Leica Quotes

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.

If you would just listen to me . . . if you would just look at the pictures I took—” “We’ve seen them, Miss Maxwell. Several times already. Frankly, nothing you’ve said tonight checks out—not your statement, and not these grainy, unreadable images from your cell phone.” “I’m sorry if the quality is lacking,” Gabrielle replied, acidly. “The next time I’m witnessing a blood slaughter by a gang of psychos, I’ll have to remember to bring my Leica and a few extra lenses.

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile.

Ne adamlar var! Bana soruyorlar. 'Sen ne marka makineyle fotoğraf çekersin?' diye. Fotoğraf makineyle mi çekilir! Şimdi en iyi, en gelişmiş daktilo bende olsa en büyük yazar ben mi olurum! Roman daktiloyla mı yazılır! Arkadaş, fotoğraf burayla, burayla çekilir. Ben Singer dikiş makinesiyle bile fotoğraf çekerim. Şunlara bak. Alıyorlar Leica'yı, Canon'u, Nikon'u ellerine, yola düşüyorlar. Bir köylü mü gördüler. Dur! İki şipşak, tamam... Koyun sürüsü mü gördüler. Dur! İki şipşak, tamam... Çadır mı gördüler. Dur! İki şipşak, tamam... Ben bir çobanın fotoğrafını çekeceksem, onunla oturmalıyım, birlikte yemek yemeliyim, gece çadırında kalmalıyım... Onu tanımalıyım. Fotoğrafını ancak ondan sonra çekebilirim.

When today Oskar, lying or sitting in his hospital bed but in either case drumming, revisits Arsenal Passage and the Stockturm with the scribbles on its dungeon walls and its well-oiled instruments of torture, when once again he looks down on those three windows outside the lobby of the Stadt-Theater and thereafter returns to Arsenal Passage and Sigismund Markus' store, searching for the particulars of a day in September, he cannot help looking for Poland at the same time. How does he look for it? With his drumsticks. Does he also look for Poland with his soul? He looks for it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ. I look for the land of the Poles that is lost to the Germans, for the moment at least. Nowadays the Germans have started searching for Poland with credits, Leicas, and compasses, with radar, divining rods, delegations, and moth-eaten provincial students' associations in costume. Some carry Chopin in their hearts, others thoughts of revenge. Condemning the first four partitions of Poland, they are busily planning a fifth; in the meantime flying to Warsaw via Air France in order to deposit, with appropriate remorse, a wreath on the spot that was once the ghetto. One of these days they will go searching for Poland with rockets. I, meanwhile, conjure up Poland on my drum. And this is what I drum: Poland's lost, but not forever, all's lost, but not forever, Poland's not lost forever.

Și caut țara polonezilor, care s-a pierdut și încă nu s-a pierdut. Unii spun: pierdută în curând, pierdută deja, pierdută din nou. La noi, țara polonezilor este căutată, mai nou, cu credite, cu Leica, cu compasul, cu radarul, cu bagheta magică și cu delegați, cu umanism, conducători ai opoziției și costume ale echipelor naționale roase de molii. În timp ce la noi țara polonezilor este căutată cu sufletul - pe jumătate cu Chopin, pe jumătate cu revanșa din inimi -, în timp ce se neagă aici, de la prima până la a patra împărțire a Poloniei și se planifică deja o a cincea, în timp ce unii zboară cu Air France la Varșovia și depun acolo, cu păreri de rău, o coroniță, acolo unde odinioară fusese ghetoul; în timp ce de aici, țara polonezilor e căutată cu rachete, eu caut Polonia cu toba mea și bat în tobă: pierdută, încă nu pierdută, pierdută din nou, pierdută în folosul cui, pierdută în curând, pierdută deja, Polonia pierdută, totul pierdut, Polonia încă nu e pierdută.

Yale tried to say some­thing, but didn’t know how to be­gin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lin­coln Park la­goon, the two of them shar­ing Richard’s Le­ica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of in­ter­act­ing with the world that was si­mul­ta­ne­ously self­ish and gen­er­ous—grab­bing at beauty and re­flect­ing beauty back. The benches and fire hy­drants and man­hole cov­ers Nico and Richard stopped to pho­to­graph were made more beau­ti­ful by their notic­ing. They were left more beau­ti­ful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found him­self see­ing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the rip­ples of sun on a record store win­dow. He said, “I get it, I do.

The PlayStation 4's errs not by being something other than what it is, but by holding on to the idea that its particular brand of novelty is in any way novel, by mistaking itself for figure rather than for ground. By calling itself "PlayStation 4" instead of just "PlayStation," because really all anyone wants is whatever PlayStation is made available, doing whatever things it ought to do at whatever moment it does them. Apple recognized this problem when it tried to correct the mistake of the "iPad 2" by reverting to its follow-up as just "the iPad," a name that still hasn't stuck. Leica, the old and traditional German photographic and optical equipment company, stopped numbering its digital M rangefinder cameras this year, after burning through as many numeric increments in six years as it had in the previous two decades. At some point, a camera is just a camera, no matter how nice it is.

