Wherein I ramble about shooting rangefinders

I’ve been using a rangefinder camera for a long time at this point. The vast majority of files in my Lightroom catalog have been shot with either the Leica M262 or on film with the Leica M4-2. I’ve made thousands of photographs with these tools. For the longest time shooting a rangefinder felt like second nature but I’ve noticed lately that I’ve begun to struggle with it. In both of my most recent outings with the M4-2 (see the last post) and this outing with the M262, using the Leicas has felt a little uncanny or at least mildly frustrating.

Shooting a rangefinder is an interesting experience in that when one looks through the viewfinder what one is seeing is basically the world in front of you with frame lines superimposed on top of it. This makes for a shooting experience that feels very loose, and open, for lack of better language. You see something, you look through the viewfinder and put the box around it and snap a photograph, and you move on. Of course you can put more thought and concern in to the framing process but overall the entire thing is a little loose.

That looseness is something that I used to really enjoy because it facilitated a very fluid kind of shooting that allowed one to shoot quickly and in the moment, so to speak. But I’ve found that as I become more and more intentional about the way I’m framing images and thinking about how to compose images I prefer the “sucked-in” experience of an SLR. I think this is part of why I’ve been shooting my old Canon 5D so much, in addition to just loving the output from that camera.

This all feels a little weird, having had such a long relationship with a specific tool that suddenly starts to feel a little uncanny. It’s like your favorite screwdriver that you’ve been using for decades suddenly has a chip in the handle and what once felt like an invisible implement now intrudes in to your awareness because of some now-perceived defect. Of course I’m aware that this is a stupid problem to have. Does it really matter that I’ve started to enjoy shooting an SLR more than a rangefinder? No, of course not. They’re both cameras, they’re both just tools. Who cares, go make fucking photos and stop worrying about it, you know? But nevertheless, I feel the need to talk through it and sort it out in my brain. And it’s an excuse to fill the space on a blog post and put some photos up, so here we are!

Thanks for listening to my rambling nonsense and looking at some pictures!