A vehicle for the best lens I'll ever own; a 35mm f2.8 Leitz Summaron. In all honesty the f2.8 Zuikos on my Trips are almost the Summaron's equal, but don't tell anyone.
At the time when I began to have more time again in my life for photography we were in North Devon, and I've always liked the relative wilderness north of the moor and south of the coast-influenced busy bits - and certainly as far away from Clovelly as one can imagine! This is a largely forgotten area in which one can happily contrive to get lost and which I've come to call the Holsworthy Triangle. South of Great Torrington, and across and down to Holsworthy, then Hatherleigh, maybe crossing the Torridge to South Molton - it's all perfect. I digress. We came across the Beaford Arts Centre (not entirely sure of the name but the clue's in the name so it's not going to be far out) and there fell into an exhibition of photographs of James Ravilious. This was rather before his life and work became more widely known, and the nice man who showed us in just left us in a room with some of his prints and we found ourselves in this marvelous world. He came back and gave me a couple of folders - "You're a photographer, I can tell. I thought you might like to see these" and in the folders were, as we all have, pages and pages of James' negs. Now that was interesting to me; to see the densities, the bracketing, the film type and so on. Completely reckless of the bloke, of course, and it wouldn't happen now that Ravilious' work is, rightly, coveted, but it was just so nice to be trusted; here we were, strangers, but trusted, deep in the fragile landscape that we liked so much, and getting a further insight into it.
So; Ravilious, Leica, old lenses, and I realised I had just such equipment myself! My Stepfather had, some years, previously, given me his old Leica and on the front of it was a 50mm Elmar.
