Those are real Rangefinder Cameras.
I let my hair grow out and act as a natural hood over the viewfinder.
Pentax 85/4.5 UAT on the Z5. I could sell Two of my lenses and get an M11. But this would be one of them.
Why Does Leica Not Make AE M Lenses?
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I let my hair grow out and act as a natural hood over the viewfinder.
Pentax 85/4.5 UAT on the Z5. I could sell Two of my lenses and get an M11. But this would be one of them.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
Professionally, I presume? As that's nearly 40 rolls a week...
pgk
Well-known
Because it would require so much redesign that all that would be left would be the M mount and the rangefinder. There are plenty of cameras that offer multimode operation already so building what would be effectively a new camera system, which would be hampered by the narrow M mount and a rangefinder with limited accuracy, makes no commercial whatsoever given the current state of the photographic marketplace (too many manufacturers offering an excess of expensive options and a minimal lower end sales due to camera phones).
wlewisiii
Veteran
I like my M 240 lots. I might, someday upgrade to a M10 but I don't see going past that because of the changes they made with the M11. That's just my preference though. What I have is close enough to a mirrorless for my needs as it is and for that matter, I rarely even remember that it does live view because I don't need it. I have my classic lenses and I enjoy using them for what I like making pictures of. My idea of what I enjoy taking can be seen here: William's Instagram
It's half meditation and half photography when you're using a rangefinder in the wild.
If I'm not using my Leica, I'm probably using one of my Nikons (D7100, F4 &, on payday, either a D750 of a D810. Need a plain prism F2 sometime as well 😉) as I have a nice, if small, collection of Nikkors too. If I want automation, P A S or M modes, matrix metering, yada yada, the DSLR is perfect for that - for me. That F4 is a real blast from the past for me - I hear AE and that camera and a roll of film is a great back to the future moment for me and a 50/1.4 😎
It's half meditation and half photography when you're using a rangefinder in the wild.
If I'm not using my Leica, I'm probably using one of my Nikons (D7100, F4 &, on payday, either a D750 of a D810. Need a plain prism F2 sometime as well 😉) as I have a nice, if small, collection of Nikkors too. If I want automation, P A S or M modes, matrix metering, yada yada, the DSLR is perfect for that - for me. That F4 is a real blast from the past for me - I hear AE and that camera and a roll of film is a great back to the future moment for me and a 50/1.4 😎
Godfrey
somewhat colored
Of course. I'd do 20-30 rolls on weekends for assignments. 🙂
Ko.Fe.
Lenses 35/21 Gears 46/20
wlewisiii
Veteran
Eh, my local lab is pretty good, though if I do decide to get serious about film again I will buy my own scanner. Even then we'd be only talking a roll or three a week on a busy week and most shooting still being digital. Reality is digital is better all the way around; film is for the fun of it.
Ko.Fe.
Lenses 35/21 Gears 46/20
I'll see my eventual going past M-E 220, once made in China batteries are available as priced accordingly for the rest of the line.
I have added X2, and paid $50 for two new batteries. This is right for made in China batteries, comparing to grossly overpriced made in China batteries with Leica word on it.
And X2 is even more meditative than M-E 220. Been made in Germany it is not a made in Japan X series 🙂 On exterior feel 🙂
And any advanced operations required extra effort. It can't do auto ISO with aperture and shutter speed are manually set.
So, I have to dial the dials.
Ko.Fe.
Lenses 35/21 Gears 46/20
I have no local lab. Need to drive four times to get it done. And honestly, I never experienced "film is fun" thing. Shooting was nice, the rest is just repetitive, time consuming routine. The only reason why I spend 2012-2022 on three rolls per day or week is because I'm fascinated by BW darkroom prints. Switching weekly between film and digital never worked for me. With film I have to use regularly one and only film camera and film brand, ISO to have predictable results. I don't even want to change focal length much, because I'm not a cropper.
But I understand, for many the operation process is fun. Would Winogrand still use film M? He mostly liked been taking pictures, doesn't seems darkroom much.
Here is something very sufficient with film M, which has smooth shutter speed dial (not all of them have it, but digital ones all comes with smooth shutter speed dial) and lens with light to move focus tab, aperture ring. It is not Nikon F feel of agricultural machinery. I feel much confident with film M than with digital M. But every time I want to use it, the huge amount of time to get result on darkroom print stops me.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
I dislike using the words "better" or "worse" with respect to film vs digital capture. They are imprecise and ambiguous in meaning. So much depends on so many different things, with either recording medium, that positing a truly objective test is at very least difficult.
I tend nowadays to dance back and forth between digital capture and instant film (or instant print, depending upon your preferences in nomenclature). My host of Minox, 35mm, and medium format film cameras all get used but much more infrequently. The reasons for this have little to do with the ultimate quality of the results, but from a practical perspective the end to end post-capture workflow is much less work and much faster with digital capture and instant film, allowing me to see what I'm doing with more immediacy—while the shooting situation is still fresh in my mind, as it were.
