I don’t know about you but I do love the quirky feel of rangefinder cameras. I don’t shoot often with it but that’s not to say its gathering dust. Digital is so much easier but there is an interest from the younger generation to try their hand at film cameras. This is a good thing as photography really started with film, and not a sensor. Now for those of us who started with digital, going back to digital can be quite different.

The Leica CL. Flawed but still a classic

What I like about it is the experience. You see, there are no zoom lenses to start with. Everything is RF focused, thus you can’t have a zoom lens for this. The image focus is determined by a small patch in the center of the frame, you get the mirror image of it exactly in place and it tells you that the image is in focus. This is also why a lot of old timers shoot with blurry photos, creating art in the way of pictures. Most of them were not done with the intention of capturing blurry shots but it just sort of happens. Now the beauty of all this you can achieve the same effect on the Pen or Lumix Micro four thirds system.

For this, you should use a manual lens via a adaptor mount. For me the best is still to start with a Leica style M mount. Take into consideration that you will have to adapt your world view with a 2X crop factor, thus a 40mm lens will be a 80mm on your Pen or Lumix camera.

More Leica Madness, this time from Scarlett

Once you start aiming, composing and focusing at the same time, you’ll get an idea where the blurry shots came from. Not that its a fault but rather than an art…an expression of sort as things move around you and all you can do is chase after it by focusing and accommodating the composition you want before click the shutter.

It takes some getting use to but this is where all the fun is. And coupled with a digital body, you can literally see the results of your efforts. In the old days, you had to send them into a shop to get the prints or index print back. So thanks to digital, you don’t have to wait.

Another quirky RF camera

Of course there are also dedicated digital rangefinders like the M9 or the Epson RDX1. The Leica’s cost a bomb to own and the Epson is about half the price. But the quirkiness doesn’t end there. There is a film advance winder on the camera that lets you mimic the action of winding film as if it was a real film RF.

You can see this on the picture and yes, I know its crazy but not everyone is that crazy. I don’t know a lot of people who still shoot with RF cameras. I do know that the Leica used in Vicky Cristina Barcelona probably didn’t belong to Scarlett Johansson, and neither did the ones used by Pitt but I do know that Brad has a whole collection of defunct R series lenses and bodies.

Brad has a Leica...maybe more...

But the real value in these cameras are of course historical. In all practicality, getting a RF camera to shoot is really way to expensive and lets not forget that the real reason why people went in for the Leica RF cameras were due to the lens. The Leica lenses are the true heroes of the film world. The camera body is all but only a tool for the lens to burn an image onto film.

Sure, film played a part, you needed to have good quality film to get the sort of dynamic range you needed. But these days, good film is hard to come by.