Gift of a Leica

It's not every day that someone gives me a Leica M4 camera with a 35mm Summilux lens, and it's not every day that the Leica camera that I was given was the very same camera that I used 40 years at the start of my newspaper career. But that's exactly what happened recently when I re-connected with a photographer that owned the camera along with a second M4 and a 90mm Tele-Elmarit lens. Around 1978 the owner lent them to me for a couple of weeks so I could familiarize myself with the Leica quality thought process that engaged a photographer while using Leica cameras.

 For those that are not in the know about various kinds of cameras and photography, the Leica camera for some photographers holds a near-mythical status and a madness of obsession in owning and using them. With that said when I was starting out as a young photographer at the weekly newspaper, The Goldstream Gazette on Vancouver Island, I had launched into my photography career in 1976 and bought a Nikon F camera and a couple of lenses. Although I had heard of Leica cameras at the time I purchased my Nikon equipment, I really had no idea what the Leica rangefinder cameras were all about and why photographers loved them so much.

As the story unfolds a friend of a friend who had a picture framing shop beside the Gazette newspaper office 1978 just happens to have these two Leica cameras. This shop owner had worked as a photographer at a couple small daily newspapers in the early ’70s, including the Brampton Times, the same paper I eventually went to work for in May of 1979. We often talked about photography and the aesthetic differences between the Nikon and Leica camera systems** and how the Leica was better suited for some kinds of photojournalism work with the likes of Henri Cartier Bresson who used a Leica camera (the only kind of camera he would use).

So it was suggested that I borrow the Leica's cameras and try them out to see what they were all about. A couple weeks later I can remember returning them with a new found desire to photograph using these amazing and beautifully made German cameras. Of course, I couldn’t afford them at that time. But eventually I did get my own kit in the 1980s when I was working for the daily newspaper the Brampton Times, I used them both in my newspaper work and personal work. Unfortunately, I have no surviving pictures that I made with those borrowed cameras while at the Gazette newspaper, trying to find those negative files, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack of negatives, almost impossible.

 My story concludes that I was able to purchase at a very reasonable cost the additional 90mm Tele-Elmarit and the second M4 body, plus I gave the owner four of my black and white prints and a Fuji X10 digital camera. Both cameras needed a CLA (clean, lube and adjust) as they had been in storage for 40 years with only minimal use. Once they are tuned up I plan to make some wonderful photographs with my newly found cameras. I will see what kind of photographic art I can make with them.


**There is a technical difference between the SLR type cameras and the rangefinder cameras, the Nikon (although they did make a rangefinder) is a single lens reflex camera, one looks through a pentaprism eyepiece which shows what the lens sees, with all the corrections, right side up and left to right it also shows what is actually in focus and what is out of focus. With the rangefinder cameras like the Leica (although they did make an SLR) one looks through a glass window on the side of the camera with frame lines superimposed in the viewfinder window which show the approximate view of the particular lens attached to the camera, focus is achieved through a small square in the middle of the viewfinder which shows either a double image if things are out of focus or a combined image if things are in focus, an example would be a fence post, if there are two fence posts its out of focus, if there is one fence post it's in focus.