Between these two, digital capture has oodles more dynamic range, sensitivity, and acutance to work with, as well as far greater consistency and reliability. So I (and you) see much more of the photos I make with digital capture than with instant film. And there's nothing the worse for that, as my digital cameras (all of them!) produce just plain amazingly good quality photographs to the point that it's what I do with the camera and how I render the results that establishes the bottom line.
That said, there are imaging qualities of instant film that keep drawing me in ... they're not acutance, or resolution, or dynamic range in a simple sense; they're more the peculiar and specific combination of a particular film's response curve and chemical rendering against the reality of my vision of a given scene. Getting the exposure just right with the narrow latitude of this capture medium and with the mostly automated exposure systems of my cameras is just plain tricky, and the cameras are individual and a bit quirky, and that altogether poses a challenge which is fun to engage with.
Minox, 35mm, and medium format film poses much less of a challenge in terms of the film itself and the cameras' behaviors. My sense of proper exposure for this medium is almost without thought, from long, long use of these sorts of capture media, and the film, exposure meters, and cameras are all pretty consistent and reliable in their precision and ability to do what I want based on the settings I make. The processing of film and subsequent scanning operations create a good bit of additional time-to-render due to the practical necessities of having to deploy the equipment, prepare it for the effort, do the job, and then clean up and put everything away—I'm not blessed with a spare room to turn into a permanent darkroom lab such that I can leave the setup in place for instant access. As a result, I tend to shoot five to ten rolls of film, of whatever formats, and batch up the processing and scanning to devote one or another whole days' effort to, with the end result being that my productivity with these traditional film formats is much lower than productivity with digital capture or instant film. Lower productivity, stretched out over often several months, means less learning—no longer being in-the-moment but rather analyzing from a distance in time. And yet, there are qualities of these formats in film that are often difficult to obtain with instant film and/or digital capture, and the feel is different.
So what is better or worse? I get similar percentages of what I'm satisfied with from all three recording media, depending on how much attention I paid in the shooting and the processing, and the rendering. Over time, digital capture costs me less per exposure unit and instant film costs the most. Instant film has the singular benefit of being able to hand a subject a physical, unique print NOW, just after the moment of exposure, which neither of the other mediums can do, and that plays a part to the advantage of the medium.
In the end, none (at least with today's equipment) is better or worse, they're all just different and bespeak different kinds of photographic opportunity. At least for me. And I pick which one to work with for a given session idea based on what my proclivities and intent for the session might be. "Just walking about photos" I'm much more likely to carry a digital camera. "Going to a party" beggars an instant film camera for the community entertainment of making and handing out prints immediately. "Working on an idea to explore a medium and format's response" almost always means some trading back and forth between traditional film and one of the digital cameras as the ideas develop and mutate ...
It's all good. For me, I've let go of didactic truisms about which is better or worse. I concentrate on what I want to produce and use what I know, and what I discover in doing, to guide my choices in medium, lens, exposure, and subject with the intent of producing photographs that satisfy me, and maybe a couple other people who care to look at them. 😉
G
I tend nowadays to dance back and forth between digital capture and instant film (or instant print, depending upon your preferences in nomenclature). My host of Minox, 35mm, and medium format film cameras all get used but much more infrequently. The reasons for this have little to do with the ultimate quality of the results, but from a practical perspective the end to end post-capture workflow is much less work and much faster with digital capture and instant film, allowing me to see what I'm doing with more immediacy—while the shooting situation is still fresh in my mind, as it were.
Between these two, digital capture has oodles more dynamic range, sensitivity, and acutance to work with, as well as far greater consistency and reliability. So I (and you) see much more of the photos I make with digital capture than with instant film. And there's nothing the worse for that, as my digital cameras (all of them!) produce just plain amazingly good quality photographs to the point that it's what I do with the camera and how I render the results that establishes the bottom line.
That said, there are imaging qualities of instant film that keep drawing me in ... they're not acutance, or resolution, or dynamic range in a simple sense; they're more the peculiar and specific combination of a particular film's response curve and chemical rendering against the reality of my vision of a given scene. Getting the exposure just right with the narrow latitude of this capture medium and with the mostly automated exposure systems of my cameras is just plain tricky, and the cameras are individual and a bit quirky, and that altogether poses a challenge which is fun to engage with.
