Leica M3, M6 or M7

[madNbad]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

19 minutes ago, nemendes said:

According to your advices, I was looking for information about Nikon fe camera and as you said it can be better choice for me at first. Auto controls, significantly cheaper system and great camera. I think I will try my analog taste at first at that camera and test myself how much I m open to learn and patient about analog photography. Then I think it will be better and easier to choose which Leica is more suitable for my needs. Thank you for your advice. 

Good choice. Try some different films, look for a good lab to process them. If you like the experience, it’s easy to expand. Stay with one lens and learn to use it. Have fun and post a few in the “I like film” section.

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[RayD28]

3 hours ago, nemendes said:

According to your advices, I was looking for information about Nikon fe camera and as you said it can be better choice for me at first. Auto controls, significantly cheaper system and great camera. I think I will try my analog taste at first at that camera and test myself how much I m open to learn and patient about analog photography. Then I think it will be better and easier to choose which Leica is more suitable for my needs. Thank you for your advice. 

Great choice.  I'm not sure where you are located but as @madNbad says you will want find a good lab.  One of the toughest parts starting down the analog path is having to wait for results.  If you don't want to invest the time and money into home development and scanning, and you don't have a store front lab nearby, a mail-order lab will develop film and then upload high resolution scans.  This is what I do for color film and I usually get the scans in four or five business days, while the developed film arrives in about ten.  

Good luck!

[Anbaric]

14 hours ago, nemendes said:

According to your advices, I was looking for information about Nikon fe camera and as you said it can be better choice for me at first. Auto controls, significantly cheaper system and great camera. I think I will try my analog taste at first at that camera and test myself how much I m open to learn and patient about analog photography. Then I think it will be better and easier to choose which Leica is more suitable for my needs. Thank you for your advice. 

They are nice cameras, tough and well-made, and can still be found cheaply. Check it thoroughly if you get one - the electronics are 40 years old at this point, and I had to send a couple back, one with shutter speeds that were way off (the slow speeds are easy to check) and one that locked up. The similar FM has a mechanical shutter (manual only) which seems to have lasted well. The later FE2 and FM2 have wider shutter speed ranges (pretty remarkable for their time), but tend to be quite a bit more expensive. The shutters on all these cameras, except an early variant of the FM, are locked until you pull the wind-on lever out to the the stand-off position. This is not ideal if, like me, you are left eyed because the tip of the lever ends up somewhere between the corner of your right eye and the bridge of your nose in landscape orientation, and either wants to stick up your nostril or dig into your forehead in portrait orientation (depending which side up you hold it). You learn to work around this quirk. There is of course a great selection of Nikkor lenses that can be had for a small fraction of the price of their Leica equivalents. Nearly all are very good and some, like the 105/2.5 that Steve McCurry is supposed to have used for the famous 'Afghan Girl' portrait (or indeed any Nikkor 105) are pretty special. You should generally get AI or AI-S lenses for the FE/FM series cameras. The FM and FE (but not the FM2 and FE2) are also compatible with earlier pre-AI lenses because their AI-indexing tabs can be flipped up out of the way, but you have to use stop-down metering in this situation. You can also find 'AI-converted' lenses which, if they were done with Nikon's own conversion kits, can be excellent (but beware of third party hack jobs). The infamous Ken Rockwell has a surprisingly good explanation of the differences.

[nemendes]

19 hours ago, RayD28 said:

Great choice.  I'm not sure where you are located but as @madNbad says you will want find a good lab.  One of the toughest parts starting down the analog path is having to wait for results.  If you don't want to invest the time and money into home development and scanning, and you don't have a store front lab nearby, a mail-order lab will develop film and then upload high resolution scans.  This is what I do for color film and I usually get the scans in four or five business days, while the developed film arrives in about ten.  

Good luck!

I have a great lab very close to my place. I didn't know that analog films, process and scans cost that much  As much as I remembered, they were cheap and nobody was interesting in them but nowadays there is a analog hype that pulled me to itself. I hope I will enjoy with whole process.

[nemendes]

9 hours ago, Anbaric said:

They are nice cameras, tough and well-made, and can still be found cheaply. Check it thoroughly if you get one - the electronics are 40 years old at this point, and I had to send a couple back, one with shutter speeds that were way off (the slow speeds are easy to check) and one that locked up. The similar FM has a mechanical shutter (manual only) which seems to have lasted well. The later FE2 and FM2 have wider shutter speed ranges (pretty remarkable for their time), but tend to be quite a bit more expensive. The shutters on all these cameras, except an early variant of the FM, are locked until you pull the wind-on lever out to the the stand-off position. This is not ideal if, like me, you are left eyed because the tip of the lever ends up somewhere between the corner of your right eye and the bridge of your nose in landscape orientation, and either wants to stick up your nostril or dig into your forehead in portrait orientation (depending which side up you hold it). You learn to work around this quirk. There is of course a great selection of Nikkor lenses that can be had for a small fraction of the price of their Leica equivalents. Nearly all are very good and some, like the 105/2.5 that Steve McCurry is supposed to have used for the famous 'Afghan Girl' portrait (or indeed any Nikkor 105) are pretty special. You should generally get AI or AI-S lenses for the FE/FM series cameras. The FM and FE (but not the FM2 and FE2) are also compatible with earlier pre-AI lenses because their AI-indexing tabs can be flipped up out of the way, but you have to use stop-down metering in this situation. You can also find 'AI-converted' lenses which, if they were done with Nikon's own conversion kits, can be excellent (but beware of third party hack jobs). The infamous Ken Rockwell has a surprisingly good explanation of the differences.

