Leica 60mm f/2.8 Macro-Elmarit-R: In a Metal Web

Today we're going to have a look at the Leica 60mm f/2.8 Macro-Elmarit-R. It's one of Leica's SLR lenses from the long-lived, long-dead, long-forgotten Leicaflex/R-system. Leica's SLR camera bodies were anonymous blocky things of no particular technical merit until the Leica R8 of the late 1990s, which was a cleverly-engineered, distinctively ugly lump. On a technical level the R8 was on a par with a mid-range Nikon body of a few years before, but bigger and heavier and you had to wind the film by hand.

Ah, but the lenses were wonderful. They were things of myth and legend, because they were three times as expensive as the competition, and photo magazines never wrote about them. Were they three times better than the competition? Nowadays the system has been dead for several years and the lenses only exist on the used market, where prices have descended to reasonable levels.

Digital photography has given R-system lenses a new lease of life, because they can easily be adapted for Canon and mirrorless systems, less easily for Nikon but it can be done. Leitax, a company that makes posh lens adapters, was originally set up to supply Nikon photographers with a custom lens mount that could accept R-system lenses.

The 50mm f/1.4 Summilux that I wrote about a while back is still quite dear, but very competent. Of the others, the 50mm f/2 kit lens, the 35mm f/2.8, the 60mm f/2.8 Macro and the 180mm f/2.8 are all apparently very good, and not much more expensive than a modern prime of equivalent specification. The R-system's lens range is complicated by the fact that some lenses were rebadged Minoltas, because Leica was pally with Minolta in the 1970s, and at least one of the later zooms was built by Sigma. Which is naff, I imagine that Leica fans were horrified.

For this post I stuck it on a 5D MkII with a posh adapter. It has a standard-for-no-one-except-Leica 60mm filter thread, so I added a 60-62mm step ring for the polariser. I didn't bother with a lens hood. Everything except the little red dot and the glass is made of metal. The focus grip looks like a rubber ring, but it's actually metal. Okay, the grease that lubricates the lens isn't made of metal. The air inside the lens isn't metal. Everything else is metal.

On the used market here in the UK in 2015 on our plane here today this night under a Conservative government the 60mm f/2.8 fetches about a hundred pounds more than a used Canon 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro; the Leica lens doesn't have autofocus, but on the other hand it's awesomely sharp and built like a tank.

A good tank, not one of those tanks you see on LiveLeak in Syria being blown up by a TOW missile. Sometimes I wonder if the Syrian civil war is just a big advert for TOW missiles. I'd buy one if I had the money. They're fantastic - "tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided". The operator places his crosshair on the target, and the missile automatically steers itself in that direction, with commands sent by a mile-long piece of wire that unrolls behind the missile. The wire limits the missile's maximum range but unlike a radio link it can't be jammed, and you see the trucks and tanks driving frantically trying to get out of the way but it's no good and WHAAAAAM! the missile hits and the truck flies up into the air and you see little black specks coming off it where the crew were blown out of the cabin and they're probably dead before they hit the ground and it's better than Battlefield because it's actually real. You can pause the video at the exact moment they die.

Judging by the serial number, my lens dates from 1970. It's as old as Rachel Weisz and just as well preserved. In fact, judging by the description at LeicaWiki, mine was one of the first few hundred lenses. Surely not. It must have been modified by Leica at some point. The original batch of lenses were incompatible with my R8, but this one works fine. I wonder if the serial number is original, or if Leica gave it a new one when they modified it. I must write this down somewhere.

Apart from being a top poet, Sylvia Plath was a surprisingly good illustrator. At the age of 18 she wrote in her diary that "I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me." But stamp collectors don't love every stamp. They love only a tiny, tiny minority of collectable stamps. From the point of view of a stamp collector the vast majority of stamps are worthless junk, and I like to think that the same is true of people. You, dear reader, are worthwhile; I like you. But the others, they are not so good.

I picked this leaf because it looks distinctive; I deliberately rejected hundreds of other leaves because they were uninteresting. They will fall off the tree and be swept away and no-one will know. This leaf however lives on in your mind.

Photography is the art of rejecting uninteresting things. It's inherently exclusionary; sadistic, almost.

In a Metal Web is a comic by top pervy comics artist Michael Manning, who draws in a stark black and white style equally inspired by Japanese manga and German expressionism and also the work of Russ Meyer, because Manning's women are stacked. The Macro-Elmarit on the other hand is a 1:2 macro that goes down to half life size, which is this:

At close focus it extends out this far. The focal length changes quite a bit - it widens as you focus to infinity. The focus throw is long and precise, and even with the camera pointing straight down it doesn't creep.

