sircarl
Well-known
I’ve recently called a halt to my roughly seven-year relationship with 35mm rangefinder film cameras and switched (back) to a film SLR. I know these are very personal decisions, but I’d be curious to hear whether others here have gone through similar experiences.
Like many on RFF, I discovered rangefinders after spending quite some time with SLRs. I started out with a Contax G2, moved on to a Minolta CLE for a while, and for the last couple of years shot with a Zeiss Ikon. All were in their own way very satisfying. And the Zeiss, M-Hexanon, and Leica lenses I used gave me excellent results.
Even today I’ll admit that rangefinders are unsurpassed in a number of ways, but the feature that mattered most to me personally was the viewfinder. That’s why I ended up with the ZI, whose viewfinder is unequalled. Yet at the same time this was the feature I gradually grew unhappy with.
I slowly came to the realization that rangefinder viewfinders aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Seeing the world through a superimposed rectangle is admittedly useful in framing the subject. But if you use three or four focal lengths regularly, as I do, inevitably some of the framelines will be too small to get a clear picture of the subject, or oddly, too big, since you may not be able to see the outer edges comfortably. That wouldn’t be so bad if they were accurate in the first place, but they’re not, as almost everyone here knows, which became increasingly frustrating for me. The final nail in the coffin came after repeated viewings of the pictures I took with my 28mm lens and even my 35mm lens, when it dawned on me that they bore only a faint resemblance to what I saw in the viewfinder, because that viewfinder can’t reproduce the distortions that wider-angle lenses impart to the subject. When I remembered that my old SLRs didn’t have any of these viewfinder shortcomings, that’s when the penny dropped.
So I started playing around with SLRs again, first a Nikon FG, then a Pentax ME Super, both of which were quite nice, but whose lenses didn’t have the same wow factor as the rangefinder lenses I was using (except for the Pentax 50/1.4, which was superb). Then a friend told me he had been having good results with an SLR I actually used to own once, a Contax Aria, the “baby” version of the more serious Contax SLRs of the 1980s and ‘90s. It’s fairly light (actually weighs less than my ZI) and has a very large and bright viewfinder, a shutter that doesn’t clunk loudly when it fires and with a 1/4000 top speed (important to me), and all the usual conveniences of a modern SLR. Most important, it takes the superb line of Zeiss lenses that were made for the Contax/Yashica mount. So I bought one, along with the 25, 35, 50 and 85 lenses, and I’m now a very happy camper.
Oddly, though, I still have to say that the camera that has always given me the greatest joy to use, even though I find it highly impractical for the kind of street photography I like to do, is my old Leica IIIf, with its 50/2 Summitar. I guess in some sense I’ll always have a soft spot for the rangefinder “concept,” even if it’s a type of camera that no longer meets my needs. And if renegades like me can be tolerated, I’ll continue to look at RFF every day, since it has the smartest discussions about photography I’ve found on the Net.
Like many on RFF, I discovered rangefinders after spending quite some time with SLRs. I started out with a Contax G2, moved on to a Minolta CLE for a while, and for the last couple of years shot with a Zeiss Ikon. All were in their own way very satisfying. And the Zeiss, M-Hexanon, and Leica lenses I used gave me excellent results.
Even today I’ll admit that rangefinders are unsurpassed in a number of ways, but the feature that mattered most to me personally was the viewfinder. That’s why I ended up with the ZI, whose viewfinder is unequalled. Yet at the same time this was the feature I gradually grew unhappy with.
I slowly came to the realization that rangefinder viewfinders aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Seeing the world through a superimposed rectangle is admittedly useful in framing the subject. But if you use three or four focal lengths regularly, as I do, inevitably some of the framelines will be too small to get a clear picture of the subject, or oddly, too big, since you may not be able to see the outer edges comfortably. That wouldn’t be so bad if they were accurate in the first place, but they’re not, as almost everyone here knows, which became increasingly frustrating for me. The final nail in the coffin came after repeated viewings of the pictures I took with my 28mm lens and even my 35mm lens, when it dawned on me that they bore only a faint resemblance to what I saw in the viewfinder, because that viewfinder can’t reproduce the distortions that wider-angle lenses impart to the subject. When I remembered that my old SLRs didn’t have any of these viewfinder shortcomings, that’s when the penny dropped.
So I started playing around with SLRs again, first a Nikon FG, then a Pentax ME Super, both of which were quite nice, but whose lenses didn’t have the same wow factor as the rangefinder lenses I was using (except for the Pentax 50/1.4, which was superb). Then a friend told me he had been having good results with an SLR I actually used to own once, a Contax Aria, the “baby” version of the more serious Contax SLRs of the 1980s and ‘90s. It’s fairly light (actually weighs less than my ZI) and has a very large and bright viewfinder, a shutter that doesn’t clunk loudly when it fires and with a 1/4000 top speed (important to me), and all the usual conveniences of a modern SLR. Most important, it takes the superb line of Zeiss lenses that were made for the Contax/Yashica mount. So I bought one, along with the 25, 35, 50 and 85 lenses, and I’m now a very happy camper.
Oddly, though, I still have to say that the camera that has always given me the greatest joy to use, even though I find it highly impractical for the kind of street photography I like to do, is my old Leica IIIf, with its 50/2 Summitar. I guess in some sense I’ll always have a soft spot for the rangefinder “concept,” even if it’s a type of camera that no longer meets my needs. And if renegades like me can be tolerated, I’ll continue to look at RFF every day, since it has the smartest discussions about photography I’ve found on the Net.