Thank you very much for your advices. I think I will choose either fe2 or fm2, and started to search for lenses already. 

[Kl@usW.]

vor 9 Stunden schrieb Anbaric:

The shutters on all these cameras, except an early variant of the FM, are locked until you pull the wind-on lever out to the the stand-off position. This is not ideal if, like me, you are left eyed because the tip of the lever ends up somewhere between the corner of your right eye and the bridge of your nose in landscape orientation, and either wants to stick up your nostril or dig into your forehead in portrait orientation (depending which side up you hold it). You learn to work around this quirk.

Only too true. Also a left eye shooter,  I had completely forgotten about this pita when I picked up my long time shelf FE 2, actually to sell it.... was like meeting an old friend and recognizing after a while , oh, she still has halitosis..... 

But it rekindled my feelings for Nikon anyway and instead of selling the FE2  I added an F, an F2 and an FM3a.... amazing value if you come from Leicaland. 

[Mr.Prime]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I started with the Barnack, but anyhow in the M world my first camera was the M3 and its a very nice camera to use. It's a bit of a one trick pony as it's best for 50mm and I don't shoot any other focal length with that camera. But coming from the SLR world I prefer not to mess about with small frame lines - this means I like the M3 for 50mm only. And later I bought an M4 to use with 35mm lenses. Each camera is well matched to these focal lengths and these are the main focal lengths I use (25mm on the Barnack for other reasons). 

 

I struggled with the sunny-16 rule for metering. It was OK for a few years but I never took enough photos to get really good at it and had to rely on an App on my iphone to allow it to function as a lightmeter. More recently I bought a small pocket sized Sekonic-208 light meter. Well, this was a revelation because it allows me to do incident light metering which no built-in meter inside a camera allows you to do. In short, it's simpler than I expected. I also don't like to have a light meter inside the viewfinder, my M3 and M4 are lovely mechanical marvels without all that added stuff. The only downside is if light levels are changing a lot and often (like going in and out of buildings a lot) but normally this is not the case and I don't need to meter for every shot. I can set the exposure and shoot away.

 

I also have a Minolta X-500 which has the auto-capability like the M7. It's also nice to use, takes away any need to set the exposure and when you are in a situation where you have to focus on navigating crowded spots or have kids with you then the benefit of the automation becomes larger. However, in most of those situations, I am using my iphone camera instead as I prefer to do film photography when I can dedicate more of my attention to it.

 

 

[a.noctilux]

19 hours ago, Mr.Prime said:

I also have a Minolta X-500

Of course nothing wrong with SLR,

if only we can accept the SLR concept which M (most) users do not.

[edstock]

I have a Nikon FE-2 and FM-2. Both are very good at what they do. At the same time I also have two Canon F-1's, new models. They are tanks, using match needle metering. Add a winder or drive and you have AE, shutter priority is there as well. You use Canon's FD lenses and FD lens mounts. Like Nikon there are plenty FD lenses on the used market. Don't forget Leica's R system of SLR bodies and excellent lenses. The bodies are not expensive, for a Leica, but the R lenses are pricey.

[Mr.Prime]

I mostly use my M's these days but to be honest, in terms of general usage, the SLR is light years better than the M, there's really no contest at all. I know people have preferences, and the M might allow some benefits (slow lenses don't produce a dim viewfinder) but I never question why the SLR approach utterly dominated photography for decades. 

[ktmrider2]

When I shoot a digital camera it is either the FujiX-T5 or Ricoh GR3 but I am finding most of my digital shooting is now on a phone simply for the east of posting to email or sending photos by text.  Film is different.  It has gotten a bit expensive so I no longer take snapshots with it (cell phone now).  Last December I was in Vietnam for thirty days and carried my M4 and my cell.  It was monsoon season and the lighting was so bad I did not finish one roll of film even though I hauled the camera everywhere in a waterproof Billington bag including days on a motorcycle during monsoon.

Now I started photography when a Leica M2 or M3 was state of the art and Pentax had just introduced the first through the lens light meter (I think it was Pentax) and Nikon F's ruled the photojournalism scene.  If you really want to learn film photography, get a meter less M and an incident light meter, lots of film and actually a bunch of books by famous photographers like David Douglas Duncan, Alfred Eisenstadt (sp?), Ansel Adams or any photographer who was at LIFE during its hay day etc.  For technique, the books Adams wrote on the zone system are hard to beat but if you can find LIFE magazines series on photography, it may be the best ever published.

Everyone here extols the M3 for 50 because of its viewfinder.  In almost 50 years of using Leica M's, I owned only one M3 and it for less than a year.  My favorite is the M2 or M4 even if I am using a 50.  If you get a 1.25 magnifier and put it on the .72 viewfinder (standard on almost all M's except special order or limited production M6's and later models) you get the same magnification as the M3 but can remove the magnifier and have a camera that allows use of the 28 even if no frame lines.  You just use the whole viewfinder field.

Remember, the classic M6 was made with a cheapened viewfinder like the M4/2, M4/P, M6TTL and perhaps some M7's.  I still think the classics are the way to go.  None of the cameras you named would be a bad choice.  It is up to you which one you like the best.