This was one of those.

Some time ago, I found a listing on Kleinanzeigen,
the German online marketplace. Someone was selling a bundle of three Phase One lenses. At first glance, that already had my attention.

The description said something along the lines of:

Three Phase One lenses. 35mm, 45mm and approximately 80mm. For the XF and MF system.

Then it became more specific. A 35mm LS f/3.5. A 45mm LS f/3.5 with a defective focus or aperture. And an 80mm f/2.8 Leaf Shutter lens.

Three Phase One Leaf Shutter lenses. The seller wanted €950.

There was only one problem. The photographs told a different story.

One of the photographs showed the lenses from below. I could make out what looked like the 80mm f/2.8, but it did not look like the Leaf Shutter version. Another lens was partly visible, but the angle was bad enough that I could not tell exactly what it was.

Then there was the third lens. It was much bigger. Clearly a zoom. On the ring I could still read the number 75. That was enough.

This was probably the 75 to 150mm zoom. And that made no sense at all, because the advertisement did not mention a zoom. It mentioned a 35mm.

The rest of the photographs did not help much. There were close-ups of the glass, presumably intended to demonstrate how clean the lenses were. The image quality was so poor that they demonstrated very little.

I saved the listing. Not because I intended to buy the lenses. I simply wanted to see what happened.

Maybe the seller would notice the mistake. Maybe somebody would tell him. Maybe new photographs would appear.

Nothing happened. Except for the price.

€950 became €800. Then €700. Then €600. Then €500.

At €500, I started paying attention again. Three Phase One lenses for €500 deserved another look, even if nobody seemed to know exactly which three lenses they were.

Then my phone showed me another notification. €459. Negotiable.

That was enough. I sent the seller a message.

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I asked for better photographs. I also mentioned that, from what I could see, the lenses did not appear to be Leaf Shutter lenses.

A few hours later, the seller sent me new pictures. Now it was clear. None of them had a leaf shutter.

There was a 45mm f/2.8. There was an 80mm f/2.8. And there was indeed a 75 to 150mm zoom.

All three were normal focal plane shutter lenses. But they were already Schneider Kreuznach Silver Ring versions with Phase One branding rather than older Mamiya markings.

That made them interesting.

I told the seller that the description was wrong because the lenses did not contain leaf shutters. I did not tell him that the mysterious lens in the photographs was a 75-150mm zoom rather than the 35mm written in the advertisement.

Some information is more useful when kept to yourself.

Then I made a considerably lower offer. He accepted.

If I remember correctly, I offered €350 for all three. With shipping and the additional buyer protection from Kleinanzeigen, the complete transaction ended somewhere around €373.

And then came the dangerous part. Waiting.

The seller had been friendly. Very friendly, actually. But I still had a strange feeling about the whole thing.

Someone was selling three Phase One lenses without really knowing which lenses they were. The advertisement contained several obvious mistakes. One lens was described as defective, but without any useful explanation of what had happened to it.

It could have been an innocent case of somebody selling equipment they no longer understood. Or it could have been a box full of expensive paperweights.

That was why I used the marketplace escrow system. It cost a little more. I considered that money well spent.

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A few days later, the parcel arrived.

This is one of my favourite moments when buying strange used camera equipment. The box is sitting in front of you. The money is already gone. You have done your research. You have stared at bad photographs. You have calculated values. You have convinced yourself that this might be clever.

Now none of that matters anymore. You open the box.

I filmed the complete unboxing from my point of view, so the first reaction in the Behind the Scenes video is real.

And, fortunately, there were three Phase One lenses inside. That was already a good start.

I started with the easiest candidate. The 80mm f/2.8 looked almost new. It even came with its lens hood.

I mounted it on my Phase One XF and tested it. Infinity. Close distance. Autofocus. Aperture control.

Everything worked. No strange noises. No errors. Nothing suspicious.

The lens was simply good.

Considering the condition, I would estimate its used value somewhere around €250 to €300. That alone changed the mathematics of the deal considerably.

This particular 80mm is also an interesting version. It is a Phase One branded Silver Ring lens without a leaf shutter.

That version only existed for a relatively short period. Later, the 80mm f/2.8 LS became the standard lens and added the leaf shutter most people now associate with the Phase One system.

Earlier versions also existed with Mamiya branding. This one sits somewhere in between those generations.

It is not especially exotic. But you do not see it every day either.

I already own the later Blue Ring 80mm with Leaf Shutter, and I also have an older Mamiya 80mm f/2.8. The old Mamiya is small, light and useful.

I had no reason to keep another 80mm. So I cleaned the Silver Ring lens, photographed it properly and put it up for sale.

One lens down. Two to go.

The 75-150mm was a different story. This lens had worked. You could see it immediately.

The outside showed considerably more wear than the 80mm. The zoom ring was stiff. The glass was dirty. There were fingerprints. There was dust.

But none of that matters very much if the lens itself is good.

I mounted it on the XF. First at 75mm. Close focus. Infinity. Then at 150mm. Close focus. Infinity.

All four tests worked. The aperture worked. Autofocus worked.

And then I looked at the files. That was the surprise.

Even wide open at f/4.5, the detail was excellent. Very excellent.

You immediately understand why this lens has such a good reputation among photographers who have used the Phase One and Mamiya medium-format systems for years.

I had never owned a zoom lens for my Phase One system before. Not one.

There was a reason for that. My IQ180 uses an older CCD sensor.

I love the files from it, but high ISO is not one of its strengths. ISO 200 is already something I use carefully. ISO 400 is usually beyond what I want from the camera.

That means fast lenses matter. A lot.

An f/4.5 zoom is not the obvious partner for an IQ180. But the first files from the 75 to 150mm were good enough that I wanted to give it a chance.

First, however, it needed cleaning.

The 45mm f/2.8 was clearly the problem child. Its focus mechanism was extremely stiff.

The focus ring moved at first, then became progressively harder to turn as it approached infinity. Eventually it almost stopped.

I did not want the XF autofocus motor fighting against that resistance. That seemed like an excellent way of turning one broken lens into one broken lens and one broken camera.

So I switched to manual focus. Or tried to.

Even the AF and MF selector was difficult to move. That told me something.

Looking closely, I could see that the rear ring of the lens was dented. The lens had probably been dropped.

It appeared to have landed near the rear edge, exactly where the focus mode selector sits.

Now I had my experimental lens.

I repair manual Leica lenses fairly regularly. Autofocus lenses are a different world.

There are electronics. Motors. Sensors. Mechanical coupling systems. More parts. More opportunities to make a bad situation worse.

That made the damaged 45mm interesting. If I repaired it, excellent. If I failed, I would learn something.

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I started to disassemble the 45mm. The detailed process is in the Behind the Scenes video, but the short version goes like this.

I removed the damaged rear ring. That part went surprisingly well. I managed to straighten it enough that the autofocus and manual focus selector worked correctly again.

One problem solved.

Then I went deeper. The actual focus mechanism uses a helicoid with a trapezoidal thread.

It is a very precise system. There is almost no play.

That is good when everything is straight. It is bad when something is bent.

After cleaning the helicoid, taking it apart several times, reassembling it and applying fresh grease, the reason became increasingly obvious.

The outer part of the helicoid had probably also been damaged in the fall. It was no longer perfectly round.

As the lens moved towards infinity and the optical assembly travelled further inside the barrel, resistance increased. That was exactly the area closest to the original impact damage.

There was no sensible way for me to repair it.

This was not an old brass Leica barrel where a small dent can sometimes be carefully pushed back into shape. The tolerances here are too small.

The focusing movement has to remain accurate, smooth and essentially free of play.

After the service, manual focusing was better. But not good enough.

The autofocus motor still could not drive the lens reliably towards infinity. The XF produced an error.

That was the end of the repair.

I reassembled the lens. Manually, it still works. The aperture works. The optics are sharp. Infinity focus is correct. Close focus is correct.

With the focus confirmation on the XF camera, the lens can even be used relatively comfortably by hand. But it is no longer useful to me.

I will sell it as a parts lens.

Maybe somebody needs the electronics. Maybe somebody needs the glass. Maybe somebody already owns another damaged 45mm with exactly the opposite problem.

Old camera equipment has strange second lives.

Now I returned to the zoom.

I wanted to clean the rear element and, if possible, investigate the stiff zoom mechanism. The rear glass is partly covered by a sleeve, so proper cleaning requires some disassembly.

I removed the rear mount. Then the sleeve. Then I finally had proper access to the glass.

That part was straightforward. The zoom mechanism was not.

Once I could see more of the construction, I decided to stop.

There is an important point in repairing camera equipment when curiosity needs to lose against common sense. I had reached it.

The lens worked. The zoom ring was merely stiff.

Taking the complete mechanism apart without fully understanding its construction would have been a good way to convert a working zoom lens into a box of interesting spare parts.

So I cleaned the rear glass and put everything back together. Then I moved to the front.

The lens had arrived without a front cap. The glass was dirty and dusty.

While cleaning it, I discovered another problem. The filter thread was bent.

Quite badly.

Apparently this lens had also been dropped.

The 45mm had probably landed on the rear. The 75 to 150mm had probably landed on the front.

A well-balanced collection.

I wanted to repair this damage because I use filters, and a damaged thread would become annoying very quickly.

I have a special tool for straightening dented filter rings. It works very well on older Leica lenses, particularly when the front ring is made from softer metal such as brass.

The Phase One zoom did not cooperate so easily. The front section is substantial. It is aluminium. It required much more force.

But eventually it moved.

I slowly worked the damaged section back into shape. And it worked.

The filter thread accepts filters again. The lens hood fits. The glass is clean. The lens is fully usable.

That felt good.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

Camera:
Phase One XF with IQ180

Lenses:
Phase One 75-150mm f/4.5
Phase One 45mm f/2.8
Phase One 80mm f/2.8

The First Real Tests

After cleaning the zoom, I made more photographs. I also used a focus test chart.

The results confirmed my first impression. This is a very good lens.

Sharpness is excellent. Detail is excellent. And the range from 75 to 150mm is extremely useful on medium format.

The remaining question has nothing to do with optical quality. It is f/4.5.

On a modern medium-format camera with good high-ISO performance, that would not bother me much. On an IQ180, it matters.

This is probably going to be a daylight lens. Good light. Sunshine. Situations where I can stay close to base ISO without ending up with unusably slow shutter speeds.

Whether that limitation becomes annoying remains to be seen. But I want to find out.

Because this is the first zoom lens I have owned since I started using Phase One.

Reflections

So what did I actually buy?

Three Phase One lenses for roughly €375.

The 80mm works perfectly and is probably worth around €270 in its current condition. The 45mm is broken, but it still works manually and might bring around €100 as a parts lens.

If both sell somewhere near those figures, the 75-150mm effectively cost me nothing.

Free is a difficult price to argue with. Especially when the free lens turns out to be the one I wanted to keep.

But I would not turn this into a story about easy money.

Buying badly described equipment is a gamble.

The advertisement was wrong. The photographs were poor. Two of the three lenses appear to have suffered impact damage that was never properly described.

One could not be repaired. The other required work.

This could easily have gone the other way. The box could have arrived with three useless lenses inside.

This time, I got lucky.

Unplanned Favorite

There is no single favourite photograph this time.

The favourite is probably the lens I did not know I was buying.

The advertisement said 35mm. The photographs said otherwise.

In the box was a 75 to 150mm.

And that is the lens that stayed.

Sometimes the mistake in a listing is the most interesting part of the listing.

What I’d do differently:

I would ask more questions before sending money.

The result was good this time, but there were warning signs everywhere. The seller did not know exactly which lenses he owned. The description was wrong. The photographs were not good enough to judge condition properly.

And the damage to the 45mm and 75-150mm was much more significant than the advertisement suggested.

Better photographs would probably have revealed at least some of it. A few direct questions about dents, stiff focus rings, filter threads and previous drops might have helped too.

You cannot remove all the risk from buying used equipment. But you can make the risk smaller.

Next time, I would try harder to do that.

Tech Minute:

The question now is whether the 75 to 150mm makes sense with my IQ180.

Optically, I already know the answer. Yes.

Practically, I am less certain.

The IQ180 is a CCD back, and I normally treat ISO 200 as roughly the upper end of the range I genuinely want to use. That makes an f/4.5 lens relatively slow.

My normal Phase One kit contains faster prime lenses for exactly that reason. And the supposed size and weight advantage of a zoom is not as obvious as it first appears.

Instead of the 75-150mm, I could carry something like an 80mm, a 110mm and a 150mm.

The 150mm f/3.5 is an excellent portrait lens. The 110mm f/2.8 LS is fast, compact and still quite light despite containing a leaf shutter. The 80mm f/2.8 LS is similarly convenient.

Three primes obviously take more space than one lens, but not as much more as you might expect.

So the zoom has to prove something else. Convenience.

The ability to work quickly without changing lenses. The ability to move from a normal perspective to a tight portrait in seconds.

That may be enough.

Or I may discover that f/4.5 forces me back to the primes whenever the light becomes interesting.

There is only one way to find out. Use it.

“Sometimes the real value of a good deal isn’t what you save, but what you learn along the way.”

I spent an afternoon taking the lenses apart, cleaning them, repairing what I could and learning where my own limits were.

That afternoon may have been the best part of the deal.

“Tobi, why are you still shooting with fifteen-year-old cameras in 2026?”

It is a fair question.

Modern cameras are faster. Their autofocus systems can follow an eye through a crowded room. They offer more resolution, wider dynamic range, cleaner files at high ISO, and countless functions we could only dream of fifteen years ago.

So why do I keep returning to cameras that are technically obsolete?

The answer is not the camera itself.

It is the RAW file.

More precisely, it is the way that file behaves when I begin to edit it.

This is the story of how I moved from the Epson R-D1 to the Leica M9 and finally to a Phase One with an IQ180 CCD back. It is also the story of how I learned that CCD and CMOS files cannot always be treated in the same way.

That discovery changed my entire workflow.

At the end of this article, subscribers can download four of my Lightroom presets for free. Two are specialised presets that reveal a great deal about how I build colour and contrast. The other two remain regular starting points for my portrait work.

They will not finish your images for you.

But they may help you understand how I begin.

Some people assume I use old cameras because I want a vintage look. Others think I simply dislike modern technology.

Neither is true.

For commercial assignments, I work with modern cameras. They make my life easier. Fast autofocus, high frame rates, sharp corners, neutral colours, and flexible RAW files are real advantages when a client is waiting.

In that environment, I want to preserve every option.

If the client decides they do not want any vignetting, I can remove it. If they need perfect sharpness across the frame, it is already there. If they ask for neutral colours, the files can deliver them.

I do not want to close any doors during the shoot.

My personal work is different.

There, I often know what the finished picture should feel like before I press the shutter. When I choose an old lens, I want its character. I want the gentle falloff in sharpness. I want its unusual bokeh, natural vignetting, flare, or Leica glow.

Those qualities are not faults to me.

They are part of the picture.

A common argument says that modern sensors have become so good that any desired result can be created later in Lightroom.

“You edit your pictures anyway. Surely you can make a modern RAW file look like a CCD file.”

I used to believe that too.

To a certain degree, it is true. Two neutral RAW files can be brought surprisingly close to each other. With enough time, one can imitate the colour, contrast, and tonal balance of the other.

But that only describes the result.

It says nothing about the route taken to reach it.

Once creative editing begins, the files respond differently. A small adjustment can send one file in a beautiful direction while pushing another towards a problem. Skin tones move. Highlights become harsh. Shadows lose colour. Saturation changes the balance of the entire frame.

That reaction matters.

Sometimes the RAW file even suggests the direction of the edit. It shows you what may be possible.

That became one of the biggest differences between CCD and CMOS for me.

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My first professional CCD camera was an Epson R-D1.

I did not buy it because of its sensor. At the time, I did not understand what a CCD sensor might mean for image development.

I simply fell in love with the camera.

Its design. Its mechanics. The rangefinder. The slower way of working.

Over time, I bought several Leica M and Voigtländer lenses and began taking the Epson with me. Most of the pictures were travel photographs. I was not producing many personal projects yet.

For work, I already used modern Canon DSLRs. The Epson was the camera I carried voluntarily. Not because it was better, but because it was fun.

Looking back, I can see how often I preferred it without being able to explain why.

I just liked the pictures.

That was enough.

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For the next few years, I worked almost exclusively with modern Canon cameras.

Every generation became better. There was more dynamic range, more resolution, cleaner high-ISO performance, and more autofocus capability.

Everything improved.

Yet I became less satisfied with my pictures, as you can read in 28 - CCD / CMOS / Film Comparison - 25 Years in a Nutshell

It sounds absurd. The opposite should have happened. Instead, I increasingly felt that I had to breathe life into the files at the computer.

They were neutral.

Very neutral.

Sometimes too neutral for me.

I added contrast. Then colour. Then microcontrast and depth. The further I pushed the edit, the more secondary problems appeared.

Skin moved towards magenta or green. Colours began to separate. Highlights became unpleasant. Shadows closed. I corrected one slider and created another problem somewhere else.

After a while, I no longer felt as if I were developing photographs.

I felt as if I were repairing problems caused by the development itself.

I could not explain it then.

I only knew that something was missing.

The Leica M9 arrived in 2019.

At first, it was only a second camera. I brought it to shoots, took a few frames, and compared them with my Canon files afterwards.

That comparison became my first mistake.

I developed the Canon photographs and then copied the same settings onto the Leica files.

The result was terrible.

There was too much microcontrast. Too much sharpening. Too much colour. Everything looked exaggerated. The Leica files appeared worse than the Canon files, so I usually put them aside and continued working with the Canon images.

Today I know that the Leica was not the problem.

My workflow was.

I was treating two different RAW files as if they were identical.

They were not.

The turning point came at the end of 2019.

An artist friend needed new portraits, and we photographed the whole session with the Canon. When her husband arrived to collect her, he brought his guitar at our request.

I picked up the Leica M9 and made a few spontaneous portraits of him.

Several days later, I started editing. I developed the Canon files first and copied their settings to the Leica pictures.

Once again, the result looked awful.

This time, however, I tried something new.

I reset every slider.

Zero.

No preset. No Canon settings. No attempt to force the Leica into an established workflow.

I started again.

The longer I worked on that file, the more I began to understand it. It needed smaller adjustments. The colours remained stable. The skin barely moved. Contrast appeared in a more harmonious way.

Eventually, I looked at the finished portrait and realised that I preferred this one Leica photograph to every Canon image from the session.

That was when I began to trust the camera.

Not because it was technically superior.

Because I had finally stopped treating it like a Canon.

I still wanted to test the old argument. If any modern RAW could be made to look the same, I should be able to recreate the Leica result with the Canon file.

I spent another hour and a half trying.

I came close. The finished Canon image was good. But I never reached the exact point the Leica file had reached so naturally. Something remained different in the skin, the colour transitions, and the way the image responded to each adjustment.

The more important discovery was not that I had failed to make a perfect match.

It was that the Canon file would never have led me towards that edit on its own.

It suggested a different treatment, different contrasts, and different colours. The Leica RAW was the file that showed me this particular look was possible.

The file did not merely change the result.

It changed the idea.

After that portrait, I changed my approach.

Until then, I had tried to adapt every camera to my existing workflow. Now I began adapting the workflow to the camera.

It sounds like a small distinction.

For me, it changed everything.

I stopped asking whether the M9 could behave like the Canon. I wanted to understand how the Leica behaved on its own.

A few weeks later, I photographed Sarah in her apartment. For the first time, I deliberately left the Canon at home.

There was no backup system and no comparison.

Only the Leica M9 and my Leica and Voigtländer lenses.

That decision changed the way I photographed. I stopped thinking about how a modern camera might record the room. I concentrated on what the Leica could see.

The images felt quiet. The colours sat naturally beside one another. Tonal transitions were soft. The lenses played a major role in this. The falloff in sharpness, the bokeh, and the slight sense of depth came mainly from the glass.

But the RAW files had something else.

They already felt close to finished.

Not perfect. Just close to the picture in my head.

Most of the apartment session was photographed in available light. The bedroom was dim. I added a few LED panels but allowed the existing atmosphere to remain dominant.

I had made test exposures at higher ISO values, but a real session is different. That is where you discover whether you can trust a camera.

I found that noise did not concern me very much.

Colour depth did.

Up to ISO 1250, the colours remained beautiful to my eye. Beyond that point, the file changed. Not simply because it became noisier. It began to lose the depth that made it valuable to my workflow.

Since then, the maximum ISO on all my Leica M9 bodies has been set to 1250.

The camera does not suddenly become useless above that. It simply begins to lose the quality I care about most.

This is why specifications tell only part of the story.

Dynamic range, ISO, megapixels, and autofocus can all be measured. But the question that matters most to me cannot be answered on a specification sheet:

How does the file behave while I am developing it?

I still edit every photograph.

But I edit differently and less.

In the past, much of my work consisted of correcting problems. Now it consists of adjusting nuances.

That is a large difference.

Every Lightroom slider affects more than one thing. More contrast changes colour. More clarity changes skin. More saturation changes the balance of the frame. The harder we push, the more often we have to correct the consequences.

With the Leica files, that happened less often.

Editing became enjoyable again.

A photograph of a fly agaric mushroom from an autumn walk still demonstrates this well. There was no model, no elaborate lighting, and no large concept. It was only a mushroom beside the path.

The RAW file was already close.

I added a little contrast, a touch of saturation, and a few minor adjustments.

That was all.

For the first time, I felt that I was no longer constructing the picture at the computer. The camera had already given me the foundation I wanted.

I think of 2020 as my year of adjustment.

The Leica was always with me and slowly became my main camera. But I did not understand it completely. Every shoot taught me something.

Sometimes I exposed correctly. Sometimes I missed.

Sometimes an edit worked at once. Sometimes it fought me.

That was necessary. I was not merely learning the strengths of the camera. I was learning its limits.

In Kyiv, I photographed Katja while travelling with restricted equipment. There were no large modifiers, no extensive lighting setup, and no assistants. I had to use what I could carry.

The pictures required more post-production than usual.

Instead of seeing this as a failure, I treated it as a lesson. I learned how far I could push the Leica files and where they began to resist.

A few months later, I went for a walk beside a lake in Austria with Sarah and Mila. I had only the Leica with me. The walk turned into an improvised bikini shoot.

There was not enough controlled light or depth. The pictures needed stronger corrections later.

The automatic white balance of the M9 is often wrong. That is no secret. Yet the files tolerated surprisingly large white-balance changes without making the skin look unnatural or breaking the tonal transitions.

That was another important lesson.

Then came the poppy field.

Sarah stood between red poppies and green grain. A storm was gathering behind her. The clouds were deep blue.

We were driving past when I saw it.

“Stop. Here.”

When I opened the RAW file later, I almost laughed. The white balance was slightly too cold. I warmed the skin, added a little contrast, and increased the colour intensity by a small amount.

Finished.

For the first time, I felt that I had seen the developed photograph while making the exposure. Not consciously. It was more instinctive than that.

The distance between taking the picture and finishing it had become very small.

My first Lightroom presets grew out of that year.

I did not build them simply to work faster. I built them because I wanted to understand why certain edits worked.

How did skin respond to the Hue controls? When did it move towards magenta? When did it turn green? Which tone curve added contrast without destroying the skin? How did different skin types react under different sources of light?

I stopped moving sliders by habit.

I began analysing them.

The understanding became more valuable than the presets themselves. I finally knew why I was making an adjustment, not only that I liked its effect.

By the end of 2020, I was certain that these were the files I had been looking for.

They were not perfect. Their restrictions were obvious. But they reacted in a way I found predictable, natural, and harmonious.

So I made what seemed like the logical next step.

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I bought a Phase One system with an IQ180 CCD back.

My plan sounded perfect.

The Leica would remain my light camera for travel and spontaneous work. The Phase One would provide the same qualities on a larger scale.

Its sensor was roughly four times larger. It offered 80 megapixels, more reserves, and files that began from a more neutral position.

Surely this would be the perfected version of the M9 experience.

That was the theory.

The first proper shoot surprised me.

A model friend asked whether I would photograph her pregnancy. It was not part of my usual portfolio, but she was a friend, so we created a mood board and planned the entire series in black and white.

I photographed almost everything with the Phase One tethered to a laptop. A black-and-white preset was already active, allowing us to judge each frame in the intended style.

She loved the photographs.

So did I.

A few days later, after finishing the monochrome series, I became curious about the colour hidden in the files. I created an alternative version with warm, chocolate-toned skin and subtle aquamarine highlights.

The colour shift was slight. Almost invisible. Yet it gave the image atmosphere.

When I sent her the new version, she preferred the colour photographs.

For me, the significance lay elsewhere.

As the musician’s portrait had done with the Leica, this session taught me to trust the Phase One.

Not because of its 80 megapixels.

Because of the RAW file.

The camera was only one part of the equation.

The lens mattered at least as much.

That was one reason I chose the Phase One system. Its focal-plane shutter allowed me to use lenses from many periods: Hasselblad V lenses, Pentacon Six glass, classic Mamiya 645 lenses, and modern Schneider Kreuznach optics.

It opened almost the entire history of medium-format lenses.

I bought examples from different eras because I wanted to understand what each one did to the file. Not only to sharpness or bokeh, but to microcontrast, colour transitions, flare, and the complete feeling of the image.

I explored this subject in more detail in “40 – A Buyer’s Guide for Your Next CCD Camera”, where I looked at how different lenses shape an image and why the glass can matter just as much as the sensor behind it.

The more I experimented, the clearer it became that the sensor alone did not create the look.

The finished file came from an interaction between the sensor, the camera’s RAW processing, and the lens.

With the right combination, the unedited photograph could sit remarkably close to the final version.

During a nude shoot with Sarah in an abandoned field, I photographed directly into the sun with an old Hasselblad 110mm f/2. The edit consisted largely of correcting a slight magenta flare so it would not reflect across her skin.

The rest remained almost untouched.

With Olga at Villa Lora in Italy, I added a little microcontrast and adjusted the greens in the background so they worked more naturally with her red lips.

Again, very little was needed.

In an Italian olive grove, I photographed Michela using a special Petzval lens made by a small Ukrainian manufacturer. It had a character that modern designs rarely offer.

A little white balance. A little contrast.

Nothing more.

I no longer saw a lens as a tool defined only by focal length, sharpness, and bokeh.

It had become part of the RAW file itself.

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The Leica and Phase One are far from perfect.

The M9 has limited dynamic range. The IQ180 becomes restrictive once the ISO rises. Blooming, flare, colour shifts, short battery life, slow operation, and old displays are part of the experience.

Yet I find these cameras easier to use today because I know where they fail.

I know when blooming may appear. I know when a lens will flare too strongly. I recognise the light that may become difficult. I understand how far I can move the file afterwards.

That knowledge allows me to solve many problems during the exposure instead of trusting the computer to rescue them later.

By the end of 2021, I could often look at the camera display and see the finished picture.

Not literally.

I could imagine which controls I would move, how the colours would settle, and how far I could push the contrast before the skin suffered.

That is what experience came to mean for me.

Not knowing where every button is.

Knowing how the file will behave.

Shortly before another period of pandemic travel restrictions, Natalie and I flew to Fuerteventura.

I left the Phase One at home. It was simply too heavy for the hand-luggage allowance.

I photographed the trip with the Leica M9.

That journey became another milestone. For the first time, there were almost no surprises between the moment of capture and the final edit.

I already knew where the file would go.

This is why I often show unedited and finished photographs side by side in my talks and workshops. I am not trying to demonstrate how dramatically I transform an image.

I want to show how close the RAW already was to the idea.

The aim is not to avoid editing.

It is to make more creative decisions before releasing the shutter.

People sometimes ask whether my photographs are still edited individually when I use so many presets.

They are.

A preset is not a filter to me. It is a starting exposure.

When I photograph, I do not invent every camera setting from nothing. I begin with a practical foundation and adapt it to the light in front of me.

My Lightroom workflow is similar.

I choose the preset that most closely matches the contrast and tonal range of the scene. Then the detailed work begins.

Sometimes the white balance needs attention. Sometimes it is contrast, skin colour, or the brightness of a specific part of the frame.

The basic direction is already established.

This saves time and keeps my visual language consistent across many years of work.

A preset designed for hard sunlight may not work on a portrait made in open shade. One created for soft available light may fail in a high-contrast scene.

The location does not matter as much as the structure of the light.

Contrast, dynamic range, and tonal distribution are the real foundation.

The four presets included with this article are deliberately different.

Chocolate Beach

Chocolate Beach began during the trip to Fuerteventura. It is a specialised preset built around a particular combination of light, warm skin, and surrounding colour.

It will not work on every photograph.

It is not meant to.

Its real value lies in the settings. Open the panels and examine them. Look at how the skin colours are separated from the rest of the frame. Study the contrast and the smaller colour shifts.

The preset shows how I think.

Two years later, I returned to Chocolate Beach while editing this portrait of Esther in Lanzarote. The island was different, but the warm skin, hard coastal light, and surrounding colours shared the same foundation. With a few individual adjustments, the preset worked again.

Blue Lake

Blue Lake was developed during a shoot with Marion in Lake Hallstatt.

Like Chocolate Beach, it is designed around a particular relationship between the subject, water, light, and colour. It also uses AI masks to identify the person and lift them slightly away from the background.

The effect is restrained.

The subject should not look artificially illuminated. She should simply hold her place within the frame.

Light and Shadow Beach

Light and Shadow Beach began with Michela in Italy.

We were walking by the sea when we found beautiful light beneath a straw roof. Sunlight passed through the gaps and drew an irregular pattern across her face.

I built the preset for that relationship between hard light and deep shadow.

Since then, I have used it for many shoots in which sunlight passes through leaves, fabric, or architecture. During a later session with Sarah and Blue in an olive grove, it worked with almost no changes. I only needed to warm the colour temperature.

The structure remained the same.

Night Portrait

“Night Portrait” came from a shoot outside an illuminated circus in Italy.

We had passed the location the previous evening and immediately knew we needed to return. I used one additional flash. The rest of the character came from the lights already present at the circus.

The preset also includes extensive AI masks for facial skin, body skin, clothing, hair, and the background. Once Lightroom has recalculated them for your photograph, each area can be adjusted separately.

That is my definition of a useful preset. It does not finish every image perfectly. It provides a reliable place to begin.

A year later, I returned to “Night Portrait” while editing my photographs of Martina in the harbour of Ancona. The location, model, and lighting were completely different. The same foundation still worked.

Subscribers can download the free presets at the end of the article.

AI masks have become a normal part of my editing.

I often separate the face, skin, hair, clothing, background, and light sources. I do not do this because I want to retouch everything.

I do it because I want to adjust one area without damaging another.

In the past, these masks had to be created by hand. Lightroom can now perform much of the initial work automatically. Across a complete portrait series, that saves a great deal of time.

It also makes the presets more practical. Once Lightroom recalculates the masks for each picture, the basic adjustments can be applied across an entire sequence and then refined individually.

The presets were designed primarily for portrait and model photography. This is how I use them myself.

Choose the closest foundation. Adapt it. Apply it across the series. Then inspect every frame.

Automation gives me time.

It does not make the decisions.

Presets are sometimes dismissed as shortcuts that replace real editing.

I see them differently.

A good preset does not begin at the computer. It begins with experience.

Behind each of mine are many shoots, failed edits, comparisons, corrections, and hours spent studying colour. The preset does not make the photograph. It condenses those lessons into a starting position.

I would not recommend applying my presets blindly to every image.

Open them.

Look at the sliders.

Ask why they are set that way. Change them. Break the preset. Rebuild it for your own files.

That is how I learned.

The purpose of these four presets is not to make your photographs look exactly like mine.

It is to help you discover how you want yours to look.

The chronological part of this story ends around late 2021 or early 2022.

My workflow has continued to develop since then. I work more precisely now. My preset collection has grown from a few starting points into an organised system.

I have presets for backlight, shade, portraits, available light, studio light, sunsets, the Leica M9, the Phase One, different lenses, and different skin types.

Many of them differ only in small details.

But those details matter. They save the final minutes of an edit. More importantly, they place me on the right path from the first click.

The tools have changed. The principle has not.

I do not want to rescue a photograph in Lightroom. I want to recognise it through the viewfinder, preserve it in the RAW file, and complete it with as little resistance as possible.

That is what these old CCD cameras taught me.

The finished picture should not begin at the computer.

It should already be there when I press the shutter.

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Reflections

There is no best camera.

That is why I struggle with many camera tests. They can compare specifications and reveal measurable differences, but their conclusions always reflect the priorities of the person conducting the test.

A sports photographer needs dependable autofocus. A studio photographer may care most about resolution. A documentary photographer has another set of needs. A landscape photographer has another.

The same camera can be perfect for one person and useless to the next.

Everything I have written about CCD files comes from my own experience and my own priorities. The number of photographers who work exactly as I do is probably small.

I am not recommending that everyone buy an old CCD camera.

I am explaining why these files work for me.

The CCD sensor alone does not create the result. The camera’s processing matters. The lens matters. The light matters. Exposure matters. Most of all, the person making the decisions matters.

The camera is only useful if it supports those decisions.

Modern cameras are technically better. I have no doubt about that.

But the older cameras often lead me to the photographs I want with less resistance. They also make me pay attention. I have to observe the light, place the exposure carefully, and remember the limits of the file.

I spend more time photographing.

I spend less time repairing.

That is why I keep using them.

Unplanned Favorite

Choosing one favourite image from this article is difficult.

Every photograph here is important to me. I selected them because they became landmarks. Each one marks a moment when I understood something new about exposure, colour, RAW development, or the way a particular lens changes a file.

If I had to choose one, it would be the portrait of Michela that later became the foundation for the preset “Light and Shadow Beach”.

It is more than a successful portrait.

It reminds me of a walk along an Italian beach. I had the camera with me, but there was no elaborate plan and no special equipment. We were enjoying the afternoon when we noticed the light beneath the straw roof.

We stopped.

The photograph happened.

Now, whenever I see it, I do not think first about the camera, the lens, or Lightroom. I remember that walk, the place, and the person who shared it with me.

Perhaps that is the most important point in this entire article.

Good pictures do not come from the perfect camera or the perfect preset.

They come from moments that move us.

The technology only helps us preserve those moments as we felt them.

What I’d Do Differently

Looking back, I could probably have saved myself several years of dissatisfaction.

I should have stopped asking every camera to fit the same workflow. I should have paid closer attention to the files that already felt right and spent more time understanding why.

That does not mean I should have bought more equipment.

It means I should have listened earlier.

The clue had been there since the Epson R-D1.

I liked the pictures.

Sometimes that is the most honest test we have.

Tech Minute

Before this begins to sound like a recommendation to buy an old CCD camera, we should return to reality.

These cameras are around fifteen years old, and they are getting older.

Their batteries are weak compared with modern systems. They work slowly. Their displays are dated. The screen on the Leica M9 is particularly poor by current standards.

The M9 offers manual focus only. The Phase One has autofocus, but it is far removed from the speed and coverage of a modern mirrorless camera. Its mirror, limited focus points, size, and weight are part of every shoot.

These cameras demand patience.

They solve very few problems for the photographer. Sometimes they create new ones.

That is why this article should not be read as buying advice. Their weaknesses have not disappeared. I accept them because the RAW files and the workflow matter more to me than the conveniences I lose.

For many photographers, that trade would make no sense.

For me, it still does.

The best camera is not the one with the most features. It is the one that takes you most directly to the pictures already inside your head.

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That had been in December, when we travelled to Gdańsk for a short winter trip. We liked the country, the people, and the quiet streets near the old shipyards. Before we had even returned home, we were already speaking about coming back.

This time, we wanted to see more than one city.

The plan was simple. We would travel across Poland by train, starting in Warsaw, continuing to Łódź, and ending in Kraków.

and handled most of the preparation. Thomas studied the train connections, public transport, and possible routes through the cities. Matt searched for unusual photographic locations. Old neighbourhoods. Industrial buildings. Railways. Places that still carried their past on the surface.

On Thursday morning in the middle of June, I drove to Munich Airport and flew to Warsaw. Matt was travelling from London. Thomas was already in Poland and arrived by train.

We met at Warsaw Central Station.

I had never been to Warsaw, Łódź, or Kraków. All three cities were new to me. Thomas and Matt had visited Warsaw and Kraków before, but Łódź seemed to be unknown territory for all of us.

A Polish friend of mine had spoken highly of Warsaw and Kraków before the trip. He had last visited Łódź around twenty years ago, when he remembered it mainly as an industrial city where people went to find work.

He was curious what we would find there now.

So were we.

Warsaw

The sky above Warsaw was grey when I arrived, but at least it was dry. It had been raining when I left Munich. The forecast for the next few days looked promising, apart from the usual summer risk of thunderstorms.

We did not waste much time.

Our first destination was the Leica Store.

We were still carrying all our luggage, though we had packed relatively lightly. Each of us had one backpack. Matt and I also carried small camera bags over our shoulders.

It was manageable, but after a few hours the weight always became noticeable.

Inside the Leica Store, we met Piotr.

He had worked there since the store opened and seemed to know almost everything about Leica cameras, rare lenses, and unusual photographic equipment.

On his desk stood a Polaroid Mini Studio. I had never seen one before. It looked as if it came from the 1980s and was still in remarkable condition, complete with its original packaging.

The rest of the store was just as interesting.

It was the first Leica Store I had visited that also sold cameras from other manufacturers. They were used cameras, of course, but the selection was impressive. Nikon, Hasselblad, Olympus, Canon, and many older analogue models filled the shelves.

There were photobooks along one wall and a large selection of used Leica cameras and lenses throughout the shop.

At first, I found this surprising.

Then it made sense.

The people working there understood the used market. They knew which cameras were worth buying, which lenses were difficult to find, and which pieces would interest collectors and photographers.

We drank coffee and spoke about cameras.

I had brought my Leica M9, but I also carried a Canon AF35ML, a compact autofocus film camera. For this trip, I had packed only expired film.

The Canon was useful because it allowed me to set the film speed manually. Many compact cameras read only the DX code and offer little control. With the AF35ML, I could deliberately overexpose old film to compensate for the sensitivity it had lost over time.

The camera had already served me well during our road trip to Wetzlar and the Czech Republic the previous year.

This time, however, the film surprised me.

I had brought three rolls of expired Agfa Vista 400 and two rolls of Kodak Gold 200. One roll of Agfa Vista from the same batch had produced poor results in Brighton. The photographs had been flat, heavily magenta, and almost without natural colour, even after two stops of overexposure.

I assumed the remaining rolls would look the same.

They did not.

The old Agfa Vista, which had expired sometime in the 1990s, was remarkably well preserved. The colours were still alive. The negatives were dense enough. The images had character without becoming unusable.

The Kodak Gold was the problem.

It produced the same heavy colour cast and weak contrast I had expected from the Agfa. I did what I could during scanning, but there was only so much information left to recover.

The results were not accurate.

They were not clean.

But they had their own strange beauty.

Back in the Leica Store, I told Piotr about my modified Leica M9.

The camera had suffered from sensor corrosion. Instead of replacing the sensor, I removed the damaged RGB filter layer and converted it into a monochrome camera.

I showed him some photographs from the modified sensor.

He became immediately interested.

He had considered different methods of rescuing badly damaged M9 sensors, especially those that could no longer be repaired by replacing the sensor glass. Converting one into a true black-and-white sensor was not something he had tried.

I explained the process as well as I could. There was a small language barrier, but cameras have their own language. I hope he understood the important parts.

Perhaps one day he will try it himself.

Before leaving, we asked whether we might borrow a camera or lens for a short test the following day. We did not know whether it would be possible, but the staff promised to check.

Then we stepped back onto the streets of Warsaw.

Thomas led us to a bar mleczny, one of Poland’s traditional milk bars. It was simple, busy, cheap, and excellent.

A tourist could easily have walked past it.

Thomas knew better.

