Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/05/31
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Sorry I'm lumping a bunch of subjects together - too tired to separate them. Just back from shooting a race, part of the women's World Cup of cycling here in Montreal. My M6 was mighty lonely - nary another Leica in sight among dozens of photographers. I use AF a lot. I bought an F5 for exactly this reason and it is an extremely useful function. Many of the best photos are taken in hurried situations and there's no shame in letting the camera do something as mundane as focussing for you. But ALL autofocus cameras share one tragic flaw: they do not accept Leica lenses. The difference between even the best Japanese-made lenses and today's Leica glass is obvious to me every week on my own kitchen light table. It is a fact remarked on by most photo editors I work with. So AF is always a trade-off for me: focus speed convenience vs. ultimate optical quality. It's a Faustian bargain. I used to be one of those who'd get into the "wish list" discussions about what Leica should do for the next generation of M cameras. Not any more. My only wish is that Solms should continue making the M6 and not branch off into tangential designs. Oh sure, there may be a few minor details I think they could tweak on today's M6. Nothing even worth mentioning here though. No new shutter for me. I like the fact that my M cameras will be with me until I can no longer see or hold them steady to shoot. I think breaking dramatically new ground for the M camera now will be a sign of more trouble to come for everybody. Don't get me wrong. I love Konica's Hexar RF (although we have not yet resolved that pesky flange-film distance issue yet, have we gentlemen?). I use it and it does things I like in certain situations when a Leica M won't do as well. I've recommended the Hexar RF to a few LUGgers and I think they'll agree with me. I hope Konica makes some little changes to their camera too. But I also hope these two cameras remain diverging paths that never meet. East is east and west is west. Sometimes a client will find in one of my photos an image within an image - usually within a horizontal. They'll ask if they can crop to get something I may not have seen or captured. For me, the customer is always right and so I agree with what they want to do. But for pictures I enlarge for my own use and pleasure, hang in my home or give as gifts, I never crop at all. I've beaten the bushes to find a printer who understands what I mean by full frame and he does a great job enlarging my slides. He's here in Montreal, a Dane named Soren Suse, a master really - I can provide his numbers if anyone is interested. For me, in-camera framing is a primordial aspect of creating a successful image. It's much more important to me than focussing by turning a ring with my own fingers. If I find later that I need to crop, it means to me that I didn't do my job right - I wasn't really seeing what was going on right there in front of my eyes. Emanuel Lowi Montreal