Kodachrome
I’ve been avoiding writing this entry just because I knew the complexity of it. If my entries could be likened to a Beatles practice session, this would be the entry that McCartney referred to when he admonished George to “complicate it where it needs complications.”
About twenty-two years ago, my uncle gave my mom my grandfather’s old Leica camera. At the time, he didn’t understand the depth of my mom’s depression and inability to function. He was giving it to her, but really he was giving it to me, because when Mom received it, if only by virtue of knowing she wouldn’t use it, she subsequently handed it over to me. It’s all been really unnecessarily dramatic, as were so many things in my family, especially when it came to my mother. I don’t want to sound like I’m speaking ill of the dead, but it was just the way she was. I don’t even know that she enjoyed making things sad and dramatized, it was just her tendency.
When I first held that camera I was kind of underwhelmed. Even at that time, I suffered from my own sense of loss about everything that had transpired in my family, the disintegration and lack of communication between everyone, and my basic response was “OK, it’s an old camera — that’s cool.” I’ll add that I was intimidated by it and on some level realized the work that using it would entail. This is not a point-and-shoot camera.
I remember my uncle giving me the directions to it, which are long gone. But for reasons I will explain, the directions weren’t that much help. I’m saying this in retrospect because I don’t really remember reading the directions because I wasn’t particularly invested in using the camera, but after downloading several versions, and also taking the time to actually print the instruction manual and sit down to read it, I was only a bit less confused.
There’s a sentiment that’s common among people who already know how to use things or do things, which purports that the thing you’re trying to learn is actually really easy. I don’t know if anyone actually told me this, but my general impression was that Leica’s were an everyman camera and were easy to use, and fair enough, they’re pretty easy to use…once you know how to use them. There were several built-in presumptions I had from using modern cameras that confounded my ability to quickly learn how to use this camera. And I will say off the bat — no, this camera is not easy to use.
Let’s start with a basic presumption that I had about cameras — when you press the shutter button, the film progresses forward, enabling the next picture to be taken. Indeed, that’s part of “taking the picture”. Not so, however. I don’t know when this advancement in camera technology occurred, but it was not before the year 1940. By the way, this camera is from 1936, according to the serial number data I looked at.
This might seem really naive to someone who knows about cameras, but I’ve been using cameras all my life and as far as I knew, part of the act of taking a picture was that the film stock progresses forward one picture. As far as film cameras, I’ve used Polaroids, shitty disposable Kodaks, and my own fancier Minolta SLR camera that Mom gave me in 1997. I’ve never used a camera that didn’t do this, so when I read the part in the instructions about using a knob to progress the film, in addition to a mode that rewinds the film, I simply thought, “why would you want to manually progress the film?” Keep in mind that at this point, my impression of these old Leica “pocket” cameras was that they were the point-and-shoot cameras of their day.
On to another much more innocuous aspect of my confusion with this camera…as I mentioned, part of my self-education in Leica camera use involved simply reading the manual(s), which I thought would be possibly the most straightforward way to learn the camera, without the added modern opinions of internet denizens who know so much more than everyone else. Now, the instruction manual was pretty good, save a few innocent assumptions on the part of the writer (like not explaining that film needs to be manually progressed), but they’re written in English. All of the markings on this camera, however, are in German. I don’t know where my grandfather got it, but somehow he got a German version. On the shutter speed dial, where there would normally be a “B” setting, there is a “Z” for “zeit” — “time” in German. Also I’d just like to say that the word “time” to denote the mode that allows you to leave the shutter open as long as you want, alongside a dozen other markings which mark fractions of a second, seems strange to me. On the bottom of the camera, on the release valve thing you use to release the bottom plate are markings for “auf” and “zu”. I don’t know what those mean except that “auf” makes me think of Melissa Auf Der Maur, replacement bass player for D’arcy in the Smashing Pumpkins.
This is where everything becomes cryptic and markings like “Summar” on the lens seem like they might be another German word, but is in fact just the brand name Leica used for lenses at the time. Speaking of lenses, another thing that I was having to try to figure out was exactly what kind of lens my camera had, not because I needed to know to take the pictures, but because the manual itself was making references that I didn’t understand because it assumed that you would use one of a couple standard ones that Leicas came with at the time. As it turned out, the lens that this camera was fitted with was considered more of a portrait lens that was not standard issue for amateur photographers at the time. Nothing bad about it, but not really a general use lens. This is where the internet really came in handy as a reference guide.