The food was local and honest. There was no attempt to turn it into an experience for visitors. People came in, ordered their meals, ate, and left.

It was exactly what we wanted.

As the evening approached, we walked towards the station and continued taking photographs.

Old cars appeared regularly in the streets. They made perfect subjects for expired film. With the right car, the right building, and the right colour cast, it became difficult to tell when the photograph had been taken.

The low sun reached the station and painted the façades and pavement with warm light.

We photographed until it was time to take the train towards our apartment.

After leaving the train at Warszawa Wschodnia, I handed my backpack to Thomas and Matt. They carried it to the apartment while I jumped onto an electric scooter.

I had forgotten my computer mouse at home.

The nearest electronics shop closed at eight. It was already twenty minutes to eight, and the walk would have taken almost exactly that long.

I updated the scooter app, unlocked the nearest machine, and reached the shop within five minutes.

I bought a mouse and rode back.

Thomas and Matt had only just arrived when I returned.

It was a small and unnecessary adventure, but it worked.

That evening, we visited the Żabka beside our apartment and bought breakfast, drinks, and snacks. Then we sat together and caught up.

We had last met in London during Photo London. It had not been that long, but there was still plenty to discuss.

Eventually, tired from travelling and walking, we went to bed.

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The next morning began with a large breakfast.

Matt and Thomas studied Google Maps while we ate. Matt likes old buildings, Soviet-era districts, and neighbourhoods where the past has not yet been polished away.

Thomas found an area nearby that looked promising.

We took our cameras and walked there.

The neighbourhood was full of narrow streets, ageing houses, courtyards, garages, and small workshops. Much of it seemed unchanged. It was the Warsaw we had hoped to find beyond the polished city centre.

My Canon still contained the expired Kodak Gold.

By the end of the walk, I had finally exposed all 36 frames. I did not yet know how badly the film had aged. That became clear only after the negatives were developed.

Even so, a few photographs worked.

My favourites were the final two frames of an old petrol station. The faded colours and heavy magenta cast suited the subject. The damaged film made the station feel older and more distant than it really was.

During the walk, Matt also tested several lenses for his YouTube channel.

Then we found a small bakery.

The baking area stood directly beside the tiny shop. There were one or two tables inside and a few more seats outside.

The smell of fresh bread reached us before we had properly entered.

I ordered a small sandwich, followed by a cinnamon roll and coffee. It became my second breakfast.

While we sat there, Matt noticed a young couple outside. They were carrying an analogue camera.

We spoke to them on our way out.

They were from Ukraine and had been living in Warsaw for several years. They were young, friendly, and enthusiastic about film photography.

It was a brief conversation, but one of those encounters that stays with you. Nothing was planned. Nobody wanted anything. We were simply travellers with cameras who had noticed other people with cameras.

After exploring a few more courtyards, we returned to the apartment and collected our luggage.

Then we took the tram back into the city.

Matt had received confirmation from the Leica Store. He could borrow a camera and lens.

We assumed that one kit would be enough for all three of us.

The staff had other ideas.

They handed us three cameras and three lenses.

Matt chose the Leica M EV1. Thomas took an M10-R. I chose an M10.

We received a current 50mm Summilux-M ASPH., a current 35mm Summilux-M ASPH., and an older 50mm Summilux from the pre-aspherical era.

The staff also allowed us to leave our heavy backpacks in the store.

We walked into Warsaw carrying equipment worth roughly €20,000.

It was an enormous gesture of trust.

I already knew the modern 50mm Summilux. I tried the older lens briefly, but most of my photographs were made with the current 35mm Summilux ASPH.

It was the lens that interested me most.

We also made a quick comparison between the four digital Leica bodies we had with us. Alongside the three borrowed cameras, I used my Leica M9.

Thomas provided a 35mm Summicron Pre-ASPH., probably the second version with goggles. We photographed the same scene with all four cameras.

The results were not scientific, but they were interesting.

The M9 separated itself from the others through colour.

Its greens and blues appeared richer. Reds had more weight. The general saturation was stronger, but not in a way that felt artificial to me.

That colour response is one reason the M9 remains my favourite digital Leica.

The M EV1 file had the lowest starting contrast and the widest dynamic range. Its colour was also the most restrained.

Among the CMOS cameras, I preferred the M10.

That did not surprise me.

We had compared digital Leica M cameras in London several years earlier, and the standard M10 had already impressed me then. Its 24-megapixel files still offer a strong balance between detail, colour, and manageable file size.

I had hoped the M10-R would look very close to the M10.

To my eyes, it did not.

It sat somewhere between the M10 and the M EV1, but closer to the newer camera than I would have liked. The colour and contrast reminded me more of modern high-resolution sensors, which are technically impressive but not always suited to my personal taste.

This was only one scene under one set of conditions. It was not a laboratory test, and it should not be treated as one.

Still, the result confirmed something I already knew.

I was happy to return the borrowed cameras and continue travelling with my M9.

After around two hours, we went back to the Leica Store.

We thanked the team and returned everything. Their trust had been extraordinary, especially considering that they barely knew us.

Matt’s YouTube work was known to them, but handing three visitors that much equipment was still far from normal.

The store had once been larger and had included a Leica Gallery before the pandemic. Today, only the smaller shop remains.

We hope the gallery returns one day.

Warsaw deserves a place where photography, exhibitions, rare cameras, and conversations can exist together.

That evening, we were booked onto a train to Łódź.

Thomas had reserved three seats. We reached the station on time. We stood on the correct platform. We were beside the correct track.

And we missed the train.

We still do not understand how.

At some point, we asked another passenger when the train would arrive.

She told us it had already left.

We had not seen it.

Thomas went to the information desk and explained the situation in Polish. The train had arrived as scheduled. It had stopped at our platform. Then it had departed for Łódź.

Three photographers had stood there and somehow failed to notice an entire train.

Fortunately, another connection left about an hour later.

We changed our tickets and sat outside in the sun.

There was nothing else to do but laugh.

The later train carried us to Łódź, where we arrived after dark.

Our delay turned out to be useful. The host of our Airbnb had been busy earlier in the evening and had worried that she would not be home in time for our arrival.

Because we had missed the first train, we reached the apartment exactly when she returned.

Bad planning became perfect timing.

After checking in, we visited the nearest Żabka.

Thomas and I placed a beer in our basket.

At the checkout, we learned that ordinary shops were not allowed to sell alcohol after ten in the evening.

We had never heard of the rule.

The beer stayed in the shop.

We survived.

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Dear Łódź, please stay ugly

We got up early the next morning.

Matt had received a recommendation from a model he had photographed in Warsaw. She told him about an abandoned factory in Łódź.

It had been empty for years. The machinery was gone, but the building remained.

We took a tram and walked the final distance.

The entrance was hidden, but not impossible to find.

Inside, the factory was far better than we had expected.

The windows on the ground floor had been bricked up. The vast room stood almost completely dark, broken only by rows of columns and the small lights we carried.

Matt photographed while Thomas and I moved through the darkness with phones and LED lamps. We painted light across pillars, walls, and empty spaces.

Sometimes we also became part of the photographs.

On the upper floors, the scale of the building became clear.

It appeared to have been an old textile factory. Each level was divided by long rows of supporting columns. Large windows ran along the outer walls.

One section had wooden floors and heavy wooden roof beams. Water had entered through holes in the roof for many years. The timber was rotten. In one room, the ceiling had already collapsed.

We moved carefully there.

Most of the building was built from concrete and appeared more stable, but abandoned structures always demand attention. Broken glass, loose metal, wet floors, and falling debris can turn a photograph into an injury very quickly.

The factory was four or five storeys high.

Wind moved through the broken windows. Rainwater had collected in wide puddles across the floors. The reflections made the empty rooms feel almost complete again.

Windows appeared below our feet.

The sky lay inside the building.

In the stairwell, someone had written a sentence on the floor:

“Dear Łódź, please stay ugly forever.”

We understood what they meant.

The three of us are drawn to things that carry age. Give us two cars, one new and perfect, the other worn and marked by years of use, and we will probably photograph the old one.

The same is true of buildings.

Decay is not automatically beautiful, but it contains evidence. It shows what has happened. It creates texture, accident, and memory.

New surfaces reveal very little.

Perhaps the message did not ask Łódź to remain neglected. Perhaps it asked the city not to polish away everything that made it different.

We had come to Łódź for those traces.

Old factories. Railway lines. Concrete housing blocks. Rusted doors. Uneven streets. Places that had not yet become copies of every other modern European city.

The weather moved between bright sun and heavy cloud. This gave us constantly changing light inside the factory.

For a moment, hard sunlight crossed the floor.

Then a cloud softened everything.

We worked with whatever arrived.

When we were finally ready to leave, a thunderstorm broke above the city.

Rain entered through the roof and windows. We stayed inside for another half hour, took selfies, and made a few last photographs while we waited.

When the storm moved on, we walked back towards the centre.

Thomas found another bar mleczny, this one inside what I remember as a cinema or theatre building.

The food was excellent again.

We had planned to spend the afternoon exploring Łódź, but more rain arrived. The forecast suggested it would stay.

We walked a little longer, then returned to the apartment earlier than expected.

After our first full day, Łódź felt very different from Warsaw.

Warsaw had appeared modern and international. On the surface, parts of it could have been Munich or London. The people looked varied, stylish, and urban.

Łódź felt more direct.

The architecture was rougher. The industrial past was more visible. The city seemed less interested in hiding its scars.

This was only our first and very subjective impression. The rain and grey sky may have influenced it.

The centre also showed another side of the city. Renovated buildings, cafés, murals, and modern public spaces made it clear that Łódź was changing.

It was not trapped in its past.

But the past was still there.

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The next morning, the sun returned.

We chose another neighbourhood near our apartment, this one dominated by Soviet-era housing blocks.

Matt tested more lenses.

I became lost in the architecture.

In photographs, these buildings are often shown beneath grey skies. The images are usually cold and oppressive. Concrete fills the frame, and the photographer uses bad weather to underline the weight of the buildings.

Our morning looked nothing like that.

The sky was deep blue. Grass and trees were bright green. Sunlight moved across the façades.

The contrast changed everything.

The buildings no longer appeared only heavy or bleak. They stood among trees, playgrounds, footpaths, and open spaces. The concrete gained colour from its surroundings.

I began to enjoy them.

For most of the morning, I photographed little else.

Later, we stopped for coffee and cake before walking towards the centre.

We passed along Piotrkowska Street, one of the city’s main streets and a former commercial route.

Here, Łódź looked different again.

Large murals covered walls. Modern tram stops curved above the street with glass roofs. Restored façades stood beside buildings that still carried decades of use.

The city was neither beautiful nor ugly.

It was layered.

Then it was time to leave.

I packed my digital cameras and lenses into my backpack and kept only the Canon AF35 ML around my neck.

I photographed the entire walk to the station on film.

Before boarding our train, we stopped once more at Żabka and tried the famous hot dog Thomas had been telling us about.

According to him, we had not properly visited Poland until we had eaten one.

The hot dog was eaten.

Our visit could continue.

This time, we found the train.

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The Kraków Apartment

Kraków welcomed us with summer.

The sky was blue. Parks and trees filled the city with green. After the rain in Łódź, the colours felt almost excessive.

We took an Uber from the station to our apartment.

Thomas had found something special.

The apartment had been preserved almost completely in the style of the communist period. The owner’s parents had lived there until their deaths. Afterward, he removed their personal belongings but left most of the furniture and interior untouched.

It was now rented as a historical apartment.

There was no separate bedroom.

At night, the living room and kitchen became sleeping areas. Two sofas opened into beds. In the kitchen, a folding bed was hidden inside a cabinet.

That was mine.

Matt photographed me lying in it later. The bed was not large, but neither was the room.

The bathroom contained a toilet, bathtub, and washing machine.

There was no sink.

To wash our hands, we had to use the kitchen.

For a few nights, it was interesting and even enjoyable. As a permanent family home, it would have required a completely different way of living.

There was little room for private hobbies, large collections, or personal space.

For someone like me, the contrast was obvious.

Photography requires storage. Cameras, lenses, lights, stands, bags, computers, printers, and film all need space. My studio alone would have been unthinkable in such an apartment.

The market had also been different. International cameras and lenses were difficult to obtain. Most available equipment came from the Eastern Bloc.

The apartment made us think about how easily we now accept space, choice, and possessions as normal.

Older generations often lived carefully and saved whatever they could so that their children might have more.

Today, many of us have more than we can use.

We fill cupboards, rooms, studios, and storage spaces with objects. Then we search for larger rooms to hold them.

The apartment was not simply an unusual Airbnb.

It was a quiet question.

How much of what we own improves our lives?

And how much of it merely occupies space?

That evening, we walked through the surrounding neighbourhood.

We later read that the area was supposedly considered one of the more dangerous parts of Poland. We could not confirm that.

The streets were nearly empty.

We never felt threatened.

Back inside, we used the apartment as a photographic set.

An analogue camera, direct flash, old furniture, and simple clothing were enough to create images that looked as if they had come from a family album.

Matt and Thomas could have been our uncles from another decade.

Only the hair and beards gave them away.

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The next morning, Thomas and Matt found a railway area outside the city on the map.

Old buildings and trains appeared to stand beside the tracks. It was difficult to tell whether the site was abandoned or still partly in use.

Railway property requires caution. Some places are restricted. Others are active even when they appear empty.

We travelled there without expecting much.

There might be a fence.

There might be a locked gate.

Instead, we crossed a road, followed the tracks, and found ourselves standing beside them.

A water tower rose on the far side of the site.

It looked abandoned.

We went inside.

The floor was covered with bird droppings. Not a few scattered marks, but thick layers.

We moved slowly and tried not to disturb the dust.

It was disgusting.

It was also impossible not to continue.

From the top, we could see across the railway grounds. Old tracks divided the landscape. Industrial structures stood beside workshops and storage areas.

In the distance, we saw an old train.

We climbed down and walked towards it.

One of the doors was open.

Inside, most of the windows were broken. Newspapers, clothing, and abandoned objects lay across the seats and floor. The train may have been used as a shelter or meeting place.

Nothing had been arranged for photographs.

That was what made it interesting.

The dirt, objects, and damage had accumulated slowly. They could not have been recreated with the same honesty.

Light entered through the broken windows and divided the interior into bright and dark sections.

We photographed the details and moved carefully through the carriage.

Another train stood nearby, but the doors were closed. Entering it would have required climbing through a high window.

We left it alone.

We already had enough.

Farther away, a metal pedestrian bridge crossed the railway lines. Behind it stood a large workshop with several tall doors.

The bridge was accessible.

Workers below saw us, but nobody objected. It seemed to be a public crossing that connected the workshop area with a small passenger station.

From above, the lines formed strong shapes.

Freight wagons stood on one side. Maintenance tracks led towards the workshops. The view had everything we had hoped to find.

We stayed and photographed until it was time to take the train into central Kraków.

A thunderstorm crossed the area while we travelled.

By the time we arrived in the city, the sun had returned.

Perfect planning.

Or good luck.

Thomas found another milk bar, hidden in a basement.

We ate soup and a full meal for a price that seemed almost impossible compared with many Western European cities.

By then, I had become a devoted supporter of Polish milk bars.

After lunch, we passed a market and went inside.

Fruit, vegetables, flowers, signs, faces, and colours filled the narrow paths between the stalls.

Then we walked towards the historic centre.

Before reaching the main streets, we noticed photographs displayed outside a small souvenir shop.

Inside was a gallery belonging to a local photographer.

He sold street photographs and landscapes from Kraków, but also showed some of his model photography.

I bought several prints.

The prices were fair, and the photographer was warm and generous with his time. We stayed for a short conversation.

It was another unplanned meeting created by photography.

The old centre of Kraków was beautiful.

Tourists stood among hundreds of pigeons in the main squares. Horses pulled carriages through the streets. Old façades caught the afternoon sun.

We walked down to the river and continued along the bank.

The light was strong and clean. The city felt alive without becoming exhausting.

Kraków deserves more time than we could give it.

By evening, we had again walked more than 20,000 steps.

We returned to the apartment and went to bed early.

One final location was waiting for us.

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After breakfast, we took an Uber out of the city.

Our destination was the Liban Quarry, one of the filming locations used for Schindler’s List.

Parts of the concentration camp shown in the film had been constructed there. Most of the set was removed after filming, but several structures and fragments remained.

The quarry had since been reclaimed by nature.

Green plants covered much of the ground. Rusted steel towers and industrial remains rose above them. Old pieces of the set appeared between trees and grass.

The contrast was striking.

Nature had not erased the past.

It had grown around it.

It had been many years since any of us had watched the film, so we could not connect every structure with a specific scene.

Later, I read more about the location and its use as the film’s version of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp.

That made the visit more serious.

The place was photographically interesting, but it was impossible to separate the images from the history behind them. Schindler’s List is based on real events and the story of Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Jewish forced labourers from murder by the Nazis.

A filming location is not the same as the place where the real events happened.

Still, standing there made the story feel closer.

After several hours in the quarry, we climbed the nearby hill.

The photographer from the gallery had recommended it for its view across Kraków.

He was right.

The city stretched below us in the clear summer light.

After days of stations, concrete, streets, and abandoned buildings, it felt good to finish the trip among grass and trees.

We made a few final photographs.

Then we separated.

Thomas returned by train to visit relatives. Matt and I travelled to the airport. He flew back to London. I took the short flight to Munich.

Five days.

Three cities.

No car.

Almost everything had been done by train, tram, bus, and on foot.

We had missed one train, entered one abandoned factory, climbed one filthy water tower, found an old railway carriage, tested several Leica cameras, and eaten in as many milk bars as Thomas could locate.

We had also gained a much broader impression of Poland.

Germany and Poland are neighbouring countries, although the Czech Republic lies between Poland and my home in Lower Bavaria. Perhaps that is why Poland had never felt like the most obvious destination.

It does now.

At the airport, we were already speaking about another trip.

People we met had suggested more cities and more places to explore.

I hope we return.

I would gladly cross Poland again with Thomas, Matt, and a camera over my shoulder.

BTS Video:

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

Cameras:

Leica M9
Leica M10 (borrowed)
Leica M10-R (borrowed)
Leica M EV1 (borrowed)
Canon AF35 ML + Kodak Gold 200 and Agfa Vista



Lenses:

21mm f/4 Voigtländer Color-Skopar
28mm f/2.8 ArtraLab
35mm f/1.8 Nippon Kogaku W-Nikkor
50mm f/2 Light Lens Lab Elcan
90mm f/4 Leica Elmar
35mm f/1.4 Leica Summilux-M ASPH. (borrowed)
75mm f/1.5 Light Lens Lab Z21 (borrowed)
75mm f/2.8 Voigtländer APO-Skopar (borrowed)

For me, the journey was a creative challenge.

I do not consider myself a natural street or landscape photographer. Most of my work centres on models, fashion, lifestyle, body art, and commercial photography.

On this trip, there were no models.

There was no controlled light.

There was no fixed subject waiting in front of the camera.

I had to react to buildings, weather, roads, people, and moments that disappeared almost as soon as I noticed them.

That forced me to look differently.

It was sometimes uncomfortable.

It was also useful.

Reflections

The communist-era apartment in Kraków stayed with me more than any camera test.

It showed how differently daily life can be organised.

The rooms were small. Furniture had several purposes. Beds disappeared into cabinets. There was little space for privacy or possessions.

Today, we accept choice as normal.

We own cameras for different moods, lenses for slightly different fields of view, bags for different journeys, and computers for different rooms.

We often call these things necessary.

Perhaps some of them are.

The apartment reminded me that a life can function with far less.

That does not mean the past was better. It does not mean hardship should be romanticised.

It means that comfort and happiness are not always the same thing.

Sometimes more space simply gives us more places to store things we have forgotten we own.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favourite photograph was made on the first evening in Warsaw.

We had left the train at Warszawa Wschodnia and were walking towards our apartment.

I turned around and looked back at the station.

The large glass façade reflected the setting sun. Warm orange light filled the windows while the camera exposed for the bright reflection.

Everything around it became darker.

The result looked almost more intense than the scene itself, yet it captured exactly how the evening felt.

There was no preparation.

I simply turned, saw the light, and pressed the shutter.

That was enough.

What I’d do differently:

I had to work on my laptop several times during the journey.

It was not ideal.

A trip like this is short, and the hours pass quickly. Time spent answering messages or finishing work is time not spent walking, talking, photographing, or simply being present.

Next time, I would prepare better before leaving.

I would finish the important work at home and protect the days of the trip from unnecessary interruptions.

The camera can come with me.

The office can stay behind.

Tech Minute:

The journey was not mainly about equipment, even though the Leica Store in Warsaw gave us the rare opportunity to test several cameras and lenses.

Still, one lens deserves another mention.

The Nippon Kogaku W-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 remained on my camera throughout much of the trip.

It performed beautifully in Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków. It was small enough to carry all day, fast enough for changing light, and full of the character I want from a lens.

I wrote about it in detail in last week’s Substack post.

It deserves more attention.

It has earned a permanent place in my camera bag.

“Sometimes the best way to discover a country is to stop chasing photographs and simply travel with a camera and friends.”

The break was not planned in much detail. I had been travelling almost without pause. Europe was trapped beneath a hard summer heat, with temperatures above forty degrees for days. The houses became hot. The bedrooms became hotter. Even the nights offered little relief.

At the same time, I had increased my training. I kept running and exercising through the heat, which was perhaps not the most intelligent decision I have ever made. For a while, I felt empty.

Now the body has adapted. The energy has returned.

It looks as though I will spend most of the remaining summer in Germany. That is good for this Substack. It gives me time to look back at the cameras, lenses, journeys and photographs that have accumulated during the past few months.

I want to begin with a lens I found in Hong Kong.

The Nippon Kogaku W-Nikkor 3.5cm f/1,8

A small lens from the 1950s. A rare lens. A lens that was never intended to fit a Leica M, yet somehow ended up mounted on mine.

And perhaps one of the finest classic 35mm designs ever made.

Nippon Kogaku introduced the W-Nikkor 3.5cm f/1.8 in September 1956.

At the time, it was the fastest 35mm wide-angle lens made for the 35mm format. Nikon had reached the front of the race.

Leica introduced the first 35mm Summicron f/2 in 1958. It was slower. In 1961, Leica answered with the 35mm Summilux f/1.4, today generally known as the Pre-ASPH. That lens then claimed the title of the fastest wide-angle lens in the world.

For around five years, the Nikon stood alone.

Most W-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 lenses were built for Nikon’s S-mount rangefinder cameras. Exact production figures are difficult to prove because complete records do not appear to have survived. Estimates based on known serial numbers suggest that roughly 8,300 lenses were produced in total.

Around 6,900 were probably made in Nikon S mount.

A much smaller number were built with Leica thread mount. Depending on the source and the known serial-number range, the figure is usually estimated at somewhere between 1,470 and 1,500 lenses.

Even the Nikon version is uncommon today. The LTM version is far rarer.

Yet I did not travel to Hong Kong looking for one.

I found it by accident.

During my trip at the end of April, I spent a great deal of time exploring the city’s vintage camera shops. In one of them, the Nikon sat inside a glass cabinet among a collection of Leica lenses.

At first, nothing seemed unusual.

Then I noticed the rear cap.

It was a Leica M cap.

I asked the seller to take the lens out of the cabinet. He handed it to me, and the story became more interesting.

The lens had been converted from Nikon S mount to Leica M.

This was not a simple off-the-shelf adapter. Someone had designed and machined a dedicated aluminium mount for the lens. The work looked clean and precise.

The rear section had also been modified.

The original rear element and its housing are too wide to fit safely inside a Leica M body. On my lens, the large rear element had been removed from its original housing and placed into a much thinner brass surround.

A new rangefinder coupling had also been machined around it. This surface connects to the roller inside a Leica M camera and translates the movement of the focusing mechanism to the rangefinder.

In other words, the lens was not merely attached to a Leica.

It had been rebuilt to work like a native Leica M lens.

I mounted it on my Leica M9 inside the shop.

The minimum focusing distance is around 0.9 metres. I tested that first. Then I focused on subjects across the shop and through the windows, reaching perhaps five or six metres.

The rangefinder coupling appeared accurate throughout the available distance.

There was only one thing I could not test.

Infinity.

There was no clear and sufficiently distant subject visible from the shop. Buying the lens therefore involved a small risk. The close and medium distances could be correct while infinity remained slightly wrong.

I bought it anyway.

Later, outside in Hong Kong, I discovered that I had been lucky. The lens reaches infinity without difficulty. The rangefinder coupling remains accurate across the entire focusing range.

The conversion is excellent.

There is even enough space on the rear of the adapter to add Leica-style 6-bit coding. I have not done this. I used the lens without a selected Leica profile, which means the M9 did not apply lens-specific corrections to the files.

The W-Nikkor became my first Nikon lens used on a Leica.

It was a strange place to begin.

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I have a difficult relationship with the 35mm focal length.

I like it. Sometimes I love it. But I am selective.

For portraits and model photography, I usually prefer fast 35mm lenses. Most of the time, that means f/1.4. I own f/2 lenses, but I reach for them less often.

My current favourite is the ArtraLab Similar 35mm f/1,4

That statement requires a warning.

My copy needed a great deal of work. I recalibrated both infinity focus and the rangefinder coupling. Once adjusted, it became an excellent lens. Out of the box, however, I cannot recommend it without reservation.

For this comparison, I replaced it with my second favourite: the Voigtländer Nokton 35mm f/1.4 Classic.

My version is the single-coated model.

The Nokton is compact, sharp enough and well balanced. Its bokeh can become a little wild. It also tends towards colder colours, particularly in the deeper tones. Shadows can become slightly blue.

That can be troublesome with skin.

I sometimes use a weak warmth filter on the Nokton. It reduces the blue cast in the darker tones without making the highlights excessively yellow. It is an old film-photography solution applied to a digital problem.

The third lens in the comparison was the Light Lens Lab
35mm f/2 8-Elements.

Mine is the collapsible LTM version. I mounted it on the Leica M9 with a simple LTM-to-M adapter.

I love this lens, especially on film and on my Leica IIIa. It is sharp enough, small enough and gentle enough. Its colours are beautiful. Its bokeh is quiet and controlled.

Its only real problem is the maximum aperture.

It is f/2.

If it were f/1.4, my search for a 35mm lens might already be over.

The Nikon therefore faced two of my favourite classic 35mm lenses:

The Voigtländer Nokton 35mm f/1,4 Classic.

The Light Lens Lab 35mm f/2 8-Elements.

The Nikon sat between them at f/1,8.

Not quite f/1.4.

Not quite f/2.

Modern lenses can be sharper. They can be cleaner. They can have flatter test charts and fewer visible faults.

That does not always make them better for my work.

A modern 35mm f/1,2 can be extraordinary, but it is often too large for a rangefinder. It can also be too sharp for model photography. On the Leica M9, many modern designs produce more contrast than I want.

I prefer classic designs.

They are small. They are imperfect. They leave something in the image.

For model photography, however, not every imperfection is useful.

Field curvature matters.

Many older lenses do not produce a perfectly flat plane of focus. The focus plane may curve towards or away from the camera as it approaches the edges of the frame.

This becomes a serious problem when working with a rangefinder.

I often focus on the model’s eye and then recompose. With a 35mm lens, the face is rarely placed directly in the centre. If the focus plane curves strongly, the eye can move outside the true area of sharpness during recomposition.

The rangefinder patch says the image is focused.

The final photograph says otherwise.

I therefore want a classic lens with a relatively flat field of focus. I want good colour, enough sharpness, smooth transitions and bokeh that supports the image without swallowing it.

The Nikon looked promising.

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I began with the least exciting part.

Test photographs.

I compared the three lenses from wide open through f/5.6. With the Nokton, the sequence began at f/1.4. The Nikon began at f/1.8. The Light Lens Lab began at f/2.

The first visible difference was colour.

The Nikon renders slightly green.

The Nokton also moves a little towards green, although its shadows can become cooler. The Light Lens Lab is the most neutral of the three. Its blues are strong without damaging the other colours.

The Nikon’s green shift sounds worse in writing than it looks in practice.

It is not dramatic. In Lightroom, a small movement of the tint control towards magenta is usually enough to correct it.

A slight green shift is also less harmful to skin than a magenta or blue cast. Red or magenta can make skin look irritated. Blue often settles into the shadows around the hairline and under the jaw, where it is difficult to remove cleanly.

Green is easier.

Warm yellow or orange would be better. Green is still manageable.

I have not tested the Nikon with a coded Leica profile. The early Leica Summilux 35mm f/1.4 Pre-ASPH is also known for a slight green tendency on some digital M cameras. Its profile might therefore provide a useful starting point.

That remains an experiment for somebody else.

Vignetting is visible with all three lenses.

The Nikon and Nokton keep the centre bright while the outer areas darken. In an isolated test image, this can look severe. In real photographs, it is rarely important. It can be corrected easily, or left in place when it strengthens the composition.

The Nikon’s edge sharpness is more complicated.

For good definition from the centre to the corners at infinity, it needs to be stopped down to at least f/5.6. Below that, the edges and corners remain weaker than the centre.

For street photography, this matters when important details are placed near the frame edges.

At f/5.6, the performance becomes very good.

On a test chart or a distant flat subject, the weakness is easy to find.

In the real world, it is much harder to see.

100% Crop Center/left border from all three lenses:

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The Bokeh: This is where the Nikon becomes interesting.

At the centre of the frame, out-of-focus highlights remain round and strongly defined. Towards the edges, they stretch into shapes that resemble jellyfish.

The edges of the highlights are outlined with thin green and magenta traces. The shapes remain clear and contrasty.

Near the corners, the deformation creates a slight swirling effect.

It is beautiful.

The Nokton has a related character. Its bokeh is also strongly outlined, but the shapes do not develop the same jellyfish form near the edges.

The Light Lens Lab is quieter.

Its bokeh is smooth and attractive, but less demanding. It stays behind the subject instead of trying to become the subject.

The Nippon reminds me of a classic Sonnar.

It has some of the character normally associated with fast 50mm lenses such as the Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f/1.5. The background becomes lively, structured and slightly restless, yet it remains attractive.

Another advantage is that the character survives stopping down.

At f/2, the strong outlines remain. Even at f/2.8, traces of the jellyfish shapes are still visible near the edges.

The Nokton changes more quickly as the aperture closes. Its bokeh becomes calmer after one stop.

The Nikon holds on to its identity.

This does not make it a one-trick pony. It makes it flexible. When the light becomes too strong, when the shutter speed reaches its limit or when flash synchronisation forces a smaller aperture, the Nikon can be stopped down without immediately losing its signature.

The signature remains.

Whether you want it to remain is another question.

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Hong Kong

I bought the lens and placed it on the Leica M9.

Then I walked into Hong Kong.

There was no ceremony. No controlled test. No brick wall.

Only streets, signs, traffic, people and light.

The daytime street photographs were usually made stopped down. At night, I photographed mostly at f/1.8.

The weak edge performance visible in the infinity tests was far less important in practice. At normal street distances, perhaps twenty to one hundred metres, the Nikon produced more than enough sharpness.

The image did not collapse near the edges.

The photographs held together.

This is worth remembering. Lens tests can reveal faults, but they can also exaggerate them. A flat distant subject is not the same as a real street with depth, movement and changing focus distances.

The Nikon was better on the street than it had been on the test screen.

It was also easy to carry.

For an f/1.8 lens, it is remarkably small and light. The original Nikon S version weighs around 160 grams. The body is aluminium. On the Leica M9, it feels almost weightless.

It does not attract attention.

It does not slow the camera down.

There is only one handling detail that requires adjustment.

The focusing direction is reversed.

Viewed from above, the Nikon turns towards the right to reach infinity. A Leica lens normally turns towards the left.

At first, the movement feels wrong.

Then the hand learns.

After a few minutes, I stopped thinking about it.

London

Not long after Hong Kong, I travelled to London for Photo London.

Sophie joined us. We photographed in the city, in the hotel and later around the Barbican.

The Nikon came with me.

Inside the hotel room, we worked with coloured LED lights. The space was small and dark. A 35mm lens was useful, but it also placed the model’s face far away from the centre of the frame in many compositions.

This was the real test of field curvature.

The Nikon performed exceptionally well.

Its plane of focus is almost flat. There appears to be a very slight convex curve, bringing the outer field marginally closer to the camera, but the effect is small.

I could focus on Sophie’s eye, recompose and place her face close to the edge.

The eye remained sharp.

For model photography, that matters more to me than the corner performance of a distant building.

The colours also worked well. The lens separated the coloured LED sources clearly and kept the tones clean.

On the Friday, organised a YouTube challenge at the Barbican.

Three photographers.

Three focal lengths.

One model.

I used the Nippon for the 35mm section.

The trees behind Sophie dissolved into a vivid background. Her skin remained natural. The central sharpness at f/1.8 was excellent.

This was the moment when the lens moved beyond being an interesting historical object.

It became a serious photographic tool.

For model photography in London, my first real-world verdict was simple:

Ten out of ten.

Graz

The next journey took me to Graz.

I spent a weekend with Sarah. We talked about old times, walked through the city and made photographs together.

I used 50mm lenses for much of the weekend, but the Nikon still produced several of my favourite frames.

Outside, the colours were strong and clean.

Inside the apartment, we used LED lights as the main sources. Again, the Nikon handled the artificial colour without difficulty.

The result looked far more modern than I expected from a design created in the 1950s.

Compared with the later Leica Summilux 35mm f/1.4 Pre-ASPH, the Nikon is the more reliable performer for my kind of model photography.

The early Summilux can produce wonderful pictures. It has its famous glow and a unique atmosphere. It also loses a great deal of sharpness away from the centre when used wide open.

That often encourages central compositions.

The Nikon gives me more freedom.

Many of my photographs of Sarah were composed far away from the centre. In some, her face was placed close to the edge.

The focus held.

No problem.

Poland

The Nikon’s final long journey with me was a train trip through three Polish cities.

I will write about the complete journey in a separate story. For now, the photographs provide another useful look at the lens.

One of the first was a portrait of in front of a fountain.

The water behind him became the bokeh. Small drops turned into bright, outlined shapes. This was the Nikon at its most recognisable.

The photograph also revealed its behaviour against strong light.

A light flare appeared above Matt. Contrast dropped slightly around it.

For a lens from the 1950s, the result was still impressive.

I did not use a hood.

The front element sits slightly recessed, and the surrounding barrel provides a little protection, but not enough to replace a proper hood. For regular portrait work in direct sunlight, I would add one.

The flare itself does not worry me.

The loss of contrast is more important.

In normal conditions, however, the lens handled strong highlights well. Even when photographing from dark interiors towards bright windows, the image retained definition. A small amount of glow remained, but it did not spread across the entire frame.

That balance works well for portraits.

The glow softens the skin.

The contrast survives.

The rest of the journey through Poland gave the Nikon a very different kind of test.

We travelled by train and moved through three cities, often with no fixed plan beyond walking until something caught our attention. The lens had to deal with bright summer streets, dark interiors, old facades, reflections in windows and the hard contrast between shade and sunlight.

What struck me most was how easily it adapted.

In daylight, I usually stopped it down to gain more definition across the frame. The lens then became a compact and reliable street tool. It handled architecture, signs and layered city scenes well, even when the important details were not placed in the centre.

We walked through old buildings, worn staircases and abandoned spaces where the light entered through broken windows or narrow openings. These scenes are often difficult for vintage glass. Bright highlights can spread, shadows can lose structure and flare can take over the image.

The Nikon remained controlled.

There was sometimes a slight glow around the brightest areas, but the detail stayed intact. The shadows kept their depth, and the highlights rarely destroyed the photograph. Even when I photographed from a dark room towards the outside, the lens held enough contrast to preserve the scene.

These photographs also show why test charts only tell part of the story.

On a flat subject at infinity, the Nikon’s weaker edges are easy to find. In the real world, with depth, movement and changing focus distances, they matter far less. The lens draws the scene as a whole. It gives the images structure, atmosphere and just enough imperfection to keep them alive.

That was the lasting impression from Poland.

The W-Nikkor may not be perfect, but it is very good at making photographs.

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Reflections

The Nikon surprised me.

I expected it to be closer to the Leica Summilux 35mm f/1.4 Pre-ASPH. I expected more glow, more field curvature, weaker edges and a greater number of obvious optical problems.

Instead, it proved to be more controlled and far more versatile.

The lens has character, but it does not fall apart.

Its rendering is strong. Its field of focus is excellent for model photography. Its central sharpness is more than sufficient at f/1.8. Its bokeh is distinctive. Its construction is compact and light.

It is one of the best classic 35mm lenses I have used on a Leica M.

Will I keep it?

No.

There are two main reasons.

The first is colour.

The slight green shift is easy to correct, but it does not match my other lenses. During a model shoot, I often move between two or three focal lengths. If the Nikon files require a separate colour correction, they add another step to the edit.

That would eventually annoy me.

The second reason is value.

A W-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 with a high-quality, fully coupled Leica M conversion can sit in a price region of around €3,000 or more.

For a collector or a dedicated Nikon enthusiast, that may be justified.

For me, it is too much money to carry without concern.

My lenses travel. They go to beaches, abandoned buildings, wet streets and strange hotel rooms. They are used in wind, dust and bad weather. Sometimes rain begins before there is time to put them away.

The Nikon is a tool, but it has become a valuable tool.

Perhaps too valuable for the way I work.

There are also two smaller reasons.

The first is the bokeh.

It is beautiful, but it is very strong. At 35mm, I often prefer a quieter background. With a wider lens, the frame already contains more information than it would at 50mm. A heavily outlined bokeh can make one part of the background look active while another part remains calm.

The two areas can begin to fight.

The second reason is the f/1.8 aperture.

In terms of subject separation, f/1.8 feels closer to f/2 than to f/1.4.

When I need maximum separation, I will choose the ArtraLab or the Nokton at f/1.4.

When I value size, colour and film compatibility, I will choose the Light Lens Lab 8 Elements at f/2.

The Nikon sits between those two worlds.

It is too slow to replace my f/1.4 lenses.

It is too expensive and too green to replace the Light Lens Lab.

The conversion to Leica M also means that I cannot mount it on my Leica IIIa. For film work with the IIIa, the Light Lens Lab will always win.

The Nikon is excellent.

It simply does not fit the structure of my existing lens collection.

So I will sell it.

I hope it finds an owner who understands what it is. Someone who wants this rendering, this bokeh and this rare combination of Nikon history and Leica usability.

For that photographer, it may be the perfect 35mm lens.

Cameras, Glass & Grit

Camera:

Leica M9

Lenses:

35mm f/1.8 Nippon Nikkor-W

Unplanned Favorite

Choosing an unplanned favourite was difficult this time.

I had used the lens in Hong Kong, London, Graz and Poland. It had produced street photographs, portraits, hotel-room images and travel scenes.

In the end, I chose a photograph from Piotrkowska Street in Łódź.

Piotrkowska is one of the longest shopping streets in Europe. It runs for almost four kilometres through the city.

We had spent the day walking and testing equipment. On the way back to our apartment, we passed beneath a sign stretched across the street.

Behind it stood another illuminated advertisement.

The lights formed a frame.

I lowered the camera close to the ground. From there, the sign appeared to float above the buildings, with the open sky behind it. The lower position separated the letters from the architecture and made them stronger.

I also wanted to preserve the depth of the street.

The road disappears into the distance. The buildings pull the eye forward. The advertisements hang above it all.

It was not a carefully planned photograph.

It was simply there.

The Nikon saw it.

Tech Minute:

Specification Nippon Kogaku W-Nikkor 3.5cm f/1.8

Focal length 35mm

Maximum aperture f/1.8

Minimum aperture f/22

Optical construction 7 elements in 5 groups

Aperture blades 9 straight blades

Minimum focusing distance Approximately 0.9 metres

Angle of view Approximately 63 degrees diagonally

Filter thread 43mm

Original mounts Nikon S and Leica thread mount

Weight Approximately 160 to 185 grams, depending on version

Introduced September 1956

When it was introduced, the W-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 was the fastest 35mm lens available for the 35mm format.

