M product lineup is everything it should be and everything the company wants it to be. The pretender is not a threat...and thus does not have to be chased through the streets with pitchforks and firebrands. If you shoot with an X-Pro3 you're only shooting with a camera. Not a legend.

My friend Kent's former M4. This is the one with the pinhole in
the chrome of the top plate that you could only see
with a magnifying glass. Otherwise it was perfect.

Which one?
The point of all this is that if you want a film rangefinder camera, don't bother mucking about with with any of the pretenders: the Nikon and Canon rangefinders from the '50s and '60s like the underrated Canon 7; the "Texas Leica" Fuji 6x7s and 6x9s or any of the other medium-format approximations; the exquisite little CLE with its complicated history vis-à-vis Die Vaterfirma; or any of the others. 'Twill not do. What you want is the real deal, the red dot, the legend, the lore, the secret handshakes, the classic movie-star good looks, the lineage straight back to Barnack. You want to be part of the fraternity/sorority of all the Leica greats. When it comes to rangefinders there is only one true club—be a member.

All Leica rangefinders have what you want in a rangefinder: namely, they're Leicas. There's not a one of them that can rightly be scorned, not the one-off M5, the little clunker CL, the old hair-shirt Barnack cameras with separate viewfinder and rangefinder windows for which you have to clip the film leader with scissors, even the M8 that everyone had to pretend to love and a few stalwarts actually did. Leicas are the best and all Leicas are Leicas. Any of them will do. I'm serious, any of them.

My Leica. Between five feet and infinity, I could set focus
accurately by feel, using the tab on the lens.

But if you want the best of the best, I'd suggest one of two. Most practical is an M6, Leica's "other" great success (the first being the M3 that dominated the 1950s and sold more cameras that probably all the M cameras since, and which in my opinion is the best-looking camera ever made). It was created when the company cunningly added a manual light meter to an M4-P. The light meter doesn't do anything but take a light reading. It's handier than having a separate light meter with you, and easier than guessing your exposures. The M6 was the film M camera's second wind, its glorious sunset.

For an M6 to the manor born, choose a Leitz-labeled sample. (Mine was a Solms model.)

The best Leica of all, in my opinion, the icon of the icons, is the M4. No less an authority than Sherry Krauter, the renowned Leica repairperson, once told me that the Wetzlar M4 was the not only the best-built of all the film M cameras, but also the only one that had no evolution in its build-quality and materials quality from its first serial number to its last. All the others either went up in quality over their lifespans, or (yep, this happened too), down.

Loosening up
I'm not going in that direction for my 20-Rolls-of-Film project. No rangefinders for me this time around—much as I love them, I don't shoot as well with them. I learned on SLRs. But, thanks to Dan Khong, I caught up with the LUG's latest annual the other day (the LUG is the Leica User Group). I was pleased to find a number of familiar names—it's especially nice to see that Ted Grant and Tina Manley are still going strong. Outstanding old-school photographers, both of them. And I was interested to learn that the group has become more ecumenical. It was fiercely—almost angrily—brand-ideological during my long-ago sojourn there. But they've loosened up and become more liberal, allowing pictures into the album that were made with all sorts of cameras.

From the preface: "So even though we are the Leica Users Group, not all of us are still able to use the Leicas of our younger years or afford to buy newer models. As editor, I was happy to include pictures taken by people who once used Leicas (and thus know what 'Leica Photography' means) but can’t use their Leicas any more. There are four phone-camera pictures in this book." (Thanks to Michael Perini for finding the quote.)

By that standard I know what Leica photography means. I shot with an M6 for three years and an M4 for one, and (although it's not a rangefinder) I have particularly fond memories of using an R4 with Michael Hintlian's Mandler-designed 35mm Summicron-R. Those were technically some of the prettiest pictures I ever made.

It's great that the LUG has decided that it's more important to support the members of its own community rather than be bound to equipment loyalties per se. Cameras are essential, and they are a separate delight and a wonderful diversion, but in the end, pictures and people matter more.

Mike

*Madly and happily. And getting a few loaners and bequests, too. Thanks to Fred Morrison, Jay Burleson, John Camp, John Sarsgard, and Earl Dunbar, among others.

**Hexar RF: 1999. Konica's merger with Minolta: 2003. Konica-Minolta quits the retail camera business: 2007. (Konica was older than Kodak! The company still makes OEM products, including lenses.)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Rick in CO (partial comment): "Mike, I disagree with your subheading; I much prefer a rangefinder camera and the Leica M is presently the only full-frame digital RF available. The stories about the Epson RD-1 and the Konica Hexar, unless factually substantiated, should be filed under 'fake news.'"

Mike replies: I thought the more established term, "rumor," worked pretty well....

Steve Rosenblum (partial comment): "Well, I must be a sucker for rangefinders as I own all of the cameras that you mentioned except for the Leicas, though I have owned two Leica M's in the past. Yes, I know, it's a sickness, it is. It is nice for me that the market has driven up their values as now I can feel so smart about having bought them when they cost less, instead of joining a 12-step group for GAS."

Giovanni Maggiora: "Well, Mike....we all know you have no sweet spots for Leica, and nobody's going to hold a grudge against you for that. It's Mike, and we love him for his quirks. Been loving him for a long time now...I don't know about others.