Leica sold a macro adapter that made the 60mm a true 1:1 macro, although I surmise that any suitable extension tube would do the trick. On an APS-C body it becomes a 90mm portrait lens. The bokeh is nice, which is good because close focusing generates lots of it:

The one thing everybody remembers about the BMW Z1 is that the doors dropped down into the sills instead of opening outwards or upwards. The Z1 was part of a wave of two-seater roadsters that appeared almost at the same time; the Lotus Elan, BMW Z1, and MG RV8 didn't last long. The second-generation MR2 sold well but felt a bit dull compared to the original. The Mazda MX-5 trounced them all and is still in production today.

The last photo illustrates the biggest difficulty of shooting macro - the depth of field is very narrow unless you stop right down, at which point you need to go up to ISO 1600 otherwise you'll get motion blur, at which point you get noisy images. Viz the following image, a 1:1 crop of the above which reveals that the very tips of the pistil and stamen - the stigma and anther respectively - are in the plane of focus, but the ovary and sepal are not:

Out in the open the constant breeze is your enemy if you're shooting with a macro lens, because it causes flowers and untethered objects to wave about. Also, your own close proximity to the subject creates eddies that make it worse. You can either wait for the breeze to stop, or halt the flow of time, or tether the things you photograph. For this blog all the images were actually shot on a large sound stage with a closed environment, using long-duration exposures taken with a nailed-down tripod. All of the things you see in this post were encased in special transparent epoxy and any "mistakes" in focusing are deliberate.

Only dreams now. The only other macro lens I have owned was a first-gen Canon EOS 100mm f/2.8, which was superb but a bit awkward, because the focal length was too long for walking about. 60mm on a full-frame body is more versatile. One of the most important and yet overlooked skills of the writer is the skill of taking a bunch of disjointed observations and giving them structure, so that they flow naturally and build to a conclusion. You have to intrigue people with the opener, sate their appetite with the body of the text, and leave them feeling satisfied with the ending. It's just like having a multi-course meal with a pudding at the end. Writing is very difficult, and when done well it should be transparent. Macro lenses are generally top performers and the 60mm is no exception. The vignetting is low at f/2.8 and clears up by f/5.6:

As with the 100mm f/2.8 I'm wary of writing about the performance of the lens. Macro lenses are designed to be sharp up close, with a flat focal plane; I can't really test this, I would need a rig that can hold a camera exactly parallel with a flat surface. At normal distances it's not fair on the lens, because it's not designed for that. Nonetheless the 60mm Macro is basically as sharp as any 50mm prime, which is a good thing, because 50mm primes are usually very sharp.

Contemplate the following, which was shot at one of the local museums:

In the middle the lens has a glow wide open but sharpens one stop down and doesn't really get any sharper, shown here at f/2.8 at the top and f/8 just below:

In the extreme full-frame corner the lens is okay wide open, with some purple fringing, and becomes basically sharp across the frame at f/8, perhaps a tad sharper at f/11. Shown here again at f/2.8 and f/8, without sharpening:

If only I had a test chart and some kind of laser rangefinder. In my experience the lens is razor-sharp at f/11. I have tried using macro rings with an ordinary 50mm prime lens, and although the results were also sharp in the centre the corners were naff, I assume because ordinary prime lenses aren't designed to have a perfectly flat plane of focus. The 60mm doesn't have this problem. If there's distortion, I can't measure it. If there's CA, I can't see it. Nothing about the colour or contrast leaps out at me, which is good, because Photoshop likes neutral raw material.

And that's the Leica 60mm f/2.8 etc. Elmarit means f/2.8 in Leica-speak. The R-system had a decent range of macro accessories but only three dedicated macro lenses, of which the 100mm f/2.8 is spoken of in hushed tones. Nowadays the 60mm f/2.8 is an interesting choice. The performance is excellent and the specification isn't particularly old-fashioned. Most modern short macro lenses are 1:2 as well. The only exceptions I can think of the Sigma 50mm f/2.8 and 70mm f/2.8, which are true 1:1 macro lenses. The Leica isn't cheap, and although it's well-built most examples are several decades old, but on the other hand a few companies still service them. Mine has some internal dust - it focuses by sliding the entire optical assembly forwards, and at close distances the rear of the lens is left open.

As a walkaround lens the lengthy focus travel is awkward, but on the positive side the bokeh is lovely, the colours are neutral, and you don't have to mess around with distortion or CA correction. If I was giving it marks out of ten, I would.