Most copies were built for Nikon S rangefinder cameras. A much smaller number were produced in Leica thread mount.

My copy began as a Nikon S-mount lens and was later fully converted to Leica M. The conversion included a new mechanical mount, a redesigned housing for the rear optical element and a working rangefinder coupling.

The focusing direction is opposite to that of a normal Leica M lens. The minimum distance is around 0.9 metres.

The lens is not weather sealed. Care is required in rain and poor conditions, as with most vintage rangefinder lenses.

My copy has no 6-bit coding applied. All photographs were therefore made without automatic Leica lens corrections.

“Sometimes a lens is technically better than you expected, yet still does not belong in your camera bag.”

That is the strange truth of photography:
Admiration is not always enough. Some lenses earn your respect, but never quite earn their place.

That is not a metaphor. Not at first.

The place was called The Field, and that was honest. It was a field outside Bath, in England, with a camping site on it, a big marquee, some smaller tents, a bar, a kitchen, a lot of grass, a lot of wind, and for a few days, a very large amount of paint.

That was where the Bath Bodyart Weekend happened.

Clemency and Helen had invited me months before. We were on Tenerife then, at ACBMAC, another bodypainting festival, under better weather and with warmer air. They asked if I would come to Bath. They wanted me there as a photographer and as a workshop teacher.

People say many things at festivals. They say, “You must come.” They say, “We should do something together.” They say it with good hearts, and then life comes in between.

But Clemency and Helen meant it.

So, on a Wednesday evening, I flew to Bristol.

Helen picked me up at the airport together with Matteo. Matteo is also a bodypainter. He was teaching workshops at Bath too. I have known him for several years from the bodypainting world, from different festivals and also from Villa Lora. We had already spent enough time together to know that sharing a tent would not be a problem.

That was good, because we were sharing one.

From Bristol we drove straight to The Field.

The sun was still there. The air was damp and fresh. The grass was green in that particular English way, as if it had been washed and polished. When we arrived, a rainbow stood over the camping site.

It was a good welcome.

There was Annie, who runs the place. There was Sophie from the organizing team, already deep in the work behind the weekend. She was not just helping out. She was one of the people holding the invisible structure together: the planning, the communication, the website, the social media, and the roles for the helpers. There were also many other helpers, hands, and good people making things possible before the guests arrived and before the paint began.

A festival like this does not build itself. It looks easy from the outside. A tent. A few tables. Some chairs. A schedule. A few artists. But behind every small festival there is a great deal of unpaid strength. Someone moves the chairs. Someone checks the water. Someone answers the questions. Someone knows where the tape is. Someone remembers the extension cables.

On Wednesday evening we moved chairs and set tables.

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The next morning the work began.

First, there was breakfast.

A proper one.

We drove into Bath for a full English breakfast in a traditional place that felt exactly right for it. Matteo was there. Clemency was there. I was there. Annie joined us later. There was coffee, eggs, sausages, toast, and the good solid feeling that comes from eating too much before a long day.

The weather had already changed. It had rained in the morning. The sky looked less friendly than the day before. But for us it did not matter much. Thursday was workshop day, and the workshops were inside the marquee.

Nick and Matteo started their workshops at ten.

I started mine one hour later.

That was planned on purpose. We wanted to leave time at the end to photograph the model from Nick’s zombie workshop. That way the people in my photography workshop would not only hear theory. They would get to photograph real finished bodypainting models. They would get to use what we had talked about.

That was important.

A workshop should not end with a notebook full of ideas and no muscle memory. It should end with someone looking at the back of a camera and thinking, yes, I can do that again.

This workshop was different from the ones I usually teach.

Normally, when I teach photography, the room is mostly men. Often the first minutes are spent comparing camera bodies. Sensor size. ISO performance. Lens charts. Focal lengths. Fast glass. Autofocus. Dynamic range. The mood becomes technical very quickly.

This time the group was entirely female.

And many of them were not professional photographers. They were artists. Bodypainters. Make-up artists. People who wanted to make better images of their own work without always depending on a photographer.

That changed everything.

It made the workshop better.

The question was not, how do we build the most technically perfect setup? The question was, how do we make strong, clean, useful images when the artist has already painted for six or eight hours and is tired?

That is the real situation in bodypainting.

The artist spends weeks thinking about the concept. Then she finds the model. She prepares the materials. She paints, glues, blends, styles, fixes, changes, repairs, and keeps going. By the time the artwork is finished, most of the creative energy has already been spent.

And then comes photography.

Now the artist needs good images. Maybe for the portfolio. Maybe for a competition. Maybe for memory. Maybe for proof that the work existed at all.

But at that moment, nobody has energy for a complicated studio setup.

So I told the group we would aim for the eighty percent solution.

Not perfect. Useful.

Not the most complex method. The method that works.

That was the core of the workshop.

We had a wide range of cameras in the room. Some had DSLRs.Some had smartphones. That matters. A smartphone cannot simply trigger a studio flash. At least not in the usual easy way. So if your method only works with a flash trigger, it already fails for half the room.

We talked about reflectors.

Reflectors are simple and good. But they need light. Where there is no light, there is nothing to reflect.

So we talked about LEDs.

Small LEDs. Larger LEDs. Colored LEDs. Battery-powered LEDs. The kind you can charge with a phone charger and throw into a bag. The kind that can become a background light, a key light, or a light source for a reflector.

We also learned something practical. Twenty-five watts is often not enough. It can work as an accent. It can add color. But when you bounce it into a reflector and expect it to become a real source, you lose a lot of power. Fifty or one hundred watts is safer.

We worked with Pansy first.

She was our model for the workshop, and she was wonderful. Patient. Calm. Ready to stand there while we changed the light, moved the reflector, shifted the background, and tested what worked and what failed.

I wanted the participants to have more than final pretty pictures. I wanted them to have a map.

So we photographed the process.

The first image. The weak image. The image where the background was too loud. The image where the light was too low. The image where the model moved one meter and suddenly everything became better.

That matters.

Two or three weeks later, when the workshop is no longer fresh in the mind, these images become notes. They show the path. They show why one choice worked and another did not.

Then we photographed Michele.

Nick had painted her as a zombie for his workshop. She was finished by then, and she gave my group the chance to photograph a complete character.

I did not shoot any pictures with my own camera during that part. I was fully with the participants. I watched their angles. I checked their light. I answered questions. I helped them get the images they needed.

So I cannot show my own photos from that workshop part.

But in the behind-the-scenes video at the end of the post you will see parts of it. You will see Nick and Matteo working. You will see the models being painted. You will see the shape of the day.

It was a good day.

The participants in my workshop were happy. The people in Nick’s and Matteo’s workshops were happy too. Everyone had learned something. Everyone had worked hard.

In the evening we drove into Bath and went to a pub called “The Globe”.

We ate well. We had one beer.

Only one.

Not because we were very disciplined, but because the bar closed at ten.

From a Bavarian point of view, this is hard to understand. Why should a bar close while there are still people inside? At home, the bar closes when the last guest leaves. There is no rush. If someone wants another beer, Bavaria will usually find a way.

Bath was different.

But one beer was enough.

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The next morning, an army was coming.

Not an army with weapons. An army with brushes, make-up, hair tools, bodypaint, nervous hands, and very young creative minds.

Two colleges came to the festival with more than forty students.

Bodypainters. Make-up artists. Hairstylists. Stylists. Young artists who were there to compete.

It was refreshing.

That is the best word for it.

Refreshing.

I was deeply impressed by how they approached the different art forms. Some of the work was bodypainting. Some was make-up. Some was hair. Some was styling. Much of it did not walk the old paths too carefully.

That was good.

Bodypainting can sometimes become trapped inside its own traditions. The same shapes. The same techniques. The same references. The old masters are important, of course. They built the road. But young artists should not only walk on the road. They should step off it now and then.

These students did that.

Of course, some of them still need more technical training. That is normal. Technique takes time. It takes practice. It takes patience and many bad attempts.

But creativity is harder to teach.

And creativity was there.

You could feel it in the tent.

More than forty young people in one marquee. Excited. Nervous. Loud. Quiet. Focused. Unfocused. Full of ideas. Trying to make something real before the clock ran out.

That brought fresh air into the festival.

I would love to show more of it.

But I cannot.

Many of the participants were under eighteen. Many of the models were under eighteen too. In Europe, we have to be careful with images of minors. Especially in a context like this. In theory, you need proper releases from parents for every recognizable person.

With that number of people, it is almost impossible.

So I will only show a few overview images, some make-up details where no person is clearly recognizable, and a few images of adults where it is appropriate.

That is a pity.

There were many works I would have loved to show.

But the good thing is this: they are young. They have many artworks ahead of them. Many faces. Many bodies. Many ideas. Many mistakes and many good days.

I hope many of them stay in this world.

I hope I see them again somewhere, with new work and stronger hands.

While the student competition filled the marquee, Matteo continued with his second workshop day. This time his participants did not only paint accessories. They painted the models too. That gave me the first finished works to photograph.

Nick was also working on promo paintings and presentations.

By the afternoon, the weather opened up.

Not completely. England did not suddenly become Italy. It was still windy. The sky was still uncertain. But it was dry enough, and that was all I needed.

I wanted to photograph outside.

The landscape around The Field was too good to ignore. Spring had made the grass heavy and green. The trees gave us shade. The edges of the field gave us depth. The place itself needed to be part of the pictures.

I did not want clean beauty shots only.

I wanted the images to carry the festival with them.

We started at the edge of the meadow, under the trees. Later we walked further up the field. Matteo had found an old boat there, and we used it as a set.

An old boat in an English field.

You do not ask too many questions when a location gives you something like that. You use it.

That afternoon Sophie arrived too.

You know Sophie already. She was with us in London only a short time before this, and the last Substack post was about her. So it felt like a reunion after only a few weeks.

I know Sophie from the bodypainting world as well. She is one of Clemency’s main models, and that is how we met.

This time she could only stay for a short time. Her artist had to cancel for private reasons, and the painting planned for Sophie was moved to another date. So she came, helped, spent time with us, and then had to leave again.

Still, it was good to see her.

In the evening, Sophie and Sabrina prepared a fire show.

Clemency painted them quickly as a butterfly. Each model carried one half of the butterfly on her body. When they stood together, the motif became whole.

At sunset, they performed.

It began to drizzle a little, but that did not kill the mood. It only made the scene more English.

For the models it was cold. Very cold.

Painted skin. Wet air. Wind. A bit of rain. Fresh temperatures. Fire in the hands helps the hands, but it does not warm the rest of the body.

So we moved fast.

I photographed quickly and gave the audience some practical tips. The fire show had been announced as a workshop, but under those conditions it was not possible to teach in a formal way. It became more of a live situation. How to expose. How to use the flame. How to time the movement. How to accept the limits of a smartphone.

Many people were shooting with phones. That limited the image quality, of course. But it did not limit the experience.

Sabrina had brought different fire props. Fans. Chains. Handles with multiple points of fire. You could see the effort behind it. The preparation. The discipline. The courage.

The reward was there.

The pictures looked strong. The scene had movement and danger. Not real danger, because they knew what they were doing, but the visual kind. The kind that makes a photograph breathe.

You will see a few clips in the behind-the-scenes video. The preparation. The fire. The wet grass. The cold air. The mood behind it all.

After the fire show we had one more beer at the bar and went back to our tents.

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The next morning was competition day.

That meant early preparation.

Chairs had to move again. Timelines had to be checked. People had to know where to go. The marquee had to become a machine.

We took a hot shower first.

Then we walked back out into the cold.

That was brutal.

The shower itself was good. Hot water. A small luxury. But the walk back across the camping site with wet hair, wind, and cold rain was not romantic. It was the kind of cold that finds the space between your jacket and your neck.

The weather was bad.

Not a little bad. Bad.

The wind came hard. The rain did not fall straight down. It came sideways. The field became wet. The air became sharp. The day felt less like late spring and more like a warning.

For the models, that mattered.

A painted body is not a raincoat. The artworks had to be protected. The models had to be protected too. After hours of painting, the last thing you want is cold rain on bare painted skin.

So the day became an indoor day.

In the morning I stayed mostly out of the way.

The artists were in their tunnels. You could see it. Eyes on the model. Brushes moving. No room for small talk. No room for a photographer walking around and making himself important.

So I sat with my laptop.

I organized files. I prepared things. I edited a little. I stayed near enough to help, but far enough not to disturb.

That is important at festivals like this.

Sometimes the best thing a photographer can do is not take pictures.

Be there. Be useful. Carry water. Find tape. Help a model. Bring a drink. Hold something for a minute. But do not stand in the way of the work.

By early afternoon, the first artists went to the jury.

After that they went to Mark, the official photographer of the festival. Mark has been photographing Bath Bodyart Weekend for years. He works in the photo tent with a neutral background and a clean studio setup.

That work is essential.

Every artwork needs a clear record. Neutral. Well lit. Complete. A proper memory for the artist and the model. A time stamp of what the work looked like before it was washed away.

My own photographic day was more complicated.

The weather made outdoor pictures impossible. At first, I did not know where to shoot.

Then I looked toward the stage.

Matteo and Nick had used it for their promo paintings. Their works were already far along. Some were finished before the first jury appointments.

So I asked if they would mind clearing the stage.

I wanted to shoot there.

It solved two problems at once.

First, the stage was inside the marquee. No wind. No rain.

Second, the heating inlet was right beside it. That meant warmth.

That mattered.

The photo tent was cold. Too cold for models who had already spent hours being painted, judged, moved, and made to wait. I wanted my little corner to feel safe and warm. I wanted the models to step onto that stage and relax for a moment.

Only then would I have a chance to make good pictures.

It worked.

1 - Ellie Baskerviell & Sue Bardwell with Pansy Cheung
2 - Hayley and Louise (GlowWorld) with Samantha
3 - Mel Hancock with Val
4 - Sabine Vogel & Robin Brunsman with Sabrina
5 - Renee Hill with Coni
6 - Zoe Marshall with Maddy
7 - Matteo Arfanotti with Irene
8 - Emma Hodgson with Joelle


The stage gave us a small island inside the festival.

The noise was still there. The people were still there. The tables, paints, bags, tools, cables, costumes, all of it was still around us. But the stage gave us enough separation.

There were lights in the tent. There were small flags hanging in the background. The warmth of the marquee gave the images a glow.

I shot wide open.

I wanted strong separation. I wanted the background to fall away. I used two flashes with softboxes and kept the models cleanly lit.

The final photographs lie a little.

They look calmer than the situation was.

In reality we were still in the middle of the festival crowd. I had to fight the background all the time. I watched for silhouettes of people. I watched for bright objects. I watched for bags, tables, colored plastic, reflections, and anything that would break the illusion.

That is often the real work.

Not pressing the shutter.

Cleaning the frame.

Choosing the angle that hides the chaos.

Waiting until the person in the background moves one step away.

Making a busy place look intentional.

The behind-the-scenes video will show this better than words can. It shows the setup and the environment. It shows how small the island really was.

This is also where I have to praise the Insta360 Go 3S again.

For me, it is close to the perfect behind-the-scenes camera.

The actual camera is tiny. Thumb-sized. When it sits in the pod, it charges, and you have a screen and the controls. When you take it out, it is so small that it can sit on a little magnetic mount on the hot shoe of my camera.

That gives me a real point-of-view angle.

From my camera. From my eye line. From the place where the work happens.

Changing the perspective is extremely easy. With a GoPro, this was often slower. Unscrew something. Change the cage. Mount the camera somewhere else. Tighten it again. Check the angle.

With the Go 3S, I just pull the small camera from the magnetic mount and place it into the pod on a tripod. It clicks in. It charges. I press record. Done.

In seconds I can go from camera POV to a third-person view beside me, where you can see the setup and how I work.

The quality is not always on GoPro level. But the ease of use is so good that it changes how often I actually record.

And the microphone surprised me.

At Munich airport, in the video, the sound comes only from the internal microphone of the little camera. No external mic. No special setup. And it sounds shockingly good. Almost too good for a camera that small.

A small camera with a big effect.

Back on the stage, I photographed around twenty models.

One after another.

1 - Vanessa Wayne-Edwards with Kirsty
2 - Tichard Nijboer with Noelia
3 - Jamuna Johnson with Lauren
4 - Bex Ghazghazi with Karma
5 - Becky Shaw with Lisa
6 - Gwen Davies with Joe
7 - Anouska Kelly with Aaron


It worked almost like an assembly line, but in the best possible way. The system was clear. Helen and Sophie had organized the schedule and the helper roles extremely well, and that kind of work showed in every smooth handover. The models knew when to go to the jury. They knew when to go to Mark. They knew when to come to me.

That kind of organization saves a festival.

It also saves the photographer.

After I finished the portraits on the stage, I moved my setup quickly. The stage was needed for the catwalk. I pushed my flashes aside so they would still add some light to the runway, and I placed myself to the side to take photos and video of the presentation.

I like these reportage images.

But they are different from the portraits.

They are records of the moment. The music. The movement. The dances. The small performances. The audience. The applause.

The energy was wonderful.

The audience was close to the catwalk. Very close. That is one of the strengths of a small festival like Bath Bodyart Weekend.

From the outside, people may underestimate a small festival. Especially if they know the larger ones. But the closeness is not a weakness. It is the gift.

The audience sees the artworks from only a few steps away. They feel the movement. They see the paint, the faces, the nerves, the pride.

On bigger stages that is often lost.

Here it was alive.

After the catwalk, Matteo brought out Italian Limoncello.

That was dangerous in the best way.

We pushed tables together. Danish friends joined. Artist friends joined. Festival people joined. It was a mixed group, and that made it better.

There was beer later. Karaoke. Bingo from the stage. Laughter.

It was a beautiful social ending to the competition day.

By then it did not matter who had won and who had not.

The real thing was being part of the creative energy.

That was the prize everyone took home.

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On Sunday the pressure was gone.

You could feel it.

Also, some heads were probably not completely clear after the night before.

That is a fine Sunday at a festival.

The creativity did not stop. It never really stops in a place like that. When enough artists are together, it keeps moving, even when people are tired.

Sunday brought the Drag Contest.

It was done with a large wink.

The models were not professional drag artists. Most of them had no real drag experience. They were guests, artists, and friends of the festival who stepped into the role for a few hours.

They were painted. Styled. Dressed. Transformed.

And then they played.

With humor. With courage. With a lot of joy.

We laughed a lot.

For a Sunday afternoon, it was perfect.

After that, Matteo gave one more live presentation.

He painted a Sugar Skull make-up on Emma, an artist from the north of England who was still at the festival and had offered herself as a model.

It was one of the last things I photographed that weekend.

The Sugar Skull was beautiful. The colors were perfect for the tent. The yellows and oranges on the forehead and chin echoed the warm background. The flowers worked with the shape of the face. The blues found their way into the small flags behind her and made a quiet contrast to the orange.

It all fitted.

Almost too easily.

The Sugar Skull, or Calavera, belongs to the Mexican Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It is not only dark. It is colorful. It is a way of remembering the dead and celebrating life.

That made the tent feel right for it.

The flags. The warmth. The flower. The painted face. The last creative moment of the weekend.

That evening, after Matteo’s presentation, we sat together and played board games.

Emma still wore the Sugar Skull make-up.

At some point she said,

“Actually, I don’t want to take this off now. I want to keep it.”

That was the quote of the weekend.

It said everything.

I am sure there were many models at Bath who would have liked to keep their artworks a little longer. Maybe not forever. But longer. Long enough to walk through the world once more in that form. Long enough to feel the work still alive on the skin.

And maybe it was not only the models.

Maybe some of the artists, spectators, helpers, and guests did not want the weekend to end either.

But festivals end.

The paint is washed off. The tents become quieter. The field empties. The lights go out. The generator stops. The road home waits.

What remains are the pictures.

And the memory of having been part of something for a few days.

The last night in the glamping tent was short.

Fresh air. Cold morning. A very early alarm.

I had to get up at three in the morning.

One more thank you here to Matteo.

He even set his own alarm to make sure I did not oversleep.

Thank you, Matteo.

You were the best tentmate a man could ask for. Easy, calm, relaxed, and great company.

Until next time!

Maybe with warmer socks.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

Camera:
Canon R5

Lenses:
EF 35mm f/1.4 L USM I
EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM

Light:25W RGB LEDs
2x Flash with Softbox

The real challenge was not the camera. It was the location.

The Bath Bodyart Weekend took place on a camping field. That is part of its charm, but it also means you work with limits. Power is not everywhere. The weather is not controlled. The ground is not always even. The wind has an opinion. The rain has one too.

The task was to find places that protected the models, protected the artworks, and still showed the feeling of the festival.

I did not want to make bodypainting photographs that could have been taken anywhere. I wanted the images to carry a little of The Field with them. The green grass. The marquee. The flags. The closeness. The temporary world of tents and paint.

That was the grit.

Not the romantic kind.

The useful kind.

Reflections

The strongest thing I took from Bath was this:

Creativity does not need a perfect place.

It helps, of course. A beautiful studio helps. A warm hall helps. Constant power helps. A dry floor helps. Luxury helps.

But it is not required.

Bath Bodyart Weekend proved that.

Put a marquee on a field. Add some tents. Add a generator. Add rain. Add wind. Add cold mornings and wet grass. Then bring the right people.

Artists. Models. Helpers. Teachers. Friends.

The energy appears.

That was the beautiful part.

Because the conditions were not always easy, people helped each other. Someone had a powerbank. Someone had tape. Someone had a brush. Someone had water. Someone carried a bag. Someone checked if a model was cold. Someone made sure the next person knew where to go.

Officially, it was a competition.

But it felt more like a creative family spending a weekend together.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite image was one of the last pictures I made at the festival.

Sunday. After the Drag Contest. After the pressure had gone. After the big competition day. Matteo was still painting. Emma sat for him as the model. He created a Sugar Skull make-up.

The colors were perfect.

Orange and yellow in the face. Warm light in the tent. Blue details in the background. Flowers. Flags. A calm face. A final moment.

It looked as if it had been arranged with great care.

But it had not.

It simply happened.

That is often the best way.

The image became a small summary of the weekend for me. Color. Death. Life. Memory. Play. Exhaustion. Beauty. A painted face that would soon be washed clean.

And a photograph to keep it a little longer.

Sometimes a favorite picture is not planned.

Sometimes it waits until you are tired enough to stop trying too hard.

What I’d do differently:

Next time I would prepare better for the weather.

Warmer clothes. More waterproof clothes. Better shoes. Definitely waterproof shoes.

I would also plan the power situation more carefully. I knew before the trip that the generator would be turned off overnight, but I still underestimated what that really meant.

Normally I charge everything at night.

Camera batteries. LED lights. Laptop. Phone. Powerbanks. Audio gear. Small cameras.

At Bath, that was not possible in the usual way. Everything had to be charged during the day, whenever power was available. That changes the rhythm of the whole workflow.

Next time I would bring another powerbank, within the limits of what is allowed on a flight. I would also organize my charging schedule better from day one.

It was not a disaster.

But it could be smoother.

Tech Minute:

The Tech Minute is simpler this time.

On a camping site, camera technology becomes less important than you think. The real question is not which camera has the best autofocus. The real question is whether your light stand will stay upright.

When you travel, light stands are often a compromise. This time I borrowed two small stands from Helen. They were light and practical, but they had a small footprint.

That is not ideal when you put a flash and softbox on top.

Especially not when British wind enters the story.

So I had brought two large empty sandbags from home. They fold flat and take almost no space in the luggage. I also had small aluminum carabiners on them so I could attach them to the stands.

On location, I filled two large water bottles with tap water and placed them inside the sandbags.

That gave the stands enough weight.

Simple. Cheap. Effective.

For travel photography with flashes and softboxes, empty sandbags are now one of those things I do not want to be without.

They weigh almost nothing in the suitcase.

But when the wind comes, they are worth everything.

The day before the fair, we also filmed a YouTube challenge for Matt. Sophie was our model for the weekend and joined us throughout the trip. She stood in front of our cameras during the challenge, walked through the city with us, and somehow still had more energy than everyone else combined.

I already wrote about Photo London, the challenge, and my test of the new Light Lens Lab 28mm 9-Elements in my previous post.

But London had given me more than one story.

Two days in the city would have felt too short. The journey would hardly have been worth the effort. So Sophie and I agreed to meet one day earlier. We also used as much of Sunday as we could before our flights and trains carried us back into our normal lives.

This post is about the hours around the official programme. The walks through London. The small hotel room with no windows. The experiments that worked. The one that failed. And the photographs that appeared when we stopped trying too hard.

Sophie arrived by train on Thursday morning.

I was sitting in the hotel lobby with my laptop, answering messages and working on a few texts. Then she came through the door in a good mood, full of energy, pulling a suitcase packed with outfits and everything else we might need for the next days.

She was prepared.

We did not begin with a camera. We went into the city to find food.

On the way, we stopped at Läderach for chocolate. Later, we raised our glasses to the long weekend ahead of us. Sophie ordered an espresso martini. I had a Negroni. There was good food and a view across the city.

It was a slow beginning. That felt right.

Afterwards, we found a small Italian café in a side street. We drank good coffee and opened some of the chocolate. Then we visited a camera shop to buy film.

For Matt’s challenge on Friday, we had planned a bonus round with point-and-shoot cameras. I had brought expired colour film and black-and-white film, but nothing I fully trusted. For a challenge, I wanted one reliable roll.

Sophie bought film for her Instax. I picked up a roll of Portra 400.

The weather changed every few minutes. London could not decide what kind of day it wanted to be.

We walked along the Thames when the sun came out. When the sky closed again and the rain returned, we escaped into a pub.

We had not even finished half of our beers when the sun returned. It fell through the window and across Sophie’s shoulder. The light was soft and bright at the same time. It separated her from the darker room behind her.

I reached for my Canon Top Twin. There was still a roll of black-and-white film inside.

The light was too good to waste.

When the rain stopped, we walked back to the hotel and prepared for our evening shoot.

Sophie had brought many outfits. But more is not always better. We quickly agreed on something simple: dark green lingerie.

The hotel room was unusual. It did not have a single window.

When I first entered it, I was disappointed. A window is often the easiest source of beautiful light in a hotel room. It gives direction. It gives shape. It offers a starting point.

But a room without windows has an advantage of its own.

There is no daylight to control. There is nothing to block. When every lamp is switched off, the room becomes completely dark. You begin with a black canvas. Every light that appears in the final image is there because you decided to place it there.

The room had built-in RGB lights controlled from a panel on the wall. They could be adjusted in colour and brightness. I could use them as a subtle background glow or make them part of the actual lighting setup.

Behind the bed was a tall black leather wall. It was simple and slightly dramatic. Next to the bed stood a mirrored wardrobe. The room was small, but it had enough surfaces to work with.

I wanted to use green and red as complementary colours.

The built-in lights filled the room with a restrained green glow. To keep the colour from becoming too dominant on Sophie’s skin, I added a small RGB LED and balanced the green with a warm orange-red light.

The contrast was strong.

Perhaps too strong.

During the edit, I reduced it. I softened the green and pushed the red towards a more earthy tone. The result felt quieter and less artificial. Sophie’s dark green lingerie became part of the room instead of fighting against it.

She knelt on the bed while I moved around her with three cameras: the Leica M9, the Canon Top Twin, and the Lomography Belair 6×12.

For some of the photographs, Sophie wore a headband. It kept her hair away from her face when she turned sideways and made it easier to work with her profile.

The setup was simple. The room was not. Every small movement changed the reflections, the shadows, and the balance between the colours.

The Lomography Belair 6x12 was the most interesting camera I had brought.

A few weeks earlier, I had found one of the rarer glass lenses made for it: a Belairgon. The standard Belair lenses were made of plastic and their optical quality was rather limited. The Belairgon promised something better.

I wanted to see what it could do.

The camera produces wide 6×12 panoramic negatives. It is an unusual format for portraits. That was exactly why I liked the idea.

My first concern was the light. The maximum aperture of the Belairgon is only f/8. In a dark hotel room, that is not much. I loaded a roll of Lomography Color Negative 800 and sometimes used a monopod to avoid camera shake.

But the slow shutter speeds were not the real problem.

The Belair uses an external viewfinder. That viewfinder has no parallax correction.

At close distances, the image in the viewfinder is not the image the camera records. The viewfinder sits above the lens. The difference becomes more severe the closer you move towards your subject.

The distance between the lens and the viewfinder is especially large on the Belair. I composed carefully through the finder, pressed the shutter, and thought everything was fine.

It was not.

On almost every frame, Sophie was cropped far more aggressively than intended. Sometimes her head was cut off. Sometimes only part of her body remained inside the frame.

The failure had nothing to do with sharpness. Matt had given me a separate external L.D. METER rangefinder. I used it to measure the distance and transferred the value to the lens. The focusing worked surprisingly well.

The framing did not.

Still, the experiment was useful. The Belairgon lens produced a look I genuinely liked. The wide negative has a special character. I only need a better way to compose the image at close distances.

Failure is easier to accept when it shows you exactly what needs to change.

For the second setup, we moved towards the mirrored wardrobe.

The cabinet sat partly against the side wall and partly behind Sophie. It created a narrow corner. She could lean against it while her reflection remained visible in the frame.

The small room suddenly felt even smaller.

That suited the pictures.

The reflections created an intimate, enclosed atmosphere. The green edge light remained, balanced again by the warmer tone on Sophie’s skin. During the edit, I softened the colour contrast as I had done with the first series.

After a while, I had seen enough green.

It is not a colour I often use as a dominant light. I do not remember why I chose it that evening. It was simply an idea that appeared when I looked at the room.

Sometimes that is enough reason to try something.

For the third setup, Sophie lay on the bed.

I removed the green light completely.

The background stayed warm. The base colour temperature was around 3400 Kelvin, and I adjusted my LED lights to match it. The lighting became simpler. There was one restrained main light and very little else.

For one or two photographs, I placed my smartphone next to Sophie’s face with its LED switched on. It added a small catchlight to her eyes.

That was all.

The final photographs are quieter than the earlier ones. They do not demand as much attention. They have less colour, less tension, and fewer visible ideas.

Perhaps that is why I like them.

Between the digital files and the Belair 6x12, I kept reaching for the Canon Top Twin as well. It was still loaded with Ilford HP5. For such a small point-and-shoot, and in such poor light, it performed surprisingly well. The camera did its job. Only once did I fall into the old trap again: the minimum focus distance is one metre, and I had moved too close.

When we finished, Sophie removed her make-up. I took a few spontaneous Behind the Scenes photographs.

Those images are funny. They are also honest.

A good shoot is not only about the moments when everything is controlled. It is about the atmosphere between those moments. The jokes. The strange faces. The pauses. The feeling that nobody needs to perform all the time.

That matters even more during an intimate shoot.

You are working with another person in a hotel room in a foreign city. The model is wearing lingerie. There must be trust. There must be respect. Everybody involved must feel comfortable at every moment.

Without that, the photographs remain empty.

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The next morning, we had a quick breakfast and went to the Barbican Centre. There we met and Thomas for the YouTube challenge.

On Saturday, we visited Photo London.

By Sunday, the official part of the trip was over. But we still had time.

Several members of Matt’s Patreon group joined us again at the Barbican Centre. We started the morning with coffee and a long geartalk in the café. The table filled quickly with cameras and lenses.

That was part of the joy of the meetup.

There were good people, strange cameras, and enough time to test things without taking any of it too seriously. During the first coffee, we already began to photograph Sophie. At first, we only wanted to compare the character of different lenses.

Some of the test pictures became more than test pictures.

Outside, the weather was still unstable.

We began beneath one of the concrete passageways around the Barbican. The light there was limited, but the location worked beautifully. The background had a strong geometric structure. Sophie wore white and stood out clearly against the darker concrete.

We did not need any additional light. The reflections from the surrounding walls and the pavement were enough.

Digital cameras handled the low light without much trouble. Film was more difficult. But even that worked well enough.

Later, the weather improved.

The sun returned and the colours became stronger. We moved into the gardens between the buildings. In spring, the Barbican can be surprisingly green. The concrete remains severe, but plants grow between the hard lines and soften the place.

Sophie had brought an apple.

Again.

I do not know why apples continue to appear during our shoots. It never seems planned. Last year, on Tenerife, Sophie suddenly produced one while we photographed nude portraits on the beach in the morning light.

Now she had another apple in London.

It suited the green gardens perfectly. So we used it.

By the afternoon, our group slowly dissolved. Some people had trains to catch. Others needed to reach the airport.

At around four o’clock, I left central London and travelled towards Heathrow.

The weekend had been full. There had been Photo London, cameras, lenses, coffee, rain, cocktails, concrete, gardens, and more photographs than I could count.

But the pictures I remember most clearly are often the quiet ones.

The sunlight in the pub.

The dark hotel room.

The apple in Sophie’s hand.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

Cameras:

Leica M9
Canon Top Twin (Ilford HP5)
Lomography Belair 6×12 (Lomography Color Negative 800)

Lenses:

35mm f/1.8 Nippon Nikkor-W
50mm f/1.2 ArtraLab Nocturne-M
112mm f8 Belairgon

Light:

2x 25W RGB LEDs

Creative challenge:

Every location demanded a different approach. The light changed with the weather. The hotel room offered complete control but very little space. The Belair added another challenge: a panoramic format with no reliable parallax correction at close distances.

Reflections

Sophie has a rare ease in front of the camera.

She can sit in a pub while rain runs down the windows. She can work in lingerie in a strange hotel room. She can stand in front of a group of photographers in the middle of London while everybody tests a different lens.

She remains relaxed. She remains curious. She is open to ideas.

Her battery never seems to run out.

I have a lot of energy when I travel. Sophie has more.

There is something special about travelling with a model and keeping a camera close at hand. You see a person in more than one situation. You see them tired, excited, unstyled, dressed up, drinking coffee, lying on a bed, waiting for a train, or standing in the right light by accident.

Those moments often become the best photographs.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favourite appeared near the end of the trip.

I was testing the Light Lens Lab 28mm 9-Elements in the Barbican gardens. Sophie sat on a low stone edge. Behind her was a green flower bed that gave me a clean background.

I photographed her from above.

When I looked at the image on the screen, I thought the same composition might work even better with a 50mm lens.

I switched to the ArtraLab Nocturne-M 50mm f/1.2.

Sophie held the apple. The wind moved through her hair.

That was enough.

What I’d do differently:

I need to find a proper viewfinder solution for the Lomography Belair.

I like the camera. I like the 6×12 format. With the Belairgon lens, the image quality has reached a level that makes the camera genuinely interesting for portrait work.

But the standard external finder is not good enough at close distances. Without parallax correction, careful composition becomes guesswork.

When my travel schedule slows down, I need to look for a solution.

Tech Minute:

Rangefinder cameras have two different optical axes.

The lens records the photograph. The viewfinder sits slightly above and to the side of it. At longer distances, the difference is small. At close distances, it becomes increasingly important.

Leica has integrated parallax correction into its rangefinder cameras since the 1950s. As the focus distance changes, the frame lines inside the finder move. They compensate for the difference between what the photographer sees and what the lens records.

The Lomography Belair does not offer that correction.

Because the camera is large and the viewfinder sits well above the lens, the offset becomes dramatic at a working distance of around one metre. A carefully composed portrait can easily lose the top of the head. In the worst case, half of the body disappears from the negative.

The photographs make the lesson quite clear.

From off camera

On Thursday evening, after the shoot, Sophie lay on the bed and looked through the photographs on my laptop while I was in the shower.

When I returned, she had reached the pictures taken between the actual setups. The ones with the strange faces she likes to make while I adjust the light.

She looked at the screen and said:

“I like the funny ones the most!”

Her Instagram followers seem to agree.

So I will end this post with a small selection.

It was Friday morning. I was ready to leave for Austria and spend the weekend with my friend Sarah. We had not seen each other for far too long. We had not photographed together for more than a year.

The UPS driver stood outside with a package in his hand.

At first, I was not sure it was mine. I had not ordered anything recently. At least that was what I thought.

Then I saw the sender.

Several weeks earlier, I had preordered the new
GoPro MISSION 1 PRO. The camera had officially gone on sale the day before. Somehow, it had already arrived at my door. The timing could hardly have been better.

I delayed my departure by half an hour, opened the box, charged the battery, and tried to understand the most important settings. I had packed my tiny Insta360 GO 3S as a BTS camera for the weekend. It never left the bag.

The new GoPro came to Graz instead.

The drive from Lower Bavaria to Graz takes about three and a half hours. My camera bag was in the trunk. The GoPro stayed on the passenger seat.

The weather was good. The sun was bright. The road ran south through a green landscape. I filmed a few clips during short stops and took the camera in my hand whenever the scenery changed.

This was not meant to be a laboratory test. It was a practical one.

I wanted to know whether the MISSION 1 PRO could replace my HERO10 Black as the camera that quietly follows me through my trips. The HERO10 has been with me for years. It records solid 5.3K footage at 60 frames per second. Its files are detailed enough. Its stabilization works. I trust it.

The new camera needed to be better.

It also had to compete with another device that is always in my pocket: my iPhone 17 Pro.

The phone is not a dedicated action camera. It is not waterproof in the same sense. It cannot be mounted everywhere without thought. But it is always there. It records good video. It takes good photographs. It is fast.

The MISSION 1 PRO is larger and heavier. It needs to justify the space in my bag.

I left the Insta360 GO 3S out of this comparison. That camera has a different job. It is for the moments when even a regular GoPro feels too large or too heavy. Its strength is not absolute image quality. Its strength is that it can be attached almost anywhere.

The MISSION 1 PRO is different. It wants to be taken seriously.

Its new 50-megapixel 1-inch sensor records up to 8K at 60 frames per second in 16:9. It also supports 8K30 and 4K120 in Open Gate mode, using the full height of the 4:3 sensor. Last part matters to me.

Open Gate gives me more room later. I can create a horizontal video for YouTube. I can cut a vertical version for Instagram Stories. I can shift the frame after mounting the camera on another camera body. I can decide later what the final image should look like.

When I need 60 frames per second and the full sensor height, I use 4K60 Open Gate. When I want the maximum resolution, I use 8K60 in 16:9.

For most people, this sounds like a small technical detail. For me, it is the reason to buy the camera.

Sarah and I met in Graz that evening.

We have known each other since the World Bodypainting Festival in Austria, almost fifteen years ago. Back then, she modeled for one of the artists. I was there as a photographer. What began as a professional connection became a friendship.

Over the years, we traveled together. We worked at festivals. We photographed in strange places and at unreasonable hours. We saw each other tired, stressed, hungry, and occasionally covered in body paint.

That is how you learn to trust people.

After dinner, we went outside for a short walk. The moon was out. Streetlights reflected from the pavement. I brought the GoPro with me and filmed a few clips in the dark.

This was the first disappointment.

The conditions were difficult. There was little light. Perhaps ISO 3200 at f/2 would have produced a slightly underexposed but usable photograph. That gives a rough idea of the darkness.

The GoPro struggled.

The preview image already looked coarse on the rear screen. The finished video did not improve much when I played it back. In the low-light mode, the camera combines pixels and outputs a 4K file. On paper, that sounds reasonable.

In practice, the visible detail looked closer to mediocre Full HD. In some parts, it felt worse.

The files were untouched. I did not remove noise. I did not sharpen them. I wanted to see what the camera produced on its own.

It was not good.

A larger sensor does not repeal the laws of physics. A small camera still has limits. The MISSION 1 PRO is better than the HERO10 Black in many ways, but it does not turn moonlight into daylight.

We went home and fell into bed.

Sarah had worked all week. I had spent hours driving south. Neither of us had much energy left.

