The reason I picked a Leica

Here they are, some photographs from a trip to Cartagena in August 2003. They turned out to be good enough (and my wife praised them so much) that I decided it was time to get a Leica camera. I earned it. They were all made with my old Canonet G-III QL17 and color slide film (except for the B&W, which are in Scala). See for yourself...

Couple in the Cartagena walls (which circle the city).

The street that follows Plaza Santo Domingo, in 2003. It's changed a little ever since...

I cannot recall the name of this street, but I think it leads to the Plaza Rodríguez de Madrid, in the San Diego neighborhood of Cartagena.

I still have my Canonet. Selling it would be out of the question. It's been resting for a while, without a battery, and I don't know exactly when I'll pick it up again. But it took going to a town that was in the middle of its summer, and it reacted remarkably well to all the abrupt temperature changes I subjected it to. After buying my Leicas I still used it a couple of times... but never later. Probably it's about time to dust it off and take it for a walk.

Next time I may have some recent scans from a nice slide roll used in my M4-2.

New Toy!

Here it is!  One more Leica lens... 

A nice Elmar 90mm f4 lens, with caps, recently came home.  It is now part of my M3 classic system, as you can see...

Of course, pretty much immediately, I loaded film it into my M3 and proceeded to burn it.  I went without a meter here, so I recall that the exposure of all the images was about the same I use with my Summicron 50mm collapsible, but with a tad of an opening to compensate for the lens's length.  So, the one above was shot at f5.6, 1/1000 on B400CN film. 

And so was this one above!

Now... where would I be without PSE6?  See... in the end, I did overexpose most of these shots, so I had to resort to the shadow/highlight sliders. 

The lens works well; the turning of the rings, both aperture and focus, is nice and dampened.  The only concern I may have is a slight squeak close to the infinity, that I hear every time I turn the focusing ring a bit fast, from the closest to the farthest distance.  However, it's been relatively quiet for a while. 

Later I will post either more shots with this one, or more with any of my other long Leica lenses.  Who said that rangefinders are not efficient with telephotos?  We'll see soon.  Meanwhile, dust off your big guns!