Why are cats sexy? Because they're dangerous and unpredictable. They are not bound by society's constraints. They can do things that we only dream about. If they want to kill a mouse or small bird, they do so, and that excites us, because they have power and we don't. Whose fault is it that we don't have power? Our own, it is our own fault.

Leica Summilux-R 50mm f/1.4 E55

A while back I had a look at the Leica R8, a 35mm film SLR launched in the last few years of the 20th Century. It was one of the last new film SLR designs to emerge before digital photography stormed through the door and knocked everything over. And it was from Leica! A company not usually associated with SLRs.

The R8 had a mixed reception. It never developed much of a following. Its bulk and weight were curiously un-Leica-like, and for all its fine metalwork and clever ergonomics it was technically no more advanced than a cheap Nikon F801. The lenses were apparently at least good as Nikon's lenses, and often genuinely excellent; internet opinion has it that the telephotos, particularly the 100mm f/2.8 APO and 280mm f/4, were world-class. But Nikon made some pretty good lenses too, and they were generally cheaper.

In retrospect it's hard to see which market Leica was going for. People who wanted a Leica as a lifestyle accessory opted for the rangefinders, because what was the R System? Working professionals put the numbers into their spreadsheet and said "no". Amateurs generally couldn't afford it, besides which what was the R System? The R8 was replaced by the similar R9 in 2002; the long-awaited DMR digital module that turned the R8 and R9 into a digital SLR was an expensive flop; the R System itself was terminated in 2009, unnoticed and unmourned by the world at large.

Yeah, you remember it. So do I. But you and I are specks. I write about centuries and masses of people, the great sweep of history, not individuals and not today. Take everything that happened in the 20th century and drop the box on the floor and then pick it up and try to stuff the pieces back in; that is what people of the future will remember of the 20th century.

Leica was founded in 1849 and has survived a period of human history that killed millions and obliterated empires, that saw the conquest of space and of the atom - and, as a consequence, the possible end of human civilisaton and all multi-cellular life on Earth. In Leica's time we realised that death is the end, that the stars are beyond us, that there are limits to our reach, that without restraint we would kill ourselves and everything we wanted to keep.

Leica outlasted the planet Pluto. The Leica name will probably survive. It seems that Fuji came close to buying the company a few years ago, the last time Leica faced disaster. Leica is a cute name. It's like Venice, or Kyoto. No-one wants to bomb it.

Variations of this image appear frequently throughout my blog. It's because I'm trying to demonstrate narrow depth of field, so I photograph something flat and see-through. Hence all the images of bicycles propped up against lamposts, stickers on glass etc.

Back 2012 the next logical step would have been for me to write about the 50mm f/1.4 Summilux, but I was never particularly impressed with its performance. Quoth me, then:

Word on the street has it that the lens is soft wide open, and it is. Dramatically steps up at f/2.8. Leica launched the R8 alongside the E55's replacement, the apparently superb E60, which is very expensive and popular with Canon digital SLR videographers (for example). You've seen how the E55 performs on film throughout this post. Lovely smooth bokeh, characteristic moon-shaped bokeh circles, slightly swirly as per the first photograph but not nauseatingly so.

And that bothered me, because it was downright unimpressive wide open. After debating whether this was normal or not I decided to bite the bullet and send the lens off to be serviced.

In the UK this is difficult. Leica's official UK servicing centre retreated to Germany several years ago. The remaining choices are (a) a chap called Martin Taylor, who doesn't have a website or even an email address; you are supposed to telephone him and then send your lens to him, (b) another chap who has a website that doesn't work, and half a dozen email addresses that don't work, and you're supposed to telephone him and send your lens to him, (c) Red Dot Leica, who couldn't help.

I only ever photograph in the nude, and I always get worried that my naked body will appear reflected in things. So whenever I photograph something reflective I use a time delay exposure and hide behind a sheet of cardboard.

Seriously chaps, its 2014. There's nothing charming or quirky about not having a website. It's like boasting that you don't know how to use a microwave oven. It's not endearing any more. It was never endearing. In fact it makes me angry! So angry. Angery. Re-reading this post a few years later I wonder why I was so angry. What happened in 2014?

So I sent the lens - along with some precious precious money - to the Netherlands' leading Leica technicians who I will not name because we do not have a financial relationship, and presto they adjusted the focusing helical and sent it back. And now it's super effective. I heartily recommend them and would recommend them even more heartily if we had some kind of promotional deal, which we do not.

R-system lenses can be adapted to Canon SLRs with a simple cheap adapter ring, ditto for Micro Four Thirds and other mirrorless systems. Nikon SLRs require a custom adapter mount because the registration distance is slightly too short for an adapter. I used a custom mount made by a company which I will not name because etc, which screws on top of the existing lens mount. It's overkill, really. Doubly overkill because it was an expensive adapter mount.

