Buckle up, kids. Brendon is talking about lenses…again… I posted a couple weeks ago about the Leica Elmar that I recently picked up. I’ve shot it a handful of times around the house but shortly after purchasing it we ended up leaving for Arizona and I didn’t bring the Leica with me. I actually didn’t bring a real camera at all, just the little H35N. My wife brought her little Fuji X-T10 which I ended up using quite a bit. All this to say that despite being super stoked to have picked up the Elmar (for reasons I’ve talked about ad nauseam elsewhere) I haven’t really taken it out for a proper walk until yesterday afternoon.
We wanted to take advantage of the nice weather on some of our last days off before heading back to work so we grabbed the pup and headed out for a walk in the local state park.
I opted to throw the Elmar on the M262 for ease of not having to develop a roll of film before seeing what the lens output was like, and judging by the rendering on digital I do think it will render beautifully on film as well. The light was pretty harsh, as we didn’t really get out until well in to the mid-day sun. But the characteristically low contrast rendering of the older lens design rendered the light pretty beautifully, especially in black and white. One of the beautiful things that I’ve always admired about old Leica glass is this kind of organic sharpness you get paired with a natural feeling contrast. A lot of modern lens design seems to opt for gobs of micro-contrast to give the appearance of sharpness in a way that can give a kind of “crunchy” rendering, for lack of a better term.
My Zeiss Planar tends to fall in to this latter category of lens design. It is bitingly sharp, like amazingly sharp especially on modern digital sensors. But part of that comes down to insane levels of micro-contrast and it can come across as a little too sharp. Weirdly sharp. Unnaturally sharp. So much so that I sometimes pull back a bit on the clarity/detail sliders in Lightroom to try and take some of the edge off the rendering. No such issue with the Elmar, and I definitely enjoy that. All in all I’m super stoked on how it renders. I remember some of the first few frames I saw off the lens thinking, “Oh my god. This is it. This is the look I remember from my old 50/3.5 Elmar. I’ve been looking for this.”
I will say that comparing the Planar to the Elmar there are some quirks that I’ve found annoying. The collapsible part seems cool on paper but generally ends up feeling cumbersome and annoying. I tend to just leave it out and locked in place the whole time and only collapse it when I need to store the camera. Another little quirk is aperture adjustment. The whole body of the lens rotates when focusing, and the focusing throw is so smooth and the aperture clicks dampened enough that when trying to adjust aperture without the infinity lock engaged, the whole lens just spins. So changing aperture is a matter of locking the infinity lock and then changing aperture. None of these are really dealbreakers, they’re just little hiccups that can sometimes make the lens feel a little clunky. But they’re small prices to pay for the upsides of the lens, IMO.
One of the more substantive annoyances is the propensity of the lens to flare. I tend to shoot like an idiot. That is, I point my camera toward the sun quite a bit, which is a recipe for flare. I understand this, and it is one of the virtues of the Zeiss coatings that it is incredibly resistant to flaring. I’m not completely anti-flare, to be clear. I do think it can work in the right context but it can be a buzzkill when it shows up at inopportune times, and the Elmar can do it from time to time. I’m sure as I shoot it more I’ll figure out how to work with it better and avoid conditions that make it flare up. And in terms of flare it does tend to be a pretty pleasing or easily addressed way of flaring, generally presenting as veiling flare that washes out the images, which is pretty easy to fix in editing.
So, all in all it was pretty nice to finally get out and get a walk with the old Elmar under my belt and from the results, I’m pretty pleased with this old hunk of brass and glass. It feels good to have an old Elmar in the lineup again.
