The first time I held an M6 in my hands, my
reaction was ‘ick’. Rangefinder focus, mechanical
shutter, no automated exposure, relatively primitive metering,
and you load the camera from the bottom. The lens hoods block off
part of the viewfinder, for God’s sake. Compared to the 35mm
SLR gear I was using, it seemed like it was stone age technology.
"Why would anyone want one of these things," I thought?
Besides, I was a large format photographer. Who uses a hand
camera for real photography, anyway?
Some years later, a friend put one into my
hands, and told me to borrow it for a week and to expose a lot of
film with it. I put the quirky little thing into a small camera
bag, and schlepped it around with me everywhere I went for that
week. All told, I probably exposed five rolls of film with it. At
the end of the week, I had a hard time giving it back. Within a
month, I had bought one. When I’m being good, an M6 goes
with me pretty much everywhere I go, in a little Eagle Creek bag
that holds the body and three lenses (35mm f/2.0 Summicron ASPH, 50mm F/2.0 Summicron, and either the 90mm f/2.0
Summicron or else the 75mm f/1.4 Summilux) along with half a
dozen rolls of film, all in a package that’s perhaps
10" by 6" by 4".
It can be a little difficult to see why this
quirky camera has such a passionate, devoted following. Heck, it
even looks funny. There’s no prism bulge on top. It’s
got a manual film advance, for God’s sake, and those went
out with the invention of lithium batteries.
But in use the simplicity of this camera along
with the outstanding lenses combine to make it one of those tools
where it becomes a part of you. Sure, there’s no automated
exposure control, not even aperture priority. There have been
times when I’ve realized that I’ve not been paying
attention to exposure, and then when I develop the film,
it was clear that I was adjusting – it’s just
become subconscious. The fear that I’ve not been paying
attention is similar to driving to work, and realizing upon
arriving that you don’t remember stopping for the traffic
lights. Did you run them all? No, you just did it all
automatically, without thought. The M6 is like that - a tool that
you end up manipulating to get the result you want - with all the
decisions happening at some sub-conscious level. Unlike the
super-automated SLR wonder cameras, it's a device that rewards
daily practice.
It’s unobtrusive. I don’t just
mean that it’s small, or that it’s quiet,
although it certainly qualifies on both counts. It goes
beyond small and quiet – it doesn't really look like
a serious camera, so people don’t react to it the
same way. With the 50mm Summicron on it, it looks like a
toy. Everyone knows that serious photographers use
serious cameras, which have Very Large Lenses. Ergo, this
thing must be a toy. For candid photography, this is a
distinct advantage.
It’s simple. It focuses where you
focus it. It uses the shutter speed you choose. It uses
the aperture you choose. Heck, there’s no DX code
reading, so it uses the film speed you set.
It’s not an SLR. Yes, that makes it
prey to parallax error, poor framing, and the whole set
of viewfinder problems. On the other hand, the viewfinder
is bright. The frame is indicated by bright framelines.
You’re not looking at a focusing screen, so the
whole image is in focus, all the time. You don’t
look into the viewfinder, you look through the
viewfinder. There’s a qualitative difference.
Without wanting so sound all woo-woo, the difference
changes the way you look at things.
Because the borders of the image
aren’t the borders of the viewfinder, you see
what’s just beyond the frame as well as what’s
included in it. Again, this sounds like a minor thing,
but it’s not. It’s important. You see
what’s outside the frame that you might want to
include. You see people about to enter the frame before
they do it. At first, it was distracting. Now, when I use
an SLR, I feel like I have blinders on.
Because it’s not an SLR, there’s
no mirror. No mirror means no mirror flop. No mirror flop
means next to no vibration. I’m not a surgeon, and
I’m not noted for steady hands, but I’ve pretty
routinely made exposures at 1/15th of a second
with a 90mm lens, and gotten tack sharp results. No
mirror flop means less noise, as well, and I’ve
gotten used to people asking when I’m going to take
the picture after I’ve already exposed six or eight
frames.
