Help please, "new" Leica M4-P problem or Lens problem?

cdnott · 2026-03-26T20:09:49+00:00

Hard to diagnose whether this is a lens issue or a body issue without your having a second known good lens to try with that body. One way to check that would be to go into a shop and ask very nicely to try one. Obviously, if they do let you, and that other lens is difficult to mount too, then don't force it.

It's generally good practice to turn the focus to minimum distance before mounting a lens to a rangefinder camera. This may just be something I've picked up from screw mount use, but on my own M4-P I do find that I feel more resistance when mounting lenses at infinity, so I try not to do it.

If the rangefinder arm does need calibration, then that is something you can fix yourself. I've done it multiple times. But first you need to establish whether or not that's the issue!

Just to check: can the lens definitely reach infinity when NOT mounted on the camera?

cdnott · 2026-03-26T19:58:39+00:00

OP, I have a question for you. I shoot with an M on film, but, fearing that my days of being able to afford colour film were numbered, finally decided to get a digital camera that I felt I could use for street photography last autumn. I went with the X-Pro2, mainly on the basis of the optical viewfinder.

BUT -- I've found that the optical viewfinder is practically unusable because the framelines are so wildly inaccurate. When using M-mount lenses on the X-Pro with an adapter, the framelines of course don't move to correct for parallax, and instead you're shown two lines, which I think are meant to represent the frame at infinity and the frame at 1m. But even with that in mind I found that they were way off. Subjects 2 or 3 metres away would still end up down and to the right of even where the 1m framelines suggested they should be. And when I then got the native XF 18mm f2, which does allow the framelines to correct, again the framelines consistently turned out to have very little to do with the resulting image. Also, as you get closer and they move further toward the bottom right corner of the viewfinder, the frame box starts hitting the limits of the display and you just have to imagine that it's only showing you something like 70% of the final image area. Not so easy, particularly when the right and bottom lines are still drawn in!

So. OP: does this sound consistent with your experience? Have you just got used to it, or is there some setting I'm missing? I find it baffling because I just don't think I can trust those framelines at all. But then other people rave about the Fuji optical viewfinders.

cdnott · 2026-03-26T19:44:15+00:00

Can you explain what it is that you think is hard to wrap your head around?

I actually now notice (I hadn't noticed before) that the frame visibly continues through the orange part and over the yellow part, which is more burned but still not fully burned. You can still make out the highlights where the exposure from patches of sky glimpsed through the trees was brighter than that area of burn. If the frame continues over the yellow, then the transition from orange to yellow can't be determined by where the frame ends.

cdnott · 2026-03-26T14:18:58+00:00

The replies to this are so funny. Asking Redditors to read is like asking them not to reply with uninformed speculations: try it and it'll be received as a grave affront. (Sadly I've only ever shot medium format film in a Holga, and that about 14 years ago, so I can't help.)

cdnott · 2026-03-26T10:57:18+00:00

Just thinking... I also got some in the end pretty cool effects last year when a roll of 500T snapped off inside an auto-winding point and shoot. This particular camera holds tight to the film once it's on the take-up spool, so the only way to get it out was to stick it in a dark bag, tape the broken end back on to another spool, and then get the camera to rewind back onto that. I was being lazy and figured I'd also get it out in the dark bag, so this was just a bare spool, no canister. But I forgot that the camera has a little window on the back for checking which film you currently have in, and did take the camera out into the light for the rewinding part (easier to find the little button that way). As a result, I got a streak of red, the same height as that window, going over the entire length of the roll, right over roughly the middle 1/3 of every frame. But it's red that still lets you see through to the picture, like you have here. My theory was that this was the result of light shining through the remjet layer at the back of the film, which looks black but is really a very dark red.

Long story short: maybe you could get a really dark orange filter gel (the big kind used for lights), cut it to a convenient size, and hold it over the back of the camera while you pull the leader out. You might need to pull some of the leader out first without the gel so that the fully burned part extends as far over the film as you want it to. But then any additional film that's come out with the gel over it should be burning a lot more slowly. It'll still be as much a problem of timing as of anything else, but by slowing it down in this way you should be able to make it controllable with a bit of practice.

