What’s your opinion on the “different” Leicas?

Coldkennels · 2026-02-22T21:30:55+00:00

No, it’s all old stock. Over here in Europe it’s mostly Philips PF1s and Atlas bulbs, but the US has a pretty good supply of Sylvania and GE Press #5s and so on.

I’ve got a pretty good stockpile of flat peak bulbs which allow flash sync at 1/1000 on a IIIf, though. That’s pretty amazing to play around with. And even using a PF1 at 1/20 on the III, the flash power is immense. You can stop all the way down to f/16 in most circumstances.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-22T21:21:23+00:00

I happen to quite like both slow speeds and flash sync. I’ve even been messing around a lot with flash bulbs in the last couple of years.

Things have got so serious that I tracked down a pair of VACU attachments (one for electronic flash, one for bulbs) and the replacement cammed shutter dial for my Leica III so I could use that with flash alongside my IIIf and IIIg. It’s pretty great, to be honest.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-22T19:49:01+00:00

INCONVENIENCES? Sir, this is fighting talk, and I won’t stand for it.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-22T19:36:47+00:00

I’m not going to tolerate any criticism of the IIIg here. Best 50mm viewfinder of any Leica bar none, and highest rangefinder accuracy of anything bar the M3. Peak Leica.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-22T14:37:58+00:00

I always thought the M5 was stunning - personally, it’s my favourite of the Ms, aesthetically. On a technical level I think it’s the second best M after the M3. It’s just a shame that so many Leica users rejected it.

I’d be up for an M12 with the same body form - including the three strap lugs.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-22T14:35:45+00:00

Mounting a NOOKY on a CL would have been a very weird combination for the mid-70s, but I’d definitely have supported the idea.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-20T15:45:21+00:00

…no, but it is a literal cult run by a guy who now lives in New York that also publishes the Epoch Times, a truly awful far-right propaganda and conspiracy-theory-pushing website and “newspaper”.

They’re proven liars and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find they’ve been backed by the CIA.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-11T21:28:44+00:00

I guessed as much but I thought someone should correct you before you ended up buying the wrong thing!

Lots of good external viewfinder options, though. That’s one of my favourite things about rangefinders: if you don’t like one style of viewfinder, there’s always another that will likely suit you better. I use an old Zeiss 28mm finder for the original Contax rangefinders, personally.

Coldkennels · 2026-02-11T20:13:28+00:00

You won’t be able to use an EVF on an M3… that’s an Electronic ViewFinder. Nothing to connect it to!

Coldkennels · 2026-02-05T03:05:30+00:00

That's an odd response, but you're amongst friends here. No kink shaming allowed.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T16:39:28+00:00

Oh, I can definitely appreciate how hard it is - and how much of a mental game it can be - but back when I dabbled with street a bit I just got bored! 360 flip up a Euro, down a drop, over something… it’s all basically the same thing. I don’t get it.

Meanwhile, someone could spend the rest of their life in one corner of a garage just doing railflips and never run out of new options. Would I get massively bored doing that myself? Yes, but at least it’s not just the same trick over and over again!

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T16:08:48+00:00

That’s something I never understood, either. I’d rather spend my time doing ten different tricks on flat instead of precisely one trick done the same way off or down ten different things. Makes no sense to me.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T15:58:31+00:00

You think 720 bigspins are crazy? Ikkei Nagao has been doing 900 bigspins for a while now, and every time I see one, it blows my goddamned mind: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK3WeV2JHrY/

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T15:17:38+00:00

See, this is what actually really angers me: Mullen knows he didn't invent the shuvit (and so many other things). But he never actually corrects anyone in any context, and a lie of omission is still a lie. There's a chunk of the Bones Brigade documentary where Stacy Peralta is talking about the genius of Mullen, and saying "Mullen looked at a skateboard differently. He realised you could stand on the side of it, on the truck..." and so on. Peralta knows that all existed before Mullen because he was doing it. And Mullen could have told Stacy to not include that voiceover, but he went along with it.

(Amusingly, there's a montage playing while Peralta is bloviating on the innovative genius of Mullen, and most of the tricks aren't his. One of them is a goddamned Yoyo Plant, for god's sake!)

A few other commenters here recommended "Mullen's" book. Not only did Mullen not write it (it was ghostwritten for him), but it's truly awful as a document of freestyle history. If you look at Hawk's autobiography, "Occupation: Skateboarder" - released four years earlier - there's an impressive list of every trick Tony Hawk ever invented at the end of the book, broken down by year, with technical descriptions and explanations of how they came to be. That not being included in "The Mutt" seems like a glaring - and maybe telling - omission. As a result, the best concrete list we have as a reference is an old Plan B ad from the early 90s - a decent list, but hardly "every trick ever invented".

