First M9 lens?

[dealrocker]

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A friend of mine recently purchased a Leica M9. His birthday is coming soon, so I thought to give him a camera lens as a birthday gift. Well, he want to use this camera for shooting street walking people, faces and small groups. Lots of camera lenses are available in the market and I don't know which is the best one that fulfill his requirements.

 

 

Any advice and recommendation will be greatly appreciated.

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[jaapv]

How much do you want to spend. A Noctilux is 10.000 $, but I recently bought a 35 mm Color-Skopar for 349 $ plus 49$ for the lens hood and to my surprise the quality is rather impressive.

[Ecar]

There's indeed a lot of choice out there. Hard to answer without a budget indication.

[Nicoleica]

Although the thread title would imply 'No', does your friend have any lenses at present? If so, then it might be best to buy one of a different focal length. If not, then probably a 35mm or 50mm would be ideal as a first lens. A Leica lens would be ideal, but a lot depends upon how much you wish to spend. The least expensive new Leica lenses are the Summarits, and these are really good lenses indeed. They may not be the fastest lenses, but I doubt very much if you could fault their quality. There are so many other lenses though, both used and new, that it's very difficult to suggest anything more specific without some guidelines as to price and/or focal length.

Your friend is a very lucky person indeed. I wish that someone would give me a lens for my birthday.

[adli]

Your friend is a very lucky person indeed. I wish that someone would give me a lens for my birthday.

 

 

I actually got one last year, from my wife!

[sanyasi]

First, can I be your friend, too?

 

I would suggest either a gift certificate or a dealer that will allow a return within a specified number of days after the gift is opened. I suspect someone who buys an M9 has some ideas of what they want to do with it and has given the question of lenses some thought so they should be the decisionmaker. Also, you could go with a non-Leica lenses, which generally will be a lot cheaper, but if your friend wants Leica lenses, the cheaper one may not be used that often. So as some people on this list have suggested in the past, it ultimately is more economical to buy what you view as tops, rather than buy something that is less, trade it in after a few years, and then buy what you really want.

 

I am not a big fan of gift certificates, but here I think one makes some sense. To give something tangible with the certificate, you might buy a nice book of photography. The catalog from the recent Robert Frank exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is very nice and can be purchased at Amazon.