The Ancient Leica Summitar

Old lenses, film, and slowing down

Fuji X-Pro 2 with the ancient Leica Summitar at a middling aperture. Looks great even at large sizes. I am still working on a reasonable grain simulation (as always).

The price of film has become almost unaffordable as of 2023. I guess you might be able to shoot 35mm black and white on somewhat of a budget assuming you buy bulk, load your own cassettes, develop, and scan it all yourself. Color film, especially higher speed professional color film processed and scanned is getting to the point of bank account threatening.

I’ve long been an advocate of shooting film occasionally. I think it’s valuable that get in the habit of shooting far too many frames of the same subject, from the same viewpoint, and hoping something will change for the better as we waste time doing so. Slowing down, thinking creatively within the limitations of a small number of frames and refining your vision instead of accumulating worthless multitudes of frames is a great exercise for just about everyone.

I have shot more digital than I have film for quite a while, probably a decade. My film shooting informs my digital use far more than the other way around. Now even my meager use of film is looking like it may have to be reduced. I’ll probably not chuck it out completely but yet again I’ll have to relegate it to endeavors that are more of a sure bet than speculative experimentation.

Summitar at f/8-ish with the depth of field manipulated to show the far background a bit out of focus. The color was inspired by those rolls of decade out of date Portra 160 pushed one stop I shot a couple years ago.

Let me offer an alternative for those of you that might also be feeling the pinch of film costs this year. How about a crappy but challenging interesting lens? The lens mentioned in the title is one I did an installment of ridiculous lens comparisons on a while back.

Obviously, it’s manual focus. Beyond that, that lens will bite you hard if you’re not careful with the background vs the aperture used. It also has low-tech lens coatings making it do interesting things in suboptimal lighting conditions. Oh, yes, the rendering wide open isn’t even close to high resolution towards the edges of the frame. You have to actually compose, choose a rendering, focus carefully, decide what should be sharp, guess what might be attractive rendered in the odd way the lens renders at large apertures then take the picture. Sounds a lot like film doesn’t it?

I’ve started to expand and refine a play-project that I’ve messed around with in the last couple of years (inspired by and shot on film). Instead of using film I’ve used three different digital cameras and that old Summitar. I’ve also used a preset (which I do not tweak) inspired by the film I used in the past. My verdict is that using that lens and constraining the “look” via one preset goes a long way to being very much like film. I only take that one lens with me to avoid temptation and also to feel as unburdened as I do with a small 35mm film camera and one lens.

I’ve not completely decided on which particular digital body of the three I’ve tried but I will soon and I’ll stick with that for this installment of the project. So far it’s been the Fuji X-Pro2, the Nikon Zfc, and my Canon R body. Yes it’s more like a 75mm than a 50mm on the later two cameras. Although I am still digesting the photos I’ve made, I am leaning far more toward the APS-C bodies as I think the isolation and compression of standing farther away with tighter framing is leading me to a different place than my previous work.

More later. Have any of you been shocked at 2023 film prices in terms of “how high can they possibly go???”