Leica M6 - 12 months on

I've had such a great year using my Leica M6. I bought it 12 months ago in a fit of extravagance from a small 2nd hand camera shop in London near the British Museum. It's 11 years old now and by its condition it's probably had more use in the past 12 months than it did during the previous 10 years of its life.

I bought it during the time I was attending a 12 week B&W darkroom course at UWE. I'd gotten seriously interested in the black and white medium and the great film Photographers of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Robert Capa, Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier Bresson and his wife Martine Franck amongst many others were all Leica owners. I loved their street photography and reportage work and I fell in love with the romanticism of the cameras they predominantly used - Ernst Leitz's Leica designed by Oskar Barnack.

The Leica M6 is a fully manual Rangefinder camera. The Photographer has complete control over the camera's aperture, shutter speed and focussing; there's no automatic settings here. Indeed the focussing of the Rangefinder was something completely new to me and took some getting used to. It takes much more consideration and forethought to get the image that you are after.

The purity of this instrument really appealed to me. At the time I first became interested in the Leica, I had become bored of "Lets make everything really quick, instantaneous and easier for the user" type of technology philosophy. It had made me lazy and as a consequence my photography had suffered. I had lost interest.

I found that taking things right back to their basics, learning the fundamentals of light and speed and how to use both in the camera and darkroom to record images from my negatives really stoked my fire. I had always had a good eye for composition, but before the Leica, I had relied on the camera's automatic settings to help me with the recording of the image. By eliminating these functions, I had learnt to be more creative especially in low light situations and in the use of depth of field.

As Stephen Gandy of Camera Quest says "The Leica M's reason for being as far as I am concerned is their incredible Black and White work.  If you have never tried it, you are in for a treat. Leica negs will stand out on a light table instantly from Nikons/Canons/Minoltas etc. You will have to process your own film, and print them, preferably on Focomats. But you will be in for a real treat not equaled by anything else I have seen. Shooting B/W and then turning the film and processing over to your local lab is like Leonardo buying the canvas and paint and then turning it over to the local quick sketch artist. If you want the best, if you want to approach an art form, learn how to do it yourself". I'm not sure about his Leonardo analogy but I agree with his sentiment.