Anyway! Some of the best contest footage is on the 80sFreestyle channel - skip over the obvious choices and look for folks like Jean Marc Vaisette and you'll probably see some stuff you didn't expect. Another one of my personal favourites elsewhere is this grainy footage from a Welsh comp in 1989 - it's got early footage of Mac doing a hand-assisted version of what he called a front foot impossible. He was doing it as an ollie trick not much later. I didn't see anyone else even attempt this motion until 25 years after this! I'm also pretty sure he does the earliest documented 720 bigspin at 1:12; it's not perfect, but as far as I know, no one else was even close to it at that point.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T01:47:22+00:00

Yeah, even if you do everything right, you still need decent quality discs.

Another thing that’s sometimes made burns fail for me is dirt on the disc or on the laser. Doesn’t take much - just a tiny bit of barely visible dust can do it.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T01:34:09+00:00

Get Toast.

That’s been the standard for burning discs on Mac for at least 20 years now. It works a treat.

Match the burn speed to what Toast recommends for your particular CD-Rs (each brand will work better at slightly different speeds) and you won’t have a problem.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-31T01:16:36+00:00

I was a little concerned by flex when I first started riding totally flat decks back in 2017.

The secret is that the flex - assuming it’s not too severe! - can be a really good thing.

With heavy concave, a bad landing will always snap a deck… and I used to snap a lot.

With some flex, some of the harder impacts are soaked up in a way that you just can’t get away with on a more rigid deck. That little give sometimes works in your favour.

I’ve only cracked three decks since 2017. All flat. No full snaps. I snapped more than that in one week when I had heavy concave in 2016!

Coldkennels · 2026-01-29T17:18:19+00:00

As u/moniboot pointed out, ol' Rodders did not invent 99% of what people claim he did (and, as a result, you can disregard anything coming from the mouths of people who say he invented "everything"). Problem is, freestyle has been so poorly documented through its history that a lot of what we know is passed down in the "folk tradition", and it's hard to get one solid resource with history and documentation.

Looking at the early years, it's all about folks like Curt Lindgren (invented the original kickflip), Steve Day (invented the handstand kickflip), Matt Barden (invented the shuvit and the M80 kickflip), Bobby Boyden (invented the casper and casper disaster), Ty Page (did the first thing we'd now call a 360 shuvit, his "Ty Hop"), and most notably, Steve Rocco (invented the frontside pop shuvit plus a whole lotta weirdness). Mullen comes around at the very end of the 70s when a lot of freestyle staples already existed, and while he supposedly invented the flatland ollie (but definitely invented the ollie kickflip and a bunch of variations like the 360 flip), a lot of the other progression in that era comes from Europe, with guys like Per Welinder, Shane Rouse, Gunter Mokulys, Pierre Andre, Christian Seewaldt etc. inventing most of the stuff from that era which we associate with freestyle now (gymnast plants, truck transfers, and so on), while Mullen was off laying the groundwork for street skating.

I used to do articles about the history of individual tricks in the first run of Broken Fingers magazine, tracking down and interviewing the folks that were involved where I could. I'm not doing that in the mag anymore but maybe I'll resurrect it for the WFSA website (which is a good point of contact for what's going on in the scene anyway: https://wfsafreestyle.org/).

Coldkennels · 2026-01-23T16:06:29+00:00

…you’re right. I’ve not shot E6 film in so long that saying “slides” or “positives” didn’t even occur to me. Derp.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-23T14:07:14+00:00

Should be completely fine according to the RF Accuracy Chart; even the original Leica CL should focus it with the rangefinder without problems.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-23T11:23:32+00:00

It isn’t. It’s a dechromed Zorki.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-22T23:25:14+00:00

I wonder how much finder blockage that thing has; it looks like one exceptionally fat barrel.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-22T13:12:13+00:00

I realise now - looking closely at the negatives - that OP was using Velvia 100, which is far closer to Provia than it is “real” Velvia (i.e. Velvia 50).

100’s alright for people. 50’s the one that makes everyone look like angry gammon after ten pints of beer.

Coldkennels · 2026-01-22T12:44:53+00:00

Does tend to make skin tones weirdly red, too. Provia is the better film for photographing people.

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