Lenses are to photographers as Dom is to champagne lovers, or as speakers are to audiophiles. Many of us end up on a quest to acquire the ultimate lens in a search for that je ne sais quoi it will impart to our images. For me, that lens was the Leica 35 mm Summicron R.
I think this narrative is pretty familiar to most folks up to this point, so what I'd like to do is jump to the denouement and talk about some of the differences between Plato's Summicron and my copy of the lens.
The first image is a view of the Snake River Valley in Jackson, WY. I was hiking with the Summicron mounted on a R6 body using a low speed, fine grained film (ISO 12). As a result, this exposure was made at f/4. At this aperture, a lens of this vintage (at least 30 years old) is not at its best for landscape shooting, and the image is pretty soft in the corners. My fault, of course, both because I was very much aware of this property of the lens and also because I could easily have brought a tripod. Still, seeing the fuzzy negative brought me back to earth a little bit.
The second image was taken in Washington, DC. The ghost in the lower left part of the frame has always bothered me, and for the record, I was indeed using a lens hood. It is just that this lens tends to misbehave when you shoot into the light is all.
I hesitated to show anyone this image for a long time because of this 'flaw', even though I liked the juxtaposition of the two structures, which was kind of the point of the photograph in the first place.
Well, then, now that we've acknowledged that the gear of our dreams is not perfect, perhaps we can at some point in the future take a deeper dive on that je ne sais quoi stuff again.
