Richard G
Veteran
If you are a fan of Ikanagas's marvellous spoof videos you will know that in order not to get blurry pictures you should have the lever that doesn't have all the numbers, like 4, 5.6 etc, pushed all the way to the right, or clockwise as he corrected himself, and make sure that your subjects are far away.
With a collapsible lens there is still the possibility of getting blurry pictures, if you forget to pull the lens tube out into position. I knew all of this already, surprisingly enough. I just acquired a lovely little 50 Elmar M and my first few shots were in sharp focus. Next day I took a shot of something more interesting. I was having difficulty finding the two images in the viewfinder, and the resulting shots were blurry. I had pulled the lens out and rotated it into the correct position, or so I thought. The focus mechanism seemed to be working.
My old Elmar 90 from the 1950s has an unerring mechanism with an L shaped groove machined into the steel collapsible barrel. There is only one way to pull it out, and only one way to turn it and only one way back. The new Elmar 50 has a more subtle design, a very shallow bayonet at the rear of the barrel. There is no grooved guide in the barrel. I must have pulled the lens out just short of where it ought to have been and then rotated it into seemingly the correct position. Fiddling around with it I found that I could even get it to a position where it would pull out, stop, rotate clockwise and have it locked open upside down with the aperture mark low down.
I went in search of the instructions on the net, but they were nowhere to be found in pdf, except for a price on that auction site, a photocopy. My copy of the lens is from 2000, advertised there as like new, and it is. It came in the box, with both caps, the hood, a Leica filter in a separate box, and the leather pouch. I returned to my office to look into the box, thinking that anyone so careful with this little kit would not have lost the instructions. They hadn't. The instructions for use is one very short paragraph.
I should quote it, but basically the gist is: line up the aperture mark with the red dot, pull out and rotate clockwise. That's it: the official instructions from Leica AG on the 50mm Elmar M collapsible lens deployment. Anyone who has the same problem as me might find my post here useful, after suffering through all the preceding paragraphs.
DSCF0988.jpg by Richard GM2, on Flickr
With a collapsible lens there is still the possibility of getting blurry pictures, if you forget to pull the lens tube out into position. I knew all of this already, surprisingly enough. I just acquired a lovely little 50 Elmar M and my first few shots were in sharp focus. Next day I took a shot of something more interesting. I was having difficulty finding the two images in the viewfinder, and the resulting shots were blurry. I had pulled the lens out and rotated it into the correct position, or so I thought. The focus mechanism seemed to be working.
My old Elmar 90 from the 1950s has an unerring mechanism with an L shaped groove machined into the steel collapsible barrel. There is only one way to pull it out, and only one way to turn it and only one way back. The new Elmar 50 has a more subtle design, a very shallow bayonet at the rear of the barrel. There is no grooved guide in the barrel. I must have pulled the lens out just short of where it ought to have been and then rotated it into seemingly the correct position. Fiddling around with it I found that I could even get it to a position where it would pull out, stop, rotate clockwise and have it locked open upside down with the aperture mark low down.
I went in search of the instructions on the net, but they were nowhere to be found in pdf, except for a price on that auction site, a photocopy. My copy of the lens is from 2000, advertised there as like new, and it is. It came in the box, with both caps, the hood, a Leica filter in a separate box, and the leather pouch. I returned to my office to look into the box, thinking that anyone so careful with this little kit would not have lost the instructions. They hadn't. The instructions for use is one very short paragraph.
I should quote it, but basically the gist is: line up the aperture mark with the red dot, pull out and rotate clockwise. That's it: the official instructions from Leica AG on the 50mm Elmar M collapsible lens deployment. Anyone who has the same problem as me might find my post here useful, after suffering through all the preceding paragraphs.
DSCF0988.jpg by Richard GM2, on Flickr