About a month ago when I wrote that entry about going to a camera store, that was my attempt to get some kind of lesson from a hopefully seasoned photographer of some kind, someone who had a deep respect and reverence for the Leica lineage. Long Island’s a huge place, and I would venture to say that while maybe not as common as a Starbucks or a Walgreens, there are certainly going to be camera repair shops, right? Think again, person who’s clinging on to the past like a liferaft. I remember this kind of thing used to happen to me when I would look for instrument stores that had Fender guitars, back in the early 2000s. As if that were a tall order. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know why, but even after every clever Google search term I could muster, there was basically nothing until you get to Brooklyn, and when you drive to Brooklyn, you might as well be driving into the city at that point. So no, I was not able to glean anything from that visit. The people were nice enough, and that’s great, but the clerk knew fuck-all about my camera or how it worked, and another employee was able to help me out with the online instruction manual that I had already downloaded previously. At that point, it’s basically a choice of driving into the city and taking a day to do this, or using the resources I had to learn how to operate this camera. And by the way, this camera store was not close to where I lived. Driving there and back was roughly two hours. If you didn’t understand before, it’s probably becoming clear as to why this camera lay unused for 20 years.
So another problem I had, probably the most confusing one until I read a reference to it in the instruction manual and saw a couple youtube videos, was that the shutter speed dial would move around in a mysterious way. The film-progress dial, which was still an enigma to me at this point, is tied to the movement of the shutter speed dial, but not in a way where one moves the other, but in a way where, unless the film dial is moved to the fully progressed position, the shutter speed dial will not line up with its marker. At a certain point I was painstakingly rigging my own paper marker to lay over the shutter speed dial so that the numbers would line up with the marker. Even that is more confusing than it seems, because the shutter speed settings are not equidistant from each other, and I needed to figure out by how far the dial was moving which setting was which. This might’ve been the biggest relief really, when I found out that the shutter speed dial actually lined up correctly when the film dial was in the correct position.
Here’s another confusing thing: for whatever reason related to the logistics of the camera itself (unless it’s intentional which would be really weird to me, but what else is new), there are actually two shutter speed knobs, slow and fast. So all the speeds that people generally use (all fractions of a second), like 1/500, 1/200, 1/100, etc. are accessed via the main dial on top, but there’s another dial on the front of the camera which is honestly still mysterious to me, because the speeds did not correspond with what the directions said. At this point, I was used to the manual being slightly off with my camera because I was unable to find the manual that was specific to my model, but in this case the manual made it clear that in order to use the fast shutter speed dial correctly, the slow speed dial HAD to be set to the correct number. But the correct number on the instructions was not present on my camera. After a certain amount of confusion, I was able to deduce that that the highest number on the slow dial (which seemed arbitrary to me), needed to match the slowest speed on the high-speed shutter dial. That might’ve been more obvious if the slowest speed on the high-speed dial didn’t randomly add a “1” to the setting, and on top of that, really the actual shutter speeds on the high-speed dial only begin after the “Z”, the open shutter setting. It would make more sense for the time/zeit setting to be on the slow-speed dial, but I guess the mechanics of the camera somehow don’t allow that.
I haven’t even gone over the topic of loading the film. Compared to the mysteries already discussed, this was by far the easiest part. And it was not easy, not by modern standards. In fact, it was presumably easier back in the ’30s, when film was probably manufactured more to fit in the equipment of the time. This was its own issue, because I’m a frugal person, for reasons that anyone reading this blog regularly will understand, and I did not want to buy a new roll of film for a camera I didn’t even know how to use. I knew I had bought it (I even looked up my own history on Amazon), but I couldn’t figure out where I had put it. I brought out old boxes I had used when I moved, looked in a drawer that I pretty much knew for a fact that it wouldn’t be in, but came up dry. Anyone want to guess where I found it?
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I had apparently loaded the camera last year after watching a youtube tutorial, but forgotten I had done so. I had moved since then, so I gave myself that much credit. The weird thing is that the memory of having bought the film was stronger than the memory of loading it.
At this point, I felt compelled to re-load the camera after so much time, especially with my renewed determination to actually use the camera. Loading the camera, according to pretty much every tutorial I’ve seen, involves using scissors to re-shape the premade indentation at the leader of the film, such that something inside the camera won’t snag on it when you load it. So, mission accomplished on that one, I guess. Then you have to use the film loading/rewiding dial to put it into proper position. Then you’re supposed to check a visual cue that didn’t make sense to me in order to see that the film is properly progressing. In other words, the situation you don’t want is to have loaded the film where it’s just sitting in there not moving when you turn the film dial. The way I judged this was that I could hear that the film was moving. Whether it was moving in some improper way wasn’t clear to me, but I was pretty careful loading it so I figured it was.
