[Leica] A mystery

["David W. Almy" <dalmy@mindspring.com>]

Good morning, all,

(or afternoon, or evening, whichever applies to your hemisphere)

A couple of weeks ago a cold front moved down from Canada into the Great
Lakes area, creating beautiful conditions for pictures. I called my
travel agent and was on a plane to Cleveland. Once there, I drove to the
Burke Lakefront Airport (at the base of the city, right on the shore of
Lake Erie) where the good folks at the Business Aircraft Group lent me a
Cessna Citation II and a Beech King Air B100. With the help of airport
operations and the tower and two volunteer pilots, we closed the shorter
runway, positioned the aircraft (engines running, lights ablaze)
artfully against the Cleveland skyline and I shot two rolls as the light
faded just after dusk. Packed up and was home several days later, after
more shooting elsewhere. 

The camera was my trusty R8 with the 70-180 Vario-Apo-Elmarit on a solid
Manfrotto tripod at F4 and about 90mm per Erwin, mirror locked up,
2-second electronic timer shutter trigger delay used to eliminate the
shakes, on Kodachrome 25 (first roll) and Ektachrome E100VS (second) for
fun, bracketing all over the place. The photo is to run 13x20 inches
(old LIFE mag. format) in a new brochure I'm working on as the backdrop
for the opening essay, so I was excited to see the developed film. 

When it arrived, I was astonished to see two rolls of blurry pictures.
Like a car wreck, I couldn't help but keep looking at them. 72 blurry
shots. What the hell had happened? Oddly, it seemed that the far right
side of the images were "in," but that most everything to the left was
out. The lens was new and not heavily tested. Could this be some kind of
weird decentering issue? (Leica quality control, again!!!) Could the
film have gone through the camera, both rolls, cock-eyed somehow? Could
I just have mis-focused, or knocked the ring after focusing, which I
(stupidly) never rechecked? It was near dark, after all.

Ten days passed. Back from another shoot (I carry two M6s, which I use
more than the R8), I had a messenger coming to pick up film late one
afternoon and had shot only half a role in the R8. Might as well shoot
flower pictures to finish off the roll, I though, so I went to change
lenses and...the lens wouldn't come off! What is THIS all about??? The
lens just didn't want to turn. Holding the camera at eye level with the
lens pointed straight up and turning it 360 degrees, I was astonished to
see the stainless steel lens mount on the camera warped about about the
4 o'clock position. It was buckled up off the camera about a 1/16th of
an inch+ at one point, causing the lens to mis-align with the film plane
and making lens removable difficult. It was almost as if someone had put
a screwdriver under the lens mount and pried one side of it up off the
camera. No signs or indications of how this happened to the camera, or
on any of three R lenses. Wow. OK, the old warped stainless steel lens
mount excuse. THAT will impress those lab guys!

Bought a new R8 the next morning (w/new, funky blue readouts in the
viewfinder) and shipped the old one back to NJ for a new lens mount.
Have to reshoot Cleveland next week, after the Labor Day air show clears
out. You might think that, with the WYSIWYG viewfinder of an SLR, that
this misalignment would be visible, but it wasn't, at least not to my
newly 40-year-old eyes. Perhaps I just looked at the right side of the
groundglass. Who knows. But be careful. Every so often you should check
to see that your lens mount is as Solms intended it. Stainless steel
apparently isn't as strong as I thought it was.

Mystery solved.

Regards,

David W. Almy
Annapolis