[Leica] My First Leica

[kapner at earthlink.net (Leonard J Kapner)]

Reading Brian's remembrance got me to thinking about my first Leica, a  
high school graduation gift from my parents over 50 years ago.

One of my extracurricular activities at a small boy's boarding school  
in western Pennsylvania was making photographs for the student  
newspaper. There was another boy, several years ahead of me named Bill  
Pierce, who had a natural eye for composition and whom I followed  
around, learning how to use the small Speed Graphic camera that made  
the photos appearing in print. Bill later went on to a distinguished  
career as a photojournalist.

 From that experience and fondling my Uncle Al's Rolleiflex from time  
to time, I grew to love making black-and-white photographs and  
developing them. When my parents, grateful that I had survived the  
rigors of a very competitive secondary school and was indeed  
graduating, asked me what I wanted for a graduation gift, I said "A  
LEICA!" My father didn't know what to do but a newspaper photographer  
friend of his, Morris Berman, helped guide him to Penn Camera and a  
specialist who outfitted me with a IIIg body, a 50mm Elmar, 35mm  
Summaron and 90mm Elmar lens kit and a Weston Master III meter.

This last-of-the-Barnack Leicas served me well and faithfully through  
college, graduate school and a working life - for 30 years until, one  
day, the shutter failed and I put the camera and its lenses away,  
tempted by modernity to invest in an M6 and a small suite of faster  
lenses, a kit that grew gradually over the past 20 years or so and  
that I continue to use to this day.

About four years ago as we were getting ready to move, I came upon my  
old IIIg kit in the back of a closet and sent everything to DAG for  
renovation. What came back six weeks later was a new old camera kit,  
ready for at least thirty more years of confident use. While I don't  
take it out much any more as digital photography has become just too  
convenient, I still DO use it and love its reliable unobtrusiveness as  
well as the fond memories of the parents who gave it to me, now passed  
into eternity.

Len Kapner