Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Martin's advice is all sound and good, but it seems nobody has mentioned one of the most common tricks: BLACK TAPE, or silver/gray color for chrome lenses and bodies. Black (or silver) tape makes a brand new lens lens look like an old banger in less than a minute. Take that APO-SUMMICRON-M 1:2/90 ASPH Martin mentions below, it has all that written in LARGE CAPITALS on the most prominent place of the lens. It screams NEW!!! Just cover it with black tape and nobody will suspect this is a new lens. Best of all, the action is reversible, you can make your lens look new in less than three seconds: just remove the tape. And then put the tape back again to make it look old and so on and so on...... Now for the ultimate trick: you cover up the f-stop engravings too. You can still alsost see where they are if you use thin enough tape and press the tape into the recessed engravings. Do not forget to cover the feet/meter engravings too. Nobody needs these - or do you work with a tape measure? (Please do not restart the dof argument .) Chris >The girlfriend's not a problem. This list is a wonderful resource of tricks >and techniques on how to hide equipment from your SO. It's made even easier >by the introduction of Cosina/Voigtlander to the market, since they will >shortly have a 21mm, 25mm, and 35mm lenses in the same mount and the >viewfinders look the same, so you can get all three and pass them off as a >single lens. Their 12mm and 25mm f/1.9 also look rather simliar at a casual >glance, so there's another two for the price of one. > >Leica lenses are a little more tricky, but the basic rule is that anything >with a square hood is a single lens, so the 28mm f/2 and 24mm f/2.8 and 35mm >f/1.4 will count as one. And of course you need that 90mm APO/ASPH! Doggy >headshots! > >Of course, the real joy is in bodies. If there is only a limitation on the >number of lenses you can buy, count yourself lucky!! Black paint is the way >to go these days, and you have an interesting and wide choice of either the >old M2/M3/M4s or the new M6 LHSA, M6 Dragon, M6 Oresund, M6 Millenium, and >others. A good trick is to equip similarly looking bodies (say, all black >paint bodies) with a similarly coloured SoftRelease, and dissimilar bodies >with a dissimilar coloured one. The softie then becomes the distinguishing >mark between "different" bodies and you can have five black paint M6s all >with a red softie, and no-one will be the wiser!! > >Ideally, you want one body per lens, to save you the trouble of having to >change lenses. So, it looks pretty good: "One" new lens a month (i.e., a >bunch that look sufficiently similar) and a body to match that "one" lens >(i.e., one for each lens). Maybe you can put up a page with Dog PAWs? > >M. > >-- >Martin Howard | >Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU | "Close doesn't shoot any rabbit" >email: howard.390@osu.edu | -- Swedish idiom >www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ +--------------------------------------- - -- Christer Almqvist D-20255 Hamburg, Germany and/or F-50590 Regnéville-sur-Mer, France