I was on the plane over from Frankfurt to England, when out of sheer boredom, I casually picked up the in-flight advertising magazine.
Flipping carelessly through the pages, I spotted an ad for the LEICA V-LUX 4.
Equally casually I started to read it, and my jaw must have dropped to the floor as I read the abbreviated details.
Disbelief
I simply could not believe what I was reading.
What? A camera with an f 2.8 lens, and a zoom of 25 - 600 mm? Nah. That had got to be a mistake, misprint, or some other boo-boo. So I put the magazine back, got home, went online to find out if this was a major mistake of some kind.
It wasn't.
A divorce?
I have now owned 3 Leica cameras, and they have never let me down, and invariably produced splendid pictures of my children and family. S-o-o-o-o...
I decided to buy one, and went on ebay and Amazon.Then I wandered through town looking for the Leica shop advertised on Google, but it had closed down and it was a wasted trip. So, online purchase then.
I looked at the ridiculous German prices (>£840), the various other sellers - the cheapest being from Hong Kong, not including the customs duty that would be payable - and finally found Spilsbury House in Burton selling the camera for £610 inc postage and VAT.
True to their word, they sent the camera by UPS on the very day they had nominated, and then the divorce proceedings nearly started. We'll leave out the unpleasant bit, but it is still simmering away in the background!
Not really - I hope.
The Camera
The camera really surprised me, even at first handling.
It's extremely compact, very light, and doesn't have an enormous zoom lens sticking out at the front.. In fact, I doubted whether this could really be a 600mm lens on there, but it is.
My wife (as she still is!) owns a Sony digital with a zoom lens up to 200mm I think, which weighs half a ton. It's a very good camera, but is nowhere near the same league as the Leica.
Naturally I had to make a comparison - and quite simply, there is no comparison. The Sony's mechanism is noisy, not silkily near silent as the Leica, and the difference in the distances they can reach quite startled me, despite the difference in physical lens length.
But the Leica viewfinder is priceless.
It 's like looking into a crystalline drop of water, like a diamond, it's so bright and clear. It's difficult to believe that a camera viewfinder can be so beautiful, and can transform simple, nearly ugly things into beautiful objects.
My first look through it was a huge surprise. It was on the 25mm setting, and I could not identify what I was looking at - for a while. It had encompassed far more out to the side of the main object I was looking at than I expected - being a novice with these things - and it took a good bit of working out to figure out what was what.
There was no shadowing or blurring at the edges of the frame, and certainly no curving of the straight line of the door edge.
I tried looking at the bucket and mop - both dirty: and they looked startlingly unlike themselves.
The focussing mechanism works very quietly, and when the shutter button is half-depressed, the object in the selector frame in the viewfinder leaps remarkably quickly into focus. I took a picture of a few cherry blossoms on the bough about 60/70 feet away, and they nearly filled the frame.
But the biggest surprise was yet to come. I tried reading the instructions, and to my enormous surprise found that if I had that picture in view, then by shifting the viewfinder lever to the right, I could enlarge the picture, or shrink it by moving it to the left. Well, well, well!
The camera just sits there on my desk, like a quiet little black cat, just wanting to be handled.. It's difficult to keep my hands off it. It's a quiet little cat - until it unfurls the mighty talon of its 600mm lens - and I could probably take a picture of South Africa from Birmingham with that thing - well, maybe not...
As a novice...
to digital cameras, I will keep writing here, and maybe it will be of use to some others, who like me are embarking on a voyage of discovery of the capacities of this remarkable camera.
Did you know, for instance that you can produce a slideshow -with music from the camera yet!!! - of the pics you have on the memory card? Hooo boy!
The Shutter on Saturday.
I mentioned above that the shutter is extremely quiet - and here's the proof:
We were at a birthday party, and my son who had never touched the camera before, wanted to take the group shots, so I gave it to him.
Everybody got into place, he climbed up on a chair and started trying to shoot the pictures of the group - only to be totally dismayed, because the camera simply wouldn't fire. (Someone in the group remarked loudly that 'That's a Leica!!" implying, no doubt, that it should be able to take pictures!) Eventually he gave up in disgust, put it down, and took a few more shots with his mobile phone.
My Dismay
As you can imagine, I was more than a little dismayed that my brand, spanking new Leica wouldn't work! Visions of complaints to Leitz, interlarded with a few choice phrases here and there, thundered through my head, as I mentally composed the sulphurous thunderbolt I would hurl up their trouser legs in Wetzlar or wherever, and stalked forward to have a look at the damned camera.
It HAD taken about 6 group pictures!
I figured out what had happened. The shutter action is so quiet - very much like a soft kiss - and so vibration-free, that he didn't know that it HAD fired. And of course, when it has taken the picture, it appears on the screen so immediately, it looks as if the group hadn't moved, and was still un-photographed!
So he kept on pressing the shutter, and did so about 6 times - resulting in about 6 pix all told!
Good one, Leitz.
I will keep updating this blog as time goes on, and upload pictures that may be worth a second look. I'm also working my way through the instruction manual - the camera is a complex animal - surprising and delighting me as I go along, with the amazing things my little cat can do.
Here is the picture of the cherry blossoms and some other flowers in my garden. I hope you like them. (Now I've got to go figure out how to upload them). Instruction manual - where are ya?
I included the fireplace because of the startlingly intense colours produced by the Elmarit.
We've got a long way to go, baby!
