The Leitz 50mm F2.8 Elmar (Collapsible)

A Simple Analogue

A particular kind of madness overtakes otherwise sensible people in the presence of small German objects, and the collapsible Elmar is one of its purest expressions. Here is a lens that costs roughly what a decent second-hand motorcycle costs, contains four pieces of glass — four! the same number as a pair of reading spectacles and a shot glass — and whose principal design innovation is that it disappears. You push it into the camera and it vanishes, leaving you holding something you could genuinely forget was in your coat pocket, which is either brilliant engineering or a very expensive conjuring trick, depending on how the month has gone. The aperture is set by a minuscule tab at the front of the barrel, positioned exactly where your fingertip cannot reach it and calibrated in the dark by a man in Wetzlar who evidently had much smaller hands than mine and possibly a grudge. I have spent whole minutes of my life squinting at that tab, revolving the lens like a safecracker, and arriving at f/8 when I wanted f/4. Repeatedly.

Still. Wide open it does something I have never heard satisfactorily explained, which is glow — not the smeary, apologetic softness of a cheap lens, but a sort of luminous forgiveness, as though the Tessar formula had quietly decided that everyone in the frame deserved a better decade than the one they got. Stop it to f/5.6 and it hardens up into something clinically, almost rudely sharp, and you begin to understand why people kept buying these things for seventeen years while faster, cleverer, more expensive glass came and went around them. It blocks a corner of the viewfinder, it won’t focus closer than a metre, and if you collapse it into certain bodies without checking first you will hear a noise you’ll think about at three in the morning for the rest of your life. None of this matters. You will use it, love it, resent it briefly at f/2.8 in a dim pub, and then look at the negatives and forgive it entirely, which is more or less the arrangement I have with most of the important things in my life……