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Photowalk with an old Industar 50-2 on a Leica M

Imagine a lazy Sunday, sunny outside, pleasant temperature, what do you think a normal person would do? Just go outside and enjoy the weather, no?

But if you are a person like me, who thinks photography 24 hours per day, you will find for sure something to do with your gears…

So I’ve decided to clean and re-organize all my vintage lenses that were somehow sadly abandoned in few boxes due to a recent moving and, as I’m in the mind blowing process of deciding what gears shall I bring with me on my next trip Japan, I started playing with my Leica M and the Fotodiox M42 to LM adapter. I know, sounds a bit crazy, but why not give it a try, on a lazy Sunday…? 🙂

The first vintage lens I picked up was the little, cute, humble, Russian Industar-50-2 50mm f3.5. Now, the Leica M typ 262 does not have the live view, so, when you attach an M42 lens, you actually cannot focus using the telemetry, you cannot see the focus in the viewfinder…you can just use the Zone focusing system, estimate the distance, use your legs to move a little bit forward or backward, then click and hope that is the right one. If not, just try again. Funny, no?

With no special expectations, i just used a bag of flour on the table as a model, I tried a couple of time and…wooow…what a sharpness, incredible level of details…are you kidding me…¨? gosh, this is way far from what I was expecting. Check this out:

100% crop: the level of details is for me very impressive, you can distinguish the print dots!

The plane was quite far, but you can clearly see it on 100% crop.

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Thrilled by this discovery, i went out for a walk, to do more tries and to get use to this challenging way of focusing and here are some pics.

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hopefully it was a very sunny day with a warm sunset…

Final considerations

Certainly, It is not easy to use an adapted M42 lens on the Leica M 262, but with some exercises, you can take good pictures. I will probably put this small lens in my bag for my next trip to Japan, to use it in those cases where you don’t need to be fast, like landscapes or still images.

I will test other vintage lenses in the next days to see if i discover other little gems in my box. So keep following me!

Ciao,
Sabino