I almost never use this lens… and I couldn’t tell you why.

I have had this lens since I bought my second Leica rangefinder back in 2020. It was a decent deal on Craigslist and I needed some sort of lens once the used Leica M-D (typ 262) I bought from B&H finally came in the mail. I wouldn’t normally buy a 35mm lens as traditionally my favourite focal lengths are generally in the longer 50mm-75mm range. But everyone always talks about the joys of a 35mm on a rangefinder so I took a chance and bought it. I used it a little bit before I bought my Voigtlander 75mm which was the main lens on Doogie until I eventually found a used Canon 50 mm LTM aka the Japanese Summilux. and the 35mm sort of just hung around in the cupboard for the last 6 years only coming out occasionally for a photo or two before I would inevitably jump back to the 50 or the 75mm. 

Why? I don’t know really! This is such a fantastic lens with more character than a grizzled sea captain in a pulp adventure novel.

I have been chasing lenses that have “character” since way back in 2012 when I got my first Leica M9. I did the same thing which was grab whatever lens I could afford ‘until I got something better’ which at that time was the Zeiss Planar 50mm f/2.0. Which is technically a fine lens. Sharp at all the right places and renders a decent image and comes complete with a decent although not stellar DXO rating, it did the job but all my images lacked that… “character”. 

What does it mean for a lens to have character? I would say ask 20 photographers and I think you would end up with 20 different answers, but to me I would define like this. 

A more modern “clinical” lens does everything in its power to disappear, while lenses with character can’t help but leave their fingerprints all over the image

To be honest (again this is just my humble opinion) this ‘character’ comes from all of the imperfections. Either because of the limits with the technology when it was designed, or by short cuts that are made to keep the costs competitive. There is reason that Holga, Diana+, and Lomo camera’s have such a distinct look to them and it isn’t all about the film and not that DXO could rate any of these lenses, but if they did I can’t image that they would score very high :) 

While newer clinical ‘perfect’ lenses do everything in their power to reduce, chromatic aberrations, lens flares, edge vignetting and trying everything to maximize edge to edge sharpness for the pixel peepers to endlessly scrutinize in boring sample photos of focus and colour charts, these are precisely the things that, again just in my humble opinion, give these lenses such character to begin with. Don’t forget when we say a lens has a “vintage look” what we really mean is it looks OLD. Something lacking in all the modern technology that we can find built into even the cheapest modern lens. 

This Voigtlander 35mm comes in two versions, Single and Multi Coated. The Multi coating does a great job of “fixing” the contrast, rendering more neutral colours, and doing what it can to quell lens flares and the like, but It does so (again just in my humble opinion) at the expense of character.  While this Single Coated version seems to offer a much more “vintage” (aka old) look, rendering images with much softer contrast and defiantly more flaring when shooting into the light. 

So why don’t this lens more? I guess it comes from this love hate relationship that I have with the 35mm  focal length. Sometimes I think it is the best focal length ever and then next week I wish it was a 50mm. I suppose I need to “zoom with my feet” more when using a 35mm, and be ok with the more pronounced barreling that images shot In the ‘wider’ focal length. But this wander around Yaletown I was so happy with the ‘character” that comes from this lens I am currently inspired to use it way more.