Saturday would be the real test.

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We started the morning slowly.

There was breakfast. There was coffee. There were stories from the past months. There was gossip. Gossip is important.

Later that morning, we drove out of Graz toward a small gorge. It was only about twenty minutes from the city. The walk was not long. It was enough to stretch our legs and find a quiet place for a first shoot.

I brought my black Leica M9-P and two lenses.

The first was the Nikkor-W 35mm f/1.8 that I had bought in Hong Kong a few weeks earlier. I had already used it in London during our shoot with Sophie.

The second was the ArtraLab 50mm f/1.2 Nocturne-M. I had also bought that lens in Hong Kong and tested it in London. It is heavier, but it delivers beautiful images. Since I had traveled by car, the weight did not matter.

Sarah had brought an orange bikini and a orange hoodie. The gorge was full of deep green leaves. Red, yellow, or orange were the obvious choices. The colors would work against the spring foliage.

At least that was the plan.

We walked through the entire gorge before taking a single photograph. The water level was low. The supposed waterfalls were thin streams. The pools beneath them looked brown and muddy.

It was unusual for the end of May.

We had already experienced a short heat wave with temperatures reaching 35 degrees Celsius. The river showed it.

Still, there was one place that worked.

The stream ran straight through a tunnel of green trees. The water was shallow and moved over small stones. The muddy bottom almost disappeared. The surface reflected the sky and the leaves.

It was enough.

Sarah stepped into the water. I began with the 35mm lens.

Hikers passed behind us from time to time. Sarah did not care. She has modeled for too many years to be disturbed by a few curious strangers. I did not care either. At wide apertures, the people in the background became soft shapes. If one of them remained visible, I could remove them later.

The GoPro sat on a rock beside the path.

I did not set up a tripod. I did not think too much about the framing. I placed the camera on the stone, selected 8K60, and pointed it toward us. My thought was simple: there was enough resolution to crop the image later.

That worked, but not as well as I had hoped.

The full frame looked good when scaled down for a 4K video. The cropped section looked visibly weaker. I used only the center of the 8K image at 100 percent. There should have been enough resolution. Yet the detail did not feel as clean as expected.

The light was not perfect. We were under trees. Still, it was a bright day.

This was my first important lesson from the new GoPro: 8K gives me flexibility, but it is not magic. It helps when the complete image is downscaled. It helps less when I crop aggressively.

Sarah and I photographed in the stream for about twenty minutes.

She stood in the water. She crouched down. She wore the bikini alone, then added the hoodie.

The photographs with the hoodie were better. They felt more relaxed. More complete. The outfit looked less like swimwear and more like a portrait of a person who had happened to walk into a river.

That small difference mattered.

At the end of the shoot, I took a few photographs of Sarah with the GoPro.

She had already put on her jeans by then. The idea came too late. I asked her to keep them on. I did not expect the GoPro photographs to compete with the Leica files.

They did not.

The GoPro RAW files are usable in the native ultra-wide setting. They can work for snapshots. They offer enough material for a small image on the web. But even at 100 percent, they do not look like convincing 50-megapixel photographs.

The JPEG files are worse.

The digital zoom is worse again.

When I cropped into the GoPro files, the quality fell apart quickly. The sensor may have many pixels, but the integrated lens and the image processing do not deliver the kind of detail I would expect from a dedicated photo camera.

That does not make the GoPro useless. It simply defines the job.

I would use the MISSION 1 PRO for photographs only when I need its extreme wide angle, its rugged body, or a perspective that would place a normal camera at risk. For everything else, I would reach for my phone.

Until the interchangeable-lens MISSION 1 PRO ILS arrives, the stills function remains a minor feature for me. The announced ILS model will use the same sensor and GP3 processor while accepting Micro Four Thirds lenses. It could become interesting.

After the gorge, we drove to a small rapid where we wanted to swim.

I had hoped to record a few underwater clips. It would have been the obvious action-camera test.

The weather had other plans.

About fifteen minutes after we arrived, rain began to fall. The sky darkened. A storm moved in. We packed our things and returned to Sarah’s apartment.

The underwater test was over before it began.

Sometimes the story you plan does not happen. You take the story that remains.

That evening, Sarah had to work at a party. Before she left, we went out for dinner and made another plan.

She would prepare her makeup and her outfit for the party. I would set up a few lights in her apartment. Before midnight, we would photograph for half an hour.

Her apartment is beautiful. It has high ceilings and the quiet mood of an old European building. The rooms already have character. There was no need to create a set from nothing.

When Sarah stepped into the room in her finished outfit, the photographs became obvious.

Her styling was bold. Her hair carried tones of pink, red, and orange. The outfit had the kind of confidence that only works when the person wearing it feels comfortable.

Sarah did.

For the first setup, I placed her in front of a golden curtain with a soft, velvety surface. I added a colored side light and a warm direct light on her face. The curtain caught the light and began to glow.

We photographed for ten or fifteen minutes.

The GoPro ran in the background as a BTS camera. The room was much darker than the gorge. The image quality dropped, but the footage remained usable. It looked flatter than I would want in a final edit. A little contrast would help.

For the purpose of the review, I left it alone.

For the second setup, I asked Sarah to lie on the bed.

The sheets were not neatly arranged. That was good. The room did not need to look staged. The soft mint color of the bedding worked against the warmer tones in Sarah’s hair and outfit.

I placed one warm LED light behind her. I adjusted the second light to match the existing room light and aimed it carefully at her face. It was not meant to announce itself. It was only there to keep the shadows under control.

We built the series slowly.

First, I photographed from a slightly higher angle. Then I moved closer and concentrated on details. At the end, I made a few portraits while Sarah rested on her stomach and looked toward the camera.

The setup worked.

The photographs felt intimate without trying too hard. The colors were warm. The untidy sheets kept the scene human.

Again, the GoPro recorded in the background.

The footage was not perfect. The light level was low. But it was acceptable for BTS material. That distinction matters. I do not need my BTS camera to replace a cinema camera. I need it to capture the process without becoming another problem on set.

The MISSION 1 PRO managed that.

Sarah left for the party shortly before midnight.

I copied the files, made a first selection, and went to sleep.

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The next morning was quiet. Sarah had not slept much. She had modeled for me and then worked through the night. A slow morning was not a luxury. It was necessary.

We went to a café. There was matcha. There was coffee. There were sweet things on small plates.

We talked about old trips and future plans. We talked about the things we miss from our younger years and the things we enjoy more now.

Eventually, we decided that we are aging in a charming way.

I can live with that.

Sarah and I originally met because of photography. The camera gave us a reason to work together. Over time, it became less important than the friendship around it.

Still, when we begin photographing again, the old routine returns quickly.

We had not shot together for more than a year. There was a short warm-up period. Then everything worked. I knew when to move. She knew when to change her pose. Neither of us had to explain much.

That kind of rhythm cannot be forced.

It is built over years.

Around noon, we walked through Graz and let the weekend end slowly. I filmed a few more clips with the GoPro. In daylight, the camera looked much better. The files had more detail. The colors were clean. The city gave me a final set of travel footage before the drive home.

Rain followed me north.

I did not mind.

The finished travel video is exported in 4K at 32 Mbit/s.

The original clips were recorded at the highest available bitrate, up to 240 Mbit/s. Each clip in the video includes a small note showing the resolution, frame rate, and mode. That makes the differences easier to judge.

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The direct comparison video between the MISSION 1 PRO, the HERO10 Black, and the iPhone 17 Pro is exported separately in 5K widescreen at 60 Mbit/s.

That file is larger. It should be. Its only job is to show detail.

The comparison between the new GoPro and the HERO10 Black is not simple.

The MISSION 1 PRO is better. But it is not better in every way I expected.

The jump from 5.3K to 8K does not produce a dramatic increase in visible detail. When I compare still frames at 100 percent, the difference is smaller than the numbers suggest.

That is disappointing.

I had hoped to crop into the 8K material and retain a clean 4K image. The BTS footage from the gorge shows that this is only partly possible. A 1:1 crop reveals the limits quickly.

The real improvement lies elsewhere.

The dynamic range is better.

The colors are better.

The tonal transitions are better.

In the comparison video, the difference becomes obvious when I walk from my studio toward the exit. With the HERO10 Black, the bright exterior beyond the door is almost completely blown out. With the MISSION 1 PRO, there is still visible detail outside, despite the sunlight.

The same is true near the beginning of the video, when a tree enters the frame. The new camera handles light and shadow with more control. The colors feel stronger without looking artificial.

The image has more depth.

The camera is also easier to use. The larger buttons may divide opinions, but I like them. They are easy to find. The startup time is fast. The battery lasts longer. The body becomes warm, but I have not managed to overheat it.

Most importantly, it has not frozen once.

That sounds like a small thing until a camera fails during a shoot.

The MISSION 1 PRO feels finished. It feels grown up.

The comparison with the iPhone is more surprising.

For still photography, the iPhone 17 Pro is far ahead of the GoPro MISSION 1 PRO. Its images show better detail, cleaner processing, and a more balanced tonal range, even in good light.
The GoPro files remain usable in RAW when shooting at the native ultra-wide angle, but the quality drops quickly once JPEG processing or digital zoom enters the equation. As soon as the light becomes more difficult, the gap grows even wider.

When it comes to video at maximum quality, the iPhone footage can look thin beside the GoPro. It sometimes feels slightly overexposed unless I intervene. The GoPro file has more room and a more controlled tonal range.

The iPhone has other advantages. It offers three focal lengths. It is always in my pocket. Its software processing is strong. I suspect it will remain better in many low-light situations, especially when I need a quick result without editing.

But when the light is good and I want a wide video image with more flexibility in post, the MISSION 1 PRO has a clear purpose.

It is not a phone replacement.

It is not a mirrorless-camera replacement.

It is a better BTS camera.

For me, that is enough.

Because I preordered the camera, my package included the cage, the grip, and an additional shutter button.

The cage is solid. It fits well. A quick-release button opens the side, allowing the camera to slide out. The battery door remains accessible through a separate removable cover.

That part is well designed.

Removing a camera from its cage every time the battery needs to be changed is irritating, especially when the cage is attached to a tripod or another mount. GoPro avoided that problem.

The grip is less convincing.

It improves the handling and adds an eyelet for a wrist strap or camera strap. Beyond that, it does very little. I would have liked a second battery, a Bluetooth connection and a few useful buttons.

The placement of the integrated shutter button becomes awkward when the grip is attached. GoPro includes a mechanical extension that sits in the cold shoe and presses the camera’s shutter button through a lever.

The idea is simple.

The execution is not good.

The lever feels vague. There is no clean pressure point. Several times, I failed to start recording. On other occasions, I pressed too hard or too long and stopped the recording immediately. The memory card contained a few clips that lasted less than a second.

The grip and the shutter extension returned to the box.

The cage may stay in use. I have not decided yet.

When it comes to audio, there is one small feature I appreciate.

With the HERO10 Black, I needed a Media Mod to connect an external microphone. The MISSION 1 PRO accepted my USB-C microphone directly.

The USB-C port is slightly recessed, so I used a small 90-degree adapter. I connected the microphone. The camera recognized it immediately and changed the settings automatically.

That was it.

The camera also recorded a backup track from its internal microphones. If something goes wrong with the external microphone, the internal audio remains available.

This is the kind of improvement I like.

It solves a real problem without demanding another accessory.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

Camera:

Leica M9-P in black

Lenses:

35mm f/1.8 Nippon Nikkor-W
50mm f/1.2 Artralab Nocturne-M

BTS camera:

GoPro MISSION 1 PRO

Light:

2x 25w RGB LED’s

Creative challenge:

The hardest part was remembering to stop talking and start photographing. There were too many stories and not enough hours.

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Reflections

The weekend reminded me how quickly a professional rhythm can return.

Sarah and I had not photographed together for more than a year. There was a brief warm-up period. Then the old trust was there again.

That trust matters more than the camera.

The new GoPro arrived at the perfect moment and gave me another reason to record the weekend. It captured the drive, the gorge, the apartment, and the slow walk through Graz.

But the most important images still came from the Leica.

Technology can preserve a memory. It cannot create the relationship inside it.

Unplanned Favorite

My favorite photograph was not entirely unplanned.

It was the final photograph I took during the weekend.

Sarah lay on her stomach on the bed. I wanted one last portrait before we ended the shoot. The light was too hard. One side of her face fell too far into shadow.

I placed a small LED panel on the bed in front of her.

It lifted the darkness just enough. It also placed a small reflection in her eyes.

I looked through the Leica’s viewfinder and knew the photograph was there.

I pressed the shutter.

Then I stopped.

Sometimes the final frame tells you that the shoot is over.

What I’d do differently:

I would focus more clearly on the actual shoot.

The MISSION 1 PRO is interesting. Its larger sensor, stronger dynamic range, improved tonal response, and flexible Open Gate modes make it a useful tool. It encouraged me to test settings and think about video.

That was also the problem.

Sarah was in front of my camera. The light was good. We had limited time.

The GoPro was only there to record the process.

It should remain in the background.

Tech Minute:

The GoPro MISSION 1 PRO will stay in my kit and replace my HERO10 Black.

The higher resolution does not deliver the dramatic increase in visible detail I expected. Cropping into the 8K files reveals the limits sooner than I would like. The low-light improvement is real, but it is not revolutionary.

The more important gains are the dynamic range, the colors, and the tonal transitions.

The files look more precise straight out of the camera. They need less correction. That saves time.

The battery lasts longer. The camera starts quickly. It has remained stable. It becomes warm, but it has not overheated.

The MISSION 1 PRO does not reinvent filmmaking.

It does not replace my Leica.

It does not replace my iPhone.

It does one job well.

It follows me quietly and records the story behind the photographs.

This time it came back in a new place. Not a new city. Not even a new kind of building. But a new home. Olympia, farther west in London.

For years the fair had lived in Somerset House, close to the Thames, in a place that looked grand from the outside and became difficult once you were inside it. Somerset House is built like a ring. There is a courtyard in the middle. The rooms sit around it. You walk from one room into another, through hallways, corners, doors, and stairs. It is beautiful. It is also easy to lose people there.

When you are alone, that can be fine. You follow your eyes. You drift. You go where the pictures take you.

When you are with a group, it becomes harder. One person stops. One person turns left. One person sees a print in a corner. Then the group is gone. You stand in a hallway and wonder if you have seen everything or only half of it.

There was another problem too. Some pictures did not have enough room around them. They hung in corners, or behind people, or in places where you could not step back far enough. Photography needs space. The eye needs space. A print needs to breathe.

So when we heard Photo London would move to Olympia, I was curious. I had seen photos of the building before the trip. It looked promising. More open. More like the Grand Palais in Paris, where Paris Photo takes place. For me, Paris Photo is still the benchmark. It is the big one. The one that feels like a proper pilgrimage.

I can say this early: Olympia is a much better home for Photo London.

The fair feels larger there. Easier. Cleaner. The crowd can move. The stands can breathe. You do not get caught in doorways. You do not lose your friends every five minutes. You can see where you are. You can see where you are going.

That alone changed the whole mood.

But our London weekend did not begin at the fair. It began the day before, at the Barbican Centre.

had planned a new format for his YouTube channel, and the finished video is now online. One model. Three photographers. Three locations. Three focal lengths. Five minutes each.

, Matt, and I would photograph Sophie at 35mm, 50mm, and 85 or 90mm. No flash. No reflectors. No tricks. Just available light, the location, the model, and whatever we could make in five minutes.

It was a friendly battle. The best kind. No prize. No drama. Just pressure, laughter, and cameras.

We also planned a small bonus round with point-and-shoot cameras. Matt had his Contax T3. Thomas brought a Nikon with a 28mm lens. I brought my Canon Top Twin with its 40mm and 70mm lenses.

Those film pictures are not ready yet. The film still needs to be developed and scanned. So for now, this post shows my digital side of the weekend. My version. My files. My mistakes. My luck.

Sophie was our model for the trip. She stayed with us through the weekend. She was there for the Barbican shoot, came with us to Photo London, and was still patient enough to join us again the next day. That alone deserves respect. A weekend with photographers can be a strange thing. There is always another lens to discuss. Another frame to make. Another reason to stop walking.

Luckily, Sophie understands us. Or at least she tolerates us with style.

I know Sophie from the bodypainting world. She was often with the British team on the Canary Islands. Over time we got to know each other better. We traveled together. We photographed together. Matt was often there too. So by now we are not strangers meeting for a shoot. We are a small team. That changes the pictures.

You can ask more. You can try more. You can fail without fear.

That matters.

My own goal for the trip was clear. I wanted to make good portraits of Sophie. I wanted to enjoy Photo London. And I wanted to test a lens I had bought only a few weeks earlier in Hong Kong: the Light Lens Lab 28mm f2.8 9-Elements, in black paint.

In the shop in Hong Kong, the lens looked wonderful. Heavy, black, precise, and serious. It had received very good reviews. The finish looked beautiful. I thought: yes, this one can come home.

Then I came home. The jet lag faded. The Hong Kong glow faded with it.

The lens was still beautiful. But it was also large. And heavy.

It is made of brass. It feels well built. It feels expensive. It also feels like too much lens for 28mm on a small Leica M. The rectangular hood makes it look even bigger. It blocks part of the viewfinder. The lens also reaches quite far into the camera. Nothing about it feels casual.

For a 50mm lens, I can accept that. For a special portrait lens, yes. For something fast and rare, yes. But for a 28mm lens, which I mostly use for travel, documentary photos, quick city frames, and behind-the-scenes work, I expect something else. I expect small. I expect easy. I expect a lens that disappears until I need it.

So London became the test. Would the lens earn its place? Or would it go back out into the world?

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We met at the Barbican Centre on Friday morning. Sophie and I came together. Thomas had arrived early that morning. Matt was there with cameras and ideas. The meeting time was 11 a.m., which sounds early enough until you realize that three photographers, three focal lengths, three setups, filming, moving, talking, and drinking coffee can eat a whole day.

We started with coffee.

That was the right decision.

Sophie wore a bronze-brown dress, a light trench coat, and a red hat. The hat did what red hats do. It saved the frame before I had even made one.

Matt and Thomas started photographing inside the café. I looked at the window and thought the outside might be better. The glass was not perfectly clean. It had a soft, milky surface. The city reflected in it. The light came through it and lost its hard edge.

So I went outside.

Sophie sat at the window with a coffee cup in front of her. The glass softened the scene. The reflections added another layer. Nothing was planned, and that is why it worked.

Sometimes the best photograph is not made when the shoot begins. It is made while everyone is still putting cameras on straps.

Then the challenge started.

We began with 35mm. I lost at rock, paper, scissors, so I had to go first.

That is not ideal. The first photographer becomes the scout. The others get to watch. They see where the model looks good, where the light falls, where the dead corners are. The first one has to find it while the clock is already running.

But that was the game.

For 35mm I used the Leica M9-P with the 35mm f/1.8
Nippon W-Nikkor. I bought that lens in Hong Kong too. It is another one I did not know well yet. That was a theme of the weekend. New lenses. New flaws. New surprises.

We had agreed on available light only. No flash. No LED panels. No reflectors. Nothing to save us.

The Barbican has a strong character. Concrete, lines, levels, shadows. It is great for black and white. Matt loves that kind of wall. It gives skin something to push against. For my color work, the gray and brown concrete was harder. I needed color somewhere.

So I asked Sophie to lie down on a ledge. Behind her, the trees caught the sun. For a few lucky minutes, London gave me light. The green came alive. The red and pink in her outfit worked against it. The Nippon drew a very nice background. The sharpness held well, even away from the center.

That matters for model photography. With 35mm you often place the model away from the middle. If the eyes are sharp, the rest of the body should not fall apart just because the subject is not centered. The Nippon handled that well.

Thomas used his Leica SL with the 24-90mm zoom. It is a strong lens. It is also not a fast lens in the same way. At 35mm and 50mm, with f/2.8 to f/4, he had less separation than Matt and me. That forced him to work harder with composition, light, and background. There is nothing wrong with that. In some ways it is purer. But in a five-minute challenge, speed helps.

Matt used the Light Lens Lab 35mm f/1.4 AA. Wide open, it gives you freedom. You can make the background leave.

After the 35mm round, we did the point-and-shoot bonus. Three frames each. Film. No display. No second chance.

I had bought a roll of Portra 400 the day before, because I had forgotten about this little bonus challenge and only had older Fuji Superia with me. The Portra went into the Canon Top Twin.

We will see what happened when the scans come back.

For the next round, we moved under the palms near the water. It felt like a small jungle. Sophie changed back into the bronze dress, trench coat, and red hat. It was perfect for that spot. A little safari, a little London, a little cinema.

For 50mm, I used the Artralab 50mm f/1.2 Nocturne-M. Mine is the black paint limited version, also bought in Hong Kong.

This lens was the winner of the trip for me.

I took it to London to test it. I came home wanting to keep it close. It draws beautifully. It has enough glow to feel alive, but not so much that it becomes a trick. It gives the M9 files a soft strength. That sounds like a contradiction. It is not. Some lenses do that.

The light under the palms was excellent. I placed Sophie in the shade. That was important. With a Leica M9 and an f/1.2 lens, the 1/4000 second shutter speed is not always enough in bright sun. Highlights can blow fast, especially when they are outside the focus plane and melt into the blur. So the shade was safer.

Matt used the Light Lens Lab 50mm f/1.2, the 1966 version, with a light ND filter. That gave him more room to work in stronger sun. You can see his results in the new YouTube Video. He knows how to use that kind of light.

Then came the difficult part.

For the 85 or 90mm round, I used Thomas’s Leica Summarex 85mm f/1.5.

Thomas had given it to me months earlier after he bought it. It needed work. The aperture was stiff. The glass had haze. The helicoid needed care. I cleaned it, serviced it, made the aperture smooth again, and calibrated it.

I had brought it to London to return it.

Then it became my challenge lens.

I did not really know it. I had made test shots at home, but that is not the same as photographing a model in changing light with a clock running. I did not know how it would handle backlight. I did not know how fast the edges would fall. I did not know if the highlights would bloom too much. The lens is old, from around the 1950s if I remember correctly, and old fast lenses always come with a personality.

Some personalities are charming. Some are expensive problems.

Before the timer started, I made a few quick frames of Matt with his Yashica T3. I wanted to see the contrast. The Summarex was low in contrast, but not weak. It had a little glow. The details were better than expected. That gave me confidence.

For Sophie, I chose backlight.

We were in the park area of the Barbican. There was tall grass. I asked Sophie to crouch low so the grass came up near her face. The sun came from behind her, slightly from the side. I kept the hood on and avoided direct light on the front element.

It worked.

The files had good contrast. The detail was there. The bokeh was beautiful. Toward the edge, the highlights became elliptical. The rings had structure. The background looked painted, not blurred by software, not erased, but painted by glass.

That is why people still care about old lenses.

They are not perfect. They are not meant to be. But when they work, they give you something that feels touched by hand.

For a second small setup, I placed Sophie under a tree. The ground reflected sunlight upward and gave her face a soft fill. No reflector. Just London doing the job.

After the official round, I made a few more frames with the Summarex. You do not get one of those on the camera every day. It is rare now. It is also large and heavy. That keeps it lower on my wish list than it would be if it were smaller. But the rendering is excellent. If you like vintage glass, it is one of those lenses you should at least try once.

When the challenge was done, we slowly split up. Thomas joined us for dinner. Later Sophie and I went for a cocktail.

The bar had caught my eye the evening before. It was the only full place on the street. All the other bars looked quiet. This one was alive. That is usually a sign.

We got a table at the window. The glass was colored and painted, almost like church glass, though simpler. The light came through it and landed on Sophie’s face.

I put my bag down, looked up, and knew the day was not finished.

Out came the Leica again. Out came the Artralab 50mm f/1.2.

Sophie still had the trench coat and red hat. The light was soft and strange. The drink had not even arrived and the picture was already there.

That is a good way to end a day.

A cocktail. A tired model. One more lens. One more frame.

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The next morning was Photo London day.

We met for coffee near Olympia at 10 a.m. The table filled with people, cameras, stories, and the usual small pieces of metal that make photographers happy.

Grom came from Paris. Ken, Richard, Andy, and Sandeep joined too. Together with Matt and Thomas, we were a real group this year. The kind of group that makes waiters nervous and camera shops happy.

Grom had his Widelux with him. He also had the coolest self-timer I have ever seen. Fully mechanical. Strange and beautiful. He showed it to us at the table. There is always something to learn when photographers gather. Someone always brings a thing you did not know you needed. (Check out my BTS-Video later to see it)

On the way to coffee, I started using the Light Lens Lab 28mm f/2.8 9-Elements. A few frames in the Underground station. A few across the table. Nothing serious. Just memory pictures. But those matter too. When you travel with friends, the documentary pictures become more valuable with time.

On the way to Olympia we stopped at a large office building with a granite wall. It was perfect for a group picture. I used the Leica M9-P and the 28mm.

Grom set up the Widelux on a post and made a group picture too. I have not seen it yet, but I hope it worked. Widelux photos are always special. That rotating lens gives a very wide view without the ugly edge stretch of normal wide-angle images. At least that is how I understand it. The lens moves during the exposure, so the perspective feels more even across the frame.

Then we walked to Olympia.

Everyone had a ticket. Everyone was prepared. We went in without trouble.

The fair was busy, but not too busy. People were there, but they were not pressed into narrow halls. The space could hold them. That was the great difference from Somerset House. No door jams. No strange traffic at corners. No feeling that you had to fight your way into a room.

Photo London felt calmer at Olympia.

We could split up and find each other again. We could make a rough plan and follow it. Someone could stop for a water. Someone could move ahead. Someone could stay behind at a print. Nobody was lost.

We met many good people. Matt was recognized as Mr.Leica several times, of course. We also spent a long time at the Leica London stand. One of the Leica people noticed my silver M9-P, and that started a conversation. I think we were there for more than an hour, talking about pictures, cameras, and the things photographers talk about when they have no reason to stop.

It was one of the better fair visits I have had.

There were strong works everywhere. I photographed some of them with my phone, not as art, just as memory. These little reference photos matter to me. They show what stopped me. What made me think. What I might want to learn from later.

Two things stayed with me most.

The first was a set of palladium prints from North Pole expeditions. I would place them somewhere in the early 1910s or 1920s, though I may be wrong. The images showed wooden ships caught in ice, men standing out in the cold, faces marked by weather and damage. The whole thing felt impossible.

It is hard enough to imagine such an expedition today, with modern clothing, modern radios, modern rescue systems, modern maps. To imagine it then is something else. And yet someone brought a camera. Someone made plates, or negatives, in that cold. Someone decided that if they were stuck in the ice, they would at least document it.

That is photography at its most serious.

The second favorite was a single work I had seen before, but it worked even better in the larger space at Olympia. It showed a woman in a dress. The special part was the frame and the glass. A curtain was printed on the front glass. The glass sat several centimeters in front of the actual photograph. Because of that distance, the curtain cast a shadow onto the image behind it.

The result felt three-dimensional. The woman seemed to stand behind a curtain, even though it was only a print and a sheet of glass. The pose, the dress, the dark wooden frame, and the color all worked together.

It was simple and clever. The kind of idea that makes you a little jealous.

As a series, the polar expedition prints were my highlight. As a single piece, the woman behind the printed curtain stayed with me most.

I kept the Light Lens Lab 28mm on the camera for most of the day. On the street. At coffee. Inside Photo London. On the way there and back. It became the documentary lens for the day.

That is also what a 28mm lens has to be for me.

I do not usually use 28mm for my strongest portraits. I use it for context. For travel. For the room around people. For behind-the-scenes pictures. For the things that make the story complete.

On the way to Photo London, I also made time for a small comparison test.

We had five 28mm lenses with us:

Light Lens Lab 28mm f/2.8 9-Elements
Artralab 28mm f/2.8
Brightin Star 28mm f/2.8 (Thanks Matt)
Voigtländer Ultron 28mm f/2 (Thanks Grom)
Thypoch Eureka 28mm f/2.8 (Thanks Matt)

That is a nice little group. Similar focal length. Similar purpose. Very different size, price, and character.

I photographed the same scene from wide open to f/8. For the gallery, I will show crops from the center, from slightly outside the center, and from the upper right corner. That should make it easier to judge sharpness and edge behavior.

The Ultron was tested at f/2 wide open. The others started at f/2.8. From f/4 onward, all lenses were tested at the same apertures.

The Light Lens Lab 9-Elements performed very well.

The color was good. The contrast was good. The sharpness was good. Nothing felt too modern or too hard. It did not give that razor APO look. It did not have brutal microcontrast. The colors were a little softer and more pastel. The color contrast was slightly lower.

For me, that is not a bad thing.

It gives you a good file to work with. You can add contrast later. You can add sharpness. You can add a little saturation. But the raw material is clean and calm.

If I rank the five lenses from this test, I would place the Light Lens Lab second.

The winner, for me, was the Thypoch Eureka 28mm f/2.8.

That surprised me. It was just a little ahead. It had slightly stronger microcontrast. It looked a little sharper in fine details, especially in leaves and small structures. The colors were strong, clean, and a little warmer than the Light Lens Lab. I like that. I photograph people often, and warmer color usually helps skin.

The Voigtländer Ultron 28mm f/2 would be third. It is a very solid lens. Good resolution. Good sharpness. It also gives you f/2, which matters. But in this comparison it showed more chromatic aberration, and its color was the coolest of the five. That is not my favorite look for people.

The Artralab 28mm f/2.8 came fourth, and that hurt a little.

I like that lens. I praised it before. It has been my small travel 28mm. It has the size and handling I want. In many ways, it is exactly the kind of lens I want to carry.

But in this test, it produced an internal reflection. In the center of the frame, a brownish patch appeared. The contrast dropped there. The color shifted. The image became damaged in a way I do not want to repair later.

Maybe a radial filter in Lightroom could help. But that is not the point. A lens should not give me a brown ghost in the middle of the picture when I am trying to make a clean file.

I want to understand it better. Maybe it depends on the angle of the light. Maybe the hood helps. Maybe a filter makes it worse or better. Maybe it only appears in very specific conditions.

I will test it again.

The Brightin Star 28mm f/2.8 came fifth.

It is tiny. Almost a pancake. Almost more lens cap than lens. For its size, it is impressive. The center is usable. The extended center is acceptable. But the corners stay soft, even at f/8. That may be fine if you accept it as part of the look. But you should know it before you choose it.

The colors were decent, with a slight green cast that should be easy to correct. The main weakness is the edge and corner performance.

Still, for something that small, it deserves respect.

Every photographer will rank these lenses differently. That is why I try to explain what matters to me. Size matters. Weight matters. Color matters. Sharpness matters. But none of them matters alone.

A lens is not a chart. A lens is something you carry all day.

Inside Olympia, I did one more small test. This time only the Light Lens Lab 28mm against the Artralab 28mm.

The Artralab flare appeared again in landscape orientation, though not as strongly as outside. In the center, there was a slight color drift and lower contrast. In portrait orientation, it was gone. But I had also aimed the camera slightly lower. Maybe that changed the angle enough.

I do not have the answer yet.

That little flaw has stayed in my head since London. It bothers me because I like the Artralab. I want it to work. I want it to be the small 28mm I can trust.

For now, I cannot fully trust it.

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So what about the Light Lens Lab 28mm f/2.8 9-Elements?

Optically, it is excellent.

The lens made clean files. It handled the day well. It gave me good color, good sharpness, and a calm rendering that fits the Leica M9 nicely. It is not too clinical. It is not too soft. It sits in a good place.

But photography is not only optical performance.

It is also the bag.

It is the walk.

It is the fifth hour in the city.

It is the moment when you decide which lens comes with you and which lens stays in the hotel room.

For me, the 28mm focal length is not important enough to deserve a large and heavy lens in the travel bag. I use 28mm for city views, documentary pictures, group shots, and behind-the-scenes frames. For those things, I prefer a small lens. Something like the Artralab, if I can solve the flare issue, or something in the size range of the Thypoch Eureka.

The Light Lens Lab is too big for how I use 28mm.

That is the truth.

I asked myself before the trip whether the lens would stay in my kit or leave again. After London, I think the answer is no. It will probably leave.

Not because it is bad. It is not bad at all. It is very good.

But it is too much lens for the place I would give it.

It had a short life with me. Hong Kong to London. Three or four weeks. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes you know quickly.

In the shop in Hong Kong, it looked perfect. In the streets of London, it felt less perfect.

The Hong Kong glasses were rosy. The London streets were honest.


Before we left London, there was one more morning with Sophie and the 28mm 9-Elements.
No test chart now. No fair halls. Just wind, grass, concrete, an apple, and that hard London light softened by the old lens design.
These pictures were not part of the plan. That is why I like them here at the end. A small bonus. A quiet last look before the road called again.

BTS-Video:

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

Camera:

Leica M9-P, silver

Main lenses used:

28mm f/2.8 9-Elements Light Lens Lab
35mm f/1.8 Nippon W-Nikkor
50mm f/1.2 Artralab Nocturne-M
85mm f/1.5 Leica Summarex

Light:

Available light only.

This was one of the creative challenges of the weekend. I worked almost entirely with lenses I did not know well yet.

The Nippon 35mm, the Artralab 50mm, and the Light Lens Lab 28mm had all come from Hong Kong. The Summarex belonged to Thomas, and I had only tested it enough to service and calibrate it. That meant I was working with glass whose behavior I still had to learn in the field.

I did not know how each lens would handle hard light. I did not know how fast each one would flare. I did not know how much contrast they would give me, or how quickly sharpness would fall away from the center.

That made the weekend exciting. It also made it less predictable.

But that is often where the good pictures hide.

Reflections

Photo London surprised me this year.

The new location helped a lot. Olympia gave the fair room. It made the whole experience calmer and stronger. The people were pleasant. The contacts were good. The Leica stand became a long conversation. The work on the walls was strong.

I saw pictures there that I had not seen before at Paris Photo or at other fairs. That matters. A fair should not only confirm what you already know. It should put something new in your head.

The North Pole palladium prints did that. So did the woman behind the printed curtain. One gave me history and cold and danger. The other gave me a clever object that became more than a photograph.

The weekend also reminded me why I like traveling with other photographers.

You borrow eyes.

Matt sees concrete differently than I do. Thomas works differently with a zoom than I do with a fast M lens. Grom brings a Widelux and suddenly everyone thinks about panoramic space. Sophie stands in the middle of all this and gives us a reason to stop talking and make pictures.

That is a good group.

A strange group, maybe. But a good one.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite is, of course, a picture of Sophie.

It happened at the beginning, before the challenge had really started, in the café at the Barbican Centre.

I was still sorting my things and filming a little for Matt’s YouTube format. Then I saw the window. I saw how the light came through it. I saw the reflections and the soft dirt on the glass.

I thought it might work from outside.

So I went out and photographed Sophie through the pane.

She sat inside with her coffee. The glass softened everything. The reflection added the city. The window took away the clean digital edge and gave the picture a small veil.

That became my unplanned favorite.

Sophie through the café window at the Barbican. Simple. Spontaneous. Better because it was not planned.

What I’d do differently:

I do not think I would change much.

The weekend worked. The weather was good. The group was good. The fair was good. Sophie was patient. London gave us sun.

Maybe next time I would bring an analog Leica M, if the days are not packed quite so full.

There was not much room for film this time. We were filming, shooting, walking, testing, talking, and moving from one thing to the next. But if time allows, I would like to shoot more film on a trip like this.

Not because it would be better.

Because it would slow me down in the right way.

Tech Minute:

This Tech Minute belongs to the 28mm lenses.

For me, a lens is never only about optical performance. It is always the combination of size, weight, rendering, color, contrast, sharpness, and handling in real use.

The full package makes the lens.

The sharpest and most beautiful lens does not help me if it is too large and heavy to carry with joy. The smallest and lightest lens also does not help me if the optical performance is too weak for the work I want to make.

The truth sits in the balance.

Not in the data sheet.

Not in the sharpness chart alone.

It sits in the question: do I take this lens with me when I leave the hotel in the morning?

For the Light Lens Lab 28mm f/2.8 9-Elements, my answer is complicated.

It is optically excellent. It made strong files. It deserves the praise it gets.

But for my kind of travel photography, it is too large and too heavy for a 28mm lens.

For another photographer, it may be perfect.

For me, it will probably move on.

And that is fine. Not every good lens has to be my lens.

Some lenses teach you something and leave.

This one taught me that optical quality alone is not enough. Not for the road. Not for London. Not for a bag that already has too many cameras in it.

Photo London was excellent. Olympia was the right move. The group was strong. Sophie gave us a whole weekend of patience and style. The Artralab 50mm surprised me in the best way. The Summarex reminded me why old glass still matters. The Light Lens Lab 28mm proved itself, then proved it was probably not for me.

That is not a bad result.

That is a good weekend.

Too much sun. Too many cameras. Just enough time.

But this week is different!
Today is Monday, May 25.
On May 25, 2025, I published my first Substack post.
It was also my mother’s 70th birthday. Some dates are just numbers. Others stay with you. This one stayed. So I did not want to publish the anniversary piece a day early, and I did not want to split the moment into two posts on two different days. This is the day. One year later. The right day for looking back.

Two Thousand

This little place has now reached roughly 2,000 people in total. Subscribers, followers, readers, curious souls, camera nerds, friends, strangers, and the quiet ones who never comment but still come back. I still have to read that number twice. Two thousand. For a personal photography diary started from a small village in Germany, with old cameras, long road stories, model shoots, bodypainting festivals, and the occasional piece of camera surgery on my desk, that feels unreal.

I started this without knowing if anyone would care. I knew I cared. That was the easy part. I cared about the roads, the people, the cameras, the bad weather, the missed flights, the little miracles of light, and the kind of photographs that only happen when everything is slightly out of control. But caring about your own stories and finding people who want to read them are two very different things. This first year showed me that there are people out there who do want to read them. That means more than I can say without sounding too sentimental, and I try to avoid that. Most of the time.

There are also paid subscribers now. Not many in the way that would make a business plan look clever, but enough to matter in a very human way.

To everyone who decided to support this diary with real money: Thank you!

You are not funding a media empire. You are not paying for polished corporate content. You are buying me a coffee in the morning when I write, or a glass of red wine in the evening when I sit at the computer, tired from the day, importing pictures, moving galleries around, writing captions, checking alt text, changing headings, and asking myself why I keep doing this to myself. Then I see the support. And I know why.

It is not about the money, not yet. Maybe never. It is about appreciation. It is a small signal that says: keep going. Keep writing it down. Keep bringing the camera. Keep taking us with you. That signal matters more than its size. It gives weight to the hours that disappear into these posts. It turns the late nights into something shared.

The Diary I Did Not Know I Was Building

A year ago, I thought I was starting a photography newsletter. That was only half true. What I really built was a diary. Forty-five posts now sit behind me, and when I scroll through the headlines I can feel the whole year come back. Not as a clean timeline, but as flashes.
Lake Garda in summer. Klagenfurt in festival chaos. Pilsen and Prague in cold winter light. Vienna with too much sun. Graz with friends and blue hour. Paris with an 88-year-old Leica. Gran Canaria with painted bodies and sandstone. Lanzarote with wind, dust, and a missed flight. Toulouse with old streets and sausage. London with Sophie, Photo London, and a cab driver who understood the assignment. Wetzlar in 38 degrees Celsius, Leica everywhere, and Kim with the white Opel Commodore. Hong Kong later, hot and humid, with camera shops stacked like treasure caves.

The places are there, but more than that, the people are there. Lissi on the road to Italy, laughing until the drive felt short. in half the stories, usually carrying more cameras than a normal person should. arriving calm and kind, even when trains or plans failed him. Sophie bringing energy into London, Lanzarote, and every frame she stepped into. Adele in rain, cowboy boots, and train-station light. Sarah in Graz and at the World Bodypainting Festival, where years of friendship matter more than any single picture. Gaelle in Paris, a spontaneous shoot born from a message after landing. Kim with the car, the sun, and the flares that almost killed the set. Models, artists, shop owners, cab drivers, waiters, strangers at camera counters, and friends who became part of the road.

