5 Frames With a 1935 Leica II and Candido 400 in Mykonos

I live in northern Italy. Only recently, after many years away, have I gone back to shooting film – mostly black and white – and developing and printing at home when I can. This is a short account of my first roll of Candido 400. I’d already used the Leica II on a previous trip, in Morocco, with a Kodak Gold. This time I wanted to try the Candido because it’s a Kodak Vision3 250D motion picture stock with the remjet removed, and I was curious to see how it would look.

The camera

My Leica II came to me secondhand, of course: it left Wetzlar in 1935 and reached me in late 2024, nearly ninety years later. An old lady who has watched History – with a capital H – flow past. I went for a II rather than a III because I didn’t need the slow speeds: the basic range was enough.

What I wanted, in plain terms, was a quality point-and-shoot – a small, pocketable camera you could carry everywhere and use the way people did back then: real glass, real mechanics, a real object. Not vintage for the sake of vintage. If someone made a camera like this today at a sensible price, I’d buy it new. The modern alternatives – a Pentax 17, a Rollei 35 – both rely on automation, aren’t exactly cheap, and to my mind respond to a real need but also to a current revival. Nothing wrong with that, it just wasn’t what I was after. What I was after was a ninety-year-old Leica: fully mechanical, no electronics, no batteries. Just the camera, the lens, and whatever light happened to be in front of me.

The lens is a collapsible Leitz Elmar 50mm f/3.5, the original kit lens for this camera. I had the body without a hood, and it was October in Greece. We’ll come back to that.

It’s a concrete, solid, practical camera – Bauhaus, if I may be permitted the comparison.

The film and the meter

The roll is Candido 400, from Candido Collective – a small London-based project I’d been meaning to try for a while. Candido 400 is a Kodak Vision3 250D motion picture stock with the remjet removed so it can be processed in standard C-41 chemistry. I’d had a roll sitting in a cool spot at home for some time, and I had no real idea how it would render. That uncertainty was part of the appeal: a camera I was still getting to know, paired with a film I’d never used, on a trip I’d been planning for months.

The only concession to electronics was a Hedeco Lime Two, a small handheld meter I’d ordered about three weeks before the trip. Twenty days old when I packed it, fresh out of the box. Reflective, centre-weighted metering – a perfect match for the Elmar.

The trip

Mykonos, 22 October 2025. A cruise stop in the Cyclades, a few hours ashore. Full autumn light, deep blue sky, that kind of Aegean glare that makes you squint even at noon.

At some point, walking around Little Venice, a tourist stopped me. “I haven’t seen a camera like that in a lifetime,” he said. Which is exactly the point. The camera looks like what it is – an object from another era – and if you pay attention, you notice. Most people didn’t. He did.

A note on the spots

One thing before the frames. The negatives came back with recurring bright spots in several shots. Honestly, I can’t say for certain what they are. They might be internal flare from the Elmar – an uncoated 1935 lens, in full Mediterranean light, and as I mentioned I was without a hood. Or they might be pinholes in the cloth shutter curtains, a common defect in screw-mount Leicas of this age. What is certain is that they only appear in conditions of very strong light: rolls shot on other days, with overcast skies or gentler light, came back clean. I could clone them out in post. I haven’t. They’re part of what this camera saw that day, and removing them would mean removing the point of the piece.

The five frames

The first picture of the day, taken just after stepping off the ship. One of the old Mykonos windmills, with a cruise ship moored in the background. Not my ship – mine was berthed on the other side of the port, and there were several cruise ships out at sea that day. I didn’t compose the ship into the frame deliberately, it was simply there. But once I saw the negative I liked it: a three-hundred-year-old wind machine and a floating hotel in the same frame, photographed by a camera built roughly halfway between the two. Burnt out at the base, stormy sky above. The sun was out, but the clouds were running without pause. This is what came out: a little crooked, no filters.

A small church in the upper town: red domes, white walls, a bougainvillea, a deserted taverna with chairs stacked, waiting for the evening shift. October light is softer than August, but still hard, and the white of the walls is a touch blown out. The Candido, however, pulled the terracotta of the dome through with an unexpected warmth, and the cobblestones on the ground held their detail.

Probably the most photographed church on the island. Sculpted white shapes against a sky the Elmar managed to render dense rather than washed out, and that’s more than I’d hoped for from such an old lens in that kind of glare. The spot landed in the upper-left part of the sky. The sun burns, and the wall – white as it is – is “burnt” too. Too much light. But with walls like those, it’s almost inevitable. And realistic.

A small chapel tucked into an alley, early afternoon. I was afraid the lime-washed wall would blow out to nothing, but the Candido kept it clean and pulled out an orange from the door I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. A small spot sits on the wall to the right of the door.

The last frame of the afternoon. Late light starting to slant, water with the reflections of the painted houses. A cruise ship is just visible on the left, behind the buildings – probably mine, but there were many that day. The red of the houses is intense, deeper than coral. The sea almost green. I feel a certain nostalgia every time I look at this picture.

After the roll

I sent the film to Ghisa Film Lab – C-41 development, Fujifilm Frontier SP-3000 scans. When I picked up the negatives, I sat with them for a long time. Looking back at them, part of me is sorry to see how imperfect they are. Then I realise that everything today seems perfect because it’s unreal, while these pictures are real – sent to me from 1935 to remind me that my own world is imperfect, limited and fallible, but no less beautiful for it, and no less worth living.

More of my photography is on NewGrain (@mocce). An older digital landscape of mine, taken at the Salar de Atacama, was featured by USRA EPOD in 2014 and is listed on Wikipedia. On Instagram I’m @inquieto — but that’s a world of digital pictures, a different story.

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