Bessa R2M

[timothyd]

Hey, I just got my first rangefinder, the Bessa R2M. I have a few questions. I've read about people receiving new Bessa's right out of the box that are not aligned correctly. What does this mean, and how would I be able to tell if this is the case with my own camera?

Further more, this is my first experience focusing with a rangefinder, and I am wondering how I can tell whether things in the foreground and/or background are in focus. Because the focusing rectangle is small, and in the middle of the frame. If I am shooting a person 4 ft away in the left side of the frame, in front of a background which is 15 ft away, the focusing rectangle will be on the background, so I can align this, but does this mean the background will be in focus and not the person (who is not within the focusing rectangle)?

And how come Voigtlander didn't make the rectangle much larger? or even the whole frame? Is that even possible?

 

[Sam N]

If the rectangle were the whole frame, there would always be something out of focus (unless you were shooting a flat wall) so it would be very difficult to focus on focusing one thing.

The thing to do is to use the "focus and recompose" method. Center the person in your viewfinder, focus on them, and then recompose the image so that the person is where you want them to be. This is accurate enough for all but the tiniest of depth-of-field.

Once you get some film back, you can check it to see if the camera is focusing accurately. If the photos don't seem in focus, you can try focus test charts (http://focustestchart.com/chart.html). It's very rare for a camera to be misaligned from the factory, so you will most likely not have to do any of this. Nobody posts threads about how their item was working as expected, so Internet forums can make it seem like defective items are much more common than they actually are.

 

[spiderfrank]

Don't worry, when I bought my Bessa R, there where a lot of topics of people (Leica owners? ;-) ) concerned about some "fragility" of the rangefinder, and possibility to have it misaligned, ecc... It was three years ago, and in three years the camera was with me under the saddle on my scooter (vibration test?), and drop two times on the concrete (one time with in a bag, last time "naked"), and now of course there are some scratches in the bottom corners, but the ragefinder alignment is still perfect...

Enjoy your new camera, it's a little jewel!

Ciao
Franco
ps: and R2M is even more sturdy than the R, that has a plastic body...