Sears 35rf

I figure I've talked about the high end so I suppose I should talk about the low end as well.

This is the Sears 35rf, possibly from the late-70s or early-80s, but I'm not really too certain about that.  It's a store-brand clone of the Ricoh 35rf which I understand is a simplified version of the more nicely constructed Ricoh 500G, but the lenses used in all three cameras are the same.

With a 40mm f/2.8 lens this is no Canonet QL17, but I found this camera at a thrift store for $4 which included the working Sears brand flash.  Made mostly from stamped steel and plastic, this little camera certainly feels...um...inexpensive, but operationally, there's not much to complain about and it 's much lighter than a QL17.  Unlike the Canonet the light meter still functions when you're shooting manually, but there is also a shutter priority mode in which the camera indicates via match-needle the aperture being selected.  Fortunately the camera uses a standard 1.5V alkaline battery which is easy to come by.

The rangefinder patch is on the dim side, unsurprising given the inexpensive nature of the camera, but it's at least reasonably accurate when you can see it.  The focus throw on the lens is fairly short so there's not much use for terribly accurate focusing anyway, and with a maximum f/2.8 aperture you're not going to be getting super shallow depth of field to begin with.  The brightlines are also kind of difficult to see in dim lighting, but they're not really that accurate anyway so you're not loosing out on much.  The lens isn't bad, at least up to compact standards, but it's nothing all that special either.  The ASA rating only goes up to 800, so if you were wanting to push some HP5 to 1600 or shoot some TMZ3200 to compensate for the slowish aperture you'll have to deduct a stop or two from the indicated value.

All of this sounds like I'm pretty negative on the camera, but I'm really not.  No, the rangefinder experience is not up to Leica standards--does anyone honestly expect that from these pocket rangefinders--but it's perfectly usable and probably preferable to your basic AF 1980s compact cameras.  In fact, what so impressed me about this camera, was that in something smaller than a Walkman (the sort that plays cassettes rather than MP3s), and probably cheaper too, you had a camera that gave you all the manual control that you could expect from a much larger and more expensive SLR type camera.  Yeah it was cheaply made, but it was a cheap camera.

Anyway, for awhile when I was in college this was my go to travel camera and it rode along everyday in my bag, and made a couple trips to Chicago and St. Louis with me.  I was never unhappy with it, but ultimately I replaced it with an Olympus Stylus Epic mostly for the built-in flash.

Examples:

Leica M2

Well I figured since I've got Leica's on the brain, I'd might as well get it out of my system.

So this is my lovely 1958 Leica M2 and the equally lovely 2008 Carl Zeiss T* Planar 50mm f/2.0 ZM.  On top you will notice the later model MR-4 Leica-Meter.

A few years ago, I had this massive camera collection with one conspicuous omission:  I had no serious rangefinders.  Sure I had a couple of Canonets and some Soviet-built LTM copies, and some other consumer grade rangefinders, but nothing...dare I say...professional.  So I decided, gosh darn it, that I was just going to do it and go right for the top and get a Leica.  I certainly spent a good deal of time considering alternatives:  Konica Hexar RF, Contax G2, Voigtlander Bessa, Canon Model 7.  But nothing other than a Leica was going to be a Leica.

So after checking around and spending a lot of time going through the used market, I determined that the M2 was the best buy at the time, and the lower magnification viewfinder allowed the use of a 35mm lens better than an M3 did and was considerably cheaper than an M4.  Of course the M2 has no built in light meter, but the MR-4 Leica-Meter was actually fairly inexpensive and worked far better than I ever expected it to.  Sure you have to manually reset the frame counter and it's not as quick to load and rewind as some of the later models, but I don't think there's a prettier M-body except maybe for the MP.

The body is really like no other film camera that I've ever used.  Compact, light, quiet, extremely well built, but still elegant.  I used to own a few Canon F-1s and they were massively heavy and felt like solid bricks of metal, but if the Leica was a fine blade, the Canons were cudgels; both deadly weapons for sure, but obviously of different character.

Using the M2 is really effortless in a way that I didn't expect considering it's age and relative awkwardness, but compared to say the M8 that I use most of the time now, the M2 just gets out of the way.  I'm not really sure if it's the character of film versus digital capture, but once I've shot a photo with the M2 I'm looking for the next one, not thinking about whether I should check the histogram or not.

Lens selection is a whole different ball-game in Leica land.  The Leica lenses are perfection, no two ways about it.  And there's a lot of people out there that would say that it's a waste to buy a Leica body and not use Leica lenses on it.  I call baloney on that.  There's no one else that makes a body like a Leica, maybe a Zeiss-Ikon or a Voigtlander, and I have picked up a Bessa R2a, but when I go out shooting film it's usually the M2 that goes along.  If you enjoy rangefinder shooting, but you're not wealthy enough to buy top-tier lenses, does that mean you should stick to your SLRs and hope that someday you're flushed with cash?  No, of course not, get the body that enables you to shoot the way you want, and then get the lenses you can afford.

So once I had the body I set about looking for lenses.  I temporarily used the old Jupiter-8 50mm f/2.0 that I had on the M2 with an adapter, buy I found that I couldn't quite get infinity focus with that combo.  It was a pretty nice lens for what it was though, and it helped me settle on getting a 50/2.0 of some sort as my first lens.  I narrowed the search down to a used Leitz 50mm f/2.0 Summicron-M, and I suspected that I'd go with the Dual-Range Summicron as it was the most affordable.  But after looking long and hard at the Zeiss ZM line of lenses, I realized I could get a brand new 50mm f/2.0 Planar for the same price that the Dual-Range Summicrons were going for used, and it had been acknowledged to be nearly as good a performer as the current Summicron.  I figured it'd be good enough for me, and I wouldn't have to mess around looking for just the right used lens.  So I sprung for the Zeiss, and my word, it's a beautiful lens.

Examples (not all with the Zeiss):