The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still. In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat. Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis. Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener. A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls. People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone. Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica. Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment. The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet. The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless. The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers. The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out. And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis. He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him. The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out: ‘Monsieur Bouvet!

Lo sentí vivo a la vez que muerto, muerto como en el negativo de la Leica, vivo porque sabía que aquello le habría gustado. Al final cogí las entradas de los conciertos y las fui soltando por el ataúd, aterrizaron como plumas de pájaro que eligen el punto del suelo en el que quieren descansar.

There were thousands of people milling around, in side streets and everywhere. Everybody was kissing each other…And there was this Navy man running, grabbing anybody, you know, kissing. Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn’t make any difference….I ran ahead of him because I had Leica cameras around my neck, focused from 10 feet to infinity. You only had to shoot…I didn’t even know what was going on, until he grabbed something in white. And I stood there, and they kissed. And I snapped 5 times.” Alfred Eisenstaedt

Ovdje ljudi rijetko se grle kad se sretnu na ulici, rijetko jedan drugog stegnu zdušno. A i što bi se grlili, ionako se stalno sreću. Ništa novo ne dešava se mjesecima, godinama. Netko tu i tamo umre, netko se rodi, netko se doseli, a iseljavaju se oni koji mogu ili moraju. Ne znam znači li to da ovdje nitko nikome ne nedostaje, da ovdje ljudi pate od nedostatka čežnje, pojma nemam, možda ima onih koji za nekim ili nečim čeznu, vjerojatno ima i takvih, pa bilo bi skroz bolesno, skroz nenormalno da ovdje ni jedne takve osobe nema.

Srećem mnoga poznata lica. Neka poznata lica i ja padamo u zagrljaj, od nekih poznatih lica okrećem glavu.

to account for an unusual, or non-optimal, lighting situation. Suppose

The zoom lever, surrounding the shutter button,

there is one important point to bear in mind: If

There are some other considerations to be discussed with regard to recording limits; I

As noted above, if

EV stands for exposure value, a

The USB/AV port is where you plug in the camera’s USB cable to transfer images and videos to a computer. You

Note that the speed class is different from the series. So, you can use a UHS-I card or a UHS-II card, as long as either one is certified for Speed Class 3.

I will introduce the main controls so you’ll have a better idea of which button or dial is which. I

For now, I’m including a series of images that show the major items. You may want to refer back to these images for a reminder about each control.

Appendices that can provide more detailed information. This

You need to let the card complete its recording process.

The shutter speed dial is used to set the shutter speed when you are using Shutter Priority mode or Manual exposure mode. If

The A button is used to switch the camera into and out of Snapshot mode. The

This button also is designated as the Fn2 button, and can be assigned another operation through the menu system. The

Suppose you have the D-Lux set to Snapshot mode and you are photographing a fairly dark object, such as a model of a diving helmet, in front of a white background, as shown in Figure 2-9. The

you should reset the EV compensation back to zero so you don’t unintentionally affect the pictures you take later.

be assigned to carry out another operation instead of EVF switching using the menu system.

If you set it to the red A mark, the camera will choose the shutter speed, in

There are several variables to take into account in computing how many images or videos you can store on a particular size of card, such as the aspect ratio you’re using (1:1, 3:2, 4:3, or 16:9), picture size, and quality.

another external flash unit, as well as certain other accessories. The

The slit to its right is the eye sensor, which senses the presence of your head and switches between the EVF and the LCD screen display. The

the existence of this dial on top of the camera, which

which makes it simple to adjust the exposure at any time.

Amidst the poetic ambience, I held my dear Leica M6, a trusted companion. With a fluttering attention, I meticulously made precise adjustments—permitting only a refinement in the depth of field by adjusting the lens’s aperture and finely tuning the focus. I captured the ephemeral moments as the enchanting duo transformed before my lens.

Life is once, a Leica is forever.” Chris Geiger

As we get older, the toys get more expensive…” - Chris Geiger

Wang’s first thought was that something was wrong with the film. The camera he had used was a 1988 Leica M2—entirely mechanical, which made it impossible for it to add a date stamp. Given the excellent lens and refined mechanical operation, it was considered a great professional camera even in this digital age.

Before he went into the darkroom to develop the film, he loaded another roll of film in the Leica and handed it to his wife. “Here, finish the roll for me.” “What am I supposed to shoot?” His wife looked at him, amazed. He never allowed anyone to touch his camera, though she and their son had no interest in doing so either. In their eyes, it was a boring antique that cost more than twenty thousand yuan.

It doesn’t matter if you use a box camera or a Leica, the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing. What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing. To have them realize without saying so, that it was up to them to give me whatever they wanted to give me . . . if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

Leica,