Merkin
For the Weekend
I started shooting when I was 8 or 9 with my dad's backup slr, the ubiquitous pentax k1000, with a ricoh 50mm f/1.7 lens and Ilford HP5, pretty much the universal beginner setup. I had great luck with this setup, winning a couple of junior contests in my hometown. Several years later, I got a jones for "modern" gear, so I got a Canon EOS elan IIe, a tamron 28-200 zoom, and I started shooting color. This is in the top three worst mistakes I have ever made in my life, as I found myself gradually giving up on photography. Part of this was a subconscious realization (I didn't come to the conscious realization until several years later) that the quality of my work promptly went in the toilet. A few years ago, when I was living in the mountains of NC, up on the side of a mountain, we had a snowy day that jarred something in my brain, so I borrowed my then-girlfriend's digital point and shoot, and spent the day alternating between drinking beer and taking pictures. It was great to shoot again, but I wasn't pleased with the quality of the images I grabbed, so I started researching digital cameras. All of the cameras at that time were, in my mind, either too expensive, or too low in quality. Not too long after that, Leica introduced the D-Lux 3 point and shoot, which exhibited a very high quality at a price that was still a bit high, but "cheap for a leica." I bought it, and shot it for a few months until I realized that I was completely hooked on photography again. It was around this time that I decided to go back to film, so I set down the Leica and picked up the Pentax. I took a couple of classes as a refresher and ended up switching pretty rapidly to medium format, as I had a seagull that my dad and I had picked up in the mid nineties for 100 bucks or so. From there, I started shooting Holgas after my seagull broke. After a while, I found myself tiring of the lack of control I had over my images, so I spent several months considering all sorts of different medium format cameras. Around this time, I moved to kentucky, where I didn't have a darkroom, so I had to get my medium format film processed at a local shop, which turned out to be disastrous. This made me decide to go back to 35mm, and it didn't take me long to realize that a rangefinder was right for me. I spent several months considering every rangefinder under the sun, and I am sure that people here on the forum got utterly sick of me asking 309967 questions about every aspect of every camera I was considering. Finally, after a long time of weighing every option, I decided on an M4-2 with a 35mm f1/4 CV lens, as well as a 90mm f4 elmar which I picked up for a song. This setup is utterly fantastic. A few weeks ago, i found a deal I couldn't pass up on a Leica CL which is in mint condition except for two tiny scuffs on the baseplate. I ended up picking up a 50mm f2.5 color skopar to pair with it, as I couldn't bring myself to disable the working meter in order to use a collapsible lens. At some point in the next year or two, I will pick up another medium format camera, but right now, I couldn't be more pleased with my Leica kit. It all fits in to a very small military surplus satchel, and looks completely anonymous.
The one piece of advice I would pass on to you from my experience that led me to my Leicas is to not rush your decisionmaking process, and weigh every piece of minutiae carefully, to make sure that you buy what you want at the price you are willing or able to spend the first time. You can buy a Leica body in fantastic shape for not much more than a new voigtlander if you are patient and do your homework.
The one piece of advice I would pass on to you from my experience that led me to my Leicas is to not rush your decisionmaking process, and weigh every piece of minutiae carefully, to make sure that you buy what you want at the price you are willing or able to spend the first time. You can buy a Leica body in fantastic shape for not much more than a new voigtlander if you are patient and do your homework.
