My YouTube Video on Early Leicas with British Lenses and Lens Conversions

[willeica]

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My video is based on a Zoom talk which I gave to the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain last Sunday. This was a development of an article of mine which had appeared earlier in the magazine of The Leica Society (UK). This traces the fact that the very first Leicas with interchangeable lenses were conversions done in Britain in the late 1920s, even before Leitz/Leica offered the same features on Leicas made in Wetzlar. These used Meyer (German) and Ross and Dallmeyer (both British) lenses. Some of the features of the British conversions were subsequently used by Leitz/Leica. Leica then adopted the wider LTM M39 mount and the British Manufacturers adapted to this with their later production.

Some of the images from my talk are below

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William 

Edited January 31, 2024 by willeica

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[sandro]

Fascinating talk, William! With interesting and important pieces of Leica history! Wonderful research.

Lex

[luigi bertolotti]

Compliments ! 

[rfaspen]

That was an enjoyable presentation.  Thanks.

[jc_braconi]

Well done Thank you

[nf3996]

Many thanks for this, William. I was in the PCCGB audience for last Sunday's live presentation (I was the one who asked about wide-angle lens conversions). I thoroughly enjoyed your talk and I shall watch it again now it's online.

Alan

[willeica]

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3 hours ago, nf3996 said:

Many thanks for this, William. I was in the PCCGB audience for last Sunday's live presentation (I was the one who asked about wide-angle lens conversions). I thoroughly enjoyed your talk and I shall watch it again now it's online.

Alan

Thanks, Alan. Wide-angle lenses were not common back then and it is also important to look at this through the prism of between 90 and 100 years ago and not through the prism of today. Leitz introduced the 35mm Elmar in 1930 (first two years recorded sales 32/33 total 3721 ) and the 28mm Hektor in 1935 ( first two years 35/36 total 2804).  The 90mm Elmar was introduced in 1931 (first two years 31/32 total 2486). The 135mm Elmar was introduced in 1931 (first two years 31/32 2,856). It is difficult to look back retrospectively at what happened back then and to interpret these figures. Note that by the mid 1930s there were a lot more Leicas around and that, as I pointed out in my talk, Leitz introduced a group of lenses to go with its new interchangeable lens Leicas in the early 1930s. This was groundbreaking and had no real precedent at that time.

I am inclined to agree with David Gardner that most people tend to add a telephoto first and then think of adding a wide-angle, but I think that when it came to the British lenses/conversions only small telephotos were available and could be adapted easily to give good picture quality. I know that Barnack's team did a lot of work on edge sharpness, even with the 50mm Elmar. Secondly, this was never a big market and actual conversions of I Model As to take British lenses are some of the rarest Leicas ever. The cameras with British lenses on LTM mounts are slightly more common.

This is an important historical story and I suspect that a lot of Leica fans and collectors do not know about the historical sequence of events. I was glad to have had this opportunity to share my research and collection.

I am also glad that you enjoyed the talk, despite the unforeseen live connection breakdowns. The YouTube video is seamless, thanks to our friends at PCCGB.

William 

Edited February 4, 2024 by willeica

[pgk]

1 hour ago, willeica said:

I am inclined to agree with David Gardner that most people tend to add a telephoto first and then think of adding a wide-angle, but I think that when it came to the British lenses/conversions only small telephotos were available and could be adapted easily to give good picture quality.

Of the 152 photos in "My Leica and I' (1937) only 17 were taken using a 35mm lens and only 1 with a 28mm. By far the most (around 2/3) were taken with 50mm lenses and 30 with various telephoto lenses (73/90/105/135). Assuming this to be at least somewhat representative, it certainly seems to suggest that wide lenses were less used than telephotos. So, given that cameras were probably generally supplied with a 50mm lens, it would make senses for other manufacturers to concentrate on producing telephoto lenses which would be more likely to appeal to photographers looking for a seccond lens.

I have a Dallmeyer 35mm lens adapted (recently) for Leica M. It was a 1950s lens and others were available from the likes of Wray. But even in the 1950s it was seen as a slightly odd, rather wide choice of focal length for a 35mm camera.

Edited February 4, 2024 by pgk

[willeica]

2 hours ago, pgk said:

Of the 152 photos in "My Leica and I' (1937) only 17 were taken using a 35mm lens and only 1 with a 28mm. By far the most (around 2/3) were taken with 50mm lenses and 30 with various telephoto lenses (73/90/105/135). Assuming this to be at least somewhat representative, it certainly seems to suggest that wide lenses were less used than telephotos. So, given that cameras were probably generally supplied with a 50mm lens, it would make senses for other manufacturers to concentrate on producing telephoto lenses which would be more likely to appeal to photographers looking for a seccond lens.

I have a Dallmeyer 35mm lens adapted (recently) for Leica M. It was a 1950s lens and others were available from the likes of Wray. But even in the 1950s it was seen as a slightly odd, rather wide choice of focal length for a 35mm camera.

