saiseto said:
Also, I would be grateful if anyone can share the experience the use of the bessa L with me. Cheers!!
Hi, and welcome! I've had a Bessa-L for a few years, used mainly with a 15mm lens and sometimes with a 25mm (which was part of the package with the L).
The Bessa-L is an odd camera, and that's part of its charm. "A camera with no viewfinder??? Why would you want that?" I look on the positive side and see that it's not a box camera with fixed focus and little or no exposure control; indeed it even has interchangeable lenses and TTL metering! But it certainly is a move toward simplicity.
This is a good camera to develop your skill in judging distances, and to get a mental grasp of the concepts of depth of field and hyperfocal distance. Dedicating this L to one wide-angle lens, while also carrying another camera with longer lens, it worked very well for tourist pictures in cramped areas, indoors or out.
In decades past many good cameras had no rangefinders, and so the user estimated distance by eye (or by string with knots!). Even medium format cameras with their 100mm or so lenses, that have much less depth of field than a normal lens for 35mm format. Slower lenses are less critical of course. I took only a 6x4.5cm format camera on vacation once, that had problems with its rangefinder. But estimating subject distance or using the hypefocal distance worked fine, just as with the Bessa L.
This can actually be a very fast way to work, if you also apply the same kinds of techniques to exposure as for focus. "Sunny 16" and all that... It reduces the need to fiddle with the settings for each shot, as you pre-set your camera for the environment you're in. Thus your reactions can be very quick indeed, in just bringing the camera up and squeezing off a shot. Maybe not even using the (accessory) viewfinder!
This is a very different way of working from the slow, thoughtful, and precise operation of a view camera, at the other extreme. More of a quick-reaction ad-hoc intuitive operation... maybe that's why Voigtlander calls their 25mm lens the "Snapshot Skopar"! Of course as the light grows dim, you will want to set the L with more care as well.
