After days of deliberation, mind-changes, looking at archives, etc. a CL found its way back into my arsenal. As a sign of how much of a black sheep this was for Leica here in the heartland of M country, not only was it dirt cheap and barely used, but it’s one of those tawny limited-edition Bauhaus sets with the 18mm fisheye Elmarit-TL and a BLACK dot.
The CL is surely the Rodney Dangerfield of cameras: It gets “no respect . . . no respect at all.” Knowing that there are quite a few others around the planet who are devotees and who capture absolutely stunning images with it, I feel almost as though I’ve rejoined a cult. I’m already poking around for bargains on its gem-like lenses.
Hopefully tomorrow afternoon will afford both time and weather for testing with the 180mm/2X combo—not the image quality, about which there’s no doubt, but whether my hands can still extract the best and sharpest from it without the benefit of stabilization.
When I abandoned L-mount last year, it did occur to me that using lighter M lenses might make a big difference, which it has done this time. But I was also determined to try other things at the time.
Sometimes it helps to go down the wrong road a ways so as to be more appreciative when one finds one’s way back to the right road . . .
