I really started getting into photography when I was in high school, taking pictures for the school yearbook. We hired pros to do all the mug shots but we needed pictures of teams, and clubs and of course, lots of random candid pictures which were pretty challenging to take with a manual focus film camera (a Nikon FG with a 50mm lens). Still, I really got into it and started taking my camera around town taking pictures of people or just odd stuff. At some point, I graduated to a Leica R system (R4) with 4 lenses. I still have and use this system (although the R4 was replaced with and R8) and I use the lenses on my Sony (A7R iii) camera now and more recently an Leica M11 rangefinder.A very good friend of mine (who also took he picture on the left) is really into old camera gear and he kept trying to convince me to move to a rangefinder. They are a pretty big investment, but after just a few days I was really hooked. While the Sony has lots of bells and whistles like super fast autofocus, shoots billions of frames per second, shoots 4K video, and takes great pictures the rangefinder is like stepping back in time. You don’t compose the shot by looking through the lens, no autofocus, no auto anything really and double the cost. You really have to take a moment to consider the scene, your surroundings and what you are trying to capture. But the results are next level. It’s hard to pin down what it is, call it the “Leica look” or whatever you want, the photos just pop without much if any post processing. It’s really small too, so it’s easy to take everywhere with a couple of small lenses.Thanks for stopping by and checking out my site!