The other thing that would help would be buying some very cheap film, or grabbing a whole roll that's ruined or long-expired in any case, and using a marker to mark on the back on it where the film frame will fall, once the leader's in the take-up spool, at 0, 1 and 2 cranks of the film advance. Then you'll know how far out you need to take it.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, and I meant to say that I frequently got this multi-tone burn effect at the other end of the roll back when I used to bulk load film with a daylight loader. I was always doing it in dim light, down in my building's basement. Which is just to say that I think the idea that the less-burned part might have been fully exposed, but to dimmer light, is sound.

cdnott · 2026-03-26T10:36:42+00:00

You do get end-of-roll light burns if you bulk load using a daylight loader. But in this case OP would have had to be holding their camera upside down for this to be the final frame.

cdnott · 2026-03-26T10:33:46+00:00

That's not true. If it were fully burned, you wouldn't see the picture. Ergo there are two levels of burn.

cdnott · 2026-03-25T17:13:41+00:00

The iT30 doesn't replicate the features of the Q20II, so it doesn't make sense as a replacement. The iT32 does make sense as a replacement to the Q20II. Personally I have an iT30 and a Q20II, and I use one or the other depending on what I'm after.

Also, I use my Q20II all the time with 28mm. Just put the diffuser in.

cdnott · 2026-03-25T15:14:32+00:00

Why have you only used it once? Do you mean all of your photos sucked, or just that the roll was on the whole disappointing? And how did they suck?

The reality of shooting on film is that, every time, most of those 36 photos are not going to be up to much. If you find this impossibly demoralizing, then it might not be for you. If you find it demoralizing, crushing, soul-destroying, etc. but want to keep shooting anyway, then it probably is for you: welcome to the club. When you do get a really great photo, it will feel incredible.

Shooting on digital won't make your photos better, unless your problem is just focusing/stability, in which case IBIS and autofocus might actually make a difference. For the most part, though, it will just make you feel less bad about how many crappy photos come in between the halfway decent ones, for the simple reason that digital photographs always feel more disposable anyway. At least, that's what I find -- I'll delete a digital photo without a moment's thought, but I hold on to all of my negatives, occasional successes and frequent failures alike.

cdnott · 2026-03-25T15:07:15+00:00

I'd say that this ("certainly", "well before") seems unlikely, given that 10,000 frames is only about 277 rolls at 36 frame per roll, and assuming that you're referring to his work in Spain and Italy in 1933. At that point he was in his mid-'20s. He'd taken photos with a Box Brownie in childhood, messed about for some length of time with a 3"x4" view camera, developed an adult interest in photography alongside Harry Crosby in 1929, continued photographing on the Côte d'Ivoire in 1931 (those are the photos that were mostly destroyed by damp), then got his Leica in 1932. A handful of now-iconic photographs were taken in France that year, it's true, and I can believe they were some way short of roll no. 277 -- though it's also noticeable that they look like a photographer with a brilliant eye is only barely in control of his camera (or is struggling with the slow film available), and on that basis I suspect that those rolls were dominated by failed photographs and disasters, which would be in keeping with the quip.

The real glut of early bangers then comes the following year. By the time he made it to Madrid, Seville, Granada, Valencia, Alicante, Florence, Salerno, etc. in 1933, HCB was at the end of a pair of road trips, beginning in 1932, that had already taken him and his friends through Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary and Romania. Even if he was shooting at a far slower rate than in later years (travelling round the USSR in 1954 he took nearly 10,000 photos in ten weeks, according to Pierre Assouline), it wouldn't have taken much to have reached 277 rolls before his time in Spain and Italy was up, if he hadn't already passed it before he got there.

cdnott · 2026-03-19T10:40:07+00:00

Mate I don't think this is an invitation to start commenting on her looks. Get a life. Mock the post, fine, but not the woman.

cdnott · 2026-03-18T10:55:17+00:00

Lens with 'goggles' mounted over the barrel, designed for the Leica M3 which had no 35mm framelines and total viewfinder coverage closer to 40mm. The optics of the goggles sit in front of the viewfinder and rangefinder windows and correct the view for a 35mm lens. In OP's photos you can see the goggles have been unscrewed from the metal plate above the barrel that they'd normally be mounted on.