I remember the weather too. The heat in Wetzlar that made the asphalt feel soft. The cold in Prague that cut through gloves. The wind in Lanzarote that tried to steal the softbox. The soft grey light in Paris. The sand in Gran Canaria. The heavy air before a thunderstorm. The quiet of hotel rooms after long shoots, when the cards are full, the bags are half-packed, and the body finally understands what the day was.

That is the part I did not expect. Substack gave me an archive of my own life. Not every day, of course. Not the invoices, not the traffic, not the emails, not the boring hours that make the good ones possible. But the highlights. The days with weight. The days where something happened. The days that would have blurred together if I had not sat down and written them. That alone is reason enough to continue.

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The World Beside the Frame

Substack also changed the way I travel. A year ago, I mostly carried cameras for photographs. Now I often carry a small video camera too. Sometimes even two. A little Vlogging camera for the wider story, and sometimes a GoPro for the point of view, so you can see what I see when I lift the camera, where I stand, how close the model is, how the light falls, and how little glamour there usually is around the finished frame.

I started filming more behind the scenes because of this place. Not for a grand YouTube career, not for polished cinema, but to give you a better sense of what really happened. A few seconds of a room. A street. A beach. A light stand fighting the wind. A model waiting between frames. A hand moving a reflector. A camera lifted to the eye. Sometimes a time-lapse. Sometimes a rough overview. Sometimes, like in Hong Kong, I even put the camera down, stand in front of it, and talk.

There is a reason for that. When we read a story, we build the world in our own head. We imagine the room, the road, the weather, the people, the distance between things. And we are usually wrong. Not in a bad way, but in a human way. It is like reading a book and then seeing the film later. Often the book feels better, because the film has to replace your private version of the world with someone else’s finished version.

The behind-the-scenes videos are my way of softening that gap. I still want the words to let you imagine the day. That is part of the pleasure. But I also want to show the edges of the frame. The mess outside the final picture. The real light before it was shaped. The room before the pose. The street before the edit. The little technical choices that turned an ordinary scene into a photograph. It gives the story a second layer. Not better than the written one. Just more honest in a different way.

The Worst Business Decision, Maybe

Let’s be honest. From a time investment and monetization perspective, this may be one of the least clever things I have ever done. The posts I write here are not quick notes. They are long. They need structure. They need images. They need captions. They need a beginning that has a pulse and an ending that feels earned. The pictures have to be edited first. Sometimes film has to be developed and scanned. Sometimes I have to rebuild the trip in my head before I can write the first paragraph.

Most posts take more than one evening. Often I start in the late afternoon, thinking it will be easy this time. Then suddenly it is midnight. The house is quiet. The screen is too bright. Lightroom is open. Substack is open. I have moved the same image three times and still do not know if it belongs before or after the paragraph about the broken lens hood. The text under the gallery needs work. The title needs work. The last sentence still feels wrong. This is not efficient. But good things rarely are.

The paid subscribers help. The comments help. The little notifications in the morning help. I like waking up and seeing that someone wrote something under a post. A thought. A memory. A question. A joke. A camera story of their own. That makes this less lonely. Writing is a strange thing. You sit alone, but you hope not to remain alone. This place has solved that part for me more often than I expected.

The Good Energy

There is another thing I want to say clearly. This place has been kind. That means a lot. My work lives in a few strange corners. Travel. Leica cameras. CCD sensors. Old lenses. Bodypainting. Model photography. Analog film. Repair projects that probably should not be attempted on a kitchen table. I know these are niches, and I know that in real life not everyone looks at all of them with open eyes. Some people judge fast. Some put a stamp on things before they understand them.

Here, I rarely feel that. The comments have been positive. The conversations have been curious. The energy has been good. Maybe some readers have a negative thought and simply move on. That is fine too. The internet could use more of that. Not every thought needs to become a comment. But what I feel around this channel is support, and support without noise is rare. It lets me write more freely. It lets me share more openly. It makes the whole thing feel less like shouting into a room and more like sitting at a long table with people who understand why the story matters.

For that, I am deeply grateful.

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What Worked

After one year, the numbers tell a story.

My five most-read posts so far are:

1. #26 - Reflecta MF5000 Scanner and Chasing a Film Look

2. #42 - Was This My Wildest Photo Job Yet?

3. #30 - From Lava Arch to Laurel Forest and Morning Nude

4. #36 - Blue Hour, Red Curtains, Five Models and a Winter Weekend

5. #28 - CCD, CMOS, Film Comparison: 25 Years in a Nutshell

That list is interesting because it says something simple.
You like analog topics, and you like model shoots. Even better, you seem to like the place where craft and story meet. A scanner is not exciting by itself, but chasing a film look is. A camera comparison is not emotional by itself, but seeing how CCD, CMOS, and film handle skin, mood, and light can be. A model shoot is not only about the model. It is about the road there, the weather, the room, the gear choice, the mistakes, the picture that almost did not happen, and the strange way a day becomes a memory.

The obvious question, then, is whether I should combine analog and model shoots more often. On paper, that sounds perfect. Film, skin, light, real grain, fewer frames, more attention. I love that idea. I really do. But reality has a bill, and film always brings the bill to the table.

Where I live in rural Germany, film takes time. If I send it to the lab, I usually wait around two weeks before I get the developed rolls back. Then the work is not done. I scan them myself on a high-end scanner. One roll takes about one hour, usually more. Five rolls of 35mm film in one model shoot means maybe 170 or 180 frames, and that is not much when you want to tell a full story. The cost climbs fast. The time climbs faster.

Digital is different. With digital I can shoot more, build a stronger gallery, deliver faster, and create more content for a post. I can work through a shoot without hearing the cash register click every time I press the shutter. But analog gives something back that digital does not. It gives pressure. It gives risk. It gives fewer chances and sometimes better attention. I think the future has to be both.
Digital for depth, speed, and volume. Analog for soul, risk, and the frames that feel earned. The trick will be finding the balance.

Images That Stayed With Me

I do not fully trust rankings for photographs. The best image changes with the day, the mood, the weather, and how much sleep you had. But some images from this first year stayed with me more than others, and looking back at them now feels like opening small doors into the year.

There is the blue-lit bodypainting portrait from Riva del Garda, where hidden UV paint suddenly appeared under the surface tones because a blue LED hit it by accident. That frame still feels like a gift. It was not planned. It was revealed. Those are often the best photographs, the ones you did not force into existence.

There is Bronze from the WBF Photo Awards. Of course I am proud because it won, but that is not the only reason it matters. It worked because artist, model, and photographer all met in one frame. Paint, trust, light, and timing. The artist behind the work was Jeje Corro, and that makes the image even more important to me now. She passed away last July. I valued her deeply, as an artist and as a person, and it still hurts to write that. Sometimes people say heaven called an angel back. In her case, it feels painfully true. When bodypainting photography is good, it is never just a record of the artwork. It becomes a second artwork for a second life. And sometimes, without knowing it, it also becomes a way to keep someone’s light here a little longer.

There is Gaelle in Paris, photographed with the old Leica IIIa. No digital safety net, no big gear, no flash, no fifty-millimeter comfort lens. Just a 1936 Leica, a few rolls of film, flat grey light, and a Sunday morning near Pont de Bir-Hakeim. That little shoot reminded me that simple can still be enough, and sometimes the limit is what gives the day its shape.

There is Kim in the Opel Commodore in Wetzlar. The light was brutal, the car was beautiful, and the Biotar flared like it wanted to destroy the whole series. Later, Lightroom saved what I thought was lost. That picture is now tied to failure, rescue, and a little bit of AI magic. It is also tied to heat, chrome, velvet interior, and the feeling that a model and a car can belong to the same story.

And there is Adele in the rain, near the rusted train. That day was supposed to fall apart. The weather ruined the original plan, the fields were gone, the sun never came, and still the day gave us something. Wet boots, bad weather, an iPhone in RAW mode, and a model who did not complain. Sometimes the planned picture is not the one you need.

There are many more. The sandstone canyon in Gran Canaria. Sophie at the morning beach. The rabbits in Graz. The escalators in London. The black curtains at WBF. The Leica sensor on my desk, half-dead and half-alive. A year gives you a lot if you are willing to carry a camera through it.

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The Rabbit Hole

It was not all smooth. Last August I disappeared. Not completely, but enough. I fell into a server-build rabbit hole, the kind where one technical issue becomes ten and one weekend becomes four weeks. Hardware, storage, backups, errors, rebuilds, more errors, more rebuilds. It was useful for life and work, but it was not good for Substack.

A channel like this needs a pulse. If I vanish for weeks, there is less to share. Less movement. Less story. Less rhythm. I learned that. I want to avoid it in the future, though life may still interfere, because life always does. But I know now that silence has a cost. It breaks the habit for me, and it breaks the expectation for readers.

At the same time, the break may not have been all bad. When I came back in December, something changed. The account started growing faster. Much faster. Maybe I had more stories stored up. Maybe the pause gave the writing more pressure. Maybe the algorithm woke up. Maybe you did. I do not know. But the main growth of this place started after that return. So maybe even the silence had its use. Maybe it made me understand what I missed.

What Comes Next

There will be more Leica content, especially about lenses. Not every lens ever made, and not charts for people who enjoy arguing in forums until the sun dies. I mean the lenses I actually use. The ones I carry, trust, test, doubt, love, sell, and sometimes regret selling. I want to structure my own lens collection better. Add a few pieces. Let others go. Stop keeping glass only because it is interesting on paper. A lens has to work for the way I see, and I want to take you along while I figure that out.

That means more real-world tests, more example images, more model shoots, more mistakes, and probably a few bad decisions with beautiful rendering.
There is already more London content coming. Photo London, street moments, and the first tests of two lenses I carried there. There will be travel when life allows it, and there will be more model work because that is where many cameras and lenses finally show who they are. There will also be analog, but with care. Film deserves time, and my scanner deserves patience, even when I do not have much of either.

I would also like to hear from you. Not as a fake engagement question at the end of a marketing email, but as a real question from the person writing this diary.
Do you want more model shoots, more analog photography, more Leica lens tests, more CCD camera stories, more scanning and workflow content, more travel diaries from places like Hong Kong, more bodypainting festivals, or more behind-the-scenes stories from the road?
You can tell me in the comments. It helps me understand what is worth doing more often, and it helps shape the next year.

Thank You

One year ago, I pressed publish for the first time here. I did not know what this place would become. I did not know that it would turn into a diary, an archive, a weekly discipline, a reason to keep moving, and sometimes a small mirror held up to my own life. I did not know that 2,000 people would gather around it in one way or another. I did not know that a few of you would even decide to pay for it.

Thank you for reading the long ones. Thank you for commenting when something moved you, helped you, amused you, or made you think of your own camera on a shelf. Thank you for caring about old sensors, strange lenses, imperfect travel plans, bodypainted people, broken cameras, saved files, missed flights, Leica shops, flea markets, and the light that keeps pulling us out of the house.

This year gave me stories. You gave me a reason to write them down. That is more than I expected, and it is more valuable than the numbers alone can show.

See you next Sunday.

Or somewhere on the road.

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A Small Gift From the Archive

Now for the birthday gift.
Some of you remember my post #41 - Treasure Hunt in Munich. That was the story of a flea market on the Theresienwiese in Munich. Cameras, books, strange finds, and one box of old negatives. Those negatives turned out to be something special.

They were nude studies from the late 1960s or early 1970s, mostly from Gran Canaria. They were made by an unknown hobby photographer, but with real care. Some frames were surprisingly strong. Good light, good composition, and a quiet confidence behind the camera. I bought the negatives and scanned them.

A friend and reader of this Substack kept telling me that it would be a shame not to share them here for paid subscribers.
He was right. So for the one-year anniversary of this channel, I want to make them available.
For the first 48 hours after publication, the download will be open to everyone. After that, it will move behind the paywall and remain available for paid subscribers only.

This is a thank-you to the people who read early. The ones who are here on Sunday evening, or Monday in this case. The ones who open the post with coffee in America or red wine in Europe. The ones who keep showing up. Please treat the images with respect. They are nude photographs, yes, but to me they are also a small piece of photographic history.
Unknown photographer. Unknown model. Unknown exact year. A little sun, a yellow VW Beetle, sand, skin, and time.

If anyone can help date them, I would love that. Maybe someone knows the exact model year of the yellow Beetle. Maybe the plates say something. Maybe the color of the car, the beach, or some tiny detail in the background can narrow it down. Was it 1969? 1971? Earlier? Later? If you see something, write it in the comments. I would love to know more.

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No lens changes. No settings. No focus patch. No shutter speed dial. No decision tree. Just a camera in the hand. You walk through a city. You look. You wait. When the scene fits the camera, the lens, and the film inside, you lift it and press the button. That is the promise of a point and shoot.

But there is always a catch. Simplicity is good. Too much limitation is not. Most of these cameras give you one focal length. That can be beautiful. It can also feel like a small cage. Others give you a zoom lens. But the zoom is often slow, not very wide, and not always good.

The Canon Top Twin does something different. It gives you two fixed focal lengths. A 40mm f2.8 for the street, for people, for daily life. And a 70mm f4.9 for a tighter frame, a little compression, and a bit more distance. That sounds small on paper. In the hand, it changes the camera.

I first heard about the Canon Top Twin more than five years ago. I had planned a trip to Portugal with models and wanted a few point and shoot cameras I could hand to them. I liked the idea of getting their view of the trip. Their angles. Their mistakes. Their jokes. Their pictures. That trip never happened. The Canon stayed.

I found it after watching a video by . Back then he was still more deeply rooted in photography. Today he is also here on Substack, and he still writes, as far as I know, while walking his excellent path as a style guide for well dressed men. In that old video he showed the Top Twin, and I thought, yes, that is exactly the kind of camera I need. I found mine on eBay for around 40 Euros.

Later came the Canon AF35ML, the camera I wrote about half a year ago. That camera did very well on our road trip through Germany and the Czech Republic. It has a beautiful 40mm f1.9 lens. It has a certain charm. But for Hong Kong I wanted something else. I wanted a second focal length. I wanted a body that felt a little stronger. I did not want the camera to fail in Hong Kong. Though I must admit, if it had failed there, finding another camera would not have been the hardest thing in the world. If you read last week’s post about camera shopping in Hong Kong, you know what I mean.

But this story is not only about camera shopping. It is about street photography. Because what else do you call it when you walk through a new city with a small camera on your wrist and let first impressions hit you? You see light. You see a face. You see a tram. You see a man working at a small table while the city moves around him. You lift the camera and take the picture before the moment closes.

That is street photography. Not the dramatic kind. Not the heroic kind. Just walking. Looking. Reacting.

Film is part of that too. I did not bring film from home. On the first evening in Hong Kong I went out and bought film. My first small haul was two rolls of Kodak Ultramax 400 and two rolls of Kodacolor 200. Fresh Kodak Eastman stock. Good enough to begin.

But those were not the only films I used in the Top Twin. I had already shot the camera before, since buying it in 2021. The first roll I ever put through it was an expired Rollei Superpan 200. Nothing special. A little rough. Not really the best film for a point and shoot, at least not for my taste. I like that film better when I overexpose it by one stop.

The Top Twin does not allow that. It reads the DX code on the film canister and sets the ISO from that. If the canister has no DX code, the camera assumes ISO 100. There is no manual override. For that first test roll it did not matter. I only wanted to know if the camera worked. It worked.

The Top Twin is simple. But not boring. On the back, beside the film door, there are only two sliders. One for the right thumb. One for the left. The right thumb controls my favorite feature. It switches between 40mm and 70mm. Slide it, and the lens unit moves forward. At the same time the viewfinder changes. A different optical element appears, and the frameline changes with it. That is clever.

The finder is bright and clean. It does not show too much. Only the frame you need. In the center there is an oval marking the autofocus area. That is it. The left thumb controls the flash. Auto. On. Off. Simple.

On the top plate there is a red shutter button and a small display. The shutter button has two stages. Half press to focus and lock. Recompose. Press fully. Take the picture. The display shows the frame counter and the battery level in four steps. That battery display matters more than usual because changing the battery is not something you do quickly on the street. The camera needs a small Phillips screwdriver to open the battery compartment.

That is not the best design. But it is robust. There is no fragile battery door waiting to break off. The battery is a 2CR5 6V lithium battery. Not rare, but also not something you find at every corner. I have now shot around twenty rolls with this camera over five years, and I am still on the first battery. The display still shows full power. So maybe I should not complain too much.

Next to the display is a small self timer button. That is nearly all you see from above. It is a clean little machine.

From the front, things get more interesting. There is a small wheel around the lens with Pac Man symbols next to it. That wheel is the power switch. It looks strange at first. Then it starts to make sense. Turn the wheel to the open mouth symbol and the mechanical lens cover opens. The display wakes up. The camera is on.

I like that switch. I take the camera running. Sometimes I have sunscreen on my fingers. Sometimes my hands are wet from sweat. Sometimes it is dark. The little wheel is easy to find and easy to use. It feels more practical than elegant, and sometimes practical wins.

The wheel has a third position too. Soft filter. You turn it and hold it there, because it springs back if you let go. When held, the camera swings a soft filter in front of the lens. For modern photographers, think of a Black Pro Mist. For people who remember the eighties, think soft filter.

But this is not a subtle modern mist. It is strong. This is not 1/8. Not 1/4. This feels closer to full strength. Sometimes it works. Often it is too much. It softens the image and also creates strange rings around light sources. With a film that is already not very sharp, it can look as if the autofocus failed. Sometimes that is interesting. Sometimes it is simply too much.

There are two more buttons on the front. One is marked ME, for multiple exposure. Press it and the camera prevents the film from advancing after the next shot. You can expose the same frame again. The other has a sun symbol. It is for backlight compensation. The idea is simple. If you photograph against the sun, the camera should not let the subject fall into darkness just because the background is bright.

That is it for controls. The bottom has a tripod thread.

Technical Data

• Body material: Plastic

• Dimensions: 13.4 cm wide, 7.9 cm high, 6.5 cm deep

• Weight: 400 g including battery

• Focal lengths:

  • 40mm f2.8, 4 elements in 3 groups

  • 70mm f4.9, 7 elements in 6 groups

• Shutter: Electronic leaf shutter

• Fastest shutter speed: 1/500 second

• Autofocus range: 0.96 m to infinity

• DX coding: ISO 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600 in full steps

• Default ISO without DX coding: ISO 100

• Battery: 2CR5 6V lithium battery
  

There is one small number in those specifications that matters in real life. 0.96 meters. Both focal lengths only focus down to about one meter. That is not close. It reminds me of old Leica rangefinder lenses. One meter can feel very far when you want to photograph food, a detail, a hand, a small object, or a quick close portrait.

I lost a few pictures because of it. The camera warns you with a flashing green light in the finder. But as a proper point and shoot user, I ignored all warning lights with confidence and looked only at the subject. That was my fault. Not the camera’s.

Then came Hong Kong. That was the real test. The first roll I loaded there was Kodak Kodacolor 200. I went hiking and running on Hong Kong Island. I took only the Top Twin and my iPhone in a waist bag. Both were wrapped in bubble wrap so they would not get damaged or bounce around too much.

It worked. They were also protected from sweat, which mattered. I was out for three hours in the humid green parts of Hong Kong Island. The city was close, but not always visible. There was jungle. Concrete. Heat. Moisture. Steep paths. Short breaths. Then sudden views. The Canon was perfect for that. Small enough to carry. Fast enough to use. Not precious enough to worry about.

Before I took the metro back to the mainland, I walked along the promenade. There were people, water, haze, and a strange old freighter sitting in front of the Kowloon skyline. It looked out of time. Not beautiful in a clean way. Better than that. Useful. Tired. Real. The Top Twin did not care. It just photographed it.

Back at the hotel, the sun came out for a short moment. I was staying on the 17th floor. Next to the hotel was a school sports field, seen from above like a small stage. I photographed it through that clean, distant hotel window view. That was easy work for the camera. Nothing moved fast. The light was simple. The city held still long enough.

In the afternoon I went back into the streets. The light became more difficult. Still, with ISO 200, most motion stayed sharp enough. Sometimes a walking leg blurred a little. I like that. It gives the picture breath. A person should not always look like a statue.

Later, after I had seen enough vintage camera candy in Sim City, I went into the evening markets and streets. That is when ISO 200 started to hurt. Static subjects were still possible. But anything moving became soft. Sometimes beautifully soft. Sometimes not. This is where the difference between cameras becomes real.

At f2.8, maybe I had 1/30 second in the evening street light. With the Canon AF35ML and its 40mm f1.9 lens, I might have had 1/60 second. That one stop can be the difference between a usable frame and a blurred one. A full stop matters. Especially at night. Especially on film. Especially when people move.

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The next day I was mostly in camera stores. I dug through Leica lenses and old bodies. The point and shoot had less work to do. But on a later day I went out again. I took the metro back to Hong Kong Island and started from Central, walking east toward Causeway Bay. There was supposed to be another SHOWA store there. I wanted to visit it. I also wanted to see the center of Hong Kong.

The center itself did not touch me as much as I expected. It was modern. Large. Polished. But not in the way I wanted from Hong Kong. Not the Hong Kong I had in my head. Not the one from movies, photos, and old imagination. Maybe that is unfair. Cities do not owe us our dreams. Still, I wanted the other Hong Kong. The older one. The busier one. The one with narrow shops and work being done in the open.

Then I walked east along Queensway. The city changed. Small shops came back. The suits and polished skirts of the center gave way to working clothes. People carried packages. Delivered food. Repaired things. Moved boxes. Swept floors. Fixed streets. Talked loudly. Worked quietly. The city had blood in it again.

My favorite scene there was an old man sitting at a small table on the edge of the sidewalk. Around him were plastic boxes full of spare parts. In the middle of all that rush, he repaired watches. Not just changing batteries. When I walked past, he was working on the movement of a mechanical watch. That is a skill. A real one. A quiet one. I made the picture and kept walking.

The trams were impossible to ignore. Short. Slim. Tall. Almost toy like, but not cute. They moved through the streets with dignity. They gave the roads a vertical rhythm. They made modern Hong Kong feel old again.

The side streets pulled at me too. Small alleys. Signs. Shop fronts. Light coming from odd directions. For those tight streets, 40mm was right. Sometimes I wanted just a little more width, but 40mm forced order on the frame. On the larger road, the 70mm was very useful. It compressed the trams, the signs, the cars, and the people into a denser picture.

That is the secret of the Top Twin. It is not a zoom. It is two decisions. Wide enough. Tight enough. Nothing in between. That can be good.

When I reached Causeway Bay, the city became more modern again. The shopping centers were huge. Everything felt bigger and more polished. In a small side street I found the second SHOWA store I had been looking for. Right next to it was a Leica store. Of course I went in first.

It was a disappointment. Almost no cameras. No used gear. A watch. A pair of binoculars. The best thing about that Leica store was the Leitz Café inside. SHOWA next door was the opposite. Film. Film cameras. Accessories. Friendly staff. A real shop. The kind of place where you feel the pulse of photography instead of the smell of luxury.

I bought more film there. Kodak Ektacolor Pro 400 and 800. I wanted to be better prepared for the night. That decision saved the next evenings.

The 400 and 800 speed films worked beautifully. The color was strong. The 800 still looked very good. And Hong Kong at night finally had the film it needed. The next two evenings I went out again. Into the lights. Into the markets. Into the wet streets and glowing signs. Into the noise.

Hong Kong is better at night. At least for the camera. During the day the weather was often cloudy and hazy. Not bad, but flat. The kind of light that makes the city feel heavy. At night the city woke up visually. Signs burned. Windows glowed. Cars reflected red and green and white. Faces appeared and disappeared under shop lights. That is when the Top Twin became fun.

During the day I mostly used ISO 400. That is my recommendation for this camera now. ISO 400 by day. ISO 800 by night. Especially if the weather is cloudy or the streets are shaded. Of course, if you want the cleanest file, the finest grain, the most detail, then use ISO 100 or 200 in good light. But I do not always want that. When film looks too clean, it starts moving too close to digital for me.

I like a bit of roughness. I like grain when it belongs to the scene. Hong Kong can carry grain.

In the end, the Canon Top Twin did its job very well. The fact that I started talking more about film choice than about the camera says a lot. It means I stopped worrying about the camera. It was just there. It worked.

Most of the time I had it switched on in my right hand. The strap was wrapped around my wrist. I saw something. I lifted the camera. Focused. Pressed. Done. The flash stayed off. Always. I wanted as little attention as possible.

A point and shoot helps with that. People are used to small cameras. Especially in Hong Kong, it seemed. A small plastic camera is less threatening than a big SLR. It is less serious than a Leica M. It does not announce itself. It does not make the same claim. That matters. A small camera changes how people react to you. Or how they do not react at all.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

• Camera:
  Canon Top Twin

• Light:
  Available light only

• Main challenge:
  The low light at night was the real test for this camera. Even with ISO 800 film and the 40mm lens wide open at f2.8, it was not always easy to get a shutter speed fast enough for clean handheld street photos.

This is where the camera showed both its strength and its limit. It was quick, small, and ready, but at night every stop of light mattered.

Reflections

I was caught a few times. That is the honest word for it. I saw people doing something interesting and lifted the camera. They noticed. They turned. And then, instead of looking annoyed or embarrassed, they smiled.

One time I photographed two young girls taking pictures for social media. They noticed me. They turned toward me. For a second I thought the moment was gone. Instead they smiled into the camera. It is not a perfect picture. But it says something about the mood in the street. I was seen. But I was not rejected.

That happened more than once. Hong Kong felt fast, but not cold. Busy, but not hostile. People had places to go. Things to carry. Shops to run. Food to cook. Watches to repair. Trams to catch. But when the camera crossed their path, most did not seem bothered. That surprised me. Maybe the camera helped. Maybe the city helped. Maybe I was lucky. Probably all three.

There was another moment that stayed with me, and it had nothing to do with taking a picture. On my last day, the evening of my flight back to Germany, I went back to SHOWA to drop off my final roll. I asked the woman in the store if there was any chance they could develop and scan the film in three or four hours. That had been the usual turnaround during the previous days. I only wanted to make sure, because I had to leave for the airport and wanted to take the negatives with me.

She said she would do what she could. I went to the next Starbucks, ordered a coffee, sat down, and started looking through photos. I had barely arrived when the message came. The scans were ready. Thirty six minutes! From handing in the roll to receiving the download link.

I have never experienced that. At home I send my film to the lab by mail. Then I wait for development and scanning. Then the negatives come back by mail. Two weeks are gone before the whole thing is finished. In Hong Kong it took thirty six minutes. That is dangerous. You can get used to that kind of service very quickly.
Big thanks to the SHOWA team!

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite shows the biggest benefit of a small point and shoot with fast autofocus. It is small. It is quiet. It is not scary.

I was walking on Hong Kong Island and passed a shop selling smartphones. Inside, a man was talking on an old corded telephone. That contradiction made the picture. A smartphone shop. A man on an old phone. New world. Old wire. Same human need.

He talked. I saw it. I lifted the Canon. The autofocus did its work. The picture was made before the men inside could really react. That is what this kind of camera can do. A larger camera might have killed the moment. A slower camera might have missed it. A manual focus rangefinder might have made me think too much. The Top Twin did not ask me to think. It just asked me to see.

What I’d do differently:

I would start with ISO 400 and ISO 800 film right away. That is the main lesson. For cloudy daytime light, ISO 400 fits the camera better than ISO 200. For evening and night, ISO 800 gives you a fighting chance. The 40mm f2.8 lens is good, but it is not magic. At night, every stop counts.

I lost some frames to motion blur. I lost a few to camera shake. I lost some because I was too close and forgot the one meter minimum focus distance. Again, that was my fault.

The autofocus itself worked well. Across six rolls in Hong Kong, I had only three or four badly focused photos. In those cases the camera usually focused on the background when I had aimed at a person around five meters away. That is something to watch.

The soft filter is another thing I would use more carefully. It can look good in the right scene. But most of the time it is simply too much for my taste. It does not just soften. It also creates rings around light sources, and with the wrong film it can make the image look broken rather than dreamy.

Use it with care. Maybe that is the whole lesson of the camera. It is simple, but you still need to know it. Use 400 in the day. Use 800 at night. Stay farther than one meter. Do not trust the soft filter too much. Watch the autofocus area. Keep the flash off if you want to stay invisible. Then go walk.

Tech Minute:

The Canon Top Twin is also known in some markets as part of Canon’s Sure Shot family. If you search online for the manual, you can find several PDF scans. One good scan is available here:

https://flynngraphics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Sure-Shot-Tele-Instructions.pdf

The camera is not complicated, but the manual is still useful. Especially for the multiple exposure function, the backlight compensation, the soft filter, and the DX behavior.

The important technical points are simple:
40mm f2.8 and 70mm f4.9
Autofocus from about one meter.
DX coded film from ISO 50 to 1600. ISO 100 if there is no DX code. 2CR5 battery.
Electronic shutter up to 1/500 second.
Built in flash.
Built in soft filter.
Built in trouble, if you forget the minimum focus distance.

Final Thoughts

The Canon Top Twin is not the best point and shoot camera ever made. But it is one of the more interesting ones. It gives you more freedom than a single focal length camera without becoming a slow zoom compact. It has enough automation to stay out of your way. It has just enough odd features to feel like a real product of its time.

The little Pac Man power switch. The strong soft filter. The multiple exposure button. The two fixed lenses. The bright clean finder. The battery door that needs a screwdriver. It is a practical camera with a strange personality. That is a good combination.

Hong Kong was a proper test for it. Heat. Humidity. Haze. Night markets. Trams. Crowds. Running paths. Camera shops. Bad light. Good light. Fast scans. Slow streets. People who noticed me and smiled anyway.

The Top Twin handled it. And while I am writing this, I am in London. The Canon Top Twin is with me again. That says enough. A camera that fails does not get packed again. This one did.

I did not go as a dealer. I did not go with one rare lens in mind. I went as a photographer, curious and a little naive. Maybe exactly naive enough. I booked the flights and the hotel at the beginning of March. That turned out to be lucky. After the American attack on Iran, flight prices and energy prices in Europe exploded, and the trip itself became less certain. I had booked Qatar Airways with a stop in Doha, and because Qatar was affected by the situation too, I was not fully sure if the flights would go as planned. Then the main players agreed on a ceasefire, and the trip was possible again.

I had not planned much. That was the truth. I knew my hotel had to be in Kowloon, because most of the camera shops seemed to be there. I also wanted good access to Hong Kong Island because I wanted to run in the mornings. I wanted air. I wanted hills. I wanted to feel the city with my feet before I buried my head in glass cabinets full of old lenses. The hotel worked. I can say that already.

The last Sunday in April came, and I drove to Munich Airport with a large checked suitcase and a small laptop bag. The suitcase was not full. That was intentional. I had left room for whatever Hong Kong might do to me. The first flight was a little over six hours from Munich to Doha. The second was a little over eight hours from Doha to Hong Kong. I left Munich in the evening and would arrive in Hong Kong in the afternoon, so the plan was simple. Sleep on the first flight. Stay awake on the second. Beat the jet lag before it could beat me.

I got into the plane, found my window seat, and noticed the middle seat next to me was empty. A small blessing. I put on the sleep mask, pulled the blanket over my legs, and tried to become cargo. It worked for about thirty minutes. Then something tapped my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw a steward standing there with the helpless look of a man forced to disturb the dead.
Chicken or beef? Great. I wanted to sleep through the meal and eat in Doha, but now I was awake. So I said chicken, and red wine, please. If I had to be awake, I wanted help going back under. The wine did its job. I slept again and got maybe four hours in total. Not perfect. Good enough.

Doha was calm. It was the middle of the night. The airport felt almost empty. Bright, polished, quiet. The kind of place where time does not belong to any country. On the second flight I stayed awake with work and pre-downloaded YouTube videos. I want to give Qatar Airways credit here. Even in economy we had free Wi-Fi. It was not fast, but it was enough for emails and messages. On a long flight that is real service.

We landed in Hong Kong on time. Now came the part I had prepared. For public transport I had bought an Octopus card and added it to my iPhone Wallet. For tourists it works like a prepaid card. For Hong Kong it is almost essential. You use it for trains, buses, small payments, shops, almost everything. I had also downloaded HKeMobility, a local transport app that connects routes and timetables. It told me to take the Airport Express to Kowloon, then bus number 73 almost to the front door of my hotel. That sounded like a plan.

In the Airport Express I activated the data plan for my phone. I wanted to stay connected. In a city like Hong Kong, a working phone is not luxury. It is your map, your ticket, your translator, your safety rope. Kowloon station was huge. I had to find my way through it and then find the bus stops. Everything was written in Chinese and English, so it only took patience. I found the stop. Then the real test began.

Taking the bus in Hong Kong feels different when you come from Europe. You step in, tap your iPhone with the Octopus card on the reader, and sit down. So far, so good. But then you need to know when to get out. Locals seemed to call something to the driver when they wanted the next stop. I did not understand the words. I did not know the rhythm. I did not know when my stop would come. The driver did not speak English. I had the app open, but that did not make me less foreign.

A young woman in the bus saw my face. That face must have said everything. She asked me where I wanted to go. I showed her the English street name. She translated it into Chinese and told the driver. I followed the route on the app and knew when the stop was coming. It worked. I reached the hotel earlier than expected.

After check-in I had only two tasks left for the day. I needed real food, and I needed film. My plan was to document the trip with an analog point-and-shoot camera. For that I needed rolls. I had a screenshot from a blog that I had taken when booking the hotel. It mentioned a place called Sim City and a good analog shop called SHOWA. Those were my first targets.

Sim City was only a few minutes from my hotel. From outside it looked harmless. Almost plain. Inside it was a holy place. Three or four floors filled with camera shops. Small shops. Tight shops. Shops stacked to the ceiling with cameras, lenses, filters, bags, straps, bodies, caps, boxes, and dreams. Glass cabinets everywhere. Price tags everywhere. Little notes in bright colors. Digital Leica. New Hasselblad. Old Nikon. Canon. Olympus. Contax. Polaroid. Fuji Instax. Rangefinders. Point-and-shoots. Medium format. Things I knew. Things I had forgotten. Things I did not know I wanted until I saw them under fluorescent light.

It was too much in the best way. I was so overwhelmed that I decided to buy nothing. Not yet. First I wanted to find SHOWA. Then I could return to Sim City with a calmer head. SHOWA was not easy to find. It was on the third floor. The entrance to the stairwell was easy to miss. But the search was worth it.

The shop was calm. Much calmer than Sim City. It had film, analog cameras, accessories, and a counter where you could drop film for development. The shelves had the important Kodak Alaris films, but also newer Eastman Kodak films, CineStill, RETO Project Amber and Prism, Candido Film, and a few others. I stood there like a hungry man in a bakery.

I bought fresh Eastman Kodak film. Two rolls of Kodacolor 200 and two rolls of Ultramax 400. That would be the start. Then I asked about development, and that was my first real shock. Black-and-white development and ECN-2 could take a week or more. But C-41 development with scans could be done within one day. One day. For around five euros.

I come from the countryside in Germany. I have to send my film away and wait two or three weeks before it comes back by post. One day felt like science fiction. They also gave me a card where every tenth roll gets developed for free. I was happy.
On the way back I skipped Sim City. Enough for one evening. I found a place to eat and ended the day with good fried noodles. After the short night on the plane, I fell into bed.

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I slept long. Maybe longer than I planned. Maybe exactly as long as I needed. The first full day in Hong Kong did not start with cameras. Some readers might be disappointed by that. I was not. I missed breakfast, put on running clothes, and took the metro to Hong Kong Island. My goal was Victoria Peak, the mountain behind the city. From there you can see the skyline and the bay. I needed movement. I needed sweat. I needed to arrive in my own body.

I got out near Central. In my head the plan was simple. Walk south and the mountains would come. The city had other ideas. The metro station led straight into a huge mall. I went up escalators. Then stairs. Then more stairs. I came out into a botanical garden. Then I climbed more stairs and arrived at a road.
My watch told me I was still half a kilometer from my planned starting point. I had not even started and already Hong Kong was teaching me humility.
I followed a winding road until I finally found something that looked like a hiking path. It led into green and up the hill. That felt right. A few hundred meters later my watch vibrated. You have left the route. What? It took me a moment to understand. The watch had not received GPS signal for a while. Maybe the city canyons had been too deep. Maybe the hills and trees were already too dense. I had missed the official start and was already too high on the mountain.
It did not matter. The route was only an idea. I turned west, because Victoria Peak was west. That was enough. The path climbed through a forest that felt almost like jungle. The humidity was heavy. I had not run a meter and I was already sweating. Not lightly. Properly. I followed the Peak Trail. It led west, past the Peak Tower. Around the tower there were people. After that I was mostly alone. That surprised me. Hong Kong is one of the densest cities in the world, but on that path I had silence. Trees. Views. Wet air. My own breathing.
Every now and then the city opened below me and the towers stood there like metal cliffs. Near Victoria Peak I entered a park and saw beautiful exotic butterflies. They moved like small pieces of painted paper. Then the path dropped down again toward the city.

It was a small road, mostly paved or asphalted. Easy to walk. Easy to run. Then something moved on my left. A wild boar!
Right beside the path. It was eating something and fighting with itself. It wanted the food. It also did not want me there. I stood still. I filmed it. The boar looked at me. I looked at the boar. Neither of us made a heroic decision. Then I laughed and moved on. You can later see that scene in the video.

The path went down and down until I reached the city again. I stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought something to drink. My watch still showed four kilometers to the metro station where I had started. I ran them slowly along the harbor and through the streets.
By the time I stepped back into the metro, I was completely soaked. Nobody cared. That is a good thing about big cities. You can be a sweaty foreigner in running clothes, and the world keeps turning.
Back at the hotel I showered and felt new again. Three hours plus metro rides. About 17 kilometers in my legs. Heat in my skin. The day had opened properly.
And now, finally, I was ready for Sim City.

I had promised myself not to buy anything right away. This is a good promise to make before entering a place like Sim City. It is also a hard promise to keep. There are three or four floors full of small stores, and none of them are easy to take in. The shelves are full. The cabinets are full. The counters are full. Cameras lean against lenses. Lenses lean against boxes. Accessories sit on top of other accessories. Every object has a small colored price label. Every label starts a thought. Do I need this? Is this cheap? Is this rare? Is this a trap?

The euro conversion was easy enough in my head. Move the comma one place and add about ten percent. That gave a quick feeling. What I did not know at first was that card payment usually added another three percent fee. The selection was absurd. New Hasselblad. Used Leica. New Leica. Japanese brands in every generation. Vintage cameras, digital and analog. Instant cameras everywhere. Polaroid. Fuji Instax in all colors and shapes.
The Instax cameras seemed especially popular with young women. In some shops people were waiting in line. In others the sellers stood waiting for the next customer. I could not always tell what made one shop cool and the next one quiet. For me the Leica cabinets were more interesting. They were less hip with the young crowd. But a Leica around your neck still draws attention. Young people notice it. Old people notice it. Sellers notice it most of all.
I learned that fast. Next time I will not bring my silver
Leica M9-P in snakeskin look. Every time I mounted a lens on it, the camera got too much attention. The sellers understood at once that there might be money to earn. The price tags were only a starting point, but I tried to negotiate on every used lens I bought. It worked well enough. I usually managed to remove the three percent card fee and around ten percent from the marked price. Maybe that is good. Maybe somebody from Hong Kong will laugh at my poor bargaining. I cannot say. But the prices did not feel bad to me.

That evening I bought three lenses:
a Voigtländer 35mm f1.4 Nokton Classic,
a Voigtländer 35mm f1.2 Nokton II,
and an Artralab 50mm f1.2.