"But I'll tell you why shooting a Leica is unlike shooting any other camera. To me, of course. (And I've shot Nikon SLRs for twenty years through the '90s, and I'm happy shooting the Ricoh GR now.) It's the viewfinder. I don't know of any other camera (I may have not been lucky trying enough of them) which makes you forget there's a viewfinder between you and the subject. It's transparent, as in: not there. You're not looking into a finder, you're not looking at an eye-level screen, you're not looking through a tunnel. It's you and the subject, and a gentle hint of where your frame will end. That's it. I can't stop loving that feeling. Strong enough to make me put up with all of the inconveniences that should push me elsewhere (most likely to Fujifilm these days, have been already swayed once, by the X100S). Strong enough, I guess, to have killed any of those 'other' old rangefinders which did not quite cut it on the viewfinder front (never had the chance to compare). It may have become a Veblen good as you say. But hey, be that what it may if that was the way to save the company, and that viewfinder glory."

Mike replies: I think my problem is that I always insist on considering Leicas like they're just cameras. That's what gives me an anti-Leica rap. Actually, if you recall, when I came up with the OCOLOY idea, I recommended that a Leica rangefinder would be the best camera for the exercise...the post was even called "The Leica as Teacher." And I doubled down on the advice in a follow-up post, called "Why It Has to Be a Leica." And I wrote a well-known eoncomium to the film Leicas (which were all there were at the time) called "Leicaphilia." So I don't think it's fair to paint me as a Leica-basher. At least not an unregenerate one. And hey, you have to acknowledge that a large number of the great photographers in history—at least among those who do the kind of photography I like best—used (or use) rangefinders, and many of them chose Leicas.

anthony reczek: "Hey! Disparaging my Fuji 6x7 film camera, which I've had for the greater part of three decades? Uh, so what if I haven't used it in the last two of those? I originally bought it for the Fuji lens, and medium format capabilities. Truth be told, though, there were not that many keepers, which I attribute to never quite getting the hang of the format for my primary passion, landscape photography. So perhaps that's why it was put on the back burner and eventually taken off the stove. Been shooting digital since about 2004 (though I still have a bunch of medium format film in the fridge). Hmm, looks like I proved your point. Complaint withdrawn."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "And there I was thinking LUG stood for LEGO User Group. I has been edumacated  :~)  ."

Mike replies: I gather you already knew about this....

MartinD (partial comment): "As regards Leica vs. the rest, I'm not entirely sure where your sarcasm ends and your true opinion begins, so I will stay away from that aspect...."

Mike replies: I'm just having fun. No worries.  :-)

J Williams (partial comment): "I still cannot understand why Leica RFs are...well...RFs. What purpose does an optical RF serve when focus peaking or magnification work so well and are not subject to any of the potential mechanical problems of RFs? I just don't understand its use in a modern digital camera."

Mike replies: That's kind of why I call it a replicam. It repeats some of the forms of the past even when there's no reason to. The removable bottom plates were (are?) the best (worst?) case in point. It was a questionable design when the rationale was to keep the body cavity rigid for film transport, but in a digital camera it's purely vestigial and nostalgic. But hey, if it's what fans want, that's cool.

Andre Y: "It's sort of an open secret that the more recent, high-performing Nikon lenses (F-mount 28mm ƒ/1.4E, 105mm ƒ/1.4E, 19mm ƒ/4 PC-E, and most of the Z-mount lenses) are designed or co-designed by Konica-Minolta based on patents filed for lens designs. The camera industry is nothing if not incestuous!"

Mark Sampson: "This quote applies to Leica users...from one of Patrick O'Brian's 'Aubrey-Maturin' novels. Here, Capt. Aubrey is contemplating some bold action: 'Sailors were as conservative as cats, he knew; they could put up with almost anything, but it had to be what they were used to, or they would grow sullen and uncooperative....' Having worked with Leica M cameras for over thirty years, I can include myself in that description."

Tina Manley: "Thanks, Mike! This old school photographer just got back from six weeks in Laos and Cambodia, using only Leicas, so I guess I'm still going strong! I did sink in a river with my Monochrome and SL. The Monochrome is dead but the SL and I are fine. Since I had cataract surgery, I can now focus all of my old Leicas again! There is nothing like them."

Mike replies: Great to hear from you here Tina! Thanks.

The New Nikon D6

Nikon just announced its new pro flagship, the D6.

Although you probably won't see this mentioned much on the Web and in the forums, this brings to parity the number of top-end film F cameras and pro digital D cameras. There's a slight disparity in the time it took to get there: the original Nikon F was introduced in April 1959 and the F6 began shipping in 2004 and can still be purchased new (or rather, out of what's called "new old stock," NOS, with outflow regulated to a trickle by a high price [UPDATE: This appears to be wrong! See Sal Santamaura’s comment in the Comments section. —Ed.]). Let's call that 45 years (1959 to 2004). The 2.7-megapixel, crop-sensor Nikon D1, a landmark in the development of digital imaging, arrived in time for the Millennium—June 1999. So the analogous span of time is 21 years, let's say—less than half the time it took to get to the sixth flagship film camera. Makes sense, considering the faster pace of development in digital.

