[Leica] AF and rangefinders: one photographer's experience

["Mark E Davison" <Mark_E_Davison@email.msn.com>]

There has been much discussion recently about AF and SLR systems. I thought
I would put in my 2 cents about AF and smaller cameras, framing my thoughts
in terms of a brief history of my photographic experience.

I learned to take pictures first on a Brownie Box camera, and then on my
dad's Kodak rangefinder.

The first camera I actually owned was a little Ricoh rangefinder, which had
lousy optics, but was a very handy size, and even had
a built-in meter that worked. I loved that camera, took it with me
everywhere, and took some nicely composed and interesting pictures with it.
My parents even framed some of the pictures and kept them on their wall for
years. In math graduate school I joined the campus camera club, learned to
develop and print B&W, marvelled at Ansel Adams
photos in the Sierra Club books, read about the zone system, and tried to
figure out what Minor White was talking about (He is the master of Zone
meets Zen, I think).

Against the better advice of my photo mentors, I bought an Olympus OM1 (I
was attracted to the compact size, and the price was right). I could only
afford two lenses for it (a  50mm 1.8, and a 100mm 2.8 lens for portraits)
but that didn't stop me from taking a few good pictures: flotsam and jetsam
on the beach, my girlfriend,
etc. I lived in Northern California, and the ever changing light was
constantly
inspiring. I printed my own stuff back then, and loved watching the images
come out in the trays. Photography was magic, and intoxicating.

After graduate school, I let photography slide for a long time, as I was
always so busy, and lost my easy darkroom access. Nothing but occasional
snapshots with the Olympus, indifferently printed by the local drug store.

Just last year, I decided to take up photography again. I was inspired by a
trip our family had taken to Sitka Alaska, during June when the eagles
gather on the coast to scrounge salmon guts left over from fishing. I tried
capturing the scenes with the old OM1, but nothing came out right:
everything was badly exposed. Time for repair, or a new camera.

Getting back into the market for photographic gear was like Rip van Winkle
emerging from a long sleep. My Ricoh had fallen into disrepair (rotten foam,
broken rangefinder), and the local repair gurus declared it to be "beyond
economic repair".  My OM1 had gotten long in the tooth. I had it "repaired",
but the
meter just isn't reliable anymore.  I ended up buying a new OM4Ti, so as to
have a serviceable new camera, and some more Zuiko glass. In particular, I
bought a Zuiko 90mm f2 macro lens, a stout tripod, and started photographing
my garden with some success. (I didn't have the Leica religion then, so had
no inkling I would want to do anything but stick with Olympus).

I figured that to get better with photography I still needed a smaller
camera which I would be comfortable carrying with me everyday, and which was
quiet, and unobtrusive, so I could take pictures of people in natural light
(I greatly prefer soft natural light to the artifical look I get with
flash).  I went out to find a small pocketable rangefinder which would allow
manual overrides, and
ended up with a Nikon 35Ti.  While shopping for the Ti, I had examined a
Leica M6, admired its amazingly bright viewfinder image (remember I was
mentally comparing it to my old Ricoh), lovingly fingered  the quiet
shutter, but
dismissed the whole thing as hideously overpriced, and a little too large. I
passed on
a Minolta CLE and a Leica CL for fear that such old cameras might have short
service
lives due to lack of spare parts.

To make a long story short, I was never totally satisifed with the Nikon. In
its way it is a lovely camera, but its active auto-focus system won't
reliably focus on water, shiny cars, flowers, tree branches, or items behind
store windows. Worse yet, there is no feedback in the viewfinder on what the
camera thinks the focus distance is: the camera will quietly focus at
infinity instead of on the water in front of you. (These are problems the
marketing literature doesn't even hint at.)

Now the Nikon has manual focus override, but its not so easy to use. For
many
shots, the working procedure is: raise the camera to your eye, depress the
shutter halfway to get the autofocus system to try to focus on the object of
interest, take the camera away from your eye, look at the analog read-out on
top of the camera and see if the focus distance is reasonable. If it is not,
then punch a button, and dial in your guesstimated distance, or pick another
object which you think is at the same distance and get the AF system to try
again.

I never had that much trouble with my old Ricoh!

To be fair, the Nikon does a great job on solid objects and people's faces.
Also I found that the small size was less intimidating to people than the
Olympus (small camera but many lenses are quite big), and it was very quiet.
I got some great candid shots of my relatives with this camera, but it has
really ended up being a "yuppie" point and shoot, rather than the general
purpose small camera I had wanted.

I went off to look for a rangefinder in current production with a better
focussing system. The Contax G1 and G2 certainly seemed to focus better when
I tested them in a camera shop, but they are just plain noisy, in spite of
their marketing claims. God forbid you should take a picture with one of
these when an orchestra is rehearsing.

And thus I backed myself into buying an M6, with three lenses: 35, 50 and
90. This, as many of you know, is a bit of leap when you actually add up all
the prices, but I figured if I truly loved the camera, and USED it
constantly, the purchase price would be worth it. I gulped, and bought the
whole outfit, new, on one day.

Using the M6 was like coming home again. Here it is, a plain-old camera,
albeit a finely crafted one! Great viewfinder, precise split image, nicely
damped focussing, simple meter. No trying to guess when the autofocus system
is going to fail, no trying to outsmart the too-clever-by-half matrix
autoexposure system which is still trying to get shadow details when I want
the shadows left black.

I am still in love with the camera. I take it with me everyday off to
school, sometimes with all the lenses, sometimes just with one lens when I
want to concentrate on seeing how the world looks through one focal length.
I take photographs everyday. Sometimes just one, sometimes a whole roll.
Photography is intoxicating again. The prints I get off my ink-jet might not
be museum quality, but they are lovely in their own way, and far better than
the drugstore stuff, and in color!