Leica M3 CLA

I recently had the pleasure of dealing with Youxin Ye, who quite simply is one of the most remarkable camera repairmen around.  When it comes to photography equipment, I tend to buy everything used.  You lose the possibility of warranty repair, but gain 30-40% in price reduction.  Unless you're talking Leica of course.  Then you're more likely to see a 30-40% increase in price (I'm exaggerating of course but prices are still pretty silly).  The only way to get affordable Leica gear is to buy used and to take a trip in the photo time machine.  I've bought a 60 year old 35/3.5 Summaron in absolutely horrible shape (hazy, scratches on the interior elements, stiff focus, the focusing cam was in backwards [!], and my 60 year old Summitar 50/2 had an incredibly stiff aperture ring - so stiff that I tended to set the aperture once per hour and vary my shutter in response to variations in exposure.  So, shutter-priority by necessity.  And finally my M3 - supposedly the crown jewel of rangefinders, I bought cheap and I bought in heavily used condition.  The vulcanite was starting to fall off and my primary concern was that the viewfinder seemed dimmer than it should - this was my first Leica so I didn't really have anything to compare to.  But most of the online cognoscenti seemed to agree that looking into an M3 viewfinder was like Staring Into The Eye of God.  I couldn't see the hype though - it was so-so bright and the 50 framelines are very big but I wasn't really entering a Nirvana state (didn't stop me from running more than 15 rolls of film through it in the first month).

For all of these repairs, the first person I contact is Youxin Ye.  He's extremely knowledge, priced very reasonable, and works incredibly fast.  I mean insanely fast.  As in he may finish your repair/CLA on the same day that the lens arrives.  And ship it the next day.

He took the Summaron and disassembled it, cleaned it.  The haze didn't go away fully (it's probably etched in the glass by now) but it did help matters.  The Summitar came back in fabulous shape, the aperture ring is Leica-smooth now, perfect.  And the M3 is now back in my greedy little hands in amazing shape.  The film advance (dual stroke) is just phenomenal - I dry-fired the shutter at least 10 times in a row just to feel how buttery it was.  The viewfinder is like night and day, the brightness was doubled (seemingly) - now I see why the M3 is regarded as the best camera ever.

So overall, I can highly recommend Youxin and his camera services.

Update [01/21/2015] : I thought I'd update this post with additional comments.  After shooting about 80 or 90 rolls of film with the M3, I noticed that the viewfinder was beginning to separate - it shows up as a light bar on each edge of the viewfinder glass (the inner element).  Eventually the separation gets worse and worse until the prism separates and the VF blacks out entirely.  My separation was getting pretty bad and the contrast in the finder was worsening so I sent it back to Youxin to recement the prism.  This work only took about 2 weeks and roughly $150 - way cheaper than I thought.  Now that I have it back it's even brighter and clearer than after the original CLA.  

http://www.yyecamera.com

Thoughts on Nikon 1

So Nikon announced the V1 / J1 mirrorless cameras yesterday - the internet is all atwitter with how these cameras are doomed to failure (small sensor! no fast prime lenses! huge DOF! small sensor!). It's funny how the Ricoh GRD/Canon S90/Panasonic Lumix cameras don't seem to merit those same complaints, even though they have smaller sensors and no interchangeable lenses.
Since street photography is what I'm trying to focus on lately, I naturally thought about the V1 (with viewfinder, the J1 is not even worth considering in my opinion) as a platform for street shooting.  So if I were building an ideal (real-world) street kit, what would I choose?

1. Customization - The Ricoh GRD III is an almost perfect example of a camera being customizable.  Almost every button could be re-mapped and you could store all settings into custom memory banks.  Perfect - the jury is still out on the new Nikon so I won't say anything more here.
2. Hyperfocal setting - an ideal street camera would be very easy to enable/disable hyperfocal shooting.  Again, the Ricoh was nearly perfect for this - Snap Focus was a breeze to setup, you could configure the hyperfocal distance, and it's small sensor naturally gave plenty of DOF to work with.  So the sensor size on the Nikon 1 isn't necessarily a bad thing here.  Pair the 1 with the 10mm f/2.8 (27mm FX equivalent) and you've got a recipe for lots of DOF.  The final test will come with the Nikon software and menu systems and whether they make this easy to setup and use.
3. Size & weight - for me, this seems to be one of the absolutely essential aspects of street photography.  You simply must pair your gear down to the absolute minimum.  the Nikon 1 is the smallest interchangeable lens camera with integrated EVF. I suspect that you'll eventually be able to take 2-3 small primes and probably carry less weight than if you were packing a rangefinder with lenses.  (And my dream kit with a 2.7x crop factor? How about an 7mm [~19mm], 13mm [35mm], and 35mm [~90mm]?  Sounds delicious.
4. Oh and what about the F-adapter? The 90mm equivalent described about would be filled in perfectly by the already released 35mm f/1.8 G - a spectacular lens in its own right.  The 50/1.8G would be about 130mm, an ideal portrait length.  The mind starts to shudder.
5. Fast Autofocus - along with hyperfocal settings, fast AF is a must.  From what I've read, on paper the Nikon 1 just blows away the competition - 135 single points, 41 area with phase and contrast detect modes.  This should be comparable to most DSLRs.

So personally, I think that the Nikon should be a beast for street photography provided that a true wide angle lens is released very soon. 

Obliviously

Obliviously, a photo by SL_Photos on Flickr.

There's a certain time of day in Chicago where the sun (either setting or rising) intersects with the building lines to bring together some amazing opportunities. I was primarily looking for shadows, following people as they hit the crosswalks. It's something that I've done before, with a little bit of success.




What I love about this shot is the homeless person on the right. There's a tension here, the couple is holding hands on a beautiful day and they're almost certainly not aware of the pain and destitution a foot away from them. To be honest, I wasn't looking at the homeless lady either. Stuff like that just doesn't get noticed when you're out shooting.

The picture of health

The picture of health, a photo by SL_Photos on Flickr.
I could have called this one "Chinese Ham" - the camera came up and this guy was instantly on a stage playing his part.  The "Health Source" sign in the background is a nice little touch.  This was taken during a photowalk in Chicago's Chinatown as part of the Eric Kim street photography workshop.  I'll be writing more about this fabulous experience later, once I free up from my busy (non-photography) work schedule. 

From this point forward I will no longer put my gear list for each shot on the blog. I'm done thinking about equipment, I need to focus on the shot & the vision.  I will say that I used a 35mm prime lens, this focal length (along with an ultra-wide) seems to be the ideal lens for street photography.  It's just wide enough to pull in more of the surrounding environment than a 50mm, but not so wide that you have to worry about extraneous elements poking their head into your frame.