I was a photojournalism student at the University of Missouri in the early ’90s when I discovered the Leica M. In contrast to the massive steel Canon and Nikon bricks we all used at the time, Leicas were small, elegant and unimposing.

Image from a fantastic New Yorker article on the Leica mystique

Despite my lavish $4,000 annual income, I vowed to acquire one. Luck would smile upon me (in the guise of a friend’s crazy photographer boyfriend) and I soon had not one, but a pair of well-used M2s.

My big Nikons (and later Canons) were the workhorses, with their choice of wide-angle and telephoto lenses, motor drives and fancy light-meters. Framing in an SLR was precise, showing you exactly where your focus was and what you would be capturing on film.

But I always had one of those little Leicas tucked away under my arm, loaded with forgiving Tri-X black-and-white film. In the large, bright viewfinder, everything appeared in sharp focus with transparent lines to show you *about* where the edges of your frame were. Focus was fast, but not precise- that’s why God made Depth of Field. There was no built-in light meter. Most of the time I’d set exposure by experience and let the film’s latitude take care of the details.

The Leicas were all about shooting fast and loose, ideal for catching quick, unguarded moments at unexpected times; the perfect tool for making pictures when you weren’t Making Pictures.

Fast forward about 10 years. Digital had finally stopped sucking and I bought a pair of Canon EOS 10d SLRs. Instantly in love with the ease of digital, my old Leicas were immediately relegated to the closet. I’ve been an digital SLR user for years now, but I’ve continued to long for that fast and loose, go-anywhere camera in digital form.

My first experiment with digital point-and-shoots (an Olympus C-5050) left me insanely frustrated. Yes, it captured beautiful images- sharp, plenty of resolution, great tonal scale. But it lacked what I consider 2 fairly critical features- the first being the ability to see what the hell your taking a picture of. The Olympus had a joke of an optical viewfinder (more of a small tunnel for aiming) and the now-standard answer of the LCD on the back of the camera. That’s great if you want to make sure you’re not cutting grandma’s head off, but even the largest P&S LCD lacks the fine detail and resolution needed to really see what your subjects are doing and what else is going on in the frame.

In an attempt to solve this problem, I found this Voigtlander hot-shoe mounted 35mm viewfinder. Like the Leica’s, the image was large, bright and detailed. The frame lines weren’t exactly precise, but close enough. Mounted in the Olympus’ hot-shoe, I thought I was finally getting somewhere. Unfortunately, I was never able to work around a second critical problem.

The single most important feature of the fast, candid camera is taking the damn picture when you press the button.  Not kinda-approximately-when-you-press-the-button-after-I-check-the-exposure,-focus,-wind,-cycle-of-the-moon,-call-your-mom-now, but NOW. The Olympus, likely in some madningly-Japanese attempt to upsell real cameras, would SOMETIMES take the picture when you pressed the button. No matter how well you set prefocus and exposure or disabled the nanny features, sometimes the camera would just think for a second or two.

The Olympus eventually ended up as a Christmas gift to my far more patient father, and I went back to my Canons.

image from DPReview

Last year, on the spur of the moment I decided I wanted a small camera to keep in my bag. I wasn’t looking for a Leica replacement, but simply something that was a) very small and b) had better resolution than my phone. After playing with about a dozen cameras, I decided on the little Canon Powershot SD1000. It was tiny, well-built and (to my shock) quite fast. It starts up almost instantly and as long as I pre-focus, the shutter lag is almost non-existent. Image quality seemed perfectly acceptable- a little noisy, contrasty and over-sharpened, but usable for the kinds of visual note-taking I intended. Alas, it too had only a tube-like optical viewfinder and no hot-shoe, so I was back to LCD framing.

Or maybe not.

I decided to bend out a bit of sheet-metal into a crude hot-shoe and super-glued it to the top of the camera. As with my Olympus experiment, the framelines aren’t exact but are surprisingly close.