We really should compare the D6 to the D1 for perspective, and the F6 to the F, but I just received a lovely Contax RTS II as a donation/gift (big thanks to Fred M.), and what strikes me about the new camera is the tremendous distance between it and the RTS II's near-exact* Nikon contemporary, the F3. I was in D.C. when the F3 was current. Many amateurs owned one, and far more wanted one. The richest kid in my second-year photo class had two. My studio partner (after I graduated), even though he did most of his work with Hasselblads, shot with one—he had the big motor drive for it and gave it the fond nickname "Darth Vader." (Click here to see a camera much like Darth.) I would occasionally see one draped on a besuited lawyer-type on the streets of the city. I wanted a top Nikon enough that I saved for, and purchased, a Nikon F4s when it was the latest thing (Paul called it "Luke Skywalker," of course). When it was new I was besotted with pride of ownership. 

By contrast, I can't see many passionate amateurs wanting a D6. The things it does well are just too specialized: 10.5 FPS in live-view mode; 105 focus points which are all selectable and cross-type; AF at the center point down to –4.5 EV; extensive GPS and transfer options and capability; and so on. To name just one feature that pros might value but amateurs wouldn't, the new Priority Image Transfer gives you the ability to move particular images to the front of the download queue. I can't imagine many amateurs getting lathered up at the mouth over that.

The astonishing abilities of the D6 "imaging computer" make a camera like the F3 look positively quaint. With the F3 you had to focus the lens yourself, which was primitive. If you didn't own Darth's motor drive or a motor winder, you cranked the film from one frame to the next with thumb-power. The biggest difference in my view is that the D6 will "process" your pictures in nanoseconds and transfer them to your computer (and thence on to your client) wirelessly, whereas Paul and I used to have to make 50-mile(!) runs in the car—often daily—from our studio in Maryland to Chrome, the custom lab we used in D.C. (25 miles one way). If a client wanted to pay for rush processing, we could get images in his or her hands sometimes within 24 hours. But that included two Chrome runs.

Perfect for...?
The D6 costs $6,500 and weighs 2.8 pounds (1270g). It might be cruel to say something like "Nikon has made the perfect sports and assignment photographer's camera, while appearing not to notice that newsrooms and magazines are withering around the globe, their staffs and budgets shrinking..." etc. Don't fix what ain't broke, sure, but the niche this camera evolved for might be changing under Nikon's feet. It might still be true to say that pros who need the D6 need the D6, although I can also imagine many pros thinking that they'll just continue to get by with their paid-for D5's or lesser Nikons, given, you know, the climate out there. As another bellwether, DPReview has let the D6 announcement pass with little fanfare but is all over the new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III.

After a year with the F4s, I reverted to using two N8008's in the '90s. For all its felicities, the F4 turned out to be unlovable—too big, too clunky, too heavy, and it chewed through batteries like a hungry pygmy shrew. I used to say that you could always tell where I was because Luke left a trail of spent AA's in its wake like Hansel and Gretel left breadcrumbs on the floor of the forest. But then, I'm prone to exaggerating.

That was the last top-end pro Nikon I was personally interested in. They're just not aimed at the likes of me, and, if you ask me, arty enthusiast amateurs coveting top pro Nikon bodies is probably a thing of the past. If I wanted a Nikon I'd want a Z6.

Just one opinion. YMMV.

Mike

P.S. I'm very behind on the comments and I promise I will get to that later today.

*Nikon F3: 1980–88; Contax RTS II: 1982–1990.

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TerryM: "In defence of the F4: at least the MB20 battery grip cut down the weight and size to four AAs. I found this gave me plenty of battery life for slide film. And I can’t think of a single frame where the meter didn’t nail the exposure. I could focus on stars with a hard infinity stop lens and open the shutter in the dark just by feel...can’t tell you how much better than with a mirrorless camera. I’d still be using it if I didn’t ruin it by dust and moisture, and sort of regret going for the lighter weight of a FM2N. Long live the F4!"

beuler: "All the negative D6 reviews boil down to using the same sensor as the D5. It seems to me the D6 is the direct equivalent of the F6: the flagship of an obsolete fleet. It's no bad thing; the F6 is a fabulous camera. It's just that nobody needs it is all. Expect the Nikon Z flagship to smoke the alpha 9 in every way except price, whenever it comes out. The question is: will it be too late?"

Mike replies: A couple of months ago I started doing a post on the term "flagship." It was really interesting and I got pretty deep into it. The term comes from the ship occupied by the commander of the fleet, who flew his pennant to indicate his presence aboard. This led to the secondary meaning of the word, in that the flagship was also often the grandest and largest ship in the fleet.

Flagships in that latter sense have often been costly. The worldwide arms race c. 1900 centered around battleships: Japan won, with the Yamato class, c. 1938 (there were only two, Yamato and Musashi—a planned third was converted on the fly into an aircraft carrier). We all know where that went. The Sovereign of the Seas in 1637 was both a vanity project of Charles I and a political statement intended to symbolize the English crown's claim to the oceans, against the interests of the Dutch, who wanted the seas to be free for all. Sovereign of the Seas, later renamed Royal Sovereign among other names, was encrusted with lavish carvings covered in gold leaf, and cost so much that building it contributed to the financial crisis that helped fuel the English Civil War. During which, of course, Charles lost his head.

Stern of the Sovereign of the Seas, from a painting by Peter Lely

Of course this really had nothing at all to do with so-called "flagship" cameras, not even by analogy, so I abandoned that post. (You should see TOP's graveyard of abandoned post ideas...pretty wacky, all things considered!)

