Rangefinder malaise, or Leicas vs Cheap old DSLRs

February 05, 2026

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!

The Winter of Our Discontent, or January on Kentmere 400

January 24, 2026

On how black and white film is beautiful

The other morning I’d pulled out a roll of Kentmere 400 with the intention of loading it in the Zorki and taking it for a walk. And then somewhere along the way that roll of film ended up in the Leica because loading the Zorki seemed like a pain (it is kind of annoying, like loading Barnack Leicas, but it’s also really not that bad). It might also be because I like the option to put the Zeiss or the Leica Elmar on the front of the M4-2 and not have to think about whether or not the Industar on the Zorki is going to pull off the images in the way I’m looking for it to without flaring like mad or introducing weird distortions, etc.. Either way, I ended up taking a walk with the Leica on a late sunny morning.

I shot the film at box speed but overexposed it by about a stop most of the time so it was kind of like shooting it at 200. I developed it at box speed in Ilfotec HC 1+31. I’d been waxing nostalgic about how beautiful black and white film is specifically when it comes to black and white work and the end results here kind of indicate that it’s not purely nostalgia or staring at my catalog of scans for too long. It does just look really nice. There’s a certain subtlety of tones in black and white film that’s really hard to get right on digital black and white for some reason. The sensor on the M262 can pull it off well enough especially when shooting a low contrast old lens like the Elmar 50/2.8. But on a lot of digital cameras it seems to take a lot of finagling to massage the tones to get anywhere close to as beautiful and nuanced as film.

I think it’s also telling that I have 10 rolls of color film in my fridge and when I grabbed some film to shoot a film camera again I grabbed the black and white film… I think it says more about my trepidation about getting everything set up for the C41 development, if I’m honest. I’ll get there eventually, I think… But for now it was nice to shoot some black and white and remember the beauty of good old black and white film.

Zorkis, walks, bulk loading film, and other assorted nonsense

January 14, 2026

Wherein rambling takes place about shooting old cameras, bulk loading film, etc etc..

This morning I got an early start taking Ruckus for a walk around the neighborhood. I grabbed my camera before I walked out the door but he is such a handful to take for a walk because he needs constant work on reactivity training that I didn’t take a single photograph on our walk. In retrospect I don’t know why I actually thought I’d be able to. But it was a beautiful morning, so when we got back home I decided to head back out the door with the ol’ Canon 5D and see what the world had to offer. It was a nice walk, the kind of walk I usually engage in. I throw a camera around my neck, head out the door and wander around somewhat aimlessly, allowing the world to show me what’s worth paying attention to. Photography is ultimately just an art of paying attention, after all. There’s technical stuff involved in there but all the technical prowess amounts to nothing if you’re not paying attention.

On another note, I’ve really been wanting to get back to shooting some film, specifically some black and white film but I’ve been putting off loading up the bulk loader and rolling film. So today I finally stopped procrastinating and pulled the 100ft roll of Kentmere 400 out of the fridge and grabbed the changing bag and got the whole ensemble set up and loaded a handful of 36 shot rolls so I’d have them to grab and load in to the camera. If you like to shoot film and aren’t bulk loading film you’re throwing away money, honestly. A 100ft roll of Kentmere is around 100 bucks, and with 18 rolls out of 100ft it’s about $6 per roll. To be fair the number of film stocks available in 100ft rolls for a decent price is dwindling but as a general rule if you can get the 100ft roll for a decent price you can save a decent amount per roll over buying individual rolls of film.

I’ve also been wanting to shoot my old Zorki 1 some more because I seem to get in to phases where I romanticize the shooting experience of that camera and have the urge to shoot it until I put a few rolls through it and realize it’s not a magical tool. I wrote a whole piece about this several years ago on here but apparently I don’t learn my lesson. I’m forever looking for the magic of shooting my old Leica III apparently. And even though I know it’s not magic, there is something really fun about that stripped down shooting experience on those super early rangefinders. It’s everything you need to make a picture in a tool and absolutely nothing you don’t. I want to run some color film through it too since I need to start working through the color film in the fridge and tackle the task of finally developing the color film. Send positive vibes… Anyways, that about sums it up for this post. A nice day of walking and making photographs, bulk rolling film, and talking about old Soviet cameras.