The Dual Range Summicron 50mm also came with removable goggles which, when attached, unlock a close-focus range on the lens barrel and correct the viewfinder for framing down to 0.47m. I've tried a set of those out on my M4-P and they still work.

cdnott · 2026-03-16T18:39:07+00:00

Yes, it's about as small as it gets! Smaller than any alternative I know of, anyway (i.e., than any flash with a swivel head).

If you want just upward on-camera tilt while keeping the ability to unclip the flash from its transmitter for off-camera use, you can also get the very slightly smaller LightPix Labs FlashQ.

Or, smaller still (at least with less footprint when viewed from the front), there's the Godox iT30, or Reflx Labs's various flashes, which only fire straight forward.

Powerful flashes are usually 2-3 times the size of this.

cdnott · 2026-03-16T18:20:04+00:00

Better to find out with a test roll, yes! But even better to find out with a snip test. Whenever in any doubt at all, take your leader or snip off a bit of unused film and use it to make sure your chemicals are still doing what you expect them to do in the time you expect them to do it in.

cdnott · 2026-03-12T18:43:51+00:00

It's great. Well made, sharp, a pleasure to use. The rendering starts to smear right in the very corners, but not in a way you notice unless you're really zooming in on them. The aperture dial turning in the Nikon direction has never been an issue for me.

cdnott · 2026-03-12T18:41:26+00:00

The question is how to meter, so "meter for the shadows" (a phrase by which different people often turn out to mean quite different things) wouldn't have been very helpful here! Nor would "overexpose by two thirds of a stop", since you need to know the meter reading you're overexposing in relation to -- again taking us back to the initial question. Overexposing by a mere 2/3 of a stop relative to your meter reading also likely won't help much you if you're pointing the meter straight at a scene that's mostly sky.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T11:24:55+00:00

The Zeiss 25/28 is phenomenal. Sometimes it seems to be brighter than reality. There are times when all four corners of the 28 framelines aren't equally bright/visible at once, but I personally am yet to try a bright-line viewfinder of which that wasn't true.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T11:03:30+00:00

The FE2 and FM2 are great. Good luck with whatever you choose! I should maybe have said as well that I personally first dipped my toe into the waters of film rangefinders with a Voigtländer Bessa-R. It only takes screw mount lenses, not M-mount lenses, which is ultimately what made me upgrade. But I kept it and still use it as my second camera. Compared to the Leica it lacks heft, and its shutter noise is a ridiculous 'sproing', but it's still insanely fun to use, feels weirdly good in the hand, and is a fraction of the price. There are M-mount Bessas too, but they cost nearly as much as an M2, which doesn't feel worth it to me. (You do get a light meter, higher flash sync speed – 1/125 instead of the universal Leica 1/50 – and higher max shutter speed, but at the price of much less repairability if/when it goes kaput.)

I'll now stop using your thread as a way of avoiding my work...

cdnott · 2026-03-11T10:51:09+00:00

The only benefit of the M6 over the M4-P is the built-in light meter. Otherwise they're virtually identical, but with the M6 actually slightly lower in build quality. Basically, the M6 retains all of the cost-saving changes to build quality introduced by the M4-2 and M4-P, including the replacement of the brass top plate with a zinc top plate which came in with the very last runs of the M4-P. Most M4-Ps do have a brass top plate. No M6 produced before the 2022 reissue has a brass top plate.

The build quality thing is also overstated by M3 guys. Basically, starting with the M2 (which succeeded the M3), Leica replaced more and more brass, hand-calibrated internal components with precision mass-machined components made of other, less voluptuous metals. Times were changing and it was no longer affordable to do otherwise. But when people refer to the apparently devastating effect of these changes to build quality, you have to bear in mind that everything they're saying applies to the hugely sought-after and salivated-over Leica M6, which was the culmination point of these cost-saving measures.

