Surviving two Leica fails on a motoring trip down to the Balkans

Assuming you’ve planned for it, retirement brings together newly freed up time, resources and a degree of freedom (and maybe a bit of adveturousness) to do what you want. Or have always wanted to do. Or have been planning but putting off.

I retired a few years ago and amongst all my new freedoms and projects, my wife and I bought a motorhome (RV if you like) to “travel the world”. Some of it anyway. Having undertaken a few trips to acclimatise ourselves to living on the road, we embarked on a big one – three months around the Balkans in late summer 2023. Coming after six weeks in France/Spain in autumn 2022 and then three weeks in Scotland last April, we both felt well prepped. That said, kitting out the van requires a ton of stuff you already have at home and it makes a lot of sense to duplicate most things so that they live in the van – so  that getting out on the road is as easy as possible.

On the earlier France and Scotland trips I took an FM2 as backup to my M3/Summicron 50 DR combo. As insurance. Just in case. For the Balkans though we needed to conserve weight in the motorhome so as backup, the heavy FM2 was replaced with a lightweight Nikon L35AF point and shoot. Given the legendary reliability and relative simplicity of the M3 though I did ruminate on the usefulness of carrying a backup at all, but it was a long trip and photography, the making of photographs, was a big part of the fun and purpose of the trip for me. Not having a (film) camera to use didn’t bear thinking about so bring one I did.

The weight saving of the point and shoot over the FM2 was probably nulled by also bringing along a new to me Summaron 3.5cm/f3.5 lens for the Leica. New as in, two weeks before the trip – an unknown and potentially hazardous beast (beauty). I had shown it no film. It was a big leap of faith.

I added the wide angle lens to the M3 setup to give me a slightly better chance of capturing some of the Soviet-era architecture I was expecting to see (more on this in a future post or two). Why 35mm not 28? The M3 has no framelines wider than 50mm so you either need an external finder for your wide lens, or get one designed (adapted) for the M3. In practical terms this involves having goggles on the lens to render the 50mm frames lines to a 35mm field of view (and so on). Very clever. My Summaron was such a lens.

The Summaron produced beautiful images.

And then, a few days into the trip, there I was on the E34 between Bruges and Eindhoven with the M3 in my lap marvelling at how perfectly the Summaron looked on it (my wife was driving, we take it in turns) when I decided to unscrew the UVa filter I’d put on it. I do this on all my lenses from time to time. I hate the thought of filters being stuck on them forever (I have a lens hood that’s somehow ‘welded’ to an expensive filter). Anyway, rather than the filter unscrewing, the whole front barrel of the lens started to unscrew! My blood ran cold. I quickly screwed it back in. But the aperture ring was now misaligned with the aperture dot. Arghhh! I also didn’t know how much to tighten the barrel… So I managed to tighten it too much and now the focusing ring was overly stiff. I loosened it. Focusing was back to normal but the aperture ring was all over the place. I was screwed. Would the lens now focus properly? Could I trust it for the rest of the trip (another 11 weeks)? Was I reduced to relying on the Summicron (not a hardship I agree but I’d bought the Summaron specifically for the trip)?

And being a rangefinder, there’s no realistic way to check whether the lens is correctly focusing or not. With an SLR setup, it would be obvious if the lens wasn’t focusing correctly. With the Summaron nthough, short of having a roll of film developed, there was no way of knowing. In retrospect, given the length of the trip, I probably should have sent a roll off for developing and scanning to see if it was still working correctly.

A few posts to /Leica on Reddit and to the Leica Forum confirmed that no major harm had been done and that all would be OK with the hand-tightened lens barrel, and not to worry at all about the aperture ring misalignment. I’m familiar with this latter point as I have the same issue on my Summitar 5cm (I’m a sucker for ancient Leica glass as its relatively cheap).

I decided to *sort of* trust the screwed (unscrewed) lens. I wouldn’t duplicate 35mm photos with 50mm ones, but if I took some of the former I’d also take some of the latter. Insurance again. If they came out, they’d be a bonus but I wasn’t going to rely on them.

I didn’t always adhere to this philosophy because it’s a pain to carry two lenes in my modest man bag (fully fledged European me). In the back of my mind though, I couldn’t help but worry that when I developed my films, all the Summaron images would be out of focus. That was actually a huge worry so I used it less and less.

By now we were in Bosnia parked up in a lovely and tiny little site in the hills high above Sarajevo. At the site, tucked away in a corner was an ancient Audi. It was a perfect get-as-close-as-you-can subject for the Summaron… I crouched down… Frame. Focus. Click. Advance. What was that grinding? My blood ran cold. Again. Probably nothing. Just my imagination. I’ll take another shot. M3 wouldn’t click. Wouldn’t click or advance or anything. I carefully rewound the film and removed it. I very minimally poked and prodded. Nothing made a difference. So I did a bit of research. Probably shutter light seals or something had come unstuck and there’s nothing I can realistically do about it on the trip. I could have cried. But at least the can-I-trust-the-Summaron question was parked, removed, forgotten. My whole Leica setup was temporarily toast.

Audi photo was ace though.

The M3 and all its accoutrements, accessories and add ons were packed away and the L35AF was brought out to assume the role of tool of choice. I had no choice.

Having thought about what had happened and the situation I found myself in, and decided it wasn’t fundamentally a disaster, I put my thoughts and feelings into words and wrote about them (in my journal). I’m a firm believer in writing about these things to myself. This helped me rationalise where I was and to focus on the positives. It helped me accept and be calm about it. I had resilience and it was coming to the fore. I also realised I was in a way liberated. Sad but liberated. Photography was a big part of the trip for me and I was planning several articles from it (but not this one). But I wouldn’t let this setback thwart my goals. I was liberated into the simple world of the point and shoot. A good little one that I liked very much. And everything at the Summaron’s 35mm. This might all sound a bit melodramatic, but spiraling melodrama was exactly what I wanted to prevent.

I even learned to use the Nikon properly. I did a bit of RTFM and worked out that you can sort of lock the AF before shooting. It worked (most of the time)! A useful new piece of knowledge that explained why so many of my previously ‘carefully crafted’ L35AF photos were off. Where the subject was OOF. That said, snatched shots with it were frequently off – it’s good, but not brilliant. But on the trip… I loved it!

And that was that. The trip carried on for another seven weeks and I had to rely on the little Nikon which fit beautifully in my man bag which meant that I could, and did, literally take it everywhere. The photos it took on the FP4 destined for the M3 were surprisingly good. Extraordinarily good on occasion. Framing was a bit tricky close up though (mind you, as the Audi image above shows, same holds for the M3/Summaron).

I think we all appreciate that the tools we use do matter. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but they do. They drive a lot of the experiences we have when taking photographs and that in turn impacts how likely are we are to use those tools and relish the experience. You’d be hard pushed though to identify the relative cheapness of the tool with some of the point and shoot images. It’s actually all about the glass though isn’t it. And the little Nikon is quite well stacked in that department. If all things were equal we might all manage with a point and shoot (some of the time anyway).

So there you go, I really quite enjoyed the liberating point and shoot experience albeit with a little bit of making myself enjoy it given that I actually had no choice.

Epilogue: Both the camera and the lens went off to the menders on my return from the trip. The M3 was diagnosed with a broken/damaged gear in the film advance mechanism, and the Summaron had to be rebuilt/realligned to stop the unscrewing happening again. Big bill pedictably.

When you go away on trips do you carry a spare camera? How long does a trip have to be to warrant taking a spare? How do you philosophise and carry on in the event of a disaster?

More of my work is on Insta here.

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