I played around with the positioning of the finder on the top of the camera and eventually settled on a position slightly offset from the center of the lens. Why? So my nose could comfortably lay aside the camera.

Finally, instead of framing a shot like this:
I can frame a shot seeing this:

I replaced the hand strap with a loop of bungee cord. I can carry the camera tucked discretely under my arm but still grab it and shoot almost instantly.

The last changes I made were to the camera settings themselves. Because I have no focus confirmation in the optical finder, I turned on the “beepbeep” focus lock sound and also reactivated the fake shutter sound to get audible confirmation that the camera had in fact followed my orders to take the picture.

Also, to minimize the problems with blown highlights and over-sharpening artifacts, I rooted around and found the “color effects” menu where I found custom settings for sharpness, contrast and saturation, all of which I turned way down. It’s not perfect, but I’m now able to get very acceptable black-and-white images, like this one.

Is it perfect? No. There are loads of new options out there to replace my old M2s, including an actual digital Leica M and I may eventually buy into one of them. But for now (and for relatively little money) I’ve got a happy little solution for fast and light picture making.

This is kind of a strange post, but I sometimes find spitting things out all organized-like helps me think…

I’ve been a professional photojournalist for many years (though I’ve been promoted beyond my personal point of incompetence and rarely shoot for work any more). I was lucky enough to begin my career shooting film and was trained not only in 35mm but medium and large format. I’ve also experienced the birth of digital photography first hand: my first copy of Photshop was version 1.0 and came on a single floppy disk. I was lucky enough to experience the best of both worlds from the very beginning of my career.

All of our work now, of course, is digital. Even in my private work, I find very little reason to shoot 35mm film, though I do maintain a fondness for the extremely wide tonal latitude of B+W film.

Over the years, as digital has gotten better and better, I’ve sold off virtually all of my film equipment– EOS film bodies first, a few medium format cameras, my Leicas and both of my 4×5 view cameras (a cheapish monorail and a fantastic Super Graphic). I still have a single EOS1n dedicated to shooting Illford XP2 film, but the digital Canon 5d’s I use now are absolutely without question the finest hand-held cameras I’ve ever used, period. Image quality is stunning, and the digital work flow is, at least for me, a dream. The quality, combined with the ease and speed of digital work flow, has pulled me away from film almost entirely.

About 6 months ago, we had our first child, a daughter. As any doting father, much less a recovering professional photographer, I’ve shot literally tens of thousands of images of her already, almost all digital. With digital cameras, I’m shooting with wild and liberating abandon. But I’ve started to grown less than completely satisfied, not just with the end product but the process itself.

Everything she does for the first time (or last time) reminds me of how fleeting life is. Quickly made digital images, no matter how technically perfect, seem inadequate to capture not just her changing life but the world around me. The small, fast camera will always be a constant companion, but I want more… a process that pays respect to the gravity of capturing life as it passes by and disappears forever.

So, I’m arriving here: I’m ready to invest in an 8×10 view camera and start working again not just in film, but in large format, black and white contact printing (i.e. where you take your 8×10 negative and print it by placing it directly onto a sheet of 8×10 paper, sans enlarger). This is basically the same process used 100 years ago, though I’m not quite ready for glass plate negatives yet. Even using modern film and chemistry, it is a basic, unforgiving, even crude way to make pictures.

My goal isn’t necessarily to capture moments in excruciating, high-resolution detail, though that’s part of it. My mind’s eye is far closer to Sally Mann than Ansel Adams. I crave the unintentional errors I’m sure to suffer while wrestling with this fussy, slow equipment and laborious process. I can’t wait to start snapping up 100-year-old lenses on Ebay just to see what they’ll do.

It may be that I’m starting to become infected by nostalgia or romanticism, but I don’t think so. This feels like a thoroughly modern, if not completely rational impulse. I’m going to sit on it a little while longer, though, just to be sure…

But I do know I feel the need to start making images that are more like memories– absolutely perfect in some ways, soft and distorted in others. Somehow that just feels right to me, at least right now.