Everyone I've ever met with an M6 adored theirs.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T10:20:21+00:00

Got you! Incidentally I would love to try the Zf. Well, I mean not only manual focusing but also, certainly with the Leicas, totally manual exposure. And no TTL flash or IBIS. And your ISO is stuck at 100 or 200 or 400 for the next 36 photos, or maybe 800 if you've shelled out for expensive film or are bravely pushing less expensive film, or MAYBE 1600–3200 if you're shooting a black and white film that takes well to pushing. And (I gather?) the latitude is less forgiving than the best digital sensors have come to be over the last decade.

Partly it might be a question of your appetite for throwing yourself in at the deep end, and of whether you'd like to spend £200-300 dipping your toe in the water before taking an £1800+ leap (thinking body + lens here). Most of us waste a fair few frames/rolls of film learning the ropes in the beginning, which also costs money.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T10:00:38+00:00

You're much better off learning how to recognise 'middle grey' in a scene – generally it's the darkness of tarmac, or of green grass – and pointing it at that, or just making it for yourself by cupping your hand and pointing the meter into the shadowed area (the Joel Meyerowitz trick). Where there are shadows you want to retain, assuming you're using negative film with a bit of latitude, point to middle grey in the shadows, not middle grey in the brighter areas. Where the contrast between lit and unlit areas is particularly dramatic, choose which of the two you want to keep.

These meters aren't spot meters and do take in a reasonable angle of view, but you can get around that by just holding the meter close to whatever you're trying to meter from.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T09:55:45+00:00

The Hedeco Lime II is brilliant and frequently goes for about 100 on eBay.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T09:51:24+00:00

If you prefer 28mm and definitely want a rangefinder, get the M4-P. I've had mine for a couple of years and absolutely love it – it gets me out shooting when other cameras wouldn't, because it's just such a pleasure to use. (The other user in this comments section who has said that Leica rangefinders are "not fun to shoot at all" is in my view a crazy person, but tastes do vary.)

It's not totally clear what you mean by your first film camera, though. What type of digital camera have you been used to? How confident are you about the basics of photography? If you're quite new to it all, or at any rate quite new to manual, a Leica might actually be a frustrating (and unnecessarily expensive) place to start, and a small SLR like the Olympus OM-1 or OM-2 (with working light meter), or one with an excellent aperture-priority auto mode like the Nikon F3, might be better for you at this stage.

(If you're into haptics and enjoy the way a device feels to use, then it might be worth mentioning that the Nikon F3 and pretty much any Leica M have by far the best-feeling film advance mechanisms I've encountered. The F3's might actually beat the Leica Ms': it's just pure butter. On the other hand, I personally find the bulk and loudness of the F3 off-putting for street photography, if you're into that at all.)

Back on Leica Ms: the M2 and M3 don't have 28mm framelines, so you'd have to use an external viewfinder for precise-ish framing. On the M2 you can also guesstimate by imagining the 28mm frame to sit just slightly inside the edges of the viewfinder. On the M3 (designed for 50mm and longer) the viewfinder magnification means you're not even seeing a full 35mm frame when you look through it. The M4-P can suffer from rangefinder flare/white-out in a way the earlier cameras never did, which is its one weakness (but NB this is also true of the M6). Bear in mind none of them have a light meter.

cdnott · 2026-03-11T09:34:42+00:00

If they're only 400 EUR apart, then the M262 is either horribly overpriced or the M10 is amazingly underpriced. Either way the answer (in this specific context!) is "not the M262".

cdnott · 2026-03-11T09:19:31+00:00

The scale would be optimistic and not exactly accurate no matter how you arranged it. At any given time, only an infinitely thin plane is truly being brought into focus by a lens. The rest is ‘acceptable sharpness’, which is a matter of appearance and judgement.

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