Because it’s not an SLR, the
viewfinder doesn’t go black when you release the
shutter. I’m not afraid of the dark, but I’ve
never cared for this mis-feature of SLRs.
Because there’s no mirror to move out
of the way, the shutter opens right when you press the
shutter release. Not half a second later, not after it
finishes focusing, or after it finishes deciding which
eye-point you’re looking at for it to use to focus,
or after it’s calculated the exposure, or any of
that protracted stuff. You press the button, the shutter
opens. Right away. If I had another dollar for every time
I’ve thought I missed that fleeting expression but
managed to get it because of the fast shutter release of
the M6, I’d have a lot more dollars.
The lenses. Oh, I love the lenses. I
won’t claim that they’re better than the Canon
lenses I use. In terms of lines/mm, MTF, all that stuff;
they are probably no better. The 90mm Summicron is OK,
not great, but OK. (The newer 90mm f/2 Summicron Aspheric
is reputed to be much better) The 50mm Summicron is
unbelievable, not because it’s sharp (although it
may well be the sharpest 35mm lens I’ve ever owned)
but because it’s, well, it’s got this look.
Call me wacky, call it the Leica look, talk to me about bokeh, I don’t care. Just don’t get between
that 50mm Summicron and me unless you want to suffer.
Fast lenses. Oh, we’re talking really
fast lenses that are really good wide open. I’m not
talking about a big, bulky zoom at f/2.8 here, I’m
talking about using the 75mm f/1.4 Summilux wide open. It
takes your breath away it’s so good. They’ll
take that lens away from me when they manage to pry my
cold, dead fingers off of it.
And then there’s the Noctilux –
50mm f/1.0. Sure, it’s big (although big on an M6 is
the same as miniscule on a modern SLR). Sure, it’s
heavy. Sure, it’s not as sharp as the 50mm f/2 Summicron. Sure, it vignettes in the corners wide open.
It doesn’t matter – it’s got it’s own
special place in my photographic world. Until you’ve
taken photographs with a lens that opens up to f/1.0 and
a body loaded with TMZ, you can’t claim to know what
available light photography is about. There's a reason why the
passionate devotees of this lens talk about 'available darkness'.
So what’s wrong with the M6? Despite my
passionate love of this thing, there are some things that drive
me nuts:
film rewind and loading: I’m
perfectly happy with the manual film advance. If I want
or need 5 fps, I use the Canon gear. If my thumb gets
tired, I can always buy an Abrahamsson Rapidwinder. The
thing I hate most is rewinding. I’m sorry, but that
cruddy little rewind crank really sucks. It always pops
out of my fingers just as I reach the end of the roll,
and then I’ve got to start over taking the slack out
of the film again. Sheesh.
Film loading is another hassle. Yes, I
know to put the camera bottom (which you take OFF the
camera to load it) in my mouth. I know the trick about
pleating the film leader. It’s still a hassle
compared to the autoloading in a modern 35mm SLR.
smudges on the viewfinder and rangefinder
windows: I admit, I’m inept. I’m absolutely
incapable of handling an M6 without getting fingerprints
on the viewfinder and rangefinder windows. Smudges on the
viewfinder window aren’t fatal but introduce
horrible flare. Smudges on the rangefinder window can
make it virtually impossible to focus. The only answer is
to carry one of those handy microfiber cleaning cloths
with you to wipe your fingerprints off the damn windows.
Even with this, under some lighting conditions,
viewfinder flare is a problem.
I confess – I’d like to have
aperture priority exposure automation. For a Leicaphile,
this is probably heresy. It’s probably a crutch, but
I find the shutter speed dial hard to adjust, and this
would help a lot. I note that on the newer M6-TTL, the
shutter speed dial is larger and turns the other way,
presumably to help address this difficulty. While this
tacit admission on the part of the Leica gnomes makes me
feel vindicated, I’m not about to trade up to an
M6-TTL just for that (although the shutter speed dial and
the newer meter readout arrangement are pretty tempting).
