top of page

Leica !!


_DSF0911.jpg

As far as I can remember, this pic was taken with my Fuji X100s, but I have a guilty little secret to confess: begining of last week, passing in front the second-hand window of a little camera store in Geneva, a beautiful, like-new Leica M6 mounted with a summicron 35 mm f.2 caught my eye - and wouldn't let go !!

No price tag attached, so I went and asked if I could have a look. A beautiful object, with a perfect heft, a little mechanical masterpiece - and if the store-manager was to be believed, its previous owner was a collector who'd hardly, if ever, used it. A "financier" who'd apparently decided to get rid of stuff he no longer used, "pricing it to sell". Seemed like I'd stumbled upon the deal of the year.

I didn't buy it though, reasoning it was just an object, that I already had more than enough cameras (including two, second-hand Nikon FM3a's I'd bought from that same shop), that at the end of the day photography was about taking pictures, not about gear, etc., etc.

I was able to hold out for all of two days !

In truth, since a couple of weeks, I'd begun to use my mechanical Nikons (FM2n and FM3a) again daily, reconnecting not only with the pleasure of handling a fine piece of mechanical engineering still functioning perfectly after 10-20 years (and 35 or so in the case of my Nikon F2AS), but also, more importantly, with the serenity of taking pictures at the wonderfully calm pace imposed by having manually to focus and set the aperture and shutter speed. It felt great, almost zen, to break from the frenetic shutter-activation often associated with digital photography, and to SLOW DOWN. We've all heard of the slow-food movement; slow-photo is long over-due !

To be fair I've taken a few shots today with my Fuji - but only when available light was no longer enough for my Tri-X-loaded Leica. I should finish my first roll of film tomorrow of the day after - and have the processed negatives and CD back a week or so after that; look forward to the results, and to posting them if they are worthy !

Recent Posts

All photographs on this site copyright of Antoine Boesch

bottom of page