I spent three or four hours in the shops. After about two hours, the overload had already started.
Too many cameras. Too many lenses. Too many prices. Too many small calculations running in the head.
It was wonderful. It was also exhausting. By the time I left, it was dark. I brought the new lenses back to the hotel, mounted the 35mm f1.2 Nokton on the M9-P, and went out again.

I wanted to explore. Also, I was hungry. I checked the step counter on my watch.
23,000 steps already, and the day was not finished. A few streets away Google Maps showed a night market. That sounded right.

The market was interesting, but not magic.
Clothes. Fake designer bags. Toys. Household things. The usual. I took a few pictures and kept walking. Then Hong Kong became the thing I had hoped for. The streets were narrow and full. Neon signs and shop lights hung over them. Buses and taxis pushed through the gaps. People walked slowly, or hurried to the next street food corner after work. The smell of small restaurants filled whole blocks. Oil, broth, ginger, meat, steam, fish, heat. Everything mixed together.

This was better than the camera shops. That surprised me. I landed in a small restaurant full of locals. A young waitress recommended fish soup. I said yes. It came with glass noodles and an extra portion of rice. It was exactly right. The broth had many spices, but no single flavor dominated. Ginger came through now and then, like a hand raised from the crowd. I ate slowly and felt better with every spoon.

After that I walked deeper into the night. Another thing caught my attention. The small shops selling aquarium fish. It seems to be a thing in Hong Kong. There were many of them, and they were busy. Young couples stood outside, looking at the little fish, talking about size and color and shape.

The fish hanging in small plastic bags on the walls looked strange to me. Beautiful and sad at once. It reminded me of the old idea of a goldfish bowl, something pretty and lifeless at the same time. That was enough for the day.
I fell into bed in the true meaning of the phrase. The watch showed 28,800 steps. I paid for that the next morning.

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Breakfast was served until 10:30. I arrived at 9:45 and found coffee and scrambled eggs. Then I remembered that this was not a problem in Hong Kong.
Many camera shops open late. Sim City did not open until around
1 p.m. So there was no rush. Before going back into the city, I backed up the files from the day before. I lay on the bed and played a DJ stream on Twitch while the copies ran.

Bonus travel tip: bring an HDMI cable. Always.

It lets you connect the hotel TV to your laptop and gives you a second monitor. Or at least a bigger one.
I discovered DJ streams on Twitch during Covid, when the clubs were closed and many serious DJs suddenly had to earn a living online. Some of them kept doing it. I am glad they did. Without Twitch, how would I hear these brilliant musicians from Los Angeles or Vancouver in a hotel room in Hong Kong?

The second afternoon in Sim City was again intense. The overload came even faster this time. I had seen the first layer. Now I saw how many layers there were below it. I bought only one lens that day. A Nippon 35mm f1.8 converted to Leica M mount. The original lens was developed in the 1950s for Nikon S mount. At the time it was revolutionary, a very fast 35mm lens. A small number were also made in LTM mount, and those are now rare and expensive. Very expensive. So I was grateful to find a converted one for Leica M.

Before Leica released the 35mm Summilux-M pre-ASPH in the early 1960s, this Nippon lens was the fastest 35mm lens available. That history alone made it interesting. But I also wanted to see what it did with light. I left Sim City while it was still bright. Good. Some daylight street photos would not hurt.

I made a short stop at the hotel and mounted the Nippon 35mm on the camera. It felt pleasantly light after spending almost a full day with the heavy 35mm f1.2 Nokton. The Nokton had done very well. It drew beautifully, and the colors had strength. But lightness matters when you walk all day. The Nippon needed neon. From the sample images I had seen, it seemed to have a gentle glow. Almost like a Black Pro-Mist filter built into old glass. Neon streets should be perfect for it. So I went back to the same area I had walked the night before.

That night something happened that happened several times in Hong Kong. Two young women stood on a bridge, taking photos of each other. They checked the smartphone together, heads close, faces lit by the screen. It was a good scene. I raised the camera.
One of them noticed me. In Germany this can go badly. People often turn away. Or look annoyed. Or make you feel like you have done something wrong before you even pressed the shutter.
Here she looked at me. I stayed calm and pressed the shutter.
I expected embarrassment. Or discomfort.
Instead she smiled. A real smile. I took one more picture, lowered the camera, and thanked her.

It was a small moment, but it stayed with me. And it was not the only one. People in the streets of Hong Kong seemed relaxed about photography. Even when they noticed you, they did not react with anger. Many smiled. Some ignored you. Nobody made it heavy. Coming from restrained Germany, that felt fresh.

I ended the day with fried noodles and chicken in a small colorful restaurant.

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The next morning depended on how tired I would be.
I had set the alarm for 7 a.m. When it rang, I felt awake. So I decided to run before breakfast. I took the metro three stops toward Central on Hong Kong Island. The weather was cloudy. Early in the morning it was not quite as hot, but the humidity was still high. Along the waterfront there was a light wind, and that helped. The route was simple. It was basically the last four kilometers from my long hike, plus one more kilometer in the other direction. Out and back made ten kilometers.

I was soaked again. On the metro back to the hotel I felt uncomfortable. What can you do? The other passengers had to survive me. The train was not too full, and nobody made me feel like an alien.
At breakfast I had an idea. I would explore Hong Kong Island.
I wanted to see the center. I also remembered that the friendly young woman at SHOWA had mentioned a second SHOWA store in Causeway Bay. My four rolls from the first evening were nearly finished. I had been shooting film with the point-and-shoot all the time. I needed more. Also, I wanted to see what the second shop looked like.

After breakfast I took the metro again. Same direction. One stop farther.
And there I was, in the center of Hong Kong. But the center did not feel like a center in the European sense. There was no old town square. No pedestrian zone. No calm heart. Instead there were roads, skywalks, towers, banks, glass, concrete, and movement. I walked and photographed.

The architecture was impressive. The trams had my attention too. Double-decker trams, narrow and short, moving through the streets like old toys made serious by use. As I moved east, away from the sharp financial center, the polished skyline softened back into more traditional streets. The people became more interesting to me. The life became more visible.

The market took my full attention. Meat and fish were displayed in ways that felt exotic to my European eyes. Direct. Open. Physical. Then there was the bamboo scaffolding. That really got me.
Modern skyscrapers. New cars. Dense traffic. High technology everywhere. And around the buildings, bamboo scaffolding tied together like something from another century. The contrast was beautiful. It made no sense to me at first. Then it made perfect sense. A city does not have to choose one age. It can carry many at once.
I kept walking east toward Causeway Bay. When I arrived, I saw that right next to SHOWA there was a Leica Store. Of course I had to go in. To be honest, the small Leitz Cafe inside was the highlight. The store itself had only a few cameras and lenses. A watch in the display. A pair of binoculars. It was neat. It was clean. It was not the wild jungle of Sim City.

SHOWA next door was much more interesting for me. Again, I was pleasantly surprised. There was a huge selection of film and a good selection of analog cameras. Even medium format cameras were there.
They also had a small display of books. I bought two small books by a local photographer. The books were sold on commission, so payment was cash only. Fair enough. I found an ATM and came back. I also bought more film. 400 and 800 speed. Ektacolor Pro.

Both SHOWA shops are easy to recommend if you are looking for analog equipment in Hong Kong. The people were friendly. The selection was good. The atmosphere was calm. I took the metro back to the hotel.
Later I went out only briefly to get food.
My watch showed 33,500 steps. A new record.
My legs were not amused.

Two blocks away I had seen a street food place the day before. Many locals were buying food there. That is always a good sign.
I wanted to try it.
When I stood in front of it, I had two doubts.
First, the dishes were written only in Chinese.
Second, I did not know if the woman accepted card payment.
As I stood there thinking, a voice came from behind me.
“You look curious.” I turned around. “Indeed.”
His name was Henk. He was born in Hong Kong, now lives in London, and was back in the city visiting family. He asked if I knew what the dishes were.
Of course I did not. I was looking at the pictures and trying to guess what I might like. He explained everything. Good thing he did. The first dish I had considered was cow intestines.
When I asked whether he thought the woman accepted card, he laughed. “I don’t think so.” Then he offered to invite me. Just like that.
I accepted with gratitude and chose the “shark fin soup,” which was actually made with mushrooms, plus dough rolls. The woman packed an extra spoon for me. I do not think Henk will ever read this. It does not matter. I hope karma pays him back many times.

I walked back to the hotel in a ridiculous good mood. The situation was simple and perfect. The food was delicious. The kindness was better. Thank you, Henk.

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The next morning I took the laptop to Starbucks. I answered emails, sorted some photos, and added keywords so I could remember which lenses I had used. I also picked up my developed films from SHOWA and discovered a rooftop garden.

In the afternoon I packed the camera bag and went out again. The goal was the southern waterfront of Kowloon. From there you get a beautiful view of the Hong Kong Island skyline.
Before that I visited two other camera stores. Both disappointed me. The quality of the items was poor and the prices were too high. That is part of the lesson too. Hong Kong is not magic. Not every shop is good. Not every lens is a treasure. Not every price is fair.
The skyline, however, did not disappoint.

I waited for the evening light. For some reason there was no light show at 8 p.m. As far as I knew, it should happen every evening. This time it did not. Instead a few helicopters flew over Hong Kong Island. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe not.
It did not matter much. The walk back to the hotel became long. My favorite time for street photography in Hong Kong had arrived again.
Night.
All the lights were on. The streets were full. Food smells came from every direction. Street sellers called for customers. Buses breathed at the curbs. Taxis slid through the beautyful colors. People moved under signs and awnings and windows and steam. I found another night market, this one in a beautiful lane between restaurants.
The mood was perfect. Not clean. Not quiet. Alive.

Back at the hotel, my last real night in Hong Kong began. The next day I was still there, but only briefly.
I went to SHOWA one last time to pick up my final roll of film and say goodbye.
That felt right.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

• Cameras:
  

  Leica M9-P silver

• Lenses:
  

  21mm f2.8 Avenon

  28mm f2.8 Artralab

  35mm f1.2 II Voigtländer Nokton (bought in Hong Kong)

  35mm f1.8 Nippon Nikkor-W (bought in Hong Kong)

  50mm f1.5 Lomography Jupiter-3+

• Light:
  
  Available light only

I kept the setup simple. One digital rangefinder, a few small lenses, and whatever light the city gave me. The Leica M9-P was not the easiest camera for Hong Kong at night. The contrast between neon signs and dark streets was often brutal, and high ISO is not its strength. But the CCD files gave the city a weight I like. Wet asphalt, old signs, skin, glass, and neon all had a certain density.

The wide lenses helped in tight streets and crowded markets. The 35mm f1.2 Nokton gave me speed when the light dropped. The Nippon 35mm f1.8 was lighter and softer, with a gentle glow that worked beautifully with neon. The Jupiter-3+ was there for quieter moments, when I wanted to step back and isolate one face, one sign, or one small piece of the night.

No flash. No extra light. Just walking, watching, and trying to keep the camera ready.

Reflections

I went to Hong Kong for the camera market. I left with something else. Sim City is real. It is overwhelming. If you love cameras, it is worth seeing. You can spend hours there. You can spend money there. You can find interesting glass, strange bodies, rare accessories, and beautiful temptations.
But the market does not fill a whole trip. After two or three hours, your head becomes tired. You stop seeing clearly. Every lens becomes another lens. Every camera becomes another camera. You start to mistake desire for judgment. That is dangerous. So you leave. And then Hong Kong starts.

That was the real surprise. The streets at night were the heart of the trip. The people. The food. The signs. The buses. The markets. The fish shops. The kind strangers. The young women smiling into the lens instead of turning away. Henk buying me soup when I stood there like a lost man with an empty stomach and no cash.

The friendliness moved me. People were helpful in a way that did not feel staged. The woman on the bus. The staff at SHOWA. Even the people I photographed in the streets. Nobody reacted with anger. Nobody made photography feel like a crime.
That is not normal where I come from. In Germany, street photography often feels tense. People guard themselves. The camera can be seen as an attack. In Hong Kong it felt different. Not careless. Not without boundaries. But more open. More playful.

Photography seemed to have a different place there. Maybe because everyone is already photographing. Maybe because the city itself is so visual. Maybe because the streets are shared more closely. Maybe I was just lucky. But I felt it. Friday and Saturday surprised me too. The streets had been busy all week, but Friday and Saturday were another level. Really full. Alive in a different way. So here is a simple lesson. Shop from Monday to Thursday. Photograph on Friday and Saturday.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite happened in the evening.
I was standing on a skywalk, or maybe it was more of a pedestrian bridge. I watched people and photographed life below and around me. There was a street musician. There were influencers. There was even a small film crew recording an interview. Then I walked down from the bridge and wanted to cross the street.
A tanker truck caught my eye. It was cleaning the road. The workers were just rolling up the hose and getting ready to climb back into the vehicle. I stopped at the light and waited until they were finished.
Then they drove away.

The road was wet. That was the gift. The asphalt caught the lights from the street and threw them back up. Neon, signs, shop windows, headlights, all broken in the water. I took the picture. It will probably not be the most perfect frame from the trip. It may not be the cleanest. But it has the feeling I remember. Hong Kong at night. Bright where it should not be bright. Beautiful because nobody planned it.

What I’d do differently:

Next time I would prepare for more photography and less shopping. That sounds strange for a trip about camera shopping, but it is true. I would still visit Sim City. I would still go to SHOWA.
I would still leave room in the suitcase. But I would not let the shops dominate the rhythm of the trip. The camera stores open late anyway, often around 1 p.m. That means the morning is free. You can sleep longer, run, walk, back up files, drink coffee, edit, write, or simply recover.

And the night is too good to waste.
Next time I might shift my whole day. Sleep longer. Start slower. Shop in the afternoon. Photograph deep into the night. Hong Kong after dark is the real treasure. The city changes when the lights come on. The dull daylight disappears. The gray sky no longer matters. The streets become stages. The windows become light sources. Every corner has a small scene.

I would also bring a less noticeable Leica. The silver M9-P in snakeskin look is beautiful, but in camera shops it speaks too loudly. The sellers see it. Other customers see it.
Everybody knows you are not just looking for a cheap point-and-shoot. Next time, black camera. Quiet strap. Less theater.

Tech Minute:

Be a little skeptical.

Not all that shines is gold. Hong Kong has great camera shops, but you still need a plan. Especially in a place like Sim City, where the amount of gear can make you stupid after an hour. Know what you want before you go in. Not exactly, perhaps. But roughly.

If you want to buy an analog camera, bring an old roll of film. Bring a lens if the camera takes interchangeable lenses. Bring the right batteries if possible. Check the shutter. Check the meter. Check film transport. Do not be shy.
If you want to buy a lens, bring the right camera. Mount it. Focus it. Shoot test images. Bring a small flashlight and inspect the inside of the lens. Look for haze, fungus, separation, oil on aperture blades, scratches, cleaning marks, strange dust, and anything that does not feel right.

Also remember the card fee. Some shops add around three percent for card payment. Cash can help. Negotiation can help too. I usually managed to remove the card fee and get around ten percent off the marked price on used lenses. I do not know if that was good negotiation or just beginner luck. But asking politely worked.

Do not rush. That is the hardest part. Because the lens is in front of you. The price is there. The city is far from home. You tell yourself you may never see this thing again.
Maybe true. Maybe not. Take a breath anyway. Walk one floor. Drink something. Check the price online. Think about whether you really want it, or whether the cabinet lights are doing their work on you.

A good lens should still feel good after lunch. A good camera should still feel good after you leave the shop and come back. And if it is gone, it is gone. There will be another hunt. There always is.

“Be a little skeptical. Not all that shines is gold.”

That is true for camera shops. It is true for cities. It is true for travel stories too. Hong Kong was not only the camera paradise I had heard about. It was that, yes. But it was also humid mornings, confused bus rides, mountain paths, a wild boar, empty Doha airport halls, noodles after midnight, fish in plastic bags, bamboo scaffolding around modern towers, strangers helping without making a big deal of it, and a wet street that became my favorite picture.

I went there looking for cameras. I came back thinking about light.

The main reason was a job. I already wrote about that in last week’s Substack. The short version is simple. We photographed for a friend of Matt’s, a former model, who now runs a erotic massage salon on the island. If you want the full story, you can go back to last week’s post and read how that job worked.

But there was a second reason for the trip.

had a Contax II that needed service. He could find someone in Germany who wanted to work on it. So I helped with the shipping. He gave me the camera, I sent it away, and it came back to me after the repair.

Now I brought it with me to Tenerife. It saved shipping costs. It also gave us a good excuse to test two old Contax cameras under the sun.

Matt had his serviced Contax II, I had my Contax IIa. I bought mine in Prague in January. It came with a Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f/1.5. It was a beautiful camera. At least it looked like one. But looking good is easy. Working well is harder.

I wanted to know if the camera would fit into my real travel kit.

On paper, it made sense. I already own several Contax RF lenses. I use them on my Leica M cameras with the Amedeo adapter. I have the 35mm Zeiss Opton Biogon. I have the Zeiss Biometar. I have Jupiter copies. I have different 50mm lenses, including the Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f/1.5 and the Jupiter 50mm f/1.5. I also have two longer lenses I like a lot, the 75mm f/1.5 Biotar and the 85mm Jupiter-9.

So a native Contax RF camera sounded useful. No adapter. No workaround. Just the lenses on the camera they were made for.

That was the theory.

The Contax IIa has only a built-in 50mm finder. For every other focal length you need an external finder. For me that mostly means 35mm, 75mm, or 85mm. At the moment I only have one proper external finder for that system, the 75mm finder for the Biotar.

So already there was one compromise.

But the real comparison was not with a modern camera. It was with my Leica IIIa.

The Leica IIIa has become my benchmark for small analog travel cameras. I use it a lot. I like it a lot. I even wrote a full Substack post about whether a 90-year-old Leica IIIa can still be used for model photography.

For me, the Leica IIIa is not a collector’s object. It is a working camera. So the question was simple.

Could the Contax IIa beat it?

On paper, the Contax had some strong arguments.
The native bayonet for my Contax RF lenses. A metal shutter curtain, which should be more precise than the cloth shutter curtain of the Leica. No risk of burning a hole in the curtain if the camera sits in the sun. Easier film loading, because the 35mm film leader does not need to be cut like it does for the Barnack Leica. A larger rangefinder base, which should allow more accurate focusing, especially with fast lenses.

Both cameras have no built-in light meter. So I used my usual small meter, the Lightmate Air Pro. It sits in the cold shoe, runs on a battery, and takes almost no space. When I used an external finder, I wore the meter around my neck and worked from there.

The Contax IIa also has a flash sync port on the back.

That sounds nice.

But the sync speed is only 1/50 second. For my type of photography, that is not very useful. It is too slow for reliable model work unless you underexpose the scene heavily and let the flash do almost all the work. That can freeze motion, yes. But it is not how I usually like to shoot.

So the flash port is nice to have. It is not a reason to own the camera.

Then came Tenerife. I flew from Munich to the island. Matt and I arrived safely. The weather forecast had looked bad before the trip. There was even a storm warning. For a moment, we were not sure if the trip would happen at all.

We spoke to people on the island and decided to go.

It was the right call.

The weather was mixed, but never terrible for us. The storm hit the south during the first night. We were in the north and did not feel much of it. Later, when we drove south, the sun was there again. The bad weather had moved north, but by then it was mostly just rain.

That is Tenerife. If one side is bad, you drive to the other side.

After landing, we picked up the rental car. We needed it. Our apartment was in the north. The massage salon was in the south. The airport was also in the south. Without a car, the trip would not have worked.

The apartment was provided by Matt’s friend as part of the exchange for the photos we made for her. We drove north, bought some food, and arrived at the building.

We were welcomed, shown around, and given a key. The key was important. It let us move around the building freely. That meant we could test cameras in peace.

Matt unpacked his serviced Contax II from a Leica box. It felt like the right kind of absurdity. A Contax inside a Leica box, carried across Europe to a volcanic island in the Atlantic.

There will be video footage at the end of the article. No spoken commentary from me this time. I am still at the airport while preparing this, and it is too loud here. My microphone would lose the fight. But there will be subtitles.

We loaded our cameras with film.

I opened a beer.

We made a few snapshots from the window.

Then the trip began.

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The next morning we had breakfast, made a few test shots, and drove south for the first day at the massage salon. I will not retell that whole story here. That belongs to last week’s post.

On the way back, we stopped at a location I already knew.

An abandoned solar power plant in the south of Tenerife.

I had photographed there before. Once with Esther. Once last year with Sophie. We wanted to see if the place was still accessible. We had the idea that maybe we could bring the models from the salon there for an outdoor shoot.

Next to it, I had discovered an abandoned greenhouse during the shoot with Sophie. Big torn pieces of fabric hang from the structure. When the sun comes in low, the whole place looks strange and beautiful.

This time Matt and I had a little more time. We walked across the fields to scout it properly.

It is a great location. One of those places where the light already seems to be waiting. I am looking forward to going back there with a model.

But I cannot show you any Contax IIa photos from that place.

Because the film did not advance.

I had loaded the film wrong, or the film slipped out of the take-up spool. I still do not know exactly what happened. The camera wound normally. The shutter fired normally. The frame counter moved. Everything felt fine.

But the film stayed where it was. I only understood it later.

At that second location, I thought I had finished the roll. I had shot 36 or 37 frames. Then I advanced again. Frame 38. The shutter cocked. That is when your stomach starts to speak.

I fired. Advanced again. Frame 39.

Still no end. Then you know. The film is not moving. The pictures do not exist.

The first roll in my Contax IIa was a lie. It was disappointing. But this is film. Sometimes it gives you silver. Sometimes it gives you nothing.

We drove back to the apartment in the dark. Bought food. Matt cooked, which was kind of him. We let the day end quietly.

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The next morning we started again.

Matt helped me load the film. I still do not know what I had done wrong the first time. I thought I had done it the same way. But this time the film moved correctly.

We started on the parking deck near our apartment building. It had a cool maritime feeling. White walls. Blue railings. Simple shapes. Clean light. A place that looked ordinary until you saw it through a camera.

Then we walked to a surf spot nearby.

There was an old abandoned hotel at the entrance. We had been there briefly the evening before, but those photos were on the failed roll. That hurt a little, because the evening light had been better. Low sun. More mood. More shadow.

Still, the second attempt was not bad.

The Contax produced good images. The lenses were strong. The Kodak Gold carried the island feeling well.

Later in the day the tide was high.

In front of our apartment building there was a pool area. One pool was filled by the sea. Another was a normal closed hotel pool. In spring, when the tide is high and the sea is angry, the waves hit the pier so hard that the water comes over the sea pool and sometimes even reaches the normal pool.

It was a show.

Water exploded against the concrete. It rose meters into the air. It fell back down with force. You could feel the weight of it.

We stayed there for a while and photographed the waves.

By evening we were done.

We had gone running that morning. We had worked hard before the trip to clear the time. We had not slept enough. The island was beautiful, but it did not make us less tired.

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The next morning there was no excuse.

We got up early.

The massage salon was planned for the afternoon, but we wanted the sunrise. So we drove to the end of the bay, where the cliffs meet the sea.

We had scouted the spot during our morning run the day before. Matt also knew it from an earlier trip. It was too early. We were tired. But this time we did not have to stand in front of a camera. We only had to look.

The Spanish sun came up warm and soft. The light was golden. The sea moved below us. A light salty wind came from the water. We had dressed warmer than we needed to, because we expected it to be cooler. But the sun changed everything.

It was one of those mornings where landscape photography makes sense.

I photographed with the Canon R5 and with the Contax IIa. I used different lenses from 35mm to 85mm. The Jupiter-9 came out too. I had the Amedeo adapter and an RF to M adapter with me, so I could use most of the lenses on both the Canon R5 and the Contax IIa.

That was useful. The same glass could speak two languages.
Digital and film.

When the best light was gone, we packed up quickly. We made a selfie on film. I also made a safety shot with the Leica SL, just in case my film had failed again.

This time it had not.

The film stayed on the spool.

Small victories matter.

After the massage salon we went location scouting again.

Matt remembered an old abandoned village. The road there was more adventurous than expected. I think we came from the wrong direction. Matt said it had not been that wild last time, or at least he did not remember it that way.

We followed Google Maps. That was probably the mistake.

But the strange road gave us good things.

First I saw a beautiful small street in an old white village. At the end of it stood a palm tree. Behind it was the deep blue of the sea. I made a photo immediately.

Then we passed an old blue bus beside a small house.

I still do not know what that bus was doing there. Maybe nothing. Maybe that was the whole point. It looked strange enough to deserve a frame.

Further along the dirt roads, we saw a lighthouse in the distance. We drove there too. It was fine. But in the end it was just a lighthouse. One photo was enough.

The real place came after that.

An abandoned village.

There was a church. From a Central European eye, it looked strange. Everything was concrete. The houses had flat roofs. No classic roof structures. Low buildings. Symmetry. One-story houses arranged left and right of the road, almost like a plan that had been drawn too neatly and then abandoned.

Matt remembered that the village had been built for people with a certain disease. Before it was finished, the disease had disappeared or been eradicated. So the village was never really lived in. Later, it may have been used by the military.

You can google the full history.

I only know how it felt. Surreal. Empty. Too planned to be natural. Too abandoned to be useful.

We made some strong photos there. I finished my roll and had no more film with me. After that I used digital for a few extra frames.

And that was the western part of our Tenerife trip.

The next day I flew back to Munich. Matt flew on to London.
The Contax test was over.

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Reflections

I wanted to like the Contax IIa.

That is the honest start.

The camera is beautiful. The lenses are beautiful. The system has history and weight and a certain cold German precision to it. It feels serious in the hand. But a camera has to do more than feel serious.

It has to make you want to use it.

After three rolls, or maybe four if I count the failed one, I did not build trust with the Contax IIa.

That is the problem.

Here is what I liked:

• Excellent build quality
The camera is built to a very high standard. It feels comparable to a Leica III. In some areas, maybe even better.

• Great rear door mechanism
The back door and the whole film chamber feel extremely well made. The lock is precise. The metal work is beautiful.

• Strong film transport mechanism
When it works, the film advance feels clean and well engineered.

• Metal shutter curtain
In theory, this should be more precise than the cloth shutter of a Leica IIIa. It also removes the danger of burning a hole in the curtain with sunlight.

• Crisp shutter feel
The shutter feels direct, sharp, and mechanically healthy.

• Larger rangefinder base than the Leica IIIa
The rangefinder and finder windows are farther apart. In theory, this gives better focusing precision.

• Bright 50mm finder
The built-in finder is bright and pleasant with a 50mm lens. The frame is clear.

• Good controls
The dials feel precise and well made.

• Good grip
The leatherette gives the camera a secure feel in the hand.

• Native Contax RF mount
This is the big reason to own it. My Contax RF lenses mount directly without an adapter.

• Good lens compatibility within the system
The Zeiss Opton Biogon, Sonnar, Biometar, Biotar, and Jupiter lenses all make sense here.

• No need to cut the film leader
Unlike the Leica IIIa, the Contax should accept normal 35mm film without trimming the leader.

• Flash sync exists
There is a sync port on the back. For me it is not very important, but it is there.

• Good image quality
When the film is loaded correctly, the results are good. The lenses perform well. Kodak Gold 200 in Tenerife light looks exactly as it should.

Now the other side. And this list is longer.

Cons of the Contax IIa:

• Film loading is not confidence inspiring
My first roll did not advance. The camera felt like it was working, but the film stayed still. A full roll was lost.

• The plastic take-up spool is fragile
Compared to the Leica III metal spool, the Contax spool does not inspire trust. The small plastic triangle on the spool breaks easily. Mine broke after the second or third roll. I bought a replacement spool, but the feeling was already damaged.

• Loading takes too long in practice
I need about three minutes to load the Contax. Yes, part of that is because I check everything two or three times now. But even with cutting the film leader, I am faster with the Leica IIIa.

• The lens infinity lock is annoying
Every time you focus to infinity and go slightly too far, the focus locks. Then you have to press the release button to move again. And the release is badly placed
The button is awkward. It is a stretch. It interrupts the flow.

• The body is larger than a Leica III
The Contax IIa is taller, thicker, and heavier. For travel, that matters.

• Many Contax RF lenses are larger too
The 35mm f/2.8 Zeiss Opton Biogon is heavy and big. Even the mount makes the whole system feel less compact.

• Lens changes are annoying
The lens must be set to infinity before mounting or removing it properly. The inner sleeve also has to connect correctly with the focus mechanism. It works, but it is fussy.

• The bayonet is not more pleasant in real life
In theory, a bayonet should be faster than a screw mount. In practice, I prefer the Leica screw mount. It may be slower, but it is less annoying.

• The rangefinder patch feels strange to my eye
When I focus my eye on a distant subject, the patch becomes soft. When I focus on the patch, the distant subject becomes soft. This is especially annoying near infinity. The Leica IIIa may be older, but the focusing experience feels more natural to my eye.

• The tripod thread is 3/8 inch
Most small tripods and cameras use 1/4 inch. We did not have the adapter with us. For our selfie, we had to clamp the camera to the tripod.

• There is little price advantage over a Leica III or IIIa
The Contax IIa is not cheap enough to forgive all this.

• It gives me no real advantage over my Leica IIIa
The theoretical benefits are real. But in practice, the Leica is smaller, more familiar, and more reliable for me.

That is the conclusion.

I could get used to the Contax IIa. I know that.

After more rolls, I would probably load it faster. I would probably complain less about the infinity lock. I would probably remember the 3/8 tripod adapter. I would probably build muscle memory.

But why?

The Leica IIIa already works for me.

It is smaller. It is simpler. It has a system of compact LTM lenses that also adapt easily to Leica M. If I travel with a Leica III and a Leica M, I can bring LTM lenses and use them on both with small adapters.

That makes sense. The Contax RF camera does not make the same kind of sense for me.

So I will probably sell it when I find someone who wants it.

I will keep using my Contax RF lenses on Leica M cameras with the Amedeo adapter. On the Leica IIIa, I will stay with LTM lenses. Or I will simply bring an analog Leica M and use M lenses for both film and digital.

That is cleaner. Less gear. Less trouble. Less doubt.

I still feel a little sad about it.
The Zeiss lenses are wonderful. The Contax cameras are beautiful machines. I understand why people love them. If you are a Contax user and you enjoy the system, keep enjoying it. This is not a verdict on your camera.

A camera can be great and still not be right for you.

Cameras, Glass & Grit

Camera:

Contax IIa with Kodak Gold 200

Lenses:

35mm f/2.8 Zeiss Opton Biogon
35mm f/2.8 Zeiss Biometar
50mm f/1.8 Zeiss Sonnar
85mm f/2 Jupiter-9

All available light.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite this time is a strange one.

It was not even made with the Contax IIa.

It happened when I adapted the Jupiter-9 85mm to the Canon R5. I noticed that the lens produced a wild flare when the light hit the front element at an angle.

So I played with it. A little more angle. A little more sun. A little more wrongness.

Then it happened.

A flare that looked strange, cosmic, and otherworldly. Not clean. Not correct. Not the kind of photo that will probably end up on a wall.

But it made me happy. Sometimes that is enough.
Photography is not always about the best image.

Sometimes it is about the small accident that reminds you why you still carry too many cameras through airports.

It was not normal. That much I know.

It was warm. It was dark. It was tight. Matt and I sweated through our shirts and came home with pictures that surprised me. Good pictures. Pictures I wanted to show. Not only because it was a job, but because it showed one of the strange and wild sides of being a photographer.

At the beginning of the year, Matt asked if I wanted to come with him to Tenerife.

An old model friend of his had contacted him. She had a business in the south of the island and needed new photographs for it. In exchange, she offered him an apartment. No hotel. No rent. Just come over, photograph the business, and stay at her place.

The business was an erotic massage salon.

Matt said yes.

Then he asked the right second question. Could we also photograph the girls creatively? Not only for the business. Maybe later in the day. Maybe somewhere else. Maybe at the beach, in the rocks, or wherever the island gave us light.

She said she would ask them.

They said yes.

That is how Matt called me.

He knew I photograph a lot of models. He also knew I do commercial work. This job sat somewhere between both worlds. It needed taste, speed, trust, and a little bit of control. So I said yes too.

We booked the flights. We did not have to book accommodation. We rented a car because the apartment was in the north, in a small surfer village, and the salon was in the south. Tenerife is not a big island, but it is large enough when you have to cross it often. And we wanted to stay flexible. We know the island from earlier photo trips. A car is almost always a good idea there, especially in March, when rental prices are still reasonable.

On the second day, the weather looked mixed. That made the decision easy. We did not want to waste a sunny day indoors. So we drove south in the morning and used the grey day for the salon shoot.

The place was hidden in plain sight.

It sat in a pedestrian street. Nothing loud. Nothing strange. You walked through the door and stood in front of a counter. A friendly young woman welcomed you. Behind her was a menu with the different massage options and times.

I did not really know what to expect.

In my private life, I make a wide circle around erotic massage salons and places like that. Not because of judgement. It is just not my world. So it was interesting. And it was also a challenge.

Behind the counter, a hallway led deeper into the salon. Three rooms opened from it. They were small. Very small. Each had a mattress on the floor, a cover over it, warm colors, soft music, and very little light. The air smelled good. The rooms were clean and calm. For the service they offer, the low light made sense. For photography, it made life difficult.

The owner welcomed us warmly. She was relaxed from the first minute. The girls were there too. On the first day we had two models to photograph. A third woman did not want to be in the pictures, which was perfectly fine. It actually helped us, because she could take care of walk-in customers while we worked in the rooms.

We looked through what had to be photographed.

There was the menu with the gold logo on the front. That was important. The owner wanted the pictures to feel real. Not like stock images. Not like licensed photos from somewhere else. She wanted people to see that these were the women from the salon, photographed inside the actual place.

There were also business cards and a lot of accessories. Masks, lingerie, small props, and other things for different tastes. The girls were very open about their work. They spoke about it like anyone else speaks about a job. They had families, plans, routines, and regular customers. For them, this was normal life.

That helped me.

At first, the situation felt strange. I usually know the models when I shoot lingerie or nude work. Here I met them for the first time in the place where they worked. That is a different start. But they were kind, direct, and very professional.

We split the rooms.

Matt took one room. I took another.

My room was the smaller one.

That became the biggest problem of the day. There was the mattress. There was a wall. There was a mirror. There was almost no space left for me. I had to move around the mattress with careful feet and too much balance. Often I was kneeling on it myself, trying not to fall into the frame or onto my own light stand.

One wall was covered with a large mirror. That saved the room. Without it, the space would have felt flat and cramped. With it, I could create depth. I could make the room look larger than it was. I could shoot into reflections and let the viewer feel more space than the room actually gave me.

The existing light was not enough.

There were small ambient lights behind shelves and in the shower. There were electronic candles. There was a little star ceiling, but it did not really help. It looked nice in the room, but it gave no useful light for the camera and was hard to include in a clean composition.

So we used LEDs.

LEDs were the right tool for this job. We could match the color temperature to the warm room light. We could add a little RGB color when needed. We could lower the power until the light blended with the room instead of killing it.

Matt had a 100 watt LED with a USB-C power setup. I had another 100 watt bicolor LED. I also gave Matt one of my small 20 watt RGB panels. For my second light I used the Godox powerbank LED, the small MA5R type, with Kelvin and RGB control. When I needed one more light source, I used the modeling light of the Godox V100 Pro. It is a warm 3200 Kelvin LED, and it worked well as a small edge light or a soft lift in the room.

The setup was simple.

Small stands. Small footprint. No big modifiers. No large softboxes. There was no space for that. Everything had to be close, careful, and controlled.

The camera was the Canon R5.

I used EF glass. Mostly the EF 35mm f/1.4 L USM, version one, and the EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM. Both lenses did a great job. The 35mm gave me enough space when there was no space. The 50mm gave me a tighter look when I could step back a little, which was almost never.

The R5 autofocus was excellent. Even in the dark rooms, it locked fast and stayed accurate. Eye autofocus was not the main thing here. We often focused on body lines, hands, lingerie, the menu, the business card, or a detail in the frame. This was not a classic portrait session. The eyes were not always the story.

Sometimes the body was the story. Sometimes the logo was. Sometimes the curve of light on skin was.

At the start, it was trial and error.

We had to find the rhythm. The models had to get used to us. I had to get used to the room. The light was difficult. The poses had to be sensual, but not too open. The final images were meant for the website and also for advertising stands outside the salon, in the pedestrian street.

That was important.

Families walk there. Children walk there. The city also cares about what is shown in public space. So I decided for myself that everything should stay covered. Lingerie, implied nude, careful posing. It should have sex appeal, but it should not show too much. It should suggest more than it reveals.

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The models were very comfortable with their bodies. Sometimes too comfortable for what we needed.

That became a funny part of the shoot.

Every now and then I had to slow things down and say, with a smile, that I could see too much. Then we adjusted the pose or moved the lingerie back into place. No drama. No strict lecture. Just a small laugh, a small correction, and back to work.

The thing that changed the mood most was music.

I opened Spotify on my phone and asked the girls what they wanted to hear. They chose the music. The room changed at once. Their shoulders dropped. The poses became easier. The whole shoot became less strange.

The second thing that helped was showing the images on the back of the camera.

That built trust fast. They saw that we were not messing around. They saw the light, the mood, the framing. They saw that the photos looked professional. After that, they became more confident. They started to bring their own ideas.

That was when the shoot got good.

They knew their customers. They knew what certain customers liked about them. Tattoos. Body shape. A certain look. A certain style. They understood their own market better than we did. So we listened and used that knowledge.

This was still commercial photography.

The images had a purpose. They had to bring people back to the salon. They had to show the real women who worked there. They had to be attractive, but also usable.

After about an hour, we changed models. Matt and I took a short break too.

The rooms were hot.

Of course they were hot. The temperature had to be comfortable for the girls and for the customers. But when you are kneeling, crouching, balancing, holding your breath, and trying not to shake the camera, you start sweating quickly.

The girls also did their part to make the room warmer.

It was a strange, funny, intense afternoon.

One model learned from Matt. One model learned from me. Then we changed rooms, and they carried that experience with them. The energy moved from one room to the next. The owner came in from time to time, looked at the camera screens, smiled, gave feedback, and left again.

It became easy.

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At some point we found out that another model could not come that day. But we were already having a good time and getting useful pictures, so we offered to come back for a second day.

That made sense.

By then we also understood the limits. The girls had to be available for customers. Their workday started around 11 in the morning and went into the evening. Even when there were no appointments, walk-in customers could arrive. You cannot just take the models away for three hours and drive to a beach.

For that, they would need a free day.

And on this trip, they did not have one.

That was a little sad, because Tenerife has so many strong locations. Rocks. Beaches. Volcanic landscapes. Harsh sun. Soft evening light. But it was also fine. We had made the first connection. The girls became curious about what we usually shoot. I showed them some of my nude work and some bodypainting photography. They liked it.

By the second day, they already came to me with ideas.

Beach. Rocks. Bikini. Nude. Their own ideas. Their own pictures.

That was the real success of the job. Not only the photos we made, but the small network we started building for the next trip.

After the first shoot day, Matt and I were done.

We took a day off. Then we returned to the salon.

Before the second day, we had looked at the files on the laptop. We knew what worked and what did not. We knew what we wanted more of. We also knew where I had made my biggest mistake.

The pictures from the first day were too dark.

Not ruined. Not bad. But darker than I wanted.

The rooms were so dark that the camera display looked brighter than it really was. My eyes had adjusted to the dark room. The display fooled me. I built the light too low, thinking it had more punch than it had.

Later, on a proper monitor in a bright environment, the truth was clear.

The images were too flat out of camera. Too dark for print. Too dark for a poster. Too dark for a website if you wanted the viewer to understand the image fast.

