M2 framelines

[darius]

Greetings!

Firstly a quick hello as I am a new RFF member; I have enjoyed very much what I've seen so far.

I have a question about the M2 framelines. The M2, of which I am a fairly recent owner, is a great pleasure to use after extensive shooting with the IIIc. I had got fairly used to the rather special focusing and framing double viewfinder on the IIIc, which helped me to see 50mm in a new way after much SLR use.

My question is concerning the accuracy of the M2 framelines. At the moment I just shoot 50, and find that I get a fair amount more on the negative than that which is framed, depending on the subject distance. I haven't tested extensively as the m2 has only been with me a few days, but though I love the parallax correction, I am hoping I can find a rule of thumb to use when shooting if I need to compose tightly, perhaps adding frameline widths mentally. Could anybody share their experience with me? And as I intend to shoot 35 and 90 eventually how would I deal with imagining the negative with those focal lengths?

I suspect a lot of shooting will solve this problem, but when I see some work of the great masters of M rangefinder cameras, and indeed screw cameras, I wonder how it is possible to reach such a finely tuned ability to control framing with the various obstacles inherent in rangefinder viewfinders.

Thanks for reading!

Darius

 

[TimF]

Hi Darius and welcome, 🙂

I wouldn't worry too much about the framelines. From what I've read they are only accurate at closest focus distances.

 

[Alec]

Hello Darius and welcome hither.
You may enjoy the superb compendium compiled by Andrew Nemeth:
http://www.nemeng.com/leica/006ba.shtml

 

[Ben Z]

It is correct that the framelines' size/area are fixed at the f.o.v. of each lens when at its closest possible focus. According to some texts (Osterloh IIRC) the outer border of the frames is accurate at 2m, and for infinity one needs to imagine 3 additional thicknesses of the framelines (with an M3 I believe it's less because the lines are thicker, but that doesn't concern you with an M2).

If you shoot mostly close in, and/or wide open so peripheral composition is flexible, and/or don't mind cropping, and/or by the time you get the film developed you don't remember what you wanted to include in the shot, you can just trust the framelines. Or, you could do what many people do, which is trust them and then claim that a Leica M is no good for exact framing. But like many things with the Leica rangefinder, if you make an effort to understand what's going on and keep it in mind while shooting, in less time than you think you'll be composing with SLR accuracy. I've been shooting travel slides for years with a Leica M and I've got framing down pat, it's been second-nature since the first half dozen rolls.

 

[meyman]

Strange, my M3 seems to have the 50 framelines optimised for ca 3m. Having used SLRs before and being a tight cropping type [does this sound like an insult to you too?], on my first Leica rolls I got ca 80% of frames with cut off feet, hands and head fragments. Or is this more related to parallax corection than frameline accuracy? Anyway the framing error was big enough for me to consider the 40 as the standard lens. Is there anyone with similar experiences out there? Maciek

 

[richard_l]

Is it a sin to crop? If so, I'm going to hell.

 

[Ben Z]

Is it a sin to crop? If so, I'm going to hell.

There are 2 reasons why I do my utmost to compose full-frame with the Leica and any 35mm camera. The first is that I mostly shoot slides for projection, so cropping would mean duping the slide, which is time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to avoid some visible loss of image quality. The second is that where prints are concerned, I would be enlarging a smaller section of an already very small piece of film, which again leads to loss of image quality especially in terms of increased visibility of grain. I'm much less hesitant to crop medium format as the neg is about 3x bigger, and I don't own a MF projector or care to glass-mount slides so I've never shot slide film in MF with the intent to project it.

 

[darius]

Well thanks for the replies to my post!

I'm sure cropping isn't a sin... and I feel that the frameline issues I'm concerned about with the M2 would be solved to some extent by some minor cropping and for me image quality is not the issue.

But the pictures I make for myself and occasionally sell, I like to print 'full-bleed' or full-frame with a thin black border. It's not really to do with whether black borders are trendy or not but that I like to see where the picture blends into black, and cutting the edge off changes the wholeness of the frame. Sounds a bit pretentious, but there ya go. Indeed thats the only way I can get the border with the enlarger I use.

If you love film and it's texture it's nice to see where the light has been cut by the film gate, I think.

With the M2 I would like to be more familiar with what the film gate will 'see' so I can carry through what I see to the final print.

Cheers!

Darius.