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...

  Yup, another Leica SLR, an R5, this time. I went back and forth between the R5 and R7, when I was looking for a second "modern" R body and settled on the R5 for the battery requirement, only two SR44/Engergizer 357s vs the four the R7 required.  The R5, like it's mechanical sibling the R6 is a distant offspring of the Leitz-Minolta partnership where camera and lens technologies were shared between both companies. The R5 has two metering modes, spot and sort of a matrix metering mode, both deliver accurate readings along with manual, aperture priority, shutter priority, and a couple of program modes.  I foud the R5 easy to use and was shooting in both manual and aperture priority modes for the duration of the photowalk. It was also an opportunity to try out two new lenses, the 35 F2 Summicron and 21 F4 Super Angolan. I've shot with the Super Angulon before when I borrowed my brother Alex's R4 kit 18 years ago, it's fun glass. The 35 F2 Summicron lens is perfe...