Thanks, Paul. I believe that what you say reflects the general situation back in the 1930s. My talk was largely about a very specific period from 1928 to 1930  when a very small number of British conversions took place, which anticipated in some respects what Leitz did in the early 1930s. At that time what we call wide-angle lenses today were quite uncommon. In my talk I described the 'before and after' situations so that my audience could get some perspective of where the British conversions sat in the grand scheme of things. A few friends have come back to me since my talk and said that they found out things they did not know before, despite being Leica collectors for many years. Jim Lager told me that cameras like my Sinclair converted I Model A with a Dallmeyer lens had a 'near mythical' status in the US when I showed it to him in Wetzlar last October. The last article on the A.O. Roth of London Meyer conversions in LHSA Viewfinder magazine was in 1970, some 54 years ago. I think I used the term 'skin on hens' teeth' somewhere in my talk. 

The chances of somebody putting a wide angle lens on a Leica in the late 1920s were effectively zero. 

William 

Edited February 4, 2024 by willeica

[pgk]

1 hour ago, willeica said:

I believe that what you say reflects the general situation back in the 1930s.

As formats became smaller it would have been relatively easy to use a lens design which covered a slightly large format and use its high central performance to ensure good image quality over the smaller format. Equally lens designers were probably more conversant with lenses slightly longer than standard on 35mm and these could have been modified to suit. Wide-angles have always been the last area to match standard and long lenses and this has been the case until reatively recently with longer zooms being followed by standard zooms and finally wide zooms with incresingly fast apertures being designed last of all. Lens design evolved along quite obvious paths.

My 1950s Dallmeyer 35mm is typical of its time with good central but not as good peripheral performance.

FWIW a lens designer friend tells me that short telephoto lenses (for 35mm format) have been well designed for a very long time😀.

Edited February 4, 2024 by pgk

[willeica]

1 hour ago, pgk said:

As formats became smaller it would have been relatively easy to use a lens design which covered a slightly large format and use its high central performance to ensure good image quality over the smaller format. Equally lens designers were probably more conversant with lenses slightly longer than standard on 35mm and these could have been modified to suit. Wide-angles have always been the last area to match standard and long lenses and this has been the case until reatively recently with longer zooms being followed by standard zooms and finally wide zooms with incresingly fast apertures being designed last of all. Lens design evolved along quite obvious paths.

My 1950s Dallmeyer 35mm is typical of its time with good central but not as good peripheral performance.

FWIW a lens designer friend tells me that short telephoto lenses (for 35mm format) have been well designed for a very long time😀.

Thanks, Paul. What you are saying is exactly what I said. Small telephotos were easier to adapt. However, my talk is about something that was extremely limited and small scale and which did not impact on the wider field of actual optical lens design, other than at the level of mounts. Leitz were working on the issues with wide-angle lenses around that time. Ulf Richter's book, Barnack, From the Idea to the Leica, should be compulsory reading for anyone remotely interested this era of Leica camera and lens development. I had the privilege to look at the original copy of Barnack's handwritten work-book along with Ulf last October. 

William  

[willeica]

Peter Karbe's comments on my YouTube Video:

"Dear William,

thank you very much for sharing the link .

You presentation was very interesting and exciting for me.

I had to listen to it twice. I know Dallmeyer but not in detail.

Most exciting for me was the existence of the 4-inch lens with internal focusing , do you know about the optical design of this lens. Is there a patent filed by Dallmeyer ?

And the story about the conversion was new for me. It shows how this conversion led to the Leica screw mount.

The dots for mounting alignment, invented in Britain I did not know either.

Thank you very much for this presentation, I learned a lot .

 Best regards

Peter"

I have told him I will get back to him about British Patents for the Dallmeyer lens. The lens has internal focussing, but it does extend and contract when focused. It does not use the mount on the camera for this and the scale with distance in feet on the early I Model A conversions is only used for focusing the 50mm Elmar. I also sent him a link to our thread here about British Threads and Whitworth Profiles.

William 

 

 

[FrozenInTime]

That was a very interesting talk.

That 1930's 1 model C, A.O. Roth, Meyer Kino Plasmat 1-5/8" f/1.5 combination is a real eye opener.

 

[willeica]

10 minutes ago, FrozenInTime said:

That was a very interesting talk.

That 1930's 1 model C, A.O. Roth, Meyer Kino Plasmat 1-5/8" f/1.5 combination is a real eye opener.

 

At about 24,000 euros at auction, it should be. Roth was a GB based German and so was the Meyer lens, designed by Dr Paul Rudoplh, one of the greatest lens designers of all time. The Ross and Dallmeyer conversions are in some ways more interesting, particularly the conversions to I Model As, which are some of the rarest Leicas you can find, if you can find them. According to Professor Neblette (1952) the Dallmeyer Dallon was historically significant as the first well-corrected telephoto lens.

FIG. 5.26. The Dallmeyer Dallon telephoto lens. 

In 1914, Booth designed a telephoto lens for Dallmeyer with an aperture of f/6 in which the corrections for astigmatism, curvature of field, spherical and chromatic aberration were greatly improved over the earlier lenses. This lens was redesigned and improved in 1920 and placed on the market as the Dallon with an aperture of f/5.6 (Fig. 5.26). This was the first well-corrected telephoto lens and as such was widely copied by others. 

More here.

https://collectiblend.com/Library/Photographic_Lenses_Neblette.php

William