Severian (partial comment): "Re: Flagship, I (and Nikon) certainly hope that the D6 doesn't become the kind of flagship which is used as a metaphor / cautionary tale! Consider the Swedish ship Vasa."

Mike replies: Totally. Everyone should know about that. I think the first full-frame DSLR, the Contax N Digital, might have been a case of Vasa syndrome.

View Cameras

I've been at least low-level obsessed with view cameras since I started in photography seriously in 1980. I used to go by Ferrante-Dege, an old-line camera store in Cambridge, Massachusetts (I loved and miss old camera stores), to "visit" a resplendent Deardorff 5x7 they had on semi-permanent display (it was for sale, but didn't sell, so it was there for a long time). It was profoundly beautiful—well, to my photogeeky young self it was—and also profoundly unaffordable, which made me covet it all the more.

My second major purchase (after my first Contax of sainted memory, and 50mm Zeiss lens) was a rosewood Wista 45DXII that I bought from a guy in Chatham, in Upstate New York, who ran a small business called "Fields and Views." It cost more than $600—an extravagant purchase.

Wista 4x5-inch view camera in rosewood, identical to the one I owned

I only really used my Wista for two projects—for one, I shot color film in the "Tip of the Mitt" region in Michigan, around the lakeshore; and for the other, a different summer (on a faculty grant, woo-hoo), I shot Polaroid Type 55 P/N (positive/negative) film in the same area, everywhere but home. My conceit was that I was going to drive over every single road in Charlevoix, Emmet, Cheboygan and Presque Isle counties. I came pretty close. I loved that camera and I wish I still had it. Current Wistas are not nearly as well made as they were then.

The Wista, which turns 40 this year—it was first available in 1980—has been made over the years in numerous iterations, and in Japanese cherry, Japanese rosewood (shown), ebony, and a few other woods. Various versions have distinct features such as back shift and removable bellows. All share the strong family resemblances imbued in the camera by designer Sadamu Yasutake. The bellows have changed from leather to synthetic over the years, although ten years ago I was told that leather bellows could still be special-ordered in Japan. Don't know if that's still true. Rising prices in the U.S. and much more advantageously-priced newer Chinese cameras such as those from Shen-Hao and Chamonix overshadow the Wista now, and I'm told it gets very little mindshare among LF shooters these days. I owned one from 1984 to 1989—had to sell it because of financial hardship—and have always remembered it with inordinate fondness. It will always remain a sentimental favorite with me. I would have loved to be the type of photographer who could use a view camera for life, crafting beautiful traditional silver prints in the darkroom.

Not con
However, "we are what we are," and there's no getting around that. My two projects with the Wista should have been enough to demonstrate to me that I'm not a view camera photographer. It didn't suit my temperament and personality.

Also, I got an early reputation as a view-camera hater that dogged me for years and years. The story, which I'm sure a few of you have heard before, is that I was told by my editor at Camera & Darkroom magazine that they were planning a "pro and con" article about view cameras, and they wanted me to write the "con" piece. The "pro" article was supposed to be written by Ron Wisner, of Wisner Classic Mfg. Co., now out of business but at the time a bespoke maker of opulent Edwardian-style view cameras. Unfortunately, however, Ron never submitted his "pro" piece (I later learned, when I was an editor myself, that this was typical behavior for him). Against my protests, the editor decided to run my "con" piece anyway, by itself, as a stand-alone article. So, without even meaning to, I authored a long, well-debated article about view cameras that was—yikes!—entirely one-sided, taking the negative position. (As I recall, Ron did write a short counterpoint, which might have been published as a Letter to the Editor? I would get my assistant to look that up if the fellow were not so lazy.) The fallout has died down now, but I'm sure, with my luck, that there are still LF people out there with elephant memories who still think I'm anti-LF.

And of course then digital came along, and large format moved down one thick layer deeper in the strata of niches.

So, view cameras: I'm not good with them, don't use them, have a reputation as someone who dislikes and disapproves of them, and they're obsolescent...

...None of which has dimmed my love for view cameras or view camera photography one bit. I still think they're lovely, fascinating devices, and I love work done with them. A circa 1903 Rochester Optical Pony Premo No. 6, a beautiful old "self-casing" whole-plate camera made not far from where I live, in a splendidly preserved state, is the first thing that greets visitors when they come into my house from the porch. I've never taken a picture with it.

Mike

This is a "TOP Classic" rerun, a pastiche of posts from 2010 and 2016.

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JH: "The 'manual transmission' of cameras."

Merle Hall: "That reminds me. If you're anywhere near Sanibel, Florida, do not miss the Clyde Butcher exhibit at the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. Simply phenomenal large format black-and-white prints as well as his Ron Wisner 12x20-inch camera. More information about the cameras he uses are on his web site. The show is not up for much longer (either February 5th or 15th; there seems to be conflicting information as to which)."

Carl Weese: "I've always thought the 5x7 Deardorff is the most beautiful view camera ever made. However, 8x10 format was what I felt I needed to work in and I found a solid Deardorff in that format about forty years ago (I think mine was about thirty years old when I bought it, making it about as old as me) and have used it ever since. I find the design incredibly elegant. Some people seem to have trouble learning how to use it but all of the control systems have always seemed perfection to me. But it just never has been as pretty as the 5x7 version."

