Correcting A Huge Mistake
Reacquiring and old friend... Sorta
Like many worthwhile endeavors in life, photography is easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master. Mistakes will be made. Without mistakes, there would be no progress on any front. Frustration and even despair are all part of the process, right? Sure it is, just need to get back on the horse and try, try again. That’s how it goes … or at least that’s what they say. Here’s what they don’t say; Stop making the same mistakes over and over again.
Avoiding the same mistake is obvious right? Sure it is, in your head when thinking about broad generalizations. That kind of advice is merely a platitude. In practice, some mistakes are difficult to identify. Let’s divide the world of errors into two arbitrary categories. The first is obvious problems that stand out after you make them and the source of the problem is easy to trace. Bad light, bad exposure, lousy focus, crappy composition. Sure it takes time and effort to get better at those things. Even after one gets better there will be the same problems here and there but they’ll be less frequent.
The second arbitrary category is far worse. Those issues are of a philosophical nature. In many cases, they are impossible to identify and diagnose by anyone but yourself. Tremendous effort is usually dumped onto going farther and farther down the road you shouldn’t have taken in the first place. You find yourself not where you want to be so you tend to go faster in the wrong direction. This second category is insidious.
Dirty, sweaty, frustrated, dejected you claw your way out of the hole you dug for yourself. Slowly recovering from wasted money, and more importantly, time to start over. You won’t make that mistake again, will you? That’s the insidious beast of philosophical mistakes— you probably will. You won’t make the same exact mistake but you’ll make the same kind of mistake. How does one avoid that?
I don’t think anyone has the answer, I certainly don’t but I may have some insight given how many times I’ve made a certain kind of mistake. The 35mm Summilux in the title is an example from a quarter-century ago. The example I owned was an old, beat-up, second or third-hand used lens. It was the second lens I scrimped and saved and finally purchased to complement my 50mm Summicron and Leica M4. The M4 and Summicron were also used and a bit beat up, it’s all I could afford when acquired in the mid-1980s.
I loved that camera for what it did well and despised it for what it failed to do. The same goes for that 35mm Summilux. By the time the mid-1990s rolled around I had a lot more money. I had other camera systems in addition to that M4, 50mm, and 35mm. I now had medium format, 4x5, etc, etc. All of those systems did particular jobs very well and other jobs not so well. The M4 was my EDC camera, my behind-the-scenes camera, my family camera, and the camera I took with me when not planning to make any particular picture. I carried a tiny light meter with me. The M4 had no meter.
One day I happened across an article in a long-forgotten publication about Leica’s then-new 35mm Summicron ASPH. Sharper by a mile, the perfect lens, the lens that would make all my problems go away and all things would be right in the world; Or so that writer said. This got me thinking, why not upgrade the Leica kit to an M6TTL with the better more accurate 0.85 magnification finder. I convinced myself that a more accurate focus, sharper 35mm, and “better” finder would allow me to use the tiny Leica to shoot “serious” pictures with ease.
Yes, this was the answer. An in-camera meter, a better focusing finder, and a sharper lens would let me shoot Kodachrome 25 and 64 and PanF+ in the Leica rather than lug my medium format for “serious” things. I kept the M4 as they weren’t that popular/valuable at the time and I needed a backup when shooting serious things with the Leica. I did sell the Summilux to cover part of the cost of the new ASPH.
Fast forward. How did that work out? My exposures were worse. I eventually worked out how to use the M6 meter to get decent results on the chrome films. A huge distraction working on that skill for months. The ASPH was sharper wide-open when testing it. It solved none of my problems for what the Leica didn’t do very well. Framing on a 35mm lens was a nightmare with the 0.85 finder even though it technically had 35mm frame lines. Worse yet, I lost a stop of speed where I liked using my Leica as an EDC — on-the-fly camera in varied lighting conditions with 400 ISO film. The final bonus with the new, better 35mm was that I didn’t like the way it looked wide-open and close up nearly as much as the old Summilux.
I dutifully mastered the new obstacles, easily identifying the problems and solving them. I forced myself to use the new gear to take pictures with the Leica where I would have been far better off using the medium format gear. I was now using the Leica to take serious pictures, the ones you plan with intent and travel to specific locations to take pictures of a specific subject.
Took me a while to figure out I had completely destroyed the experience, results, and look of what I liked using the Leica for by attempting to make it better at doing things it didn’t do well. Solving problem after problem, getting better at using it for things I didn’t even want to do. Sure I still made casual, documentary-style pictures that I loved with the M6. All of those were with the 50mm I already had using ISO 400 black and white film usually pushed a stop or two. The ASPH Summicron was uncomfortable to use on the M6 due to the “better” finder and didn’t look nearly as good at doing what I liked to do.
The M6, the Summicron ASPH, a 90 ASPH, and a whole bunch of other super expensive Leica gear are long gone. My first M4 is still with me. I use it for the same things I used to use it for that made me fall in love with that camera in the first place. Candid black and white subjects with high ISO film wide-open. That problem I corrected? Philosophically I’ve avoided a few but repeated them here and there over the last 25 years. Literally, I purchased a replacement for the 35mm Summilux this year. I am extremely pleased with my purchase. For the first time in a quarter-century, I have my M4 connected to a 35mm 1.4 although technically not a Summilux.
I stumbled across a Voigtlaender Nokton VM II at a great price. I bought it. Much to my surprise, it looks exactly the same in terms of wide-open rendering as my first 35mm Summilux. Stopped down it’s super sharp. It even looks the same externally in many ways. Handling is similar but instead of wings on the aperture ring, it’s more typical of other Leica lenses. After ten seconds of research, I found the optical design is a clone of the Summilux with one tiny extra element that I assume is the claimed correction for focus shift when stopped down. You’d be hard-pressed to detect which lens was which wide open from what I see.
Optimizing For The Wrong Things
After making more than my fair share of philosophical mistakes I’ve found there’s a certain flavor many of them have. That pernicious second category of mistakes circles around optimizing for the wrong things. The tricky nature of optimizing for the wrong things is the huge distraction of solving easily identifiable flaws while doing so. At this point, I’m sure I’ll fall down that rabbit hole again but while falling I ask myself the question “why” a lot in serious ways rather than superficially. I ask reasonable questions like why am I trying to do this at all rather than how can I make this thing I shouldn’t be doing in the first place “better”.
#essay #camerafashion #photography #leica