Leica M6 v Konica IIA

a whole lot closer than you’d think………..

The thing nobody tells you about the Leica M6 is that owning one makes you feel obliged to look like someone who owns one. Stepping into the English Gardens at Regent's Park on Saturday, M6 round my neck and the little Leitz 35mm Summicron perched on the front, I felt like a Magnum photographer on assignment, and then like a man who had spent roughly the price of a decent second-hand Fiat to photograph a large bronze blob next to a flowerbed. The M6 is everything people say it is: dense, precise, and reassuringly expensive. Its meter blinks red arrows at you from inside the viewfinder like a polite butler who has noticed your shoelace is undone. The Summicron, meanwhile, does that maddening Leica thing where it renders a wet Tuesday in Zone 2 as if it were a dappled afternoon in Tuscany. I pointed it at a sculpture I could not have explained to you at gunpoint, and on the negatives it looks profound. Ish.

Then there is the Konica IIa, which I took along in the same spirit you might bring an elderly uncle to a wedding, out of affection and with no great expectations. It was built in 1950s Japan by people who had clearly decided a camera ought to weigh about as much as a house brick and last about as long. It has no meter, so I worked out every exposure with the Sunny 16 rule and a good deal of muttering, much to the interest of a small boy who watched me squinting at the sky as though I were trying to predict rain from the clouds. The Hexanon lens is fixed, the rangefinder patch is not as dim as the proverbial pub window, but winding it on gives you the feeling of operating some small piece of agricultural machinery. Yet when the Kodak Gold came back from the lab, the Konica's frames had a warmth and a gentle, slightly dreamy glow that made the Leica's look ever so faintly like they had been to finishing school.

And that, I think, is the real lesson of the weekend. Kodak Gold 200 is the great leveller, a film that turns everything the colour of a 1980s holiday snap and makes no distinction between a German masterpiece and an excellent Japanese super-curio you bought for the price of a takeaway. The Leica gave me marginally sharper pictures, and I could take them faster, with fewer sums, and without the small boy's look of pity. The Konica gave me fewer keepers but more fun, and it never once made me feel I had to justify myself to the man next to me with an Instagram account and a Fujifilm. If I'm honest, the sculptures didn't care either way. They just stood about in the haze being art, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing for them to to do on a weekend……..