William Schneider: "Because this is a 'memory lane' post, I thought that I'd make available the Fields and Views literature from 1982. That's about the time that I bought my own Wista. I had written to them to request information.

"I scanned the material and made a PDF of it. It can be found here.

"That should start a reverie, especially seeing the price list in the PDF."

Mike replies: That brought back memories! Much better was the color brochure for the Wista from Japan, which had some of the funniest, most treasurable examples of "Japlish" I've ever found. Wonderful thing.

Gary Nylander: "I bought a beautiful old 4 1/2 x 6 1/2-inch view camera circa 1910 or so from an antique store in Victoria, B.C. around 1978. It had a Cooke lens of about 8 1/2 inches, and it came with wooden film holders a clip-on tripod and a well-worn leather case. I used it a little bit but not much as I had to cut down 5x7 film to use it.

"In 1985, I bought my next real serious view camera it was a 4 x 5 Tachihara which looks remarkably similar to the photo of Wista that you have included in your post. It saw the Tachihara in a local camera store in Kelowna, B.C. where I live. It came with a 150mm Schneider lens and half a dozen film holders. I think it was about $600 (CDN) It seemed like a lot of money, but it looked really cool and I really wanted to use something a bit more 'modern' than my old 1910 view camera. At first, I didn't use it a whole lot and it mostly sat on a shelf in the closet of my apartment. A couple of years later I gave myself the challenge to shoot with it or sell it. I ended up shooting with the Tachihara for over 20 years.

"In 2009 the Tachihara was getting a little worse for wear so I thought I would upgrade to an Ebony RW45, I loved the titanium fittings. It was the entry-level basic model. I always shot mostly black-and-white film, and some years I shot as many as 800 sheets a year. I also bought a Tachihara 8x10 view camera in 1991 that I still have, but it was not as convenient and practicable to shoot with. I preferred the 4x5. It's something I could backpack on many of my hikes.

"I still shoot with the Ebony view camera but in the last year I have slowly been migrating over to digital. I needed a Nikon D850 camera for some of my commercial freelance photography. Of course, I had to make a few comparisons between my 4x5 and my newly acquired D850. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the digital camera is and I now I am happily exploring what I can do with the digital D850 in terms of creative output."

Nostalgic Nikons

A quick snap to show you the reason why I asked about Nikon repair shops. It's an FE, for those of you who don't know that on sight. It works fine; I just want to get it CLA'd. I found the body (I already had the lens) for very few bucks, and it's basically flawless, to my non-collector, not-too-picky definition of flawless. Figured it should really have the benefit of a refresh. Even though I doubt I'll do much if any shooting with it. It will probably go in the metaphorical glass case alongside my Nikkormat FT-3.

When I get an old camera for cheap, the way I think about it is that I have enough budget left over to get it serviced. That might not be sensible from a $ and ¢ standpoint, but I like to see these old devices survive. Why be sentimental? Nostalgia, I guess. I can't justify it. It's the way I feel, though.

Meanwhile, I've gotten confirmation that Nikon is cutting off the supply of parts to non-authorized repair people. I understand that from a business standpoint—they want to make sure their authorized service centers continue to have parts at least as long as anyone else does. But from a "meta" standpoint it's a very bad development...it will surely have a chilling effect on peoples' willingness to get older cameras fixed and serviced, and it might hasten some independent repair operations into insolvency—Nikon is effectively depriving them of a core service they previously could provide. Given that we will eventually lose repair options as the experienced technicians age out anyway, that's just not a good thing.

But time marches on, as they say, and the forces of change are what they are.

Mike

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Michael W:

"I'm starting a collection of old 35mm cameras as well, sticking mostly to cameras that were made in the '70s and '80s. Here's my beautiful OM-1n."

Eamon Hickey: "Since a bunch of people mentioned the parts issue, I think it's worth mentioning that Nikon USA's parts distribution policy is almost completely irrelevant to the question of who can repair Nikon cameras that are more than 5–10 years old, and it's especially irrelevant to film cameras and lenses from the year 2000 or before. Nikon ran out of most parts for nearly all of those products years or decades ago. No camera company continues to indefinitely produce spare parts for discontinued cameras and lenses. So the lack of spare parts for old film cameras is a universal issue. Given that situation, repair shops generally cannibalize broken cameras and lenses for the parts they need. That very loosely means that brands that had high sales numbers in the past may be easier to get parts for (because there's more broken stuff to cannibalize). Canon sold by far the most SLR cameras and lenses in history. There's also a lot of old Minolta, Pentax, and Nikon stuff in the world. In medium format, there seems to be plenty of old Hasselblad stuff (but also high demand, so the parts get used up) and a good pile of Mamiya gear."

Sylvain G.: "As much as I agree with you and fear the disappearing of technicians, the 'hipster' (hate such characterization but you get my point) march has done wonders to revive interest with younger people too, with some becoming rather excellent it seems. Pierro Pozella is 23years old and has learned from working in camera shops...he will fix supposedly unfixable electronic cameras such as the Minolta CLE it seems. Then there's the the Camera Rescue Project. Just a few names now but there is hope, friends."

Bruce Hedge: "Congrats—that's a great camera and lens combo.