Minox, 35mm, and medium format film poses much less of a challenge in terms of the film itself and the cameras' behaviors. My sense of proper exposure for this medium is almost without thought, from long, long use of these sorts of capture media, and the film, exposure meters, and cameras are all pretty consistent and reliable in their precision and ability to do what I want based on the settings I make. The processing of film and subsequent scanning operations create a good bit of additional time-to-render due to the practical necessities of having to deploy the equipment, prepare it for the effort, do the job, and then clean up and put everything away—I'm not blessed with a spare room to turn into a permanent darkroom lab such that I can leave the setup in place for instant access. As a result, I tend to shoot five to ten rolls of film, of whatever formats, and batch up the processing and scanning to devote one or another whole days' effort to, with the end result being that my productivity with these traditional film formats is much lower than productivity with digital capture or instant film. Lower productivity, stretched out over often several months, means less learning—no longer being in-the-moment but rather analyzing from a distance in time. And yet, there are qualities of these formats in film that are often difficult to obtain with instant film and/or digital capture, and the feel is different.
So what is better or worse? I get similar percentages of what I'm satisfied with from all three recording media, depending on how much attention I paid in the shooting and the processing, and the rendering. Over time, digital capture costs me less per exposure unit and instant film costs the most. Instant film has the singular benefit of being able to hand a subject a physical, unique print NOW, just after the moment of exposure, which neither of the other mediums can do, and that plays a part to the advantage of the medium.
In the end, none (at least with today's equipment) is better or worse, they're all just different and bespeak different kinds of photographic opportunity. At least for me. And I pick which one to work with for a given session idea based on what my proclivities and intent for the session might be. "Just walking about photos" I'm much more likely to carry a digital camera. "Going to a party" beggars an instant film camera for the community entertainment of making and handing out prints immediately. "Working on an idea to explore a medium and format's response" almost always means some trading back and forth between traditional film and one of the digital cameras as the ideas develop and mutate ...
It's all good. For me, I've let go of didactic truisms about which is better or worse. I concentrate on what I want to produce and use what I know, and what I discover in doing, to guide my choices in medium, lens, exposure, and subject with the intent of producing photographs that satisfy me, and maybe a couple other people who care to look at them. 😉
G
wlewisiii
Veteran
I used the "like" button - at Cameraderie I'd use the "vulcan salute" instead because that would fit better for how I understand what you're saying. I like both, I enjoy both and, now that I am again in a city with a _good_ lab, I am really enjoying playing (and the key word is playing) with film again. I am seriously thinking about buying both a FX Nikon DSLR and a film scanner because I want to do both easily.
Not sure that makes sense to anyone other than me, but that's kinda like why I take so many pictures of my "usual suspects". Perhaps someday I'll get the perfect image of that location I know has a great image locked up inside it...
D
Deleted member 65559
Guest
You crack me up Kostya. I guess you could include FED , Zenit & Zorki in that description 😉
35photo
Well-known
This is all about workflow there is no right or wrong answer...
ranger9
Well-known
Your fingers will get tired turning that little crank on the side... (oops, I guess that wouldn't be non-electric, just non-battery...)
D
Deleted member 65559
Guest
well the same can be said of computers & scanners....
Not to fuel the argument (oops discussion) Take the $9k for an M11....that buys a lot of anything (used camera, lens, film, complete darkroom, used car....)
Pál_K
Cameras. I has it.
Digital. I’m almost certain he’d use digital because, you are correct, he liked taking pictures. My question is whether he’d use a digital camera or a smartphone.
das
Well-known
-Many avid film photographers already have scanners. And they are not that expensive. Let's say $400 for your Plustek 8200.
-Bulk loading film is easy and can get the price down to $6-7 per roll. Fuji 200/400, which are great all-around films, can be had for around $8 per roll.
-If you are using a lab that charges more than $7 for "develop only," then that is not a good deal. I know that some digital photographers like to find the most expensive labs in the country for these comparisons. Lab scanning is rarely worth it if you can do it yourself.
-Let's say $14 for film + lab processing. Cheaper if you can develop at home.
-So, I can take 20,571 35mm film photographs for $8,000, or 571 rolls of film + processing, or 1000+ rolls of film without processing.
-And then remember that the $8,000 camera depreciates in value rather quickly while any quality film camera (at least for now) may hold close to 100% of its value, or may increase in value a bit. So, if your $8,000 camera is only worth $6,000 two years later, that depreciation alone adds 250 more rolls of film.
Obviously, there is a great economic case for pros for the $8,000 rig. For everyone else, unless you are spraying and praying every day, the case is not that strong.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
My Olympus E-1 was a $2400 body-only camera in 2003; add a couple of lenses and you have a $5000 system. It is still working beautifully, makes lovely photographs (several of which won recognition in various competitions), and has to date recorded 57,000+ exposures. I could probably get $120 for the body if I were to sell it now, and a few hundred for the lenses I have. And yes: I still use it now and then.
Now ... How much money in terms of 35mm 36 exposure rolls of film is that equivalent to? 😉
G
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