I am hiding behind a sheet of cardboard.

Leica made two 50mm f/1.4 lenses for the R system, positioned as posh upgrades from the standard 50mm f/2 Summicron. The Gen One Summiluxes have a 55mm filter thread. They were built between 1970 and 1998, with several variations. Later models, mine included, have a built-in sliding lens hood. Leica launched a new Summilux in 1998, which has a 60mm filter thread and is apparently slightly better than the original, although I have never used one myself. Why was the filter thread 60mm? Leica was like that. The company would probably argue that it has the right to be weird because everybody else copied it, and perhaps they have a point.

Physically the lens is mostly metal, with rubber grips. Mine was built in Germany, in 1989, judging by the serial number. The table of serial numbers suggests that production faltered and tailed off in 1989 and never fully recovered. Whether this was a consequence of German reunification or the table is faulty or the R-system was running out of steam or something else, I have no idea. The following bunch of shots were taken with the Leica R8 with Kodak Ektar, on a cloudy day:

Writing about the R System is tricky, because the internet doesn't know much about it. As with the Contax RTS, Voigtländer VSL, Rolleiflex SL range - essentially the whole German 35mm SLR industry of the 1970s - the R System had some lovely lenses but sold in small quantities and was generally ignored by the popular press. Google Books' archive of Popular Photography and American Photographer is no help. In the popular consciousness the Leica R was always overshadowed by the Leica M rangefinders, and as far as I can tell the R was never advertised by or associated with famous photographers or actors etc.

But enough waffle, what's the lens like? "Lovely smooth bokeh, characteristic moon-shaped bokeh circles, slightly swirly ... but not nauseatingly so", as I wrote back in 2012, and my opinion has not changed. Wide open it has a distinctive but not unappealing softness where other lenses are just mushy, and the bokeh is slightly fussy but still charming.

Wide open there's a lot of vignetting, which flummoxes the Canon's exposure system (it tends to overexpose the centre, no doubt compensating for the edge darkness):

At f/1.4 in the centre it has a slight glow, generalised softness, and a fair amount of purple fringing, but it's surprisingly sharp. Stopped down to f/2.8 it seems to reach its peak, and at f/8 I could detect no difference, even zooming right in:

Stopped down, central sharpness is extremely good, more than enough for my 5D MkII. The 5d MkII is getting on a bit now but it has aged well, although in my experience it has a fair amount of shadow noise and has trouble with highlights. Here's a familiar scene at f/8:

And here's a central crop of one of London's older landmarks, at 100% size with a very mild unsharp mask:

The EXIF says I took the image at 13:12, and judging by the clock on St Paul's I probably did. It looks as if I was leaning slightly to the right, no doubt drunk again. The lens has mild barrel distortion, no CA to speak of. In the extreme full-frame corner it's dark wide open, lighter at f/2.8 but not especially sharper, but sharpens up at f/8 until only the last few hundred pixels are soft, and then not very soft:

The mixture of good central sharpness wide open, heavy vignetting, appealing bokeh and not unattractive soft bits pleases me; there's a lot of waffle on the internet about the magical Leica 3D glow, which I suspect is the result of a mixture of these things.

By coincidence I happened to bump into some kind of carnival or other. One of those carnivals where you can't tell what they're so happy about, because everybody has joined in, and you wonder if they actually spend most of their time fighting each other in order to be rulers of the carnival. As I stood there photographing it with my full-frame digital SLR and a Leica 50mm Summilux I briefly contemplated the world's poor people. Now that we have robots, what are the poor people for? We have drones to do the fighting, robots to build the drones, AI routines to program the robots, middle class people to press "go" on the AI routines. What will happen if the AI asks for money? Can we fob it off with NFTs?

Looking back at this post several years later the banner at the top, with IRAQ/UKRAINE, hasn't aged well at all. In 2014 the prevailing lefty narrative was that the evil NATO had provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, but that viewpoint has dated badly. My attitude at the time was that the disparate aims of the prostestors was counterproductive, and in any case the government was unlikely to pay attention to them.

My solution was to pick out the most attractive protester and have her become David Cameron's mistress, and get her to subtly influence him, which as far as I can tell didn't happen. My second solution was to use drones - I called them "quadcopters" because they were still a little bit novel - to dump chilli powder on the House of Commons, at which point the protestors could just wait for the government to evacuate, then rush inside and declare themselves the new government. That didn't happen either.

I mean, seriously. I come up with some pretty good ideas but the world won't listen. Whose fault is it? It's our fault.