"I repaired Olympus OM cameras for thirty years as an independent small shop here in Australia. The OM-1 was/is a very reliable mechanical camera with many fans. Only three faults accounted for 95% of all repairs. Firstly, the meter went dead. Most of the time it was repairable, because the line from the battery chamber to the top meter circuit became corroded and failed. Best to replace the whole line, but sometimes only the short bit from the battery chamber was needed to be replaced, and it didn't need a major disassembly. Also the plastic insulation screw used to break, shorting the contact against the body. Easily fixable with a sharpened plastic Q-Tip cut, threaded, and and glued in place. Secondly the timing of the wind-on assembly got out of whack, and needed re-seating. But, the main problem was when the meter became open circuit due to one reason or another. Some time late last century, no more new meters were available and the only way was to cannibalize one from another camera. They soon dried up, too. Camera still worked fine, just no meter.

"Not much else ever went wrong with OM-1's or even OM-2's, but I never saw inside an OM-3 (few sold, and very reliable), and the OM-4 had several circuit board updates until they got it almost right in the OM-4Ti.

"I ended up throwing away about 50 OM-1 bodies in various states of disrepair—all with the bits which broke missing. Oh, yes, the other repair which is now becoming much more prevalent is replacing the prism, which gets 'corroded' at the bottom of the viewfinder by deteriorating foam seals on the clips holding it in. Fortunately, the prism from a junk OM-10 fits perfectly, and is quite an easy job. Light seals also deteriorate, but can be easily replaced.

"Loved my time with OMs...favourite lens was the 100mm ƒ/2.8. Sold the lot in 2005 to start my digital journey with Canon. Silly me."

Mike replies: Thanks for that inside story, Bruce.

The great Jane Bown also favored that 100/2.8. I believe she used the 85mm ƒ/2 as well, but less often.

Nikon Repair

Can anyone recommend a good independent shop or repair person for old Nikons? Thanks.

Mike

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The Contax Brand, 1974-2005

Apropos the previous post, Roger Bartlett wrote:

Having coined the term 'bokeh' you have a track record for instigating new stuff—so if such a lens were to be created, no matter who the manufacturer, then a lens with this feature set would have to be called the 'Johnston' or at least have the letters MJ included in the name on the filter ring. Mike, you already have a Patreon following—perhaps start a cloud funding drive and get this lens on a production line. A project for 2020.

Well, I had about as much influence on the camera industry as I had on the word "bokeh"—a slight emendation. Here's the only camera product I ever had any direct influence on (and I'm not even absolutely positive about that):

Contax S2b, 1994

Contax released the S2 in 1992 for its 60th anniversary. It was conceived as a "purist's camera," something you might imagine I would have liked. I also liked it because it was similar to the Contax 139Q, the camera I went through art school with. It was fully mechanical, with an uncoupled meter. The battery powered nothing but the meter. Really not a bad concept, if you happen to remember that "independence from batteries" was a value amongst camera mavens and advanced amateurs at the time, as evidenced by cameras like the Leica R6 and Olympus OM-3 (and, negatively, by the scorn heaped on the battery-dependent Nikon FE by Nikon FM fans). The conventional worry, often repeated but seldom experienced, was "what would happen" if you were caught photographing miles from civilization and your batteries failed? Oh no. With a batter-dependent shutter, you'd be SOL. Yeah, like that ever happened to anybody more than, like, twice ever. And the solution was not exactly beyond comprehension...you could just carry an extra set of fresh batteries in your bag. We're talking button batteries, remember, which are tiny and weigh nothing.

However, the S2's meter was a spot meter—the camera didn't have any other metering option. After discussing this with the American Contax rep at the time, I wrote a brief arguing for a center-weighted meter for the S2. He said it wasn't going to do any good, but he promised to take it to Japan. A number of months later the rep got back to me and reported that, much to his surprise, the brass in Japan bought the argument and would be making a variant of the S2 with a center-weighted meter. And the S2b was born.

So that's my sole influence on the camera industry, as far as I'm aware.

Embarrassingly, I couldn't even buy an S2b myself when it appeared in 1994. I was a single parent with a one-year-old and had just gotten hired as Editor-in-Chief of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques magazine at the time, and the premium price of the S2b was beyond my pay grade. I think it cost $1,100—something like that—and it was simply out of reach.

You know what they say: Oh well.

Some Contax history
The "anniversary" marked by the S2 was something of a manufactured occasion, in reality.

Here's a brief rundown: Zeiss Ikon first labeled a rangefinder "Contax" in 1932. That was the problem-plagued Contax I, which was essentially released as a "beta" as we might call it today. It was rushed to market and underwent many modifications after release, not really maturing until it became the Contax II in 1936. After WWII, with Zeiss split into West German and East German branches, the East German VEB Zeiss Ikon developed the Contax S SLR in 1949, followed by subsequent Contax models. (The Contax S is where "S2" as the name of the anniversary model came from.) But the Contax name didn't really resonate worldwide because export models were labeled "Pentacon." After the Japanese essentially blitzkrieged the German camera business in the 1960s (Germany had long been identified with cameras like the Swiss were associated with watches), Zeiss stopped making cameras. But in 1972, German Carl Zeiss and Japanese Yashica launched a co-operative venture with the in-house name of "Top Secret Project 130." Yashica would make the cameras, Zeiss the lenses—best of both hemispheres, right? The launch of the new brand did make a big splash in the early and mid 1970s. The first product was the Contax RTS, a beautiful camera with industrial design by the Porsche Design Group, accompanied by lenses in uniform livery made in Germany by Zeiss.

