The analogue romance

So I clutched precariously my new camera. This was 2019. March 2019 to be precise. Was I mad to pay so much money for camera tech that was easily 5yrs old? Sonys pump out new generations of cameras every 2-3yrs and yet here I was … feeling proud of holding my first ever Leica M body. I was officially mad.

Why Leica? Why M240? Well, prior to this, I have been shooting street on the Fujifilm X100S which I had since it was released in 2014, and the Sony alphas and somehow, when walking the streets, even the fastest Sony AF just didn’t seem fast enough for me. I often don’t even bring the camera to my eyes or even look at the screen. I prefer to just snap inconspicuously as fast as I can. So…. Rangefinders… I need to see what the fuss was all about.

So there I was at the local 2nd hand dealer in a place called Peninsula Shopping centre looking at M10s. Frankly these were going at SGD6k-7k then pre-loved and coming from the world of spending SGD2-3k for the latest camera tech in the big camera brand world, I couldn’t imagine the money I have to tediously withdraw from the ATM for a used camera. Then at the corner of my eye I saw a really pristine M240 M-P… and after a little haggling at SGD4.2k, I held the camera in my hand and said a silent whisper of a prayer to thank the Camera Gods for making a dream start a beautiful photographic chapter.

Lenses lenses lenses… of course this was the next question… what lens should I mount on my first Leica? Somehow despite having owned Voightlander glass before on my Panasonic GH5S, I really couldn’t bring myself to not have Leica glass for my first initiation into the world. So the budget-minded me landed for the cheapest Cron, and most easy to live with lens to ease myself into rangefinder shooting, the 50 Cron that I snagged for SGD2.2k. So, total outlay… SGD6.4k for camera tech older than what I could logically believe I needed to pay… the experience had better live up to the hype… I suddenly worriedly thought.

Black and white photography. This was how I was going to start shooting my first Leica pictures. Coincidentally, I was rendezvousing with some mates down at Chijmes for the evening and my first realisation was that wow… nobody really cared about the camera being around them… which was a really good thing for me to capture the moment. The small lenses on a full frame body was a revelation for me coming from Canon EF glass sitting on my Canon 1DX body. And that quiet click of a shutter… I spent my first hour just lost in the mesmerising “click click click” of that shutter.

Rangefinder shooting was both revelatory and strange. Instead of dancing lights (Sony AF) moving around the viewfinder, I had to play “jigsaw puzzle” for every shot, matching 2 rectangle windows together. How is this faster than the speediest AF I thought? Then, at a point, muscle memory kicked in…

Zone focusing …. Was the revelation part of the rangefinder initiation. To set my F-stop, cue in the distance for pin sharp focusing and just snap. Snap snap snap. This was the creme de la creme of the experience. To never need to bring the camera to my eye and make a picture at chest level without live-view, was a Hallelujah moment… this was it. This was what I was missing in my street sojourns. And there, my romance with Leica Ms has started… and no one could prepare me for how deep the rabbit hole can get… to be continued .