The Camera I Miss the Most

If you’ll go to the previous post (just below this one), you’ll find quite a lot of comments, and quite a lot of Featured Comments. I thought I’d add my own pick, from up here in the bully pulpit.
Oddly enough, I think the camera I miss the most is a Leica R4s with a Leitz-era 35mm /2 Summicron-R and 90mm Summicron-R (I’m hazy on the variants of the latter, now, but the one I used had the narrow focusing ring). I used them a little more than 20 years ago now. Michael Hintlian, who is a fine and accomplished photographer himself, loaned me the two lenses when I was Editor of Photo Techniques. After trying to buy a camera body from eBayone described as “mint,” which arrived not only dirty and dinged but broken*I bought a worn but functioning R4s from Josh Hawkins at Oak Park Camera. Later, I bought that 35mm lens from Michael; then he wanted it back because he missed it, so I sold it back to him. I really should have kept it, but I’m just not the type to refuse to sell a guy’s lens back to him if I know he wants it back.
I wonder how much work and time it would take to rummage through the boxes in the barn to find some pictures taken with that camera and lens. I know I have lots, but finding them could be tough. We’ll see.
The lens was designed by Walther Mandler at Elcan, Ernst Leitz Canada. It was way, way overbuilt mechanically. Rather brilliant optically, although a friend dismissed it as “just another super-sharp, soulless lens.” I liked it, though. Although it did have some quirks, it seemed to mesh with Tri-X 400 really well, at least to my eye. (That “Tri-X” is no longer made, by the waythe film you buy under that name today is the new Tri-X 400, which is “improved” and not the same film. But then, Kodak made many small, unannounced improvements to Tri-X over many years, and no one ever really knows which exact version of the film someone else is talking about when they say “Tri-X.”)
For a long time I’ve been in the habit of looking at R7’s on eBay. That’s the most recent variant of the R4R7 lineage of which the R4s was a part. The R4s was a simplified, supposedly “budget” version of the R4. It was still expensive when new, though, and at various times they’ve sold for more on the used market than the R4 because people seem to put a premium on their greater simplicity. I know I did.
(The same variantthe cheaper, simplified versionof the R5 was called the RE. One of my students when I taught had a brand new R5 which had just come out at the timehis outfit cost a rather humiliatingly large percentage of my annual salary at the time.)
R7’s are very cheap now and it would be easy to buy one. The R lenses, however, can be adapted, so they’re still expensive. That’s probably a good thingkeeps me from buying one. One complication is that I don’t actually like 35mm Summicron-R’s…something I know because I tried to buy one to replace the one I sold back to Michael. I didn’t like it as well. The new one was a “Leica” branded one, and I  suspected the coatings were different by then. What I liked was Michael’s lens. That particular 35mm Summicron-R, I mean. And there’s no going home again on that.
(Just a word of advice that’s of fairly limited relevance in the digital age: when you find a lens you particularly like, particularly if it’s a zoom, you should consider your affection to be just for that particular lens, not the make and model generically. There’s just enough sample variation in lenses (particularly zooms, but primes too, sometimes) such that the last little measure of ineffable magicfor your own definition of “magic”is likely to be a property of the particular specific lens you tried rather than of every single sample of that same model. See Roger Cicala for plenty of lowdown on that.)
Let’s put it this way: If my ship were to come in (which won’t happen because I don’t have a ship at sea, to stretch the analogy), I’d get a couple of R7’s and those two Summicron-R’s and shoot Tri-X for the rest of my life, getting someone else to develop, proof, and workprint the pictures. (Because that’s what it would take to make film just as easy as digitalha!)
I’d make the final prints myself, in the basement of the house I would of course build because, you know, that ship and all**.
However, back here in what I conceive of as my provisional, temporary situation, known to all others as “my real life,” I don’t use film. So the whole exercise is simple nostalgia. I’ve come to believe that my pining for that old camera probably derives from the simple fact that I just wasn’t done with it at the time I had to give it up, such that I’m left with a permanent lingering sense of unfinished businessa lack of closure
if you get my drift
That’s all it is. Probably. Subject to further experiment, possibly…I’ll keep scanning the horizon from the widow’s walk***.
Saturday post this weekHappy Street Photography Day tomorrow! I’ll be back in the morning this week with some thoughts about that.
Mike
*And the seller had the cojones to explain to me that “mint” was only the fifth-highest description in his condition hierarchy, the slimy weasel. Behind “Mint+,” “LN,” “LN,” and “LN in box,” I think it was. Scurvy bilge-rat.
**Hundreds of years ago, European investors would buy shares in the speculative voyage of a ship, whether its mission was trade, whaling, plundering gold from the New World, predatory privateering on the open sea, or whatever. If the ship was successful in its mission, then, when it returned from the voyagewhich could take multiple yearsthe investors would reap a rich payoff according to how many shares they were due. Certainly, from such investors, “I’ll pay you when my ship comes in” must have been common to hear. And, with communication in a primitive state, no one on shore knew how the voyage had gone until the ship returned. Our familiar expression today no doubt derives from the fact that if a voyage was wildly successful, an investor could potentially grow rich on the proceeds of even a single voyage…when his ship came in!
***When a ship in the age of sail was lost at sea, it would simply fail to return. Wealthy seafaring men often equipped their coastal houses with rooftop cupolas or platforms, the better to see to a farther horizon. Many is the time a captain would not come back, and his wife would climb to the rooftop walk to scan the sea for the ship that was never coming home, often far past the period of any reasonable expectation. Hence the term “widow’s walk” for these lookouts.
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