I feel like so much of the preceding would’ve been solved if I had just had an instruction manual for my actual model instead of relying on similar models. After what I’ve learned, I would be fine reading those analogous manuals, but before that all the different numbers and settings made everything totally mysterious.
So now we come to actually, you know, taking pictures, which was its own learning curve. After getting back the developed pictures (really, printed from a digital representation), there were six in all that amounted to avant-garde minimalist blobs, which I asked to be subtracted from the total price, and threw away. I guess that seems harsh but they really weren’t even out-of-focus — just brown blobs, and I ended up only having to pay about $12, which makes this a sustainable hobby. And by the way, those unfocused nothing pictures were also a function of my newness to manual cameras — a few times I forgot to progress the film forward after taking a picture, and also forgot to remove the camera lens at least once.
Yes, I’m a moron, but keep in mind that if I lose the camera lens, it’s lost, and there’s no string or anything attaching it to the camera body, so I have to keep it in my pocket or something the whole time, so it behooves one to have it on the lens unless you’re literally using it. Also there are TWO distinct viewfinders in this camera, neither of which is affected by whether or not the lens cap is on, because they’re only proxies of what the lens is actually seeing. Again, I don’t remember this with my old SLR camera; I believe there was just one eyehole, which enabled focus and framing. For some reason focusing and framing are separate on this camera. The eyehole you use for focusing is distinct from the one you use to frame the picture. This was slightly fatiguing to me because I had to concentrate on keeping only one eye open while switching from one viewfinder to another. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but just something you have to get used to.
I’m going to post a few of the better pictures I got that day. This was not a good day to take pictures, as it was overcast, and it was really busy around my apartment complex for some reason, such that I felt very conspicious taking pictures with an old camera. I think people thought I was a student or something though, so no one really cared. It was frustrating though because all I wanted to do was casually walk outside and get some good pictures, but it really wasn’t possible without people doing the “oh look, there’s a person doing something, what’s he doing?” thing. I know, everybody looks at everyone, but I guess I just wanted to be able to take pictures in peace because I really didn’t know what I was doing.
The last aspect of my naivete as far as this camera was much more basic — I have no idea what settings to use for shutter speed OR aperture. I was able to notice that I used too large a setting for some of the outside pictures, but in order to really know what I did wrong or right, I would’ve had to manually jot down the settings I used for each picture, which I was not up to doing. Honestly, this whole exercise was to find out if the camera even worked, which I suspected it did, but I did not know.
Oh just as an aside, another thing I learned in this process, which was more interesting to me, is that whether a photo is color or black & white has nothing to do with the camera itself, but the film apparently. So this may seem obvious to someone reading this, but to the extent that I know anything about cameras, it’s because I really liked using a camcorder in the ’90s, and one of the big technological innovations was in the ’80s when camcorders started using three separate color sensors for their lenses. To me, this means it is the lens or something associated with the lens that enables color photography, but apparently that is not the case. So if nothing else, I now have a deeper appreciation for Paul Simon lyrics.
None of these pictures is good. The one of the train tracks is probably the best from the perspective of clarity. I put all of these photos under the plate of glass that usually is part of my nightstand, because they were all really convex without it, but because of the glass there is extra reflection, sorry.
So Medium is being a little bit difficult and auto-rotating the pictures from the way I corrected them on my PC, so I’ll just casually caption these within the main body here. [Edit: I uploaded normal ones after the fact; when I uploaded them from my phone they became randomly pixelated and looked even worse than they came out in real life] The first one is a picture of the hallway in my apartment, facing the dolphin poster I have at the end of it. The second one is of the train tracks facing east, near where I live. The third one is the view outside my window. Again none of these pictures is really great, because I honestly didn’t know what was going on inside the camera. This one for example, I took through the insect mesh of my window, where otherwise it would’ve been clearer, but I would had to have raised the camera to above my head to take it through clear glass and not know if it was in focus or not. The third one is my living room, so to speak, where I have three consecutive rock star posters.
Come to me with any questions about how to operate a Leica. I still have a lot to learn about aperture and shutter speed settings though, so ask someone else that.
I will say, in all honesty, that my skepticism toward photography as a profession has faded a bit in this process, seeing the degree of knowledge it takes to really operate a camera. Certainly before the modern era photography was obviously a legitimate craft.
