Last time I discussed getting off the gear merry-go-round, defining and de-GASing. A couple of times lately I’ve briefly alluded to my situation. So what you may ask have I done?

Well, after a lot of trial and error I have finally figured it out, and over the last year or so I have settled into following use cases and cameras to go with them.

1. Street and other candid situations where I know I won’t be hurried or don’t require the fastest of response in close quarters. Here my beloved Plaubel Makina 670 medium format rangefinder is the choice with its fixed 80mm Nikkor lens.
2. Fast moving and/or crowded situations. No question here, it is my Leica M2 with the diminutive Summaron f/2.8 lens and M3 with the 50mm Rigid Summicron lens. To be honest I could get away with using just the M2 with both lenses and truth be told I have done that when I really want to travel light.
3. Urban and other architecture, murals, the occasional landscape and other non-people related images. After kissing a lot of frogs, the Mamiya Universal with its changeable lenses fills the bill wonderfully for medium format … finally! For most cases I’m using the last version of the standard 100mm f/3.5 lens. I also have the 75mm with its beautiful auxiliary viewfinder and a 150mm short telephoto. If using together with the Plaubel Makina for a project I can use the 6×7 film back. Otherwise I can use the 6×9 back for a larger negative and greatest quality.

That’s it! Pretty simple. Easy decisions on what to use and when to use it, without stress. The right tools for the right jobs! What could be better!

Full disclosure … you might be wondering what does they mean for my trusty 35mm Leica SLRs, Frank and Elsa, and the incredible holy grail R lenses I have that go with them. They’re safe and sound in their camera bag. While they haven’t been used in several years I’m not losing sleep over still having them. Even though they’re worth a boatload I’m not yet prepared to part ways. Call it a lingering emotional tie. And to be honest I could never afford to replace the lenses. Maybe someday I’ll cut the cord.

All of the gear I use in heavy rotation is a minimum of 40 years old, the youngest being the Plaubel Makina. The rest were made in the 1950s and 1960s, but the results speak for themselves. I’ll admit that every once in a while I look at eBay for a 100mm 2.8 to replace my 100mm 3.5 lens that came with my Mamiya Universal. Only because the Planar design is said to be sharper than the Tessar in this application, but I’m not obsessing about it. For a couple of hundred bucks I’ll try it and see.

I’m in a very happy place now and see no reason to change what I’ve got, short of the possible Mamiya 100mm experiment.

I can’t remember ever feeling this way before … and that’s a good thing.

Stay well,

Michael