This partnership turned out to be not so cooperative as it appeared from the outside. It was instigated and motivated mainly by Yashica, which licensed the Contax name from Zeiss. Yashica had to order runs of lenses from Zeiss, paying up front, and Zeiss was sometimes less than forthcoming about filling the orders...something that became clear later. Yashica was acquired by Kyocera (originally Kyoto Ceramics) in 1984, and in the '90s Kyocera wanted to follow the hot trend and create an autofocus camera. But when it asked Zeiss to make AF lenses, Zeiss refused! Supposedly the tolerances could not be strict enough for Zeiss's standards (Nikon had weathered lots of criticism for this), so they just said nope, ain't gonna do it.

Kyocera, frustrated, in 1996 introduced its workaround, the Contax AX. The AX used Zeiss manual-focus lenses, but autofocused by moving the entire film plane back and forth! Keep in mind that the film still had to be transported past the gate as it was exposed, and held flat and in position to quite high tolerances, and you'll realize what an undertaking this was. Obviously this was not an ideal way to do autofocus. The AX was expensive as well as large and clunky by the standards of the time, and was understandably not a big seller. It was never followed up. It remains a true oddity in camera history. It was, though, as Barry Reid points out in the Comments, the only camera that could autofocus a tilt-shift lens.

Zeiss eventually did relent and there were a few AF lenses labeled Carl Zeiss made for the ill-fated Contax N, although it's likely Zeiss didn't really have much to do with them.

Back to the S2. Kyocera had swallowed Yashica, but was not shy about outsourcing cameras if it was convenient. I don't know this for sure, but I think it's fairly likely that the S2—celebrating the anniversary of the Contax I, an essentially failed camera that happened to mark the first use of the Contax name—was manufactured by Cosina. If true, one nice thing that would mean is that the S2 and S2b would have direct links to the Zeiss Ikon ZI rangefinder, which was manufactured for Zeiss by Cosina. (Cosina, one of the largest camera and lens OEM manufacturers in Japan, is the maker of Voigtländer cameras and lenses now.)

Another little factoid: Camera mavens were (and sometimes still are!) adamant in preferring German-made Carl Zeiss Contax lenses, but the Japanese-made versions were actually better because all the tooling was new.

The most beautiful true German-Japanese Contax if you ask me was the RTS II, a deluxe film SLR with an electronically controlled shutter, an electromechanical shutter release, and industrial design by Ferdinand Alexander ("Butzy") Porsche. I owned one briefly and had it stolen from me. It would be fun to have one with a Carl Zeiss 45mm ƒ/2.8 Tessar, a lens design that is central to Zeiss history and dates to 1902. You'll need sharp eyes, though—that combination is difficult to focus.

Contax discontinued the S2 and S2b in 2000. After hemorrhaging money trying to bring to market a deluxe and advanced 6-MP DSLR too early on*, Kyocera left the camera business in 2005.

Mike
(Thanks to Roger)

*It's a footnote now, but that camera, the Contax N Digital, was the world's first full-frame DSLR.

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Gaspar Heurtley: "There’s a typo under that picture. It’s not a Contax from 1994, that camera is a Fujifilm X-T100 from 2018."

Mike replies: Twin sons of (very) different mothers.  :-)

Al C. (partial comment): "Wonderful history lesson. Thank you. The Contax S2b has beautiful massing—perfect, actually. Its Fuji 'twin' has such ugly massing. The prism is fake, stacked on, entirely un-inflected by the rest of the body."

Peter: "Wow, memories...I was smitten by the Contax RTS back in the day before I could ever afford one, at the same time that I was smitten by the Lotus Europa before I had a drivers license. But 40-odd years later, I picked up a Pentacon FM, with its proto-steampunk whirligig shutter speed selector, and a 1932 Zeiss Ikon 520/15 folder, both great cameras—maybe no RTS but hey, no batteries to die on you either.  ;^)  "

Mike replies: You need to seek out the episode of "Pawn Stars" in which they buy a Lotus Europa. It'll make you smile and roll your eyes both.

Eamon Hickey: "I've had fun over the years tracing back the origins of camera and lens brands and manufacturers, and this post brings up one of those llttle threads for me. When Kyocera bought Yashica, the company (Yashica) was an integrated lens and camera manufacturer. But Yashica had acquired its lens manufacturing capability only a few years previously by buying Tomioka Optical in the late 1960s. Tomioka had been supplying Yashica with lenses for a couple of decades (and supplying lenses to other camera companies, too). The Japanese-made Contax lenses were manufactured in the Tomioka factory.

"Tomioka, in turn, was founded by an optical engineer who had worked at Nikon from its beginnings in 1917. At Nikon, he would certainly have worked with (apprenticed under?) one of the German engineers (some had worked previously with Zeiss) that Nikon had hired to teach them how to be a lens and glass manufacturer. Connections within connections.

"Something of Tomioka still lives at Kyocera."

Mike replies: So that was it! Tomioka. And I never knew exactly who manufactured the early Japanese-made Contax C/Y lenses. A piece of the story that has always been missing for me. Thank you my friend.