The Canon R5 saved me.

The files had enough dynamic range. I could lift the exposure. I could raise the midtones and highlights. I kept the shadows dark, because the room needed to stay moody. But I gave the images more life, more contrast, and more readable light.

With a Leica M9 or the Phase One IQ180, I would not have had the same freedom here. Not in this situation. Not with these underexposed files.

So yes. Thank you, Canon R5. You saved my ass.

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On the second day, I used more light.

I still kept the mood, but I pushed it higher. I worked more with RGB color. Blue and red. Warmer highlights. More separation. More contrast. I wanted the files to be closer to finished in camera and not depend so much on recovery later.

One of the new models was Meri.

With her, I also tried to shoot in the shower. The idea was good. The space looked good. But we could not really let the water run. If we sprayed the door too much, water came out at the bottom. So we had to wet it quickly, stop the water, shoot fast, and repeat.

Running water would have been better.

But sometimes the room says no.

Still, the second day worked well. We were faster. The models were relaxed. We knew the space. The pictures became stronger. Matt and I sweated again, worked hard again, and came home with images that I am proud to show.

That is why this Substack post exists.

Not because it was only a job.

Because it was more than that.

It was a reminder that photography takes you into strange rooms. Sometimes beautiful rooms. Sometimes difficult rooms. Sometimes rooms you would never enter without a camera in your hand.

And once you are there, you still have to do the same simple thing.

Find the light.

Find trust.

Make the picture.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

For this shoot, I kept the gear simple.

No film. No old Leica. No special vintage lens. No medium format CCD drama.

This was a job. A tight room. Low light. Moving models. Mixed detail shots. Commercial needs. I needed a camera that would not fight me.

Cameras
Canon R5

Lenses
EF 35mm f/1.4 L USM I
EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM

Lighting
100W BiColor LED
RGB LED Panel
Godox MA5R Powerbank LED
Godox V100 Pro, used only with the warm LED modeling light

Reflections

What stayed with me most was how normal everything became after the first strange minutes.

Before the shoot, I did not know what to expect. I was skeptical. Not in a moral way. More in the way you are skeptical when you walk into a situation you do not fully understand.

But the girls were relaxed. They were open. They were professional.

For them, this was their job.

They had customers. Families. Routines. Plans. They laughed. They joked. They made suggestions. They wanted to look good in the pictures, and they understood very clearly what the pictures needed to do.

That made the shoot honest.

We did not create some fake fantasy from outside. We photographed their world, inside their space, with their own ideas mixed into ours.

And even though we did not manage to take them to the beach or the rocks this time, that was okay. We built the first bridge. Next time, maybe the island opens a little more.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite image is one of Meri.

She was kneeling on the mattress. We used simple side light. Nothing complicated. Just shape, shadow, and enough glow to make the figure stand out.

Her pose worked. The lingerie worked. The room worked for one small moment.

It was one of those frames where you do not need much.

No big setup. No clever trick. No heavy concept.

Just a person, a little light, and the right second.

What I’d do differently:

Next time, I would make the camera display darker.

That sounds small, but it matters.

In a dark room, the display can fool you. It looks bright because everything around it is dark. Then you trust it too much. Later, on a calibrated monitor, the files tell the truth.

I would also bring a little more controlled fill light from the start. Not to destroy the mood, but to make the files stronger out of camera. The shadows can stay dark. But the skin, the logo, and the main shapes need to read clearly if the image is going to live on a website or a printed sign.

Tech Minute:

The Canon R5 impressed me again.

It was almost pitch dark in parts of the room, and still the autofocus was fast and reliable. I did not have to fight the camera. I could focus on the model, the light, the pose, and the frame.

That is worth a lot.

A camera does not always need to be romantic. Sometimes it just needs to save the job.

Here, the R5 did exactly that.

Behind the Scenes

At the end, I added a short behind-the-scenes clip so you can see how small the room really was (mine was even smaller), how dark it was, and how the whole setup looked from the outside.

The photographer role model in the clip is Matt.

There is no behind-the-scenes footage of me from this shoot. I was too busy sweating in my own small room, kneeling on a mattress, trying not to fall over a light stand, and hoping the next frame would work.

Thanks for reading.

See you soon.

That was the mood when the alarm went off at 2:45 in the morning.

I had set up the coffee machine the night before, so all I had to do was press the button and wait for the first sound of life in the kitchen. While the coffee brewed, I took a quick shower, woke up properly, and got ready for the road. Backpack. Flashlight. Two cloth bags. Jacket. The kind of outfit you wear when you know the day will start in the dark and end with tired legs.

At 3:30 I picked up my friend Sven. That was our call time. From there we drove about an hour and a half toward Munich, toward the giant flea market at the Theresienwiese.
Around 80,000 visitors. Roughly 3,500 sellers. An absurd amount of stuff spread across a massive field. Rare things. Cheap things. Beautiful things. Useless things. The whole madness of it.

And inside all that chaos sits one question.

Can you still find photographic treasure at a flea market of this size?

Cameras. Books. Studio props. Old prints. Strange objects with a second life in front of the lens. Things with use. Things with story. Things that make you want to carry them home.

We arrived in Munich at about five in the morning. It was still pitch black. The market was already alive. Cars moved slowly into the parking area. Sellers unpacked boxes under weak lights or no light at all. People walked around with flashlights like hunters moving through a field before sunrise. We parked without much trouble, grabbed our bags, and stepped into the dark.

The first rows were only half full. Some sellers were still building their tables. Others had already laid out their goods, but in that light you saw things only in fragments. A camera strap. A chrome edge. The shape of a case. The mood was good. No rain. Not too cold. Everyone seemed awake in that special flea market way, half tired and fully alert.

It did not take long before Sven made the first hit.

At a private seller’s stand there was a box of photo gear. He spotted a Canon DSLR with lens, asked a few questions, negotiated for a moment, and suddenly the first deal of the day was done. He walked away with a Canon 40D, charger, batteries, and a zoom lens.

That first buy always changes the air.

Until then, you are still asking what the day will be. After the first good find, the market begins to open.

When Sven lifted the camera gear from the box, I noticed that underneath it were two original Canon battery grips, both still in their boxes. I asked the seller about them and we agreed on a low price almost at once. Sven had his DSLR. I had my first purchase. One seller, two quick deals.

Some people may ask what the point is in buying old Canon battery grips at a flea market. For me the answer is simple. I go there with two hopes. First, to find things I can use myself. Second, to buy a few things cheap and sell them later, so the trip pays for itself. If the day ends as a near zero sum game, even better.

The grips were for the second category. Easy to carry. Easy to resell. Good start.

From there we moved deeper into the market.

A little later I saw two leather cases in a size that made me think at once: Cameras. I opened the first one and was honestly surprised. Inside was a Canon AF35M II.

That made me smile.

It is the successor to the Canon AF35M, the camera I already wrote a full Substack post about after taking it with me to Wetzlar during the 100 Years of Leica trip. That first version came along for behind the scenes work and burned through a few rolls on the road. Now, almost by accident, I had found the second version. The camera and the case were both in remarkable condition. Really close to mint. The kind of condition that makes you stare for a second because it feels wrong for something that is about forty years old.

Ten euros.

That was the price.

The second case held an Olympus Trip 35 with the fixed 40mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens. Not quite as clean as the Canon, but still a very nice little camera, and again cheap enough that I did not hesitate for long. Into the backpack it went.

With cameras like these, one thing matters immediately. Check the battery compartment on the spot.

Many compact cameras from the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s were left sitting for years with AA or AAA batteries inside. Back then the batteries were not as safe as people liked to think. They leaked. The acid crept out. The contacts corroded. The camera died slowly on a shelf. So whenever I find an old compact camera, the first thing I do is open the battery door.

The Canon still had batteries in it. They were from 2003, which means the camera may have sat unused for about twenty years. But they had not leaked, which felt almost miraculous. The Olympus was empty, which was also good news. I had not tested either camera yet, but the condition gave me hope.

Then came a quieter stretch. We walked. We searched. It slowly got brighter. The flashlights became less important. You still needed them for dark bags and deep boxes, but the market itself began to reveal its true face.

At another stand I found two more small camera cases. One was marked “Braun”, which usually does not promise much. The other had no label. I opened it and found an Olympus Mju II Zoom 115 in black.

A very nice little find.

Black, silver, champagne. I believe it came in a few colors, but black always feels right. It is the zoom version, with a 38 to 115mm lens, autofocus, weather resistance, and that compact late film era charm that still works today. In the Braun case, where I expected some forgettable cheap camera, I found something else entirely. A JVC Everio camcorder.

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That was another lesson from the day.

Never trust the label on the bag.

The camcorder came with only a battery. No charger. No memory card. No USB cable. Nothing else. Still, those little SD card camcorders have come back into fashion with younger people, and I figured it was worth a closer look later. Maybe it becomes part of the trip financing. Maybe not. That is always part of the gamble.

Sven, meanwhile, kept an eye out for books. We both do. Art books, photography books, coffee table books, anything with substance. He found a few for himself. We dug through camera bags, broadcast camcorders, tripods, and overpriced DSLRs. At one point I even found a Canon 5D in a Peli case with two lenses. A great camera, beautifully packed, and in very good shape. Too expensive for my flea market taste, but still a strange and wonderful thing to see sitting on a folding table in the middle of all that noise.

Then came one of the real highlights of the day.

At the edge of one row we found a young team of sellers who were clearly clearing out the contents of an apartment. It looked like the former owner had been a hobby photographer with a good eye. I dug through boxes of books, prints, negatives, and old photo material. In the first box of books I saw a small round red logo looking back at me.

Leica!

That moment always does something to me.

Under a few other books sat a Leica handbook from 2002/2003, full of cameras, lenses, accessories, order numbers, the whole system laid out the way Leica used to do it. Opposite the lens pages you find the matching filters and accessories. Clear. Precise. Built for someone who wanted to work inside the system properly.

Under that was another one. The Leica System handbook from July 1986, with a Leica M6 and Leica R4 on the cover. I love objects like that. They remind you that these cameras were once the new thing. Fresh. Current. Desired. Now they are old iron, though the M system survived in a way the R system never did.

Later, in another box, I found something even stranger. Two paper sleeves marked Gran Canaria. Inside were old transparencies and negatives. When I held them against the light, I saw private nude photographs made on the beach and in isolation, likely from the 1970s by the feel of them. AGFA Color CT and Kodak Ektachrome. There was even one 6x6 negative among them, which suggested the photographer had worked with more than one camera and had taken the work seriously.

That kind of material interests me. Not just for the subject, but for the sequence. You can study how another photographer moved, corrected, refined, changed the frame from one image to the next. That is always valuable. There is also still a collector’s market for anonymous vintage erotic work in Europe, especially when the negatives are intact. I negotiated well, bought the material, and decided I would digitize it later before passing it back into the world.

The Leica handbooks, though, those stay with me.

By then the backpack had real weight to it.

A few rows later I found something I had not expected at all. On a clothing rack hung a long coat that caught my eye at once. I looked closer. Great condition. Nice shape. Strong presence. I asked for the price, and it was already low. After a little negotiation it became absurdly low. So I bought it for the studio.

I could already see it on the right model.

That is how these things happen. You do not always buy what you planned to buy. Sometimes you buy the picture before the picture exists.

Right after that I found two old cigarette packs at an antique stand. One Slovak pack, still sealed, with cigarettes still inside. One German pack from what I would guess were the 1990s, empty but visually perfect, from the time before warning photos and modern packaging killed whatever graphic charm these things once had. A few euros later, they also joined the studio fund.

While I was doing that, Sven bought four expired 35mm films from the stand opposite. Two Fuji Superia. Two Kodak Gold 200. Storage unknown, of course. That is part of the fun. He often picks up expired film for me so I can use it for behind the scenes work or risk it on a model shoot and see what happens. I always appreciate that.

My part of the tradition comes later.

After hours of hunting, the Currywurst and Coke at the Munich Spring Festival next door is on me.

It is a running joke by now. Also the most expensive Currywurst we eat all year. This year, two sliced currywursts with fries and two colas cost thirty euros. Completely ridiculous. Completely necessary.

By the time we ate, it was after ten and the stomach had started to complain. Then it was back into the market again.

The later hours felt different. More crowded. More noise. More picked over. The professional flea market dealers still had plenty of beautiful gear, but usually at prices too high for the risk. At a flea market, you often cannot properly test anything. That matters. So we aimed more for the rows that looked private from a distance.

In one of those rows I found three more Leica publications. A Leica M6 guide. A booklet on Leica lenses from 21 to 400mm. And, thanks to a kind seller who remembered there should be one more, a booklet called Leica and Leicaflex that he simply added to the already agreed price.

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That felt like the right kind of luck.

Then came a long dry stretch. More than an hour of walking. Nothing. We crossed from one side of the market to the other, and with so many people it felt enormous. I started to think the best things were gone.

Then, just after midday, I saw a Panasonic Lumix FT5 box sitting openly on a table. It was so visible that I assumed it had to be empty. Nobody leaves a five euro miracle sitting in plain sight. I opened the box.

The camera was inside.

Original packaging. Charger. Five euros.

At that point I had almost given up on finding another good piece, and then suddenly this waterproof compact camera lands in my hands for next to nothing. That is the rhythm of a flea market. Long silence. Then one bright strike.

By now we had nearly completed the whole market, something we had never managed in previous years. We were deep past 10,000 steps and running mostly on habit. Your eyes get tired. Your brain gets tired. Searching actively all day drains you in a way normal walking never does. But this year we kept going.

In one of the last rows I saw the corner of a camera body sticking out from under a cloth. I lifted the cloth and found several cameras underneath. One was in a leather case with a flat silver and black shape visible through a cutout. I knew the silhouette at once.

Polaroid!

At first I thought it might be an SLR 680 because it had sonar autofocus. But when I checked more carefully, it turned out to be an SX 70. Black body. Silver metal frame. Beautiful condition. Original leather case. The asking price was 170 euros, which explained why it was still there. For a flea market, and for a camera you cannot really test on the spot, that is high.

I said no.

Then the seller asked what I would pay.

I told him 100 euros was my absolute maximum because the risk was mine. He came down to 120. I stayed at 100. And then he sold it to me.

That was the last real purchase of the day.

Beside it sat a twin lens Rollei that Sven looked at, but the seller would not move enough on the price, so it stayed on the table. The SX 70 came home with me.

I am genuinely curious about that one. I already own two SLR 680 cameras with built in flash, so the question is whether I would actually use an SX 70 often. I do not know yet. First I need to order film, test it, and see if it works the way it should. After that I will decide if it stays.

Then the market was done.

We walked the last rows. Mostly empty tables now. Mostly leftovers. We packed everything into the car and drove home.

In total I spent a little over 300 Euros on everything I bought.

That sounds good on paper, but flea market reality is always honest. I still do not know if every piece works as it should. Good condition helps, but at a flea market you never get certainty. That is part of the game. Still, I am hopeful. I think there is a real chance this was one of those successful trips where the resales cover the cost and a few good things remain with me.

Two good analog compact cameras that might come along on future trips for behind the scenes work, or maybe even the occasional model shoot. A few Leica books for the shelf. Props for the studio that would cost much more online. And maybe, if the Polaroid behaves, one more beautiful machine with a second life ahead of it.

That is why I keep going to flea markets, at least once a year.

Not just to buy.

To search.

To look through other people’s leftovers and find the objects that still have one more picture in them.

They are fast. Clean. Sharp. Efficient. They do what they should do, and then they get out of the way.

CCD cameras are not always like that.

Many of them are slower. Some are stubborn. Some are old enough to remind you of computers that once sounded like machines in a workshop. Their screens can be terrible. Their menus can be clumsy. Their batteries can be moody. Their storage habits can feel ancient.

And still, people keep coming back.

Not because CCD is better in every measurable way. It is not!
Not because every CCD file is beautiful. It is not!
But because some of these cameras have a way of painting colors that still feels different. A little harder. A little rougher. Sometimes a little more alive.

That is where this guide begins.

Not with myth. Not with forum religion. Not with the lazy sentence that “CCD just has better colors.”

It begins with a simpler question.

What do you actually want to photograph, and which kind of CCD camera makes sense for that work?

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The four roads into CCD

For this guide, I would divide the CCD world into four groups.

First, the compact cameras. This is the broadest and noisiest family. It includes cameras like the Canon PowerShot G-series up to the G12, the Ricoh GR Digital line, Panasonic LX3 and LX5, Leica D-Lux 4 and 5, and Fujifilm’s famous small Super CCD compacts such as the F30 and F31fd.
These cameras are small, often charming, and sometimes surprisingly beautiful in good light. But they are not the heart of this article, because most readers looking for a serious CCD body are really looking for a camera system, or at least for a body they can build a way of working around.

Second, the DSLR camp. This is where CCD becomes practical. The original Canon EOS-1D from 2001 belongs here. So do Nikon’s classic CCD bodies such as the D80 and D200, Fujifilm’s Nikon-based Super CCD DSLRs like the S5 Pro, Olympus bodies
like the E-1, Pentax bodies like the K10D and K200D, and Sony or Konica Minolta bodies from the early Alpha era. This is the group for photographers who still want a proper grip, an optical finder, a broader lens market, and a camera that feels more like a tool than a jewel.
And it is also the most sensible CCD group for photographers who still need a fast and reliable autofocus system. If your work depends on tracking movement, reacting quickly, or getting a sharp frame without hesitation, a DSLR remains the strongest option in the CCD world. It is the category built for people who shoot action, events, wildlife, or any kind of sports work where speed still matters. Just as important is the lens ecosystem. DSLR systems such as Canon EF and Nikon F give you access not only to standard primes, but also to long telephoto lenses and practical zooms. That matters more than many CCD buyers first think. A beautiful sensor is one thing. But if your work needs reach, flexibility, and autofocus lenses that can keep up, DSLR cameras are the group that makes the most sense.

Third, the digital rangefinders. This family is small and easy to name. Epson gave us the R-D1, later followed by the R-D1s and R-D1x. Leica gave us the M8, M8.2, M9, M9-P, M-E Typ 220, and the first Monochrom. This is probably the most romantic road into CCD, and also the one most likely to empty your wallet faster than expected. But it is also the road that gives you the rare mix of compact size, quiet shooting, manual focus precision, and access to one of the most interesting lens worlds ever built.
With Leica M mount, you can use lenses that span almost the entire modern history of the system, from classic designs going back to the 1930s all the way to today’s highly corrected APO lenses. That means a CCD rangefinder can still be paired with glass that is, in many ways, fully state of the art. At the same time, the system is incredibly broad on the used market and through third-party makers. You can choose from large, extremely fast primes, compact everyday lenses, character lenses, technical modern designs, and even very small collapsible options.

Fourth, digital medium format. This is where CCD stops being cute and starts becoming serious. Pentax 645D belongs here. Leica S2 and the later Leica S Type 006 and S-E Type 006 belong here. Hasselblad H-system CCD bodies such as the H3DII and H4D families belong here. Mamiya ZD belongs here. And so do the older Phase One CCD backs and systems, including backs like the P45+ and the IQ series with 40, 60 and 80 megapixels. This is the part of the CCD world where image quality can still feel enormous, where files can still carry a special weight, and where every purchase becomes less casual and more of a commitment.
Medium format is also the CCD group where it is hardest to save money. Unlike the rangefinder world, where clever buyers can still find different paths into the system, medium format leaves very little room to escape high costs. Whether you look at Pentax, Leica, Hasselblad, or Phase One, the bodies are expensive, the digital backs are expensive, and the lenses are expensive as well. That has always been part of the territory. But it is also the reason this group still has to be taken most seriously in pure image-quality terms. Resolution, tonal depth, and overall file flexibility are often strong enough that these cameras still feel relevant even next to much newer systems. If your main priority is the file, and you are willing to accept the cost, the size, and the slower pace, digital medium format CCD remains the most serious end of this guide.

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What are you actually trying to shoot?

This matters more than sensor mythology.

If you want to shoot sports, moving subjects, events, or anything that asks for fast autofocus and a body that keeps firing when the moment turns hot, then the DSLR branch is the sensible place to start. Not every CCD DSLR is fast, but this is the category where speed, autofocus, buffer behavior, and modern lens choices at least begin to work in your favor. The original EOS-1D was built for exactly that world, and Nikon’s better CCD DSLRs still feel far more at home in motion than a digital rangefinder or a medium format back ever will.

If you want to shoot portraits, model work, editorial, fashion, or still life, the answer becomes more open. Here, speed matters less. Accuracy matters more. Tonality matters more. Lens rendering matters more. This is where medium format CCD can start to make real sense. Not because every medium format CCD file is automatically superior, but because larger sensors and later generations of CCD development often buy you more room in the file, more grace in transitions, and a different kind of depth. This is also where a rangefinder can still shine, if your way of working is calm and intentional.
Rangefinders also have a real advantage for portrait and editorial work because of their lens character. The M-mount world offers an unusually wide range of lenses with strong individual rendering, from classic vintage designs to highly refined modern optics. That makes it possible to choose not just a focal length, but a look, adding an extra layer of creativity through bokeh, transitions, and overall drawing style.

If you want to shoot street, travel, daily life, city walks, or quiet personal work, then the rangefinder family becomes very hard to ignore. An Epson R-D1, a Leica M8, or an M9 can do an astonishing amount if you are willing to live without autofocus. They are small enough to carry, direct enough to keep your head in the frame, and flexible enough to move from street photography to portraiture without changing the whole mood of the day. That is a very different experience from carrying a 1-series DSLR or a medium format rig.

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Lenses matter as much as the sensor

People shopping for CCD often talk as if the sensor is the whole story.

It is not.

A camera body gives you a look. A lens system gives you a life.

That is why DSLR CCD bodies still make so much sense for many buyers. Canon EF and Nikon F built huge worlds. Even if the newest development has moved elsewhere, the used market is still rich, deep, and full of choices. You can buy fast glass, strange glass, old workhorse zooms, modern clinical primes, and lenses that cost little enough to experiment with without fear.

Leica M is different because the lens market around it is almost endless. Digital CCD rangefinders do not only give access to Leica lenses, but also to a vast used market of Russian M39 optics, Japanese screw-mount lenses like the old Canon designs, and a wide range of third-party makers. That makes this system especially attractive not just at the high end, but also for photographers on a smaller budget who still want an enormous choice of lenses.

Medium format is more selective. Pentax 645 is narrower. Hasselblad H and Leica S are more expensive worlds. Phase One gives you serious options, especially with older Mamiya and Schneider Kreuznach glass, but the whole ecosystem asks for more money, more patience, and more tolerance for specialist gear. In return, you gain access to a lens lineup that can be exceptionally complete, including macro lenses, technical options, and tilt-shift solutions. For portrait photographers, leaf shutter lenses are another major advantage. They add size and weight, but they make outdoor flash work far easier and can reduce how much lighting power you need to carry.

That is an important truth of CCD buying.

Sometimes the right camera is not the body with the most famous sensor. Sometimes it is the one whose lens world gives you room to breathe.

The next question is not only how many lenses a system gives you, but how good those lenses still are in actual use.

That matters more than people think too.

A great portrait lens does not stop being great because it was built in another decade. The Biotar 75mm f/1.5 from 1948 already proved that long ago. It made beautiful portraits then and it still can now. The Zeiss 110mm f/2 Planar, built for Hasselblad in the 1960s, became one of those lenses that helped define how magazine portraiture could look. And the Schneider Kreuznach 150mm f/2.8 LS for Phase One, released in 2017, feels like the modern end of that same line, precise, refined, and for me as close to a perfect portrait lens as we have right now.

Three lenses. Three eras. Three very different systems.

And yet they all prove the same thing. Good glass survives time better than most technology does.

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The interface can ruin a beautiful camera

This is the part many romantic buyers forget.

A camera can make lovely files and still be miserable to use.

Old digital cameras do not all age in the same way. Some feel primitive but solid. Some feel old in the wrong places. Some become tedious exactly when you need them to disappear in your hands.

The Leica M9 is a perfect example of the trade. Its CCD file is why people fall in love, but it is also a camera with a 2.5-inch 230,000-dot rear screen and SD/SDHC-era card support, which tells you very quickly that you are not using a modern digital machine anymore. The charm is real, but so is the friction.
Max 32gb SD cards and 7 frames buffer. That means after 7 frames contineous shooting, the camera will take a break for 25 seconds to clear the buffer.

The Phase One IQ180, by contrast, shows how different “old” can feel at the top end. It gave users an 80 MP CCD back, a 3.2-inch 1.15 MP display, and touchscreen control that still feels respectable today. It is slow in the way medium format is slow, but not clumsy at the back of the camera. That matters. A lot.

And then there are cameras like the original EOS-1D. They feel like working machines. They were built to earn money, not flatter your hand. They are not elegant in the modern sense. The rear display is from another age, the menu logic shows its years, and image review is not where the pleasure lives. But once you understand what the camera was built to do, much of that becomes easier to forgive.

This is why no CCD guide should stop at image quality.

You do not only buy a file. You buy a process.

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What image quality really means here

Yes, sensor size matters.

Yes, later development matters too.

A small-sensor CCD compact and a late digital medium format CCD back do not belong in the same sentence if we are talking about absolute image quality. That is obvious. But the mistake would be to think that the smaller camera therefore becomes irrelevant.

It does not.

One of the enduring surprises of the CCD era is how good some early files still are, even at modest pixel counts. A six-megapixel Epson R-D1 can still look wonderful. An original Canon EOS-1D can still make files with more presence than the resolution suggests. That does not mean they beat a later medium format file. It means that file quality is not only a number. There is color, transition, structure, and the strange thing we still call feel because we do not have a better word for it.

Still, there were real generational jumps. A late Phase One CCD back is not merely “more megapixels” than an early DSLR. It belongs to a different chapter of digital imaging. The same is true when you move from small APS-C or APS-H bodies into the larger Leica S or Pentax 645D world.

So what should you buy?

CCD compact cameras

Buy a CCD compact when you want a small color machine, a pocketable camera with real character, or an affordable way into older digital. It is also the branch that has become popular again with a younger generation, where old compacts are now used as party cameras for social media and everyday snapshots with a rougher, more nostalgic feel.

• Small, light, and easy to carry anywhere

• Affordable entry into the CCD look

• Popular again as a party and social media camera

• Limited control, limited speed, and usually limited image quality in low light
  

CCD DSLR cameras

Buy a CCD DSLR if you still want the most balanced tool. Better autofocus. Better lens availability. Better speed. Better value. The tradeoff is resolution. Even top-end CCD DSLRs like the Nikon D200 peak at around 10 megapixels, while cameras like the Canon EOS-1D sit much lower. So this group is less about maximum detail and more about usability, speed, and lens flexibility.

• Best CCD option for fast and reliable autofocus

• Broad lens ecosystem with telephoto lenses and zooms

• Strongest balance of speed, handling, and value

• Resolution is limited compared to rangefinder and medium format options
  

CCD rangefinder cameras

Buy a CCD rangefinder if you want the most distinctive shooting experience, the smallest serious body, and you are happy to focus by hand. It is the strongest middle ground in the CCD world, combining compact size, serious image quality, and enormous lens flexibility. Its weaknesses are real, but many of them can be overcome with skill.

• Best middle ground between size, image quality, and creative flexibility

• Huge lens market from budget vintage glass to modern state of the art optics

• Small and light enough for travel, street, portraits, and model work

• Manual focus and slower operation demand practice and skill

CCD medium format cameras

Buy CCD medium format if you want the deepest files, the slowest pace, and the highest ceiling, and if you are willing to carry both the weight and the cost. These systems are large, heavy, and often live in a bigger bag. They also tend to have lower native ISO values, which means high ISO shooting is limited and low-light flexibility is not their strength.

• Highest ceiling for image quality, resolution, and tonal depth

• Expensive bodies, backs, lenses, and accessories

• Larger and heavier systems that ask for a bigger bag and more commitment

• Lower native ISO and weaker high-ISO flexibility than smaller formats
  

That is the real shape of the market.

Not one king. Not one winner. Just four roads, and each one asks something different from you.

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Personal Reflections

My own path into CCD was not planned.

If I ignore the small compact cameras that came before, the first real CCD camera that mattered to me was the Epson R-D1 in 2010. I did not buy it because of specifications. I did not buy it because I had compared charts or pixel counts. I bought it because I saw the camera and fell in love with it. The analog gauges on the top plate, the image counter, the battery status, the way the whole thing looked and felt, it had soul. That was enough. I bought it on impulse, together with two Voigtländer lenses, and over the years that slowly turned into a small Leica M lens kit.

Then came the Leica M9 in 2019. I already wrote the full story in another post: 28 - CCD / CMOS / Film Comparison.
But the short version is this: the M9 was the camera that made me understand what I had been missing. From around 2015 on, even while using modern Canon DSLRs, I often felt that something in the files was gone. The cameras were better on paper. Faster, cleaner, more advanced. But something in the rendering, especially in the color, no longer moved me in the same way. When I bought the M9, I finally understood what that missing piece was. It was not nostalgia. It was not imagination. It was the rendering of that sensor.

From that point on, I started to look at CCD more seriously.

I built a proper Leica M lens setup. I adapted lenses. I tried different looks. And then, in October 2020, I bought the Phase One IQ180, first on a 645DF body, later on the XF. The reason was simple. I wanted the same charm I had found in the M9, but with more resolution and a higher ceiling. The IQ180 was the goal because it was, in many ways, the most modern expression of that idea. It still offered serious image quality, serious resolution, and files that could stand their ground even today, as long as the conditions were right. At high ISO it is terrible. There is no point pretending otherwise. But in controlled light, it is magnificent.

Those two cameras, the M9 and the IQ180, still make up around 80 percent of my creative work today.

The Canon 1D came much later, in 2025, and for a different reason. That one was more about nostalgia. I already had a full Canon EF lens lineup in the cupboard and still use EF glass today on my Canon R5 with an adapter. So the 1D was not a logical purchase in the same way as the M9 or the IQ180. It was more of a collector’s camera, a piece of history I wanted to own. The same goes for the Canon 1V, the 1Ds Mark III, and later the 1Ds. They are pure nostalgia, a collection.

But if I reduce it to the cameras I truly rely on, it comes down to this.

I shoot the Leica M9 because, in the 35mm world, it is still the CCD camera that gives me the most convincing balance of resolution, size, and rendering. It is also supported by a lens ecosystem that keeps my creativity alive. That matters more than people think. The slow interface, the slow writing, the weak screen, all of that becomes easier to forgive when the final image gives you exactly what you came for.

I shoot the Phase One IQ180 because it is, by far, the most professional CCD camera I own. Not only in the CCD world, but in general. Paired with the XF body, it feels modern enough to work seriously with. It has autofocus. It has real system depth. It gives access to leaf shutter lenses, flash control, and all the things that make a camera more than just a beautiful sensor in a box. Yes, it offers live view, but in practice that feature is barely usable. That is part of the compromise. But the image quality is so strong that I can live with it. It is one of the few cameras I own that I truly would not want to be without.

So in the end, my own choices follow the same logic as this guide.

I did not choose these cameras because they are perfect. I chose them because each one gives me something I could not find elsewhere. The M9 gives me the rendering and the lens freedom I had been missing. The IQ180 gives me the same emotional pull at a much higher level of image quality. And the 1D reminds me where part of this story began.

That is why my own CCD world is still centered around Canon, Leica, and Phase One. I have some insight into Hasselblad as well because my friend shoots a H3D-39, but beyond that my own horizon gets narrower quite quickly. There are still cameras that interest me from a distance, like the Fuji S5 Pro or the Nikon D200, but without a lens system already waiting for them, I have always passed them by.

I would love to hear where your own CCD path leads.

Which CCD cameras do you use today? Which ones are still on your wish list? And which models do you think deserve more attention than they get?

Leave a comment and tell me what I have missed.

But sometimes that is not what you need.

Sometimes you do not want to carry external drives. You do not want video files. You do not want the whole archive. You only want a light machine, a short trip, a few synced collections, and the freedom to check your files properly when the day is done.

That is where this second workflow comes in.

It lives partly in Lightroom Classic and partly in the Adobe cloud. It is not as obvious. Adobe does not really lay it out for you. But once you see it, it makes a lot of sense.

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The whole problem starts with Smart Previews!

When you sync a collection from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC on a laptop, or to an iPad, Lightroom usually does not send the real RAW files. It sends Smart Previews. Those are fine for many things. You can rate, sort, edit, and work on the road without much trouble.

But Smart Previews are not enough when you want to judge sharpness and detail for real.

Modern sensors give you a lot of resolution. A lot of detail. A lot of truth. If an eye is just slightly soft, if the focus sits on the lashes instead of the iris, if the frame moved a little in low light, Smart Previews can hide that from you. They are too small. At some point you are no longer judging the image. You are judging a version of the image.

And that is not the same thing.

So the obvious wish is simple. You want the synced collection on your laptop or iPad, but you also want the real RAW files behind it. Not later. Not at home. Right there on the road.

Adobe does allow RAW files in the cloud, but only in the direction Adobe prefers.

If you import your shoot into Lightroom, the cloud based app, on a laptop, iPad, or phone, Lightroom uploads the RAWs to the cloud. Lightroom Classic on the main computer can then download them. That works. It is clean. It is the official path.

But there is a catch.

If the shoot starts at home on the main workstation and you import it into Lightroom Classic first, Adobe does not want you to push those RAW files back up from Classic into the cloud. Classic will sync the collection, yes, but only as Smart Previews. Not as full RAWs.

That means a home shoot, or any shoot first handled on the main machine, stays trapped in this half state. Available on the laptop, yes. But not in full resolution.

And that was the part that bothered me.

I knew there had to be a way around it.

I found a YouTube video from Florian Froschmayer, a creator who showed a clever solution on Mac.

His method was simple. He used Lightroom Classic and Lightroom on the same main computer. First he synced the collection from Classic, so the Smart Previews appeared in Lightroom. Then he took the original RAW files and simply dragged them into Lightroom. Lightroom recognized them, matched them to the existing synced collection, and uploaded the real files to the cloud.

That way the RAWs became available on the laptop, on the iPad, and anywhere else Lightroom was installed.

A neat trick. Clean and elegant.

Only one problem. On Windows, that exact drag and drop workflow does not behave the same way.

So I tested further.

The good news is this. The method still works on Windows. It just needs one extra step.

The setup is simple. Your main computer has both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom installed. Your second device is a laptop, or an iPad, or even an iPhone if you enable full resolution downloads in the settings.

First, you import and organize everything on the main computer in Lightroom Classic, just as usual.

Then you sync the collection from Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic sends up the Smart Previews. Lightroom on that same main computer downloads and shows the synced collection.

What comes next is the weak point of the whole system.

At first glance, the synced files look fine in Lightroom. In single image view, they seem clean enough to work with. But the illusion breaks the moment you zoom in. Since these are only Smart Previews, the resolution is reduced, and the 100% view is not a real 100% view of the original file. It turns visibly pixelated.

That is the problem. You can get a general impression, but you cannot judge sharpness with full confidence. Not on the eyelashes. Not on the iris. Not on the fine edge where focus either lands or misses. For quick edits, Smart Previews are good enough. For critical image selection, they are not.

At that point, on Windows, you do not drag the files onto the app icon like on Mac. Instead, you open Lightroom itself, choose Add Photos, go to the folder where the original RAW files live, select the images, and add them there.

That is the key step.

If the collection already exists through sync, and the RAW files come from that same main machine, Lightroom is smart enough to match them to the existing collection instead of making duplicates. It simply upgrades the cloud version from Smart Preview to real RAW.

And once that happens, the job is done.

The RAW files upload to the cloud. Your laptop gets access to the full files. Your iPad gets access to the full files. Even your phone can get them if you let it. You can zoom in properly. You can judge sharpness honestly. You can travel light and still see the truth in your files.

On Apple devices, there is one more small but important step. If you want the full RAW file to download onto an iPhone or iPad, you need to disable the option that downloads images only in reduced resolution. Once that is turned off, Lightroom can pull the original file onto the device. On the iPhone this feels a little excessive, but on the iPad it makes real sense. The larger, sharper screen benefits from it immediately, and judging details becomes far more comfortable.

There is a cost, of course. Full RAW files eat through storage quickly. The standard 100 GB of Adobe cloud space fills up fast, and on Apple devices that storage is expensive too. So the workflow is excellent, but only if you keep one eye on available space.

There is one warning, and it matters.

This only stays clean if the whole process begins on the same main computer.
If you import in Lightroom Classic on one machine, then later try to assign the RAWs inside Lightroom on another computer, duplicates can appear. That is where things get messy. Then Lightroom stops being elegant and starts being Adobe.

So the rule is simple. Build the collection on the main system. Sync it there. Add the RAWs there. Let the cloud do the rest.

For a short trip, this is a very good setup.

You do not need to carry external SSDs just to check focus. You do not need the whole archive. You do not need a heavy bag for a light job. You sync the collections you want, let the main machine push the RAWs into the cloud, and take the laptop or iPad with you. That is enough.

Not for every trip. Not for every job. But for the right kind of travel, it is a strong little system.

And sometimes that is all you need.

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Reflections

What I like about this workflow is the freedom in it. I can take only the laptop, leave the rest behind, and still work on the full resolution RAW files. That matters. After a long winter, a change of scene is sometimes not a luxury but a necessity. A table in a café. A chair in the garden. A few quiet hours away from the desk. This setup makes that easy. It keeps the kit light, but it does not force me to work blind. Smart Previews are useful. Full RAWs are better. When I sit down to edit, I want the real file in front of me.

Conclusion

If you want the short version, this is the workflow step by step:

• Use your main computer with both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom installed

• Import and organize the shoot in Lightroom Classic as usual

• Create the collection in Lightroom Classic

• Sync that collection from Lightroom Classic to the Adobe cloud

• Wait until the Smart Previews are fully synced

• Open Lightroom on that same main computer

• Let Lightroom download and display the synced collection

• Open the collection in Lightroom

• Click Add Photos

• Go to the folder on your drive where the original RAW files are stored

• Select the RAW files that belong to that synced collection

• Add them inside Lightroom

• Let Lightroom upload those full RAW files to the cloud

• Wait until the sync is finished

• Check the sync status panel to confirm that the original files are available locally and in the cloud

• Open Lightroom on your laptop, iPad, or even iPhone if full resolution downloads are enabled

• Let the device download the synced originals

• Now you can work with the full resolution RAWs and use a real 100% view for sharpness checks

And one rule matters most:

• Do the whole process from the same main computer if you want to avoid duplicates

There is no model in the frame. No street at blue hour. No old lens wide open. It is still the work that makes the work possible. The quiet part. The part that saves time, nerves, and bad decisions on long days.

It is about using the same Adobe Lightroom Classic catalog on two Windows computers.

I have worked with Lightroom since version 2, back in 2008. Back then it was not even called Lightroom Classic. It was just Lightroom, because there was only one. No web version. No mobile version. No cloud workflow trying to look modern and clean while sending you around corners to find the tools you need.

Later Adobe added more. Lightroom Mobile came along. Lightroom CC came later too. Every time I was curious. Every time I hoped this would finally be the solution. Every time I ended up disappointed.

The synced Smart Previews are too limited for serious sharpness checks. The handling feels awkward if you grew up with old Lightroom. Functions are there, but they live in different places. The layout does not feel like Classic. It feels like speaking a language that has the right words but the wrong rhythm.

So I stayed with Lightroom Classic.

And in 2018 I built my own workflow. A simple one. Practical. Fast. It lets me work on the same catalog with my workstation and my laptop. Not at the same time, of course. But back and forth, it works beautifully.

It has done so for almost ten years.

Anyone who travels a lot will know the problem. The real data sits at home on the workstation. The edits are there. The folder structure is there. The previews are there. Then you leave with the laptop. Maybe you are only in the studio for a tethered shoot. Maybe you are on the road for three days. Either way, at some point you need the same work environment on the other machine.

