Every once in a while I like to throw my old Soviet Industar-22 on the front of my Leica M262. It’s kind of a ridiculous pairing on the surface of things. Why would you throw a $50 lens on the front of an M body? Let’s throw an objectively mediocre lens on the front of that nice 24MP M sensor (insert thumbs up). Right? I mean, kind of. But also not really.
I’ve talked about these simple old lens designs before and the long and short of it is that I just love the way they render scenes. There’s a kind of liveliness to them that feels very close to the way we visually experience the world around us. I like my Zeiss Planar that I use as my go-to 50mm, don’t get me wrong. It’s a scalpel of a lens and as a tool that I can trust to just give me a straightforward, objective rendering of the world in front of me. It hardly ever flares, it’s sharp as hell across the frame, has little to no distortion. But this rendering can also feel a little lifeless. These old imperfect, simple lenses seem to have a certain vitality in the way they render. I think the more standard term for this is “character” but I find that term comes up a little short.
I first had this experience with an old Leica Elmar that came on a Leica IIIa. The venerable 50/3.5. A slow 50mm with a simple optical formula that always had a way of rendering with this beautiful organic sharpness, soft contrast, a pleasing way of failing when it did flare, etc etc. All this came together in a rendering that has always stuck with me as a kind of benchmark for how elegantly simple and beautiful a lens can be. One of these days I might need to find another Elmar, either the old 3.5 version or the slightly faster 2.8 version.
The Industar-22 is not as good as the Leica (shocking, I know). It’s got some field curvature, and maybe some decentering, it needs to be stopped down to about f8 before you approximate the sharpness of the Elmar, and it flares in a chaotic frame-ruining style when the sun is just in the right spot. But it is similar in many ways. It is a slightly different but still very simple optical formula that lends itself to that characteristically organic rendering when you can work around some of its flaws, and the results are enough to keep me coming back to this weird combo.
Someone made the comment the other day that they were more and more convinced that the camera is just an accessory to the lens and I think this weird combo goes to prove the point. Photos made with either the Zeiss Planar or the little Industar are both made with the M262, but they’re worlds apart in their “seeing,” so to speak. Each lens delivers a unique take on the world as it translates the scene in front of it in its own unique way. What really makes each particular image is the unique combination of an individual’s seeing and a lenses way of rendering the world in front of us. And when those two factors work synergistically there’s magic.
So, that’s why I put a “shitty” Soviet lens on my Leica
Below is a little sampling of additional photos made on a recent walk with this combination
