Bill Smith's Photography

 I'm doing this ass backwards, I should have posted this back in April prior to the March photowalk as this was the first roll through my Leica R5. The big question, why the R5, and not the R7?. Simple answer, the R5 only needs a pair of SR44 batteries, the R7 needs twice as many. Two, I was looking for something around the same age as my R6.  For those not familiar, the Leica R5 is a very well featured manual focus SLR with a battery operated shutter, with full manual metering, aperture priority, shutter priority and program modes. Compared to a Nikon FE2, the R5 is a more complex beast roughly the same size. While Nikon went for simplicity with  centre weighted metering and robustness, Leica loaded up on features like a built in diopter and both spot metering and their version of Matrix metering. On this little self directed wander I exclusively used spot metering in full manual mode and aperture priority. It pays to familiarize yourself with the R5 before using, it's n...

 The end results overall with the R6 were stunning, some of it, me, some of it, the 3 Cam Leica R glass. Damn, I can see why it costs so damn much. The R6 as a camera is an interesting one, one would be really cynical and say, "Yeah a Nikon FM does the same thing at a fraction of the price." Yes, to a point but the R6 also has both a sorta matrix metering and spot metering modes, both deliver nicely. The R6 also has a built in diopter for those of us with Gen X eyesight. The one quibble is the little window in back so you can see the film. It became a trend but some reason I had some odd flare on a few frames early on in the roll, granted I had to re-load in the bright sun which is much less than idea. I taped over the window with black duct tape to reduce that variable hopefully to zero in future rolls when reloading in the wild.  When it gets super cold, and stormy which we had plenty of this past winter, Lake Ontario delivers with some epic ice build up. My brother Alex ga...