Yes, you can export a catalog and import it again later. Yes, that works. But it is slow. It breaks the flow. It feels like packing your whole desk into boxes every time you want to move to the next room.

So this article is about a better way.

I am writing this from the perspective of Windows. I do not use Mac, so I cannot say with confidence how well the same method works there. My guess is that the principle stays the same and only the file paths change. The software exists for both platforms. That part is easy.

Before we start, one thing matters: Lightroom Classic is database-based.

That means the catalog file alone is not enough.

If you want to move from one computer to the other and keep working without delay, you need more than the main catalog. You also need the previews. Smart Previews, and in some cases 1:1 previews too. On top of that, you need the sync data. If you skip that, the online collection sync through Adobe Cloud can run into trouble.

The previews matter because you do not want the second computer rebuilding them all over again. That is wasted time. The sync data matters because even if I do not enjoy working in the mobile apps, I still keep some collections synced there. It is useful when a client wants to see something on short notice. For that, the sync needs to stay intact.

Once you know where all that data lives, the most obvious solution is to simply copy it from the workstation to the laptop and back again.

That works, but only up to a point.

The problem is backup and conflict. If you accidentally change something on both computers before syncing, then you have two realities. Two versions of the same world. Then you must choose one and lose the other, or spend extra time merging the work.

That is why I use a NAS as neutral ground.

When the data is synchronized through the NAS, there is always an untouched version sitting there between both machines. And if I ever do make the mistake of editing on both computers without syncing first, I can still recover the work. It is clumsy, but possible. I export the changed work from each machine as a catalog, then import both into the neutral master catalog. It is not elegant. But it saves you when you make the mistake once.

And you will probably only make that mistake once.

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In normal everyday use, the workflow is simple.

Catalog, previews, sync data from the workstation to the NAS. Then from the NAS to the laptop. Off to the studio. Shoot tethered. Cull. Rate. Adjust. Then later do the same in reverse. Add the newly shot RAWs, and within minutes I can continue on the workstation exactly where I left off.

When I say minutes, I mean it.

I run a 10 Gbit network and fast NVMe drives in both computers and in the NAS. Syncing about 400,000 files takes roughly one minute, plus the copy time for whatever new or changed data exists. Do that twice, once to the NAS and once from the NAS, and I am usually done in around five minutes.

That sounds like a crazy number of files, but in database terms it is not much. Think of a catalog with 50,000 photos. Then add entries for edits, previews, smart previews, and all the little things Lightroom needs. If you clear the cache from time to time, the file count drops again.

The job itself is done by Syncovery.

To be clear, I am not sponsored. Nobody asked me to say its name. I mention it because it has done this job for years without drama, and because it is the heart of the whole workflow.

Syncovery exists for Windows and Mac. There is a 30-day trial, so anyone who wants to test the idea can do that first. If it works for you, the Professional Edition is a one-time purchase. For me, it has long since paid for itself.

I use three jobs.

The first one is for Camera Raw Settings.

That job syncs the Camera Raw settings from the Adobe folder. Why does that matter? Because presets live there. If I create a preset on one machine, I want it on the other one too, without needing to think about it. This takes care of that.

The second job is the Lightroom database itself.

This is the important one. It includes the backups Lightroom creates automatically, the cache, the helper data, the previews, the smart previews, the sync container, the catalog data, the Lightroom settings folder, and of course the catalog file itself.

In my case I also included two extra folders called Looks and Premiere Videos. Those are my own folders. They do not belong to Lightroom, but I wanted them traveling with the same workflow.

The third job is for the RAW files.

Simple enough. The name says what it does.

The good news is that nobody has to rebuild these jobs from scratch. I will include the Syncovery profile data for download at the end, so all you have to do is open the profiles and adjust the paths.

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That would already be useful. But the real magic sits somewhere else.

The most important feature in Syncovery is called Smart Tracking.

It does not just look for changed files. It can also detect moved files. So the whole catalog is not copied every time. Only the files that changed are transferred. If a file was moved, it is moved on the other side too instead of being copied as something new. That saves time, and a lot of it.

Smart Tracking also works in both directions. From computer to NAS and from NAS back to computer. In normal use that makes the whole system very safe. I have had no real trouble with it over the years. The only moment it stops is when a file was changed on both sides. Then Syncovery shows the file information and asks which version should win.

That is exactly what you want.

There is one thing Lightroom Classic absolutely depends on, though.

The folder structure and storage paths must be the same on both computers.

That part is not optional.

If your RAW files live on this path on the workstation:

E:\Cat1-2\Photos\Digital\2026\

Then they must live on exactly that same path on the laptop. Otherwise Lightroom will not find them. It does not care that the file exists somewhere else. It wants the path it knows.

That may mean changing drive letters in advance. It may mean creating an extra partition. That sounds more dramatic than it is.

My solution is simple. Both my workstation and my laptop have a 500 GB partition for the catalog, previews, and cache. That is drive F: and I call it Lr Database. Then there is another partition for the RAW files. That is drive E: and I call it RAWs intern.

Once that is set up, Lightroom behaves exactly the same on both machines.

In theory this may sound difficult. In practice it is not.

You spend one or two hours once. You figure out which data matters. You find the storage locations. You set up the jobs. After that it becomes routine. The principle is simple, and once it is in place it feels almost automatic.

The one real rule is this:

Never open Lightroom on the workstation and on the laptop without syncing first!

If you do, you buy yourself an extra hour of work.

That happens once. Then you remember.

I explained this with a workstation and a laptop, but the same method also works with two desktop machines. For example, if you split your time between two homes. In that case you might need VPN access to the NAS, or you may replace the NAS with an external SSD.

That is another good option. An SSD can become your transport layer. Fast, simple, easy to carry. It lets the catalog travel without carrying the whole computer.

So what are the alternatives?

Over the years I have thought about that a lot.

Some friends keep the catalog and the RAW files on an external SSD. That works, but it also tends to create trouble. At least the catalog itself should live on an internal drive. Otherwise Lightroom Classic can become unreliable, and in general the IOPS over USB are lower than with an internal drive. That makes the catalog feel slower in daily use.

I am also simply not a fan of external USB drives. I prefer the clean internal solution. On my Windows laptop that is manageable. In the Apple world it can get expensive very fast.

Another colleague syncs his catalog through Google Drive. That works well for him. The weakness is speed. It depends entirely on the internet connection, and that means waiting.

Another path is to stay fully inside Adobe’s ecosystem. Use Lightroom Classic on the main machine, then Lightroom CC or Mobile on the devices you take with you. For me that is not enough. At home I want the speed of a real workstation. And in the studio, when I shoot tethered, I want a laptop that can run the real Classic catalog, not a cloud-shaped compromise.

So yes, there are different roads to the same place.

This is simply mine.

I have passed this workflow on to a few photographer friends over the years, and they were grateful for it. They do not forget backups anymore. They have their data with them on the road. And if the laptop dies during a trip, a copy still waits safely at home.

That matters.

Because most of the time, efficiency is not some cold business word. It is stolen time returned to you. Time you can spend with the camera in your hand instead of with your eyes on a progress bar.

And right now that feels fitting.

The light outside still does not matter much. Spring has not fully arrived yet. So this is the right season to fix the workflow, clean the machine room, and get ready. Summer will come soon enough. When it does, I would rather spend my hours making pictures than moving folders around like a clerk.

The reason for writing this article now is simple. I recently put a new laptop into service, and this workflow made that transition easy again. Syncovery helped there too. Unlike the normal Windows File Explorer, it can copy many files at the same time. I set mine to 30 parallel files. A modern NVMe SSD handles that easily, and it is enough to saturate a 10 Gbit connection.

At the end of the article I will provide the profile data for download:

Workstation <-> NAS

NAS <-> Laptop

Just remember one thing before the first sync: adjust all source and destination paths on both sides before you start.

After that, it is simple.

And once it works, it feels a little like cheating.

Have fun using it.

Not for street photography. Not for landscapes. That is too easy.

The real question is this: Can a Leica IIIa from 1936 still be used seriously for model photography?

I have owned my Leica IIIa for about two years now. It has already traveled with me more than once. If you have been reading along here for a while, you have seen it before. In Paris, where it came with me into the streets. In Gdansk, where it looked at the docks. On Lanzarote, where it got its first taste of model photography. You could say we have become friends.

To get there, I had to accept a few things.

I had to get used to the two little windows on the back. One to focus. One to compose. I had to get used to trimming the film leader with scissors before loading it. I had to accept that the built-in finder feels more like 40mm than 50mm. None of that is hard, but none of it is modern either.

Still, there are things about the Leica IIIa that are hard not to love. The rangefinder is very precise. The magnification is good. The camera is tiny. It disappears in the hand. It works quietly. In fact, it may have the softest shutter sound I know. It never announces itself.

The full mechanical design also comes with both comfort and trouble. On the good side, the battery is never empty because there is no battery. There is no electronics to fail because there are no electronics. On the bad side, there is no meter either. No selenium cell. No battery-powered meter. Nothing. Just shutter speeds, aperture, focus, and your own judgment.

That can be a real problem in a fast model photography workflow.

An external light meter means one more device. One more thing to carry. One more thing to take out, check, put away, and walk back and forth with. Metering with a digital camera and copying the settings works very well, especially with flash. But I can not use flash with the Leica IIIa. It does not even have a PC sync port. So that route was out.

After quite a bit of searching and testing, I found the solution that works best for me: the LightMate Air Pro.

It is a small cold shoe mounted meter with a built-in battery and USB-C charging. That alone makes it travel-friendly. It sits low on the camera, and the mount can be attached in three positions, so it does not block the controls. The three dials make it quick to use. Fast matters. The little screen can even show a simple exposure scale, which makes it easy to overexpose or underexpose with intent. You can see at a glance how far off you are.

It also lets you set an offset in case the factory calibration is off, or if the cell should drift over time. I think the second case is unlikely, but the option is there. I own a black one and a silver one, and both of mine have been accurate. That was not the case with the TTArtisan meter I had before. That one offered no offset function. I also had a Voigtländer VC Meter II. It worked, but it ran on a button cell and had no power switch. If the meter button was pressed by accident in the bag, the battery drained. The dials also had no clicks, which meant the settings could shift without you noticing.

Nothing here is sponsored. I bought all of it myself. I am only sharing what worked for me.

If the cold shoe on the Leica III is already occupied by an accessory finder, I wear the meter on a lanyard so it is always ready. That works well enough too.

This is a lot of text about a light meter before even getting to the camera itself. But to be honest, I think it matters. If you want to have a good experience with a Leica III today, especially for model photography, a meter like this makes a real difference.

Beyond that, there is not much else you need. Just a small pair of scissors.

That sounds ridiculous until you own one.

The scissors are only there to trim the film leader into the right shape so it can be loaded. That is all. The only important thing is that they are small enough not to get taken away by airport security.

And then you are ready.

To set the mood, this post belongs to a shoot in Pilsen, Czech Republic, at the end of January. I used the Leica IIIa heavily there alongside the Leica M9. We shot with LED light, moved between hotel room, staircase, city streets, and later snow-covered corners of town. The full report with the digital work already exists here. This piece is about the analog side of that weekend. About the Leica IIIa.

We photographed across three days with five models. Jolana, Adele, Natalia, Kristyna, and Sofia. was there too. He is the reason I started looking at the Leica III years ago in the first place. Thanks for that.

I tried to make life as easy as possible. Camera changes can break the flow of a shoot, and that matters more with film. So I packed only two Leica Thread Mount lenses: a 35mm f2 8E from Light Lens Lab and a 50mm f2 Elcan, also from Light Lens Lab.

Both lenses offer a more modern rendering than lenses from the Leica III era. Wide open, they are much sharper than an old Elmar, Summar, or Summitar. Their coatings also help with contrast and backlight. But they still have character. They are not sterile. They do not feel like clinical modern optics. That matters to me too.

There was another reason for those focal lengths. The finder in the Leica IIIa behaves more like a 40mm finder than a 50mm one. That means I can mentally frame both 35mm and 50mm without needing a separate external finder. Thirty-five is a bit wider than what I see. Fifty is a bit tighter. It works surprisingly well.

The first evening in Prague was hard.

I did not know what to expect. I had Portra 400 and Portra 800 in my bag, with one roll of each pre-cut for quick loading. It got dark fast. Our locations were lit only by shop windows and street lamps. At a huge green wooden door, I loaded Portra 800 without thinking too much. On the M9 screen, the image looked promising.

I had told Jolana to take one step back so there would be more light on her face. That was the mistake. Without the green door close behind her, the frame lost its structure. She floats in space. The color contrast falls apart. The image never finds harmony.

At the next spot, I got hit again. Jolana leaned against a shop window with LED lighting inside. It looked beautiful. It was not flicker-free. Twice I released the shutter at exactly the wrong moment and caught the dark phase. Not the start I wanted.

Of course I did not know that at the time. I only saw it later while scanning. While shooting, I was still confident. In my head, the door shots worked. The window shots worked too. That is one of the cruel little games of film. You carry your hope for days.

We finished that evening at a temporary ice rink in the town square. Strings of lights hung above it, and of course they looked good. Portra 800 even gave a slight halation around some of the old-style bulbs.

That was more like it. The light in the face was a bit flat, but I liked the tonality and the depth. My favorite frame from that little set may actually be a making-of shot of Matt and Jolana. Still, the film told me enough. Portra 800 handles color and contrast very well. The Leica IIIa also does its job without complaint, even in the cold. Focusing is easy enough. The rangefinder magnification helps, even if the rangefinder window itself is smaller than on an M camera. The lenses performed exactly as I hoped.

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The next day we were in the hotel room with Adele.

Same setup. Portra 800. Leica IIIa. 35mm f2 and 50mm f2. This time we used various LED lights and modifiers, which made life easier. The light was under control. Adele helped too. She dances, and you can feel it. She knows her body. She can hold a pose a little longer, which matters when you are working with an old camera and moving slower than usual.

Because yes, the Leica IIIa is slower.

Even though I shoot a lot with the M9, the IIIa still slows me down. It asks for it. There is also the cost. One frame on Portra 800, including development but without scanning, comes out to around 0.75 euros for me. That changes your hand. You become more selective. More careful before pressing the shutter.

There is also something else. With a digital file, I do not mind retouching small mistakes. A stray hair. A mascara smudge. A tiny distraction. With film, I want the picture to be finished the moment I press the shutter. If something is wrong later, it bothers me. Maybe that is a flaw in me. But it is there.

We began at the window. I think film handles mixed light more gracefully than digital. It feels less like an error. Less harsh. So I like to play with it. Bi-color LEDs are perfect for that. Turn the Kelvin down and the effect grows. I still try to keep it subtle.

Later Adele posed at the small desk in the room. Daylight was less important there because the window was too far away. I shot both of those setups with the 35mm because space was tight. For the last set on the bed, I switched back to the 50mm to get more depth. There was still a little help from the window. On the left side of her hair, you can see a cool blue shimmer from the daylight.

This was my favorite set of the weekend.

Adele could pose in the center of the bed while I stepped back just enough. That gave the frame real depth. I love the pose where she supports herself on her hands and knees. It naturally brings her toward the camera. She raises one shoulder slightly, and that adds intimacy without trying too hard. Portra 800 renders skin beautifully, and because the LED was set a little warmer, her cheeks picked up a soft, glowing tone.

That was our last set for Saturday. Adele had to leave. Matt and I walked the city with our cameras, but I saved film and shot only digital.

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Sunday morning began early. After a long breakfast, we went straight back to work. Over breakfast, Matt pushed me to shoot more film. He had already been working a lot on film himself, even with old Kodak Vision3 stock. So I decided to lean into it.

Matt started with Jolana and later Natalia. When Natalia arrived, he continued with her, and I took Jolana into the bedroom. I was still thinking about the photos with Adele from the day before. The white bed sheet made it easy to build a flattering portrait light. Jolana knelt in front of the bed, elbows resting on it. I used blankets to frame her from both sides and keep distractions out of the image.

Those bed shots worked better for me digitally. I actually like the film pictures too, but the color mood was not what I had imagined. I think a good black and white film might have done even better there.

At the window, though, I found the look again.

Jolana sat on the deep windowsill. The red curtain gave her support, and the transparent curtain was perfect to play with. At the end, we pulled the curtain almost fully behind her so that only a little side light slipped through. That gave her a faint contour and made the light slightly harder. It turned into a stage look.

Up to that point I had photographed everything with the 50mm Elcan. When Kristyna arrived, we moved to the staircase. There we had space, silence, and very little light. It was one of those big old central hotel staircases. Red velour everywhere. Dim light. Strong mood.

Kristyna looked great in black trousers and heels. The cut of the trousers and the heels made her already long legs look even longer. The warm golden light caught in her blonde hair.

I photographed Jolana there too, though mostly digital because I had finished the roll by then.

Then Sofia arrived.

She had made a little time for us, even though she really should have been studying for exams the next week. An hour or two, she said. It was worth it.

Matt started with her first. She wore a black blazer, a red headscarf, and red leather gloves. It looked fantastic. As if an old Aston Martin were parked right outside the hotel. We took over the couch in the room. The vintage feel of the couch and wallpaper matched perfectly. The blazer, however, was too dark. Without the blazer, the gloves lost their meaning. Without both, it became perfect. Sofia’s blue eyes stood out more. The red lipstick helped. The cool daylight from the window helped even more.

By then I had already shot my last roll of Portra 800, so I switched to Portra 400.

This part of the room gave us much more space. It made lighting easy. I could go back to the 50mm and enjoy a little more compression and depth. One good thing about the 50mm Elcan is its close focus. On modern cameras it focuses down to 0.7m. Even on the Leica IIIa it still works reliably down to about 0.9m, and the focus is dead on.

Carried by that same mood, we picked a casual outfit for Kristyna and placed her on the couch too. This time she sat on the backrest in a cool pose, turned just enough to catch some cool side light from the window.

That was the last set of the day. Matt and I walked to the station afterward just to stretch our legs. I shot only digital and let my mind breathe. Then we ended early because there was a good chance of snow the next morning.

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So the next day we were outside again at seven in the morning, before breakfast, with frozen fingers and cameras in our bags. This time the Leica IIIa came with me again, along with another roll of Portra 400.

Pilsen is beautiful in the snow.

The tram is the obvious star. It looks good in the blue early light with its lamps on, and it looks good later when its color stands out more clearly. But the public laundry place fascinates me too. Just washing machines standing outside, almost like an object from another time. We do not really have that in Germany. To me it feels almost American. I have photographed those machines more than once by now, but I have still never seen anyone using them.

By breakfast time we were already deeply cold. That takes more than coffee to fix, but coffee helped. Then we packed all the equipment, carried it to the car, and drove to Prague. Matt had a late flight, which gave us a free day there. I still had about half a roll of Portra 400 left to shoot.

Prague is always beautiful. During the day too. But at night it is another thing entirely, as we had already learned on Friday with Jolana. Later that evening there was a little sleet, and the polished cobblestones reflected every light in the city.

That was the end of the trip for my 90-year-old Leica IIIa. Matt flew back to London. I drove home, packed my exposed film into a box, and sent it to my trusted lab, Bilderfürst in Fürth.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

• Cameras:

Leica IIIa with Portra 800 / Portra 400

• Lenses:

35mm f2 Light Lens Lab collapsible LTM
50mm f2 Light Lens Lab Elcan LTM

• Light Sources:

2x 100W bi-color LED
2x 40W RGB LED SmallRig
2x 25W RGB LED SmallRig
With light modifiers and a gobo attachment

The biggest challenge was the lack of light. Even at ISO 800 and f2, I was rarely getting shutter speeds faster than 1/100 second. With Portra 400 it got tighter still. That is where old cameras stop being romantic and start being real.

Reflections

What stayed with me most was not only how well the Leica IIIa still works, but how people react when they learn its age.

The models are always surprised. Then curious. Then a little charmed by it.

Adele loved holding it. She treated it like a small jewel. A little machine from a different world. When I explained how focusing works and how you compose with separate windows, she seemed to understand it almost instantly. So I handed her the camera. I wound it, told her to take a picture, and watched her face when she heard that short, rich click and felt the tiny vibration in her hand. She smiled.

That was a good moment.

It reminded me that even the next generation can still be fascinated by a Leica III. It is small. Simple. Honest. It does only the essential things, and it does them well. There is something beautiful in that.

For me, the bigger realization was this: I do not really miss much when I use it. I have good lenses. Focus is accurate. The camera goes up to 1/1000 second, which is enough in most situations. The one thing I genuinely miss for model photography is flash sync. Especially when I fly and want to use small flash units instead of larger LED setups. In that case, the Leica IIIa becomes less practical.

But aside from that, it is still very much a working camera.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite image came with Natalia.

I did not really cover her set above because it was only one frame on film. I had one shot left on the roll, and Natalia had already stayed about fifteen minutes longer than planned. When I picked up the Leica IIIa, I could make exactly one exposure before the film was finished. Rewinding, trimming a new roll, and loading it again would have broken the rhythm too much, so I shot the rest digitally.

Still, that one frame was enough.

Not only because it became the only film shot of the set, but because Natalia looks fantastic in it. Leaning casually against the window ledge, thumbs hooked into her pockets. Her head tilted in a way that feels both curious and sharp. Her mouth slightly open. The lip gloss catching the light. It has ease and tension at the same time.

That was the frame I did not plan for and would not want to lose.

What I’d do differently:

Next time I would bring more Portra 800 and pre-cut every roll before leaving home. That alone would make the whole process faster and smoother.

The fridge is already full again with the expensive Kodak stuff.

Tech Minute:

Fun fact: I bought this Leica IIIa two years ago together with a scratched 50mm f2 Summar. I think I paid less than 300 Euros for the whole package. I restored the Summar and sold it on. The Leica IIIa needed some care because the rangefinder was not calibrated correctly. I calibrated it myself, and since then it has worked well in my hands and traveled with me often.

Paris is still her favorite city, I think.

And maybe that says enough.

A camera built before the Second World War can still be used today for model photography. Not as a gimmick. Not as nostalgia. Not as a museum piece pretending to work.

It can still do the job.

Slowly, yes. With discipline, yes. With more thought and less comfort, absolutely.

But maybe that is exactly why it still matters.

“What!? Ninety years old!?”

That was Adele’s reaction when she first tried to guess the camera’s age and landed somewhere in the 1950s or 60s. I think in that split second she was doing the math in her head, measuring everything that has happened in the world since this little camera first existed.

By the end of January I was more than ready for the first shooting weekend of the year.

On Friday afternoon, January 23, I got in the car and drove to Prague. I had packed everything the night before, so all that was left was to carry the laptop bag and camera bag to the car and go. The sky was shut tight with clouds. The light was flat, dull, and cold. During the day it stayed just above freezing. At night it dropped below zero. The forecast could not make up its mind. Maybe snow, maybe not.

I had my usual gear with me, but this trip had two extra reasons to matter. One was the new Artralab 28mm f2.8, which I wanted to test properly in the field. I already wrote a separate post about that lens, because this weekend gave me the chance to push it hard. The other was a surprise for and the models. I had also rebuilt my whole lighting setup, and I was eager to see whether it would hold up under real pressure.

This time I left the flashes at home.

Instead I packed a fully LED-based kit. Two 100W bi-color Yidoblo lights formed the backbone, each with different modifiers. I brought a Fresnel lens, a softbox, and even a small gobo spot. Around those I added two 40W RGB Smallrig panels and two 25W RGB Smallrig panels, which gave us extra options for background light, edge light, or a quick accent where it was needed. The 100W lights ran from long USB-C cables and power supplies. The smaller LEDs used their internal batteries, which made them easy to place fast and without fuss. That mattered. We switched between digital and analog all weekend, and with LEDs there was no trigger swap, no waiting, no interruption. Just light and work. It turned out to be one of the best changes I have made in a long time.

I also brought new stands, the Ulanzi AT-05 and MT-80. The little MT-80 impressed me most. It is compact, stable, and easy to live with, which matters when you are hauling half a studio through hotel hallways. This is not sponsored. I paid for all of it myself. I only mention it because it worked.

Still, on the first day almost none of that gear came into play.

Prague was for walking.

Jolana and Matt had already been in the city for a day. They had shot Thursday afternoon and all through Friday. By the time I arrived, they had warmed up in a café and were ready for a few street portraits. After my three-hour drive the sun was already nearly gone. We were moving into blue hour, and Wenceslas Square gave us the kind of light that makes you forgive winter for everything else. Shop windows, signs, wet pavement, headlights, cold faces, warm colors. Prague always seems to know how to glow when the day is dying.

We used the shop windows as our main light. That always works well until it does not. You have to choose carefully. Not every bright window is good light, and not every good-looking window is safe light. I paid for that lesson again. Alongside the M9, I had brought the Leica IIIa loaded with Portra 800. The LED shop lighting I chose was apparently not flicker-free. On both key shots I hit the shutter during a dark phase. Bad luck. The film frames were lost. The digital files from the M9 were good, though, and they carried the mood of the evening.

By the time we looked up, it was dark and we had to get back on the road to Pilsen. Jolana had another appointment that evening, and Matt and I still had to check into the hotel. Friday night stayed quiet. I showed Matt the new lighting kit, ran through the pieces, and explained what did what. Since he always flies into Prague, I usually bring the lighting for both of us. There is room in the car, and it makes life easier.

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Saturday started fast.

First came the breakfast at Hotel Continental, which was good enough to feel like a reward. I had two or three coffees and began to feel human again. Then, just after nine, Adele arrived. She came in like a burst of energy and never really slowed down. For Saturday we had only one model, but Adele fills a day the way some people fill a room. She was already glowing in the lobby.

The plan was simple. We would shoot in the hotel room.

Simple can still be good. This room was very good. Matt had found us one divided into a living area and a sleeping area. In the living room stood a rust-brown couch that looked like it had been waiting since the 1970s. The wall behind it had texture. Heavy red curtains hung beside it like stage curtains. When Adele opened her suitcase and we saw a red top and red leather boots in almost the exact shade of those curtains, the room clicked into place. Even the dark red leather strap on my Leica IIIa suddenly felt like part of the set.

On the way upstairs Adele apologized for her wild hair. She said in the morning it was always a matter of luck who was in charge, her or the hair. I only smiled. I love wild hair. It moves. It breaks perfection. It makes the frame breathe.

We chose the first outfit and started.

I lit the scene with a 40cm softbox as the main light. The lamp behind Adele got help from one of the 25W LEDs to push the mood a little further. Matt used the time well and shot behind-the-scenes photos and clips, which helped us build a fuller story from the weekend.

Adele picked up my Leica IIIa as a prop, and from there we went from half-length portraits to close-ups and then wider frames. The wide shots were made with the new Artralab 28mm f2.8, and again it proved itself. Small, light, easy to carry, and more than usable at f2.8. A practical lens, but not boring. That matters.

Matt and I had agreed to work outfit by outfit, one after the other. That way we wasted less time on changing clothes and restyling. When he took over, I became the set photographer for a while. He had one advantage over me. He had not handed his film camera to the model as a prop, so he could keep shooting film. He worked the whole weekend in color, using different Kodak motion picture stocks from old freezer reserves that he had respooled himself. Very Matt. Very good.

After that I showed Adele how the Leica IIIa works, and she made a few test frames. Honestly, that camera would suit her well for documenting everyday life. We need a cheap way back into film photography. Twenty euros for a roll of Portra 400 or 800, then another twelve for development and scans, is simply too much for young creatives.

Then came the window setup.

Adele changed into black, and we moved to the window. This kind of picture always asks more of me than I expect. I have so many window portraits in my inspiration folder, and every time I try to make one, I end up wrestling with it. If the model stands with her back to the window, which should be harder, I often find the light more quickly. But if she looks out, if the window is meant to lead the scene, then I fight it. Maybe I need a bigger room. Maybe a bigger window. Maybe more sun. Maybe all of it.

Still, we made it work.

After that we shot two more outfits. One was a white top with a flat cap at the desk. The other was jeans and a cropped sweater on the bed. The desk set was wild in the best way. We let Adele go. Even before she turned around properly on the desk, the light was already good and I had to make portraits. She sat, crouched, stood, and even lay on that small desk. She gave the set more space than it had.

The bed pictures became some of my favorites from the whole weekend. The mixed light worked beautifully there. It was subtle enough not to shout, but strong enough to shape the color. Orange, red, and yellow played against blue, aquamarine, and teal. Adele posed with the same energy she had carried all morning, and I used a 25W LED low on the left to lift her figure while the large LED with the softbox shaped her face.

By early afternoon Adele had to leave. Matt and I packed up fast because we still wanted a little daylight for street work and more 28mm test shots. We walked along the river, watching for pictures. Not just strong street frames, but situations where the Artralab could show us what it could do. The gray winter day gave us very little. It was the kind of weather that makes the world seem unwilling. Still, we found enough for comparisons, then took a coffee and waited for blue hour.

Pilsen becomes another city when blue hour comes.

The old town, the cobblestones, the reflected signs, the wet ground, the neon. It all wakes up. By chance we passed a small shelter at a bus stop. The glass was cloudy and translucent. Behind it stood a police van with blue lights on. Street disco. It looked absurd and beautiful, so of course we tried to catch it. On the way back we found a street covered in strings of lights overhead.

That was the end of the photographs for the day. In the evening we sat on the couch, backed up data, and talked about our channels. Substack came up again and again. We both enjoy writing here. The community is strong. The level is high. It feels like the right place.

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Sunday morning, breakfast became ritual.

We both agreed quickly that we had no interest in going for a run. I was still fighting off a cold, and one look out the window finished the matter. Gray, cold, colorless.

At 9:30 Jolana arrived right on time. Matt was already building his light by the window. Over breakfast he had told me he wanted to try reflections from outside the window. It sounded simple. It was not simple. Our room was on the third floor. Matt sat on the windowsill, one hand bracing himself, the other around his Leica SL. The manual lens was prefocused, and he rocked slightly back and forth to bring Jolanas eyes into the plane of focus.

It looked insane.

Maybe it was.

But the results speak for themselves.

An hour later Natalia arrived. She is a good friend of Jolana and also models a lot, but she had never joined us before because she had been traveling the world. Matt continued with Natalia, and I took Jolana into the bedroom. Matt gave us his bed because it stood right at the window and the light there was good. It also gave me room to shoot across the space with longer lenses, especially the 85mm f2 Jupiter 9 on an Amedeo adapter on the M9. I like that lens because of the way it flares. If the backlight is not too hard, the contrast fades but never collapses. It goes soft in parts, not everywhere, and gives the image mystery instead of mush.

We pulled the heavy red curtain behind Jolana and tucked blankets around her to make the bed feel warm and closed in. That became her stage. She moved easily through moods, soft, playful, curious, tender. Then we kept shooting by the window. At first she wore a pink hoodie with black sport leggings. In the room, with the red curtain, it never quite settled for me. Good outfit, wrong place. We made one portrait using the dark television screen as a reflective surface, then changed the top. The leggings stayed. The new top was more elegant and shaped the body better. Suddenly it fit.

Then we swapped models and I moved on to Natalia. First at the window with the blazer. I wanted more mixed light there, something cooler, looser, less business-like. The pose had to relax. Natalia leaned back and braced herself on the windowsill. Then we tried it without the dark blazer. The white crop top and blue jeans made more sense in the room. In my head the image became clear. We used both curtains like theater curtains and framed her with them. She felt it too. The poses came alive. Her expression sharpened. Five minutes before she had to leave, I still could not let go of the television reflection idea, so I moved the light again and tried once more.

Just after noon Natalia crossed paths with Kristyna, who arrived as she was leaving. Jolana was still with us until evening. Since Jolana and Kristyna study together, they already knew each other. Matt took the chance and, after Kristyna changed into an all-black outfit, photographed the two of them together on the couch. I stole a few frames over his shoulder and made some BTS pictures.

Then Matt started with Kristyna while Jolana changed for a staircase shoot. Jolana likes those wide fabric trousers that recall men’s tailoring from the 1920s and 1930s. I like them too, as long as the cloth is not too heavy and the shape still lets the body show through. With a fitted top, it becomes a very strong look, especially in standing poses.

While we were shooting in the stairwell, Sofia arrived, the fourth and final model of the day.

Before Kristyna changed, we made staircase portraits. Sofia started with Matt. The black outfit was elegant and severe in the right way. Heels that made her long legs even longer. Trousers cut perfectly. A top with semi-transparent sleeves. A little jewelry. Finished. I had to adjust the light because that black outfit swallowed far more than Jolanas lighter look had before.

I still needed model shots for the Artralab 28mm test, so when Kristyna changed into a casual look, white tank top and skinny jeans, it felt right for the couch. Tight clothes help when the posing becomes more physical. Lying down. Climbing up. Leaning over the backrest. Nothing needs constant fixing. It frees the frame.

I was deep in the shoot when Matt came into the room and reminded me that I still had not photographed Sofia. He was right. While we were busy on the couch, Sofia had come in, and all at once the room changed.

She looked great.

A black blazer. Only a bandeau top underneath. Red leather gloves. A red headscarf. Since Matt was shooting so much color that day, red lipstick was allowed too, and it finished the outfit perfectly. Before we started portraits, we took a picture with the surprise I had brought for everyone. During Christmas our online exhibition “Light Faces Pilsen” had been up, and I had printed a catalog from it. I brought copies for Matt and for the models. They signed the books for us and for each other. Sofia was kind enough to sign our favorite image, Mona Lisa. Matt caught the moment for us.

Then we photographed the outfit on the couch. In that room the blazer was a little too much black, but without it the look opened up. The gloves had to go as well. I love photographing portraits with Sofia. Her blue eyes, the strong lines of her face, her full lips, all of it gives me room to build light in many ways. She always gives something back to the camera.

What a day it had already been, and it was not even five o’clock. Four models. Different outfits. Good energy all through it. Kristyna had even brought cupcakes. I love that. It means the day is not just a shooting day. It becomes a shared day.

Matt and I ate quickly and went back out for blue hour at the station. Lights, people, trains. Good light there, and also on the walk back into town.

That ended Sunday. We backed up data again, and I finally gave myself a beer.

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Good thing we went to bed early, because on Monday morning Matt woke me before breakfast with a grin already on his face.

It’s snowing.

That was enough.

Out of bed. Into clothes. Into the street.

It was the first time I had seen Pilsen freshly dusted with snow. We had seen snow on earlier trips, but never this kind of new snow. It was worth every bit of effort. Pilsen is beautiful in snow.

We went first to the station and later into the center. At the station the trains still were not snowy enough. In town it was better. Tire tracks cut lines through the white streets. Every colored jacket looked twice as vivid. Every lamp, every neon sign, every warm window felt stronger against the snow.

Then back to the hotel. Coffee. Somehow I was still not fully awake. Breakfast and a third cappuccino fixed that. We asked the hotel director whether we could photograph the beautiful breakfast room. He said yes without hesitation.

Before we checked out and drove to Prague, Matt and I made quick portraits of each other. I was not the only one carrying a surprise that weekend. He had brought me four of his newest books as Christmas gifts, two copies of Girls on Film, Leica SL Girls, and Travel Memories. Beautiful books. I think most of them are sold out by now, but maybe he still has a few left.

In Prague we had time this round because Matt had booked a late flight. We started at Coffee Factory with what was, for me at least, a second breakfast. Matt refused the sugar shock.

Then we went to Foto Skoda, and that visit turned out very well for both of us. Matt bought a Canon LTM 100mm f3.5, which he has since tested properly and even made a YouTube video about. I found a Contax IIa with a Zeiss Opton Sonnar 50mm f1.5 in nearly mint condition. The camera really looks new, and it works that way too. I am curious how it will compare to the Leica IIIa, especially since I already have several Contax RF mount lenses.

From there we went on to the Leica Gallery. We had barely arrived when Matt checked Instagram and said someone had seen his post and wanted to meet him. Perfect. He replied that we would be in the gallery a little longer, and soon Ondrej Tojan joined us for coffee. He is a young street and reportage photographer from Prague, already successful, already showing work, already leading workshops, and on top of that very easy to talk to. We talked about his photography and his love of Leica cameras.

Then together we walked back to Foto Skoda, where our paths split again. Ondrej needed film. We came back because Marek had returned from lunch. He runs the book section there and always has something interesting to say. I almost never leave without a book. This time I bought two.

One of them, Sex after the Velvet Revolution: The Wild Nineties by Jaroslav Kucera, means a lot to me for a personal reason. In the 1990s, when those pictures were made, I was still a child. After the border opened, my parents took me on day trips into the Czech Republic. While I walked markets with them, looked at the landscape, and watched my father buy fishing gear in Klatovy, the people living there were moving through a revolution and its aftermath in a way I could not understand then. That contrast between my memory and their reality is what makes the book so strong for me.

By then Matt and I still had a few frames left on our rolls. It was dark. It was raining. That meant Prague was ready.

We walked and shot what was left.

Then it was over. I drove Matt to the airport and started the three-hour trip home.

A gray sky. Cold days. Good people. Good work. That was the weekend.

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Cameras, Glass & Grit

• Cameras:

Leica M9-P
Leica IIIa with Portra 800 / Portra 400

• Lenses:

28mm f2.8 Artralab
28mm f2 MS-Optics
35mm f1.4 Artralab Similar
50mm f1.5 Jupiter-3+
50mm f2 collapsible Summicron (thorium glass) with close-focus goggles
85mm f2 Jupiter-9

35mm f2 Light Lens Lab collapsible LTM
50mm f2 Light Lens Lab Elcan LTM

• Light Sources:

2x 100W bi-color LED
2x 40W RGB LED SmallRig
2x 25W RGB LED SmallRig
With light modifiers and a gobo attachment

Between us there was enough character in the bag for ten weekends, but character only matters if you use it hard. That is what I liked most about this trip. Nothing stayed precious. The gear worked. It got handed around. It became prop, tool, experiment, and companion.

Reflections

The mood this time was the best we have had in Czechia so far. Better than I expected, maybe better than any of the earlier weekends. Usually the models arrive in pairs and leave in pairs. This time people overlapped. They talked, laughed, shared outfits, exchanged stories about university and exams, and turned the room into something bigger than a set. That changed everything. On a gray winter day, when the city looks almost colorless, it is not easy to find energy. But good people make the work lighter. Matt always arrives with energy. The models come in smiling and ready. When you are surrounded by people like that, the pictures begin to find you.

One small surprise stayed with me more than I expected. Kristyna brought cupcakes. A little thing. But I love that kind of gesture. It means the day is not just work. It means everyone is building the day together.

Unplanned Favorite

My unplanned favorite is Adele on the bed in the bedroom.

I think the music caught her. She stretched and moved as if she were in the middle of a dance, propped up on one arm, still half wrapped in the blanket, looking straight into the LED light. The frame is not perfectly sharp. That is exactly why it works for me. Together with the pose, the softness lets the picture move. It does not sit still. It feels like a fragment of a dance, like something seen in passing and caught just in time. That is how I would describe the whole shoot with her. Not a performance. A dance.

What I’d do differently:

Next time I would pack one or two more small LEDs. The 25W and 40W panels slowly ran down across the day, and there is almost always a moment when one more little source could add the last bit of depth, shape, or separation. Small lights do not look important when you pack, but in the room they often become the difference between good and right.

Tech Minute:

Rebuilding the LED kit was worth it.

I started the process at the end of November last year and spent time finding the right ZY-mount lights and the few modifiers available for that still relatively new mount. Accessories are still rare, so the setup took longer to finish than I expected. But now the core of it is there, and the weekend proved it.

Matt’s reaction to the little Zhiyun gobo adapter said it all. He tried it, saw how much focused light it could throw from a 100W LED, and said,

“Wow that focused light of that Gobo is amazing.”

He was right. Set to 3200K, it also gave him exactly the kind of mixed light he wanted for his Vision3 film. That small light earned its place fast.