Bill Smith's Photography

 New camera and lens time. In my continuing bout of gear acquisition syndrome this past spring, I rescued an early production button rewind Leica M2 at Burlington Camera, it needed some love. The veiwfinder needed fixing and everything else could have used an adjusting and lubrication. I got it back just before I moved to the city and my M2 felt brand new in my hands, and "just right."  The other bit of kit I bought was the Light Lens Lab tribute/reproduction note for note, the eight element 35 F2 Summicron lens from Leica right down to the type of glass used in the lens elements. The original eight element Summicron has gotten silly expensive of late, having read a ton of reviews on this lens and not being a Leica purist, I bought the lens. What I found was LLL 35 F2 performed really well with Cinestill 400D in both foggy almost damp weather and on a super sunny day.  Am I done buying Leica gear? Don't know. Maybe a M mount 28mm lens in the medium term future. Right now ...

 Just like that, I'm now a 416 resident, I went out to play with two new to me lenses running errands around town, the Canon 35 F2 and 100 F3.5 lens both are amazing. I've been looking for the 100 F3.5 lens for a while for my Canon rangefinder kit for a while, usually the examples I found online were a tad dodgy, I got lucky buying one with the Canon 7S. The 35 F2 lens, is the later black barrel from the late 1960s is amazing glass, glad I splurged on this.  Said this before, if you can't afford a Leica M kit, take a good long look at the Canon rangefinder system, particulary the P and the 7 Series of bodies. We have an upcoming Classic Camera Revival episode on the subject so stay tuned on that. I love my Canon 7's particulary the 7S and 7sZ, both were the pinnicle of Canon rangefinders with the Leica screwmount, Nikon bailed it's rangefinder platform and concentrated on the Nikon F, and later Nikkormat cameras.  One shot I really wanted to nail is the CP24 News Tr...