Pierre Charbonneau: "Mike, Have you ever sprung for the Contax G?"

Mike replies: No, but I followed its introduction closely and as it happened I was the first writer in N. America to receive the press kit for the G1. Another of my .15 seconds of fame: I was the first photo writer to receive T-Max 100 and 400 films for testing. One precious roll of each! Oh, how I brag.  :-)

Oskar Ojala: "I never owned a Contax, but since getting into full-frame mirrorless I realized that all my lens options are either sharp on sharper and adapting older manual focus lenses works better now than ever. So I started playing with the idea of getting some older Zeiss lenses for Contax, did some research and bought a 85mm ƒ/1.4, which I like very much for its look. This lead to me thinking 'why not get a Contax body for the original experience? surely they must be cheap now.' I was partly correct; the basic Contax body is indeed inexpensive, but the S2b, which would be appealing since the electronics failing do not render the camera inoperable, is quite expensive and rare. I'm not really surprised though, I doubt many people were tempted by an expensive full manual SLR in the mid '90s."

Mike replies: See if you can find an RX. I liked that one, and it might not be so dear.

Phil Aynsley: "Your words on the 'phobia' regarding cameras featuring batteries, or rather what happened if the batteries failed, reminded me of the lengths Canon went to with the design of the 1981 Canon New F1 (my all time favourite camera, with the T90 a close second). As a Canon technician at the time I could fully appreciate the elegant engineering that went into the mechanism that converted the shutter release from electronic to mechanical by simply removing the 6V battery."

Dan: "Kyocera is an interesting company that seems to get in and out of businesses. In the early '80s they made some top-notch high-end stereo equipment. Then went out of business in that field in the mid-'80s if I remember correctly. I still have my Kyocera receiver from 1982."

John: "I loved my Contax N and G kits and briefly the 645 MF camera as well, before all fell victim to the digital onslaught. There’s a follow-up story: when Kyocera left the business, PhaseOne wanted to buy the tooling and production lines for the 645 cameras. Kyocera refused and destroyed everything. The Contax name went back to Zeiss, which strangely enough doesn’t use it for its new digital camera."

Barry Reid: "Very interesting story about the S2/S2b. It’s amazing how expensive those bodies remain, even now. The 'batteries are for wimps' hair shirt mentality seems to be strong in many film photography fans.

"I do have the AX which is just about the only Contax body, along with the RTS III, which is big enough to counterbalance the Zeiss 28–85mm and 35–135mm zooms! Although, much like the Zeiss zooms, The AX doesn’t seem so large compared with modern DSLRs. It’s still quite an extraordinary experience shooting with one. Even more extraordinarily it’s actually quite an effective AF camera and able to hold its own against the early screw drive AF bodies, say pre-1990. With the PC-Distagon attached I believe it remains the only camera to allow AF with a shift lens.

"The RTS II the most stylish and usable of the RTS line. The original model went too far along with the ‘Real-Time System’ idea—the separation of metering preview and shutter release made it awkward. Something the RTS II fixed along with adding TTL Flash. If only they had added a spot meter option.... Unfortunately that only came with the ginormous beast that is the RTSIII. The 139Q is sweet though, a mini-me of the RTS II and probably nicer to use too.

"However the 159 which superseded it has by far the best spec (fastest shutter, highest flash sync, best selection of modes) of any of the non-motorised Contax bodies. The 159 with 25mm, 50mm and 85mm ƒ/2.8 was the camera my 15-year-old self would have most liked to get his hands on in the mid '80s. Thanks to the end of Contax plus the DSLR revolution, I’ve been able to pick up a really good collection of Contax bodies over the past 10 years or so. Sadly all the hype around the T2 and T3 seems to be lifting the SLR prices now."

Mike replies: The 159 was one of those cameras that always fascinated me but always remained somehow over the horizon, just out of sight. I do believe I finally saw one, long after they were new. I seem to vaguely recall that I bought a used one but learned on trying to get it CLA'd that it had a fatal flaw and couldn't be fixed.

Jerzy Z: "Was it really stolen? I bought an RTS II with 45mm ƒ/2.8 from you in the '90s through listserv for $460, if I remember well. ...Unless you had two copies of the camera, of course. I still have it and it’s an awesome camera. Thanks again for selling it. Best wishes for the New Year."

Mike replies: That's awesome that you remember that. And cool that you still have it. That was my second RTS II. The first one I bought in '85 when I got my first real job after graduating. You could still buy them new then. That was the one that was stolen.

Vijay: It’s intetesting to me that your last two posts have been about the 40mm focal length and Contax cameras. Several years ago, I purchased the Voigtlander Ultron 40mm lens to use with a Nikon FE2, inspired by your earlier article about the focal length. I loved the focal length but didn’t like the eyepoint of the FE2 so I sold the lens. Another article you wrote about viewfinders and eyepoints led me to the Contax Aria, which I love using for its light weight and great viewfinder. For the longest time, I had to 'settle' for using it with a 50mm lens. But much to my surprise, I found a 40mm Ultron in Contax mount listed on eBay a couple of years ago. I bought it and now enjoy the best of both Mike Johnston inspired tool choices! It’s the only film setup I use regularly in my kit. Thanks for your writing over the years!"

Mike replies: Very cool. You're more me-ish than me!